Entries from November 2009 ↓

The turn out at the Stop BC Gaming fund cuts rally at the West Georgia steps of the Vancouver Art Gallery on Saturday November 28th was lean but spirits were strong.

Stories were shared across the affected sectors (arts, sports, nonprofits, public media).

One family held a poignant sign while people spoke at the mic: The Arts Feed My Family.

They feed mine too.

And why eat stone-soup sandwiches when you don’t have to?  Ask your MLA and MP’s.

Lets get the reds, pinks, greens, yellows, purples back onto the table and leave the gray for the November skies.

Here is an excerpt of some of the speeches.

Tonight is the night my ribcage is gonna be opened up by one of the most powerful soul voices in the city.

I dare say my heart will get fatter in the mix, for it’s a special charity fundraiser at Raw Canvas and no amount of rain will stop us eager listeners from soaking up every last melody and word.

Poster for the Bavubuka Passion Project Fundraiser at Raw Canvas Nov 28th 8-12am

Vancouver artist Jessi Nicholson and a stage full of masterful musicians will make ya forget the rain has come to stay and get ya back in touch with why we’re all here in the first place: each other.

Jessi Nicholson; image copied from: www.sonicbids.com

The Bavubuka Passion Project is all about empowering young people through music and arts, something this city rocks out at no matter what sort of budgets certain politicians allot for it.

It’s 10 bones at the door and a wealth of sounds + art + people inside.

I’m going to record some of that sound and plan to post that soon.

Take off your pants on stage the night you win the Polaris Prize AND

make a Christmas single with a crapload of musical guests AND

give all sales of this single to organizations like Justice for the Missing and Sisters of Spirit.

Well, that’s just F*cked up (and awesome!)

F*cked up won the 2009 Polaris Prize for their album The Chemistry of Common Life from Matador Records.

F*cked up performed for a sold out show at Masonic Temple in Toronto on Sept 21st.

The buzz around Santa town is that the hottest xmas gift going this year may just be a mechanical hamster but I think F*cked Up is going to kick some fuzzy ass with their take on the single “Do They know it’s Christmas?” (Watch out Bob Geldof and Bono, Pink Eyes is coming at ya!)

The proceeds from it will go to raise awareness and help the organizations do what they need to do in order to find the thousands of missing, mostly aboriginal, women in Canada.

Now I know the mechanical hamster is special, but an all-star Canadian indie/hardcore/punk/reggae/pop/emo xmas single? I’d get out of line at Toys r us and get ready to rock.

Libby Davies recently spoke out in the House of Commons about the Highway of Tears and ending violence against women. Calling on the government to make it a political priority.

December 6th will mark the 20th anniversary of the “Montreal Massacre” where women were targeted and killed at a college in Montreal in 1989.

F*cked Up copied from Pitchfork, click on pic to go to story.

F*cked up’s clout and Polaris Prize reach will get some more heads turned and hopefully wallets and hearts involved in one of Canada’s rarely covered atrocities. There’s no exact figure for how many women have gone missing, but c’mon, if it’s more than zero, it’s more than fair to say, way way way too many.

Copied from Amazon.com

The post-it note.

An ambiguous little slip of sticky paper that can make leaving a message convenient and visible. And acccording to the organizers of the facebook group: Organizing Against Campbell’s cuts to the arts, it’s a slip of paper that can have quite a creative impact.

Copied from flickr.com/photos/artscutsmemo/sets

The Arts Cuts Memo Team are calling out for all British Columbians to get visual and creative with a plain yellow post-it. The only stipulation is to make sure the message “restore arts funding now” is visible. Then take a snapshot and upload it to their photo stream on flickr.

There will be prizes for the zaniest, most creative, ambitious post-it note memo art and no matter, all notes are going to the government, bringing a little pizzazz with the petition:  restore arts funding now.

Now, I wear the same pair of frames for approximately a decade (it’s hard to let go) but according to Earth911.com, over 30 million people get new frames each year. And like most everything else, eyeglasses can be recycled.

The great news is it’s really easy to recycle your old pair of glasses, you can leave them with your eye doctor or if you’re in Vancouver drop them/mail them in here.

If you’re outside the Lower Mainland, visit here.

Each week I want to share the sketches I’ve made of my glasses testing out the theory if you do something enough you get better at it, and to just share a love of glasses! And what better way to spread love than with a story or a tidbit of interesting info?

So for this week, I want to talk about recycling glasses and there’s one local organization that has been doing exactly that for close to 15 years.

TWECS: Third World Eye Care Society of Canada – started in 1995 with a 100 bucks, continues to be 100% volunteer-run and refurbishes 1000’s of old eye glasses for people who need them. I love this pictures from their website. You can volunteer there too.

Picture copied from TWECS homepage: www.twecs.ca

(That’s how I feel about my glasses!)

