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The days of dancing being illegal are behind us and concerts are back. There are still some issues regarding travel and COVID-19 restrictions, with local legend Tommy Genesis cancelling all of her North American tour dates including her show at Fortune Sound Club.

But there are plentiful events to look forward to in the weeks and months to come. Heres a list of some of the hottest concerts in Vancouver scheduled in 2022.

RELATED:Surrey Is Hosting a Life Size Robotic Dinosaurs Festival This Spring

@billieeilish / Instagram

Thursday, March 24, 2022 at Rogers Arena. The one who oscillates between Nickelodeon Rugrat, and Marilyn Monroe vibes, Billie Eilish, will stop in Vancouver this spring. This will be her only Canadian stop on her world tour.

Photo: unrealaltj / Instagram

Wednesday, March 30 at the Pacific Coliseum. Chilled out, emotionally psychedelic rock band alt-j will returns to mellow Vancouver skateboarders and those that hang out with them.

Photo: Captured! By Robots / Facebook

Wednesday, April 6 at the Fox. A highly anticipated event for robot enthusiasts as it is the only touring robot band coming to Vancouver this year. Supported by local acts BOG and Ape War.

Photo: Snotty Nose Rez Kids / Facebook

Friday, May 6 at the Commodore Ballroom. SNRK will play the Commodore this year, in lieu of their postponed show last December. These darlings of local hip hop put on a really good show. Both men hail from Kitimat Village.

Photo: @dualipa / Instagram

Friday, April 1 at Rogers Arena. Dua Lipa announces her long awaited Future Nostalgia Tour in celebration of her platinum-certified sophomore album Future Nostalgia Ticket link

@feliciathegoat / Instagram

Thursday, April 7 at Pacific Coliseum. Tyler the Creator, fans of the skateboarding artist and style icon already know.

Photo: Slipknot / Instagram

Sunday, April 17 at Rogers Arena. Enormously popular over the course of many years, they play metal and resemble the cast of every horror movie ever made. They scare me.

Photo: @davechappelle / Instagram

Friday and Saturday, April 22 & 23 at Rogers Arena. Dave Chapelle is very funny and knows when to quit.

Photo: @jordan.b.peterson / Instagram

Monday, May 2 at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre. He cannot sing, he cannot dance and he thinks women should all have babies, but Jordan Peterson will no doubt be speaking to packed house. Question is will he bring the lobster?

Photo: Motley Crew / Facebook

Friday, September 2 at B.C. Place. When you rock that hard, its probably hard to go back and do a normal job which may explain why these artists still tour. They will be supported by Joan Jett & the Blackhearts and Poison.

Photo: @rupaulsdragrace / Instagram

Sunday, September 4 at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre. Four months after Jordan Peterson plays should be plenty of time to clean and decorate the theatre for the likes of RuPaul and her queens. Question is, will Vancouver queens bring sufficient pageantry and sass?

Photo: @chrisrock / Instagram

Friday, October 21 at the Doug Mitchell Thunderbird Sports Centre. He played UBC the last time he was here, and he will again. Rocks Ego Death World Tour is his first world tour in five years.

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More:
11 Concerts You Can Look Forward To In Vancouver For 2022 - 604 Now

After holding a pre-Town Meeting informational meeting earlier this week, Waitsfield voters headed to the polls and elected Jordan Gonda to the select board along with Chach Curtis.

Gonda and Jennifer Stella ran for a three-year seat on the board with Gonda receiving 307 votes to Stellas 101 votes. Curtis ran unopposed for a two-year seat on the board and received 395 votes.

Waitsfield voters passed a $2.4 million budget 364 to 90 and also voted 297 to 160 to permit cannabis retailers and integrated licenses. Voters approved spending an additional $10,000 for the Mad River Valley Recreation District 337 to 119. Waitsfield voters cast 343 yes votes and 109 no votes on adding an additional $10,000 appropriation to the Waitsfield Conservation Commissions Restroom/Recreation/Conservation reserve fund.

