Mad Mad World: Issue No. 12/13

no . 12 /13 mad mad world

experimental music

heard unscene

sex work in the city

red light legacy

Quarterly Conversations about Arts & Culture

RISE AND FALL OF CINEMA HOUSES

burning down the house

ISS 12/13

12

0

74470 94971

8

7.95 ca / printed in canada

Vancouver’s Three-Week Multidisciplinary Arts Festival Celebrating dance, literature, music, theatre, visual arts, & workshops.

TRANS GRESS ION NOW WEDNESDAY JULY 24TH – FRIDAY AUGUST 9TH ART PARTY! OPENING NIGHT JULY 24TH, 7PM ROUNDHOUSE EXHIBITION HALL & PERFORMANCE CENTRE 181 ROUNDHOUSE MEWS, VANCOUVER TICKETS AVAILABLE JULY 1ST AT LITTLE SISTERS & BROWNPAPERTICKETS.COM

queerartsfestival.com

We also acknowledge the financial support of the Province of British Columbia.

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2013-04-26 1:54 PM

CONTRIBUTE TO THE NEXT ISSUE OF SAD MAG Sad Mag has a man­date to sup­port Vancouver’s diverse cul­ture and young artists. We fea­ture the lives and work of Vancouver res­id­ ents as seen through the eyes of bur­geon­ing writers and visual artists based in the Lower Main­land.

We welcome pitches and submissions from new contributors for our print issues and online counterpart. We accept illustrations, paintings, and non-digital photographs. We publish original creative non-fiction, interviews, critiques, reviews and retrospectives.

Please contact us at hello@sadmag.ca to learn about our upcoming issues.

Professional Photo-Imaging.

DIPLOMA PROGR AM

Spaces still available for September. Apply now. www.langara.bc.ca

sad mag would like to thank

Amber Dawn

Ben Knight

Ann Nguyen

Nicole Dawson

Tina Krueger

Pacif ic Backlot Rentals

John Atkin

Diamond Rings

Julia Kreutz

Vanessa Parto

BC Arts Council

Diplomatic Immunity

The Lab

Rachael Pope

Megan Branson of Olla Flowers

Zoë Druick

Mark Lafranier

Maya Postepski

The Gam Gallery

Red Fox Society

Colin Browne Scott Bullock

Heather Gordon and The Vancouver Archives

The Langara Professional Photo Imaging Department

Rachel Burns

Viviane Gosselin

Kristin Lumsden

Clarence Ruth

Colin Cej

Donna Henning

Liz Schulze

Church at the Hollywood

Andy Hudyma

Sarah Maitland at The Writer’s Exchange

City of Vancouver Cultural Services

Garrett Johnson

Amanda McCuaig

Andy Kallstrom

Brian McIlroy

k am & lee

Tony Myshylaev

Sara Colliss

Devin Karringten

Cotte D’Armes

The Kingsgate Chorus

The Mon Keong Chinese School Association

Mr. Cobalt

Jenny Lynn of Oh Hey Style

Museum of Vancouver

The Remington Gallery Gilly Russell

Rob Seebacher Coral Short Hilary Van Dyke

featured contributors

marnie hiebert is an abstract and

figurative painter who lives and works in Vancouver, BC. Born and raised in Calgary, AB, Hiebert has been a part of several group shows, exhibiting at many galleries including The Stride Gallery and The Sugar Estate. She prefers painting in oils to lure subconscious imagery to the surface.

shazia hafiz ramji lives in

Vancouver, BC, where she writes poems and songs. She recently coordinated the 10th annual BC Book Prizes On Tour, and she will complete her undergraduate degree in English, History, and Publishing this September. She is seeking to build a group of people devoted to reading the work of David Foster Wallace and Robin Blaser. You can reach her at @Shazia_R.

rommy ghaly moved to Vancouver from Berlin but was born and raised in New York. He takes photos of people on the streets, in bars—and oftentimes when they’re not looking. He’s contributed to Scout Magazine, ION, and Discorder and uses his photography to raise the profile of the local art and music scenes. You can find his blog at vancouverish.com.

bryce evans is an emerging artist

contributing writers

contributing photographers

editorial staff

contributers to sadmag.ca

Jesse Donaldson

Jayde Becker Alyshia Burak

Michelle Reid Co-Editor-in-Chief

Schmuel Marmorstein

Bryce Evans Rommy Ghaly

Michael de Courcy

Lise Monique Oakley

Jeremy Jude Lee

City of Glass

Jackie Hoffart Co-Editor-in-Chief

Matty Jeronimo

Randy Eely

Pamela Rounis

Monika Koch

Bryce Evans

Pamela Rounis Lead Designer

Tyler Morgenstern

Brandon Gaukel

Farah Tozy

Eleanor Radford

Rommy Ghaly

Monika Koch Designer

Shazia Haf iz Ramji Michelle Reid

Humans

Suzy Sabla

Patience M. Lavallee

Katie Stewart

Jeremy Jude Lee

Hannah Bellamy

Justin Barnes

Matty Jeronimo

Tori Lemire Ruby Lockhart

contributing artists Sophia Ahamed

Karen Campos Castillo Sara French Marnie Hiebert Lenkyn Ostapovich

Lillie Louise Major Mode Moderne Hannah Moody Amber Morgan Rosie Peters Jayne Peters Steven Pham Joseph Posey Ian Ruhter Rachelle Simoneau Katie Stewart Robert Tam Alex Waber Kasia Jaleia Mariah Wale Lauren D. Zbarsky

Katie Stewart Creative Director

working primarily in photography in Vancouver, BC. He engages conceptual, abstract, and experimental subject matter with a focus on driving positive social change in the world. He founded The One Project and is currently working to create a nonprofit organization to encompass it. You can reach him at @bryceevansphoto.

Ariel Fournier

Nina Paula Morenas Emily Ross Jessica Russell Shannon Waters

Caitlin Bauman Design Intern Kristin Ramsey Copy Editor Kaitlin McNabb Copy Editor Kristine Sostar McLellan Copy Editor Carmen Faye Mathes Web Editor Jayme Cochrane Web Designer Robyn Humphreys Advertising & Publication Coordinator, Designer Deanne Beattie Founding Editor-in-Chief Brandon Gaukel Founding Creative Director

Sad Mag is published four times per year by the Sad Magazine Publishing Society, Suite 534, 2818 Main St., Vancouver, BC V5T 0C1 Email: hello@sadmag.ca ISSN 1923-3566 Contents ©2013 Sad Mag All rights reserved. sadmag.ca facebook.com/sadmag twitter.com/sadmag #BijouPlease

LETTER FROM THE EDITORs

Vancouver is an idea as well as a place, one that inspires and infuriates each of us in different ways on different days. In this double issue, we address the city as a specific place as well as an amalgam of ideas in order to reckon directly with the life and death of arts, culture, and commerce in this rapidly changing metropolis. Part of our mandate at Sad Mag is to create space for the local creative community to converse about arts and culture in this city and holy shit are we ever proud of this issue.

Why? Because this city is bursting with artists, musicians, photographers, designers, and writers who have managed to eke out space and time for their creative projects on their own, despite the high rents, lack of venues, and buzz-killing rain we know so well. As more than one artist points out in the issue, Vancouverites know how to make it work and work it. It’s a necessary survival skill, and one that means there is never a lack of action—if you know where to find it.

Mad Mad World is a tribute to the hustle of Vancouver’s artists at home and abroad, as well as a chronicle of the more rowdy aspects of our local history that have shaped the present-day scene. We all know the Vancouver real estate market is ludicrous, but you’ll be surprised to learn how long we’ve been complaining about it. Likewise, the recent loss of so many independent arts venues is mirrored in the disappearance of our independent cinemas and heritage homes. Vancouver artists are undeterred, matching bad news with good: our experimental music scene is thriving, our photographers are recasting their ideas of “home” in relation to identity, our queer artists are saving lives. In this issue, we’re acknowledging the malevolent forces that would turn every gallery and venue into a condo building, and we’re celebrating everyone who’s making it work anyway. — michelle reid & jackie hoffart, Co-Editors-in-Chief

table of contents

06 12 18 24 30 36 38 52

The Disposable Camera Project

Nothing for Sale: Michael de Courcy

Red Light Legacy: Vancouver’s oldest profession

Time Enough at Last: Debora Cohen

This Must Be the Place: History of Vancouver real estate

Illustrations by Sophia Ahamed & Lenkyn Ostapovich

Heard Unscene: Vancouver experimental music

54 59

60 62 67 68 76

Gay Incantations

A Diamond is Forever: Diamond Rings

on the cover Advice from the Young at Heart

Debora Cohen (p.24) Photographed by Lauren D. Zbarsky Ilford FP4 Plus

The Alchemist: Ian Ruhter

Person, Place, Thing

Burning Down the House: the rise and fall of Vancouver cinemas on the back cover Home: Jeremy Jude Lee

by Marnie Hiebert (oil on canvas)

Photographs by Rommy Ghaly 5

: Dispatch

the DISPOSABLE CAMERA PROJECT vancouver’s lost generation Since August 2012, over 30,000 sq. feet of creative space in Vancouver—studios, jam spaces, independent venues, and art galleries—has been lost to developers. Finding a suitable place to live, make art, and make noise in this city is becoming so difficult that many of our local musicians are venturing elsewhere. To take a peek at this phenomenon, Sad Mag put disposable cameras in the hands of three Vancouver bands, to see what they see and wander where they wander: Mode Moderne, Humans, and City of Glass.

No fancy lights. No makeup. Just a tiny plastic camera that’s more durable than a can of beer.

MODE MODERNE by suzy sabla photography by rachelle simoneau & mode moderne

Agfa Photo Vista Plus

Pictured above: Josh Martyr, Rebecca Law Gray, Clinton Loftkranz, Sean Gilhooly, Phillip Intile

Sitting in a quiet bar in Vancouver’s Chinatown are Mode Moderne’s Phillip Intile (voice/words + keys) and Sean Gilhooly (drums + keys). Unable to join them are the other half of the quartet’s puzzle, Clinton Loftkranz (guitar + bass) and Rebecca Law Gray (keys + voice). On this chilly night, two out of four will have to do. What they do, and how they do it, is about to pour itself into a conversation that covers everything from the band’s new album, to pop music, to romanticized nostalgia.

With the anticipated late-summer release of the band’s LP, Occult Delight, I ask the boys what the future holds for Mode Moderne. With the departure of Felix Fung, who has produced all their releases to date, and the addition of new producer Josh Stevenson (Sex Church, Nu Sensae), change is inevitable. Intile explains, “This album is going to show a diversity of sound and the different types of music that we like to listen to … it’s going to be a little bit schizophrenic.” Gilhooly adds reassuring words for fans who like the familiar Mode Moderne: “We’re trying different sounds, but some sounds will be recognizable. People will say, ‘Yeah, that’s still them!’”

The album may be a little disjointed in nature, but it will still feature an element of Mode Moderne’s signature symbiosis.

From post-punk, to mechanical drums, to a brand of shoe-gaze Intile describes—with a hint of Lost Generation poetry in his voice—as, “swirling and druggy,” there’ll be something for everyone. It also comes as no surprise that we can expect,

according to Intile, “some that are just straight up Smiths pop songs,” for those who may have a harder time dealing with change.

“We love pop music!” exclaims Intile. “I love choruses, I’m a sucker for a chorus. Something that I’ve always wanted to write is pop music. I love writing songs about boys and girls, and heartbreak songs. What I love even more is writing songs about big themes like luck or fate, some of those big literary classical concepts.”

Gilhooly agrees, “It all comes down to a great pop song. People love a great pop song. I guess a lot of people may say that, but it’s so true.”

Just as diversity can be read from one song to the next, the idea of dichotomy within a single song is attractive to the band. Intile explains, “I really like singing really miserable misanthropic lyrics over a happy, snappy drum beat. If I can jump from absolute despair to trouser-dropping hilarity in the same line, that’s what I want to do: to bring people to the verge of tears, and then pull down their pants … and just pants them.”

As everyone bursts into laughter, I realise that humour and humility are integral in understanding not only Mode Moderne, but also their music. Just as Intile presents himself as equal parts dream and dreary, or comic and cynic, the songs offer a similar trajectory. They meander through dark forests of minor chords only to find themselves on a dance floor surrounded in sparkling keyboard riffs alongside Intile’s signature croon. There’s an eloquent magic to Mode Moderne that’s hard to put a finger on.

The very eclectic influences to which they owe much of their inspiration help explain what makes their music so addictive: Intile admires Scott Walker, Morrissey, and Leonard Cohen for their sense of romanticism. Meanwhile, Gilhooly highlights his love for jazz drummers: Art Blakey, Billy Joe Jones, and Elvin Jones. His enthusiasm on the topic jumps effortlessly, much like a jazz beat, from one name to the next concluding with an off-kilter statement that has everyone in stitches, “The first drummer that got me ejaculating was Tommy Lee.” With a slight roll of the eye, yet in evident amusement, Intile simply replies, “So quotable.”

It’s no surprise that such a cheeky quartet would be charming when captured on film, but their photo diary offers sly insights as well. “Everyone wants to be a voyeur,” Intile points out, “and few people get to go tour in a rock band.” Their photos relate an amusing tale of Europe and the nuances of a rock ‘n roll tour. For the boys, Parisian cemeteries, cheap wine, and cute girls make it into their tour highlights. Glasgow girls held a particular allure for Intile, who muses, “Every girl I saw, I was convinced that they

just went home and listened to Belle and Sebastian and Camera Obscura. They put on their little cardigans … they are all fantastic, but all their boyfriends carry switchblades.”

It’s easy to understand the streak of nostalgia in centuries-old European capitals, but what is it about the past that holds so much interest to the twenty- and thirty-something’s in Vancouver? Gilhooly suggests, “I think nostalgia is riveting. Even if it’s a song that makes you think of a specific time, I don’t think we really ever get over that.

I think it comes out in music when you’re not even noticing.”

Intile continues, “Obviously, your past shapes you. You can’t escape the things you listened to when you were 16 … but there’s a certain type of person that is always looking for something new.”

“Everyone wants to be a voyeur, and few people get to go tour in a rock band.”

Clockwise: St. Pauli, Die Spiderplatzzz Glasgow, Caledonian gale Outside of Paris, midnight train / wanton ghost St. Pauli, ego death / dizzy eyes Hamburg, Central Station

7

: Dispatch

HUMANS by matty jeronimo photography by matty jeronimo & humans

Portra 800

Pictured above: Robbie Slade, Peter Ricq

The driving programmed drums and hooky synths of Vancouver duo Humans contrast with the indie rock-indebted vocals to create an atmosphere that is at once minimal and bombastic. Peter Ricq and Robbie Slade write songs that prowl a murky borderland between the immediacy and intimacy of modern indie, the groove of old-school funk and soul, and supremely danceable DJ music.

