The Georgia Straight - Brew Crew - May 19, 2016 by The Georgia Straight

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2 THE GEORGIA STRAIGHT MAY 19 – 26 / 2016

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Time is precious. Choose your beer accordingly. Next time you have a Mill St Original Organic Lager, take your time. This way you won’t miss the distinct flavour that comes with only brewing it in small batches, using only the finest ingredients. The result is a light, crisp, refreshing taste with a clean finish. Now that’s something worth savouring.

MAY 19 – 26 / 2016 THE GEORGIA STRAIGHT 3

4 THE GEORGIA STRAIGHT MAY 19 – 26 / 2016

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8 THE GEORGIA STRAIGHT MAY 19 – 26 / 2016

LONSDALEQUAY.COM

CONTENTS

Northern lights, Porteau Cove. Jonathan Colvin photo.

HEALTH

On the eve of Vancouver Craft Beer Week, learn how keep your beer belly at bay by paying attention to what you decide to snack on while indulging in all those delightful sips of suds. > BY GAIL JOHNSON

THE LARGEST SELECTION OF THE NORTH FACE IN VANCOUVER

FOOD

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COQUITLAM CENTRE MALL 604.677.4770 PHOTO / GREG MIONSKE M NSKE NSK KE

COVER

With the addition of a multiband blowout, organizers of the Vancouver Craft Beer Week say they’ve realized a dream. > BY MIKE USINGER

BEER

From painters to photographers, local artists are finding show spaces in craft-beer tasting rooms across the city. > BY LUCY L AU

START HERE 42 43 38 37 42 43 26

Confessions I Saw You Real Estate Red Meat Savage Love Straight Stars Theatre

TIME OUT

ARTS

Miami, Madrid, and Toronto have made their big art fairs a destination. Now a Vancouver show wants to add us to the list.

28 Arts 37 Music

> BY JANE T SMITH

SERVICES

MOVIES

A shallow pool makes for A Bigger Splash; High-Rise offers sex, death, and elevators; sheepherders butt heads in superb Rams; Men & Chicken lays a big old comedy egg. .

39 Careers 12 Healthy Living 38 Real Estate

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10 THE GEORGIA STRAIGHT MAY 19 – 26 / 2016

Enjoy beer without the belly

t’s a good thing Vancouverites are so health-conscious, given their love affair with craft beer. We all know that ale ain’t exactly low in calories and that pounding back the pints can lead to the dreaded beer belly. A mid-alcohol IPA, for instance, has more than 200 calories in a 12-ounce bottle, according to Beer of Tomorrow, an L.A.–based website. It equates a 12-ounce bottle of Sierra Nevada Bigfoot Barleywine to a 20-ounce iced caramel macchiato from Starbucks (about 330 calories), while a pint of New Belgium Fat Tire Amber Ale has approximately the same number of calories as two Oreo Personal trainer Craig Boyd says cookies (about 140). Meanwhile, that alcohol can inhibit fat loss. something like a six-ounce pour of the Bruery’s Imperial Stout has about 500 calories, the same amount Vancouver’s Precision Athletics, says in a large order of McDonald’s fries. that most people look at drinking as Alcohol is the major contributor to simply a few extra empty calories, calories in beer, with every gram add- with some opting for beverages like ing about seven calories. Then there vodka and water that may seem to are the carbohydrates due to the fer- have fewer calories. However, the mentation process’s leftover sugars. problem is that the alcohol in beer An obvious way and other drinks to avoid beer gets converted to belly is, of course, acetate, which is to not drink any a waste product Gail Johnson beer—or at least and needs to be not very much of it. But there are processed by your liver, he explains. other strategies that beer lovers can “Your liver is also responsible for consider when it comes to keeping breaking down fat,” Boyd says. “So if belly fat at bay. you have a couple of beers and head “Watch what you eat with those to the gym the next day you could be beers,” says Cristina Sutter, a private- nullifying your fat-loss gains.” practice sport dietitian at Optimal Alcohol also affects your sleep, he Performance Clinic in downtown says, limiting the amount of rapid Vancouver. “Beer is often served eye movement (REM) in any given with greasy snack foods like nachos, night. It’s during REM that your calamari, sliders, cheesy bread, or body physically repairs itself and pizza. These platters challenge even produces testosterone and other the strongest of willpowers, and al- hormones that are important for cohol impairs our restraint around maintaining lean body mass, buildour food choice. Instead, order a ing muscle, and burning fat. plate of edamame, mussels, tuna “Beer, and specifically hoppy beer, tataki, or shrimp cocktail for guilt- can lead to beer gut and man boobs,” free munching.” Boyd says. “There is a double effect: Sutter also suggests cutting out the effect of alcohol on your sleep weekday drinks and holding out for a can lower testosterone. Simultansingle special night on the weekend. eously, beer, and specifically hoppy “If you have an active social life beer, can increase your estrogen. and enjoy a couple casual beers three “So drinking beer is sort of a or four nights a week, this can double multifaceted weight-gain problem. your overall intake compared to It messes with your hormones, resomeone who only drinks on a Sat- duces your recovery ability, and urday night,” she says. “Savour every stops you from burning fat if you drink. Better to enjoy one craft beer are working out,” he says. than mindlessly guzzle five light beer.” Aside from limiting intake to help Personal trainer Craig Boyd, co- with fat loss, Boyd recommends infounder and director of trainers at corporating high-intensity interval

Health

training (HIIT) into workout routines along with steady-state aerobic exercise. The former involves short bursts of maximal-effort cardio followed by recovery periods of active rest. “My recommendation is two to three HIIT sessions per week of 2030 minutes, which include a warmup and cool-down,” he says, “as well as one session of steady-state, lowlevel aerobic exercise over 45 minutes—60 minutes is ideal.” Weight training is also vital, with Boyd suggesting two to three sessions per week to help improve testosterone levels, posture, and metabolism. Personal trainer Janet Archibald, founder of Alive & Well Personal Training in Kitsilano, notes that it’s important for anyone hoping to get rid of excess stomach weight to realize that we can’t “spot lose”. “Our bodies lose and gain weight where we are predisposed to, and for many that is in our midsection,” Archibald says. “What we can do, though, is tighten and firm those muscles up by doing things like crunches, planks, and many other abdominal exercises. Getting into a good habit of incorporating cardio, strength, and flexibility into your regular fitness routine is very important. They each play an important role in our health.” Cardio strengthens your heart and lungs. “The stronger our heart and lungs are, the better we feel, and cardio is what kicks in our endorphins, which give us that natural-high feeling. When you’re doing cardio, you are burning calories while you’re doing the activity as well as up to four to six hours later.” Strength training is important because muscle density helps burn calories 24 hours a day, she says, while flexibility helps ward off back strain and other unexplainable aches and pains. “The best way to keep the beer gut down is to choose things like lowercalorie beers and lower-fat foods and to move more,” Archibald says. “There is nothing wrong with enjoying those things once in a while, but the remainder of the time you should be wanting to take better care of your body,” she says. “Always remember the 80-20 rule and you can’t go wrong. Eighty percent of the time we should be eating healthy, exercising regularly and hard, and resting enough. Then 20 percent of the time you can let loose.” -

The Georgia Straight | Vancouver’s News and Entertainment Weekly | Volume 50 Number 2525 1635 West Broadway, Vancouver, B.C. V6J 1W9 www.straight.com Phone: 604-730-7000 / Fax: 604-730-7010 / e-mail: gs.info@straight.com Display Advertising: 604-730-7020 / Fax: 604-730-7012 / e-mail: sales@straight.com Classifieds: 604-730-7060 / e-mail: classads@straight.com Subscriptions: 604-730-7000 Distribution: 604-730-7087 EDITOR + PUBLISHER Dan McLeod ASSOCIATE PUBLISHER Yolanda Stepien GENERAL MANAGER Matt McLeod EDITOR Charlie Smith SECTION EDITORS

Janet Smith (Arts/Fashion) Mike Usinger (Music) Steve Newton (Time Out) Adrian Mack (Movies) Brian Lynch (Books) EDITORIAL ADMINISTRATOR Doug Sarti ASSOCIATE EDITORS

Gail Johnson, John Lucas, Alexander Varty STAFF WRITERS

Tammy Kwan, Lucy Lau, Travis Lupick, Carlito Pablo, Amanda Siebert, Craig Takeuchi, Kate Wilson SENIOR EDITOR Martin Dunphy EDITORIAL ASSISTANT Jennie Ramstad PROOFREADER Pat Ryffranck CONTRIBUTING WRITERS

Gregory Adams, Nathan Caddell, David Chau, Jack Christie, Jennifer Croll, Ken Eisner (Movies), George Fetherling, Tara Henley, Michael Hingston, Ng Weng Hoong, Alex Hudson, Kurtis Kolt,

Robin Laurence (Visual Arts), Mark Leiren-Young, John Lekich, Amy Lu, Bob Mackin, Michael Mann, Rose Marcus, Beth McArthur, Verne McDonald, Allan MacInnis, Guy MacPherson, Tony Montague, Kathleen Oliver, Ben Parfitt, Vivian Pencz, Bill Richardson, Gurpreet Singh, Colin Thomas (Theatre), Jacqueline Turner, Andrea Warner, Jessica Werb, Stephen Wong, Alan Woo ART DEPARTMENT MANAGER

Janet McDonald SENIOR DESIGNER David Ko CONTRIBUTING ARTISTS

Alfonso Arnold, Rebecca Blissett, Trevor Brady, Louise Christie, Emily Cooper, Randall Cosco, Krystian Guevara, Evaan Kheraj, Kris Krug, Tracey Kusiewicz, Kevin Langdale, Shayne Letain, Matt Mignanelli, Mark “Atomos” Pilon, Carlo Ricci, William Ting, Alex Waterhouse-Hayward DIGITAL PRODUCT MANAGER

Chet Woodside LEAD WEB DEVELOPER Jeffrey Li WEB DEVELOPER Tina Luu WEB ADMINISTRATOR Miles Keir

PRODUCTION SUPERVISOR Mike Correia PRODUCTION

K.T. Dean, Kristen Dillon, Sandra Oswald

AD SERVICES ASSOCIATE

Lyndsey Krezanoski

AD SERVICES ASSISTANT Jon Cranny DIRECTOR OF ARTS, ADVERTISING & MARKETING

Laura Moore SALES MANAGER Sharon Smith (On Leave) ADVERTISING REPRESENTATIVES

Steve Barmash, Glenn Cohen, Laura Findlay Robyn Marsh, David Pearlman, Patrick Ruel, Dawn Searle, Kathy Skelton

PROMOTIONS + SPECIAL PROJECTS

Navdeep Chhina

ADVERTISING + PROMOTION ASSISTANT

Maya Beckersmith

DIGITAL SALES COORDINATOR

Brenna Woodhouse INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY DIRECTOR

Dennis Jangula

CREDIT MANAGER Shannon Li ACCOUNTING SUPERVISOR

Tamara Robinson

ACCOUNTING

Angela Krommidas

RECEPTION/PROMOTIONS ASSISTANT

Teagan Dobson

The Georgia Straight is published every Thursday by the Vancouver Free Press Publishing SUBMISSIONS The Straight accepts no responsibility for, and will not Corp. Copies are distributed free every week throughout Vancouver, Burnaby, North necessarily respond to, any submitted materials. All submissions should be and West Vancouver, New Westminster, and Richmond. International Standard Serial addressed to contact@straight.com. Number ISSN 0709-8995. Subscription rates in Canada $182.00/52 issues (includes GST), $92.00/26 issues (includes GST); United States $379.00/52 issues, $205.00/ 26 issues; foreign $715.00/52 issues, $365.00/26 issues. Contact 604-730-7087 if you wish to distribute free copies of the Georgia Straight at your place of business. Entire contents copyright © 2016 Vancouver Free Press, Best Of Vancouver, BOV And Golden Plates Are Trade-Marks Of Vancouver Free Press Publishing Corp.

