Carl Begai

I first heard rumblings about e-books back in 1994 or so. The concept of having books converted to digital format to be read on a portable screen sounded like something yanked straight out of Star Trek: The Next Generation, and as a sci-fi fan it most certainly piqued my interest. Right up until the gung-ho folks in the publishing world and avid readers started running off at the collective mouth about how e-books were going to change the way we think about reading and revolutionize the literary industry. Blah fricking blah. As cool as the technology sounded I thought they were being ridiculous. Good old fashioned hardcover and softcover books had been around for hundreds and hundreds of years, so to my mind there was no bloody way enhanced videogame technology was going to do away with them just like that… (continue reading…)

By Carl Begai

Normally I shy away from doing live / event reviews simply because I suck at them. Kind of ironic given that’s how I got my start in this business. Fact is I find it almost impossible to express how good I think a show was in print without boring myself to tears. You can only use and re-word the terms “kick ass” and “awesome” so many times until you begin to sound like that idiot hack who shows up for two songs and a shot of Jack, then heads home to compose a glowing review before bed of what he didn’t see. Between bouts of World Of Warcraft and Spongebob.

All that said, I was invited by singer Amanda Somerville to attend a video shoot for the song ‘If I Had A Wish’, taken from the forthcoming Kiske / Somerville album featuring herself and ex-Helloween vocalist Michael Kiske. Also on board for the shoot were bassist Mat Sinner (Primal Fear / Sinner), guitarist Sander Gommans (ex-After Forever / HDK) and drummer Rami Ali. Amanda and I have known each other a long time (yes, I namedropped; sue me ) and Mat has been a long time friend and supporter of BW&BK, so I was more than happy to come down and play a game of hurry-up-and-wait with them.

Besides, it was a good excuse to see if Sander was the metalhead he claims to be. I wasn’t disappointed; the ‘Painkiller’ footage was priceless (a story for another day).

In the meantime, a new video report from Amanda is available here. Below are a few highlights from the experience (continue reading…)

Note: This is not a new blog. I wrote it back in 2007 in a fit of inspiration and posted in on MySpace, where I believe it was read by a total of 2.5 people. I’ve chosen to re-publish it more or less as it was because it’s a story that still makes me shake my head in disbelief. As in, this actually happened to me?! I’ve also had some people ask about the oddball Glue In The Eye that appears in my recent blog Your Boyfriend Don’t Dance, You Can’t Rock N’ Roll. Well, this is how and why the moniker came to be. Enjoy!

When I was about 20 or 21 and still living in Toronto I had a girlfriend a year younger than me who worked at a kids’ shoe store. She was rather pretty, her two most endearing qualities were located at chest level, and although she wasn’t the sharpest tool in the shed there’s no question she had at least inherited all the brain cells alotted to the family gene pool. She also had a problem with her left eye that required her to take special steroid-laced eyedrops whenever it began to hurt. It was a condition that manifested itself about a year into our relationship which, now that I think about it, could well have been an allergic reaction to yours truly.

In any case, we’d been going out for a couple years and our relationship eventually hit the Girls Night Out phase. Translated: she wanted to go out unaccompanied and get plastered with her airhead friends Dipsy, Lala and Po because she was getting rather sick of me and wanted to find someone new before serving my walking papers. And, of course, there’s no better night to get picked up in Toronto if you’re female and stacked than Thursday night, otherwise known as Booty Night by anyone between the ages of 18 and married. Thus she and her gaggle of geese headed out to a well known testosterone / estrogen meat market on Kennedy Rd. in Scarborough on a particularly warm summer night, leaving me to stew in my own juices wondering just how fucked up she was going to be by the end of the night and by whom.
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I fell in love with photography when I was 13 years old. Credit goes to my parents for that, as they decided to send me to summer school that year. Well, it wasn’t exactly summer school. More like educational courses were being offered for the summer and they took place at a local institute of learning, so to my mind it was summer school, which was a fate worse than death for a 13 year old kid. Particularly one such as myself who had all kinds of nothing lined up for the holiday stretch. My parents would have none of it, however, and decided that I’d spend 9:00am – 12:00pm from Monday to Friday for a month taking part in an activity of my choice. Or else.

Of all the courses on offer photography was the only one that held any sort of appeal. It was either that or I could learn how to needlepoint my way to boredom by weaving fake Persian rugs. And so, off I went bitching and complaining that first day of July wondering why life was so goddamn unfair, determined not to enjoy myself. The world would pay for putting me through such misery as having to spend my summer holidays frickin’ learning stuff. My parents would rue the day they sent me away to be lectured by teachers with no real lives to speak of. I would make a mockery of their decision by being the worst student in the history of summer school-ism…
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Jive Bunny.

Two words combined that are enough to make my brain itch uncomfortably, like poison ivy on one’s naughty bits. It feels like there’s a bug walking around between the inside of my scalp and my skull; it shouldn’t be in there but I can’t get it the fuck out.

