I’ve been on a mission to reduce clutter in my life over the past few years. Trying to pare down and minimalize, if you will. This mission has taken the form of purging clothes, books, CDs, and other useless material things collecting dust in my home that in turn collect mental dust. I’m also trying to reduce intangible clutter, like declining a Tuesday night concert in favour for sleep (so trendy right now). Paring down materially is an odd one. I’d like to think that, “I’m not my fucking khakis,” but it’s hard to separate the artifact from the memories and emotions that can get tied to it.
Case in point: sifting through boxes of my junk on a mission to purge inevitably means taking a trip down memory lane, whether it be choosing to keep or chuck my dated oversized grad dress, claiming the photo album from my parents wedding, or taking on a bunch of ceramic 78s from the ‘20s passed to my dad from his dad. I’ll never wear my grad dress again, yet I’ll probably let it take up space for years to come. I have more photos accumulated on my phone from the past year than I have in boxes from the previous 28. It’s easy to delete photos, but throwing them in the garbage is more difficult. I think it’s because my generation is one of the last that will have experience two ends of the technology spectrum that are so opposite. My parents wedding album weighs about seven pounds and takes up about a square foot of space, while l can scroll through a digital retrospective of the past year on a 2.5 inch screen in less than a minute.
While reading the content for this issue, I realized how central nostalgia is to so much of what we are covering. The Courtneys, our cover artists this month, are an example of the not-so-long-gone ‘90s and the paraphernalia of Gen Y’s teenage years; Discorder Revisited flashes back to Expo ‘86 and a bygone era of live music in Vancouver’s history; Here’s the Thing pays homage to the delicious history of beer; and Young Braised outright embraces our iPhone era via hologram, and then some. The polarity we’re experiencing right now is overwhelming and intriguing.
If you want to witness some of this in music and art form with your own ears and eyes, I will gently persuade you to hit the streets of Vancouver for Music Waste this month. It hosts heaps of local music, art, and comedy, and we’ve got the official guide nestled in here. And on that note…
Read on and stay rad,
Laurel Borrowman