Voters also approved a measure calling for establishing a reserve fund for invasive species management in the amount of $10,000. That vote was 355 to 96. Voters also approved exempting the Masonic Lodge from property taxes for five years by a vote of 280 to 164.

Other election results saw Ted Joslin elected as a lister, Jennifer Peterson elected delinquent tax collector, David Babic elected library trustee, Joslin elected as town agent, Laura Brines elected cemetery commissioner and Robert Cook elected cemetery trustee.

At the towns informational meeting on February 28, after the board fielded questions about Town Meeting and the budget, board members held a regular meeting during which they discussed the towns indoor mask requirement. The board renewed its indoor mask requirement for 30 days at its February 14 meeting with a plan to revisit the issue at this weeks meeting. Curtis said his preference was to extend the requirement for the next two weeks because Washington County is still in a high COVID risk area , as defined by the CDC.

Gonda pointed out that part of the new CDC guidelines on county by county. COVID risk levels are based on the availability of hospital beds for non-COVID patients and board member Fred Messer (who is also the towns health officer) concurred that Washington County is still high risk.

Im inclined to leave things as they are, board chair Christine Sullivan said and board member Brian Shupe agreed. Sullivan pointed out that the school district would be making a decision on whether or not to continue requiring masks in schools in the coming days as well. Schools are allowed to remove mask requirements if vaccination rates are at or above 80%. Currently, Harwood Union, Crossett Brook, Waitsfield and Fayston are over 85% vaccinated and Fayston is close to 80%, Sullivan said. Brookside Primary and Moretown are not there yet, she added.

Stella, who was present at the February 28 meeting objected to the board making the decision to keep the mask mandate in place for another two weeks.

The rest of the world is backing down on mask mandates and were going forward with a mask mandate. Masks have done nothing to quell the number of cases. Its time to let people make their own decisions, she said.

Read more here:
Waitsfield voters elect Gonda and Curtis to the select board - The Valley Reporter

Don Letts knew what Jamaica sounded like before he knew what it looked like. The film director, DJ and musician was born in London to Jamaican parents in 1956 and grew up listening to reggae. We had our soundtrack, he told me over video call. But there was no visual accompaniment. When I was a child, the only thing youd ever see of Jamaica was a postcard with some dude riding a donkey on a beach in a straw hat, or somebody limbo dancing.

This lack of authentic cultural references affected how Letts understood himself. Im first-generation British-born black, a child of the Windrush generation, he said as he spoke from his studio, a shed in the garden of his home in Kensal Rise, north-west London. He wore a khaki sweatshirt, a rasta cap and a gold chain around his neck, and spoke as he does on his BBC Radio 6 Music show Culture Clash Radio with warmth and charisma. That British-born black rolls off the tongue now, but back then it was confusing. I described myself as being of a lost tribe, neither here nor there.

All that changed with the release of The Harder They Come, the Jamaican crime film directed by Perry Henzell, which Letts saw upon its release in 1972. I remember walking out of the cinema having been taken by the power of a film to inform, inspire and entertain, he said. The film offered, for the first time, a visual representation of the country he was from, and that had influenced so much of his cultural life, but which he had never seen.

It also set Letts in pursuit of what would become his profession. Returning home from the cinema, he wondered whether he could be a filmmaker too. But in the Seventies, for a young black man, that was a ridiculous idea, he said. Film was an old white boys network. Fast-forward five years and, with the explosion of punk rock and its DIY sensibility, Letts saw his opportunity. My white mates are picking up guitars, man. I wanted to pick up something too. So I picked up a Super 8 camera.

At the time, Letts ran Acme Attractions, a clothing shop on Kings Road, London that was a hang-out spot for members of the Clash and the Sex Pistols, and artists such as Patti Smith, Chrissie Hynde and Bob Marley, who became a good friend. His filmography began with the Clash: he shot the music videos for tracks including White Riot and London Calling. He would go on to make videos for the British Jamaican group Musical Youth whose 1982 song Pass the Dutchie was a UK number one and sold over five million copies worldwide the Pretenders, Elvis Costello and Marley, and is renowned for spearheading music-video direction for black artists in the UK.

