Month: July 2016

The Good Life (Taste of Edmonton)

Posted on by Tim Kuefler

This has gotta be the good life, we’re all still young enough to say that right? Right! The city is on fire and there is a feeling you can’t fight, so I know that means we should get out there and watch the day turn into night, because after that who knows what’ll happen.
Well I have a pretty good idea – Good music, food, drinks, and friends.
That’s usually what you hone in on when you look to develop your taste. And I’m not just talking about your cultural preferences of art, style and behaviour, I’m also referring to that which determines your food palette.
Luckily enough there is a local event that takes place every summer, and right around the the time that Fringe festival is getting ready to ramp up. That’s right, I’m talking about Taste of Edmonton. A local event that takes place over ten days and which is held at the core of downtown Edmonton in Sir Winston Churchill Square.
Like a few other festivals that take place in the summer here, Taste of Edmonton is the largest food tasting based festival in all of Western Canada. And it just so happens to include some other components.
There are culinary based workshops and lectures, and a fantastic sound stage which features all kinds of musical talent, both local and international, to give some fantastic atmosphere to all of the food trucks and pop up tents that appear during the festival.
Some of the names that I’m familiar with already are Shawn Desmon, Prozzak, and Scenic Route to Alaska, but there are twenty nine acts  taking the stage over the ten days, and because we are THE festival city, you know that whoever is performing will be high-calibre and entertaining.
After all, Taste of Edmonton gets attendance in the neighbourhood of 500,000 people every year, and this year marks the 30th anniversary of the event with a new venue called Sip ‘n Savour to help you take it all in. And I think best of all, entrance to the festival is free, so if you don’t “want” to eat every single time you visit, you can grab a drink and enjoy some music outside.
Now for the details.
Taking place between July 21-30, at Sir Winston Churchill Square (intersections are 101a avenue & 100 street and 102 avenue & 99 street), you can reach the event by bus, LRT or car. Though if you plan on parking I recommend taking your car to the Stanley A. Milner library parkade which is just south of Churchill Square.
And that’s all I’ve got for this week friends. I hope you have a fantastic weekend, and I’ll see you on Sunday with something stimulating.
Tim!

I Can’t Get No Satisfaction (Syndication)

Posted on by Tim Kuefler

Sometimes I wonder if I’ll ever have it all, dear readers.

I want to have a successful blog, publish a few bestseller novels, create & feature in at least 3 popular YouTube video series, maintain a healthy diet that include meals, meditation, exercise, & affirmations, create meaningful & beloved paintings, and operate a community driven app for the arts.

Now you might say that that is crazy, but a lot of that those ideas tie in and relate to each other, which means that I’ll be sharing my brand across a number of channels, and working together with others to produce a brand that is viable and collaborative.

But in order to do that I need to syndicate – which happens to be a major part of marketing.

This is post number three in the Importance of Marketing series. We already have the business plan post ready for your absorption, so be sure to check that one out as well. But I digress, let’s now focus on today’s Wisdom Wednesday topic – A post about the importance of content syndication.

What’s content syndication timotheories?

Well my dear, sweet readers, content syndication is a way to put your name and ideas out there into the ether. It helps you build your reputation and generate leads which then generate sales for your business. If you can figure out a healthy mix of syndication, you’ll be rewarded with search rankings, increased traffic, and better exposure to your personal brand. Did I mention that it will also help promote you as an industry leader too? And when you become a leader, people start back linking to your blog.

That’s when you know you’ve hit the big time.

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But in order to get your name out there, you should set up a strategy first. Set some goals and determine the results you need in order define that content strategy. You need to be honest with yourself and ask the hard questions. Like whether you’re positively impacting the community around you with your syndication methods or if you’re really going to drive traffic with your current plan.

What it comes down to is quality content and quality resources to manage your syndication. You could use the carousel method and increase your traffic by publishing to established websites like Hubpages or you could go the advertising route and use something like Newstex to get paid when other publishers source your material. Having said that, you aren’t assured to get paid right away if you share your material for a fee, your content has to be of a certain calibre.

And we haven’t even touched the tip of the iceberg when it comes to promotion. Just using a syndication delivery method isn’t going to get you there alone. Yes, you have to take advantage of the networks mentioned already, but you’ll also have to start guest blogging on websites that already have success in a wide breadth. And of course you need to consider where social media and forums fit into the mix. Every social media application and forum has a different tone, so be very mindful of how you construct your tweets, posts, shares etc.

But before I get too far into the weeds and begin the process of telling you in detail how to syndicate your content, I’m gonna stop the post and let these theories sink in.

After all, at timotheories, we are about digital curating at heart, and that means giving you content in bite size pieces. We would never expect you to swallow the elephant all at once.

