hard stare

Dr. Sun Yat Sen's Escape

2012-01-08T16:38:00.000-08:00

On certain days, my favourite thing about Dr. Sun Yat Sen Gardens is the way the light and shadows fall on its stark white walls in a sharp dark blur. It's a hidden little spot really, on the edge of Chinatown, just across from a set of benches where a man can sit and drink all day, shopping cart parked beside him, faint traces of a grey-green pot smoke halo hanging in the air above. Inside the walls, everything is silence, and razor-y bamboo stalks slice the light into neat vertical lines; here and there, an old syringe litters the ground -- the bamboo shooting gallery as Mark calls it. Little gravel paths wind past still ponds -- startle of orange koi S-curving the green depths. The magical, pitted black rocks look like tiny mountains from some Chinese folk tale. In spring, some of the first blossoms open here. Walled off from the city's chill reality, bright yellow witch hazel stings through the fog with a spiny perfumed gleam, spring plum flushes its faint purple. Traffic's rush is silenced, voices slow and fade, birds rustle the leaves until all the trees are empty.

Wood and Where it Leads

2011-08-19T15:48:00.000-07:00

He just wanted to build something. But in the beginning, it was difficult to find wood. We lived in a big city after all, and had no car. Although he saw it everywhere, wood was tantalizingly inaccessible. Walks along the Seawall proved painful-- the huge salt-encrusted logs that washed up on shore were heavy and waterlogged; they eluded him. Sometimes, we saw workshops filled with boards and stumps and chunks of cedar and walnut, shiny modernist tables and simple rough- hewn chairs, enclosed in glass, just visible along well-worn Culture Crawl routes. This lasted for months. He spent hours online searching for companies that would sell reclaimed wood, looked at timber and slabs and felled trees with unparalleled yearning. And then when he decided to build us a kitchen table for our little cottage, his quest for wood reached a fever pitch. Work yards with stashes of wood were no longer safe, old pallets began to look more appealing, the piles of lumber at a nearby construction site were fair game. There was even a brief stint when he considered

buying ipe wood from the dismantled Coney Island boardwalk off Craigslist. And then my father called. He had a piece of wood, he said, in his garage. He sent a photo. It was a burl from the base of a Douglas Fir -- a piece from a neighbour's felled tree. It was almost 5 feet across, dusty but perfectly dry. Mark looked at the photo for what seemed like hours, essentially wrote my father a love letter, and hopped on the next bus to Maple Ridge. His vision was singular and absolute.

We arrived in the morning, and Mark went straight to the garage. He set the slab on two sawhorses, tenderly brushed the dust from its surface, and set to sanding. We didn't see him again for 12 hours. From my comfortable spot on the couch next to the fireplace, I could hear the muted endless drone of the grinder. Late that night, Mark emerged covered in a fine sawdust mist, glasses shuttered with an orange-brown film. He didn't talk much, took his dinner down with him, and continued sanding into the darkest hours. We were there for two and a half days and Mark worked basically nonstop, only sleeping because my dad's girlfriend forced him to, and waking up at 6 AM, the earliest he could start. The wood was changing colour now, rich reds and yellows emerged, fingerprint whorl rings, a slippery softness. The bark came off, the outside edges were smoothed and silkened. The sawdust piles rose around his feet, everything coated in gentle reddish snow. On the last night, Mark woke me up in the middle of the night and showed me his plan for the base of the table. It looked like the scribblings of a mad man. But sure enough, early that morning, he started sawing and hammering, and within a few hours, he had created an ingenious base that separated into two. At last, it was ready. It took three people to lift it onto the roof of the car. Once home, we set it up in the kitchen, where it fit perfectly into the space, its undulating edges opening up the room.

A few months later, inspired by an art installation, Mark sho sugi ban- ned the base in the back yard using a blow torch and letting the flames lick a dark pattern into the wood -- much to chagrin of our neighbour, a former forest fire fighter as it turns out. Since then, he's lugged home several stumps and blocks of wood recovered from various yards and alleys. One chunk of cedar we dragged home left a red trail all the way from the block where we found it, right to the front door. He has also accumulated a set chisels, an axe, a planer, his own grinder, even a used chainsaw. The yard is littered with stumps in various states of progress, a few branches. He's learned how to make dove tail joints, a scribe and a mortise and tenon. A good friend who works at a botanical garden has begun dropping off beautiful slabs of cedar which Mark has fashioned into outdoor benches for the garden. His latest discovery is the documentary film Alone in the Wilderness about a retiree who heads out into the wilds of Alaska, builds himself a log cabin and survives out there for almost 30 years. Mark has begun eyeing up land. I'm pretty sure a log cabin is in our future.

Launch of the Major Matthews Collection

2011-07-06T12:01:00.000-07:00

The Vancouver Archives building is tucked in behind the planetarium; almost stubbornly ignorant of the glittering mountains and ocean beyond, it is windowless and subterranean --grey cement with little slits to let the light in. It was a mixed crowd there for the launch of the digitized archival holdings in early June. A perfect-bangs, locally-designed dress kind of girl took our tickets at the door, hinting at some sort of hidden cool factor at the Archives. Once inside, it was a sea of heritage-focused boomers, quite a few nonogenarians that had probably actually been a part of early Vancouver, and a bevy of intelligent-looking , rarely-see-the-light-of-day Archival Science grad students. This latter bunch was led by the head archivist who seemed to live and breathe history, efficiency and order. Tall and slim, bespectacled, conservatively clad, she was everything a head archivist should be, making a straight-to-the-point speech, peppered with archiver-insider jokes;, the kind of woman you want in charge of your city's history.

Over in one corner was a small clutch of plaid shirts, messy hair, devil-may-cares -- the rock stars of the Vancouver Archives that day. Lee Henderson as it turns out, was the source. He was there to read from the Major Matthews collection being launched that day in digitized form, and from which he drew inspiration for his novel The Man Game, a book steeped in the stories and imagery of early Vancouver. He chose several excerpts he had made use of in his writing. In an even voice, with the cadence particular to tellers of tales spun a century ago, he began to read. Marvellous little gems about makeshift pubs built of strange leftover materials, a dance held on planks of wood from a felled tree, the recovery of a wired-together skeleton after the great fire, a man bewitched by the sound of a strange woman's voice singing deep in the forest . It reminded me of my grandfather's stories, the way his voice rose and fell and held on certain notes, paused for effect, dove down deep and then softened -- an aural campfire. There was something magical in each of the anecdotes. Major Matthews was possessed of a whimsical sensibility, sensitive to odd and humorous details, with a knack for finding the poetic in the everyday, so his material couldn't be more perfect for a surreal novel about early Vancouver. Considered Vancouver's first archivist and chronicler of the city, he wrote a series of historical narratives based on interviews with locals. Newly digitized, the online collection offers the public complete access to his collection of stories and images.

Once Lee Henderson finished, he turned the stage over to his friends for the musical component of the launch. They were to perform an experimental piece based on the readings. Right away, you could tell this music wasn't for everyone. The instruments consisted of two medium sized sticks and a laptop. A hush fell over the white-haired crowd; they leaned forward. The first musician began to bang the sticks slowly together in what could loosely be called a beat. After a very long period of wood clunking, the laptop player started making stuttery sounds, looping the wooden rhythm, remixing. The audience began to thin. A tall elderly man and his wife cleared out first, bee-lined to the catering table. Others shifted in their seats. There was much coughing and throat-clearing. The music continued, slowed to a crawl, sped up-- white noise, buzzing. Slides of old buildings, huge tree stumps, Vancouver's first makeshift city hall in a tent were projected in the background. A few more people filed out. The sticks and laptop noise built to its inevitable electronic orgasm. Experimental musicians had come to the Vancouver Archives and they weren't about to let go. One was unsure of when it might end. Or if they might play another 10 minute song right after, but eventually it was over, the musicians closed their laptop and put away their sticks, the audience clapped politely. In the strangely beautiful silence of in-between, the neatly filed books and images contemplated what they had just heard. After that, everyone was invited to sift through envelopes filled with copies of archival photographs from the collection. We spread the images out on tables and chairs, reading the information on the backs of the photos, exchanging pictures, chose some to take home. Outside, the city breathed life into the still afternoon and the day carried on.

Gathering Nettles

2011-05-30T22:15:00.000-07:00

Spring reminds me of wildcrafting. When we lived in Maple Ridge, we were sometimes hired by a local herbalist to gather St. John's Wort and other plants. Long afternoons were spent scanning the ditches and backroads for flashes of delicate yellow, the intricate pattern of a particular leaf. The heat clung to us, steam rose from pavement and grasses, hands were criss-crossed with stem slashes. In my elegant ensemble of rubber boots and Value village sweaters and Mark in an over-sized holey suit coat, we stalked our botanical quarry. At home, we set the leaves in baskets or hung them to dry. Along the way, we saw nesting white-tailed birds, web-footed moles, a deer's shimmering grace. And we found streams and fields and little secret paths.

One of my favourite plants at this time of the year has always been the stinging nettle. It was Gill O'Rourke, the infinitely wise gardener, singer, puppeteer, and weaver of vine maple fences we lived with who unlocked its mysteries for me. Taught me how to tell the lacy leaf of a columbine as it edged out of its dark winter earth, proud green shoot of a garlic bulb. Showed me how chewing on a leaf of feverfew could relieve migraines, fresh peppermint tea could soothe the stomach and a tincture of plantain and thyme could restore a roughened throat. The kitchen was filled with little bottles of St. John's Wort oil for swollen glands and jars of dried nettles for a special spring tea.

Nettles, it turns out, have twice the iron of spinach, and are loaded with vitamin C. Interestingly, the stinging hairs on the leaves and stem contain chemicals including histamine and serotonin, and arthritis sufferers have been known to apply stinging nettle to joints for pain relief. Nettle tea is dark and earthy; it tastes of secret things hidden underground, plants trampled underfoot, rust and dirt, and drinking it instantly makes me feel strong, fortified for a summer of gardening, hiking, swimming , planting.

And so I found myself last weekend crouching in a patch of nettles under the Lion's Gate Bridge in Stanley Park, pulling on some gloves, snipping the stems and leaves, tucking them into a bag. I had seen the patch the week before, biking by in a blur -- jagged deep green leaves with a silvery fringe of hairs. Gathering the leaves, my world narrowed. I breathed in the damp foresty smell of them, felt the wet grass seep through my pant legs, heard the far-off sound of waves against the shoreline. I parted the grasses, snipped the raindropped stems, fell into memory.

Arbutus Corridor: railway ambles through hidden places

2011-05-25T20:11:00.001-07:00

Another back road route I love at this time of the year is the foot trail that follows the railroad tracks from Granville Island near the Molson Brewery all the way to Richmond, otherwise known as the Arbutus Corridor. I first discovered it looking for a shortcut to a tutoring job in Kerrisdale and later used it as a new way to explore the environs beyond. We first walked the length of it one day a few years ago, following the rail tie spine past small parks flushed with bright yellow forsythia and soft spring plum. Past the perfect people in their expensive leather boots walking equally well-groomed golden retreivers. Past the bored rich kids smoking pot behind the school and BMXers impressing girls with bike tricks.. Eventually, the landscaped perfectititude of westside gardens gave way to industrial corrugated metal buildings. A blinding silver ocean of factory workers' cars spread out in an undulating gleam of sunlight. The people who passed us now were dodgier; one man carried a black plastic garbage bag and looked furtively over his shoulder, another clung to the shadows and seemed to be sizing us up for a possible shakedown. Although we felt it best to turn around that point, I've been told the tracks lead down to the Fraser where a little pub sits at the end of a dock and you can watch the float planes taking off. As it was, we were content with the shadow of airplanes from YVR as they hummed overhead, the glints of blue river behind car lots. Apparently, the Arbutus Line was bought by the CPR in 1901 and it ran an electric streetcar until 1958 from Vancouver into Steveston. The city has been trying to decide what to do with the land since the trains stopped running around 2000. For now, the corridor remains a hidden 11 km pathway across the spine of the city linking tourist haunts to beer factory to old money hoods to industrial plants to the edge of the Fraser; the sun glints off rail ties, wildflowers edge up to the tracks, and out over the crest of a hill past the tennis court bubbles, you can see out over the rooftops to the ocean and layered hills beyond. Your feet find the path and the day finds its rhythm in your footsteps.

