It’s impossible to experience my immediate physical location in precisely the same way in which I experienced it as a barely pubescent youth so many years ago. Nevertheless, as I sit at an upper-level table in the W2 Media Café I sense many ghosts unrelated to the Halloween enthusiasts who occasionally wander through in costume. In this physical space once again, memories flood back of those days in the 1970s, when I was beginning to come of age and Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside community (often DTES in current written reference) was beginning a sharp decline.

The W2 Media Café sits in the south-east corner of what was once a department store. It’s more than just a café, though it is the café that makes up the “storefront”. It serves good food and employs DTES residents. But it also provides, on three levels, community meeting space, broadcasting facilities, office and desk space, training programs and workshops (particularly in media-related activities), public washrooms out of which security won’t throw non-spenders, and provides other services as well. In other words, it’s a sort of high-tech community centre that’s more about providing access to modern cultural and political communication tools to everyone, including those who live in the the area but may not enjoy the privileges that allow them to be full civic participants. The social centre of the new complex, into which the café and other operations face, is an atrium that contains a basketball court as well as Stan Douglas’s large mural Abbott & Cordova that depicts the Gastown Riot of 1971.

The department store, of course, was Woodward’s. In its day Woodward’s, with its big, revolving ‘W’ on the roof, was a landmark and bit of a community centre itself. It was the dominant economic anchor of the community when I was young, particularly after the other major department store, Eaton’s, moved uptown to the new Pacific Centre mall, a tragic failure of urban planning that has been sucking the life out downtown Vancouver’s streets ever since (including the streets beneath which it sits).

As a child I spent a good deal of time at Woodward’s, for my only paternal aunt, Peggy, was a sales clerk at the store. I was born in Vancouver, but I’d been taken to the prairies when I was quite young and I usually spent only my summer holidays in Vancouver. Visits to see Peggy at Woodward’s were common, and often during those visits I travelled downtown to Woodward’s by myself. I used to catch the BC Hydro trolley bus on Fraser, near 37^th, adjacent to the Mountainview Cemetary. Back then, the buses were of the old, brillo style, and on rainy days were musty and steaming as they rattled along with a seemingly interminable series of stops and starts.

The Fraser bus stopped right outside Woodward’s, on Hastings just past Abbott. As I remember it, the entrance to the store was on Abbott, and as I rounded the corner I always saw the same plump, upper middle-aged woman in a colourful flowing dress and a hat. She sat on a wooden box against the building’s granite cornerstone, sang or chanted softly, and held out small religious tracts to any passer-by who felt called to take one, her apparently sightless eyes focussed somewhere above my head.

Often I took one of her tracts, though I had no more than a passing interest in their contents. It was she about which I was curious. Part of it was racial: I had never known any black people, except through the unreal filter of a television, but there was something else that drew my interest, and I’m not sure that I know today what that was any more clearly than I did then. Perhaps I wanted to know who she was, where she lived, and what she thought. Perhaps I just wanted to sit down beside her and listen to her sing. I was too cowardly for that, however, and instead, as I sat on the bus later, I read her tract and then left it on the seat for someone else.

Once inside the store, I sought out my aunt, who worked in Men’s Undergarments (or in later years, Purses and Wallets). She was usually busy with a customer, so I would hang around in the periphery, absent mindedly fondling underpants until she noticed me. Once free, she told me what time her break was and then I went off to explore until then. If her break wasn’t too far off, I would hang around the store, browsing records, or stereos, or sometimes furniture. Undoubtedly I was tailed by store detectives on more than one occasion.

In the 70s there were plenty of down-and-out and addicted people living in the area. I was wary, and cautious of danger, but I never felt particularly afraid wandering through the neighbourhood, and indeed, I felt far more in danger on the grounds of my own middle school in suburban Winnipeg than in Vancouver’s skid row. In a way, my peripheral experience of the Downtown Eastside probably contributed to my future expectations of what a big city should be, and I loved Vancouver – in small part – for the rough edginess of its inner city.

Of course, that was the 70s. I was somewhat naïve and the Downtown Eastside would deteriorate considerably in later years – due partly, in my opinion, to government policies that, instead of treating suburban social problems in situ, encouraged addicts and the criminals that prey on them to gather in the neighbourhood in a climate of virtual lawlessness, left largely alone as long as they stayed out of richer neighbourhoods.

If I was meeting my aunt for her coffee break, we usually went to the lunch counter in the basement of Woodward’s, near the entrance to the store’s grocery department known as “The Food Floor”. The lunch counter was a long horseshoe-shaped, chrome-and-formica counter behind which waitresses walked back and forth, pouring coffee from glass pots and pulling pencils from behind their ears to scratch orders on slips of paper that they would rip from their pads and stick to a long coil for the cooks to retrieve. I always ordered a grilled cheese sandwich with a pickle, crinkle-cut fries, and a milkshake, a flavour combination that still makes me salivate when I think of it today (though one I tend to avoid ordering).

Other days, I met my aunt for her lunch or dinner break, and we left the store to eat, sometimes with her co-workers, at a nearby restaurant. Most memorable was a few doors up Hastings (or was it across the street?), at the White Lunch Restaurant. Later I would learn that the White Lunch had once been a chain of diners in Vancouver that was reputedly so named because of the racist laws and culture of the day, particularly the anti-Asian laws in various forms. In the 70s, however, the White Lunch had a diverse clientèle that included Caucasian, First Nations, and Asian diners, and a healthy socio-economic mix, too. Woodward’s clerks, business people, hippies, and down-and-outers all occupied booths and counter stools without noticeable rancour or judgement.

