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cruella-devegan · 2 years

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The Hogtown Vegan on College / Toronto, Canada

Soy Pork Nachos - Fried corn chips, nacho cheez sauce, BBQ soy pork, pickled hot banana peppers, sunflower seed sour cream, cilantro.

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brf-rumortrackinganon · 3 months

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I’ve really been enjoying your timeline of the Meghan/Harry relationship. I remember when the VF cover came out because a friend of mine had worked in the Toronto entertainment industry, specifically catering, and they told me that Meghan had been incredibly rude and hostile to them at an event they catered for suits, specifically because they didn’t have pizza that was both vegan (maybe dairy-free? I don’t quite remember) and gluten free, even though she hadn’t sent over any dietary requirements. I was laughing at the time bc of how much they disliked her on account of that one-off personal interaction, but in the end they were right, because Meghan has a long history of mistreating staff and service workers by the looks of it.

Meghan's treatment of service workers is well known. I hadn't heard a whole lot about her but those pictures from Skippy's wedding where she was dressing down that waiter told me everything I needed to know about her.

The Suits pizza party must have happened during the week, when Meghan is strictly vegan. Remember, she only eats animal products on the weekend. (But she can wear leather whenever her heart desires.)

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gaypornvideoswebsite · 11 months

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You wash your bedsheets once a week. Pulling them erotic from the tight corners of your mattress is a second undressing. Throw a pod in, feel bad about it. You’ll get laundry sheets next time.

You stretch in the morning sun because you feel obligated. It does feel good, but you wonder if it’s picturesque. If this moment was captured on film would it serve cunt? You don’t own a tripod out of self-preservation, but more often than not you’re outside yourself anyway.

You do a sun salutation in a non-racist way.

When pride month started people were on edge. Finality was palpable, being jaded was a balm. You’re scared too, but you’re not surprised. In Toronto you felt it too, that first feeling of crossing into Church and Wellesley now sun-faded. The leather boy advertising outside of Sailor hit on you and made you give him your number. Eating a vegan burger in an Amsterdam window-patio, you were your very own pride commercial. Make sure the sidewalk sees your good side.

You pass the fetish gear store because they carry sexy Trudeau merch. Gear refuses to flatter the contours of your body anyway, a damning judgment of not enough self-flagellation or betterment. Luckily, you exist just outside the YMCA low-income support program range, a cosmic something or other. Cruising isn’t your speed anymore anyway.

You expect more out of people who’ve experienced ego death. You pick at your cuticles. Thank god you still bleed.

#crossposted from my real person s*bstack happy end of pride month

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leoinjapan · 3 months

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A week in Colombia

Day 1

i arrived at El Dorado Airport at 4am, having slept not that great on a six-hour overnight flight from Toronto. my friend had booked me a taxi straight from the airport to her apartment; taxis here are really cheap, around 4 pounds to get across the entire city. Uber is also widely used here, although you should sit in the front seat as they are not actually allowed in Bogotá. apartments in Bogotá are really well protected, with different security measures to keep you safe. first i napped for a few hours and then had a delicious vegan bowl made by my friend's lovely mom. then my friend showed me around her neighbourhood, Chapinero, a historically queer district in north Bogotá. i learned how Colombia is a really queer and trans-friendly country, where gay marriage is legal and trans people have complete right of self-determination to change their documents, even with non-binary options, as well as gender-affirming healthcare!

for lunch my friend treated me to patacones, a mashed plantain baked to a crisp and topped with delicious toppings. she also showed me some awesome bookstores, such as Nada and Tornamesa. i tried delicious local chocolate from Fruto de Cacao. the weather was amazing at around 23 degrees celcius, not too sunny but pleasantly warm with no wind. luckily i did not suffer immediately from the altitude sickness that many tourists get when they arrive, as Bogotá is the highest capital city above sea level in the world.

we went back to watch a documentary about Lemebel, a queer icon in latin america (my friend was scandalized i had not heard of him). then i napped a bit more, which was a mistake; i woke up feeling so sick that i couldn't eat!

then we went to Theatron, latin america's biggest queer club. the streets that were empty before came alive with music and thousands of people. we had hotdogs from Nomáda Bogotá which were lovely, but sadly i was too sick to eat. Theatron has over 15 rooms with different types of music and live shows, and a capacity of over 6000. entry is less than £10 on saturdays (cheaper on other days) and includes a drink (gatorade for me)! my friend tells me more and more straight people come to the club now, but it was still very queer-friendly and one of the coolest club experiences i have ever had.

Day 2

for lunch my friend took me to a delicious vegan restaurant that does all traditional Colombian food, called Maria Candela. i tried ajiaco, a Bogotán dish of a herbal soup made with different kinds of local potatoes and chicken. it was so yummy, cheap and super filling!

i then went on a general tour of Bogotá hosted by Beyond Colombia. the guide was super enthusiastic and taught me so many things i didn't know about Colombia. we walked around important sights in its history, tasted the local traditional alcohol called chicha (fermented corn and sugar), and walked around the iconic La Candelária district. it was so colourful, full of street art and intricate crafts.

we then went to see Past Lives (again) at the cinema. the cinema quality was amazing, and the popcorn tasted really good! during Oscars season, you can get a pass to all the Oscars movies in february.

Day 3

in the morning i took an Uber to the bottom of the Monserrate, a mountain in Bogotá. it costs about £6 for a return journey on the cable car up the mountain to its peak, where you will find a church, a tourist market, and some restaurants. you can hike up the mountain yourself, but it takes around 2 hours. on the holy week, people walk up barefoot or on their knees on a sacrificial pilgrimage up the mountain to the church. in the church is the Black Madonna, based on the same iconic statue on the Montserrat mountain in Catalonia.

