Places to Play

Kids don’t need an invitation to play. I have two nieces and a nephew who take any opportunity to transform their beds into trampolines, couches into jungle gyms, boxes into forts, living rooms into dance floors. 

Adults, on the other hand, need to be told to play. In a world where speed and efficiency are rewarded, play is underrated but oh so necessary. 

Westlake Park, Seattle

This temporary art installation by Downtown Seattle Association invites people to do just that: take a break from the hustle and bustle of everyday life and play. Their website says they “offer a variety of daily games and activations – from ping pong to foosball.” When I was there the other weekend, I noticed a play area for kids, as well as portable library with books for kids and adults to enjoy.

In their other location, Occidental Square, they had a life-sized chess game. This square was really empty on a Monday morning at 9am, but I wonder how much traffic it gets other times. Do people respond to these efforts at interaction and creativity? Do you?

You can see the “PLAY” blocks in the far left corner of Occidental Square, Seattle

Seattle isn’t the only city encouraging its residents to play. I’ve encountered similar efforts in New York City and Amsterdam through public art, life-sized chess games, public pianos, and letters to climb.

Perhaps this sign is more popular with tourists (guilty), but fun nonetheless

Where there are life-sized letters, there are people wanting to climb them. Heck, there are people wanting to climb almost anything. These jellybeans that were in Vancouver’s Charleson Park are a prime example. I think some of the most effective public artworks are ones that can be touched. Humans are so hungry for contact. 

Love Your Bean by Cosimo Cavallaro in Charleston Park, Vancouver. This public artwork was a Vancouver Biennale project and has since been removed, sadly.

When I think of the word play, I think of a piano. Its presence in my various apartments over the years is akin to a good friend’s quiet constancy. For me, a piano is not just an instrument, but a physical space to unravel myself. I much prefer playing to my ears alone, but I appreciate the public pianos cropping up in virtually every city (or in Victoria’s case, along the beach where I played only to wave, wind, and husband). 

My favourite public piano so far, Victoria

Friends in Okotoks, AB

The above images all strike me as examples of placemaking, a word popular in urban planning spheres for the last few decades.

Project for Public Spaces, based in New York, has a concise article summarizing this hands-on approach to making neighbourhoods and cities more enjoyable places to live, work, and play.

With community-based participation at its center, an effective placemaking process capitalizes on a local community’s assets, inspiration, and potential, and it results in the creation of quality public spaces that contribute to people’s health, happiness, and well being.

I’ll share one last example from Seattle that literally appeared like a hole in the wall. I don’t know if it was a community-driven initiative, but it felt like it fulfills the last part of the above quote. I was walking to King’s Street Station from Occidental Square to catch the bus back to Vancouver when a sign on a gate reminiscent of a high-security prison stopped me. 

Say what? How could something beautiful hide behind such ugly doors? But when I stepped inside, I kind of liked this incongruity between outside and inside, catching me unawares. 

Just as adults need places to play, we also need places to rest like this Waterfall Garden Park. An oasis of quiet and calm. I sat on one of these chairs and listened to the music of the waterfall, feeling like I had found a diamond in the rough.

Do you have any stories like this of surprise urban retreats? What’s one of your favourite places to play or rest that you’ve encountered in a city? I’d love to hear!

Valentine’s in Victoria

Thanks to Miss604 and the Victoria Film Fest, I won a trip for two to Victoria last weekend, which also happened to be Valentine’s Day weekend. I’ve never won something like this before, so that was particularly exciting and it came at such a great time for the Artist and I.

Part of the getaway package was round trip flights by float plane, which I’ve wanted to do ever since seeing Reese Witherspoon reject her opportunity in Sweet Home Alabama. (what was she thinking?!) This was on the Artist’s bucket list too, and we both loved it.

The plane fit 12 people plus the pilot. We sat at the back and watched as our beautiful city faded from view—the downtown office towers, Lion’s Gate Bridge, Stanley Park, UBC. And then we oohed and ahhed as we flew low over the Gulf Islands, trying to identify which ones we were looking at. If you don’t like a lot of turbulence, a float plane is probably not for you as you do feel every dip and turn that much more than on a regular plane, but as someone who loves that sinking feeling you get from roller coaster rides, I was totally in my element.

We landed in Victoria Harbour just 30 minutes from when we left Vancouver. How fast is that?! SO beats taking the ferry. And then we walked to our hotel, none other than the iconic, Edwardian, château-style Empress Hotel built in 1908 and designated a National Historic Site of Canada. To say we were excited was an understatement!

