The Georgia Straight - Racial Justice - March 18, 2021 by The Georgia Straight

FREE | MARCH 18 – 25 / 2021 Volume 55 | Number 2770

Meet five Metro Vancouver residents, including ex-athlete Markiel Simpson, leading the way toward a more equitable society

VANISHING BUS STOPS

Transit users rise up

FIGHTING FAMINE

Quinoa to the rescue

RACIAL JUSTICE SAVAGE LOVE

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VAN GOGH ART

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MIXTAPES

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YOUNG REALTOR

NEWS

CONTENTS

Transit riders rise up against elimination of city bus stops

I thought public transit was about increasing accessibility… – transit user Joan Gillis

“Some of the bus stops to be eliminated are especially important as they are currently serving schools, community centres, parks and libraries.” All of this comes as the City of Vancouver is planning to increase density along parts of Oak Street. Heyman’s VancouverFairview constituency includes all of Oak Street north of 33rd Avenue. Cooper stated in his letter to Heyman that TransLink will eliminate the following stops: Laurel and King Edward Avenue on the westbound 25 route, Oak and 2

THE GEORGIA STR AIGHT

COVER

In advance of the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (March 21), we profile five local residents who are advancing the cause of equality.

by Charlie Smith

he pandemic has hit TransLink hard, with sharply declining parking and fuel taxes and lower fare revenue. But one of the regional transportation authority’s budget-cutting measures—the elimination of some bus stops—has run into opposition from transit users. When almost one-third of the bus stops along the Macdonald No. 2 route were eliminated last year, more than 100 people declared their opposition to this. Now, plans to cut Vancouver bus stops on the 17 and 25 routes in April are once again raising hackles. On March 12, Joan Gillis declared on Facebook that walking two or more extra blocks is “not trivial” for those with mobility problems. Moreover, she noted that on some days, her ankles are in severe pain. “There must be many people facing the same issues,” Gillis wrote. “I thought public transit was about increasing accessibility, not decreasing it.” Another Vancouverite, Alan Cooper, has written to the provincial minister responsible for TransLink, George Heyman, urging him to intervene. “Th is week, this policy hit home near where I live as stops were cancelled along Oak St. and King Edward,” Cooper stated in his letter. “These bus stops are on Routes 17 and 25. Overall about 20% of bus stops on these routes will be eliminated on 12 April 2021.

March 18 – 25 / 2021

By Charlie Smith Cover photo by Tallulah

REAL ESTATE

Raycel Fortaleza, 23, is demonstrating that just because you’re young doesn’t mean that you don’t know how to close deals. By Charlie Smith

LIQUOR

Spring is the time for cleaning out what’s been gathering cobwebs, but it’s a good idea to check before pouring old liquor down the drain. By Mike Usinger

ARTS

Vincent van Gogh fans in Vancouver can rejoice because there’s a new show that presents his art in ways never seen before in our town. By Martin Dunphy

Signs warning of changes to bus stops showed up on Oak Street and King Edward Boulevard.

West 22nd Avenue on the northbound 17 route, West 14th and Oak on the northbound 17 route, and Hamber and Oak Meadows on the 17 route. According to Vancouver transit advocate Nathan Davidowicz, most of these bus stops have existed in the same location for more than 65 years, with changes only coming when new traffic signals were introduced. In addition, Davidowicz told the Straight that more than 50 percent of the regional transit ridership is in Vancouver. Only about one-quarter of the regional population lives in Vancouver. Davidowicz maintained that the elimination of bus stops will increase walking times. He also claimed that the city’s engineering department simply rubberstamps these changes without real oversight from city council. At the March 9 council meeting, COPE councillor Jean Swanson inquired whether the Seniors Advisory Committee or the Persons With Disabilities Advisory Committee were consulted about TransLink’s cuts to bus stops. The acting city manager, Paul Mochrie, said he will follow up after he speaks to engineering-department staff. g

MARCH 18 – 25 / 2021

e Start Here 15 CLASSIFIEDS 14 CONFESSIONS 10 FOOD 12 MUSIC 2 NEWS 9 REAL ESTATE 14 SAVAGE LOVE 13 THEATRE

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Economist says foreignbuyer share in home sales fell to near zero in 2020. As immigration falls sharply, red-hot housing market attracts hordes of buyers. Two worksites and two pubs linked to possible exposures to COVID-19. More British Columbians schedule appointments for COVID-19 vaccinations. City of Vancouver parts ways with director of planning Gil Kelley. @GeorgiaStraight

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FEATURE

Advancing the cause of racial justice in Vancouver

by Charlie Smith

here were many horrific incidents of racial discrimination in the 20th century. They include the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in 1919, when a British brigadier-general ordered his soldiers to fire on unarmed civilians in Amritsar, killing almost 400 people. During the Nanjing Massacre, beginning in 1937, Japanese troops committed mass murder and mass rape against residents of the Chinese city, leaving up to 300,000 dead. But it was the Sharpeville Massacre in South Africa on March 21, 1960, that led the United Nations to create the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. On that day, South African police opened fire on peaceful antiapartheid demonstrators, killing 69. This week, in advance of International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination on Sunday (March 21), the Georgia Straight is profiling five Metro Vancouver residents advancing the cause of racial justice. MARKIEL SIMPSON

Black history advocate Former Capilano University volleyball player Markiel Simpson knows what it’s like to be racially profiled. Sometimes

Markiel Simpson has been inspired by other Black British Columbians, including Harry Jerome, as he sets his sights on becoming the province’s first MP of African descent. Photo by Tallulah.

when he’s in stores, he feels like he must keep his hands out of his pockets because of the way others perceive him.

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MARCH 18 – 25 / 2021

In a phone interview with the Straight, Simpson noted that because he’s a biracial Black man, he actually benefits from privileges that other Black men don’t have. But that hasn’t prevented the cops from leaping to incorrect conclusions about him. “Police have asked if I’m breaking into my vehicle, if I’ve stolen the vehicle,” Simpson said. “It’s not a feeling. It’s a lived reality for myself, for students in schools with police there, for other Black people driving, for people in their employment. We face racism all the time.” Despite these experiences, he remains remarkably upbeat as he fights to change the way people think about Black Canadians. A happy warrior, he works with the B.C. Community Alliance to encourage the B.C. government to introduce a Black history curriculum into public schools. “Institutions are going to have to start taking accountability for recognizing Black people as valuable assets to our society and stop demonizing them in the news and the media,” Simpson said. “I think that it’s starting to happen now. We try and lead with our example.” There are still serious challenges, of course. In November 2018, Black people in Vancouver became aware of a vile video posted by a student at Lord Byng secondary on Vancouver’s West Side. It was riddled with the N-word and spoke about using explosives. It led to the creation of the B.C. Community Alliance in August 2019 to seek accountability for the student who made the threats. According to Simpson, Black students felt they weren’t being heard by the administration or the school liaison officer.

