I’m very excited about the huge Car-Free Commercial Drive Festival happening in East Van today. In case you don’t already know, this is a street festival, for which Commercial is closed off to traffic from 1st Avenue to Venables, from 10am to 8pm. I have gone to this for the past couple of years and it’s a blast! There’s a lot of international flavour and tons of cool people. There is music galore, weird chopper bikes, excellent food and so on and so on. I plan to hit it up after the cool old-school bike swap (also in East Van, see here). I’ll try to take some photos at both events, which might surface here. Unfortunately, a few of my friends are out of town for this one, but the great news is that this year there’s another one on July 22nd! There is a lot more info about the bands that are playing, the various events etc. here:

• Festival Website
• Festival Poster
• Facebook Event Page

On Sunday, I’m headed to the Vancouver Vintage Bicycle Show and Swap Meet (6th annual, no less). It’s happening at the Cambrian Hall, right by Main Street. This is right in my old ‘hood of Mount Pleasant and I’m excited to go there before the Commercial Drive Car-Free festival. That latter one was one of the best events of the summer last year. Anyway, I’m desperately in need of a cool and inexpensive set of pedal-powered wheels. Finding something like the one pictured or a less out-there roadie or hybrid would make my week. I’d also like to snap some cool pictures there.

When: Sunday, June 17th 2007. 9AM – 3PM
Where: Cambrian Hall, 215 East 7th Avenue
How Much: $2
More Info: Event page on Facebook , Momentum listing.
[Photo courtesy of sgoralnick on Flickr]

It’s been a while since a culture-related or Vancouver-related post so I thought I’d muse a little about “1067″. 1067, prosaically named after its address on Granville Street in downtown Vancouver, is an ultra-cool underground jazz venue that few know about even here in town. I personally got introduced to it rather randomly. When I was still quite new to Vancouver and largely ignorant of the music scene I found myself at Calhoun’s (another good local live jazz spot). I was talking to their house band’s drummer during a break between sets and he suggested I check out 1067 when I asked him to recommend other places around town for good music. After following his cryptic directions (see info on how to find it at the end of this post) a few days later, I made it to this mysterious little space.Photos courtesy of: Flickr, MySpace, Petterpang’s blog and a friend of mine. None are mine, but I’ve tried to link all to the sources.

When I got in from the random back alley door (see photos) and got up a set of stairs, I found a little jazz club that looked a lot like someone’s living room and served only cans of beer from a mini-fridge. The acoustics in this large room are quite good and the music has definitely kept me coming back. 1067 has some of the best jazz in town, especially if you are into its more modern and experimental forms. You can listen to some samples and see if you like it (MySpace). Cover is always $5 and a beer costs $4. Lately, they’ve been getting more organized and have a little Yahoo! Groups page which they use to keep people updated about the upcoming shows. It also seems more consistently open than before: there used to be times when the door would be inexplicably locked on Fridays or Saturdays. They even have a MySpace page with fan comments, photos and tunes played the club.

I get a really peaceful vibe at 1067 and the music has a tendency to put me in a very contemplative state. This is a great spot to while away the evening and you can combine it with other weekend outings – they usually start at 10 or 10:30 PM and play until 2 AM or so. Now that I’ve moved downtown, I would like to come here much more often.

Directions: coming soon

If you enjoyed finding about this random Vancouver spot, get my free newsfeed to get the latest music updates.

[PHOTOS/VIDEOS to follow]

As promised, here is a breakdown of the recent festival roadtrip from Vancouver to The Gorge in Washington State. It was a great decision to head down to Sasquatch Music Festival. I love these kinds of things and who really needs an excuse to camp, tune in and have a few beers in an otherworldly setting?

Although my little carful was late getting there, we still caught Manu Chao, The Arcade Fire and Bjork at the main stage. The latter was yawn-tacular – my apologies if you’re into Bjork, but I just am not.

Already fueled by great vibes from his Vancouver show the night before [see posts below], we were a very receptive audience for Manu Chao’s brand of cool stoner fusion and upbeat pseudo-punk. The sun began to set and, when Manu asked Bobby Marley to ’sing something good to me’, it was a memorable moment.

The Arcade Fire totally stole the show. Apparently, one of their band members fell off the stage at one point, but I didn’t witness this. They sounded like a frickin’ record, but they were live. Unbelievable. There was even the tiniest dig at Jerry Falwell. I am now a gushing-schoolgirl-type fan of theirs and want their children. The pipe organ alone was worth the whole trip!

Bjork was largely boring (to me) and I headed with my crew back to our campsite … it was a little like bring Jim Morrison: we walked for (literally) two hours and people were strange and acid-laden strangers + pleaded us to take them home, but we little knew where our own was. At least one of them did and it was sad and funny in equal measure. The car/tent conglomerate was finally located, no thanks to the Gorge people and we slept.