(this is also when i found out i got into the university of tokyo starting in april!)

it was super foggy on the 3000 metre high mountain and we could barely see the city. it started to pour with rain and my umbrella was not enough. unfortunately i got cold and wet without a coat, and was also exposed to high levels of UV up on the mountain, which led me to develop a fever later that evening...

i tried a bit of coca tea on the mountain. in Colombia and other countries in the Andes mountain range, people have been consuming coca leaves for centuries. coca tea contains a small amount of cocaine with mild stimulant effects, much like caffeine in coffee, and is completely harmless. Colombians use it to cure altitude sickness, nausea, and other stomach upsets.

i took my friends i made on the tour to Maria Candela again and i tried frijolada, which is a wholesome bean soup that i really loved. after that, i went to the Botero Museum/MAMU which has some really unique art from international artists, paintings by the iconic Colombian painter Botero, and a current exhibition highlighting indigenous culture and art (all in Spanish). it's free to visit so i definitely recommend going!

when my friend heard i felt sick, she took me to get aguapanela. panela is unrefined sugar, which you put in hot water for a nice soothing beverage. the Bogotá tradition is to put pieces of cheese in it, let them melt and then eat them! since i'm vegan i had it with bread. it was very delicious

Day 4

i had a restless night with my fever and decided to stay at home for the day. my tour guide even cancelled, so it felt like a sign not to go anywhere.

my friend's mom was an absolute angel and made me delicious vegan food and hot drinks and before long i felt a lot better

Day 5

in the morning i went on a war and peace-themed walking tour, also operated by Beyond Colombia. our guide was super knowledgeable, condensing centuries' worth of history into three hours. i learned so much about Colombia's recent history and controversies and i highly recommend this tour.

after that, i went to the Gold Museum (or Museo del Oro), which houses pre-Hispanic golden artefacts. in the indigenous culture, gold represented the sun and did not have monetary value; it was used in crafting and often offered back to nature. El Dorado is not a place, but an ancient ritual in which gold is thrown into the water, particularly a large lake near Bogotá; the Spanish dug up a lot of it and melted it into gold bars, but this museum still holds a large collection of 35,000, which is still only about 1% of the original artifacts that have been sacrificed in the ritual over the millennia.

at the end of the day my friend invited me to a collage-making workshop, which was really fun and therapeutic!

Day 6

at 8am in the morning, i took an Uber to the Paloquemao fruit market, where i was to have an AirBnB Experiences tour with my friend's brother, Victor. i was stunned by the amount of fruit i had never seen before. i tried different avocados, guavas, berries, cactus fruit, melons, and more. my favourite was the guanabana, or custard apple, which tastes exactly like custard!

the market is also full of beautiful flowers, vegetables, souvenirs and all sorts. i recommend visiting, though take an Uber as apparently it is not in the safest of neighborhoods.

in the evening i went to the National Museum, which houses an impressive amount of information about Colombian history. there are currently a few exhibitions about indigenous cultural revival. i was most excited to see a small exhibition about Las Traviesas, a collective of displaced indigenous trans women in Colombia, which was a beautiful and inspiring display of art.

towards the end of my visit, i developed a migraine. i got a tasty dinner at Wok and then went home to recover. thank you again to my friend and her mom for taking care of me!

on the day there was a big protest in the city centre in support of the current president. it's better to try and avoid the city centre when there are big protests.

Day 7

me and my friend went on a day trip to Villa de Leyva, a town north of Bogotá in the beautiful Boyacá region, famous for its emeralds. the bus trip took between 4 and 5 hours each way.

the town is absolutely gorgeous, full of cobbled streets and old colonial architecture. it was more touristy than Bogotá, with lots of tourist shops and some tasty food options. i got gelato made with tamarind and tajín (chilli flakes). for lunch, we went to La Maria Bistro which had an incredible brocolli dish that was the best thing i've eaten in a long while.

we went to Casa Terracota, the world's largest ceramic structure. it took 15 years for the architect to bake the house, during which it fell down three times. the construction was incredible and it was a very unique experience. usually the tour is only in spanish, but the guide did a great job translating it to english for me. the crazy thing was that he did his study abroad in Paignton, which is the town next to my hometown!

Day 8

on the last day, my friend and i went into the city to buy souvenirs for my family. there are tons of tourist shops and stalls in La Candelária, and we did our best research to find out which crafts were authentic. for lunch we want to Maria Candela again as the whole city was having a vegan burger festival with several restaurants participating.

in the afternoon we went to see Perfect Days, a really beautiful japanese movie. the cinema in Bogotá was really nice, with great quality screens and tasty snacks.

in the evening we went to my friend's favourite taco place, Insurgentes. the vibe was great and the tacos were delicious (mostly meat but some vegan).

for our final stop, we went to Chiquita. much smaller than Theatron but with a majority queer crowd, the music was on point and the atmosphere was great. there were even a couple of drag performances which apparently happen every night. i really loved this bar, which had a mixture of 90s/2000s pop and latin pop. i could have stayed there much longer but i had to get home to sleep before my flight at 9am.

i am the first to admit i knew nothing about Colombia (or even South America in general) before coming to Bogotá. i was eager to learn, and yet i learned far more than i ever imagined. Colombia exceeded my expectations 100 times over.

the internet is full of scary stories about Colombia, yet i felt safer here than i ever have in the US, for example. the city is so vibrant, colourful, and creative, full of life and soul. it is also the most queer-friendly capital i have been to, with the most amazing clubs you could imagine.

i learned so much about the history of the country, the language, the food, the art, and the gorgeous nature that's around every corner.

but what makes Colombia so, so great is the people. everybody here was so friendly and made such an effort to make me feel welcome, even though i know barely any Spanish. the city feels so alive with passion, hope, and resistance. i am so, so grateful to my friend Estefanía for taking care of me while i was there, looking after me and showing me the real Bogotá, making sure i knew where to go and what to do. she really is the best of us, and i will never forget her kindness 💕

i am so grateful to her incredible mother as well for nursing me back to health when i was sick!

i would come back to Colombia in a heartbeat, but until then, i have to get on the language apps!

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mediaevalmusereads · 1 month

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Kung Food. By Jon Kung. Clarkson Potter Publishers, 2023.

Rating: 4/5 stars

Genre: cookbook

Series: N/A

Summary: Jon Kung grew up as a “third-culture” Born in Los Angeles, raised in Hong Kong and Toronto, and now living in Detroit, Jon learned to embrace his diasporic identity in the kitchen after pivoting his career from law school graduate to being a cook. When the pandemic shut down his immensely popular popup, he turned to social media—not just as a means of creative expression, but as a way to teach and inspire. Over time, Jon discovered that expressing himself through food not only reflected his complicated identities, it affirmed them. From dumplings to the most decadent curried mac and cheese, Jon inspires millions through his creative recipes and content.

***Full review below.***

I bought this book a while ago, but I wanted to make a few recipes before giving it a proper review. My friend introduced me to Jon Kung's YouTube channel, so when I learned he had a book, I rushed out to get it.

Overall, I really love the ease at which this book is written. Kung's explanations of ingredients are clear for those who are unfamiliar with Asian cooking, and I appreciated the instructions for using a wok. The recipes themselves are very clear and informative; I felt like I knew what I was looking for while making each dish, even if I hadn't made it before. In that sense, even some of the more intimidating dishes feel doable with Kung as the guide.