“They came together and launched a formal B.C. Human Rights Tribunal complaint in 2019,” he said. He added that the B.C. Community Alliance advocates for antiracism training for all teachers, staff, and students. It also wants to see a database documenting all instances of racism in B.C. high schools. “We’re also working with a few other groups to help provide some opportunities for leadership training for young people,” Simpson said. On March 15, Simpson announced that he’s seeking the NDP nomination in the federal riding of Burnaby North–Seymour. Even though he’s only 26 years old, he doesn’t think he should wait. “I want to prove to other people that young people should be involved in the political arena,” he said. “Young, racialized people and people with disabilities can contribute to their country and to their society.” If Simpson were to be elected to Parliament, he would become B.C.’s first Black MP. Among his inspirations are the first Black man ever elected in B.C., Mifflin Gibbs, a businessman and antislavery activist who was elected to Victoria city council in 1866. Another inspiration is Harry Jerome, a Black Vancouver sprinter who won a bronze medal at the 1964 Olympics and set seven world records in his career. Then there are the two Black former NDP MLAs, Rosemary Brown and Emery Barnes, who were first elected in 1972. “They both contributed a lot to the province in a number of ways and set a really great example,” Simpson said. “And so as I seek this nomination, I’m kind of standing on their shoulders, in a sense.” Simpson lives in North Burnaby and is president of the provincial NDP constituency association in Burnaby North. As he pursues the federal nomination, he has sought advice from a Black member of the NDP federal caucus, Matthew Green, who represents Hamilton Centre. “He’s always encouraging me to go the extra mile and to do my best,” Simpson revealed. “So I’m really grateful for his encouragement, because there aren’t a lot of elected Black people in B.C.” MYRNA MCCALLUM

Métis-Cree trauma-informed lawyer and podcaster When an Indigenous mother, Deborah Campbell, tried to observe Vancouver police officers taking her 19-year-old son into custody in 2015, she encountered a hostile response. According to a B.C. Human Rights Tribunal ruling more than four years later, the arrest took about 20 minutes. Over this period, Campbell was “roughly and physically see next page

separated from her son and blocked from witnessing his arrest”. “Her questions about what was happening went largely unanswered, and she was warned that her own behaviour could justify a charge of obstruction of justice,” tribunal member Devyn Cousineau concluded in her December 2019 ruling. Campbell received a $20,000 award plus $1,500 for expenses incurred that night after Cousineau declared that the VPD had discriminated against her as an Indigenous mother. It was a landmark victory for Campbell and her two Indigenous lawyers, Amber Prince and Myrna McCallum. Cousineau’s decision linked the officers’ conduct to their lack of understanding about the legacy of colonization, which was exposed under cross-examination by McCallum. In a recent phone interview with the Straight, McCallum said that she presented the officers with a report that their own chief had commissioned, Breaking Barriers and Building Bridges. The VPD had submitted it to the National Inquiry Into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls in 2018. “Not one of those officers, including their own Indigenous liaison officer, had ever seen that document or ever read it,” McCallum said. “And that was really quite shocking to me. “And then when I asked each of them how they defined reconciliation or what that meant to them, none of their answers were consistent,” she continued. “And more often than not, they really had no explanation.” According to the ruling, back in 2015 officers only received a half-day course on policing Indigenous people; three of the cops had never even heard of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. McCallum added that she was shocked by what she described as “stereotype-upholding” views from a VPD member under oath. “One officer said to me something along the lines of, ‘Well, they have broken family structures and they rely on housing subsidies,’ ” McCallum recalled. “I really found it quite alarming that that was what he understood Indigenous people to be collectively experiencing.” Less than a month later, VPD officers detained and handcuffed a 12-year-old Indigenous girl and her grandfather in the back of a squad car after they tried to open a bank account at a downtown BMO branch. A bank employee became suspicious and called the cops when the pair used Indian Status cards as identification. Chief Adam Palmer later defended his officers’ conduct, saying the bank had insisted that fraud had been committed. The chair of the police board, Mayor Kennedy Stewart, heaped blame on BMO rather than the police for what had transpired. None of this surprised McCallum. “After the Campbell decision, Amber and I both wrote to the mayor and we both tried to reach out to the chief,” McCallum said. “No response. Nothing.” She alleged that Stewart and Palmer “are

between trauma, addiction, and self-harm. After several more episodes, she has a growing list of subscribers around the world and she’s been invited to speak to law schools, law societies, and law firms in many cities. “Some law schools are requiring that their students listen to the podcast—it’s required listening for some of their courses,” McCallum said. “It’s just quite amazing.” The Trauma-Informed Lawyer podcast isn’t only for people in the legal profession— McCallum pointed out that many can benefit from it, including police officers. “It’s for anyone who carries trauma,” she added. “And I would say right now in this pandemic, we all do.” STEPHANIE ALLEN

Métis-Cree lawyer Myrna McCallum (left) helps fellow legal practitioners understand trauma; Hogan’s Alley Society director Stephanie Allen thinks communities need a stronger say in planning.

We have Black studies. We have Indigenous studies. We’ve got gender studies. I want to understand what whiteness is. – Hogan’s Alley Society director Stephanie Allen

more interested in performing relationships” around reconciliation with photo ops rather than communicating the importance of this issue to cops on the beat. If they were really serious about this, McCallum added, the principles and commitments in Breaking Barriers and Building Bridges would have filtered down through the department. “And their officers clearly know nothing,” McCallum said of their testimony. “It’s so scary, especially for the Indigenous people who are powerless and voiceless.” A few months after winning the case before the tribunal, McCallum decided to launch a podcast in partnership with the Canadian Bar Association called The Trauma-Informed Lawyer. It came after she reflected on her own trauma as someone who attended Indian residential school in Saskatchewan and the trauma that her mother and grandmother had experienced as Indigenous women. “I ended up going into criminal law and then I did adjudication work,” McCallum said. “And one of the things I noticed pretty quickly was that I was not prepared for all of the traumas that were meeting me in courtrooms and hearing rooms.” She feels that lawyers often deal with people in distress or in trauma, particularly in cases involving immigration, family, human rights, or criminal law. In response to this, she said, lawyers can become detached as a coping mechanism and live in their heads to ignore their own feelings.

According to McCallum, that leads many of them to engage in “transactional” exchanges with clients. These lawyers shy away from seeing the whole person, preferring to focus largely on legal questions. “What I have learned through my podcasts and through having these really meaningful and important conversations with all of these guests is that law school really overlooks the fact that we come into an institution and a profession with our own traumas and our own triggers,” McCallum said. “No one gives us a heads-up about how or own traumas and our triggers can collide with the traumas of the people that we are working with. “And when that happens, if you are not well-supported or practise a lot of selfawareness, it can really set you up for significant mental-health issues.” On her podcast, she says that being a trauma-informed lawyer will challenge a practitioner to critically reflect on their behaviours, personal beliefs, and biases while calling on them to transform the way they approach their advocacy to avoid doing further harm to others. It can also get to the root of why they may devolve into a spiral of addiction, whether that be to drugs, alcohol, work, or anything else. “Your education starts right here, right now,” she tells her listeners. Her first guest on June 1, 2020, was Dr. Gabor Maté, a Vancouver physician who has written extensively about the links

Director, Hogan’s Alley Society Stephanie Allen’s Twitter feed includes the following biographical note about herself: “Building replacement systems for when we dismantle oppressive ones. Constantly in trouble, most of it good.” In a phone interview with the Straight, Allen explained why she’s so interested in advancing racial equality even though she’s already incredibly busy as B.C. Housing’s associate vice president of strategic business operations and performance. That’s on top of being a caregiver to her mother. “I would be lying if it wasn’t personal,” Allen said. “It’s absolutely personal. I’ve seen the devastating impacts of systemic oppression on the lives of people I care about. “I’ve felt that—the sting of it in my own life,” she added. “And I’m…driven by that notion that if we can find the off switch for this thing, we’d all be better off, including our environment, including our ecology.” She’s perhaps best known as a founding member of Hogan’s Alley Society, which advocates for Black Vancouverites whose history was erased when their neighbourhood in Strathcona was razed in the late 1960s to make way for the viaducts. The society has partnered with the Portland Hotel Society and B.C. Housing to create a 52-unit temporary modular housing development named after Nora Hendrix, a major figure in Vancouver’s Black community in the 20th century. Hogan’s Alley Society has made progress persuading the city to support a Black cultural centre in Northeast False Creek. But the society’s demands for community control over the land where Hogan’s Alley once stood have so far been rejected by senior officials at Vancouver City Hall. “There’s a lot of progressive conversation,” Allen said, “but are they really willing to stop and go, ‘Hey, we planned to sell the Hogan’s Alley block and that really screwed us up when you said don’t sell it. We’re grappling with that and it sucks because we have a whole machine that counted every nickel out of that and now you’re saying you want to make it into a community land trust.’ “They had the opportunity to partner with us and say, ‘Let’s find the money; let’s make it happen,’ ” Allen continued. “But, instead, what we found was resistance and arrogance.”

