deerawn

2011-10-15T18:50:00.000-07:00

2011-10-14T14:27:00.000-07:00

2011-10-14T00:39:00.001-07:00

2011-10-11T22:38:00.000-07:00

2011-10-10T23:15:00.000-07:00

2011-09-29T23:43:00.000-07:00

2011-09-27T00:30:00.001-07:00

2011-09-26T20:57:00.001-07:00

2011-09-25T02:23:00.000-07:00

2011-09-24T00:35:00.000-07:00

2011-09-20T00:00:00.000-07:00

2011-09-18T00:19:00.000-07:00

2011-09-09T04:09:00.000-07:00

2011-09-09T03:24:00.000-07:00

2011-09-04T03:14:00.000-07:00

2011-08-30T00:50:00.001-07:00

2011-08-30T00:41:00.000-07:00

Grid street: one side has a canal. It is a long brown straight gouge struck down blocks and blocks the stiff grass of the lawns grass green grass green mixes with dandelion and other weeds with thick pale grey or green leaves and it mixes with blackberry cane and thistle when the municipal tractors skirt up the road brushing down that mean weedy grass they chop up waxy paper cups and cigarette packs and leave the shreds on trimmed yellow grass. A muskrat is startled and the sound is first the thrushle of thistle and dried grass and then it is the plunk of the water being opened up by a muskrat who at the same moment you notice he has scurried and jumped is feeling the warm blanket feeling baked into his fur by the sun being zapped away by the cool of the water. "You didn't even need to jump."

--

A juniper tree, in the yard of a house waiting for demolition
with the red and blue notification of development there with it.
Blackberry canes are wrapped around the bottom of the tree. Blackberry canes have slowly circled up all the way to the top of the juniper. At the top of the juniper tree, blackberries shine higher than anyone could ever reach them.

2011-08-22T23:56:00.000-07:00

Richmond is gridded with roads named Blundell Williams
Francis Jaskow Saunders Swinton and you can imagine it being covered in
now submerged by development
farmland. You see a lot of boarded up houses. Well, not boarded up, right? They're fenced in with what I would call snowfence. It's orange plastic mesh. There is snowfence across the front sidewalk; the trees are fenced, separately. Some of the trees are marked with the plaque of the Significant Tree Registry. The houses are usually flatfaced stucco blocks with gardens and big lawns. The houses are tidy and humble, even unoccupied or bound in snowfence.

2011-08-18T01:19:00.000-07:00

2011-08-18T01:02:00.000-07:00

Across from City Hall, there's a grassy half block park. One third of the park is a baseball diamond and all summer, I hear the ding of bats. One third of the park is grass, trimmed weekly by a municipal tractor that spreads a confetti of shredded Belmont packs and fragrant long yellow grass. One third of the park is a parking lot. Down one side of the park, along Number There Road, there are twenty chestnut trees. The sidewalk below them is littered with green pods. Down one side of the park, along Granville, there are low flower beds and flagpoles and a sign made of painted stones laid in the dirt that spell out RICHMOND. In the morning, ladies in crisp slacks and pastel blue oversleeves do tai qi in the orange dust of the diamond's infield. In the morning, there is a pale green trail in the darker dewsoaked grass, made by kids cutting diagonally across to their bus stop on Number Three Road. In the morning, the men that sleep in the booths at the McDonald's across the street go for a stiff stroll. In the afternoon, men from the condos across the street tuck Bichon Frises under their arms and tiptoe across Number Three Road, barefeet in loafers, carrying shishy plastic bags from the bulk bins at Superstore. In the afternoon, couples lean down against the outfield fence and eat fast food picnics and hold each other in the sun. In the evening, ladies in pyjamas tuck Bichon Frises under their arms and shump over the grass in their slippers. In the evening, the sprinklers come on with a rattle and go until dawn. In the evening, you can hear the flag rings and ropes dinging against the pole, the cement waterfall running at city hall, cars ticking and buzzing up Granville, chatter and music when they stop at the intersection, the man with the trumpet, who plays facing a wall in the parking garage half a block away, the same frustrated phrases over and over again. In the evening, kids ride bikes across the grass and toss them against the backstop and sit and talk shit and smoke cigarettes on the rough wood benches fresh from their yearly coat of enamel paint. In the evening, when you look up, you are surrounded by condo towers, multicolored cells, glass, and cranes.