Now time to reveal the sketches for this week…I’m hoping in 15 years time, I won’t be able to tell the difference from the sketch and the real thing…ok, maybe in 20 years…

On M2M Sarah Hyde and I get thankful.

laurie dawson and sarah hyde thankful for tank tops

And the more we talk about what we’re thankful for (Sarah after battling wits with a stomach-punching-amoeba and me getting stuck in a bus door) we realize it kept coming back to kindness.

Kindness to ourselves, strangers, each other and most importantly….

kindness to our families… Our 15-year-old-punk selves would be so pissed.

So get ready for some cheese and hear us gush about the people we once thought were aliens, on the November 12th edition of Mouth2Mouth on CJSF 90.1fm.

Note: this stream takes a couple minutes to get going so if you hear 3 minutes of dead air, take the time to think of all the things you’re grateful about and then compare!)

A little foreboding took place in the last post about the marathon training and for good reason.

We have to sadly move on from our running-five-minutes-walking-one comfy perch of jogging-ness.  It’s a hard fall to running 7-minutes-walking-two-minute trials. The one minute between running 5-minutes felt infinitely longer than the 2-minutes between the seven minute trials. I have no idea why.

Well, maybe, I do: we’ve gotten a bit lazy.

We’re sorta stalled in our fundraising and training attempts, getting caught up in the busyness of life and jobs, and so running feels like a chore right now rather than an adventure.

I keep forgetting why we are doing this: arthritis research, family members who have pushed themselves through way worse, to lead and live better lives. And I think more about the extra hour of sleep, the cold rain outside and how incredibly far it feels to only be able to run 5 km  poorly rather than 42 km well (and to be sitting around $1600 of fundraising money in comparison to the $13 000 we need).

although $1600 is darn good amount.

and how amazing it will feel to do something I honestly believed I couldn’t.

and how cool would it be to run the original marathon…in Greece.

and how lovely it is to run with the person I’m going to marry and the person whom I’ll share tougher roads than this with.

and the money that will be raised going to research for something that affects 4.5 million Canadians and counting…

alright, on Monday I’m going to tackle those 7-minute-run-2-minute-walk trials like I’m the cover art for Meatloaf’s bat outta hell.

Cover art: Meatloaf Bat Out of Hell; copied from Image Shack, online media hosting: http://imageshack.us/

and I’ll make sure to tell you about it.

It’s been awhile since I’ve posted an update about the marathon training.

I am especially self conscious of the fact that the last post only has images of both Jordan and I sleeping so it may come across that we’re not running at all.  (haha).

Well, we are running, sorta.

In our training to build a 10-km base (to be able to run 10-km without needing to stop, pant, or barf), we finally made it to the five-minute-running-one-minute-walking level and then to our dismay we had to move on.

Here’s two video excerpts of us happily running our 5 minute stints and notice, we’re not even sad about the late-fall raininess. No, we’re stoked we can actually run the five minutes while discussing our favourite Kurt Russell movies (The Thing, Big Trouble in Little China) but I haven’t seen them all yet, so like the 5-minute time cap, those picks could change.

Last spring I interned for a month in Whitehorse.

A shot of Whitehorse, the capital city of the Yukon, taken from the East bank of the Yukon River. Visible are the White Pass train station, Main Street, the Elijah Smith Building, and the clay cliffs. Copied from Commons.wikimedia.org

It was such an adventure for me, having never been up North. I got to visit Destruction Bay, Watson Lake, (and see someone kite-ski for the first time ever, and ohh boy, do I want to try that!), drive along the Alaska Highway and gape in wonder out of the windshield at Sheep Mountain.

Copied from Yukon News, an article about an expedition to Greenland.

Sheep Mountain in Kluane lake area; copied from an amazing adventure story of a "world wide wanderer" riding a bike from Florida to Alaska in 1997 on Flickr

Destruction Bay and Kluane lake, copied from www.alaskahighwayarchives.ca

Something that stood out to me right away in Whitehorse (besides the fact that it’s cool to bring your dog to the airport off-leash, if that isn’t a reason to move there…) is all of the arts. If the streets were sponges, they’d be sopping wet with paint, music, theatre, woodcarving, writing. performances, multi-media adventures and more. If you squeezed them a 1000 artists would fall out, no make that 10 000.

(The population of the city hovers somewhere around 22 000).

What a community!  And not to mention the explorers, weekend warriors and  environmentalists. Someone where I worked personally composted all of the office garbage on her own, bringing it home to mix with her own compost. Most people think it is disgusting to take a stranger’s apple core but imagine taking all the paper towel in the bathroom’s trash too. And then this person whom I look way way up to, found time to hike the aforementioned Sheep Mountain with her children on the weekend.

Who are these people who live in Whitehorse?