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THE GEORGIA STR AIGHT

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That’s not the only example of “institutional arrogance” at Vancouver City Hall. She said that this also occurred when the city spurned a request from her and more than two dozen other Black leaders and organizations to cancel a planned virtual town-hall meeting with the Black community. It ended up being bombarded with racist messages, resulting in the city issuing an apology. “Don’t get me wrong: wonderful people work for the City of Vancouver,” Allen declared. “A lot of them I really adore and admire. But what I’m talking about is that the institution itself doesn’t just shift on a dime.” She is not reluctant to speak out if she thinks that this will prompt greater selfawareness of the nature of the problem. “They have power and they want to hold onto that power,” Allen said. “They’re not as interested in giving away power.” She revealed that she’s lost friends in the past year as she became more vocal about her analysis of racism and her own experiences. “We’re starting to come to terms, finally, in Canada with the way that white supremacy has been the cornerstone and the building block that has shaped this nation from the initial displacement and land theft and genocide of Indigenous people through to enslavement through to gender-based subjugation,” she noted. Racialized communities, which created enclaves to forge social networks and interdependence, are often caught in the crossfire by a real-estate industry hell-bent on VANCOUVER ABORIGINAL CHILD AND FAMILY SERVICES SOCIETY

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Lawyer Will Tao won the Canadian Bar Association’s Immigration Law Section Founders’ Award after writing a paper delving into intersectionality and Indigenous approaches to the law.

pursuing profits by zeroing in on “desirable” neighbourhoods. “What makes these places really fantastic is that they are bringing other facets of culture, of language, of art, of expression, of music that we can enjoy,” Allen said. “But what happens is instead of something we celebrate and enjoy and share, it becomes a consumable. It becomes something to kind of extract from, market with, and then eventually destroy. This is the irony of these processes.” She wrote her SFU master’s thesis in urban studies on Hogan’s Alley. It won the 2020-2021 Western Association of Graduate Schools and ProQuest award for distinguished master’s thesis in humanities, social sciences, education, and business disciplines. The fate of Hogan’s Alley once again demonstrated to her that “people who are racialized have been unwelcomed across the landscape and have been unwelcomed in certain neighbourhoods”. In light of her comments, it might come as a surprise that she has a great deal of experience in the real-estate sector. Allen, who has an undergraduate business degree, grew up in a lower-income household but was able to gain entry into the upper middle class in the early 2000s while working the red-hot Arizona property market. “I remember buying up apartment buildings [and] converting them to condos, because there were no restrictions on that,” Allen recalled. “You could just go full bore.” After the market crashed following a global economic meltdown in 2008, she decided to go back to school to learn more about the context of what she had been doing for a living. Around the same time, she decided that she wanted to work in the nonprofit-housing sector. That led her to move from Calgary to Kelowna to Vancouver, where she was hired by B.C. Housing. She described the SFU urban-studies program as “life-changing”. “I understood racism,” Allen said. “I understood what my family went through. I knew the history of it, to a degree. But I

MARCH 18 – 25 / 2021

didn’t understand how it manifests itself in the economic system. I didn’t understand how it manifests itself in policy.” She would love to pursue a PhD in the future. “I’ll tell you the topic,” Allen said. “I’ve already got it in my head. I want to understand whiteness. “We have Black studies. We have Indigenous studies. We’ve got gender studies,” she continued. “I want to understand what whiteness is. Where it came from. Why scarcity is so deeply embedded in this culture. Why it drives the type of responses—both violent and policy and institutional—to ensure that it shores up and maintains power. And what is the off switch? I think there must be one.” She wonders whether evolutionary biology led whites to adapt to the scarcity of food sources in colder countries in ancient times in ways that nonwhite people living in the tropics didn’t. “We’ve been around this culture long enough that we’ve absorbed certain parts of it,” Allen emphasized. “It’s not like white supremacy only exists in white people’s heads. It exists in our heads.” WILL TAO

Immigration lawyer How do we keep from forcing Eurocentric, patriarchal, and assimilative perspectives on migrant women of colour? It’s a question that Vancouver lawyer Will Tao asked in a thoughtful paper exploring the potential of intersectionality and Indigenous approaches to immigration appeals. The 32-page paper, submitted to the Canadian Bar Association Immigration Law Section, told the story of a Chinese grandmother and permanent resident. She spoke no English after being in Canada for 15 years and the government wanted her deported. The grandmother was providing valuable care for her granddaughter, whose single mother was busy generating an income to support them, according to the paper. The lawyer representing the Crown bluntly asked Tao if he was saying that the mother couldn’t take care of her own child. Tao argued that if the grandmother was

removed, it would expose the granddaughter to financial hardship, as well as remove the girl’s primary caregiver. “As much as I tried to step into the white athletic shoes of the Appellant’s daughter, they were not mine,” Tao wrote. “I could not relate directly to her worsening financial situation, her role as a mother, her navigation through immigration challenges, and most of all, the physical and emotional abuse. Even though I also lost a father to illness and spoke her mother-tongue, I was not her.” This statement reflects Tao’s high awareness of his own privileged position in society, even though he’s the son of immigrants who faced discrimination after they moved from Shanghai to Victoria in the 1980s. His father was a graduate student at UVic who arrived in Canada with just $60. In his paper, Tao expressed that he still has a great deal to learn about Canada’s history of genocide on stolen land. After the paper resulted in him winning the Canadian Bar Association Immigration Law Section’s Founders’ Award, Tao posted it on his blog. He noted that it represented his “first major (academic/creative) deep dive into the issues of intersectionality, racism, and Indigenous approaches to Canadian immigration law”. In his conclusion, Tao argued that a better appreciation of these areas in the immigration system would “go beyond pathologizing Indigenous women and girls” and acknowledge that “a migrant women’s resilience and resistance have not been given adequate space for consideration”.

…in our family, we never talked of hatred toward another religious group. – Spice Radio CEO Shushma Datt

Tao, a former chair of the City of Vancouver cultural communities advisory committee, founded Heron Law Offices. He told the Straight by phone that he’s hoping to develop the firm into a leader in exploring how Indigenous perspectives can be incorporated into Canada’s immigration system. “We’re still in the very, very beginning stages of this,” Tao said. “We’re excited about the possibility. We’re talking to some major thought leaders in the Indigenous communities to get their input and to build it.” He feels that it’s essential that resources go to Indigenous communities and that their perspectives be sought on “what could be continued colonization” through immigration processes. “How can we give sovereignty of immigration back to the Indigenous community?” Tao asked. “It was taken from them, essentially, through the process of colonization. see next page

Applications Now Open for Vancouver’s Residents Advisory Committees Are you able to: • work in a team environment; and • provide strategic policy advice and transmit community input to City Council and staff? Are you willing to support: Spice Radio CEO Shushma Datt (seen with Jobs, Economic Recovery and Innovation Minister Ravi Kahlon) promotes an antiracism campaign on her station every spring. Photo by Ravi Kahlon.