01:52. The nightbuses idle at the intersection. There's a 24 hour Cantonese place down the road; the parking lot is busy. The sprinklers slurp. There's a cold mist. A police truck drives past a diamond formation of Filipina ladies getting off late shifts at the airport, getting off the last Canada Line trains, walking with airport screener-approved transparent bags up Number Three Road. On the hour, a white transit van pulls into the intersection, loaded with Air China staff headed to the airport. Maroon and white identically uniformed flight attendants, lighted soft yellow by interior lights. I wave and they wave back.

2011-08-17T20:53:00.000-07:00

2011-08-16T23:14:00.000-07:00

2011-08-13T00:29:00.000-07:00

2011-08-11T02:42:00.000-07:00

2011-08-11T01:43:00.000-07:00

The village straggles out to the new edge of town with sputtering company town two-bedrooms, gives way to the Strata development, fades fades, fades and gives way to salmonberry and Scotch broom, highway foothills mountain. The mountains are a wall in the west. The mountains are dark green. Clouds gather in the mountains. The clouds look like clean white smoke. When the sun comes up it heats the air and burns off the cloud. But the tops of the mountains are dashed with invincible snows. The mountains start on the eastern side of the island and continue all the way across to the western coast of the island. The smell of fog and trees blows down the mountain into the village. The village used to be called Union. It was called Union after the Union Coal Company. & New grey highways lined with weedy ditches lead to narrow grey roads that run past tidy farm yards lead to dirt roads lead to abandoned logging roads branch off onto rocky paths that suggest detours onto more rocky paths that keep going and twist back on themselves and, here and there, point to what might be paths but it's hard to tell. & Dunsmuir. Dunsmuir. Dunsmuir, for the industrialist, the coal baron, who battled for raw land given up by the Hudson's Bay Company. His mines built the village. Dunsmuir: the King George Hotel. That brown and brown fortress. Hotel bar. Always remind me of those dust velvet rooms on High Street, River Street. Crown Royal rocks Tragically Hip Dumaurier Player's Light snap of pool table swonk of men's room door beer breeze. Dust. Dusty velvet in front of glass tables always moist from runoff condensation swipe of rags. Men whose heads slouch ahead of them, neckless: heads replaced with broad surface of slouched shoulders and beaky head protruding from ribcage. Crown Royal, rocks. Snick of lighter. Years of movie smoking has made me imagine the suck and crackle of the first drag but it's as perfectly silent as the Sportsnet highlights on the bar's TV set. Right on the bar, off to the right. Back up Dunsmuir, under a weave of electrical line. Walking under a drooping black lace cradle of electrical line, along the cardboarded windows of an empty grocery store, across from a row of flatfaced stuccofronted houses painted in dark purple and dark blue, across from all the houses lined up along the sidewalk. Across from the Legion, which bursts flat white off a close clipped lawn. Across from that cube of pressed pure white dust with its moat of tattered poppies. At the convenience store attached to the butcher shop. The convenience store was built of the same pure white dust as the Legion, but had darkened to a dull grey. A sign in the window of the convenience store said: still locally owned. The sign was written with a black felt marker, across six sheets of white paper. A sign in the window of the butcher shop said that New York steaks were five dollars each. The sign in the butcher shop window was written in green chalk, on a chalkboard. The butcher shop was owned by Italians. The convenience store was owned by Koreans. The daughter worked at the counter. Her mother unloaded boxes and rearranged the aisles in the back corner of the store, where the shelves were stocked with dollar, dollar fifty, two dollar hair bands and tape measures and sticker books. They never spoke. Christian rock radio station playing at a low volume. There was always the sound of the frozen drink mixer turning. Cigarettes were kept behind the counter and a locked metal shutter. On the counter, there were plastic tubs of beef jerky and a glass case for lottery tickets and a Bible in Korean.

&

Lemon square in a paper bag. The buttery cake at the bottom of them splotched oil onto the bottom of the bag.

&

There was a falls. It was about forty feet high. Three streams of water fell from three spots. The streams combined near the bottom. There was a flat pond at the bottom of the falls. The pond brimmed over. Water tipped down several rocky streams into a frothy creek that ran down the hill and into Allen Lake and the reservoir. Fallen trees, pale and sandy like driftwood, bridged across the creek. There must have been a flood. There must have been a wash come through, we said. We wanted to hike up the creek and splash in the calm pool that was filled by the waterfall. We climbed down a pyramid of fallen trees that had bunched up as the wash came through. We took off our shoes and tied the laces together and slung them around our neck. We stepped down onto the flat river stones. We stepped across the flat river stones. We walked up the creek. We reached up and grabbed petrified branches of washed out trees to steady ourselves.

