The list is way too long, but you can find out who all will be there at the official website! Regular rates still apply if you want to check out the KRAZY exhibit.

I don’t leave my house much.  I used to live downtown, where the action is.  But have you seen rent these days?  Now I live out in the suburbs and what am I going to do out there?  I mean I could walk to the 7-11, but a man can only drink so many slushes in one day.  It’s twenty-minutes to the Starbucks.

So maybe that disqualifies me from being relevant here.  Maybe the fact that I’m using Folgers Coffee to give me pep each morning means that I’m not Vancouver enough.

Here I am.  If you don’t like me I’ll go away.

It’s fairly simple.  I’ve been thrown to the lions in a Roman Coliseum.  Thumbs up or thumbs down lads?

I was able to attend the book launch for Crochet Me at Urban Yarns last night in Point Grey. This is the first time I’ve heard her speak and she’s a very enthusiastic speaker. She loves what she does and she just can’t hide her excitement about her website and now her new book. Kim spoke for about an hour and talked at length about the designers who contributed to the book. She compiled the patterns from crochet designers around North America and from Europe.

Kim has created a satisfying career for herself with a lot of hard work. That’s pretty inspiring in itself. But now, I think I’ll bust out some crochet hooks and crochet a cute little circle rug.

Here are a few photos from the event here. And bonus for me – I won a door prize! Thanks Urban Yarns! I’ll be back again to buy some beautiful yarn.

jPod

Originally uploaded by mushon.

I have Douglas Coupland’s latest book jPod sitting on my desk at home waiting to be read. I’m a huge fan of his work but have just been putting it off for months with my free time filling up with resumes and work related reading. However now I’ve got a deadline, I need to be done reading the book by January when the author’s television series of the same name will hit the airwaves thanks to the CBC.

Via a bit of CBC self-promotion [cbc]:

The 13-part series will be a look into Vancouver’s video game industry and is scheduled to air on CBC Television in January 2008.

The show’s pilot was produced November 2006 by Larry Sugar and directed by Mike Clattenburg of Trailer Park Boys.

The quirky novel JPod follows the lives of a group of video-game developers as games are created, twisted into a new shape by the marketing department and eventually cancelled without seeing the light of day.

Sounds wonderful, and because it’s the CBC we’ll actually see all 13 episodes instead of three run out of order before the series is cancelled as happens on American network television. Also it has Alan Thicke who I thought maybe was dead or something because he’s been missing in action since the 80s’ ended.

The journalist’s guide to the universe

Originally uploaded by Jeffery Simpson.

Some of the best memories I have are from when I was a student journalist. That’s right before I started blogging for free I worked in the coal mine that is the university press at the Phoenix [tp] at Okanagan University College in Kelowna. I miss pretty much everything about it, including staying up late and struggling with a Powermac G3 and a pirated copy of Quark to get the paper to the printer on time. Whether it was editing an article [ep] or writing one [teotw] it was almost all a joy.

One of the best parts was the paper’s involvement with the Canadian University Press (CUP) [wp], the world’s oldest national student organization. Its yearly national conference was always a great time combining a goodly amount of learning with mind numbing quantities of booze.

This year the annual CUP conference is being hosted in Vancouver from January 18 – 27 [cup]. People from the public are allowed to go, for a price. Having seen some of the big name speakers, such as Nardwuar the Human Serviette and Dan Savage before and they’re both fun if not high on actual education value.

The workshop “Getting paid to blog” sounds very interesting, especially since Vancouver’s Darren Barefoot [db] is one of the speakers. That and the other workshops will definitely be value for the money, if you’re thinking of going.

Though I’ve spoken at past CUP conferences I promise I wasn’t invited to this one, so feel safe in knowing you won’t have to listen to me. Feeling so safe you should go.

There’s nobody left

Originally uploaded by dooda.

There’s a really interesting look at Vancouver up on Salon.com [sc] (free but ad watching required) and it’s actually a very interesting read. It’s main focus is on the city’s literary nature, and it focuses a lot on Douglas Coupland and William Gibson, but it’s got a bit about the vibe of the city which I do think it hits nicely. If nothing else it’s probably one of the best non-Vancouver produced ads for visiting or moving to Vancouver that I’ve seen in a long time. In fact in a way reading it made me want to scrap my holiday plans and just stay home.