How do we move toward that step of what we believe is reconciliation?” Tao told the Straight by phone that his thinking has been influenced by UBC history professor Henry Yu, who recently testified about anti-Chinese racism at the Commission of Inquiry into Money Laundering in B.C. “There are a lot of Indigenous law aspects that can be inputted into Canadian immigration law—and, frankly, should be,” Tao said. “Because the way Canadian immigration law tests are right now, [they] are very assimilative, patriarchal, and don’t move forward the conversations we need to have on reconciliation.” SHUSHMA DATT

CEO Spice Radio Veteran broadcaster Shushma Datt isn’t reticent when it comes to discussing racism within her own community. In a recent phone interview with the Straight, the CEO of Spice Radio noted that India still has a caste system, as well as a class system grafted onto it by British colonizers. There were many massacres in South Asia in the 20th century, and not only by the colonial oppressors. During partition in 1947, when Britain divided its former colony into two countries, India and Pakistan, it has been estimated that between 200,000 to two million people were killed. This occurred as Muslims fled India and Hindus and Sikhs escaped Pakistan. Datt recalled that when she was a child growing up in Nairobi, her uncle married a woman who had been abducted and abused during that period. She often expressed how much she detested Muslims. “There would be so much hatred in her voice,” Datt recalled. “And yet, in our family we never talked about hatred toward another religious group.” Even though the Datts were Brahmins— the highest caste in Hinduism—the family regularly discussed religious teachings from Islam, Christianity, and Sikhism. “Our parents were very particular about talking about equality and talking about

religious freedom,” Datt said. This continued when the family moved to England, and this attitude has remained with Datt since she immigrated to Vancouver in the early 1970s. Upon her arrival, she described the city as a “beautiful place”, but she could not find a job at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation or other radio stations because she had three things against her: she was a woman; she was “coloured”; and she had a thick English accent. This was despite her experience as a broadcaster at the BBC, where she had interviewed rising pop stars such as Mick Jagger, Jimi Hendrix, and members of The Who. She found a job at CJVB in Vancouver, making peanuts coproducing Indian programs. By 1979, Datt was producing TV shows for the local multicultural channel, something she continued doing for 40 years. She started her first radio station in 1987. In 2015, on the birth anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr., Datt launched Spice Radio’s annual Hands Against Racism campaign. It coincides with and was inspired by Holi, the Hindu festival of colours, where people gather together to share laughter and repair broken relationships. People visit the station or attend an annual party in nonpandemic years, place their hand in a rich palette of paint colours, and leave a hand imprint on a long sheet of white paper, along with a message. “For me, starting Hands Against Racism was to look deeply into my own soul,” Datt said. “Are we racist? If I can become nonracist and talk about it openly, maybe my friends will become nonracist. And so slowly and gradually, we will move forward and eliminate as much racism as we can in our own lives. That was the idea behind it.” Spice Radio’s Hands Against Racism has won awards from the B.C. government and the B.C. Association of Broadcasters. It has also attracted the attention of everyone from Premier John Horgan to members of the federal and provincial cabinets to entertainers and human-rights activists. “I think I was very impressed by the teachings of Martin Luther King,” Datt said. g

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REAL ESTATE

Young agent’s work ethic yields results in Surrey

by Charlie Smith

ctor Michael Caine once said that there’s no point in competing with young talent. “I just concentrate on getting better each day,” he said. Some veteran Surrey realtors might share this sentiment now that there’s a talented young agent in their midst. Raycel Fortaleza became a fully licensed realtor before her 20th birthday. And last year she won a Sutton Realty President’s Award, which goes to those who close at least 18 deals. Fortaleza, 23, said that she’s the only realtor from her Grade 12 graduation class at Holy Cross Regional High School. Now her friends’ parents are connecting with her to discuss their real-estate needs. “I’ve had two classmates who I went to school with in elementary, and I helped their parents purchase properties and sell their house as well,” Fortaleza told the Straight by phone. One of those parents is an investor who bought three properties. In this regard, she has something in common with Vancouver’s most famous realtor, Bob Rennie, who sold homes owned by his friends’ parents after leaving

Raycel Fortaleza, 23, enjoys helping her friends’ parents buy property and sell their houses.

high school more than 40 years ago. “There are a lot of families who think

that buying a home—purchasing a home— is very hard or it’s only for the other people who have big money,” Fortaleza said. “But I feel it’s very possible.” She acknowledged that the market is very hot right now. But the young agent quickly added that condo prices are not rising nearly as dramatically as singlefamily homes. And interest rates remain at historic lows. “Don’t be scared, because it’s mostly the single detached [houses] that have the 30 offers at once,” Fortaleza advised. She credited a seasoned Surrey agent, Karolina Bukala, for mentoring her when she was launching her career. Nowadays, young people interested in becoming agents are contacting Fortaleza to find out how to succeed. She’s happy to help them once they’ve become licensed, and she is even prepared to allow some to shadow her as she goes about her business. Her longer-term goal is to have her own team of agents. As for her work ethic, she said learned this from her parents, who ran their own business from their home. Her father is a gregarious extrovert—and she said that this has rubbed off on her. “I like to say hi

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THE GEORGIA STR AIGHT

to everyone as well and be approachable.” She’s not only selling homes to people twice her age: last November, she also found a home for a young married couple who were 26 and 27 years old. It was a two-bedroom, 880-squarefoot condo near Gateway Station that went for $390,000. The couple was prepared to spend less than $400,000 and assumed that for this price, they would only be able to get a much smaller onebedroom unit. Another couple in their 30s, also firsttime buyers, purchased a two-bedroom condo in Guildford for $471,000 in November. According to Fortaleza, the final sales in this complex with the same f loor plan were above $550,000. “These two buyers were very fortunate to purchase before the new year,” she said. Fortaleza has observed that millennial buyers tend to be quite decisive, sometimes wanting to submit offers immediately after viewing a property. And because she’s younger herself, she feels that she’s a good judge of which homes they might be interested in seeing. “They’re very determined to get to their goal,” Fortaleza noted. g

MARCH 18 – 25 / 2021

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REAL ESTATE

Scapegoaters missed the mark on money supply

by Ng Weng Hoong

es, it is different this time. As Metro Vancouver’s housing prices surged to yet another record high, the public’s response today stands in stark contrast to what it was a few years ago. During the housing boom or crisis of the 2010s, politicians and opinion makers angrily blamed foreign investors for allegedly killing affordability in the region. The outrage against the supposed foreign invasion, led by newspaper columnists being mistaken for real estate experts, created a new type of populism. Politicians were quickly on the bandwagon as they campaigned to crack down on the “toxic demand” emanating from out of Asia, notably China. These days, the public is just as anxious, but the antiforeign anger for Metro Vancouver’s housing problems seems less explosive. More people are waking up to the far bigger threat of increased domestic money supply and low interest rates that have been driving the housing market for more than a decade. Some have just discovered the modern-day alchemy called quantitative easing (QE), where central bankers mysteriously create money out of thin air. (Yes, it can be done). Josh Gordon, the Simon Fraser University academic who became famous for his strident blaming of Chinese buying, is finally showing signs of acknowledging monetary policy. Another veteran anti–foreign capital campaigner, Raymond Wong of the Housing Action for Local Taxpayers (HALT), recently discovered QE and can’t stop tweeting about it. Between 2009 and 2014, the U.S. Federal Reserve System, effectively America’s central bank, led other countries to launch

In the most recent round of housing price hikes, there’s significantly less anger being directed at Vancouver residents who trace their roots back to China. Photo by Veronica Dudarev/Unsplash.