The Edges of Things

2011-04-21T00:10:00.000-07:00

A few days ago, we began a long walk eastward. Shipyard shorelines soon led us out of the city, through several districts, up steep hills and down mossy forest trails -- all the way from Commercial Drive to Port Moody, with only the merest hint of a suburb. Past the rendering plant, Dockers Diner and the Princeton Pub, a turn down Wall Street leads to a neighbourhood that alternates between ocean-view Gulf-islandy homes ringed with forsythia, and low-end rentals bordered by stabby looking parks and pre-noon drunken teenagers setting up for alleyway fights. Then past the back end of the Hastings Racetrack -- sad faces of horses in stalls that face the highway. All this gives way to the massive Viterra grain elevators that shadow the port beneath the Second Narrows Bridge. Up a small hill and into the forest behind, and a rickety looking tree house comes into view overlooking the Straight and the North Shore beyond. Wild delicacy of dark pink bleeding hearts and curled bright fiddleheads, vine maple arches in perfect ribbed ceilings overhead. Here and there, the view opens up to sandbars and factories, fjords and cedared mountains. The air has that faint chill beneath its blue-gold surface. A few jigs and jags, a dart behind the Eileen Dailey Rec Centre, and you are climbing up, up, on a dirt trail along a bluff -- sharp pangs of green now, the cliffs below, the ocean beyond, and nothing but birds and a little ruffling breeze and the moss covering everything in a muted velvet. And you begin walking though your past again. Your legs find their old strength as you climb together.

Eventually the oil rigs force you onto Hastings for a time,and you emerge into metallic sunlight, car exhaust and construction detours. Pushing on, you mount another hill; this one is hot and steep and relentless but it ends in more forest, and finally you are up by SFU, looking out over Japanese sculptures and the ocean behind. Dark cedar stands and wrinkled waves across a stormy Straight; the waters moving on to wilder places -- curved islands undoing flat horizons. Further up, another trail traces the edge of sheer cliff faces, and you wind through crumbling old growth forests knotted with roots and huckleberry bushes fanning out in soft fringes from rotted trunks. Finally, the descent and the path opens up, undoing itself as it falls. You can see Port Moody far below -- its boats and sulphur piles. And then you are at the base of the mountain, crossing a highway and finding the trail sign below -- a narrow path that skirts the water. The last 8 km's are mostly flat. All around you, the air fills with the centering sweetness of balsam poplar trees, waxy yellow green that returns you to Maple Ridge woods and the springs you once had there. The trail finally leads you up close to the artificial hot yellow of the sulphur pile, railway ties flushed with its mustardy dust;. Until you climb one last rise and end up on a quiet street -- plum blossomed in the late afternoon slant of sunbeams. A wood-beamed pub filled with dead-serious Canucks fans awaits. The day's end washes over you both as you head into this particular form of light.

Tin Woks and Paper Parasols

2011-03-28T20:52:00.000-07:00

Chinatown had for me remained strangely under-explored until recently. But daily walks down Pender and Keefer have begun nudging me into little known shops. Several seem to have almost identical long and skinny aisles crammed with slightly rusted tin woks and inexplicably large varieties of feather duster. Upon entering one such kitchen store, a parallel universe seemed to yawn open ahead of me, narrow and packed with ladles, fish-mapped porcelain, dusty rice cookers, and a husband and wife crouching by the cash, chopsticking their way through something delicious and garlicky; an exact mirror image of the store I had explored the week before, one street over. Down the street, the elderly meander and jostle, fighting over closing out sale items, bartering for dried squid and ginseng root. Tea shops and whispery paper parasols the colour of candies, Mao relics, and paper shirts and money for burning in temples. One day, we ended up in a two story mall with several makeshift stalls and defunct escalators. Upstairs, a store sold art supplies half-hidden under tarps next to a stall filled with Hello Kitty luggage and plastic hardware paraphernalia. By the front doors door stood a table densely packed with small jade Buddhas. There was a fountain with a stone waterwheel and a twisted tree growing out. An older man rearranged things absentmindedly, whistling fantastic classical Chinese melodies, so that the notes bent and wound against the water's song, echoing through the empty white-tiled hallways.

The Back Way There

2011-03-06T20:51:00.001-08:00

I've taken to walking downtown along the shoreline, hugging the meanstreets -- under bridges, past chainlink, barbed wire and shipping containers. In these back-alley channels, the cement seems to absorb all sound; a crow circles existentially. After a time, the dockyards give way to Gastown's more refined loneliness. Here, the workers are not bruised-up missing-toothed labourers but coked up, houndstoothed macbookers. Past the faux Native arts and airbrushed wolf t-shirt shops with their endless variations on maple syrup. Coal Harbour, ringed with glassy skyscrapers and undulating sea-themed architecture -- the throaty rasps of Seaplanes. Rounding Stanley Park, the day opens up, the city of glass reflects itself in a still harbour, a seal surfaces, glides, dips under with a swish of slippery black. Kelp gathers in glossy salted knots, a heron contemplates the skyline with its prehistoric hunch. Round the bend, by the lighthouse, Chinese fishermen still cast their nets and wait for a thin silvery flashing catch, later on when the Seawall quiets down and the light comes in behind Siwash Rock. The sun sways a moment, then dips below the horizon; cyclists whir past, the ocean breathes its way out and leaves a whisper of crackling black and purple shells.

On the Fringes

2011-01-14T13:09:00.000-08:00

North Strathcona is a vast network of beautiful, desolate little nooks and crannies, alleyways and warehouses, dockyards and derelicts. Mark's obsession with wood has led us into stranger places yet -- peering into metal yards, sifting though piles of broken skids, happening upon a high end carpentry shop, complete with wood lot-- the owner comfortably holed up in a trailer parked outside, smoke curling from a makeshift chimney. Blocks of wet wood piled behind punk squats,, deserted construction sites, and axe-hewn logs; metal foundries and backyard cement mixers. Every walk leads past some odd new detail -- a few weeks ago it was a seemingly deserted series of brick-walled factories which turned out to be a movie set, and later, a hidden trail leading to a raised wooden boardwalk hovering out over the shipyards of Vancouver. Junk shops filled with old signs and dusty figurines and high-ceilinged studios strung with sculptures. Streets fringed by fabrication yards and old clapboard homes, deserted lots and crumbling hotels. A magical sort of world, where neon-bright rainbows seem to touch down every few days, and a tiny grey shingled cottage behind an ancient Chinese corner store has a sign reading "Sound Sleeper ". Down one street, a series of old homes are accessed by a sort of drawbridge -- remnants of the days when the hilly parts of Strathcona were leveled for street cars. And from the steep incline of a caged-in pedestrian overpass, the mountains and city stretch out endlessly, forlorn rise and fall of foghorns, bright flash of shipping containers in the last of the light.

Bravin' the Bull

2011-01-11T12:44:00.000-08:00

The Brave Bull is one of those neighbourhood restaurants that has been there forever, stubbornly clinging to its corner as its recently-increased-to-$9.95 steak dinner signs buckle and fade in the Vancouver rain. It is in fact, so visually shoddy that people either speed by it on Hastings or take a second look and keep on driving. However, it has such a promising level of kitsch -- not to mention ridiculously cheap food-- that we just had to try it. Inside, a series of dusty plants, a lot of wood, old-school pub chairs, and a simple bar with an incredibly narrow selection of classic booze. The place has been described in more than one review as your grandparents' slightly musty living room, and the reviewers seem to have it dead on. The night we were there, a boisterous party of Abbotsforders was celebrating a friend's birthday by getting him disgustingly drunk, then spinning him around in circles until he came close to puking. Watching this bunch screaming obscenities, cheering, and torturing the birthday boy with drunk blindfolded pin-the-tail- on- the- donkey games, I must admit at first regretting we had "braved the bull" as the expression goes. Especially since I'm vegetarian, and it is, after all, a House of Steaks.

However, everything changed when we met our server Linda Lum, a beaming elderly Chinese woman with pronounced teeth --proud owner of a crumbling carnivorial dynasty. "I'm too old for this", she kept mumbling, glancing nervously over at the increasingly-volumed bridge and tunnel crowd. "Another rye and Coke!" one of them slurred, and Linda shook her head and apologized to us. "You can wait a long time? Kitchen slow. Too many people here. Only one cook." Apparently, her husband was the beleaguered cook, a kitchen staff of one. Linda took our order on an old-fashioned order pad, writing everything down carefully, repeating it back and writing the total at the bottom and reading it out to us, presumably to ensure we could afford the $9.95 price tag. She seemed world-weary and kind at once, and there was something in her smile that spoke of hardship.

Later research has revealed that Linda and her husband arrived in Vancouver from Hong Kong, she worked her way up as a seamstress, teaching herself English and eventually took over the restaurant with husband Frank in the 1980s. That was in its glory days when its faux Roman pillars gleamed white, and it was packed with families and dockworkers. In fact, very little about the restaurant has changed since then. The prices are still ridiculously low, the banners outside are tattered but still intact, and the interior looks to have been entirely un-renovated. It's a bit like a time capsule --as if those family celebration-destinations the Keg and Swiss Chalet had crossbred circa 1986. Suffice it to say that my husband loved his perfectly cooked steak, smothered in fried mushrooms with a baked potato and sour cream on the side, and, despite myself, I rather enjoyed his iceberg lettuce salad with Kraft Italian.

The Long Walk Down Halifax Street

2010-11-11T14:45:00.000-08:00

Halifax is a long lean scar of a street, stretching across a suburban section of South Burnaby. For eight years now, I've been traversing the length of it, trundling an assortment of lumpy handbags stuffed with books and papers -- half-hearted love songs to the art of ESL. Here and there, along the route, lie the shells of tutoring locales past -- chilly houses and dim apartments long since abandoned for highrises in Seoul or Taipei with radiant heating and tiled floors. The families come and go. Inside, I huddle in underheated makeshift studies, plates of apple slices at one elbow, electronic dictionaries at the other, concocting ways to make English palatable; a comic book strip on dinosaurs for one young boy, a series of In Touch articles on celebrities for a surly teen girl. Sometimes, in a fit of boredom, the mothers will hire me to teach them conversation skills for a month or two, invariably revealing heart-breaking details about their husbands' alcoholism, their secret bisexual desires, or the way they are treated by their mother- in- laws if they can't bear them a son to carry on the family name. I've worked with reticent Taiwanese teenagers who like to play with fire and collect BB guns, semi-genius Harry Potter freaks, sleepy junk-food hoarders, anorexic self-loathers, snotty little rich kids, brilliantly inventive 12-year olds with a taste for Salinger, hip hop dreamers, future criminals, scrape-kneed tomboys, and been in a bathroom where the father kept his tools for an illegal dentistry practice. There is something eerie and dreamlike now about Halifax Street after so many years of stopping now here, now there -- books spilling across tables, the unmistakable sharp smell of kimchi from an opened fridge door, the thrill of a grasped concept, whisper of cash in an envelope at the end of a hard month. The night air shimmers and from far off, a few Rottweilers start barking ; the darkness of a Burnaby suburb, closed in dampness of hedges, tall cedars reflected in wet tarmac, the ache of my shoulder strap on the long walk home.