Sometimes I would stay downtown until my aunt finished work and we would go out for dinner, or shopping, and later ride home on the bus to her house. Other times, I caught the Fraser bus on my own. The returning bus passed behind Woodward’s, on Cordova Street beneath the walkway to the Woodward’s Parkade. At the corner of Cordova and Abbott an older man with an accent (Italian? Portuguese?) sat, surrounded in a hut seemingly built of newspapers and magazines so that only his face and hands were visible. He shouted out to rush hour commuters major headlines and implored them to get their news. Occasionally I bought a newspaper, not so much because I wanted to read it (it was difficult to read the large broadsheets of the day on a crowded bus), but because I felt so big city buying a paper from such a vendor. Sometimes I was downtown late enough to see the booth after the vendor had gone home, when all that remained was a small plywood shack, undressed and padlocked, its daytime life extinguished.

After finally closing in 1993, Woodward’s sat empty for many years. Most of the buildings that comprised Woodward’s were demolished in 2006, but not before an uprising by local residents and activists, who occupied the original building for a week during the infamous Woodward’s Squat before being evicted by police. A subsequent tent city that emerged, and lasted for three months, shamed the city into a more progressive and community-focussed development plan, rather than allow the site to simply be turned over to land speculators, saving us, for now, from another soulless Coal Harbour.

Today, only the exterior of the remaining Woodward’s building is original – probably just the upper portions of the east and south walls. The interior is all new concrete and glass, industrial looking, clean. Behind the granite cornerstone sits a bank. The plywood newsstand on Cordova is long gone, and in its corner sits a shiny convenience store called “Express News”. The Woodward’s Food Floor is back, sort of, in the form of Nester’s, which is owned by Buy-Low Foods, which is owned by Jim Pattison. The rest of the complex is occupied by a combination of office space, condos, social housing, and the unfortunately-named ‘Goldcorp Centre for the Arts’, which is also the site of SFU’s contemporary arts programs.

I remember when I felt a youthful excitement about Vancouver, inner cities in general, and about my own prospects. In Winnipeg I watched Woody Allen films and – in comparison to my home – imagined that his Manhattan existed, on a smaller but growing scale, in my Vancouver. Thirty years on, I feel somewhat betrayed, for things have moved in a much different direction than I’d hoped. The town has too much money and too many people who seem willing to welcome increasing blandness and sterility. This is not unique to Vancouver, of course, but I feel the pain of it especially acutely here in my home town.

I’d thought I’d lost for good that youthful feeling of excitement. I had. But I got it back, just a little bit – I got it back this afternoon. Despite the extent of the changes in it, being back in this building, on this streetcorner, is an invigorating experience. I’m no good at being noble, but it doesn’t take much to see that the Visions of the Antons don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy town.

Anyway, we’ll always have Woodward’s.

PS: Don’t forget to vote in Vancouver’s election November 19.

edwards block

Speaking of the Vancouver Museum, while I was there checking out Ed Pien’s opening (as it were), I stepped into one of the museum’s other exhibits for a few minutes. Ravishing Beasts is an exhibit of creatures that have been preserved, primarily through taxidermy. Most of the collection was apparently acquired from Vancouver residents between 1894 and 1950, and before being moved to the Vancouver Museum was housed on the top floor of what is now the Carnegie Community Centre.

I have mixed feelings about taxidermy, generally. I am capable of admiring a well-preserved specimen of almost anything (except perhaps an over-Botoxed Kerrisdale arts matron). My grandparents had a mounted Great-horned owl in the living room of their farmhouse for many years that I was both fascinated and frightened by as a child. I like to think that the owl died of natural causes, or perhaps flew into the living room window one night and was subsequently stuffed, but the more likely explanation is that someone shot it, whether for stealing chickens or just for the hell of it.

That explanation was forefront in my mind as I toured this exhibit at the museum. I can’t walk through a room full of dead, stuffed and mounted critters and not be appalled at man’s inhumanity to beast, even while I am simultaneously awed by those that are – or rather, were – quite majestic, such as the enormous Canadian moose or the African lion. It’s possible that some of the creatures were killed out of necessity, for food, or in self-defence, but the likelihood is that most of them were killed for what enthusiasts of such killing call sport. The pursuit of a trophy at the expense of a life.

The museum does not, as far as I could discern, explicitly express an opinion about the collection of such trophies. It seems likely, given the accepted standards of the era, that in its earlier days the directors of the museum may have been enthusiastic collectors of such things, but also likely that those now in control of the museum have somewhat more modern attitudes toward trophy hunting. Whether they would turn down the opportunity to have something killed in order to expand the collection is unknown.

However, the museum’s materials do prompt the visitor to question the “legacy, current value, and future relevance” of taxidermy. Additionally, there is one small corner of the room in which an interpretation display asks the visitor a rhetorical question about whether a dead, stuffed animal retains any of its dignity of life. It’s an interesting question, but not, I feel, one that can be answered simply by staring at a preserved corpse. The taxidermist may have preserved many of the physical attributes of the creature that – in its living state – made it impressive, or noble, or dignified to us, in a sort of mental personification, but in order to determine whether the creature maintains any of that dignity, I need to know where it lived, who killed it and why, and how, and when, and with what intention. Dignity in this case is not simply a matter of the taxidermist using the right sized eyes, or setting the best pose, but in determining the whole experience of the animal from death to being propped up in a museum.

I suppose that each person who visits the exhibit will view it through the filter of his or her own world view, though I think that the museum did provide some signals to help those without preconceived opinions to view this sort of taxidermy with a more critical eye. For instance, they included in the exhibit some items that probably would have been left out of another exhibit that focussed more on taxidermy as a fine art than as a cultural and historical curiosity. Among these are a stuffed squirrel wearing ski goggles and propped up in a mountain diorama constructed in a hollowed-out television console, and a description of another diorama display comprised of a dozen stuffed kittens dressed in knickers.

