Friday, July 17, 2009

Junq Tour 2009: Neepawa

Welcome To



This is a new piece I've decided to start called the "Junq Tour". Basically, whenever I get sent to a different town or city on business, I make it my goal to find some nifty treasures! I got the "rubbers" sign from the abandoned personal care home I was working in. I could have taken home a bedpan, but I decided that was probably a dumb idea.

Neepawa is a little town. Not tiny, but not huge. It's apparently the Lily capital of the world, although the only Lillies I saw were the cardboard ones stapled to the telephone posts. Neepawa has a few cool places to visit though. I had the privilege of staying there for a week while on business. Here's my crappy 1970s hotel room. The rug was a trip!



I checked out the Thrift store while I was there, but didn't find much. Just the usual Thrift store crap - clothes, toys, etc. No interesting treasures. However, there was one store that I spent quite a bit of time browsing for treasures:


This place is chok full of the kinda crap that heaven is made out of! Well, maybe not heaven. There were too many Eddy Arnold LPs and too many home-recorded video tapes of Little House on the Prarie.

But here's the treasures that I did manage to find:



Anne Kraichy - Musical Gems


Ah! Here's a great album full of Ukrainian polkas. Just for the hell of it, I Googled Anne's name. Lo and behold, the third link that popped up was my blog. It appears that Anne Kraichy played violin on Roy Mykytyshyn's albums. No wonder I'm enjoying this tape so much! It's a shame that I don't have a track listing for it though. Click here to listen to the first song!


Evelyn Broadfoot - Must I Go Empty Handed?


What the..??? Okay, it's obviously a lady and her guitar. Singing in Cree... at least that's what it says on the inlay. She could be singing in Norwegian for all I know. She's not irritating, but I can't understand what the hell she's singing about. This tape also has no track listing.


Larry Novak's Latest and Greatest


Latest and greatest what? Considering this album was released on cassette only (as far as I can tell) I'm guessing 'latest and greatest' isn't referring to technology. The songs on this tape were sung by different people, at least that's what the piece of paper Scotch-taped to the back of the case tells me. The first song "Good Bye, Lady Di" not only sucks ass, it's fucking country music. The sound quality of the tape sounds like someone wiped their ass with the master tape, which is pretty bad since it's a professionally produced hunk of plastic. The Evelyn Broadfoot album (which was probably recorded on a shoebox tape recorder) sounds less shitty than this thing.

I can imagine Larry's art direction for the cover....
**flipping through photo album of a trip to Winnipeg** "Aahhh! There's a nice picture of... scenery! We'll use that."

Good job, Larry.

And finally, here's a great video tape I picked up....



It's a wonderfully entertaining Sex Education video tape! I'd post some content from it, but I've still got that strike against my Youtube account. It should be clearing up sometime soon, and I'm not risking having my account nuked on account of one video. I'll risk it when the strike is cleared up.

Now, just because I can't post video, it doesn't mean I can't post questionable content on the free webspace that I get from my ISP. Here's a screenshot of this dude who seems to not only be unalarmed, but is in fact HAPPY to see a flock of penises flying by:



There's lots of great stuff on this video that I'm just dying to post. But alas, we wait.



If you're in Neepawa, you need to check out the little restaurant across the street from the book & tape shop. It's called Wilson's Place, and you'll get a great meal, fantastic pie, and be surrounded by cool junk on the wall. They also have the best clock in the world:



So, there's my trip to Neepawa in a nutshell. It's a damn good thing I brought my guitar and my laptop, because the whole town pretty much goes to bed at 6:00 PM. I did some songwriting and on my last day in the Personal Care home (when nobody showed up), I did a bit of recording. It sounded great in that big echoey building. Perhaps when I get some time, I'll finish mixing it and upload it. But don't count on it ;)

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Having grown up in Neepawa and moved to Regina, Sask. I can say that whoever the person is that wrote this trash article... they are doing their best to misrepresent the town. It is a gorgeous town in full bloom of summer, and has a very beautiful river running right through the centre of it which serves as a park. Get a life and stop writing dishonest blogs.