Folks old enough to remember cassette tapes as a form of audio entertainment will recall the Jive Bunny phenomenon. The actual name was Jive Bunny And The Mastermixers, a moniker worn by a glorified mash-up project in 1989 spearheaded by a medley entitled ‘Swing The Mood’. It featured instantly recognizable ’60s tunes smooshed up against and mated with Glenn Miller’s classic ‘In The Mood’, all remixed, spliced and remixed again into dance-able tracks of varying length. Not quite techno; just classic melodies poked and fluffed into swing-ish updatedness so as to draw anyone with too much booze in their system onto the dancefloor.

Perhaps you see where this is going…
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A close friend of mine recently suggested I check out a Canadian band he’d come across in his travels. We’re always sharing our musical discoveries, so I trusted his judgement when he pointed me in their direction. I wasn’t “Why-in-the-hell-aren’t-they-signed?” bowled over by what I heard, but they didn’t make me feel like I’d just wasted my time wading through the usual MySpace layout hiccups to get to the audio samples either. What really grabbed my attention, however, was the band’s biography. In a nutshell, if my presence on that page had been a scene in a splatter film I would have been ripped apart by a bag of exploding adjectives.

It was two or three paragraphs shovelling the required industry bullshit about how much the band rawked and smoked and was the best thing since ketchup-flavoured Crispers. The piece was loaded down with so many descriptives and flowery turns of phrase that it read like a car salesman’s Scrabble tournament. I couldn’t get through it without laughing. (continue reading…)

The other day I was getting my daily fix of online music news and stumbled upon an article on Yahoo! discussing the new music poptart Ke$ha. Seems the sweet young thing, according to Nielsen SoundScan, racked up some huge numbers for her first digital single ‘Tik Tok’ prior to the release of her debut album, making her something resembling a big deal (click here for the info). Curiosity piqued, I tripped on over to YouTube to see what the fuss was about and was suitably appalled. The young lady is easy on the eyes, sure, but I found myself wondering yet again what it is that makes people buy into someone that is quite obviously devoid of talent beyond her nose piercing.

What set me off was the fact that all the vocals on the song are auto-tuned. Not just a little bit, either. There isn’t a single tone that comes out of the girl’s throat – or any other orifice for that matter – that wasn’t process cheesed by a computer before going to tape (yes, I said tape; I’m old school but you know what I mean). And it’s not just the one song; I did some checking and it’s the whole bloody album. From where I sit in the Castle Of Know-It-All Arrogance this is one of those things that is unforgivable in music, and the folks responsible don’t deserve the financial windfall that has and will continue to come their way.
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With 2009 coming to a close I found myself thinking back 20 years, trying to remember what kind of crap I was up to then and comparing it to the nonsense I’m into now. Following are a few random comparisons between past and present. Enjoy …

1989 — “Holy crap. A real live gorgeous girl talking to me. I think I’m gonna pass out.”
2009 — “Holy crap. I have a girlfriend and friends who are girls, and they’re all gorgeous. That whole ‘sell your soul to the devil’ thing really works…”

1989 — Alice In Hell.
2009 — Alice still in hell, aged well, still awesome.

1989 — As of December 1st I’m legally allowed to drink in the United States.
2009 — “Boy, these Americans are clever. Moose piss sold in beer bottles. We’re heading back to Toronto tomorrow, right?”

1989 — Children Of Bodom frontman Alexi Laiho is a Poison fanboy, has learned every lick on Look What The Cat Dragged In and dreams of being like guitarist C.C Deville minus the poofy blonde wigjob.
2009 — “This next song is called ‘Vai And C.C. Wish They Were Me’. GRRAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHH!!”

1989 — Finland according to North American metalheads – “Like, Vikings live there, right?”
2009 — Finland according to North American metalheads – To make one (1) internationally successful metal band: Just add water (Note that vodka may be substituted).
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All this talk about Tiger Woods going off to play extra holes on the back nine with most of America’s female population got me thinking about how his wife must feel. Having been married and likewise screwed around I have an idea of what she’s going through on the inside, although the pain and sense of betrayal are undoubtedly worse for her given hubby’s popularity, his bullshit squeaky clean image, and the media’s need to splatter every little bit of info all over this side of the universe.

Like Woods, my ex-wife was (is) an idiot. Looking back on it now I shake my head and wonder “How much stupid did they put in that head?” Not because the relationship going to hell still bothers me – nothing could be further from the truth – but because there are rules about self-absorbed ego-bitches being allowed to fraternize with decent people. Or at least there should be.
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Being as I’m a proud Canadian with ridiculously excellent taste in music , I thought I’d offer a brief update on several hoser-related activities with regards to new releases, tour dates and general ass kickings. Lots going on with my Canuck brethren, as you’ll see…

(For those of you that don’t know what a “hoser” is, it’s used here as a term of endearment to describe my fellow Canucks. The official scientific explanation, assembled after several hours of watching Bob & Doug McKenzie, can be found here).
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