Of Cheese and Coffin Shops

2010-10-29T21:13:00.000-07:00

And then, after a few more dusty turns, we are in Aculco. The first thing you see is the white walls that enclose it, with a huge cannon-ball hole through one section where Hidalgo was run out of town. This is off- the- beaten- track, the-hero-lost-here Mexico. The streets are cobbled, brightly coloured paper flags hang from above, and every possible type of shop lines the street. There's the tequilaria with its walls of bottles, presided over by a bored middle-aged woman. And next door, one of two coffin shops -- open to the street-- with glossy saran-wrapped shiny coffins for sale in every size and colour. Raz stops off at a sweets store where they specialize in making this impossibly small, impossibly flaky perogie-shaped pastry with a home-made melted caramel filling. Everything in this town is incredible. Each shop seems to specialize, perfectly, in some particular confection. There is the cheese shop with its artisan cheese rounds, one threaded with jalapeño, another with cilantro. The local coffee is blended with fresh cinnamon, and even the pharmacia, where a young woman, with shy child in tow measures out some kind of Latino Peptobismal, pill by pill into a tiny waxed-paper envelope for about three cents, exceeds all expecataions. We meander through the town square, with its centuries-old frilled palms, its ornate shrines, and bushes trimmed into animal shapes. On one corner sits the mayor's office, complete with a line-up of at least 20 people, winding their way out the door, wrinkled pesos stuffed in pockets, up sleeves. . Men in dusty jeans and sombreros stroll the ancient streets; grey-haired women in embroidered dresses stand outside shop doors, sorting piles of bright orange marigolds. Children and stray dogs dart underfoot. There's an ornate pink stone church where the wedding will be held tomorrow. Later that evening, the groom will disappear into its gilded depths for hours, giving the first confession of his life in preparation for marriage. Outside, in the courtyard, teenaged hoodlums press against eyelinered temptresses, going as far as they dare. Hot pink bougainvillea spills down white stone walls; trucks cruise the bumpy streets, blaring garbled ads and tinny music through mounted megaphones. We check into our multi-tiered hotel, with its spare, simple rooms overlooking the courtyard and heavy wooden gates that shut after 10 PM, and then it's off to L'Esperanza, Raz's family's ranch in the hills above Aculco.

The Chaos of Delicacy

2010-10-09T23:58:00.001-07:00

I wake up in a Mexico City suburb with a sense of absolute surreality. Outside, the bright oppressive grey of morning glints off endless rows of sugary pink and orange houses, wrought-iron grates, ornately tiled courtyards. Mourning doves make water-drop melodies, the dogs chime in -- an intricate aural maze of barks and howls; the sing-song voices of delivery boys rise and fall through the silt and smoke of polluted air. A lemony Mexico City butterfly swoops and swings on a current. We stand out on the deck and drink in the day's chaotic delicacy. Breakfast brings utterly delicious corn tortilla quesadillas with layers of thinly sliced jambon, studded with jalapeños and fresh queso. There are little bowls of salsa verde and diced onions.

After take-out coffee from the local, staffed- by- gangsters Oxxo, we head to Aculco, a tiny town a few hours north of the city where Raz's family has a ranch and where his wedding is to be held the next day. The highway is packed with cars, and everywhere -- at the sides of the road, below underpasses, in ditches -- people are selling things. Flowers, candy, toys, fruit. Flatbeds packed with close-pressed farm workers standing perfectly straight and silent, sombrero-clad on their way to some meager pay day. Huge billboards, quadruple the size you'd find in Canada, line the highway, most with apartment-sized images of women in lacy thongs, advertising god knows what. Raz is a fast driver, confident, darting in and out of traffic, making quick diagonal trajectories across five lanes of traffic. A half hour outside the city, he pulls over, wipes the sweat from his brow and says he needs a beer. Under normal circumstances, this would make me nervous; somehow in Mexico, it feels like it might make for a safer drive. He pulls out a few bottles of dark Indio, pointing out that no one here would ever stoop to a Corona, and we adjust our seats a little, turn up the Beirut and drink down the calm cold of a beer at the side of a Mexican freeway. It is before noon.

The road slips by. The city turns to outskirts and then to jungle-covered mountains. Layers of darkening green trees and vines, conical volcanoes -- the widening blue sky above, the pot-holed black tarmac below. Here and there, a gold-roofed church, an abandoned farm, thin goats, an old stone building. At last, we pull off the main highway and head down a narrow,nowhere road. After a long bumpy half hour or so, the road gets even narrower, and stonier; stalls and open storefronts line its sides. Here the children look poorer, the whole feel is wilder. Animals roam free, walls are cracked, an old woman walks through tall grasses, trailed by several rag-tag children and a few bony stray dogs. Neil Young plays on the stereo.

2010-09-30T16:41:00.000-07:00

The Long and Winding Road into Mexico City

From the airplane, Mexico City is an electrified carpet unrolled over hills and valleys, orange streaks of light moving out and out as far as the eye can see so that the edges blur and glimmer. The airport itself is humid and mildewy, done up in a kind of 60's Modernist style of La Decima Vittima variety. Heavy-on-the xylophone lounge music would not be out of place on the loudspeakers. On the other side of customs, it smells more like cigarette smoke and sulfuric unbreathable city air. But after our friends arrive and bundle us into their jeep, that leather-seat, rolled-up-window, my-Mexican-friend-is actually-kinda-rich-with-good-taste-in-music-and-there's probably-some-cold-beer-waiting-for-us-in-his-fridge feeling takes over. Outside, the streets are pot-holed and desolate, the way only a Mexico City suburb's could be. For the first of what turns out to be dozens of times over the course of our visit, we discover we are lost. Very lost. There are shanty towns and spiralling freeways and graffitied walls and back-alley gangsters we have to ask for directions. And there is a moment when, after driving for several hours, our car starts to climb up, up into the hills ringing the city proper and I begin to seriously consider the suddenly plausible idea that we might be part of the plot of a very real B-horror movie. I picture our host, Raz, (who, I begin to realize, I frankly don't know that well) driving us deep into the wilderness to slit our throats with a rusty Mexican bandit's knife. The hills grow steeper now; we begin to drive down a deserted highway. There is silence. It is 2 AM in an entirely foreign country and our driver and his friend are the only people we know in this god-forsaken place. And then, just as suddenly, we are winding our way back down towards the city, over a bumpy road, past palm-tree-lined boulevards and the ever-present Oxxos, Mexican equivalent of the 7-11. Finally, we pull up to a gate manned by machine-gun-wielding guards who wave Raz in nonchalantly with the butts of their weapons, and we drive through a winding suburb of brightly painted adobe villas with wrought-iron gates. Raz's house is large, with a tiled courtyard, and once inside, some sort of upscale-Coquitlam-esque style prevails -- a relentless red and black colour scheme, punctuated by silver sculptures of entwined nude lovers and a 3-foot high lacquered red angel. The couches are leather, the flat-screen TV is enormous -- the Brick show room come to life. There is indeed beer in the fridge, and upstairs there is a king-sized bed covered in pilly polyester-fill coverlets, a familiar near-replica of the relatives-in-the-suburbs bedding we grew so accustomed to in our cat-sitting days. Sleep is instant and dreams are filled with driving through winding streets in the dark deep of a Mexican night.

The Crescent

2010-08-27T17:09:00.001-07:00

One day mid-summer, a friend introduced me to the joys of "The Crescent". Tucked in behind 15th, close to Granville, an unassuming side street curves up a hill and disappears out of sight. At the end of that street, the first thing you see is what looks like a beautiful treed park, which is just what it would be anywhere else. But here in Shaughnessy, it is simply a vast circular median in the middle of "The Crescent", heart of old-money Vancouver. It appears to have its own ecosystem. Hallucinations of deer and even small bears cavorting beneath the trees are not uncommon. The circular street unfolds slowly, dreamlike, ringing the grassy shadowed centre, while the late afternoon sun slants down through the pointy leaves of impossibly huge chestnut trees. There are 14 enormous mansions in all, built by those who made their fortune in lumber, sugar and mining. Some are starting to crumple and crinkle at the edges, fall into a state of seedy disrepair, a crumbling aristocracy. One house looks like a Greek villa -- all white-washed walls and cerulean blue roofs, another has a meticulously groomed lawn with ornamental hedges and a view that stretches out across lavender and roses, down towards the ocean and mountains beyond. As you walk around The Crescent slowly, hypnotically shuffling along its silent curves, you circle past the same houses again and again.

Cracked Tarmac, Decrepit Neon

2010-07-04T12:09:00.000-07:00

My fascination with Kingsway continues. Most weeks, I walk to and from work in Burnaby along this l no-man's land that cuts across the city, pocketed with decrepit buildings and obscure discount stores. One of the longest roads in Greater Vancouver, it was originally named Westminster Road and re-named Kingsway in 1913. It follows the Wagon Road which linked Gastown and New Westminster, then the capital of the Colony of B.C. Because Vancouver's street grid had yet to be laid out when the road was built, the Royal Engineers constructed it diagonally. It was later widened in a make-work project during the Great Depression. Somehow that spirit prevails.

There are liquidation centres open one day a week for 3 hours; a Church's Chicken with orange plastic booths and smeary mirrors -- the poor man's KFC; a discount "physical activity equipment" store with deflated yoga balls and damaged weights; several sparkly Vietnamese video stores; empty rental halls; a store that sells only McGavin's bread ( a long-time downtown eastside staple) at even more reduced rates. The 2400 Motel pulls in unsuspecting tourists with its insistent neon glow, while the El Dorado down the street crumbles into oblivion.

Late in the evening, on the way home, the air takes on a gentle smoggy quality, and the lights begin to glint, then fade. Hookers emerge on certain corners. Bed-bug evictees sit forlornly in empty parking lots, all their worldly possessions piled up around them. Gangsters filter into the Vietnamese coffee shops. And massive family expeditions to the Filipino video stores are in full swing. Three more Chinese restaurants,two nail salons, a thrift store, a few appliance shops, and then I round the last turn home, take the tarmac-buckled hill up 17th.

2010-06-09T23:48:00.001-07:00

Every year around the beginning of March, I spend an afternoon or two pacing along the chain link fence that surrounds Kits Pool, peering in like a zoo animal in reverse. Over the winter, algae has returned to its home, ringing the pool with a slippery green sheen. Crows litter the bottom with with hard black mussel shells, and the seagulls take over, floating dreamily across its reclaimed surface, with a sidelong proprietorial glance over their beaks. But about a month before it opens, it is cleaned and refilled. Invariably the whole month is unseasonably sunny and warm. The day it opens, the rains move in. But no matter -- the wetter the weather, the fewer the people. Built in 1931, Kits Pool is the longest pool in Canada -- 3 times the size of an Olympic Pool at 137 metres, and it's filled with salt water. It takes me about 10 minutes of hard kicking to do a full lap, but what a lap it is.

On opening day , I breathe in the wild ocean air and let out an audible gasp, sink into a salty bath of blue. Arms and legs unfurl in a rhythmic swoosh of kicks and strokes, loosening the waves, feeling my body stretch out and assume that familiar pattern of push and pull. Ten years of laps and lengths. The water fizzes with memory. Sidestroking now, I lean into liquidity, and it somehow supports me. Layers of grey misted mountains glide past.

Amphibious wet-suiters swish by--silent, intent, goggle-suctioned. Occasionally, I catch a bit of dialogue from the hardcores.
"Planning to bike to Utah and do the triathalon there. You?"
"Maybe Iron Man. I dunno. I kinda want to push myself. Do you know anything more challenging?"

Scattered about the the pool are the regulars. There's the architecture critic back-floating to my left, a cougar-esque woman preening on deck in her tiny bikini, the 80 year old urban planner with a penchant for European vacations, a muscular clutch of speedo wearers who eye each other up, the Greek yoga instructor and her daughters, the woman with the meniscus problem. We nod at each other cordially as we swish pass. The water bubbles and purls; there is a reverential silence. Seagulls dip and swoon overhead, reflect the pool in their feathers, soft green from beneath.

