Last year? Shoot. How did I miss this?
Psych! JOURNALISM HAS BEEN RESURRECTED. Well, music journalism at least.
It’s SOUND UNHEARD, comin’ atcha’!
Goodbye Duthie Books. I hope you don’t become a yoga studio.
As someone who chooses to purchase goods primarily from independents, I realized that with the loss of Duthie’s, I can no longer allow myself to read (note: although one could argue that I could borrow books from the library, I’m at the point where if I open one more library book and find it filled with poppy seeds from the previous borrower’s bagel, I will feel upset).
I will continue to purchase peasant loaves from the Transylvanian Bread Company, to be slathered in honey and homecoming jam from Gord, the kind yogi upstairs. I can rent sweet old documentaries like Grey Gardens from Limelight and giggle softly to myself while others misunderstand. I’ll have sushi, buy bookshelves and homemade cosmetics, hit up wineshops, or get someone to hose down my poodle, all independently. I will continue cultivating such a guiltless urban lifestyle.
I just can’t read anymore, and that blows.
We will miss Cathie, Ria, Michael, and all of their lit-hit apparel (Michael’s Howl t-shirt especially meaningful, as my mother, after accompanying me on a visit to the admittedly underwhelming San Francisco Beat Museum, deemed the Beats filthy. Thus Ginsberg was immediately deified).
Shame on us for valuing characterless economy, not intellectual capital.
Life in the Fast Lane
I wrote some stuff for Megaphone, Vancouver’s street paper. Read it here.
Swell to be back at j-school again. Lewis Kelly looked really good today. Swoon! Just kidding, Lew. You looked totally average.
Dear Hannah,
Since you shot down my first New Years resolution to participate in 6 fad “get fit” programs this 2010, including the Subway diet and WiiFit, and therefore dashed any hope of my getting someone other than you to read my blog, someone who feels compelled to fund my project and purchase me a Wii and a lot of Subway gift cards, in addition to killing any chance of my blog scoring a book deal and Meryl Streep playing me in some movie, I have decided to scrap the drafts of my New Years resolution plots. I hope you are proud of ruining all of my sense of direction for 2010, and no, donating blood is not the solution to this resolution problem. They will have to knock me out first, and spoonfeed me donuts after. Spoonfeed.
I hope you have a wonderful 2010, dear Reader. May you always dance like the water, sing like the air, dress like the earth and drink like fire. That sounded cooler in my head.
Mazel tov!
Last Tuesday I survived my first media day at YVR. After pestering the airport’s kind media relations director for months, attempting to prove my loyalties and legitimacy as a journalist, she agreed to let me come with the rest of the muck-rakers. I put on my high-visibility vest (the first I’d ever worn that didn’t chafe my delicate neck skin, come apart in my hands or become half-eaten by a bear when I left it alone outside for a moment), picked up my press pass and boarded a bus full of whining journalists.We were like agitated children on their way to summer camp, which made me deliriously happy. A sarcastic photojournalist from the Globe asked me if I was a reporter. I told him no, I was a journalism student. He laughed, said it was my money, and ratted me out to the media director because somehow I’d managed to get a banana through airport security.
De-icer creeping on the Boeing.
We were taken on a 20 minute circuitous route that might have taken five minutes to walk, sat through a one hour press conference they claimed would take 15 minutes, and were then shipped out to the runway to get a lengthy glimpse at the sexy new de-icing machinery. Here is an Air Canada Boeing 767 getting its icy arse kicked by a coquettishly Danish de-icer armed with $1500/7 minute glycol rinse.
The actual fleet was on the other side of the Boeing; of course you can’t see them, it being a Boeing and all. I did manage to get a shot of the Oshkosh H-Series Sweeper. According to its trading card, the Oshkosh Sweeper keeps YVR’s runways clear and clean during snowstorms by using a 22-foot wide broom to ensure nothing gets in the way of aircraft during take-offs and landings.
“Sweep Lightning” was the moniker chosen by the 47-year old winner of a naming contest that YVR promotions ran when they had initially purchased the Oshkosh.
Why, it's Sweep Lightning!
“As you can see, it really is just a giant broom. Now, when bothersome snow clutters up the runway from the gate to the front door, you’re not likely to take a broom to it. Yet your broom ain’t made of steel bristles, is it? You’re lucky this isn’t on right now. It would take off your foot if you kicked it like that. Please don’t kick it like that” is what the runway troll told me when I stole over to take this photo.
The Globe photojournalist turned out to be John Lehmann. He took some stunning photos that I can’t find anywhere on the interweb, but I did find a bit of his portfolio.
