Archive for Vancouver
Save the mural
Blank grey wall or … marvellous art – decisions!
Vancouver is one of my great loves, but it disappoints me again and again.
—
June 27:
Always True
(After this cottage at Harwood and Bidwell in Vancouver was emptied out prior to demolition fifteen or more years ago, it was covered with delightful tags.)
home soon & joy now
On March 7 Amtrak started up its Vancouver, BC – Portland line again – the Amtrak Cascades – almost exactly three years after the pandemic shut it down. This filled me with profound joy.
The line gives me to my love & the line brings me home.
Crossing the Fraser River last night, about forty minutes from English Bay.
My train
My friends know I love a good train ride. And more than that, I count on one particular line, the Amtrak Cascades, to bring me to and from loved ones in the States. Discontinued at the start of the pandemic, Amtrak restarted partial service a few months ago, and in March Amtrak is bringing back the second train – early morning southbound to Washington State, night-time return to beautiful Vancouver. They’re hiring, and I could not be more pleased.
Below are photo tributes I made to my home stations, in Vancouver and Seattle, a few years back.
Amtrak
I rejoice at the news the train from Vancouver, BC to Seattle is set to start running again in September. That train has meant the world to me. It brings me to my loved ones in Washington State and then home again to my beguiling paradise.
Here’s a little piece I wrote on that train ten years ago on my iPhone blog:
A morning Amtrak conversation
Old fellow: “Same person’s been in that bathroom for five minutes!”
His wife: “What makes you think it’s the same person?”
Fellow: “It has to be!”
Wife: “No dear, it doesn’t have to be.”
Me: “How long have you two been married?”
Fellow: “60 years!”
Wife: “50 years, dear.”
Car 6 explodes in laughter. It’s going to be a fine trip to Olympia!
Stunning work
With some friends on Saturday I visited the rennie museum to see a group exhibition of work by photographers Katy Grannan, Andres Serrano, and Larry Clark (their photographs left to right). It was a thrillingly moving experience for me.
This is the museum’s penultimate show, as Bob Rennie, who owns and who restored the 51 E. Pender building, the oldest in Vancouver’s Chinatown, announced last month that the building will soon be home to the first Chinese Canadian Museum in the country. I know the new incarnation will be marvellous, but I will make sure I get down to E. Pender to see this show again, and the last one, too (I don’t believe the artists have been announced for that one yet).
A note about the middle image above, Andres Serrano’s “Piss Christ.” You can see the damage to this photograph, which was attacked with hammers in Avignon, France, on Palm Sunday in 2011. Several other large photographs by Serrano in this exhibit had also been attacked in another previous showing, the cracked and smashed glass covered over by bright red tape.
Great photographs teach you how to see them. But not everyone is you.
‘Heroines Revisited’ review
Mala Rai’s review of Lincoln Clarkes‘ “Heroines Revisited” gets the important things exactly right.
For the people that loved her, whether she is missing, deceased, or transformed, these pages are a sensitive keepsake. As half the women photographed may be closely connected to [or even have been among] are murdered and missing indigenous women, these pictures may be the sole glimpse into a family member or friend’s troubled time. How can the surroundings be so dire, yet every woman in that instance is utterly stunning? They are in terribly vulnerable places, yet invoke the persona of tough-as-nails heroine: Your sister riding a 10 speed, smoking a cigarette, clad in page boy at and a crop top. Your former high school friend at St. Paul’s hospital, perched in a confident, yogi pose upon her bed. The woman who’d become your mother, about to inject, focused on her syringe, but 13 pages later, impeccably put together, she is confidently staring right back at you. A tender Mother’s Day sisterhood collective. Perhaps their arrival at that destination in life was a shock. Maybe it was expected. It isn’t profound sadness or pain that I see in each frame, but the significance of these women in our society. They likely had no idea that their images in the finished product would comprise a collection of artful history. The pictures make us hunger for more details of each person’s personal history, but there are no crumbs to spare.
Lincoln Clarkes
Anvil Press just published Heroines Revisited, by Lincoln Clarkes. Looking at this series of photographs will always be an overwhelming experience for me.
The photograph below was part of the original photographic exhibition in 1998 at Vancouver’s Helen Pitt Gallery.
Here’s an interview I did with Lincoln for my old ezine Ellavon, in which many of the Heroines photographs first appeared.
Sunset Beach Barge
A highly rated Vancouver vacation destination!