Later in the summer, the pool will crowd; "Marco...Polo... Marco... Polo" echoes against cement , teens will scale the fence and outdo each other with feats of bravado, the Showboat will start up with its amateur Hawaiian dance and lip syncing country singers. The Aquafit class sashays along the length of the pool, displaces the water. But on late summer evenings, there are just a few of us. The sky lights and fades, undoes the day. Mountains glow pink for just a moment. The water ripples and is still; a silence sinks into our skin as we glide, stroke, glide against the dying light.

The Truth About Free Things

2010-05-27T16:37:00.000-07:00

Free things, you think. So much more civilized than thrift store finds. You imagine yourself meandering the sunlit back alleys of Point Grey, stumbling upon, among other things, an early 19th Century mahogany- inlaid roll top desk some retired UBC professor emeritus discarded in his back alley during a fit of academic pique. But when you get back to Vancouver, you scan the empty grey streets and wet- mattress- dappled alleys with the dim realization that this city is not quaint, gardeny Victoria. The wealthy elderly do not simply leave boxes of European antiques out in front of their well-kept rosebushes, hummingbirds darting jauntily overhead, "Free. Help yourself" written in ornamental cursive across a perfect square of thick vanilla card stock. A bleak memory resurfaces--you see yourself 10 years ago lugging a hollowed-out chair with hand-mended patchwork fabric across town to your sad little Van east basement apartment where a bit of weak sunlight straggles through the window, vaguely illuminating the dust-covered ratty sofa you use as your bed. When you get the chair inside, it looks deflated, saggy and faded, dumpster bound. Vancouver free things are not Victoria free things.

Still, you can't help browsing the free section of craigslist. Nor can your husband. Soon, you are spending Saturday morning on your respective laptops yelling out things like, "Desk. East 16th!" or the doleful, "Broken photocopier. Surrey." You read about some free stuff in an alley a couple streets over. Turns out it's a pile of broken boards and a juice pitcher with missing plastic lid. Another search sends you a few blocks east where you find a few wet cardboard boxes containing broken glasses and an algebra textbook. These are not the kind of free things you were hoping for. And then it happens. A free barbeque. on craigslist Two blocks away. In "good working order"; this is worth getting out of bed at 8 AM on a Saturday for. When you arrive, a young woman and her boyfriend, encircled by a halo of pot smoke, greet you at the door. He is wearing dirty track pants and kind of lurking in the background. While she emotes enthusiastically, he hangs back, looking faintly guilty. Just as you begin to wheel the rusty barbecue triumphantly out the door, he mentions casually, "You might find it has a couple of hot spots." She gives him a look as if to say, "Shut the fuck up. We've almost disposed of this rusty piece of junk and this clueless couple is about to haul it away for free." Hot spots , it turns out, could be more accurately termed cold spots.

Free Things

2010-05-27T16:15:00.000-07:00

You walk by the thrift stores casually now. You don't need them anymore, you think. They were part of your misspent youth. Of course, it doesn't take long to fall back into your old habits. A few weekends of lower than expected pay cheques and you start trolling the second hand shops again, certain you will score some amazing deal. That Mr. Dudley plastic pepper grinder never looked so good. Perhaps that amateur painting of an iceberg is worth something. The upwardly mobile life can only go so far in a downwardly mobile apartment.

And then you take a fateful trip to Victoria. It is there that the uncanny gleaning abilities of your sister and brother-in-law are fully revealed. Your sister is the finder of the family, the kind of woman who covets a job at the town dump. But more than that, the kind of woman who could make a job at the town dump interesting, even glamorous. A typical stroll down the block involves a free set of shelves and a pair of red rubber boots that leave horseshoe shaped footprints. Alleyways are treasure troves of lampshades, toys, pictures, garden tools. Her daughter is already learning the tricks of the trade, deftly turning up a gilt-framed mirror and a silk blouse with a casual, "Mom, found something." Your sister peers down at the mirror, looks it up and down with an expert eye. "Nice job", she says, tucking it under her arm with a smooth, well-practiced gesture. Your brother-in-law is the free-section-of-craigslist sort. The downstairs manzone is tricked out with a huge free TV and a bar; the backyard boasts a courtesy-of-craigslist barbeque.

Home Sense and Sensibility

2010-05-23T15:19:00.000-07:00

It starts innocently enough with the thrift stores. You score a few amazing finds -- a vintage Lite Brite, a 70's sunlamp in box, a missionary novel entitled Before We Kill and Eat You. Soon, you find yourself in there a few times a week, sifting through sordid stuffed animals and sad little trivets, dust-covered cordless vacs, and pobody's nerfect mugs. You begin to covet things no one would want-- a crappy serving plate, a sticky picture frame, a single silver art deco-y looking shoe. You find yourself depressed, knee-deep in a junk pile in the Salvation Army basement, desperately holding up a chipped porcelain floral sculpture and sincerely thinking it might be worth the $39.99 written across it in red felt pen. Then one day, the damp, used smell is too much for you. The layer of dust and grit that seems to settle on your skin, the "free bread" bin at St. Vincent de Paul. You leave and never look back.

The next weekend, you find yourself in the new Winner's Home Sense, and life truly does seem to make more sense. This is where the semi-upwardly semi-mobile shop. The girls are slim and blonde and wear cashmere wraps and pricey boots; they often carry a yoga mat. Their boyfriends are buff and healthy looking, thick wallets in one hand, latte in the other. They repel and attract you in turns. They are from some better, richer,more boring parallel universe that has been going on all these years you've been spending underground in the thrift store basement, fingers whirring through the bins, hands glazed with other people's lives. At the Winner's Home Sense, everything is new. Somehow this is a revelation. And it's not that expensive. It is possible to join this other world, you think. Maybe you should. It begins with the king sized pillows.

If you do not own a king size pillow, you should know this: A) It will change your life, B) You can get two for $24.99 at the Home Sense. Ralph Lauren. Upon arriving home, you will place the pillows on your bed, lie down, and experience The Rapture. They are fluffier than your wildest dreams; they are so white and silky. They are huge and you don't have to fold them over to make them poofy enough. This is how the better half lives. Obviously, the next weekend you return. You've had a taste, and now it is time for the king-size pillow cases. Sheets soon follow. Higher and higher thread counts; there is no end to your consumerist bedding desires. You look knowingly at normal people on the streets. They have been investing in bedding for years; they have been having beautiful sleeps. They do not sleep under scratchy twin size sheets their former 85-year old Austrian neighbour passed down to them because they were too old and pilly for her. Their pillows are not made of old cushions stuffed into undersized mismatched pillow cases. You buy a duvet. Your bed has become a white whipped meringue of perfection. And don't even get started on the kitchen. You have no idea how much you need a set of white bowls with birds on them.

The shadows of things

2010-05-18T22:14:00.000-07:00

All became shadow
and mortal.
I believe, the stars,
flickering up there,
had died millions years ago.
-from Regret by Rainer Maria Rilke

On a recent walk westward, paper-thin shoes dusty with gravel and beach, I wound up trudging down a side street lined with high old trees. Right away, I noticed the shadows; winter light had begun to shift into the longer lines of spring. And I started to think about swallows. How they're my favourite bird-- the way they dip and swoon, leaning into currents of hot sun-filled air, and their feathers turn oil-puddle rainbow colours. Most of all, I love a certain dusky shadow that falls just under their wing. I thought on shadows awhile --the darkness that leads or follows you. All around me, the light was perfect for shadow-hunting. Dark roots of tree shadows shimmying across a bright stretch of lawn, intricate sooty lace from something delicate-leafed, scratchy points of a tropical plant. I couldn't stop taking pictures; there were blurred shadows, sharp shadows, industrial shadows, the shadows of legs and roots and lamp posts. A reverse world, like looking at reflections on water; upside down and bent into a soft and infinite darkness.

Slow Change Artists

2010-03-25T23:24:00.000-07:00

A few weekends ago, after a series of absurd circumstances involving "the compromiser" (a fraud artist who copied our bank card and absconded with the absolute last vestiges of monetary prowess we possessed), we found ourselves standing in front of a coin machine in the SuperValu on Commercial Drive. The SuperValu itself deserves a mention because although it is open 24 hours a day, and although it does possess the one and only existing coin machine in Vancouver, it had flown under my radar all these years. Now, standing under the bleak fluorescents, tucked in behind the popcorn machine, we slowly emptied our plastic bag, feeding our pennies onto the belt which vibrated and clanked in the silence of the overbright store.

Years ago, this process was a common occurrence for us. Those were the salad days, when every Safeway had a coin machine that whirred efficiently, then smoothly released its receipt. There were many of us coin-machiners then --university students gathering up their resources, little old ladies with decades of savings. It still seemed somehow respectable. But one day we arrived at the Safeway, heavy bags in hand, dreams of a restaurant meal in our heads, and the machine was gone. Nothing but a rusty outline on the floor, shadow of its former self. And just like that, the days of easy money were gone. That is until a recent Internet scour revealed the last remaining coin machine in Vancouver. Sure, the casinos apparently offer a coin-counting service, and a guy advertising on craigslist will count your change for a 10% fee, but to avoid the petty humiliation of strangers seeing just how broke we were, the coin machine won out, hands down.

The guy working the popcorn maker in the SuperValu was about 12 years old, and he looked bored beyond his years. "Coin machine broke down again?" he asked with a mixture of sympathy and contempt. Dusting off his salty hands on a buttery apron, he headed toward the back room."I'll get Joe." Joe emerged shortly -- pale, aproned, sinister scrapes and cuts dotting his head, knuckles, elbows; dark circles ringing his thousand-mile stare. But he knew his coin machine, opening it up with one deft movement, running the belt, checking the mechanisms; a man with years of service at the SuperValu. "Don't worry," he said nonchalantly, "Gets jammed all the time." That was the first time. By the sixth time, he had begun to show signs of mild agitation; the veins in his forehead swelled, his skin took on an unhealthy pinkish tinge. He stopped making idle conversation. We developed a new strategy: one of us was the bag emptier, the other the coin spreader. Ever so gently one of us emptied a smattering of change into the tray with a tinny clink, while the other, always spreading,spreading, thinned the layers with rhythmic fingers. In the end, after at least an hour of fits and starts, the coin machine spat out its receipt -- after the 20% fee, a grand total of $42, enough for an Indian meal at Sweet Cherubim, with money to spare for groceries. We stepped out into the bright day, blinking, hands coated in a mossy copper dust.

Crowtotillers

2010-03-01T23:13:00.000-08:00

A few weeks ago, back-pedaling down a back street in East Van, I came across a woman furtively fixing her ravaged lawn by trying to cover up the mud with bits of new sod. "I'm trying to get it done before the crows return," she said apologetically, noticing me noticing her. I mentioned a documentary on crows that I'd recently seen, and how extraordinarily intelligent they are -- how they can recognize and remember individual faces, and pass the information on to the next generation of crows. She glanced furtively down the block. "There's one of them now; I hope he doesn't take revenge and come back. He probably knows exactly who I am. He's targeting me. They've been tearing up my grass for weeks. They just dig down in it with their beaks and leave a pile of mud and tufts. I'm at my wits end." After that little semi-paranoid exchange, I began to see more and more dug-up lawns, clumps of moss and sod, beaked up corners, naturally aerated beds of mud-grass. It seemed to be confined mostly to the eastern sections of the city -- the edges of Burnaby, the kind of places where the scent of early cherry blossoms is mixed with laundry fumes and samosas. A few friends concurred; they'd been seeing a lot of crow/lawn action, and it was getting worse. "They've discovered agriculture," my husband theorized one day at the end of a foot-blisteringly long walk. "They've begun to farm." Watching them closely, we noticed the crows didn't seem to be taking the grass away to make nests; they just dug and dug, reducing jewel-green lawns to nothing more than a series of clodded heaps. The birds would look up at me with their shiny beetle wing-black eyes, briefly interested; then, as soon as they realized I wasn't going to impede their project in any way, they'd get back to it. I had to get to the bottom of this. My subsequent research has revealed that there is indeed unprecedented crow digging action this spring, particularly in East Van and its suspect suburbs. It's because of the chafer beetles. The European chafer beetle infestation has been on the rise since 2001 in Vancouver and outlying areas. The beetle was likely brought here accidentally in nursery stock shipped from the east (where it was introduced in the 1940's after hitching a ride over from Europe). For a crow (or raccoon or skunk), the grub is a delicious treat. Apparently, the crows are actually doing us a service because they get at the grubs pre-beetle stage, halting the cycle and nipping the little buggers in the bud. Supposedly, this is just the beginning of the invasion. At the moment, the crowtotilled lawns are most obvious in the Fraser Valley and eastern areas of Vancouver; however, experts predict that the beetles are coming to a lawn near you in the (gasp) the Vancouver west side, and even North Van. Don't worry though, the crows are onto it.

