My love for Sean Heather‘s empire is well documented. I have spent enough time dropping Guinness in the various incarnations of the Irish Heather to pay my first borns college fees.

So when Heather started talking about going out and establishing a beer variation of what his Shebeen is to Whiskey, I was intrigued and then when photos began to show up online I got excited. Then I showed up and had my mind blown.

My concern with Bitter was going to be if I was going to want to come back. I do. The beer list is to die for and as close to the mile long whiskey list that you get at the Shebeen, it really is a beer lover’s paradise. The taps are awash with obscure micro brews from across BC and Ontario, the likes of which you’re not gonna see anywhere else. anyone that can get R&B Brewing to give them an exclusive on tap is doing it right. The bottles? You may as well look at the list yourself, it’s gonna blow your mind.

The vibe in the room is great. The current incarnation of the Irish Heather rubbed me the wrong me design wise, mainly because I still don’t think anything could beat its old home. Bitter home on West Hastings is lovely, dark and warm and hard to leave. The food continues the trend of being amazing. When you offer up simple bar food like pretzels, sausage rolls or my all time fave, the scotch; you can easily blow it.

Make it cheap, make it barely palatable and you’ve got an easy money maker. Bitter’s bar food astonishes, you’ve not had a scotch egg until you’ve had their scotch egg. With so many choices in Vancouver today, let alone so many choices with Heather’s empire, Bitter is enough to make you never leave.

Dance culture in Vancouver is very transient, much like the city’s denizens themselves, so to maintain a consistent brand to the point of which you all you need to do is a say a name and have people simply get it.

Blueprint Events is a brand now. Founded in 1997, many have wondered why Alvaro Prohl and his band of merry men have not gone further a field or put an established brand name behind other products like a clothing line or a label.

When you’ve lasted this long, do you really screw with a good thing? Blueprint has been a driving force in bringing a very specific brand of dance music to Vancouver. Call it commercial or not, they were the first to bring the likes of Deadmaus and Skrillex to Vancouver while at the same time maintaining a consistent hold on the city’s house and trance markets. Not bad for some guys who started off in the legendary Chameleon Lounge back in the day.

Commercial? Sure we are talking about an organization that has brought David Guetta to town and is now at the point of being able to do stadium shows. But with three separate sub-brands on their umbrella, they’re as able to break burner bass acts like Tiny Lights in the city as much as they are obscure progressive house DJs.

She won’t admit to it but she may very well be the most interesting person in Vancouver.

Nina Mendoza is a figurehead in this city and she may likely smack the taste of out of my mouth for saying, DJ, occasional promoter, foodie, iconoclast, woman abut town, whiskey fiend. If anyone in the city has fingers on more pulses, I’d love you to introduce them to me.

As a DJ, the lady takes from everywhere, happily content to reference Rustie as she is Bobby Valentino. Easily opening for the likes of Theophilus London or playing Prince tribute nights, she’s a solid bridge between the city’s r&b/hip hop community and the new generation of modern bass music.

As Vancouver’s rep for the Red Bull Music Academy, it’s her influence that has allowed the city to spend quiet personal time with the likes of Ali Shaheed Muhammad and Flying Lotus while promoting the brand to a new generation of producers dropping everything from house to cumbia.

Then, there’s her metabolism. A night out with young Neens is not complete with out food and if you’ve seen her twitter feed, you get the short form version of Vancouver’s best food blog. Drooling yet?

The David Fincher experience is very much like anything else out there. Few directors in cinema today seem to be that identifiable with such immediacy.

It’s traits like these that the concept of the Swedish “Millennium” film trilogy so appealing. You might know it as The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo.

You’re best served tossing pre-conceived notions about the film out the window, especially if you’ve either a) read the book or b) seen the original films. Doing so allows you to approach this as a very idiosyncratic, individual trip down the rabbit hole. Two hours and 40 minutes go by like nothing, but it doesn’t feel rushed. It’s like downing a bottle of cinematic absinthe.

You will hear lots about Daniel Craig and Rooney Mara. Craig is as Nordicly stoic as is required. Rooney Mara has been handed the breakout role of a lifetime here and she does it justice. You can feel the pot ready to boil over. Playing it with less sass than Noomi Rapace did in the original, you seriously begin to wonder if Mara isn’t entirely sociopathic after all.

There’s been lots of talk regarding why this isn’t a box office hit. Look at Fincher at his darkest; films like Seven, Fight Club and The Game didn’t smash it off the bat. They took time, but like with any good trip, were worth the wait.

If you’re used to Chinese cinema, you’re prepared for swords, fighting, emperors and what have you. This is all there, but with a twist. Take all of that and then drop it in the stylistic heart of a Philip Marlowe detective novel. Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame is as simple and as noir as it come, a beautiful woman calls a detective into play to help investigate a distinct series of events. The difference? It’s the about-to-be-crowned empress of China getting the detective, that she tossed in jail, out to help solve a little problem regarding spontaneous combustion.