And so I’m out of theories for today, I hope you enjoyed this peek into syndication, and I look forward to releasing the remaining introductory points on the importance of marketing. I’ll see you tomorrow friends, with something timely and rather tasteful.

Tim!

Jockstrap-on (Everybody Wants Some!! review)

Posted on by Tim Kuefler

I kind of hated dating when I was a younger buck. Mostly because of all the hormones, the uncertainty of identity, and dealing with the scores of other impressionable youth who were in the same boat as I.

It was messy and unclear, but giving myself and others roles made it easier to navigate, and in hindsight it probably was the most mature way to deal with the situation.

But hey, I wanted some, and everybody else did too.

 

 

 

Everybody Wants Some!! (2016)

Cast: Blake Jenner, Tyler Hoechlin, Ryan Guzman, Juston Street, Wyatt Russell, Glen Powell, Temple Baker
Director: Richard Linklater
released on blu-ray July 12, 2016
******** 8/10

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IMDB: 7.3
Rotten Tomatoes: 87%, Audience Score 76%
The Guardian: ****/*****

Richard Linklater is an American filmmaker, screenwriter, and actor. He is also one of my favourite directors of all-time. To quote Wikipedia:

Linklater is mostly known for his natural humanist films which mainly revolve around personal relationships, suburban culture, and the effects of the passage of time.

Linklater is responsible for Dazed and Confused (the spiritual predecessor to Everybody Wants Some!!), Before Sunrise, Before Sunset, Before Midnight, Waking Life, Boyhood, A Scanner Darkly, Fast Food Nation, School of Rock, and Bernie.

And those are just the movies of his that I’ve seen. I STILL haven’t seen Slacker, SubUrbia, The Newton Boys, Tape, nor Me and Orson Welles. But let’s not talk about The Bad News Bears remake. *shudders*

Influenced by the film Raging Bull, Linklater has always made movies about travelling, whether literal or a metaphor. Never focusing in on one theme or end goal, his movies resolve themselves in a loose way, much like life itself.

Everybody Wants Some!! is a perfect example of this play on suburbia, timing, and relationships. Set in Texas in the fall semester of 1980 and taking place over the first few days of college, we meet freshman Jake (Blake Jenner) as he moves into the house he’ll share with college baseball teammates over the period of his college education.

Sharing the screen time with Jake are his roommate Billy AKA “Beuter” (Will Brittain), teammates Finnegan (Glen Powell), Roper (Ryan Guzman), Dale (Quinton Johnson), Plummer (Temple Baker) and several others.

Over the course of the movie Jake and his new friends cruise the streets to meet women, get competitive over ping pong, basketball, drinking, and other games, and host a couple of parties. Not to mention attending a disco, a country bar, a punk show, AND a theatre house party.

We watch the group dynamic quickly evolves over the weekend, and Jake develops a relationship with Beverly (Zoey Deutch) (one of the women he met while cruising the streets at the outset of the film), it isn’t long before the film closes out with Jake and Plummer in their first class, sound asleep.

Pros: Linklater has a delicate touch, and he’s able to inject us into the lives of his characters without giving us a villain to best or a heart to win. He manages to articulate brotherhood and time in such a venerable way, that becomes quite sad when you see the credits roll and realize it’s time to go.

Cons: You do feel tested at times in this experience, wondering if all of this competition really is necessary and if the characters wouldn’t benefit from some breaks in their self-imposed roles.

Runtime: 1 hour 57 minutes

Points of Interest: Linklater has said that Everybody Wants Some!! is a continuation of Boyhood as it picks up right where that movie left off, conceptually. The original title of the film “That’s What I’m Talking About” is a line from Dazed and Confused, and often quote in this film.

The major takeaway of this movie is that dialogue is at the centre of it. It’s a coming of age tale in a time when masculinity was overtly tied to direct competition. And it demonstrates rather well the challenges that young men face in their conquest of meeting young women, whether that means putting on bell bottoms, adorning a cowboy hat, ripping up a white t-shirt with blood and ash or ultimately (and cleverly on Linklater’s part) putting on a costume to cozy up to the artistic. And he manages to make interest in sports way more nuanced than it’s ever been on film before.

The attitudes these young men hold for themselves, their peers, and women are rather basic at the root, but underneath the costume of jock wearing costume to get a woman, they reveal they are complex and just as lost as the rest of us dumb nerds.

Tim!

I Have Been Over The Rainbow (The Avalanches, Wildflower review)

Posted on by Tim Kuefler

We’ve witnessed lots of absenteeism in music over the years, but my all-time favourite probably came from Guns ‘n Roses and their lack of interest in seeing Chinese Democracy arrive in a timely manner, at all.

