Walking with an iphone means I have a 2gb camera in my pocket, all the time. That means, I’m prone to taking pictures, all the time. Generally speaking, the total lo-res package is pretty bad but, still, a camera is what you make it to be. So here’s a couple pictures.

Went to Playland yesterday. Long day with a bunch of 13-yr-olds but it was plenty of fun. And there’s something I like about Playland. I think it has to do with the old, worn rides under their many coats of paint. It’s very honest, basic East Van. I’ve been going since I was a kid (but I didin’t grow up in E.Van). My Granpa used to have a booth in the midway during the PNE. He was a carnival man. But that’s a whole other story. Believe me.

So we went to Park Royal mall today. Kind of a holiday weekend adventure. It’s way out of the way for us but the Family thought it might be a nice place to go. As for me, I hadn’t been there for 10 years and then that was only to the future shop and before that was probably over 20 years ago. So after some basic indoor mall experience K. says we should have lunch at the Whole Foods and I’d looked at the Mall directory and it’s waaaaay over the far end of the place so we hike about three blocks and cross a busy street and, lo and behold, it’s a whole “village” mall concept at that end of the place.

Now, that’s interesting because in my days at the Land Centre I’d spent plenty of time reading about and learning about the new shopping mall tricks such as making them into “village” high-street places and these Park Royal guys have really gone to town with the concept. And it’s pretty seductive, I have to say. Lots of people all over the sidewalks. Lots of places to sit. Lots of stores (some small, some big) with their doors on the “street”. Feels very comfortable and “human scale” to walk around. Only problem is that, it’s still a mall. There’s mostly chain stores. Many of the stores are big box stores that are, well, still big box stores even if you walk across a sidewalk to get to them. But I have to admit: I can see why people who don’t over analyze things like I do would be quite happy to park their car on the fake street and walk down the sidewalk into the front door of the fake village grocery store. Very interseting (and not wholly unenjoyable) experience, I have to admit.

After a Sunday afternoon lull sitting reading our books in JJ Bean’s on 14th & Main we were driving along past Main & Kingsway and I remarked to the wife: where did people hang out on Sundays in the winter when we were 20-somethings?

It occurred to us that there was almost nowhere to go: I remember once or twice going to the SoftRock Cafe and once going to the old Vienna tea house on Robson. K remembers going to Beanos. Ugh. I can’t deny I went there too. But it got me thinking.
I realize now that I spent a lot of time visiting friends. At their houses. And that reminded me of what people used to say: Vancouver was a very difficult place to break into the regular social life. There were no ubiquitous coffee shops. No hip hangouts. There were bars, a few nightclubs. And during the day there was Beanos. So almost everybody visited their friends at someone’s house and that meant that if you didn’t know anybody in town, you didn’t meet any locals. And if you didn’t like your friends, it was very hard to meet new ones.
(My perpective is limited, I know. I grew up with a very close set of friends who I still see. I realize now that we didn’t admit newcomers easily. Although I don’t think that was on purpose as much as it was a function of having known each other from such an early age. But that’s another story….)
I hate to admit it (because people are probably sick by now of hearing about the “before Expo/after Expo”story) but this *was* something that changed after Expo 86. For one thing, before Expo, very few places were open on Sunday. Certainly bars weren’t. Most stores weren’t. And I seem to recall that many many cafes were not either. That’s compounded by the fact that there weren’t many cafes in the first place.
I guess this is something we can be thankful for now that we have a grownup-like city. Traffic may be a constant hassle. Rent may be insanely expensive. But at least there’s somewhere to go and something to see on any given day. It sure wasn’t like this when I was growing up.

Fog used to be pretty common here when I was a kid. I can remember lots of days walking to school and hearing the Pt. Atkinson fog horning going. This past week we’ve had a return to that kind of weather. I’ve even heard the fog horns once in a while (though they aren’t as prominent as they were years ago.

The strange part of all this is that, up on the north shore mountains, it’s sunny and warm. Heck, it’s down right hot. I was up there today and it was 18 degrees.

I don’t know if temperature inversions are really rarer now than they were 30 years ago but, man, it’s weird to get off at the top of the Grouse skyride and feel a wave of air 12 degrees warmer than down at the base.

It usually doesn't look like this.

The fact of the matter is, despite the global perspective about our country (that it’s the “frozen north”; that it’s the source of storms dumping snow on the U.S.; that we have 8 months of winter, blah blah), Vancouver very seldom actuallly looks like this. Oh, sure, it snows once a year, usually. Sometimes it snows twice a year. But you usually can’t get a picture like this because many snowfalls are followed by rain (and rain and more rain) or the bright sun that might follow a snowfall doesn’t last long enough to get a picture like this.

So, here’s a picture to contribute to the myth. What can I say.

Here’s an old picture I’ve posted before. I still don’t know what this place is who it belongs to. For some reason, I have a suspicion it’s owned by the Vancouver School Board.  Does anybody know?

An awful lot of artists in the Vancouver Eastside Culture Crawl were producing an awful lot of art.

Beyond the obvious “culture high” one gets from wandering around and among so much creativity, I’m starting to wonder about a few things:

1.  Do most North American cities of 2.5million people have this size of art community? Or is this an example of Vancouver’s prodigious wealth in the “creative class”.  We tend to like to think we’re special, but maybe we’re kidding ourselves. I don’t know.  
    
2.  What’s the attraction of that artistic, studio-scene? Both K & I remarked about how attractive the artistic life seemed from this superficial level. That said, after a while, I started to wonder how many of these artists were really making a living from their art, how many have to have second jobs or alternate incomes to support themselves, and how many are essentially dilletantes who are using some other source of income to support their artistic lifestyles but don’t really have a chance of ever supporting themselves with this stuff. Furhter, there’s two kinds of people in this latter category: those who’s art isn’t commercial and who don’t feel inclined to change it to make it so (and there’s nothing wrong with that); and those who’s art is, let’s face it, not very good!
    
3. A studio (which seems necessarily to have to be in a fixed location) doesn’t seem very nomadic. Perhaps it’s not,  but there do seem to be people there who can and do create their art in various settings and use their studio for only particular parts of their process. 
    
4. There’s a whole ‘nuther thing about the artistic community being urban pioneers and making a place for a next wave of urban dwellers (who then make a place attractive to a third wave, and so on). The huge trap with this cycle (and one Vancouver is caught tight in) is that the second (and third) waves of urbanists cause real estate prices to go up and price the artists complete out of the district. In Vancouver this is hugely exacerbated by our crazy-high land prices which are just now beginning to subside (but not nearly enough for the average (starving) artist).