The hotel is beautiful, inside and out. And the staff there are so delightful. They asked us if we wanted a romantic room in the turret with a round bed, and we were like, “Yeah we do!” Can’t say I’d ever seen or known round beds existed before this trip! We stayed in the turret at the back of the hotel on the 7th floor. The only unfortunate thing was that the Empress is undergoing major construction right now so the central facade that is normally covered in ivy and shows the magnificent letters of the hotel name was hidden under  a large white sheet with a printed facsimile of the exterior.

love this arched hallway!

view from the window

That’s our room up in the turret with the blinds drawn

Staying at the Empress was ideal for walking around downtown because the hotel is situated right there, in the Inner Harbour.

You could tell love was in the air that weekend, from the decorated lampposts to the rose salads at Wild Coffee and the “kissing bench” that we couldn’t resist 😉

In the evening, we saw Our Little Sister at the Victoria Film Fest, a simple yet beautiful Japanese movie about sisterhood that was one of the best storytelling I’ve seen on cinema in a long time. (I’ll save my thoughts on that for another blog post because it needs more space than this).

Before we left on Sunday afternoon, we took a stroll to colourful Fisherman’s Wharf and saw some seals putting on a show for the crowd.

It was a wonderful way to spend Valentine’s and we are so grateful for the generosity of all who were involved!

A Street Named Faithful

The art & literature magazine ArtAscent had a call for submissions on the theme of “Home”. I submitted the poem below based on my year living in Victoria. You can read the poem that was just recently published in the mag here. I’m also including it below as, unfortunately, the photograph that inspired the piece was not published with it, and I think it helps the poem make sense.

A Street Named Faithful

Tucked between ocean and city

you’re hard to find

and not that faithful

with faded blue skin

and chipped front tooth

how could I walk by each day and believe in you?

 

Even when set in concrete

raised eyebrows and question marks follow your name

because you’re not a place

yet I knew where I was with you

 

Carrying heavy bags of groceries

past the Victorian house on your corner

my soles walking the rhythms of your concrete

wishing you weren’t so long

 

Rainy mornings you felt my canvas shoes

the sharp point of my umbrella

poking the crevices

testing the depth of your foundation

 

My first greeting when I left the house

and the word calling me back

you let me know I was safe

home on a street named Faithful

 

If a streetcar named Desire

takes me away in my youth

in my old age

I will return to you

 

Cracked and peeling

when my colour has faded

and I have my own chipped front tooth

to find time and erosion

left their marks

but couldn’t erase you

 

© Charlene Kwiatkowski

To the Island

My less frequent posts as of late have been in part due to a vacation I took to Vancouver Island. I like to call it my “To the Island” trip as a take-off on Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse.

She felt… how life, from being made up of little separate incidents which one lived one by one, became curled and whole like a wave which bore one up with it and threw one down with it, there, with a dash on the beach.

I visited several small towns along the east coast that I’ve never been to before, including Crofton, Ladysmith, Duncan, and then up to Nanaimo and down to Victoria (which I have been to before since I lived there as a grad student).

I’m not one for small towns, but I concede there is a certain charm to them when visiting. I was pleasantly surprised at the plethora of used bookstores and vintage/consignment clothing shops in a number of places. Aaron Espe captures the small town life in this song:

And I’ve tried to capture some photos that, even if they don’t exactly characterize the town, at least characterize my experience of that particular town:

Ladysmith

There’s only one main street running through Ladysmith. It hosted the town’s annual “show and shine.”

If that wasn’t rural enough, I was about to get even more country by staying on this picturesque farm on the outskirts of town.

Crofton

A day lounging at the beach, petting goats, and walking the boardwalk around Crofton’s harbour.

Duncan

The town doesn’t look like much from the highway, but once you turn off and actually get into the downtown area, it has some really quaint spots. Duncan is also known as “The City of Totems.” Apparently there’s over 80.

Nanaimo

Home of Nanaimo bars and Diana Krall. Lovely, colourful harbour city.

Victoria

I took the least amount of pictures here, probably because I took so many when I lived in this city. In any case, I love visiting this old “home” and running the ocean route along Dallas Road I used to do as a student.

Pico Iyer says we carry many versions of home inside of us and I think that is very true. Sometimes we may even call a place home that we’ve never lived in but dream of living in, because we spend just as much time thinking about it. I had never thought about that until he said it, but it made sense. Vancouver was home to me long before I moved there. So, where is home for you? Small town, big city? Both?

Here’s the TED talk if you have fifteen minutes:

Let there be Light

I get a Carleton alumni magazine a few times a year, and in the latest issue, I was really happy to read the MacOdrum Library is getting a much needed facelift.

