And every time I walk around my legs go whyyyyyy

whyyyyyy are we moving why aren't you in a big bubble bath soaking us after such a physically challenging week of working and packing and working and packing and then running all over the place?

My reply is it's only Friday and half a work day is left and after that you need to carry me to Tavern United with co-wokers to bid farewell to the lovely Mariah and have pints and probably calimari and maybe a salad, we'll see.

The original plan was to sit on the rooftop patio but it's raining outside so the that isn't an option so we'll grab a booth somewhere and get served by cute girls.

I believe they wear plaid skirts there.

If there are I will take a picture for Tony in his honor.

Guess that's what happens when you switch either between Work Mode and Extreme Packing Mode; I've either been at the office or cooped up in my apartment packing up the ridiculous amount of boxes needed for The Move this weekend. Honestly, why do I have so much stuff? The only thing I can justify and be proud of are my five large boxes full of books that I will never, ever part with.

Good news is that tomorrow I go back to clean and then spend the night hanging out and relaxing before the moving extravaganza which will swiftly be followed by the Wine Festival. Should be an interesting weekend.

But enough about this coming weekend, let's rewind and visit last Saturday when I was graced by the presence of these two gentlemen and a couple bottles of wine before heading out to check out The Ghost Show at the opening of Freud's Bathhouse and Diner.

Possibly the best name for a venue ever.
I'll just say flat-out that I adore this space; there isn't a lot of sitting (or standing) room as I believe capacity is 50 people, but it makes for a really nice intimate environment. I was also a fan of the "ghost-themed art" hanging/on the walls and the sexy-time pink lighting. I have a fetish for little spaces like these.

We happened to walk in during musical performance that involved a guy occasionally strumming a guitar with some weird synth as background noise. Not exactly our style, so we all stuck around inside to check out what would follow but that turned out to be a really cool beat and a woman singing like Yoko Ono.
So we headed outside to mingle with the hipsters and take drunken pictures of the buildings instead.

The venue was definitely somewhere I would check out again. Iffy musical performances but you win some you lose some and I'm not even 100% sure who was playing so I can't point fingers at who was whom anyway. That being said, I have a feeling that a lot of weird-assed musicians will be playing there and I am extremely excited to check upcoming acts in the future; it's venues like these that you can find some real musical talent.
Eventually the music started to wind down and when the Hipster Conversation turned to how the City is potentially going to be paving over the cobblestone streets in the Exchange (outrage!) we decided that it was time for more beer and to head to Jabez's sweet-assed condo to wind the evening down.

All in all a very successful night.

I could go for more Saturdays like these.

Last night a few of us went to The Cre8ery to check out "Wonderland Interactive Party", which basically advertised itself as an Alice in Wonderland-themed interactive visual party hosted by Po-Mo Productions, a local visual media arts group.

Usually I would take pictures of this sort of event to share here, but there wasn't anything worth photographing. We stayed roughly 45 minutes while that was only to have a few beers and socialize, it honestly was 40 minutes more than was needed.

For an "interactive party" there wasn't much there to interact with. The idea was that you texted sentences to a phone number, and based on secret words certain characters would "appear"... and by that I mean lower from the top of the screen or rise up from behind a hill momentarily. I can appreciate the idea but it was poorly executed because the words were "secret" and the animations didn't really do anything at all except move back and forth a little bit.

It all felt very much like something you would see at Chuck-E-Cheese, except those animatronic characters were actually complex, well-designed and not projections on a wall.

The set up of the projectors and wires was exceedingly sloppy, the projections on the walls overlapped and weren't color-matched properly, one of the screens kept dying so one of the screens would revert back to a Mac desktop for a few minutes, and the background art was some tossed-together vector art I could have drawn myself.

The thing that bothered me the most was something I found out after the event when I was doing some research into how little effort went into the actual production of the party: I was on the FaceBook page for the event, which boasted a picture of the vector background as well as the caption "I was going to do crosshatching for the background art, but that was too time-consuming...", a statement that left me stunned.

A crosshatched background that blended with the art used for the "animations" would have looked significantly better and more thought-out than a tossed-together vector background. Not only that, but to publicly make a comment of that nature indicates the lack of professionalism and dedication behind this endeavor. Obviously there was too much time spent promoting the product, and not enough time and care put into actually creating something worthwhile.

The reaction I got from everyone that I spoke to was that of disappointment, but that they all came out because they felt it was necessary to support a local artist. Understandable, because that's why I went as well. However, to get unanimous reactions of "it's less than what I expected" or "I didn't expect anything great" is disheartening to hear even though I had nothing to do with the event. It sets a low standard for other visual artists in Winnipeg.

Honestly, if Po-Mo are going to promote themselves so fiercely -the only thing they seem to be adequate at doing- then they should at least deliver a decent product to back it up and not leave their audience with lower expectations than those they walked in with.