re: christmas day.

hello friends, fans, foe and lovers,

it's christmas day and i hope you spent it with loved ones and lovers, my day was quiet, i spent it alone, this year i didn't have my kids and it sucked. i'm anti-social and hermetic by nature i think, and i find it challenging to reach out to others and be around people over the holidays. for the first 20 years of my life christmas wasn't exactly a fun time, that was usually when my family members were binging, fighting and violence and chaos sort of ruled the time. certain family members would attempt suicide, or get beaten to a pulp, or set the house on fire, and so on and so on.

only in the past few years have i even given a shit about this holiday season and that's because i have kids now, that are older and i want to try to give them a better life than i ever had. this is more difficult than it seems, because if you've never known a normal childhood, how in the hell do you provide it for your own children? it's a challenge, a struggle to provide some normalcy for my kids, because i never had it. something as boring as a christmas dinner, with friends and family, something that "middle class," or "functional," people take for granted is quite the challenge for me and my family. le sigh.

anyway, i spent the day alone, went for a walk, got some fresh air, watched some television, and wondered when my life was going to change? what do i have to do change my situation? i'm bored. having time is one thing, but not having money is quite another. i want to tour, make some money and see the world. be surrounded by friends, artists and musicians and try to live a good life by example. haha, i don't ask for much eh? i found some solace making some music and a video poem today, perhaps in a year i'll be posting something much different from somewhere else on the planet. paris or new york city would be just fine in a year, that would probably be a nice change of pace.

until next time lovers,


chris bose.

re: luck, a new video poem

hello friends, fans, foe and lovers,

here's a new video poem for my new book, "A moon made of copper." it's called "Luck," and on page 72.

happy holidays,

cb

and a link to this video on my youtube channel.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XaZ3rWLZVL4&feature=youtu.be

re: the monster project burning crosses thing.

hello friends, fans, foe and lovers,

ah, the burning crosses in our video preview. no, we're not satanists, maybe a bit hedonists, but bloody hell, who wouldn't be given the opportunity? haha. i don't think we're nihilists, maybe a bit anarchist, probably left wing, and definitely Indigenous.

so, what's with the burning cross you say? is it about something sinister? devious? a plot against organized religion? i don't think so, we're not that bloody clever. haha. the real deal is, a couple years ago i was filming a documentary about a group of First Nations, or Indigenous people, or aboriginal people, or as they like to say in the United States, "native americans," haha, sorry about the laugh, but Indians in the states are always so serious about that, whereas up here we refer to ourselves as "Indians," or a variation of that. haha.

anyway, this documentary was about a particular tribal group that was replacing the "pitch," headstones with granite slabs, proper memorial stones, because the pitch gravestones were 50 to 100 years old or more. a pitch headstone is increasingly tough to find as well, because we've plundered our forests so bad here in the interior of british columbia, the entire province actually, has been over logged for more than a century. i'm getting off topic a bit, so a "pitch," headstone is one where a tree has died, or has an excessive amount of pitch, the tree dies and all the pitch, thanks to gravity sinks to the bottom of the tree and then the top of the tree eventually breaks off in a thing called "windshear," where the dried up, empty part of the tree breaks off in the wind over time. people have died from it, i mean imagine a 2000 pound tree falling on you. boom, your dead.

so, because our people didn't have money and still don't have money for fancy grave stones or memorial markers, we'd go find a pitch stump, carve it up, bring it down the mountain and use it as a memorial stone. i mean think about it, they weigh a ton and are bloody solid because the sap hardens and acts like a preservative. which is why they last so long, i mean, an ordinary stump would only last a few decades at best and begone, concrete would crumble  and so we were left with an extraordinary amount of these crosses and grave markers piling up beside the cemeteries throughout the interior of BC as we replaced hundreds of these pitch headstones with granite ones.