The item I found most appalling was an end table made from the leg of an obviously very large elephant, including the leg hairs and the toenails at the base. This piece is not displayed prominently or particularly highlighted, which I think is to the museum’s credit. Casually mixed in with other, less startling pieces, and looking like a simple pedestal to display a stuffed mynah, one comes to the sudden realisation of what it actually is. I can’t imagine anyone finding it and not being at least a little disturbed. What sort of person would imagine, and commission, such a tasteless thing? If the law allowed for someone to be charged with committing an indignity on a non-human body, that surely would have qualified.

The most obvious evidence that someone at the museum holds an unfavourable opinion toward taxidermy, or at least toward bad taxidermy, is a stuffed fox. The poor thing has been manipulated into an absurd position, with an even more absurd countenance, presumably by a taxidermist that was either untrained or working under the influence of mescaline. The museum apparently bought the fox on eBay (for which they were the sole bidder) for all of $15.

Naturally, when I got home I took a glance through the taxidermy listings on eBay myself, not a category that I’d ever felt compelled to browse previously. I was curious: if you can get a fox for $15, what else can you get?

There are a few actual, mounted beasts of the kind that you might see in a rural tavern or over the fireplace of an America businessman, like a bear, or an elk, or some such, but they are few and far between, really. Mostly there are a lot of other things that at best reveal poor taste and at worst reinforce this idea that committing an indignity on a non-human body should be added to the criminal code.

For instance, there are quite a few stuffed frogs available from someone in Wisconsin who has a lot of time and little aesthetic pretension. For the same price that the museum paid for the fox you can get a frog riding a wooden motorcycle, playing a wooden harp, or drinking from a wooden bottle. There are stuffed bats ($25), lamps made from blowfish ($18), and several “jackalopes” (rabbits to which small antlers have been attached) for just $9.99.

If those are insufficient to define “a beast deprived of its dignity”, how about a kangaroo scrotum coin bag ($17.95) or a bottle opener made from a kangaroo’s claw ($6.77)? One entrepreneur in Wyoming is selling packages of five raccoon tails for just $9.99. The notes say “may have picked up a slight purple tint during the tanning process“. First lesson of pelt preservation: no Kool-Aid in the tanning booth.

If you’re fond of deer and don’t have a sister who is also your mother, you probably won’t feel compelled to order the “deer foot thermometer” ($4.99), the “deer hoof salad servers” ($29), or the “deer antler toilet paper holder” ($19.99). Nor will you likely have a burning desire to own the wall hanging made from the ass end of a doe, the anatomical features of which have been enhanced with accessories to make the face of a dog with a goatee (“Would make a great conversation piece”). Only $11.50! Oh hell, see for yourself. But if you decide to buy it, please un-friend me on Facebook.

Ravishing Beasts is on display at the Vancouver Museum until February 28, 2010.

edwards block

Last night I went to the opening of Tracing Night, a work by Edward Pien at the Vancouver Museum. Pien’s piece is a maze-like structure suspended from the ceiling in one of the museum’s galleries. It appeared to be constructed from paper, possibly coated with a light wax or some similar material. The surfaces of the hanging paper “walls” of the maze are imprinted with images of fanciful creatures that seem to incorporate characteristics of humans, animals and insects, while the installation also includes projected video and soundscape that support the overall feeling.

The museum’s information sheet suggests that the imagery was inspired by Chinese and Inuit mythology that confront uncertainty and fear, and there is a slight spookiness to the work that, as the museum says, recreates “the phenomenon of night and darkness”. The work is primarily lit from within and from above, so the visitor is not exposed to direct lighting, but it is still quite light, as the paper is illuminated and distributes light in the room as if it were an extremely large paper lantern.

Visitors are encouraged to wander through the maze, between the hanging sheets, where one can view the imagery on the walls, as well as peer into several small vortexes in which tiny characters can be viewed. These vortexes seemed to slightly evoke the erotic for me, though I am undecided as to whether that was to some extent intended by Pien, through the detail of the viewable characters, or if I was simply projecting my own latent memories of dark rooms with holes in the walls.

I was also entertained by the apparent natural animation of the maze walls. As I walked between the paper sheets, they seemed to part before me, expanding to allow just enough room to permit my physical form to pass through without brushing against them. I didn’t hang around to wait for someone considerably larger than I, to see if they would expand to their size too, but I assume so.

Though some smaller children might find the spookiness of the installation slightly frightening, I suspect that most would be fascinated by it, as children often are with things in museums that are somewhat interactive, as long as the parents prevent them from grabbing and pulling.

Tracing Night is well worth a visit and will be at the Vancouver Museum in Vanier Park February 4 through April 11. For more information about Edward Pien, see his website.

edwards block

For much of my adult life, I have been living in apartments in what is sometimes referred to as the most densely populated square mile in North America, Vancouver’s West End. I’m somewhat sceptical of this claim, as it sounds a bit like chamber of commerce spin, not to mention that we northern North Americans tend to overlook Mexico as a part of our continent too, surely an area of population concentration of note. Nonetheless, the West End is an area of significant population density.

Density of this sort is an easy thing not to notice when you live in an economically privileged and relatively homogeneous form of it, however. Inside our boxes in the sky it is possible to feel a greater sense of privacy than in a house on a 33 foot lot in the suburbs. Despite having several hundred people within rock-throwing distance, you may never see or hear most of them. Even the other windows of other apartments, and the people behind them, are often distant enough to offer a sense of anonymity.

In my case, I also had the benefit of living right next door to one of Canada’s largest, and possibly wildest, urban parks, Stanley Park. It was like having a 1,000 acre backyard. Yes, I had to share it with others, but some sections, at some times of the day or week, you can have almost to yourself, especially when it’s not summer and the average Vancouverite won’t drag his ass away from the television or out of her car in case it rains. Have they never heard of raincoats?

