Chicken soup for the geek:
My friends David and Irving are two really sweet guys who love underground dance music, particularly hip-hop, breakbeat, deep house, and drum-and-bass. At any given dance event such as Chicks Dig It, Milk, or Movement, it’s very likely that I’ll run into them. Being hardcore dance fiends, they’re not content to merely attend other people’s parties; they’re party organizers themselves.
Their latest party idea — setting up their sound system and DJs at Cherry Beach — has caught on so well that it’s on its way to becoming a weekly event. Tomorrow (Sunday, July 21st), they’ll host another installment of the Cherry Beach Sunday Afternoon Sound System. Here are the details, taken directly from their mailing list:
this sunday July 21, 2 -10pm
rnb, livin’ large and promise
cherry beach sunday afternoon soundsystem
with
- The Reverend (dub’n atmospheric drum n’ bass)
- Miss KLC and Gerald Belanger (beach party house n’ techno)
- Dalia (hip hop n’ stuff)
- Tim Patrick (big deep house)
- Gabor (trip hop)
and maybe some others
Bring a frisbee, bring a kite, bring a handy sweater, bring a dog (only nice dogs), bring your lover and a hammock. And pass the time on this lazy sunny sunday afternoon with friends and friends of friends.
directions:
Take Lakeshore Blvd East of Toronto, just past Parliament
Turn sound south down Cherry Street all the way to the parking lot at the end
Walk west (right) along the beach and you’ll hear music
And, biking there is easy along the trails beside the lakeshore
things to think about:
Please don’t bring more than you plan to take back out with you – leave no trace.
Bring something warm and something to sit on and also something to keep sun off your head and maybe some bug spray for the evening.
If weather turns foul the day of, call 323.0361 for the emergency update.
See you there.
cheers,
Jim, Rene, Keijo, Rick, Ali, David and Irving
All this and the ever-cute DJ Dalia too? I may have to attend this one as well as the Streets are for People party.
Earlier this week, my friend Rick Conroy mentioned some kind of street party taking place on Augusta Avenue this Sunday. He mentioned that it was something along the lines of the Reclaim the Streets party that takes places annually in many cities around the world. He mentioned that the businesses on the street would be participating — Bikes on Wheels would be doing free bike repairs and tune-ups and La Palette, a great little French restaurant on Auguta, would be providing free food.
Yesterday, while locking my bike outside a store on Queen Street, I noticed that the rack was had some flyers attached to it that read:
Streets are for PEOPLE!
Join us in a celebration of bicycles, pedestrians and the idea of a car-free Kensington Market.
July 21st – Sunday – High noon to dusk – Augusta Ave. and Oxford (SW of College and Spadina)
There will be:
- music
- free bike repairs
- bicycle giveaways
- refreshments
Our celebration will culminate with a mass bike ride at 8:00 p.m.!
Bring along your friends and families, and your bikes, trikes or even unicycles if you have ’em and anything you can imaging to help us celebrate!
I’m all for the reassertion of pedestrian culture (“pedestrian” as in “person walking on the street”, not as in “ordinary and dull”); it makes for more interesting neighbourhoods that areas specifically designed for car culture (see Stephen Johnson’s book, Emergence for more on this). I’m also for grassroots parties such as this. They have a more community-oriented feel than more corporatized events such as the Molson Indy, Gay Pride Parade, World Youth Day or Celebrate Toronto (Mayor Mel Lastman’s faux street party), and you can feel more like a participant than merely a spectator.
I’ll be attending, and I’ll bring you-know-what with me.
Some minor updates made on Saturday, July 20th
One of the interesting things about the Current Situation is that the binary left-wing/right-wing sorting bins just don’t quite work anymore. Savage Love’s Dan Savage is a hawk!
He even has a good battle cry: “A Marshall Plan for Afghanistan!”
As he recently announced in BoingBoing, Cory Doctorow has been taking a little breather away from San Francisco and has returned to his home town of Accordion City. I got a phone call from him early Friday evening, asking Paul and me to join him at Tequila Bookworm. Like me, he’s fond of the place as it serves great coffee, is a book-and-magazine lover’s paradise, has a certain bohemian comfiness to it and there’s also the matter of very cute staff.
As you may have also read in BoingBoing (and in the lively discussion that ensued), a man-mountain of a drug dealer who plies his trade half a block away from his apartment stole his beloved MiG fighter goggles (one can only imagine what he looks like when he’s wearing the goggles). He’s since replaced them with a new pair he acquired online and proudly showed them off to us. He told us to try them on, and here are the results:
…and I see I still have a lot of stuff to post. There won’t be any shortage of material on this blog!