Heart Like a Wheel

2010-01-27T13:07:00.001-08:00

When I was young, our record player was pretty much the centre of my world. My brothers, sister and I would sit facing it, piling the album sleeves around us, caressing their familiar waxy smoothness. A swiftly tilting angle of covers-- now 30 degrees, now 45, balanced precariously under the record player, arranged in a half hazard Logan-mishmash as dense and impenetrable as a brier patch. But any one of us could reach in and pull out a favourite at will, avoiding the dreaded Christian-themed Godspell and post-conversion Dylan albums of our father's (though we were oddly obsessed with Jesus Christ Superstar), gleaning instead the blank heft of the White Album, the worn out creepiness of a Crumb-illustrated Janice Joplin. One of the albums that mystified me most, drawing me in and repelling me at turns, was Pronto Monto by Kate and Anna McGarrigle, two Montreal sisters with warbly folk songs and piercing harmonies --one of my mother's favourites. The cover showed two young women with light-haloed buns, staring curiously, seriously at the camera, glamorous and unabashedly ironic at once. Some of the songs were beautiful in a way I couldn't define; there was something heartbreaking and honest about them -- the way the sisters' voices soared up together, wavering on the high notes, cresting and falling. And then there was that weird song about the hot dog vendor who served french fries on the side, which I knew was supposed to be funny because Mama laughed every time she heard it, but also had a vague hint of raunchiness that I didn't quite get at that age. They were funny. And they were dead serious. So much like my mother. There was also this undercurrent of anger in their songs. The McGarrigles were angry at men especially. Their songs were complicated and vague, piercing and vulnerable; they kind of shimmered and faded, and I came to identify them very strongly with my mother. We would sit together sometimes and just listen; light bleaching the living room, the needle whispering behind their voices. Years after Mama died, I rediscovered the McGarrigles. Reassuring, how time freezes voices, so your memory, at least of old songs, stays intact. Their voices lifted and came together and left each other, and came back again.

BLIM Gleanings

2009-12-17T22:54:00.000-08:00

On the last Sunday of every month, BLIM holds a community market at the Cambrian Hall at Main and 17th. BLIM itself is an amazing gallery and workspace, offering everything from build-your-own- transistor-radio workshops, to silk screening, to Mexican wrestling mask-making classes (www.blim.ca). My first introduction to the market came during the heat of the summer. Outside, hopelessly hip British guitarists and bespectacled collectors laid out blankets filled with vintage clothing, old records, comic books and heavy metal tee-shirts. Sifting through one-piece lace cuffed polyester jump-suits and Led Zeppelin albums, I came across a fully beaded Navajo- patterned belt with gold clasps and metallic thread: $3. Inside, there were tables packed with felted animals, multi-pendant necklaces glittering with cameos, crosses and crystal beads, racks of reworked clothing -- leather jackets with painted birds, grommetted sweaters. Teen girls tried on feather headpieces, ceramic artists exchanged emails, mothers jostled babies and ate homemade chickpea patties, a band set up. I made my way to the back and found two young girls at a table. They had a delicate selection of paper bags, loaded with meticulously-cut-out vintage children's book illustrations, 60s postcards, maps, ancient Polish letters and stamps, and even someone's decades old yellowing hand-lettered report card;I bought a bag for $8, and spent hours at home unravelling its pleasures.

Another time, I found a pristine copy of Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel, written and illustrated by Virginia Lee Burton in 1939. This was one of our family favourites as kids, and the illustrations are phenomenal. According to the Wikipedia entry, Burton's books are "notable for their swirling, stylized illustrations and her stories concerning technological change. Characters are apt to be buildings or machines." This one is about a man and his steam shovel, and how he gets stuck in the basement of a school while building it and stays there. I also found an embossed ivory and black clutch with an oversized brass clasp and red satin lining, handmade by Davie and Chiyo, that never ceases to delight me. The last time I went to the market, I circled the room, but kept drifting back to a young man with a table full of pen and ink illustrations. We got to talking and he told me he's done a lot of murals and street art in various cities, and he draws and paints on whatever he can find for free (check out some of Matt Watson's art at www.flickr.com/photos/identifythefiveflaws/). Intricate and whimsical, his pictures were drawn on the backs of cereal box cardboard and other found bits of paper.There were trucks and trees and a beautiful line drawing of shipping containers in the rain, but I couldn't help choosing a tugboat, floating on a turquoise sea with dashed- line smoke curling up past a flat yellow sun in the cardboard-brown sky.

The Decline and Fall of the Payphone

2009-11-26T13:57:00.000-08:00

As an unrepentant long-distance call abuser, I have often been forced to whisper salacious details into pay phone receivers city-wide. There was a span of a couple of years -- before the advent of affordable cell phones and after a few too many unpaid bills --when I sallied forth to the City Centre Mall to make all my calls. Those were humiliating times. I shared pay phones with drug dealers, halfway housers, and a woman who constantly talked about her dog's myriad of health concerns. I heard things not fit for public consumption. Phone sex, verbal abuse, alien abduction stories. Yet I was unequivocally one of them, a pay phone user, letting my despairs, ambitions, family crises, and faltering requests for money float out into the dirty tiled corridors. These days, I am mercifully less of a user, only occasionally forced into a marker-streaked Plexiglas booth. They are of course getting harder and harder to find as cell phones become ubiquitous, and besides upping the price to 50 cents, the phone companies don't exactly seem to be making pay phone upgrades a priority. My favourite neighbourhood pay phone is located in the upper level of City Square Shopping Centre at Cambie and 12th. It's folded into a quiet little corner, and often a chair is placed thoughtfully beneath it. Hours of comfortable semi-private conversations for all. But you'll have to fight for it; you'd be surprised at the competition.

Fire on Main

2009-11-14T20:17:00.000-08:00

In the early morning hours last week, a fire destroyed most of a block at the corner of Main and Broadway. As an 11 year inhabitant of the neighbourhood, I will miss those places. There was the accounting firm, a ghost of a business which I never set foot inside; neat black lettering, unobtrusive awning, walls lined with ancient metal filing cabinets. Zocalo -- I remember watching with fascination as it went in; for months, there was just a tiny window with a fan, a series of Spanishy objects and a 'coming soon' sign. It had been picking up of late with salsa dancers spilling out onto the streets, and a Brazilian night that was packed to the rafters with partying Vancouver ESL students.

Kishu Island was one of our favourite places for cheap food when we moved here; you could eat and drink for two for under $20. It's where had my first real Japanese food as a sushi-reluctant recently-transplanted Ontarian. Sticky, shadowed floors, cavernous chill of cement, contemptuous flush-faced head waitress, steaming dishes of vegetable yakisoba and robata; it had one of the few indoor pay phones left the city, attracting a mix of drug dealers and muffin-in-a-thong-jeaned Surrey teens. Fruit flies huddled in wispy gangs, following us home and moving into our kitchen on more than one post-Kishu occasion. Many a night of $9 pitchers and even cheaper sushi with easy-to-impress out of town friends.

Slickety Jim's was perhaps the heart of the neighbourhood, a 10 year veteran of the block. I remember when I first saw the "Slickety Jim's Chat 'N' Chew" sign; it was so authentically vintage looking, I thought it had been there for years and I had somehow just missed it. The walls were a riot of thrift store finds: velvet bullfighters, oil paintings of sad clowns, shelves filled with every possible shape and size of porcelain figurine and vase. It had that Grandma's-on-acid aesthetic I'm sure a lot of Main Streeters ended up emulating in their apartments. There were old pennants from places like Banff, and pull-down maps of Canada from 70's classrooms. There was always a punk chef in the kitchen and some good tunes on the stereo. One day I found a strange book on Korean shamanism on the bookshelf and must have drunk 6 cups of coffee just reading it. Another day around Christmas, we had just finished a delicious brunch (We Don't Need No Eggs and Bacon and the Morning Yearning if I recall correctly). When we went up to pay the bill, the waitress waved us away, "Merry Christmas. Breakfast's on us." It was that kind of a place. It was always packed and the service was slow, but you could get cup after cup of coffee. The menu was amusing, with my favourite entry being the Salad of the Renaissance: "soft poached pear guided by a most subtle and divine goat feta lazing about a garden of wild greens, mingling with fresh herbs and sundried black olives, with the implied subtleties only balsamic vinegar can provide." The best thing about Slickety Jim's was the clocks. There were several of them above the counter and not one of them told the right time.

Those businesses are just heaps of smoldering metal and plastic now, cracked and emptied shells against a grey November sheen. Beside the sooty pit of blackened remains, a former bank's billboard, taken over by the art crowd several months ago: "There is no loneliness. There is only this."

We are for the dark

2009-11-07T21:38:00.000-08:00

In October, several billboards advertising Guinness popped up around the city. "We are for the dark" the slogan read, accompanied by shadowy Halloweenish images. After a few days, I began to notice the odd murder of crows clustered on the metal frames. I mentioned it to a few people; it seemed like the birds were attracted somehow by the dark hues, the sinister message. Lucky for Guinness, the crows seemed willing to play along with the whole we-are-for-the-dark scenario. Vancouver being a city of crows, I thought the company had chosen the ideal location for this ad campaign.

Halloween night: noticed the crows congregated yet again above the Main St. billboard. But something was wrong. They shouldn't have been there that late at night. Crows around here have a curfew. As every east ender worth his salt knows, Vancouver crows head to Burnaby at dusk. They gather slowly in perfect formation, swooping and swerving ever Burnaby-ward as the sky slowly dims, purples, blackens. Thousands of crows wing their way out of the city, sheen of feather catching the last lines of light. The birds settle in a vast empty lot, far east, on tarmac, in dead trees, a sea of shimmering blue-black till night drifts and hovers overhead, descends, silences.

But these crows were on Main Street, on a billboard, past pumpkin-turning time. Moving a little closer, I noticed they were suspiciously shiny, plastic shiny in fact. A little too still, bent over the billboard in slightly too-perfect poses.

Two days later, I was headed past the billboard again. Work crews had torn down the poster; it lay in a sticky heap. Halloween was over. In the empty lot behind the sign, black plastic crows lay on their backs in the overgrown grass.

Post Script: Mount Pleasant Community Centre

2009-10-25T21:33:00.001-07:00

Today marked the last day of the Mount Pleasant Community Centre. The whir and buzz of failing machines, the squeak of marker on sign up sheets, the thrill of a new stash of gossip mags. A table of snacks was set out, goodbyes were said, and at 6 PM, closing time, a small but close-knit group of us remembered things in the half-light of old fluorescents. I post some photos that evoke the decrepit but somehow compelling feel of the place, soon to be leveled and made into park land.

