Archive for March, 2011

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

I’m really liking what Barry Duncan has done with his photograph Queen Elizabeth Park: Knife Edge, Henry Moore. I’ve never seen the sculpture in this way before, but the thumbnail version in the pool caught my eye even without any context. I kinda thought I was looking at some cacti or something; the first thought in my mind was ‘Ansel?’

Because Ansel knows his cacti.

But there’s so much more going on than that – the relationship between positive and negative space, the depth created by the shallow focus, the image as a whole becomes quite abstract. I bet it would make a lovely print, what with all that detail and texture and such.

Gary

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.

Did you spot a dozen or so vampires entering the blood-red interior of Barcelona night club on Granville Street this past Tuesday night? Maybe it’s not that surprising to see vampires on the streets of Vancouver with two big features – The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn and Underworld 4 – filming here but the vampires at Barcelona this week belonged to TV series Psych and are featured in the third episode of the sixth season, the aptly-titled “This Episode Sucks”.

Psych star James Roday teased fans late last year with the prospect of a vampire-themed episode for the long-running and popular USA Networks detective series, promising that the show would do something different than the ”spoofs on spoofs on spoofs” already out there. I don’t know if he planned to direct the episode back then but he is directing it now and getting ribbed for it by his co-stars.

Psych is the story of Shawn Spencer, played by James Roday, who cons the Santa Barbara police department into believing he`s a psychic but really uses his superior observational skills to solve crimes.  He partners up with his best friend Burton “Gus” Guster, played by Dulé Hill (The West Wing) as police consultants. Lots of jokes and pranks later, the American comedy-drama is filming its sixth season.  

A vampire episode is not that much of a departure for a dramedy like Psych, which paid tribute to cult noir series Twin Peaks last fall in an episode where the detectives investigated a murder of a high school student  in fictional Dual Spires, with Twin Peak cast Sheryl Lee, Sherilyn Fenn, Ray Wise and Dana Ashbrook all guest starring.

For the first filmed episode of the sixth season, Psych producers searched for an actress already known for playing a vampire in a film or TV series. Then in a role reversal, they cast Kristy Swanson, who staked many a vampire in the movie Buffy the Vampire Slayer, as their lead suspect in a vampire-style killing. Vampire-related actor Corey Feldman from Lost Boys is on board too in one of the guest star roles, either as a vampire club bartender or as an offbeat rocker. The other vampire-related guest actor  is not yet known.

Late last week, Dulé Hill tweeted a  photo of  a Psych family reunion, along with special guest star Kristy Swanson as Marlowe Viccellio. She reportedly meets and charms Timothy Ormundson’s …READ THE REST OF THIS ENTRY>>>

When I’m walking in the rain on dirt trails in the Lower Mainland, I tend to get this sense that I’m not so much stepping on wet dirt, but that I’m barely avoiding sinking into water that’s really full of dirt. And though I grew up in a ditch-encrusted neighbourhood next to a ravine, I never considered that other streams had been buried by the development of our cities.

"This is a photo of Heather Street Creek (Mackie Creek) overflowing Broadway in 1909, presumably during a period of heavy rains," borrowed from mappingfalsecreek.com

Of course, there are tons of salmon runs and spawning streams that branch out from the ocean around here — so why did it never occur to me (until I was reading a history book) that Vancouver had active salmon spawning streams too?

If you click on the photograph above, which is of a poster of Vancouver’s Old Streams I found in my grandparents’ affairs, it will open a larger version that you can zoom in on. Note the area of low-lands devoid of streams near Chinatown, just east of Main Street and west of Clark — the area was tidal flats before being filled in in the 1930s. My grandmother told me once that she and her brother would run across the flats at low tide from Strathcona to swipe apples from a backyard on the other side.

The sons of Major J.S. Mathews, Chief Archivist for the City of Vancouver, near the mouth of Mackie Creek in 1902. City of Vancouver Archives, via mappingfalsecreek.com

It just fascinates me to think of the waterways that still, one way or another, flow under us everyday. Sure, a lot of them have been diverted to storm sewers and gush out into the inlets and bays, but water has a long memory of where it wants to go.