Beaver Lake, in Stanley Park

I love the park, especially when it’s raining. When I lived beside it, I used to put on a raincoat, hiking boots and a Tilley hat, load my backpack with snacks, a thermos of tea, and head out at 7:00am with a pair of binoculars. The trails are beautifully peaceful during a misty rain, the park is loaded with life, and if you sit still for a bit, it will often reveal itself. I once saw a family of river otters cross the trail from the forest into Beaver Lake while I was sitting on my favourite bench.

Another favourite local escape is Wreck Beach, another park on the periphery of the city. Wreck is not the place to go for solitude if it’s sunny and warm, but it is still a great respite, nonetheless. Wreck has different sections, featuring slightly different demographics, though there is a certain amount of blending of and acceptance of “cultures” in all areas. Often on hot summer days I head for the main beach, the only place really suitable for swimming and, conveniently, where there exists an open market for every beach necessity imaginable, including empanadas and magic mushrooms, both of which I highly recommend.

Later in the day, however, I often head to the southern end of the beach, predominantly populated by queer men, where I can enjoy the sunset in relative peace. Sometimes it has the ambiance of an outdoor bathhouse, without the disco, but most of the crowd starts to disperse shortly after 4pm, which means it is pretty calm and quiet until the sun sets, which at this time of year isn’t until after 9pm.

Wreck Beach at dusk

Unfortunately, the presence of an offshore breakwater, behind which sit large booms of logs headed for the mills of the lower Fraser, means that there are only scattered small patches of sand, and swimming is neither practical nor recommended. However, it’s still pretty scenic (in its own, industrially polluted way) and any tugboats working – when the tide is high – are usually distant enough that their engines don’t drown out the buzz, chirp and rustle (and sometimes, moaning) of the plentiful wildlife.

Ever since I was quite young, I have both enjoyed and suffered the incongruity of wanting to be out of the city while wanting to be in it. When I was younger, I was generally satisfied with opportunities to escape the city for a weekend or a longer journey, despite the inconvenience of arranging transport and dealing with the traffic. And then there is always the trauma of having to come back again. This is a trauma I always experience while leaving the park or the beach. As I leave the density and dissolve into the forest, I feel my stress and urban agitation lift from me. The sensation of relaxing is physically tangible in a way that I get from no other experience. All too often, however, as soon as I begin to leave the park to return to “real life”, I start to feel some of that agitation settle once again upon my shoulders, and as I re-immerse myself back into the concrete, car alarms, yapping shih-tzus and gas-powered landscaping tools, I long once again to make a more permanent escape. If it weren’t for Stanley Park and Wreck Beach, I would surely have either fled this city, or fled my (albeit unique variety of) sanity, long ago. They provide me with the easily-accessible respite from urban hubbub that I require.

Lost Lagoon

I’ve had it in my mind for many years that it would make far more sense to spend most of my time living out of the city, visiting it when I am in the mood for a dose, than to be trapped in it most of the time, constantly craving an opportunity to escape. I’ve had many visions of a semi-rural home over the years, and have been scouting out real estate for years. In the late 90s, I contemplated the purchase of a property in the Horsefly area of the Cariboo region in central British Columbia. It was 80 acres, with a small A-frame house, well forested with some cleared areas for growing, and with a large pond in which beavers and muskrats were known to reside. At only $100,000, it was hardly unaffordable.

So why didn’t I buy it? I can list off any number of rationalisations. How will I make money? What will I do for sex? Will I feel socially isolated? Will my nearest neighbours be gun-totin’ Reform Party loonies? Will I miss the city after all?

All valid concerns. Of course, most of those are concerns living in the city too, but there are likely more opportunities to generate cash in the city (regardless of the quality of those opportunities). It all came down to fear of the untested, really. In hindsight, I regret not having acted while I had the chance, and the resources. There would have been challenges, yes. But, older now, and having faced a few self-initiated challenges, I suspect that I would have found a way, and discovered that the differences between “here”and “there” are not as wholly distinct as might be imagined. After all, as I discovered not too long ago, my own big-city Jewish (now former) physician turned out to be a gun-totin’ Reform Party loony.

While I would be inclined now to act, I don’t currently have the resources to follow that path, though it’s not entirely out of the question that it could happen. In order to do it, I’d either have to win a lottery, or re-join the rat race from which I ran screaming several years ago. I don’t buy lottery tickets, and I seem not to have the fortitude (or the masochism) necessary to make the rat race tolerable. So here I am, a city boy still.

Wreck Beach at sunset

In the meantime, I am trying to make things as earthy as possible under the circumstances. I have always had a very polarised view of city living. If I’m going to live in a city, I want to live in the middle of it. If I’m not going to live in a city, I want to be in the woods. I have no time for suburbs, where people seem to resent foliage and physical exertion. Virginia Woolf (apparently) once said “If the choices are Richmond or death, I choose death”. She did, of course, in the end choose death, and I don’t blame her.

I have no plans to solve my residential plight by loading my pockets with stones and taking a nice long swim (though I reserve the right to change my mind if I ever find myself forced through circumstance, or really bad luck, to take up residence on the noxious Mary Hill), but I have taken steps to make city living a little more tolerable and, occasionally, even sorta pleasant.

For the past seven months or so, I have been living in a rented house on the east side of the city. I had always been curious about living on “The Drive” as this neighbourhood is known, but giving up instant access to the park always stopped me from trying it out. As it turns out, I quite like it. It has more real cultural diversity than any other Vancouver neighbourhood, and that’s integrated diversity. Really, the area is probably on the decline, as character goes, since real estate is getting more and more expensive and the people with lots of money and no sense of community buy up land and gentrify things, but for now, I like it.

