shedding still...

yes-today commiserates no-morrow...

and to pre-borrow is to re-borrow

from the next time for the this time,

from yesterday ever to the morrow...

the last quiet notes...

 When I heard that the Mansion was slated for re-development and its end days are drawing near, I felt that I should find a way in to record a little of its brief history as a communal house for some of East Vancouver's cool musicians...
I was let in on a couple of days when the house was quiet, resting between gigs and practices, and when most of the occupants were preoccupied elsewhere...

I found this bright orange satin cushion half hidden in the over-grown back garden - a pumpkin pretender tossed nonchalantly from a house where all that music will soon fade away...

[thank you, Marita, for letting me in]
[and thank you, Greg Girard and Emily Carr, for the assignment]

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...