For those who realized what the central banks were doing, QE was manna from heaven. – Ng Weng Hoong

three rounds of QE to fight the global financial crisis of 2008. Together, they unleashed trillions of dollars into the world economy so that it would not collapse under the combined weight of the U.S. subprime banking crisis and the humongous costs of former president George Bush’s two disastrous wars in Iraq (2003) and Afghanistan (2001). The high priests of finance continue to conduct extreme monetary experiments

on an unsuspecting public that even most Canadian politicians still do not comprehend. Equally blindsided, the Canadian media has failed to explain to the public that billions of dollars, mostly leveraged from within the country, have poured, and continue to pour, into the hot housing markets of Metro Vancouver, Greater Toronto, and other major cities. The Bank of Canada did not participate in the initial QE exercises, but it oversaw the doubling of the country’s domestic money supply between 2009 and 2019. I first mentioned the impact of QE and money supply on housing prices on my website in October 2015. I emailed my article to David Eby and Prof. Gordon, as well as mentioned QE in conversation with David Ley, a University of British Columbia academic who studied the migration of

Asian people into Vancouver. Eby, B.C.’s housing minister and attorney general in the ruling NDP provincial government, was then the housing critic when the party was in opposition. Astonishingly, these three influential people dismissed QE’s relevance to the Vancouver housing market despite it being the most important monetary event of this century. More than a decade of ultraloose monetary policy has led to the inflation of stock and real estate values in major cities around the world. But wages or labour costs hardly budged while businesses held back investments as companies chose to hoard their surplus cash and buy back stocks, to the delight of shareholders. The early QE experiment was deemed a success, as governments claimed credit for saving the global economy while keeping inflation low. For those who realized what the central banks were doing, QE was manna from heaven. This helps explain the huge widening of the wealth gap between the elite and the rest over the course of the 2010s. WHEN PEOPLE IN Metro Vancouver started feeling the pain (or pleasure) of rising housing prices, the focus immediately fell on foreign buyers, especially Chinese people. The 2010s coincided with China’s growing assertiveness under President Xi Jinping and the increasing presence of “Asianlooking” people in Metro Vancouver that included old-stock Chinese Canadians as well as the rising number of students, businesspeople, new immigrants, and affluent travellers from across the Pacific. The conditions for scapegoating were set. They were further enhanced by dubious see next page

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FOOD

Community builder aims to avert famine in Rwanda

by Charlie Smith

ancouver community-development worker Lama Mugabo likes to say that hunger feeds his desire to find a cure for malnutrition. That’s because after his family fled from Rwanda to Burundi as refugees, he experienced pangs in his stomach on a regular basis due to poverty. “My mother tried to stretch a pension cheque that she received every month to feed us,” Mugabo told the Straight by phone. “So I said that hunger has been a companion. It followed me like a shadow—an unwanted visitor who refused to go home.” This childhood hunger has led him to remain closely connected to Rwanda throughout much of his adult life in Canada. Mugabo is the cofounder of Building Bridges With Rwanda, which fosters connections between Rwandans and international organizations. In addition, he’s working with a friend, fellow Rwandan expatriate and scholar Cedric Habiyaremye, in bringing quinoa to the landlocked East African country. “We’re very excited to introduce this superfood to Rwandans’ diet, and we hope to use it as a tool to fight malnutrition in Rwanda and propel the country into sustainable development,” Mugabo said. “I’m really delighted to be part of this experience.” Habiyaremye, a Washington State University research associate, was selected as an Aspen Institute New Voices Fellow for 2020. Last year, he also delivered a TED Talk entitled “How quinoa can help combat hunger and malnutrition”. Habiyaremye explained in his presentation that beans were the only thing that kept Rwandans alive in periods of hunger and starvation. Cultivating quinoa, which is indigenous to South America, ensures there is regular rotation of crops to ward off diseases and pests. “While beans are considered nutritious, quinoa has far more micronutrients,” from previous page

research and flawed studies that purported to “prove” that Chinese investors were buying up Metro Vancouver’s limited housing supply. The media heaped more misery on Vancouverites with regular false stories that they had the world’s second least affordable housing, a ranking derived from Demographia’s limited survey of eight countries. People were soon led to the “obvious” conclusion that “foreigners” had cornered the housing market at the expense of “hardworking local wage earners”. Politicians joined in the scapegoating as it enabled them to evade responsibility for the region’s housing problems, widening income disparity, and rising living costs. 10

THE GEORGIA STR AIGHT

You don’t hear about Rwanda today because things are going well. – Lama Mugabo

build a community garden. In addition, he’s been involved in community activities for many years in the Downtown Eastside and Strathcona neighbourhoods. That includes helping residents of a temporary modular housing project learn about gardening, nutrition, and wellness.

Habiyaremye said in his Ted Talk. “And with quinoa, you can make many [more] different food products and drinks than beans.” Meanwhile, Mugabo, who has a UBC master’s degree in community and regional planning, is spreading the word in Vancouver through a Zee Zee Theatre project. The Virtual Humanity initiative is designed to challenge biases about differences and features more than 30 people who are speaking on the theatre’s platform. So how does Mugabo feel about becoming a virtual human? “I’ll tell you what, I’ve been described worse,” he said with a laugh. It’s easy for him to find humour these days. Not only is he helping people in Rwanda, he’s also the field projects manager at an SFU Pacific Water Research Centre initiative to reactivate a greenhouse and

IT’S AN ASTONISHING life path, given where he came from. Burundi was a francophone country, but Mugabo was keen to learn English at a very young age. So he joined an English-language club run by American missionaries in Bujumbura, which was then the capital city. And when the UN High Commission on Refugees offered scholarships to students to study abroad, Mugabo was an obvious candidate. That brought him to Pearson College in Victoria in the mid-1970s. “It was a unique school in the sense that it believed that bringing young people together for two years, give them an opportunity to study together and live together, and hopefully they’ll go back to their home countries and help build a better world,” Mugabo said. “But I didn’t have a country to go back to, ’cause I was a refugee.” When he returned to Africa, he went looking for opportunities. That led him to live in the capital of Zaire, Kinshasa, for three years before he moved to Nairobi, Kenya. Canadian friends then sponsored him to come to Canada as a landed immigrant in 1981. After working for the United Nations Association in Canada, helping B.C.

Although foreign demand certainly contributed to Metro Vancouver’s rising housing cost, the mainstream media and academia failed to investigate a host of other factors that were also in play. Since last year, I have tweeted out at least 16 other factors that have driven the region’s housing markets during the past decade. I have compiled them into the list below, in no order of importance. 1. More than a decade of strong economic growth. 2. Record lending by banks and alternative mortgage providers. 3. Historically low interest rates. 4. Doubling of Canadian money supply between 2009 and 2019. 5. Quantitative easing’s impact on hard

asset prices. 6. Real estate investment trusts. 7. The commodities boom, including oil at US$100 a barrel or more, from 2008 to 2014. 8. Metro Vancouver’s population boom. 9. The surge in technology and liquefied natural gas investments from 2010 to 2019. 10. The tourism boom and record arrivals from 2008 to 2019. 11. Airbnb from 2015 to 2019. 12. Intergenerational wealth transfer. 13. Government regulations and red tape blocking and delaying housing supply. 14. Millennial household formation (i.e., nonpopulation household growth) 15. Preboomer seniors living in their houses.

Lama Mugabo says that growing quinoa in East Africa will sharply reduce malnutrition.

MARCH 18 – 25 / 2021

students get involved in local and global issues, he moved to Montreal and attended Concordia University. Just as exams were about to take place in 1994, the Rwandan genocide hit the news. “In 100 days, a million people were killed for no other reason than they were Tutsi,” Mugabo said. “I was really devastated.” After completing his master’s degree at UBC, he worked at the Liu Institute for Global Issues, where he helped organize a national campaign to raise awareness of what had happened in Rwanda. His nongovernmental organization, Building Bridges With Rwanda, enables volunteers to go to the country to work side by side with Rwandans. While he was in Rwanda on an internship, he worked alongside Habiyaremye, who later obtained a scholarship to Washington State University. “So Cedric came to Pullman, Washington, and did his master’s in agriculture and went on to do a PhD in quinoa,” Mugabo said. When asked about the biggest misconceptions about Africa, Mugabo said the continent is always seen in a negative light in the West. “If it’s negative, they will put it out. If it’s positive, you won’t hear about it,” he declared. “You don’t hear about Rwanda today because things are going well. But you heard about it in ’94 because there was genocide.” If he mentions Rwanda to anyone who’s not interested in current affairs, the first thing they bring up is the 1994 massacres. “But if you’re interested in African issues or if you read on politics and so on, you’ll inevitably come across the fact that Rwanda has become a success story,” Mugabo noted. “It emerged from a basket-case situation 26 years ago and is now a model that others are emulating.” g Zee Zee Theatre’s Virtual Humanity streams online on Saturdays and Sundays until March 28.