of course, we wrote down as best we could the names of the people, they were from our bands, our families or long lost ones and families we never knew or heard of, because think about it, a century ago our people were going through unbelievable turmoil and changes. settlers and immigrants were landing in canada en masse and the indigenous people were being pushed off of their traditional lands onto tiny, shitty, useless reserves and forced to exist on rations and handouts from the colonial oppressors. not too mention all these horrible diseases we had never encountered before that were ravaging our people, something simple like the flu lead to complications, worse infections and death. then there was small pox, bronchitis, typhus, and more and more. whole bands and even nations were dying, so they were moving all over the place trying to escape these new, horrible ways to die.

as we were going about, i noticed quite a few cemeteries along train tracks, and i asked why? well, apparently, people would come to the train tracks with their ill trying to get a ride to a hospital or a doctor, and many died along the tracks, or the trains would be so full of ill people or dying or dead that when there would be too many, they'd simply stop somewhere and dump bodies into a mass grave. if they could, families would come back and put up pitch headstones, but more often than not, these places only had one large ominous cross in the cemeteries. maybe with a date and the name of a chief or someone of note who had passed away. it was all quite sad really, thinking about all these aboriginal people that were dumped along the train tracks into mass graves and given these anonymous silent burials. i'd notice chiefs far from other territories that no one knew or could remember, perhaps they'd died trying to find medical attention for their nation or family or themselves. and as we pulled these gravestones out of these cemeteries, they began to pile up and i remember my chief and some others wondering what to do, and i said, 'let's burn them," because we didn't want people to steal them.

deep down i also think i wanted to rid ourselves of the yolk of colonialism and conquering, european religion was rammed down our throats for well over a century, we had residential schools, we've had abuses of all kinds in these horrible places that took generation after generation of children away from their families and forced them to stop practicing their culture, their language and their traditions in some misguided attempt to "remove the indian from the child." my own family has been deeply affected by the residential school system, both my parents went as did their siblings, and life has never been the same for them, or normal for me.

so i said we should burn them and almost without word or ceremony that's exactly what we did, we dragged all these pitch crosses and headstones out and set them on fire. and because they were full of pitch, boy did they go up in flames, the heat burned fast and fiercely intense and hot. in a way it was a relief to watch them go up and so i started filming and taking pictures, and then my chief called me over as i was wandering around one particular cemetery and told me to look, because as the headstones were burning, the names of the people would briefly appear as the years of debris burned away, so i tried taking as many photos as i could. some of these headstones were so old that on the surface, there was nothing we could get from them, no names or anything, we would even trying to rub a pencil on wax paper to get something from them and we would get nothing. but some of them, as they burned, the names and dates would appear, only for about thirty seconds and then would be gone. so we got some documentation and would fix unmarked headstones with their names. for me it was cathartic, a relief really, that we were taking back our family and traditional names where we could and freeing ourselves from this forced religion that had done so much damage to our people. everyone one was quiet and i often wonder if they felt the same thing, it was powerful and something i'll never forget.

which leads us to the whole point of this endeavour, it was to remember those who had passed on before, with proper stone memorials, the by product was perhaps wiping away clean the lasting vestiges of a religion we never wanted in the first place. so now you know the story about the burning crosses in our video preview, and perhaps now we could move on and get back to the music if you don't mind too terribly?!?

regards,


chris bose.
ps: as an artist and aboriginal person, i'm pretty goddamn tired of explaining and justifying myself all the time. been doing it my whole life, and quite done with it. perhaps you should explain yourself to me?!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d7tLpysqAnY&list=UUX6ugt96BuSUAPvoWFogX-w

re: the monster project

hello friends, fans, foe and lovers,

at long last the monster project is coming together, it's taken nearly two years, but we're almost done 10 songs for our debut album.

so, here's a little sneak peak!!!

stay tuned,


cb

re: new video poem!!

hello friends, fans, foe and lovers,

i miss you, it's been too long already, even though it's been only a few days.....here's my new video poem for my new book "A moon made of copper," published by Kegedonce Press a couple months ago. It's on page 62, and it's called "Wake up."