The food is great around here too. Though many of the historically-present Italians have dispersed to other parts of the city, there are still a number of merchants around that supply their tastes, which conveniently are also my tastes. Old style deli counters at Santa Barbara and Bosa markets are fattening me up on parmesan-crusted salami, prosciutto, fennel sausage, and a variety of cheeses, and the choices of vegetables, with both the Italian and Asian influences, is much more satisfying than those found in the big chain stores.

Another way that I am making the best of things is by having a garden as well, which is kind of like farming on a very small scale. In fact, I have two gardens, having also taken over the unused one at the house next door. The quantity of food that comes out of them is not astounding, particularly since the weather was so unusually hot and dry in the late spring and early summer that many of the more water-demanding greens shot stalks straight up and bolted before they could even produce many leaves. However, I am eating out of the garden daily, mainly lettuce, mustard greens, chard, and snow peas. The pole beans should be ready to eat in another week or two, I have a bit of rhubarb, and I have just done a second planting of a few quicker growing things, as well as some fall crops. If the winter isn’t too cold, I should be able to get a good supply of kale through the end of the year, too. My yard also has apple, pear, plum and fig trees, all of which seem to be producing a good supply of fruit.

The Main Garden

Of course, getting food out of the garden is nice, but I suspect a big part of the satisfaction comes from the opportunity to play in the dirt. I can sit out there for hours, digging, pruning, thinning, and weeding. Usually when I am finished, I have half of the garden on me, which I shower off before I return to the yard to sit in the shade and read, or watch the chickadees and bushtits.

As an added bonus to my need to satisfy my farming urges, city council recently passed a motion permitting citizens to keep chickens in backyards, something I have been demanding for years, since it seems absurd that you can have cats, dogs, birds, reptiles, rodents, and even children, but not a couple of hens. The city managers are taking their time actually writing the new law, so I don’t yet know what limit will be in place for the quantity of fowl, but I am making the plans for my new coop in the meantime. Now I just have to start warming my neighbours up to the idea of chicken-sitting for me when I need to escape to the woods for a weekend.

edwards block

Last weekend in Vancouver, two events took place that sought to advance the idea of the car-free city. One I attended, the other I tried to avoid, with limited success.

Saturday was the World Naked Bike Ride, an event I favour for several reasons. Any opportunity to run around naked ought to be exploited enthusiastically, but especially when it’s being done to increase public consciousness about, as a friend once put it, the “offensive ubiquity of the horseless carriage”.

That same friend – who recently bought a car to replace his deceased one – had to drag his old bike out of storage and dust it off in order to participate, as it had not been used since the last World Naked Bike Ride. It would be easy for someone less charitable than I (!) to accuse him of hypocrisy, but on the contrary, I think he is being courageous and intelligent enough to recognise that he resents feeling the need to own something that he doesn’t really want, but that the forces of capital conspire to virtually (for lack of realistic alternatives, perceived or otherwise) require him to purchase and maintain. He feels powerless to live without the comfort and convenience of a car, and his participation is an act of symbolic defiance.

The point of the World Naked Bike Ride is not to promote nudity, or cycling, or civil disobedience (though those are all very worthy pursuits), but to remind us that “car culture” is not something that we are necessarily stuck with, that we, as a society, have the power to choose a different kind of city, one in which we are not all subservient to the private automobile and the special interests that have caused us to be enslaved to it. That a large majority are convinced otherwise suggests, in my opinion, lazy thinking rather than conscious commitment.

The other event lends some credence to this view, I think. Car Free Day was spawned on Commercial Drive by people not unlike those who participate in the Naked Bike Ride, citizens on feet and bikes and wheelchairs and crutches and elderly legs who took over the street by force of their collective mass as a reaction to the domination of the automobile. Since those early days, however, it has been largely hijacked by civic politicians and business interests, and become an object of curiousity by those who have either no opinion about car traffic, or one supportive of the status quo.

The result is that Car Free Day is quite the opposite: seemingly large numbers of people drive to a neighbourhood that is holding a Car Free Day event. Sure, six blocks of one street are “car free”, but sixteen blocks in all surrounding directions are jammed with cars whose drivers are either trying to park for the event, or are trying to bypass a formerly accessible artery. It’s not “car free”, it’s “car relocated”.

A major cause for difference between the two events is that the naked bike ride is unsanctioned by city hall (in other words, an “illegal protest”) and is largely unplanned. The route is spontaneously made up by those participating. Meanwhile, the city is involved in planning the so-called car free day, an official series of events that are car-free in name only.

Of course, those who enjoy taking over the street and playing hopscotch where cars normally roam will see it more positively. And good for them. They can enjoy their day of faux-rebellion, and I’ll take my opportunity to flash my scrotum at Floridian tourists. In the end, the cars are still going to get to dominate for the other 364.75 days of the year. It’s that that we need to come together to change.

(Main page photo credit: Hepcat Cabal – http://www.flickr.com/photos/19835686@N00)

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I’m no Martin Luther King. I’m not even a Christian – at least, not the capital-C, church-on-Sunday, wait-for-the-rapture, don’t-choke-your-chicken-or-you’ll-burn-in-hell kind of Christian. I’m more of a great-mysterious-nuclear-energy-in-the-universe kind of spiritualist, which (along with my disbelief in the story of Jesus, Mohammed, Santa Claus, and Raelian-alien-rescue) is really a pretty atheistic interpretation of spiritualist, so I guess I’m really not a Christian at all.

