Archive for October, 2011

Welcome to The Playground, a place for Vancouver families.From fields to haunted houses, all month long I will be featuring some of my favourite places to visit to get you and your family to get the most out of autumn.I’m always on the lookout for fun stuff to do, so if there’s something happening that you think I should know about, don’t hesitate to contact me.

Halloween festivities around the city this weekend will likely mean big crowds and long lines.  For those looking to do something quiet but with a more “natural” twist on Halloween, I would like to suggest visiting the Richmond Nature Park this weekend.

Sadie and VIA’s youngest blogger, Arlo, spent a damp autumn morning exploring the park’s trails and Nature House.  The park is over 200 acres of bog habitat with four walking trails.  Most are soft surfaced but the shortest trail, around the Pond, is on a raised boardwalk. There are plenty of opportunities for young ones to encounter plants and birds.  One of the paths we walked was lined with vines that had entrances carved into them. Sadie and Arlo really enjoyed exploring these secret passages.

For the month of October, the Nature House has incorporated the story of Halloween and its roots in nature into it’s permanent exhibits.  Sadie and Arlo couldn’t get enough of the all the puzzles, stamps, displays, snakes, bees and microscopes.  Lots there was a lot to see and such a fun way for your child (and you) to learn about the bog and the creatures that live there.

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A new kitty once a week! Click here to find out how your cat can appear on Van City Kitty.

Courtesy VIA reader Rhonda Sherwood, who connected with Van City Kitty on Twitter, we’re pleased to introduce you to three beautiful Tuxedo cats: Mylo, Lola and Chloe. All special kitties were adopted from the BC SPCA!

Name: Mylo Breed/Coloring: Black & White Hood: originally SPCA and now lives in Vancouver Habits: Bugging his fur sisters Chloe and Lola. Snuggling with mom. Howling to go out on his leash. Hangouts: Anywhere his Mommy is. Other info:Age 6. Adopted as a kitten from the Vancouver SPCA.Name: Lola Nickname: I sing to her the song ‘whatever Lola wants, Lola gets’ Breed/Coloring: Black & White Hood: originally SPCA and now lives in Vancouver Habits: SLEEPING & breakfast, brunch, lunch, afternoon snack, dinner, evening snack. Lola loves to eat. Although she is on a diet. And snuggling with Mommy. Hangouts: The kitty bed on top of the chest in front of the window. Other info: Age 12. Adopted at age 9 from the Vancouver SPCA. She had been in the shelter for one full year when I was blessed enough to have found her. Name: Chloe Nickname: Bear bear Breed/Coloring: Black & White Hood: originally SPCA and now lives in Vancouver Habits: Chloe thinks she is a big protective dog. She never lets her Mommy out of her site. Wherever I go she follows and is ready to protect against anything. Hangouts: Chloe loves to sleep in her box in front of the fireplace. Or she is snuggled in my arms. Other info: Chloe is 6. Adopted at age 5 months from the Vancouver SPCA. She was found wandering East Vancouver. Why she is such a tough girl. If you’re interested in adopting a pet, check out our Happy Tails feature. If you adopted your pet from the SPCA and would like to share your awesome story on Happy Tails, send an email to Rory.Blanchard@novusnow.ca.

 

Mylo

Lola

Chloe

VANCOUVER DAZE showcases and highlights the social life and scene of our beautiful city, covering all the misadventures and shenanigans at various cultural events, mixers, parties, meetups, and local happenings. We fiercely promote all the fun times the city has to offer along with the interesting people behind them. Follow more of my work/coverage over at RICKCHUNG.COM and on Twitter at @RICKCHUNG. You can pitch me HERE.

Volume 40: Painted Rock Estate Winery‘s 2nd annual tasting party at Gotham Steakhouse & Cocktail Bar on October 20, 2011. More photos available on Flickr.

On a random weekday afternoon, I popped into Gotham Steakhouse for Painted Rock’s annual private wine tasting and celebration.

Everyone sipped on the fine wine from Pentiction. I stuck mostly with the fairly tasty chardonnay and merlot. Forgive me, I know next to nothing about wine or wine culture. I just know when I like it and it tastes good.
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The Waldorf is doing it again this weekend! Again? Yes, last year they opened with a huge “Boo” in the form of a massive Hallowe’en Party. This should not be a surprise as all year there has been exciting stimulating events happening at the fabled Hotel! Proof? This all ages outdoor BBQ gig The Waldorf Hosted in the Summer with Denmark’s Iceage. Here’s an interview with Iceage from that very event and Happy Birthday to thee Waldorfian ones! Doot doola doot doo … doot doo!

Nardwuar vs. Iceage

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 series had its genesis when I began photographing Vancouver area location shoots in the summer of 2010 to get over a post-Olympics funk. Film and TV productions like Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol, Fringe, Supernatural and The Killing showcase our city in similar fashion and sometimes put a celebrity actor or two in the frame.

