Ariel Fournier | Sad Mag

This spring, Sad Mag mailed disposable cameras to various Canadian electro-pop bands so we could see what they see and wander where they wander. Maya Postepski, drummer of Austra and one half of goth duo TRST, was one of the lucky participants in Sad Mag’s Disposable Camera Project.

Get a sneak peek–before Saturday’s Mad Mad World Party–of the various objects, subjects and locales on Maya’s radar, and read her thoughts on music, feminism and feeling like a rock star.

ARIEL FOURNIER: Maya, you toured with Vancouver artist and musician Grimes, who holds strong opinions about stereotypes in music. What did you think about Grimes’ open letter about sexism in the music industry? Did you identify with any of her points in particular?

MAYA POSTEPSKI: Touring with Grimes was awesome, I think what she’s doing is relevant and interesting. Her open letter was brave and refreshing. So many female artists or public figures are afraid to even say they’re Feminists—I found her letter very intelligent and compassionate, and powerful. I liked how she specifically explained how being a feminist does not make one a ‘man hater’ and how she went into details about her family, her father and brothers. Being a feminist does not make one a man hater. I am in line with that and I think the word Feminist has way too many negative connotations, which is a such a shame. Being a feminist, in my mind, means I’m looking for women and men to gain equality

AF: What was it that grabbed you about The Organ’s music before you went on tour with them?

MP: I liked the sound, the aesthetic, [and] the nostalgia in Katie’s performance of the vocals. I loved how sad and romantic the songs were. I also loved how greatly they’re crafted—the pop structures in each track are impressive and sophisticated. Each song is barely over three minutes long and hits you where it hurts. Wicked songwriting and awesome musicianship.

AF: How influential was The Organ for you?

MP: They took me on my first real tour. That’s a huge deal—I felt like a real rock star, like my dreams came true, like they saved me from all the horrible thoughts I had of failure as an artist. I felt like I was finally real, like I mattered, and that was very empowering. As a fan I was also very inspired because I finally found a band that I looked up toward, that I could relate to on some distant level, and that I believed was writing music for people like me: young, gay, and confused.

AF: Maya, we talked about how Vancouver used to be less associated with an innovative music scene in your mind. Did Vancouver seem like a more interesting place to you when you were a teenager or when you joined up with The Organ’s tour? Do you feel now that that has changed?

MP: I don’t know Vancouver intimately enough to comment that deeply but I think it’s been a city that people in Canada consider to be kind of sophisticated or fancy, bourgeoisie. I guess it’s quite expensive and getting really developed with condos and the nouveau riche, as is Toronto. With money comes innovation, so there you go. I don’t think any of that affects the art scene though. In fact, I think it draws artists away because artists are generally not wealthy so they leave and go to cheaper cities like Berlin or Montreal. I might do that soon as well, heh.

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More photos from the Disposable Camera Project will be on display at The Gam Gallery on May 18th. Come hang out with us at the Mad Mad World Party and peruse photographs by HUMANS (Robbie Slade), MODE MODERNE, AUSTRA and CITY OF GLASS; Lauren Zbarsky, Alex Waber, Brandon Gaukel and Matty Jeronimo.

{cover photo of Maya c/o Hannah Marshall}

“Sad Mag’s Disposable Camera Project is like a behind the scenes from the folks who are in the scenes you wanna get behind.” –Katie Stewart, Sad Mag’s Creative Director.

It isn’t easy to create funny looking portraits. Photographer Alex Waber took on the task of capturing the style and the seemingly effortless lack of grace of the comedians of Vancouver for Sad Mag’s Glamour issue. Waber is well versed in the glamorous and absurd: he has photographed for some of Canada’s best fashion magazines as well as created some unsettling satire of the industry; he elegantly portrayed a baker covered in flour, and he has even made a one man comedy show about a tinfoil sculpture seem dignified. To provide a glimpse of the method behind his madness, Waber sat down for a coffee at Revolver Cafe in Gastown to shoot the shit with Sad Mag on a rare not-rainy afternoon.

Sad Mag: What was the initial idea the magazine brought to you and how did it evolve?

Alex Waber: The concept was to do a series of portraits about the comedians of Vancouver in the style of 1940s glamour. They had a few ideas of character types they wanted to portray – because each comedian has their own personal style, whether it be improv, sketch performance or political comedy. [The magazine] had a skeleton and then we worked together to flesh it out.

SM: The sets are very elaborate. You even built a cityscape for the action man photos – what made you what to take on that task?