If your spiritual house is built on all that stuff about virgin birth (or one of the other deity-based religions), I encourage you to give Zeitgeist: The Movie a viewing. It provides a very interesting interpretation of history on which the Christan church, and other religious institutions, are based. The film is full-length, in documentary format, and contains three distinct sections. After a longer than usual, visual, introduction comes the section to which I referred, Part 1. It is a fairly easy to watch segment, and though it raises major questions about the veracity of religious assumptions, I would think that most viewers would find it somewhat empowering. The following two sections are more challenging if you are not fond of conspiracy theories related to 9-11 and international banking, but they come after part one, so you can always stop watching then, if you like. However, I would encourage watching the whole thing, for though I am undecided on how much of parts two and three I would accept as factual, it is thought provoking. If nothing else, at least watch Part 1. It’s brilliant. You can watch it online for free here, or download it for later viewing for free here. Or, you can order the DVD for $5 from the website, http://www.zeitgeistmovie.com.

Anyway, back to my primary purpose. I have a dream, I’m not ML King, etc, etc. I’m also not a visible minority, unless you count wild-bearded men with pasty legs and knobby knees who run around all winter in shorts as minorities, which I suppose they are, but they aren’t a historically persecuted minority, unless you count not getting laid on Saturday night as a form of persecution. The fact is, I have a great many dreams. I’m not talking about the kind of dreams that wake you up at three AM in a cold sweat, or at nine AM in a warm wet spot, but more like imaginations, instinctive mental images that come in the form of daydreams and subconscious aspirations.

Most of the time, these dreams are not expressed openly, and when they are, unfortunately, they are typically expressed in a more negative form, such as an attack on whatever institution, tradition, power structure, or lummox in a Hummer I believe prevents the dream from becoming a reality. Generally, I feel (accurately or not) that I am encouraged to keep these dreams to myself, and I don’t react all that well to stuffing things inside and forgetting about them. I can either make some effort to release the dreams constructively, or they will come out in unproductive, unpleasant, and perhaps self-destructive ways.

After essentially “dropping out” of the mainstream rat race in 2005, I’m currently in the position of trying to make money, ideally without having to completely and without restraint whore myself out to the Protestant Lords of Capital. I’m not opposed to a little survivalist whoring – the construct of our society and our economy makes it extremely difficult not to participate – I just don’t want to buy into the whole whoring game so thoroughly that I start to think that I’m Princess Goddamn Privilege and forget that I am a corporate whore, trying to accumulate enough wealth that I can start buying up more shit that I don’t want so that I can pretend to be someone that I don’t want to be.

The easiest thing to do, according to popular opinion, would be to find a nice job and learn to like it. There’s a lot to be said for a nice, comfortable tan cubicle in a climate-controlled building with a gym and a bike locker and a lunch room. Many do it, seemingly without major anxiety. At least, not any anxiety that can’t be managed with Xanax or Prozac. Thank Jesus for the corporate “health” plan! I’m not one for medicating symptoms that are completely avoidable, however. Schizophrenics should probably take medication to help them live. Office workers should not take meds to keep them from blowing off their own heads out of despair for their lot. They should find a new path. It’s frightening to think about stepping off the treadmill and following your heart, and the uncertainty that comes with it. But it’s very likely that it’s a lot less frightening than coming to the realisation just what you didn’t do with your life, two seconds before you drop dead for good.

It remains to be seen what my ongoing path will be. I suppose I’ll just throw it out there to the great-mysterious-nuclear-energy-in-the-universe and see what happens. Maybe a year from now I’ll be chowing down on Paxil and smiling broadly for some exploiter entrepreneur as I invest my labour in his children’s leisure, with no hope of a reasonable ROI, watching my days tick by. Or maybe something more magical will happen. Ya gotta dream.

Stay tuned for the dreams.

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Here I sit in La Guardia airport, where I’ve been for the last six hours waiting for Air Canada to come up with an idle 767 to clear the surplus bodies abandoned after a couple of flights were cancelled this morning due to thunderstorms. La Guardia was apparently named “greatest airport in the world” (quotes not mine, LL) in 1960, but in 2008, it leaves a bit to be desired. Specifically, services. The only place after security that sells hot tea is sold out, and anyone looking to drink themselves silly to combat the boredom is out of luck, too. The universe (ie: Robert Milton) willing, I’ll be out of here by 5:30 tonight.

This wraps up part one of my summer vacation. I left my friends at the commune on Monday and made my way to Manhattan with Tim. On Tuesday, were got up at 5:30 am and cycled to Central Park to sit in line outside the Delacorte Theatre to wait for the scheduled distribution of free tickets to the 41st anniversary opening of HAIR. Seven hours on a blanket in Central Park was infinitely more pleasant than the same at La Guardia, and we got the tickets we sought. They even turned out to be great tickets. The show was great – with the Central Park setting, it was like being in the 60s again. And how oddly relevant it all seems, once again.

Also on Thursday, Tim took me out to a few Chelsea galleries. Most memorable were pieces by Zhang Huan at the PaceWildenstein Galleries. I have since discovered that there is an exhibit of some of Huan’s work at the VAG right now, so I’ll have to check that out too.

Wednesday night, after a day of cycling in Manhattan and dinner at an Indian restaurant, another sort of culture: Mamma Mia (the film, not the play). We’d read an amusingly critical review in the New York Times, and decided to give it a go. It was, as the review promised, awful but entertaining. I suspect that it might be an ideal candidate for viewing under the influence of mood altering substances.

I should be back in Vancouver late tonight, unless Air Canada abandons me in Toronto for the night. I’ll not have time for much more than re-packing, though, as I’ll be off to Singapore on Sunday.

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I spent the past weekend at a ranch, fifteen kilometres south-east of Spences Bridge, that belongs to a couple of gentleman farmers of my acquaintance. The ranch, a small orchard operation, is a peach-shaped property near a sharp bend in the Nicola River, a tributary of the Thompson, which in turn feeds the Fraser, the little brown stream that rushes westward through the province to settle itself in the briny blue-green of Georgia Strait.