Consider the second paragraph:

Visiting Vancouver is like simultaneously taking a step forward and back. In its near-future, Vancouver boasts an uncharted, wet-lab urbanity that has inspired author and Vancouver resident Douglas Coupland to call it “the city of glass.” Its past, the deep native roots in the region, is also present, right from the international arrivals terminal. Air travelers are greeted by a dramatic installation, festooned with the First Nations iconography of totems, masks and canoes, echoing the aboriginal people’s distinct sense of place. Now the native Vancouverite’s reverence is for land value, the product of a generation-long development boom instigated by the transition of Hong Kong to China and the waxing of Asia’s economies. Vancouver is today among the select handful of world centers — think Geneva or Sydney — recognized solely by its livability: a happy accident of freeway-forbidding geography, Canadian social engineering and the best lessons of urban development.

So is our city as Salon puts it, “A blue-green lagoon perched on the San Andreas fault, Vancouver is Canada’s Los Angeles for its similar sense of mirage and cartoon inconsequentiality. But it is also inimitable and may be the millennial city par excellence. Picture the world’s best backwater, a cabin with a view. “? It’s a far more generous assesment of the city than we’ve heard from some locals [mbv][mg].

I suppose there are two Vancouvers, the very nice Vancouver we show off to everyone else and the one that everyone actually lives in which isn’t simply a literary masterwork waiting to happen. I find myself experiancing the Vancouver that’s more like the Salon version, though that’s not to say that I don’t see its faults. More needs to be done for the homeless, instead of just planning on pushing them all out of the downtown core starting in 2009. Though I do credit the city for trying things that other big cities would not have tried. Can you imagine an American city being the first to start a safe injection site?

WTF douglas coupland!?

Originally uploaded by oceanpark.

I like the BlackBerry Pearl [jks] quite a lot. The fact that I work for a Rogers dealer is the only reason I haven’t written about it in my weekly article [em], since that would be a conflict of interests even though others do it. However if I’m not out there pimping it in the press it’s interesting to discover that Vancouver author and voice of a generation Douglas Coupland [dc] is.

The author of Generation X and Microserfs as well as last year’s jPod is featured on the website for the BlackBerry Pearl in one of those “how this device can change your life” style features [bbp]. The feature basically just describes how he uses the phone, and magically happens to use each and everyone one of its features. From watching trailers of his upcoming movies to sending pictures of his sculptures via MMS the phone seems to match his lifestyle perfectly. So perfect it should be used in a marketing campaign.

Ta da, it is.

I was going to comment, more than I have already here, but the blog This Blog Sits at the did it better [tbs]:

But it is necessary to see that Blackberry hires Coupland precisely to lend his cultural significance to the brand, that it might become more glorious, better defined, and more profitable. Coupland brings several things. He is a Renaissance man of a kind, comfortable in several media. He has a certain international reach. He is restless and experimental in his creative undertakings. But, most of all, and the very point of the hire, surely, is that Coupland lends to Blackberry some of his standing as a man who reads culture with perspicuity and power, and the fact that he read the early 1990s so well he helped to give it shape and form.

When Coupland spends his cultural capital on behalf of Blackberry, he extinguishes some of it. This is true for every celebrity endorser. For Coupland, this may well be a fair trade. He will use his endorsement fee to sustain his creative career, and who knows what new accomplishments await him? A single “hit” would restore the capital this campaign will cost him.

But back to the anti-materialism, anti-marketing of the early 1990s. When Coupland endorses a consumer good, he contradicts his cultural significance. In the process, he extinguishes the part of the credibility that made him a suitable celebrity endorser. This damage to Coupland’s celebrity inflicts harm on the Blackberry brand. The “meaning mechanics” of this marketing campaign are ill advised.

Photo courtesy: Jason Vanderhill

Matt and I were just talking about the Secrets of the City tours. Matt had no idea they existed and I explained that, as I work Wednesday nights and Saturdays, I always miss them. The tours have been to the Post Office tunnel that runs from Georgia and Hamilton to Cordova Street; the basement of the Vancouver Art Gallery; the Hotel Vancouver’s roof with the abandoned CBC radio studios; the back spaces and roof of the Hudson’s Bay Company; the Shaughnessy hospital steam plant and tunnels; the main ambulance station for the BC Ambulance Service; the Yip Sang building on Pender; and more. To educate Matt (and others) on these tours, I dug up some tidbits.

Turns out I’ve already written about the tours. Which turned out to be a good thing because John Atkin, the historian who leads the tours and he of Vancouver Neon curating fame (and author of Heritage Walks Around Vancouver and Skytrain Explorer, co-founderof Heritage Vancouver, etc., etc.), removed the link to his Secrets page. The Vancouver Museum also removed links to his page.

