Melting point

[Bglass]

So i just got back from canada, and the main stop was melting point. straight up the best stuff ive ever layed eyes on. all the artists that i admire had stuff there and i didnt even know. JP, Jason Lee, bearclaw and others. the max polin piece blew my fricken mind because it was so huge. i mean huge. i probably coulnt even pick it up and come close to working it. definetly worth the 8 grand or so for it. that was the other thing that blew my mind, the prices. definetly wish i was in their shoes. the lee pieces started at 5000 or something like that. the recent ones he posted on glasspipes. bearclaws pieces was extreamly tall, which was sweet. the faceted crystals in the pics dont do justice. in real life they look exactaly like crystals shooting up. but my favorite of all of them is JP's soldier guy. it was a lot bigger than i thought it was. super clean and had so much imagination, definetly sick. it seemed if a store had prodo and higher end prodo slinger was in every single case. some of the doublers are huge. he and the other guy who made the surfing rat piece. brian i think. that brian guy had the most glass in b.c. stragiht up. everysingle shop. up there they are still on the joint and tube seen, probably vapors too, seeing how every counter had one set up. i saw a lot of crappy tubes get bought up. B.C. definetly doesnt have the glass we do here, but its cool how its portrayed there. in any shop here on any given day we have four times as much glass in a shop than up there. i thought i was just going to be overwelmed with prodo and glass everywhere. but wasnt. i think i have more glass in my droors here at home than they do in a shop. but its all good. it was quite the culture shock and change. but it makes for a tidey and clean shop which was super nice.
one last thing, if you thought we had crack heads, think again. we are lucky to not have as bad of crakys. hastings crack heads are more hard core than even the hardest crack head here in washington. i was litterally amazed,never have i ever seen anything so bad. my friend who is a girl pretty much cried passing through the twenty or more block of just crack heads. she got real upset seeing a sixteen year old girl bleeding and half alive. no joke. they all line up to get there shots and run around. litterally i think some of the people i saw were dead. talking to people, they made me realize the situation is more worse than i could even ever imagine. im sorry to say all this but i was extreamly suprised, and i think probably anybody who goes down hastings to commercial would agree. and thats not even the alleys. thats where they make them stay, its horrible to see so many down and out people. i was depresses till the bubble. so atleast i feel a little better living next to longview, because not one person ive seen even close to the people i saw there. im not saying its b.c. and is bad or dont go there, the scenery is the most beautiful place ive been too. i was just culture shocked and dont have anyone to tell it too. sorry if i set a bad picture, but it was worse than i could describe. so if your doing crack or heroin, id say re think your life real quick.
but on a better note, props to all the guys who worked their asses off to get all of the amazing pieces up there. it definetly inspired, and gratified me. and mow i have a huge amount of respect for all of you, and the heady blowers. Jason lee pieces in person is the cleanest piece ive ever seen and will for a long time. his techinical skill is at the peak of work. hes the shit. saw my first deppe piece too. the eye and faces one. lot smaller than i thought but perfectly struck and worked. sweet.
peace and thanks for reading my ramblings.

[rustyglass]

I wish I could have seen them. The pieces, not the crackheadz.

Rusty

[jeh glass]

did you happen to see a piece by myself (JEH) and troy bennett? we sent it there but have not heard from them yet and have not been able to get through to anyone. just kinda wonderin what the deal is. thanx

[slinger]

HAHA. Interesting observations about Vancouver. You are very right about the glass scene here being very different from the States. Honestly living here made me realize that the whole glass fanatacism IS the U.S. , the rest of the world just doesnt care nearly as much about glass pipes or 'heady" glass. Vancouver and Canada in general is predominanlty a rolling paper society, and otherwise a few peeps here fancy a big tube. As a result, stores dont carry nearly the quanitity and/or selection compared to shops in the U.S., and even then a good portion of the pieces in the shops in Vancouver end up being sold to tourists, mainly Americans. Even lots of glass pipemakers ive met up here roll mostly and dont even use pipes much themselves. So when it comes to selling more expensive artsy pieces, its very difficult because no one has them, there is no reference, and to the average Canadian smoker spending a couple hundred dollars on a pipe is crazy, let alone a couple grand. So shops fear carrying much more than "high end prodo" or "prodo headdies" as i call them.

