This evening I met up with Jill to check out the Vancouver Art Gallery's current exhibits. I haven't been for quite a while, completely missing out on the Arthur Erickson exhibit last year for no really good reason (and kicking myself for it).
We started at the top and worked our way down. On the top was the BC Binning exhibit and I'm in love with his stuff from the late '40s/'50s. The geometrics and colour blocking... It's so familiar and yet I can't figure out if I've seen the pieces before or if it reminds me of something else.
The Fred Herzog photo exhibit of Vancouver from the 1950s to 1970s is amazing and we only got halfway through (another visit is in order to see the show that's opening tomorrow anyway). In talking with my city planning friend about the show afterwards, he mentioned how today the city he works for okayed the demolition of five 1930s houses, making way for larger developments with no real character. I realised that the thing that made me wistful about the Herzog photos was the abundance of houses in the dowtown core. There's something less warm/heartless about the city with monolithic apartment towers where single family homes used to reside.
We were distracted by the grumbling in our tummies and the CBC Archive videos showing in one of the little off-shoot rooms. The video we were most enamoured with was one shot of the night life in Chinatown in the 1960s. The video was only about 2 minutes, but it made an impression. One scene showed cooks flinging stuff around in woks and after we finished watching the rest of the clips we decided we needed to go for Chinese food at that exact moment.
We went to Hon's, had lettuce wraps, potstickers and Shanghai noodles with chicken and green beans, and rolled out of there fully stuffed with leftovers. Hon's is so fricking fast: it took about 10 minutes to get everything we ordered. They are a well-oiled machine there. And it was so fricking cheap! And I never feel sickly after eating there, which is a feat in itself.
For a while I felt guilty about not doing homework after school, especially since I got out an hour early, but then had a chance to go for coffee beverages with my friend instead and figured that was a decent sacrifice.
Unrelated: despite not liking pet-type animals in general (mainly an allergy thing, but also the lack of mothering/caring-for-other-living-things genes in general), I saw a puppy yesterday morning that looked like the Pokey Little Puppy and thought we could live in a happy co-existence. He padded along like he'd just learned how to walk (which is probably true. He was so tiny and adorable) and was obviously being trained. His care-giver stopped him at the corner and said something to him (maybe "wait"), which made him put up his left paw and tilt his head like he was thinking, confused or waiting to spring into action. I wasn't interested in his care-giver, but might have feigned interest just to get at the puppy.
Also, "Cat House" is an awesome song, despite my severe allergies to cats.
To bed or bust.
Currently listening :
Cloudy Cloud Calculator
By Takako Minekawa
Release date: 10 February, 1998
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