So I’m excited to promote an unveiling tonight at Rhizome Cafe (317 E. Broadway) of the False Creek Watershed Society’s community mapping project. Artists Wes Nahanee, Celia Brauer, Louise Towell, and historian Bruce Macdonald will present the artworks and new thoughts that came out of tapping into local knowledge. (More event info here)

As the project site for “The Water Beneath Our Feet” says:

The process of mapping has been done by humans through countless centuries. Maps of trails, feeding grounds and seashores have been prominent in history books. Maps were one of the first images made by the explorers of the New World. Using as a guide the award-winning model created by the BC artists and community leaders “Islands in the Salish Sea –a Community Atlas” [Heritage, 2005] http://www.heritagehouse.ca/press_releases/salishsea_press.htm we would like to share the idea of mapping one’s “home place” to the centre of Vancouver’s False Creek.

I’ll just end this by saying one of my favourite discoveries in Vancouver has been Camosun Bog — also the only place I’ve seen an owl in this city.

What’s your favourite water feature  in the city (and it’s okay if it’s not natural!) Tell us in your comments below.

After spending some time moonlighting as an undercover NARC on the streets of Vancouver (21 Jump Street, to be exact – I think it’s somewhere in East Van) Johnny Depp made waves as Cry Baby Walker in John Waters’ 1990 musical ode to the weirdness of Baltimore’s 1950s teenage class structure, Cry Baby.

Oh, Hatchetface.

Thanks to popular demand Vancouver is Awesome‘s favourite (full disclosure – we’re co-sponsoring!) East Van indie-movie house is going to be presenting a midnight screening of Cry Baby this Friday, April 1! Admission is $8 – unless you come decked out as a pin-up, a jailbird, a drape, or an unwed teenage mom who uses her “bazooms as weapons” – in which case admission is only $7. For more information, go HERE or HERE.

Extra points if you know all the words and can sing along.

If you have not seen this movie then you lose serious points (with me, anyway) in terms of pop-culture savvy. This was the first John Waters feature I ever saw (at the impressionable age of 10) and I’ve been a huge fan ever since. Specifically, Cry Baby‘s group kissing scene warped my brain, scarred me emotionally, and left me with a lifetime of intimacy issues… hopefully seeing it on the big screen (finally!) will clear that up. Just what the doctor ordered.

(For realsies.)

… and for a chance to win some passes to tomorrow’s midnight screening, put on your John Waters trivia hat and follow @VIAGiveaways on ye olde Twitter… just sayin.’

THE OPENING is all about introducing the fascinating, quirky and wonderful people working in and around the visual arts in Vancouver. Each week, we’ll feature an artist, collective, curator or administrator to delve deep into who and what makes art happen!

Instant Coffee is an artist collective originating from Toronto, now based in Toronto and Vancouver. If you don’t subscribe to their weekly listserve detailing openings, lectures, open calls, employment, studios for rent and more about this fair city, you probably should. Instant Coffee is more than just an email however – they have a long CV of work hosting and engaging people in art, in locations all over the world. Regular members of the collective are Cecilia Berkovic and Kate Monro (Toronto), and Jinhan Ko, Kelly Lycan, Jenifer Papararo, and Khan Lee (Vancouver). I sat down with the Vancouver members in a nook they had created in their new studio.

The Vancouver members at Light Bar during the 2010 Olympics. Photo courtesy Instant Coffee.

Jinhan Ko: We went to [UBC art history professor] John O’Brian’s lecture on Tuesday.

Anne Cottingham: How was that? I wanted to go to that.

Jinhan: It was really different. I thought it would be more about the Cold War. But I don’t really know his writing. Otherwise maybe I would have known that.

Jenifer Papararo: Well it was one talk. I mean we only heard one out of three. I think it was really hard to gauge. It was pretty specific. This one he was making an argument about photography in relation to the atomic bomb and its development, but it was a very technological discussion of photography. It wasn’t an aesthetic one necessarily. In the question period he articulated he was interested in both of those things, in melding both of those things together. We really only got one side of it for the talk.