On Sunday, the dawn sky was clear and the temperature began to rise. By 9:00 am I was laying naked on the cedar deck, tea in hand, ears tuned to the Yellow-rumped Warblers, genitals pointed due east into the warming morning sun. After a long, dark, cold winter, it was a welcome tonic.

After gaining my traditional spring burn, I spent part of the afternoon clearing brush. Very presidential. Actually, the brush was fallen trees. I cut the branches and trunks into nice stove-length sections, a somewhat unnecessary detail as there is no wood stove here, but my Ruskin training is deeply ingrained.

There’s a lot to be said for a little self-directed, manual labour. I had an electric chainsaw, but I used it only on the pieces I could not break by hand, or by snapping them across my knee. Many would assume that it would be faster to cut it all with the saw, but I doubt that’s true. Really, people usually prefer a saw as it requires less actual effort. But a little effort is something more of us could use once in a while, and I’d rather snap branches than pay for the privilege of lifting iron discs in a gym.

By avoiding the saw, I was also better able to enjoy one of the reasons why I came up here in the first place: the sounds of silence. Over the noise of the saw I can’t hear the calls of warblers, the cries of ospreys, the buzz of insects, the continuous babble of the river as it stumbles over rocks and itself, the wind as it meanders through the valley, or even the planet as it vibrates its way through its orbit. The awareness of such things is so easy to forget in the city, where the hubbub distracts us from so many of the sounds that connect us to our origins.

Even now, as I sit in a coffee shop in Vancouver’s west side remembering this, an espresso steamer is trying to out-screech both a coffee grinder and a small child, and something the locals refer to as “music” is hammering away at my fleeting connection to the distant sounds that feed my soul. Alas.

The spot in which I was doing the actual cutting was directly adjacent to the meditation hut. One of the ranchers rises early in the morning each day in order to meditate in this hut. It’s a pleasant room, sparsely decorated and smelling of incense, and I imagine that it provides him with a good deal of satisfaction and serenity. I respect his practise, but it’s not really something that works very well for me. I could sit in the hut for weeks and wouldn’t gain a fraction as much serenity as I did snapping birch branches in peace for an hour or two. My meditation comes in the form of mindful activity. It’s not enough to simply contemplate the unhewn log. I must interact with it, even (or perhaps especially) without overly focussing on it.

I often find such satisfaction in laborious, solitary activity. When I was young and my opportunities for independent journeys were limited, I found solace in such things as cutting the lawn in summer, and shovelling the sidewalks, driveways, and sometimes even streets during the winter. These days, without a lawn or a snowy climate, it’s usually washing dishes that satisfies this need. Not quite the same physical benefit, but my nails are generally cleaner.

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I’ve just returned from a quick trip to San Francisco, a week by the bay, where I was satisfyingly warmed by the California sun after months of (relative) freezing in Vancouver. Either I’m getting old and soft, or spending much of last winter in Costa Rica has removed my usual winter hardiness. Or both. Whatever. San Franciscans didn’t seem to feel quite as comfortable as I, however, as they all seemed to be running around in toques and scarves while I was running around in shorts and a t-shirt (or at times, considerably less).

I flew to San Francisco, and as is frequently mentioned in this blog – ad infinitum – I find modern air travel almost irritating enough to just stay home. It’s difficult to say whether my objections are explicity about air travel, or about capitalism generally, for the effects of capitalism are as ever-present in an airport as they are in any suburban strip mall. Or worse. Let’s take, for example, my stop at the Seatte’s Best Coffee outlet in Sea-Tac airport. I ordered a cup of tea and a toasted bagel with cream cheese, not having had an opportunity to enjoy a hearty breakfast before catching my bus at a distinctly unholy hour of the pre-sunrise morning.

Allow me a brief, irrelevant digression on the topic of ordering tea in America. Such a thing is often a challenge, as waiters usually respond to such a request by dropping their arms, and often their jaws (and once, her menu), and exclaiming loudly with wide-eyed incredulity, “Hot Tea?”. Say this to yourself aloud, but with extraordinary emphasis on the word “hot”, preferably with a slight uvular fricative and you’ll be on the right track.

Anyway, I had a choice of two bagel types: plain tasteless plastic, or sesame-coated tasteless plastic, with a tiny thimble of flavourless cheese. They don’t, of course, spread the cheese for you. Instead they give you a plastic container of cheese that has been refrigerated at a temperature of zero degrees Kelvin and is as firm as a TSA agent’s insistence that you remove your shoes at security, despite the fact that you bought the kind with the plastic last that won’t set off the metal detector.

As this is a post-9/11 airport, you are required to spread your cream cheese with a plastic knife, even though the cheese is hard enough to warrant spreading with a good, sturdy pair of box cutters. Not only is the knife plastic, but it is individually wrapped in a plastic sleeve in order to protect you from any bacteria that might have attached itself to the knife during it’s manufacture in the third world. What I want to know is, where was the plastic sleeve made? I have to touch the sleeve to remove it, thereby contaminating my hands, hands that will ultimately need to grip the presumably sterile knife firmly in order to spread the cheese. If the Al Qaida publicists want to foment panic in middle America, they need only announce that they’ve infiltrated the plastic sleeve manufacturing plant and convinced workers not to wash their hands before returning from the washroom.

I’d been invited down to California by my friend Paul, whom I met at a nudist gathering last year in Pennsylvania, in order to participate in the Hunky Jesus contest, a segment of the annual Easter gathering of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence in Dolores Park. Although I was virtually beardless and had recently, mistakenly, had the rear portion of my flowing locks shorn in a failed experiment in follicular fashion management, it sounded like fun, and travelling, even just for a week, was just the pick-me-up I needed. Check out my Flickr page for event photos, if interested.

