acache

in the hood

It’s Saturday night and I went with my friend to one of the Vancouver Film Fest movies – the festival goes on for a week, showcasing independent film from all over the world. The film that we saw is called “Antonia” and it’s from Brazil. It tells the story of this group of female rappers/singers who go through various stages of elation and hardships in their pursuit of their dream of making/writing music/songs. (I love this one scene where one of them is incarcerated and the others go to visit her and what they do is they start writing lyrics sitting together but separately writing on pieces of paper, each in their own world of rhymes and beats, intending to bring what they have written together into a song). It is a really good movie, with gorgeous liquid colours at dusk and distinct characters that you can totally relate to.

After the movie we went to this little bar/pub in our hood (we both live a few blocks from Main St. and each other). Because one of our little plans is to check out the bars and pubs in our hood and go on extensive bar hops or pub crawls to places we choose as our favourites. So far we have a few favs and this place tonight I’ve only been to once before but it’s definitely one of the favs. They have a killer martini, it’s blue and goes down so easy. You can’t even taste the alcohol in it.

Actually we totally saw a cockroach and you know how they are supposed to be all hiding from the light and at least pretend to be scared of us, well maybe not scared actually, but at least there is usually a mutual aversion? This one was running all over the counter, totally unconcerned that we were sitting right there, trying to have a converstation. Instead of avoiding the presence of us people and the lack of darkness, he was very much front and center. He scurried along the counter then stopped right in front of us, turned to face us and just stared at us for a good minute if not longer. Meanwhile we were like, “hey, roachie, dude u are supposed to be hiding from us! go on now, go on under the counter or find a crevice to nest in!”(yeah the martinis were having an effect for sure), but he just sat right there in front of us and stared. His little antennae or whatever were all twitching. Like he was saying something but I couldn’t hear.

But there’s so much going on in our neighborhood – from bars/p;ubs, restaurants to clothing stores and magazine/comic/book shops. There is lots of artsy stuff. Lots of places are super nice shops with super nice stock, that double as galleries as well. After we had a couple of martinis we walked up a couple of blocks to this flower shop called the Flower Factory. I had recently submitted three framed photographs to their gallery. Once a year they have this art exhibit where people from the hood are invited to submit some artwork and then they put it all on the walls of the flower shop. We walked by and through the windows we looked at the show – the art was all over the walls of the shop. Then we spotted my pieces! The were right there in a prominent spot, three photos hanging on the wall and in the company of all the other pretty amazing art, they looked way better than I remember them. It is such an honour to be in a show with all these obviously talented artists. It was pretty cool.

The next thing I would like to explore in the hood is the spoken word stuff that is happening at certain cafes around not just this hood but my old east van neighborhood as well. This city seems to be really expanding with art shows and productions sprouting up everywhere. From what I’ve heard, there are some wicked poets/rhymesters out there.

PS still havent got my camera for the laptop. And I cant even save files right now because my hard ddrive is so fing full. and the external hard drive I got won’t work… I’ve got to get my little computer working good again. It needs some attention from me that’s for sure because I’ve been neglecting it and now it barely can barely function!