Cheese: Issue No. 23

Stories.

BRIE STILL MY HEART

Design.

What drag performers hate

issue no. 23: cheese

Photographer Sara Cwynar

Art.

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WHINE & CHEESE

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letter from the editor Aside from the actual food, my favourite kind of cheese comes in the form of teen dramas. I admit, with zero irony, that Beverly Hills, 90210 is my favourite show.

It provides the one thing I want most out of television: an escape.

That’s what this magazine is about, too: transporting readers somewhere else. In this cheese-themed issue, we have stories from Greece, Georgia, the Okanagan, Whistler, and France; but we also have more existential trips, such as the one that dissects the allure of Guy Fieri, or another that explains why vegan cheese is now called Gary (seriously). Carolyn Nakagawa discusses identity as portrayed on Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt; Pascale LaViolette paints a cheese still life, and Christine McAvoy documents drag queens and the things they hate. There are Hawkins Cheezies and porn posters, and even a custom cheese font. No matter how you slice it, within these pages, you’ll find your great escape. — sara harowitz, Editor in Chief

contents

08 dispatches 21 block cheesy adventures around the world oil on canvas — Whitney Millar, Rebecca Slaven & Paloma Pacheco

10 12 14

manifestation of kitsch

—Pascale Laviolette

odyssey 22 the a man’s cheese filled journey —Nathaniel G. Moore

photographer Sara Cwynar —April Thompson

here 36 everything is sold by weight life as a cheese angel —Clara Cristofaro

cheese 38 ideal love crumbles in Amsterdam

how to wheel

pizza: a love affair

& dealing 26 wheeling a Canadian cheese rolling festival

the poetry of provolone —Kim Budziak

breakup 15 the saying goodbye to a favourite food

—Alice Clair

—Madeline Barber

27

—Ashleigh Hawrysh Haier

poetry —Joelle Barron

the martyrdom of Guy Fieri —Graeme Zirk

are other 54 there ways to live a list of cheese substitutes —Rachel Burns

56 tyropitas the story of a saint, a lost eye, and two cheese pies —James Gifford

puddles 41 not poetry

58 untitled ink and watercolour on paper

than cheese 42 more a bi-coastal love affair

fromage 59 monsieur cheese painter Mike Geno

—Selina Boan

take me to flavourtown

—Andrea Warner

—Mica Lemiski

something 24 cheese–or like it–please good good 40 our exploring vegan cheese everything

selections from a self-help manuscript —Chelsea Campbell

big cheese 52 the making peace with Celine Dion

—Adèle Barclay

—Marcus A.M. Hastings

—Alice Fleerackers

gets feta 16 itmy four years with cheese

breezy, 28 cheesy, beautiful

gary 44 meet vegan cheese gets a new name

60 unbreakable my problem with Kimmy Schmidt

in da funk 18 bring a hater’s guide to stinky cheese

partner 30 perfect a consideration of cheese pairing

to dust 45 dust gouache on paper

62 untitled photography

of edam 20 garden india ink on paper

desire 32 heavenly the cheesiest porn posters

— Ashley Linkletter

—Alison Sinkewicz

—Jenny Ritter

—Katie Stewart & Robyn Humphreys

—Jessica Johns

—Robin Bougie

—Kim Budziak

—Pamela Rounis

—Carolyn Nakagawa

—Brendan Meadows

& cheese 46 whine photography —Christine McAvoy

on the cover

on the back cover Photography by Lauren D. Zbarsky Photography Assistant Emma Phillips Art Direction by Pamela Rounis SAD Slices typeface by Kenneth Ormandy

Dark Moon by Mike Geno oil on wood Interview by Alice Fleerackers P.59

Kodak Ektar 100

sadmag.ca | hello@sadmag.ca | Instagram @sadmagazine facebook.com/sadmag | twitter.com/sadmag #SADCHEESE

SAD Mag is published two times per year by the SAD Magazine Publishing Society 1-3112 Windsor St. Vancouver, BC V5T 4B1 Distribution coordinated by Disticor

ISSN 1923-3566 Contents © 2017 SAD Mag All rights reserved.

featured contributors

K E N N ETH OR MAN DY

MINJOO KIM

KIM BUDZIAK

C A R O LY N N A K A G A W A

Kenneth Ormandy is an independent designer and developer. He studied at Emily Carr University and Type@Paris, and organizes Type Brigade, Vancouver’s typography meetup. Kenneth designs type for SAD based on each issue’s theme.

See what Kenneth is working on at kennethormandy.com.

Minjoo is an illustrator based in Seoul and Vancouver. In her illustrations, she tries to capture the moments and feelings that usually pass by unnoticed. She believes that the most mundane moments can be the happiest. She wants to create illustrations that enable viewers to revisit and cherish their own stories.

Kim wants to give you a hug.

It’s because she recently read an article stating that eight hugs a day increases your overall happiness (selfish, really).

When she isn’t pressing herself against unsuspecting friends and colleagues, she writes. Find her work at kimbudziak.com and her poor photo filtering on Instagram @kimbudziak.

Carolyn Nakagawa is a Vancouverbased poet and playwright. Her work examines the emergence of ambiguous and intersectional identities through lived experiences in local and phenomenological contexts. She really likes Rilke, Ibsen, Roy Kiyooka, Hannah Moscovitch, and TV shows in which people are nice to their friends.

editorial staff

contributors to sadmag.ca

board of directors

Katie Stewart Co-Publisher & Programming Director Michelle Reid Cyca Co-Publisher & Development Director Pamela Rounis Co-Publisher & Creative Director

Hannah Bellamy Katherine Chan Becca Clarkson Meredyth Cole

Paula Duhatschek Maya Hey Nana Heed

Sara Harowitz Editor in Chief

Sagal Kahin

Robyn Humphreys Art Coordinator

Cole Nowicki

Kyla Jamieson Editor of Poetry & Prose

Krystal Paraboo

Kenneth Ormandy Typographer

Ljudmila Petrovic

Katrina Vera Wong Proofreader

Sarah Thompson

Brittany Tiplady Fact-Checker

Helen Wong

Megan Jenkins Web Editor

events

Charmaine Li Paloma Pacheco Emma Phillips Keagan Perlette Liam Siemens Shannon Tien

Jackie Hoffart Booker & Host of SAD Comedy

Alice Clair Digital Art Curator

Todd LeBlanc Audio/Visual Coordinator

Only

Film

Sarah Bakke Web Editor

Maryam Bagheri Anthony Casey Taryn Hardes Zeenat Lokhandwala Jarren MacDougall Amanda McCuaig Kristin Ramsey Emily Ross Pamela Sheppard Gillian Wong

thanks to

Kristin Cheung Sean Cranbury HiVE Vancouver Society Jackie Hoffart Kudoz Megan Lau Tartine Tarts Lauren D. Zbarsky

cheese index Kinds of cheese in this issue:

84% dairy 14% vegan 1% celine dion 1% guy fieri

special thanks to

It’s all film, baby! True story. All of the photographs you see in this issue (and every issue) were shot on film or Polaroid. We believe that the world is rough around the edges, and there is beauty in that imperfection. We hope you do too.

SAD Mag is an independent Vancouver publication featuring stories, art, and design. Founded in 2009, we publish the best of contemporary and emerging artists with a focus on inclusivity of voices and views, exceptional design, and film photography.

Dispatches

DISPATCHES illustrations by ellie yeonhee seo

L I F E , L AU G H T E R , A N D L O V E I N K E L O W N A convention of Stormtroopers and Holly Golightlys; sepia-toned Eiffel Towers and glossy Starry Night prints; beer pong rules and Gandhi quotes. We strained to relate to something in the maze of mass production.

Within the first few hours of moving into her Kelowna university dorm room, my new neighbour had hung two multi-windowed photo frames on the wall (images of girls with their hands on their jewel-toned, cupcake-skirted hips; others with their blue gowns and caps with tassels flopping every which way). She also put up trickling cursive blocks—stuck with extra-adhesive, no-damage, doublesided tape—spelling out the words live. laugh. love.

These days, while others find comfort in superimposed quotes on sunsets and positive phrases painted on Pilates studio walls, I instead find myself rolling my eyes. To me, clichés feel like a filter—like thin slices of melted cheese masking bread that tastes like cardboard. Rather than turning to these formulaic quotes, I find comfort, perhaps misguidedly, in sentences layered in irony or humour; the truth is still addressed, albeit in the most roundabout and paradoxically disingenuous way.

Our newly-made friends (boys, engineering majors) immediately pointed out and guffawed at the words, but I didn’t think anything of them. I was fresh out of high school: still warm from the residual sparks of hope from administrators’ year-end speeches encouraging us to chase dreams while pursuing higher education, and from summer nights spent walking the Crescent Beach shores after all the street lights had already gone out.

Down the hall from living, laughing, and loving, my own dorm walls were bare.

But I, too, had a frame filled with high school moments: a going-away gift compiled by a friend back home. It was perched atop my dresser, a decoration-tobe if I ever got around to hanging it—which I didn’t. Instead, seven months later, I returned to the Lower Mainland for good.—whitney millar

Was it just the first-year university pixie dust that demanded kitsch? In attempts to make the bland hand-me-down dorm rooms homier, students covered their walls with goods from the country’s campus-touring poster fair. It was an unlikely

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A B O N D H E L D BY C H E E S E I N G E O R G I A Georgian khachapuri is one-size-fits-all, and that size feeds three big eaters.

Despite my stretchiest active wear, I could never finish all that salty, squeaky sulguni cheese, baked in a boat made of dough. I hate to waste, but my panniers had no temperature control and any leftovers amassed into a soggy lump of oil.

It was bad enough that six of my eight daily litres of water were 20 degrees away from boiling by the time I took a drink.

And then I met Oleg. The beautiful, sombre young Russian was my khachapuri answer.

What luck, to find another cyclist travelling from east to west. What further luck that his favourite of the four regional khachapuris was also adjaruli. Two minutes before this khachapuri is ready, an egg or two are cracked on top of the cheese.

Immediately after serving, the diners stir the cheese to cook the egg within.

Oleg and I fucked, fought, and ate our way through Georgia. Our differences highlighted our origins and we agreed on nothing, except our mutual attraction and the combination of egg, cheese, and bread. Stubborn to the end in his national devotion, when I informed him of the statistic that over 80 per cent of women cannot cum from penetration alone, he looked me dead in the eye and said, “Not Russian women.”

Sulguni was the glue that held us together. As soon as we crossed the border into Turkey, our tenuous relationship fell apart.

Now when I make khachapuri for friends, it’s never as good as the original, especially since I have to combine feta and mozzarella to get anything close to sulguni. The magic of khachapuri cannot be recreated or planned. It’s a dish best served hot, in a faraway land, with someone you actively dislike.

—rebecca slaven

C H E E S E - M A K I N G I N AV E Y R O N , F R A N C E Lola makes it clear very quickly that she doesn’t like me. I can’t say that I am feeling too chummy myself, but given that I am crouched with my face mere inches from her back leg, my hands clasped around her udder as I try my very best to coax her into compliance, I figure I could spare some generosity. So I whisper, “Shh, ça va, Lola? Lo-laaa, shhhh, Lo-laaa.” She is unimpressed.

I have landed on the set of my rural French fantasy.

Mondays are for weeding potatoes, and Tuesdays are for milking goats and making cheese. I have landed on the set of my rural French fantasy: a countryside full of low vineyards and still, stone-paved hamlets. Éléonore and her husband Arnaud run their own farm, and have accepted me as one of three wwoofers (agriculture volunteers) who will spend the summer with them learning their trades. From sowing onions and hacking nutshells to baking bread and vending at markets, I spend my days first trailing my hosts through their daily routines and then, eventually, breaking off on my own, more confident with the skills I have gained.

Lola and her three other companions are not my favourite part of the week, but the harvest that our awkward dance reaps certainly is. Éléonore knows her cheese. After several days of sitting and “breathing” in Éléonore’s special cheese corner, our baby belles are ready to be consumed. Following a simple and delicious dinner prepared for us by the other two wwoofers (an Italian couple— they serve pasta, of course), Éléonore brings out a tray of homemade bread and an assortment of the fruits of our labour. Dusted with rosemary, lavender, and thyme, each cheese is beautiful and unique, and as the first bites grace my tongue, I send a small, secret thank-you out to the stable: Lola, you did good.

—paloma pacheco

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Interview

THE MANIFESTATION OF KITSCH Photographer Sara Cwynar

words by april thompson photography by sara cwynar Sara Cwynar is a contemporary photographer known for her ability to create captivating images with a depth of theoretical concepts behind them. En route to her Brooklyn studio, she spoke over the phone about kitsch imagery, being a Canadian in Trump’s America, and the power of photography.

april thompson: The very first image in your book project, Kitsch Encyclopedia,

am so proud to be Canadian, especially in the era of Trump. It’s also been interesting to live here in New York and see how a country can be reduced to a few pop culture images of it. Everyone in America thinks Canadians are really nice, kind of boring, that it’s really cold and there are lots of trees—which is sort of accurate, but also not really true.

is a neon sign, in the shape of a cross, affixed to a brick building. This reminded me of Ken Lum’s famous East Van sign in Vancouver. When you reflect on your brief time living here, do you remember any particular kitsch aspects of the city?