Their attention to songwriting craft and catchy, genre-bending sound has quickly launched them to prominence locally and beyond. The past year has seen them featured in numerous music publications, at the top of the college radio charts, and featured at festivals like Pop Montreal, sxsw and Bass Coast. The band was formed in 2009 after different forces brought the two to Vancouver: Ricq, a visual artist and filmmaker, came to work on his successful kids’ cartoon, and Slade to “go to UBC and skim board and grow up.” After meeting at a gallery show of Ricq’s work, Slade hired him to work on some art for his band Family Room. That project soon fell apart, but not before spawning the collaboration that would become Humans.

After an initial period of jamming and recording, Humans released Avec Mes Mecs in 2010. The self-recorded EP garnered significant international interest and landed them on local independent label Hybridity Music, with whom they also released their criticallyacclaimed 2012 EP Traps. “We must have written at least 40 songs for Traps, and we only ended up with seven on there,”

says Slade. “It kind of sucked, to be honest. You tell yourself that you’re going to use some of these songs then they just die.”

Some of the songs that didn’t make it onto Traps may finally see the light of day on Humans’ next album. “Some of these songs [on the new album] we’ve been playing for years. Peter and I have a really good idea of what we want to put on it.”

One of the most interesting aspects of Humans is the process of how disparate elements come together to form the music itself, which changes as additional elements are added or modified. The way their songs change over time, morphing between the recording and the live performances, is one of their hallmarks. It may surprise the listener that this isn’t necessarily a planned architecture, but rather a product of context and repetition. The band has been touring and playing shows heavily in recent months, often playing multiple shows in a day (up to six one day at sxsw ), allowing them the opportunity to refine their songs piece by piece, day by day. In fact, Slade mentions in passing that they hardly ever modify songs when they are just practicing. It tends to happen live, “Something about the energy of it all, and putting it on the line,” he says.

When the topic shifts from process to setting, Slade is quick to bring up the inevitable Vancouver music topic. “One complaint, and it’s a ragged, tired old thing,” he says, “is we need more fucking venues. We need more 150-person capacity rooms for

new bands to play.” Unsurprisingly, the loss of The Waldorf and Richard’s on Richards is also discussed, as is the recent bylaw barring venues like The Rickshaw from temporarily delicensing to host all-ages shows. Slade’s educational background in property and real estate lends insight to the topic. “It shapes everything,” he says. “It’s just so expensive here, it’s so hard to open a venue.” But the two quickly grow more positive. “I think the music and art scene in Vancouver is great,” says Ricq, “I go out all the time for both, and it’s always so easy to get involved,” Slade adds, “A couple times in recent years I’ve been in a far away city and commented on a cool piece of art on someone’s wall and it’s been a Vancouver artist.” The pair’s optimism extends to their own work. “I’m excited about all the festivals we’re doing this year,” Slade says, counting them out: “Osheaga in Montreal, Bass Coast, a big gay pride party - it’s top secret right now, I can’t say where it is, Jazzfest, Keloha, Tall Tree, and a bunch of other ones too. You play for a shitload of people and they’re all there to party as hard as they possibly can. It’s the best ever.” Ricq adds, “I’m really looking forward to Osheaga, I’ve been wanting to play this since year one. It’s the best festival in Canada, I think.”

Whether just having a drink or climbing out of windows onto a sketchy roof above Main Street to shoot photos, it’s clear both Ricq and Slade really enjoy what they are doing in Humans.

Their attitudes towards music, their dedication to song writing, and the cohesive overall feel of the band place them far from the

buzzy, hyperactive internet pastiche culture some electronic music can veer toward. The next year promises to be a big one for the duo: in addition to working on remixes and side projects, recording a new full length, and hitting the North American festival circuit, they have a European tour booked, with an eye on making it to Asia as well. Slade is cagey about giving any details, but he lets slip that we can expect their new album to be released sometime in Spring 2014. “The songs are a bit all over the place, but I think people will like it,” he says, unintentionally providing an apt description of not only the upcoming album, but of Humans as a whole.

“A couple times in recent years I’ve been in a far away city and commented on a cool piece of art on someone’s wall and it’s been a Vancouver artist.”

Clockwise: Vancouver, Humans’ Studio Austin, Action Bronson from crowd.

Austin, Fight Club car Austin, half peace / full-on duckface

: Dispatch

CITY OF GLASS by eleanor radford photography by brandon gaukel & city of glass

Fuji Pro 400

Pictured above: David Phu, Michael Champion

Michael Champion and David Phu of City of Glass are both looking rather dapper when we meet, and it turns out there’s more than just good interview etiquette behind the crisp white shirts. The musical duo have a Mad Men-themed gathering to attend later this afternoon and are dressed the part. The television show deftly portrays covetable ‘60s style (Joan’s dresses) while unsentimentally depicting the pervasive racism, sexism, and quiet despair of the same age (poor Joan). Champion and Phu are similarly immune to nostalgia when drawing on the past for inspiration. “We really identify with Art Deco, with the clean lines,” says Champion. “The overall aesthetic [portrays] a sense of class that we strive for … in the way we hold ourselves, the way we present ourselves.” Though the singer knows how “easy it is to romanticize the past,” he’s certain he wouldn’t want to be alive anytime but the present. His creative partner Phu concurs, noting, “I would never survive [in the past] because I’m Asian.

And everything I like about western culture did not involve Asians, other than railroads.”

The pair see eye-to-eye on most things. “We think very similarly, and we like a lot of the same things,” says Champion.

The high-school friends decided to form City of Glass in 2008 following a trip to Paris. The name, borrowed from the title of a Douglas Coupland book, is a meta-reference to Vancouver.

Their close relationship is a creative asset. “We’re brutally honest about everything and it’s never personal,” says Champion.

“It’s about getting the best [results] possible; it’s quality control.”

Their ongoing collaboration recently yielded a four-song EP, The Diving Bell, their first original release since the Equations EP in 2009. Two of the tracks will also appear on their forthcoming full-length album, The Modern Age. Though they cite the influences of The Cure, Thom Yorke, and Foals, this release finds them secure in their own musical identity. “Anything we released before, it was just us experimenting and trying to find a sound. It sounds like we’re trying stuff out; you can hear influences,” Phu says. “The Diving Bell is the beginning of us feeling comfortable, and also not caring nearly as much what people think. It’s the most honest we’ve been so far.” City of Glass makes dark, synth-laden music with catchy melodies designed to entice you onto the dance floor. Champion’s brooding vocals are stark and clear against a spare sonic backdrop, and as with their visual aesthetic, nothing feels overdone.

Success is something they are prepared to work hard for. “If you can find a way for your art to make you money then you’ve sort of won at life,” Champion says. “We want to put ourselves in a place where we can keep creating and make that our focus, and not have to do that on the side.” Both have called the Lower

Mainland home since high school and find the struggle to live and work as musicians in the so-called “No Fun City” frustrating.

“There’s just not enough outside support and that puts heavy, heavy limits on music and gives other people a bunch of reasons to complain about it. There’s not enough venues for the amount of artists,” says Phu. Champion points out, “Some of the best Montreal bands right now are Vancouverites who left: Grimes and Mac DeMarco. They left because there wasn’t a scene for them.”

Phu and Champion decided to temporarily transplant themselves to Berlin in 2011, anticipating that the city would be receptive to their music and ideal for fostering further development. During the six-month sojourn, Phu observed that they had maintained a “Vancouver mentality” in Berlin, “hustling, hustling, hustling.”

Champion noticed it as well: “We were significantly more motivated than a lot of the artists we met there.” Both enjoyed being part of a bigger arts community that didn’t feel as isolated and exclusive as the one back home. “Berlin provided a fantastic music scene to get involved in and the ability to tour a significant amount within short distances,” says Champion. “We were able to build up a good network of people and some great fans who have been eagerly anticipating our return. The amount of fans and hype we were able to build up there in such a short time really surprised us.

It was very reassuring.” The low cost of living in Berlin makes

it a Mecca for creatives; since he was only in contact with other artists, Phu found himself talking just about music. “That’s all we did and it was so liberating.”

So why isn’t the Vancouver arts scene thriving? Phu points to growing pains, saying, “Our city’s only a hundred and fifty years old, of course there’s no frickin’ culture. We’re not allowed to, we’re not old enough.” Champion blames our attractiveness, “The gift and the curse of Vancouver [is] it’s this beautiful place where everyone wants to live, and only those people who can afford to really can … [it] doesn’t necessarily have to be this bastion of the arts.

Maybe we just aren’t that city. We shouldn’t force things that aren’t organically happening.” Perhaps, they suggest, it’s best to accept Vancouver as is. Champion says, “There’s good and bad, and you can’t be truly honest without embracing both.”

“Some of the best Montreal bands right now are Vancouverites who left.”

Clockwise: Toronto City Hall, freezing walks Toronto, Adelaide and York Mar’s house, late nights and a cold Loft party, familiar faces

11

: Interview

nothing for sale An interview with legendary Vancouver artist Michael de Courcy by rommy ghaly photography by rommy ghaly & michael de courcy

Kodak Portra 400

Michael de Courcy moved to Vancouver from Montreal in the late 1960s, a late-era baby boomer in a blue collar, industrial Vancouver, and he has been a fixture in the arts scene ever since.

He immersed himself in the now-defunct art collective called InterMedia; at the time it was a fledgling movement fueled by new media, jazz, and performance art.

InterMedia was an underground and transient Vancouver art collective in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s. It was largely made up of artists who shared spaces and equipment, collaborated on public art installations, put on performances, promoted events, and, in de Courcy’s words, just liked to “get blasted.” De Courcy claims that hundreds of artists were involved with InterMedia at its peak, but it was never intended to become a permanent fixture. It would eventually dissolve into the ether during the pro-establishment period of the ‘80s and ‘90s. While some of the artists would go on to pursue individual endeavours and achieve modest success, others followed their passions while raising families. Such was the case with Michael de Courcy.

De Courcy and I spoke at his home in New Westminster, a city which also served as the backdrop for his project Asylum, in which he documented the shuttering of the infamous Woodlands psychiatric hospital. For the project, he researched and documented the closure of the hospital post-mortem as well as the subsequent rezoning and redevelopment of the real estate to condominiums.

Later, he sought out former residents of the psychiatric hospital, photographing portraits of them. He also screenprinted news clippings and returned to the site prior to its demolition to capture photos of its deterioration.

De Courcy and I spent an entire morning together chatting over breakfast, touring his basement studio, and hauling firewood into his truck. But we started with Woodlands. As we drove through the rows of condos that rested atop the hospital’s former cemetery, I listened:

michael de courcy: Because they were just mental patients, they just took all the [gravestones] out and encouraged contractors to come and take them away to use them as paving stones. So they ended up in residential projects in Coquitlam, Richmond, and various other places. They figured they might as well recycle them rather than throw them away. I had been totally unaware of the asylum prior to the noise about it being redeveloped. Then I thought, “This is just happening on my doorstep, I’m curious, you know, I’m an artist but maybe this’ll be interesting.” So I started to go to the meetings at a local hotel being put on by BCBC (British Columbia Buildings Corporation) and I carried a tape recorder and photographed my way through some of these

meetings. I participated, not very much, because I’m not very politically-oriented. I was just astounded by how blind that meeting was, at what a force that government was. They were so prepared. They had big-time architects and designers and lawyers and heritage people. And there’s this little group of concerned, community activists. And of course everybody gets exhausted quite quickly. So I became quite cynical of all those public processes. [The developers] were talking about what you wanted to hear them talk about, you know, heritage, non-market housing. It was all smoke and mirrors. Then they managed to get that rezoning, and they rolled all that shit back. It was really eye-opening.

rommy ghaly: You say you try not to be too political about it.

How hard do you find that?

mdc: Well, I began to find it more and more difficult. It was

an awakening for sure, politically. I could play a role in this as an artist with a camera, with the ears and the eyes, as a witness.

rg: I’ve looked at a lot of your work from the ‘70s through today

and I’ve found that you’ve played more of that activist role since the ‘70s—that a lot of what you did in the ‘70s was experimental and artistic, but that you’ve shifted towards having a voice and leaning towards an opinion on things.

mdc: I think that at the root of what I do is a formation of community.

rg: So InterMedia was an interesting community. You documented a lot of that back in the 1970s.

mdc: I did. In the same spirit that I documented what was going

on at Woodlands. Because it seemed important, it seemed unique, and it seemed fleeting. It was all ephemeral. It was performance art, getting loaded, all that stuff. And a lot of it was underground, so it wasn’t being documented by anyone else. And of course, that was the beginning of my art history, my personal art history. I was the guy with the camera and I figured that was my responsibility.

rg: Had anyone else been documenting what was going on? mdc: Oh yeah, other people had, but not in such a systematic

way. I was embedded, whereas other people had gigs doing this and that. I was right in the heart of it.

rg: But it wasn’t until the past decade that you started to compile that work and present it.

mdc: Because it was taken at a time when I was pretty unsure of

my own identity as an artist and even as a human being. Because I was a young guy, 18 to 24 years old, I was never quite sure how to deal with this big knot of data, from 1967 until the ‘70s. It took until the mid-2000s for me to get to the point where I felt like I could actually sort that shit out. So it’s been great. It’s been a real awakening for me to redefine myself as that person on the basis of the information which I recorded. My memory wasn’t great about it. Nobody else’s memory was great about it.

school. It was a pretty old-time, classical art school, and it was all about the atelier. As a 16-year-old, it served a purpose to me, it gave me a way out of my home and my family, and it made me feel somewhat independent at least for a while. So I came out here, I did my own personal education. I went to the library. The new library had just been built at Burrard and Robson St. They had a good arts section. I got a darkroom together in a closet and started experimenting. And I did that for years while I did other things.

