VA N C O U V E R
Photos Submitted Between October 22 – November 23, 2016 DOWNLOAD THE ARCHIVE APP & HELP MAKE THE MAG
the fine jewellery shoppe www.cavaliergastown.com | 604.681.0047 217 W.Hastings St. | @CavalierGastown
Archive is Vancouver’s people-powered magazine.
Get the app. Get in the magazine.
ARCHIVE MAGAZINE
H OW A R C H I V E WO R K S Our app finds the most popular photos in Vancouver and we publish them in a monthly magazine.
H OW T H E A P P WO R K S
It’s like Tinder for photography. Swipe up if you like a photo. Swipe sideways if you don’t care. If a photo sucks, swipe it down. You can swipe a photo only once, every swipe is equal, and all swipes are kept secret. Each photo is assigned a score based on these swipes. SUBMISSION DEADLINE
There’s a timer in the app that counts backwards from thirty days. When it reaches zero we stop counting swipes, pull the winning photos off the server, and make the magazine. A week later, copies of Archive can be found in cafés, restaurants, and shops across Vancouver. W H AT TO P H O TO G R A P H
There are four categories for your photos: People, Places, Things, and Monthly. People is self-explanatory. If a person is the focus of your photo it belongs in the People category. Places is for photos on a big scale like sunsets, landscapes, beaches, or architecture. Things is for the small stuff like food or animals. If the subject of the photo could fit in your living room, it belongs in the Things category.
2
ARCHIVE
Monthly will change every issue. It could be tattoos, the beach, cats, or black and white photos. Its purpose is to make each magazine different. If you’d like to suggest a monthly category, email it to info@elective.ca. W H AT N O T TO P H O TO G R A P H
Don’t be antisocial. Don’t post nudes. Don’t embarrass people. Don’t upload copyrighted material. Don’t post photos with watermarks. Don’t use the service to try to sell products. For fuck’s sake, do NOT post inspirational quotes. There are lots of ways to be a jerk with a camera, please avoid them all. If you encounter a photo that breaks one of these rules you can bring it to our attention by touching the three dots beside the photographer’s name. We will review it as soon as possible. THE PHOTOSTRE AM
The default photostream consists of every photo on the network presented in reverse chronological order (newest to oldest). You can refine your stream at any time by touching the sandwich icon in the top left corner of the app. Browse a category by touching People, Places, or Things. If you want easy access to the photos your friends have submitted, touch the Following filter.
L E A D E R B OA R D
Top Photos is a list of the top 50 images based on score. It resets each month. Top Photographers is a list of people ranked by the average score of their five best photos in a given month. The winner will be interviewed and given a six-page spread to showcase their best photography in the following month’s magazine. CO M M E N T S
We didn’t include commenting in the app because user-generated comment sections often devolve into an orgy of racism and harassment. Instead, we will hand-pick someone from Vancouver each month to provide the text that accompanies the photography in the magazine. That person might be a comedian, a musician, or a bartender. Their profession is irrelevant so long as their comments are insightful, interesting, or funny. If you would like to be the commenter, read the three questions below and send your answers to info@elective.ca. 1. If you could fight one person from Vancouver (past or present, alive or dead) who would it be and why? 2. What is the worst restaurant (or bar) in Vancouver that is secretly good, and why? 3. Use a metaphor or simile to describe how people in Vancouver dress.
T H E M AT H
Photo scores are based on this formula. For context, 1000 is a perfect score, 500 is right in the middle, and 0 is the worst photo you’ve ever seen.
(
((
TRU E STORIES
W H AT ' S N E W I N T H E A P P
Our readers submit stories about their lives and we publish them. A story should be between 1200 and 1500 words, set in Vancouver, and based on real events. We pay $100 for any story that ends up in print. If interested, email a draft of your story to info@elective.ca. We are hiring writers for other elements of the magazine. If you’d like to write for Archive, True Stories is a good way to introduce us to your writing.
We redesigned the profile screen. It may seem like a cosmetic change but it’s actually the first step in a larger product evolution. We’ve freed up the space for a new feature that we will be introducing in the new year. I can’t tell you what it is but I think you’ll like it. Get hyped.
(
+
) +
)
)
x 1000 + 999
)
÷ 2 = photo score
F E E D B AC K
Nothing is more valuable than accurate criticism. If you have any comments, complaints, or ideas about how we could make a better magazine or do a better job running Archive please email them to info@elective.ca. I read every message and will respond when I can. BUGS
If the app isn’t working the way you think it should be working, that’s something we want to fix. Archive is still in its early stages and we want to build the best possible experience. If you notice something buggy, think something could be made better, or you want to get involved in other ways please send an email to info@elective.ca. T H E M AG A Z I N E
Archive is a record of the moments that animate life in Vancouver.
W W W. A R C H I V E . L I V E
3
VA N C O U V E R
ISSUE 04 PUBLISHER
Elective Media Inc.
CTO
Allan Harding allanharding@elective.ca
EDITORS AT LARGE
EIC
Samuel Kerr samuelkerr@elective.ca
COPY EDITOR
Douglas Haddow Michael Mann
John Lucas
DESIGN DIRECTOR
SALES
Karim Kadi
UBC REPRESENTATIVE
Steven Hu
BUSINESS INQUIRIES
info@elective.ca
Matt Coolen
PRINTING PARTNER
Still Creek Press
COMPLAINTS
samuelkerr@elective.ca
ADDRESS
280-1090 West Georgia Vancouver, BC V6E 3V7
archiveapp
www.archive.live
NICK IGNATEV, 542
Developed with the participation of Creative BC and the British Columbia Arts Council
44
AARRCCHHIIVVEE
PSF LAGER | #SILVERCAN PARTIAL PROCEEDS GO TO SUPPORTING SALMON CONSERVATION IN BC
@postmarkbrewing | #EnjoyYourPostmark
@ARCHIVEAPP
5
ISSUE 04 | DECEMBER
Contents 08 Editor’s Letter 12
Staff Picks
24 In Your Mouth With David Stansfield CITY OF GLASS ALGER LIANG, 500
26 Blow It Out Your Ear With Trevor Risk
29 Adult Colouring Book
32
Art by Peter Ricq
People Comments by the Archive Staff
46 The Mysterious Death of Cindy James
51
Places Comments by Dusty Baker
By Harrison Mooney
64 Bleach Soup
66 Things
By Meighan Donaldson
Comments by Harrison Mooney
78 Top Photographer Jeff FitzGerald
84 Let’s Eat
92 A Vancouver Crossword (with dick jokes)
Comments by the Archive Staff
Harrison Mooney and Merlin Von Duck
94 Break Free From Your Echo Chamber By Doug Haddow
96 Top Rated Photo of Them All
ARCHIVE VANCOUVER IS MADE POSSIBLE WITH THE GENEROUS SUPPORT OF THESE LOCAL BUSINESSES. IF YOU LIKE ARCHIVE SUPPORT OUR FRIENDS.
B
T E R E T
L
I
A
F E
6
N
F
O
U
N D A T I
O
DOWN BY THE RIVER ARCHIVE
SAM ROBERTSON, 472
-ONE YEAR STRONG-
L O V E F R O M T H E C L U B - TWO WEE K IN T R O PAC K AGE $ 7 0 SIGN U P N OW APPLIE S TO N E W MEMB E R S ON LY
@tightclub
tightclubathletics.com 604.620.0209
ICELAND/KRYSUVIK KATRIN BRAGA, 546
KATRIN BRAGA, 414 BRIET
Editor’s Letter Face Facts
Something unexpected is taking place. Professional quality portraits are getting terrible scores. This phenomenon isn’t happening in the other categories, DSLR photos of landscapes do amazingly well and staged photos of animals thrive. But there’s something about portraits that causes people to swipe down. I’m worried the problem may be human faces. Last week I asked my friend Katrin (a professional photographer) to upload two photos of equal quality so we could see how they scored relative to one another. One featured a model looking at the camera. The other photo showed the model with her back turned. You can see the pictures above this essay. They seem pretty equal to me but the portrait scored significantly lower than the picture of the woman’s back. This phenomenon could be a function of the network’s structure. Unlike most social media platforms, Archive does not allow you to immerse yourself in a bubble of content that fits your personal taste and bias. We expose you to photography you didn’t ask to see. People may not mind a picture of a dog they didn’t ask for but they are much less tolerant of a strange human face looking back at them from their phone. It’s also possible that down-swiping a portrait on Archive is a subconscious protest against the narcissistic presented-
self that we find on social media. This kind of protest was summed up 120 years ago by Nietzsche, “Whenever a man strives long and persistently to appear someone else he ends up finding it difficult to be himself again.” It’s true that candid photos score better than ones featuring the stagecraft of the portrait but even the best candid photos of people don’t come close to the scores regularly awarded to the average dog. Maybe we’re all just jealous haters. Pictures of men’s faces do slightly better than photos of beautiful women which makes sense because our user base has far more women than men. Our goal is to create a magazine that functions like an organic cultural asset created by Vancouver. So, maybe the lack of faces is a feature, not a bug. It could represent your maturity of character, proof that you are not captivated by shiny objects or beautiful people. The good news is we are committed to making the magazine you tell us to. Archive can have more faces anytime you want. All you need to do is swipe them up. I won’t hold my breath. *We are taking a break for the holidays but we will be back early next year. I hope everyone reading this can enjoy time with their friends and families in the coming weeks, and I want the best for everyone in 2017.
