wakarahen / ganbaresugi

Whatever, I do this all the time.

Slow news day, I guess.

kchayka:blackvon:

napoleonsbattleplan:

towerofsleep:

It’s not that Vancouver isn’t a great city. And it’s not that great people don’t live there. But in many ways, it’s a disingenuous city. It’s a violent, stressful place, as uptight as it is free. All of those tourism ads that show it idyllically nestled betwixt mountains lapping at the nape of the sea only hold it back, and it’s not until some Vancouverites, or its public servants and tourism steering committees, own up to its problems that the events of last week will be understood. The hubris that propels West Coast factions to see themselves above other Canadian places only hardens the glue that holds these blinkers in place. That and the conceit that everyone else is doing themselves a disservice by not migrating to its sandy shores.

Vancouver has always had more of a geographical and social and cultural affinity with the North American West Coast than with the rest of Canada. As a result, it has absorbed many of its contradictions — and problems. The triumph of the Olympics may have been both the best and worst things to happen to Vancouver, giving the city an unreasonable sense of stability and calm when neither of these things are as uncomplicated as they appear. The lower mainland’s chemo-weed Wreck Beach calm is chimeric and, as we saw in the aftermath of Game Seven, the city has a tendency to swerve from meek to freak. I’m not saying that other Canadian cities are better or worse. It’s just that Vancouver’s civic boastfulness should be seen as suspicious. And when WestJet pilots shepherding passengers west to east offer their condolences to those disembarking in Toronto, you wonder what they’re really saying, and why they feel compelled to ridicule another part of their country.

My wife once said that it was impossible to get into an argument in Vancouver. “Bad place to be Italian,” she figured. Me, I’ve had some of the best times of my life there. But maybe what Vancouver needs is a good argument. Maybe it needs to see itself for what it is, where it is going and whether the old themes still hold true. Maybe it has to step across its fog of Pacific mellow to know that rage and anger expressed only occasionally leads to hair-trigger events such as hockey riots and other violence. Before Game 1 of the series, singer Michael Bublé said, “The Canucks aren’t Canada’s team, they’re Vancouver’s team,” before listing the reasons — typically, the mountains, the sea, the sunshine, et al — why anyone who doesn’t live there is depriving themselves of a fulfilling nationhood. If that’s the case, Vancouver’s hockey riot is its own, too. Maybe people would have seen it coming had they listened more to closely the songs of Joey S–thead, and others. Enough with Douglas Coupland’s Emerald City, the breezy swing of Bublé or Sarah McLachlan standing on a mountainside telling us how perfect her city is. Maybe it’s time somebody changed the goddamned station.

My issue with the suggestion that Vancouver should be more like the rest of Canada comes down to the simple fact that Canada doesn’t, in my view anyways, have a defining identity. Alberta is just as isolationist as Vancouver is (if not more so - no one ran a federal campaign using Vancouver’s isolation from the national conversation like Harper initially did with Alberta.) Canada’s a divided country, it just is. 

The trouble the West (you’ll note that WestJet is a Calgarian company) seems to have is that the prevailing view seems to be that to be Canadian is to be like Toronto. Many, if not most, of the articles castigating and belittling Vancouver have been written and published in Toronto. The reason for Vancouver’s perceived exceptionalist complex (and Alberta’s - I can’t comment on other provinces because I’ve only lived in two), in my view at least, is that the rest of Canada is still forced to define itself as “not Toronto.” 

What does all this have to do with the riots? Nothing, really. Then again, I don’t really think the riots had a lot to do with Vancouver as a city, so much as the corrosive mix of hyperpartisanship (Canada as a whole cares too damn much about hockey, but that’s for another time), inadequate preparation by the city and the VPD, and a bunch of stupid drunk kids. But I wouldn’t expect Toronto to know about that, since we all decided that that G20 stuff never happened.

Following napoleonsbattleplan on principle for scoring thoughtfulness points in the above response…

towerofsleep:

I forgot about Young Canada Works. I was only browsing Work In Culture and the Akimbo job board and fucking Workopolis and I completely forgot that all of the good jobs for recent arts grads are on Young Canada Works and you have to apply for them in April. There were seriously almost 60 summer…

Imagine my frustration during all those years in school and being “too old” due to their age cap.

backleftlitz:

So no, what I and correct me if I’m wrong here but I think a lot of other people do to “kick back” and “forget that pretty much everything is terrible all of the time” is surf the web, which in reality is the least relaxing thing anyone could possibly do ever. There is nothing pleasantly mind-numbing about tackling your RSS feed while browsing through your Twitter dash and actively updating it with short sentences that are also very clever and funny and then also waiting around to see if any of your three million plus followers are going to validate your short clever statement with a re-tweet or whatever. And also you’re toggling between that stuff and Facebook where you’re learning that a guy you hated in high school has become very successful in a field you have repeatedly failed to break in to…

…Also you’re looking for new music but nothing sounds good and you fear you’ll never truly enjoy anything ever again.

DUUUUUUUDE, WHAT ARE YOU DOING IN MY HEAD? 

Also, this.

I’ll just leave this here. 

Discuss.