Looking back on my early Vancouver school days, I remember the many teachers and fellow students I encountered, both the good and the bad.

I went to a primary school in southeast Vancouver named Walter Moberly Annex from Grades 1 to 3. By that time the strap was rarely used, but teachers found other means to discipline. Some primary school teachers would just give a misbehaving student a spanking, which I received more than once that first year because I was unable to concentrate on a subject. Later, another teacher gave me a terrible shaking for the same reason. It was very frightening.

By Roxanne Beatty

By Ron McGrath

Look to the future, it’s time to solve today’s homelessness. Everybody deserves their own privacy and sense of self-worth. The province is spending all kinds of money on renovated housing, but I don’t recommend that kind of housing for anyone.

I have been chased out of BC Housing because of environmental illness. They’ve told me that all of their places are the same and that there is no place for me.

By Kevin Hollett

“I wasn’t a hippie and I wasn’t a disco chick. What the fuck was I?”

So asks Mary Armstrong, aka Mary-Jo Kopechene, former bassist of The Modernettes, in Susanne Tabata’s documentary on Vancouver’s punk rock scene of the late-1970s and early-1980s.

By Monte Paulsen

Last summer, Vancouver city council invited several B.C.-based companies to submit ideas about how modular housing might be employed to house the homeless.

Three container-based proposals were among the five submitted. One firm offered to build a 43-suite supportive housing complex at no cost to taxpayers. Another offered to lease dormitory-style rooms for only $350 a month. Yet another offered to build a similar project from scratch using local labour at its Coquitlam factory.

After the first time I participated in the hunger relay for housing and homelessness, the first meal I ate after fasting for a week was a smokie hotdog . The effect of all those processed chemicals and meats sent me into a red food dye number 5 delirium high that was the best and worst meal I have ever eaten.

By Elecia Chrunik
Photos by maxw

Many aspects of music have changed dramatically in the last decade and more. With the advent of digital music, the ever-shrinking portable music player and big box, chain store takeovers, the way listeners consume music hardly resembles the days when spinning black vinyl was practically the only option to hear music. But there always has been, and hopefully always will be, the never-wavering music junkies that are dedicated to buying music and supporting artists and their local independent music shops.