Do watch the video and read the poem. I'm doing pretty much what i wanted with my life, but like anything, it comes with a price, but i'm fine with that and i no longer pine for the past like i once did. life is good my friends, live it well because we never know how long we've got. i vaguely remember writing this poem, it was about 4 years ago, and the video represents what my life has been like since my last book was published and some success with my art and stuff. my wish now is life to get crazier and to tour overseas with other secret projects i've got in the works.

i hope the best for you over the holidays with your friends, family and loved ones, i'll be working diligently on new stuff and will let you know more as i know more about it. haha.

until next time lovers,


chris bose. aka horatio cornblower.

re: image and power.....

hello friends, fans, foe and lovers,

here's an oldie but a goodie i did many years ago with Randall Eustache, it was part of a commission Arnica Artist Run Centre, and we projected it on the wall of the old Kamloops Daily News. which has been long since out of business, at least a year anyway. a shame. it was pretty cool to see this projected massively on public space, we had about 100 people show up and check it out, much more than we expected.

until next time,


cb

re: new video poem

hello friends, fans, foe and lovers,

here's my new video poem for my new book, "A moon made of copper," entitled "watching you," which is about parenting and missing your children when out on the road working, being away from home, trying to make a living and so on. as well as being creative if you're an artist, musician, poetry, filmmaking and so on......

balancing family and work is never easy, add creativity and the need to appease the muse, then it's almost impossible to do. i'm away at least a couple months a year on the road, and i miss my kids every single day, but this is down from up to six months a year. you go away, do your thing, work, try to make some money, and come back, buildings have gone up, or been torn down, people become parents, people die, get sick and seasons pass. it's a weird life.

anyway, this video is for parents who work at being creative and being parents simultaneously, i recorded this song with my kids playing in the background and is probably the only demo song to ever start off with "Hey! Feet out of the face!" hahaha

until next time,

cb

re: day 5 of 5 day song challenge

hello friends, fans, foe and lovers,

here is the final video of the 5 day song challenge brought on by dean hunt and bracken hanuse corlett. i decided to make a video for each song, which was kind of crazy, but is already helping my creativity in video editing and making, hope you dig them, and stay tuned for more videos and songs to come!!!

until next time,

cb

re: song 4

hello friends, family, foe and lovers,

here's my video for day 4 of the 5 day song challenge!

it's basically a road video, touring away from home and family, trying to make a buck and being creative at the same time ain't easy and requires a tremendous amount of time on the road. which i love, because you see the most amazing things, meet all kinds of people, live and have crazy stories and learn from it all. hopefully. haha. anyway, check it out!

cheers,


cb

re: day 3 song of the 5 day song challenge!!!

hello friends, fans, foe and lovers,

it's day 3 of the 5 day song challenge it's safe to say i'm kicking it's ass. haha. 

so, here's the 3rd song and video, and i don't really plan this out, it just comes together.

i woke up this morning at 5:30, made some tea and picked up a guitar and played this riff. it's an old one, i wrote it about 20 years ago, but it hasn't found a home yet. maybe now it has, it's kind of somber, kind of beautiful, kind of introspective and relaxing. when i added the video, i started dropping in travel stuff from across canada. being an artist/musician/author and filmmaker in a small town means you have to travel A LOT!!!

traveling takes it's toll, you miss loved ones, your home, your bed, and so on. but it is also awesome, and exciting, you meet new people, see new places, learn new things and it's good for the soul. it's a cruel catch 22. when you're on the road too long, you miss home and everything about it, but when you're home, after a few days you can start climbing the walls wanting to be back out on the road. perhaps they'll never reconcile themselves. haha, and i'm okay with that, i crave new adventures and stories, so i'm sure i'll never stop as long as i can. 

anyway, peace out, stay tuned for tomorrow's song and video!!

cheers,

cb

re: day 2 of 5 day song challenge.....

hello friends, fans, foe and lovers,

here is my offering for the 2nd day of the 5 day song challenge!!!

hope you like it!!! it took five and a half hours to make, from writing and recording the song to editing and finishing the accompanying video.

all the best,


cb

re: 5 songs in 5 days challenge....