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West End Residents: Parking Permit Renewal Current West End residential parking permits will expire on Tuesday, May 31, 2016. To make purchasing your annual permit as quick and easy as possible, we offer three ways to do it: • Online (24 hours a day, seven days a week) at vancouver.ca/parking • Phone 3-1-1 (7 am – 10 pm, seven days a week) • In person, during business hours at City Hall, 453 West 12th Avenue (8:30 am – 5 pm) and at the West End Community Centre, 870 Denman Street THE COMMUNITY CENTRE PARKING PERMIT DESK WILL HAVE EXTENDED HOURS ON THESE DATES: • Friday, May 27, 9 am - 7:30 pm • Saturday, May 28, 9 am - 2 pm • Monday, May 30, 9 am - 7:30 pm • Tuesday, May 31, 9 am - 7:30 pm REGULAR HOURS OF OPERATION: Monday – Friday, 9 am – 1 pm and 2 – 5 pm year round (except holidays) To pay online or by phone, you must: live in the permit parking zone and have valid car insurance registered in your name and address, a credit card (American Express, MasterCard or Visa), and a valid email address. You may pay by cash, cheque or credit or debit card if you pay in person. If you are not the registered owner or lease holder of the vehicle, you must purchase your permit in person and bring in the required supporting residential and vehicle documents. Your new permit will be mailed to the residential address provided within 10 business days of purchase. The permit fee is $76.37 and payment options are: cash, cheque, American Express, MasterCard, Visa or debit card. FOR INFORMATION: vancouver.ca/parking or phone 3-1-1

Beat the ban.

Corrugated cardboard, newspapers and office papers are banned from landfills. Aren’t you glad you’re saving money by recycling?

For more ideas on recycling at work call 437-GVRD

MAY 19 – 26 / 2016 THE GEORGIA STRAIGHT 11

Summer 2016

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RETAIL

Registrations are NOW open. Contact us at 604 430 3337 or visit our new website at italianculturalcentre.ca Before and After Care available

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Lifting or Acne Facial & Lymphatic Massage Jade Powder Energy Soak $68/120min Acupuncture, acupressure $60/90mins. Ins. acc. $58/120min 778-893-3422

LIVING THROUGH LOSS COUNSELLING facilitated support group for people who are grieving the death of a significant person. Monthly drop-in- last Wed of every month YLTLC #201 – 1847 W. Broadway Van. 604-873-5013 www.ltlc.bc.ca

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STRAIGHT MAY MAY 19 19 –– 26 26 // 2016 2016 12 THE GEORGIA STRAIGHT

Infertility Awareness Assoc. of Canada (IAAC) provides educational material & support to individuals or couples experiencing infertility. Meetings: 7 pm the 2nd Wed of the month. Richmond Library & Cultural Centre, 7700 Minoru Gate. Info 523-0074 or www.iaac.ca

MOOD DISORDERS

SUPPORT GROUPS We have peer-led support groups all over the Lower Mainland for people with depression, bipolar disorder and anxiety led by well-trained facilitators. Group sessions during days, evenings, or Saturdays. For location and times of groups:

www.mdabc.net 604-873-0103 Parkinson Society BC

offers over 50 volunteer-led support groups throughout BC. These provide people with Parkinson's, their carepartners & families an opportunity to meet in a friendly, supportive setting with others who are experiencing similar difficulties. Some groups may offer exercise support. For information on locating a support group near you, please contact PSBC at 604 662 3240 or toll free 1 800 668 3330. Anxiety? Depression? Free Mental Wellness Support Group held on Saturdays (10:30 am – 12:30) Promotes a holistic approach to healing (body, mind & spirit). Networking and interactive learning experience in a safe, non-judgmental environment. For more information call 604-630-6865 or visit www.mentalwellnessbc.ca

Fertility Support Group Discover new perspectives make positive changes and learn simple tools to take charge of your reproductive wellness while connecting with other women. The meetings provide a space for open discussion. 2nd Tuesday of each month 7:45 - 8:45pm (Sign up required) Reg & Info call: 604-266-6470 or www.familypassages.ca

Are you living with HERPES? Need Support? Join our Vancouver (Lower Mainland) social group and come out and meet others in the same situation. All ages. Lots of different events (pub night/brunches/ bowling/ movie night/ etc.). We also run a bimonthly support group. Join our Meetup site 'vancouverhfriends' or contact vancouverhfriends@yahoo.ca for more info

IBD Support Group Suffer from Crohn's and ulcerative colitis? Living with IBD can often be overwhelming, but you're not alone! 3rd Wed of each month the GI Society holds a free IBD support group meeting for patients & their families to come together in an open, friendly environment. 7:00pm at RavenSong Community Health Centre (2450 Ontario St). or more information call 604-875-4875.

PFLAG Vancouver Parents, Families & Friends of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgendered and Questioning People Call for meetings or individual info: 604-626-5667 or info@pflagvancouver.com www.pflagvancouver.com

Battered Women's Support Services provides free daytime & evening support groups (Drop-ins & 10 week groups) for women abused by their intimate partner. Groups provide emotional support, legal information & advocacy, safety planning, and referrals. For more information please call: 604-687-1867

Sex Addicts Anonymous

12-step fellowship of men & women who share their experience, strength and hope with each other, that they may solve their common problem and help others recover from their sexual addiction. Membership is open to all who desire to stop addictive sexual behaviour. For a meeting list as well as email & phone contacts go to our website at

www.saavancouver.org

1807 Burrard St (@ 2nd) • 604.336-4448 1232 Burrard St (@ Davie) • 604-428-2420 2580 Kingsway (@ 34th) • 604-336-0420 2619 W. 4th Ave (@ Bayswater) • 604-336-6420 6657 Main St (@ 51st) • 604-336-7420 866 East Broadway • 604-876-2163

Suffering from OCD?

Obsessive Compulsive Disorder The BC OCD support group meets most Saturday afternoons from 4 to 6 p.m. at the Central Vancouver Public Library on Level 6. For more info call:Mon to Fri 9:30 am to 8 p.m. Suggested that you have actual diagnosis first before calling and attending the group. Arte - (604) 325 - 6290

411 Seniors Centre Society

704 – 333 Terminal Ave. Van 604 684 8171 An inclusive centre for older adults, 55+ on low income, and those with disabilities, offering year-round educational, health-related, recreational activities. Information & Referral to assist seniors with resources & services in the community ie seniors benefits, income tax preparation & government services. Hours: Monday to Friday, 9:00am to 4:00pm

5038 Victoria Dr (@ 34th) • 778-379-4420 1108 Richards St (@ Helmcken) • 604-891-1420 991 Marine Dr (North Van) • 778-340-2420 11295 Clearbrook Rd (Abbotsford) • 1-604-746-0420 5536A Wharf Street (Sechelt) • 1-604-885-0191 MORE LOCATIONS OPENING SOON!

FOOD

Best bites to pair up with craft-beer picks

s Vancouver’s craft-beer scene has exploded, local watering holes have stepped up with their food offerings, too: no longer are you stuck with ordering a plate of nachos to go with a round of cold ones. Check out the must-have items from a few local establishments and be prepared to dig in—and, of course, wash it down. ALIBI ROOM (157 Alexander Street)

Eat this: Chicken wings breaded with gluten-free chana flour, served with fresh cilantro, and thoroughly doused in house sauce, “a unique Central City Brew Pub’s bacon breakfast burger is a succulent indulgence combo of honey, vinegar, roasted to buddy up with its gold-medal-winning Red Racer India Style Red Ale. garlic, Thai chilies, and secrets and magic”, says general manager Perrin Trivia: The Sausage Party charcuterie Pale Ale. Trivia: Pretzels and beer are Grauer. Either that or the natural beef platter was originally a joke’s name pretty much the perfect pairing, and burger or meatballs. Down with it: created by office staff in the begin- with two dozen craft taps and five kinds Brassneck King Maker Pilsner or Per- ning phases of menu creation—saus- of mustard to choose from—including sephone Keller Pilsner. Trivia: “Chef- age party being a colloquial term for the craft-beer black mustard—there are owner Greg Armstrong is a devout a group of men, says Kate Bobroske, scores of ways to create a pretzel-andmarketing and part- beer combo here. heavy-metal and nership manager c ou nt r y-mu s i c of the Granville THE BLACKBIRD PUBLIC HOUSE fan, which leads E nt e r t a i n m e nt (905 Dunsmuir Street) Eat this: not only to biGail Johnson Group. “Everyone in Currywurst. The pub’s ode to zarre and highly entertaining sonic moments in our the team thought it was so funny that classic German street food, it features a house-made curry ketchup, open kitchen but has also earned him it just kept.” roasted bratwurst, and golden the loyal following of his small and extraordinarily hard-working kitch- THE BIMINI PUBLIC HOUSE (2010 French fries finished with mayo for en staff, who are likewise inclined West 4th Avenue) Eat this: Sausage extra-saucy pleasure. Down with it: to a quiet worship of the dark arts, board. “This dish shines a light on our Moon Under Water Light Side of whiskey-soaked guitar-playing, and great partner Two Rivers Meat Co., who the Moon Lager. Trivia: Vietnamthe practice of a particular species of handmake all of the feature sausages,” ese short ribs are a long-time fasays executive chef Alvin Pillay. The vourite on the appetizer menu, the gentlemanly nihilism.” sausages rotate in variety every four resto partnering with Chau Veggie, BELMONT BAR (1006 Granville months to feature different proteins which has been making some of Street) Eat this: Braised beef short and styles. The sausage board also fea- Vancouver’s best Vietnamese food ribs, served with potato purée, roasted tures the guest’s choice of artisan mus- for 30 years, to nail the recipe. mushrooms, and bacon jus—savoury tards and classic condiments. Among and tender. Down with it: Elysian our favourites is the IPA chorizo paired CASCADE ROOM (2616 Main Street) Dragonstooth Stout or a glass of J. with tarragon mustard and sauerkraut. Eat this: Pan-seared Haida Gwaii Lohr 7 Oaks Cabernet Sauvignon. Down with it: Postmark West Coast halibut, served with Sole Food Farms

Best Eats

THINGS TO DO

chives and lemon arancini, fresh B.C. heirloom tomatoes, and traditional pesto. “This dish is exactly what we are about: sustainable, seasonal, and ethically responsible,” says general manager Justin Taylor. Down with it: Bar manager Rob Scope’s Sea Wall, with de Vine New Tom Gin, Lillet Blanc, house-made falernum, fresh lemon, egg whites, and Ms. Betters Bitters Smoke and Oak. Or Main Street Brewing’s Saison #7. Trivia: “When executive chef Tim Evans…took his first job in Canada, at Enigma on West 10th, he was nearly fired for not knowing what cilantro was,” Taylor recalls. “He was asked by the head chef to go find some but after some lengthy time had passed, the chef went looking for him and he had to fess up that he had no idea what he was looking for. Tim, hailing from England, simply called it something else—fresh coriander. The story repeated itself when he discovered that courgette and aubergine, as they are called in England, were really just zucchini and eggplant.” CENTRAL CITY BREW PUB AND RESTAURANT (871 Beatty Street;

13450 102nd Avenue, Surrey) Eat this: Bacon breakfast burger, a blend of juicy and messy, with a fresh chuck-andbrisket bacon patty, house-made bacon jam, jalapeño Havarti cheese, fresh tomato and lettuce, pork rinds, and a fried egg. Down with it: The brewery’s gold-medal-winning Red Racer India Style Red Ale. Trivia: The options are almost endless with the build-yourown-burger program and its extensive list of premium ingredients. Says Josh Bentley, director of operations, restaurants: “We had a math genius do the math and there are, literally, 14,250,297,600 combinations!”

