Archive for February, 2012

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

Ahh, the end of February in Vancouver. And a Leap Year to boot! Nothing says the end of February in Vancouver like a little snowfall, followed immediately by rain. Like clockwork. It’s what makes Vancouver awesome. Really. ;)
You know what else is cool about Vancouver? The fact that by the time the end of February rolls around, people are so comfortable with the fact that it’s probably gonna rain, that they just go about their day, business as usual, not caring about how wet or cold or windy it is. Just pop open an umbrella and go. :)

Enjoy Against the Wind from Jianwei

John

Read All Over celebrates the bookworm in all of us, showcasing readers in Vancouver and the books they love most.

Joseph Planta is the founding editor of TheCommentary.ca. He’s been working on the project for almost eight years and in that time he has amassed a collection of hundreds of audio interviews with artists, authors, journalists, political figures and other notables that feed his interest (and ours) in politics, current affairs, and books. Joseph also holds a day job with a local towing company that’s unrelated to his internet efforts, but we can all be grateful for his dedication to making the most of the off-hours. Listen to his interview with Vancouver is Awesome’s editor-in-chief Bob Kronbauer right here.

Who are your favourite Vancouver / Lower Mainland writers?
Charlie Demers is a favourite, because he wrote one of my favourite books on Vancouver; he’s also a gifted and perceptive wit.  Pete McMartin is one of my favourite columnists in the Vancouver Sun.  I also like Douglas Todd a lot.  His pieces are some of the most thoughtful writing on faith and religion in the country.  Stephen Hume is more Vancouver Island than Vancouver/Lower Mainland, but he’s such an elegant writer, I’d hate to leave him off a list of favourites.

The one book you always recommend is…
Vancouver Special by Charles Demers.  It’s the most awesome book about Vancouver ever.  Charlie writes from such a thoughtful and heartfelt place about Vancouver, and in doing so really captures Vancouver: the good and the bad, its spirit, and what we’re all about.    It’s a remarkable achievement for a writer, as he’s a fine writer; but for a Vancouverite, he does this place proud. Charlie’s thought-provoking writing and photographer Emmanuel Buenviaje’s photos are a credit to this town.

Do you have a favourite story set in Vancouver?
I don’t read very much fiction, much to my detriment, but I’d read Wayson Choy’s books growing up, The Jade Peony chief among them, and they’ve stayed with me.  I’m remembering stuff in the book to this day, well over a decade after reading them.

Where is your favourite place to read in Vancouver?
My office at home.  I’ve got a couple thousand books, and that’s where they all are.  I like walking around looking for a book, finding one, and taking it down from the shelf and reading it.  I like reading at the Central Branch of the Vancouver Public Library, too.  I’m afraid of heights, but I like going to the sixth floor and looking out the glass and looking down in the middle of my reading.

Photo courtesy of Joseph Planta

What’s next on your reading list?
I’m in the midst of reading Allan Levine’s biography on Mackenzie King.  I’ve also got a Downton Abbey coffee table type book, I’m looking forward to reading.  Everyone seems to be talking about the show, and I’m deeply immersed in it.  I started Kevin Chong’s Beauty Plus Pity before Christmas and am looking forward to finishing it.  I also got Joan Didion’s Blue Nights before the holidays, but haven’t had time to start it.

What writer excites you right now?
I’m also reading J.J. Lee’s wonderful book The Measure of a Man.  I think it’s an outstanding book, and his column in the Sun offers useful tips.

What writer would you love to see read their work?
I like Alex Waterhouse-Hayward’s blog, and it’d be great to hear him tell the stories he writes on his website out loud, accompanied with the photos he also posts.

How do you like your books served up best – audio books, graphic novels, used paperbacks, library loaner, e-reader…
There are no better books to add to one’s collection than new, hard covers that are truly one’s own.  They’ve got a certain smell to them, they look smart on a shelf, and cracked open, they’re full of possibility.

Photo courtesy of Joseph Planta

What magazines/journals can you not live without?
Maclean’s, Quill and Quire, Canadian Business, and The Walrus are regular reads.  I read the New Yorker on occasion, buying it on the newsstand, which is as it is, highly overpriced.  Vanity Fair too is worth a read for the articles, and if you run out of cologne.

If you had to choose, which writer would you consider a mentor?
Rafe Mair.  He wrote as he spoke, and as someone who talks on the internet, one can learn a great deal from his many years of broadcasting and his writing.

