Archive for April, 2011

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

Every now and then, I just have to say how grateful I am to be able to contribute to Vancouver Is Awesome through the Daily Flickr Pickr. Not only do I have the pleasure of seeing all the wonderful photos you readers submit to the pool, but I also never really know where a particular post will take me until I start digging in. Today is a good example; upon visiting the pool my curiousity was piqued by a thumbnail that appeared quite abstract and almost monotone. Had I not clicked on the photograph by wurkingartist I would not have heard about an interesting project called the Burrard Bridge Stairwell Project by Josh Hite and Scott Billings, with the help of many others (for more information, visit their blog HERE).

I’m interested in the results of the aforementioned project, but based on Inside the Burrard Bridge #7992, I’m at least as interested in the space itself: a public stairwell, an original feature of the Burrard Street Bridge, that quickly proved itself to be a rather secluded and unsafe place and was closed off within months of the bridge opening in 1932. Had I known about this project sooner I would have loved to enter the space myself, but instead I’ll have to be satisfied with what I see from those who did have access, like wurkingartist‘s tasty urban abstract below, with hints of wonderful light and dusty, concrete tones.

Yup, pretty satisfied.

Gary

Have you seen any of the live eagle cams sponsored by the Hancock Wildlife Foundation? The CBC site hipped me to them and I couldn’t help but share these four…

Lafarge Concrete Plant:

Delta:

…READ THE REST OF THIS ENTRY>>>

Okay, I’m pretty stoked for this, and if you like beer, you will be too.

Vancouver’s Craft Beer Week is back and will be running from May 6th to 14th throughout the city. There are SO many events that you could attend during the week, including ones with dinner and beer parings, meeting brewmasters, and seminars on beer-making (psst home-brewers!…). On top of that a ton of bars/restaurants will be offering specials during the week (click to see what they are!).

Check out the VCBW website for all of the events (tickets are going quickly already!)… and check out their promo video below.

We’ve missed you! We’re back with another episode of Giants Of The Forest to share with you. We’ve had a busy spring! Josh went on tour with We Are The City filming for 45 days. Joe spent another 17 days on Midway Island lending his sweet camera operating and cinematography skills once again for this unreal documentary, read more about it here and check out this incredible piece Joe filmed and edited on his last trip to Midway. We’re all pretty proud of Joe, can you tell? We also had a couple screenings of our project “We Are The City’s High School, a video series” which you can read about here. Pretty busy and inspiring few months! Somehow in that time, we managed to film a new Giants of The Forest video right before Joe left for Midway. We ventured out to the Delta Watershed forest. Beautiful sunshine, whistling eagles overhead, a few pestering bugs, and lots of laughs equals a pretty awesome way to spend a couple hours outdoors. Wednesday, we’ll be posting a video for our new friends, The Never Surprise who were joined by the talented banjo playing, nice shoe wearing, Robbie Driscoll. We’ll see you on Monday! In the meantime, head on over to The Never Surpirse’s band camp page. Click HERE to read about the project Episode One – Redbird Episode Two – David Vertesi Episode Three – Treelines Episode Four – Adrian Glynn & Nat Jay Episode Five – Aidan Knight Episode Six – Tyler Bancroft & Ashleigh Ball (Valentine’s Edition!) www.giantsoftheforest.com

Photo by Elissa Crowe

I started this project called A Stranger A Day to overcome my shyness and talk to people. The challenge: talk to a stranger a day for a year of my life and try to convince them to let me take a picture and share a story. Since most tattoos have a story behind them, this will be my conversation starter and a common thread that links them all. Every week I will be sharing one of my favourite findings here on Vancouver Is Awesome.

Join me in this Stranger a Day adventure and let me know what you think!

