[caption id="attachment_3485" align="alignnone" width="497"]
All downhill from here. Frame from Murray Siple's NFB documentary Carts of Darkness (2008)[/caption]
Stand in downtown Vancouver, or farther South on the steeper parts of Fairview Heights, and look North, across the waters of the Burrard Inlet -- you are looking at the North Shore, aka, North Vancouver, a steep slope covered with rich homes, and mansions, which catch the sunlight, and glitter like gems, all in settings of natural greenery, These properties all run along, and are connected together by, steep, and winding, streets and avenues. Naturally, there are binners who collect bottles and cans on this well-to-do slope. Some of these fellows have been righteously crazy dudes, who turned bottle collecting with supermarket shopping carts with no brakes on steep, winding roads, with names like "Mountain Avenue," into a kind of extreme sport.
Back in 2008 a former snowboarder, turned documentary filmmaker named Murray Siple, made the documentary about this North Shore binning culture, called Carts of Darkness, for the National Film Board of Canada. I've only just noticed that the NFB posted the entire documentary on YouTube -- embedded below. I think this is a great bit of documentary filmmaking, whether you care a whit about binning or not. It's also an interesting look at binning in Vancouver. While, I've never collected containers on the North Shore, it looks nearly identical to areas I do bin, particularly parts of the Arbutus Ridge.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2sGyq5l-dfI
All downhill from here. Frame from Murray Siple's NFB documentary Carts of Darkness (2008)[/caption]Stand in downtown Vancouver, or farther South on the steeper parts of Fairview Heights, and look North, across the waters of the Burrard Inlet -- you are looking at the North Shore, aka, North Vancouver, a steep slope covered with rich homes, and mansions, which catch the sunlight, and glitter like gems, all in settings of natural greenery, These properties all run along, and are connected together by, steep, and winding, streets and avenues. Naturally, there are binners who collect bottles and cans on this well-to-do slope. Some of these fellows have been righteously crazy dudes, who turned bottle collecting with supermarket shopping carts with no brakes on steep, winding roads, with names like "Mountain Avenue," into a kind of extreme sport.
Back in 2008 a former snowboarder, turned documentary filmmaker named Murray Siple, made the documentary about this North Shore binning culture, called Carts of Darkness, for the National Film Board of Canada. I've only just noticed that the NFB posted the entire documentary on YouTube -- embedded below. I think this is a great bit of documentary filmmaking, whether you care a whit about binning or not. It's also an interesting look at binning in Vancouver. While, I've never collected containers on the North Shore, it looks nearly identical to areas I do bin, particularly parts of the Arbutus Ridge.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2sGyq5l-dfI
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
I'm going to grab this and enjoy it.
...homeless men who have combined bottle picking with the extreme sport of racing shopping carts down the steep hills of North Vancouver...
HEH. This reminds me of a scene in Cormac McCarthy's "The Road" where father and son ride a loaded and modded cart down a steep hill dogsled style. If this is a sport it's one I'd love to watch :D
Reblogged this on Typing Loud And Knowing Nothing. and commented:
Just finished watching this. Wow. Very VERY good doco. Give them some money if possible - otherwise scrape it off YouTube with DownLoadHelper in Firefox.
Happy to promote such goodness. It can be purchased online via the first link in the post, to the NFB, perhaps only by Canadians? The mention of putting skis on a cart remindded me of crazy physicists at the University of Saskatchewan's linear Accelerator, when I was maybe 15-years-old. The lin-acc's business end was buried in a steep-ish hill. The Winter past-time of the physicists was to replace the front wheels of bikes with skis and race down this hill. Several design generations never resulted in a ski-bike with brakes -- ah, but they had fun! Friend of mine who helped at that lin-acc, used the beam to heat up cans of soup, and took shielding bricks home to make book shelves. Wonder how big his family is?
Ha ha ha those crazy scientists. Just goes to show people had fun before there were pocket sized HD cameras and YouTube.
And hey - physics soup and *really* cool household accesories are more than adequate compensation for a less than average contribution to the population, no?
I edited the comment on my reblog to point to the NFB page and mention the fact DVDs and download licenses are on sale there. I'm sure they accept most international flavours of plastic fantastic.
That said Quvi is another handy option. I used it for YouTube when I was running Debian on my old PowerMac. Flash was no go and even when it was available for the PowerPC I couldn't watch anything higher than 240p in the browser. It was fine once I'd scraped the video and got it playing in VLC or Mplayer though. No 1080p obviously but decent SD played just fine.
Heh. I wouldn't last a week on the streets with all this useless bulky crap I'm hanging onto :D
Don't think I'd last a day on the streets in, say Los Angeles. Being homeless in Vancouver B.C. is like Nerf-homelessness.