SAM KERR 8
ARCHIVE
W W W. A R C H I V E . L I V E
9
LET TE RS TO — THE E DITOR
HOW WE CHOSE THE COVER —
Nov. 3, 2016 at 6:04 PM Mr. Kerr, Please accept this as a formal request under BC’s Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act. In particular the privacy concerns I have around the Archive Vancouver App, and it’s insistence on using Facebook as a log in. I believe this to be a violation of the law, since your organization cannot guarantee the protection of my personal information. Your App forces BC residents, I believe, to register for a Facebook account, thereby releasing personal information to a multinational corporation. I appreciate you may have considered this already, and I look forward to hearing your response within the time limits suggested by the Act. Sincerely, XXXXXX
Nov.3, 2016 at 10:49 PM Hello XXXXXX, We are currently building a sign-up protocol for Archive which would allow people who do not have Facebook accounts to participate with our app and help make our magazine. I will send you an email as soon as it is complete. There are two main reasons why we chose to use Facebook as our sign-up authentication tool. First, we wanted people on Archive to use their real names. People online treat one another better when their actions are tied to their offline identity. Abuse is a legitimate problem that can destroy an online community, and we wanted to protect our community from malicious trolls. If a user behaves badly we can remove them from Archive and ban their Facebook account for life. Banning malicious users would be much more challenging if we allowed people to sign up using an email account, because it is very easy to create multiple email accounts. Conversely, most people only have one Facebook account. The second reason we chose to use Facebook for sign-up is time. We only have one software developer and he has built the Archive app from scratch. As you can imagine, that is a lot of code. When we brought our product to market we had to make some hard decisions about what features to include in the first version of Archive. An in-house sign-up protocol was not a feature that we deemed to be mission critical because Facebook offers a sign-up tool that is accepted as an industry standard for apps. Remember, the Archive app is less than four months old. It is not a finished product. We don’t even have a website yet. We will release our own signup protocol soon, we just haven’t completed it. There are other more pressing concerns to deal with, like making sure the app doesn’t crash every time someone opens it. I hope this email has allayed some of your concerns. If not, I am happy to answer any other questions you might have.
Smoke bombs Emmett Sparling, 663
STOCKISTS C H I N AT OW N
Best, Samuel Kerr
El Kartel – 104 E Pender St
Nov. 4th, 2016 at 9:27 PM
G A S T OW N The Latest Scoop – 159 Water St Save On Meats – 43 W Hastings St
Hi, Samuel, Thank you for your reply, and I appreciate the time you took to write it. (It looks like you were working late to get it to me.) I’d like to assure you that I think Archive is fantastic, and I hope it is successful. I do understand your technical concerns, and I can even see how the Facebook login is an easy fix. The difficulty, though, is that it’s (in my opinion) illegal. It’s worsened by the fact that it appears taxpayers’ money was given to support a clear violation of statutory rights. I’m not trying to derail your project. If you have another protocol, please inform me of what it is—I would like to know if it is compliant with privacy law—and a specific date when you intend to have it implemented by. I don’t intend to hold you to the exact date you give me, but without some reasonable guideline for when this protocol will be implemented, I will have to proceed with a formal complaint under the Act. I hope you appreciate this is not personal, but is really a matter of principle and law. Sincerely, XXXXXX
MAIN STREET Still Life – 2315 Main St Eugene Choo – 3683 Main St
KITS Gravity Pope – 2203 W 4th Ave
YA L E T OW N Small Victory – 1088 Homer St
WEST END
Nov. 5th, 2016 at 4:38 PM Hi XXXXXX, Archive was designed for use by sane people. We regret any inconvenience this may have caused. Samuel Kerr
People laughed at me when I told them I was starting a photography magazine. They said a colourblind person had no business operating in a visual medium. Well, those haters also said a woman could never run for President of America. Hillary proved them wrong. I don’t need to see in colour because black and white photography is better. Take this cover for example. Look at the beautiful detail in all the shades of grey. The darkness of the blacks and the pop of the whites. I don’t think colour would improve it at all.
Little Sisters – 1238 Davie St
SOUTH GRANVILLE National Standards – 3012 Granville St
— CHECK OUR WEBSITE OR IN THE APP FOR A LIST OF ALL LOCATIONS.
$3.95 TACOS ALL DAY
OPENING DECEMBER 7th W W W. A R C H I V E . L I V E
11
Archive Staff Picks This month, we did something different with staff picks. Readers of Archive tell me that they love seeing portraits in the magazine, but pictures of human faces have been highly unpopular on the app lately. To square this circle, I asked the guys to choose a portrait as their staff pick. So, enjoy these fine portraits in spite of their terrible scores.
Hannibal Buress has always been a trailblazer. First famous comedian to publicly call out Bill Cosby. First famous comedian to kick Flavor Flav in the face. And now the first famous comedian to appear in Archive. MICHAEL MANN
12
ARCHIVE
ALISON BOULIER, 331
CHRISTMAS SHOPPING CAN WAIT UNTIL DECEMBER 24TH, BOOKING YOUR HOLIDAY PARTY CAN’T.. Book now, limited availability contact: ash@markbrandinc.com 6 POWELL ST. GASTOWN www.di6mond.com diamondgastown thediamondgastown gastowndiamond
Photography by: Louis Alberto Valdizon
W W W. A R C H I V E . L I V E
13
This is a tricky one. I want to say I like the look here but if I’m being honest it’s a bit of a mess. On one hand, I appreciate the cluster of hanging Edison pendant lamps, it’s still on-trend right now and makes a unmistakably bold statement. Mind you, the danger with these sorts of lighting fixtures is that their raw filaments can take on an air of kitsch if paired with other similarly nostalgic interior design features. And that’s where the exposed cedar becomes a problem and everything begins to feel a bit “Steampunk Chalet”. Risks were taken here, but I’m not convinced they were intentional. Might as well slap a stuffed alligator on the wall and call it a day.
EDEN
SAMANTHA CHAN, 409
DOUG HADDOW
14
S TA F F P I C K S
For every $3.50 donated, we provide a meal for someone who is hungry. #BEINGHUNGRYSUCKS
TO HELP YOUr CITY: www.beinghungrysucks.ca
W W W. A R C H I V E . L I V E
15
Jpns Rstrnt TREVOR RISK
16
S TA F F P I C K S
CHARLIE LIKES SUSHI BENJAMMIN PAINTER, 474
Help those in need this hoiday season In Proud Support of Being Hungry Sucks
GREASY SPOON SUPPER SERIES AT SAVE ON MEATS DECEMBER 19th FEATURING MARK BRAND
B
E
T T E R
L
I
A
F
E N
E
TO HELP YOUR CITY: www.abetterlifefoundation.com
F
Food & Plating: Pilgrimme Rest
@ARCHIVEAPP O
Photography by: Louis Alberto Valdizon
F
O
U N D A
T
I
17
This illustrates the problem with portraits on Archive. An expertly lit and composed photograph of a beautiful woman scored worse than a pseudo-artistic shot of a waiting area at YVR (seriously). Sure, it’s a bit “lad mag” but it also got nearly 3000 likes on Instagram when Jason Harynuk posted it. IMO, Archive will be a better magazine when we stop hating on pictures of people we don’t know.
LADY IN RED
JASON HARYNUK, 354
SAM KERR
18
S TA F F P I C K S
919 Granville Street www.studiorecords.ca @studiogranville
W W W. A R C H I V E . L I V E
19
The problem with the whole "don’t give a fuck" aesthetic of the hipster elite is that there’s literally never been a group of people who need more validation. Now, this guy? HE doesn’t give a fuck. Still listens to Dokken, still drinks Labatt Genuine Draft warm, still rocks BluBlockers. So ask yourself, is THIS the guy you were trying to be the whole time? I fucking hope so, because this guy doesn’t play Sufjan Stevens at his house parties. DUSTY BAKER
20
S TA F F P I C K S
THE GOLD SLINGER SAM TRAFFORD, 385
@ARCHIVEAPP
21
Dude looks like a good time, like Martin Short in a fat suit, but even Chad Claus over here can’t make me like ugly Christmas sweaters. They’re stupid. Merry Christmas, everybody! DAVID STANSFIELD
HAPPY H GRANT BALDWIN, 310 22
S TA F F P I C K S
@PARALLEL49BEER PARALLEL49BREWING.COM FACEBOOK.COM/PARALLEL49BREWING @PARALLEL49BEER @ARCHIVEAPP
23
with David Stansfield
David began his wine career as a teenage cellar hand 20 years ago. Today, he works as an independent sommelier and is a co-host of the popular Sunday School wine school. When not ruminating on the grape, his interests include spy novels, escape rooms, contact juggling, Slovenian design, and beer.
Sufganiyot Christmas Day is great. Christmas season is terrible. When $3 - Solly’s Bagels did Jesus become that girl who doesn’t celebrate her birthday, but her birth month? He now kicks down the door of the club the day after American Thanksgiving screaming The human race screws up all the time. It’s sort of our thing. But every now and again we get something right, something “CHAMPAGNE, BITCHES!” Be cool, Jesus. like donuts. Donuts represent the best of humanity. Take it Don’t throw the Baby Jesus out with the bathwater just from David Lynch. yet. It’s not all bad. Christmas spirit is real. The closest I ever “There is the donut and there is the hole,” he observes. came to really getting it was 1985—the year my parents “The hole is so deep and so bad [but] the donut is a beautiful bought my brothers and me a Nintendo. thing. Keep your eye on the donut.” Lord have mercy, but we went fucking nuts. That little This Hanukkah, keep your eye on Solly’s scratch-made grey box changed our lives. My dad got a camcorder that Sufganiyot. These immaculate, deep-fried, jelly-filled donuts year, so my memory of that morning also includes his view are a seasonal staple and, according to Israeli folklore, a gift of us losing our shit in fits of childish ecstasy. from God to Adam and Eve after their expulsion from Eden The right gift can do that. They bring people together in brief communions of joy. While toys break, videos disap- to try and cheer them up. pear, and people—even the ones we love—die, Mario lives Space Case 4-Piece Titanium Grinder/Sifter forever. Amen. $119.99 - Ignite Smoke Shop Taylor Fladgate 10 Year Old Tawny Port Level up that special chronic in your life with the top of $37.99 - BC Liquor Stores the line Space Case 4-Piece Titanium Grinder/Sifter. This thing has everything: razor-sharp diamond-cut grinding Booze makes a great gift. You just have to follow one simple teeth, powerful neodymium magnets, Teflon O-rings, and rule. You can’t give somebody something they already buy an anodized titanium coating. All precision machined from themselves. That’s like giving them groceries. It sounds aerospace grade aerospace-grade aluminum and backed good in theory. Terrible fucking etiquette in practice. with a lifetime warranty. Instead, buy something special, like port. It’s the cardigan It’s a far cry from the foldable scissors my hippie neighof wines. The classic Taylor Fladgate 10 Year Old Tawny is bour kept in his man-purse in high school. But you’re an adult sort of sweet, sort of boozy, and sort of perfect for romantic now: treat yourself. trysts in front of the fireplace channel.