MacOdrum Library. Don’t be fooled – building in picture looks nicer than in reality

This library is so ugly it never once crossed my mind to take a picture of it in the four years I was there, and I take pictures of a lot of things. So ugly that a prof even went on a rant one class about how uninspiring it is, and how can students be expected to respect a space that doesn’t respect itself? The only good thing about that library was its hours–it stayed open pretty late, but I’ve heard that has since changed.

As the article says, everybody hates the tiny, jail cell windows. Ask anyone who’s ever studied there. And unless you have a super long torso, there’s no chance you’re even going to get a view of the quad because the windows are way too high. Did the architects think students would be less distracted if they didn’t have a window to look out of?

The renovation plan, which aims to be completed by the end of 2013, is to push out the front by six meters and to cover those four floors with one large window. The space between the current wall and the new wall will be a socializing/group study space. This expansion also seeks to rectify the growing problem of a lack of study carrels by increasing its seats from 1200 to 2000.

The future MacOdrum Library. SO. MUCH. BETTER.

Too bad it didn’t look like that when I was there. You can imagine my relief when I arrived at the University of Victoria for grad school and was greeted with this:

William C Mearns Library. What a difference!
Photograph by Vince Klassen. © 2008 UVic Communications

That entire glass wing is called the Students Galleria and it has extremely comfortable chairs. I would sit with my books and my laptop and bathe in the bright sunlight, waiting for inspiration to strike or maybe burn me through those windows, and the connection between libraries and illumination was all too clear but I didn’t care if it was cliché because here was a spot I liked to study. In openness, in light.

Where the magic happened

These two university libraries got me thinking about a loosely similar contrast in the New York Public Library. When I was there with a friend last October, our tour guide pointed to the ceiling in the antechamber of the breathtaking Rose Main Reading Room.

mural in antechamber of NYPL reading room

The antechamber features a large mural with dark, chaotic clouds packed together. It’s supposed to make you feel tense, unsure, because that’s how research often is. You embark on a project and have no idea what you’re getting into.

But as you stick with it, either you get used to the dark or it’s actually not dark anymore (see the Emily Dickinson poem below), and suddenly, you’re in a completely new space. The clouds part, the sky speaks in a softer blue, and the sun shines gloriously through.

New York Public Library Main Reading Room

Let there be light.

We grow accustomed to the Dark–

When Light is put away–

As when the Neighbor holds the Lamp

To witness her Goodbye–

 

A Moment–We uncertain step

For newness of the night–

Then–fit our Vision to the Dark–

And meet the Road–erect–

 

And so of larger–Darknesses

Those Evenings of the Brain–

When not a Moon disclose a sign–

Or Star–come out—within–

 

The Bravest–grope a little–

And sometimes hit a Tree

Directly in the Forehead–

But as they learn to see–

 

Either the darkness alters–

Or something in the sight

Adjusts itself to Midnight–

And Life steps almost straight.

 

~Emily Dickinson

The Yellow Room

Last week I wrote about spaces that famous authors have lived and wrote in. I said I would invite you into a former writing space of mine, so here it is:

I knew happiness whenever I entered my Anne of Green Gables loft with yellow paint that complemented the Jack Vettriano hanging above my bed. The angled skylight amplified the sound of West Coast rain drumming me to sleep many a night; the south-facing window offered a cropped view of paragliders sailing effortlessly through the skies above Victoria’s Dallas Road. They say different spaces make you feel different ways, and I felt home when I turned the knob of that bedroom door I was almost too tall to walk through. I remember the morning sun streaming through the blinds, making patterned rainbows on my wall that could be the subject of an Impressionist painting; the smell of the ocean when I opened the window and let the salty Pacific air waft through my fairytale space in all its glory. I even had a little writer’s desk that looked towards the ocean that I couldn’t see as much as I could sense. I couldn’t have asked for a better space. I think I could almost endure windowless, dreary basement suites for the rest of my life because I had one year in that yellow room—a room of my own, thank you Virginia Woolf. It made me want to write in it and about it, although I wish I had written less fact and more fiction. I got through grad school pouring copious cups of tea for myself while poring over books, articles, and notes that ate up all my energy for creative leftovers, every last drop, and what little I saved I brought to the ocean to contemplate, rejuvenate, and forget.

Okay, so I tend to be a bit melodramatic when I write for myself (this was an excerpt from my journal), but from looking at the room, does it not live up to the image I painted of it? I think so. Oh how I miss that yellow room, that space that apparently I grew so exhausted in writing academically that I gave up on writing creatively, although what was I thinking? When will I have such an inspiring place again, or so much mental stimulation?

What’s your writing space? Do you have “a yellow room?”