For many years, Vancouver’s
Public Dreams Society has presented
Illuminares, a summer-evening festival built around a lantern
procession. Typically held outside, around
Trout Lake, it’s a
nicely-hippie-flavored explosion of fire and noise and energy. This year, because
Trout Lake park is under construction, they held it inside and it was still
fun, if not quite as much. I got some pictures which are sort of pretty and
represent a new frontier I think in my current low-light-photography
obsession.
I should note that I was a performer at the event, appearing as usual with
Russell Shumsky’s West-African percussion
ensemble “Linoleum Blownapart”.
The pictures are by the
Canon S90 at ISO
800 and up; they benefit both from that camera’s outstanding little
sensor and from...
What happened was, we went to a party at Shane and Ally’s place on East First Ave at a mixed
residential-commercial development with a common rooftop garden. We barbecued
up there, sharing the space amicably with a couple of other parties. The view
was compelling and the clouds were interesting.
This is looking West from more or less
here.
Notice that in the foreground there’s quite a bit of low-rise low-rent
industrial land; every city needs to earn its living and to have cheap
neighborhoods, but the density doesn’t feel right.
Doug Coupland (I believe it was in
City of
Glass) said “In 100 years, Paris will still be Paris and New York will
still be New York. What will Vancouver be?” He had a point, and the point is
that Vancouver is profoundly unfinished; we’re making...
Our pear tree died, a victim of old age, root pathology, and a high
wind. Herewith consequences bureaucratic and photographic.
Vancouver Tree Rules
The tree doctor came by and pronounced the condition terminal (at
this point, it was leaning against our porch, so not a surprise), quoted on
its removal, and discovered that it was big enough to require a City of
Vancouver license.
I dropped by City Hall (we live nearby) and found the process efficient and
courteous. I was neither surprised nor displeased when informed that the
tree would have to be replaced. I was fairly shocked at the 7-page double-sided
city flyer enumerating the acceptable species of replacement trees.
Furthermore, we wanted to replace the pear with
another fruit tree and discovered that such trees occurred on...
It started a couple weeks early for me with a gentle welcoming invocation
by an elder of the
Musqueam Nation. It’s
done, finally. What happens on the morning after? Maybe we can all wear less
red.
I’m a blogger and photographer and I really ought to have been doing an
Olympic Diary series, except for
I’ve been distracted. But
I can’t let these last weeks living at the center of it all pass
unremarked. This is way too long and stuffed with network-clogging photos.
My Take
You don’t have to ask me because Vancouver’s own excellent Frances Bula
totally nailed it in
Hey, it’s okay to be grumpy about the Olympics.
I wouldn’t have chosen to put them on, there’s a lot about it that’s
nauseating, but it was impossible not to enjoy and I’m pretty sure it will
have given...
That’s the name of a pretty nice park on Vancouver’s
University
Endowment Lands, which sort-of belong to
UBC but can’t for the moment be covered with
condo towers, which is a Good Thing. Observing in the Saturday morning
forecast the heavy rain I now hear on Sunday evening as I write this,
I determined that force-marching the urchins into the Pacific Spirit woods
would be a good idea. Plus, I brought my camera.
It was a good idea. The sky was grey and the light thus dim, but being
alone among trees (save for the occasional dog-walker) is good.
I can’t force my children to love nature but I’ll be damned if
they reach adulthood without regular exposure to it.
It’s a pity I don’t run pictures of the kids here because I got a few
good ones posed among the standing and fallen...
Last weekend, friends were about and we went to the market and I made
lurid bicoloured salad for the ballgame and it was all good. With pictures
and a recipe.
Friends
We had friends in the house almost continuously between Friday afternoon
and Sunday evening, old members of the markup tribe and in parallel some of
the boy’s cronies. Right now, with the professional situation lousy and
some recent family stress, this is the Right Thing To Do. Thanks to
Eve and
Kim and Peter and
Jaclyn and
Dijon and Sam and
Sebastian and Leo for the company.
The Market
Sunday morning dawned cold, wet, and grey. So we went to
Granville Island
for good things to eat. It’s expensive but a morale-booster, and on these
winter days, the hanging lamps casting pools of brightness on the goods for
sale and...
It worries me that, as a resident of Vancouver off-and-on since 1983, I am
engaged so much on the Internet and so little in my home-town. My local
outings have been limited to music, children’s sports, and dining out
with friends. I’m attempting to become more local and have thus recently
become a member of two organizations: the
Vancouver Hackers’
Society (Motto: Down with Betamax! ) and
Vision Vancouver. They aren’t
like each other at all.