“Living in Vancouver can be a real manifestation of kitsch, in a way, because you are living in this idyllic natural landscape, but after a while you can’t even see it anymore.”

sara cwynar: I didn’t really grow up in Vancouver; I was born there but

moved away when I was five. I later returned to go to UBC when I was 18 or so. My memory of Vancouver is really nostalgic, and maybe my whole idea of Vancouver is kitsch because it’s totally fogged over with a few specific childhood images like mountains. I do remember the White Spot restaurant really clearly.

Living in Vancouver can be a real manifestation of kitsch, in a way, because you are living in this idyllic natural landscape, but after a while you can’t even see it anymore.

at: There is something very kitschy about nationalistic imagery with the passing of time.

at: Some of the sources that you pull from in Kitsch Encyclopedia are taken from

sc: Yeah, I was looking through some old encyclopedias just today, looking for

sc: I don’t think kitsch is gendered in that way. The traditional way we think of

As a Canadian living in New York, do you feel nostalgia toward contemporary imagery of Canada, or is it something you try to detach yourself from?

older images. I saw all these pictures for the entry on Canada in this encyclopedia from the 1960s. It was every single stereotype of Canada you can imagine: a red canoe on a lake, surrounded by pine trees, people looking over to mountains. I

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Elle magazine, while others draw from very specific 1950s images of domesticity.

Is kitsch gendered?

kitsch is as detritus of pop culture or bad sentimental products. In Kitsch Encyclopedia I was really working with an expanded idea of kitsch. I’m trying to think of it more in the way that the writer Milan Kundera intended it: as something

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more political, connected to the way that people are convinced to participate in political causes and ignore human suffering by buying into images that don’t necessarily benefit them—like military images, religious images, political images.

That, in a way, would traditionally be gendered as male, I suppose, because it has always been men who have perpetuated these systems of violence. In his book [The Unbearable Lightness of Being], which is kind of a cheesy novel, I just love his idea of kitsch. He was writing this book in Prague during the revolution in the 1960s, which was a time of great violence.

at: When you are finding these materials for your work, would you say you have a hoarding quality?

sc: It’s interesting that you follow up with that question, because I think the

word “hoarding” is really gendered. There are plenty of male hoarders, but it’s kind of associated with a crazy lady who has a lot of cats and a pile of books and surrounds herself with stuff. I try to avoid that word in a way, but also, it’s not entirely inaccurate, because I am just constantly accumulating things. I have a hard time letting anything go. I have a whole room of my apartment devoted to my collected materials.

at: Maybe a different word to counteract the gendering of “hoarding” could be “gathering.” Can you turn off that impulse to gather materials? sc: I like that word, “gathering.” I will go on binges and collect tons of stuff

when I am trying to start work on a new project. That can be images, objects, but it also applies to reading and collecting ideas. I read a lot of theory before I make anything. My work can look decorative and perhaps not connected to intense reading, but actually I read so much before I make anything. That is more of a process, so I can turn it off. I’m finishing a show right now, and yesterday I decided that I needed 50 pictures of women demonstrating technology. I’m making a video about the rose gold iPhone and an accompanying photograph of all these mid-century photos where new modernist computer and telecommunications technology was being imaged and shown to the public, always through beautiful women demonstrating it. I spent the whole day at the library yesterday. The video will be about the rose gold iPhone as a cultural object that is meant to be so new and seductive, but then can be replaced by a newer model really quickly. I’m comparing this to other objects that have shared a similar fate historically, and thinking about the emotional impacts of colours to seduce you.

at: That may have pre-emptively answered my next question, which is: What do you think will be seen as “kitsch” from our current moment when looking back in the future?

Maybe it’s the iPhone?

sc: For sure, I think the iPhone is such an example of something that is an

amazing technology but hasn’t really changed much since the first iteration. It’s pure marketing: how do they sell us the things we already have, but make them seem new? I think rose gold is a really genius way of trying to do that. It’s going to seem ridiculous in like 10 years.

at: Do you think photography is a particularly apt medium for archiving kitsch? You’ve explored this before in other works like Flat Death.

sc: Yeah, I think that a lot of how kitsch manifests itself is through photography.

Sara Cwynar, Kitsch Enclyclopedia, Published by Blonde Art Books, 2014, Edition of 100. Images courtesy of the artist.

Photography has such power to convince and to idealize.

at: Are you a stickler for analogue photography or do you also embrace digital? sc: I use a digital Hasselblad, but I also use an eight-by-10 camera and Kodak

film. That’s a combination of one of the newest cutting-edge cameras with the oldest. I am by no means fetishistic about old technology. I am often trying to find the best combination of old and new photography to get across the content of my work, which often has a lot to do with the way that things warp or fade over time. I’m also really interested in mistakes, so film makes more mistakes, while the digital can make everything look so perfect. That’s not as interesting to look at, I don’t think.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

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Humour

HOW TO WHEEL Selections from a self-help manuscript for the romantically dead-inside

words by chelsea campbell lettering by alanna munro Let me start by saving you some time. I don’t want you to read half this article and think, “Hey, wait!

I’m not the intended audience here, too bad there wasn’t a strict screening process at the beginning of this piece to alert me to this fact.”

because that’s what would happen anyway. I slept fitfully from then on, terrified of my mother’s pragmatic love.

pick-up lines

Hi my name’s [your name] but you can call me *pause* *never stop pausing* *eye contact*

brad from tinder: ha-ha wut :’D do you like

Hi handsome are you toilet paper cuz you charmin’ / ultra strong. Also I wouldn’t mind sharing you with my friends when they come over. Also you’re white.

and do you like to ban people and crush dreams?

him: I don’t like to put labels on things.

If you answered “No,” congratulations, this one’s for you. If you answered, “Yes,” look in your mailbox right now. I left something there for you.

you: Oh. Um, okay.

Is your name Luke Warm? Because you are both hot and cool. Also you’re ruining my bath. Also how did you get into my house.

Since I have been denied the traditional path to publishing via manuscript trafficking, I have been forced to pursue alternative routes. I am convinced that if the public could see the contents of my work without the nosy influence of the satanic gatekeepers they call “editors,” my book would be as popular as that one about your socks having feelings.

you: OH, you mean you don’t want to help me

butt stuff

There’s only one screening question. Ready? Okay:

a. Is your name Laura and do you work at Chapters

My book is called Yo Where the Boys At: How to Entertain Yourself When You’ve Accidentally Locked Yourself in the Women’s Washroom. This is a fake title on the dust jacket so that people on the bus won’t know you are reading a book called How to Wheel Instead of Third Wheel. See? I get you ;) The following are excerpts from my dating self-help book, coming to shelves near you, if you live near me:

relatable occurrences

I remember when I saw Indiana Jones and he hid in the fridge to save himself from dying when the scientists tested their atomic bomb, and my mom said if she saw the flash she would load us into the car and drive towards it so we could die quicker,

you: *Realize you are holding a label maker* label the gift-wrap drawers! Haha.

him: No I meant I don’t want you to tell people I’m your boyfriend.

you: You could have chosen a less ambiguous time

drop-off lines

Boy you are so hip I’m gonna hafta replace you at some point.

you: (on the phone) Ma—shhhh-i-crackle-ona— shhhh clo—

to tell me that.

them: I can’t hear you, it’s breaking up.

him: You could have chosen a less ambiguous

you: No it’s not, but we are.

relationship.

Kids are like potato chips you can never have just one, ha-ha.*

advice

*

You have to be careful with online dating these days. I went out with a guy who wrote, “I hate crime,” in his profile. Turns out, he was a racist with bad grammar.

As the great and wise Tumblr once said: “Sometimes you have to unfollow people in real life.” It’s a great thing to whisper to yourself as you attempt to abide by the terms of your restraining order.

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Warning: may not work if you are Catholic

There are 10 copies of How to Wheel Instead of Third Wheel in Laura’s mailbox, but if that’s not convenient, I also have another hundred copies on floppy disk since everyone’s so into “retro” these days. Thank you, and I look forward to your money.

Essay

PIZZA: A LOVE AFFAIR The poetry of provolone

words by kim budziak illustration by bryce aspinall Just around the corner from my some-480-square-foot apartment at Main Street and East 16th Avenue, someone is making a pizza. Delicious, thin crust, perfect cheese-to-sauce-ratio pizza. I know this because Don’t Argue Pizzeria resides at 3240 Main Street (half a block away from my abode), serving up oozy cheesy goodness seven days a week. My favourite is the Spicy Margherita, but I get it with mushrooms instead of olives (because ick, olives). It’s a fiveminute door-to-door-and-home-again trek, wherein my peripheral vision seems to fade out completely; all I can see is pie, my gorgeous pie. By the time I’m back on my sofa it has cooled to the perfect temperature—deliciously warm and melty, when I can bite away without fear of burning my mouth.

There was a time, not so long ago, when I was probably purchasing one a week, drawn back to that marble counter time and time again, retrieving my box of golden goodness, and retreating to my home to bask in its circular glow.

I suppose the love affair began in early 2013, shortly after my six-year relationship came to a close. I was visiting loved ones in Calgary when a friend suggested we eat at Una Pizza + Wine for my farewell dinner. “They can do a vegan one for you,” she said. It’s true. I had eaten this tasty pie that was loaded with chickpeas, rocket, roasted vegetables, and drizzled with chili oil before. It was delicious.

“Cool, I’m in,” I said. There, as the discs of herby, spicy melange floated towards us on the arms of casual wait staff, I saw it: the 4-maggi. Provolone picante, friulano, fior di latte mozzarella, and pecorino Romano cheese perfectly blended and finished with truffle oil and local urban honey. My friends watched in awe as I reached for a slice. It was my first bite of cheese in three years.

But something in me snapped that day at the pizzeria. I was tired of adhering to such a strict code of self-imposed conduct. I was sick of talking about what I ate all the time (with vegans and omnivores alike). I was impatient waiting for my nut cheese to culture over a week and a half. And I wanted to eat the best damn part of the pizza: the cheese.

So there I went, mouth-first into that sweet slice of ‘za. It was everything I wanted it to be and more. And to my surprise, my friends didn’t give me too much shit about it. Maybe they were just happy I was back on their side. In fact, it opened a whole new realm of closeness between us: we bonded at Pizza Farina, The Parlour, Bella Gelateria, Campagnolo Roma, Nook, and Pizzeria Barbarella. Those are some good memories.

Given my fondness for those cheesy-old days, it might seem strange to learn that despite this whirlwind romance between pizza and me (those Italians get me every time), I’m back to eating vegan again. Or, veganish. Thank Virtuous Pie’s amazing Stranger Wings pizza: Bianca, buffalo cauliflower, fried shallots, scallions, and a vegan blue cheese drizzle. I tend to have regular get-togethers there with a friend suffering from the same pie addiction (Hi, Sheila!), and the bonding sessions are just as good. It’s the best vegan pizza I’ve ever had. But is it as good as a real cheese pie? Not quite. Call it unrequited love.

It was a big deal, because I had been “that” vegan. You know, the one who cut every scrap of leather, silk, and wool out of her closet; the one

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whose pantry had an entire shelf lined with plant-based tomes, including The Kind Diet, Veganomicon, and Raw Food/Real World; the one who was quick to tell you how she wouldn’t eat cheese because “it’s torture for those poor cows.”

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Essay

THE BREAK UP Saying goodbye to a favourite food

words by ashleigh hawrysh haier illustration by jenny ritter It became harder and harder to leave. I finally admitted to myself that we could no longer spend as much time together, but you were most places I was; our lives were intertwined. How could you be everywhere? All the parties, restaurants, and bars? Even moving provinces proved to be unsuccessful.

We kept in contact and it became more dangerous, destroying my willpower at every turn.

Leaving you was one of the hardest things I have ever had to do. My darling, I know that being the object of my affection comes with its challenges—but did we not have fun while we were young?

You were most places I was; our lives were intertwined.How could you be everywhere? All the parties, restaurants, and bars?

I have now successfully lived without you for a year. One year, out of nearly a quarter of a century. With ending this harmful relationship came an inner power. Something I never would have felt or possessed if I had not cut you off at the root. Yet, there are still moments when I am angry. Why can I not have you, while she can? What if I had behaved differently? I do believe my only fault was caring for you, all the while thinking you could do no wrong.

Moderation is something I am still learning, but parting from you was the first step to fulfilling my life. Though I still miss our times spent on the sofa after school with crackers and pickles and our late-night drunken encounters with pizza, my world was not over nor was it shattered when I left you. All of this has forced me to amend myself, to pull myself together. I have come to the conclusion that I can be spontaneous, be versatile, and give depth to my relationships—without you.