24
S TA F F P I C K S
W W W. A R C H I V E . L I V E
25
SAM TRAFFORD, 495 ANARCHY
BLOW IT OUT YOUR EAR with Trevor Risk Local man describes everything terrible about the music business in Vancouver. 26
S TA F F P I C K S
PLAYING GUITAR IS SPEAKING A DEAD LANGUAGE
S
ome of you locals may have heard the same fun story I heard this summer about the show that (finally!) brought together techno-glam retreads Orgy with that band that made that song that’s been on every movie trailer for a decade, Filter. I wasn’t there, but I heard from two first-hand sources that Filter were doing their hit (or the other hit, I’m not sure which) and they had the plug pulled on them, leaving the band without any power to project their presumably soaring vocals and pointy-shaped guitar squealings. Reactions ranged from “Aw, that’s a shame,” to outright outrage because it was early in the night but there’s a reason they were cut off, and it’s simple: economics. There was a late-night DJ scheduled, and a DJ is far more important to the finances of a venue than an early, live music night. I know we all love to lionize live music, especially when it’s made with guitars. Our good old dads used to pump that business in the car. We still get wistful when we hear Dire Straits’ “Romeo and Juliet” come on a jukebox, but at this point, not even a debate between both parties at war for Vancouver’s venues can chip a hole in the wall that is live venue economics. Let’s look at how a venue makes its money. Most live music events are run by outside promoters. They pay a small room fee that covers staffing (sound engineer, box office attendant) and then take home the entire door profits. The venue makes money on bar sales. If you are at a live music event, look around the crowd. Most of them are nursing a single pint of beer for the entire show. Many mid-sized venues will actually run out of pint glasses at a live event. The average drinks per customer at a live music show—no matter which night of the week or whether it is early or late—is 1.5. Instead of drinking, attendees naturally end up standing and watching the band intently and do little fraternizing. At a DJ event, patrons do more moving, dancing, meeting one another, and are more likely to buy rounds of shots and highballs. The average drinks per person at a DJ night is often closer to eight or nine. Therefore, a sold-out three-hour DJ night is much more beneficial to the bar than just about any band, and that’s without even taking into consideration other factors like the overhead on soundcheck or the fact that most venues also get to profit from door sales from late DJ events. It becomes a no-brainer. Often, given the aforementioned variables, a live music event will make as little as 8% of what a DJ night will. Now, that’s not to say that live music has 8% of the value that DJ events do. There are some less quantifiable ideas to consider like the prestige or brand awareness that a wellknown live act could provide for a venue, or the idea that
an early show will bring in patrons to fill the room and provide a welcoming space for late-night bar stars. However, one can notice the schism in the routing and programming of events in this part of the world quite easily if seen through a certain combination of lenses. Look at mid-level acts routing through the Cascadian region lately. Many at this point opt out of playing Vancouver and instead play a venue in Bellingham. The immediate assumption is that American acts from, say, Oakland wouldn’t want to deal with the headache of the border, but in fact, the issues with live music and the border are one-way. If an American act is coming to perform in Vancouver, whether they’re a comic, a DJ, or a musician, all that is needed to cross legally is a form letter, and very rarely are they even asked to present it. Trying to find a spot that’s worthwhile financially in Vancouver is so challenging that artists are finding more success playing a Washington town of 80,000 inhabitants. There’s a colloquial saying I picked up in my hometown: It’s the empty trucks that make the most noise as they rattle over the train tracks. The cultural uproar between performing live music versus performing recorded music is not being helped by those rickety pickups. In what has become a regular occurrence when a festering cesspool being passed off as a live venue gets shut down for lack of interest, the old timers and vintage fetishists of this city, specifically the East Side, are now taking to the streets (read: their Facebook pages, otherwise full of hamfisted posts that attempt to virtue signal their long-leaning Champagne socialism) to basically demand the city provide them a bar, and to pay long-time local, scuzzy impresario Wendy Thirteen’s pension. Listening to this type of caterwauling, it’s almost like these bloviators haven’t noticed the music industry completely dissolving over the past 20 years. Perhaps those same oldsters yelling about “Some hipster pressing play on his iPod isn’t music, man!” should consider the fact that their community has been watering down this city’s music scene by having four or five “final shows ever” for every single one of their relic new wave and punk bands that once put this city on the proverbial map. Perhaps the two scenes aren’t comparable and we should stop. They could dovetail quite nicely if the live scene wasn’t having a temper tantrum about what is and isn’t “real” music. Ironically, before live musicians became publicly furious and dismissive of recorded dance music evenings, there were many nights in this city where DJs and promoters would put on live music early or even halfway through the evening, but that format has since been discarded due to economics, public disinterest, and obscenely ridiculous demands from the live musicians. We guitar people could learn a few things from the DJ scene rather than spew hate, because the latter’s response is mostly, as the meme goes “I don’t think about you at all.”
@ARCHIVEAPP
27
VANCOUVER SKY JANET HOFFAR, 532
Last Month’s Winner Colour it in. Take a picture. Upload it into Things. We’ll print the best one next month.
PATRICK STANFIELD, 721
28
ARCHIVE
ART BY NIKKI PECASSO
R ADULT COLOURING BOOK “Trump arrives in Vancouver to christen his new hotel.”
Art by Peter Ricq
www.peterricq.com
W W W. A R C H I V E . L I V E
29
Last Month By The Numbers Photos by
P E O P LE
P L AC E S
TH I N G S
M O NTH LY
TOTA L
TOTA L S
405
843
333
131
1,712
P E O P LE
P L AC E S
TH I N G S
M O NTH LY
TOTA L S
7,300
19,017
6,108
2,224
34,649
5,729
11,957
4,346
1,885
23,917
17,826
34,440
15,012
7,169
74,447
30,855
65,414
25,466
11,278
133,013
Votes
TOTA L S
H I G H E S T SCO R E
7 70
LOW E S T SCO R E
Top Photographers is a list of people ranked by the average score of their five best photos in a given month. The winner will be interviewed and given a sixpage spread to showcase their best photography in the following month’s magazine.
Rank
30
Name
Avg. Score
108
AV E R AG E SCO R E
3 49
Congratulations to Emmett Sparling
on winning a spread in next month’s magazine. If we don’t get ahold of you, please email info@elective.ca
Rank
Name
Avg. Score
1
Emmett Sparling
720
6
Steph Hunter
603
2
Libby Williams
638
7
Thomas Colter
601
3
Steve Dynie
627
8
Ben Williams
597
4
Sina Ronaghi
618
9
Ania Darrell Labrecque
587
5
Luc Frst
602
10
Brittany Anne
566
ARCHIVE
PROUD PRINTER OF
W W W. A R C H I V E . L I V E
31
PEOPLE
32
PEOPLE
Each month, we choose people from Vancouver to supply the comments that accompany the photos in the magazine. If you would like to be the commenter, check the questionnaire on page 3 and send your answers to info@elective.ca.
Commenter of the Month
A R C H I V E S TA F F
TOGETHER GRANT BALDWIN, 354
Anyway, the greatest tennis player of her generation was late to class that day. The hallway had cleared by the time she appeared, running full speed to make up for her tardiness. When she tried to turn the corner it looked like she was on skates. The motor oil was in control. I can still remember the look of terror, confusion, and regret on her face as she slammed into the bay of lockers. Her arm broke in six places. She never played competitive tennis again.
ART IS LOVE
GEORGE LAWSON, 495
: The girl in the hat looks like someone I went to high school with. For her age, she was the best tennis player in the province. Our school was old and had dangerously narrow hallways. When I was in Grade 12 we decided to see what would happen if we spread motor oil all over the floors. When the bell rang, kids filled the hallway and almost immediately they started falling down. One person would slip and they’d grab the person next to them and that person would fall too. It was like a game of human dominoes.
When you work on a publishing schedule you find out that people are unreliable. This month, the professionally funny person we asked to supply the commentary for the People section didn’t show up to work. So that responsibility fell onto the Archive staff. We apologize in advance.
LONG EXPOSURE PAIGE MCCULLOUGH, 500 W W W. A R C H I V E . L I V E
33
JUST BREATHE ALGER LIANG, 625
it’s weird that you like this magazine but you don’t have the app....... 34
PEOPLE
#STILLZPORTRAITS BENJAMMIN PAINTER, 580
@ARCHIVEAPP
35
BAD ANIMAL BENJAMMIN PAINTER, 524
CHRISTINE MCAVOY, 668
@B_FOR_BIRD
BRITTANY ANNE, 514
LOVE IS PEANUT BUTTER AND JELLY CONNIE STANSFIELD, 570 36
PEOPLE
: That’s Gastown. You can tell by the overhead walkway in the top of the frame. I know those alleys pretty well because when I graduated high school my father told me I had two weeks to get a job or he would get one for me. I called his bluff and two weeks later I was working at the United We Can bottle depot on Hastings. My job consisted of cleaning the alleys, mostly. One morning I was in the alley sweeping up garbage, specifically those little orange packages that sterile syringes came in and socks covered in human feces. It was around 7 a.m. and I was pretty sure that life sucked. The sound of movement drew my attention to a nearby dumpster. A man climbed out. He looked at me, nodded his head, took a piss beside a telephone pole, then climbed back inside and, presumably, went back to sleep. At that moment I knew life sucked because a man who lived in a dumpster was getting more sleep than me and to a 17-year-old sleep was more valuable than any life lesson.
ARJUN HAIR, 536 THE PHOTOGRAPHER
W W W. A R C H I V E . L I V E
37
TIM BARKER, 556
TOWER FIRE GRANT BALDWIN, 612 38
PEOPLE
@_THE_RUNAWAYS LIBBY WILLIAMS, 500
SUP CRABBING GRANT BALDWIN, 530
: You should never poach crab from another man’s trap. When I was a kid my parents took us on a boat trip up to Desolation Sound and we docked for the night in Squirrel Cove on Cortes Island. It was my brother’s and my job to go out in the dinghy and get dinner. Darkness had set and there were floats all over the yard so the job was easy. We pulled four beauties out of a pot near a yacht called “Patch” and rowed back to our boat. Thirty minutes later a group of four obviously intoxicated and enraged Hells Angels boarded my family boat like pirates. There are few things more disheartening for an adolescent boy than watching a group of bikers assault his father while trashing the interior of the family’s prized Bertram 35. Crab is just crappy lobster anyway.
