There’s a new online arts & culture magazine in Vancouver that’s creating quite the stir. Staffed mostly by former (and recent) arts staff at The Georgia Straight — said the weekly’s new owners, MediaCentral (a condition of employment: management must show their horns at all times) “Nah, we’re not cutting arts coverage. We’re just rationalizing it, by dumping a whole lotta staff, and refocusing editorial categories by eliminating any focus whatsoever on venues and the arts”) — the glorious new Stir is the illustrious new home for arts & culture coverage in our city.
Where to find beloved Straight arts & entertainment editor, the kindly but tough Janet Smith, or bon vivant, Adrian Mack, and acclaimed journalist, Gail Johnson? Vancouver’s nascent Stir magazine is the place where you’ll find Janet, Adrian and Gail, as well as a number of other former Straight staffers, and first-rate British Columbia-based arts & culture journalists, who in Stir have created the place to be for arts coverage in our city.
And isn’t that what makes a city, culture? Otherwise, what are we but an amalgam of greenhouse gas spewing towers, and windy roads laden with too many carbon emitting vehicles. Vancouver’s many and varied arts & culture institutions breathe life and meaning into our paradise by the ocean.
In 2020, at the virtual Vancouver International Film Festival, Stir has emerged as the place for coverage of VIFF 2020.
For instance, in her enthusiastic review of Jimmy Carter: Roll and Roll President (which VanRamblings just loved when we screened it at 3 a.m. yesterday morning), Ms. Smith writes …
Jimmy Carter was cooler than you ever knew — even more so when he’s put up against the presidential candidates for the 2020 U.S. election. Turns out the man once derided as the Peanut Farmer was besties with the likes of Bob Dylan and Willie Nelson, both of whom sing his praises here. He also hosted regular concerts, first at the guv’nah’s mansion in Georgia, and later at the White House, after the Allmann Brothers helped propel him to election. In her fun, well-researched, and zippily edited documentary, director Mary Wharton connects Carter’s open-minded approach to music to his political achievements.
The review above is just one of many VIFF 2020 reviews you’ll find on the Stir Vancouver online website, from Janet Smith, Adrian Mack and Gail Johnson, in 2020, your go-to website for Vancouver’s finest VIFF coverage.
Here’s hoping Stir thrives long, long into the future, that Ottawa’s modernized Canadian Periodical Fund provides sustaining monies to aid Stir in its necessary endeavours, and that readers (and advertisers) flock by the thousands to Stir Vancouver, such that Stir becomes a west coast institution, a Canadian version of New York Magazine’s Vulture website.