The contest was loaded with potential hunky Jesuses (or whatever the plural is of the One True God), competing for a prize of $100. Clearly, they go to this effort for the fun, not the money. Here’s a shot of me with Paul (left) and the winner, Kaleb, aka “Michaelangelo’s Jesus”:

I spent several evenings hanging out with Paul, of course, and also managed to get out to San Jose to visit Garry and Pedja, whom I have not seen in a startling number of years, since they decamped Canada for warmer climes and nursing school. As Garry was largely responsible for my first foray into deity impersonation, circa 1995, it was a timely reunion. They took me out for a drive on the coast highway north of Santa Cruz. Here are Garry and Pedja, at the Pigeon Point lighthouse:

While in SF, I also managed the usual visit to City Lights, hung out in various cafes, and visited the Gilbert & George exhibit at the De Young museum. Here’s an example of their work, titled Winter Tongue Fuck:

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As is well known among those who have long felt an inexplicable desire to suffer my company during the darker months, I am not an enthusiast of the holiday in which we are currently immersed. I don’t erect a tree, I don’t hang lights in my windows, I think eggnog a vile substance unsuited to human consumption regardless of the quantity of rum with which one dilutes it, and I have largely recovered from the social guilt that in the past has compelled me to prepare and mail to my friends and acquaintances the pulped remains of the boreal forest. (Evidently, I have not yet abandoned a propensity for lengthy sentences. Welcome to my Henry James Christmas story.)

This year, however, I fear that I may be having some sort of mental breakdown: I’m feeling unusually charitable.

I’m not especially fond of clothes shopping, so I generally leave it until it becomes a necessity. As misfortune would have it, my last pair of 501s decided to burst apart (no, not in the chilly California sand) five days before Christmas. As I said, I don’t shop very willingly, and I certainly don’t set foot anywhere near a store or mall after Halloween for fear of encountering horrors such as the Backstreet Boys Christmas Album playing on an endless cycle. They say that suicides increase at this time of year, and after my experience working in a mall a number of years ago, I’m convinced that these are largely comprised of retail workers pushed beyond the limits of aural human endurance. Waterboarding has nothing on Celine Dion wailing Adeste Fideles.

Not surprisingly, it was with some apprehension that I set out to buy more jeans on the evening of the darkest night. As solstice rituals go, mine seemed ill-advised. I’d rather have been dancing around an evergreen, clad only in ivy and toasting the moon with a hogshead of the blood of the sacred grape, but it was either now, or January, for I’d sooner stroll about Vancouver naked than set foot in a store during ‘Boxing Week’, and I kind of wanted the trousers earlier rather than later.

I began to sense that something was amiss at the bank, where I held the door for someone behind me and – get this – smiled. Then, waiting for a red light to change (an out of character incident in itself) on Howe Street, I found myself making smiley-faces at a pram-bound infant gawking at me with wide-eyed interest, until his or her presumed parent caught me and I was forced to hurriedly turn my head to check the status of the walk signal.

I went to The Bay, for not only can I get into it without entering the evil mall, I know which door to enter that doesn’t require either that I walk through the cologne section or have to use an escalator to get to the Levi’s section. As luck would have it, the 21st turned out to be one of only 362 days in the calendar year that The Bay gives out Scratch and Save cards, and spending less on clothes is for me second in popularity only to wearing none of them at all. As I was there anyway, I decided to buy three pairs of pants, and some socks (spending roughly 20% of my 2007 income, I might add, somewhat proudly). Naturally, I was also given what surely must be my 17th Bay credit card in order to enjoy an additional ten percent off of my purchases. You’d think they’d eventually clue in and stop giving me these cards, as when they eventually arrive in the mail, I cut them up and toss them, never to be used. Cash is everywhere I want to be.

I must digress briefly on the subject of Scratch and Save. There are three possible discount amounts to scratch: 30, 40, or 50 percent. I’ve always suspected that cards providing fifty percent are severely limited, if any exist at all. As I was mindlessly scratching my card to reveal the predicted 30%, the woman behind me engaged the cashier in a discussion of the topic. He said to her, “We departments all compete to see who gets the 50%”. Characteristically silent until this point, I burst forth with almost a shout, “Aha!”. Beaming in victory, I turned to the woman behind me and said “You’ll notice that he said the 50%.” Everyone in line had a good laugh at this.

Picture it. There I was, standing in a long line at a cashier in a department store, buying clothes, four days before bloody Christmas, and engaging in jocularity with my fellow Gomorrahns.

I swear, during the whole journey from home to store to home, I didn’t once scowl at a soul, or mutter under my breath, with Tourette-like articulation, about the third-world schlock with which we purport to honour ‘our’ christ. In fact, on the way home I stopped at a bookstore for a couple of novels, and afterward I was a block away from the store before I realised that I was humming I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas.

Now, I’ve been having some unusual dreams lately, but I don’t recall any with Sim-like characters dragging me unwillingly through traumas past, present and future. Most of my dreams have been more satisfyingly Bacchanalian in theme than reminiscent of Ezeqielian repentance. (Is that a word, or is my attempt at classical metaphor ridiculous?).

Perhaps my apparent conversion from Christmas-sceptical grump to, well, Christmas-sceptical sorta-cheerful, is less a vision-induced submission to something about which I am inherently and decidedly unenthusiastic, and more a result of just having been to a few more fun, satisfying and highly social seasonal parties this year than usual. Or maybe I am actually undergoing some sort of fundamental conversion, the culmination of which is yet to be known. As I once said, “I think I’ve done just about everything I said I’d never do”. So who knows? I do, however, remain sceptical.

To all my friends, a Happy Solstice!

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