SAMANTHA CHAN, 656 @ARCHIVEAPP
39
BODYSCAPE YASMIN BAKHTIAR, 548
: HA! This is the EPITOME of the "just got busted staring at girl’s boobs and now trying to pretend like I’m thinking deep thoughts. Please don’t call the Transit Police. Are they even real police?" look. Dude, just move to Japan already, you’ll never have to make this face again. MAN ON THE SKYTRAIN CALEB FRIESEN, 490 40
PEOPLE
ORDINARY GEORGE LAWSON, 526 W W W. A R C H I V E . L I V E
41
42
PEOPLE
BEN WILLIAMS, 614
GALEN ROBINSON-EXO, 505
: People pretend that they take pictures of old people because "their faces tell a thousand stories". That’s BS. Admit it, you do it because they can’t move. If you were a real photographer you’d take a picture of the kids’ ballroom at IKEA. See how many keepers you get out of a roll of film. A sepia filter on the iPhone 7 ain’t going to fix that blurry mess, people. CHRIS BARKER, 663
JOON JOSEPH, 539 @ARCHIVEAPP
43
WEATHER - D GRANT BALDWIN, 614
FRESH FROM ALASKA LUC FRST, 479 : Uhhhh, HEY BUDDY. Not sure if anyone’s told you this, but the whole, "hanging out in a dimly lit van in the middle of the night" is basically what half the PSAs in the 1980s were all about. Can you call the cops on a photo?
44
PEOPLE
Let’s tango Oliver Mann, 485
The Mysterious Death of Cindy James IMAGES FROM: VANCOUVERTRUEBORNS.COM 46
ARCHIVE
Cindy James was found dead outside an abandoned house in Richmond in the summer of 1989. She had been drugged and strangled. She lay on her right side, a black nylon stocking tied tightly around her neck, and another used to hogtie her arms and legs behind her back. She was wearing one shoe.
F
or years, this day had seemed inevitable. It was the predictable end to nearly a decade of well-documented and thoroughly-investigated psychological and physical torment: threatening phone calls, notes, strange encounters, vandalism, fires, animal killings, and a halfdozen violent physical attacks; all perpetrated by an unknown assailant. There were about a hundred documented incidents between 1982 and 1989. Someone was terrorizing her. After Cindy’s death, there was a thorough investigation. It culminated in the lengthiest and most expensive public inquest in British Columbia’s history. Cindy’s death was ruled a suicide. Cindy’s “living nightmare”, as one psychiatrist would put it during the inquest, began in the autumn of 1982. Three months earlier, she and her husband of sixteen years, Roy Makepeace, had begun a trial separation. The pair met at Vancouver General Hospital in 1965. Makepeace, who emigrated to Canada from South Africa with his wife and two children, was midway through a four-year psychiatric residency. James (then Cindy Hack) was in her third year of nursing school. The distinguished and dashing doctor 18 years her senior helped Cindy gather materials for a research project on “Free Love”, which investigated the birth control pill’s contribution to the sexual revolution. This led to an affair. On December 9, 1966, just four days after Roy’s divorce was finalized, he and Cindy, then 21, were wed. By 1981, what Roy Makepeace had once characterized as “a marriage made in heaven” was described by Cindy to one of her colleagues at Blenheim House, the child psychiatric facility where she now served as founding director, as “a bad marriage”. The Makepeaces split up in the summer of 1982. Cindy took Heidi, her beloved dog and only constant
companion during the nightmare to follow, and rented the main floor of a home at 334 East 40th. It was the first time she’d really ever lived on her own. She and Roy remained on speaking terms, however. Said Roy: “It was an amicable separation until all the nonsense came on.” On October 7, Cindy got a phone call. The man on the other end graphically described the ways he was going to sexually abuse her. He knew her name. Frightened, she slammed the receiver down. The phone rang again. This time, all she could hear was a slow, steady breathing. The next night, another phone call. “You’re dead, Cindy,” said the voice. Then, the next afternoon, another no-talk call. Frightened, Cindy closed the drapes. The phone rang again. “Don’t think pulling the drapes means I don’t know you’re in there, Cindy.” Two days later, another no-talk call. And on the following day, October 12, a man called and said, in a low whisper, “I’ll get you one night, Cindy.” She called the police. The attending officer suggested Cindy keep a log of the strange calls, unlists her number, and contact the authorities again if she heard any suspicious noises. Later that night, she logged her first call—more threats of sexual violence. She told the voice she had contacted the police. “You fucking bitch,” he said. “I’ll get you.” Around midnight the following night, she heard someone at her back door and called police. They found no evidence of a prowler. On October 15, someone broke into Cindy’s house while she was out, smashing her back window. Later that week, the back door was found ajar—this time the intruder had used a key. Cindy found it on the floor next to her bed. The intruder had been in her room. He’d stabbed her pillow over a dozen times. Cindy called 911 from a neighbour’s house. The police sent Constable Pat McBride to investigate. He
W W W. A R C H I V E . L I V E
47
FROM THE ARCHIVE —
found no useful evidence. He did, however, request more she had intended to hang herself. Later, it was discovered of a police presence in the area, and helped Cindy to install that an officer had moved it there to have a closer look at the deadbolt locks. Then he moved in. Recently separated beam, and failed to put it back. The detective assigned to the case, however, treated it an himself, he was looking for a place to rent until an apartment opened up in December. Cindy invited him to sublet a room; as attempted murder. The most likely culprit, of course, was Roy Makepeace. having a policeman in the house would make her feel safer. They soon began to date. One night, McBride listened in on “You know, being the estranged husband,” the detective told one of the no-talk calls, and even managed to complete a Roy, “you’re inevitably on the suspect list.” But Makepeace partial trace: it originated somewhere near the airport. He provided an alibi, and it checked out. He even agreed to take became convinced that this was not, as some suspected, a a polygraph, but the polygraph operator refused: Roy’s heart medication might have falsified the test. woman simply seeking attention. Hoping to convince investigators to take her more Not that it helped. Cindy received another obscene phone call twelve days later, and two weeks after that, someone seriously, Cindy, the victim, took a polygraph. She failed, left an unsettling note on her car’s windshield. It was a card, twice. The polygraph operator suggested the stress she with a picture of a blond woman cut-and-pasted inside. The was under might have affected the results, but she was woman’s eyes had been scratched out with a sharp blade. In too embarrassed and frightened to be comforted; Cindy December, Cindy received another note in the mail. MERRY demanded the investigation be shut down, then refused to CHRISTMAS, it said, above another cut-and-paste picture of sign her statement, saying she was afraid for her family. With no other evidence and a victim who didn’t appear entirely a blond woman, her throat slashed with red ink. When the harassment continued into the New Year, Cindy credible, her investigation was declared inactive a month decided to move. On January 27, 1982, as she was packing after the attack. As planned, Cindy moved. The cut-and-paste letters boxes, she was attacked for the first time. Cindy’s good friend and neighbour Agnes Woodcock had followed her, and two months later, in April, the calls agreed to spend the night, as she often would throughout the returned. “Are you afraid?” asked the low, hoarse voice. ordeal. Agnes arrived at Cindy’s around 9:30 p.m. No one Cindy was, and she was even more unnerved when, one answered the door. She went around to the back, where she night, she discovered that someone had unscrewed and heard moaning. Cindy was slumped in the stairwell leading smashed her backyard flood lamps. She moved again, ignoring her friends’ calls to get an to the basement apartment. Her arms and legs had been slashed—about 14 cuts total—and there was a black nylon apartment or condo and instead finding a little house at West stocking tied so tightly around her neck that the downstairs 14th and Blenheim where she could tend a garden and Heidi had space to run and play. In June, she took a vacation to tenant had to cut it off with a knife. Indonesia, hoping to clear her head, and when she returned, most of the summer was quiet. II On August 22, Cindy received a letter at Blenheim House. Cindy later explained that she had taken a load of boxes to Her name was spelled on the front in letters cut from a the garage, only to discover the light was out. In the dark, magazine. “WELCOME BACK. DEATH. BLOOD. LOVE. someone grabbed her from behind. “Shut up,” he said. HATE,” it said inside. She tore it up. On October 15, she found “Keep quiet or I’ll cut your face.” She didn’t recall much, a dead cat with a rope around its neck in the yard of her new and suspected she might have been drugged. She had felt a home. Next to it was another note. “YOU’RE NEXT,” it said. pinprick on her right arm, and a needle mark was found on There would be two more dead cats in the coming weeks. Cindy spoke again to Pat McBride, who told her the police her elbow. Still, she was able to describe the fear and pain she felt when he cut her arms, legs, shoulders and back, then weren’t going to be any more help than they had been. He strangled her with the nylon. As he left, he whispered, “It will may have been sour because she had recently declined his marriage proposal, effectively ending their budding take a long time to die,” then shut the back door behind him. The initial investigator didn’t believe her. Traumatized, romance. Still, he connected her with Ozzie Kaban, a private she wasn’t eager to relive the incident. “She wasn’t totally investigator with his own security firm. Kaban promised to there, as far as being coherent,” he would later say. His report “catch the sucker” and set up a burglar alarm and a two-way suggested that it was a suicide attempt. He based this mostly radio that connected Cindy to his dispatch office. The harassment continued. Notes, calls, cats. The newlyon three things: blood found on Cindy’s bathroom counter, which didn’t fit her story; the parallel nature of the cuts, installed alarm sounded often. On New Year’s Eve, 1983, which suggested to him that there hadn’t been a struggle; someone smashed Cindy’s bedroom window. On January 30, and a chair placed strangely under a crossbeam, as though 1984, Cindy was attacked for the second time.
