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Taking Stock
January 9, 2009
Taking Stock is conceived as an unconventional portrait series that pays homage to one of my favourite Whitehorse institutions. More than a just a corner store, Riverside Grocery is a lone holdout of independence and diversity in an encroaching tide of big box stores and mega-brands that are swiftly and irrevocably changing the social and urban fabric of my home town and small towns like it everywhere.
Carrying such old-school staples as Blue Star chicken in a can, Mapleine imitation extract and Gold Rush cigarillos, this mom and pop shop on the banks of the Yukon River stands stalwart against that wolf in sweatshop clothing known as “progress”. Truly one of the last of the last frontiers, Riverside stares defiantly in the homogenous face of globalization and refuses to go quietly. I like to think of it as the place where the Colourful Five Percent do their grocery shopping.
P.S. If you look closely, you may also see the secret mini-series buried within and inspired by “Skinny Legs and All”, in which author Tom Robbins proposes that the inertia of objects is deceptive and that inanimate objects remain static to us humans solely on account of our neuro-muscular chauvinism. As we hurtle at breakneck speed through the self-imposed chaos of blackberries and blue tooth, play dates, strategic planning and treadmills, the codification and commodification of the mystic, are we missing the trees for the commercially engineered forest? In our never ending pursuit of progress, at the end of the day, is the cosmic joke really on us?
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