Some Gents | Vancouver, British Columbia
I had a meeting with a local publication this past Friday to discuss an essay they wish to produce on Vancouver’s unrelenting gentrification. Our discussion revolved around Mount Pleasant, the neighborhood I currently live in, and in thinking about its change-over-time in another discussion with a friend today I was brought back to thinking about the years of my childhood spent at the opposite end of this ‘hood.
The 2010 Winter Olympics brought a great deal of mixed change to South Main, the Olympic Village development bringing usable park space back to the East Basin of False Creek along with the hollowing promise of social housing post-games – hollowing because of the recent publicizing of a change-of-plans that will steer much of that particular development away from those in need of affordable housing. I couldn’t help but marvel at the transformation on the south shore of the Creek last week as I photographed Roger Bayley, Design Manager with Merrick Architecture, the firm behind the development, for the cover of Sustainable Architecture and Building Magazine. Only a few years ago friends and I used to canoe among the creaking barges and creosoted pilings with wind-swung shack doors hanging out over the shallows at the foot of the cityworks loading ramps. To us, it was the scariest place we could think to be past eleven at night, but now all of it has now been replaced with a remarkable wildlife habitat, a tastefully-manicured seawall and the quasi-kitsch of benches shaped like mooring cleats. The only scary thing about the East Basin now is how much it all must have cost.
Further to the south and east is a welcome change, the new Mount Pleasant Community Centre where Naomi Klein can be found on audio disk and (I suppose) listened to while (possibly) exercising in the (so I’m told) well-equipped gym. A family friend and realtor said something about South Main months ago that stuck with me – “Put in the right coffee shops and you’ll soon attract the right kind of people”. I’m not quite sure who the ‘right kind’ of people are (doubtfully people like myself, although we do seem to spend more on coffee than we do on housing), but certainly I have seen independent grocers, diners and cafes replaced by chains and boxes in the last few years.
15-or-so years ago when my parents were looking at property it was easy to have reservations about moving to the East Side (Ontario Street, just a few blocks west of Main, is where the cardinal directions divide). We ended up moving not too far south of where I sit now, our neighborhood bordered by cemeteries, a dive of a donut shop and the now-quarried Mount Pleasant housing projects. Now I learn, while editing a National Housing Strategy multimedia piece with the Pivot Legal Society, that more boxes and condos will soon be replacing low-income housing as the trend machine that is Main Street pushes further and further south through a no-man’s-land of fried chicken joints and VCR repair shops.
I had the opportunity to explore another slowly-gentrifying area of Vancouver with my photography students from the Urban Native Youth Association last week as we explored the section of Hastings Street adjacent to the Metro Vancouver Port. The area holds an interesting mix of cheap hotels and live/work studios, but the slow boom of nearby Commercial Drive continues to push the community’s artists, and with them, culture, further from the centre.
The Malahat Revue
The Malahat Revue Teaser from Jonathan Taggart on Vimeo.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
JEREMY FISHER, SAID THE WHALE, HANNAH GEORGAS & AIDAN KNIGHT
PRESENT
THE MALAHAT REVUE ‘BIKE-TO-WORK’ TOUR – JULY 2010
BC-based Jeremy Fisher, Said the Whale, Hannah Georgas and Aidan Knight have come together, with a salute to the environment to form The Malahat Revue, an eight-piece musical collective that will begin touring their beloved province by bicycle on Thursday July 8, 2010 in Salt Spring Island, BC.
Current Tour Dates:
Thursday July 8 – Artspring Theatre – Salt Spring Island, BC
Friday July 9 – Pender Island Community Hall, Pender Island, BC
Saturday July 10 – Sugar – Victoria, BC (*ON SALE MAY 15)
Sunday July 11 – Duncan Garage Showroom – Duncan, BC
Friday July 16 – Nanaimo Entertainment Centre – Nanaimo, BC (*ON SALE MAY 15)
Sunday July 18 – Vancouver Folk Fest – Vancouver, BC (CURRENTLY *ON SALE)
–
Yesterday, on what by all appearances was the first day of summer, I hopped on my bicycle alongside my good friends Tyler Bancroft of Said The Whale and Matthew Clarke, who, along with a bike helmet, wears the hats of Actor, Writer and Director in varying combinations. Together we pedaled up hill and down dale and out to the University of British Columbia campus on our first training session for The Malahat Revue, a 10-day tour of Vancouver Island and the Lower Mainland featuring the combined talents of Said The Whale, Jeremy Fisher, Hannah Georgas and Aidan Knight. I will be accompanying the 8-piece for the duration of the tour, documenting the great adventure in stills and video. Stay on the lookout for dates – until then, please enjoy this simple teaser shot from my handlebars as we bombed the infamous UBC hill before congratulating ourselves with cold ones at Spanish Banks.
Breaking Boundaries | Burnaby, British Columbia
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.
The Home Stretch | Day 6 | Calgary to Kelowna, Kelowna to Vancouver
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 Home Stretch | Day 5 | Edmonton to Calgary, Alberta
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.
The Home Stretch | Day 4 | Lethbridge to Edmonton, Alberta
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.
The Home Stretch | Day 3 | Canmore to Lethbridge, Alberta
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.
The Home Stretch | Day 2 – Canmore, Alberta
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.
The Home Stretch – Day 1 | Sicamous, British Columbia
For the next few week I will be on the road with Dan Mangan documenting his tour through British Columbia and Alberta.
Aidan Knight travels light. So light, in fact, that he regularly eschews a bag of toiletries in favour of a toothbrush tucked jauntily into the breast pocket of his jacket. You can tell he’s from Victoria because his other belongings are rolled together neatly in a MEC dry sac. If Dan has any luggage, I haven’t seen it – months of sustained travel have earned him the eerie ability to move through time and space with an enviable rugged-yet-well-oiled aesthetic.
Leaving Vancouver at the crack of noon, our round of pick-ups was unremarkable, save for the gyroscopic bungee-slinging of Johnny’s double bass inside the trailer and a compulsory stop at Solly’s bagels for schmears and knish. There’s no show tonight: today’s departure is just to cut the drive to Canmore in half, so we take our time. On the highway in the early afternoon the band catches up on jokes learned in the past few months. Dan has been touring Australia with Folk Uke, the notoriously foul-mouthed duo comprised of Amy Nelson and Cathy Guthrie (daughters of Willie and Arlo, respectively), so there are plenty of new stories to be told.
The Home Stretch | Various Points, BC & Alberta
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.
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