Vision
Short here for
Vision Vancouver, a still
wet-behind-the-ears municipal political party whose members and allies
currently comprise a majority of our
City Council and
occupy the Mayor’s chair.
I had some conversations with
David Eaves, who is well-connected in both the
open-source and civic-politics worlds, and decided that, while...
Recently, I’ve been taking public transit around town more and more. The
advent of the
Canada
Line is one reason, and another is that since I’ve been carrying
the Android-flavored Internet in my pocket, travel time isn’t necessarily
downtime. Plus, as I steer thousands of pounds of steel and glass
and so on around town, the proportion of my mind that’s thinking about
carbon-loading keeps increasing unnervingly.
Also, I happen to live in a spot that gives me superb access to public
transit heading pretty well anywhere. (Vancouver cognoscenti: In the
16th/Main/King Ed/Cambie quadrangle).
Also, when you’re not driving, you can take pictures, for example of rainy
gleaming streets.
Damn, it’s getting dark early these......
I mean
Granville Island market of
course. If you live in the main part of Vancouver, it’s hard to avoid,
particularly on a rainy weekend.
Well yes, now that you mention it, pictures very much like these ones have
been taken by lots of people over the years (in fact, if you look closely at
the exterior shot you can see one of them being taken). But hey, bits are
free.
By the way, while the selection at the market is excellent and some of it
is good, the produce in particular is nothing special, and everything
is severely overpriced. Having said that, the buskers are good, the
atmosphere is very pleasant, and I’m seriously fond of the seriously-fattening
goodies at
La Baguette et
l'Echalote......
I had two ten-year-old boys with me; they said “Fight dancing!” Really it
was Capoeira, somewhere
between a martial art and dance form, invented by African slaves in Brazil.
There are a couple of stories but let’s start with the picture.
Chili and Blues
This happened at the
Gastown
Blues and Chili Fest.
Gastown is a tourist
district here, blues and chili need no introduction. They blocked off a
street and had electric blues on a stage at one end, and (while we were there)
Capoeira at the other. In between were stands selling chili, and you could
get beer or wine.
It was a warm afternoon and a cheery, if crowded event, with only moderate
spillover of the sad folk from the
Downtown
Eastside. I’d brought my ten-year-old son and his friend and my
three-year-old daughter, and...
In
Music,
Arts/Music,
The World/Family,
Family,
Arts/Photos/Cameras,
Cameras,
Food and Drink,
The World/Food and Drink,
The World,
Places,
Arts,
Photos,
The World/Places/Vancouver,
Vancouver
Being an illustrated mini-travelogue on taking the new Canada Line train to
Vancouver airport. Almost certainly of interest only to people who might do
such a thing.
We live near 19th and Ontario; the nearest station is thus King Edward. I
asked Lauren to drive me over there, which cost her under ten minutes there
and back, and saved me a twenty-minute walk; but I’ll walk next time the load
is light and the day is bright.
The stations are not exactly glamorous; I wonder how drab they’ll look on
one of our many grey winter days.
My camera says I got there at 11:16 AM.
So in the middle of a Friday, the trains are running pretty often.
The tunnel is very narrow and the train doesn’t seem to go that fast, but
then there are only six stops to the airport. In the tunnel it’s kind...
We walking along Jericho Beach around suppertime of a recent weekend when
the clouds and light performed a summer-afternoon dance for us. I was
shooting in every direction and present for your entertainment one marine
vessel and two feathered scavengers; nothing you can’t see there every day.
This is the Hector; I’m sure you could look it up
somewhere online and find out where it goes and what it carries.
We have eagles around here, and cormorants and loons and great blue herons
too, and every kind of duck you can imagine, and they all have their own
beauty, and we ignore the gulls mostly, because they’re not big and not rare
and not fierce and not colorful. But really, they don’t look bad when they
get some help from the sun and clouds.
Photo-weenie note: More samples of...
Vancouver’s
Main Street
has enough places to eat and drink that a person like me with a wife and
family and job will totally never get to all of them. But the other night we
got to
Zakkushi and
Sweet Revenge, in good
company. With pix.
What happened was,
Eve AKA XMLgrrl (or
@xmlgrrl) came up to visit and so we
decided to make an evening of it. But before I go on, I have to put a frame
around something Eve said; don’t know if she invented it, but anyhow it needs
to be featured:
What happens on the Internet, stays on the
Internet. Forever.
Zakkushi
The problem with The Main is that it’s trying to gentrify, but most of the
buildings are fifty-plus-year-old low-rises that were cheap&nasty when
they were built. Zakkushi’s storefront on Main which at the end of the day is
in cheesy...