LIBRARY SQUARE PUBLIC HOUSE

(300 West Georgia Street) Eat this: Signature burger, made using beef brisket and chuck sourced from Cache Creek and featuring two patties, sherrysautéed mushrooms, and freshly fried buttermilk onion rings. Down with it: Phillips Blue Buck Pale Ale. Trivia: “Last summer, our culinary team, including kitchen managers and chefs, travelled to Cache Creek to meet their meat,” says executive chef Alvin Pillay. “An in-depth tour of the cattle farm by its ranchers gave our kitchen managers a deeper appreciation for natural beef as well as motivation to cook our burgers perfectly every time now that we know the cattle by name.” TAP & BARREL (various locations) Eat this: Tap burger. The certified Angus beef patty is made in-house, topped with caramelized onions and white cheddar, and served on a fresh brioche bun with sea-salted fries. Down with it: One of the pub’s Collabobeers, “a unique, singlebatch, local beer brewed with the help of our staff, available exclusively at our restaurants”, notes Kira Enos, marketing and communications administrator. Trivia: Some of its menu items are made with local craft beer, like the jumbo pretzel’s beer and cheddar sauce and the beer-battered fish and chips. -

FOOD High five

Meal ticket BEER BONANZA If you’re a craft-beer and art aficionado, check out an upcoming fundraiser to get the best of both worlds. The Eastside Culture Crawl is hosting a brewery tour (1000 Parker Street) on June 4 from 1 p.m. to 6 p.m. to support its festival in the fall. Guests will be taken to four different East Vancouver craft breweries, including Storm Brewing and Callister Brewing Company, with tasting flights— small glasses holding different beers—provided at each location. The brewery tour will culminate with a wrap-up party at Strange Fellows Brewing. Tickets ($50) can be purchased at www.eventbrite.ca/. -

Cocktail of the week

Five places to find craft beer flights

ALIBI ROOM (157 Alexander Street) Choose your tasting flights from over 50 taps of local and imported craft beer.

ST. AUGUSTINE’S (2360 Commercial Drive) Pick four craft beers from its “live” beer menu, served on its signature wooden paddle.

LAMPLIGHTER PUBLIC HOUSE (92 Water Street) From lagers and pilsners to premium ales and bitters, choose any three beers for a sampling flight.

PORTLAND CRAFT (3835 Main Street) Select four beers from its neatly printed craft beer chalkboard to build your flight.

BIERCRAFT BISTRO (3305 Cambie Street) Pair your craft-beer tasters with some popcorn or mouthwatering poutines.

FLAMINGO #1 A tall, frosty pint isn’t the only way to enjoy craft beer—and no, we’re not talking sleeves, cans, or straight out of the growler. Rather, Clough Club has cooked up a special craft-beerinfused cocktail using handcrafted vodka, Pimm’s No. 1, watermelon juice, and Phillips Brewing Company’s ginger beer. It’s a busy sip, which will be served at the Vancouver Craft Beer Week Festival (June 3 to 5) at the PNE Fairgrounds. Can’t wait? Stop by Clough Club (212 Abbott Street) for a taste test anytime between now and the fete. -

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DARBY’S PUBLIC HOUSE (2001 Macdonald Street) Eat this: Library burger. Traditional pub fare with a couple of twists, including fontina cheese and root-beer-and-onion jam. Down with it: Persephone Pale Ale or Strange Fellows Talisman Pale Ale. Trivia: Darby’s makes its own bacon and sausages inhouse for its weekend brunch.

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VISIT US ONLINE FOR TAKE-OUT OR DELIVERY! MAY 19 – 26 / 2016 THE GEORGIA STRAIGHT 13

BEER

Leah Heneghan, Paul Kamon, Chris Bjerrisgaard, and Tyler Olson are dedicated to developing Vancouver Craft Beer Week with integrity. Amanda Siebert photo.

Craft beer week grows but stays true to roots at the Strathcona Beer Company. “When you grow festivals, the people ancouver Craft Beer Week who sponsor them and the people has come a long way from who pay for them—ask music fesits charmingly small-scale tivals—are usually booze sponsors. beginning six years ago, They’re the ones who pay the freight. but what makes the folks behind it But when you’re doing a festival proudest is that the spirit of the event about craft beer and you’re unwillhasn’t changed in the slightest. ing to take the big guys’ money, it’s “In the initial going, we wanted to difficult, because you don’t have the do this because we were passionate easy funding that a lot of people get. about it,” says Chris BjerrisWe had to bootstrap this thing gaard, marketing direcup, and I think that’s my bigtor and one of the four gest point of pride.” Check out… principals behind what’s STRAIGHT.COM BJERRISGA ARD, now Canada’s biggest Visit our website OLSON, KAMON, celebration of craft beer. for food and drink AND HENEGHAN “We wanted to see more interviews, news, have reason to be proud. beer events in Vancouver and reviews The inaugural VCBW in because there weren’t any. 2010 concluded at Heritage As things began to get more Hall on Main with a festival that serious, we started to have a mission statement where we were like, drew around 100 enthusiasts. Since ‘What are we trying to do?’ And this then, the fest portion of the event is something that we always look back has grown each year, moving to the on, and make sure we check ourselves. old Salt Building near False Creek Our main mission is still to grow craft before heading outdoors to differbeer and craft-beer culture—without ent locales (the Hard Rock Casino parking lot in Richmond, Olympic compromise.” That’s been accomplished, he sug- Village) and finally settling in its gests, thanks to above-and-beyond current location at the PNE. This year’s edition of Vancoudedication to the cause from a Vancouver Craft Beer Week team that ver Craft Beer Week runs May 27 also includes events director Leah to June 5. Highlights of the 10-day Heneghan, technical director Tyler event include a kickoff party at the Olson, and sales director Paul Kamon. Roundhouse Community Arts and “Doing it without compromise Recreation Centre with 32 breweries has been really tough,” Bjerrisgaard and cideries on-site. Biercraft Bistro notes, reached on his cellphone see page 16 > B Y M IKE USIN GER

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Craft beer week

from page 14

hosts the week’s wildly poplar Belgian Showcase on May 30, while sours and fruit beers from 20 craft breweries will be the focus at Devil’s Elbow House in Crosstown on June 1. Things wrap with a three-day festival of beer, food, and a multiband livemusic blowout at the PNE from June 3 to 5. Presented by the Donnelly Group, it will feature food trucks and over 400 beers and ciders from 100 North American breweries and cideries. “We’ve always had bands and DJs involved, but this year we decided to really step it up and go to a festival size with a main stage and two side stages,” Olson says. “We had a contest with a hashtag, #willplayforbeer, to select local acts to open up and get the chance to play in a park for 5,000 people on a big stage. It’s great exposure for those bands, as well as the bands that we’re featuring, like the Boom Booms, JP Maurice, and Good for Grapes.” The festival will again also feature a pinball arcade and games area curated by the Donnelly Group (see sidebar below). Through this growth, VCBW has managed to steadily evolve while working to change attitudes about what makes a great beer. “A big part of our marketing was about breaking beer out of the industrial box and putting it in a new

context—essentially, trying to make it cool and attractive to people like millennials, and to women,” says Kamon, reached in his adopted hometown of Powell River, where he’s enjoying a beer on his deck in the spring sun. “Getting it out of that industrial model where it’s like, ‘You drink 24 of these after a hockey game.’ ” Interviewed over VCBW collaboration beer at Strange Fellows on Clark Drive, the East Van–raised Heneghan adds: “Every year, we grow and we change and we look at what worked and what didn’t work. We look at it like, ‘If we were going to a beer festival, what would we want to see?’ It’s a monster that keeps going and going, and when I say ‘monster’ I don’t mean that in a bad way—it’s a great thing.” And, even in small ways, that monster gives back to the city. One of the highlights of each year is a collaborative beer that improves the lives of people in Vancouver. “We get a brewery, and then a brewer from a different brewery to come there, and the ingredients donated from the hops guys and the maltings company,” Olson says, reached on his cell during a break from his day job working on movie sets. “They come up collaboratively with the recipe and it’s brewed for us for Vancouver Craft Beer Week. We serve it at all of our events, with the proceeds going to charity. This year it’s Music Heals.”

A Unique Combination.

Great Selection of Local Craft Beers and Delicious Gourmet Burgers

best local brew bets 2 Want from the folks on the front-

lines? Visit Straight.com and check out our guide “Vancouver’s craft brewery insiders share their favourite local beers” where a whole host of the city’s top brewmasters let you know what they’re drinking at work, and what picks they’re reaching for when out on the town.

It’s music, as well as a commitment to evolving, that explains why organizers are so excited about Vancouver Craft Beer Week’s new bandshowcase component this year, which will feature acts on three stages. (To understand the extent of their excitement, it helps to know about their musical backgrounds. During a stint in England, Heneghan worked at a record label and helped run a stage at the fabled Glastonbury music festival. Kamon and Olson have both worked on electronic-music festivals in B.C., and Olson ran stages at the Olympics. Bjerrisgaard used to work for local hiphop label Battle Axe Records.) “We’re all super-crazy stoked for the festival this year,” Heneghan says. “Getting the festival to this music-food-beer point is what we’ve all wanted to do from the very beginning. The four of us all have, to some extent, a background in music and/ or festivals, as well as this long-term love for beer. Getting our festival to the point we’re able to focus on craft beer and local music is what we’ve wanted from the beginning.” “By adding a music element this year, we’re showing that we’re a cultural event that you go to to listen to music, drink good beer, and enjoy food from the food trucks,” Olson says. “Our slogan this year is Music Food Beer, and it’s a celebration of all of that.” A major reason VCBW continues to grow is, of course, that the province’s craft-beer scene continues to explode. Kamon points out that, despite being a new and shiny thing to a generation that buys its beer in growlers rather than six-packs, the

microbrewery movement in B.C. is older than many think. While new craft-beer operations seem to pop up every week in Vancouver (scheduled to open in the next couple of months are the Andina Brewing Company, Faculty Brewing, and Luppolo Brewing), there was a time when the movement was considerably smaller. “We have these watershed moments,” Kamon says, “when craft beer really takes a leap. Like when Granville Island opened, and then you get R&B and Russell and Storm—some of the early pioneers. Then things kind of settle down for a while and breweries get bought up the way Granville did and Sleeman did. Then you have another one of these big moments, and that’s what happened in 2010.”

having to go across the border. We wanted a celebration in a place that deserved it, because the beer was just so good. So we ended up being the first craft-beer week in Canada.” This year’s music-festival component not only ramps up the entertainment a couple of bombastic notches, but also builds on the idea that VCBW is ultimately about community. And a crucial part of that component is that the bands playing the festival are either homegrown success stories or acts getting a big break. “What we decided to do with the music—and what’s been fantastic about it—is that we’ve stayed with our grassroots and our integrity,” Bjerrisgaard opines. “We thought, ‘We could bring in some big international bands,’ or do something that no one else is doing because it’s not necessarily profitable as its own thing, and make it a showcase for B.C. talent, B.C. music. The long-term goal is that, if you’re an up-and-coming artist, you want to play that Sunday spot that the Boom Booms have.” And, hopefully, help bring craft beer to a whole new audience. Because despite the growth of Vancouver Craft Beer Week, the ultimate goal remains the same: growing a proudly local movement without compromise. “It’s almost like Stage 2 starts now,” Bjerrisgaard suggests. “If you are going to grow craft beer, you have to grow it past the people who are just in it for the beer. We believe in craft beer, so how do you Trojan it into a new group of people? So we’ve got elements like the Donnelly Group bringing in pinball machines and all this extra fun stuff. It’s not just people standing around with tiny cups debating what beer is good. You can do that— you totally can—because we have the amount of product, and we’d never compromise the integrity. But at the same time, you can now bring your friend who doesn’t even like beer.” He pauses, and then adds with a laugh: “Or bring your celiac friend, because we have craft cider.” -

IT’S NO COINCIDENCE that the first VCBW happened in the year that Vancouver not only hosted the Olympics, but threw the kind of party that seemed to mark the beginning of the end of the No Fun City era. Kamon remembers wanting to capitalize on the energy and buzz that the Olympics gave Vancouver. He wasn’t alone. “We started Vancouver Craft Beer Week, and then breweries just started to open up,” he remembers. “And then, year after year, we’d see more breweries and it kind of created a critical mass. And now look where we’re at— we have 120 breweries in the province. That’s exponential growth. And the best part is that it’s small business. When I drink a Red Racer, I know my friends are getting paid. It’s a good B.C. story to see how we’ve embraced these new breweries and made them part of our community culture.” And right from the beginning, Olson says, Vancouver Craft Beer Week has been all about community. “There are craft-beer weeks all over the States,” Heneghan relates. “The initial thought was ‘Why isn’t there anything like that in Vancouver or Canada?’ We had this scene that was just starting to grow bit by bit and it seemed like the perfect time to celebrate it. What everyone For full information on Vancouver wanted to turn the attention on was Craft Beer Week, go to vancouver local craft beers so we weren’t always craftbeerweek.com/.