The difference btw the States and the rest of the world i believe is the whole "tour" scene. With the Dead and Phish and other "jam" bands touring the states extensively for decades, bringing the "lot" culture to every town USA, the culture of glass pipes spread and evolved in the States; and now we have the pipe scene we have today. Once upon a time a pipe for $420 was a specimen of a blowers best work, his tour de force; now a piece with a prcie tag of " a thousand dollars" doesnt surprise anyone. I was on phish tour with Jason Lee in 1998 and he had a piece with him for $420, which had every tech he knew at the moment in it, ohhh how times have changed. But this cultural phenomenon and the evolution of art glass pipes hasnt ever happened here in Canada. in 2002 i was joking up here that the pipe scene was still in 1997 or so. Ive been good friends with the guy who does the bubblebags up here for awhile, and when he opened his store, the Melting Point, i approached him about having a glass pipe show. I wanted to do this for many reasons, but one important one was that i was intent to expose Vancouver to the eclectic world of art glass pipes and all the stlyes and artists involved. With Vancouver's reputation for being a "pot friendly" city, it didnt make sense to me that the art of the glass pipe was not known here.

This year i didnt have much to do with putting on the show. Last year i did all of the planning and initial work on putting the show together myself, and it took up so much of my time that i barely got my rent paid let alone had no time to make a piece of art myself for exhibition. This year the staff at the Melting Point used my template and info i left them to put it together again. When i get a chance i will roll thru there and try and get some pics, but i broke my digi camera so i'm officially lagging. And i would like to get some pics of the piece i made, the guy above didnt even seem to notice it. Maybe thats because my piece wasnt "functional"? :P

oh and about the crackhead situation. From an outsiders perspective it does seem like total chaos on hastings btw commercial and cambie, but i dont know if im used to it or what, but the situation isnt as bad as it might seem. In those neighborhoods there are lots of groups and organizations working with those people to keep them and non-users more healthy and safe. There are safe injection/inhalation sites and social workers and volunteers working in these neighborhoods to help addicts. The cops dont just put every user in the alleyways in jail, so yeah, we have open using, but most of the addicts are pretty harmless and non violent. With the proliferation of drug use in that neighborhood, if that was in the United States id expect alot of violence and gang presence due to the money that can be made off slinging drugs, but its a relatively safe area to walk through. Junkies are just people with a disease. I had a friend who used to work at a safe injection site and at a welfare hotel and i spent a few nights with her on the job to see first hand what was going on down there. We walked the alleys @ 3am giving out clean needles, crack pipes and condoms, and it was pretty amazing to interact with people that many just disregard as "crackheads and junkies". To me they were just people. They were thankful for that someone actually cared about there welfare. Its hard to explain, but yeah its sad either way...... i live right on the edge of that hood.

on a lighter note, this is one of the most beautiful cities i have ever been too.

ps... shoutout to Bearclaw.... it was nice meeting you, hope you and the fam had fun in Van...... sweet work!

[slinger]

ps.... Jeh, your piece made it. I guess a few came late. I havent seen it yet, but my shopmate saw it the other day. That ease piece on gp.org i guess is there now too. Ill "try" to snap pics, but argghh, no camera.

[Bglass]