hello friends, fans, foe and lovers,

my bro jet pack sent me the insane 5 song in 5 day challenge, like i need more on my plate, but i instead upped the bet with videos for each song. here is the first one, recorded last night on acoustic guitar with all the sour notes in between. 1st take. haha.

sky songs

thanks to dean hunt and bracken hanuse corlett for the challenge!

this was on a flight to montreal i think and one of the first times i used my go pro camera to record parts of the flight. generally i try to fly in the day, because i love seeing the earth and the mountains the water and the sky, it's pretty cool. night flights are boring. cities are distant glittering orange jewels on a black tapestry, if you can see a full moon and clouds, it's cool, but few and far between. anyway, enjoy, the next five days are gonna be riff a rammic!

cheers,


chris bose.

re: all i know is this.....

hello friends, fiends, fans, foe and lovers,

here's my new video poem called, "All I know is this...." and it's from my new book, "A moon made of copper," published by Kegedonce Press.

it was filmed last year in spences bridge, bc, lytton, bc, botanie valley and stein valley bc.

this part of my new challenge, goal of making a film a week and uploading online here and various other social network platforms.

i recently lost my youngest brother to cancer, the day after he died i quit drinking and made a commitment to improve my own health. part of that commitment is getting back into a creative frame of mind and continue pushing boundaries and to challenge myself. over the years i've gotten jaded as fuck, kind of tired and miserable. i felt trapped once again. but these days, i'm feeling good, and moving beyond feeling trapped to, "how do i escape?" haha.

i want to go to europe and play shows, have exhibitions, do readings, go to music festivals and perform in front of tens of thousands of people. how does one get there? lots of hard work. i lost sight of this trapped in my own prison, in my own mind. but i'm ready now to giver and take no prisoners. life is short. live it hard and live it good, who knows what happens afterwards?

until next time lovers,


chris bose.

re: street art........

hello friends, foe, fans and lovers,

here's some cool art by some guy named 'kyoti,' i'd say each piece is 7 x 15 feet in size. is this graffiti or street art?

thoughts?

should it be illegal?

until next time,

cb

re: street art and murals......

hello friends, fans, foe and lovers,

getting some youth inspired and working with kobra cans for the first time on 4 x 8 sheets of plywood, new mediums to explore and express themselves. when i do mural or graffiti workshops, i lay down the unwritten rules, or laws or codes of street art. once they know the rules, tagging and nuisance graffiti stops by 99% in the schools where we go, and people get more serious about the art and technique and using legal walls or making their own walls at home. 

vilifying and criminalizing a means of creative expression never works. people have been drawing and painting on walls for nearly 30,000 years, i don't see it stopping anytime soon. providing safe places for a creative means of expression is the way to go. instead of making our kids go to dangerous places crawling over broken bottles, needles and other hazardous things to just paint on a damn wall is ridiculous. ottawa has open walls and spaces to do graffiti and it's awesome. if people in kamloops think we have a graffiti problem, they've obviously never left this city and been across canada. i've seen cities that have graffiti 'problems,' and believe me, kamloops is about the safest, most beige city i've ever been in my entire life.

re: first day of snow.

hello friends, fans, foe and lovers,

the snow has hit the loops, kamloops, bc that is, and it's coming down like crazy. which is both good and bad, i like it, because it isn't so damn gloom and doom because in the fall/winter this place is unrelentingly grey. i can't take it. the snow makes it brighter, which makes me happier. i think i need to move to new mexico or somewhere warmer and sunnier. i ain't talking tropics, but mountains and sun. i've spent my whole life living in the mountains and whenever i've lived elsewhere, i can't handle it. 

anyways, just a quick update, i've been working on new songs for 'the monster project,' and we'll have an album ready to go in the next couple weeks. it's heavy, groovy and haunting!

i'll post more stuff later!

cheers,

cb

re: a moon moon made of copper

Hello lovers, fans, friends and foe,

how's it going? here's a new video offering, a video poem for my new book called, "A moon made of copper," featuring music by yours truly and my old pal Sean Luciw. We recorded this in about 2003, but i think i wrote it back in the 1990's.