He now finds himself in front of the camera for the first time. Rebel Dread, which will be released in cinemas on 4 March, tells Lettss story through evocative archive footage, much of it his own. It details the threat of racism and police violence that he grew up with in Brixton, and tracks his career as a videographer, band manager and musician in the group Big Audio Dynamite. He alongside his brother Desmond Coy and contemporaries Norman Jay, Jeannette Lee, John Lydon and Mick Jones appear as talking heads.

Letts is often credited with marrying Londons punk and reggae scenes in the Seventies through his resident DJ sets at the Roxy in Covent Garden, London. White people from the suburbs would come to the nightclub expecting to hear punk, he said, and in between these raucous, punk-rock guitar live things theyd hear Don Letts playing dub reggae. During the course of our call he referred to himself in the third person several times, though never with arrogance. He remains aware of, but modest about, his place in the history books.

It was Trojan Records, the British ska, reggae and dub label launched in 1968 that sowed the seeds for the UKs love affair with Jamaican music, he said. People of my generation would have been hip to that stuff before Don Letts dropped a record on the deck. The people that I turned on to reggae in 1977 were all the white people that didnt interact with black people. Id like to take it on my shoulders, folks, but I never claimed it was all me.

Still, Letts in establishing the Roxys sound was at the heart of the culture clash. Thrilling archive footage in Rebel Dread shows the filmmaker and his rasta brethren dancing alongside punks who are in heavy eyeliner and bondage wear. Shane MacGowan is there, smoking by the bar. Letts remembers the Pogues frontman asking for a beer and two spliffs, which is, he said, the perfect example of cultural exchange.

Rebel Dread was finished more than two years ago, its release delayed because of the pandemic. With all thats happened in the interim, Letts feels as though he has changed since the film was made. Black Lives Matter made me examine what Ive been doing for the 66 years Ive been on this Earth, he said. I wanted to know if Id been tap dancing for the man or doing my bit. I quickly realised, whether it be in the films I made, or music videos or songs, the argument an underlying anti-racist message has never been far away.

But Don Letts doesnt spend his life on a soapbox. There is party music too. I just keep reminding people: you cant spend your life on the dance floor. Eventually the musics gonna stop and you have to go out and face reality. And guess what? There are some great tunes for that too.

[See also: The chaotic life and bruising songs of Mark Lanegan]

The co-existence of Londons punk and rasta movements was a testament to the power of culture to bring people together, Letts said. In both subcultures he sees a celebration of individuality and freedom, which, he observed, are themes the tabloids and the politicians are still determined to destroy. In the 21st century, he added, the only counter-culture is over-the-counter culture. The advent of technology has shifted many of these movements online, where they are less visible to outsiders.

Letts, who is a father, also wondered whether the rebelliousness of his generation had made things difficult for the next. Because of music, old aint what it used to be. I certainly havent become my parents, which is problematic for young people: how do you rebel against somebody like me? You cant out-tattoo, out-hairdo, out-style my generation. Ive got young kids and theyre trying to impress their dad and thats kinda cool, but We havent left a lot of stones unturned for them.

He is speaking partly in jest, because he realises, too, that todays young people have their own difficulties. Recently a friend asked him why teenagers today look so crap? And I said, because its more important that they get their heads together than their hair-dos. Its tough. I do empathise. Its hard to be a rebel when youre living with your mum.

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Read the rest here:
Don Letts: Black Lives Matter protests made me question if I'd been tap dancing for the man - The New Statesman

Rep. Cori Bush, D-Mo., was seemingly unhappy on Tuesday night after President Biden announced his support for funding police departments.

In his first State of the Union address, Biden told Congress: The answer is not to defund the police, its to fund the police. Fund them. Fund them.

Fund them with resources and training they need to protect our communities, the president continued.

While his message received loud praise in the audience, with a standing ovation from both his party and Republicans, Democrats like Bush said Biden has the wrong idea.

With all due respect, Mr. President. You didnt mention saving Black lives once in this speech, Bush tweeted. All our country has done is given more funding to police. The result? 2021 set a record for fatal police shootings."