By the time I got to InterMedia, after Expo ‘67, which I spent in Montreal, I was knowledgeable about photography, moreso than anyone else.

rg: It must be great to go back after 30 to 40 years and revisit that. mdc: You let it guide you through. rg: At that time, did you realize how incredibly creative that period

rg: What drew you to Vancouver originally? The ‘60s were a pretty

mdc: No, there was a terrific momentum for creativity at that

mdc: There was no industry in Vancouver, whereas there was a

was? Or were you just going with the flow?

time just because it was a breakout time. Young people were at the forefront, because there were more young people than there were old people.

rg: Right. The boomers. mdc: It just was gonna happen, whether anybody wanted it to

happen or not. Sometimes it was painful, and other times it was humourous.

rg: How have you found that momentum has changed over the years, through the ‘80s to today? Good and bad?

mdc: I think there’s a lot less idealism and a lot more cynicism,

just because people are trying to regain something that they feel they’ve lost, whereas there was a tremendous dynamic in the ‘60s that seemed preordained. It was like you were at war, but it was a holy war, it was a good war. It wasn’t a war against the establishment, because you knew you were gonna win. You knew that good was gonna prevail. I don’t know if that’s the case today because everything is so fucking mercurial. You can’t put your finger on anything. Everybody owns everything and they’re all manipulating it like crazy and that’s sucking the life out of it.

rg: Like you said, you owned it. You controlled it. I don’t know how

much [anyone] owns anything anymore. I really struggle with a lot of it.

I don’t know who or what to believe anymore.

mdc: Exactly. Exactly. At that time, no one believed anything.

They just believed in themselves. rg: You’ve worked in a lot of mediums: photography, screen printing, video. Which one would you say is your primary medium?

mdc: Photography seems to have been essential at every step

of the way. There needs to be a way of making imagery. I tried painting and sculpture and drawing and so on and so forth and I didn’t have the patience for it. I wanted to cut right through to reality, and photography seemed like the way to do that. Once you get used to using those kinds of images that are directly related

vibrant time in this city, especially with regards to new media.

huge multimedia industry in the east. That’s where all the advertising happened, out east. Photographers there were all commercial photographers. Photographers here, well, there wasn’t really any way of monetizing that medium, so you were left up to your own devices. You’d throw yourself into this boiling pot of underground culture and then suddenly you’d be doing avant-garde art instead of commercial art.

Then there was the original Cellar in 1956 which was expanding this whole notion of jazz music, and producing plays on Sundays between jazz sets. They produced Beckett plays and had a gallery downstairs. It was a non-profit society. It was like the first artistrun centre. And Al Neil played there. He was the constant thread that connected the bebop heroin scene to the psychedelic rock and roll scene to the InterMedia scene. He was doing new music by the time he got to InterMedia. Very extremely important cultural figure here.

rg: Arts and culture right now in Vancouver has been a focal point

for struggle. A lot of my friends are in the arts scene and they struggle to make sense of it. The condos, the commercialism …

mdc: The thing about commercialism is that it’s based on

competition. There’s a few that win and a lot that lose. And that’s fine with other fields of endeavor. But for art it’s a whole different story because commercialism pushes you in directions you don’t want to go. I don’t think competition is particularly positive in the arts. It comes easily for some and difficult for others. So you have people tearing their hair out. At the same time, I don’t think it’s positive for artists to only have an audience of artists. I think it’s really important and I think I’ve tried to do that in my own practice, and I hate to use that word, is to connect with people on the outside of the system. I’m not so much interested in making art for artists as I am in communicating ideas and bringing people together around certain ideas and events.

rg: I think that’s the biggest complaint I’ve heard from artists in this city; that art is only consumed by other artists.

mdc: Exactly! Or by rich people.

“I’m not so much interested in art as I am in communication. In fact I find art quite offensive because it avoids communication, because it retains a certain level of abstraction that I don’t feel is necessary.

With photography it’s possible to be confrontational.” to life, it’s hard to shake it. I’m not a romantic in that sense.

I’m not going to go backwards and use ancient media. I’m not so much interested in art as I am in communication. In fact I find art quite offensive because it avoids communication, because it retains a certain level of abstraction that I don’t feel is necessary.

With photography it’s possible to be confrontational.

rg: At what point did you decide you wanted to get into art? You

decided to pick up and move from Montreal to Vancouver where you went to the Vancouver School of Art [now Emily Carr University of Art and Design]…

rg: It’s true. If you’re not the Vancouver Art Gallery, then the people looking at your art are the ones creating art.

mdc: You’re basically subjecting yourself to the Vancouver Art

Gallery. You’re subjecting yourself to the establishment. What’s the point of that? Nothing’s going to come of that. It just means that you’ll have a lot of artists like a lot of other artists. In Vancouver, the whole rise of so-called photo conceptualism has been completely traumatic, for everyone, because it means that it’s a one-horse town.

It means that there are celebrities here and everybody else is fucked.

mdc: Oh, I went to art school in Montreal right out of high 13

: Interview

Background / Vancouver: an artist’s view of the city, October 30, 1972

by Michael de Courcy with Gerry Gilbert and Glenn Lewis

: Interview

rg: There’s a huge gap between the haves and the have-nots. mdc: Right. You go to a place like Toronto, and there are all kinds

of art. You don’t have to be taking large-scale colour photographs.

You can do anything. And before all that academic stuff happened here, you could do anything here also. It’s gonna take a long time before Vancouver is open again to anything. We now have Jeff Wall “running” the VAG. I’ve got guys from LA working on reanimating an exhibition I did in 1970, BC Almanac(h) C.B., who say that in LA Jeff Wall is sort of over. That moment’s over. And the reason why it became so big, is because it was so easy to understand. It’s academic. It’s like “You wanna make art, you do it this way.”

rg: And there’s Emily Carr as a school. There have been critics who

say that Emily Carr churns out the academic artistic types, and that the grassroots movement—the people picking up art because of a passion or a creative drive—is getting drowned out by this influx of graduates and a dwindling demand. What are your thoughts on that and the academia?

mdc: Emily Carr started out as an honest, poor arts school in 1930 as the Vancouver School of Art. And it’s been uppity and pretentious for the last 20 years to the point where it’s basically sold its soul to the devil. It’s all dollars and cents. You get as many people as possible in there and it doesn’t matter if they’re getting served, because they know that the education you get at an arts school is from your peers. It’s like the little group that you’re in, the community. And you pump out 300 graduates a year, 300 new artists every year, into a scene that can’t even support more than three. I taught there for years. You’re building up the potential because you’re selling the institution. That’s what faculty members there are encouraged to do. You don’t get to be an artist in an institution anymore, you get to be a faculty member. You’re part of the administration. At one time, at a place like Emily Carr, you rotated. You had eight people in the photography department and once every year, a new person did the dean part. Nobody really

are sticking around are seeking any kind of media coverage they can get their hands on because they’re going up against non-arts things, against entertainment, against the Canucks.

mdc: Exactly. rg: People who seek things out aren’t as well-rounded as they used

to be. They seem to be focused on very specific things in their lives: only watching sports or only engaging in the music scene or only engaging in the visual arts scene. The way it sounds from what you’re describing is that it used to be that people were engaged in a number of different things, The Cellar as an example, jazz fueled art which in turn fueled photography. It was all so interlaced and interconnected.

mdc: Well the trick is to make it meaningful. Why not make

Canuck art? If you want to make it meaningful, reach outside of yourself, challenge yourself with making it meaningful. For me, making art meaningful at a certain point meant connecting with ex-residents of Woodlands and their families and their caregivers and the others that worked there. I had to go to great extremes to find them. I found some of them in the DTES who had fallen through the cracks. I found others in group homes in Coquitlam.

I found family members who’d been active at Woodlands, and I interviewed and talked to them. Slowly I put together a community of those people that didn’t exist before. Woodlands was one of the central forces in New Westminster for almost its entire tenure; everybody knew somebody that was either a resident there or who worked there. This community was wrapped around [Woodlands], and when they were trying to pull that tooth, that struck a lot of chords with a lot of people. I felt that when I was doing that project. I felt that I was doing it for the community of New Westminster and the community of Woodlands. Art didn’t mean anything to me at that point in time. What meant something to me was the communication that was going on between me and this community which was forming around the work I was doing.

“I have nothing for sale. I never have had anything for sale. I didn’t feel comfortable competing in that venue.

I found it was not conducive to continued creativity.” wanted to do it. Everybody was an artist, they weren’t into administration. Then suddenly, a whole new wave of people who had cut their teeth at universities wanted to be dean. They wanted the power. They wanted to accumulate the power and control the institution. So that’s what’s happened. Now everyone works, everyone is an administrator. It doesn’t matter if you’re an artist. You’re not an artist. You’re an educator/administrator.

Of course there are always going to be brilliant students. There will always be eight or nine students per year in every graduating class that are precocious. They’re prodigies.

rg: One photo project that you did that I’m curious about is

Background: Vancouver, where you took tons of photographs of Vancouver.

mdc: That happened on one day: October 30, 1972. Those

photographs were taken on one single day (photos on previous pages).

rg: And you just walked the city on foot? mdc: Yeah, I prepared by working on a map and plotting out

these roots, tracing them through the city. Many of the routes connected various venues, domiciles, meeting places, of the group of people that were part of InterMedia, because it was my last true InterMedia collaboration.

rg: How many people were a part of InterMedia? mdc: Oh hundreds. Hundreds. It was big. There was a core group.

But it was the only game in town for over three years, from 1967 to 1970. The Vancouver Sun and the Province published 60 to 70 feature length articles about things that were happening at InterMedia, so it affected every aspect of the arts.

rg: I’m a bit engaged in the grassroots movement here. I have friends

who are artists in the DTES and in Chinatown some of whom are doing great stuff, but the challenge being that it’s hard to recognize now, and the few that do manage to find moderate recognition through the internet, a lot of them leave Vancouver because it’s too hard in this city. Those that

rg: And the output happened to be the art that resulted from your research into that community.

mdc: Absolutely, you got it. I wasn’t sitting down beforehand

thinking, “I’m gonna make a bunch of big photographs and put them on the wall and then I’ll get some kind of ideas around them.”

No, it evolved, it emerged. The Eskimo has a piece of soapstone and he looks at it and looks at it and thinks, “What’s in that stone?”

Everything is connected. The idea is connected to the stone, the stone is connected to the earth, the person is connected to the idea, and it reveals itself. For the longest time, throughout the ‘80s and ‘90s when everyone was conceptualizing and theorizing, the whole idea of making art was to have it made somewhere. “I’m gonna be Jeff Koons…” or whatever. And unless you were having something made that was big or fabricated, you didn’t want to get your hands dirty because you were too busy thinking it up. That didn’t make any sense to me. So you go from project to project. There was the Woodlands project then it was like, “What the fuck am I gonna do now?” It’s not like I wanna do another project like that. I wanna find something else that’s meaningful to me with the people around me.

rg: Right, and InterMedia was that. It was your documentation of a

movement that in retrospect becomes the art that it was capturing.You had Jazz in the Cellar and Hippie Vancouver. That was interesting.

You took articles and prints and you screen printed them, you took the clips and quotes from that time, and that became the art. It was the opinions.

mdc: Exactly. rg: And that’s some of your most fascinating stuff: the Cellar, InterMedia. mdc: Far out. You know, some of that stuff has never been exhibited.

Those are actual objects. All that stuff is based on actual objects.

I mean, the internet has been fabulous for me since 2003 when I started with Asylum. And suddenly [the internet] became the venue for public art because it’s freely accessible. It’s like graffiti. You can throw anything up on that wall and people will see it. They live their life around it and the stumble upon it, or they look for it or

Kodak Portra 400

whatever. And you can’t force them to want to stay. They’ll stay if they want to stay and they’ll go if they want to go.

rg: And they’ll continue to look at it and tell their friends about it. mdc: So nothing’s for sale. I have nothing for sale. I never have

had anything for sale. I didn’t feel comfortable competing in that venue. I found it was not conducive to continued creativity. Yes, I was under the impression at a certain time that an artist developed a reputation and made a living from what they were doing, but I found that wasn’t gonna work for me.

rg: It’s a fine line. The best artists are the ones who build a reputation

and people come to them to buy their art, but so often nowadays, going back to the Emily Carr example, pumping out 300 artists a year, a lot of people come out. Part of what they learn is how to sell their art and how to sell themselves. And that’s a struggle. Because that creates the industry.

Emily Carr whether they know it or not has created the industry. And

by creating that industry, has flooded the market with people.

mdc: But there’s nothing at the end of the rainbow. There’s no product. And there’s no market.

rg: Are you doing any new work, or is most of your work compiling and curating past work?

mdc: I see [compilation and curation] as new work. I’ve always

found that because I’m not playing the game, I’m wearing all the hats. I’m the creator, the curator, the promoter, the archivist, the librarian, everything. I don’t have access to the system that way. So in this sense, I’m functioning on all those levels. Nobody is going to do this for me. I took it all seriously. If it’s going to prevail, I’m going to have to package it and put it together, and that’s what I’m doing.

17

: Feature

Vancouver’s oldest profession

by michelle reid photographs courtesy of the vancouver archives police records lettering by pamela rounis

: Feature

Pictured: Public police records for prostitutionrelated charges from the early 1900s.

Previous page: Gertie Johnson, age 23, arrested February 20, 1905, on the charge of vagrancy.

Fined $15 and asked to leave the city at once.

It’s hard to reconcile Vancouver’s present-day epithet “No Fun City” with the city’s origin: a rough, rowdy, Wild West frontier town where the saloons and speakeasies were open 24 hours a day. A single city block in 1889, according to historian Bruce MacDonald, contained “six buildings labelled ‘ill fame’; two labelled ‘gambling’; two saloons; one lottery house; and one opium factory.” The town was so small that lamp lighting, dog catching, and jailing duties were all managed by the same man, John Clough, who only had one arm. Men outnumbered women as many as 10 to one, which might explain why the most common professions seem to have been lumberjack, dockworker, sailor, and prostitute. If you’ve read The Man Game, Lee Henderson’s historical fiction masterpiece that portrays Vancouver as a lawless, chaotic pioneer town overflowing with opium and bursting with violence, rest assured that it’s not an exaggeration. Early Vancouver was much like the TV series Deadwood, only in a coastal rainforest setting rather than the South Dakotan desert.

Activities associated with prostitution became illegal two years after Confederation, with an 1869 law quaintly titled “An Act Respecting Vagrants.” The Act, in the wonderfully abstract euphemisms of the day, took issue with “all common prostitutes, or night walkers wandering the fields” and “keepers of bawdy houses and houses of ill fame.” In effect, it banned soliciting sex, living off the avails of sex work, or running a brothel, which is legally defined as a home where one performs sex work. In a confusing twist, the actual act of exchanging sex for money was (and remains) legal in Canada.

Nowadays, we associate red-light districts with foreign cities and street-level prostitution with our own, but in fact Vancouver had a cavalcade of notorious red-light districts from its inception until the end of World War I. Birdie Stewart opened Vancouver’s

Vancouver got its first museum, skyscraper, and professional baseball team (called The Beavers). By 1911, it was the fourth largest city in Canada, trailing just behind Winnipeg. That same year, in response to pressure from citizens who chafed at sharing the streets with sex workers and johns, the city police began shutting down Shore Street brothels, and the madams packed up their bags and moved to Alexander Street.