It also turns out that Vandigicam took in his latest tour, which might also be his last tour for a while. This last trip, on September 9, was to the Richmond Steel Recycling Plant. Until the next one, there are always photos of the tours.

If it’s the last Sunday in September, it’s The Word on the Street Book and Magazine Fair. On this day, several cities across Canada (Vancouver, Calgary, Kitchener, Toronto, and Halifax so far) hold a free festival celebrating the printed word and those who enjoy it–readers, writers, publishers, booksellers, libraries, literacy organizations. (The last Sunday in September 2006 is today, 24 September–the fair is on.)

Vancouver’s show is held at Library Square (map), the central branch of the Vancouver Public Library, downtown. As befits a festival of words, the webpage for The Word on the Street–Vancouver does a fine job of describing the participants, exhibitors, and schedule of events, so I won’t reinvent the wheel reiterating them here.

One suggestion from me, though:

Even in a word festival, there are big attractions in the geographical or attention centre and smaller ones off to the side. Like any festival, it’s often in the small, out-in-the-suburbs booths that the most interesting finds are found. While the stage performances and author readings and poetry slams and kids’ literacy activities may get the write-ups in the programme and draw the crowds, may I suggest if you go to the fair, that in addition to the above, you also make enough time to browse the little, crammed-together tables away from the stage or reading tents–Magazine Mews (Canadian & BC magazines) or Word Under the Street (micro-published comics and ‘zines).

The world of the printed word is a ‘quieter’ one, compared to, say, that of film or music. More of it tends to not be found or noticed unless one specifically goes looking for it–or comes across it in a fair like this one. Even though I know this, I keep getting surprised every year at The Word on the Street by the sheer quantity and variety of magazines, independent booksellers, comic writers and artists, small presses, and other individuals or organizations who seem to run just on a shoestring and passion, whom I find at the fair. Spend some time checking them out–particularly if they’re new, even strange, to you–browse some comics, magazines, and ‘zines, talk to the exhibitors, rather than just glancing curiously as you go past–perhaps you’ll surprise yourself too.

Having read jPod this week, and seeing in it a reference to “Generation K”, I found myself on wikipedia reading the articles on various generations (lamentably nothing about any “Generation K”), and revisiting the ever-growing article on Generation X.

In reference to Coupland’s seminal novel on the topic, the article now has a section which mentions that Generation X is a particularly relevant concept in Vancouver, where the incomprehensible real estate prices and sudden flood of foreign labour made the gap between the lives of Baby Boomers and those who came along afterward especially obvious.

I’d never really thought about it. I mean, I’ve read Generation X, being that Coupland chose California as its setting, it seems one of his least Vancouver-anchored works. But when you look at the environment in which it was written makes Vancouver seem like just about the most Gen X place on the planet, almost to the point of being a stereotype in itself:

• The aforementioned real estate issue almost goes without saying. In addition to causing friction between Gen-Xers whose parents insist they should move out and buy a house “like normal people,” housing prices have also contributed significantly to the apartment-dwelling multiple-roommate perception of the X Generation, for those who don’t still live with their parents, that is.
• Vancouver is the largest video game development centre in Canada [New Media BC] and one of the larger ones in North America.
• Vancouver ostensibly has more public skateparks than any other city on the planet (over 40 in the GVRD, according to this recent Georgia Straight article). The sheer number of late 20- and 30-something skateboard commuters rolling down Granville Street at 5 o’clock on a weekday is pretty startling to anyone who grew up elsewhere.
• Lots and lots of recreational drug use. Not saying it’s a trait which doesn’t belong to other generation groups as well, but it definitely carries a strong association with Gen X.
• Whistler is consistently ranked amongst the very top snowboard destinations in the world [Tourism Whistler]. And Cypress Mountain has been selected as the snowboard event location for the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics.
• Vancouverites typically boast that Vancouver (unsubstiantiated but believably) has the highest restaurants per capita in Canada, and has a number matched only by New York in all of North America. Plenty of McJobs, among other things.

Anything else I’m missing? There are all those other attributes associated with Generation X that aren’t particularly measurable or specific to any one city or place, but from a general Gen X look and feel perspective, you can’t get much more spot on, it seems. . . .

(And I still have no idea what that “Generation K” reference was all about. A typo? An editing error? Or a wily experiment by Coupland to find out just how potent his generation-naming powers are?)