Before going to Tundra on Saturday, I wanted to catch a bit of the New Pornographer’s concert at Nathan Phillips Square. I think this is the first year that there have been good concerts as part of Wintercity, usually they have some no names, but this year they also had Philosopher Kings, Sloan, and Mobile as headliners in addition to the New Pornographers. That’s a pretty good all-Canadian selection, it must have been due to Toronto Water’s sponsorship of Wintercity. Yes, when we saw that we were like wtf?? The water utility of Toronto is sponsoring free rock concerts? It’s true, but more on that later.
It’s too bad the organizers couldn’t have gotten say Broken Social Scene or Arcade Fire as part of their campaign to get the demographic I am part of to attend free indie rock concerts, but New Pornographers is not a bad selection. Unfortunately, I only recognize one song by them, Laws, which they played 2nd in their set. It is a catchy song however, and it sounded great live. The sound system that they had was pretty good, because the instruments were clear. I think it would have been a good concert if we didn’t have to leave like 7 songs in to make our restaurant reservation. Oh yeah, that and the cold.
This year, Wintercity really was a celebration of cold. I think every night, except for the night with Sloan, was at least -10°C. Saturday might have been the worse, being something like -30°C with wind chill. Even huddling close deep within the crowd didn’t really help much. So it was a good and bad thing that we had to leave early. On the way out, I wanted to see what this Toronto Water Hot Spot covered tent was, figuring it would be somewhere to warm up and get a warm cup of…water? Well it was warm, and if you answered a 3 question quiz correctly, you would receive a HTO water bottle and 2 hand warmers (Smittens get an extra).
The whole Toronto Water experience was a bit weird I suppose, but here’s the kicker. When I got home, my parents said that while I was out, our home didn’t have any water; although it had since been fixed. The next day, we AGAIN didn’t have any water for the entire day! Sure, it was due to a leak somewhere that the utility was trying to fix, but the fact that it happened right when I was exposed to this big marketing campaign? Wow.
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