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Features

At this point, who hasn't seen the pit on West Hastings? It stretches endlessly. Anyone who beholds it reels in vertigo. Well, once upon a time, a building stood there, and before long, a new building will stand there.

Late last year, I heard whispers that a massive undertaking was in progress. Then it occurred to me that I knew nothing about it. I'd vaguely recalled reading something about the Woodward's redevelopment, but couldn't find the source. I was panged with guilt: there I was, a citizen of Vancouver, and I knew jack about the single largest construction site in the history of the city.

As I sought knowledge, I discovered that virtually no one I knew had anything concrete to say about Woodward's. None of us could find a decent article outlining the who, what, when, where, and how. So I decided to write one myself. The goal was simple, at least at first: read the schematics, meet some of the players, and gather their voices under one roof, whether they agreed with each other or not. My aim was to present a manual for understanding the rudiments of this historic project.

Here is the result.

It wasn't long ago that concern for our habitat was considered the lonely province of patchouli-scented maidens and unkempt men in Birkenstocks. But thanks to the efforts of resolutely normal activists like Al Gore, climate change and sustainability have become the definitive political issues of the day. Corporations are scrambling to green their image, and sectors like alternative energy are poised to become highly profitable industries. Still, confusion abounds as to which solutions are the most effective in terms of reducing our ecological footprint and ensuring sustainable development. Scientific data on life-cycle emissions and carbon credits is disorienting at best, and proponents and detractors offer polar opposite facts on the same issues. The suits have moved in, but some cobwebs remain to be cleared away.

Take biodiesel for example: We've all heard stories of some eccentric inventor running an old VW van on french-fry oil distilled in a bathtub. Little did we know, that fringe curiosity is in fact a clean-burning, renewable fuel with massive potential to reduce the environmental impact of motorized transportation. Biodiesel is safe for use in normal, unmodified diesel engines, either in its pure form or blended with conventional petrodiesel. Use of 20% biodiesel (B20) results in a 20% decrease in unburned hydrocarbon emissions, while B100 or pure biodiesel provides a 67% reduction. All other categories of tailpipe nastiness are significantly lowered as well.

Fishnets, skulls, red and black knee-high socks: rollerskating never looked so badass.

The Terminal City Rollergirls are Vancouver’s newest roller derby league, resurrecting a sport last seen here in the 1930s, when coed teams competed at UBC. Founded just over one year ago, the league got its start when a group of rollergirl firestarters posted a Craigslist ad calling out for team members – a move that garnered a flurry of enthusiastic responses.

“A woman I work with brought her new roller skates to work and I flipped my wig,” says Andrea Fraser, a.k.a. Andi Struction, the captain of league team the Faster Pussycats. “I said, ‘Where did you get those skates? Why do you have them? Where do you skate? Aieeee!”

After the initial ad, word of the league spread quickly. It’s now over 50 members strong, and a hotbed of DIY athleticism and entrepreneurial badditude.

David Repa and Ifny LaChance, along with the rest of the folks at Free Geek Vancouver, want to give you a free computer.

All it will cost to participate in their “adoption program” is 24 volunteer hours. During that time you will help to refurbish six computers. At the end of it, you walk away with number six, a souped-up “Freekbox” outfitted with the latest version of Ubuntu (a user-friendly distribution of Linux, the open source operating system).

That’s the plan, anyway.

Before I became a bike messenger, I put in four years of mind-numbingly monotonous office drudgery. I was a receptionist and fair-weather commuter cyclist who deeply envied messengers. Loafing lackadaisically at my desk all day in uncomfortable boring office garb, trying to sound like I cared when I answered the phone or talked business, checking my email at any available opportunity, discussing American Idol and the caloric content of my lunch with co-workers I mostly hated: no matter how well it paid, after four years of this, I’d had enough. I was starting to feel like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day.

