Archive for January, 2011

Vancouver is Awesome and ZenHouse Media are proud to present the second week’s winners in the The Granville Island Storytelling Contest. Go to granvilleislandworks.com/contest to check out all the submissions – the contest is going on until Feb. 10th with winners chosen every week, so get your story in soon!

Read on to find out why Barry Weaver, Emily Rose and Jenny Ng won this week’s prizes: an Insider’s Tour of Granville Island, a shopping experience at Edie Hats and a gift bag including tickets to the Vancouver TheatreSports League!

Grand prize winner Barry Weaver: a sense of pride and place

In the late sixties, while I was in university, my summer job was working for the National Harbours Board, who, at that time, was responsible for the management and maintenance of the Island. Three weeks each summer, I would be on the Island cleaning out the dirt and garbage along the railway switches and doing overall cleanup around the Island. At lunch, I would either sit on the wharf by Arrow Transport or wander around looking in the different industries on the Island at that time.
One summer I also campaigned for Ron Basford on his run for Parliament; and when I was in grad school in Geography at UBC, one of my supervisors was Walter Hardwick. Little did I realize at the time that both these men would be champions of renewal and restoration of the Island and False Creek.
Now, when I go down to the Island, I can still visualize where I worked some forty years ago, and never stop marveling at the changes that I have seen there. The Island has given me a real sense of pride and sense of place.

Second prize winner Emily Rose: Love on Granville Island

In the summer he holds my hand and takes me to where the Canadian flag flies every …READ THE REST OF THIS ENTRY>>>

Here’s a brand new interview I did with Alex Burrows from the Vancouver Canucks! Doot doola doot doo … doot doo!

Nardwuar vs. Alex Burrows

Stay tuned for another interview next week and if you can’t wait then head over to NARDWUAR.COM, FACEBOOK.COM/NARDWUAR or TWITTER.COM/NARDWUAR!

This new series had its genesis when I began photographing Vancouver area location shoots last summer to get over a long post-Olympics funk. Film and TV productions like This Means War, Mission Impossible 4, Fringe and the new AMC series The Killing showcase our city in similar fashion and sometimes put a celebrity actor or two in the frame.

I am known for getting more excited at the prospect of seeing film or TV location stunts than celebrity actors, although occasionally a celebrity actor will do his or her own stunts and that’s fun to watch.

It’s usually the big-budget movies which stage the most spectacular stunt falls and jumps. For example, the supernatural-horror film Final Destination 5 (FD5)’s opening scene is of people cheating death when one gets a premonition of the collapse of Vancouver’s iconic Lions Gate Bridge, which takes the vehicles and people on it with it. To create the scene, FD5 closed the actual bridge for filming from 2 a.m. to mid-morning one weekend. And crew built two Lions Gate bridge sets: the one on a mountain side in Lions Bay big enough for cars and buses to drive on and the one near East 1^st Avenue and Boundary Road just a bridge segment placed on top of three shipping containers.  I missed seeing people and a car falling off the bridge segment but captured this stunt woman falling off the much higher greenscreen Lions Gate Bridge at that set in early November 2010.

A few weeks before, rom-com/action hybrid This Means War (TMW) closed the area behind the Burrard Skytrain Station at night to film some spectacular parachute jumps. On the first night, David Clem Major based jumped with a black parachute off the roof of the Bentall 4 tower onto a closed-off Dunsmuir below dressed as Shanghai.  Several local photographers captured his feat from the Cactus Club Cafe at Bentall 5. The following night, Clem Major and his black parachute were dropped several times from a multi-story crane to land on Dunsmuir. And TMW crew told me Clem Major even did a dead drop (no parachute) off Bentall 4 in the middle of the night when there was less risk of spectators stumbling onto the site.

I anticipated even bigger stunts from Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocal this winter but so far all the Vancouver towers have been quiet. Celebrity actor Tom Cruise did do his own …READ THE REST OF THIS ENTRY>>>

Every day we share a single photo from our Flickr Pool shot by one of our faithful and talented readers (that’s you!).

I had big, big plans. Really, I did. Inspired by eja_crepusculario‘s photograph Wind in the Curtains, I was all ready to tell you about Vancouver’s second Mayor David Oppenheimer and the legacy he left behind, and how Cordova Street was previously called Oppenheimer Street (after initially being christened Willow Street).

Or the Powell Street Grounds, the park which was renamed Oppenheimer Park after his death in 1899 – which is just outside the frame to the right. Or the Asahi Tigers, a Japanese-Canadian baseball team established in 1914 whose home field was there. Or the Powell Street Festival, which has taken place there annually since 1977.

But then I looked at the photograph again, and was struck by its beauty. It was then that I decided that my words cannot add to what is already there – thank you eja.

Gary

ps: the next person to join the Vancouver Is Awesome Flickr Group will be our 1,000th member!

It’s hard to believe that we’re coming up on three years of Vancouver Is Awesome this February. It’s also hard to believe that Paul Anthony’s Talent Time shares the same birthday, but it’s true! And wouldn’t you expect that we’d be throwing a party together? That’s right, this coming Wednesday at the Biltmore we’re proud to present…

Here’s what Paul has to say about it…

It’s the joint 3 year anniversary of Vancouver’s favourite televised talent show as well as Vancouver’s cheeriest website Vancouver Is Awesome.com. To celebrate we are putting together an incredibly mental BEST OF SHOW!!