Defund the police. Invest in our communities.

A flagship Black Lives Matter account shared a tweet suggesting it also wasn't happy with the presidents stance on the issue, using a screenshot of Rep. Maxine Waters's face, from at some point in the night, to deliver its message by meme.

Other Democrats, however, including New York City Mayor Eric Adams, as well as leaders in other liberal cities, have called for increased police budgets to combat crime.

Rep. Ritchie Torres, D-N.Y., told MSNBC that the defund-police movement is dead in New York City and good riddance, adding, Any elected official whos advocating for the abolition and/or even the defunding of police is out of touch with reality and should not be taken seriously.

Similarly, Rep. Val Demings, D-Fla., the former chief of the Orlando Police Department, used Bidens remarks as a moment to support funding law enforcement, even touting her new legislation that would do just that.

She tweeted: Public safety is the foundation on which we build great communities, and then included a link to her bill, which would provide grants to help municipalities with deescalation, domestic violence and officer safety training, among other things.

Story continues

Republicans are seemingly using this opportunity to lump Democrats together and criticize them for jumping ship on the idea of defunding.

Republican strategist Rick Wilson tweeted: Biden guts the Defund the police stupidity.

Meanwhile, Rep. Lauren Boebert, R-Colo., said: Is the entire Democratic Party going to act like they didnt just defund and demonize the police for the last 2 years? #SOTU.

Hundreds of police officers gather for the funeral of fallen NYPD officer Wilbert Mora at St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York on Feb. 2. (Eren Abdullahogullari/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)

During his address, Biden opened his remarks on policing in America with a story about how he visited the NYPD days after funerals were held for two of its officers, Wilbert Mora and Jason Rivera, who were fatally shot in January after a man opened fire on them with a stolen gun.

Rising crime in some major U.S. cities has led Democratic leaders to reverse course or take a stance against defunding police departments.

But Biden also aimed to appease critics of police when he touched on two controversial arrest tactics that have gained notoriety following the deaths of several Black Americans.

Thats why the Justice Department required body cameras, banned chokeholds and restricted no-knock warrants for its officers, he said.

No-knock warrants came under fire in 2020 when officers in Louisville, Ky., stormed, unannounced, into the apartment of Breonna Taylor, a Black woman and paramedic, fatally shooting her after her boyfriend fired on them, thinking they were intruders.

More recently, several Minneapolis police officers are once again under a microscope after a SWAT team conducted a no-knock warrant at an apartment downtown, shooting and killing Amir Locke, a 22-year-old Black man.

A rally for Amir Locke on Feb. 5 in Minneapolis. Locke was a 22-year-old Black man shot by Minneapolis police executing a search warrant. (Christian Monterrosa File/AP)

Bodycam footage from the Feb. 2 incident captured police storming in, then announcing their presence and seeing Locke, who was noticeably shaken from being suddenly woken up. Officers were following up on a tip involving a murder case, but Lockes name was not mentioned in the warrant, according to the Minneapolis police chief.

Civil rights attorney Benjamin Crump, who is representing Locke's parents, said during a February press conference, The blood of Amir Locke, the blood of Breonna Taylor, should hopefully call for a ban on no-knock warrants all over the country, President Biden.

Civil rights attorney Benjamin Crump at a news conference with the families of Amir Locke and others at the Minnesota State Capitol in St. Paul on Feb. 10. (Kerem Yucel/AFP via Getty Images)

On Tuesday, Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., introduced a bill that would limit no-knock warrants, naming it after Locke.

Hours before Bidens address, she unveiled the legislation, called the Amir Locke End Deadly No-Knock Warrants Act. It would enact "strict limitations on the use of no-knock warrants in drug-related investigations."

The bill directly affects federal agencies but would open up grant funding for state and local law enforcement.

As for Biden, he also touted his American Rescue Plan, which he said provided more than $250 million to cities, states and counties for hiring more police officers and investing in proven strategies.

So lets not abandon our streets. Or choose between safety and equal justice, he said.

Lets come together to protect our communities, restore trust and hold law enforcement accountable.