On the last day of June we went to a
Vancouver Canadians minor-league
game, with fireworks. I seem to document such an expedition once a year,
which is unsurprising as it’s a treat for the eyes.
I think anyone who savors the flavors of baseball might want to enlarge
this pre-game warmup shot for a smile. The smoke is from the big barbecue
pits out along the first-base line. You can rent these for a party, and I’d
like to try that sometime.
The game was entertaining even though we took our just-turned-three daughter
along, which wasn’t a huge success. Why on earth would a child that age pay
attention to the game or the crowd when she had Mom and Dad pinned in
place, both their laps available for continuous bouncing
and squirming?
Thus the girls left early and I stayed with the...
This is brick building with green trim; a garment factory I suspect.
Yes, it really was that green.
Vancouver has a flourishing garment trade, with designers, factories, and
retail outlets (many along Main Street), all of them small and
interdependent.
Ontario Street, pictured here, is an immensely useful and pleasant
bicycle-optimized north-south artery that I use all the......
I was editing some pictures (which I organize per-month) and realized that
there were a ton in the June folder that I’d been meaning to run, and now it’s
not June. So let’s populate the first few days of July with some of ’em.
First, musical faces of
Car-Free Vancouver Day.
The first is self-explanatory.
The second is a few blocks north;
DRMHLLR,
a spacey sort of jam band, was playing really loud. I was
pushing my little toddlergirl and she’s usually pretty sensitive, always
telling me to turn down the rock & roll in the car. But as we rolled up
she seemed fascinated, so I bashed a couple of bystanders with
the stroller to get a front-row spot. She just leaned back and went with the
groove; I have high hopes for the girl.
That Car-Free day, it’s OK by me. This is on...
Recently, Vancouver’s City Council
passed an “Open Data, Open Source”
motion. I was too busy at the time to pay much attention, which I’ve
regretted. Now I’ve started poking around a bit, and turned up an interesting
person and an outstanding example.
Open Garbage Data
No, I’m not kidding. This idea was recently floated by David Eaves in
How Open Data even makes Garbage collection sexier, easier and cheaper.
Seriously; take a moment and read it. If there’s low-hanging fruit in
garbage collection [Watch those
metaphors. -Ed.] it’s hard not to get excited over what you could build on the
raw data about housing and zoning and licensing and traffic and all the other
intensely-local things a city has its hands on.
I’ve always liked opening up data resources and have spent...
Justice via ongoing May 27th, 2009 at 10:00
Here’s a little news story of direct interest only to people in Vancouver,
but it’s pleasant and uplifting; made me smile and might please others
too. And it gives me a chance to gloat a little bit.
The History
What happened was, partly in preparation for the Olympics coming here next
year, several layers of government got together and built a big subway line
(the
Canada Line because the
Feds paid most) from downtown through the
airport, much of it along Cambie Street, very near where I
live.
As a side-effect, the merchants along Cambie street pretty well got raped.
The subway, which had been pitched as a bore-from-underneath project, suddenly
at the last minute turned into a “cut-and-cover” project.
Here are a couple of pictures from August 2007 that illustrate what “cut...
On a lousy spring weekend day, which this was one of, you can do way worse
than going to the
Granville Island Market.
While this looks nice, the produce merchants are not one of the market’s
strengths: fruits and veggies generic and overpriced.
To be fair, everything at Granville Island is overpriced. But
there are some fantastic bakeries and delis offering quality that’s hard to
match in this town. I brought home stewing beef and a traditional
baguette, along with some basic veggies.
The reason to go is the atmosphere. It’s good to be reminded that however
crappy the local economic minimum is, we are blessed with abundance. People
look better, their faces more alive, in a market.
Also the standard of buskers is high. There was an ugly old
Mittel-European guy playing...
If you’re fortunate enough to live in a city by the sea, you should bloody
well go visit it sometimes. This last weekend I was on single-Dad duty,
so Sunday morning I ignored the lowering sky and general
dampness, bundled the protesting urchins into the van, and took them to the
beach.
I’m not sure what this piece of Vancouver waterfront is actually called;
it’s the wild part between Kitsilano and Jericho, with the really big piece of
drift-log on it. There is sand but you wouldn’t really call it a beach,
because it’s messy and rocky and mostly ignored. It’s totally my favorite
local piece of our oceanfront.
When we got there it was still really damp, low clouds caught in Stanley
Park’s trees.
Vancouver’s a nautical kind of place; there was some sort of rowing rally...
While, like many, I’m ambivalent about the Olympics, I lean to the positive
side, and was moderately happy when Vancouver scored the 2010 Winter
Games. Since then, the infrastructure preparations have ripped the shit
out of our city, the financial arrangements have gone sideways, and I failed to
get any of the tickets I signed up for.