A note about brothels: these weren’t low-stakes operations.

Madams were serious business women of the day, and they descended on Alexander Street with purpose. As Atkin points out, “These brothels were purpose-built. The women were taking out building permits, they were paying $20,000, $30,000, $40,000 for the building ... They also hired brand-name architects.” Brand-name indeed: W.T. Whiteway, the famed architect who designed the Sun Tower and the original Woodwards, was hired by Dollie Darlington to build her brothel at 500 Alexander Street. It would later, appropriately, become the British Sailors Society. A few buildings remain along Alexander, although one has to dig deep to find evidence.

Atkin recalls one house: “You go in the basement, and you scrape through the plaster and the wood, and the five layers of wallpaper, and the last layer is the 1912 Art Nouveau red wallpaper.” It’s nearly impossible to picture that red wallpaper and not imagine it in a decadent boudoir, isn’t it? “You can see that history. It’s rare to have that—the street’s almost intact. You can get a sense of the scale of the operation.”

At the time, brothels were one of the few professional spheres where women reigned. “Most of the houses were run by women.

Few business opportunities were open to them at the time,” says Atkin. Men in charge were rare. “Historically, as far as I can see, you see pimps get involved when it’s individual women. But when it’s a house being run, it’s almost always a woman in charge. And these aren’t fronts; these are pretty serious business people.” Incidentally, Vancouver’s police force hired its first two female constables in 1912, who supervised female detainees and patrolled the bars and cabarets.

Building permits and city records are some of the only ways of tracking madams’ activities and movements throughout the city, as they understandably kept their heads down. The records also reveal madams lingering in red-light districts after their supposed closure.

“Dupont Street disappeared in 1906 as an object of discussion. But if you go back and check on the madams, they’re there through 1908-1910. They just called themselves a rooming house, but they were still there. You go through the city directories. Once you know the names you’re looking for, it’s easy. And usually in the directories, if you come across a house listed as ‘Mrs. So-and-So,’ then 90 times out of 100 you’re guaranteed it’s a madam. If it’s ‘Mrs. So-and-So (Widow),’ that’s something completely different. There was a little bit of code language in the directories.” These Mrs. So-and-So’s were busy: “You see madams on multiple building permits, so they’re not just involved in one property, they’re involved in two or three properties.”

In 1911, madams and their employees began migrating to Alexander Street, forming a community that would persist until the end of WWI. But a vocal contingent of Vancouverites, having run the brothels out of other parts of town already, demanded the extermination of sex work in Vancouver. The Moral Reform Association, led by a Reverend A.M. Sanford, published the pamphlet “Social Vice in Vancouver” in 1912, which called Alexander Street a “vice colony” and called for the city to drive out prostitution.

Perhaps surprisingly in an era that made frequent use of the phrases “bawdy-houses” and “night walkers,” there were liberal realists.

J.W. Wilkinson, writing for the British Columbia Federationist, argued that the wages earned through prostitution were the only way that many women could support themselves, and that a red-light district was more efficient and economical for the city to manage than futile attempts to stamp it out, which would only disperse the problem. William Bowser, the Conservative attorney general of BC, argued it was a waste of time and money to lock up women for prostitution; as quoted by Daniel Francis, Bowser rhetorically asked, “What good [would it] do to put these women in jail for six months?” The debate between pragmatists and abolitionists was alive and kicking a hundred years ago, and still rages on today.

Brothels persisted in Vancouver for over 40 years thanks to the limited capacity of the police force, lax regulations, and high demand from a population that was predominantly young, single, and male. But as the city welcomed new numbers of families and professionals, and the young men left for WWI, attitudes began

“W.T. Whiteway, the famed architect who designed the Sun Tower and the original Woodwards, was hired by Dollie Darlington to build her brothel at 500 Alexander Street.” first brothel on the corner of Abbott and Water Streets in 1873— the same year the first school opened. In Red Light Neon, author Daniel Francis observes that Stewart wasn’t coy about her business: she set up shop just two doors down from the Methodist minister and around the corner from the jail. Other madams convened on the 100 block of East Pender Street, then called Dupont Street.

Enforcement was sporadic; brothels were occasionally raided or razed on vague grounds of “sanitation violations.” Vancouver’s second chief of police, John McLaren, was fired after he was found to be taking bribes from madams (he was later reinstated).

The area remained an active red-light district until 1906, when pressure from police officers, business people, and morally-outraged citizens led madams and their employees to relocate to a less central part of town.

By 1907, there were reportedly more than a hundred brothels in Chinatown, which was also home to many still-legal opium dens. The brothels were concentrated in Canton and Shanghai Alleys—tiny, teeming streets that would disappear completely by the 1940s. The other new centre for business was Shore Street (now part of East Georgia Street), although logistic problems rendered the district short-lived. “It was a tiny street, and it was hard to control the men,” explains John Atkin, local historian and author, over pie in Strathcona. “There’s a wonderful newspaper article of the day where the owner of the Avenue Theatre, which was at the corner of Georgia and Main Street, was complaining to the cops that there were 50 men lined up around the corner from his theatre.” Presumably the owner was less motivated by moral outrage than the indignity of watching dozens of men line up patiently for brothel space rather than theatre seats.

The Shore Street era coincided with a period of enormous economic and demographic growth in Vancouver: the city’s population exploded from 26,000 people in 1901 to 121,000 just 10 years later. The population of sex workers had grown suddenly as well, as hundreds of women came north looking for work after San Francisco was largely destroyed by a massive earthquake in 1906. The same decade saw rapid cultural evolution as well, as

21

: Feature

to change. After the war, the city was a different place; Atkin explains, “I think it was just harder to establish [brothels] because we had much more of a regulatory aspect. There was a very busy building department, more licensing, and more town planning. Zoning by-laws began to show up. People were paying more attention.”

Ordinary people were paying attention, and so were police.

A clear reason for the flagrant operation of red-light districts was that police weren’t enforcing the laws with much dedication or consistency. Fines were liberally given and occasionally paid, and now and then an unlucky madam would be made an example of and thrown in jail, but for many years police didn’t so much shut down brothels as discreetly usher them to a less central location, most likely while lining their pockets with bribes.

Atkin describes the police as tolerant and realistic about sex work—they had to uphold the illusion of enforcing the law while privately ascribing to the belief that it was better to keep an eye on sex workers than try to eradicate them. “They didn’t want the problem distributed everywhere,” he suggests. “And they also felt that if the women weren’t in control, then that meant that they were in danger. Their health was in danger, and it led to the other problems: pimps, guns, drugs.” Women were certainly arrested and fined (madams and workers, as well as brothel piano players and, much less frequently, johns), but it’s possible to imagine this as a tax on the business, a symbolic slap on the wrist to please the Moral Reformers, a show for the people. As Atkin recounts, “No one ever interviewed the women. If they took a statement it was just to get the personal details that showed up beneath the photograph. No, they stayed out of the papers, stayed off the radar ... I think [the police] wanted to keep the women off the radar.”

This is an attractively rosy picture, and no first-hand accounts from the sex workers are around to discount it. But on inspection, the police records accompanying those photographs suggest a less harmonious reality.

A wall of hundred-year-old police records for prostitution-related charges are on display at the Museum of Vancouver for the Sex Talk in the City exhibit, an unflinching look at Vancouver’s history of sexual politics, action, and education. As Amber Dawn, writer and one of the curators of the exhibit, explains, “One of the things that struck me about those public police records was the language used, which to me so screamed of misogyny and racism.” Some of the archaic descriptions that populate the records include “coloured,” “Indian,” “quarter-breed,” “dark-complected,” and the puzzling “complex quadroon.”

Dawn’s own experience as a sex worker bears out the theory that institutionalized racism is a factor in the enforcement of prostitution laws. “I did see that in my own life as a sex trade worker—the women who faced discrimination and violence, including from police and other authorities, tended to be migrant women and First Nations women … The racist, misogynist language, it still rings true today.”

Racist motivations were a major factor of the day. In Red Light Neon, Francis documents the early 20th century frenzy over “white slavery,” a widespread cultural panic that originated in Europe and asserted that young white women were being abducted by ambiguous “foreigners” and sold into the sex trade. (This panic has not wholly subsided, if the popularity of Liam Neeson’s Taken and Taken 2 are any indication.) While this fervour died down after WWI, the leniency toward white sex workers and harsher treatment of “foreign” (non-white) workers has persisted.

Living in a city with the progressive aspirations of Vancouver, it’s jarring to realize that our attitudes regarding sex work have remained essentially fixed for over a hundred years: prostitution is there in the open (in the city directories of 1913; in the Georgia Straight ads of 2013) but no one talks openly about it; some push for abolition while others suggest that tolerance is safer and more realistic; we shuffle sex workers out of neighbourhoods when their presence deters business and gentrification. The only major shift has arguably been for the worse: instead of concentrated districts facilitating familiarity between workers and providing a semblance of protection and order, we have workers on the street with little safety or community. As Dawn points out, “In other professions you have the right to congregate with other workers. For anyone who works in isolation and silence, of course your job will be dangerous. There’s a safety to knowing who your colleagues are and being able to look out for each other.”

Nine out of 10 charges related to sex work offenses are for “communicating,” which has the logical consequence of making sex work more dangerous. Sex workers stay off streets with foot traffic

and lighting and work alone, which makes them less conspicuous but also more vulnerable. The emphasis on charging sex workers for communicating also places the burden of punishment on the workers rather than the johns, since one is far more likely to be arrested for selling rather than buying. Even if sex workers aren’t caught “communicating,” there are other legal loopholes to exploit.

“The police can ask street-based sex workers to move along based on loitering charges,” Dawn explains. “Loitering is one of these things in our Criminal Code that can be used to ask sex workers to ‘move along.’ There’s always a way to push vulnerable people out of neighbourhoods.”

In Red Light Neon, Francis points out that 80% of sex work occurs “off the street,” in private homes, hotels, euphemistically named “health spas” and “massage parlours,” and the like. But even these larger numbers of workers who are off the streets run into police officers, due to frequent complaints from neighbours and business owners who dislike sharing postal codes with sex workers. Dawn’s experience shows that the problems for sex workers are social as well as legal. “I’ve never had an officer say, ‘We know that you’re soliciting and it’s illegal.’ They just say, ‘You’re loitering in a residential neighbourhood.’ That’s very telling. In the sex workers rights movement and the decriminalization movement we look at how the bylaws can be changed, but there’s also a major societal change that needs to happen where the first thing a ‘neighbour’ does is call the police. Why wouldn’t that neighbour go out and talk to a sex worker? Or start a conversation about what they see in the neighbourhood that involves sex workers rather than calling the police right away? If you had a conflict with your neighbour about the noise they were making, most people would talk to the

“Historically, as far as I can see, you see pimps get involved when it’s individual women. But when it’s a house being run, it’s almost always a woman in charge.” neighbour first. But sex workers are very rarely included in discussions about neighbourhood safety.”

After over a hundred years of failed laws and codified silence, the time has come to speak out. “What’s very tricky about sex work is we have a lack of sophisticated ways to talk about sex in society in general,” says Dawn. “There are still a great number of people who believe they don’t deserve pleasure, or that the gender relationships between men and women are not on equal footing, so all the complexity that follows us into the bedroom exists in sex trade. Except all of our hang-ups about sex are magnified when you add sex work to it.”

“What we need is a huge cultural change about how we view sex, how we view women, and how we view sex for money. And this can only happen through discussion. This can only happen through people talking about it more. Silence doesn’t help anything.”

The silence is cracking. Dawn has just released a memoir, How Poetry Saved My Life, which reflects on her experience as a sex worker through poetry and prose. Her decision to publish was carefully considered. “I’ve tried to be a very public advocate for sex workers, but putting it all down in a book is like that last threshold. There are certain stories or personal experiences that have stigma attached to them, and sex work is one of them. So I just had to reflect on whether I wanted to put it out there.” The warm reception from a wide range of communities has proved that speaking was the right decision. “I had all this work, all this writing, and it was heavy, sitting on the shelf, with no one reading it. Now I feel elated. I feel free.”

23

: Profile

time enough at last Debora Cohen returns to her hometown for a musical reinvention by shazia hafiz ramji photography & art direction by lauren d. zbarsky styling by monika koch hair by jenny lynn of oh hey style garments by cotte d’armes

Debora Cohen walks towards the Black Frog in Gastown dressed in all black, her head lowered and hair falling over the right side of her face. I stub out my cigarette, eager to talk with the artist whose songs were responsible for making me feel less alone during my late teenage bus rides to SFU. Formerly the guitarist of The Organ, a well-loved post-punk outfit that disbanded in 2006, Cohen’s new solo project Lovers Love Haters infuses the same brand of jangly pop with lyrical forays into loneliness and city life. The forthcoming release titled Time Enough At Last hints at Cohen’s work-life balance, cutting a new record after The Organ, and resettling into our changing city.

Cohen joins me in the lively dark of the pub, sweeping the hair off her face before ordering a glass of red wine. She slouches slightly as she tells me about taking a year or two off from writing music and barely playing instruments after the demise of The Organ.

“I think when you’ve only been in one serious band from when you are quite young, and where the circumstances in which it ends are less than desirable, it taints things a little bit, and I needed distance from that.”

Disillusioned, Cohen left for London in mid-2007, only to return to Vancouver a couple of years later. “After leaving The Organ, and not playing music for a while, I felt like I needed a change, a new experience. I basically needed to throw myself out of my comfort zone, and moving to another part of the world was a good way of doing that. It helped me become a lot more independent and less terrified of everything. I had been on tour a lot in the UK, but never really got to experience it in full, so this was a chance for me to do that, which I really enjoyed.”

Sometimes a journey out of the comfort zone ends with moving back home; now Cohen lives with her parents and wakes up at 5 a.m. to go to her job at Finch’s Tea House three days a week.

She smiles and admits, “It’s very difficult living with parents at 32. Will they tolerate my singing all over again?” Despite being jokingly doubtful, Cohen admits to constantly having songs in

remembers Vancouver having far fewer buildings. On visiting her childhood home recently, she says, “It was barely recognizable.

It’s rather ugly now, to be honest, all the nice little houses are gone, and tall buildings have taken over.”

But she is surprisingly buoyant when I ask her whether or not she laments the wave of venue closures in the city. “Actually, I think there are plenty of places to go. I always hear people complain, but in fact there’s so much happening. You could have several places to go at night if you really wanted to.”