More here:
Rep. Cori Bush to Biden: 'You didn't mention saving Black lives once in this speech' - Yahoo News

Rachel Rydalch Shelton

Black Lives Matter mural displayed at the City County buidling in downtown Salt Lake City on Nov. 24, 2021. (Photo by Rachel Rydalch | The Daily Utah Chronicle.

I often find myself roaming the streets of downtown Salt Lake City, trying to escape my stuffy apartment, but these are no longer the streets of my childhood, the ones I grew up on. They are forever changed by the Black Lives Matter protests that rocked the city during the summer of 2020. I find myself wondering how these protests and the images they left have seeped into the cold concrete and coarse asphalt. What remains?

Passing by the Salt Lake Countys District Attorneys office on 500 South, one cannot miss the pools of red that saturate the road. The gallons of paint and handprints that covered the street and much of the buildings entrance are gone now, but even after multiple attempts by the city to paint over it, it still cuts through to the surface ensuring we never forget.

This faded, yet persistent quality almost adds to the pieces initial meaning. It still declares that there is blood on the hands of the SLCPD and District Attorney Sim Gill, though the city may try its hardest to paint over the tragedies faced in Utah and absolve the perpetrators of the murder of Bernardo Palacios-Carbajal, and others nationwide.

The aftermath of the pieces inception is important to understand. Protesters who poured the paint were identified by law enforcement and arrested. Gill then formally drew up felony charges against the group, 8 of which were found guilty, in a move that garnered international attention. Even in its faded splotches of red, this potent piece on many levels decries the racial injustice that plagues our city and state. The pools of paint are unrelenting in their silent screams for justice and accountability.

In a move by city officials to show support for the Black Lives Matter protests, Mayor Erin Mendenhall commissioned eight artists to paint a mural outside the Salt Lake City City-County Building. The brightly colored mural, according to Mayor Mendenhalls Deseret News interview, make[s] it clear that Salt Lake City believes Black Lives Matter and is committed to real change in our community. Were taking this symbolic step as a city to boldly acknowledge this movement and commit to our role in it.

But how symbolic was the gesture? The now-fading mural was the target of many white supremacist groups who tried and failed to deface it. These attempts were not deterred by city officials or the SLCPD, but rather armed Black Lives Matter protesters. Former Black Lives Matter director Lex Scott posted TikToks and live-streamed such instances almost daily.

Additionally, Mayor Mendenhall was called to cut the police budget and allocate the funds to other social programs by Black Lives Matter activists and many in the SLC community. While money was moved from the police budget in 2020, funds were reallocated in 2021 for diversity and inclusion trainings as well as social workers, a far cry from the demands for complete reform. According to a KSL interview, officer pay was increased in 2021 in order to attract quality officers, a move that feels, again, far from what protestors were fighting for.

The beautiful mural Mendenhall commissioned and the message behind it is powerful and necessary, dont get me wrong, but it is an undercut made hollow by the inaction behind it. The initial display of solidarity has faded and drifted from the public consciousness, much like the mural itself. The once vibrant colors of the mural have been dissipated by time and broken promises.

Out of all the remnants left from the protests last summer, the murals on 300 West and 800 South remain seared into my consciousness. Whether it is the brightly colored faces or the stories they hold, the site with these impactful murals will not easily be forgotten.

The murals not only gave space to and humanize those murdered by the police but also created a site of mourning for them. Unlike the other pieces of protest art left behind, these murals are more than just acts of defiance or solidarity. These murals provide a space for the community to come together to mourn and grieve the loss of life.

The site mourns the loss of 17 people, both local and from around the country, in individual murals. In front of the murals there are often flowers and other tokens of memory left by loved ones and community members. Looking at each mural and seeing these marks of mourning is sobering and grounds police brutality in its reality one that tears a community apart and leaves them in a constant state of grief.

The public art and protest materials that litter Salt Lake City will fade, but it is this intention of deep, inescapable grief behind each one that will continue to stay with us.

[emailprotected]

@Drew_Reyno

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What Remains: Returning to the Protest Art Left in Salt Lake - Daily Utah Chronicle