We've got it all right here, folks! Everything that's ever been written up, photographed, and discussed on the Sad Mag website. Enjoy browsing our archives!



 

Self-Portrait
Cole combed his hair just for Sad Mag

Small prairie towns are no place for a fervid skateboarder. “The roads are crappy and there are no hills,” says ColeNowicki of his hometown Lac la Biche, Alberta.

The 24-year old came to Vancouver four years ago in pursuit of greener pastures (AKA smoother concrete) and settled in the Commercial Drive neighbourhood—in great proximity to the city’s skateparks, but also in prime people-watching territory.

In September 2013, Cole started documenting his “run-ins, pass-bys and overhears” with Vancouverites—capturing their quips and quirks, using them as a platform for reminiscence or introspection. He posts 2 or 3 original sketches each week on his Tumblr, “Portraits of Brief Encounters.” It’s what might happen if you placed Humans of New York in Vancouver, and replaced its photos and overt sincerity with a sharpie and a healthy dose of irony. Cole’s keen observations and wry sense of humour make Portraits a resonant visceral experience. The result is poetry, both written and visual.

“I’ve always liked making things—drawing painting, making figurines out of twist ties. And I like storytelling so this combination of art and text seemed like a natural progression,” he explains.

BriefEncounters Gå Bajs

Inspired by fellow skateboarder and contemporary artist Ed Templeton, Cole loves the connection between skateboarding and art: “Skateboarding is my passion—the longest relationship I’ve ever been in—but it’s also where I gather creative inspiration.” He combines the two on his skate/art site: sundaydrivedigest.com

Cole will be creating an original sketch for Sad Mag once a week, but in between you can follow his Brief Encounters project on Tumblr and Instagram.

BriefEncounters Matter of Convenience

BriefEncounters The Stranger BriefEncountersCrowdsourcing #2

Eadweard Muybridge, "Famous Horses"It’s a sunny Spring evening. I’m in the warehouse that houses the office and work space of the Electric Company in East Van to interview its Artistic Director, Kevin Kerr. I’m here mostly to talk about Kerr’s 2006 play, Studies in Motion, based on the life and work of the revolutionary photographer-scientist Eadweard Muybridge, whose photographic studies of human and animal locomotion stand at the dividing line between still photography and film. The conversation ends up roving far and wide across theatre, art and truth.

While he speaks, though, my eye keeps being drawn to two items on the overstuffed shelves behind his head: a book entitled Lucid Dreaming, and a box for the game Twister. There’s something about these two artifacts that sum up what Electric Company is. Dreams. Memory. Pure physical energy.

Muybridge was, as Kerr puts it, ‘an enigmatic character’—landscape photographer turned scientist, his photographs were produced using a series of cameras shooting in sequence. He produced approximately 100,000 images between 1883 and 1886. This body of work (of which 20,000 images were published in plates available to subscribers) revolutionized the way that physical locomotion was understood.

But, though this was what Kerr stumbled upon originally—in the form of a series of VHS cassettes containing strung-together animations of the plates—it was Eadweard Muybridge the man that drew his attention to the ‘theatrical possibilities’ of his story. As Kerr watched the cassettes, he felt that ‘a sense of obsession began to emanate from’ them, which he initially put down to some kind of Walt Whitman-esque fascination with the human body. What he found couldn’t have been further from that impression. He discovered an awkward, intensely serious man with a failed marriage who had murdered his wife’s lover (an act followed by an acquittal on the basis of justifiable homicide)—‘It just felt like melodrama,’ says Kerr.

He goes on to describe his fascination with ‘this interesting duality between these motion studies which seemed to be very clinical…everything stripped away from the actions. Everything’s sort of— All sorts of indicators of intention are stripped away… They seemed to be very anti-narrative. They were just actions, raw.’