Speaking of venues, I tell her I saw Lovers Love Haters at the Biltmore and Railway Club in late 2011, and ask her if they plan on touring. “I have done a couple of mini East Coast tours in Canada with Lovers Love Haters, but I find that generally, it’s not a financially smart thing to do unless you already have an established fanbase. I find that in Europe and the UK, going to shows is a much bigger part of their culture, and they seem more passionate about music. I also prefer a change of scenery, a more adventurous experience when touring, which I get when overseas.”

Self-discovery and a change of scenery are part of what has brought Cohen to her current collaborative headspace. “While recording the new album, I’ve really had to learn how to let go and take the advice of others—mainly Felix Fung, who has been producing these songs with me. I can be quite stubborn at times, so getting fresh ideas is really helpful.”

After our conversation, I walk out of the pub, listening to the light rain falling and remembering the rain sample used in There Is Nothing I Can Do by The Organ. Cohen follows shortly after, mirroring the cryptic simplicity of those songs: smiling in a black outfit.

“Actually, I think there are plenty of places to go.

I always hear people complain, but in fact there’s so much happening. You could have several places to go at night if you really wanted to.” the back of her mind. “There’s something about working hard to write a song. I like the satisfaction at the end. Playing music and writing songs gives me purpose, which I felt I was lacking when I had stopped.”

Cohen describes the sound of Lovers Love Haters as “a darker kind of pop,” reminiscent of the music from the 1980s or early 1990s. Cohen used the Roland Juno 2 and Korg Poly 800 to create the synth-based sound. Growing up in Vancouver during the same decades (she describes herself as a “Richmond baby”), Cohen recalls listening to her dad’s oldies radio station: “I’m sure listening to all of those great songs had some sort of subconscious influence on me. And, I remember a phase when I was in elementary school and everyone was listening to Top 40 pop like Ace of Base. I was really into Ace of Base. Maybe that’s why I can appreciate a good pop song,” she says, letting her hair fall over her face as she smiles.

“But really I think just being around instruments was the big thing,” she continues. “We had a piano in our house, which I had started to learn to play when I was six years old, and someone was often just around playing it. Guitar didn’t happen until I was 16, and that was another whole new world of excitement for me. From there, I eventually just taught myself bass and drums.

To me, instruments may as well be candy … and I have a sweet tooth.”

Interested in hearing more about her youth, I ask her how she feels Vancouver has changed. With a slow smile, she says she

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denim vest: Cotte D’Armes jeans, shirt: Debora’s own Ilford XP2 Super

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jeans, top: Cotte D’Armes blazer: Debora’s own Fuji 100ACROS

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This must be the place

This spring, Sad Mag photographers Lauren D. Zbarsky, Katie Stewart, Tina Krueger, Andy Hudyma, and Bryce Evans teamed up with Aboriginal youth from the Red Fox Society to sift through thousands of photos in the Vancouver Archives from the 1890s onward. Their mission: to recreate an archival photograph of a building, neighbourhood, or cultural space in Vancouver in order to start a conversation about gentrification and the evolution of British Columbia’s landscape. This is Vancouver through the lens of a Pentax K1000 and a pile of expired film.

A city built by real estate speculation

In January of 2013, an international housing survey ranked Vancouver as the second least-affordable city in the world, triggering groans from locals and stoking fears that overseas property speculation would soon price the average homebuyer out of the market. Mean house prices have passed the $800,000 mark, now exceeding those in New York and London when compared with income. Vancouver is consistently ranked among the three least-affordable cities on the planet. Real estate, speculation, and affordability are topics on the lips of activists, politicians, and locals all over town. But how did it get this way? What changed? When did overseas ownership take over the market? How did Vancouver go from being a city where a hard-working adult could reasonably expect to purchase a single-family home, to the most expensive city in the country?

The reality is, nothing’s changed.

Contrary to the cozy little myths about inflated land values and foreign ownership started in the 80s by investors from mainland China, the factors that fuel the city’s vibrant real estate market are not so different than they were 100 years ago. In fact, if it weren’t for the global property market, there may never have been a Vancouver in the first place. The only difference is, back then, the speculation that transformed a tiny logging village into a bustling metropolis was coming from entirely different places: the United States and Europe.

by jesse donaldson introduction by katie stewart

In fact, so great was the influence of the real estate industry on the development of Vancouver that it even influenced the names of many well-known streets.

“During that land boom at the turn of the century, American speculators bought large tracts of land in the area of Ninth Avenue and Westminster Road,” Anne Broadfoot explains in her history of the Greater Vancouver Real Estate Board. “To promote sales, they decided to upgrade street names, so in 1909, Westminster Road became Main Street, and Ninth Avenue became Broadway— familiar names found in many major centres around the world, so bound to appeal to the cosmopolite. News reports of the day show that it worked, because all the land sold quickly.”

However, the prewar boom was not to last. Between 1913 and 1915, following the us stock market collapse, and resultant worldwide depression, Vancouver’s real estate market crashed for the first (and possibly only) time; suddenly, commercial rents declined by 50%, and ordinary working people, no longer able to meet their obligations, defaulted on their loans. The city of South Vancouver went into receivership. The market was decimated. In fact, there is one recorded instance of a corner lot on Cambie and Broadway being listed for $90,000, and eventually selling for less than $8,000.

Even though the Depression took longer to affect Vancouver’s real estate market than it did the rest of the province, construction slowed to a virtual standstill. This, combined with the sudden influx of unemployed men and women seeking refuge in its neighbourhoods ensured that, by the time servicemen were returning from overseas after the Second World War, the city was being affected by a severe housing shortage. Even the creation of the Vancouver Housing Registry (started during the Depression with the intention of encouraging homeowners to rent empty rooms to prospective

“In 1887, only a year after incorporation, Vancouver had 12 grocery stores and 16 real estate firms.”

Opposite page first photo: Stanley Park, original date and photographer unknown.

Re-created by: Bryce Evans Steven Pham Joseph Posey Robert Tam

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In 1887, only a year after incorporation, Vancouver had 12 grocery stores and 16 real estate firms. The city’s first mayor, Malcolm McLean, was a real estate agent. But, in the late 1870s, before the arrival of the Canadian Pacific Railway (cpr), land in what is now downtown Vancouver sold for approximately $1.00 an acre. Previous to that, the West End itself was granted to Englishmen Samuel Brighouse, John Morton, and William Hailstone for a total of 116 pounds (a sum thought to be so exorbitant that it earned them the nickname “The Three Greenhorns”). However, by 1886, with the announcement that Vancouver would be the home of the cpr’s coveted Western Terminus, property values skyrocketed, and suddenly a lot near Granville and Dunsmuir was selling for $400. By 1893, a lot in the same area sold for $1,100, and, by 1900, an adjoining lot went for roughly $4,250. Incredibly, by 1912—at a time when wages were roughly 50 cents an hour, and a tailored suit cost less than $40—a lot in the very same area was worth $725,000. Property speculation was so rampant that, when the first cpr land auction took place in 1886, (the railway was notorious for bullying government and landowners into granting large tracts of land, which they then sold at a profit), Vancouver ceo Harry Abbott realized with dismay that speculators “had seized upon all the best sites without any intention of putting up buildings.” By 1889, proceeds from the sale of granted land in Vancouver had made the cpr more money than in all other company towns across the country, combined —not to mention turning all of the employees involved (themselves quietly speculating on the side) into instant millionaires.

“Better chances for investment were never offered,” reads an 1870s advertisement in The West Shore, out of Portland, Oregon.

“Lots that can now be bought for a few hundred dollars will beyond a doubt be worth as many thousands within a year or two. Investment of only a few hundred dollars will yet return fortunes to those that have the foresight to realize the future in store for this place.”

By 1912, the market was an orgy of borrowing, spending, and inflation, a place where real estate fever had even hit those who could least afford it; according to a 1912 survey conducted by the Ministerial Union of British Columbia (entitled “The Crisis in BC”), during a single week in October, more than 40% of the land-purchase applications received were from working-class people.

Vancouver had become a place where, according to novelist Bertrand Sinclair, the common man would “go without lunch to make payments on plots of land in distant suburbs.”

tenants) couldn’t completely solve the problem, leading to severe overcrowding, particularly in the West End. The crisis eased only slightly throughout the 1950s (fuelled by the continued demand for single-family homes) with prices continuing to rise.

“It may be, also, that to achieve a truly low-cost home in this high-priced time we will have to spread the repayments over a far longer period than the terms accepted today,” complains a Vancouver Sun editorial from 1958. “Housing costs are high, but we can’t afford to throw up our hands and say we can’t afford to build many more houses until costs come down again. In a city growing as fast as ours this would be the counsel of stupidity and despair.

We must have more homes and we must have them at prices people can afford to pay.”

Though housing price increases in Vancouver continued to outpace the national market by a substantial margin (in 1967 alone, according to property assessments, the value of lots for singlefamily dwellings increased by 25-35%), there was one crucial factor that would change the face of city real estate forever: apartment living. While today, 99% of the downtown population lives in apartment buildings, before 1966, it wasn’t possible to own one’s own apartment; subdivision of a building into separate units had no legal basis, leaving individuals to either purchase an entire building, or rent from someone who did. Apartment buildings, viewed as a terribly downmarket option, were exclusively rented, usually only a few stories high, and generally built outside of the downtown core. However, with the enactment of the 1966 Strata Titles Act, the city’s real estate landscape changed abruptly. Suddenly, it was possible for British Columbia’s apartment owners to subdivide their properties into affordable units for individual sale. However, downtown high-rise living was still considered a revolutionary idea, one which would take time to catch on, and would require massive changes to existing zoning bylaws.

“Downtown zoning should be changed and great apartment towers should rise above stores,” a 1966 article in the Province suggests.

“If thousands of people had their homes downtown, they would both extend the daily ‘life’ of the city and reduce its traffic problems.”

In 1958, 75% of all housing starts were declared as singlefamily dwellings. By the mid-1960s, apartment construction outnumbered house construction by two to one. Suddenly condominium living was so popular that apartment owners began rushing to convert their rental stock into 99-year leases and selling them to buyers. However, it wasn’t long before speculators got

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YMCA Building: Original (1890) by Major James Skitt Matthews Re-created by: Jayde Becker, Randy Eely, Tori Lemire, Ruby Lockhart, Lauren D. Zbarsky

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A History of Vancouver Real Estate “Land prices are high, it is said, higher than anything would warrant. ‘Why, the workingmen cannot afford to pay at the rate demanded for these tiny outside lots,’ asserted one man recently. The same thing was said here twenty years ago, answer the pioneers; others of us know that it was repeated ten years ago and five years ago, and our children and our children’s children will hear the same tale of woe decades hence.”

— R.J. McDougal, British Columbia Magazine, June 1911

involved in this lucrative new market. In fact, the problem became so pronounced that, following a report made to council, the city of North Vancouver requested a provincial ban on any such sales, and both Vancouver and Burnaby put a moratorium on all rental-lease conversions. The report, prepared by a North Vancouver land agent, estimated that close to 25% of all condo sales in the city were being made to speculators. The report details one incident of a suite purchased in May of 1973 for $38,500 and sold for $42,000 later the same day.

Though Vancouver enacted a lease conversion freeze in 1973, and provincial programs such as murb (the Multiple Unit Residential Building program) were enacted in hopes of encouraging developers to construct purpose-built rentals, cries about the city’s lack of affordable housing remained on people’s lips. Accusations of developers abusing murb are evident in many of the papers of the day, as in the case of the False Creek developments in the 1980s: developers allegedly building condos for tax breaks, and then selling the units to wealthy speculators.

“Many of the suites are expected to be rented out by investors,” reports a Vancouver Sun article from 1982, regarding the development.

“A $100 million False Creek apartment project will soon become a refuge for many of the city’s wealthy—and a renter’s rights spokesman

“Like the European Union, Vancouver is crumbling, not along ethnic lines, but among the owns and owns-not,” reads a January 2012 article by the Vancouver Courier’s Mark Hasiuk. “Globalization, in the form of foreign investment, may help chase an entire generation of native-born residents from the city and deny other immigrants a chance at home ownership. Remedies are scarce. But returning property to people who live, work, and raise families here seems like a good start.”

There’s no debating that Vancouver is the most expensive city in the country. And it would be hard to argue that much of that value is the result of speculative investment. However, contrary to the views expressed by xenophobic reactionaries like Hasiuk (“It began in the 1980s,” he asserts, “when waves of Hong Kong residents including members of the business elite, wary of communist China’s pending takeover, poured across the Pacific, gobbling up property with converted hkds”), this isn’t a recent phenomenon.

People from all over the world have been investing in Vancouver for more than 130 years. In fact, Vancouver was a real estate investment before it was even incorporated as a city. It was a city invented by real estate speculators, incorporated on the advice of real estate speculators, and named by real estate speculators, and the factors that draw investors today are no different than those that brought

Opposite page: Lord Strathcona, original (1902) by Major James Skitt Matthews Re-created by: Garrett Johnson Patience M. Lavallee Jayne Peters Rosie Peters Katie Stewart Kasia Jaleia Mariah Wale Fuji 200

“It was a city invented by real estate speculators, incorporated on the advice of real estate speculators, and named by real estate speculators.” calls it ‘typical’ of lower mainland development.”

“There’s no shortage of expensive apartments,” commented Tom Lalonde, of the Greater Vancouver Renters’ Association, in an interview with the paper. “Developers have used the murb program as an example of affordable housing, (but) murb has never given anybody affordable housing.”

Even Pennyfarthing Development spokesman Ian McBean admitted, when interviewed, that “the project falls well short of the False Creek apartment goal of one-third high income, one-third medium income, and one-third lower income ... Construction costs and land costs are extremely costly. It would be economically impossible to do that.”

the European settlers of the 1870s; simply, that Vancouver is a desirable place to live. As the first few generations of Vancouverites bought, sold, swapped, and developed, and realized the desirability of their new city’s climate, location, and resource wealth, the land took on incredible value unbelievably quickly.

And we’ve been bitching about it ever since.

Originally published in The Dependent and reprinted with permission.

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by Sophia Ahamed (pencil, ink, and digital) On the right:

by Lenkyn Ostapovich (pen and ink)

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“ W h e n w e t o u r, p are always a s ki ng in Toronto. They h something really h a p p e n i n g t h e r e. people think of Va I never hear p eop wh at’s new c om i ng

people in Europe g about the scene ave this idea that y interesting is But I don’t think ancouver that way. ple talkin g about g from Vancouver.” −Maya Postepski (Austra, trst, Princess Century)

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h e a r d u n s c e n e

The new sound of Vancouver by monika koch / photograhy by alex waber introduction by katie stewart For some, the idea of experimental music conjures an image of a sweaty, poorly lit bunker, packed with twenty-somethings standing motionless against a wall of sound, entranced by the sheer volume of noise coming from a microphone spinning in a kitchen blender.