48
ARCHIVE
T H E M Y S T E R I O U S D E AT H O F C I N DY J A M E S
Kaban found her this time. He’d gone to Cindy’s to personally investigate strange noises at the house picked up on the radio. But when he arrived, it was silent. There was no answer at the front door. He went around the side, to the back porch. Then, peering through the window, he saw Cindy on the hallway floor. He kicked in the door and found her face down, unconscious, a paring knife jutting out of her hand attached to a bloody note that read, in usual ransom-note style, “Now You Must Die Cunt.” There was a black nylon stocking tied tightly around her neck. III The ensuing investigation was a lot like the first. No fingerprints were found. No clues. No leads. Apart from Cindy’s injuries, there was no evidence anyone else had even been in the house and again, Cindy frustrated investigators, appearing to withhold information. This time she suggested strange theories that only increased skepticism: what if it was Roy—with voodoo? Still, what if it was Roy with voodoo? At this point, nothing could be ruled out. Makepeace was brought in and aggressively interrogated for nearly six hours. Investigators tried everything. They told Roy that Cindy said he’d beaten her. They tried appealing to his ego. “Well, Dr. Makepeace, I think you’re very clever,” said one investigator, trying to provoke, “but you’re not going to get away with it.” But Roy remained composed; he said nothing incriminating. He admitted to slapping Cindy on “two or three” occasions during their marriage, but denied having a hand in the “diabolical campaign of terror” that began after their separation. He was believed and released. He began to pull away from Cindy. Pat McBride was investigated as well. The harassment had started, after all, right around the time he came into her life. He was subjected to a polygraph test. He passed. Ozzie Kaban suggested Cindy take another as well. She agreed. The RCMP officer administering the test asked her pointedly if she was her own stalker: Did you stab yourself in the hand? Did you make the note? Did you tie a stocking around your neck? No, no, no. This time, she was judged to be telling the truth. The authorities were flummoxed. A frustrated officer suggested it was Heidi, the dog. Then even that theory went up in smoke. One day in June, right around Cindy’s birthday, Heidi went missing. She was found cowering in the basement in a pile of her own mess, a cord tied around her neck, next to a fresh cut-and-paste note. “Fuck. Last Days. Warning. Run. Death. Happy Birthday. Love.” Kaban installed more cameras. The police gave her a “special attention” designation. Nothing stopped the torment; on July 23, 1984, Cindy was attacked for the third
time. Dazed, desperate, and suffocating, she staggered to the front entrance of a house on West 33rd, a black nylon stocking wrapped tightly around her neck. She collapsed in the doorway. IV Cindy had been attacked while walking Heidi in Dunbar Park. She told investigators that a van had pulled up alongside her as she walked, and the driver had asked her for directions. That’s all she remembered. She had twigs and leaves in her panties. Police found a mark near the sidewalk that indicated a body had been dragged through the dirt. The case was transferred to major crimes, and they tried a new approach: hypnosis. It only raised further questions. Cindy recalled a boating trip she and Roy had taken in the summer of 1981, a year before their separation. Docked on an island, Roy had gone to look at a property. Cindy went for a walk. At the top of a hill, she found a log cabin, and she entered to find Roy standing over two dead bodies. He’d cut them up with an axe. “What the hell are you doing here?” he seethed. Cindy became too frightened to continue the session. Later, again under hypnosis, she told the same story again, but with more detail. Roy had dismembered the corpses, placed them in bags and disposed of them in the ocean. Noting that her emotion was very real, the hypnotist took this charge seriously, and police followed his lead, launching an investigation that, as usual, turned up nothing. Makepeace’s outrage at this latest accusation effectively ended what remained of their amicable separation. The letters and phone calls continued. In June, 1985, at her wit’s end, Cindy told a physician she wanted to die. She was diagnosed with severe depression and committed at Lions Gate Hospital in North Vancouver. She spent a month there. Upon her release, she was heavily surveilled, as was Roy. Nothing came of it. $75,000 in man-hours later, the surveillance was discontinued. Then, four days later, she received a package: a book titled You Can Heal Your Life. There was a bookmark—a black nylon stocking. On the marked page, the phrase “Blood flowing freely” had been underlined. Cindy was placed under even heavier surveillance, this time for 25 days. Police saw nothing unusual. She decided to move again—four days after the move she received a phone call: “You’re a dead bitch and it’s going to hurt real bad." A week later, she was attacked for the fourth time. A passing cyclist discovered her in a ditch in the UBC Endowment Lands. Cindy was lying in an icy puddle, her clothes soaked, with a men’s brown leather boot on her right foot, a black rubber glove on her right hand, and a black nylon wrapped three times around her neck. Cindy had no memory of the afternoon before the attack.
@ARCHIVEAPP
49
FROM THE ARCHIVE —
The last thing she recalled was picking up her prescriptions— she took Ativan, among other things, for her nerves. Her mental state was revisited. She was examined by forensic psychiatrist Dr. Tony Marcus. After two meetings, he determined that Cindy’s troubles were “self-initiated”. He made clear, however, that he didn’t believe she was simply faking incidents. Instead, he said, she had fallen into a “psychogenic fugue”, an altered consciousness, likely stemming from deep-seated trauma.
Then, on October 26, 1988, Cindy was attacked for the fifth time. An RCMP officer discovered her unconscious in her car, nude from the waist down, her hands tied behind her back. Her right hand was squeezing the panic button on her silent alarm. There was duct tape over her mouth, bruising and swelling around her left eye, and, of course, a black nylon stocking tied tightly around her neck. She was rushed to hospital in a coma. VI
V When Cindy awoke, she remembered very little that would Things quieted down after Cindy’s release from hospital. She help the investigation. She recalled two men, but couldn’t spent three weeks with her brother in Germany, and when describe them. She wasn’t taken particularly seriously this time, especially with no one else’s fingerprints at the she returned, months passed without a single incident. But Cindy was still ill at ease. Agnes Woodcock and her scene, or even a scent for police dogs to pick up—instead, husband Tom spent the night regularly. They were with her investigators mostly looked into how a woman could have the night of April 2, 1986, when Cindy’s harasser returned. It tied her own hands behind her back like that. Cindy was was just before 3 a.m. Agnes, Tom, and Cindy were playing released from hospital the next day. The torment returned the following spring. At the cards when the burglar alarm sounded. They checked the house and discovered the basement door’s glass window had hospital, a security guard spotted a ransom-style note on her been completely removed. And the Woodcocks were also car. “SOON CINDY”. And at the end of her shift, another there, two weeks later, when someone set fire to the house. message, this time written in the dew of her windshield: All three escaped safely, though Cindy nearly got lost in the “SLEEP WELL”. Cindy did not. Over the next month, the burglar alarm sounded four more times, the last incident smoke after charging back into the fire to rescue Heidi. The arson investigation pointed to nobody but Cindy. occurring on May 10. Two weeks later, Cindy disappeared. On June 8, a Initially, investigators believed someone had thrown a firebomb through her basement window, but the glass had construction worker found her body on a pile of blackberry fallen outward, and a liquid accelerant was found on the brambles. Cindy’s living nightmare had finally come to carpet near a shelf where she kept all her memorabilia. If an end. It was a murder investigation now, and a high-profile one. there had been a fourth person in the house, he’d escaped without leaving a trace, as usual. Instead of receiving a Every possibility was considered. The evidence, new and old, settlement from her insurance company, Cindy received an was thoroughly examined and reported. Roy Makepeace was once again treated as the primary suspect. “Either the whole eviction letter. Crushed, she moved in with the Woodcocks. In her thing is true and I’m Ted Bundy, or I’m not,” he said, during despair, she lost over twenty pounds, and began smoking the headline-grabbing public inquest. Cindy James was tormented and tortured. Of that, there’s two packs of cigarettes a day. “Now he is coming after my friends,” she told her sister. “I may as well give up.” She was no question. But as to whether it was an external or internal admitted to St. Paul’s Hospital, and would spend the next two torment, no one is quite sure. The sheer absence of evidence months in psychiatric care. When she returned to Blenheim seems to point to a monster of her own making, or at least House after six months on sick leave the following November, of her own mind. A compelling case has been made for word of her potential mental health issues had gotten around. dissociative identity disorder, perhaps triggered by her first experiences being truly alone after her separation. But that’s She was immediately asked to resign. Her stalker had succeeded in ruining her life. She’d lost hardly a completely satisfactory explanation, especially her job and her home. She hadn’t had a romantic relationship since, if it’s incorrect, a monster continues to live among us. But we will likely never know. As Catherine Kinahan since her brief fling with Pat McBride. Maybe now that the said in the inquest’s final summation: “The proper verdict tormenter had taken everything from her, he would go away. Cindy was buoyed by the idea. She found another job, is the so-called open-ended verdict… The Vancouver Police returning to nursing at Richmond General Hospital. She Department’s position is that Cindy’s death was suicide or appeared to be regaining control of her life. But the following accident. It would be pointless to reopen the investigation at summer, in July, the burglar alarm sounded at her home this stage. It’s not going to solve this case.” “There is no more evidence to be found.” while she was at work. It happened two more times in August.
50
ARCHIVE
BEA SUNGA, 767
P L AC E S
W W W. A R C H I V E . L I V E
51
Each month, we choose people from Vancouver to supply the comments that accompany the photos in the magazine. If you would like to be the commenter, check the questionnaire on page 3 and send your answers to info@elective.ca.
*COMMENTS ARE MARKED WITH THE COMMENTER’S NAME. ARCHIVE’S ARE IN PINK.
Commenter of the Month
DUSTY BAKER Dusty is best known for taking part in the world’s first ever high five on October 2nd 1977. Baker is also the pseudonym of a software engineer who works in Gastown and would like to remain anonymous.
Dusty: People always ask me if I have any regrets. Typically, the answer is no, but then I see pictures like this and I’m reminded of how many years of my life I wasted by NOT watching Bob Ross’s The Joy of Painting on acid. Hindsight’s 20/20, I guess.
ABOVE PEMBERTON LUC FRST, 747 52
PLACES
OUTSKIRTS BENJAMMIN PAINTER, 654
MOUNTAIN VIEW MARC DE MONTREUIL, 686
LIBBY WILLIAMS, 655 @ARCHIVEAPP
53
54
PLACES
SUSPENDED
EMMETT SPARLING, 684
Dusty: “Oh yeah, totally—let’s just hunker down for the night. Nothing ever went wrong in a shack in the middle of nowhere”. Stop pretending the deep forest is a place that we should go, ever. The best case scenario is that you catch the hantavirus.
Dusty: I’ll admit it, heights scare the shit out of me. The closest I come to murder is when little children run past me on a suspension bridge. Keep those little buggers on a leash, folks.
WEEKEND AT THE CABIN BRITTANY ANNE, 664
ALEXANDRA BRIDGE BRITTANY ANNE, 643
@ARCHIVEAPP
55
MOONWALK 56
EMMETT SPARLING, 755
PLACES
EARLY MORNING ADVENTURES EMMETT SPARLING, 717
Dusty: Reason #372 that I’m single: most guys would sit back and let their girlfriend have a moment’s peace. I would re-enact that scene from the 1970s King Kong where he roars and shakes people off that fucking log like it’s his job.