Break-dancing kid, rapper Mom, a trio singing The Climb while building a girl pyramid, large group performing the Macarena and YMCA. That’s the audience at the Live Show of homegrown teen sitcom Mr. Young. So much talent in the audience and on set makes the Friday night taping of this multi-camera sitcom a fun destination for parents and kids. Plus every so often a well-known actor sits watching the show instead of being on it:  V’s Christopher Shyer and family won a round of audience Monster Family Feud last Friday.

Made-in-Vancouver Mr. Young is a situation comedy about child prodigy Adam Young (Brendan Meyer) returning to his high school at the age of 14 to teach science to his best friend Derby (Gig Morton), his crush Echo (Matreya Fedor) and the dim-witted school bully Slab (Kurt Ostlund). Filming its second season in a massive studio behind the old Watchmen set in Burnaby, Mr. Young is a Canadian hit about to make it big in the U.S. Last month children’s entertainment giant Disney started airing YTV’s #1 show on its Disney XD channel and this past weekend premiered three episodes on the main Disney Channel as well as multiple airings on Disney XD. Seven episodes aired on Saturday alone.

Is Mr. Young on its way to becoming The Suite Life North? It has the pedigree: Mr. Young was created by Dan Signer, the writer/producer of Disney’s hit series The Suite Life on Deck. And it’s certainly laugh-out-loud funny to kids and some of their parents, although some of the adult-oriented jokes might have to be toned down for prospective Disney audiences. Each episode name is a variation on the premiere Mr. Young, from Mr. Roboto to last week’s Mr. Tickleshmooz  — about Adam’s attempt to clone his crush’s hamster after it dies in his care. I laughed watching Brendan Meyer give the stiffened original hamster CPR and again when the cloned hamster grew to monstrous size filling the school hallway. Monster hamster turned out to be the fifteenth episode of the second season, which started taping in July and wraps in January of next year — six months for 26 half-hour episodes, including brief hiatuses for the young cast.

Last Friday’s Live Show for Mr. Cyclops began with the audience load-in at 4:15 p.m. of about 200 into a basketball-court-length grandstand,  followed by a playback of Mr. Tickleschmootz, which I’d already seen on TV at home. Shooting of live scenes began about 5 p.m. and ended five hours later at 10 p.m. with a curtain call for the cast. That’s a long time but the audience’s energy never flagged thanks to wrangler/performer Dave Dimapalis, who kept the kids hopping between set-ups with games, contests, singing, dancing, you name-it. This man is great at his job.

Of the eight live scenes we watched, my favourite had to be Adam and Derby dressed as Men in Black with CIA (Cyclops Intelligence Agency) badges in their back pockets and black one-eye bands on their heads.

Note the yellow card in the photo above asking the audience not to “jump over the railing” at the teen stars. …READ THE REST OF THIS ENTRY>>>

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!

To the novice art aficionado, the paintings Elizabeth McIntosh makes could be described as abstract. She prefers to leave it more open-ended than that however, feeling that painting “exists now as a whole mixture of all the histories [of painting movements] combined together.” Abstraction “just seems like a word that can’t encompass all that painting can now encompass.” Her paintings hover around pattern, decoration, collage and representation that say more about the process of creating the composition than they do about the composition as a whole.

‘Zig Zag’ 2009, approx. 24 x 32 in., construction paper

McIntosh has been painting since she was a teenager, when she took a summer art class and fell in love with the medium. Eventually that love led her to study art at York University in Toronto, and while she painted the whole time, got caught up in the feminist agenda of the 80s and produced a lot of performance work. In one performance she cut herself out of a cardboard box; in another she strapped a tape recorder to her front with a baby harness, which alternated between playing the sound of children booing or cheering while she tried not to show emotion to the sounds. While she enjoyed the performance work she found it “nerve-wracking to get infront of an audience,” and realized in time that she preferred painting and the solitary time doing so in the studio. Many of her fellow students and even some teachers suggested painting was not the medium she should pursue, but McIntosh would not be persuaded and went on to Chelsea College in London to obtain an MFA in painting.

‘Cat’ 2010, 75 x 90 in., oil on canvas

Eventually she ended up in Vancouver, with it’s large but oft-overlooked painting community. To her, painting is a “geeky thing,” equating it with ceramics and the technical knowledge about the medium that only other practitioners care to know or pay attention to. Her paintings are a process that begin and end in different places, but always lead to something new for McIntosh. She had a large show at the Contemporary Art Gallery late last year entitled “Violet’s Hair,” in which she exhibited a group of large paintings in one room, and turned the other room and the outside windows into …READ THE REST OF THIS ENTRY>>>

Vancouver is an amazing city, chock full of creative talent. WE ARE VANCVR is a simple, elegant way to showcase all that talent in one place. Every week we profile one individual from the VANCVR community.VANCVR.com is a Domain7 Labs project.

Recently, we published an open letter to TEDxVANCOUVER with a modest proposal.