vancouver

I’m walking down the alley on my way to the post office. It’s the first time I’ve been outside since my aborted attempts at going to class on Saturday, and I’m enticed by the long, golden rays of sun that warm the sides of the neighboring apartment buildings. 

As I get close to the end of the alley, I see a binner working on pouring the dregs out of a 12-pack of Heineken bottles. His cart is full, and he’s minding his own business. He’s grizzled and gray, but relatively clean. He seems sober, not strung out like so many others who come up and down the alley. I have my camera in hand, but something tells me not to shoot him, but to smile at him instead. He was surprised that I acknowledged him; you could see it all over his face. 

“Hey, lady. How you doin’ tonight?” I told him I was well, and kept walking on my way. Just as I’m about to cross the street, I hear him call after me. 

“You stay pretty, you hear?”

I thanked him and kept walking.

What better way to test the weather sealing on the D300 than taking a walk through the neighborhood on a rainy night?

Tonight, citizens around the world celebrated Earth Hour, an environmental awareness campaign that urged people to turn off all electricity-powered items in their homes. R. and I turned of (nearly) everything, and were curious to see how many other people and businesses in our neighborhood participated in the effort. As you can see by the photos, folks in Fairview weren’t really feeling it.

Because my blog posts of late have been very US-centric — no apologies, just a statement of fact — I decided it was time for me to start paying a little more attention to the town I live in and to start using local Vancouver media as a source for the news items I post. What I found after spending the morning on the website for the Vancouver Sun reminded me why I abandoned that site in the first place.
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The Pacific Light Workshops will be holding an all day multimedia lecture and workshop with Bryan Peterson on Sunday, February 11, 2008 at the Vancouver International Film Centre. Peterson is the author of some of two of the most useful books for novice photographers — Understanding Exposure and Learning to See Creatively. Tickets are $149 and are available through theVIFF website.

Cultural critic Mark Kingwell writes about Toronto in this quote excerpted from a longer piece in Walrus Magazine, but as one who finds it difficult to answer the oft-asked question “What’s Vancouver like?”, it could easily apply to this place I call not-quite-home:

Torontonians talk about the value of otherness, celebrating cultural diversity in word, but they do not walk that walk. The smug inwardness of our de facto stealth neighbourhoods, the vertical gated communities of condo developments, the lifetime preoccupation with the averted gaze — all this shows city not confident enough to engage with itself. The gravity of downtown is reduced, as so often, to the cash nexus of shopping, democracy soured into a form of narcissistic pathology and sense of entitlement for a few, invisibility for the many. Race and class, poverty and hatred cannot find a point of intervention when the discursive space of the city is limited to surfaces.

What makes a city just? How does one create a just city? In the frenzied build-up to the 2010 Olympic Games, I’m a little uneasy at the increasingly gated nature of Downtown Vancouver, even as we prepare to throw our doors and windows (but not our arms and faces) open to welcome the world.

Vancouver touts its role as Hollywoood North, extols its undeniable natural beauty, and gets more than a little mileage from its image as a clean, well-lighted space for people of different races to settle and do well. It seems, however, when held up against the lens of Kingwell’s analysis of Toronto (and many other North American cities) that Vancouver is every bit as guilty of creating divisions, of turning our gaze inward and upward, of seeing fellow citizens not as extensions of ourselves, but as the other. Here in this place where more mixed marriages occur than in any other place in North America, where First Nations art gilds our International Airport, where we have not one, but several Chinatowns, Little Indias, and at least one Francophone community, people are witnessed but not seen, known but not understood, tolerated but not fully embraced.

If Vancouver is to become one of the world’s truly great cities, this will have to change.

Kingwell continues:

We have a choice before us. We can continue to congratulate ourselves on how interesting and vibrant and creative we — some of us — are. Or we can bend some of that intellectual energy to the hard task of asking what we — all of us — could be. The just city is a process, an emergent property of complexity, not a steady state or final outcome.

So what will it be, Vancouverites? Will we always stand uncomfortably on the edge of greatness?

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ilke a bird on a wire, originally uploaded by cecily.

It’s time the truth was told: Vancouver is home to some of the ugliest architecture I’ve ever seen. What’s worse, is the city doesn’t seem to give a damn about it.

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a snowy day from Cecily Walker on Vimeo.