16. Limited supply of developable land in Metro Vancouver. Given the precarious state of the COVID-scarred global economy, most major countries will likely continue with their policies of suppressing interest rates and boosting money supply. Governments everywhere, including in Canada, are bankrupt of ideas and money. They are counting on their housing markets to stay strong and remain a source of growth for their heavily indebted economies. Whether they succeed or not with more QE is another matter. The world’s geopolitical and economic conditions today are far worse than they were a decade ago. So, yes, it already is different this time. g

LIQUOR

Spring cleaning a time for asking big questions Where do the flowers, dust, Axl Rose candles, and weird bottles of liquor you never use come from?

by Mike Usinger

here in the hell does it all come from? That’s a question we ask on multiple fronts every time a rainy West Coast winter turns, seemingly overnight, into sun-drenched spring. Where in the hell does the dust—half an inch deep on the furniture, and making full-blown bunnies beneath the bed— come from? The second the spring sun arrives it’s made abundantly clear you’re the worst housekeeper in the world. For proof, simply look at the layers on your Arditi Collection side table, LG NanoCell 75inch 8K UHD LED smart TV, and Gaggia Babila Super Automatic espresso machine. Where do the flowers come from? How can daffodils, tulips, lamb’s ears, goat’s beards, bleeding hearts, star creepers, and fantastically filthy-sounding red hot pokers spend half the year doing sweet dick all buried where the sun don’t shine? And then pop back up like clockwork for a couple of weeks before going back to sleep for another seven months. But, because spring is time for cleaning, one of the biggest questions every March is “Where did all this crap I don’t need come from?” The Saint Axl Rose Dirty Lola prayer candle. The framed Williamsburg doily with “God Bless This Mess” spelled out in miniature Pabst Blue Ribbon bottle caps. Meik Wiking’s The Little Book of Hygge—you’ve never been to Denmark, so you have zero idea of how people there live. And mostly, because liquor’s all that’s getting you through the pandemic at this point—a half-dozen half-empty bottles of booze you have no recollection of buying, and have zero idea how to use. Meaghers’ Crème de Menthe. Berentzen Apfelkorn. Uphoria Pomegranate. Ricard Pastis de Marseille. And not one, but two bottles of Sour Puss—one tangerine and one raspberry flavoured. For those last two, we ask your forgiveness sweet Saint Bill Boothby, because at some point during the journey to truly enlightened liquor nerdom, we were obviously clueless. A well-stocked liquor cabinet might be a sign of good breeding, but not when Sour Puss is in the house. Here’s the problem with spirits—unless you’re talking cream-infused offerings like Baileys or RumChata, they theoretically last forever. Or at least during your time on Earth. Which means that Sour Puss will sit there until you either use it or dump it. There’s no need to drink that bottle of Old Fitzgerald Very Old 8 Year Old bourbon in two pulls because it’s still going to taste the same six months from now. Same

While Ricard Pastis de Marseille might seem every bit as useless as the two vintage bottles of Sour Puss in your liquor cabinet, the reality is that you’re sitting on the fixings for a Mauresque.

for whatever bottle of gin, tequila, rum, or cherry-cheescake bottle of vodka you’ve got kicking around. As for liqueurs, alcohol acts as a preservative. And that explains why, even though McGuinness no longer seems to make Uphoria Pomegranate, you’ve got a perfectly usable quarter bottle—which tastes disturbingly like cherry cough syrup—taking up valuable space in the liquor cabinet. And why, apart from the taste (think Pop Rocks melted in cherry cough syrup), that your Raspberry Sour Puss is perfectly consumable despite being at least a halfdecade old. So how to proceed? When looking at bottles you haven’t touched since Barack Obama was president, the easiest thing is to dump them down the drain or off the condo balcony. But then common sense also reminds you that we’re in pandemic times, where today’s job can vanish tomorrow. And when money’s tight you get creative with what you’ve got. You just need to accept that not every cocktail creation will remind you of that Macadamia Nut Mai Tai

you had at the Tahiti Nui in Hanalei. So, um, Sour Puss. The roots of the mouth-puckering liqueur can be traced back to the turn of last century, when cocktails were all about offerings like easy-pour Appletinis and Sex In the City Cosmopolitans. Never mind the Savoy, Experimental Cocktail Club, or Canon Bar—the world was happy with TGI Fridays and bridgeand-tunnel faves like the Blackberry Long Island Ice Tea and Electric Lemonade. So, as you spring clean, use up that Sour Puss by embracing the era of Blockbuster, Zima, and Must-See TV. As long as you’re in on the joke, no one will judge you for breaking out your best puffy pirate shirt or neon scrunchie and then settling in for a Seinfeld marathon with a couple of Rockets (blue curaçao, lemon-flavoured vodka, and Raspberry Sour Puss mixed with pulverized, Slurpee-like ice). Relive the golden age of appallingly named shooters with a double bill of Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights and a half-dozen Spray-Tan Porn Stars (1/2 ounce blue curaçao in a shot glass topped by 1/2 ounce Tangerine Sour Puss). No modern bartender wants to hear

the words “I’ll have an Appletini”, but no one will shame you for making use of the Berentzen Apfelkorn that’s kicked around since Oktoberfest 2013. Pull on the lederhosen and put a Bavarian spin on things with an Apple Strudel Martini (vodka, apple juice, lemon juice, simple syrup, Berentzen Apfelkorn, shaken with ice and strained into a glass). Crème de menthe provides an essential building block for the Grasshopper, but more than three or four of those things a day is asking for clogged arteries. So instead embrace the Grasshopper Coffee (Kahlúa, espresso, steamed milk, and crème de menthe), starting with one at 9 a.m. as you begin your home workday, another at 10 a.m., and repeating as necessary. Uphoria Pomegranate? Um, sometimes you gotta cut your losses and do the Prohibition pour. There’s a reason McGuinness no longer makes that stuff. Finally, spring cleaning can also be a time for revelations when it comes to culling the liquor cabinet. As much as that mysterious bottle of Ricard Pastis de Marseille might seem about as useful as Sour Puss, a quick Google search reveals you’re actually sitting on liquid gold. At some point you obviously muled it back from France after a couple of beautifully blurry weeks in Provence, and then promptly forgot about it. Which is a shame, because the anise-flavoured spirit—created in 1932 as an alternative to absinthe— is the building block for a whole range of elegant French cocktails. Go traditional with a Ricard (Pastis de Marseille, grenadine, and water). Swap in the pride of Marseille for absinthe in an Obituary or a Tremblement de Terre. Or use Ricard Pastis de Marseille the way God intended by making the classic French cocktail known as the Mauresque. Originally absinthe-based, the drink dates back to the 1830s when it was reputedly invented by French soldiers stationed in Algeria. Today Ricard Pastis de Marseille is most-often used, and the drink is potent thanks to the 45 percent ABV of its main ingredient. Have two, and the hell known as spring cleaning will screech to a halt. Or suddenly—despite the layers of dust, and endless armies of dust bunnies—become a whole lot more enjoyable. MAURESQUE

2 ounces Ricard Pastis de Marseille 1 ounce orgeat syrup Chilled water Pour Pastis and orgeat syrup into a chilled Collins glass. Top with chilled water, add ice cubes, and stir. g