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There’s far more to Vancouver Craft Beer Week than food and drink, with pop-up versions of pubs and grooming shops. featured attractions at this year’s Vancouver 2 The Craft Beer Week three-day festival at the PNE don’t

stop with live music, food trucks, and a small army of onsite brewers pouring more than 400 different varietals. The Donnelly Group, which owns numerous bars across Vancouver, including the Lamplighter, Library Square, and Republic, is once again presenting the June 3 to 5 festival part of VCBW. “We’ve always had a partnership with Vancouver Craft Beer Week—ever since its inception,” says Donnelly Group director of marketing Damon Holowchak, speaking to the Straight via phone. “Last year we got a little crazy and decided to do a pop-up pub for the festival. We brought in some pinball machines and ping-pong tables, had Skee-Ball brought in, and did bocce in a grassed area. Essentially, we had a pop-up Lamplighter in the middle of the festival, and people lost their minds. They absolutely loved it. So we decided to kind of up the ante this year.” The Donnelly Group will be staging pop-up versions of three of its popular Gastown enterprises—the men’s grooming shop Barber and Co., the Lamplighter pub, and the cocktail-centric Clough Club—at the festival.

16 THE GEORGIA STRAIGHT MAY 19 – 26 / 2016

“We’re bringing in some of the DJs that work throughout our company and then surrounding ourselves with some of our favourite beer partners,” Holowchak says. “So that section of the festival will feature a lot of the local craft breweries that we work with really closely.” He notes that Vancouver’s craft-beer revolution has changed the way that the Donnelly Group’s bars do business, with the emphasis having shifted from macrobrands to local artisanal breweries. Today, for example, the Lamplighter has 50 mostly local beers on tap. Hanging with the micros that have proven popular at the Donnelly Group’s various ventures isn’t all that Holowchak is looking forward to at the VCBW festival. What he loves about the event is that although it’s theoretically about beer, it’s also about having fun. “We’re selling not just beer but also the ability to loosen up,” he says. “That’s kind of in our DNA as a company. Craft beer is all about being creative and having fun— which is funny, because that’s how craft beer started. It was never a business model. It was a movement started by people who were really passionate about beer.” > MIKE USINGER

BEER

Artists add visual flair to craft-beer scene From gallery spaces in brewery tasting rooms to photography exhibits, local artists are helping to elevate the beer-drinking experience > BY L UC Y LA U

lthough brewer Evan Doan is dressed in a nondescript cap and T when he meets the Straight at Doan’s Craft Brewing Company’s East Vancouver tasting room, his likeness to one of three characters splashed upon the wall behind him—a bearded, rosy-cheeked fellow rocking a wacky checkered top and accordion amid a sea of personified evergreens, polkadot mountaintops, and a hodgepodge of strange, doe-eyed creatures—remains uncanny. “It’s the first thing you see when you walk in, or when you’re walking by or driving by, and everyone is always like, ‘Wow, look at that,’ ” Doan says of the floor-to-ceiling mural, which was created and hand-painted by Vancouver artist Ola Volo. “It’s so different and unique—kind of like how craft beer is.” The large black-and-white painting, which depicts, in addition to Doan, big brother Jon and brother brewery co-owner Mike, is but one example of the local art scene’s increasing presence at craft-beer tasting rooms across the city. At Doan’s, Volo is also responsible for designing the brewery’s growlers and award-winning beer labels—a collection of whimsical illustrations that tell the story of the Doan brothers through the artist’s signature, folklore-inspired strokes. Opposite the striking mural, a cozy nook serves as a gallery space in the modest 450-square-foot spot, where guests can peruse pieces curated by Vancouver-based illustrator Eden Cooke. The exhibits rotate monthly and have spotlighted everything from quirky robot watercolours by selfdescribed “visual chef” Sunny Shah to moody travel shots by photographer

Artist Ola Volo designed Doan’s Craft Brewing Company’s beer labels and painted a mural in its tasting room. Lucy Lau photo.

Ryan Moore to scenic oil canvases by Carolynn Doan, the boys’ mother. “The nook is awesome; it’s a conversation starter, for sure,” says Doan. “And what better catalyst than beer to kind of thin Vancouverites’ social shells?” A short walk away at Callister Brewing, co-owner and head brewer Chris Lay echoes this sentiment. He loves listening from behind the bar as patrons discuss the meanings of the various photographs, paintings, and multimedia and sculptural works that line the bright, industrial-cool room’s walls. “They really bring up conversations about what you see,” says Lay.

“And the longer you sit and look at them—whether you’ve had one beer or three beers—you get different interpretations of what’s going on.” Known collectively as the Goldmoss Satellite—a reincarnation of Roberts Creek’s now-closed Goldmoss Gallery—the show space is culled by Lay’s friend and contemporary artist Lee Roberts, who occasionally works from a studio situated on the brewery’s mezzanine level. Roberts pulls from a mix of homegrown and international names for the ongoing display, which currently includes pieces by Edmonton-born painter Jay Senetchko, Brooklynand Sunshine Coast–based visual

artist Mira Hunter, and B.C. painterphotographer Bon Roberts. Like Doan’s, Callister even conducts openings for its exhibits, where guests have a chance to chat with featured artists and explore the brewery’s production and studio spaces. “Artwork and craft beer actually go really well together, because there’s a lot of creativity and work going on,” adds Lay. “And people love the behind-thescenes aspect of both of them.” Art also plays an integral part in the day-to-day operations of Strange Fellows Brewing, located just steps away from the mammoth artists’ hub of Parker Street Studios. The brewery’s Charles Clark Gallery—a

self-contained space separated from the tasting room by a flex wall— showcases monthly exhibits that go hand in hand with Strange Fellows’ so-called Strange Days, which recognize little-known superstitions from around the world through a collection of monthly events. March’s Carnival celebrations, for example, saw the space play host to a rainbow of snapshots taken at India’s equally vibrant Holi festival by Vancouver photographer Kyla Bailey, while May features a selection of cubist-style landscapes by artist Jessa Gilbert, who will later participate in a live-painting show for the Belgian fete of La Ducasse. Christine Moulson, Strange Fellows’ in-house graphic designer and the Charles Clark Gallery’s curator, notes that the exhibits typically “fall into place”, given the stream of submissions she receives from artists, who, at times, happen to be regular patrons. “We have a lot of customers that’ll approach me and say, ‘I really love your place. I love the beer; I love the gallery. Is there any chance that I could show?’ ” she explains. “And I say, ‘Yeah, sure. Let’s see what you have.’ It’s very organic.” Strange Fellows’ packed calendar of events suggests that the brewery, like many others, will continue to tap into the city’s creative drive. Soon-to-open tasting rooms, such as the Strathcona Beer Company, also promise an assortment of artistic elements, like dedicated gallery spaces and branded merchandise handcrafted by local designers. “I think what people really respond to well is just finding art in an unexpected place,” says Moulson. “It’s just the artist sharing his or her vision with you in a very unintimidating venue.” -

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n a transition that seemingly happened overnight, Vancouver’s craft brewers have stepped away from the IPA craze and moved toward another type that is just as flavourful but has the potential to appeal to a much broader group of imbibers, according to local cicerone Paul Pyne. As a cicerone—akin to a sommelier, but for beer—Pyne says that sour beer’s tangy tasting notes, which vary wildly from style to style, can win over beer, wine, and cider drinkers alike. “You’re not going to convert a Molson Canadian drinker or a wine drinker to craft beer by giving them a superhoppy northwest IPA,” Pyne says during an interview with the Georgia Straight at Big Rock Urban Eatery in Mount Pleasant, where he is a bartender. “But a sour, a nice lambic, or a gose of some kind— they can go over very well. I’ve often brought sours to wine parties, and it really kick-starts conversations.” He says that this type of beer gets its sharp, acidic taste from the addition of some volatile ingredients. When brewers pitch strains of bacteria—like lactobacillus (the same kind used to turn milk into yogurt) or pediococcus—into their brew, funky things start to occur. Pyne stresses that this process has the potential to throw a real monkey wrench into a brewmaster’s process if not handled correctly. “It’s very unique in brewing because it makes your brew house very susceptible to infection, and when you’re working with bacteria and yeasts that are raw, you can potentially contaminate other products by making a sour beer in your brewery, so it’s very finicky in that way,” Pyne says. There are key differences in how a sour can be produced: some are created through what’s called mixed

Big Rock’s Paul Pyne touts sour beers’ wide appeal. Amanda Siebert photo.

fermentation, which uses the natural process of clean starter yeast and the addition of bacteria, the more controlled option. Spontaneous fermentation, as its name suggests, employs natural bacteria and yeast in the air to “spike the beer and cause it to start fermenting”, according to Pyne. As such, spontaneous fermentation also takes much longer. (Think of making bread without yeast: doable, but not exactly quick.) Yet another method involves “kettle souring” the brew, a process that is relatively instantaneous compared to a standard aged sour. Although kettles may make more sense for a brewery—aged sours take much longer and tie up resources and equipment—Pyne says the flavour

profile of an aged sour is much more multidimensional. “Some bacteria, like Brettanomyces, takes a full year to develop, so by consuming oxygen and all the other sugars and bacteria, it can be ready in three months, but it’s not going to be desirable yet,” Pyne says. “It goes through stages of disgusting and gross before it comes back down to being uniform and wonderful.” Common sour-beer styles include lambic, gose, oud bruin, Berliner Weisse, and Flanders red. According to Pyne, “the main difference is the malt build and the ingredients that go into them. A lot of them are quite wheat-heavy, which gives them more of that body and thickness.” Fruit is often added as well, for two reasons: the naturally occurring sugars add to the beer’s fermentability, which can help speed up the process. The unique flavours of different fruits also help to balance out the beer’s sour quality with sweetness, making for a less aggressive, more palatable taste. Local easy-drinking sours include Four Winds Brewing’s Nectarous, a delightful dry-hopped sour with notes of apricot that should be at the top of every sour-beer virgin’s list. Another is Steamworks Brewing Co.’s Kettle Sour, which gets its tropical taste from Mosaic and Nelson Sauvin hops. Parallel 49 Brewing’s Bodhisattva, a sour white, is aged in French Chardonnay barrels, making for a deliciously crisp finish. Graham With, head brewer at Parallel 49, knows all about the trickiness that comes with brewing sour beer. “When we started brewing at Parallel 49, there wasn’t a big guide on how to brew sour beers, so we thought, ‘Let’s just start brewing and we’ll learn as we go,’ ” With says by phone. Their first sour release, Lil’ Red, a 4.5-percent Berliner Weisse made with sour cherries, “didn’t quite turn out as see page 20

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The Netherlands–based Heineken’s decision to power several breweries with energy from the sun has earned it the nickname “king of solar beers”.