A lot of the prose also feels very casual, and I can easily hear it in my head as Jon's voice. There are also helpful little notes scattered here and there offering extra tips that aren't necessary to the recipe - things like comments on flavor profiles, humorous notes about your ingredients, and more serious instructions (like not needing to pretoast your sesame seeds for shrimp toast).

My main criticism is that I think there could have been more pictures showing the cooking process or techniques. I don't mean to suggest that there aren't any; this cookbook is quite colorful and has some nice professional photos. There are also various QR codes that take you to demonstration videos on Kung's YouTube channel. These are all well and good, but I personally would have liked more photos because I don't think we can rely on videos (or internet connectivity) to be around forever.

I don't think I'd recommend this book for vegetarians or vegans, however. While some recipes are vegetarian/vegan and some could probably be adapted, I don't think the book was written with those eating styles in mind. This isn't a bad thing; just know that vegetarians/vegans are not the audience.

I would, however, recommend this book (and Kung's YouTube channel) for those who might want to get into Asian cooking but perhaps might have been a little intimidated. Kung is a wonderful guide and makes every dish worth the effort, and it was lovely to be introduced to ingredients, cultural foods, and techniques that were unfamiliar to me.

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theunicornsdotnet · 2 years

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I took the time to (extremely painstakingly) auto transcribe this section from the ebook, but of course support the author if you can, or if you're simply curious to learn a whole lot more about The Unicorns' many Canadian contemporaries.

from Hearts on Fire: Six Years that Changed Canadian Music 2000-2005 by Michael Barclay, Chapter 16: Drunk Clowns of the Victorian Era

Released April 26, 2022

The Unicorns were definitely real, though much of their story is hard to believe. "It didn't make any sense how badly they wanted to be taken seriously," says Richard Reed Parry of Arcade Fire, "contrasted with how not serious it came across. It was phenomenal."

In the space of 18 months, the Unicorns transformed from a band who once spent an entire show motionless in sleeping bags to midwifing Arcade Fire's success to having the Yeah Yeah Yeahs beg them to stay together after turning down a multimillion-dollar deal. All this happened to a band who were prone to onstage fistfights, whose one and only album was about how much the two core members hated each other. They formed in high school in tiny Campbell River, B.C. , on northern Vancouver Island. One of their last gigs was at Orson Welles's house in L.A. for a debutante's birthday party. In between is one of the most unusual stories in the history of Canadian music.

Nick Thorburn grew up in Prince Rupert, near Haida Gwaii and the Alaskan border. When he was 14, his family moved to Campbell River, a working-class industrial town where he was bullied relentlessly. Music was his salvation. He went to punk shows in nearby Courtenay, seeing Vancouvers Submission Hold and an early version of Hot Hot Heat. When he was in grade 12, Thorburn noticed a kid two grades below, wearing a plaid skirt and a T-shirt that said Share the Power. His name was Alden Penner.

Thorburn was obsessed with music; Penner actually knew how to play it. "I didn't have a guitar or any skills," says Thorburn. "When Alden asked if I played music, I lied and said yes." They quickly agreed he should just sing. "We did these youth centre, rec centre shows," says Thorburn. "I was really trying to do a Peter Murphy thing, because Bauhaus was my vibe. The bassist was a punk guy. The drummer was into funky stuff. Just a criss-cross of styles. I was paranoid that I was a terrible singer. I quit out of total fear of being exposed as a fraud." in 1999, upon graduation, he split for Montreal to study film. A friend from Cortez Island had told him the city was a paradise for people like him.

Montreal was everything he hoped it would be. "My head exploded," he says. "Every night, it was outrageous." He put up an ad to start a band. Chloe Lum responded. Shewas a visual artist who was about to start Da Bloody Gashes with her boyfriend, Yannick Desranleau. She needed a roommate; Thorburn needed an education. "She was really cool and really rock'n'roll; he says. "She had all these records and gave me a really quick, total musical education, took it up to the next level and turned me on to so much. I'd go to shows as much as I could. I didn't have any money. Nothing. I also didn't drink. My costs were low There was this thing at Concordia called the People's Potato, which was free vegan food. I would eat that every lunchtime and take leftovers for dinner. It was perfect and cheap."

Thorburn's film career got off to a rocky start. For his student project, hewas determined to make a movie with Corey Haim.

The Toronto-born troubled Hollywood child star (Edison Twins, Lost Boys) had reportedly moved to Montreal. Thorburn saw an opportunity. He hit the phone book and started calling Haims. The second one was the actors uncle, who offered to pass along the message.

"Great!' Thorburn responded. 'We met at a party a few nights ago and really hit it off. I'm a young filmmakerwho'd like to talk to him about my next film."

"Okay, I'll give him your number and maybe he'll call you."

One minute later Thorburn's phone rang. It was Haim, confused but curious. "I kept up the facade for 20 seconds; says Tborburn, 'and then I said, 'Look, I gotta level with you. We didn't meet. I just wanted to work with you.' He was really impressed and moved by the gesture and the effort. I didn't know what would happen. He agreed to do the movie."

Thorburn now needed to raise money for what might be more than just a short student film. "It was scandalous. but I did a benefit show at the Jailhouse [club] called Save Corey Haim, implying that he was dying and we had to raise money to save him," he says. "We raised all this money to fly him in, even though he was coming in for a wedding; he actually lived in Toronto. It all didn't turn out so well, ultimately.

"The film was about me trying to get Corey Haim to be in my film. It was all non-synch sound and I was into experimental stun, so there were sock puppets. It was a chaotic mess. There was a final scene I'd envisioned where he'd sit down at a diner and tell me he couldn't be in the film. Ultimately, he showed up really late and there was a guy with him who was really freaky. He wanted me to come to his car and give him the money. Everyone on my little crew was like, 'Don't do it, he'll lust leave.' it got really weird." The director of photography then smashed the camcorder tape with all the Haim footage and demanded a kill fee; Haim later threatened to sue. The film was rescripted and ended up being iust about the initial phone call.

Thorburn returned to Campbell River in the summers and reconnected with Penner. They played a few shows on the Island, hitchhiking with their gear, and one at Ms. T's Cabaret in Vancouver. In the fall, Thorburn returned to Montreal and tried to coax Penner to join him, while they wrote songs by emailing sound files back and forth.