We grew up together, and you helped mold me into the person I am today. But I do not believe I had the same effect on you. There were days when you were forgiving: soft, creamy, and nutty. Other days, you could be sharp and hard—not as reassuring, but all mine nonetheless. The perfect companion.

As the years passed, our relationship took more and more out of me. The fatigue, illness, and mental games were taking their toll. Have you forgotten about all those days I spent unable to leave my house? Or those moments when I spoke of our toxicity? If you do not, then I suppose this proves that our affair was much more one-sided than we would like to admit.

The dissolution of our personal union was long coming. And although I have moved on from you, there will always be a void. We may not have said our farewells correctly, but not everything in life needs closure. You will find admiration and gratification with someone else—likely many others. So goodbye, dear. I knew you well.

That is no way to live.

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Essay

IT GETS FETA My four years with cheese

words by ashley linkletter illustration by nomi chi I never anticipated my life’s path would be shaped by cheese. I never thought answering a Craigslist ad for a job at a cheese shop would allow me to rediscover myself. But here we are. This is my cheesy tale to tell.

I tasted cinnamon and dried marjoram. No one else had been able to taste these notes, and I instantly assumed that I was the one who had made a mistake.

Quiet vindication came later that night when I was reading about Queso Maxorata: a cheese made from the milk of goats that feed on wild marjoram.

year one : the unsure bocconcini

I began to share other observances with my peers, until I eventually reached the point when I felt assured enough to share them with select customers. I suddenly had a skill with potential—a skill that made me feel solidly confident with the recommendations I gave, the choices I made on behalf of a shopper.

I moved to Vancouver six years ago with my husband after we finished university. I had made the terrifying decision to leave my hometown of London, ON, having never before lived away from my family—the glue I was convinced held me together. I can’t blame the weather for my depression; I fell in love with the grey Vancouver days. I walked along English Bay every afternoon feeling restless and empty and cold. It was in that state of aching and profound loneliness that I began working as a full-time cheesemonger.

We wore uniforms: white lab coats that identified us as the people who could transform your dinner party cheese course into a wild success, who could tell you off the tops of our heads what to pair with a bottle of peaty whisky or special occasion wine.

At least, my co-workers could. I spent three months learning about cheese before I was allowed to begin serving customers. Most importantly, beyond learning, I became comfortable with asking questions. With not knowing the answer. With slowly coming unstuck from my life in Ontario. year two : the maturing parmesan

My second year of being a cheesemonger was my time of awakening. I would come home from work buoyant, bursting with ideas gleaned from that day’s conversations with coworkers and customers.

It was during this time that I began to actually think about food blogging seriously. I had been tentatively writing about food for the past year, dipping my toes into the water only to yank them back out in fear. I discovered that I had a good palate. Flavours that were elusive to some found their way to me easily.

I let this slip one day while we all gathered around at work to try a new wheel of Queso Maxorata, a firm cheese from the Canary Islands made with raw goat’s milk. An entirely ordinary-looking cheese, I had expected it to taste like other goat’s milk cheeses: tangy and undeniably goaty. Instead,

year three : the confident gruyere

All my experience transformed and began to move forward with accelerated speed. I had more responsibilities at the shop, more chances to work with restaurants when they were developing their cheese dishes, and fewer moments when I felt completely out of my element talking to customers.

My interest in cheese pairings became a weekend obsession. I discovered that milky coffee brings out rich chocolate notes in Beaufort d’Alpage.

I tentatively experimented with the unlikely pairing of gin and cheese. As it turns out, Fleur du Maquis, a semi-soft raw sheep’s milk cheese from Corsica that’s aged in rosemary and juniper berries, is the perfect match for an ice-cold gin and tonic.

Kaltbach Alpine Extra, a firm raw cow’s milk cheese from Switzerland, tastes as though it were destined to be shaved thinly onto roast beef sandwiches with mayonnaise and arugula.

Cheese is something pleasurable, something that could even be described as fun, and I began to notice how fearful people were of screwing it all up. I’ve since come to the conclusion that if it tastes good to you, then the pairing is a success. There are endless rules—arbitrary rules—that are ascribed to cheese by imperious food writers who would like to make you think there is something wrong with the fact that you enjoy a spicy shiraz with burrata. If it’s true, though, that this combination tastes wonderful to you, there’s no sense in denying yourself something that brings you the simplest of joys. It became my goal to make people comfortable with their own taste, to give customers the room they needed to unabashedly enjoy the pairings they desire.

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year four : the free roquefort

I experienced a tipping point in the form of being ignored by the shop’s exclusive oenophile customers—the kind who claim they have a bottle of 2004 La Grande Dame sitting in the trunk of their car, as if telling their friends they were dating a European supermodel. I’d listen to them talk to my male coworkers with visions of foie gras mousse, aged Mimolette the colour of orange poppies, a wedge of unctuous triple cream brie, and a dollop of Champagne rose petal jelly. I had great ideas, but they would never know.

Not being included in these customer relationships made me feel bitter, like I had a vast cavern of information tucked away that I wasn’t allowed to use. As though I had embarked on a backwards journey in time to visit my former self, the self that hadn’t realized her real potential yet. Bitterness is the most unyielding cement, the stickiest glue in which you can trap yourself. The only real antidote is bravery: forcing yourself to blindly leap off a cliff without any real assurance of landing somewhere remotely safe.

I spent several unhappy months thinking about being brave; I would replay my ideal quitting scenario over and over again in my mind until it became a situation of do or die, write or be written off. And then one bright November morning, after a sweat-soaked and anxiety-ridden bus ride to work, I closed my eyes and leapt off the cliff. My voice sounded like ground-up pebbles being dropped down a metal chute; the fear was a combination of standing up for myself and finally understanding I had real knowledge and real power.

I could stand on my own, on the other side of the counter, and I could be an authority on the subject of cheese. I could write for magazines, and I could contribute to books, and I could be sought after for my recommendations. Saying goodbye was difficult in the same way that leaving my family in Ontario was difficult—I loved so many aspects of my time as a cheesemonger and I felt as though I was abandoning my friendships with my coworkers.

But in the end it came down to the simple fact that I needed to be free, to experience and embrace a life and career of my very own. Cheese was there for me then, and though in a different way, it’s still here for me now.

Field Guide

BRING IN DA

FUNK A HATER’S GUIDE TO

CHEESE Words by Alison Sinkewicz Illustration by John Larigakis Go back to your first taste of beer: fizzy, sour, musky, and only drinkable shotgun-style. Over the course of time, though, adult taste buds change, and even through the chug-induced vomiting and hangovers, that initially repulsive funkiness becomes covetable in a tall, frosty glass. It is much the same with stinky cheeses (most commonly soft and well aged), which are an important part of the cheese circle of life. Avoiding stinky cheese is akin to drinking Smirnoff Ice in your twenties—it is a trait that lacks sophistication.

Here, then, are four selections from Vancouver’s Les Amis du Fromage to help conquer your stinky fears and make a full cheese conversion. All you have to do is believe.

14 Arpents Hailing from Fromagerie Médard Saguenay-Lac Saint-Jean in Quebec, 14 Arpents is refined, classy, and just a little bad—the Jane Birkin of cheeses. Slowly unwrapped, the aroma develops as nutty, its stink resembling freshly laid manure under a bed of roses. Creamy and buttery, it’s excellent eaten just on its own, licked off cheese knives and fingers. Consume this cheese on a picnic in the woods, naked, reading Baudelaire aloud—bring a lover.

Stink Rating: 2/5

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Victor & Berthold Another cheese hailing from our Quebecois friends is Victor & Berthold from Fromagerie Du Champ à la Meule. This unpasteurized semi-soft cheese’s smell is funky and fruity, with distinctive notes that resemble straw and barnyard; it’s a little bit country and a little bit rock n’ roll. Embrace the contrast: enjoy with a tall boy of an adored beer and your favourite Kid Rock album.

Stink Rating: 3/5

Limburger Limburger is perhaps the most famous of the stinky cheeses. But don’t mistake this fame to mean that it is a reliable beginner—this guy is no poser. Under that quaint, folky German wrapping is a powerful stank. The aroma of Limburger is predominately feet, and that’s not throwing shade—the bacteria used in the cheese (Brevibacterium epidermidis) is the same kind that appears in between your toes. This mushroomy-funky cheese is best eaten in between two pieces of thick bread to squelch the wet smell and let its grassy, tangy flavours come through. Think of the bread as two well-worn gym socks.

Stink Rating: 4/5

Époisses de Bourgogne Hold on to your noses, ladies and gentlemen: this is the big stink. Époisses de Bourgogne has been made in the Burgundy region in France since the 1600s, garnering a rather nasty reputation over those some 400 years. Its aroma is so powerful that the cheese has even been banned on public transportation throughout France.

Stink Rating: 5/5

The soft cheese seeps out from its hard orange rind. It’s a hostile ooze, conjuring up terrifying childhood memories of The Blob: eat or be eaten. One bite, however, reveals this is no monster—this is Harry from the Oscar-winning 1980s Bigfoot classic Harry and the Hendersons. The flavour is sharp and pungent, yes, but also complex, developing a range of tastes from apple to hazelnut, bite after bite. Sure, it may be a little oafish, loud, and rude, but take it home and introduce it to your family. Soon, they will all be believers in the folklore of the delicious and the stinky.

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India ink on paper

Garden of Edam ——Jenny Ritter

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Block——Pascale Laviolette

Oil Field on canvas Trip

Essay

THE ODYSSEY A man’s cheese-filled journey from bachelorhood to fatherhood

words by nathaniel g. moore illustration by maria centola puts it in his salads, and I’m not talking about a Caesar: he cuts up cubes…sorry, it’s too much, I’m feeling a bit sick thinking about a large, glistening salad my brother once tried to make me with small squares of cheese hiding within the sad dressing-soaked lettuce leaves. But that’s his cheddar cross to bear. We all have our cheesy demons.

I have far too many memories of sneaking cheese from my family’s refrigerator as a teenager. I was a scrawny kid who played outside a lot (road hockey, bike rides, tobogganing, and other typical pre-internet kid activities popular in the 1980s).

My mother fed us well, though we didn’t always enjoy her cooking—I can still recall my younger brother nearly in tears trying to get through a main course he

Over the last decade, I’ve noticed that my relationship with cheese has changed dramatically. I’m eating less of it, but for different reasons. I still love it when I do indulge, but I’ve noticed major changes in my overall consumption since starting a family. Whether or not I eat cheese at the same rate as I did in previous incarnations of myself is now an economic decision, because the less cheese I eat, the more my wife and daughter can enjoy.

george: “I was free and clear. I was living the dream.

I was stripped to the waist eating a block of cheese the size of a car battery.” jerry: “Before we go any further, I’d just like to point

Despite its colossal price here in B.C. (I remember the first time I saw a brick of cheese for $13.50 on Vancouver Island and nearly cried), not a week goes by that we are not stocking up on cream cheese, brick cheese, cottage cheese, cheese sticks for our daughter’s lunch, and parmesan cheese for our pasta. Cheese is the penultimate ingredient at any given time in our household.

out how disturbing it is that you equate eating a block of cheese with some sort of bachelor paradise.”

—seinfeld episode “the foundation”

Something that I once sawed off a hunk of after gazing into the refrigerator for several minutes, too lazy to create a full meal, is now a sacred food item. I have a deeper relationship with our domestic mascot—or rather, the fourth member of our one-child family. We eat goat cheese on crackers, we spread cream cheese on bagels (well, they do), we shake it over pasta, and my wife melts it for a sauce on cabbage.

later described as “bad breath meat.” This phantom meat was a recurring character during our treacherous dinner hours, and cheese was in many ways our salvation.

It glistened against the equally shiny ham and mustard nestled in bread. This was the standard snack back then—something we’d make ourselves after school or, in some cases, after meals. We’d use generous proportions of ham and cheese, dislodge a kosher dill pickle from the bulbous jar, and add a noisy squirt of mustard.

And like with most kids, when it was time for parmesan cheese on pasta, let it snow, let it snow, let it snow. The trick was to shake more cheese over our plates when mom or dad wasn’t looking.

Years later, as a single guy, cheese was still a staple—though since I was the one paying for it, depending on my fiscal reality at the time, it was a fluctuating ration. I was the one who would control the inventory and, much like George Constanza’s portrayal of himself as a widow in paradise eating cheese, I was king of the wheel, the chief investment officer for every block of mild, old, and marble that I negotiated. If I could afford it on a given week, I’d certainly eat a whole block in a matter of days.

As adults in our thirties and forties, my brother and I would meet up at his home, and it was then that I discovered his love of cheese was still running wild. He even

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Occasionally it’s even a behavioural bargaining tool, a panacea to a restless daughter who, on the morning after a tree fell through our bathroom ceiling, refused to take a nap following a considerable night of bad sleep. Within the nanosecond time span that the single-syllabled noun jettisoned in all caps from my wife’s lips amongst this sentence, “If you take a nap I’ll make you your own CHEESE pizza,” our daughter had rolled over and begun her quest for rest.