Beer giants fight back against tiny breweries > B Y C HARLIE SMITH

here are large beer companies and then there’s Big Beer. Late last year, Brazil- and Belgiumbased Anheuser-Busch InBev reached an agreement to buy the world’s second-largest beer conglomerate, U.K.–based SABMiller, in a deal worth more than $100 billion. When this transaction is completed at the end of this year, 400-plus labels will come under one company’s umbrella. The new behemoth will have a 30-percent global market share. Numbers like these might surprise aficionados of Vancouver’s craft breweries, which are utterly tiny in comparison. But don’t think that the big guys haven’t noticed the growing market share for breweries that produce fewer than 160,000 hectolitres per year. In B.C., it has reached 20 percent, according to the provincial government. It’s likely far higher in East Vancouver. Last October, one industry watcher, Money writer Brad Tuttle, listed some tactics being used by large beer companies to remain on top. He noted that large corporations are creating their own “quasi-craft brands” and buying craft breweries. He also mentioned that the big guys are merging to “overwhelm the marketplace” and trying to control distribution. (This isn’t as easy in B.C., where the Liquor Distribution Branch has a monopoly.) And in some cases, Big Beer is defending “macro brews” and choosing to “bash craft beer snobs”, according to Tuttle. During the U.S. Super Bowl broadcast, Budweiser ran a macho advertisement with thumping music, declaring that it’s “not a hobby”, “not small”, “not sipped”, “not soft”, “not imported”, “not a fruitcup”, “not following”, and “not backing down”. Business Insider reporter Kate Taylor interpreted the message as a direct snub against craft beer. The implication was that craft appeals to effete tastes. Even as craft beer appeals to urban millennials, Anheuser-Busch’s most recent quarterly financial results showed that its global-brand revenue was up 5.9 percent. Revenues rose 3.1 percent in the quarter. The company also reported that volumes rose one percent in Canada, along with “good growth” for Stella Artois, Goose Island, and its “craft partners”. The major sore spot was Brazil, where macroeconomic factors are having a negative impact on consumers’ disposable incomes.

Sour brews

from page 18

hoped”, according to With. However, the brewing team had another sour on reserve, which they had actually begun brewing before Lil’ Red. “Lil’ Redemption was the first sour beer we brewed. We put it in wine barrels and let it age for three years,” With says. At 6.5 percent, the cherry sour was vastly different than its predecessor and definitely lived up to its name, according to Pyne, who sampled both beers when they were first released. 20 THE GEORGIA STRAIGHT MAY 19 – 26 / 2016

Anheuser-Busch claims that it is reaching millennial consumers, in part through—you guessed it—the development of craft beer. And in its 2015 year-end results, the company declared: “Our near beer offerings are responding to consumer demand for more choice and excitement.” Meanwhile, the world’s third-largest brewer, Heineken N.V., reported earlier this year that its sales volume rose seven percent in its last quarter, vastly exceeding analysts’ expectations. This came after it bought a 50-percent stake in California-based Lagunitas Brewing Company, which is the fifth-largest craft brewer in the United States. Heineken has also distinguished itself with its environmental record. It has worked with another Dutch company, SolarAccess, to install photovoltaic panels on five of its Heineken breweries as well as at its Tiger brewery in Singapore. Solarplaza, a private company that supports solar-energy initiatives, recently noted that Heineken could be called the “king of solar beers” because of its efforts in this area. It markets some of its beers as being “brewed by the sun” to appeal to environmentally conscious millennials. The largest single installation of solar power in the beer industry is at the MillerCoors brewery in Irwindale, California, according to Solarplaza. At that spot, there are more than 10,000 photovoltaic panels over a four-hectare site, but Heineken and Lagunitas still have seven of the top 10. Steam Whistle is a smaller Canadian brewery that also plays up its environmental credentials, relying on green power from Bullfrog Power since 2007. Its green bottles are heavier than brown beer bottles, and according to the company, they last three to four times longer. In addition, Steam Whistle markets itself through a fleet of electric-powered vintage trucks. Many Vancouverites have spotted the “Retro Electro”, a 1958 Chevrolet Apache pickup driven by company representative Mike Kiraly, which is powered by 24 lithium-ion batteries. Delivery trucks run on environmentally friendly biodiesel, carrying beer made entirely from natural, GMO–free ingredients. Although microbreweries like to talk up the fact that they hire local people and pay local taxes, breweries from outside of town—big and small—have shown that they won’t give up without a fight. For With, the shift to sours is simply a way for brewers to showcase their inventiveness. “I like my hops, too, but I think a lot of the reason for the rise of sours is people can’t get the hops they want to get, so it’s causing them to be a little more creative with their beers,” the brewer says. “I hope we see a lot more sour beers that are well-aged.”For a list of local sour beers and appropriate food pairings, courtesy of certified cicerone Paul Pyne, visit Straight.com.

ARTS

The second annual Art! Vancouver’s diverse offerings span Argentine painter Andrés Dorigo’s Laying Man, Israeli-born Efi Mashiah’s Gun, and (below left) musician Kirsten Nash’s Peony Ride.

Art! Vancouver joins fair frenzy

exhibits to let them know it was taking place,” she says. “You have to find quality. We just kept going and going and talking to people.” This year more than 100 exhibiting artists and galleries are joining in, from as far As international events draw growing numbers, Lisa Wolfin away as China, Austurns this city’s convention centre into a gigantic gallery tralia, and Argentina. Art fairs are surging around the globe, drawing Wolfin says the fair plays a role in showcasing lothousands of people to shows like ARCOMadrid, cal artists. “Say they can only show in Vancouver, BY JANET SM IT H Art Cologne, and Art Basel. Back east, residents and they don’t produce enough to show anywhere else,” tourists head in droves to events like Art Toronto she says, pointing to Bowen Island talent Marc Baur, and the Toronto Outdoor Art Exhibition. In fact, who makes landscapes out of meticulously ripped the European Fine Art Foundation’s most recent art- paper and gesso. “He sells every piece he can make, market report found that almost 40 percent of gal- so if people want to find someone like him, they have lery sales worldwide—about US$12 billion—were at to come here.” fairs in 2014. Then there was the logistical issue of turning a That all raised a question for long-time art- giant room at the convention centre into something ist and curator Lisa Wolfin: Why wasn’t there that feels like a high-end gallery. Art! Vancouver anything like that here in Vancouver—a ended up having to source its walls from Art Tohappening art hub that is also a tourist ronto, and has found a U.S. art-lighting company and cruise-ship destination? that can showcase the works in the way they deserve. The idea led Wolfin, who had organ- “We want to have the same look and feel and calibre ized art showings at Hollyburn Country of those other shows,” Wolfin explains. Club for about eight years, to hold the As for the art itself, expect a wild range of first Art! Vancouver last year at the pieces, from sculpture to photography to multiVancouver Convention Centre. And af- media. As Wolfin says, “It’s not just paint.” ter having more than 130 exhibitors and Look for the event’s signature runway show, in 9,000 people come through its doors, which Wolfin puts a face to the artwork by sending she’s game to make it an even bigger artists down the catwalk with their favourite piece. success this year. She’s also trying to expand off the convention-centre “The convention-centre people said site, with showings at nearby places like fashion outit was the best first-year event they’d ever had,” let Leone and the Bauhaus restaurant. “Long-term, Wolfin tells the Straight on a brief break from we want more events to go on around the city,” says organizing. “The only problem we had was Wolfin, pointing to the Miami Art Week that takes there was a lineup for alcohol. We didn’t know over that Florida hub each year. how many bars we’d need,” she adds, explainMore than anything, Wolfin’s dream is to make ing the event clearly has a social side to it and Vancouver an art-fair destination that ranks she’s adding more this year. alongside Miami and Madrid. “People fly in from Pulling together an international art fair, all over the world to these fairs,” Wolfin says. of course, has its challenges. Off the top, there “And we want to put Vancouver on the map for was trying to convince artists to take a chance people who want to do that.” on a fi rst show. “We just started researching artists and sending out invitations and then went Art! Vancouver runs from next Thursday to Sunday all over the place to speak to all the people at (May 26 to 29) at the Vancouver Convention Centre.

THINGS TO DO

From screws to oils, Art! Vancouver shows a range of media

How diverse is the art amid the hundreds of talents on display at this year’s Art! Vancouver fair at the Vancouver Convention Centre from May 26 to 29? Here is just a small sampling: EFI MASHIAH (Palm Springs, U.S.) Israeliborn Mashiah’s striking metallic pixelated works aren’t made with a computer, but by hand—he uses drills and screws to create three-dimensional images, from eye-tricking abstracts to provocative gun portraits. Check out his other half Elena Bulatova’s bright, splashy abstracts as well. KIRSTEN NASH (Vancouver, B.C.) The busy local musician also happens to have a talent for oils and acrylics, whether it’s colourful canvases depicting giant peonies in detail or work that captures old jazz cafés and musical history. ANDRES DORIGO (Santa Fe, Argentina) After showing here for the first time outside of his home country at last year’s Art! Vancouver, Dorigo went on to be picked up by multiple collectors and galleries in the U.S. and Europe. He’s back this year with his deeply humanistic, expressionistic paintings of his compatriots, as well as studies of Argentina’s rugged land- and waterscapes.

STEFAN ROGENMOSER (Surrey, B.C.) The Swiss-born artist was trained as a tool-and-dye maker, and now creates sculptures—mostly figurative and sometimes shocking—out of everything from metal to wood. Witness his Ripped Apart, a cherrywood carving of a man—or at least a man and his torso—hanging from wrist chains. > JANET SMITH

ARTS High five

Editor’s choice BALLET BOY With its off-the-hook dance numbers, songs by Elton John, and story of a boy’s journey from boxing ring to ballet studio, Billy Elliot: The Musical is a show that sends you out of the theatre with a big, stupid grin on your face. You can’t resist it— mostly because the production based on the hit 2000 movie sets its feel-good tale against the grit of County Durham’s 1984 miners’ strike. Of course, it all comes down to who plays scrappy Billy himself, but Nolan Fahey—a kid with mad ballet, tap, and gymnastic skills whom we’ve seen in a bunch of local musicals leading up to this—seems like he’s up to the task. Billy Elliot is at the Arts Club’s Stanley Industrial Alliance Theatre until July 10.

Five events you just can’t miss this week

REVOLUTIONS (At the Warehouse, 3681 Victoria Drive, to May 29) Immersive, interdisciplinary performance in a 7,000-square-foot industrial space. Wow.

MICHIKO SUZUKI: HOPE CHESTS (At the Burnaby Art Gallery to June 12) Gorgeously printed silk tents encapsulate girls’ adolescent dreams.

WIT (At Pacific Theatre from May 20 to June 11) A moving, Pullitzer Prize–winning play about life, death, and redemption.

NICOLA BENEDETTI AND DALE BARLTROP (At the Chan Centre on May 20 and 21) Vivacious duelling violins at the VSO.

HONG KONG EXILE (At the Fox Cabaret on May 24) Multimedia space opera at Music on Main—need we say more?

Guest pick

SYMPHONY AT THE ANNEX Our guest pick comes courtesy of Owen Underhill, artistic director of the Turning Point Ensemble, which presents Tasting Notes, a concert and dining night, at SFU Woodward’s and L’Abbatoir on June 5. Here’s the show he’s most looking forward to this week: “Don’t miss the Vancouver Symphony at the Annex program The Elusive, Imaginary Future [with maestro Gordon Gerrard, shown here, at the podium]. With a new commission by Gabriel Dharmoo and music by some of my favourite composers (Edgard Varèse, Melissa Hui, and Julia Wolfe), it will be a visionary experience.” The Vancouver Symphony Orchestra presents The Elusive, Imaginary Future at the Orpheum Annex on Sunday (May 22).