At this point Kerr seems lost in the world of the ideas for a moment. ”There’s this curious sort of choice of actions’—action that, in the human studies, contain substantial themes of ‘sensuality, eroticism, humor, and violence’. Kerr realized that the ‘photos felt like a metaphoric attempt to atomize life’—actions that weren’t ‘corrupted by emotions’. An attempt to get to some kind of unadulterated truth about the violence in Muybridge’s past by fragmenting the complexities of similar motions until each moment could be studied individually: ‘rearranged and assembled to suit yourself’.

What does all this say to a modern theatre audience looking for a meaningful experience? Kerr observes this moment in history as ‘a point in the ongoing birth of a really visually oriented culture… We’re pretty skeptical about our physical perception of the world as being a source for our understanding of our total truth. Or the idea of truth being outside of us, I guess—it’s the contemporary kind of thing—you separate the human subjective experience from the notion of truth. And Muybridge’s work was one big part of an ongoing series of events that convinced us that truth was not available to us except through science and technology. So that there are things that we can’t—we’re not afforded the ability to see without some sort of mechanism or medium that will lift the veil off of nature and give us insight, and so today we are all about the things that we use to negotiate our world and that we turn to, to give us truth, like MRIs or some Google algorithm.’ Or a photograph. Evidence.

I ask him, ‘As an artist, are you creating something that replaces people’s ways of processing events for themselves?’ This is not a new question for Kevin Kerr, or for Electric Company. He counters: ‘Art can be one of those agents that installs itself into your being’—‘art that sedates us and assures us… On the other hand, the other version of art is the art that shocks and stimulates us; that tears that membrane open and allows us to see the world in a new way…’

Kerr articulates for himself and for us that ‘art is experiential at its core’. The vibrant, image-rich, site-specific theatre for which Electric Company is well-known demonstrates this concept to its fullest. The upcoming ‘You are Very Star’ at the H.R. MacMillan Planetarium, following last year’s (now touring) ‘Tear the Curtain’ devised around Vancouver’s historic Stanley Theatre, promises an opportunity to enter a lucid dream with Electric Company. Let’s just hope that Twister stays up on the shelf behind Kevin Kerr’s head.

written by Ralph Bingham.

On June 1st, queer voices are taking over the airwaves!

Tune in to CITR 101.9FM for a whole day of LGBTQ programming that starts at 6:00AM, including Barb Snelgrove, Ryan Clayton, David C. Jones, DJ Lisa Delux, Jennifer Breakspear, Miss Meow, Spencer Chandra Herbert, Kate Reid, Dean Nelson, not to mention your favourite unofficially-queer magazine Sad Mag!

QueerFM has been broadcasting on CITR for almost 20 years, making it one of the longest running queer radio programs in Canada. We caught up with Aedan Saint, QueerFM Broadcast Coordinator and Rainbow 24 organizer,  to ask him for the story behind this event. We are glad we caught him just before his departure to Hawaii, where he’ll be kicking off a new Hawaii edition of QueerFM!

“I took over for QueerFM founder Heather Kitching in 2010 as she went off to Ottawa while I was hosting Fruit Salad (30+ year LGBTQ radio show on Co-Op Radio 102.7FM) for 16 months during and after my year as Mr. Gay Vancouver XXX.  Juggling two radio shows on two stations was… interesting.

“I’ve been producing & hosting QueerFM since then… as well as creating the spinoff shows QueerFM Arts Xtra and QueerFM QMUNITY – AND coordinating the broadcasts of the closing of the Odyssey Nightclub in 2010, WinterPRIDE at Whistler 2011,  The 2011 OutGames and Rainbow 24: LGBTQ Voices 2012.”

“I saw an old flyer from the early 1990s on the CiTR Programmer’s office wall. I thought it odd that no one had produced such a marathon in all the intervening years.  As I planned to make my departure from CiTR and Canada in early June [for Hawaii], I thought…why not create a love letter to the LGBTQ community of Vancouver?  Rainbow 24 is a snapshot in time of our community and its many voices.

“Why June 1st? Simple. US President Bill Clinton first declared June PRIDE Month in the US on June 2nd, 2000 which was re-signed by US President Barack Obama in 2009. Being an American and leaving to go back home, I thought it a poignant way to express the FAMILY that both Canadian and American LGBTQ Communities are, and that we’re stronger together.”