The Last Days of Mount Pleasant Community Centre

2009-10-22T00:11:00.000-07:00

I am beginning to say goodbye to my gym of the last 11 years. At the corner of Ontario and 15th stands Mount Pleasant Community Centre, built in 1966 and fraught with memories. It is, in fact, the oldest of the Vancouver community centres. In dire need of a seismic upgrade, not to mention a good clean, it will be shutting down at the end of this month to make way for #1 Kingsway at the corner of Kingsway and Main. I have been going to Mount Pleasant at least 5 days a week since 1998. They know me by name here; if my pass has run out and I don't have change, they let me in for free.

It is no Fitness World. The pretension level is around zero, with a mix of poor, elderly, new immigrants, overweight, under-orthodontisized, and mentally ill. I count myself a proud member. A smell of old man sweat and light mildew, amateur art displays, pocked walls, smears on the change room doors, low foamy ceilings, dim lights, unclassified insects, clanking machines echoing off the low-slung pipes. The sexual grunts of heavy weight lifters, shaky mentally ill patients, smoky ex-cons, tripping heroin addicts, anorexics, hipsters, steroid users, Cambodian stalkers, Russian cabbies with drinking problems, halfway housers, 80s spandex wearers, butch lesbians into doing squats.

The staff are great. From the straight talking women at the upstairs desk always game for a laugh -- multi-taskers veering between exhaustion and hyperactivity, to the wide-ranging assortment of fitness room attendants -- physical therapy grads in track suits, athletic philosophers. The mood is set with a combination of the background music (which fluctuates depending on staff from classic rock to dirty hip hop to Will's trancey indie curated selections) and the heat level (which fluctuates depending on the number of dusty fans on high and whether the old metal fire door is propped open or not).

Three sets of fifteen on each machine, magic marker sign-up sheets for the cardio, pilly grey towels and spray bottles filled with vinegar for cleaning, the same guys on the same equipment for 11 years straight. Gentrification has made only slight in-roads here. A few dark-haired pale girls in silk screened T's here, an ironic moustache on the treadmill there.

In summer, the pool is packed. People leave their drips down the corridor; the whole gym smells like chlorine; the change rooms are sopping. Outdoor, central, neighbourhoody, overheated, undercleaned. It's everything an old school urban pool should be. So crowded on hot summer days that it heaves with life; screams, leaps, parents, babies, old men, gangsters, ghetto dwellers, Kits Beachers in training, larger women in smaller bathing suits, hairy-backed men, Filipino scenesters; all of them diving, flailing, making out, dunking each other, playing Marco Polo, laughing, learning how to swim toward their parents' hopeful outstretched arms. The pool is so small and full that when aquabics starts, with the first aerobic leap, half the pool's water is displaced. Those of us swimming laps in the eighth of the pool cordoned off for such foolishness get a sudden jolt of lukewarm, chemically water up the nose as the ladies sashay to techno versions of Phantom of the Opera and Tomorrow, from Annie.

The pool's been drained for the last time. The weight room equipment is slowly disappearing to the new centre, leaving its shadowy imprints on the streaky floor. Even the staff seem only half there. In less than a week, Mount Pleasant Community Centre will be a shell of asbestos, old pipes, and the echoes. For now, it still has a little life in it yet.

Mysterious Airstream

2009-09-21T19:20:00.000-07:00

Early this summer, the car dealership across the street from my apartment went out of business. I took at as a sign of these recessionary times and watched with mild bemusement as it was slowly emptied, leaving a huge hollow white nondescript shell, glowing under the cold hum of defunct signage. First, the boarders moved in. Daredevil pre-teens with showy hair, plaid-shirt skinny-jeaners with paper backs tucked jauntily into pockets; their friends filmed them as they dazzled the razor's edge of a shiny black rail, plunged off roof tops, flipped and skimmed and slid, skinned shins. Then, it was a small band of homeless men pushing shopping carts. They took a cursory look around, then set up shop under the roof, each found a corner to call his own and in this high rent, Olympics-fuelled city, achieved a measure of free accomodation. It didn't last long. One morning they were gone. For a week or so, silence reigned on the tarmac. Shadows fell across the lot, puddles formed, and subtle whispers of moss and grass began sneaking up through the cracks. And then the Airstream arrived. One day it was just there. Silver, ergonomic gleaming, trailer hook unattached to any vehicle. A white plastic patio chair at its door, official-looking orange pylons set up across the parking lot entrance to ward off unwanted guests. I have never seen anyone enter or exit the Airstream, but all day a slapstick routine of nosey neighbours, community patrollers, bored mothers, future law enforcement hopefuls and the drunken young edge across the lot, make a complete circumnavigation of the trailer, peek in the windows, back away, edge forward again, snap pictures, make phone calls, leave, come back, bring friends and generally accomplish absolutely nothing. Late one night, a woman on the second level of the dealership sat bent over a violin, notes washing into the traffic as the stars came on, white plastic chair mirroring the one in front of the trailer. The Airstream remains, inscrutable in its skin of reflective metal, shining the city back at itself day after day.

A Brief Study of Sidewalk Cracks: East 17th- East 19th

2009-09-15T22:14:00.000-07:00

Long walks through the backroads of east Van unfold strings and strands of buckling road, heroin-veined sidewalks, and thick uneven bandages of tar. In places, roots curl and push, cracked cement loosens, the sidewalk undoes itself. My heels catch and grind; I lurch forward, grasp air, right myself -- layers of dust and gravel sifting in a splintered rain. These are the forgotten streets; the swamp beneath them gathers tarmac into angled mounds, tilts houses, splits cement. The neighbourhood inhabitants – immigrants making do with uneven doorways, young couples with tool fetishes -- step gingerly over grey chasmed cracks, watch ribbons of moss spread with delicate precision just ahead of each footstep.

The Dilemna Dilemma

2009-08-11T14:41:00.000-07:00

A few years ago, I had an encounter with the word dilemma. I was tutoring one of my more troublesome students, a surly teen who had little faith or interest in my skills. I had managed to remain tentatively and precariously balanced on my pedagogic throne until that evening. We were reading a short story when we came across the word dilemma. "I thought you said it's spelled dilemna, with an n, " he sneered, clearly pleased to have caught me in a mistake."Remember when you edited my essay last week, and you told me never to forget that dilemma is always spelled with an n? Remember?
"Oh this must be the American spelling, " I smiled confidently. "Let's look it up in the dictionary."
The dictionary said dilemma; there was no alternate spelling. My confidence slowly crumbling, I silently repeated the tutor's mantra: maintain the façade. We checked his electronic dictionary, his paper dictionary, his thesaurus; they cruelly corroborated. I left his apartment defeated. I imagined my entire ESL empire collapsing; mothers calling each other to whisper, "Did you hear? Amy teacher doesn't know how to spell."
When I got home, I asked my husband, a huge reader, how he would spell dilemma. With little hesitation, he spelled it out, with an n. I googled dilemna. Close to a million entries came up. There were whole chatrooms devoted to the topic of dilemna vs. dilemma. One professor had had a heated argument defending the n spelling at a dinner party, only to discover he was wrong. In the weeks that followed, I asked a wide variety of people how they would spell the word. My father and most of his friends instantly spelled it correctly, but at least 90% of my friends spelled it with an n. There seemed to be a generational divide. People between about 32 and 45 often spelled it with an n, while the rest almost uniformly spelled it correctly. One theory poses that a manual during the 70's or 80's taught a batch of teachers the wrong spelling. I can distinctly remember my grade 5 teacher spelling dilemna on the board and circling the n in pink chalk. Looking out at us over her bifocals and shaking her pointer, she warned, "Never forget it." I didn't.

Leg-in-Boot Square

2009-08-03T15:27:00.000-07:00

Along False Creek, just past Monk McQueen's and the former Stamps Landing pub is a quaint little area known as Leg-in-Boot Square. It's made of red brick, set back from the water, with a fountain and a few trees and benches, surrounded by small shops and businesses. Somehow there's always a layer of crisp leaves shushing across the stones in a dry wind. It's easy just to walk past it on your way to Granville Island or Kitsilano, but it's worth a stop. My husband is quite obsessed with the area, and has often expounded its merits to doubting friends. The space has a feeling of shadowy vastness and the dusty red bricks make it look old and European, a rare sensation in glass and steel Vancouver. In fact, it doesn't really seem to fit with its surroundings of shiny condos , clinking yacht masts and geriatric garage sales. But that's why it's a perfect spot to step back from the rush and whir of Seawall --the glare of sun off water -- and retreat into a dim brick courtyard of sorts, somewhat crumbling. The name Leg-in -Boot has a very literal origin, stemming from an incident that happened in the late nineteenth century. At the time (and indeed into the 1970's), the area was completely industrialized, and one day, a leg in its boot washed up on shore. Not knowing whose it was, police hung it up on a post hoping someone could identify its owner or claim it for himself.

Free to Be... You and Me

2009-07-23T13:40:00.000-07:00

In the Ellipsis

I grew up the child of hippie parents, like many in the 1970's. My father was a United Church minister, inspired to preach after an acid trip during which he saw the hand of God reach out of the sky. My mother was becoming an increasingly virulent feminist, who subscribed to Ms. Magazine and threw out the Barbies I got as gifts. There was no television. Which leads me to Free to Be... You and Me.

Records were an intrinsic part of my childhood, and my brothers, sister and I sat around the record player like cavemen around a fire. It was our oracle. Stravinsky's Firebird Suite, with its story of the phoenix rising from the ashes, unfolded around us, feathers and smoke dusting the wooden floors of our living room. We could see the things we heard; Peter traipsing though the snow after the wolf, Snow White singing to the birds, Raffi's robin in the rain with his socks of yellow. And then there was Free to Be... You and Me. I can't explain why it disturbed me so much, but it holds an uncomfortable power over my psyche. And I'll bet I'm not the only one.

Produced in 1972, the year after I was born, the record was the brainchild of Marlo Thomas, and "friends", including Harry Belafonte, Michael Jackson, Mel Brooks, and Roberta Flack. According to wikipedia, it's a "cult classic" (however, tellingly, citations are needed). Inspired by her friend Gloria Steinem, Marlo (I feel like I'm on a first name basis with her) set out to create stories and songs that avoided gender stereotypes, and left children open to exploring who they were no matter what their race, sex or class. A noble cause. Trouble is, the result was deeply confusing, at least for me. I got caught in that ellipsis between "Free to Be" and "You and Me". I'm probably still there.

It starts out promisingly enough with the theme song,, suggesting that there's a land where the children are free; that sounded good. In the TV special of the same name, children on a carousel are eventually freed, turning into cartoon characters and riding off across the desert in cowboy hats. But things soon get weird. In "Boy Meets Girl", two babies talk in the hospital nursery and try to figure out what gender they are. They get mixed up of course because they don't have preconceived ideas of gender roles yet; we all start out the same -- bald and open to change. The problem is that it actually is two adults playing the babies; they are ironic and savvy and it's all very funny. But it doesn't make sense when you're 4 or 5. You already know there's a big difference between boys and girls, and you also know that babies can't talk. Adults using baby voices to express a Utopian ideal of gender neutrality really seems more for the parents than for the kids.