After going vegan three years ago, my dear friend Spencer Gordon, a writer who lives in Toronto, found that cheese was the most difficult ingredient to strike from his regular diet. “Like everyone else, I used to eat an abundance of cheese.

After going vegan, I realized I put, or ate, cheese on nearly everything,” he says.

“Cutting it from my diet was more difficult than dropping meat (blame the casein).”

Gordon says that going vegetarian made him lose 10 to 15 pounds, and going vegan helped him shed another 10. But is losing weight really worth severing my ties to cheese completely? The thing is, in my household, a simple plate of cheese and crackers—a popular weekend snack—is in fact so much more. Once we bite in, we know it plain and simple: cheese is a major source of comfort for us. All of us.

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Field Trip

Field Guide

cinnamon bun with cream cheese frosting at the smallflower

CHEESE—OR SOMETHING LIKE IT—PLEASE

It’s rare to find a vegan cinnamon bun, so I was over the moon when I came across one with an amazing cream cheese-style frosting at Gastown’s The Smallflower, sister of Mount Pleasant’s The Wallflower (which has its own dairy-free specialties, including a Vegan Benny with marinated tofu and veggie sausage and Baked Mac ‘N Cheesy with vegan cheddar and vegan cheesy sauce).

The Smallflower’s gooey cinnamon treat is not only delicious, but also gluten-free.

Exploring the world of vegan cheese

words & illustration by alice clair When I was 12, I decided to stop eating meat. And like many vegetarians, I began to include more and more dairy options in my diet. Arriving home from school, I would pile slabs of cheddar onto Triscuit crackers and melt them in the microwave, or smear a mountain of cream cheese onto a toasted bagel. Pizza, nachos, Kraft Dinner, bean and cheese burritos, and spaghetti doused in parmesan made weekly appearances on my plate well into my twenties. In 2007, though, I noticed that I consistently felt tired and a general malaise. After doing some research, I decided to try going vegan for a month. Quickly noticing the benefits of a plant-based diet on my health and mood, months turned into years, and I have now been dairy-free for a decade.

When people discover my diet of choice, they typically reveal that they would have no problem giving up meat, but they could never, ever give up cheese. I get it. I was hooked on it for years, and I understand why it is so hard for people to imagine themselves going without a ball of fresh mozzarella, hot and bubbly aged cheddar, or a drizzle of blue cheese dressing.

But I have witnessed a huge growth in the dairy-free cheese world, and there are now plenty of delicious options available for those who make the choice to go dairy-free themselves, or for those whose bodies make the choice for them. Here are a few of my favourite plant-based cheese goodies available in Vancouver.

cashew mozzarella and tofufeta at virtuous pie

A new addition to the vegan food scene in Vancouver, Virtuous Pie in Chinatown has quickly built up a stream of loyal customers who can’t get enough of its plant-based pizza, made completely in-house. The mozzarella is made from organic cashews and melts perfectly on top of several of the pies, from the traditional Margherita, with tomato sauce and basil, to the more adventurous Kim-Jack, with kimchi, jackfruit, and brocollini. Save room for a slice of The Med, with an unbelievable tofu feta sprinkled on top of baba ganoush, falafel, roasted red peppers, olives, onions, and mint chutney.

daiya shreds

When Daiya Cheddar Style Shreds and Mozzarella Style Shreds were released, they quickly became popular for their ability to actually melt. Many restaurants now offer Daiya as a convenient dairy-free option—it’s also free of gluten and soy. Try it with sun-dried tomatoes, jalapenos, and red onion on the Tuscan nachos at The Naam on West 4th Avenue, on burritos and tacos at Bandidas Taquería on Commercial Drive, or on the vegan poutine at The Spud Shack Fry Co. at the New Westminster SkyTrain station.

Daiya products are also available in many grocery stores in Vancouver, and its vegan Key Lime Cheezecake—like all of these dairy-free cheese treats—is worth the hunt.

cheez sauce at meet on main or meet in gastown

When you’re craving vegan comfort food, MeeT is the place to go. Its Mac N’ Cheese is served with a house-made cashew “cheez” sauce. The dish is creamy and delicious on its own, topped with chili, or piled with pickled jalapenos and onion rings on my personal favourite, the Mac’N’Cheez Burger. If you’re feeling spicy, order the Not-Cho’ Average Nacho Fries, covered in “cheezy queso” sauce.

blue heron creamery

Karen McAthy of Blue Heron Creamery has stepped up the vegan cheese game, carefully culturing and aging her creations like traditional dairy cheeses. Some of the varieties available so far include Ashed Cashew Camembert, Hot Pepper Gouda, Apricot Wensleydale, and Smoked Coconut-Cashew.

These cheeses are so convincing that they’d fit right in on any party cheese plate. Enthusiasts can subscribe to Blue Heron’s monthly box, which includes a selection of tasty cheeses.

FujiColor Superia 400

Field Trip

WHEELING & DEALING The Great Canadian Cheese Rolling Festival

words & photography by madeline barber While competitors in the British version forgo all safety gear, we Canadians prefer a little cushioning—helmets, elbow pads, and shin pads were provided for all willing to brave the hill. There were no major injuries last year, but plenty of crushed ankles and red rashes of grass burn as competitors crashed into the bottom. To help with this, every finish line requires “cheese blockers”: sturdy folks with padded shields to stop the racers’ momentum. While they may look like shaggy ski bums and mountain bikers plucked from Garfinkel’s pub with the promise of some free dairy products, make no mistake: these are the unsung heroes of cheese rolling. If no one were to stand at the bottom, competitors wouldn’t be able to stop in time, and would slam directly into the bales of hay, taking down a CBC cameraman with them.

Only the Brits could come up with something like this.

This past August, Whistler hosted the ninth annual Great Canadian Cheese Rolling Festival. It is based on the historic original event, which has taken place for over 200 years on Cooper’s Hill in the quaint countryside near Gloucestershire, England.

There is something so delightfully insane about dozens of lads and lasses literally falling over each other down a hill—all after a piece of cheese. But that’s the name of this game.

The rules are simple: when the horn shrieks, run down the hill as fast as you can. (This is done in heats to give everyone a fair chance, so about 12 people run at once.) There is no need to catch the cheese; in fact, it’s never been done.

To be the winner, all you have to do is make it to the bottom first—it doesn’t matter if you roll the whole way. And yes, the winner gets the 11-pound round of cheese.

In the end, two cheese champions were crowned: Mike MacDonald from Summerland, and Laura Chipman from Bainbridge Island, Washington. Dairy Farmers of Canada’s Sandra Da Silva was thrilled with the turnout. “The festival always has such a great air about it,” she says. Even though the rolling is a competition, the bottom line is to have fun and let the cheese-makers show off their pride and joy. Da Silva notes that the festival is a great combination of a British Columbian’s two loves: adventure and good food.

The Whistler festival’s prize is a 100 per cent Canadian cheese made with Canadian milk, donated by Courtenay’s Natural Pastures. An award-winning aged cheddar, the product is loaded with rich flavour and lingering sweetness, representing the terroir of the Comox Valley. The winner also walks away with two season’s passes to Whistler Blackcomb, but who needs that when you’ve got 11 pounds of aged goodness?

If running down a hellishly steep hill after a massive piece of cheddar isn’t your thing, there are plenty of other activities during the festival, including potato sack races, costume contests, uphill dodge ball, and even a seminar on wine and cheese.

During one of his sessions, chef David Beaudoin reminded everyone why they were there. Whether you’re chasing cheddar down an incline or eating an expensive blue in a fancy restaurant, this food seems to have bonding powers: “Get together, eat cheese, drink wine, and talk about life—this is what it’s all about.”

At the 2016 event, Just for Laughs comedian Ivan Decker charmed the crowds with cheesy jokes and announced the arrival of each round. It was one of the hottest days of August, yet while festivalgoers’ foreheads beaded with sweat, all the vendors’ delicacies were fresh as a newborn dairy cow. The endless samples provided a delicious distraction to the lulls in between each heat.

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Essay

TAKE ME TO FLAVOUR TOWN The martyrdom of Guy Fieri

words & illustration by graeme zirk Watching a man who is dressed like Randy River upper management eat a slew of greasy things should not be pleasurable. But it is. No one ever watches just one episode, and we know that. They know that. Triple D only airs in four-hour blocks for a reason. We binge-watch it on a Sunday afternoon because after six straight days of good, boring choices, it feels nice to live vicariously through a person we actively try to not be, but secretly wish we were.

When I wake up, I open my phone to make sure people on Instagram are still doing cool things, and that they think I’m still cool, too.

When the high of validation wears off, I have breakfast. My choice is never based on what’s exciting or pleasurable. It’s based on what’s fast and not terrible for me. I eat the same gluten-free protein bar I had yesterday faster than I can say, “Good enough.” I pick out a dark, blank, work-appropriate shirt from my closet of dark, blank, work-appropriate shirts. I then drive to work in my nondescript hatchback.

He is a martyr—one that turns the other perspiring cheek and drives from “flavourtown” to “flavourtown” to sample food and shout his deep-fried gospel.

Guy Fieri, the boisterous host of Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives, has never woken up to this life. Every day of his existence is the diametric opposite of mine.

He doesn’t make decisions based on consequences and their deeper ramifications.

Everything he does is to the nines—sincere and never with the residual Millennial subtext of, “The world’s ending, none of this matters lol.” He reminds us that there’s a kitschy world without irony outside of the pseudo-intellectual bubbles that we curate for ourselves.

Fieri sacrifices reputation and intestinal lining so that we might live our best lives. He is a martyr—one that turns the other perspiring cheek and drives from “flavourtown” to “flavourtown” to sample food and shout his deep-fried gospel.

There is a strong chance he’s never done a juice cleanse, he probably doesn’t feel the need to substitute Earth Balance for butter when his vegan friends come over, and it’s entirely likely he didn’t read that Atlantic article that’s been making the rounds on Facebook. His approach offers a reprieve from these social obligations, and an opportunity to live a life impervious to shame, heartburn, and critique.

After all, salt, sugar, and fat are simple, un-nuanced tastes. It doesn’t take a refined palate to appreciate them or know when they are missing. But Fieri defies our need to ration dopamine-triggering foods, and instead dishes them out with a ladle. He’s the patron saint of the universally gratifying and simple, but because his greasy path is a direct contradiction to the cultural superiority we’re supposed to feel over others, we hate him for it. We laugh at him and meme him to death, because we know he’ll take it without flinching.

The prospect of reviving the frosted tips you wore in high school would seem unconscionable. Eating feedlot meat to excess on camera would trigger backlash amongst your friends and followers. Fieri defies those notions.

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Photography

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Interview

PERFECT PARTNER A consideration of cheese pairing

words by jessica johns illustration by min joo kim I’m preparing for a dinner party and, of course, want to put together a stellar charcuterie board for the occasion. So, I head to Benton Brothers Fine Cheese, an artisanal store on Granville Island (with a second location in Kerrisdale) focused on handcrafted, small-production cheese, and the choices are overwhelming.

Cow, goat, sheep, and water buffalo cheese. There’s hard cheese, soft cheese, firm cheese, creamy cheese, sweet cheese, salty cheese, nutty, crunchy, tangy, tart.

Otherwise, the general guideline for pairing flavours is to either choose ones that are similar or ones that contrast. Andrew explains that by matching items with similar flavours, the different levels of taste build to one focus. At Andrew’s recommendation, I pair a slice of Etorki—a sweet, delicate cheese made from pasteurized sheep’s milk in the hilly regions of the French Pyrenees—with a sweet apple. The duo’s shared characteristics heighten the all-around level of saccharinity.

“It is a very North American thing that we have cheese with other things”

Alternatively, contrasting two food items balances the intensity of flavours, but also combines them to make a completely different taste. Pairing a sliver of buffalo blue (made from the milk of a herd of water buffalo in Abbotsford) with a drizzle of honey proves this. The sweet honey balances out the force of the rich, salty cheese, creating a harmonious interplay on the palate.

And then there’s the decision of what else to add to the plate: nuts, cured meats, crackers, chutneys, jellies, fruit, and vegetables pickled or fresh. How do I know what food to match with which cheese? What constitutes a “good” pairing?

Pairings don’t have to revolve exclusively around taste, either. Texture is also a consideration. I try a chunk of Grey Owl, the shop’s most popular Canadian goat cheese from Quebec, with toasted almonds. The wonderful, cakey texture of the cheese is offset by the hard crunch of the nuts, creating a pleasing sensory combination. To compare, I then match the cheese with a dried apricot.

Combining the two soft foods adds to the cheese’s rich consistency, requiring slower, more calculated chewing and similarly measured appreciation.

To answer these questions, I ask the man himself: Andrew Benton, co-founder of the shop. Andrew and his brother Jonah, former engineers from Calgary, spent years working in cheese shops and factories, cultivating their knowledge before opening their shop in Vancouver in 2007. The nice thing about Andrew is that he doesn’t set up cheese pairing as an intimidatingly complex and precise task.

