Archive for March, 2009
One day on the road
I miss mix-tapes.
I have only owned 4 vinyl records in my life, and I’ve never had to buy a record player, machine, turntable, whatever it was called. I really entered music consumption as it turned from records to CDs, before we could burn a CD. So we had mix tapes.
The thing with a tape is that you couldn’t change the order of songs, couldn’t skip directly to the song on your mind. You had to go through the other songs, everything happened in a personalized version of its own time. So creating a mix-tape required some planning. One song had to flow into the next, a mood established, then sustained.
I also entered music consumption at about the same time I got my first car. So for me, a lot of good songs are linked to memories of places on the highway just outside the city.
New songs, new memories, same highway.
New article on Gangs
Replica handguns and submachine guns that have been seized by Vancouver's Youth/Gang squad
I’ve also just finished an article for the Canadian Immigrant print magazine on gangs in Vancouver. It should come out in the April edition. One of the things I didn’t get a chance to talk about in the article is a movie called ‘A Warrior’s Religion’ by Mani Amar. It’s a great documentary about the violence that has occured in the south asian community and taken the lives of over 100 young men.
To see some photos that I took, but that won’t be in the magazine
Happy Nowruz
Early in the morning of Friday March 20, the new year will begin for Persians (like my wife) around the world.
I wrote an article for Canadian Immigrant about the event.
It’s online now at : Celebrating Nowruz
Voices of Wisdom Photo Essay now online
A project that I did this past winter for Canadian Immigrant.ca is now online. In addition to writing an article, I got to put together a multimedia project joining my pictures with audio of the interviews. The story is about the Voices of Wisdom project that the 411Seniors Centre started in Vancouver to record the stories of people in the community.
It is online here : Voices Of Wisdom