Tomorrow might be its last day:
While it could be possible to push it off using airbags and heavy equipment, the plan it to wait for a so-called king tide to refloat it and try again with the tugs.
It’s believed a tide that is just five to 10 centimetres higher than 4.5 metres would allow the barge to easily slip back into the water. And federal officials are forecasting an exceptionally high tide of five metres on Dec. 6.
A company representative from Richmond-based Sentry Marine Towing Ltd., which is involved, said that seems to be the best chance to pull the barge off. He declined to give his name, saying several government agencies are working on the operation. (Vancouver Sun)
The “king tide” arrives tomorrow morning at around 8. I will be there with bells on!
—
Update! – 10 Dec ’21
A plan without a plan
Last week’s assault on a Manhattan restaurant hostess by a group of Texans, who were angry they were asked for proof of vaccination, was of course galling and disgusting. Alas, the city’s plan for dealing with this type of conflict has been baffling. From Mother Jones: “New York City provided restaurants with conflict resolution training in recent weeks, and we’ll continue doing everything we can to help them adjust to this program safely and smoothly.”
As my friend @bfwriter notes: “Conflict resolution training only works with reasonable people and resolvable conflicts. This is. . . something else.”
There are two overall kinds of conflict resolution: Two-sided, where the two antagonists can come to a resolution together on their own, and three-sided, where they can’t come to a resolution on their own and require a third party. Examples of three-sided conflict resolution include mediation and arbitration as well as litigation and police intervention. The only possible resolution choice here – when patrons are volatile and emphatic – is police intervention, it seems to me, but even that choice is not really feasible most of the time.
In British Columbia,
Premier John Horgan has said police could be called if patrons refuse to show businesses their vaccine cards, but [restaurant owners] and police representatives say that may not be realistic. …
Tom Stamatakis, the president of the Canadian Police Association, said placing the burden of enforcement on police will stretch resources and potentially affect responses to other calls. “We have a huge government infrastructure around, for example, the operation of licensed premises,” he said. “My view would be we should be looking to those agencies and resources in the first instance when it comes to enforcement.
“Police will obviously be available to assist in those circumstances or cases where it might escalate. The default should not be the police.” (from CBC)
I don’t know what the answer is.
Red Horizontal
I’ve walked or biked the seawall along False Creek more than a thousand times but only the other day did I really notice this wonderful panorama by Gisele Amantea called Red Horizon. It’s remarkable!
Lincoln Clarkes show
My dear friend photographer Lincoln Clarkes is having an opening tomorrow: “P r O t E s T,” a window display exhibition from July 16th – 31st 2021, 234 East 5th Ave – at 4by4on5th in Vancouver. The “opening social” is tomorrow, Friday, from 5:00 – 7:00pm. From the news release:
When environmentalist Greta Thunberg traveled the globe, millions of concerned youth following in her wake, adding their voices to her emotionally succinct vocabulary targeting governments and corporate agendas that put profits before people. Were you there experiencing the tsunami of environmental awareness?
This major protest movement is relived in Lincoln Clarkes’ photographs. Clarkes’ P r O t E s T postcard series was photographed at the zenith of Thunberg’s media-fuelled mission during her visit to Vancouver in October, 2019. There are over fifty identifiable faces, surprisingly unaware of Clarkes’ camera capturing their powerful, at times poetic messages.
Throughout his prolific career, Clarkes has photographed several major protests and has published numerous postcard series. “P r O t E s T” is a remarkable combination of both sharp messaging and vital images.
I will be there with bells and beret on!
Photograph by Lincoln Clarkes, 2019
Perfect day otherwise
Me: I think I’ll stroll down to English Bay and walk in the surf this morning, before it gets really hot.
English Bay:
Love the logs
The great Vancouver landscape architect Cornelia Oberlander has passed away at the age of 99. I hadn’t realized until now how ubiquitous her work was in my beloved city. It was Oberlander’s idea, for instance, to set up “log seating” on our city’s beaches (in 1963). I visit her simple yet sublime design literally every day, on English Bay.
According to the Vancouver Sun, Oberlander’s “legacy of design [also] includes such iconic contributions to Vancouver’s public spaces as … Robson Square (1983), the Vancouver Public Library Central Branch rooftop garden (1995) and the VanDusen Botanical Garden Visitor Centre (2011). She also designed landscapes for the Vancouver General Hospital burn unit garden, UBC’s Museum of Anthropology and the C. K. Choi Building.”
“May her memory be a blessing,” Mayor Kennedy Stewart wrote in a statement.
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