seattlelite of love.

this evening we left our brief visit with my family to hit the open road again and headed south into washington state. that up there is mount baker. i was trying to make aitor take pictures of it but conditions would not conspire with my designs. instead, you get a picture wherein it looks like i am about to consume some pylons like little candy corns.

we are lucky enough to be staying with our friend sarah and her fiance matt while in seattle. we met sarah a few years back in a dark and noisy bar in baltimore where we were all trying to hock our wares at the city's first big art show. we were fast friends.

upon our arrival here, matt and sarah took us out to a place near sarah's night job called the whiskey bar. they had like fifty kinds of bourbon! what a welcoming. i can only hope our full day in seattle tomorrow will live up to this start. i also hope we don't have headaches.

terminal city.

terminal city is my favorite of vancouver's nicknames. it gets this name from the railroad terminus (originally intended for new westminster) but sounds so bleak and hollow and skidzy. i've always liked it.

today we also saw a bit more of vancouver's terminal underbelly as we drove from main street down to gastown. this is also a part of vancouver i've always felt i understood - the drugs and destruction of a pacific port city, but also the community that bustles and works far away from the sheen of fancier neighbourhoods. i could ramble on about the slums of vancouver, but the truth is i've never lived in any of them (although i did put in some formative years working on the downtown eastside). when i come back to these parts of my hometown i am mostly just happy that i have had the good fortune to not be a junkie. i am also appreciative of the freewheeling, independent life i have built for myself in a new light.

so back to that freewheeling life...we were on our way to gastown to have a meeting with my longest-standing vancouver store, dream on cordova (no website, can you imagine?) wendy opened the shop around fifteen years ago and i probably met her close to that time. she specializes in independent canadian clothing design with lots of accessories and a few other things thrown in on the side (books, pouches, art dolls...you know). i've bought some of my all-time favorite dresses there, some going back to high school. go there.

after our visit (she stocked up on some new artist sets), aitor and i finally got an actual visit with our friend ehren and his studio/collective space, little mountain studios.



little mountain is some sort of collective studio space that also serves as a performance venue as well as housing a little gallery in the front. when we visited today, our other friend, aaron read, was building a little recording studio in what can only be described as a series of cubby holes. he also sits in these little holes to make music. he's a small guy.



this sort of arrangement kind of sums up the exciting shambles that is little mountain. i can only imagine that the space is in a constant state of flux. but the creative output there covers the walls. working right in other people's work must be fortifying to the little mountaineers.



ehren also showed us one in a series of large-scale pencil drawings he was commissioned to do for nat bailey stadium. i can't really express how perfect ehren is for this job. not only is he an incredible artist, but he is also the only one i know who had to leave art for a while to pursue a professional baseball career. i think the art won out in the end.

we rounded our day out with a double-date dinner party with our friends taz and olivia. they have some strict rules around their place:



olivia also makes a mean thai curry.

sweet dreams, vancouver, wherever you sleep. we have to leave you again tomorrow. we will try to write. it's just...you know...it's complicated.

new person alert.

my friend emma made a baby! we met him by chance on the ferry back from pender island. world, meet isaiah.

pender island adventure day.

my father lives on pender island, british columbia, and has since i was in my teens, so i usually just spend time with him and fall into an allergen-induced coma when i go to visit. but with aitor in tow, and fostering our current lust for exploration, i undertook a day of intense activity (by island standards).



we started late, i guess (by farm standards), with a trip to the weekly pender island farmer's market. it runs every saturday from 9:30am to 1:00pm. we got there just before noon and all of ewa's famous baked goods were sold out. so if you go, go earlier. we did get to see lots of cool stuff, though, like the spinning demonstartions (above). to our great joy, we also discovered the table of an artists collective/partnership/residency called islands fold. we had heard of these folks before from our friend zeesy powers who just finished a residency with them a few weeks ago.



it's interesting to encounter different artist projects in rural areas (like all citizens) and to see how they manage to survive (or not) in different ways. it's also neat as a pseudo-resident to see art that i identify with appearing in the gulf islands. in spite of possible offenses this may dispatch, i have to say i have never had much fondness for the bulk of "art" i have seen coming out of the gulf islands. i mean, i have seen beautiful native art (and cruddy knock-offs thereof), and some impressively skilled craft (there is an amazing metalsmith here, and spinners), but the ratio of these things to wreaths with dried flowers glued on them is shockingly low. to be diplomatic, wreaths and ceramic cat buttons are not my thing. if everyone is being out-priced by the surrounding cities, it is nice to know that young artists who don't fit the "country kitchen" aesthetic of art and craft are also making a sustainable migration. long story, short - i bought this book:

...and i'm really happy with it.

from the market, we went to the pender island recycling depot. the depot also houses pender island's free store.







i thin someone needs to give a home to these guys (below). maybe the regional assembly of text? whoever you are, these are just waiting for you on pender island. for free!



we poked around the free store and found an adjustable eat-in-bed service tray that will probably find its way into my craft fair displays back in toronto. after shopping for free, it's hard to go back to shopping for money but the nu-to-yu is a happy medium. besdies, we were trying to do everything there is to do on pender island and this thrift shop is a real social hub on the weekends. we found so many silly goodies - glass-top mason jars, an old collapsible egg basket for my dad, some rick-rack, vintage fabric with a large football print, an old portable stapler, a vintage two-hole punch, some picture frames...all sorts of fetish-worthy trinkets. and when the ladies behind the counter tallied it all up, it was under three dollars! this is why i go so crazy at out-of-the-way thrift stores. they also packed all the jars up in old mismatched sewing patterns.



after our loot score, aitor and i reconnected with my father to go get oysters for dinner. the tide was so low that we didn't even have to hammer them off the rocks very much, the just littered the beach. we also learned that to test the potential poisonousness of oysters, you should rub their juice inside your lower lip. if it tingles or your face goes numb, eat no further. or so my dad says.