The musician is a shadowy figure scurrying over a barricade of amps, synthesizers, and blinking lights to ensure that the sound pulsating through the room continues to reverberate through your internal organs. For anyone who has even been to one of the noise shows that have been popping up for the last twenty years, this image is only partially accurate—why use a blender when you can use a coffee grinder?

As with many of the interesting things going on in this city, the experimental music scene has been simmering just below the surface of Vancouver’s glossy exterior, largely undocumented.

In order to shed some light on this bustling underground scene, Vancouver photographer Alex Waber teamed up with Sad Mag’s Monika Koch to chat with some of the most innovative experimental musicians making noise in Vancouver.

i a n wi l l i a m c r a i g Ian William Craig makes soundscapes. They’re crafted from tape ribbons, loops and recycled recordings, and layered sustained slices of tone. Listeners may find their ears clinging to a certain part of the mix as a soundscape tour guide even while it fades, reemerges and evolves. His process-driven method in musicmaking shares an ancestral home with his background in printmaking. Having come here from Edmonton, getting tuned into the Vancouver way of doing things wasn’t without some frustration for Ian. “I thought it was pretty, uh, vapid for a while,” he says, “because the Vancouver paradigm is just so much different than what I’m used to. [In] all the other cities I’ve been in, there’s a kind of instantaneous and mutual excitement about things, and Vancouver just doesn’t operate that way. And that’s ok, it’s not like I’m shitting on the place.

Many people have tried that path in more eloquent ways than I could. You just have to figure out how it operates. It doesn’t matter what you’re doing, as long as you’re doing it honestly.”

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anju singh Anju Singh is a serious doer. She performs by herself and as part of punk duo Ahna with her partner, Graham Christofferson. She also helped organize the Her Jazz Noise Collective (“Mostly noise and experimental music played by mostly women”), Fake Jazz, and initiated Vancouver’s own Noise Fest. Singh is a Toronto native who started out playing saxophone in school. The story of her entry into the punk scene—and consequently, her move west—is one of taking action and changing scenery when she saw the need for different options, different resources. “It just comes down to doing something, and everything will follow. I don’t feel like I’ve ever been handed anything, I’ve worked for everything I’ve done. I hear lot of people saying, ‘there’s no venues, there’s no this, there’s no that’— I think it’s the worst answer. Because, there aren’t ‘no venues,’ that’s impossible. You’re going to find it somewhere, even if it’s outside by the train yard. Do you remember McBarge from Expo ‘86? We did a show there and canoed people on to the barge. And had generators. Stop complaining and don’t settle. “

A m i r Abbe y

(pictured right)

Amir Abbey has been performing solo as Secret Pyramid for the last three years. Experimenting with a variety of instruments, including guitar, for Abbey involved “unlearning” and deconstructing them so that they became sonic tools, divorced from their distinct, traditionally defined personalities. Abbey’s approach is detectable in his music, where collections of drones hover en masse, nuanced shifts in their arrangement leading the listener from the sound of daybreak to the gothic solitude of a cemetery. “From my beginnings of playing until now, the way I approach the instrument and the way I utilize it has been completely re-vamped. I don’t even see it as a guitar in a traditional sense anymore, it has become more of a tone generator. It makes texture, it is a tool. There is nothing that special about it, it could be any instrument.”

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J o s h u a Steve n s o n Joshua Stevenson has been active in the Vancouver music scene for roughly the last twenty years. He’s played in several bands and side projects (Jackie-O-Motherfucker, Vong Bingen, Staked Plain), several solo projects, and recorded and produced for local exports (Nü Sensae, White Lung, Destroyer, Pink Mountaintops; among other artists profiled here). Performing as Magneticring, he uses an armoury of synthesizers to make music that will remind you of the soundtrack to an Arthur C. Clarke television program. It’s otherworldly, hypnotizing, and laced with a cool energy. “Because you have to build every sound from scratch, it really makes you think about the process of sound. There are certain principles you have to deal with using an analog synthesizer that relate to everything: guitars, the sound a bug makes, the sound a bird makes.

It’s made me a lot more aware of the shape and control of sound.”

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k eit h we c k e r Keith Wecker plays in bands, ensembles, and on his own. His experimental work comes with the moniker V.Vecker, which is also an ensemble featuring individuals from a few other local acts. The music is dark, psychedelic, rough, and off-kilter. “I find that if you’re really interested in doing something, it’s not impossible to make it happen yourself if you’re really wanting it. On one hand you have people bitching about how there’s nowhere to play, and then you have a band like White Lung who tours nonstop and do shit like that. You don’t have to be situated here. And [your music] doesn’t have to be referential to here. That’s one thing that I really strive for: not being typically Vancouver, or even Canadian, at that point.”

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Luka Rogers Luka Rogers’ seven-month old solo project Sisters of Seance had been in the works, in his mind, for years. His main gig has been as a member of energetic electronic sort-of-dance-punk group Basketball. Though he’s had no real Western musical training, Rogers draws from his knowledge of Persian music and interest in making sound with a motion-picture feel. “I’ve always been obsessed with cinema, I really wanted to do something slow and cinematic. I like creating some sort of narrative with my music, where there’s no voice—because I can’t sing—but there’s some sort of narrative within what I play.” Despite admittedly being a little out touch with ‘the scene’, he’s noticed some positive change in Vancouver’s reputation as a terrible audience. “I never really paid that much attention to ‘the scene’. I feel like in the early 2000s, Vancouver definitely was one of those cities where people would just stand there. Later, around 2007 or 2008, people started dancing more at shows. Vancouver was a really uptight city in the early 2000s.

Which is cool, when people started to be okay with dancing more it fit really well with the time when Basketball was playing a lot. And now, I just like to psych out.”

w a te r s

(pictured left)

For Andrew Lee of In Medias Res, the trajectory between indie rock and experimentation has seemed more circular than linear. “I have always made music that is more atmospheric, a bit experimental, stuff that I would do in my bedroom when I was a teenager with a four-track, kinda random weird shit. And now when I listen back to it —everything that I’m doing now makes sense, everything I was doing then makes sense, and everything else in between is like an awkward growing stage.” He accompanies Lindsey Hampton in the duo Waters, a project borne of Hamptons’s at-home experimentation. Bringing Waters into the context of live performance was an unexpected move, but one that provided both with lessons in complimentary improvisation and control. “There is a point in a live performance where every step you take either adds the exact amount of what it needs, or takes it away,” says Hampton. Lee adds: “When we perform it, it never sounds the same as when we rehearsed it. It’s like we’re always on the brink of totally fucking up. It’s like playing Jenga.”

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J E R E MY V AN W YCK Aerosol Constellations’ Jeremy Van Wyck is a veteran of Vancouver’s punk and experimental music scenes. He may be more recognizable as the percussion half of Shearing Pinx. Van Wyck has been at it since the late ‘90s, when the Emergency Room was alive and well. “[We] established Fake Jazz to give ourselves a place to play, and it ran for five years. Through that five years, I met everyone and it put me in touch with so many older people [in the community]. And that’s really special, because these are people that generally just sit in their rooms and don’t go out partying. I was lucky to be doing this around 2008-9, when there was a burst of, for lack of a better term, weird music going on. Everyone felt the need to check it out. It’s still strong though, Vancouver has always a weird bend to its music aesthetic. There is a similar brand of energy coming off of our music. It’s really beautiful that people can transcend all the forms involved and feel that.”

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Pictured right: Andrew Lee

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graham christofferson Graham Christofferson is Worker on his own, and one half of grindcore outfit Ahna, whose live shows invite the listener to reevaluate the “acceptance” part of the musicversus-everthing-else dichotomy. Graham builds his work around the process of isolating and exploiting particular qualities of noise with various appliances, contact microphones, instruments, and audio equipment, the final chosen production techniques showcased in live performances. “I want to make the harshest sound I can.” For instance: “I tried using a grinder, like a coffee grinder, and I didn’t like it because of the motor sound. I wanted more of a cutting sound, so then I tried the angle grinder on a piece of steel, and I liked that. Or, I have a record player—when I tried using the needle on the record and scratching up the record I found that wasn’t harsh enough, so I put a contact mic on the needle arm and then rubbed that on the record sideways.”

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pr0phecy sun With the help of her homemade Theremin and a toolbox of live vocal modifiers, pr0phecy sun anchors her work in performance, each instance an exchange with her audience and immediate environment. Starting out as a collaborator in Her Jazz Noise Collective in 2006, she also went out on her own as a solo performer but stays involved in group projects. “When I’m doing solo work, if I’m in a space and there are people there, I will draw from the crowd and channel the work I’m doing to fill that. It’s definitely about feeling their energy, and feeling how I’m feeling—sometimes I want to cry the whole time, sometimes I’m really excited to just share something. All the sound makers in this city have such a different approach. Especially in Her Jazz, I learned so many different ways of working with others. Some are very harsh, some are soft, everyone has a very different sound idea. What’s really beautiful is, seeing when everyone allows themselves to be whatever that sound is, when they embody it and just let it happen.”

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By Rommy Ghaly

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GAY ATIONS T N A INC

Sending inspiring affirmations into the digital universe by bryce evans illustrations by karen campos castillo

Gay Incantations is a project created in 2013 by performance artists Coral Short and Lucas Crawford. Every day during the month of February, Crawford and Short would each post an incantation to the project website as well as their personal Facebook pages, in order to connect with their friends and add some glitter and gold to the bleak month of February.

Encouraging interaction and collaboration, Gay Incantations have been made into tote bags by Christine of Chateau Noir in Vancouver, comics by Jesse Blanchie, and a zine by Karen Campos Castillo. They have been submitted from as far away as Buenos Aires, curated in a show by Ted Kerr for the positive assertions art event in New York for Visual Aids, and will be translated into French.

Gay Incantations exposes and celebrates our greatness in imperfection, the beauty in the struggle, and the importance of self. magic exists and today i will be a part of it.

bryce evans: What are Gay Incantations? lucas crawford: Gay Incantations are attempts to use

language, speech, and human connection to change the possibilities of our lives, our moods, and our days. They are succinct magic spells that we are casting on ourselves. They are little relics of depression hammered into hopes.

be: I have found that the darkest moments of my life have helped

inspire and construct my brightest days. How did Gay Incantations begin?

coral short: Gay Incantations organically began when

I ended a long-term partnership and was heartbroken. I had to start to rebuild my self-esteem and my life. Lucas was also going through a rough time so, together, we starting volleying these affirmations back and forth, which helped us to stay positive.

We were both in very dark places struggling to get out. Lucas and I understand each other on a deep level and these affirmations, I believe, created lovingly for each other, helped us move into better places.

lc: At a time when communication and reaching out felt very

difficult to me (and sometimes pointless) just a few lines at the end of emails to and from Coral really did something for me.

They allowed us to break out of the generic conventions of email and write out our strongest hopes for each other and ourselves

be: On the website, you write, “These incantations do not aspire to

help anyone become better acclimatized to a wrong world.” What are your biggest issues with the world we live in?

cs: I think this world has many problems that we internalize

and are meant to keep quiet about. This is an extremely problematic thing—that inner homophobia, shame, and discomfort with our sexuality, emotions, and desires leads to heavy substance use in the queer community as a way of coping. Sometimes our blood families also reject our sexuality or our transitions. Communication and love are things that need to be taught in schools in my opinion.

All about Love by bell hooks is a great start if you haven’t read anything before on love.

lc: I am increasingly bothered by the way in which non-normative

people are associated with “failed lives” when normalcy requires just as much (if not more) loss, disavowal, pain, ignorance, sacrifice, and sadness. Let’s be more honest about that, and let’s not base our success or our selves on the concealment of those things. Let’s be more compassionate to others and their troubles.

be: Are Gay Incantations a way of fighting stereotypes about the lgbtq

community?

cs: I think society tells us we can’t take up too much space as

queers, but Lucas and I believe in taking up space–inhabiting the psychic and physical space that we deserve. By loving ourselves we make ourselves more powerful. In the words of Rupaul, “Honey, if you can’t love yourself, how the hell you gonna love someone else?”

lc: I think they are more a way of fighting off the conventions

and rules—in a sense, stereotypes—of normalcy. Mainstream lgbtq movements are often eager to show how “normal” we are, and I think the incantations subtly show that we are struggling not to be assimilated into that, that it can be difficult to live like that, and that the bad feelings and troubles we experience are not caused by being queer, but are, rather, relieved by being queer.

be: Do you find that people are becoming more open and accepting of people for who they are, regardless of gender or sexuality?

cs: Yes, I do believe the world is shifting but there is lot of work

to be done fighting against all the horrible homophobia, racism, sizeism, ableism, and classism still remaining! These oppressions are embedded in our systems and we need to fight them within ourselves and also in our communities around us. There is also a lot of stigma against mental illness in our community here in Vancouver. And to the people who ostracize: I want them to think about compassion and the fact that we all go through dark times at one point or another.

be: Does education to eradicate hate play a role in Gay Incantations? lc: I like thinking of them as educational, but in the sense of provocations rather than lessons. If we provoke some people to think differently or act differently in relation to their own loneliness or that of others, that would be a success in my books.

be: Do you have a favourite Gay Incantation at this point? cs: My personal favourite is this: remember kindness is the most radical thing of all.

Because we live in a time where people talk about radical events, and radical politics but at times I see people treated so cruelly within our community and with very little compassion. I think the root of radicalism is to be kind to each other - to create community. To care for each other. To hear each other. To look for signs when people need help. To reach out. To be responsible to each other. We do not need another queer/trans suicide. Let’s take care of each other as much as we can. is an internationally infamous performer, artist, video-maker, curator, and community-maker who divides their time between Montreal and New York.

coral short

is a poet, spoken word performer, video-maker, researcher, agitator, and occasional professor who lives mostly in Montreal but has many ties to Edmonton. lucas crawford

gayincantations.com

CORAL: 1. I WILL DO AMAZING THINGS THIS YEAR. 2. EVERY DAY I TRANSFORM. 3. I AM COMPASSIONATE TO MY LOVERS AND HATERS

4. I AM A STRONG, RESILIENT AND CREATIVE SURVIVOR. 5. KWEEN YOU ARE NEVER ALONE. SEND ME A MESSAGE. 6. NO JUDGEMENT. I LISTEN WITH LOVING KINDNESS. 7. LETTING GAY DRAMA FLOW OUT OF MY LIFE.