yeah i thought it was cool that when you first walk in to the meltingpoint marbleslinger had a huge coffin type box with a broken manican i think. around it was a bunch of scrap glass and nice headdie pieces of glass that didnt make the cut. i thought it was pretty cool because, i think every blower has a huge box of scraps that they either dont know what to do with or dont want to take the time. so it was like an art piece dedicated to all us blowers, definetly cool.
yeah there was a JEH piece, i remember because i was just looking at that piece before i left. i was so overwhelmed with all art there i was bouncing back and forth. ive only seen the blowers work that was there on the internet for like the past three years, never in person so i was pretty siked. i was also amazed because it seemed like i saw all the peices there on the site like a month or two ago, and i didnt even know that they were going to be there. i was in there for a while.
Slinger was it your doublers that were around every where? in Da kine? if so the huge dubble bubs you do are sweet. all of the glass was shining in nice lighting, you get the feeling of like being in an art museum.
but yeah we walked down into that part of town thinking we could walk up to the meltingpoint from the amsterdam cafe, it wasnt scary which was cool. youll see average joe guys walking around everywhere, so you know off the bat your not waliking into a place where your going to get hurt. it sucks because we met this guy who gave us a very bad perspective, and from the start he didnt like us because we were american. but we are talkitive and he wasnt so bad and rude to us then. but the whole time you could tell he was feeding us crap a lot. other than him about every person we met was super nice, you can definetly have a conversation to any one, which is inviting. and it is nice because there isnt as many guns in the streets, or killings and stuff like that. one guy was saying the murder with guns rate was super super low compared to here. so you feel a little safer.
my favorite place was up around horeshoe bay, and stanley park is huge and cool. its like central park, but super nice and your surrounded by old growth.
all in all i kinda gave a bad perspective, but you do when you dont take your time and dont write a little slower.
yeah about the whole scene there, its totally different than here in the states. i think mainly because a lot of the scene here is about the counter culture and fighting for stuff, politics and so on. but up there a lot of the stuff we fight on that drives our movement is and has already been settled or on its way with time. there still is the same people and clicks but you just get a different feeling from them. you can do a lot up there and its still relaxed.
all in all, different for me never been to vancouver, but super fun and chill. i was so stoked on all the glass there. i just had to come back and say something. i was only there for a day and a half. it was a sparatic mission.

[slinger]

i dont think you gave a bad perspective, i think your initial post was a very real and honest reaction to your visit/adventure to Vancouver, it was really interesting for me as someone who lives here to read. Its good you got to go up to horseshoe bay, the drive up the 99 Sea to Sky Highway is breath taking. Did you make it to Kitsalano? The beaches on the west side are real nice and the complete opposite vibe from hastings. Theres a pretty cool store tucked away in Kitsalano called "High End". Those guys are mad chill and actually buy nice pieces, they have some jason lee, derek white, hamm and nice local stuff (bryan, hippo, me). In terms of prodo doublers around town, i used to make millions of em but i dont really make many at all anymore, i was the initial guy to pollute the local scene with prodo dubs and trips and since then theres a bunch of people now making them, and i got sick of them so i dont make the armies of them i did a few years ago. When you said Da Kine did you mean the store across the street from New Amsterdam?AKR(A Kind Revolution)?my shopmate and i have a nice worked doubler in there. Mostly though, any piece thats over a certain price point the stores wont touch and we are forced to retail it ourselves.

The interesting thing is how you bring up the difference in the scene here. There is a big activist scene here, but the ones who are in the business side of things like for instance Marc Emery and his shop(BCMP Bookstore); he has little to no interest in headdy glass pieces. I dont think he even owns a nice bubbler at all. People like him own the local stores and glass is not at all and interest to them or focal point of business and therefore they dont invest much money into it, and arent interested in art pieces for the art of it, its all business. The New Amsterdam for instance, thats the only cafe on the block since Blunt Bros. burned down, buys way more import glass than local glass, its pretty sad. And since 9/11 way more import glass seems to be flowing thru Canada cuz it seems its easier to import here rather than directly to the US. We even have a big import pipe company based in the city here, and they even market their glass like its locally made by using a Canadian leaf in their logo. Not only do they distribute to any store that will take their stuff, but they opened up their own shop, and yes, its ALL their import chinese glass. And some of that import stuff is total schwagg, but ive watched in just the last few years, the chinese are getting way better and cleaner. Some of the chinese work is pretty tight these days.... nice fume, reversals, pretty clean. sigh. Unfortunately places like Emery's shop and the AMsterdam are in the prime location for turning over glass. Places like Melting Point and High End are off the beaten path. This is the reality of the Vancouver glass scene.

But it is mad chill and relaxed. Hallelujah.