aitor was pretty much in hog heaven and asked that i take and post these pictures to make anahi jealous:





good night, pender island. we really ate you up.

tales of the high seas.

today we hopped a ferry for an all-too-brief visit to my father's home on pender island. man, the ferries have gotten expensive. fuel expenses have made their car fares almost double. my dad says less and less people are able to leave the island anymore for supplies. it is also cutting into tourism.

but we are not out this way very often, so i paid through the ass to see my dad. he also thinks he can do some fixin' on our car's bumper which is still hanging off the car like a big battle wound.







we didn't get a lot done today. we just went down to port washington to get live crabs from my dad's friend pat then we had an ol' crab boil, ate and went to sleep. ah, a pirate's life for us!





oh, and we got a tour of the ever-changing farm that my aunt and dad run. this year, fancy greens are the new black.

cabinets and curiosities on main street.

the last time we visited vancouver together, aitor and i were graciously housed in our friend noah's apartment. noah lives on south granville and he and i were performing at a a festival down on granville island. those who know vancouver will appreciate that this little strip of swanky shops and tourist haunts is not the best representation of vancouver (or at least the vancouver that young, poor people like me and aitor would inhabit if we lived here). south granville is great if you want to watch bif naked shop at caban or eat with your grandparents at the normandy, but mostly people in fleece vests just stared and pointed at aitor when we were there.

with no slight to noah's hospitality, i was happy that we were offered housing by my pseudo-stepfather this time. he lives right near main street which, in spite of recent yupping up, had a better chance of changes aitor's sour impressions of vancouver.

today we decided to go walk a bit of main street with the ultimate goal of eating some of the best and cheapest sushi in the world. but before we got to that, we stumbled into a curiosity, antique and "surrealist decor" shop called either alexander lamb antiques or wunderkammer. to my great amazement, the back room of this shop now houses the remaining collection of the exotic world museum. with aitor's general interest in curiosities (and desire to convert our apartment into a museum), i had long told him stories of exotic world from my childhood. it used to be housed is the storefront now occupied by neptoon records and was this crazy collection of things maintained by a couple who liked to travel and archive. i have the fondest memories of this place and thought it had disappeared years ago. and then all of sudden, we were in the midst of all this stuff (well, what must be a smaller collection of it).







nearby on main, i also saw these:





i'm sure some local crafty could tell me what these are. i mean, i know what they are - a softer finger-crochet version of knitta-type public art. but is this part of a larger action or someone's small whim?

we finally stopped digressing and made it to simply delicious, an outstandingly cheap and amazing sushi place at 28th. i kind of panic there because the gomae is like $1.43 and rolls are all $2 and it's all good! i just want to order everything. sushi is one of vancouver's most shining miracles. so much so that i actually broke down and took a picture of our plate of sashimi (i didn't think i was the meal-blog type):



i guess i come by it honestly. my mother photographs almost all her meals (and those of the people around her):



after refueling, we doubled-back on our walking tour of main street with some more art/craft appropriate stops. we stopped first at little mountain studios, an art gallery and performance venue run in part by my old pal and multi-disciplinary wunderkind, ehren salazar. ehren wasn't there - actually it was closed - so we just stalked around the windows like creeps. then we went to red cat records to look at the album art that ehren did for woodhands' lastest cd and 12". it was kind of like visiting with him but not really.



we are going to have to make a better visit when we get back from the gulf islands. i wish we had more time here.

we rounded out our tour with a visit to the regional assembly of text. do you ever have the experience of witnessing something that is at once aesthetically uplifting and also disheartening in that someone has already done it? i get this double sinking/lifting feeling a lot at this shop. the two artists who run in must share many aesthetic tendencies with me but they are more focused and seemingly get more done. they also make buttons and are on my snobby list of button superiority (with popnoir and what what, among others).



amid all the things they make, the shop itself also features gallery drawers (that artists are commissioned to fill) and the lowercase reading room - a former storage space, turned gallery, turned zine collection. if you are going to vancouver, i recommend a visit, especially to all you typographical/design/officephile kindreds.

the charm of the highway strip (and tiring thereof).

for the right amount of money (too much), canadian tire will fix your car on a long weekend and give it back to you on canada day. pricey, yet somehow miraculous. after getting our car back yesterday afternoon, we opted to spend yet another night in edmonton with the lure of a barbecue at our friend andrew bursey's place.

this was a lovely choice, save for the troubles that would face us trying to drive from edmonton to vancouver the following day. it's a fourteen hour long drive at the best of times - a length of drive i was hoping to leave behind me with my twenties - so an ambitious undertaking to begin with. this was only enhanced by the fact that the yellowhead highway had washed out west of jasper (for those who don't know, that's a pretty major route to wash out). so we were rerouted from jasper to lake louise. this involves driving in kinda the wrong direction amid mountain goats and slow-going rv's for about three hours. the upshot is that driving from jasper to banff usually requires having a park permit and is therefore something neither aitor nor i has ever done. you know what? canada is pretty fucking beautiful.









oh, whoops. did i sneak in a picture of my beautiful life partner?

to make a long story even longer, the trip ended up taking us eighteen straight hours of driving (did i mention aitor doesn't drive?). british columbia is beautiful but after the sun went down sometime after we passed kamloops, i was pretty ready to get to ol' terminal city. i had to stop from driving the prerequisite 130 kph down the coquihalla.

when we did arrive, we were met in vancouver by my family who greeted us with a big platter of sushi (the best things about vancouver). i say my family, but really it was the vancouver contingent of my family - my brother, mother and her spousal equivalent. we will be visiting my dad on the island where he lives in a few days. but for now, sushi-filled sleep calls.

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