making some good changes in my life, and will be continuing to upload new things as times go on and i get on with it.

cheers,


cb

re: street legal.....

hi lovers,

here's some street art that myself and KAST painted recently at a local high school in Kamloops, BC. after several years of doing FREE workshops in high schools, it feels good to finally get somewhere. although now, there's plenty of competition whereas there once none before. we started a good thing, and now others are getting on the workshop train. it's crazy. we're trying to show people that street art is vibrant, colourful, a safe means of self-expression, not gang related, not vandalism if done legally and properly. 

we did this in about an hour and a half. when we get going we can crush it out quickly.

enjoy,

cb

as you can see, we start with 6 sheets of plywood

at 4 x 8 feet in size.

they were from an art show we had at Arnica Artist Run Centre

we never buffed the wood, we just painted over them

at this time of year, buffing a wall means waiting over an hour

for the paint to dry before you can start painting.

I did two new fun characters and KAST wrote

some fresh new letters.

literally it is an explosion of colour.

Juxtaposed against the bland wall

of the high school, it just leaps out

adding much needed colour and life.

re: 1001 posts

hello friends, family, ex's, lovers and fans,

hope all is well in your world, i'm doing alright in mine. just painted a bunch of murals across canada, starting in montreal at a 'decolonizing street art,' festival, the 1st year, then i was in prince albert, saskatchewan where the indigenous people's artist collective commissioned me to paint a large mural for their 2 story cafe festival. i also did a book launch there for my new book, 'a moon made of copper,' then i went to vancouver and victoria for art, book launch and a gig with "the monster project," the band for the grunt gallery's 30 anniversary party. things didn't go as planned, but i still had fun in vancouver. then i was in boundary country where i ended my little mural tour across canada and had a lot of fun and met a lot of great people.

so, for now, here's a few photos from the boundary country mural i did with the grade 11/12 class, and something for you to check out. as well as some graff i did here in kamloops at a local high school with my bro KAST. it's nice to be able to finally paint stuff legally and have fun, while bringing art to the streets and the students. opening minds and ideas to street art, proving it can be fun, safe and non-gang related. i'm going to breathe some life back to my blog and start posting again.  been through a lot the past year or two, and was burnt out and tired, but i'm finally feeling good. taking a bit of a break from the art world has been great. the band i'm in, "the monster project," is exciting and fun, mixing heavy guitars, atmospheric guitars and with dj beats and live visuals by Deano Hunt and Bracken Hanuse Corlett respectively.

well, we'll talk more soon and i hope you come back and keep checking out the blog and art, and adventures!

cheers,

cb

the concept sketch

the concept sketched in on the wall

the tarp to protect us

and the mural from the elements.

first gig with scaffolding

putting the kids to work!

get'r done!

painting.

ladder painters

the art teacher was 6 foot 9

we used kobra cans

for the waves

but ran out.

and ordered more

they arrived on the final day

of painting.

whew.

the finished mural!

took 8 days, at about 10 - 12 hours or so

in total. 

re: my writing process, sort of a response to joanne arnott's blog!

hello friends, fans, foe and lovers,

back again, it's been awhile, i lose my way on the internet quite often as well as damn passwords. haha. with so many websites and stuff to take care of, passwords get mixed up and forgotten. i hope all is well wherever you are, and this blog is about a project joanne arnott started, she's been the editor for my last two books of poetry, "Stone the Crow," and my newest one, "A Moon Made of Copper," which comes out July 15 nationwide through Kegedonce Press.

without further ado, let's begin with some questions:

What am i working on?