Stranger #196

Location: the Drive around Kitchener

God, I just met a super cool group of people! And yup, by group I mean around seven of them. I was walking home after having a coffee on the Drive and skyping w/my dad in Mexico (things that make me happy) when I saw a group of friends hanging out. It seemed like they had just stepped out of some hang-out place and where waiting for something. I decided to go up to them and tell them about the project. A couple of them had stories to share. She shared this one:

“Well, my friend here  has the funny stories (about his tattoos), but mine are a bit different. Like this one on my wrist…”

…when my kid was five he drew this. It is a family portrait of him and me, so I got it tattooed. He’s now eight…”

We all went dawwww. It was a super lovely story. It was also a cool combination and contrast of stories in one single encounter (the guy with the ‘funny stories’ also shared his). It represents nicely the vast range of reasons and meanings behind those marks we make on our bodies, stories to remember!

I thanked them all, shared the blog and walked home. :)

Thank you strangers!

To check out the daily strangers, click here: astrangeraday.com

SCENE AND HEARD showcases the independent music scene here in Vancouver. With 25,479+ artists, boasting 116,705+ tracks, the CBC Radio 3 web site is the absolute ultimate authority, and the home, of independent music in Canada. With that massive library along with tools for members (free to join!), we’re taking advantage of what they’ve set up by bringing you a fresh batch of music every week featuring local groups who have tracks (entire albums, even!) on the R3 site.

I’m very excited for this week’s West Coast Pop! show… Young Liars, Kingdom Cloud and this week’s playlist creators Oh No! Yoko. A very young and very talented band of guys from Abbotsford who’s EP is coming out in May…but for now you can see them at the WCP show at the Red Room on Saturday and check out the playlist they put together for us!:

Nicholson Road is part of an ongoing photo project aimed at sharing and celebrating the different communities in Metro Vancouver. Each week Vancouver Is Awesome will be featuring one of the latest, most engaging photos from the project in order to draw your attention a little bit outside of the hyper-focus that we usually have on the city of Vancouver. Metro Vancouver Is Awesome, and you should get out and explore it!

If you’ve never been to a Vaisakhi Parade/Celebration before, I highly recommend you mark it in your calendar next year.

This past weekend, I ventured out to 128th and 78th in Newton to see Surrey’s Vaisakhi Parade in person. On my way, I thought to myself, “Hey, I haven’t seen so many people walking in Surrey before.” And then I thought, “That’s a bit of a walk, why are so many people parking at Kwantlen?” And after keeping my foot on the brake for 15 minutes, “Oh. Sorry environment, I get it now.” Eventually I found my way through suburbs lined with cars – along both sides of the street, covering driveways and front lawns, everywhere you look, cars cars and more cars – and ditched my macchina in an industrial lot.

What an amazing experience followed! People were EVERYWHERE – walking in the middle of the streets towards the 7km parade route, which itself was packed solid. Attendance estimates are around 150,000 people, which makes the 2011 Surrey Vaisakhi Parade the largest in the world outside of India! As if that’s not cool enough, the celebrations involved all sorts of free food (as part of the harvest festival roots, sharing is a big deal), dancers and entertainment, and so many beautifully colourful outfits. And that wasn’t even including the parade!

For a bit more background on Vaisakhi, it was primarily a new year/harvest festival in Punjab until Guru Gobind Singh created the Khalsa (meaning ‘pure’) in 1699, in an attempt to prevent the present injustices and corruption from occurring in the future. The name Khalsa is given to Sikhs who have been baptised or initiated in an Amrit Sanchar ceremony, and is often marked by the Panj Kakka (5 Ks), which includes ‘Kesh’, keeping uncut hair, ‘Kara’, the steel bangle, and ‘Kirpan’, a sword for defence.

I’ve got a few more colourful shots up on my flickr and there’s tons more interesting information on Vaisakhi out on the interwebs, so if you’ve got a few minutes maybe read up a bit. Learning is Awesome.

More from Nicholson Road can be found HERE.

Live at Squamish launched a contest with Metro to provide the opportunity for a band to win a slot at the festival this summer. All the entries are in and the voting process has begun. You can click here to surf through the entries…and you’ll find many VIAindie regulars like Treelines, ROCOCODE, David Vertesi and more…(there are 10 pages of bands to go through!)

Voting ends May 6th – and you can vote once a day until then!