MARCH 18 – 25 / 2021

THE GEORGIA STR AIGHT

MUSIC

Mixtapes changed the way we consume music

by Mike Usinger

ou Ottens has gone to another place, leaving the world to wonder whether or not he ever truly understood the exquisite misery and unbridled joy he was once responsible for. The Dutch-born inventor, who died on March 6 at age 94, created the cassette tape. Employed by the Netherlands-based Philips tech company, he helped develop analog magnetic tape that could be used for recording and playback. Determined to design a format that was thinner and more portable than reel-toreel, Ottens eventually came up with the two-spool cassette. First presented to the world in September of 1963 at the Berlin Radio Show, the format became a runaway smash, racking up the adjusted-for-inflation equivalent of $1.2 billion in sales by the end of the decade. While the invention certainly made Philips shareholders happy, what’s really important about the cassette tape is the way it revolutionized the music industry. Overnight, you didn’t need a portable record player with the world’s longest extension cord to take your favourite album to the beach. Instead, you were ready to roll with a cassette player and a cassette, which came in both prerecorded and DIY versions. It was the blank cassette which became Ottens’s true gift to the world. For generations of audiophiles, C-90s were the place to make painstaking, at times frustrating, but ultimately rewarding statements on the power of music. Before there were Spotify, Apple, and Tidal playlists, there were mixtapes. Thank you, Lou Ottens. To create the perfect mixtape back in the day meant blocking off an entire afternoon, knowing that things might bleed into the evening. Then the real work began. Step one was the opener—a song with enough nitro to get everything off the ground with an incendiary bang. The doubly challenging thing was that the track had to be brand new. There was no filling a mixtape with songs you’d heard a million times before— that was an express pass to instant burnout. And the last thing you wanted to get sick of after three plays was a 90-minute creation you’d spent 10 laboured hours on. So you took each discovery of a worldbeating banger as a sign that you were meant to get busy with the cassette deck. Slow’s “Have Not Been the Same”. Rollins Band’s “Low Self Opinion”. Geto Boys’ “Fuck ’Em”. The Runaways’ “I Love Playing With Fire”. Or Sonic Youth’s “Teenage Riot”. The more bombastic, epic, angry, or loud the song was, the more it was a no-brainer for the lead-off. And then the real work began. A 90-minute cassette meant you were in for roughly 14 songs per side, meaning 28 in 12

THE GEORGIA STR AIGHT

A perfect mixtape required finding a fire-starting kickoff track like D.O.A.’s “World War 3” or Public Enemy’s “Night of the Living Baseheads.”

No single act belonged on a mixtape more than twice— that was just plain laziness. total. Because we’re talking pre-Internet here, that meant you had to stockpile vinyl, and later stupidly overpriced CDs, for the job at hand. Think 14 or so full-lengths, where the goal was to find at least a couple of cuts from each album to love. No single act belonged on a mixtape more than twice—that was just plain laziness. Two tracks per artist was acceptable—but only for one appearance on Side A and one on Side B. Having to find two songs on an album meant you sometimes accidentally struck gold. Railroad Jerk’s “Bang the Drum” off One Track Mind was totally gold star, but after a few spins it became obvious that “Forty Minutes”—thrown on side B of the tape, mostly because you just wanted to get the fucking thing finished after nine hours—was the album’s real diamond. Mixtapes made you think long and hard about sequencing. There was no overstating the importance of coming hard out of the gate, especially when getting ready for a road trip. What worked were ragers like Black Flag’s “Rise Above”, Public Enemy’s “Night of the Living Baseheads”, D.O.A.’s “World War 3”, N.W.A.’s “Straight Outta

MARCH 18 – 25 / 2021

Compton”, and Blur’s “Song 2”. What didn’t was the Cranberries “Linger”, Iris DeMent’s version of “Big City”, R.E.M.’s “Everybody Hurts”, and Crash Vegas’s cover of “Pocahontas”. Except all those latter songs slotted in brilliantly on a mixtape after that first all-important rush of adrenalin. When, understanding that no one needs to hear 90 minutes of bands that sound like NOFX or Toxic Holocaust, you began mixing things up. So I, Braineater’s “Johnny”, was followed by Hank Williams’s “Move It on Over”, 100 Flowers’ “Reject Yourself ”, Secret V’s “Waiting for the Drugs to Take Hold”, and the Breeders’ “Drivin’ on 9”. And then, for the stretch run of Side One, it was time for anything goes. So, even though Pantera and the Smiths don’t belong anywhere near each other in real life, it made sense for “Fucking Hostile” to be followed by the sensitive saddo-anthem “Please, Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want”. The only thing left to take care of after that? Finding a song that could fill the final 39 seconds of Side One, which is where the likes of the Dirty Rotten Imbeciles’ “I’d Rather Be Sleeping” and the Descendents’ “Weinerschnitzel” proved gifts from God above. A God who’s currently making mixtapes with Lou Ottens. Then it was time to do it all over again for Side B—nothing wrong with getting funky instead of full-bore to start with. Think Fishbone’s “Freddie’s Dead”, Soup Dragons’ “Free”, or Missy Elliott’s “Work It”. As with Side A, it was all about making

sure to change things up stylistically on the journey. As great as Metallica’s “One” is, you didn’t sandwich it between Slayer’s “Raining Blood” and Crowbar’s “The Lasting Dose”. Bookending it with Wu-Tang Clan’s “Protect Ya Neck” and SNFU’s “Cannibal Cafe”, however, was perfectly acceptable. The tricky thing about mixtapes was getting things right the first time. Because there was no fixing things if you blew the sequencing by going too heavy on the squeegee punk, Scandinavian death metal, or chopped-and-screwed Houston hip-hop. Unlike a Spotify or Apple playlist, there was no moving songs around with the click and drag of a mouse. When you got a mixed tape wrong, the magic was gone after a couple of plays. But when you nailed it, right down to the absolutely mandatory naming of your creation (Hello My Awesome Mix Tape #6!), it was pure goddamn magic. Mixtapes changed the way we consume music—the idea of a killer playlist being every bit as important as a great album holding true to this day. Some things in life are worth the exquisite misery when the payoff is unbridled joy. A perfectly executed mixtape was one of them. Dig that old box of TDKs or Maxells out of the attic—even if it means heading to your parents’ or grandparents’ storage locker—and thank Lou Ottens. Especially if you’re lucky enough to find a C-90 called My Awesome Mix Tape #6 that starts with “Have Not Been the Same”. g

ARTS

Cultch finishes season with Van Gogh comes alive on four shows by local artists soaring screens with music

by Staff

by Martin Dunphy

he Cultch’s four remaining shows of its 2020/2021 season will be presented online during April and May. Streaming performances of IGNITE: Plugged In! (April 9 to 11), The Essentials (April 16 to 18), The Boy in the Moon (May 6 to 9), and 1 Hour Photo (May 28 to 30) will mark the end of a season like no other. “Throughout this year of unprecedented challenge, the Cultch has continued to prioritise its support of local artists struggling from the effects of an industry in lockdown by pivoting to create world-class online theatre, thanks to the hard work of a talented video and tech team,” a Cultch news release stated. “Going into the spring, the Cultch is thrilled to continue this work with some exciting new projects from local artists.” IGNITE: Plugged In! is described as “an exciting online festival created entirely by the Cultch Youth Panel”, while gospel-soul musician Khari Wendell McClelland’s multidisciplinary The Essentials involves “an exploration of music,

Tetsuro Shigematsu revives his 1 Hour Photo in digital format. Photo by Raymond Shum.

poetry, movement, and ideas”. The Boy in the Moon, postponed from its originally scheduled spring 2020 presentation, will bring its story of a family dealing with a severely disabled child, and a Tetsuro Shigematsu fan favourite, 1 Hour Photo, will be reborn digitally. Tickets to all remaining shows went on sale March 12. g

unique travelling exhibit of images from one of the world’s most famous painters, Vincent van Gogh, has its roots in a mesmerizing spectacle presented in vast abandoned quarries in France more than four decades ago. The current show, Imagine Van Gogh: The Immersive Exhibition, opens in Vancouver’s Convention Centre this Friday (March 19) and runs until June 11. But the creative genesis of this walk-through extravaganza took place in Les Baux-de-Provence in Southern France in 1977 as a grandiose artistic exhibition within limestone caverns and tunnels carved out of the district’s rocky hills. That enveloping experience was the grand expression of an inspiration by French photographer and filmmaker Albert Plécy, who took two years to develop his concept of “Image Totale” and present it in an immersive audiovisual showcase. That combination of massive projected images synchronized to a musical soundtrack wowed the public. Imagine Van Gogh features over 200 of