AW: The original name for that shoot was ‘heroes’ and when I was thinking back to 1940s heroes I immediately thought of the stereotypical scene with heroes standing on a rooftop with the wind blowing. I was initially thinking it would be awesome to put them in brightly coloured leotards and capes, but then I wanted to ground it more in spy thrillers from that era. I figured it would be more fitting with them wearing bomber jackets and dressed in that style. I love early Hollywood movies where there are blatantly painted backgrounds, and I wanted to portray that sense of artificiality in this glamorous situation; so we shot [the scene] in a studio rather than on an actual rooftop…which we actually ended up doing for another shoot.

SM: That’s right, the “heavy hitters” were drinking martinis on a roof – how did that come together?

AW: The rooftop one was a weird situation because originally we were going to shoot it in someone’s apartment that we decorated to make look like an office, but due to unforeseen allergies we had to rethink that plan half an hour before the [comedians] arrived on set. Rather than having one sneezy character in the background, it made more sense to move. The solution we came up with – aside from photoshopping in the background, which would have been a bit of a nightmare – was moving up to the roof of the building and setting it up like a fancy cocktail party, with a table cloth, drinks and all that. It was a fun scramble to set it all up.

SM: Is it difficult to come up with a photo shoot that will work as a visual-joke. Or at least seem jokey?

AW: Sometimes. I often will come up with a really big complicated ideas and then have to scale it back to something that is manageable for us. We can’t do the billion dollar sets quite yet, but one day. It’s a fine balance.

SM: What do you think brings the comedian photos all together? Do they speak to each other or do you think of them as separate concepts?

AW: I think they work together because they all have a nostalgic vibe to them, primarily because of the stylists. I had two awesome stylists, Burcu Ozdemir (from Burcu’s Angels) and Tyra Weitman. The clothing, hairstyling and the makeup – there was a whole team of makeup artists – really helped to tie it to a time period. The shoots themselves can be similar, but there a few of them that get pretty crazy – the action man photos were like nothing else in the series – so I think it was mainly the styling that helped keep it together.

SM: How did the comedians react to the intricacy of your set ups?

AW: I think they really enjoyed it. A lot of them said they had never done anything like this. They’re natural performers, so once we decided to do something, they were great. The only challenge was that they’d make me laugh and then I’d jiggle the camera, so not the worst problem in the world, really.

Jenny Ritter is the goat herding, choir conducting, former member of Vancouver Island’s beloved, now defunct, folk band The Gruff. Now she’s struck out on her own on the mainland and is releasing her first solo album.

For a bright spot in the cold and rainy winter months. Jenny Ritter brings Bright Mainland to the world tonight (October 13) at Saint James Hall. Sad Mag talked to her about leaving her previous band behind, busking for the internet age (i.e. crowd funding) and starting Vancouver’s best choir – and now their potential rival group.

Sad Mag: How long have you been working on this album?

Jenny Ritter: The process started last October. I started a crowd-funding campaign and I raised about half of the funds I needed for the album. I wouldn’t be releasing the album without that money, so it was pretty amazing. We started recording in March of this year. We went over Mayne Island and did a recording-slash-retreat. My producer (who played most of the instruments on the album), my drummer (who I brought from Saskatoon) and I just hid out in this house in the country. The only hitch was that I lost my voice as soon as I got there, so what was supposed to take ten days in total ended up taking another month. We recorded everything but the vocals and then I came back a month later and finished it in May. I’ve been sitting on it for a couple of months and I’m just releasing it now.

SM: What did you think about crowd funding as a way to finance an album?

JR: It was a great experience because it made visible the support network I have. It was interesting to see people I know and that I don’t know come together to help the project. I don’t want to call it donating because everyone who contributed gets some kind of reward for it. There were a couple of dissenters and I got some negative feedback from people who thought that crowd funding was akin to begging. But people will think what they think. I guess they’ve never tried to do a project they couldn’t afford to do on their own.

SM: How does your solo work compare to the experience of working in a band?

JR: It’s really different. I’m basically a dictator now. It’s a lot more work than being in a band where to some extent we split up the work, but now it’s just me calling the shots. It’s been difficult, and sometimes I wish I had back up, but I also find it kind of liberating to make the decisions myself and execute them as I see fit. I like having control over it. I’ve been joking a lot about being a control freak and I guess I’m starting to realize it’s not really a joke.

SM: How would you describe the sound of this album?

JR: I would describe it as indie folk. I would describe myself as a folk musician. I’m obsessed with folk music – new and old – so I think I have that in me. The songs that I write are not folk songs in a traditional sense, but they’re influenced heavily by it. So while I feel like a folk musician, I’m presenting the music in a rock band format with a drummer and an electric bass player and pedal steel and whatever electric instrument I can get my hands on. Just because you’re a folk musician doesn’t mean you don’t want to rock.

SM: What can people look forward to seeing at your album release?