In his mind, personal taste is paramount. “Cheese doesn’t have to be paired specifically with something,” he says. “If you have two things that you like, put them together. Most likely, they’ll pair just fine. There’s not only one way to have it.”

Finally, I ask Andrew my most important question: why do we pair cheese at all?

Is it not sufficiently delicious on its own? Why does it need a slice of meat, a glass of wine, or a piece of fruit to make the experience complete?

Andrew just laughs. “It is a very North American thing that we have cheese with other things,” he says. “In Europe, where the cheese culture is much more common, it’s more of an everyday regular food that you can go for.”

This is exactly the kind of answer I would expect from a man who melts an Italian Taleggio on his barbequed burgers, and sprinkles locally made jalapeño goat Gouda on his game-day nachos. Andrew is aware of the snobbery that taints artisanal cheese production, and he wants to put an end to it. While he truly believes in the subjectivity of pairing, he grants that there is value in knowing some general starting principles. It’s fun. It can be challenging. And, more than anything else, it’s delicious.

This makes sense. Europe has a long history with cheese; it’s integrated into the culture, both because of individual consumption and collective production. The top four exporters of cheese in the world are European countries. In Canada, cheese is less prevalent, so perhaps we see it as more of a delicacy.

Andrew’s number-one suggestion when choosing a pairing is to match the intensity of flavours. You do not want to couple something very bold with something light— for example, you probably shouldn’t pair a really strong blue cheese with a light sauvignon blanc, as the strength of the food will overpower the wine.

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But even considering cultural differences, artisan cheese shouldn’t be a snack reserved for the elite. With the help of Andrew, I assemble my charcuterie board.

I pair no-name crackers with an aged Swiss gruyere and add some baby gherkins to the plate, because that’s what I happen to like, and that’s perfect.

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Feature

HEAVENLY

DESIRE: THE CHEESIEST

PORN POSTERS WORDS BY ROBIN BOUGIE As the author of Graphic Thrills, a full-colour coffee table book series about the history of adult film posters, you might say I’m an expert on the subject. Often times, the advertisement is better (or worse) than the movie itself.

Here are 10 of the cheesiest.

DEBBIE DOES LAS VEGAS 1981

JUNGLE BLUE 1978

PASTRIES 1975

Debbie Does Las Vegas just screams cheese.

Maybe it’s the fact that the drawing style belongs in a colouring book rather than on a theatrical film poster, or that it’s a forgettable knock-off of a much more famous adult film, or that it’s directed by one of the worst porn directors of all time, the interminable Ray Dennis Steckler.

Regardless, it’s ripe.

Los Angeles porn director Carlos Tobolina loved to travel the world, and so unlike every other Tarzan porno movie, in this one we actually get some authentic footage that he shot of real tribes and the wildlife-filled Amazonian jungle they lived in. Also: orangutan buddies, rope swingin’, jewel thieves, blow-dart shooting, and a guy in a terrible gorilla suit humping a woman. WTF.

Come, bathe with me and make sweet hairy love in my construction site bathtub.

None can resist my handyman charms. If you need any piping or rebar for your next renovation project, I’ve got that as well.

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Feature

CO-ED TEASERS 1983

GIRL GIRLS GIRLS 1985

FASCINATION 1980

This is an XXX movie about the sexual misadventures that take place at a summer camp in the Catskill Mountains in New York State, but one would never know the plot was anything so generic going by the one-sheet—a confusing cash-in that begs the question: surely the movie E.T. isn’t something anyone wants to think about when they’re masturbating?

Why is that two-mile-high naked man wearing a pilot helmet and carrying around giant women in San Francisco?

I’ve never, in my exhaustive searches, been able to find a copy of this West German production directed by Czech pornographer Alan Vydra, but I just know that it has no chance of ever living up to this insane and colourful poster.

A young Ron Jeremy in a disco-era smut is just what the doctor ordered. In his autobiography, Jeremy noted that playing the wide-eyed lovable loser going to the Big Apple and becoming a stud was easy—because it modelled how he himself arrived on the New York XXX scene of the ‘70s.

SEX IN THE COMICS 1972

HEAVENLY DESIRE 1979

LIBRIANNA 1981

Sex in the Comics isn’t so much erotic as it is genuinely unsettling and bizarre.

Who asked for a porno version of 1940sand 1950s-era newspaper comics that few remembered even in the early 1970s? And what’s with their stilted, oldtimey dialogue and horrifying homemade rubber and paper-craft masks? A couple of them have white paper eyes taped over their actual human eyes, which is more nightmarish than cartoonish.

Johnnie Keyes is a purple-clad devil-pimp who dead prostitutes have to please before he’ll let them into hell. This funky devil is in charge of “Hooker’s Heaven” and is looking to see if these beautiful blonde “bitches” (Seka and Serena) can prove their “badness.” Failure means heading “upstairs” and chastely sitting around on a boring old cloud while playing a harp and “singing Amazing Grace with Pat Boone for the rest of eternity.”

Here our lead, Scott, takes a train from Seattle to Moscow (!?) and joins the Bitch of the Black Sea on her home turf. Then the two of them go about pulling off a James Bond-esque caper that involves piles of penetration, a crazy humphungry druid, a guy in a creepy bear suit, dog sledding, and a weaponless takeover of a prison camp. No, it’s not a comedy.

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BY ITS POSTER. BUT SOMETIMES YOU CAN

SOMETIMES, YOU CAN’T JUDGE A MOVIE

THUNDER BUNS 1976 Not sure what they were thinking of when they named this movie. I mean, I don’t know about y’all, but “thunderbuns” just makes me think of someone who farts a lot. Don’t look for an interesting plot here— Thunderbuns is no more than a loop-carrier: a collection of previously-shot footage, edited together into an 86-minute feature film that played theatres in sleazy Times Square circa 1976.

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Essay

EVERYTHING HERE IS SOLD BY WEIGHT My life as a cheese angel

words by clara cristofaro illustration by pamela rounis She could cut and wrap pieces of cheese while looking over her shoulder to make sure we were serving fast enough.

You have beautiful green eyes, said the Boss. Just beautiful.

His eyes were blue, watery, and saggy at the corners. He had reddish jowls and what looked like a wig of snow-white hair.

She was their longest-standing employee, more like an oldest daughter than staff. She took grocery list dictation over the phone from the Boss Lady and picked up their dry cleaning. She was indispensable, while still drawing what we suspected was the same hourly wage as the rest of us.

Thank you, I said.

You know, he said, leaning across the desk in his office, at my shop we are like a family. A family of beautiful girls! I call them my angels.

Jenny did the job for the money. She tolerated the roving eye of the Boss over her full breasts and the Boss Lady’s glares in exchange for skimming the day’s cash for years until she had enough for a purebred puppy and a down payment on the truck she wanted.

Cheese angel, can you hear me? Sarah sang when I told her. Cheese angel, can you see-ee me?

Margot had big, curly hair and got away with having a smart mouth, like a younger sister whose side your parents always take. Margot told the Boss he was a perv, told the Boss Lady she’d married down. They laughed and clapped her on the shoulder.

It’s creepy, right? I asked. He only hires women, says they sell better.

I tallied how much money I would make in a month. For rent, groceries, phone bill, tuition.

At the end of every day we washed the floor with pine-scented cleaner. Kaye filled a bucket with hot water and poured it over the floor, then scrubbed with a heavy push broom. She guided all the water to the drain in the floor and it swirled away. The soles of the second-hand combat boots I wore to work smelled like pine, while the rest of me always smelled faintly of cheese.

Are you somewhere up above? And are you still my truest love?

But it’s a job, I said.

A job’s a job, Sarah agreed.

The market was closed Mondays. On Sunday nights after closing we’d stand in the parking lot by Kaye’s truck and share a two-litre bottle of apple cider, poured into plastic cups. Kaye would chain-smoke and complain about the Boss Lady while the rest of us complained about the customers.

We sold cheese. Two hundred varieties, plus crackers, condiments, and deli meats. We didn’t have a number system for the customers. People showed up at the counter and we kept track of who was next. They complained, not wanting their purchase of sliced meats to be at the mercy of our fickle attention. We had a few regulars who enjoyed jockeying for position, getting their thinly sliced prosciutto ahead of the guy who had cut them off at the vegetable stand.

Six months in, I started borrowing from the till, just five or 10 dollars to buy my lunch that I always paid back by the end of the day. Once, I forgot to pay it back and then the till was short at closing. I started not ringing things through, leaving the cash drawer open and making change, keeping track of how much I’d taken and needed to account for. If it came out exactly even at the end of the day I was delighted. Rather than paying it back, eventually I just kept the money. I didn’t think of this as stealing. I thought of it as taking what I was owed.

Next in line? Anyone need help? May I help who’s next? we chorused, 50 times a day. Most customers didn’t say please or thank you. They pointed and ordered.

We never argued with them, even as they assured us we used to sell unpasteurized cheese, or that they had bought Roquefort from us last week for much less than $4.69 per hundred grams. We smiled and gripped the counter with our red, over-washed hands and kicked at the boards by our feet, pretending we were kicking that customer in the shins. We cut custom pieces of cheese for people and gave them the less desirable pieces with more rind. Sometimes we gave them the middle finger under the counter, as we grinned and nodded and agreed yes, we remembered now, there had been a nicer piece of prosciutto for sale just the other day, it must have sold, we would have a word with the boss about it.

My last day of work started in the Boss’s office, where I’d had my interview three years earlier. He didn’t lean across the desk this time, he didn’t comment on my appearance. He glared at me and his cheeks were flushed.

We were a family, he said, I told you when you started. All my girls are my family.

I remembered.

And what do you do to your family? he asked. Do you steal from them?

I had no defence. I had not stolen as much as he thought I had, but I had stolen some and there was a witness. The new girl, Susan. She’d been watching me while I watched everyone else.

The Boss, and his wife, the Boss Lady, were concerned only with the money they were making. It was our job to keep the customers happy.

Kaye was our manager, a smoker with her hair always pulled into a tight ponytail. Built lean and sharp like a paring knife, she moved swiftly through the 10 feet of space behind the counter, angling her body to glide between us.

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I hung up my apron and went home to dump my spare change on the carpet and roll it. It wouldn’t be enough for rent. But at least I wasn’t a cheese angel any more.

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Essay

IDEAL CHEESE Love crumbles in Amsterdam

words by mica lemiski illustration by maia boakye More and more, I am alone. I sit on the lips of the canal, drink too much, imagine my Dutch ancestors riding wide-hipped bicycles through the cityscape.

If I am lucky, they wave hello.

On the first night of my visit, you say the words open relationship and I am completely blindsided. The suggestion itself is not outrageous, but we’ve been apart for five months and this first night is supposed to feel warm, comfortable, like an old sweater. Now all I want is to run, barefoot and dramatic, out into the rain and watch my hair become tentacular with the weight of water.

One afternoon, I disembark a trolley with a heavy bag, lose my balance, and fall backwards off a curb. A silver hatchback nearly kills me. I know because I feel the quick, high-pressured wind as it passes and wonder if, on a molecular level, the car actually hit me. You aren’t there to see it happen. Later, I tell you I almost died but my words aren’t as heavy as I imagined: they puff from my mouth, then settle at our feet like snow. All the drama has faded.

Of course, I do not do this. Of course, I fold myself into the curve of your torso and allow you to pet my hair, apologize for your poorly-timed inquiry, feed me an extra cube of sweet, briny mozzarella from the kaasmarkt.

While you sleep, I lie awake and wonder if it is wrong, or maybe naive, to want to be someone’s one and only. But answering this question feels like staring at the sun. I’ll blind myself by morning.

I guess I’m just upset because you told me you were falling for me a year ago, yet you don’t seem to have progressed past the falling stage. Or is it me that has not progressed? I want to help you land, but I fear it’s impossible. Perhaps you have stalled, mid-air, the earth repelling you like a magnet of similar charge.

I wish I could unzip your skin and crawl inside you like a sleeping bag.

There’s a castle I want to see—De Haar, the one with the moat and a garden so bright it looks painted. You can’t go. You have that paper to write. I have no money on my train card but I’m restless, or maybe reckless, so I neglect the train fare and board anyway. I know my tiny theft would anger you. You are not a rule breaker. You are an abider of speed limits, a studier of fine prints. This ride is revenge-based. I allow myself a private smirk.

We go to Best Kept Secret, a music festival where one of your friends feeds us drugs from a fanny pack. Some mushrooms, a pill. We stand together in a sopping mud puddle, 100 spectators wide, and vibrate collectively. But a question bites me: what is your best kept secret? I wish I could unzip your skin and crawl inside you like a sleeping bag. Bundled in our skin-womb, organs colliding, our hearts would physically touch and, for the first time, we’d experience true intimacy.