It goes on from there. Songs about boys who want dolls, songs that teach you it's okay to cry, songs about girls growing up to be engineers. It's all ideologically sound. But what remains embedded in my memory is not the anti-stereotype, pro-equality messages but creepy skits on kids being forced to eat eggs and grown women pretending to be boys. In "William Wants a Doll", Marlo plays the young William. It doesn't make sense when you're little; if boys should be encouraged to have dolls, why is the boy being voiced by a girl in the song? And given Michael Jackson's questionable sexuality, it's ironic in to hear him sing, "Will I grow up to be big and tall?", striving for a masculine ideal that he didn't exactly reach (the song, of course, suggests that it doesn't matter whether he does grow up to be manly; everyone will like him just the same). On the other hand, maybe the message did influence me. After all, I do believe it's alright to cry, boys can have dolls, and women can be anything they want.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aDGQgSGHGZ0

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wSNwxeY09bE

On the Way to Kits Pool

2009-07-21T13:44:00.000-07:00

The walk to Kits Pool in late afternoon sun, glance of light off water, hot stone of the seawall: the lean and tanned, the Asian umbrella hiders, the aggressive garage salers, the proud walker of 6 large, long-haired dogs (trailed by older female admirers). And then there are the competitive lemonade hawkers, bottlenecking as you near Granville Island. Most are children, though you question the motives of the skateboarder teens slowly inching the prices of their cheap Koolaid of dubious wateriness past $2.00 a glass. I overheard one jaded kid telling his friend, "Yeah, I know they promised they'd come back, but they always say that. Never trust the customers, man. First rule of lemonade sales." The ones that put up signs saying, 'All Proceeds Go to Charity' are perhaps the most savvy.

Dodge the long-haired guy under the Granville Street Bridge who poses as a bicycle advocate, but hands out plastic beads and a photocopied article about himself (he seems to have recently retired, having farmed out his job to a mentally ill fan). Ditto for the older ultra Christian guitar strummer, who leaves his case open to display paintings of Jesus on the cross, and has yet to learn how to play one chord after over ten years standing there mumbling and thudding his strings. No one ever leaves him any coins.

Past the Go Fish stand, up the stairs, through a park filled with small fluffy dogs, down the stairs to the path where you almost get hit by cyclists whipping down the hill and around the corner, past the tree where the eagle lives, beyond the Bard on the Beach tents with actors practising their swordmanship pre-show, past the full-time, full-body kite-flyers, around the curve, till you reach Kits Beach.

I absolutely hate Kits Beach, so its funny my favourite pool is right beside it. All the people I purposefully avoid in society are gathered in one oiled, sweaty location. It is hot; there is volleyball. There are big, muscled guys throwing footballs, and young, overly-tanned women with breast implants parading in leopard print bikinis and heels. There is Fox radio blaring. It's the kind of place where they hand out free vitamin water. Kits Beach is their exact target market.

2009-07-12T12:44:00.000-07:00

Stanley Park Seawall

The best time to walk or bike the 10 km's around Stanley Park is early morning on a weekday. You see almost no one, and the curve and line of stone and sea arch endlessly away from you. On soft blurred days, you might see a seal's slippery sheen. And when the tide peels back, the underside of the ocean unlocks: gleam of purple sea stars, bubbling breath of clams, crust of barnacles. The best part comes when you round the pavement near Siwash Rock. On one side, a cool wet wall of rock rises up, trickling with tiny streams, on the other, the swish and glow of ocean, now green, now grey, washes out to a pale horizon. In winter, a blueprint of black and white birds rises and settles with the waves like a breathing cloud.

2009-07-07T12:38:00.000-07:00

Walls
One of the pleasures of walking is in the almost hidden things: the edges of alleys, a breath of hot green grass in the ditches, the beat-up cracks of a root-torn sidewalk. Last week, I saw a pile of hay bales inexplicably ringing a parking lot. At the end of Quebec Street, there's an old warehouse. Its crackling, fading wooden walls are perfect for pasting things up. Fighting with the glossy concert posters is an increasing collection of art. One day its a tangle of grainy photocopied cut-up face collages gently disorienting you on your way downtown. The next its a photo of the surface you're looking at pasted on the larger background of rough splintered wall. Each time you pass, the pictures peel a little more at the edges,shred into fine strands, shimmer into dust.

Foxes on boxes

2009-07-05T12:46:00.000-07:00

The landscape along the south side of False Creek is changing as the Olympic Village is hastily and shoddily constructed, but there's still some lovely no man's land left. Past the shiny condos and the man made Habitat Island (voted best place for a cry), you can find rusty pipes, tasseled weeds and worn-out docks. They haven't gotten to this bit yet. Someone has managed to climb out over the broken rocks and beyond the chain link fence to paste a paper fox on the side of a rotting wooden shed.

2009-06-22T21:06:00.000-07:00

Burnaby Snapshots

A compact Chinese man moves in perfect, smooth Tai Chi archs under the concrete shadow of the Skytrain track. Beside him, an old ten-speed with caution-tape tassels; a rusty dismantled engine, tiny parts scattered in the gravel. A breeze blows, no one pays him any heed.

Two older ladies chewing their pastries in unison, backlit by the flourescent lights of The Bay cafeteria. Bony hands dab serviettes, and they lean forward toward each other, listening.

Fear

2009-06-15T22:10:00.000-07:00

Fear:
terror, anxiety, concern, dread, fright, panic, alarm, trepidation, apprehension
Antonym: assurance

The way the wolf spider scuttles up the wall; such an unexpected manifestation of fear come to the surface so fast -- a plane crash, an earthquake; too big and too immediate to make sense of it, but paralyzing.

Things I am afraid of:
wolf spiders in unexpected places
plane crashes
earthquakes
losing all my teeth
death
insanity
being found out
having children
not having children
heart attack
weight gain
brain injuries
writing
losing my husband
giving up
failure
success
letting go
forgetting
being ugly
being on stage
large changes
revenue Canada
being nothing
losing all my friends
sun damage
alcoholism
bad drug trips
cancer of every kind
extremely high places
unexplained lumps
not being able to protect my family
anger
things going too well
limitations
freedom

Recession Activity #1

2009-01-23T23:20:00.000-08:00

Fakeations
During a recession it is necessary to invent new and ideally free modes of entertainment. One recent favourite is taking fakeations. Go to Google earth and click on street view. Choose your city and zoom in on any area of interest. You are instantaneously transported to the streets of Rome, Paris or New York. “Turn down that street,” you brashly order your lover as you cursor leisurely down a cobblestone alley. “That’s our hotel over there, with the red trim, by the Coliseum.” Make some espresso; sip it as you take in the 360 degree views from your favourite café. Zoom in on some Italian graffiti; check out the frozen passersby. May as well light a cigarette and pour some wine; nothing’s really off limits on this fakeation. Next time your friends drop by, tell them all about your recent trip. Revel in the details.

2009-01-23T22:52:00.000-08:00

2008-12-06T22:32:00.000-08:00

Jermalism (Part 1)
For a few years now, I’ve been walking the 1 ½ hours to work up the Kingsway. On foot, I absorb the texture of the landscape. The beefy smells of Vietnamese noodle restaurants, the rough crack and slope of neglected east end sidewalks. A concrete moonscape pocked with shops you can’t imagine surviving, then the sudden lushness of a vegetable stand teeming with eagle-eyed produce connoisseurs.

Over the last few months, I’ve started finding street art creeping up the Kingsway, particularly old-school style letter stencils with clever messages. The first one I saw was a page from the National Post pasted to a wall. The article was about the economic crisis and the artist had stenciled it over with MANIC RECESSION. A few weeks later, I found a similar article labeled FLEE MARKET. Then a few weeks later, a bumper-sticker sized stencil wedged between a couple deserted Indian restaurants: JERMALISM.

I did a little research when I got home and discovered quite a few photos of jermalism art on flickr (you can find some by the artist at www.flikr.com/photos/jerm9ine/). People find jermalism in the strangest places, from the sides of crumbling wood sheds to dumpsters to B.C. ferry decks. There is always a word twist, a comment on something contemporary, an interaction with the urban environment. Turns out there’s a jermalism blog (jermalism.blogspot.org).

Jerm9ine describes himself as a street artist, emcee, and poet. Originally from Ontario (London and Toronto), now he lives in Vancouver with his wife of 13 years (known as ninja9ine), decorating the streetscape. He talks about taking long walks together, and the explorations of and interactions with the environment that inform their art and relationship. His art goes in darker directions too, but that's part 2.

2008-11-19T11:07:00.000-08:00

Found Art

One recent art project I noticed in the neighbourhood was a series of high-quality blown-up black and white portraits posted on side streets just off Main. All the photos were close-ups of young women. One day, I saw a concerned looking elderly Korean man examining one of the photos that was stapled to a telephone pole. “Excuse me, “ he asked anxiously, gesturing at the picture, “Do you know… what is this?” He seemed to think it was a missing person poster.
“I think it’s art, “ I said.
“Oh…, “ he paused, “I see.” And he walked away. About a week later, on a rainy day, Mark found a picture blowing down Main St. and picked it up. It was the same portrait, so he brought it home and hung it in the living room.

2008-11-18T09:18:00.000-08:00

Main and 17th

This is the kind of neighbourhood where shops and restaurants don’t open before noon. If you’re up early, you see the original inhabitants: immigrants, elderly women and criminals. There’s a Native man who’s been biking steadily up and down Main on his ten speed with tape -swaddled handlebars for at least the last 10 years. He wears his hair greased back, an all jean outfit, and massive headphones, stopping occasionally to lean up against a building with a tallboy, always alone. After noon, paint-splattered skinny jean wearers with plaid shirts and oversized black-framed glasses duck out of one bedroom apartments, trailing pot fumes. All of them seem young and hip. Even the toy store two doors down restricts its hiring policy to the impossibly pale and pretty.

2008-11-12T22:45:00.000-08:00

The Kingsgate Mall

The Kingsgate Mall is another Main area institution. It is one of the seediest malls around, drawing the alcoholics with its liquor store, the wanna-be gangstas with its hip hop clothing store, the prostitutes with La Scala shoes (think thigh high patent leather boots), and construction workers with Mark’s Work Wearhouse. It’s a potent mix. But its all worth it for the cheap bookstore with its bizarre selection of Creationist literature, bad novels, sex guides and excellent video collection. It is here, before downloading criminalized us, that we discovered the Street Fighter series, and perhaps better yet, an amateur horror film anthology. Our favourite from that collection was Creepers, a hilariously homemade affair. The film maker must have hired only family and friends, a sad assortment of skinny guys in reedy moustaches and plump, pimply girls delivering monosyllabic lines. The kicker was that the Creepers were terrifying monsters made up of a Styrofoam ball rigged onto the back of a remote control car with flashing lights; they were out to get you all right.

2008-11-11T20:28:00.001-08:00

Saint Vincent de Paul Thrift Store

The Saint Vincent de Paul with its lifesized plaster statue of Saint Vincent himself. I’ve lived in this neighbourhood so long, I actually saw it get a new lease on life when it was lovingly restored with a fresh coat of brown paint. There’s a bin of free bread when you walk in, and the store is small and cramped. These days you have to jostle the hipsters to get the good stuff, but back in the day, it was all ours. This was where we found the Christian-themed aerobics video with its pulsating hymnal backbeat. Those church ladies really cover up, even during cardio. We also managed to locate a sunlamp with a gigantic 500-watt bulb and a noisy timer. The idea was to lie in front of it till you were tanned. The box showed a curvy blonde in a seventies bikini, body bronzed to a perfect orange, basking in the glow of a huge light bulb. That sunlamp really perked up our apartment on rainy days (though it got dangerously hot and sometimes made a searing sound).

2008-11-10T08:23:00.000-08:00

The Salvation Army

When we last lived in this area, it was Mark who frequented the thrift stores, clearing his mind in the Sally Ann basement. He would come home with the strangest assortment of things. For a year or so, he gathered an impressive collection of Christian missionary books with titles like A Tool in His Hand and Before We Kill and Eat You. I hated the thrift stores at the time: the dust and claustrophobia, the piles of old worn-out shit. But after a year browsing the gleaming shopping malls and high end furniture shops, I start to get twitchy if I miss more than a few days of thrifting

The mothership of second hand stores in our neighbourhood is the Salvation Army on twelfth, with its AA recovery society out back. Its influence is so strong that the style is leaking outwards; a nearby housing development mimics the same faux brick façade. The key to predicting vintage trends apparently consists of finding clothes that would annoy and offend anyone you know. Years ago, Mark sussed out snapper jackets, airline bags and bad eighties acrylic sweaters, including an electric blue mock turtleneck with pleather zig zags stitched across the front.