One night at an experimental improv jam-- of which there were many in Montreal at any given time Thorburn saw a drummer play a kit with his foot on the snare drum. "He was amazing and doing some crazy shit. l wanted

to befriend him." This was Jamie Thompson. Thompson grew up in Guelph, Ontario, making music in a scene that included Royal City and Gentleman Reg, in whose band Thompson played alongside Tim Kingsbury (later of Arcade Fire). He fell in love with Montreal before he moved there. "l'd taped this old NFB movie about a drummer named Guy Nation, called Le roi du drum, and watched it ioo times," he says. "He played on garbage cans and had this weird successful-slash- unsuccessful career. I developed this really romantic notion of Montreal as this exotic place that was cool in a way I didn't understand." it was. "When I moved here in 1999, the rent vas almost nonexistent. I paid $150 a month."

After meeting Thorburn, Thompson moved into an apartment with him above a butcher shop at St. Laurent and Pins, and then underneath him in the Fattal Lofts in St. Henri, a building that Maisonneuve magazine described as "infamous in Montreal for their cheap rent, custodial negligence and infestations of misfits, artists and crust punks.' During the day, Thompson busked in Metro stations to make rent. At night, he played in a live house music band, Gazelle, who were big enough to play a major outdoor stage at the Montreal Jazz Festival that year, in front of tens of thousands of people. He backed up Spek of the Dream Warriors for a while. Above him, Nick Thorburn and Richard Reed Parry paid $600 for an enormous space as well as access to a concrete jam spot in the building, dubbed the Bread Factory.

Alden Penner came to visit several times from the West Coast,while he and Thorburn pieced together the Unicorns Are People Too EP, which was mostly Penner's guitars with Thorburn's drum programming. "That was the best creative situation for Nick and Alden," says Thompson, "because as soon as they had to be in the same room together, things got more difficult." Nonetheless, Penner soon moved into the Bread Factory. Some of the Unicorns' earliest Montreal shows were in another loft, where Chloe Lum lived, above the club Barfly on St. Laurent. Brendan Reed, later of Arcade Fire, was an early Unicorns drummer; he set his cymbals on fire at one show, opening for the Microphones. Another drummer was Michael Makhan, the co-owner of St. Laurent vegan restaurant Aux Vivres. Thorburn sent demo CDs to every promoter in town. But he didn't have any money for postage, so he'd put packages in the mail without stamps addressed to himself, with the promoter as the return address. "We'd write these letters that were like hostage negotiation letters," says Thorburn. "Not with clipped out letters, but the tone was very forceful. 'Trust me, you have to do this.' The kind of brash hubris only a 21-year-old can have."

Sometimes it worked: in May 2003, upstart promoters Blue Skies Turn Black started giving them opening slots for Metric, the Walkmen and one of the band's heroes, Texan outsider artist Daniel Johnston. But the Unicorns burned a bridge with the big boys early on. In April 2003, they were begging to open for Cat Power, whose showwas put on by the big promoter in town, Greenland Productions.

"We had no bona fides," says Thorburn. "They're like, 'No.' We tried towill it into reality, so we showed up early during soundcheck and started loading our stun in through the back door of Theatre Outremont. We started eating Cat Powers rider. Her tour manager walked in. 'Uh, what the fuck are you doing?' 'Oh, we're playing, Greenland said we're on the bill.' She's like, 'No, you're not on the bill. Get out of here.' That was our promotional attack. We wanted this to exist so badly. I also wanted to have fun. There was a prankish, impish component to it. 'Why do we have to be so serious about all this? Let's just fuck around a little bit.' That was the MO for the early days."

Two months after the Cat Power incident, the Unicorns started recording their debut album. "lt was made in our practice space, the Bread Box, this concrete box inside the Bread Factory," says Richard Reed Parry, who had by then recorded the Arcade Fire EP in Maine and was also working on his own band, Bell Orchestre. "The whole thing was made using my instruments: some synths, an amp I had, a glockenspiel, an Echoplex. I was like, Huh, someone's getting really creative ith my stuff! That lit a fire under me."

Local sound tech Mark Lawson volunteered to help them put it together. "We basically won the lottery when Mark Lawson got involved," says Jamie Thompson. "He had all this know-how and put all this effort into crafting a record that sounded pretty good. I think we spent $300 total to make that record, and most of that was for renting mics."

Jamie Thompson wasn't yet officially in the band during the recording; he also fell ill, so Penner played some of the drum tracks. "I wasn't sure I wanted to be in the band," says Thompson. "l got an offer to play in a cover band that was very highly paid. I probably could have made more money doing that than being in the Unicorns, ultimately. It was steady, shitty work. But I made a decision: I'm going to literally sell all my belongings and go on tour."

Thompson had other concerns and terms upon joining a band that had once played a gig at the Mile End Greek pub Pasalymani's dressed in sleeping bags and performing a puppet show. Thorburn booked a show at the Jupiter Room in the summer of 2003 where neither of his bandmates showed up which was fine with him. "Jamie and I were at loggerheads a lot," he says. "Jamie has a very strong personality. Brilliant human being. I felt a little threatened. Alden had maybe double-booked, but we got in a fight and broke up temporarily. I was outside the Jupiter Room and saw two guys panhandling, so I offered them $10 each to come on stage and be my backing band."

What should have been disastrous turned out to be a turning point: Gary Worsley, who ran local noise label Alien8, was there and intrigued. By the end of the night, he wanted to sign the Unicorns whoever that might be.

The three original members put aside their differences and took the plunge. Alien8 didn't do indie rock. They specialized in abrasive electronic music, both locally and internationally. "I don't know what they thought of us," says Thorburn. "l think they saw the playful, experimental side. We were into all that stuff, too: Merzbow, Phycus, Brian Damage from Unireverse. A lot of drills, buzzing and true industrial sounds. We were influenced by that, but we were also into Simon and Garfunkel. We were really trying to fuse those two. They courted us by taking us to Aux Vivres, and we split the cheque when the bill came. I was like, Oh, is this how the record biz works?"

The album eventually sold almost 100,000 copies. "I think we recouped" Thorburn deadpans.

lt was time to break out of Montreal in July 2003, they had a show booked at Clinton's in Toronto, with Constantines side project Woolly Leaves and comedian Nick Flanagan. They bought a used Honda Civic for $200, from a guy who warned them that it needed a ton of work and needed to be certified. "We said. 'Okay, no problem!' and immediately drove to Toronto," says Thorburn. "We had to pull overevery 30 minutes because it was overheating. The last leg, we had to push it on the side of the 401. It took us 12 hours to get from Montreal to Toronto." (It's normally a six-hour drive.) Miraculously, they made it to the show.