Incredible beings. (And don’t forget, the weather is let’s say, a tad more rugged than Vancouver).

So, with the love and stars twinkling in my eyes for the residents of Whitehorse, you’d think my most memorable moment would be meeting some of the people.  That was great, sure, really great; but riding a pony was even greater.

Thanks to writer Sarah Lindstein, and an award-winning horse rider as well, I got to ride a pony named Spirit.

Writer Sarah Lindstein at the Yukon Horse show

I’m usually afraid of everything so my fear was considerably palpable upon entering the ring at Bales of Fun at the Takhini Hotsprings. Sarah helps out at the stables and in return gets to feed her love of riding (and caring for) horses.

Writer Sarah Lindstein cleaning the horse Josie's hooves.

One afternoon she took me along to Bales of Fun (owned and operated by another incredible Whitehorse resident: Trish Pitzel). I brought a book with me and figured I would sit in the car or if it wasn’t too cold, on a picnic bench and read. I had no intention of going anywhere near a horse.

After being persuaded to walk alongside the horses to the ring, I stood off  by the fence and watched Trish teach a group of kids around the age of 10 how to handle their horses. I scanned the kids’ faces, all of them except one seemed overjoyed to be sitting atop these huge beautiful creatures, and the one girl who seemed nervous quickly became confident, holding her reins just so, making left hand turns like she was born to it.

So, after the lesson, the students were free to ride their horses around practicing what they learned. I was standing inside of the ring, pretending I was much cooler & calmer than I was, when Sarah rode up to me.

“Alright, Dawson, it’s your turn,” she said as she gracefully dismounted from her pony.

I figured I deserved a very fancy gold star for just being so close to all the animals. Getting on one, well…

“Oh, no, no, no, I am way too big, I will hurt the poor guy, I love just watching, how about we go now? I don’t know how, I, I,I,” and all other excuses you can imagine me making, I made. You gotta know I was arguing for my life here.

The pony looked at me sideways. He swatted his tail.

“You’ll be fine,” Sarah say, “Spirit here will take good care of you and I’ll lead you around.”

“You won’t let go?” I ask.

“You’ll be fine,” she says, “Spirit’s the nicest one here.”

And she was right.

To the pony, I was just an oversized kid squeezing my bum into the saddle and nervously holding the reins like two pieces of cooked spaghetti. Spirit had no idea I was the oldest person in the ring that day and if Spirit knew how deep my terror ran, the pony didn’t let on.  Sarah, too, kept my secret as she started leading me around the ring dodging kids on horses as gracefully as she rides. Which is incredibly graceful.

We walked around the ring a few times. Spirit didn’t falter or swing his head in defiance or do anything you’d expect a pony to do with a fat scared kid on his back who narrated the entire ride with “oh, good boy, wow, doing so good” under her breath. I was becoming smitten with Spirit. I had read somewhere that a horse/pony can feel everything you’re feeling. Man, Spirit showed a type of acceptance I wish I had. It didn’t fluster him that I trembled and made too many nervous jokes. He just walked on. And I felt indebted to Sarah. This was an experience I would have never been able to do on my own.

Turns out I wasn’t able to get out of the saddle on my own, either.

My butt was stuck.

Really stuck.

The saddle was meant for a kid and although I usually get mistaken for one, in this saddle I was definitely no kid.

Uh-oh.

Spirit took it like a champ as both Sarah and I tried to heave my corduroy’d bum off of his back.  Sarah was unflappable and calm.

“Try this,” she says, “swing this leg over here.”

I had awful visions of knocking this saint-pony down with my big bum while the beautiful horse-riding children watched on in horror. There were some long, dreadful moments there when I didn’t think I was going to be able to get myself off his back. I briefly thought about what life would be like for both Spirit and I if we had to live like this. How would we have breakfast together? How would we sleep?

Then it was my turn to look sideways at the pony. Spirit was as calm as anything, not betraying my craziness for a moment to the crowd in the ring that day, it was like Spirit was saying, “listen, I don’t care how long this takes” and “we’ve got this.”  The pony didn’t budge a millimetre for all of my leg swinging attempts, he stood solid, waiting.

“Ok, Spirit,” I said and tried swinging my leg higher than before.

“That’s it,” Sarah says.

And with Sarah’s help I swung my leg enough to get the momentum to jump off of his back.

I felt like a bleacher full of parents should of given me a standing O for that.

If we could all be so lucky to meet a little pony named Spirit.

*Writer Sarah Lindstein not only shares her love of horses but also her love of the arts, you can read her column at What’s Up Yukon.

outside the cjsf studios on top of the beautiful burnaby mountain

M2M on CJSF 90.1fm for Thursday, October 8th was all about art openings.

Join myself and Sarah Hyde inside the white walls of a gallery or two.