Well, i just finished working on my latest book of poetry and non-fiction called, "A Moon Made of Copper," with Joanne Arnott. It's all new work, written in the past 4 years since my last book, "Stone the Crow," which seems like an impossibly long time. I don't write all the time, or very often in fact due to the reasons of being a workshop facilitator, artist, dad, filmmaker, musician and so on. i'm spread a little thin i guess, but i do believe this is my strongest work i've written. focussing is a challenge, haha, but i'm going to probably start writing more, it's just discipline. i used to get up every morning and write for about 3 or 4 hours every single day, and then spend the afternoon sort of editing what i'd written.

but to be an "artist," for a living, means diversification. you have to be able to do a bit of everything to make a buck, workshops in filmmaking, photography, mural painting, street art, even music and songwriting along with creative writing. if you were to do only one discipline, you would not be able to survive. so i'm busy doing a bunch of other things and i think i'm going to slow down and write some grants to do research and development into creating a new body of work artistically and creative writing as well. i also am the creative director for the arbour collective, a group nacoma george and i started back in 2011, so we do community  based arts projects throughout the kamloops area and that's nearly a full time gig on top of everything else. it's a bit hectic, but we're representing aboriginal artists, filmmakers, writers and musicians here in the kamloops area and beyond. we had about 7 exhibitions in 4 different cities, as well as a 10 artist residency last year, which was insane. we're slowing down a little this year. haha. just a bit.

how does my work differ from others of its genre?

that's a good question. i think there's this "sacredness," aboriginal authors tenderly tip toe around, many do not tread on the "black road,"which to me is the path that is infinitely wide and often without direction. in the writing of many other aboriginal authors, their writing, reflects the "red road," or the higher ground and "sacred," or holistic way of living. i choose to go to the darker places, sometimes lonelier, sometimes intoxicating, sometimes crazy places to live and be instead of the red road. this reflects the life i've known growing up, both my parents went to residential school, and both were basically put through the meat grinder. they've made their choices to deal with what they went through and more often than not, it meant getting numb by any means necessary. usually alcohol. so i guess i'm saying i'm not afraid to be "real," and write about what i know, how i live, or what i've done on the black road. it's not for everyone, but if you're a fan of leonard cohen or charles bukowksi or the beats, allen ginsberg, jack kerouac, and william s. burroughs, then you'll likely dig my new book, "A Moon Made of Copper."

why do i write what i do?

this is an easy question, because i write what i know about or experience. i'm not a "fiction," writer, because life is crazy enough i don't have to make things up. haha. growing up aboriginal in canada isn't the most easy experience. there's violence, abuse, racism, but also family, ceremonies, songs, stories and incredible amounts of laughter and good times. everyone has a story, it's just finding out a way to tell it. i guess i've also lead a pretty crazy life, done an incredible amount of traveling and performing for most of my life, so telling these stories is a way to remember things.

how does my writing process work?

a long time ago, i used to do everything longhand, then computers came along and i remember bashing away on a monochrome monitor computer, using dos, and some really primitive word processing project. that must be over 20 years ago. wow. haha. i use a computer almost always, unless i'm not near one, then i'll write it out by hand. i used to self-publish a lot, i think i did about 4 books back in the 1990's, as well book my own reading tours and get them into stores on consignment deals or outright selling them. i toured most of b.c. and sold about 500 books or more. i used to do all sorts of things for promotional give aways, bookmarks, post cards, posters, and so on. i think it's because i come from a musical background, having to do our own tours, posters, shirts and so on, i applied the same skills to poetry and creative writing. haha.

i think i process things for a long time before i start writing about them. i usually get an idea for a poem while traveling, mountain biking or doing an art project. something gets triggered and if i don't jot it down right away it gets lost. i don't do a lot of navel gazing, because i don't have time, haha, so when i get an idea i have to act on it. i think i've got a new direction to go in soon, would like to do some non-fiction. about 10 years ago, i wrote 3 books back to back, the first one i've been re-editing so maybe i'll try to get it out next year. time to get back to writing every day. maybe here on the blog. i don't know. we'll have to see.