2011-08-09T17:57:00.000-07:00

2011-08-09T17:27:00.000-07:00

2011-06-15T00:40:00.000-07:00

2011-06-12T01:30:00.001-07:00

Bathtub box of rice spatula pushed into a corner.
Can of diet soda.
Spread out globe&mail british columbia section as my tablecloth.
At my table in the corner between the coke machine and the suggestion box.

Cabbage wearing a tattered char.
Peashoots and bacon.
Yellow peppers and dried tangerine peel.
Beancurd skin cucumbers chicken.
Tomato and egg.

Waffly slippers that exhale with each step across the kitchen floor smell of oil in the part in your hair
when i get home.

2011-06-11T00:50:00.000-07:00

2011-06-07T03:50:00.000-07:00

2011-05-03T13:37:00.000-07:00

2011-04-30T19:57:00.000-07:00

青岩.

2011-04-26T19:56:00.000-07:00

2011-04-23T00:53:00.000-07:00

2011-04-18T00:56:00.001-07:00

2011-04-16T22:27:00.000-07:00

Guiyang.

2011-04-03T00:16:00.000-07:00

2011-04-01T01:21:00.000-07:00

People coming up from the West Coast Express. People going down to the Expo Line.

2011-04-01T00:20:00.000-07:00

Cordova. The walk from waterfront, east, brandnew restaurants in fake cobblestone streets shoes always slip on those things,

steam clock, into
the next mix of hostels and a few native girls in doorways with dirty windbreakers and a murmur of ya want a date?
past smack alley and the 24 hr decoy cop car parked beside
shower ministry
dumaurier five a pack
where spanish accent shouts BASE ROCK BASE ROCK
past the ruin warehouses and ruin tunnels of chinese edgetown stores lay out sidewalks of cabbage leaves and sugarcane trimmings
the shelters the lines around oppenheimer park the girls in tight skirts running up -- jackson is it?
-- feels like interpretive center walk back in time from a debased present to -> the various textures of boom times, stucco and pastel and on down the walls of warehouses until you get glimpses of railway and the sugar refinery and turn of the century, until it's nothing but mountains on horizon.

2011-03-26T22:14:00.000-07:00

微博:

Whole city is strawberry ice cream pink
shampoo white

walk around at dusk and take pictures

eyes are awful itchy.

2011-03-24T23:54:00.000-07:00

2011-03-21T23:59:00.000-07:00

微博: My walk begins at Broadway and Kingsway, an intersection that will soon be dominated by a highrise complex whose space is being saved by a bizarre art installation singing the praises of real estate development in Mount Pleasant. Down Main and past the Pacific Central Station, which stands totally alone, now, even the hostels and first run of skidrow bars keeping a respectful distance, and under the Chinatown-Stadium Skytrain overpass. I continue through the first blocks of Chinatown, past Keefer, and the kid on Pender that says he'll trade me a gram of kush for bus fare, and onto Hastings. Starting at the Carnegie, Hastings is divided in half. The north side of Hastings is a mess, sidewalk given over to an open air market, fiends selling shoplifted bacon, shampoo with London Drugs pricetags stuck on them, junk VHS tapes scrounged from bins. Packs of du Maurier for five bucks, and a Spanish accent shout, "BASE ROCK. BAAASE ROCK." And the south side is slightly less of a mess. Hastings. The dive bars with separate entrances for ladies. Lunch counters. Army and Navy. The last grimy houses stuck between them. The storefront gospel revival churches. I like the somber posters that have been put up in the neighborhood by community activists opposed to condo development in Chinatown and the greater Downtown East Side. I am across the Fraser, on an island which has been consumed by real estate and the importance of development, and it can feel as if the city has been sucked up and all life is wrapped up inside 30-storey buildings and busy roads. The sidewalks are empty.

微博: Watching Jean Swanson talk/slideshow on "community benefit agreements"/low-income residents vs. gentrification in Downtown East Side. She says: no bargaining for community benefit agreements-- get social housing/low-income housing first. "No towers."

2011-03-15T02:02:00.000-07:00

微博: Snuck in late to Wang Der-wei lecture, sat on floor.

2011-03-08T01:24:00.000-08:00

2011-03-08T00:54:00.000-08:00

2011-03-07T23:46:00.000-08:00

2011-03-05T21:43:00.000-08:00

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2011-03-05T21:19:00.000-08:00

Crossing over the Fraser. In my notebook, I was transcribing Yo Gotti lyrics.

2011-03-03T03:30:00.000-08:00

2011-03-03T03:13:00.000-08:00

2011-03-03T03:00:00.000-08:00

2011-03-01T23:03:00.000-08:00