Dusty: "What would you like for your next wish, intrepid traveller?" "I’d like to be on the surface of Neptune" *POOF* *takes picture* *suffocates* *genitals freeze and shatter into a million dick-sicles* CASTLE MOUNTAIN AB ANIA DARRELL LABRECQUE, 728
CROWN IN THE SKY EMMETT SPARLING, 685
W W W. A R C H I V E . L I V E
57
SUNRISE ENGLISH BAY SEASCAPE MICHAEL AAGAARD, 646
Dusty: This reminds me of Twister, which inevitably sets me off on a rant about how the leading ladies of the ‘90s were punishment for all of the fun we had in the ‘80s. Helen Hunt? Laura Dern? You know how you’re never supposed to call a woman ‘handsome’?
VANCOUVER SUNSET EMMETT SPARLING, 720
THOR’S ARRIVAL EMMETT SPARLING, 720
BRANDYWINE EMMETT SPARLING, 692 58
PLACES
W W W. A R C H I V E . L I V E
59
LIONS GATE BRIDGE THOMAS COLTER, 655
Dusty: You know, without all of the blood, piss, steroids, and piles of vomit that appear to be 80% tomato skins, Granville’s actually quite pretty. I think I’ll go down this Saturday night and strike up a conversation with some friendly locals.
TYLER LOGAN, 658
60
PLACES
Dusty: NOTHING gets my motor running like “Parkour Fails” videos. I did a lot of stupid stuff when I was a teenager, but I never looked at a flight of stairs and said, “Have you got a camera? I’m going to make this really dangerous.” Between parkour and krokodil it’s a miracle that Russian teenagers have ANY teeth left. LIGHT & SHADOW #4 STEPH HUNTER, 633
Dusty: AGAIN with this serene Enya hogwash? Don’t you people ever go to the monster trucks? If you want a cool afternoon turn off PBS, set your library books on fire, and go to the Abbotsford Air Show. There’s a plane crash every other year. That green cave doesn’t seem so interesting now, does it? SOMBRIO BEACH STEVE DYNIE, 664 @ARCHIVEAPP
61
SAYRES LAKE JORDYN CHARTRAND, 701
62
PLACES
IAN BUCHKO, 725
@_THE_RUNAWAYS LIBBY WILLIAMS, 674
Dusty: We talk a lot of shit about nature in this magazine, and that’s because a lot of animals are dicks. Take swans, for instance—a hissing, shitting white ball of rage. I always laugh at how passively insulting it is to call someone an ugly duckling who turned into a swan. "You know, you used to be disarming and awkward—now you’re a maladjusted, self-important sociopath."
W W W. A R C H I V E . L I V E
63
— READER SUBMITTED STORY
BleachSoup By Meighan Donaldson
T
he city bus chugged slowly east along Hastings Street as the spotty rain turned into a full downpour. I didn’t have an umbrella, or even a hood for that matter. When I exited the bus, I walked as fast as my ego would allow. Although it was only a few short blocks and my pace steady, I was soaked by the time I walked up the decrepit steps of my home—one block from the main industrial road, just on the outskirts of The City. The house I had rented for the past two years was a small bungalow with patchy grass in front. Our landlords had painted it Palm Springs Pink in the late ’80s but over the years it had become dusty and worn along with the cement steps. The iron fence was eroded beyond repair. Despite the rough exterior, it was home. This was a type of home where Christmas was spent at the movies and bedtime didn’t exist. We were products of broken families and bad parenting; we had each other. We were fine. The front door was unlocked. I kicked off my soggy shoes and immediately began looking for another pair of footwear. The floor was littered with beer cans, cigarette butts, and something sticky. I grabbed an abandoned pack of cigarettes off of the graffiti-covered coffee table and popped one in my mouth. I smoked slowly and began trolling the house for life. The living room was scattered with mismatched furniture dragged home from various alleyways, but the chaos of the place was comforting. Alex and I had the rooms on the main floor. His room was deserted as well as the kitchen next to it. I peeked in the sticker-encrusted cupboards for anything edible but only found hot sauce and a bottle of gin. At the back of the kitchen
64
ARCHIVE
was a rickety staircase to the basement. Noah and Mickey’s rooms were at the bottom right and left with the jam-room in the middle. The boys were in a punk band called the Dirty Wieners. If they weren’t so talented I’d think they were only in it for the blowjobs. There were at least 15 pairs of panties draped on various instruments. I had considered selling them online when rent was due. I descended the unsteady flight of stairs. It took a moment for my eyes to adjust to the darkness. The lights had burned out months ago and we never bothered to replace them. I treaded carefully across the cluttered floor and poked my head into Noah’s room. It smelled like hangover and mildew. It was damp, and the walls were covered in wilted posters of the Damned, but at least he was in there. Noah’s morals were as questionable as his hygiene. He was my best friend. “I don’t know how you live like this.” I stormed in ashing on his floor. “It smells like you still have some girl from last weekend under your bed and she’s starting to decompose.” “Did you come in here just to judge the way I conduct my affairs?” Noah snorted and grabbed the cigarette out of my freezing fingers. “Maybe,” I said. “But you also look like you could use something to eat.” Noah looked a little pale from his constant diet of 7-Eleven meals. “Eat?” He smirked and picked a giant sticky piece of last night’s narcotics out of his nostril and started rubbing it on his gums. “You’re disgusting” I said, stamping out my smoke on
B ON
A
S
E
D A
TR U E S TO RY
Our readers submit stories about their lives and we publish them. A story should be between 1200 and 1500 words, set in Vancouver, and based on real events. We pay for any story that ends up in print. If interested, email a draft of your story to info@elective.ca. We are hiring writers for other elements of the magazine. If you’d like to write for Archive, True Stories is a good way to introduce us to your writing.
EAST VAN AT NIGHT STEVE DYNIE, 597
the floor. “Where are the rest of the boys? I’m hungry and I need a goddamn drink.” “Mickey’s working,” Noah answered. “And Alex? Last I saw he was running around the block with a dead cat in a Tupperware container. That was around five this morning.” We grabbed our coats and headed back out in the rain. I like to eat bad food when I’m feeling bad. Not unhealthy food, like eating a whole container of ice cream because you went through a breakup. I mean bad food, like eating mashed potatoes with a hint of mildew or things that taste like fish when they shouldn’t. It goes well with the shakes. I hope the person working the grill hasn’t showered in a month. We walked to our favourite place. It served healthboard-violating Chinese food. The lobsters in the tank had gangrene, and the soup tasted like bleach. I’m certain. I’ve ordered it three times. Noah and I found our usual table by the window that overlooked the rain-soaked parking lot. The top of the table was sticky and the plastic flowers in the center needed to be watered. “Mustard Milk is going on tour,” Noah said with disdain as we sat. “Pressed another 7-inch too, the bastards.” Mustard Milk is one of the countless garage-rock bands from this side of the city, but, unlike their peers, they seemed to be going places. “You know why that is, though?” I asked and saw Noah’s lip quiver. “Marin’s dad owns that restaurant chain. It’s easy to be successful when you never have to work a day job.” Noah splashed a little of something into each of our
green teas while his lip continued to twitch. “It’s not fair, man. We can barely pay for recording and rent. Mickey and me are both working two jobs. Touring? Forget about it.” The little old woman who had silently dropped off our tea was back and ready to take our order. While I was contemplating my fourth bleach soup, Noah was crunching numbers for the Dirty Wieners. “It’s going to take three years at $12 an hour.” He was sweating. “And I haven’t even factored in the insurance for the van and repairs.” I watched the lobsters out of the corner of my eye. A smaller one was being cornered and prodded by the resident in the back of the tank. “Half the time I’m too exhausted from trying to pay rent to even play the guitar.” He didn’t look up from his whiskey tea as he continued. “I’m scared I’m going to fail. What if no one cares about our songs or our stories? It’s not like we’re getting any younger either. If you don’t make it in your late twenties there’s a damn good chance you won’t make it at all. And then what? I spent all this time playing shows and trying to make it when I should have been in school. Now who’s going to hire me with tattoos fucking everywhere?” Noah tugged at his shirt sleeves self-consciously. “Why did I take my early twenties out on my arms and any visible skin I have?” As he finished, he took a long slow defeated breath. He was silent for a long time. “Noah, do you think we blew it?” I asked Our food showed up before he could answer. I took a huge mouthful of my bleach soup. It tasted like we had.
@ARCHIVEAPP
65
THINGS
PUPPY MUGSHOT JOANNA RICKARD, 661
6 66 6
A R ICNHGI V TH SE
Each month, we choose people from Vancouver to supply the comments that accompany the photos in the magazine. If you would like to be the commenter, check the questionnaire on page 3 and send your answers to info@elective.ca.
Commenters of the Month
HARRISON MOONEY Harrison Mooney is a journalist with the Vancouver Sun and a freelance writer on the side. His work has appeared in Maclean’s, The Guardian, Yahoo Sports, and the National Post, among other publications. He’s the co-founder of hockey blog Pass it to Bulis, the author of Weird and Wild Vancouver, and a legendary karaoke singer. In his spare time,
Harrison Mooney: Remember the swans in Lost Lagoon? There were four, and then a raccoon killed one and the city panicked and “retired” the other three to a farm. Either that or a raccoon killed four and they lied to us.
WHA’CHU LOOK’N AT SWANNNN LIBBY WILLIAMS, 600
W W W. A R C H I V E . L I V E
67
DANDELION THOMAS COLTER, 572
68
THINGS
Harrison Mooney: Lovely photo for some, but I have allergies, so this photo stresses me out. Don’t you blow on that. Don’t you goddamn dare.
Harrison Mooney: All I can think about is how uncomfortable the rest of this person’s run is gonna be. Those cotton socks are gonna suck up the entire puddle. This is how you catch your death of cold. Worst Nike ad ever.
SPLASH MICHAEL LUO, 587
@ARCHIVEAPP
69
BEN WILLIAMS, 552
MIKI MAYO, 556
Harrison Mooney: I really, really, really want to see the puppet show this rooster is about to present.
70
THINGS
MIKI MAYO, 543
MARC DE MONTREUIL, 538
W W W. A R C H I V E . L I V E
71
LONELY UMBRELLA IN THE POND
NICK IGNATEV, 529
HAPPY HUMP DAY LAUREL BORROWMAN, 646
Harrison Mooney: People are always so impressed by whales. Not me. I get that they’re sublime, majestic creatures and all, but seriously, water mammals are morons. Lungs? You live IN THE SEA, motherfucker. Every other ocean creature evolved smarter. A HAPPY HUMPBACK LAUREL BORROWMAN, 613
Harrison Mooney: Seriously, fuck whales. A HAPPY HUMPBACK LAUREL BORROWMAN, 513 72
THINGS
LIGHT & SHADOW #3 STEPH HUNTER, 576
BEN WILLIAMS, 550
LIGHT AND SHADOW STEPH HUNTER, 552
W W W. A R C H I V E . L I V E
73
HIGH SPEED STROBE STEPH HUNTER, 500
74
THINGS
Harrison Mooney: Sure, this looks cool now, but in a second it’s just gonna look like grape Kool-Aid, and grape Kool-Aid is the absolute worst. Sharkleberry Fin or GTFO.