The only other rock band on the Alien8 roster was Soft Canyon, the new project for Andrew Dickson. from the much-beloved garage band Tricky Woo. The two bands embarked on a national tour which should have been a great gig, except that Soft Canyon was a psychedelic country-rock band that didn't sound anything like Tricky Woo, and whose album had a lukewarm reaction. Turnout across the Prairies was low. And the Unicorns' Honda Civic fared only marginally better than it did on their Toronto trip. But there was no turning back. All three were committed to the road, come hell or high water. The next 18 months was full of both.

On the West Coast, they spent some time at home in Campbell River and, with some parental help, bought an '80s RV camper van in Victoria for $2,000, as a low-rent touring bus for the broke band. "It immediately started falling apart," says Thorburn. Exhaust fumes easily penetrated a hole in the floor. The heat didn'twork, so the windows had to remain up. Carbon monoxide poisoning was a serious concern. Nonetheless. it became the Unicorns' touring vehicle for three straight cross-country trips.

"We drove that RV from Victoria to Halifax to Victoria to Montreal," says Jamie Thompson of the fall of 2003. "Touring in that thing in the winter in Canada, you'd be sitting with a blanket over you, shivering, blowing steam while wind came in the cracked manifold in your face for a 20-hour drive from Edmonton to Winnipeg. We left it parked somewhere in Montreal. We left the doors open so that homeless people could live in it for a while."

The shows were sparsely attended: 15 people, maximum. Most of them came from local campus stations, after the band sent all the station managers CDs with a unique typewritten note.

The album, Who Will Cut Our Hair When We're Gone?, was released in October 2003. It was deeply melodic and based in popsongcraft, and it was deeply weird. The synths sounded like they were barely being held together. The guitars were scrappy indie rock.

The live drums and drum machine were mostly rough; Thompson only plays on a couple of tracks, and it's pretty clearwhich ones. Yet everything also sounded carefully planned: the dynamics, the directed tempos, the instrumental choices. "I Was Born (A Unicorn)" became an immediate set highlight: in part because it's driven by a relentless Thompson beat, in part because of a three-chord riff with West African overtones, in part because of the dance breakdown in the middle, in part because Thorburn and Penner don't just trade lines but get into an argumentwhile doing so ("I write the songs' / 'No, I write the songs!").

American campus radio loved it. Will Butler of Arcade Fire was working at Chicago station WNUR at the time. "People were losing their shit over it," he says. "WNUR was deeply committed to being weirdos. We played Lightning Bolt. We were playing '70s minimalism, like Terry Riley We were on the early Rapture train; with later Rapture, wewere like, 'Bah. This is essentially a hit: But the Unicorns threaded the needle. They were just weird enough. The music director would write a little review on the sticker of every CD, and on this one he said something like 'the possibilities of pop music but it's experimental.' The Chicago nerds thought it was amazing." Reaction across the continent was similar, among snobs and non-snobs alike.

At the Pop Montreal festival a couple of weeks before the album release, the Unicorns tried to put their CD in the hands of as many bands as possible. It worked. Hot Hot Heat invited them to tour in November. Though they were fellow Vancouver Islanders of the same generation, there were no previous social connections. Hot Hot Heat was, well, hot at the time.

The Unicorns saw a great opportunity until they learned that Metric had been added to the bill. 'We were really pissed,' says Thorburn. "This was going to be a big break, and now we were first of three on the bill and our [guarantee] went down. We were only getting $100 a night. Hot Hot Heat were doinga victory lap and were in celebration mode. We were tagging behind in this RV that was barely able to get to the next town, waking up to frozen bottles of water in the van."

Jamie Thompson enjoyed himself a bit more. "I watched their set almost every night," he says. "Such joy: [drummer] Paul [Hawley]and [singer] Steve [Bays], especially, were so fucking psyched to be doing that. Their positivity was infectious to me. It made us feel like we were supposed to be there. Whereas a month earlier we were playing to 10 people in Regina. Psychologically to me, the tour felt right. It felt like what should be happening."

The crew was a different story. Thorburn recalls, "One of the last shows we did with Hot Hot Heat, the tour manager came back from dinner and was like, 'Oh, that lobster was so delicious.' Welvere starving, and we were like, 'Do you have our meal buyouts?' He just callously laughed in our face and said he'd used it toward his lobster dinner. This was after touring with these guys for three weeks. The tour endedwith two nights at [Toronto's] Opera House. We were always pissing peopleofr. We did something on stage, I don't remember what it was, and we got kicked off the tour on the second-last night. Their merch guy opened for them instead."

---

The Unicorns' stock was rising while they were on tour with Hot Hot Heat in the fall of 2003.

On November 11, Pitchfork gave the album an 8.9 rating. It appeared on several year-end top 1O lists. Vice magazine, stared by Montreal pranksters infiltrating Brooklyn hipster circles, declared the Unicorns "the best band in the world." in December 2003, they were the top seller at the U.S. online music retail outlet Insound (the indie rock equivalent of Amazon at the time). They spent the first four months of 2004 touring the U.S. extensively, with venues selling out and increasing in size with each return visit. Unlike every other ladder-climbing careerist indie rock band, the Unicorns were wildly unpredictable.

"Alden and I were big practisers, and Nick wasn't," says Jamie Thompson. "When we first started, Alden and I could keep it really steady. Nick would sometimes lose himself, but it created this interesting approach. We couldn't just nail our songs perfectly every night, so it had to open up. We could just show up and improvise. Maybe we'd just make weird noises until someone started playing a song. Nick got tighter obviously, just touring and touring. It made us unflappable. We had so manyweird things happen because we created a situation where weird things could happen."

That extended to their dealings with the press. They claimed to be Scientologists, or that Thorburn and Penner met while nose modelling. All these claims were taken at face value, especially at Pitchfork, which ran a rambling, nonsensical and lengthy transcript of a conversation. (One headline, from Prefix magazine: "We Spent an Hour with These Guys and Didn't Find Out Dick.') On stage, the heterosexual band all wore pink, which four years before the advent of Pink Shirt Day led to speculation that they were gay. When asked directly in the press, they would neither confirm or deny, which was understood to be a tacit admission, not unlike Ricky Martin or Michael Stipe's public stances. "In the early 2000s," says Thompson, "any straight guy would deny it right away.' 'I think we're all fairly straight," says Thorburn now, when asked to clarify. "But hey, it's a spectrum, baby!" Meanwhile, some zealous fan started posting extremely detailed erotic fan fiction online called "Uniporn"; assumed to be yet another prank, it was too weird even for the actual Unicorns.