What books have changed your life?
Father Joe by Tony Hendra made me laugh and cry in the short time it took me to read it.  It moved me a great deal, and consistently does so whenever I read it.  I try to read it once a year in appreciation of Hendra’s brilliance.  As well, it’s spiritual enough that I find in it some understanding of my relationship with Catholicism.  Tuesdays with Morrie by Mitch Albom really affected me in high school.  It did so in a very male sort of way, which I can’t really explain.  Most of all it made me appreciate the older people in my life, as well as all the other people I come across in life.

A Vancouver time travelogue brought to you by Past Tense.

With the high school student walkout planned for this Friday, I thought it would be a good time to look at the one staged on May Day in 1935 in support of striking relief camp workers fighting for “work and wages.” The authorities were prepared for something along the lines of the Winnipeg General Strike or the Bolshevik Revolution, but instead it was a peaceful one-day walkout of workers and students.

As many as 30,000 demonstrators paraded from the Cambie Street Grounds to a rally in Stanley Park. In their secret intelligence report to Ottawa, the RCMP said it was “one of the largest labour demonstrations in the history of that city,” and noted that it included “approximately 900 public school and high school students who had come out on strike in sympathy with the relief camp strikers,” even though some were threatened with disciplinary measures if they took part. Other estimates put the size of the youth contingent as high as 3000.

The relief camp strike evolved into the On-to-Ottawa Trek, which helped bring down the Conservative government of RB Bennett in the next election and set the stage for the establishment of Canada’s post-WWII social safety net.

Source: Vancouver Public Library photos #8796 & 8788, via Lorne Brown, When Freedom was Lost (Black Rose Books, 1987)

Vancouver is home to a thriving fashion industry made up of individuals committed to its growth and success. Get to know these personalities in The Inseam and discover what makes the Vancouver Fashion scene so awesome.

Photo: courtesy Nibz Bandanaz 

There is a common misconception that snow gear is unfashionable, and while this may still be true in some cases (note the dreaded onesie), this is changing rapidly. Nibz is a collection of high quality bandanas that keep you warm and dry without sacrificing style on the slopes. Its founder, Sara Niblock, is a snowboard cross athlete, ensuring that each piece is designed with the rider in mind.

I chat with Sara about her venture with Nibz, her motivation for the line and what makes Vancouver so awesome.

Valerie Tiu: Tell us a bit about yourself.

Sara Niblock: I grew up and graduated from university (I studied kinesiology) in Ontario, then headed west as soon as I could – and I won’t be turning back. I grew up beside a tiny hill called Chicopee; I knew no better then …READ THE REST OF THIS ENTRY>>>

Hometown: St. John’s, Newfoundland Age: 35 Favorite Documentary: Koyaanisquatsi, Lost in La Mancha Dream Collaboration: Carl Sagan Usually you’d have to wait another week for the next installment of The Reel Vancouver but when I learned of this next director (and his film’s impending Vancouver debut) I couldn’t wait to share his story with my favorite fan-couverites. So, coming to you a whole week early is my interview with the fascinating Joel Heath and review of his film People of a Feather.

But first, a little history…
The Belcher Islands (in South East Hudson’s Bay) were considered largely undiscovered by the modern world until Robert Flaherty began prospecting what would later become Flaherty Island and what had long been home to the Sanikiluaq community of Inuit people. Flaherty had taken with him a hand-cranked motion picture camera, and after observing the Inuit people and their traditions he decided to film them, hoping to share their stories with the rest of the world. (For those of you who already know the story of Nanook of the North this next bit will just be a refresher.)

Flaherty returned to Toronto with copious amounts of footage – 70 000 feet of film to be exact – and sat down to begin the tedious act of manually editing when the nitrate from the film combined with an ill-placed cigarette caused the entire stockpile to literally go up in smoke.

Devastated, he decided to return to Hudson’s Bay prepared, and in 1920 did just that. Only this time, he cast a “typical” Inuit family and had them reenact scenes he knew he had lost in the original footage. This would bring criticism from the community for years to come (an argument still rages on on whether or not Flaherty, a man known as the Grandfather of Documentary Film, deserves the title, and whether or not Nanook of the North should be considered a true documentary), but Flaherty achieved what he had set out to do: bring the stories and traditions of the Inuit people to the new world of 1920’s Canada.

Nearly 100 years later another young man was sent to the Belcher Islands with film equipment, this time in the hopes of gaining a better understanding of how the changing sea ice effected the Eider birds’ ability to survive the winter months. The outcome, however, is the same: Joel’s film People of a Feather is a breathtaking look at Inuit life today and 100 years ago, sharing a story of struggling to adapt to a quickly changing world, and a startling message to the rest of us that turning our backs on issues as seemingly “trivial” as the Eider bird population is going to come back to haunt us sooner (and louder) than we think.