Harrison Mooney: Poor Big Bird. He’s trying so hard to fit in. Just be yourself, you Big beautiful Bird.
UNTITLED JOSIE BREULS, 547
@ARCHIVEAPP
75
Harrison Mooney: The last time I did mushrooms, I became convinced this one tree was trying to kill me. Turns out he just wanted to talk.
76
THINGS
AMANITA MUSCARIA CALEB FRIESEN, 538
RACCOON LOOKING FOR DINNER BY LOST LAGOON MICHAEL AAGAARD, 532
KITSILANO LUC FRST, 585
TYLER LOGAN, 561
CUTEST CHIPMUNK ON THE PLANET MICHAEL AAGAARD, 556
CURIOUS RACCOON IN STANLEY PARK MICHAEL AAGAARD, 630
JOANNA RICKARD, 500
Harrison Mooney: Hey, remember that cartoon The Raccoons? With Cyril Sneer? It was on all the time when I was growing up and it’s all I can think of right now. Here’s a Raccoons fact: Sharon Lewis, the woman that played the aardvark Sophia Tutu, also played Drake’s mom on Degrassi.
@ARCHIVEAPP
77
Monthly Top Photographer Top Photographer is a ranking based on the average score of a person’s best five photos in a given month. The winner will be awarded this section of the magazine to do with as they please. Last month’s winner was Jeff FitzGerald.
JEFF FITZGERALD @jeff.m.fitzgerald W H O A RE YOU AND W HAT D O YOU D O W HE N YO U AREN’T TA KI N G P I C T U R ES?
My name is Jeff, I originally come from Sault Ste. Marie, but largely grew up in Tillsonburg. If you’ve never heard of Tillsonburg then you need to listen to more Stompin’ Tom Connors. And if you’re Canadian and you’ve never heard of Stompin’ Tom Connors then you’ve been missing out and need to start questioning your Canadianism. During weekdays I am an engineer, and outside of that I find a variety of activities to keep myself busy including running, biking, skiing, drinking coffee or beers, and walking my dog Wolfgang. C A N YO U G I V E U S A T I P O N H OW T O TA K E A G R E AT P H O TO? W H AT K I N D O F C A M E R A D O YO U U S E ?
By cracky, finally an opportunity to sound pretentious! Oh how I’ve longed for this moment ever since I was a young boy in the old country. Ontario was a fine place to grow up but eventually the photographic lure of the scenic West Coast mountains and ocean drew me in. I’ve mixed up cameras over the years, but currently shoot with a Canon 6D. To each his own on taking a good photo, but if you want people to really like your photo I’ve been told you just need to include a puppy or kitten somewhere in the frame. Or as one of my best friends constantly states: “just read the f@cking manual”. I, however, usually opt for the Google.
78
ARCHIVE
W W W. A R C H I V E . L I V E
79
80
ARCHIVE
W H O I S YO U R FAVO U R I T E L O C A L P H O TO G R A PHER AND WHY?
I’ll have to plead ignorance to this question as I don’t have much exposure to local photographers outside of a few friends, work colleagues, and those whose names I am being introduced to through Archive magazine. I’m a big fan of landscape photography and shooting at night, there were some great photos in the November issue taken by both Chris Barker and Tim Barker among others. W H AT D O YO U L OV E A B O U T VA N CO U V E R ?
I moved to Vancouver from Montreal for “just a couple of years” almost 10 years ago. I love the easy access to nature and unparalleled ocean and mountain views. And hey, I have friends here and they keep it entertaining. Vancouver is chill
and has a good vibe, albeit it can be socially awkward but it’s gradually coming out of its shell. W H AT D O YO U H AT E A B O U T VA N CO U V E R ?
Hate is a strong word, but the thing I dislike about Vancouver is that it is a small city and at times it seems like it has an inferiority complex regarding some of the downsides of the city—I mean it’s okay, Vancouver, other notable cities have downsides too. An obvious downside at the moment is the soaring cost of living, which makes it harder to call Vancouver home. The thought of investing 30 years into an overpriced aquamarine-blue-glass condo marketed as an affordable 1 bedroom “home” with a “flex space” and Miele appliances isn’t for me. As an aside I too hate all the rants about cost of living, but I hear parts of Spain are nice this time of year.
@ARCHIVEAPP
81
Hmmm. D O YO U D R I N K ? I F S O , W H AT ’ S YO U R FAVO U R I T E P L AC E TO H AV E A B E E R I N VA N CO U V E R ?
I do drink and I’ll name a few of my favourite places in the off chance the proprietors of the following fine establishments read this and feel obliged to give me a free beer(s): the Alibi Room, oh the selection; Brassneck Brewery, the tastiest and freshest beer in all the land; Six Acres, who needs to read books when you can use their toilets; the Revel Room, great tunes by excellent musicians; My Living Room, it’s very affordable but arguably could be cleaner. H OW D O YO U F E E L A B O U T D O N A L D T R U M P B E CO M I N G T H E P R E S I D E N T O F T H E U N I T E D S TAT E S ?
Understandably there has been a lot of negativity coming out
82
ARCHIVE
of Trump becoming president-elect but here is one potentially positive opinion: If a “successful businessman” can become President of the United States after running a campaign filled with misogynistic, racist, undiplomatic, discriminatory rhetoric, then I guess anything really is possible. So it should make us all feel warm and fuzzy inside to think that perhaps one day we too can follow our outlandish dreams without the prerequisite skill and or knowledge to carry them out— assuming we have billions of dollars in the bank. I F YO U CO U L D C H A N G E O N E T H I N G A B O U T A R C H I V E , W H AT WO U L D I T B E ?
I stumbled upon Archive Magazine, it’s a great concept and I hope to see it flourish. If I could change anything, maybe I’d put one of my photos on the cover. Or maybe as the number of users grow I’d limit the number of monthly photos participants can upload, I dunno, I’d probably just put one of my photos on the cover.
W W W. A R C H I V E . L I V E
83
BREAKFAST OF CHAMPIONS
HELEN ANNA, 505
M O N T H LY
84
AUTUMN
Monthly
: Language is a tool we use to communicate ideas. What you’re reading right now is an idea in my head that I can communicate to you using words. The english dictionary is descriptive rather than prescriptive. If a word takes on a new usage within a large enough portion of society then that usage of the word becomes legitimate. This lexicographic malleability exists for the pragmatic reason that we need to agree on the meanings of words in order to communicate ideas effectively. For example, if I asked you to make me a sandwich you wouldn’t return from the kitchen with a hotdog. Because a hotdog isn’t a sandwich.
Monthly is a category that changes every issue. It could be tattoos, the beach, cats, or black and white photos. Its purpose is to make each magazine different. Last month’s category was called Let’s Eat. We chose that theme because sometimes a meal can look better than it tastes. Face it, food photos are delicious in the same way that symphonies are beautiful, sweaters are loud, and magazines are cromulent. I mean look at that blue banana. It’s magnificent. For December the new monthly category is titled: Winter Is Coming. In the next issue this section will be populated by photos that celebrate the best of this holiday season, like dogs dressed as reindeer, artisanal eggnog, drunk coworkers at staff parties, ugly sweaters, the annual Star Wars movie, and maybe some snow. Season’s greetings, everyone, try not to do anything embarrassing.
DYLAN MARANDA, 417
@ARCHIVEAPP
85
COFFEE WITH A BOURBON TWIST
JANET HOFFAR, 416
COMMERCIAL DRIVE TONJA KATHERINE, 360 86
AUTUMN
JANET HOFFAR, 376
: People say the book is always better than the movie but that’s not actually true. The Silence of the Lambs was a better movie than book and the same could be said for the entire genre of pornography. Food photography is similar insofar as some food looks a hell of a lot better than it tastes. Pop-Tarts, for example, look like heaven but they might as well be made of cardboard. Scones are trash. Starbucks has a market cap of $84 billion and I wouldn’t feed their sandwiches to my dog. Pretty much any Chinese dessert tastes like it was made by a man who lost his tongue as a child. Flan has the texture of medical waste. Marzipan is made of chalk. Biscotti seems like someone tried to make food by sticking a fistful of gravel together with glue. And I’ve watched a family of raccoons refuse to eat a plate of vegan cheese.
KRISTINA KIM, 504
W W W. A R C H I V E . L I V E
87
TACOS SAM KERR, 361
TRAVEL TABLES DYLAN MARANDA, 388
: I can’t decide if the trend toward artisanal everything is the logical endgame of a capitalist system structured to encourage individuality and human consumption. Or if it’s the last spasms of frivolity from a decadent empire verging on the brink of collapse. No matter what this peculiar trend portends for the future of humanity, I will rest comfortably through the afterlife knowing I was alive when humankind mastered toast. SMALL VICTORY YALETOWN TIANA PAPPAS, 417
88
AUTUMN
JANET HOFFAR, 353
LATER LATTE JANET HOFFAR, 394
GASTOWN EATS AT BIRDS AND THE BEETS JORDAN LAYNE, 369
PURPLE’S A VEGETABLE CHRISTINE MCAVOY, 375
@ARCHIVEAPP
89
ALISON BOULIER, 358
JANET HOFFAR, 351 : I’ve been staring at these two pictures for the last fifteen minutes and I still have no idea what either of them are. I mean, is that salmon or is it a salad? If it’s a tomato why does it have whipped cream on it? Who the hell designed this menu. And in the top one, is that like a weird bowl of chilli? But what is that chocolate thing on top? Is it a bowl of oatmeal? I guess it could be some kind of dessert. But what is that sawdust looking stuff. I’m so confused. How am I supposed to write a comment if I can’t even make out the content of the photo? I quit. 90
AUTUMN
Archive has given this page to the UBC Photo Society. If you'd like your work featured here, follow the guidelines on the photosoc website and submit your photography on Archive app. Good luck!
