Take a moment today to remember those that laid down their lives so that we might enjoy ours.

Man of Investigation on Flickr.

Via Flickr:
Now that the wax has cooled, I can finally share my liner shot of the D. Trevlon Band, appearing inside their most excellent new CD ‘Man of Investigation’, available here.

Excellent music and, a real pleasure to work with them.

Foggy Industry on Flickr.

Via Flickr:
From my window on a November Monday morning.

More of the past disappears on Flickr.

Via Flickr:
There wasn’t a particularly good vantage point to show this now empty lot at the corner of Alberni and Thurlow Street downtown but, the building that previously stood there wasn’t much to look at either.

A parking lot with retail on the ground floor and sort of a restaurant mall in the basement, the building won’t be missed by any but a few.

It did have a few tenants over the years to recommend it though. Most notably Vancouver’s Theatre Sports League, where noted comics such as Ryan Stiles, Colin Mochrie, Dean Haglund and Nancy Robertson got their starts, made it’s home here in the late 80’s and early 90’s. And, of course, if you lived downtown at all in the last 20+ years, you knew that this building held the liquor store that stayed open until 11!

Of primary interest to your narrator, however, is the little café that sublet the space in front of the theatre, the Passion House. It was here I met many of the people that I still consider amongst my closest friends, discovered that coffee can indeed be a very effective hallucenogen, spent an entire unemployment insurance claim playing chess, fell in and out of love a dozen or so times (the last one stuck to this day), learned to roll cigarettes without putting down either the one I was smoking or my beer, read Leonard Cohen, Lao Tzu and Friederich Nietszche, pretended to read Proust and Coleridge.

It was probably the last place downtown that you could sit and nurse a coffee all day with 25¢ refills and join pretty much any table at pretty much any time.

Oh, and the light in the place was simply marvelous. I’ve really got to dig up some of the pictures I took there and post them.

It shouldn’t be a surprise that it didn’t last. For the last 20 years, the space had become a McDonalds, pretty much a complete negation of all it had been. I’m glad the building has gone now. It’s never good to be reminded that your warmest memories happened on the ground floor of a parking garage.