Rengeneration

There is a very cool exhibit on at The Hearth Gallery on Bowen Island, a virtual reality experience called “Texada.” The show features a 17 minute documentary VR film about time, rock, islands and our place in it all. It’s immersive and absorbing not just becasue of the medium, but also the story, a meditation on this small moment in time in the context of the biggest cycles of time that we are a part of. The show is on until November 30, and well worth a visit.

I spent this morning resting at home after an exhausting week of facilitation and design work, and in preparation for a week of travel to Halifax to do even more. At noon I headed up the hill to the Legion where the Bowen Island Fixit Fair was going on. It was cool to see people talking about regenerative economy with their hands on repair tools and fixed items after hosting the Business Summit on Wednesday where circular economy was the topic of the evening.

Vancouver sports continues to be unbelievable. I haven’t watched a single MLS game this season, but I tuned in to watch the Vancouver Whitecaps play Los Angeles FC in the quarter final of the MLS Cup playoffs. It was as unhinged a game of football as I have ever seen, and that’s saying something after a couple of weeks in which we had a snow bound Canadian Premier League Final, and Vancouver Rise’s road to their first ever Championship, won after two come from behind wins. Last night the Whitecaps took an early 2-0 lead and then blew it in the second half on the strength of tow goals From Son Heung-min (who about half of the 53,000 people in the stadium seemed to be exclusively cheering for. The game went into extra time with the Whitecaps down a player, and then down another as an injury necessitated that they see out the game with nine men. And so it went to penalties. Son missed his first, the ‘Caps went on to keep their nerve and ended up winning a totally improbable victory. It felt like a Cup Final. It was in reality, just the next stage with two more rounds to go, but Vancouver shook off some demons.

After 10 or so years of devoted support to the Whitecaps, I stopped following them in 2019 for reasons associated with the sexual abuse cases that they covered up. I put my effort into TSS Rovers at that point, and haven’t looked back. The Whitecaps impact on soccer in Canada, and indeed on the trajectory of development in Vancouver is really interesting though, and a recent Copa 90 documentary beautifully uncovered this. As a migrant who moved to Vancouver in 1994, I don’t feel the impact of the Whitecaps quite the same way as people who lived here through the 1970s do, and despite having been a deep fan for many years, there was stuff in this documentary I didn’t know. It’s really worth a watch.

What wasn’t worth the watch was my other two teams in games against their closest rivals. I wasted two hours this morning watching Tottenham play Arsenal with a set of tactics that seemed completely bereft of ideas about how to win the game. the only redeeming feature was a long range Richarlison lob that found the net. Other than that it was just a morning of humiliation from the foot of Eze, who was rumoured to be signing with us in the off season but who chose Arsenal instead and today scored the first hat trick in the North London Derby in Premier League history.

And last night the Leafs dropped a 5-3 result to the Montreal Canadians as the continued to drift purposeless in the becalmed waters of the non-playoff positions in the NHL. Ugh.