kingsway long lived...[vancouver stretch]

On a recent Saturday evening when the sun was less intense, I biked a length of Kingsway from Victoria Drive all the way to Boundary - going south east along the north sidewalk and back north west on the south sidewalk [it was dinner hour and the sidewalks were mostly deserted] - and found a long street more than a little lost in time despite being a fairly busy thoroughfare connecting Vancouver center [at Main Street] diagonally to the Burnaby- New Westminster border... [It was known as Westminster Road when it was first constructed and renamed Kingsway in 1913]
The blocks are comprised of mostly low rise modestly nondescript commercial buildings, some with apartments above, and the businesses are still small family run shops and simple restaurants of various asian flavours...

a disco flashy torso in a closed for the night beauty parlour draws the eye...

while next door, an empty restaurant waits serenely for customers...

an upholstery shop so left over from another era...

and a signage post from the 1960's for a fast food restaurant remains standing...

the meticulously kept cluster of bungalows that constitutes the 2400 Court Motel exudes a mid-century wholesomeness that has somehow defied the marks of time and evolving tastes...

unlike the corner grocery store that has succumbed to the changes in buying habits and the neglect of neighbourhood support...

the Dream has died with this ex-wedding shop...

and Kimmy's desperately needs a face-lift!

marking my clark park:: part V

We could hear the eaglet's shrill cries from our house and we had spotted his parents soaring high above the park - our modest little park!  This is the first time Clark Park has hosted a bald eagle family and a few days ago our older son found the tree that they had set up home in...

The nest is quite hidden amongst the branches but daddy eagle keeps watch nearby, and every once in a while, an obnoxious crow would dare to taunt him and he would have to chase it away...

Around the base of the tree [mysteriously labelled WPC], there was scattered a small offering of flowers for the birth of a majestic but now sadly urbanized bird of prey...

industrial grace

"You want a picture of that ugly building?!" asked the old guy dismissively as he climbed into his car parked near to where I was standing to take my shot.
Without lowering my camera, I smiled at him and nodded yes. He didn't wait for an explanation.
If he had been really interested, I would have told him that I frequently sought out old industrial buildings particularly for their disheveled and dilapidated state - that I find a certain solemn aesthetic quality in their decrepitude and the worn integrity of the utilitarian materials used, and that often the cubistic massing of structural forms resulted in an overall unexpected architectural grace...blah, blah, blah...
And he would have laughed in my face and gone away wondering about my sanity - but without a second thought to that monumentally humble temple of industry again...

GRACE Canada, Inc.
460 Industrial Avenue

windowlessness

""Keep your eyes open!

You're seeing this for the last time!""*

*selected lines from 'The Open Window' by Tomas TRANSTROMER, 1970 [translated from the Swedish by Robert Bly]

[this house has since been demolished]

unwindowed

Norman is a friendly guy and his produce is as cheap as they come on the Drive, but you have to wonder about the concatenated neurosis that goes on behind this graphically barricaded window on the side wall of his building... 

the chains of light squeezing through the bars of nondescript darkness dangle in casual defiance of a blinded quarry...

door no more

 "Ara baixare les escales que donen a l'exterior i no penso defraudar."*
[Now I'll descend the stairs that lead outside and not worry about letting anybody down.]

*the last line from "Stairway, 1949" by Ernest FARRES, translated from the Catalan by Lawrence Venuti, 2009 [from Edward Hopper: Cinquanta poemes sobre la seva obra pictorica (Fifty poems on his pictorial work; Barcelona: Viena, 2006)]

emily carr grad show:: upspotting

This year at the Emily Carr Graduation disgorgement, I pointed my lens upwards in the high- ceilinged Concourse gallery and found an agile curation of coolly minimal and starkly lyrical installations...

 from a linear pair of stiff L-shaped rods piercing the wall at varying angles to create optical variations from various perspectives...[Ivan Mickovic, Untitled]

 to the softly draping cascade of black cotton strands that reject any angular intervention whatsoever...[Kit Kilgour, "Weftless"]

 to a single thick red rope hanging like a stream of corded blood emitted from a spot-lit source...

to convolute into a single knot beneath a piece of nautical hardware pointing towards three panels of marine blueness...[Roy Munz, "A Poetic Visual Interpretation of 'Time and Free Will:...' Henri Bergson, 1889"]

 to the tilted shiny sculptural soupcon of a suprematist ode, which by chance reflects partial views of the double paintings on the near wall, and hence unwittingly smears its purist constructivist mode...[Evgueni Saiapine, "Phase 1"]

 the upper abstracted explosion of those two paintings looms over the viewer in a downpour of virulent colours and feral forms...[Andrew Smith, "The Meeting"]

 and one last twirl around this desolately contrived tropical extravaganza of kitschy pink flamingos perched high above and far from any suburban lawn and a precariously elevated  stemmed glass vase with a palm seedling sprouting obliviously away...[Eun Kyung Kim, "One Night in Bangkok"]

[damn you, Eun Kyung Kim, now I can't get that song out of my head!

"like the devil walking next to me..."]

Emily Carr University of Art and Design
2012 Graduation  Show
May 5-20

ravaged reMains

There is a section of Main Street between the gentrified so-hip SOMA stretch and the beige colonizing of Chinatown that has been dying a slow death amidst drawn out efforts to revitalize the area...
Some indecorous vestiges of the seedier elements still standing, but barely...

sweet lulu swing

 she may be old and creaky now, but she can still swing open for the big boys needing to get through...

 the heavy freight trains keep rumbling along her dark trestle legs, and yet, when out of sight, out of mind...

 sweet old lulu island bridge, she be hanging on to the north arm of her strong river Fraser for a while yet...

[Lulu Island was purportedly named after an american showgirl known as Lulu Sweet who had been up to entertain the Royal Engineers in Vancouver in the mid-1800's]

 ***

 across from lulu's old trestle are tart cranberry fields lying around in russet fallow in the spring sunshine...

Lulu Island Bridge at 2100 Block of River Road, Richmond [Lulu Island]

downtown westside:: the sexy sixties [episode one]

Soaring glass behemoths squeeze around the odd oldie still holding out on its tiny piece of developer's baitlot...
they may be sleek and shiny, with self-contained promises of high efficiency appliances and measured to the millimeter space-planning illusions, but these 21st century luminous colossi have none of the idiosyncratic sexiness of some of the modernist structures implanted on downtown soil in the oh-so-long-ago 1960's when Vancouver was nary a blip on the world map of architectural avant-gardism...

The well-hung Westcoast Transmission Building at 1333 West Georgia Street [1968-69, by Rhone and Iredale] has ridden out the decades in suspended glass-sheathed immutability...and has recently been transformed into a QUBE-full of too-cool condos for dark shades wearing sophisticates...

The virginal white and coquettish detailing of the East Asiatic House building at 1201 West Pender Street [1963, by Gerald Hamilton and Associates] still marks her as a delicately alluring stand-out amongst the leggy glamour-glazed models now posing all around her...and almost half a century on, her proportional compactness and fineness of features have been left relatively unmolested by over-excitable upgrade casanovas!

[after all, her corner stone had already once been laid by a suave and elegant danish royal!]