How can you get involved with QueerFM? You can listen on CiTR 101.9FM Vancouver, Like QueerFM on Facebook, and follow them on Twitter. Also check out QueerFMVancouver.com, or email them your love letters or requests to be a guest on the show!

What’s next for QueerFM after Aedan’s departure?

“QueerFM 2.0 launches just after my departure on June 5th to continue the legacy Heather and I have created and nurtured.  Our NEW Producer/Host Jared Knudsen is a great guy, and when you add in the other hosts (Barb Snelgrove, David C. Jones, Ryan Clayton and Velvet Steele) there are not many topics in the LGBTQ community and beyond that they couldn’t handle.  They’re a fantastic collaborative team. CiTR has been pretty fantastic in their support and we appreciate their continued commitment to diversity and support of the LGBTQ Community in Vancouver and beyond…

As for me, I’m headed home to Hawaii, and have a great little show called QueerFM Hawaii that I’ve already scheduled to start when I arrive as well as cross-show content between Vancouver, Victoria and Hawaii.  So we’re expanding the rainbow… one city at a time! :)

“Thanks SAD Mag & Vancouver…it’s been quite a ride.”

Rainbow24
June 1st 6:00AM – 6:0oPM
CITR 101.9FM
Listen online at CITR.ca
QueerFMVancouver.com | Twitter | Facebook

Peach struts on to the stage in a bedazzled, black-and-white-striped dress looking like the most glamourous of inmates or a sexy Hamburgler. The crowd at The Cobalt showers applause upon one of its newest and most admired drag queens.

Music begins, bass rumbling, and she reels off every word to Lil Kim’s “How Many Licks” in perfect lip-sync. I been a lot of places, seen a lot of faces, aw hell, I even fucked with different races. Near the end of the song, Peach does one-armed push-ups in three-inch heels while maintaining the illusion that she is, in fact, Kim’s white doppelganger. The audience hurls five-dollar bills at the stage. Girl is hustlin’.

All in a night’s work for this unlikely queen. Underneath the make-up, Peach Cobblah is Dave Deveau, award-winning playwright and promoter for popular East Van queer parties, Queer Bash and Hustla. Deveau produced a drag show for a year prior to putting on make-up and strapping on fake breasts himself, and first found inspiration to do so in his wallet.

“My business partner and I started doing drag for financial reasons,” he says. “We weren’t making any money but watched queens get tips thrown at them week after week so we thought, ‘Let’s make some fuckin’ tips, girl.’”

Peach Cobblah aka Dave Deveau photographed by Rob Seebacher in Issue 9: TRANSPLANT.

Get Issue 9 here.

Thanks to all who came out to Sad Mag Issue 9 Release + Hip Hop Karaoke last night! It was an amazing time and we’re thankful to all of you for joining us to celebrate the newest addition to the Sad Mag family!

If you missed out, you’ll be able to find Sad Mag Issue 9 at a retailer near you soon. If you’re subscribed, you already have an issue coming your way!

We thought we’d share the outpouring of happiness and love with this song from geneva.b, Issue 9 cover girl and brief West Coast transplant. It’s rare to have consecutive sunny days in a row in Vancouver, so seize the moment while it lasts and enjoy this new track!

love, Sad Mag

I think I really started to like living here when I got into playing ball at Kits Beach in the spring of 2009. Playing ball and reading on the beach is basically my dream vacation except I don’t have to go anywhere so it’s perfect.

I also really like my neighbourhood. I live just off of Commercial Drive—among artists, graduate students, and other undesirables. I don’t know how to cook, so the crazy restaurant density nearby is helpful. It also appears to be the only neighborhood with other black people. Most of all though, I appreciate that I’ve stumbled on a great crew of friends on my block—an outgoing, thoughtful, spiritual community that embrace me despite my transience.

Shad, Issue 9 (the TRANSPLANT issue)

RSVP to our launch party on May 14th at Hip Hop Karaoke!

Photo by Leigh Righton