Only a couple of years ago, music fans in Kingston had to expertly budget both their time and money in order to balance their concert calendars.
But lately it seems easier on the wallet and the datebook to get to just about every show in town.
Even The Grad Club, a local live music staple, is scaling back the number of shows it books in a year.

Another year, another successful Kingston Canadian Film Festival. Here are reviews of some of the highlights from this year’s festival.

With the year’s third and final instalment of the Vogt Studio Series, the student-run program has
abandoned any pretense of clarity for the perplexingly bizarre. With three pieces ranging from a Samuel Beckett reproduction to a studentconceived sound spectacle, Vogt C is worth the trip for the sheer novelty of the experience.

Sit down with Tony Dekker, the brains behind Great Lake Swimmers, and in one phrase, he’ll tell you everything you need to know about his music: “Stop, listen and feel.”
Without whiny self-indulgence, Dekker’s Great Lake Swimmers explore the human condition on their third album, Ongiara. Much like their two previous albums, Great Lake Swimmers (2003) and Bodies and Minds (2005), Ongiara taps into a familiar melancholy that Dekker is quick to admit.

This past weekend’s Canadian Music Week (CMW)—an industry-driven vehicle for the nearly 600 bands that showed up to play 40 Toronto music venues, consisted of three days of bars serving until 4 a.m., longer lineups than many of these bars see all year, and equal parts debauchery and schmoozing.

There’s something rotten in the Wellington Street Theatre—and it’s Bottle Tree Productions’ presentation of Hamlet. Hamlet is definitely an enormous undertaking for any theatre company, and it’s clear that each cast member put many hours into memorizing lines and stage movements. It’s unfortunate that the same level of effort wasn’t evident in the rest of the production.

After seven years together, the Brampton band has finally released their first full-length album, a self-titled follow-up to 2004’s EP. Inspired by the small-room feel of albums like Nirvana’s In Utero and Pearl Jam’s Vitalogy, the three-piece recorded the album’s instrumentals off the floor in nine days, an intentional departure from the process behind the EP.

The Canadian film industry may not have the rich production opportunities or star systems of Hollywood, but every year it manages to produce a few memorable little movies, even if poor distribution prevents most people from seeing them. Canadian filmmakers may have government funding, but the money and audiences just aren’t sufficient to support a substantial industry. Still, the movies are out there—you just have to work a little harder to see them.

If life worked out as planned, Ashley Hobb would be the next Steven Spielberg; Breean Hougesen would be practicing botany in a biochemistry lab; and Dave Bedrich wouldn’t even be in Kingston. Fortunately for the Local Shorts program, they’ve all been brought together for the Kingston Canadian Film Festival …

40×30 is the name, theme and the only request curator Jeremy Mulder had of the artists in The Artel’s current gallery show. An open-ended and open-minded concept, the show brings together the diverse voices of 10 mostly emerging Kingston artists in one room to be expressed in the allotted frame of 40 inches by 30 inches.

From an Academy Award winner to Degrassi Junior High, the Kingston Canadian Film Festival takes the idea of Canadian content to a whole new level.
The annual festival, now in its seventh year, features only Canadian content. In fact, the Kingston Canadian Film Festival is the largest exclusively Canadian film festival in the country.

It’s been an eventful few weeks for Halifax’s In-Flight Safety. In February, their video for “The Coast Is Clear” received a Juno nomination for Video of the Year.
Less than two weeks ago, they took home three East Coast Music Awards—for Group Recording
of the Year, Alternative Recording of the Year, and CBC GALAXIE Rising Star Recording of the Year—
and performed live at the nationally televised ceremony.

Picking up where bands like The Hives and The Mooney Suzuki left off, Les Breastfeeders are all about
having a good time. Combining the simple, repetitive riffs and casual sensibility of garage rock with the ferocity of ’70s punk, Les Breastfeeders have earned fans and friends by just being themselves.
Like their label mates and fellow Montrealers Malajube, who were shortlisted for the Polaris Prize last
year, they sing in French, but lead guitarist Sunny Duval insists that singing in their native tongue has never been a problem.

Jillian Keiley’s production of The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus aims to demonstrate “how we sing
to each other as much as do birds and whales” by using elements of musical theory in the theatrical
presentation. Keiley’s director’s notes admit Faustus is one of the most challenging but potentially rewarding tests of this idea, because it’s “known as one of the most rhythmically complex works ever composed in pentameter.”
The production’s central problem is its assumption that Marlowe’s rhythmic complexity is not enough in itself; by piling so much additional weight on top of the text, from the sound design to vocal arrangements, Faustus itself is buried under too many other ideas.

It’s not often that drinking beer on a porch can start a revolution. But then, it’s not often that you find a house like the one on Bellwoods Avenue in Toronto, where ohbijou lead singer and songwriter Casey Mejica lives with her sister and bandmate, Jenny.

Stepping into See you tomorrow, an exhibit of paintings at the Agnes Etherington Art Centre’s Samuel J. Zacks gallery, your first sensation is of nearly overpowering vertigo. The dizziness comes from
the small exhibit’s massive main attraction, Eleanor Bond’s “Later some industrial refugees from communal settlements in a logged valley in BC.”

In the middle of Cameron Tomsett’s “Light Up” sits a nondescript everyman.
His demeanour is burdened and his face is vapid and vague. Sitting at the bottom of a lamppost that dominates the frame, he is caught in emotional limbo, stuck between an illuminating dawn and a path of confusion.

Since 1999, Feb. 14 has been about more than just cinnamon hearts and teddy bears. For the last nine years, V-day, a global movement to stop violence against women and girls, has been celebrated on Valentine’s day, with Eve Ensler’s Vagina Monologues as V-day’s centerpiece in the fight for gender equality and female empowerment.

We Were Writers for Disastrous Love Affairs Magazine is Thomlison’s first release from his independent press, 40wattspotlight.