So yeah, it’s a little different. Hong Kong star Andy Lau plays the psychic, martial arts loving formerly prison bound, slightly emotional detective with verve. He looks like he’s stoked to be playing Detective Dee. Tony Leung is well, Tony Leung. Tsui Hark’s firm hand makes sure you know what you’re getting from the look and feel of the film while at the same time, helping you forget he has done movies with Jean-Claude Van Damme.

The end result is a film that may confuse, will astound and will certainly remind you that Asian film is not all saccharine comedy.

After attending the New Forms Festival’s 2011 edition, the brain and the body both were both a little wiped, but there was a definite standout for me in the form of the mysterious Cloudface. For just under an hour, he had a room of abject hipsters, beatniks, techno fans and lost art school students going off in a delirious, post-acid house fashion. The most glorious thing of all? We could see everything he was doing.

You see, it was a live set and one comprised of nothing but analogue gear, all outboard hardware. No screens, no mice, just a wing, a prayer and the hope that everything would stay synced together. Magically enough, it did, and the end result was the kind of old school house and techno vibes you heard on early Trax records. The mystic majesty of the 808, the 909 and the 101 all coming together to sing a hallelujah chorus to the rave gods.

The cool thing is, he’s not the only one. More and more local producers seems to be shying away from the software for the hardware. Local beat-smith Prisongarde recently tried to sell me a Machinedrum, when shut down, he was on the phone to Taal Mala, the only other guy in town with as much hardware as him. Gear fetish? Sure, but when stuff sounds this good, you know it can’t be helped.

Sean Heather

Owner of the Irish Heather, the Shebeen Whiskey House, the Salty Tongue Deli, Salt Tasting Room, the Judas Goat, the Everything Cafe and mastermind behind forthcoming projects known as Bitter and Rainier, Heather has defined a taste and an aesthetic in Vancouver food and drink for over a decade.

The Irish Heather was my home away from home in it’s original location, the closest thing to walking into a Dublin pub that Vancouver had to offer, it was the place to acquire a pint. Traditional without cliche yet still ever leaning forward and I think that’s always been where Heather works best.

Dude could rest on his laurels. He could have sold out, he could have gone into Yaletown or signed a deal with a chain. Instead he’s remain completely uncompromising in a no holds barred attempt to better Vancouver and the Gastown area.

So the curious out there were hesitant, will they simply roll in a shop, pack in the same gear as everywhere else and be done with it? Not by a long shot. It’s the Vancouver specific product which makes the place. You know that you can score goodness out of a brand with the kind of street cred that Stussy has, it really goes without saying.  So it’s always a pleasure a brand represent a city, be it via hoodies, t-shirts or skate decks. It’s all in the style that you know and that you love, the only different is that this time it’s Stussy repping Kitsilaino, Strathcona and Granville.

You can still catch all the classic limited edition grind and they’re still dropping amazing bits and their crossover stuff done in collaboration with Nike and Marvel comics might still be there for you when you feel the need to cop it, but really, shouldn’t you be repping your hood in style?

Thirty seven years deep, it remains a bastion of listener supported media, taking solace only in membership payments of sixty bucks a year and whatever government grants and donations happen to arrive. The end result of like the little media engine that could. Being a cooperative means that all the major decisions are made by the members, via a board of directors. There’s no station, only four part time staff, with the thousands of members and volunteers who donate their time.

What you then get on you radio dial is a completely different perspective. This isn’t college radio, this isn’t commercial radio, nor is privately funded. It’s by the people, for the people. You get different perspective son non-English programming from anything else in Vancouver. You get a focus on non-commercial music that people actually care about, so everything from the city’s only all-accordion show to reggae, to hip-hop, to folk and to electronic music.

But most importantly, you get the a perspective from the people themselves about the day-to-day functions of existence when it comes to current affairs. There was no spicier a time than during the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver and there was no more vital a voice for dissent at the time, than Co-op Radio.

If you know your house music, you’ve heard her, be it on tracks with Todd Omotani, Vinny Troia or the Rurals in recent years or on her own solo releases.

 If you were smart, you’d have copped her debut LP by now. Pieces Pendulum is a dance floor with the lush vocal stylings of miss Veda calling everyone from Erykah Badu to Barbara Tucker over tops of serious beats from the likes of Mr. Tunes and Thomas Osaze.  Plus, it takes a very specific voice to convince NYC house legend Timmy Regisford to remix it after all.

One of the more intriguing things about Jaidene is that unlike many house vocalists, she’s the full package, not just the voice. Graduate of the Vancouver film school, she’s the eye behind the series of promo clips that have blazed their way through the Pieces Pendulum release.  These ain’t just chunks of iPhone video that have been thrown up online, instead, they’re Soderbergian mini-epics. If ever a sound met a vision so well, it’s here in the hands of Jaidene Veda, the next great voice of Canadian house.