I had friends who were messengers. I heard the stories of wipeouts and car crashes and biking in the ice and snow. I knew the pay was crap and you were tired as hell by the end of the day. But still, the best part of my day was my bike ride to and from work. It had gotten to the point at the office where I knew what everyone was going to say and do before they did, and so it wasn’t all that difficult for me to work up the nerve to give my notice.

Nobody in the office could really understand why I would quit a well-paying reception job in order to exert myself outdoors all day in downtown traffic for less money, or why I’d choose to even associate with smelly, low-life couriers. But they wished me well, and everyone I knew told me repeatedly to be careful.

Scott McCloud is a comics expert. Not in the history of comics and its accompanying trivia, but in the art form itself. In the past 14 years he has released a trilogy of graphic novels (UComics, Reinventing Comics and the recent Making Comics) that has broadened our general knowledge and understanding of the medium, while keeping an eye firmly fixed on its future. On top of this, he’s a full-time dad to two net-savvy daughters, Sky and Winter (who produce their own video podcast Winterview), and is currently in the process of taking his family on the road for a year-long book tour through all 50 states, a few provinces and the U.K. He’ll be passing through Vancouver for a signing and chat at Sophia Books (author’s disclosure: I work there selling graphic novels… often his) on May 31st at 7pm, and had time to chat for a few minutes beforehand from the parking lot of a Holiday Inn somewhere in Montana.

Before I became a bike messenger, I put in four years of mind-numbingly monotonous office drudgery. I was a receptionist and fair-weather commuter cyclist who deeply envied messengers. Loafing lackadaisically at my desk all day in uncomfortable boring office garb, trying to sound like I cared when I answered the phone or talked business, checking my email at any available opportunity, discussing American Idol and the caloric content of my lunch with co-workers I mostly hated: no matter how well it paid, after four years of this, I’d had enough. I was starting to feel like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day.

I had friends who were messengers. I heard the stories of wipeouts and car crashes and biking in the ice and snow. I knew the pay was crap and you were tired as hell by the end of the day. But still, the best part of my day was my bike ride to and from work. It had gotten to the point at the office where I knew what everyone was going to say and do before they did, and so it wasn’t all that difficult for me to work up the nerve to give my notice.

Nobody in the office could really understand why I would quit a well-paying reception job in order to exert myself outdoors all day in downtown traffic for less money, or why I’d choose to even associate with smelly, low-life couriers. But they wished me well, and everyone I knew told me repeatedly to be careful.

Scott McCloud is a comics expert. Not in the history of comics and its accompanying trivia, but in the art form itself. In the past 14 years he has released a trilogy of graphic novels (UComics, Reinventing Comics and the recent Making Comics) that has broadened our general knowledge and understanding of the medium, while keeping an eye firmly fixed on its future. On top of this, he’s a full-time dad to two net-savvy daughters, Sky and Winter (who produce their own video podcast Winterview), and is currently in the process of taking his family on the road for a year-long book tour through all 50 states, a few provinces and the U.K. He’ll be passing through Vancouver for a signing and chat at Sophia Books (author’s disclosure: I work there selling graphic novels… often his) on May 31st at 7pm, and had time to chat for a few minutes beforehand from the parking lot of a Holiday Inn somewhere in Montana.

Late October of last year I was in a hoop house at Garden of Eve Farm, knee deep in nightshade vegetables. “All of these need to go,” said Chris Wallbrecht. “Pick all the peppers and eggplants, even the small ones, and then pull up the plants. We’ll dump the compost in the chicken coop.”

A dozen of my fellow cityslickers and I had driven two hours out of New York City to the very end of Long Island to pick pumpkins and help out for an afternoon on Chris’s farm, which had grown the vegetables we’d been eating all season in our Community-Supported Agriculture project, or CSA.

Forcing young people to go to regular school is like trying to “colonize mold into a grid,” says Devon McKellar, co-ordinator of the Purple Thistle Centre, a youth arts and activism space in East Vancouver. The Purple Thistle offers free classes in drawing, publishing, film photography, bicycle mechanics and animation. It also provides access to a dark room and a computer lab with internet and a variety of animation software.

