theFUTURISTS

Lately I’ve been following local blog Vancouver Is Awesome, whose aim is to reflect the city in permanently positive light. They may just be permafried from snorting too much pixie dust, but whatever it is that’s making them so optimistic, it’s contagious. I often find myself thinking about what makes Vancouver awesome, and one thing deserves a mention: the alleys.

 Here are three reasons why alleys are awesome (but I they only apply in suburban neighborhoods, because downtown alleys are usually the opposite of these):

1)    They’re unpopulated.

2)    They’re full of interesting shit that you want to take home.

3)    Free off-the-vine blackberries.

I’ve had an alley addiction lately (sidewalks suck). Here’s photographic proof:

You know you have an alley problem when you come home with weird, unsexy stuff. Like an old TV or a pylon. Alcohol made it appear to be the perfect thing for your dog/ house/ project, but in the harsh light of day you realize it’s just a dirty piece of shit.

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Anvil Press; $45 List Price, $36 at Book Warehouse

I discovered this wonderful new book today, which maps Vancouver through nearly 100 poems centered in various locations across our grand and gritty city. Each poem is accompanied by a full-page colour photograph by Derek von Essen, and it’s surprisingly fun to read verse about places you know and love, like Gastown in “4:00 am”  by Wayne Stedingh, the VAG steps in “What Jack Shadbolt said” by Trevor Carolan, Wicked Cafe at 7th and Hemlock in “Purgatory” by Christine Schrum, or taking the good old B-line in “99 Express– 8 a.m.” by Bibiana Tomasic. And this is just naming a very, very few.

Yet my favorite, hands down, is a speculative poem about what it would be like to be on Wreck Beach when the dreaded “Big One” earthquake hits, excerpted after the jump:

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Photo via Vanity Fair (Derek Berwin/Fox Photos/Getty Images)

 Don’t you hate falling in love with something, and then discovering that you’re just a little late in some way? Like finding out about a new band who makes your toes tingle, looking up their tour dates to see if they’ll grace our fair city, and realizing that they did play here two weeks ago but you had no idea who the fuck they were at the time? I hate that, and it’s happened again. 

Today I read that Toronto’s Julie Wilson is ending her three-year literary voyeurism project Seen Reading. This was the first time I had ever heard about the blog, so I checked it out and promptly fell head over heels. In a nutshell, Wilson spies on people reading in public places, notes the page that they are on, finds the same book in a store so that she can copy down a paragraph from that page, turns the anonymous reader into a character, and creates a fictional vignette about them using what they were reading as inspiration.

Here’s a neat video of Wilson at work.

Creeping and creativity combined! Golden.

You may have heard about WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE, Spike Jonze’s upcoming filmic adaptation of Maurice Sendak’s classic children’s book. Since Sendak’s story is relatively sparse (48 pages, lots of grand illustrations but very few words), it makes sense that when Jonze and Dave Eggers were adapting the book into a screenplay, they had to beef it up a bit with new characters and scenarios. Well, it seems that Eggers (famous contemporary novelist that he is) had so much fun that he is adapting the film adaptation of the children’s book into a 300 page novel called THE WILD THINGS, complete with a weirdly awesome “Fur Edition” dust jacket. Strange eh?

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So I opened up a box of brand-spankin-new books at work today, and guess what was staring up at me?

AAH! Sweet Jesus. No joke, I was actually startled. Could those piercing hazel eyes be hiding the soul of an artist of literary majesty, whose debut novel might rip the veil off of humanity and make us face our deepest, darkest emotions?

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