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: Profile

LUCAS 1. MY QUEER FAT MAKES ME RADICALLY BUOYANT. IT WILL SAVE ME IN THE UNLIKELY EVENT OF AN EMERGENCY LANDING OVER WATER. 2. CHANGE! I WILL DO THINGS THAT I NEVER IMAGINED AND THAT MIGHT HAVE ONCE REPULSED ME. 3. TODAY I ACKNOWLEDGE THAT TAKING CARE OF MYSELF IS NOT JUST BOURGEOIS BULLSHIT: EAT, SWIM, SHOWER, DRESS, CREATE, WALK, TALK. 4. LET ME WONDER AS MUCH AS I GRIEVE, CREATE MORE THAN I MOURN. 5. LET MY BEAR BELLY CONNECT ME TO MY PAST. LET ME ACCUMULATE. 6. REMEMBER: MENTAL HEALTH > NIGHTLIFE.

ST, ERRATIC, DAY MY PACE FECT!

21. TODAY I BUILD MY CAPACITY FOR PLEASURE. 22. TODAY I DO NOT NEED SCHADENFREUDE TO KEEP ME COMPANY! I’M BUSY MAKING THINGS.

23. TODAY I PRANCE ON ELITISM AND FART ON YOUR FROWNS! 24. I CHOOSE NOT TO LIMIT MYSELF TO WHAT WILL BE UNDERSTOOD BY OTHERS. 25. I AM NOT THE SOVEREIGN RULER OF WHAT I WILL BECOME. LET THIS BE FREEING. 26. I DEPART FROM THE GAY PAST PRECISELY AND DELICATELY. 27. LET ME FEEL SAFE SO THAT I CAN DO WILD THINGS. 28. FAIL AT EVERYTHING. LOVE SELF ON DAYS THAT AREN’T MAGICAL.

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14. LET ME BE A KIND HOST TO MYSELF IN MY HOME. 15. WHEN PEOPLE STARE AT ME TODAY, I WILL FEEL GRATEFUL THAT I INSPIRE WONDER. IF I AM NOT GRATEFUL, I DON’T BLAME ME! 16. SLOW, FAST, ERRATIC, GLACIAL: TODAY MY PACE IS JUST PERFECT! 17. TODAY I RECOGNIZE THAT MY FOURTEEN YEAR-OLD SELF WOULD HAVE HAD A HUGE LIFESTYLE CRUSH ON PRESENT-DAY ME.

18. MY LIFE WILL NOT BE MEANINGFUL BECAUSE OF STATUS OR “ACHIEVEMENTS.” 19. MY INBOX IS NOT MY BRAIN. 20. I SEIZE THIS GAY DAY!

: Interview

a diamond is forever

tyler morgenstern: As we pulled this issue together, it became clear that one of the biggest questions we wanted to ask was about the future of Vancouver’s cultural and performance spaces. As an artist who’s traveled the world playing all manner of venues, do you think holding on to heritage stages matters?

my first great show in Vancouver and since then they’ve all been really memorable. I’ve never heard about “No Fun City” but I honestly think a city is what one makes of it. If something isn’t to your liking you should get off your computer or blog and do something! Put on a show or start a band yourself!

Catching up with Diamond Rings

diamond rings: I’ve played in really old theatres and churches as well as brand new spaces and it’s honestly more about what people bring to the stage and the way the promoters, staff, and technicians work as a team and treat visiting artists than whether or not a building has some historical designation. It certainly makes no sense to tear down or tear up heritage buildings provided that they’re in working condition and don’t pose a safety risk. However, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with a new or refurbished space either. Just as long as people don’t draw male genitals on the dressing room walls I’m fine.

tm: Your music and your performances recall a sort of 80s glam

by tyler morgenstern photography by lillie louise major

tm: What do you make of Vancouver’s performance landscape? We’re often talked about as “No Fun City,” but how does it feel to perform here? dr: Vancouver has always been good to me as a performer.

aesthetic that’s seen a huge revival in the last few years. What draws you to that world and time as a performer?

dr: I think the concept of an ‘80s or ‘90s “aesthetic” serves the

journalist much more than it serves the artist. For example, the 80s were as much about Metallica as they were about Madonna, and those two artists are rarely mentioned in the same breath. As a performer I’m drawn to sounds and styles that I like but I don’t question why I like them. I just do. And of course, at risk of contradicting myself, I’d wager that “glam” has more to do with the early to mid ‘70s (T-Rex, New York Dolls, Bowie) than anything that came out in the 80s!

I’ve been fortunate to work with some really great promoters and organizers since the beginning, which I’m sure has helped.

Tristan Orchard, in particular, was the first person to take a

Fuji 3000b Instax

chance on Diamond Rings when he flew me out to play a Winnie Cooper party at Funky Winker Beans a few years ago. That was

59

: Field Trip

lettering by caitlin bauman

Words and pictures created at a recent poetry workshop at the Writers’ Exchange, a mentoring and creative writing program for inner-city kids. Sad Mag editorial staff Jackie Hoffart and Katie Stewart, along with Vancouver comedian Rachel Burns, worked one-on-one with students and Writers’ Exchange volunteers to write about the places and spaces that hold a particular importance for them. For many, it was their first foray into stream of consciousness. A challenging task for even the most eloquent of poets. And as you can, sometimes pictures are more telling than words.

participants

Bryan Jasmine Thomas

Judy Branky Jeremy Kahlil

Chelsea samuel JNikita Andrew

Huynh Selena Mico William 61

: Interview

the alchemist Ian Ruhter on his unusual photographic process by rommy ghaly photography by ian ruhter

Things have blown sky high for Ian Ruhter and his gang of collaborators since their first video “Silver and Light” was released just a year ago.

Ian turned a delivery truck into a camera, brought together a band of misfits, and hit the road taking photos of strangers using a 160 year old photographic process which renders instant photos on wet metal plates using liquid silver to create the images. Their first video went viral and since then they’ve been hitting the road, meeting people, giving interviews, and doing what they love: taking photos. rommy ghaly: Tell me about the process you have behind shooting

people. Because what really blows me away is not your photos actually.

I mean your photos are incredible. But it’s actually what you do to engage yourself with the people that you’re shooting ahead of time. ian ruhter: The setup of it is so slow. I mean, you shoot people,

so imagine you bring someone into a studio and you put them in front of the light. For the first twenty minutes, you’re shooting pictures just to break down the nerves. But this takes so long to set up, that you’re bringing them in front of the camera, and they become part of it, the whole process. They want to make it cool as well, so by the time you do it they become relaxed. The cool thing is too, because they’re long exposures, they can’t put on this fake thing. You can’t do the Facebook pose. You can’t, so the only thing you can do is be you. And when you get a picture of who the person really is, it shows. I think that’s what makes them so compelling.

rg: How do you pick your subjects? One thing I’ve noticed from

your pictures and your videos is that you tend to pick folks that have been dealt a tough hand in life sometimes and have overcome them overwhelmingly, or even sometimes not. How do you find these people?

Do you just go out on the street? ir: Well I think the people that we’re working with, they actually

mirror my story and our story. So what we’re doing with these films is, and there’s a bigger picture, we want to make a documentary but what they’re doing is, they’re telling my story as they’re telling their story, so it’s been really interesting.

up on this dream. It was weird. But then it actually ended up working out better for me in the end. rg: What are your thoughts on the state of photography nowadays? One

thing I notice about what you’re doing, which makes it so mind-blowing, well I guest feel like everything’s been thought of, there’s not enough people pushing the limits, not innovating, and that 99% of what I see out there is total shit. But then there is the 1% of people out there doing incredible things and that’s where I put you. You seem to have overcome all that, ignored all that. You just go your own way. What are your thoughts?

ir: As far as my thoughts on photography, it’s not my place to say

what someone is doing is good or shit. I don’t believe in that. I do see a lot of the repetitive things in ad campaigns and art. People are just copying other people’s work. And I just stepped back from all that and was like, I’m gonna do what’s in my heart. And if you truly do that, you’ll never copy anyone because no two people are alike. They could be similar but they won’t be alike and I think that’s where I started to really break out in my photography, when I said to myself, “Just do it your way, your version of it.” That helped me a lot and that’s how I got here. rg: How did you get into wet plate collodion process?

ir: I wanted to shoot film.

rg: Well how did you learn it? Who did you learn from?

ir: I learned from this guy Will Dunaway. He taught me.

rg: You say at one point in your videos that each shot costs $500.

ir: Yeah.

rg: That’s incredible. Where does all that cost come from? Does that cost

include the truck? Or is it just the metal plates, and the silver, and the chemicals?

ir: That’s with the truck—and the prices of silver are so high—

and that's the base of these images.

rg: How do you think they’ve responded to it? It’s funny. I watch your

videos and I get the sense that it’s been therapy for them, it’s been helpful, it’s allowed them to open up.

rg: It seems like you have this magic where everything falls into place.

Like the journey is the adventure. Who knows where you’ll be in six months and someone else might come on board. And someone else might move off. But that’s all part of your process, part of your journey. And that’s pretty incredible. And you’re still loving it?

ir: Yeah, it’s therapy for them and it’s therapy for us. One thing I

ir: Yeah. I really am.

said in the first video is that I built this thing and I want it to show us how we’re all connected as a human race, so it’s me saying, “I feel the same way about this.” And it’s them saying, “I feel the same way too.” So it’s really just showing how we’re all connected.

“I’m just gonna do what’s in my heart. If you truly do that, you’ll never copy anyone because no two people are alike.” rg: So it’s the four of you on every shoot, taking the truck out. How

many shoots are you doing a month?

ir: It depends. We’ve been, so far, taking care responding to

emails, taking care of business. Sometimes we won’t go out for months. Out here in Vancouver, we shot for probably 20 days in a row.

rg: What brought you to Vancouver?

ir: That guy Rick Etkin was like “You wanna do Creative

Mornings? We wanna get the truck up here.” And I was like, “Ehhhh, it’s gonna be pretty expensive.” So he started booking us for all these other talks and workshops. And then we did these demos and all that money went in to paying for our expenses.

So the first two weeks we were just working to pay for our travel up here, and it just gave us the opportunity to be up here and working on a piece. rg: You were in LA before. Why did you go?

ir: To learn more about photography. It was weird, because I went

to LA and I had these dreams of being “this kind of photographer” and doing “this kind of photography” and as I started working in it I realized, this wasn’t what I wanted to do at all. Then somehow I ended up back at home doing the same kind of photography that I didn’t want to do. It was scary going back, because I was giving

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: Interview

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: Person, Place, Thing

person

Caroline Adderson

place

Kerrisdale

thing

Vancouver Vanishes by hannah bellamy photography by justin barnes

Fuji 3000b Instax

Unappreciated histories were all I could think about as I stood at 3175 West 36th Avenue, a 1930s house slated for demolition. Caroline Adderson, who maintains an homage to demolished homes in Kerrisdale through her digital project Vancouver Vanishes, gets you thinking about these things.

The house, completely restored, had been recently lived in.

All the fixtures were intact. The basement had been renovated into a full suite. It was from a time when every room contained a fireplace. Its unlocked doors granted our entrance, another sign of imminent demolition.

Many similar houses are being demolished in Kerrisdale, which makes it a critical place for historical and material preservation.

It teems with development, not heritage. On Vancouver Vanishes, Adderson preserves these houses with photographs and details.

Adderson is an award-winning novelist and short story writer whose discussion of local houses and their histories began with the 2012 essay “Lives of the House”. She has lovingly restored her 1920s Kerrisdale house and knows her neighbourhood history from all angles. She also gets attached to things. In “Lives of the House,” she inventories everything: a plate rail on a dining room wall, ten different wall papers, drain tiles made in Italy, light fixtures, various wood floorings. She is attached to these things not just aesthetically, but for their stories; how and where they were made and used.

Vancouver Vanishes makes another kind of inventory. Several times a week she posts a photograph of a house, complete with the address, year of construction, first owners and their occupations, and its status—always demolished. She shares these photographs on the Vancouver Vanishes Facebook page so that viewers will receive them in the course of their day and, she hopes, expand the discussion. Commenters often share personal stories and information about these houses in what Adderson describes as “lament and celebration.”

When I asked her about the response she has personally received from the online community, she tells me that people seem unaware of the person behind Vancouver Vanishes. “Someone referred to me as V.V. on the Facebook page,” she continues.

“I kind of like that.”

It is not much easier in person to separate the project from the writer. When she looks at these houses, narratives seem to stare right back. To describe each house, Adderson combs archives and directories extensively for connections, but there is something exceptional about her immediate impressions of these houses.

Vancouver Vanishes makes a statement about our priorities in maintaining culture, and the role of our civic leaders in cultural preservation. As the individual entries mark disappearances of neighbourhood landmarks in real-time, the larger project carries within it a sense of urgency.

The house I visited with Adderson at 3175 36th Avenue had only been spared demolition through a turn of bureaucratic irony: a stop work order had been placed on the site because workers had illegally tried to take down a tree. The protected tree standing beside the fateful house epitomizes the issue Vancouver Vanishes publicizes. Adderson is trying to influence our civic leaders to protect privately owned entities just as they protect natural ones.

The house at 3175 West 36th Avenue vanished the following week.

Read Caroline Adderson’s “Lives of the House” at Geist.com

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: Feature

The rise and fall of Vancouver cinema houses by tyler morgenstern photography by rommy ghaly / art direction & styling by gilly russell makeup by vanessa parto / garments by diplomatic immunity, kam&lee

Fuji Pro 400

: Feature

Before movies told stories, they played tricks. Less interested in coherent narrative and meaningful character development than the boundless possibilities of their nascent medium, the earliest filmmakers delighted in an energetic aesthetics of play. By the dawn of the 20th century, their freewheeling experiments in perspective, scale, editing, and photo manipulation conspired to produce what film theorist and historian Tom Gunning has famously christened a “cinema of attractions.”

This was a cinema of smoke, mirrors, and vanishing acts. Crude jump cuts punctuated by awkward pauses and shuddering celluloid would put a man on the moon in the blink of an eye and make monsters disappear within the space of a frame. Visibility and invisibility kept close company on early screens. Awkward combinations of sprocket, gear, lamp, lens, and nervous finger transformed presence and absence into peculiar bedfellows.

And just as the first films straddled the border between here and gone, so too did the earliest movie houses. In the late eighteen- and early nineteen-hundreds, the cinema exhibition landscape was a technological scatterplot with no line of best fit—an incoherent patchwork of formats and devices distributed unevenly across street side viewing parlours, cramped nickelodeons, and travelling road shows. And while these early venues are well documented in the abstract as a broad phenomenon, little information remains that gives them shape as specific venues. Mostly relegated to scant newspaper clippings, they often appear in the record as little more than a trace, vanishing just as soon as they emerge. Historical jump cuts.