I had the great privilege to sit down with Joel and talk about his film, working alongside the traditional community of Inuit people, and how we can turn despair into hope for the future.

You weren’t a filmmaker before this project so what is your background? And how did you end up deciding to make a film from a research project?
My background is actually in Biology. I started on the Belcher Islands as a research student and I was working with the community to understand the massive die offs of the Eider bird. But I think that ended up being a major strength of the film, you know, that I didn’t head up there with the intention of making a film. It was something that came naturally out of the research and my close work with the community, and we eventually decided to do it together. I was already filming to observe the ducks, and using the time lapse equipment to study the ice formations and so it was just the next step in what we were already doing.

At first we were just really excited to have a bunch of great underwater footage of the birds diving beneath the ice to feed, which is something the people in the community have never seen, so we decided to put something together to show them what we were watching all day. That ended up going so much better than we thought, so we knew from there that this was something we wanted to show more people and teach the rest of Canada and the World what was happening in the Arctic. From there we just kept thinking bigger and bigger and bigger…

There’s obviously a lot of Robert Flaherty to be seen in the film, did you have that in mind once you had decided to make the film, and did you study documentaries to prepare?
I definitely did a lot of research, especially on Flaherty because of the similarities between our stories. I tried to learn more about him and his films, and he was certainly a big part of the motivation for doing the flashbacks. But like I said, I always thought one of my greatest strengths during this process was my lack of influences from other documentaries. I just knew that I wanted to show the juxtaposition of the past and present and let the Eider serve as the through line that connected it all. I wanted to show that by learning how we’ve changed, we can better adapt to an uncertain future.

…READ THE REST OF THIS ENTRY>>>

Two weeks back we introduced you to the $5,000 photo contest that we’ve partnered with Marine Gateway to raise awareness about, and so far there have been some really great entries. Below is a shot submitted by Jeremy Jude Lee. Is it a $5,000 photo? Think you can do better? Enter now!

The rules are simple: upload a photo (or 3) that you shot depicting “Life on the Canada Line” to their Facebook wall and Like their page and you’ll be entered in the contest to win a $5,000 gift certificate to Future Shop.

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

I’ve said it before, but I’ll say it again. Vancouver is awesome because of the wonderful mix of natural beauty and man made stuff. Buildings, sculptures, etc. I think, overall, our city planners have done, and continue to do, a bang up job on keeping the city moving forward ona progressive, modern architectural level, while keeping it naturally beautiful.
Take my Daily Flickr Pickr selection for today as an example. Not only is it a wickedly awesome photo, but it incorporates both of these aspects in it just perfectly. the buildings and the trees. Awesome.
Oh, and I totally dig the long exposure aspect of it as well. Kudos Keath.

Enjoy F27 from Keath Ling

John

A few months ago I concluded a project called A Stranger A Day made 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 was my conversation starter and a common thread that linked them all. Every week I have been sharing the story of the week here on Vancouver Is Awesome. With the year now over and 365+ strangers and their stories documented, I’ll continue to talk to a stranger every once in a while, and post a story weekly here on VIA.

Stranger #374 || Location: A friend’s house in Kits

Oh man, it took me a long time (a couple of weeks) to get my bum in front of the project blog and write about this tattoo, but before I keep going collecting stories, I have to start posting again! So here we go. This is how this one happened:

A house warming party. Y’know, I’m at that age (the inglorious 23) when couples start to move in together into a real house —as opposed to a room in a basement. To be honest, I don’t even think it is an age thing, but this has happened quite a bit lately. I’ve only lived my young-adulthood in Vancouver, so I don’t know if this only a local thing (with high rents and people from all over coming to study or work here adding to the equation). Anyways, I was warming a house for two of my dearest friends in their new little nest, when the project came up and I managed to collect a story from a stranger. Gatherings like this one are always good to find cool strangers. We stepped aside from the crowd (the 9 other people) and he proceeded to tell me the deal behind this piece:

“I love nature. I love animals. I love birds. This is my feather, my skin. The three little birds are my sibings. They are flying away, floating away because they know that I am now responsible for myself. So it’s about the four of us, me and my siblings.”

It was a pretty neat story and really neat tiny tiny birds. We talked some more about our tattoos and what not. Then we reintegrated ourselves back into the gathering as if the exchange hadn’t happened.

Thanks stranger!

For all the 400+ stories, click here: astrangeraday.com