Artists, laypeople and kids helped build a green, densely populated, eastside neighborhood out of building blocks and plastic trees, in a project called Emergent Urgent, at FUSE, the Vancouver Art Gallery’s first all-night event, June 22-23.

Urban-planning sustainable design specialists Duane Elverum and Jérôme Bertrand used “community expertise” in their model of a future, green Vancouver.

“The population of Vancouver will double in the next 40 years,” said Elverum. “We have to somehow fit all of these people in and make it livable and sustainable, thinking about sunlight paths, green energy, and urban agriculture.”

Having just returned from Ethiopia, I was curious to see how Vancouver’s Ethiopian fare compared to the real thing. With this in mind, and some amenable friends to keep me company, I popped into the Addis Café on Commercial Drive to see whether a meal at Addis Café could rival a meal in Addis Ababa.

Artists, laypeople and kids helped build a green, densely populated, eastside neighborhood out of building blocks and plastic trees, in a project called Emergent Urgent, at FUSE, the Vancouver Art Gallery’s first all-night event, June 22-23.

Urban-planning sustainable design specialists Duane Elverum and Jérôme Bertrand used “community expertise” in their model of a future, green Vancouver.

“The population of Vancouver will double in the next 40 years,” said Elverum. “We have to somehow fit all of these people in and make it livable and sustainable, thinking about sunlight paths, green energy, and urban agriculture.”

Having just returned from Ethiopia, I was curious to see how Vancouver’s Ethiopian fare compared to the real thing. With this in mind, and some amenable friends to keep me company, I popped into the Addis Café on Commercial Drive to see whether a meal at Addis Café could rival a meal in Addis Ababa.

A few weeks ago, a friend and I approached the Wendy’s drive-thru on the corner of Cambie and Broadway. It was late. There was no place else open, and we had the shameful hunger for fast food.

Unfortunately, there was a problem: we were riding bicycles.

Last week, I cleared my kitchen of visitors and timid roommates by doing two simple things: 

1) Making bagels.  

2) Discussing radical anarchist queer politics. 

Neither is for the faint of heart. When I make bagels, everyone in the area is involved. Upon entering the kitchen, you will have dough hurled at you and be expected to do something with it. 

Radical queer politics are similar in the sense that they are participatory, involve collective action and tend to pique the interest of many progressive, left-leaning folks until they enter the proverbial kitchen and realize what is involved. 

So it’s understandable that the organizers of this year’s Queeruption, a radical, international DIY queer gathering, are wary of media attention. Securing an interview with the collective was like trying to coax a hissing cat out of a tree, knowing others had tried before and failed. 

“It’s not like folk fest, where you buy a ticket and walk in the door,” explained a Queerupter named Laura at a recent meeting. “You have to be prepared to participate.” It became clear, as I struggled to jot down notes while engaging in a heated debate about the sensationalism of DIY, that even journalists are not exempt from this principle. 

In the context of Queeruption, non-participation can be outright harmful. For a festival that aims to create an open, cooperative, skill-sharing environment. If you are a tweaked-out party kid looking for the new Shambala, I am required to tell you, that this festival will be no fun at all. 

Biking fast is addictive. Whether it’s hammering the pedals across the Saanich Peninsula to catch a ferry, pumping to the front at Midnight Mass or racing other riders on the daily commute, the adrenalin-laced euphoria I feel in these bursts of speed made me decide to get involved in racing this year. 

At first, I didn’t know what kind of races existed or where to begin. Entering a race can be harder than just stepping up to the line. Despite the complications, a new generation of riders hailing from East Van are making their presence felt on the scene and winning converts from the roadies. 

So let me break it down for you. Every week, there are alleycats, and road races or criteriums, a.k.a. “crits”. 