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ARTS

Layering sounds and textures, rising-star singer-composer Gabriel Dharmoo imagines an array of different â&#x20AC;&#x153;ethnicâ&#x20AC;? styles in his utopian musical world.

Dharmoo composes fictitious â&#x20AC;&#x153;court musicâ&#x20AC;? > BY A LEX A NDER VA R TY

utocratic conductors and dysfunctional bandmates aside, thereâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s something quite utopian about a wellmade musical ensemble. Everyone listens, everyone contributes, and, as rising-star singer and composer Gabriel Dharmoo notes in a telephone interview from his Montreal home, â&#x20AC;&#x153;everyone knows their place.â&#x20AC;? That shouldnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t be too difficult for the 11 Vancouver Symphony Orchestra players whoâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ll premiere Dharmooâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s the fog in our poise this weekend, as part of The Elusive, Imaginary Future. (The program also includes works by pioneering sound sculptor Edgard VarĂ¨se, Bang on a Can mainstay Julia Wolfe, and others.) In contrast to some of Dharmooâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s improvised performances, the work is almost fully scored, with hints of indeterminacy creeping in through the various unconventional instrumental textures that bring a kind of sonic fog to this otherwise poised piece. â&#x20AC;&#x153;There are some layers of sound that are a bit more free,â&#x20AC;? Dharmoo explains. â&#x20AC;&#x153;Everything thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s texturalâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;atmospheres and stuff like thatâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;is notated really freely, almost like an improv score would be. But those are always textural effects that are in the background. I think I have four of them or so. One is having the musicians pronounce the letter S super softly, so itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s just this drone of S sounds. And the same with the strings, which are doing little bowhair crunches.â&#x20AC;? Realizing such instructions should be easy enough for the VSO players; in recent years, the orchestra has come to include a large number of contemporary-music specialists. There will be times during the fog in our poise, however, when the NOW PLAYING!

audience might feel slightly at sea, primarily because the piece is designed to suggest the court music of an entirely fictitious civilization. As such, itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s one of a series of fascinating ethnological forgeries perpetrated by the Montreal-based singer and composerâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;with the best-known being this yearâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s PuSh Festival hit Anthropologies Imaginaires, a multimedia performance for which Dharmoo invented an array of different â&#x20AC;&#x153;ethnicâ&#x20AC;? vocal styles. â&#x20AC;&#x153;With this new piece, I wanted to explore the same sort of thing,â&#x20AC;? he says. â&#x20AC;&#x153;But my ensemble is an instrumental chamber ensemble, so I couldnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t rely on sung theatre and all those forms. Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s more like court music, or trance musicâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;a transcendental, ritualistic kind of music.â&#x20AC;? In Dharmooâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s ideal musical culture, elegance is all. But that, he explains, doesnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t mean that physical effort is an afterthought. For instance, the fog in our poiseâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s two percussionists will be playing their own bodies at times, in addition to kick drums, sandpaper, and pebbles. â&#x20AC;&#x153;I was thinking about how court music is, almost by definition, refined, because thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s who would be commissioning or hearing the music,â&#x20AC;? he says. â&#x20AC;&#x153;And I love refined music, but at the same time I like to think of music as democratic, in that anyone can just enjoy it. So I tried to imagine a culture where there was this sense of refinement, but that was also really connected to nature and the body. Music for a grounded and democratic elite, in a way, or for a society where everyoneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s elite!â&#x20AC;? The Vancouver Symphony Orchestra presents The Elusive, Imaginary Future at the Orpheum Annex on Sunday (May 22).

Flicker uses multimedia projections to create an immersive world of video and Northwest Coast design. Chris Randle photo.

Ancient meets tech in Flicker > B Y JA NE T S M ITH

he flicker is a woodpecker that regularly shows up in Northwest Coast art, its tail feathers appearing again and again as a key design element. Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s also a beautiful masked creature that features in the Dancers of Damelahamidâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s ambitious new multimedia work, Flicker. But executive and artistic director Margaret Grenier says thereâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s a dual meaning to the title that is a perfect metaphor for the way the company not only shifts between human and spirit worlds in its show, but also honours its ancient past while pushing into contemporary digital and dance forms. â&#x20AC;&#x153;Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s that idea of the light flickering,â&#x20AC;? she tells the Straight on a break in the troupeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s North Shore rehearsal space, which, fittingly, looks out to the distant West Coast mountains and rustling leaves that play such a big role in the piece. â&#x20AC;&#x153;How do we best honour the practice? How do we keep something thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s been pretty marginalized and connect with that and strengthen that? Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s not just about having a leg in one place or another, but that flickering of a time and place.â&#x20AC;? Figuring out that delicate dance between the past and present has been a three-year process. â&#x20AC;&#x153;I call it a life practice,â&#x20AC;? Grenier says with a smile. Flicker ends up mixing together not just movement from traditional First Nations and contemporary indigenous settings, but video footage and imagery from coastal design. Add meticulously made costumes, masks, and music, and you have an exciting new hybrid that Grenier hopes will bridge cultures. Flickerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s venue is also new ground for the troupe. Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s known for per-

forming at the Museum of Anthropologyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Coastal First Nations Dance Festival (which Grenier organizes) and has taken its traditional work out to the world. (Grenierâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Sharing the Spirit toured to New Zealand and the 2010 World Expo in Shanghai.) But this is the first time it will take the stage of the Cultchâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Historic Theatre. After showing here, Flicker moves on to the Canada Dance Festival (which has coproduced the work with the Cultch), taking its place on a roster of the countryâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s best contemporary-dance troupes. â&#x20AC;&#x153;In terms of movement, all of our work comes from the foundation of traditional indigenous dance,â&#x20AC;? Grenier explains. â&#x20AC;&#x153;But things become very categorized: you have a powwow and you can practise that there, or you have a celebration of coastal dance and you can practise that there, or you have contemporary dance and you can practise that in the contemporary world. â&#x20AC;&#x153;Weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ll have the communities weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve developed in Vancouver coming to this show, but certainly it will bring the Cultch audience, and thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s exciting. Weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re aware of that also as a responsibility: youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re always aware of representing more than just dance.â&#x20AC;? To understand this responsibility, itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s important to know how the Dancers of Damelahamid evolved. For generations, the Northwest Coastâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Gitxsan people celebrated song and dance at their feast halls. The Canadian governmentâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s potlatch ban outlawed the practice from 1885 to 1951, and Grenierâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s parents, Ken and Margaret Harris, started the Dancers of Damelahamid in the 1960s as a way to revive the ancient art formsâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;this time for a public audience instead of private ceremonies.

(Damelahamid refers to the land granted to the Gitxsan when their ancestors were placed on Earth.) â&#x20AC;&#x153;I have a very strong foundation in the coastal dance form, and thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s what I grew up with and what was passed on to me from my family,â&#x20AC;? Grenier says. â&#x20AC;&#x153;Even though my parents were doing more traditional dance, up to their generation it had only been used in cultural ceremoniesâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;so even just to take dance to public performance was a significant shift for them. And now our generation has other influences. How do we contribute to that with our own generation?â&#x20AC;? Finding the answer to that question is something the dancers have been working toward in residencies at the Cultch and elsewhere. On this day in North Van, in a segment set to the sounds of twittering birds and traditional singing, dancers Jeanette Kotowich and Nigel Grenier (Margaretâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s son) find a movement language that, as Grenier says, flickers between characterizations of the titular bird (their arms pointing out in front of their heads like its long, pecking beak) and more abstract dance. Multimedia artist Andy Moroâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s projections will give the piece another immersive level, bringing to life forests, rivers, and spirit worlds. But consider this hybrid only the first in a long journey for the Dancers of Damelahamid, whose dreams go far beyond art. â&#x20AC;&#x153;Weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re hoping to create change in our society and create cross-cultural dialogue,â&#x20AC;? says Nigel Grenier before heading back into rehearsal. â&#x20AC;&#x153;We want to make Canada a more accepting place.â&#x20AC;? Flicker is at the Cultchâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Historic Theatre from next Wednesday to Sunday (May 25 to 29).

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MAY 19 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; 26 / 2016 THE GEORGIA STRAIGHT 23

ARTS

VETTA CHAMBER MUSIC 2015 2016 Joan Blackman Artistic Director

30th Anniversary Gala

Angela Cheng with

piano

Angela Cheng

Joan Blackman violin Jennie Press violin Nicolò Eugelmi viola Ariel Barnes cello

Fri May 27th at 7:30pm Christ Church Cathedral Burrard at Georgia Joan Blackman

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The Argentine company Che Malambo takes its name from a dance that originated with South America’s gauchos.

Malambo dance makes its mark > B Y TO NY M O NTA G U E

illes Brinas believes in intuitive magic. According to the Paris-born and -based choreographer and ensemble director, that’s what led him to create the Argentine dance company Che Malambo. He’d seen a performance of malambo dance in a Paris cabaret years before and it made a strong impression, but nothing more came of it—at first. “It lay there in a corner of my memory until one morning I woke up—just like that—and said to my wife, ‘I’m going to leave for Argentina in search of malambo,’ ” says Brinas, reached in New Orleans just before the 14 dancers of Che Malambo begin their North American tour. “That’s it. There was no calculation, it was magic. When ideas impose themselves like that, you have to follow their lead.” The dance he researched is for men only and traditionally performed by gauchos, who are usually equated with cowboys. But the original gauchos of South America were more than that. Mainly nomadic, they ranged freely over the pampas, the vast grassland plains that stretch from Patagonia to the Andes, and as far north as Rio Grande do Sul in Brazil. “The true gaucho period, when they were totally independent, was brief—perhaps 70 years,” Brinas explains, speaking in French. “It was

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a couple of years his company was performing nightly at the Casino de Paris. “It’s called Che Malambo because che is like ‘buddy’, ‘pal’, or ‘mate’ in Argentina, and can also mean ‘my’. Anyway, Argentines use che every three words! That’s why [Ernesto] Che Guevara got his name. He used it so much the Cubans nicknamed him ‘Che’. I called the company Che Malambo to reference a famous tango called ‘Che Bandoneón’—so it’s both ‘My Malambo’ and ‘Buddy Malambo’. Che is always used affectionately.” The ensemble’s powerful show includes some guitar music and songs to give the performers a pause. The highenergy dance and percussion sequences are spectacular, especially in their use of boleadoras to pound out fast rhythms on the stage. “Boleadoras are a weapon developed by indigenous peoples of the region—originally, large stones closely fitted into leather pouches, like a sling, on the end of three leads that measure around two metres each,” Brinas explains. “When thrown, they wrap very quickly around an enemy’s or an animal’s legs to bring them down. Now boleadoras are made out of plastic and commercial nylon, but they’re still dangerous, and the performers have to be very skilled—and very careful.” Che Malambo plays the Vogue Theatre on Friday (May 20).