also, never underestimate the support of a mentor. i was lucky enough to have Garry Gottfriedson mentor me when i really started to get serious about creative writing, some 20 years ago! as well, about 10 years ago Richard Van Camp mentored me as well to the next level. these friendships came about because of my stubborn persistence to get published. haha. i passed along my poetry to both of those authors and they contacted me or i contacted them and they helped me out by getting my work stronger creatively and to continue working to find my "voice." also, this is a long road, i've been writing over 20 years. i got published in about 20 literary magazines before i got my first book deal. it's a tough slog, but it's worth it. even though my subject matter is dark, i break it up really well during readings with humour and observations. again, my history as a musician has probably really helped me be comfortable on a stage in front of lots of people. never underestimate your strengths.

the cover art for my next book

by Bracken Hanuse Corlett.

well, that's about it. i'll get back on here more often now that i remembered my password!!! haha!

thanks to Joanne Arnott for editing my book "A Moon Made of Copper," coming out July 15 through Kegedonce Press. Thanks to everyone at Kegedonce press, Kateri Akiwenzie Damm, Renee Abram and Allison Brown. Thanks to Bracken Hanuse Corlett and Amanda Strong for the awesome cover art.

re: waiting for springtime......

hello lovers,

i hope it's warm wherever you may be. it's cold still in kamloops, bc, we've got snow on the ground still in the mountains around town and it's just perpetually chilly. here are some older photos showing what we miss around town. warmth. greenery. plants. animals. life. it's kind of void right now, but it'll get better. in the meantime, enjoy the photos and see you real soon,

chris. 

kamloops summer time haze, looking west

as the sun sets.

one of my girls. delicately trying to hold

a flower, it was so cute. i remember this like it was yesterday.

my son, this is several years ago

at harrison lake, which is bloody cold.

this was in august or september

we just went for a road trip and decided

to drive to the coast and see family.

i remember the smell of smoke

in the crisp fall air.

re: what i did last summer.......

hello lovers,

last summer, while working on the "crawling, weeping, betting," project in vancouver, my friend david let me crash at his apartment downtown vancouver. it was awesome. shenanigans ensued for sure. but i also took my kids down for a week, we left kamloops on canada day, the temperature was hitting 41 celcius and i thought it was the perfect time to get the hell out of town. 

so we went to vancouver, where it was a balmy 26 celcius, and it was so trying, so fun, and so exhausting. i would need a nanny to help me do that again. i learned my limitations as a parent on that trip. haha. we also discovered it was cheaper to catch a cab from english bay to helmecken. $7.50, the bus, $11.00. plus hot, packed like sardines, sweaty, gross and some real sketchy people. what do you think we did? especially after a long day wandering around exploring the city with kids? 

but we had a great time and they got to see some cool things, soak up the vibe of the big city, the homeless, the crowded bus #23 or was it #21? as well as a boat ride, playing on the beach at english bay, playing in a rooftop garden, and generally running around downtown vancouver just being kids and having fun. it cost a small fortune to feed them, but it was worth it. i hope some good memories were created for them on that trip. 

this seems like a travel blog right now, but that's what happens when you travel a lot. we'll get back to art soon enough. plus, this is good for me to revisit all these good and crazy times. it was weird to be in vancouver at such dizzying highs last year, compared to such crushing lows when i was a kid, wandering the streets aimlessly, lost, hungry and almost another lost street kid. another statistic. what saved me and pulled me off the streets was my cousin jackie. she brought me to her apartment on davie street. gave me a guitar and a sense of purpose. it hasn't stopped since i was 16 and life has taken me around the world and across canada and the united states way too many times to count and sometimes remember. sometimes when you follow your path, the one you know you need to follow, against all odds and bullshit, you might just make it. 

and if you don't at least you tried. there's plenty of time to join the drones and dig yourself a happy or miserable little rut like the rest, but for now, keep givn'r. 

looking back on all these photos makes me smile. i wouldn't be where i am without the help of a lot of people. you know who you are, and thank you! and thanks david for letting us crash at your place! it was kick ass!

cheers,

chris bose. 

my daughter on the little boat in false creek

my son in english bay

my youngest monkey playing 

in the elevator. 

they handled the change

really well. the city didn't really phase them.

haha. 

"what do you think all these people are doing daddy?"

i don't know honey. i don't know.