Our “Hollywood North” moniker belies the fact that, even today, little is known about just how cinema put down roots in our city. Thanks to the dutiful efforts of a handful of local academics and hobby historians, we are not completely without information. But as vintage movie houses across the city shutter their operations with grim regularity, we are still without a definitive history of just where they came from, how they emerged, what legacies they recall.

And with our overheated real estate market constantly ratcheting up the speed on cycles of (re)development, this fragile record is shaking on the sprockets. If we’re to preserve what little we know, a pause is needed.

Fuji Pro 400

“What is apparent in even this cursory history, punctuated as it is by rapid oscillations between here and gone, is that the threat of disappearance has always haunted this city’s cinema ecology.” a new hope: the york

Originally opened as the Alcazar in 1913, the York (Commercial and Georgia) was the first and only purpose-built theatre on the East Side. The Alcazar hosted live theatre and short film programming until 1915 when it was reopened as a movie theatre: the Palace. After being purchased by the Vancouver Little Theatre association in 1923, it re-emerged once again as the Little Theatre. Following extensive renovations, it was rechristened the York in 1940. In the late Seventies, however, with the cost of upkeep becoming unmanageable, the theatre was sold and converted into a Bollywood-exclusive cinema. By 1981, the space had been slated for demolition by its owners. But thanks to the efforts of the “Save the York” society, the theatre was once again transformed and renamed, this time into a music venue known as the New York. In 1996, though, the New York was replaced by a second Bollywood theatre called the Raja, which operated only a few short years before closing its doors permanently. The theatre then sat unused for more than a decade, though a number of proposals to save and revive it were circulated. Finally, in 2008, Vancouver City Council gave its blessing to ongoing preservation efforts, spurring a partnership between the Vancouver East Cultural Centre (The Cultch) and the Wall Financial Corporation that will see the York properly restored at long last. Pictured above.

the last picture show: the pantages (previous page)

After opening three successful theatres in Seattle between 1904 and 1907, Greek-American businessman Pericles (later Alexander) Pantages turned his sights further north. In 1908, Pantages opened what would become one of the longest-standing of his theatres at 152 East Hastings. The Heritage Vancouver society waxes lyrical about the building’s “wonderful” interior and “superb acoustics.” Over the years, however, the space fell into dramatic disrepair and disuse, pushed to the breaking point, as with so much of the Downtown Eastside, by the city’s explosive rents and overheated property speculation. After years of negotiations between the theatre’s owner and the City failed to yield a coherent refurbishment or preservation plan, the Pantages’ fate was sealed. On April 6, 2011, the City of Vancouver issued a demolition permit for the site. By December 29, 2011 the Pantages had been dismantled. Sequel 138, a condominium development that been fiercely targeted by Downtown Eastside housing activists and bailed out by the city, will take the theatre’s place.

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Most local historians agree that cinema arrived in Vancouver in 1897, two years after brothers Auguste and Louis Lumière first unveiled their Cinématographe in Paris, and four years after the New York debut of Thomas Edison’s competing Kinetoscope.

The exhibition took place at Vancouver’s first city hall, then known as Market Hall, originally attached to the Carnegie building, which still stands at the corner of Main and Hastings.

While specific details of the exhibition are predictably scarce, it’s safe to assume that this was a temporary installation grafted on to a larger program of travelling attractions. Though novel enough to draw a crowd, exhibitions of this sort were still too crude to stand as independent events, particularly given the fierce competition they faced from the booming vaudeville industry. Vancouver was no exception to this rule. By 1895, local vaudeville houses like the Imperial were hosting the likes of Mark Twain. Even the most sophisticated cinema shows of the day would have had trouble holding court against such luminaries.

In the years that followed, a number of exhibition spaces emerged in Vancouver, though none proved any more stable. According to late Vancouver historian Chuck Davis, in 1898 we find evidence of what may have been Canada’s first motion picture theatre, located on Cordova Street (though this claim is up for debate, given that Her Majesty’s Theatre opened the same year in Montreal).

However, beyond the odd newspaper clipping announcing its official opening, little record of the space remains.

Similarly in 1905, a purpose-built exhibition space known as the Edison Electric Theatre appears to have opened its doors near Main and Hastings. Yet once again, following a relocation to Cordova in 1906, it disappears from record.

There were, however, some faint signs of momentum in this period. In 1904, Frank Kerr established an Edison parlour along Columbia Street in New Westminster that operated independently until 1948, when it was finally leased by the American chain Famous Players-Paramount. And in 1907, with the arrival of Oregon-based attractions company Hale’s Tours, Vancouver not only obtained yet another temporary cinema installation in the Cordova-Main cluster, but for the first time, was itself put to film by Seattle filmmaker William Harbeck.

By the end of the first decade of the 20th century, then, Vancouver’s integration into the North American film industry had begun, however hesitantly. All the same, vaudeville continued to command, by some distance, the lion’s share of audience dollars.

But as the century wore on, developments in the North American film industry began to shift this balance. In the interest of shoring up their market position against European competitors, the leading American cinema companies of the day began establishing powerful patent sharing and licensing agreements. In 1910, this de facto cartel, led by Edison and the Biograph Company, formally emerged as the Motion Picture Patents Company (MPPC). By barricading new, more sophisticated production and editing technologies behind restrictive licensing fees, the MPPC worked quickly to consolidate and standardize American production standards. Novelty shorts—the sort that had debuted at the Market Hall exhibition— gradually expanded into more narratively and spatially coherent “features,” some of which ran as long as fifteen minutes.

The MPPC also took to the task of shaking cinema’s bawdy image by developing new industry standards for exhibition venues.

Better lighting, posh interiors, stronger safety regulations, and

Fuji Pro 400

saved: the hollywood

Opened in 1935 in the heart of Kitsilano, the Hollywood stands as modest, but still well loved reminder of the picture palace aesthetic.

Known for its posh Art Deco detailing and iconic neon sign, the Hollywood was, until its recent closure and conversion into a community church, the oldest family-run and owned cinema in Canada. In a city characterized by rapid turnover rates that make true independence a volatile if not impossible proposition, it is something of an anomaly; a testament to the essential function of supportive communities in supporting and ultimately preserving our cultural spaces.

“In 1935, the Hollywood opened its doors in the heart of Kitsilano, treating patrons to an interior filled with high Art Deco flourishes, plush seating, and fine gold and marble detailing.”

higher ticket prices (a bulwark against the mixing of classes) were voluntarily implemented by studios. The move was as political as it was economic, meant to undercut the regulatory ambitions of those state governments and faith-based civil society groups who vocally denounced the cinema as a breeding ground for moral transgression. The studios had control, and they intended to keep it that way.

These higher production and exhibition standards gradually began to translate into bigger profits for the studios. And those increasing revenues, combined with the formal demands of more sophisticated films, many of which rehearsed historical narratives familiar to audiences, catalyzed the development of the first star system. Where most early film actors also maintained careers as vaudeville performers, the MPPC’s efforts at consolidation made it possible for studios to hire stables of regular performers and produce serials that would draw repeat audiences. Once nameless artifacts filled with bit-part actors and orchestrated by anonymous technicians, by 1920, movies were putting names in lights.

Without a robust Canadian production industry to temper American influence, these industrial shifts had a major effect on how Vancouverites went to the movies. Many live performance venues, sensing that cinema was no longer just a passing fad, began converting exclusively to film exhibition. The Rex Theatre, for example, originally located on Hastings Street next to Army & Navy, made the conversion from leading vaudeville house to movie theatre sometime between 1916 and 1918. Similarly, the second Pantages Theatre (demolished in 1967), which had originally opened as a vaudeville venue in 1917, became a full service movie house over the course of its many reconfigurations.

Other venues weren’t so resilient. The Imperial, the Avenue, the Empress, the Columbia, and the National, all located along Hastings Street, failed to keep pace with the rapid expansion of the post-MPPC film industry. In their place emerged a number of purpose-built movie houses. The Colonial, which stood on the corner of Granville and Dunsmuir until being torn down to make way for Pacific Centre mall, began operations in 1915. That same year, the Alcazar Theatre on Commercial Drive (now known as the York) reopened as a cinema under the name the Palace. Posters advertising the Maple Leaf, perhaps the city’s first purpose-built cinema, date back, as well, to at least 1915.

With the introduction of sound-synchronized film a little over a decade later, this already brisk pace increased once again. By 1930, as John Atkin puts it, “Granville [Street] was firmly established as theatre row with the Dominion, Odeon, Paradise, Plaza, and the converted Capital, Lyric, and Orpheum. The Vogue was late to the game in the 1940s.”

And while Vancouver never managed to attract the sort of picture palaces that flourished in New York, London, Paris, and Berlin, smaller but still lavish venues began to appear. In 1935, the Hollywood opened its doors in the heart of Kitsilano, treating patrons to an interior filled with high Art Deco flourishes, plush seating, and fine gold and marble detailing. In the post-war period, the exhibition landscape continued to expand with the emergence of spaces like the Ridge, which since 1950, has been an icon of the Arbutus neighbourhood.

Set against the rash of closures and demolitions that now threaten Vancouver’s remaining heritage theatres, this vibrant network of movie houses is staggering. But what is apparent in even this

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cursory history, punctuated as it is by rapid oscillations between here and gone, is that the threat of disappearance has always haunted this city’s cinema ecology. Throughout the 20th century, the Canadian production industry in general languished in the shadow of Hollywood, putting exhibitors across the country at the mercy of major American studios that exerted powerful control over venues, either through direct ownership or exploitative booking and licensing policies. By exploiting this market imbalance, familiar names like Famous Players and Odeon (later known as Cineplex Odeon, currently Cineplex Galaxy) became dominant in Canada’s major urban centres. Independent exhibition, in this sense, has always been and remains a risky proposition for those north of the forty-ninth So what changed? By what force have these latent threats been translated, half a century later, so quickly and with such sweeping effect into a living reality for Vancouver’s movie houses?

Vancouver’s independents now find themselves in a daunting double bind. On the one hand they must contend, as always, with market pressures. More than ever before, the major American exhibition chains are working to consolidate their market share by investing in capital-intensive and often proprietary exhibition formats like 3D in an effort to boost revenues amidst the collapse of ancillary markets and ticket sales. Most small theatres simply can’t, for lack of space or funds, make these kinds of dramatic upgrades.

On the other, more particular, hand, they must confront the forces of predatory urbanism that have become so much a part of life in this city. Skyrocketing rents, a compliant policy climate, and an exploding global demand for capital sinks in the form of empty condos have opened a second front of attack in the assault on our independent theatres.

Elizabeth Murphy, former property development officer for the City of Vancouver’s Housing & Properties Department, recently described the preservation climate this way: “we have a

thrilling variety of early film formats into the decidedly less diverse studio production system, it does point us (as do Murphy’s comments) in the direction of politics. Recognizing that a resilient exhibition industry would never take root in a policy climate that wanted nothing to do with it, the MPPC took seriously the task of challenging, subverting, and plying that climate in its favour.

Of course, simply swapping the control of inadequate policy instruments for that of strict corporate regulation, as the MPPC did, is hardly desirable (when it comes to the diversity of cultural work and space, most of us can agree that more is more). But all the same, the case of the MPPC and Murphy’s scathing critique make it clear that if there is any hope of supporting an independent cinema culture in Vancouver, it’s going to take work—serious work.

It’s going to take collaborative, imaginative policy-making that deliberately violates the inertia of the market and its scattershot logic of development. But more than anything, it’s going to take a more fully developed commitment to a culture that we might call our own; a commitment that must start with an excavation of those flickering histories that today teeter on the edge of visibility.

“The state of precarity in which Vancouver’s movie houses now exist is balanced on a different, more reactionary spirit: one of acquiescence and inevitability, one of inertia.” chronic state of crisis management where last minute attempts are made under threat of demolition, often after the building has been abandoned and degraded—as it was with the Pantages and York theatres.” Murphy goes even further, likening the rapid-fire parceling up and selling off of land in contemporary Vancouver to a “warzone” where cultural spaces like movie theatres are either caught in the crossfire or tossed aside as refuse, the sort of collateral loss that must be the inverse of any great march toward development.

There is, then, a sad reversal at hand here. Where the chaotic instability and frequent failure of the earliest exhibition venues could at least be attributed to a willingness to experiment, to quite literally think beyond the frame(s) of what was possible, the state of precarity in which Vancouver’s movie houses now exist is balanced on a different, more reactionary spirit: one of acquiescence and inevitability, one of inertia.

The situation seems grim, but what remains of historical records offers us (as it usually does) some important instruction. While the MPPC should never be mistaken for a champion of cinematic experimentation, having almost single-handedly shoehorned the

Kodak Portra 400

modern times: the ridge

Presided over by its iconic neon sign, the Ridge has been an icon of Vancouver’s Arbutus neighbourhood since opening its doors in 1950.

Unique architectural features like it’s families-only “crying room” and distinctly mid-century styling cues—the Heritage Vancouver Society points to its dramatically mirrored lobby, original auditorium flooring and undulating ceiling design—make the Ridge unlike anything else in Vancouver today. In February 2013, both the theatre and adjacent bowling alley were acquired by a property developer who plans to convert the site into condominiums.

: Profile

home Explorations of the intersection of identity and heritage by jeremy jude lee photography by jeremy jude lee

(pictured above, assisted

by Tony Myshylaev) Kodak Portra 160

For most of my youth, I did everything that I could to avoid being different. Since I associated being Chinese with being different, that meant the neglect of my own cultural heritage.

When I began my photography practice, my work was mainly based around the idea of “man” and the idealized representations of male icons in both popular culture and in my own mind. As I created a body of work surrounding my own ideas of manhood, what I came to realize was that all of the men I had photographed and all of the romantic notions I had projected on to these images were white and western.

I realized that my self-image was shaped in the form of a romanticized western ideal, and I was so out of touch with my own cultural identity that it made me uncomfortable to think of it. I had spent my whole life in “self-orientalism,” identifying my own ethnicity as “other” and separating myself from the culture of my ancestors.

Since that realization, my practice has been based in analyzing and revisiting self-orientalism and its cultural implications through photographs.

In my most recent project, I have photographed young ChineseCanadian adults in front of the homes that they grew up in, or that significantly influenced the formation of their identity. All of my subjects were born and raised in Vancouver, and are people that I feel a connection to based on my relationships and my conversations with them. My intention is to grasp the idea of “home” in relation to identity, including the idea of home as both a house and a country.

I want to question the relationship between place and personhood, past and present.

More importantly, I want to create a justification for the way I am. Rather than resenting my loss of cultural accessibility, I hoped to gain an understanding of it. The project has become a sort of self-portrait: by photographing subjects that I feel are reflections of myself, the series serves as a basis by which I understand my own identity.

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: Profile

julian

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