JR: A lot of happy people. We’re going to play through the album beginning to end. I have a number of guests including members of my choir, the Kingsgate Chorus, who recorded on the album. I have some new songs too. All sorts of things will be unveiled. The general message of the album is hope and positivity, and I think when we perform that kind of feeling goes out to the audience. This will be my biggest show in a long time – biggest in terms of audience, and the size of the band, and excitement. And whenever the Kingsgate Chorus gets together there’s a lot of giggling, so I think they’ll be a lot of that too.

SM: How did the choir get started?

JR: I started the Kingsgate Chorus when my band broke up. There’s a specific feeling you get when singing with other people that I was longing for. I missed that harmony that you feel when…well, when you’re harmonizing with people. So I got a handful of friends that were really supportive and then within a few months it became about thirty people. I’ve now even started a second choir called the Mount Pleasant Regional Institute of Sound – the name still makes me laugh every time I say it because it’s so unnecessarily official sounding.

When I started the first group, I found that a lot of the feelings I had about life getting better were connected to the choir, so they ended up singing on some tracks on the record. And if you have a choir you might as well use them!

Jenny Ritter plays her album release concert October 13th with Tim Tweedale on steel guitar, Jay Hosking on bass, Kevin Romain drums and members of the Kingsgate Chorus.

Tickets are $20 at the door and $16 for members.

Dir Mirjam von Arx

For the Wilson family, every little girl gets to be a princess for a day. But it comes at horrifying cost. The patriarch of the family, Randy Wilson, founded the American custom of purity balls: ceremonies where daughters dress up in gowns and promise their fathers that they will remain virgins until marriage. The film focuses on Randy and his oldest unmarried daughter Jordan (22 years old).

The film is predictably disturbing, not because the family has hidden secrets or are hypocritical monsters, but because they really do embody their own twisted Christian ideals. The mood in the Wilson home is suffocating. Von Arx described the feeling of filming the Wilsons as “claustrophobic” and it is comes across in the movie. Their entire existence is wrapped up in gender norms that are so restrictive being a woman is a full time job for the Wilson ladies. Jordan waits to meet her husband while she teaches other young ladies to embody grace and manners at workshops she organizes. And every goddamn (sorry, I mean gosh darn) thing the family does is marked by some strange ceremony they invented for the occasion, always preceded by exhausting beauty prep.

Von Arx sometimes seems to reach a little when stating the political importance of the Wilsons, but their story is no doubt important when you consider how many people in America are either just like the Wilsons or aspire to be. Perhaps most shocking of all is how sympathetically the family is represented in the movie. They are constantly reaffirming how much they love each other and they are principled, even if their principles are grotesque to most liberal-minded audiences. The audience was obviously at once horrified and drawn in by the Wilsons. Despite a pointed and often mocking Q&A discussion of the documentary, when Von Arx announced that after the film wrapped Jordan did indeed marry the man of her dreams, the crowd cheered.

If you missed Virgin Tales at VIFF, a shorter cut will air on CBC television on October 20 on the Passionate Eye.

The writer Malcolm Gladwell tells us that to achieve mastery, we need to put in 10 000 hours of dedicated work toward a craft or specialty.The concept is a new spin on an old idea: practice makes perfect. Richard Williams puts in more than his 10 000 hours, but the film Persistence of Vision begs the question of whether or not it was all worth it.

Williams, the Oscar-winning animation director of Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, spent thirty years obsessing over a film that he never finished. He alienated family, friends and animators pursuing a project that a studio eventually swept away from under him when he was unable to bring his vision together on deadline.

As it is becoming increasingly popular to ascribe to the Gladwell-ian manner of thinking, it is surprising to find a documentary that serves as a cautionary tale against creative obsession. Making its world premiere at VIFF, this film has all the makings of an engrossing documentary but falls a little flat in production. Still, Williams’ story tells us something about what it takes to be a genius and why it might not be all it is cracked up to be.

Thirty years allows enough time for things to go wrong in myriad ways: an investor embezzles funds; a master animator dies; Disney steals characters and images. There is something to be said for letting your work go and Williams’ problem is probably more ego than persistence. He constantly wants to tweak elements that are already finished, yet he fails to finish basic parts of the project like story boarding.

Schreck does not quite do Williams’ story justice; the documentary is hastily done, and since Williams refused to cooperate there is only archival footage of him in the film. There is a certain lack of insight into what drove his genius. However, the animation is beautiful and it was interesting to see not only Williams, but a team of animators so driven, only to see it all fade away. It is well worth checking out the documentary and definitely worth looking at the various recuts from the unfinished project The Cobbler and the Thief.

Persistence of Vision
Dir. Kevin Shreck
10:45AM, October 12
Pacific Cinematheque (1181 Howe)
Details

Author Archives: Ariel Fournier

SNEAK PEEK! Disposal Camera Project w/ Austra’s Maya Postepski

Q&A: Alex Waber

Q&A: Jenny Ritter

Virgin Tales

Persistence of Vision