Show lets loose on the lecture > B Y A ND R EA WA R NER

Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun: Unceded Territories

a very raw and rough life. They lived on horseback and herded cattle, which also ran free on the pampas. Gauchos slept on their horses. They even ate on their horses. They’d kill a cow to cut out the tongue and eat it, and leave the rest for the birds—that way they didn’t have to bother with slaughtering or skinning. Or they’d make a big fire, kill a cow, slit open its belly, remove the entrails and replace them with red-hot coals, cover the gash with skin by placing stones on the edges, then come back 48 hours later to feast. The less that gauchos had to do, the better. They wore ponchos—a square cloth with a central hole to put the head through, one on top and one below. It gets cold in Argentina, and the horse served as radiator, too.” At first, malambo was a rhythm, but the name was eventually transferred to the dance it inspired, which developed from little challenges a pair of gauchos would make to each other. “One would perform a particular rhythmic pattern, and his opposite respond with the pattern added to or altered. It’s a rhythmic discussion, shall we say. Malambo likely had African and indigenous origins, but nothing is sure. It’s changed—and keeps changing. Techniques have evolved and elements were absorbed from other dances, such as contemporary classical and jazz.” Brinas started Che Malambo in Argentina in 2005, and within

Clements to contribute a piece, as well as Edinburgh-based artist and playwright Clare Duffy, both of whom turned in drastically different works on the theme. “The text that Marie delivered was very much a personal story about a trip she had—she was right up at the top where the Mackenzie River squirts out into the Arctic Ocean,” Long recalls. “She was doing a film shoot and they were scouting locations, but she also has relatives up there. She was actually standing in the ice river, the Mackenzie River, as the water rushed underneath.” Duffy’s text is rooted in science and contains plenty of jargon to help trip up the actors/“experts” every night. “Clare has done a bunch of research about light conditions, extreme light and lack of light, for people living in the Far North, the Hebrides, northern islands off of Scotland,” Long explains. “She spent quite a bit of time there doing research, actual scientific research on what light does to your eyes and brain.” With each new layer or complication, Three Lectures very much lives up to its premise, not only on-stage but in reality. Each performance features two actors who have never seen the script before. It’s an act of metatheatre that directly parallels their characters’ role as experts devoid of actual expertise in their subject matter. “I don’t know if it’s intentionally difficult,” Long says with a laugh. “I think it’s more playful. We’re just interested in effing around a little bit.” It’s not improv, but it’s not rehearsed, either; rather, it’s largely uncharted territory for the actors—a situation that could be viewed as high-risk with little reward. But, Long points out, actors are trained to perform like they really do know what they’re talking about, even when it’s for the first time. There was no shortage of takers. “Everybody wants to do it, because it takes all the pressure off. You don’t have to be good. You just have to be able to read,” Long jokes. “We’re asking good actors. These people are capable for sure, but the pressure is low—you just have to try to be present and engaged.” -

or some, the opposite of a TED Talk or a PechaKucha is your friend’s usual drunken diatribe/monologue on bike lanes and city planning. But Theatre Replacement twists the concept of public presentation and “expert” discussion even further with its new theatre piece, Three Lectures on the North, a somewhat tongue-in-cheek send-up of the practice of and cultural fascination with public lecture. James Long, co–artistic director of Theatre Replacement and the writer of one of the titular three lectures, says the idea sprang from a talk that he and his colleagues were giving overseas about multiculturalism in Canadian theatre, which they then spun out into more absurdist directions. “We’re all constantly watching these seven-minute excerpts of experts talking about expert things,” Long tells the Straight over the phone during his lunch break, less than a week before opening night. “What if we tried to challenge that notion a little bit by having the nonexpert deal with the ‘expert’ material?” The inspiration to focus on the North—as place and concept—came out of the 2014 announcement by then prime minister Stephen Harper about the recovery of a ship from Sir John Franklin’s failed expedition to find the Northwest Passage in 1845. “This conversation was happening right around the time that—and this is big air quotes around this one— they ‘discovered’ the Franklin boats up north,” Long says. “It got us really thinking about this region of the North and the history, and how we attach this massive identity as Canadians to the idea of the North, when in reality we have very little idea about it, or a very small sense of who actually owns the North or belongs to the North. This fascinating arrogance of going up and saying, ‘We discovered this thing,’ when, really, the Inuit population knew exactly where those boats had been for years and years, but we just never took the time to listen to them.” The Franklin story ended up inspiring the piece that Long himself wrote for Three Lectures. Theatre Replace- Three Lectures on the North runs Wednesday to Saturday ment also invited Métis playwright and artist Marie (May 18 to 21) at the Shadbolt Centre for the Arts.

UPCOMING CONCERTS

THE ELUSIVE IMAGINARY FUTURE

SUNDAY, MAY 22, 7:30PM Annex

EDGARD VARÈSE Octandre MELISSA HUI From Dusk to Dawn GABRIEL DHARMOO the fog in our poise (World Première) KATIA MAKDISSI-WARREN Parade JULIA WOLFE The Vermeer Room Gordon Gerrard conductor

This concert celebrates music inspired by worlds of the imagination and predictions of the future, all conducted by VSO Associate Conductor Gordon Gerrard. SYMPHONY AT THE ANNEX SERIES SPONSOR

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LAST NIGHT OF THE PROMS WEDNESDAY, MAY 25, 8PM Orpheum Bramwell Tovey conductor David Childs euphonium Vancouver Bach Choir

A proud one-hundred and twenty year-old tradition returns to the Orpheum stage, as the VSO, Maestro Tovey and the Vancouver Bach Choir present Last Night of the Proms. Traditional Proms favourites like Jerusalem, Rule Britannia and Pomp and Circumstance will be featured along with Blue Bells of Scotland and the Karl Jenkins Euphonium Concerto. CONCERT SPONSOR

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VSO CHAMBER PLAYERS:

A MAGIC FANTASY

TUESDAY, MAY 24, 7:30PM THURSDAY, MAY 26, 7:30PM SUNDAY, MAY 29, 2PM Pyatt Hall, VSO School of Music

WEDNESDAY, JUNE 1, 7:30PM Kay Meek Theatre, West Vancouver BEETHOVEN Serenade in D Major, Op. 25 Christie Reside Ŵ XWH Nicholas Wright violin Byron Hitchcock viola

SHOSTAKOVICH Five Pieces for Two Violins and Piano Jennie Press violin Dale Barltrop violin Terence Dawson piano

JENNIE PRESS

HINDSON Little Chrissietina’s Magic Fantasy Jennie Press violin Dale Barltrop violin

MARTINU Madrigal Sonata Christie Reside Ŵ XWH Nicholas Wright violin Terence Dawson piano

BEETHOVEN Grosse Fuge, Op. 133 Jennie Press violin Nicholas Wright violin Byron Hitchcock viola Zoltan Rozsnyai cello

NICHOLAS WRIGHT

A TCHAIKOVSKY CELEBRATION

SATURDAY, MAY 28, 8PM Orpheum MONDAY, MAY 30, 8PM Centennial Theatre, North Vancouver

TCHAIKOVSKY Eugene Onegin: Polonaise TCHAIKOVSKY Variations on a Rococo Theme* TCHAIKOVSKY Symphony No. 6 in B minor, Pathétique Bramwell Tovey conductor Johannes Moser cello*

Maestro Bramwell Tovey conducts an all-Tchaikovsky program, featuring the remarkable, powerful and emotional Pathétique Symphony, an ode to the power of fate. And brilliant cellist Johannes Moser performs the Rococo Variations for cello and orchestra, in this exciting concert. MAY 28 MUSICALLY SPEAKING SERIES SPONSOR

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MAY 19 – 26 / 2016 THE GEORGIA STRAIGHT 25

ARTS

Brad Fraser’s 5@50 has big heart and laughs TH E AT RE 5@50 By Brad Fraser. Directed by Cameron Mackenzie. Coproduced by Ruby Slippers Theatre and Zee Zee Theatre. At the PAL Theatre on Friday, May 13. Continues until May 28

The script and production are

2 both good. The script, especially, could be better. In 5@50, playwright Brad Fraser introduces us to a group of women, friends since high school, who are now all turning 50. The central character, Olivia, used to be fun but has morphed into a mean alcoholic. Her partner, Norma, tells their other pals to mind their own business, but Tricia, Lorene, and Fern intervene anyway and send a humbled, grateful Olivia off to rehab. The intervention feels like an arch convention. Do real people do this or is it just Dr. Phil? And without giving too much away, there’s a plot turn in the second act in which Norma jeopardizes Olivia’s recovery. Yes, the enabling partners of addicts sometimes fail their loved ones, but Norma’s failure is so direct that it looks crudely illustrative. Every member of

Deborah Williams and Beatrice Zeilinger play two of the women turning 50 years old and facing a crisis in the show 5@50. Tina Krueger photo.

the group has a crisis, which makes the play schematic. And, in an odd structural device, the characters keep getting together for parties, but none of these events lasts more than 10 minutes: there’s a lot of exiting. Still, Fraser’s script has a big heart, it features vivid characters, and it delivers

a ton of raucous laughs—many of which are ribald. (In their aggressive sexuality and overt nastiness, Fraser’s women feel a lot like stereotypical gay men.) “I’d blow a monkey for a bourbon,” Tricia proclaims on her first entrance. “He puts the cock in Caucasian,” Lorene says of her well-endowed

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husband. And, later, when Olivia describes a creamy chocolate ganache, Lorene moans, “Oh. I just peed a little when you said that.” Between the scenes, Fraser gives his characters monologues, many of which are moving: when Tricia remembered a moment of cruelty from elementary school, it brought tears to my eyes. And Fraser doesn’t back away from the pain and debasement of alcoholism: there are slurred and desperate late-night calls. Veena Sood is stellar as Tricia, who is, essentially, Fraser’s wise mouthpiece. In a velvety smooth performance, Sood gets laugh after effortless laugh, and, emotionally, she is achingly honest. Beatrice Zeilinger’s work as the cautious Norma is impressively subtle and completely credible. And Diane Brown plays Lorene’s comic rhythms and mood swings with equal ease. As Fern, a busy housewife who does yoga to stay sane, Donna Yamamoto has her moments, especially when the character dips into sensuality, but at other times, including the intervention, her performance becomes onenote. Deborah Williams covers a range as Olivia. Off the top, director Cameron Mackenzie lets her go way too big, but in the darker parts of the script, the rage and self-loathing, Williams is fearless. With its textured white curtains, Marina Szijarto’s set is elegantly flexible. And the blue special in Kyla Gardiner’s lighting design adds weight to one of the evening’s toughest passages. Describing this play, one of Fraser’s highly sexual characters might say, “Considering its length, it doesn’t go deep as often as you want it to.” > COLIN THOMAS

OKAY.ODD. Created by Milton Lim, with Aryo Khakpour. Produced by Hong Kong Exile in association with Theatre Conspiracy, as part of the rEvolver Theatre Festival. At the Cultch’s Vancity Culture Lab on Thursday, May 12. Continues until May 21

Watching okay.odd. didn’t en-

2 lighten me as to the meaning

of its title, but the show is odd, and that’s okay. Hong Kong Exile’s Milton Lim wrote, directed, and designed okay. odd., billed as a multimedia meditation session. The performance begins with an extended preshow speech by Aryo Khakpour that goes much further than the conventional series of acknowledgments. On a screen behind him, a rectangle of light strobes on and off. Khakpour leaves the stage, and the box of light pulses and recedes, replaced by a series of words as a voice-over by Lim invites us to summon the values of concentration, mindfulness, contemplation, and visualization, following our curiosity from thought to thought in hopes of discovering “what may be on the other side of consciousness”. The words follow random associations—breakfast, champion, Queen, eggs—but the text is often freighted with connotations of environmental issues, race, sexuality, and postcolonial politics. There’s a dose of pop culture, too: on the night I saw the show, a ripple of laughter broke out when Beyoncé’s name appeared on the screen. But the rapid-fire visuals and the pounding percussive score tax the senses, forcing each audience member into a more solitary space of contemplation. That might be Lim’s goal, but I was left with little more than those random associations. Is the show sincere or ironic? Is it meant to encourage us to find our calm centre in a technologically overwhelming world, or to mock our desire—which comes from a place of privilege—to do so? If there’s an implied critique of our culture, what are we supposed to do with it? Perhaps that’s up to each of us to figure out. Everything about okay.odd. feels expertly crafted—it’s sophisticated

in both concept and delivery, as Lim assaults us with polished visuals and exquisitely sculpted noise. The piece has the feel of participatory performance art, and so might find a more natural home in a gallery. (An earlier version was presented at the Vancouver Art Gallery’s FUSE.) In the theatre, I long for something more communal. I enjoyed the head trip that okay.odd. took me on, but I felt like I was taking it alone. > KATHLEEN OLIVER