Tickets for Imagine Van Gogh will specify both date and time. Photo by Laurence Labat.

the tortured Post-Impressionist painter’s works from three periods: Aries, SaintRémy-de-Provence, and Auvers-sur-Oise. Music from eight classical composers accompanies viewers strolling through neckstretching galleries where original 70-centimetre paintings become seven-metre giants on towering screens that magnify every brushstroke. g

CANADIAN FILMS

teleﬁlm.ca/en/seeitall MARCH 18 – 25 / 2021

THE GEORGIA STR AIGHT

SAVAGE LOVE

Cuckolding is great until masturbation begins by Dan Savage

b A MALE FRIEND—not my best friend but a close one—told me his wife was really attracted to me, another male, and asked if I was attracted to her. His wife is an incredibly hot woman and I thought it was a trick question. I read your column and listen to the Savage Lovecast, Dan, so I know there are guys out there who want other men to sleep with their wives, of course, but I didn’t want to risk offending this friend by saying “Fuck, yeah” too quickly. After he convinced me it wasn’t a trick, I told him that of course I wanted to have sex with his wife. She’s incredibly beautiful and a really great person. I told him that I was not the least bit bisexual and not into MMF threesomes, and he

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told me he wouldn’t even be there. He just wanted to hear all the details later— and hear them from me, not her. I’ve slept with his wife four times since, and the sex we’ve been having is phenomenal for both of us. But the talks I have afterwards with my friend make me uncomfortable. We’ve gotten on the phone later in the day or the next day and I give him the details and insult him a little, which he likes, and, honestly, none of that is the problem. What makes me uncomfortable is that I can hear him beating off during these phone calls. Which makes me feel like I’m having phone sex with a guy. I’m not comfortable with this, and I feel like our friendship has become The Georgia Straight Confessions, an outlet for submitting revelations about your private lives—or for the voyeurs among us who want to read what other people have disclosed. Dan Savage advises a reader to use his cellphone’s voice memo app to leave messages for a friend who likes masturbating to his cuckolding details. Photo by Jonas Leupe/Unsplash.

I confess A nice aspect of getting on a BC Ferry (if necessary), is that the kids play areas are closed. The vessels are finally a bit more quiet.

Get real I confess that my friend’s total inability to know when joking is not okay is a big barrier between us. He’s a funny guy, but he’s so uncomfortable with any emotions other than that, that it makes it almost impossible to have a close relationship. He even joked when I was trying to tell him how upset I am about the fact that my father is dying ffs. I just wish he could get real. (And yes, I have told him this before.)

In order to be wanted... ...you have to make yourself desirable. You aren’t going to attract anyone if you are sour and self-absorbed. Lesson learned.

I don’t get it I had the weirdest dream the other night. I had a dreamt that I came faceto-face with an old friend from my past whom I had a falling out with. He said “you are my brother.” I got confused. “What do you mean I’m your brother?” I said. “We’re not even related.” He said, “It doesn’t matter. None of it matters anymore because we’ll always be brothers.” Strange. I wonder if maybe it’s a sign trying to tell me something?

What to do... I may have just lost my job and it’s not my fault.

Visit 14

THE GEORGIA STR AIGHT

to post a Confession MARCH 18 – 25 / 2021

sexualized in a way that just feels unnatural for me. The one time we met in person to talk after I fucked his wife he was visibly aroused throughout our entire conversation. I would like to keep fucking my friend’s wife, and she wants to keep fucking me, but I don’t want to talk with my friend about it afterwards. Shouldn’t it be enough for him to just know I’m fucking her? - Distressed Aussie Chafes Under Cringe Kink

P.S. This is his thing, not hers. She loves having sex with me, but the calls to her husband don’t do anything for her. It’s obviously not enough for him to know you’re fucking his wife. If that was enough for him, DACUCK, he wouldn’t want to get on the phone with you afterward. This is a consent question. If your friend consents to his wife having sex with other men on the condition that he hears about it afterwards—and hears about it from those other men—that condition has to be met for the sex she’s having with other men to be consensual. And while the calls afterwards aren’t a turn-on for his wife, DACUCK, if those calls make it possible for her to sleep with other men and she enjoys doing that, then the calls actually are doing something for her too. You’re not obligated to have these conversations with your friend if they make you uncomfortable—because of course you’re not—but if you were to

refuse, DACUCK, then your friend might withdraw his consent for you to fuck his wife. Your friend and his wife might be willing to revise these conditions just for you, DACUCK, so it couldn’t hurt to ask. But if he says no, you don’t get to fuck his wife anymore. Or if he says no and his wife keeps fucking you, then she’d be cheating on him for real and not “cheating” on him for fun. Zooming out for a second: you knew this was a turn-on for your friend before you fucked his wife. You knew he was a cuckold, which means you knew he would be getting off on you fucking his wife, DACUCK, which means you knew he’d be out there somewhere beating off about you and your dick. Even if he didn’t want to hear from you directly afterwards, even if he was pumping the wife for the details, your friendship was sexualized pretty much from the moment he asked you to fuck his wife and you agreed. So the problem isn’t the sexualization of this friendship or the awareness that this dude is out there beating off about you. The problem is having to listen to him beat off when you get on the phone— or having to see him become visibly aroused when you meet up in person— and there’s a pretty easy workaround for that. (I love a solvable problem!) Instead of giving him a call after you’ve fucked his wife, use the voice memo app on your phone to record a long, detailed, insultsee next page

b I’M A 20-SOMETHING hetero female living in the South. I’m having trouble with my boyfriend of almost three years. We are very happy together but our sex life is lacklustre. The really strange part is that the sex, when we have it, is always good. It’s intense and satisfying. However, getting sex to happen is a challenge. My boyfriend has a lower libido, but it’s not a huge discrepancy. I want sex two to three times per week and he wants it maybe once per week. We have compromised on twice a week.

However, the sex is routine and banal. It always happens on the same days—Sundays and Wednesdays—and there’s no spontaneity at all, which makes it boring for me. In addition, my boyfriend never initiates. He has a history of being promiscuous—he slept with about 100 women before we were together—and I am completely fine with that. But he has admitted to me that he misses his promiscuous life and that monogamy is difficult for him. He says he loves me and that he wants to make this work. He is the person I want to marry, but I feel like I’m settling sexually. Please help. - Becoming Annoyed Now About Lovemaking

The sex, when you have it, is intense and satisfying but routine and banal at the same time because there’s no spontaneity. The answer is obvious: if having sex at the

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same time and in the same place is ruining the intense and satisfying sex you’re having, BANAL, maybe don’t always have sex at the same time or in the same place? And since you’re the initiator and that’s unlikely to change—turning a cheater into a faithful partner is easier than turning a noninitiator into an initiator—that means you’re in charge of the when and the where. You’ve already compromised on having sex twice a week, which is your low-end preference and double his preference (so you got the better end of that deal), and now all you gotta do is initiate sex on different days, at different times, and in different places. Easy-peasy. Now for the nonobvious answer, BANAL: you need to listen to what your boyfriend is telling you. Monogamy is difficult for everyone, not just your boyfriend, but some people find it more dif-

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ficult than others. And asking someone who finds monogamy extremely difficult to make a monogamous commitment… Yeah, that’s not a great plan. This isn’t entirely on you; someone whose libido tanks when they’re in a monogamous relationship and/or someone who’s way more interested in sex when they’re free to sleep around shouldn’t be making monogamous commitments. Or not making them yet. Monogamy might not be right for your boyfriend at the moment, BANAL, but that doesn’t mean it won’t be right for him ever. Just like sex you have to schedule might not be right for you now, while in your mid-twenties, but that doesn’t mean scheduled/routine/maintenance sex won’t be right for you ever. g

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