Many of your favourite performers from the past 3 years will share the stage together! YOU DON’T WANNA MISS THIS ONE.

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-BC’s #1 Senior’s Entertainment Troupe: THE VAUDEVILLIANS!!

Witness the triumphant return of the only act to ever receive a spontaneous, unanimous standing ovation on Talent Time! This incredibly inspiring group are back with a brand new set of singing, dancing and joke telling especially for you!

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-The King of the Ukulele: RALPH SHAW!!

A huge favourite on last year’s program, Ralph is back channeling the true spirit of early 20th century showmanship and singing with the voice of a seasoned chanteur. Backed up by his stellar Ukulele playing, he croons, dances, plays harmonica, yodels and whistles like a state-fair champion. Brand new set!

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-A hilariously epic duet between Teen Pop Sensation I,KANDEE & 11 year old NHEMY CEPEDA!!!

2 of our favourite entertainers share the stage together for the first time. Not since Elton John joined Eminem at the Grammy’s has there been a more anticipated musical collaboration. History in the making!

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-Co-host of the ever popular podcast Stop Podcasting Yourself and charity beard painter GRAHAM CLARK!!!

Graham’s name has appeared on the Georgia Straights “Best of” reader polls for years now. More importantly he was on the very first Talent Time live show ever produced. Mouths before we had a theme song and started shooting it, when I was still trying to figure out what it was going to be….there was Graham. Thanks buddy!

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With…
-Musical director DEVON LOUGHEED!
-Special Co-host AUBREY TENNANT!

PLUS:

-The first 200 people at the Biltmore will receive a complimentary commemorative pin celebrating the shared 3 year Anniversary of Talent Time & Vancouver Is Awsome.com!!

-Special 3 year Anniversary pinata made by Meaghan Kennedy at YOUR PINATA!
www.yourpinata.com

-Book off work now! Stay after and celebrate with us with KARAOKE & CHAMPAGNE with WEEKEND LEISURE KARAOKE!!

-TONS OF SURPRISES + COMEDY + SO MUCH MORE……

Great news for book lovers today! This coming fall, The Association of Book Publishers of BC are facilitating the republishing of ten classic Vancouver books as part of the Vancouver 125 celebrations. BC’s publishers in partnership with the City of Vancouver, which has provided a subsidy to help bring these lost gems back into print, will reissue 4 non-fiction, 4 fiction and 2 poetry titles to celebrate Vancouver’s 125th anniversary.

The books in the Collection were selected from submissions from publishers and suggestions from an advisory committee. The Vancouver 125 Legacy Books Collection will be launched in the fall of 2011. Books that will form the collection (none of which I have yet read, for the record) are:

Non-fiction
- A Hard Man to Beat by Howie White, Harbour Publishing.
- Along the No. 20 Line: Reminiscences of the Vancouver Waterfront by Rolf Knight, New Star Books
- Opening Doors: Vancouver’s East End edited by Daphne Marlatt and Carole Itter, Harbour Publishing
- Who Killed Janet Smith? By Edward Starkins, Anvil Press

Fiction
- Class Warfare by D. M. Fraser, Arsenal Pulp Press
- A Credit to Your Race by Truman Green, Anvil Press
- Crossings by Betty Lambert, target=”_blank”Arsenal Pulp Press
- The Inverted Pyramid by Bertrand W. Sinclair, Ronsdale Press

Poetry
- Day and Night by Dorothy Livesay, Oolichan Books
- Anhaga by Jon Furberg,Smoking Lung/Arsenal Pulp Press

To warm you up, check out this PDF of Rolf Knight’s Along the No. 20 Line: Reminiscences of the Vancouver Waterfront that he’s sharing online! Originally published in 1980 I am very much looking forward to picking up a copy when it’s re-released this fall. Click below to read it…

This weekend, Vancouver is Awesome and Talk Green Vancouver (the City of Vancouver’s Greenest City initiative) present a screening of the 2009 documentary No Impact Man at Day For Night – Films in the Afternoon at the Waldorf.

“Colin Beavan decides to completely eliminate his personal impact on the environment for the next year. It means eating vegetarian, buying only local food, and turning off the refrigerator.It also means no elevators, no television, no cars, busses, or airplanes, no toxic cleaning products, no electricity, no material consumption, and no garbage. No problem – at least for Colin – but he and his family live in Manhattan. So when his espresso-guzzling, retail-worshipping wife Michelle and their two-year-old daughter are dragged into the fray, the No Impact Project has an unforeseen impact of its own.”

Preceded by Ryan Larkin’s short animated film Walking (1968) made by the National Film Board of Canada.
Sunday, January 30. Film begins post-brunch at 3 pm.
RSVP on Facebook.

About Talk Green Vancouver:
After a year of consultations, meetings and research, Vancouver has drafted a plan to become the Greenest City in the world by 2020. We’re not done yet. Give your input, share your priorities, tell us what you think at www.talkgreenvancouver.ca