W W W. A R C H I V E . L I V E
91
A VANCOUVER CROSSWORD
WITH DICK JOKES
Puzzle by Harrison Mooney. Edited by Merlin Von Duck. ACROSS 1 5 10 14 15 16 17 19 20 21 23 24 25 28 31 34 35 36 38 40 41 43 45 46 47 49 51 55 57 58 59 61 62 63 64 65 66
Type of draft ruined by Vancouver’s Stefan Heck Creature hunted in "The Most Dangerous Game" Turn-___ (hairy backs, racism, e.g.) Unit of measurement for a penis ___ can of whoop-ass Wino ark-builder Flagship IPA and Heroica Red Ale brewery Like kittens and puppies Author popular with the nerds at the Storm Crow Onside pass, to CFLers Monkey poses, in yoga ___ Room Cafe, where your waiter will insult you Postmark’s Social and Dry Irish Influenza spread by village poultry farmers Neurotic condition played for laughs in "As Good As It Gets" (abbr.) Vancouver’s ___ Studios (Jam space for local bands) Brandon’s sister in 90210 Promiscuous girl Red Sox great Garciaparra Nutritional figs Fentanyl, e.g. "That’s hilarious" in Twitterspeak "I’m disappointed" in Twitterspeak Teamster Jimmy who disappeared in 1975 Does not consent ___ Frutti Get plastered? Screwjob Sorry Beta Moron for Mayor Robertson, e.g. Peek ___! Goddess Golden Ale and PBC Dry Stout brewery Long, laborious work (such as cluing this crossword) Shenanigan Pootie ___ Canvas shoe brand popular with nurses Trump edible sold at The Sharper Image "Right back ___!"
LAST MONTH’S ANSWERS
DOWN 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 18 22 26 27 29
Light rains Cowgirl Mid-size flashlight battery White people pants Devil’s Elbow IPA and Rail Ale Nut Brown brewery Word that follows Once, in a Vancouverfilmed fantasy drama Mal de ___ (ocean sickness) Allen Iverson’s crossover broke many of these ___ spray (naloxone, e.g.) Cursory look La Maison Wild Saison and Vexillium Imperial IPA brewery Retired NHLer Rico, drafted 6th overall by Calgary in 1998 "The Giving Tree" author Silverstein Glove and Romney Thong Game with Draw Two and Reverse cards Original name of Motown Records VPD chief constable Palmer
30 Victoria’s Steve who’s suing to have his name removed from B.C. fitness clubs 31 "Then again..." in Twitterspeak 32 Guitar clamp 33 Farmhand Ale and Fat Tug IPA brewery 35 One Trick Pony and No Brainer PreProhibition Lager brewery 37 Franks served at The Naam 39 Woman with a Loonie Toonie Town 42 "I can’t believe ___ the whole thing!" 44 Way to get wine at The Settlement Building 47 Like some farts 48 "You ___ Know" (1995 Alanis Morisette hit) 50 Espana and Sardine Can offerings 52 Meaning of Bo Horvat’s last name (Zagreb resident) 53 Clever 54 James Bond watch brand 55 Goaltender Tuukka 56 ___ Auctions 57 Continent home to more than half the world’s population 60 Hwy.
JEREMY SHAW, 522
CHAZ MANDELTON EXPERT REALTOR • 專業地產經理 Yaletown Guru & Mortgage Ninja • 耶魯鎮專家 &“貸款忍者”
The Hottest Trend in Real Estate. Are you worried that your “sure thing” real estate investment isn’t all that “sure” and may just be a “thing”? What if interest rates rise? What if the economy slows and we enter a recession? What if Mayor Graham Robinson attempts to enforce his racist empty home tax on one of your numerous investment properties? These are serious and scary questions. At the Peebus Group we understand that a professional realtor’s job doesn’t end when the client takes possession of his house. We know that customer service means going the extra mile. That’s why we are so proud to announce our newest real estate innovation: Vancouver’s first private arson service. If your investment home decreases in value at any time, the Peebus Group will send one of our arson specialists over to burn your vacant structure to the ground. City Hall can’t tax an empty home if it’s a smouldering pile of rubble. Looking for an insurance claim? Our specialists will stage the blaze to appear like it was set by racist teenagers. Accidentally buy a heritage home that can’t be destroyed for profit? Our pros will make it seem like the old junker had faulty wiring. The arson rate is up 600% over last year, making it the hottest trend in real estate. Sure, it may be illegal but the Peebus Group takes customer service seriously. It’s 2017 and this is Vancouver: if your realtor isn’t prepared to commit a felony to secure your business he’s in the wrong line of work.
Information You Need to Know Arson negotiations conducted on dark web only. Peebus Group preemptively denies any knowledge of all structure fires.
PEEBUS GROUP Realty Associates
Break free from your echo chamber — Start smoking By Douglas Haddow
I
would like to preface this article with the following: cigarettes are bad for you, okay? And the tobacco industry is run by a group of ashen old-money vampires who spend their days devising progressively creepier ways to convince you to pay them for the privilege of dying a slow and painful death. Now with that said, indulge me for a moment. I smoke. I love smoking. I revel in it even though I am well aware that it is a filthy, disgusting, and nihilistic habit that at its best is an ostentatious way to broadcast your death
94
ARCHIVE
drive to the world. But as with all vices, it is not without its virtues. And perhaps, just maybe, one of those virtues is that smoking can save us from the rising tide of fascism that is currently sweeping the Western World. This is a world where Donald Trump, a tangerine slum lord and failed casino magnate with a conspicuous taste for sexual assault is now President-elect of the United States. This is a man who before being paid by television networks to abuse desperate D-list celebrities, was best known for playing the rich asshole in movies like a Ghosts
Can’t Do it, The Pickle, and The Little Rascals. A messy string of disastrous films that shared but one common thread: they were all certified box-office poison. Much ink has been spilled in an attempt to try to figure out what in the fuck actually happened in the 2016 presidential election, with explanations numbering in the thousands. I won’t bore you with an exhaustive rundown of plausibilities, because we’ve all been choking on this shit for the better part of the last two years. But one of the most convincing arguments as to why so many were taken by surprise by Trump’s ascent to power is that we are now all living in tightly bound, self-reinforcing informational echo chambers. For a more local example of how echo chambers work, a recent Bloomberg Nanos Canadian Confidence poll found that only 20% of Canadians think real estate prices will decline, while over 40% still believe that they will continue to increase. Even with dire warnings of price decline from the Bank of Canada and numerous measures to rein in the prices by the federal government, a deranged optimism persists within the minds of Canadians. Like a magical microwave that turns parmigianoreggiano into liquid stadium cheese, our brains love to take extremely complex phenomena and transform them into easily consumed chunks of understanding. Social media has taken this microwave and jerry-rigged it with a nuclear reactor, supercharging the process and leading us to our current historical moment, where tribalism, post-truth, and a generalized myopia rule the day. The solution to escaping these echo chambers, we’re told, is to become more critical consumers of news and information. Just as people like to think they have a diverse friend group because they sometimes play hockey with that guy from Lethbridge who says racist shit when he drinks too much rye, they should also take pride in reading diverse opinions. One shouldn’t compulsively believe incendiary headlines, and if a news item angers you, then you should seek out stories from the opposing side. And you should always consider the bias of the news source and try to empathize why someone may hold an opposing view to yourself as best you can. But isn’t that just a lot of extra labour? And aren’t we too lazy to actually put in the requisite effort to become more conscientious consumers? If you walk around the streets of Vancouver, you will notice a few things very quickly. One: architects here have a real hard-on for metal-rimmed glass. Two: this city’s economy will implode if luxury automobile leasers
ever decide to call in their bills all at once. And three: most Vancouverites are perpetually lost in their phones, waddling around oblivious to oncoming traffic as they look downwards into an Infiniti pool of themselves, soaking up the reflection like a pasty retiree sunbathing at a dumpy Mexican all-inclusive. Now this is all well and good if you happen to be taking beautiful and captivating photos, say, for the Archive app. Or are turbo-texting on Bumble with that guy or gal that is gonna make you glad that you cleaned your apartment for the first time in weeks. But quite often, it also means you are divorced from the possibility of a chance encounter with someone you would otherwise never meet. Echo chambers form because social media, the internet, and our beloved phones all capitalize on the dodgy, ratlike make-up of the human brain. So rather than expecting people to take a more enlightened approach to replacing our current addiction with another equally destructive addiction: cigarettes. When you start to smoke you are immediately enlisted into a ragtag band of brothers and sisters who are repeatedly forced out into the elements together. This provides a bonding experience between you and steady stream of perfect strangers, be it outside a pub, club, or the hospital emergency ward. These people don’t share the same taste in music as you, their political opinions are probably ghastly, and they are often criminally misinformed. But by simply venturing into the terra incognita of nicotine addiction they will become your fellow travellers and you will be privy to all sorts of new and exciting opinions. Most crucially, you will come into touch with information that could never possibly pierce your echo chamber, as I did while huddled under the awning of a congee restaurant in Joyce-Collngwood last week. A man who was enjoying a Pall Mall explained to me in great detail how Vancouver was being flushed into a moral sewer of violence and immorality and it was all a result of people not adhering to basic driving etiquette. “It starts with that turn signal,” he said. “Stop making turn signals and then it’s hell in a handbasket.” You will also learn more about class from bumming cigarettes than you ever will from reading Marx or Chomsky. For instance; when your pack runs dry and you need to bum one, you’ll find that middle-aged white guys are extremely selfish and that squeegee kids and the homeless are some of the most generous people you will ever meet. Shocking, I know. No man is an island, but demographics do trend towards archipelagos. Perhaps bringing an intensely addictive substance into your life isn’t the perfect solution to our current woes, but it sure does take the edge off.
@ARCHIVEAPP
95
Top Rated Photo of Them All— Headlamps vs Supermoon Sina Ronaghi, 770 Archive: “Why don’t we just wait here for a little while, see what happens,” Kurt Russell says to Keith David in the final scene of The Thing. What happens is they both freeze to death as Ennio Morricone’s ominous score plays them out. Clearly no one in this photo has seen John Carpenter’s magnum opus. The imminent threat of shapeshifting aliens and Wilford Brimley complemented by a bout of hypothermia should be enough to deter even the most rabid MEC member from ever wanting to go winter camping.
96
ARCHIVE
11.05.16 OLIVER MANN, 455 W W W. A R C H I V E . L I V E
97
98
ARCHIVE
EAST VAN!! STEVE DYNIE, 609