At the castle, I become sad. I cannot pay the four-euro entry fee. I don’t have my credit card, I have no cash, and so I do not get to see the flowers or the Queen’s chambers or the gargoyles, perched and spying from the battlements. I take selftimered photos on the drawbridge: #dehaar #castle #netherlands and begin to feel myself shrink—down down down, to the size of a Polly Pocket. My rebellion, too, becomes small and plastic. I cannot bear the thought of stealing another ride, so I walk two hours back through the countryside, sheep devouring grass on either side of me.

They call this the land of cheese, with samples in every shop, cubed like dice, but I can’t seem to find my perfect flavour. You find yours, gouda flecked with truffle, and so that’s what we buy from now on. I am devastated by the thought that I may never find my ideal cheese.

Maybe I shouldn’t have used the word love but, unexpressed, the word had sat in my throat like a burr. I’d needed to either get it out or swallow it completely.

I’d chosen to get it out, sensing that if I swallowed it would dissolve in my stomach and disappear. And maybe that was the problem: the love-burr was time-sensitive, and we both knew it.

When your parents visit, they give us everything. Food. Wine. More of the truffle cheese. Train rides and a rental car. How could we refuse? At night, we stay in their AirBnb (the one they’ve abandoned because of the mopeds that roar up the street at all hours) and smoke hash in plush housecoats. We have sex downstairs because it’s cooler and we listen to church bells clang through the city.

The bells remind us that history is a priority here, that we are simply interlopers.

I couldn’t imagine a more beautiful trespass.

Late at night, we zoom through the streets on our bikes while holding hands.

We are fast. Nothing can stop us. I suck in air, push it out, and think of how miraculous our bodies are, connected and in motion. And this is the memory I want to stamp all over myself as I navigate the airport with you, sipping on the raspberry water you bought me. I am leaving you, maybe forever, and we both know it. I am boarding a plane, a wedge of aged gouda tucked in my suitcase.

Not my ideal cheese, but close enough.

But, the longer we’re here, the more ghostlike you become. You’ve got work to do and papers to write—you disappear, dungeon yourself in poorly-lit rooms.

I watch as your skin turns pale and yellow.

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Poetry

N

O Not queer enough, too stealth. Not straight at-fucking-all.

Not the white-gay-men-next-door.

Not men, not women. Not the guy

N

with your face, fuzzy. Not the girl with my skirt,

O

after you fuck me into a puddle.

tight. Not solid at the knees Your puddle, it’s bigger than mine. Not

T P U T

presenting our bepuddled sheets

to The Committee of Confused but Well-Intentioned Straight People,

P

for them to divine, based on puddledensity/size, once and for all,

who really is the fucking Guy.™

U

Or to the Grand High Council

D

our dildos, You must be THIS LONG

D

of Gay Witches, who measure to enter the gay bar without being side-eyed. Not

D D L L

E

S

giving the drunk fuckhead at the party a roadmap

of our junk. Not explaining why

I wouldn’t rather fuck a real guy

with a Disappointment Guaranteed bloodflow dick. Why I’d rather fucking die. Not letting you get beat up in the bathroom. I have bear mace in my bag.

—By Joelle Barron

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O

U

O

G

U

O

window chatter at walmart,

R

O

our mouths are tiny apartments

D

each of our arms a basket

R

up-sigh / inside out,

G O O D G shaking from fault,

filled with clouds, and milk, and ache, seems like everyone these days wants

O

E

O

V

D

E

comfort you can walk into without knowing, I once shoved my foot through a glass door getting to know my own anger,

GRO O D its patches of stupid, bloody, love, an isle is an island, not a aisle,

not a passageway separating seating areas or boxes of kleenex and frozen corn,

in aisle six, you insist spring is coming

Y

despite the cold, recognize

T

duck/cover

earth in emergency, quake/

heave,

EV ERY I H

we shake back the doubt of our breaking,

offer each other the weather, our good, good everything.

N

—By Selina Boan

G

THING -

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Essay

MORE THAN CHEESE A bicoastal love affair

words by adÈle barclay illustration by aimee young You were to fly into New York late but your flight was cancelled and your arrival pushed even later. I planned to feed you upon our midnight reunion in my Bushwick sublet. It was October: Canadian Thanksgiving in America.

I couldn’t find pumpkin pie that early in autumn. Cheese in America, however, is abundant and cheap. At the grocery store, I selected fresh mozzarella and a buttery gorgonzola out of a plush dairy sea.

I once read an article that suggested the pleasure derived from cheese operates along similar lines as hard drugs.

Before leaving to meet you at Newark, I looked in the mirror perched on the desk that touched the bed and contemplated not showing up. My heart burned.

Bitter, hot blood flushed my cheeks. Abandoning you in a new city would be an exorbitant revenge. Was what you’d done cheating? Maybe not, but you’d lied. The rules were foggy. Still I had the dizzying thought of standing you up.

I looked over the balcony and visualized a fall.

What I find most compelling about casomorphins in dairy is their suggested function—to encourage the bond between mother and child during feeding.

When I was with you I walked around in a daze from all the orgasms that increased in number and altered in intensity depending on my cycle. Was it oxytocin that made me scratch your head, smell your armpits, crawl into your lap every chance I got? You suggested that maybe I use sex to feel better about myself but I think it’s more that during fucking, good fucking, I enter a higher realm where I exist excessively and yet am rinsed of myself. When we fucked the strength of our connection did away with any fettered sense of self, obliterated my awareness of goodness. We bowed to the space of hot abstraction between two bodies hurling themselves at each other.

I came to the airport and brought you back to my borrowed room. We ate a Brooklyn bodega charcuterie. I came 11 times while you ate my pussy and when we started fucking I lost count. I had to buy extra towels from the dollar store on Knickerbocker Avenue to sop up all the come.

We proceeded like this daily: fucking into the night, sleeping, and fucking until late afternoon, when we rose from bed hungry for savoury things. The fucking made me regress: I was a base of fluids and needs. All I wanted was to fuck, drink water, eat, and press my forehead against yours. One day I took you for pizza at Motorino, under the Williamsburg Bridge. We split a mushroom pizza with white sauce and a sopressata pizza with tomato sauce. I’ve had the same pizza in the same place, since, and it has never tasted as extraordinary as when we ate it for breakfast at 4 p.m.

Each night we were together I slept with my head on your chest. Back on the West Coast, at your home in Victoria, I shared the pillow of your breasts with your cat, who kneaded your chest and purred as I dozed. For the most part I slept soundly. When I did wake up panicked and scared, not from nightmares but from an amorphous anxiety that has always haunted my sleep, you soothed me, whispering, “I got you” and, “What bad things happened to you?”

I don’t know how it is that we associate chocolate with lovers. Chocolate, to me, tastes like childhood: a melted KitKat in my pocket; a waxy Easter bunny; the slow, sugary drip of Nesquik added to warm milk. Then again, I’ve never really had much of a sweet tooth. Cheese, on the other hand, has a funky array of flavours and textures that taste and feel like sex: a soft and filling ricotta, morbier with a streak of volcanic ash running down the middle, halloumi’s recalcitrant firmness when fried, how raclette only comes alive when melted. All those moulds conspire to produce a variety of sweaty, stinky pleasures.

When I returned to Victoria from New York in mid-December you picked me up from the airport in your car. Tupperware containers filled with crackers, havarti, and aged cheddar waited for me on the passenger seat. You drove me back to your house. I bathed in salted water while you fed me the cheeses.

Your life is such that for every season of it you adopt a new activity and get really into it: cycling, blues dancing, fucking me, making ice cream. My expression of obsession is more obvious: it’s sprawling, operatic, and messy, while yours is linear, thorough, and task-oriented. I may have been exuberant in my intensity, but I do think I was evenly matched by your quiet drive to love me. Anyway, I’m still figuring out why every time I fall in love it feels dire and conflicted, like being thirsty while craving salt.

I once read an article that suggested the pleasure derived from cheese operates along similar lines as hard drugs. Dairy contains a protein that, when digested, releases casomorphins—opioids similar to morphine. Cow’s milk contains 10 times more casomorphins than human milk and, since 10 pounds of milk go into each pound of cheese, the concentration of opiates in cheese is further intensified.

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Field Trip

Essay

MEET

GARY

words by kim budziak

illustration by nima gholamipour

On a regular September day in 2016, one unwitting omnivore brought the vegan community together more than it had ever been before. The patron was perusing the refrigerated aisle of United Kingdom supermarket chain Sainsbury’s when something altogether unholy was spotted: a coconut product masquerading as cheese. To Facebook the devout dairyholic went, declaring the wrongdoing as the ultimate foodie sin, and issuing a stern warning to vegans everywhere: “If you’re going to be vegan, don’t call your vegan cheese BECAUSE ITS NOT CHEESE!!!!! As a real cheese fan myself it’s really annoyed me that Sainsbury’s has brought out a ‘Vegan Cheese’ made with COCONUTS. CHEESE IS NOT MADE WITH COCONUTS. Call it Gary or something, but don’t call it Cheese because IT’S NOT CHEESE!!!!!”

Cue the Sainsbury’s marketing team. Shortly after the post was published, an image of the product in question made its way to Twitter with a slight amendment in the packaging. It read: “Thanks to customer feedback, we’re excited to introduce our new range of #Gary.” The internet loved it. Soon memes, GIFs, and t-shirts made their way online, including images of people named Gary holding packages of Gary (clever) and being asked to “sayyyyyyyyy Gary!” for the camera.

So, should a viral success have real implications? How do the Garys of the world feel about sharing their name with a block of coconut and tapioca? Beware, Allens and Jims—omnivores don’t seem too happy about those “chick’n” cutlets and “beefless tips,” either.

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Gouache on paper

Dust to dust——Pamela Rounis

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Photography

Bitch, cheeeeeese.

Local drag performers pair their favourite kitschy outfits with cheesy snacks, cocktails, and a complaint for the modern humanoid.

Photography by Christine McAvoy

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Kodak Portra 800

Bons: Cheese and Bacon Omelette

“The cheese in this omelette didn’t melt the way I wanted it to. Nothing’s ever good enough, is it? Life.”

Sir Cumference

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Photography

Black Lodge: Goat Cheese & Crackers

“Whatever happened to moving forward, working together, loving our neighbours! We are always seeking approval when we have bigger problems.

Please recycle.”

Femanadé

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Kodak Portra 800

The American: The Dirty Burger with Extra Cheese

“Stop posting regrets on Facebook events by naming other events that you’re attending—you’re not missed that badly!”

Shanda Leer

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Photography

Storm Crow Alehouse: grilled cheese, Cheetos cheese puffs, cosmopolitan / Budgies Burritos: The Mr. Jones Burrito

“Positive people: once we acknowledge that everything is actually horrible: maybe then we can change the world.

Until then... shut it.”

Alma Bitches

“Stop jumping to conclusions! These days nobody wants to ask questions before going on the attack. What’s happened to the art of discussion?!”

Adam Zapple

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Kodak Portra 800

Haus of SAD: Old Cheddar and Blue Cheese plate

“I really dislike how we as humans are so quickly to dismiss nature and earth, what is with the disgusting way we treat each other and nature?�

Thanks Jem: the people Queen

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Feature

THE BIG CHEESE Making peace with Céline Dion: mockery, manipulation & matters of the heart

words by andrea warner illustration by karla monterossa the fevered, frantic love of her dedicated fandom. It’s certainly not cool in the contemporary sense of the word to like Céline Dion, but that’s likely the attraction and why so many people are compelled to such devotional heights: her unapologetic, guileless earnesty.

An excerpt from We Oughta Know: How Four Women Ruled the ‘90s and Changed Canadian Music (Eternal Cavalier Press). Portions of this essay re-printed courtesy of CBC Music.

When you come of age in the time of Céline Dion, growing up takes on a certain sateen sheen.

Yes, her music still makes me feel things it doesn’t necessarily earn. There’s no real reason I should get teary listening to “My Heart Will Go On.” I don’t like Titanic. I thought the ending was stupid, and that piece of wood was easily big enough to rescue them both. The tin whistle at the beginning of the song is cloying, as is the whispery little girl voice Dion uses to softly pull us in. And yet she slips inside her character so completely, damned if I don’t believe that her heart really will go on. When the final verse crescendos and she sings, “You’re here and there’s nothing I fear,” well, it’s shattering. And it’s supposed to be. So well played, Ms. Dion, consider me willingly gamed.

Falling in love, first kisses, subsequent breakups, and inevitable pregnancy scares: every moment has a song, if not an entire soundtrack. And if these milestones happened between 1991 and 1999, Dion and her emotionally wrought, soaring, soprano melodramas likely played a role. (Anyone born between 1993 and 1995, if you’re reading this right now, go ahead and do the math: yes, you were probably conceived thanks to Dion and “The Power of Love.” On behalf of Canada, you’re welcome.)

There’s passion in Dion’s songs, but it’s a sexless passion, like a Ken doll’s beige genital wasteland. It may be considered pretentious but it’s actually wholly accessible.