Worst of all, it seems that the
security costs have ballooned, up towards a billion dollars. We’re not that
big a city and that’s way too much “security”. I
just know it’s going to be lame-brained persnickety abusive
intrusive pervasive bullshit; a thousand officious minor officials drunk with
their pathetic petty power, imposing massive inconvenience embodied in rules
designed to prevent the last five terrorist ploys and cover officials’...
Vancouver’s weather has been sufficiently bad this winter to have made the
national news a few times, and if you follow any local online voices, you may
be growing tired of our whining about the weather. Well, I’m going to
publish a few pictures of the carnage anyhow.
The problem is that the city isn’t really set up for snow, particularly
multiple feet of snow that stays on the ground for weeks, particularly where
it’s on narrow local streets with nowhere for snowplows (if we had any) to put
it. So there are cars that have been buried since sometime in the middle of
December.
Of course, people are out shoveling, day after day after day.
Some people have special snow-shoveling issues.
And today on January fourth, as the dusk settled, the situation was not
improving.
The...
This is not of the remotest interest to anyone who doesn’t live in
New Westminster, a
small city near Vancouver that doesn’t think of itself as a suburb.
It turns out my old friend and colleague
Matt Laird (who, by the way, provides
hosting for this
Web site as a sideline job) is running for city council
there (the election’s on the 15th).
I’d think voting for Matt would be a no-brainer. He’s bright and
honest and super-energetic and is totally dedicated to civic involvement;
always pursuing one good cause or another. Near as I can tell, his motives
are more or less pure public-spiritedness. This package sounds like exactly
what you’d want in your local government,......
Of the Lost
Souls I mean. It was so much fun it shouldn’t be legal. This post is
here so I can post a funny picture of myself and meditate, once again, on
the profusion of digital recordings of, well, everything.
Here’s your host:
Photo credit: Sue, one of my band-mates.
You can also get the flavor of the event with a
Flickr
Search; I recommend following that link, some of the pix are fantastic.
And there’s
video
too—on one of the fire-show sequences, you can hear the band.
I found
one that
shows our band in action.
I’ve come to expect that everything public and quite a bit of what’s
private too is subject to capture and posting. Last night it got on my nerves
a bit, for the first time. What happened was, after the parade part and the
accompany-the-fire-show part, the...
I mean
Parade
of the Lost Souls, which happens next Saturday October 25th on Commercial
Drive here in Vancouver.
I’ve
paraded before; once
again I’ll be part of
Russell Shumsky’s West-African drum
ensemble, layin’ down the dance beats.
Assuming the weather co-operates, it’s a blast; come on out and......
On a recent weekend we took the
Seabus over to
Lonsdale Quay. The
Seabus is both romantic and reliable, a rare enough combination in this
world. On the way back, I took a photo of the big container-handling
cranes.
I don’t know what proportion of Canada’s import/export business these
things wrangle but the numbers are big; this is the busiest port in Canada (and
also on the whole West Coast of North America) measured by tonnage.
William Gibson fans: the closing scenes of Spook Country are
set right around......
It’s on
Main Street
near 14th Ave. They make a damn fine chicken
Shawarma.
The place is a little odd inside; apparently once a French bistro,
the shift to Middle Eastern cuisine seems not to have involved a redesign.
But it’s cheery and comfy and lets you be part of the Main Street scene.
Hey, while writing this, I learned that the dude who makes the awesome
lunches is “Mori” Momenzadeh Tameh and
is little political issue all by
himeself.
Anyhow, you can’t beat it for a quick tasty nutritious bite on that part of
Main; which is saying something given the number of nearby......
Its full name is
Car-Free Vancouver Day and it
happened last Sunday. We hadn’t been planning to go but stumbled in more or
less accidentally and it was good fun. It gave me an excuse to take
pictures of people; something I’m too shy to do except in a crowd.
The place—at least the Main Street location near our place—was jam-packed.
There were a few merchants set up, doing a
roaring trade, it looked like. I bet they’ll all be out next......
Two photos of not much in particular, but with explanations.
Explanation:
Girls
and Trucks.
This is another part of Main Street, which is partly explained in the first
paragraph of
Main Art.
I tried this last one in black and white, and it looked sort of stark and
strong and lovely, but then I turned the colour back on and liked it better.
I guess I’ll never be a Real......
Being a picture of one, with some other things.
It’s a window. Some of the people and things are reflected in it, others
seen through it. Honestly I don’t know which is which. If you’re from Vancouver and the
propeller rings a bell, you’ve probably walked by it down on Granville......