Ever savvy, they also knew that few things drive media attention more than a beef! Beatles vs. Stones, Blur vs. Oasis, Tupac vs. Biggie. In one early 2004 interview they took shots at fellow Montreal band the Stills, who were signed to Wce's new record label, 'exposing' the band's ska past and exclaiming, "Fuck the Stills!" The Unicorns' manager, Dan Seligman, soon got a call from Vice's Suroosh Alvi, who told him point blank, "Don't bite the hand that feeds you." To make amends, the two bands played shows together in Cleveland and Baltimore.

"At the end of the night [the Stills] were like, 'Hey, that wasn't cool,'" says Thorburn. "We apologized and we moved on and after that we were friendly. Only Oliver [Corbeil], the bass player, kept a grudge going. Everyone else realized it was just playful poking.'

Adding to the unpredictabilitywas roadie Max Groadie, part of a planned posse that never really took shape. "I had read that Toni Braxton had gone bankrupt because she had a 60-person entourage that travelled with her all the time,' says Jamie Thompson. 'For some reason, I said to Nick, 'We should do that!' We could show up in town and find the weirdest people and eventually have a 60-person entourage of the craziest people anyone's ever met.'

They made a list of all their favourite freaks. starting with a guy named Bill, who wasdown on his luck and washing dishes in Victoria. He didn't know anything about music, never mind tuning guitars, but they hired him and dubbed him Max Groadie. Sound tech Mark Lawson became his boss and minder.

Because Groadie wasn't much of a roadie, he started developing characters that became part of the show "He had this one character, King Cobra," says Thompson. "He found a pair of fake leather pants at a thrift store. He'd be topless and had a big Elvis pompadour wig and a cane with a dragon on it. He would come out and just heckle us, or whatever."

"Whatever ' took a turn toward the particularly strange at the Knitting Factory in New York City, in May 2004 at a gig with the still-unknown Arcade Fire. The Unicorns had just paid themselves for the first time in six months; until then, all money had gone straight to food and gas. They were selling out shows and selling tons of merch, and Dan Seligman gave them a big cash payout before the first of two Knitting Factory shows.

Thorburn bought a new guitar. When he went on stage, he left the rest of the money in thebackstage area. When he got off stage, it was gone. At least he had his new guitar.

The next night things got weird. Max Groadie came out in his topless get-up and asked the crowd, 'Who's going to crowd-surf me?' People cheered. Groadie continued, 'Okay, who's going to KILL ME?'

"It was like, What the fuck?!' says the normally nonplussed Thompson. "It was super awkward. Then he took a bear-bottle of honey he had shoved down the back of his pants, poured it all over his chest and said, 'Who's going to crowd-surf me now?' Everyone's like, 'Nooooo!' He said, 'Fine,' then turned around and hugged Nick and got honey all over his guitar. We started the next song, and Nick couldn't play. It was his older guitar, thankfully, and so he just smashed it. He got off stage. Me and Alden were still playing, and we think, 'Okay, I think that's that. Good night, everybody!'

"Backstage therewas this documentary film crew from New Orleans who'd come to some shows. I got off stage, and everything was chaos. I played mediator a lot, because Nick and Alden genuinely hated each other. I was trying to calm down, and there was a camera in my face. 'Can you get the fuck outta here?!' I found out later it was Kurt Braunohler, the comedian. He'd just answered a Craigslist ad to help work on a documentary. I don't know where any of that footage went, by the way. We just never heard from them again. We didn't have time to think about it."

"Max Groadie was the linchpin, or the scapegoat," says Thorburn. "His role was to funnel and pour all of our anger and frustration onto him--we weren't yelling at him, but we were encouraging him to be destructive. He was our impish mascot and would go on stage and do disruptive things that would antagonize the audience and the headlining band and the venue. There are lists of people we had to apologize to. We could easily have just said, 'Sorry, that's Max Groadie, our crazy roadie. We can't contain him, but we'll try harder next time."

"At one show he took Thousand Island salad dressing from Ben Kweller's backstage area and spit it into the front row of the audience. The tour manager, who is now Arcade Fire's tour manager, made us apologize to Kweller's guitar player. She said, 'You know, he asks for this salad dressing every night. It's the one thing on his rider. He finally got it tonight and you guys spewed it into the crowd.' People were so mad. We did a show for the CBC and Max Groadie came on stage and started ranting about how the CBC was a secret society. The show was entirely unusable and wasted all this time and money. It never aired.

"We never understood what consequences were, because we were falling up while fucking around," Thorburn continues. 'It was working. We weren't malicious. We weren't trying to hurt anybody. We justwanted to be playful with the nobility of rock'n'roll, which we thought was stupid. These bands from that time like Interpol or the Futureheads and all these pretentious British rock bands who were so self-serious. I mean, fuck you, this should be fun why not be crazy with it? I'm glad we got that out of our system at 21 or 22. I think you're supposed to be a little irreverent and impish at that age. But you gotta do it before you're 25. After that, it's just a bad look."

None of this scared Arcade Fire. They were more than excited to accept an offer from the Unicorns to open an American tour in June 2004. They'd just finished recording Funeral, had just signed to Merge Records and were ready to take on the world. But the Unicorns had also stepped up their game. "It was the first time I'd seen a band become a real band," says Richard Reed Parry. "When we met them at the first show of our tour, they'd been on the road for many months. They were burning. People were so stoked to see them, and musically it was just so awesome. They'd transformed themselves. They were still a weird indie band, but it wasn't scrappy and art-schooly anymore. It was really heavy and saying something quite profound while still totally irreverent. I was jealous. And there were only three of them. Nothing beats that."

At the Milwaukee stop, they played a bar where the stage had a gear-loading door directly behind it that led to the street. In the middle of a Unicorns song, a stranger opened the door, poked his head in and looked around. The crowd started laughing; when the band noticed, they invited him in but told him he had to rap if he wanted to stay to see the show.

"Nick ushered him up to the microphone," recalls Parry, "and then he just started freestyling in Spanish, like a baller, and he loved the attention. He totally killed it, and they went with it."

This attitude endeared them to risk-takers in every town. "We ended up with a lot of celebrity fans, people in comedy and film, especially in Los Angeles," says Jamie Thompson. Fellow Canuck Michael Cera, a 16-year-old actor on the show Arrested Development, was vocal about the Unicorns being his favourite band. "It wasn't just that we built a big following--in terms of crowds they weren't huge shows, necessarily," says Thompson. "But the key people got into it at the right time."

The irony of their success and onstage chemistry is that the two principals fought constantly and quite literally. "l mean, we'd made a concept album about how much we hated each other and wanted to break up," says Thorburn. "We were ready to call it quits before we even started playing the game."