There’s no sly, arch abstraction to a Dion ballad. It’s perfectly devoid of subtext.

It’s entertaining and emotional, it goes down easy, and its sole purpose can be the amplification of the listener’s own feelings, whatever those are. It doesn’t bring with it any agenda other than “FEEL THIS. FEEL IT NOW.”

Dion earned her place amongst the reigning pop divas of her time quickly. She stood shoulder to shoulder with Whitney Houston and Mariah Carey in terms of vocal range and power. Her goal was stardom, and you could feel that ambition in every note; she wrung all the feelings from your senses, leaving you a dry, dirty mop of human emotion.

It’s right that Dion is simultaneously one of the most mocked and most beloved singers in the world. Her voice packs a feelings retreat’s worth of sentiment into every word, and she has made a career out of using her stunning pipes to sell the most treacly, generic adult contemporary pop.

Despite her lyrical interpretations of love devolving into meaningless platitudes, it’s impossible to deny how much Dion means to her fans, even now, decades into her career. She affords the listener permission to pull down the walls and let something enter in a safe, risk-free way. That’s huge. So many of us are taught to deny, suppress, and suffocate the most basic emotional reactions every day. We live guided by arbitrary and not-so-arbitrary rules: codes of conduct at work, societal constructions, neighbourhoods, elevators. Never mind the more oppressive conditions of socioeconomics, gender, race, and sexual orientation.

The shrewdness of her business skills are balanced with genuine talent and Dion’s instincts are flawless. Every record since 1993’s The Colour of My Love has reaffirmed Dion as master of the heart. She places herself firmly in the middle of our biggest thrills and our weakest moments, singing about our deepest fears and wildest hopes.

Love is her business, and we are both the commodities and the consumers.

But it’s not the songs themselves or the production that earn these feelings: it’s Dion. Dion the vocalist, performer, and pop diva construct wants to touch people.

She wants to possess listeners, consume them, change them with her voice and the precision of every decision. She’s a skilled woman who has perfected her instrument, carved a precise path for her career and never wavered. She basks in the worship and adulation of generations of people who are grateful for the singularity of her vision, her commitment to being a conduit for life’s biggest moments.

In part, I think that’s where my initial resentment started to build: I didn’t begrudge her ascent to pop stardom, but I did resent being a casualty of relentless emotional manipulation song after song, sameness after sameness, calculating David Foster ballad after calculating Diane Warren ballad.

The earnestness in her artifice was hard for me to reconcile when I was fourteen. Now, having seen the graceless rise of “music” that demands quotes around it because it’s so fake and Auto-Tuned and over-produced, I’ve come to appreciate Dion in a new way.

Early on, I couldn’t turn a blind eye to Dion’s crass commercialism and the nonstop marketing that twisted her into a larger-than-life diva. I couldn’t comprehend

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Her manipulation is her sincerity and vice versa. In this way, her songs own some of the biggest moments in our lives. This is Dion’s superpower and it’s why her music endures; as principal shareholder of our nostalgia she lays claim to our pasts and to pieces of our hearts, even if we resent the fuck out of her for it.

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From 1993 to 1997, I objected strenuously and righteously to everything I felt she represented: banal melodrama, terrible clichés about women, songs that were essentially gold-plated crap. I saw her peddling and hustling to reinforce gender stereotypes, a woman with obvious daddy issues who served to please her husband, a woman so invested in pulling a Mariah Carey that she’d found her own Tommy Mottola but even worse. I didn’t deny her talent, but I devalued it. I judged, harshly, the friends who worshipped her rather than someone like Courtney Love or Jann

But, I couldn’t escape Dion’s soaring voice. Like Twain she was everywhere and in everything, and it was just too much. In a 1996 Billboard interview, John Doelp, executive VP of 550/Sony, Dion’s label, put it this way: “Her typical consumer? Life to death. She has transcended any kind of demographic study. At her shows, you see the family, the date, the parents, the kids and the teenagers.”

Ubiquity can sometimes feel akin to bullying, which may be why people reacted so viscerally and with so much contempt to something as relatively innocuous as someone singing with gusto. Of course, there were those who hated Dion because she was a woman singing with so much gusto, and that sexism and misogyny plagued her, as well as some anti-Québécois or French sentiment. Millions of people found ways to justify making Dion the object of their collective displeasure, but the honest truth was Dion could fucking sing. She can sing now. And that’s what matters.

There’s passion in Dion’s songs, but it’s a sexless passion, like a Ken doll’s beige genital wasteland.

Dion’s raw vocal talent was, and is, impossible to deny, but I was blind to it as a teen.

I couldn’t see the commitment or drive, the singularity of her vision. The overarching truth, the one that takes precedence over every other narrative, is that Dion worked her ass off. By 1993, when she became an inescapable part of my youth, she’d already released eleven albums, nine in French and two in English. At the age of 25, Dion was a veteran of the music industry with more albums under her belt than most artists release in an entire career. This is Dion’s greatest asset: an incredible work ethic. She wanted it. Badly. Always.

Arden. There were women who wrote their own music and had something to say, and who weren’t content to simply sing somebody else’s words.

I wonder now why I’ve always placed such value on writing one’s own songs; I don’t require actors to write their own material or any other artist to be entirely DIY, and yet there’s something about songwriting, the craftsmanship and the creation process

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that ties so intimately to the actual singing. I value those words and the arrangements almost more than I value the vocals.

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Humour

There are other ways to live: a list of

cheese Substitutes 1

Words by Rachel Burns Illustration by Kiel Torres It’s true. The world is cruel and the truth has ruined everything you love/try to enjoy—even Gruyere and aged cheddar.

If you’re Daiya-ing for a new way to spice up pizza or want a different way to cash-chew-up subs, here are five cruel-free, DIY options to get you saying “cheese” (fake smiling).

Cumulative Despair You can turn the world on with your smile, but what of your frown? The energetic din of an apocalyptic future blends nicely into a smooth paste. Excellent to nosh with bagels, sans lox. Get “despairing” for this “cream-cheese-esque” pairing!

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2

3 Your Ex’s Fermented Tears

Compass Crunch

He cried a lot because you kept breaking plans; you casually

Want a cheese with bite? Find your way, with Compass!

collected those tears in a glass jar. Adding nutritional yeast

“Tap” into this “thrill ride” that will deliver you straight

will turn these “man-sad-o” into “manchego.” Savour the

to “flavour country.” Make the environment “beddar”

bitterness of abandonment in every bite!

with this savvy “blue cheddar.”

4

5 Community Dryer Lint Taste the rainbow of diversity—in your building! Get

Cube your (indebted, in-the-past) enthusiasm

a “baked brie” feel from a cheese that’s “hand-spun.”

Why top your salad with “feta” when you can have pretty,

Wheel your next meal from the collective “tastes” of the

pretty, pretty good “debt-a”? Wet or dry, they crumble or fry!

92 people with which you tenuously “share space.”

Yes—your student loan statements—cultured and brined.

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Essay

TYROPITA The story of a saint, a lost eye, and two cheese pies

words by james gifford illustration by julia iredale Despite the aches of time, Rhodes spoke most clearly to my travelling companion and me on an evening halfway through our visit. We leapt down the smooth stone street flowing toward the harbour—friends waited for us below with wine, bread, and salt pooled on the table. While we poured ourselves along between stalls and pink window frames, my companion suddenly noticed that the leather band around her wrist had become lighter. Its brown tether once held the mathi she was given several years ago, and in a foreign place like this, its eye was a helpful guardian against ill luck or worse. The small stone was an eye of dark blue lapis lazuli—she’d shown it to me many times, in many places. Her mother gave it to her as protection when she had lived in the most un-Hellenic version of Syracuse: snowy New York State. I’ve wondered how Louisiana could have an Alexandria and New York a Syracuse, but then again, my British Columbian Surrey is as far from England as I can imagine. The mathi had been my friend’s personal talisman during the long, dark nights in snowy Syracuse—and now, after loosening right off the band on her wrist and falling somewhere on the ground, it was lost.

Despite ambiguous musings, the real world intrudes. A good poet might talk through (and revise) crepuscular ink in the crevasses and interstices of sea stone walks, but a travel companion looking for a much-loved stone lost between pavings will swear, swear bluntly, swear madly, and swear without care for the cognates between languages or the fact that open windows cannot hear English but will capture Greek with unerring exactness. And Greek is a language that owns exactness in swearing. She was shamelessly intruding through windows,

“When I was only a boy, I came to town on the Saint’s day.

I saw Agios Fanourios help a blind child find his eyes.” and few things stir more local interest, and action, than a Greek woman swearing and crying while a xenos, her foreign guest, walks beside her, both of them oddly scanning the street—albeit a street inked by moonlight between the reflective rocks. I doubt a resident trying to sleep will care much for bruised moonlight, it see? Regardless, the book did not bode well for us. As we searched, an older man, short and soft-tempered, walked over to us while tugging at his moustache. and the crying will quickly sicken the metaphor. “Home” and the “threshold to adventure” really are the same place, distinguished only by whether you need to “What are you looking for, little girl?” he asked her, ignoring me just as much as he ignored her age. wake and work the next morning.

She rolled her eyes at me but then told him of the mathi and its personal value, its hard-earned meaning. He patted her cheek as if she were an adolescent crying over a tipped ice-cream cone, not the 40-year-old professor she was. “Don’t worry, little girl,” he said. “It is silly. This is Odos Fanourios, Saint Fanourios’ street, and nothing can be lost here.” He looked at her more seriously, as if she

We had the night before us, and our hunt for her lost mathi continued on for half of the hour. While I did not mention it then, I couldn’t help but think about the book peering at us out of her purse—a book in which a poor young fool helps an older doctor unsuccessfully hunt for his lost watch key, time falling away and threatening to stop for the both of them. What was the mathi? What did

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The following days carried us to places like an abandoned ancient city and a forgotten acropolis. But I could not forget that somewhere, a blue eye was staring unblinkingly at the sun—and such a thing seemed unfair, in particular for the eye.

might not know. “He is, after all, the patron saint of lost things. You didn’t lose it. You just don’t know where it is.”

She glanced at me again with skepticism, an atheist’s doubt rather than a Greek’s faith.

Three days later we were set to leave Rhodes, aiming for an overnight ferry that we might not reach in time. Again pouring (no other verb is suitable to the soft, rounded stones) down the streets, and with treasures flung in bags with straps over our shoulders and coins ringing in our pockets, we began to make our way to the port. Just as my shins began to ache from fast steps in poor sandals, a labour-softened form stepped up from his thick coffee and thicker cigarette at one of the ubiquitous tables lining the road. His eyes sparkled with mischief.

“I have, even myself, seen the Saint perform miracles!” the man said, reading her nibbed but unwritten hesitation. “Here!” he said, performing for us. “When I was only a boy, I came to town on the Saint’s day. I saw Agios Fanourios help a blind child find his eyes. You’re even standing in front of his church, right here.” Again, he gestured as one might to a teary youth who would not be able to read the inscriptions, but would believe the narrated story if you ran a finger beneath the words.

“Don’t worry, little girl. All will be well. The Saint dwells here, remembers, and he surely finds everything. No history is lost here.”

“Wait, my little girl,” he said, stepping in front of my friend without question.

It was the man from a few days before.

He reached into the pocket of his front shirt and stretched out his closed hand to her. “Fanourios has found your eyes,” he said, and pressed the small blue treasure into her hand before she had even raised it. “Now tell me what you see.”

Without further words, and as if this statement itself had solved all the tragedies he could imagine, the man slipped like the smoke of his cigarette back in through

She stood, shock-still, as if some invisible colossus had been guiding the world around her, somehow just out of sight—an unseen creator watching and shaping.

She looked into her lapis blue eye, held it up; with the sun turning around it as it wiggled at the ends of her fingers, it gazed back at her, as if they each saw the other and somehow in that watching, made each other into a being, seen and recognized.

She held her breath and wordlessly kissed the man quick on both cheeks, and he smiled like a Saint Nicholas, but not the one he would recognize. He understood.

“And don’t forget, little girl, that the Saint likes cheese pies, a tyropita,” he said, and he patted her cheek again before turning his back on her and sitting down amidst his circle of comrades at the table. Sometimes children need reminding of polite recompense, as if we close our eyes to what is shown.

My friend turned to me and quickly we backed up the street to a small bakery only a few doors away. Then with two small cheese pies in hand, we made the spring pilgrimage slowly down Odos Fanourios to the Saint’s church, the smell of fresh bread and feta insinuating itself through the grease-cleared paper. Entering quietly into the church, as if the building might house older secrets and older faiths, we passed the one door with the candle flame, breathed our way wordlessly to the icon, and my companion set down her pies. I dreamed of what had once sat beneath this church—what fecund altars and stones with rich smells of earth—before some demiurge had written a new narrative over it. It was as if the sequence was out of place, or I was in the right place in a wrong time, somewhere outremer, and was trying to read something unwritten. But those were odd musings for the moment. They didn’t suit the quietness of the still and incense-exhaling room. A disquieting bee buzzed merrily around an ultramarine icon of the Virgin Mary, and I decided to exit while my companion stood there, not wanting to disturb any phrases or oblations she might mutter to that older spirit, the one buried beneath the ancient faith. Once again in the sun, I marvelled at such a place, with its domes and ageless spirit, hearing some distant voice over the houses, dropping short fragments of a song that seems as old as singing itself. I looked in on her through the window.

