Jonathan Taggart | Photojournalist

On Tuesday I had the opportunity to photograph the first day of a new Burnaby Board of Trade initiative.  Over the course of the next 18 months the “Breaking Down the Barriers” project will be bringing groups of skilled immigrants on tours of employer facilities throughout the city.  The goal is to allow new Canadians, for whom language barriers and the non-transferability of some international qualifications often stand as obstacles to employment, to share stories of the challenges they face, to network, and also to create an opportunity for transparency as potential employers share information about their hiring policies.

Tuesday’s first stop was at the Sorin Group, a company that develops, manufactures and markets technologies for the treatment of cardiovascular diseases, where the immigrant delegates witnessed replacement human heart valves being sewn by hand from cow tissue and rigorously tested.  Needless to say, it was all very, very interesting.

Last night’s sleep was nothing like as luxurious as yesterday’s.  After leaving SAIT in the wee hours we checked in to a cool mid-60’s motel – the kind with a vintage banker’s cage surrounding the front desk and sheets so strictly laundered that small electrical storms of static were created with every sleeping movement – and we woke early to begin the 7-hour drive to Kelowna.  Before the day really began, however, we had the unfinished business of breakfast to take care of at the Communitea Cafe in Canmore.

After a while the drive through the Rockies becomes a blur of mountains, snow, highway and fog.  After a while, the dates on this trip began to blur: as an observer I was witness to various shades of the same songs, similar venues, similar crowds and motels and food and beer.  It would have been a blur, but that propensity for redundancy was defeated soundly (pun intended, as always) by great music, great hosts, and an exceptional cast of characters.  John Walsh, fog-slayer, soon-to-be father, bass player extroadinaire; Aidan Knight, pop culture buff and iPhone App aficionado, humbucker-hummer and devoted knitter; Kenton Loewen, consummate brofessional, jazzman, cynic, and possible philosopher; Neil Mangan, Mr. Science himself, articulate articler, King of the Road and merch guru; and of course the dedicated and inexhaustibly talented Mr. Dan Mangan of the hard voice and soft words: you have all made this short trip unforgettable.  It was a pleasure and a privilege to tour with you.  Thank you for having me. Read the rest of this entry »

The hands of the clock on the wall are being pulled reluctantly into future with the sound like a knife against a whetstone, signifying that it’s time to drag the fattened night to slaughter and begin another day.  I awake in a nursery, peeling an assortment of Disney princesses off my face as I lifted my head from the pillow.  We’re staying at the home of Dan’s prairies promoter and a weekend sleepover has left his young children’s bunk beds vacant for the road-weary.  With two inches of headroom and another two below my feet, I slept like a baby. The clock reads 11:05, the hands taking the shape of a peace-symbol or perhaps a Victory ‘V’, and gathered around the kitchen table a while later we are all feeling rejuvenated by the luxurious sleep in.

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I think by now the cat is out of the bag: Dan hasn’t been feeling so hot.  What started as some additional vocal gruffness at the Communitea Cafe has since snowballed into an all-over pale-faced affliction.  Of course, coming off a six-week stint in the summer hemisphere, a pale-faced Dan appeared every bit as ruddy as the Edmontonians lined up along Stony Plain Road opposite the seedy Double D Diner in the -14° chill.

A wholehearted subscriber to the “if you can’t fake it, own it” philosophy, Dan opted to share this information with the crowd at Haven Social Club, adding that the straw-coloured beverage in his hand was in fact Pedialyte, not beer.  Riding a wave of sympathy – and seriously, by his own count the man has slept in his own bed a total of 4 nights since September – the band began set one of two at the twice-sold-out Haven.  The resulting hour was akin to a strong cup of soul-warming coffee while camping: it might be a little gritty, but given the circumstances, it really hits the spot.

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We left Canmore in crystal-clear morning light after a relaxed breakfast at the Communitea and a stop at gas station for a much-needed window-washing.  Windows clear, we could now actually see the Rockies as we left town, their skewed strata giving the appearance of fumbled layer cakes sitting at 45° angles to a kitchen floor.  Soon the Rockies gave way to the foothills which in turn gave way to the prairies as the mountains dropped and the trees receded, and suddenly flat and frozen Alberta was stretching out all around us.

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Continental breakfasts and frisbee-tossing in the parking lot of the Super 8 in Sicamous, “the town that rhymes with fun”, as Dan would later put it.  The fun is abruptly ended when a mistimed Aidan Knight foot trap cracks the disk cleanly in two, and we climb reluctantly into a van filthy with highway grime and begin the four-hour drive to Canmore.

Somewhere between Revelstoke and Golden we encounter a thickening stream of snow-sodden cardboard boxes lining the highway.  A road-work crew slows traffic and 100 meters further we discover the source of the spilled goods: a cargo trailer, doors open wide, flanks crumpled, jutting from the opposite snowbank at an unnatural angle.  The delay is minimal – the accident appears to have happened earlier the previous day – but Neil’s internet sleuthing pulls up a Calgary report of the crash, two tractor-trailers meeting head-on and colliding with a third, killing two truckers.  Roger’s pass is notoriously dangerous, especially in the winter and in Clam Chowder fog.  Wives, girlfriends, mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters – we are driving carefully and wearing our seatbelts.

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On Tuesday I leave for a short touring stint with Dan Mangan, Verge XM’s Artist of the Year for 2009, articulate ranter / arts advocate, and all-round great guy. I can’t say how excited I am to finally get the chance to head out on the road with Dan – it’s something I’ve been trying to do for quite some time, and this time the pieces have all fallen into place. Dan’s been touring internationally for the better part of 6 months, and these last few dates will be a kind of ‘home stretch’ – cities and towns that are tantalizingly close, in relative terms, to the quiet respite of some well-deserved time off.  Of course for Dan, “respite” is a relative term as well, and “time off” means more dates in Vancouver performing as part of the Cultural Olympiad.

Dan will be accompanied by the legendary Aidan Knight in Canmore (Feb. 3), Edmonton (2 shows, Feb. 5), Calgary (Feb. 6) and Kelowna (Feb. 7) – more information on venues can be found at www.danmanganmusic.com. Tour diary content will be posted here, as well as at www.vancouverisawesome.com, www.soundproofmagazine.com,www.nxew.ca, and after-the-fact at www.npac.ca.  If all goes well (and why wouldn’t it?) we will be releasing a limited-edition book of images in the coming weeks – more on that a little later.