"Nick and Alden were already fist-fighting--like legitimately fighting, not a stage thing--backwhen we were still opening for people at Casa del Popolo,' says Thompson. "Usually Alden would get Nick into a submission hold, because Alden had a bit more natural aggression. Nick has a different aggression. I'd usually lust try to keep the energy of the show going and keep playing. But occasionally I'd go break it up. One time in Chicago, I broke up a fight with them and then Nick tried to fight me, so I picked him up and threw him over a couch. It wasn't a fair fight between me and either of those guys, really."

"We were thrust into this position where we were constantly working and we had the stamina for it--or Jamie and I did," says Thorburn. "We embraced it. Jamie and I had fights that final year as well, and sometimes on stage. But for the most part, it was Jamie and I versus Alden, or Alden and Jamie versus me. It was this weird triangle where we were trying to consolidate power. Alden wasn't happy playingbigger shows. Jamie and I relished it: why not have this be as big and fun and exciting as it can possibly be? And use this platform to do something different? And if nothing else, to entertain ourselves, like projecting My Dinner with Andre behind us as our light show."

Things got bigger and more exciting when they went to Europe for the first time in August 2004. Someone who worked for XL Recordings was a big fan and offered to be their driver in the U.K. , pro bono. At that time the label vas known for Badly Drawn Boy and the Prodigy (later on as home to Radiohead and Adele). The Unicorns were big fans of the U.K. grime records XL was putting out by Dizzee Rascal and Wiley. They took a meeting at the label's ofhce with CEO Richard Russell.

"They made us an absurd offer," says Thompson. "I won't speak numbers, but it was a ridiculous, stupid offer, an insane amount of money." It was iust to license the debut outside of North America, with an option on the next two records. Penner was dead set against it. He didn't provide any reasons.

That European leg ended in Paris--badly.

"We ended up breaking up on stage that night," says Thorburn. "l smashed a microphone stand into this brick wall and chipped the wall and the venue refused to pay us. There was this big kerfuffle. Geoff Travis of Rough Trade records was there and was like, 'l need to sign this band.' He came backstage andwas like, 'Get back together. I like it.' We thought, Fuck it, let's do it."

"The Rough Trade deal was maybe 10% of what XL had oHered us," says Thompson, "and Alden was like, 'That's great! Let's do that!'"

Penner had become obsessed with the DIY philosophy of Fugazi and their main mouthpiece, lan MacKaye. Manager Seligman gave MacKaye's phone number to Penner and told him to iust call him. Which he did, repeatedly. Penner wanted the band to start booking their own shows and charging a cap of $5 at the door, like Fugazi did. To pacify him, Thompson and Thorburn let him book three shows in Vancouver and Victoria at the end of the September tour, places where he'd have some connections.

"Needless to say, those Vancouver andVictoria shows didn't go that well," says Thompson. "But Alden doubled down. I would understand if we were being chewed up by the machine. But Dan Seligman was our manager, and he's maybe the best person I've ever dealt with in the entire music industry. He didn't tell us to do anything. I don't care if his title is 'manager' and there's a history in the music industry of managers being horrible. Alien8, same thing: run by two guys, theyweren't a problem. Our booking agent was one guy. Our publicist was a one-person operation at the time, while taking care of his sick mother. We did all-ages shows all the time."

After yet another North American jaunt, the Unicorns went back to Europe, beginning in London with an official Rough Trade showcase at Barfly in Camden. It was packed with a who's who crowd. Onstage tension was high.

"There was some weird technical glitch on stagewith a rented synth and we ended up not really playing a show, just making noise and screaming at each other," says Thompson. "We went backstage, sitting on a couch, no one'slooking at each other. Then Karen and Nick from the Yeah Yeah Yeahs came in and were like, 'Guys, thatwas so great! We loved it!' We're like, 'You loved that?!'" The two bands had never met before; the Yeah Yeah Yeahs were just finishing the tour cycle for their breakthrough debut. They all retired to the New Yorkers' hotel room, where they drank and talked for two hours about how to manage internal conflicts. The Unicorns were urged not to break up and left that night with an opening slot for the American stars at a sold-out gig in London a few nights later. But because they dallied on accepting the offer, the Unicorns ended up third on the Yeah Yeah Yeahs' bill, playing right after the club's doors opened to a tiny fraction of the 3,500 ticketholders. "The writing was on the wall," says Thorburn. "You could only put us back together so many times."

It wasn't the ideal time to tour the other side of the world. But they had six dates in Australia booked for December 2004 with one odd stop en route: the 16th birthday party for the daughter of Russian aristocrats held at an L.A. mansion once owned by Orson Welles.

"It's weird, but Alden was super into doing that," says Thompson. "It seemed against anything he would have wanted to do." The girl's family paid for the band's flight and hotel room on top of their fee. While there, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs invited them to a dinner party with Beck, who wanted the Unicorns to open for him in Montreal on his next tour. Back at the hotel, however, the Unicorns decided once and for all to split.

That clarity made the Australian dates somewhat easier, even though Penner and Thorburn didn't speak once during the two weeks there. "We flew there and had five days off in Melbourne," says Thompson. "Everyone had their own hotel room, which was the height of luxury. The people we worked with there were amazing. Then we went back and played a huge sold-out show in Houston, three times the size we had before, maybe 1,000 people. More people than had ever come to see us in the States, bigger than L.A. or New York. We kept telling people it was our last show and nobody believed us. Nick got annihilated, wasted. We snuck a bunch of kids in the back of that show, and they came up on stage and danced. Nick disappeared after, and so did Alden."

"There was a bootleg recording of that gig floating around, and it's horrifying," says Thorburn. "I was just gone. I knew it was the end. It was a funereal air in the room. Very dark and very negative. We left Houston and we both went back to Campbell River; we might even have been on the same plane but did not speak. Then [Penner] called me a week later and said, 'l can't do this anymore.' I said,

'Okay.'"

"l was really interested in the dynamic between Nick and Alden," says Thompson.

"Nick does film stuff. He put out a graphic novel. If you said, 'We need someone to design a toothbrush!' Nick would probably be good at that. He's a super creative, visionary guy. He's not an obsessive, music-specific guy. He was more of a frontperson and wanted that attention. Alden was really obsessive, had a very introverted approach to things. He might want to go live in a cave and just play guitar. That's an interesting mix of guys."

On December 28, 2004, 14 months after their debut was released, a message was posted on the band's website: "The Unicorns are dead R.I.P."

---

After the breakup of the Unicorns in December 2004, Nick Thorburn didn't want to face a Montreal winter. He went to L.A. and urged drummer Jamie Thompson to join him.