Quiet and smiling, she returned from the darkened room, stepping back up from the lower level as if she were returning from a lengthy sojourn inside the shrine, which had somehow lasted only a few minutes for me in the warm sun. the doorway from which he had entered the street. Uncomforted, my friend “Well, that’s right,” she said. “We have to move quick.” But we didn’t, instead slowly threading our way back to the square and gates on which we saw the sun’s was puzzled and phoned her mother in Athens, as if a matriarch’s wisdom could somehow guide her from a distance to the unburied treasure. “Silly girl, reflected light.

I bought it for 200 drachmae in the Plaka—I’ll get you another tomorrow!” her mother said. “Go meet your friends. Your dinner is cold!” After some desultory We happily made our way down to the harbour for our peaceful ferry ride across the sea, both of us leaving our cameras in our bags as we watched the latediscussion, like good children, we did as we were told. The krasi aspro was warm day sun shine like a chorus across the roofs of Rhodes. It seemed somehow a and our friends were cold, but the plate of olives was kind and the bread and trespass for us to speak about the Saint’s gift, so we left without words while salt slowly led us all back into a silvery evening of much enjoyment and eventual the ship turned its way out of the harbour, with the town fading, layer under humour. By the end of it, smiles were had all around, but my friend continued layer, behind us. to fidget with the leather clasp around her wrist.

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Untitled——Marcus A.M. Hastings

Ink & watercolour on paper

Interview

MONSIEUR FROMAGE An interview with cheese painter Mike Geno

words by alice fleerackers art by mike geno Sometimes hunger makes people do crazy things. But for Philadelphia-based food artist Mike Geno, a rumbling belly kick-started his career.

When he was a poor grad student, it was that familiar gnawing at his stomach that motivated him to paint his first food portrait: a big, juicy steak. Recalling the experience, he describes entering an almost trance-like state, “zoning-out,” and connecting to the piece of meat on a level he’d never been able to with any other painting. When he finally stepped back to evaluate his work, it became abundantly clear: he’d found his subject. Since then, Geno has painted hundreds of food portraits, including everything from crisp bacon strips to plump jelly donuts. But what he’s best known for are his cheese portraits—the crumbling, oozing, mouthwatering compositions make up the bulk of his portfolio.

alice fleerackers: Why did you start painting cheese? mike geno: I had turned 40 and someone gave me a gift certificate for this really fancy cheese shop. I decided, “I’m gonna go crazy. I’m gonna spend my $25 on one wedge of cheese.” I hadn’t painted in a while, but seeing this wedge—there was something about it. I said, “Oh my god, you have to paint this before you eat it.”

Then I was at this party, and I met this amazing woman at the food table. She had this blog called Madame Fromage, and she wrote about cheese. I was kind of struck by that, so I emailed her. I sent her an image [of my cheese painting], and I said, “Are there enough cheeses that I could paint maybe 25 to 30 of these?”

mg: I have a Velveeta in there. I loved doing that; I’ve always had a fondness for

She emailed me back excitedly, and opened up this world of cheese. We started going to cheese shops together, she introduced me to people. I started painting cheese, she started posting them, and it kind of took off that way.

kitsch. Food can definitely go into the kitsch world.

af: Do you ever eat the cheese you paint?

af: Do you do a lot of research for your work?

mg: Always.

mg: I like to have an idea about where it’s coming from and what its relevance is

af: Then you’ve tasted a lot of cheese by now. Is there one country or region that has the best?

before I paint. The cheese portrait series became a portrait series because I was thinking about the personality of the cheese, the history and the region where it comes from, and all the people who are connected to it.

mg: That’s a very cruel thing to ask! I’m not going to answer that. If I’ve learned anything, it’s that there’s great cheese everywhere.

af: Who buys your portraits?

af: Do you think about cheese differently now, after all of these paintings?

mg: The audience is more food fan than art fan. My biggest patron is this really

mg: After five years or so, I’ve become part of the community, I think. I know

wonderful, generous man in San Francisco. I call him my Cheese Daddy. He called me years ago, and asked if he could commission seven paintings right away.

He’s a cheeseaholic, he said. He later explained to me that he was representing his friends and family with these paintings of cheese and bread. He was letting his friends pick the subject. If someone said, “I love Manchego,” I’d paint Manchego. A certain bread from Paris he had overnighted to me for his mom.

It was crazy.

a lot of cheese-makers, I’ve been to a lot of events, I’ve heard so many talks— I feel like I know a lot about cheese that most people don’t.

And I think about cheese now—that’s the difference. You know how with your computer, you’ve always got your operating system running? [Laughs] Cheese is kind of my operating system.

af: Do you only paint fancy cheese?

This interview has been edited and condensed.

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Essay

UNBREAKABLE My problem with Kimmy Schmidt

words by carolyn nakagawa illustration by rachel wada woman even vanishes into thin air after admitting she’s no longer offended, a cutesy effect in line with the show’s offbeat humour.

I want to talk about a very particular kind of love: not the grandest or most important love, but the kind that makes you devour pizza, or binge-watch a new favourite television show. It isn’t as noble as love for your family, or even love of most poetry, if that’s your thing, but it is just as powerful at three in the morning, if not more so. What do you consume when life makes you sad or tired, or when you can’t sleep at night, that leaves you feeling safe and happy?

Despite loving the show, I couldn’t shrug this plot line away. I am heavily invested in Asian Canadian and Asian North American issues, communities, and identity. I may not personally be the real-life equivalent of those people on the internet declaring Titus “#3 Hitler,” but I know a lot of people who could be, and I agree with them most of the time.

I’m a poet and playwright, but most of the things on my 3 a.m. list are novels and TV. And though I’m a proud and self-conscious Asian Canadian, most of those things are white. Like Jane Austen, for example: I adore the skill and meticulous attention to detail with which she draws her characters, subtly illuminating their complexities within the microcosm of a very specific social context. Another example: the Netflix series Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt.

I grew up being told I was Japanese, like anime, like geisha, like kamikaze, without knowing what this meant beyond what I saw on TV. It was years before it hit home for me that I wasn’t Japanese in this way, and nothing could make me “more” Japanese or “properly” Japanese—not living there, not learning the language—because I was never even a little bit Japanese in this way. I was Japanese like my grandparents ran a grocery store in South Vancouver in the 1960s, like teriyaki salmon at New Year’s dinners, like not speaking the language but knowing a few random words mostly related to food. I was, and am, Japanese Canadian. I inherited my culture in drips and dregs, pieces left over after postwar government policies encouraged and intimidated Japanese Canadians to avoid gathering as a community or visibly practicing their culture. There is so much that I have lost forever, and that loss is also part of my culture.

When I watched the first season, I loved everything about it: the exuberance, the clever and offbeat humour, Kimmy’s kindness. I immediately identified the premise as a feminist allegory: women have been trapped in a bunker that’s effectively frozen in time for their formative years, being told they are stupid and worthless. Even when they are rescued from the bunker, they not only don’t know how to navigate the freedom of their new world, they also have to fight against the lasting effects of years of imprisonment and abuse: the bunker has made it into their minds and continues to limit and shape what they do. Kimmy goes through an exaggerated and literalized struggle with inner demons that women like me fight every day. But she also manages to enjoy life along the way, in spite of her problems; it is part of how she overcomes them.

As many times as I’ve been told what my Asianness means, I’ve also been told that I am white. I have a vivid memory from high school of one time when a close friend, who was white, told me I was too. I remember feeling that she was wrong, but not knowing how to say so. Was I white because my friend said so? Is Titus Asian because he decides he is? What is race but one big drag show, anyway? Isn’t it just a way to keep us from disappearing, like I disappeared that day in school?

I hadn’t spent enough time performing my Asianness, so I lost it. So why should I be angry that Titus was picking up an identity that I wasn’t using anyway?

From an intersectional feminist standpoint, the show is not without its issues.

Jane Krakowski, a white actress, plays a Native American woman, and the comedic aspects of her storyline have varying and debatable levels of tastefulness.

There’s also Dong, an illegal Vietnamese immigrant whose name is often used as a crude double entendre, and whose accent and mistakes while learning English are exaggerated for comic effect. But he is also an important character, a romantic lead, even—and that’s huge for an Asian man, especially one who is always portrayed as very obviously Asian and not “whitewashed.”

But the thing is, I wasn’t just upset that Titus had a geisha drag alter ego named Murasaki—I was upset that the show had already responded to the critics of this idea, dismissed them as vitriolic internet personae who needed to learn a lesson in what art really means. I could have told you exactly what was wrong with that episode, posted it on Facebook, and probably garnered hundreds of likes.

But in doing so, I would become just another Masuda69, or more likely, that nameless angry woman who represents all Asian women on Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt. It wouldn’t matter how solid my arguments were. I—my feelings, and my identity as an Asian North American woman—had already been declared irrelevant. They should have been dissolved into silence by the brilliance of the show. I should have been dissolved. But I wasn’t.

Like many people, I began watching the second season of Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt with a great deal of anticipation and excitement. And then I got to the third episode, when Kimmy’s best friend, a gay black man named Titus, performs a one-man show portraying a geisha whom he claims he was in a previous life. The internet (personified by a band of angry Asian Americans led by someone with the screen name Masuda69) finds out about Titus’s show and immediately becomes outraged, declaring him “#3 Hitler.” But when Kimmy invites them to watch the show, they are almost immediately turned around by Titus’s apparently brilliant and moving performance. After, they apologize; one

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What about those of us who actually presume that we can be artists ourselves? Where do our identities go?

After that episode, I realized what I had only suspected before: Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt—the show, the writers, producers, whoever—does not care about my pain.

The show is beautiful and sparkly and joyful and clever and feminist, but it does not understand what it is like to be an Asian in North America, nor does it even vaguely want to. It is actively uninterested in making the world a kinder place to those who are dealing with this kind of historic and systemic oppression in real life. Titus may be a loveable black sidekick, but Asians, in the form of Dong, are an extended punch line to be deported; and after that, what is left for us but, like Masuda69’s nameless friend, to be angry, to learn the true meaning of art, and, as a result, to disappear? And if that’s the case, what about those of us who actually presume that we can be artists ourselves? Where do our identities go?

Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt is like this white boy I dated once who was uncomfortable with my feminism. He didn’t understand my pain; he didn’t think it was necessary. Didn’t I have a perfectly good life, after all? Financially more comfortable than him, in university, getting better grades than him? And don’t I love Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt for its humour, for its exuberance, and, most of all, for its feminism? Isn’t it a fun, entertaining show I look forward to watching?

All of that is true, but it doesn’t change the underlying reality of pain that systemic oppression creates, in spite of any other kind of privilege or success. I loved that boy, but he didn’t care about my pain. And no matter how much I loved him, or for how long, he never would. And just like I had to give up on him, a part of me has given up on Kimmy.

This isn’t a choice. It’s not a protest against the show on artistic, political, moral, or any other grounds. I didn’t choose to be so hurt by its portrayal of Asian Americans (although I take its parodic depiction of my community seriously); but I do choose to allow myself to be hurt, and also to allow myself to keep watching.

Enjoying some parts of this show, and of this messed-up culture that I belong to, is part of how I overcome my pain—or, at least, part of how I defy it.

So Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt is still an option for me in those wee hours of the morning, even though I love it in a different way than I used to. If I’m being honest with myself, and with you, this isn’t really a change so much as it is a reminder of something I have always known, on some level or another, about a lot of things on my 3 a.m. list. I love Jane Austen, despite the insularity of her world and the complicity in British colonialism that I’ve come to see in her work since I first encountered it. Perhaps she has some subtle critiques of these practices in her novels, as some academics argue, or perhaps she shrugs them off, accepting them as incidental details in her universe—but I want to believe that if Jane Austen lived today, or if she had known her own world more widely, that she would have cared about my pain.

I also love Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, even though I know it doesn’t care about me. In the end, the show’s representation of Asian Americans is not the only thing that matters: it’s a show I enjoy watching, and one that validates my feminism. I can live with the rest, even if it hurts. I know I can’t change it, can’t make it love me in every way I want it to. I just have to leave my guard up a little bit when I watch—low enough to enjoy the show, but ready to protect me if it tells me again that I’m a gimmick, that I have no reason to exist beyond being a minor and temporary plot point for a more important and interesting white person. And ready to raise up again when I go out into the world and face others who have been told the same thing, and maybe believe it.

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Photography——Brendan Meadows

Styling Leila Bani

Model Rhi Blossom Clothing Miu Miu

Color Kodak Ektachrome