Kelly Lycan: And then too the questions brought out a lot more information.

Jinhan: Part of the reasons I wanted to go were totally selfish reasons. For example, like the one project we made was Disco Fallout Shelter, and it was our sense of being nostalgic for the Cold War era. Because officially it ended when the wall came down ’89, the Berlin wall, and since then it’s like… there’s this sense that the left has failed, that capitalism is winning. So I was kind of curious about being nostalgic for something. Something that’s recently passed like the Cold War era. You know like living with the bomb. So that was the bunker, living with the bomb, the fall out shelter.

Jenifer: I think our interest in the fallout shelter took on a more domestic scale. How it infiltrated everybody in their household and how it shifted it or affected the way that they lived. And how they were actually used. So even though it was this sweeping fear, and this global perpetuation of fear… how it actually was articulated in people’s backyards, and how it was used aesthetically and architecturally mainly as a site of leisure in the end.

Jinhan: Particularly in North America. Because the bomb never came this far.

Khan Lee: Oh that’s true actually.

Jenifer: But all the hype about it, even very close to the site that we built the first one. The CBC themselves built one and had a family live in it.

Jinhan: But that was in the ‘50s right?

Jenifer: Yeah, it was a long time ago. They did studies, these stats projecting what would happen if a nuclear bomb was dropped in the area, and how many people would die and all this, and had these sweeping predictions. So they were inflating that fear for sure.

Kelly: But I mean that’s also, the fear… there’s a certain living with the fear now. Because it really got perpetuated after 9/11.

Jinhan: Well that’s a different kind of fear.

Kelly: Really?

Jinhan: Yeah. The interesting thing about the Cold War was that we knew the enemy. The enemy was very palpable, over there. Whereas contemporary fears are more abstract.

Kelly: But you know it’s still the same, the propaganda, the fear.

Jenifer: It was timely for us, the war in Iraq and against terrorism, watching people go out and buy duct tape and anthrax things, and just watching fear spread and incite such violence. Even though there were these protests, the world’s biggest protests, they were totally ineffective.

Disco Fallout Shelter. Photo by gadjo via flickr.

Anne: Disco Fallout Shelter was locked right, nobody could get in? I was really interested by that. When I read that, it was like there was this party downstairs, that it was this community that nobody could get into. This cool party that nobody could get into.

Jinhan: Yeah that was kind of what it was.

Jenifer: This exclusivity.

Jinhan: I think we were playing with the survival of the collective. But at the same time ended up being the cool party. Or “this is the surviving party” kind of thing.

Khan: And also, when you were inside, I just couldn’t trust …READ THE REST OF THIS ENTRY>>>

Did you know that Art Garfunkel (of legendary folk group Simon and Garfunkel) filmed a movie in Vancouver with Jack Nicholson in 1971? It was called Carnal Knowledge. True story.

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

I experienced a feeling of déjà vu looking in the pool today.

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

I experienced a feeling of déjà vu looking in the pool today. A photograph that caught my eye was Steam over Expo Blvd by Pamela De Mark and heavily features, you guessed it, steam. And then I recalled one of my early posts where I mentioned the Central Heating Building at the western end of the Georgia Viaduct, and how it sends steam to various downtown buildings. That’s pretty close to where this photo would have been taken – mere metres in fact. No mystery here; this is most certainly not a city ghost.

Gary

Tonight’s Rain City Chronicles event that we’re co-presenting as a part of the Vancouver 125 celebrations is all but sold out! If you’re attending you’re in for a treat as a part of tonight’s theme of “Family Matters”, local photographer Robert Fougere curated a slideshow for the night. Of said slideshow, Robert says:

From a box of a thousand photo negatives I purchased on ebay. This one came from an envelope that reads “Karen Michiana June 1960″. Michiana is a region in northern Indiana and southwestern Michigan centered on the city of South Bend, Indiana. It’s on Lake Michigan.