They started plotting a new band, Islands. They knew what kind of baggage they carried. "I didn't want to be that joke that isn't funny after awhile; says Thorburn. "Something that really bothered me about how the Unicorns were framed was that it was whimsical and quirky. 'They play toy instruments!' These things that weren't true. We were playing synthesizers from the '70s and drum machines from the '80s; those aren't toys. But that was the narrative and it irked me. I hated bands that were 'adorkable,' I really wanted to make serious music that could move you but also make you laugh. When Jamie and I started Islands, we wanted to try some things. Some of those things were to write explicitly sad songs or romantic or emotional songs, and that's what I've tried to do ever since."

First, however, came a hip-hop project. With Steve Mcdonald of Redd Kross and future Red Hot Chili Pepper Josh Klinghoffer, Thorburn and Thompson started backing L.A. rappers up live. This evolved into something they called Th' Corn Gangg, which didn't exist past two SXSW performances and one sold-out L.A. gig. "My great regret in life was not doing more Corn Gangg stuff," says Thompson, "because that was an amazing project."

Instead, focus turned to Islands demos, also done in LA. with Steve Mcdonald. Though happy with the results, Thorburn and Thompson wanted more of a Montreal vibe. They returned to the Unicorns' birthplace and invited their friends: all but two members of Arcade Fire, most of Bell Orchestre and Wolf Parade, Snailhouse's Michael Feuerstack, Jim Guthrie, bassist Patrice Agbokou. The debut, Return to the Sea, came out on the short-lived Equator Records, a label founded by Matt Drouin, a high-school startupwunderkind. They turned down an offer from Universal, because Drouin, who was now Metric's manager, could get them more money from Canadian granting agencies than the major label was offering as an advance. And yet, says Thorburn, "I never received a single dime or saw a single royalty statement from Equator."

Beck kept in touch, and the oder still stood to open his Montreal show at the Bell Centre, which would be Islands' ofhcial live debut. The band, all clad in white, featured Feuerstack, Agbokou and two string players who'd never played a rock show before. Jim Guthrie was also on board. Says Jamie Thompson, "For me, growing up in Guelph, that was like Paul Mccartney joining the band. lt was a huge deal."

The debut was well received, the tour well attended; there was also a tour opening for Hot Hot Heat. But by then Jamie Thompson was exhausted and wanted out. He'd assumed financial and managerial duties since Islands' inception, as well as tour managing, and it all got to be too much. He left in the spring of 2006, just a few months after Return to the Sea came out. "In high school, I figured I'd be an unknown jazz musicianwho died penniless, like all my heroes," he says. "When success came, I was determined that no one was going to take it away. I'd be on the phone, doing emails and spreadsheet work, and we're on a bus and everyone else is having the time of their lives, drinking and partying, and there was more and more shit falling on me. We'd do wild things, and I'd have to talk to the cops all the time and I'm not a huge fan of talking to cops."

One night in Providence, Thorburn led the crowd out of the club and played the encore with acoustic instruments in an adjacent basketball court; people stuck around to play a game afterwards. Good times. The next night in Manhattan, the same stunt didn't fly and led to the promoter telling Thompson that they wouldn't be paid. "While everyone else is having this wild, transcendent experience on the streets of New York, I'm talking to cops and finding out we're not getting paid," he says.

"I had to put gas in the bus and pay this guy and that, and it got more and more stressful. In L.A. , Nick had been taping smoke bombs ontothe headstock of his guitar and lighting them off at shows. The person at [influential California promoter] Goldenvoice came up to us and said, 'We've heard he's been doing this thing. We're telling you right now, if he lights off a smoke bomb, you're not getting paid and Goldenvoice is never working with you again. Just so you know.' I went back and said, 'Dude, you have to not do this.' But he has an antiauthoritarian thing, and now I'm the heavy. He ended up doing it, and the woman chewed me out like crazy afterwards. That was it for me."

Around the same time, Alden Penner re-emerged in Montreal with a five-piece called Clues, co-founded with Brendan Reed, an early Unicorns drummer. They put out one record on Constellation in 2009 before packing it in.

He surfaced again in the Hidden Words, a conceptual project based on Baha'i texts, at a time when he was reconnecting with his faith. It was primarily a three-piece with violinist Marie-Claire Saindon and Jamie Thompson, with whom he'd reconciled over a long and apologetic phone call. After releasing one Hidden Words album on Bandcamp in 2011, Free Thyself From the Fetters of the World, "he had some family issue and had to go away," says Thompson. The album has since disappeared from all online platforms.

Improbably, the Unicorns reunited in 2014. Or perhaps it had been prophesied: the last thing they releasedwas a single called '2014' in 2004. Penner was in a better emotional and musical space; his 2014 solo album Exegesis was deservedly acclaimed. Penner and Thorburn had talked occasionally over the years about doing something, but the ice finally thawed when an invitation from Arcade Fire came to open some key dates on the Reflektor tour. Uncharacteristically, Penner agreed to six shows and signed all the contracts before telling his bandmates. "Which is hilarious, but that's life," says Thompson.

Penner told the Kreative Kontrol podcast, "It's not really a cash grab or based on any sort of nostalgia coming from those who've been calling for it for a long time. It feels like a point in my life where it'd be nice to honour that friendship. It's never too late to do that sort of thing, even though it might feel that way as you get older."

"We hadn't played in 10 years," says Thompson. "We rehearsed in L.A. for a couple of days before. On the first song on the first day, we just counted in and played it perfectly. It was super normal, very casual and natural for us to be playing a huge show like that."

There were two shows at the Forum in L.A. and three at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn, followed by a hometown show headlining the Metropolis as part of Pop Montreal. Offers flooded in to keep it going, including one from the Pitchfork festival. Thorburn says, "Alden and I couldn't come to a resolution about how to perform live, the scale of the live show, and Jamie's involvement, so I turned it down."

Is there not a certain beauty, Thompson is asked, about burning so brightly before imploding and then having a brief, triumphant return? "Yeah," he laughs. "But I'm over 40 now, and there would also be a beauty in being able to buy a house."

#lore #biography #2002 #2003 #2004 #2014 #2022 #interview #the unicorns #nick thorburn #alden penner #jamie thompson #michael barclay

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Welcome to Japanese Baby Food Series! This is the 1st video!!

In this vlog, I will introduce how to make baby food. In Japan, babies start eating baby food around 5 months old. As a mom of 2 children, I've been enjoying making baby food (and also kids meal) for almost 5 years now. My daughter is about to become 7 months old so I decided to film what she's been eating during 5 - 6 months old. I hope you enjoy watching this video and try it out if you have small baby in your family! :)