On Sat, September 22, environmental activist and self-propelled daredevil dynamo Ifny Lachance threw CARcass, “a day of bicycle battlegames and buffoonery,” in the otherwise under-used and under-appreciated Strathcona Park.

The competitions included bicycle jousting, derbies, blindfold races...

At Tooth and Dagger’s last Lecture-oke event, the oration had wound down and attendees were instead giving voice to Hoko’s selection of karaoke. Manning the microphone, I’d worked my way through half of Morrissey’s “The More You Ignore Me, The Closer I Get” when this publicatio...

Name: Robin Sex: Male Age: 29 years Occupation: Chemistry Grad Student

My first “drug of abuse” was sugar. Next in line was alcohol. I started drinking when I was about six. I’m sure I only had a few sips, but I think it may have caused my aversion towards alcohol later in life.

...

If you live in a city for long enough, you start to notice curious places. Movie theaters that appear permanently closed, with no evidence of staff or customers, that still change their movie posters every six months. Or the gallery-like stillness of the now papered-over Lido Grocery Store near Broadway and Frase...

For nearly nine years now—most of my adult life—I have dreamed of sailing and surfing around the pacific. Hawaii, the Baja, Costa Rica; surf breaking in the foreground and my sailboat in the back.

Nine years ago I was an idealistic prairie kid looking for adventure, but I have held onto the dream as my ...

Leila

Began her day at 6 am with a hangover, a full bodum of coffee, and a French exam.
Seems to have little awareness of her surroundings, but retains high spirits.

Sarah (narrator)

Has ingested no coffee, and feels pretty okay.
Has not informed the other participants that she turns into a giant bitch after too much coffee.

Dana

Has ingested no coffee.
Seems distracted and angry.
Repeatedly insists on being referred to as “THE MOUTH.”
Describes her state as “Fresh off a bender, and feeling good!”

Hungover? Smoking like a Chinese factory? Gotta puke? Forget that crusty bottle of Pepto-Bismol, or the stash of expired Tylenol 3. There may be a cure for what ails you growing down the street. "Medicines live all around us," says Cease Wyss, a healer from the Squamish village of Ela7an in North Vancouver. "If we all took more time to heal ourselves, we wouldn't need to be so dependent on pharmaceuticals." Wyss, currently a coordinator at the Vancouver Native Health Society, has always known she would be a healer. Her traditional name, T'uy'tanat, translates roughly to "Woman that travels by canoe to give medicines to all people." "What a name, talk about pressure!" She jokes. But as a long-time health activist in the Downtown Eastside, Wyss lives up to the hype. She does, in fact, give medicine to all kinds of people—but mostly from behind the wheel of her classic aqua-blue muscle car. Wyss, who is also a media artist, brings an urban perspective to traditional health practices. She's currently working with the Vancouver Community Agriculture Network (VCAN) to establish a healing plant garden at the corner of Keefer and Gore. The garden is named Luk'Luki in honour of the First Nation village that once stood there, and will be a place where the community can grow their own medicines and learn about alternative healing practices. "It's something Vancouver has needed for a long time," Wyss says. Luk'Luki will start taking shape early next year, and anyone can get involved. In the meantime, Wyss suggests medicine-gathering around East Van. Areas like Strathcona, Mount Pleasant, and the Drive, which all have community gardens, make for especially good foraging. "When you are first learning about medicinal plants, it can be so overwhelming," she says. "Then a healer I met named Kayendres told me that we only need seven medicines in our whole life to keep us strong and healthy. Seven plants—now that's not so bad. " So, here are Wyss' top seven medicinal, West Coast plants that you can find in urban areas. Please identify them carefully. Not a whole lot of poisonous things grow in Vancouver, but the D in Deadly Nightshade does not stand for Delicious.

You have likely never noticed the strange Stonehenge-like structure at the corner of Clark and 4th Ave, because it does not exist. It is not a monument, nor a sculpture, nor a park. There are only two ways to describe it: 1. A non-place. 2. A thing. This “thing” is lovingly hemmed-in by two majo...