Archive for December, 2009

Presently located at Main and 17th Ave, Blim is a community based art resource center that you’ve hopefully heard about and maybe even visited. They’ve been cozied into a modest space over the past couple of years but have since outgrown it, so in May they will be setting it off in a major way in Chinatown! See below for the 3 floors of awesome that they’re opening up and if you’re an artist looking for studio space hit them up.

CLICK TO SEE WHAT LIES IN THE BASEMENT —> …READ THE REST OF THIS ENTRY>>>

“I design for a living. When I started to design in the late 90s, it was all about making things look beautiful and attractive. That still applies to my design now, but last few years, I’ve been constantly thinking about the customers while designing.  The most important factor, if you ask me.  Especially now as we live in a very anxious time, so I try to design things that are intuitive and accessible to people. I want people to have a good experience with what I design.”

The Proof

1. My coffee table/mini library. I live in a small studio. I love it but storage is always an issue. I figured, rather than having a big bookcase, it would be nice to have easy access to some of my favourite books and magazines.
2. These are wireframes, a part of design process. I explain these to my clients as blueprints for design a building.  I create these before all my website design.
3. View from my window at night.
4. One of the buildings around my home. Kudos to the person who painted the …READ THE REST OF THIS ENTRY>>>

Last week the Gilleys reported on the little Christmas shred we had at The Dry Spot in South Van. While we were there I shot this photo of what the surveillance cameras were capturing and it wasn’t until I got home that I noticed a V.I.A. editor slamming in the image! Guess which editor it was?

UPOEA Makes for an Offal Dinner Party
By Kristina Campbell

Over a pint in our local British pub, a few friends and I wondered about the runaway popularity of good old-fashioned liver ‘n onions among the under-40 crowd there. When I grew up, most of us kids actively disliked liver. Years and years later we tried it again and discovered that it had a certain kind of chalky deliciousness. What appeals about rediscovering a food that you once tricked your mother into not having to eat? There’s something tantalizingly rebellious about it.

But rebellion isn’t the end of the story. The appeal of liver now is not unlike the thrill of thrift-store shopping: knowing that something can be new to you, but that its existence in the world in the first place had nothing to do with you. The cute plastic second-hand purse was made for the original person who bought it; the cow met its maker to get at its tenderloin, not its tasty liver.

And liver, we reasoned, was just scratching the surface. There must be scads of other animal parts that don’t end up shrink-wrapped in the meat section of the grocery store. And with this, we gave birth to the idea of The Culinary Exploration of UPOEA: Underused Parts of Everyday Animals.

We all went looking for UPOEA in Vancouver. Turns out, if you ask a Granville Island butcher for something in the UPOEA family, his eyes light up like Willy Wonka contemplating his chocolate fantasy-world. The butcher hustles to the back of the shop, to the special fridge where the cache is kept, and proudly brings out a chilled prize: a beef tongue, for example.

Our first offal dinner party was held a few weeks ago, on a Saturday night. The menu included both “disguised UPOEA” (beef tongue tacos; chicken liver pizza with kalamata olives), and “featured UPOEA” (chicken livers; cow thymus, AKA sweetbreads, on a bed of caramelized onions). I was definitely the weakest stomach link at the party – unlike our hostess, I am not a high school biology teacher, nor do I have a casual taxidermy hobby. But I ate everything on the table and even helped myself to seconds of choice dishes. (Admittedly, it helped that my sister-in-law had called from Iqualiuit that morning, saying her boyfriend had just shot a caribou and that his Inuit-hunter friends were helping him strip the animal of every edible part. Eating a bit of chicken liver seemed elementary in comparison.)

chicken livers!

I can safely say that UPOEA is awesome for your personal growth as an eater. If I can do it, so can you!

Here’s the recipe for holding your own UPOEA dinner party:
1.Find 3-5 willing tasters
2.Tell each person to pick one UPOEA meat and make a dish out of it
3.Pick a host, who will supply salad and beer
4.Get together and serve each dish in succession
5.Don’t announce what the UPOEA is until everyone’s had a taste
6.Congratulate each other on your offal dishes

99 local photographers, more than 200 photographs, Schramm Vodka and a free photobooth made for one awesome night. In case you missed our FLICKN AWESOME party, over the next ten days we’ll be sharing all of the images that were in the slideshow that we presented at it, with help from a ton of amazing photographers. Click each of the images to be taken to that particular photographer’s Flickr stream.

…READ THE REST OF THIS ENTRY>>>

More photos from the Trinity Street Light Festival.  If you have a chance make sure you get down there and check them out before Jan. 2nd and vote for your favourite block!

Do these guys creep you out too?

We told you about it on our twitter (@viawesome in case you’re not yet following), but wanted to remind you of Mini Yaletown’s “Festively Ugly” (that’s Fugly) Sweater Contest. 14 entries as of the time of this posting means that your chances of winning a $1500 prize pack are pretty good if you post soon. HERE‘s the facebook page with all the info!