So I skipped out on it, I mean fuck’em right? Well not so, well, not entirely. Chinese Democracy didn’t have the hitmaking power of Appetite for Destruction, nor the sweeping epic of Use Your Illusion I & Use Your Illision II, but it’s a pretty solid album on it’s own. Just thirteen years later.

Well today, we look at an album sixteen years in the making.

 

 

 

The Avalanches – Wildflower
released July 8, 2016
******** 8/10

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The Avalanches are an Australian group that started spinning records back when I was still in junior high school. Or to put it another way, way, way back in 1997. They were making plunderphonics back before I even knew that that was a cool way to make music.

I don’t want to dwell too much on what plunderphonics is, but if you are familiar with pretty much any other existing audio recording ever, than you’ll understand that combining existing samples and/or altering them allows for a track to enter into the mix. Pun intended.

The Avalanches current lineup consists of Robbi Chater, Tony Di Blasi, and James Dela Cruz, but they’ve gone through a huge rotation with five other band members coming and going. Incidentally this has something to do with the fact that the group released their debut album Since I Left You in 2000, but haven’t put any studio albums out since that first one.

The reason for this is because of many personal issues the band faced, between Chater being ill for three years, and issues of too many songs to choose from, the band was faced with the problem of genius and perfectionism. And so here we are sixteen years later. But you know what, Wildflower is still a delight to listen to. It reminds me of The Go! Team, Beastie Boys, Gorillaz, Jackson 5, and Canadian favourite Caribou all mashed together into one giant happy, fuzzy, sleepover with rainbow pillows and unicorn blankets.

Remember when I mentioned a while back that jazz music has been making a resurgence via successful acts like Leon Bridges and Kendrick Lamar? Well, The Avalanches are hopping on this bandwagon of rather raw music and the results are coming up nicely. It never feels like a strong narrative, but it doesn’t produce nostalgia.

For instance, those tweeting birds on Zap! takes me right back to the soundtrack of that Sleeping Beauty movie from the 1950s.

I would be remiss to break down this review into particular tracks and emotions, because I think that you’ll get more out of it just diving right in and considering the source material. Seriously.

Now it is a little sad that founding member Darren Seltmann opted out before the album finished, but it is comforting to know that co-founders Robbie Chater and Tony Di Blasi are still there for us. And for such a nostalgia trips, this feels very present in our time space. It is both jazz and pop infused, and good music fans know that those genres are very “lit” right now.

 

 

 

I would argue that The Avalanches have produced a much cooler vehicle than Guns ‘n Roses, but it does help that they sampled the Mega Man 2 death sounds and featured cereal eating alongside their hip hop.

It’s not a perfect record, but it is very accessible if you are a fan of generation sweeping music. I hope you listen and I bet you’ll find some great samples that make your own heart all weepy.

See ya tomorrow with another nostalgia trip, this time a movie about the 1980s.

Tim!

Bad To The Bone (Cross Talk Ep. 7)

Posted on by Tim Kuefler

Bad content abounds. Man, does it ever.

The funny thing about bad content is that sometimes people enjoy it even more than good content. Actually, maybe amusement is a better way of looking at it. People are amused by some obviously horrible things.

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Filmdom is riff with examples of this too though, it’s not just a thing in music.

Well, give us some examples timotheories!

The Room, Troll 2, Road House, Showgirls, Batman &Robin, Battlefield Earth, Anaconda, Splice, and Howard The Duck are all poorly conceived movies. And that’s just a small sample of the options available to us. If we really started to dig into genre specific examples I could easily come up with 100s of films that don’t cut the mustard.

Which is why we decided to focus mostly on action movies in this week’s Cross Talk episode. And we didn’t want to just go on a rant about action without making a big deal out of it, so for the first time EVER, we are pleased to introduce K. G. Singh! Singh is our resident action movie expert; he practices martial arts and is a screenwriter to boot, so you know he has the goods to back up his claim.

Now you’re probably wondering what the topic is for today, if we called in an action expert. Ever heard the expression “that movie is so bad it’s good” dear readers? Well, we recognize that there is a difference between a bad movie versus a movie that is so bad that it becomes amazing. And so, Episode 7 of Cross Talk arrives at your digital door.

The challenge comes down to recognizing the elements of quality, intent, emotions, authenticity, and motivation. Of course subjective experience factors in too, which is why this is an episode you won’t want to miss! And if you have an interest in movies like Sharknado, Mortal Kombat, and RoboCop but don’t know where to slot them on the spectrum, all the better.

I’ve included a direct link to the full video for you here, but as always (and conveniently apt for today), the real action is just below for your convenience. Otherwise, please sit back and enjoy Episode 7 of Cross Talk!

I’m out of theories for now, but please check back tomorrow for an album about avalanches and wildflowers. It should be a good one! Please comment, subscribe, and share this with friends. We want to hear your feedback!

Tim!