Stop me if you've heard this one before...

Apparently the Urban Culture Conference and Awards is having slower ticket sales than they expected. How do I know this? Because they have trotted out the 'Vancouver sucks' card, and I quote, "Vancouver has had an historic reputation for lacking the community spirit necessary for a festival like the one we planned." Really? How could people possibly not be interested in shelling out of a conference of "all things Vancouver" that, for one, is even called the "Urban Culture" anything. I'm willing to bet if you were to talk to anyone anywhere in North America about "urban culture" in it's general usage as inner-city African-American/Afro-Carribean Vancouver would be pretty much the last place to come up in that conversation (O.K., Igloolik would probably be the last place to come up, but still, you get my point.)

But given the 2004-ish hipster icon and the fact that one of their initial selling points was "low-rider cars" (see this early version of the conference map) and the visuals in their promo video I've pretty much assumed a broader use of the term "urban culture" to mean something akin to "stuff people do in the cities on TV." In fact I have been referring to at the "suburban douchebag conference" as it seems firmly rooted in the culture of the cookie-cutter Granville bars and what is sold as cool on TV. Maybe they are having trouble selling tickets because a good percentage of their target maket has been arrested for setting cars on fire and looting?

So why would I even enter the awards contest when this is what I think of the conference? The first reason is that someone whose work I really don't like was doing reasonably well at the point I entered and it made me curious how I would do. I looked at the front runners in some of the other categories and noticed some strange things. For example, a boutique commercial gallery in Yaletown was way out in front of far more notable galleries, including what I would absolutely expect to to be the front-runner in a genuinely popular vote, the Vancouver Art Gallery. This made me curious and I did some checking into the people running the conference and the front-runners and I found a lot of connections that made me firmly believe that the whole thing was not about "showcasing the true, unfiltered skills of the city" but really about a back-patting collective for Yaletown SEO snake-oil salesmen and online gambling sheisters. Having spent now over two decades steeping in the "fringe" culture of local artists, designers, musicians, and other creative people that stuggle against the tide of mediocrity and imported, mass-media, mass-produced culture represented by this conference, I found myself very interested in seeing how far I could get in the one category I am best known for, photography.

Could a dark horse from outside the connected circle that got a head start with the voting make a showing? Apparently so. It seems having a presence in and working in my own small way to bolster the creative scene I enjoy for a couple decades has created a big enough bubble of micro-celebrity to float me to the top in the photography category. Whether I am still there in a few weeks when the voting is done remains to be seen. Online voting is pretty fantastically flawed, and there have been some pretty blatant cheaters using means like GetOnlineVotes.com and other tricks.

If so much as one person wakes up enough to realize that rehashing L.A. is not "everything Vancouver" and that there is more out there than what's on American television, I'm happy. It'll be an interesting problem if I actually win and have to come up with something to say to a Granville Street nightclub full of the sort of people that have been yelling "freak" and "faggot" at me my whole life.