The basement is filled with finds-in-waiting. Descending the grey cement stairs, you pass gumball and peanut machines filled with terrifyingly ancient snacks. For me, the strangest thing about the Salvation Army basement is the sound of it. In a way, it is absolutely silent; no one talks -- they just sift through the bins. But as they sift, a subtle din of clinks, rustles, clanks, clatters and crinkles echoes off the walls in a half-light. Old men, alcoholics, intellectuals, beautiful mysterious girls, Chinese dissidents -- all of them sifting, sifting under the blinking grey of worn out flourescent bulbs. There’s the tall items section with its array of golf clubs, cross country skis, metal tubes, old treadmils and vaccuum cleaners, seemingly organized by shape rather than by theme. That’s how Mark found our film projection screen; he figured it would be kept with the blinds since it’s tall and rectangular. The stuffed amimal bin is perhaps the saddest. Huge hairy pink dogs mashed in with headless Donald Ducks and one-eyed dolls, all slightly dirty and seedy.

2008-07-31T20:39:00.000-07:00

How to Make Jigsaw Puzzle

as found on the back of a box containing a Japanese puzzle of the Tower of Babel

Please 1 and confirm the number of peace in the beginning.
They are 130 pieces of 13 pieces X 10 pieces in total.
They are groups of parts of a small class.
Please note keeping enough so as not to lose it.
It becomes easy to unite if it united it from the peace of the outside frame.
As for the outside frame peace, one place or two places have flattened.
Please note that there are a lot of assembly mistakes.
Please do not set it forcibly when there is loosening or it is tight.
It assembles it while dividing each colour that look like peace referring to the finished image chart of the package.
Pasting method:
Please paint without irregularity to bury the joint part under the surface of a completed jigsaw puzzle with the sponge of the attachment and crowd. The paste will dry in about an hour (Different somewhat according to the season.)
When peace is sufficient:
Please search the surroundings well once now.
Still, please paint out the beam and the lack peace part with the pen etc., and sorry to trouble you, but, send back 50 yen stamp to an enclosed postcard when it is not found.
Please note the report of correct peace and not coming excluding an enclosed postcard.
After it sends it back, We will send the peace and 50 yen stamp at once(Become a response only of Japan.)

2008-07-29T21:53:00.000-07:00

Protection Factor

I am hiding from the sun, creeping about in the shade, darting under trees. I look for the dark pattern of leaves on the sidewalk, squeeze into the shadow of a stop sign. A few weeks ago, I bought a red paper parasol in Chinatown. I was so embarrassed to use it at first that it stayed folded in my bag. I kept scraping my arms on its sharp wooden rib tips. But I got over it. It casts a nice red glow across my skin, holds the sun at bay.

I want to be one of those pale people. One of those retro sun dress, big shades, straight-dark-hair girls with the thin white legs and flats who talk about smart things and have bangs that angle perfectly across their spotless foreheads. But I’m far from it. The sun seeks me out, turns me brown in a flash, pigments my cheeks, deepens lines. The sun remembers.

I spent most of my youth sprawled on a beach towel, oiled-up, bikini clad, ideally at noon. I forced a succession of boyfriends to cross to the sunny side of the street. My husband has suffered the most, begging to duck into the shade of a tall tree, the cool cloister of the library stacks, only to be spurned again and again. The hotter the better. I lay on a Mexican beach until my skin blistered, floated on a raft in an Arizona pool at midday, converted tiny wrought-iron balconies into personal tanning beds. As summer ended, I watched my dying tan fade away into nothing; exfoliation was the enemy.

My seismic sun shift has its origins in the ESL market. I tutor English full time and tans don’t fly in Asian culture. They are for peasants, children and men. A tanned Canadian woman makes no sense to them. In a pinch, they will use their school supplies for makeshift protection, holding a binder up against the sun.. They buy Darth Vader visors. As soon as the first spring rays flush my skin, they ask, "What’s wrong with you? What happened? Why is your skin so black?" They have bleaching salons in Korea, tan-removal services. I’m tempted to go.

These days I spend a lot of time and money in shopping malls, forced to wander up and down escalators in fluorescent light, deeply hidden from the sun. But it finds me. Between stop-sign shadows, under a large hat at 7 PM as I swim laps coated in SPF 50, through the skylight above my bed. It won’t let me go without a fight.

2008-07-06T10:22:00.000-07:00

Traffic and Weather on the Ones

I developed an addiction to News1130, all news all the time, all day every day with traffic alerts as they happen. The same news stories and weather reports looped again and again, a soothing OCD repetition. Traffic and weather on the ones. I used to have my alarm set to it. I would wake up with the deep voice of Shane Bigham calmly reporting violent stabbings, high gas prices, or 9/11 in exactly the same tone. Tech Knowledge, the Offbeat, so relaxing, so predictable.

There is a definite edge to the station though. You hear it in reporters’ voices when they talk about a downed pedestrian causing delays. This is a show for drivers, for the employed. Their listener line and surveys are full of the anti-homeless, the pro-global warning. A suicidal woman holding up traffic on the Second Narrows Bridge? How could she be so selfish? We have places to go, things to buy.

In extremely rare cases, you hear about an interesting story coming up right after the break. You can spend all day waiting for it and never hear it. They’re baiting you. I sing the commercials in my head, I have nightmares that I’m involved in a menage a trois with the Business reporter and the Family Minute lady.

In my new apartment, the concrete walls block the AM signals so I was without News1130 for six months, forced to get spotty hourly news from CBC and listen to opera with my breakfast (I began to eat croissants and bought a pitcher for my coffee cream). The sun would flood in, the oboes would start up. There were no more florid reports with words like “massacre”, “breaking news”, “startling discovery”, “grisly remains”. It was all so objective.

But then I found News1130 on my computer, so I’m feeling much better now. I must admit I stay in bed a little longer as I “Listen Live”. I’m considering joining the News 1130 Insider Club designed to honour and reward loyal News1130 listeners. I’d have a chance to win some fabulous prizes, purchase items from the News1130 Marketplace, sign up for breaking news, and listen to exclusive online content. But that might be going too far.

2008-06-28T10:04:00.000-07:00

photo by Zsu Zsi Huebsch

Moving: An Exorcism

One long ragged exhalation of smoke; a soft yellow leak that smears obscenely across the ceiling; behind a broken baseboard, a wall pocked with spider lairs; the rust and wet crumbs building against the kitchen wall, behind the sink; slippery sheen of earwig curled inside the tap; a tacky blue-grey cake of toothpaste on the bathroom wall socket; what is under the bed; shards of glass behind the sofa, curls of dried-up tape across the vents; a gurgling sigh of rusty pipes; a temp secretary chain smoker; the shed; a paranoid nympho pothead cat collector; a compulsive prog-rock bather; the front door, installed backwards; a blueprint of mildew growing across the porch; wet piles of unsorted recycling; the slow shudder of nails unhammering.

2008-06-25T09:35:00.000-07:00

Swimming Pools

The city is on strike. Garbage overflows, huddles on street corners -- dangerous gleam of banana peel, the glint of tin foil. The pools are closed, their aggressive blue shut off from us at the height of summer. Every day I am compelled to bundle up my gym clothes, bathing suit balled into a plastic bag with my books. Speedwalk to the Skytrain which stutters and shuttles me off to the suburbs.

Out here the pools are lidded or subterranean. Strange black silt lines their bottoms. Teenage boys with too much hair gel troll for booty or violence. One day I arrive during senior’s hour and the pool is a wall of withered bodies moving in slow motion to old show tunes at low volume. The lanes are cluttered with Chinese men water-walking backwards and white-haired women with foggy glasses zig-zagging their kickboards straight down the middle at two laps an hour. The lone young woman is a physiotherapist pulling a brain-injured patient on a pool noodle. All eyes are on her lean legs and tramp stamp tattoo as she eases into the water. Two bald Croatian ganstas heave themselves into the hot tub, displace half the water, and eye her like sharks.

The show tunes are muffled and wavering. And then there is silence . In unison, the mass of bodies lifts out of the pool. Change room doors open. The air wrinkles and exhales chlorine, follows us out into the sharp sunlight like an acrid mantle.

2008-06-23T09:17:00.000-07:00

Silver and Blue Class

In Silver and Blue class, you get champagne send-offs, salmon crudités and you meet the British -- hordes of them. Crystal glasses clink politely across a dinner of roasted root vegetables and grilled red pepper. You get a bed that’s folded out for you, chocolate on your fluffed pillow in your private curtained chamber. You watch the stars, reclined. Feel the soft pulse of the train as it rushes over tracks in the darkness. You meet people named Hillary and Fred who invite you to their home in the Lake district, or suntanned tour guides named Bob, who dart in and out of the rooms of beautiful blondes. You get a bag filled with soft white towels and toiletries to use in your spacious shower. Even the washroom has a cushioned stool, a full length mirror, double-ply toilet paper. You cringe when you have to cross the threshold into Comfort Class, where goateed, bi-curious computer-school dropout film school students drink beer, hair growing greasy from days without bathing. Where balding storytellers from Germany smile at you hopefully, as you turn back to your quiet compartment, your complimentary orange juice, your temporary sheen of power

2008-06-22T14:03:00.000-07:00

Passengers
A magician in his forties headed to Casaloma for several days of performances.
He wears a striped shirt with a coffee stain down the front and talks about a girlfriend in Montreal, refuses to do any magic tricks. Hair long and greasy, has a goatee but he’s quick-witted and knows a lot about South American politics. He is very thin in his black cotton suit jacket, a Small Steel man. Has been appointed safety guide for our car. If anything should happen, we’ll have to depend on him.

A young man, still quite boyish, an Argentinean with a lot of hair and a reddish blonde beard which he curls with one finger. Blue eyes and intense hippie stare. A long thin braided dread at the back of his hair makes me feel suspicious. Fresh from a ski instructor job at Whistler, lives in Buenos Aires and loves the nightlife, plays the sax. Talks about shantytowns, the relocation of poor families, the unstable economy, Argentinean lit. Plays me bad Argentinean pop music on his ipod and sings along, with passion.

A man in his fifties and his unwelcome teenaged nephew, chews on a smokeless cigarette and argues endlessly. They head to Saskatoon from Victoria, accuse each other of being welfare bums. The younger drinks beer, the older is a recovering alcoholic. They talk to each other about drug addicts and protecting each other from death threats and leaving each other homeless on the streets of Saskatoon, they talk a lot about money owed. The older one fancies himself an intellectual, has been to university and talks about Kafka and William Burroughs, the younger uses fuck a lot, raises his voice and talks about the Saskatchewan boom. They might get kicked off at the next station. They do.

A tall man with a beer-full belly nic-fitting his way across the prairies. Short disheveled blonde hair, a face full of creases and a German accent, loves Roxy Music and Talking Heads, ska. Wears expensive sneakers and all black, talks about getting to Montreal, getting drunk and hiring a hooker. Desperate, eying up the 13-year old blonde, talking about Nazis and making jokes about blacks. Hyperactive Picasso-esque artist of bad sketches. The kind of guy who when he offers you a gingerale, you suspect its laced with the date-rape drug.

Young, half-asleep, hangover-recovering, death-metal loving. German-speaking, North Bay-born-and raised. Made his living selling flimsy Chinese sound systems from the back of his truck outside of Future Shop.

Stuck in a tiny tabled car with all of them-- grey vinyl seats and long pauses. Nervous snack bar operator serves us a last-call drink. Voices rising -- all of them somehow trivia experts of the worst kind. Finally figured out the magician’s lisp. He has no teeth.