I think I have my first journalist crush.
I just saw Jennifer Gardy’s UBC Ted-Terry talk and I’m wondering how the increasingly simple dissemination of scientific information can make me a rich woman via the Knight Media Challenge. Pandemic surveillance software already exists, as scientists are willing to collaborate via wikis or publish papers instantaneously on the web. Locally, how can we enhance the generosity of whimsically absent-minded science folk by organizing and distributing current endeavours across academic communities? Imagine we could open source the UBC scientific community, reflecting a transition in the scientific process from, say, the single-author efforts of one lone sequencing wolf to the multi-author, cross-discipline publication of ongoing projects, open to public editing. With a micro-status updating feature, of course. It could even extend to the social science and humanities disciplines. The idea is to make projects more transparent in their infancy and allow the public to ask irritating ethical questions or link other work. Maybe we could even organize Project Cafes for academics to express or defend their work.
More importantly, Stephen Quake used $48 000 worth of reagents in his H1N1 viral sequencing. I haven’t heard the word ‘reagent’ since Mr. Kim’s grade 11 science class and I am adding it to my back-pocket list of scientific terms (see also: ‘catalyst’, ’symbiotic’ and ’spectator ion,’ the chemist’s frequent lament) that add scientific flourish to writing.
I spent my birthday at the Vancouver Bridge to a Cool Planet rally in support of the international Climate Action Day. A peaceful gathering – children on stage yelling, “Darn it, I ate my broccoli, now you stop global warming!”, reptilian costumes aplenty, vegan pakoras, UBC and SFU competing via punchy and elaborate rhyming chants. A pleasant day but significantly lacking in specificity and impact. Despite filling Cambie bridge and defying all my concerns about its engineering flaws, the event went relatively unnoticed. I was certain that the rallies in Ottawa would be taken more seriously.
Imagine my surprise having caught a bit of today’s noon-hour CBC broadcast. E. May spoke at a press conference after 120 young people were removed from the House of Commons for their flashy mobesque protest.
“What was heartbreaking was that the MPs below laughed in derision as the young people were removed. Following the demonstration, Environment Minister Jim Prentice referred to the youth action as an NDP stunt. I just want to share with all Canadians that those were our children we threw out of the House of Commons today. Those were the best, the brightest, the most dedicated, the most responsible young adults in Canada.”
Ignored in our families, we go to the community. Ignored in our communities, we go to Ottawa. Ignored in Ottawa, we go to the House of Commons. We eat our broccoli, and we expect everyone else to follow the rules. For how long will this simple ethos be crushed by laughing paper tigers?
Here’s Dana laughing/sneezing in retaliation while exiting Cambie bridge. Note angered rally stance.
Checking out Wreck Beach in its post-glory days, Mike and I met this Newfoundlander during our first photojournalism assignment. He belongs to a small diaspora of Newfies that “don’t bum, don’t beg, and don’t borrow,” but do make $90 a day canning in order to buy a large bottle of Alberta Premium and pineapple juice for the day.
We asked if we could take his photo and hung out until I began pondering how many skin cells must be mixed in with the storied sand. He told me I was gross and we all became upset thinking about intimacy and DNA, so Mike and I headed back to the school with these shots.
Why exactly am I in j-school?
I spent the first three years of undergraduate finding out what I hate. Compared to my contemporaries who were not only hating a wide variety of things and speaking articulately against them, I was a late bloomer. You simply can’t love everything. Perhaps this was my first journalistic lesson, that not everything has a bright side, or can be given a positive qualification which tempers the uglier bits. My fourth and final year was a write-off; I fell in love. I finished my university with an appreciation for ambition and achievement without having any of it.
The one thing I had managed to do was apply to journalism school. It was simple math: English + Politics courses = Political Journalist. It made sense, sounded dramatic, and fit with my newfound love of hating. I left Kingston and moved to Vancouver to try it out. So far, there is a lot to hate about fall in Vancouver; it lacks Kingston’s pure, concentrated drama. Vancouver fall is laissez-faire. In Kingston, there are about three days of straight leaf-storm. During this time, leaves compete with other leaves in how fast they can drop (like Atwood novels) and in the craziest places they can land (in my pants and in your pants, and then they reproduce).
Valuing the truth in retrospect is no good. It’s not that I hate the Vancouver fall, it’s that I loved Kingston and failed to recognize an amazingly original fall while it was happening. This is why I’m in j-school. Good journalism is recognizing and stating the worldly truth as it is happening. I would hate to keep missing out.