NEVER THE LAST By Molly MacKinnon and Christine Quintana. Directed by Laura McLean. Produced by Delinquent Theatre in association with Electric Company Theatre, as part of the rEvolver Theatre Festival. At the Cultch’s Historic Theatre on Wednesday, May 11. No remaining performances

Never the Last is so ambitious

2 and sincere that you can’t help

but want it to succeed. In significant ways, though, it doesn’t. This piece is based on the true story of the relationship between violinist and composer Sophie-Carmen Eckhardt-Gramatté and her husband, the expressionist painter Walter Gramatté. Their apparently epic love affair unfolded in the period between the two world wars. The main problem with this piece, which was created by theatre artist Christine Quintana and violinist Molly MacKinnon, is that it’s illustrative. In scenes, monologues, and movement sequences, which are all accompanied by the live performance of Eckhardt-Gramatté’s music, we watch the relationship play out: the composer and painter meet, fall in love, get married, move around Europe, and pursue their careers. The central issue is the tension between Eckhardt-Gramatté’s artistic ambition and her love life. In the play’s climactic scene, she must choose whether to accept a commission and go to New York or stay in Berlin and care for her husband, who may be dying of tuberculosis. Male artists often have wives who devote themselves to supporting their husbands’ careers. Even today, female artists are far less likely to experience similar support. So the script’s core concern could be resonant. But Never the Last fails to provide the specifics, the details that might have brought EckhardtGramatté’s dilemma to life. Instead, the text contents itself with abstraction and grand gestures. In Never the Last, Eckhardt-Gramatté moans so repetitively about her inability to find artistic satisfaction that she becomes a clichéd tortured artist. And, too often, the presentation of the connection between the husband and wife feels equally large and hollow. The story ends tragically about five times. The movement sequences, which were choreographed by Kayla Dunbar, are literal and melodramatic expressions of feeling. Jenn Stewart’s set consists of huge violin parts, including a bridge and strings. It’s clumsy, and director Laura McLean’s decision to have the players constantly rearrange the giant strings is distracting. Redeemingly, there is also tenderness at the heart of this production. A lot of that comes through Nadeem Phillip’s portrait of Gramatté. Phillip’s work is so restrained and true that, when Gramatté is talking to his wife, you can almost slip into the warm folds of their relationship. Quintana, who is the composer, matches Phillip in these exchanges, and she plays the text about her character’s ambition sincerely, even though that material is far less compelling. MacKinnon performs EckhardtGramatté’s searching music with aplomb. In the most interesting musical passage, she has teased apart two harmonic lines and given one of them to Quintana to sing. That passage is lovely. > COLIN THOMAS

ARTS

Ballet BC pushes into the primal and pretty D ANC E PROGRAM 3 A Ballet BC presentation. At the Queen Elizabeth Theatre on Thursday, May 12. No remaining performances

Opening with perfect pirouettes

2 and ending with primal screech-

K OO PR

S IZE

BC B

es, Ballet BC’s enjoyable season-closer worked as a perfect illustration of how far both the dancers and the form are being pushed these days. First, let’s jump to the end, where the dancers tackled, for the first time, Israeli mavericks Sharon Eyal and Gai Behar’s techno-beat-driven Bill—a piece they created for the famed Batsheva Dance Company, where Eyal was a long-time dancer, muse, and choreographer. On its surface, it might seem to be as far removed from proper “ballet”

as you can get. The dancers move in the gut-instinct, Gaga movement method Eyal is trained in, exploding from their core, gyrating their hips at warp speed, lunging and squatting and flailing their arms to the point you think the limbs might fly off. Adding to the eerie effect are their nude bodysuits and hair caked in the same pale colour. All the while, Ori Lichtik’s pulsing beats drive the ever-shifting formations. But in the preshow talk, Eyal stressed her work is more ballet than contemporary—and when you start looking at its patterning, the intricacy of its vocabulary, and the extreme physical detail, it’s as technically and physically demanding as anything Ballet BC has ever taken on. It also required the company to let loose an almost primeval force we’ve never quite seen them access

before, particularly in the frenetic sequence of solos that opens the work. They had to be part automaton, part animal. Sometimes the troupe members looked mechanical, moving in unison; at others they appeared to be possessed, emitting pterodactyl-like screeches as they moved about the stage. The program opened with a sophisticated reminder that the troupe has rigorous ballet chops— a fact that can be forgotten when its members are doing more radical, earthbound contemporary work. In Jorma Elo’s swirling I and I Am You, the dancers, dressed in soft blue, performed a flickering blur of arabesques and jêtés, their arms uplifted and propelling them through twirls—and it’s a piece that demanded they pull them off with high-gloss polish.

It’s not as if the remounted work by the resident choreographer at the Boston Ballet is straight-up classical, though it is set to the strains of Johann Sebastian Bach. Elo plays with the classical form: at one point, three men carried their partners like stiff-straight boards; in the swirling sequence toward the end, Brandon Alley exploded into a one-hand stand that was closer to breaking than ballet. But it was a gorgeous meditation on relationships, with some truly transcendent pas de deux. Wedged between these two extremes is artistic director Emily Molnar’s 16+ a room, a piece that finds an existential place where time and space can freeze and move forward. It’s hard-edged, set to Dirk P. Haubrich’s industrial score, with its metallic pulses, thunks, and whirs. Dancers en pointe run backward or

sideways like they’re in a container that’s just been tipped. It’s a hypnotic, yearning piece as humans ricochet like pinballs through the dark box of the stage—kind of like the way we’re all tossed around in life. In the end, they simply convulse—from the pressure?—in the dim light. So it’s human, but there’s also intellectual play going on here, to haunting, sometimes surreal effect. As it closes its 30th season, Ballet BC is boldly propelling itself forward, adding the edgy work by Eyal, and planning for a piece by Batsheva founder Ohad Naharin next season. At the same time, work like Elo’s helps it keep one pink slipper in neoclassical ballet. For now, it seems it has the dancers, and the audience (who jumped to a standing O), to forge ahead. > JANET SMITH

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SATURDAY & MONDAY, JUNE 4 & 6 8PM, ORPHEUM Bramwell Tovey conductor EDWARD GREGSON Dream Song (North American Première) MAHLER Symphony No. 6 in A minor, Tragic In the penultimate concert of the VSO’s new season, Maestro Bramwell Tovey conducts Mahler’s epic, incredible Symphony No. 6, one of the greatest symphonic masterpieces ever written. In addition, the VSO performs the North American première of Dream Song, a piece by British composer Edward Gregson, originally commissioned to appear in a concert alongside Mahler’s Sixth Symphony.

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ar ts/ timeout THEATRE DANCE MUSIC COMEDY LITERARY EVENTS ET CETERA GALLERIES MUSEUMS

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THEATRE 2OPENINGS THREE LECTURES ON THE NORTH Theatre Replacement and Rough House Productions present three speeches on the subject of Canada’s North. The words will be woven together and partnered with instructions for how they should be delivered, which will then be relayed to an actor who will perform them in front of an audience for the first time each night. May 18-21, Shadbolt Centre for the Arts (6450 Deer Lake Ave., Burnaby). Tix $15-35, info www.shadboltcentre.com/. REVOLUTIONS Fight With a Stick Performance presents a telescopic journey through dust, human chemical relationships, and geological time. May 19-29, 8-10 pm, The Warehouse (3681 Victoria). Tix $20-25, info www.fightwithastick.ca/. WIT Pacific Theatre presents a poignant play about unwitting redemption, starring Katharine Venour, Erla Faye Forsyth, and Ron Reed. Directed by Angela Konrad. May 20–Jun 11, 8-10 pm, Pacific Theatre (1440 W. 12th). Tix $22.99-29.99, info www.pacifictheatre.org/season/20152016-season-3/mainstage/wit/.

2ONGOING TOWARDS ZERO Suspenseful whodunit sees a seaside party derailed when the host (a wealthy widow) is found dead in her bed. Based on the book by Agatha Christie. To May 21, Metro

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PIANO PROVOCATEUR Latvian piano sensation Georgijs Osokins may be only 21, but he’s already stirring up the classical-music world with his radical interpretations of Frédéric Chopin’s music. At last year’s 17th International Chopin Piano Competition, in fact, he was considered too revolutionary to take the prize, but he ranked as a muchtalked-about finalist and critics went gaga, calling him “exceptional,” “unpredictable”, and “original”. It’s exciting stuff, and well worth a jaunt to the Vancouver Chopin Society’s presentation at the Playhouse on Thursday night (May 19), where we’ll get to see the talent put his fingers to the works of Scarlatti, Beethoven, Rachmaninoff, Scriabin, and, of course, Poland’s greatest composer.

theatre program. To May 22, Waterfront Theatre (1412 Cartwright St., Granville Island). Tix from $10, info www.arts umbrella.com/expressionstheatre/.

by the Vancouver Recital Society. May 18, 7:30 pm, Vancouver Playhouse (600 Hamilton). Tix from $25, info 604-602-0363, www.vanrecital.com/.

BILLY ELLIOT The Arts Club Theatre Company presents the musical story of an 11-year-old boy who discovers he loves ballet dancing. Book and lyrics by Lee Hall. Music by Elton John. To Jul 10, Stanley Industrial Alliance Stage (2750 Granville). Tix from $29, info www.artsclub.com/.

GEORGIJS OSOKINS The Vancouver Chopin Society presents the classical pianist in a program of music by Scarlatti, Beethoven, Rachmaninoff, Scriabin, and Chopin. May 19, 7:30 pm, Vancouver Playhouse (600 Hamilton). Tix at www.tickets tonight.ca/, info www.chopinsociety.org/.

5 @ 50 Ruby Slippers Theatre and Zee Zee Theatre present the North American premiere of Brad Fraser’s play about friendship, addiction, and codependence. To May 28, 8-10 pm, PAL Studio Theatre (300581 Cardero). Tix $28, info tickets.theatre wire.com/shows/5%20@%2050/events/.

NICOLA BENEDETTI AND DALE BARLTROP Violinists Dale Barltrop and Nicola Benedetti lead the VSO in a program of Bartok’s Rumanian Folk Dances, Mozart’s Violin Concerto No. 5 in A Major, Turkish, and Shostakovich’s Chamber Symphony. May 20-21, 8 pm, Chan Centre for the Performing Arts (6265 Crescent Rd., UBC). Info www.vancouversymphony.ca/.

DANCE 2THIS WEEK DANCE CO’S 23RD ANNIVERSARY RECITAL AND SHOWCASE Vancouver dance studio presents six spring-recital shows and one competitive showcase. May 19-22, Gateway Theatre (6500 Gilbert Rd., Richmond). Tix $25-47, info www. danceco.com/. CHE MALAMBO Caravan Rhythms presents a percussive dance and music spectacle inspired by the gaucho tradition of Argentina. May 20, 8 pm, Vogue Theatre (918 Granville). Tix $23-48 (plus service charges and fees) at www.ticketfly.com/, info www.caravanbc.com/. SWAN LAKE Coastal City Ballet presents the Canadian premiere of the classic ballet with choreography by Irene Schneider and music by Tchaikovsky. May 21, Vancouver Playhouse (600 Hamilton). Tix $25-45, info www.coastalcityballet.com/.

Theatre (1370 SW Marine). Tix $24/21, info www.metrotheatre.com/. ALWAYS ... PATSY CLINE Claude A. Giroux directs Ted Swindley’s musicaltheatre tribute to ‘60s country icon Patsy Cline. To May 21, 8 pm, Deep Cove Shaw Theatre (4360 Gallant Ave., North Van). Tix $18, info www.firstimpressionstheatre.com/.

FLICKER The Dancers of Damelahamid present a dance piece that combines West Coast design with a unique scenographic hybrid. May 25-29, 8 pm, The Cultch (1895 Venables). Tix from $20, info www.thecultch.com/events/flicker/.

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REVOLVER THEATRE FESTIVAL 2016 Theatre festival features an eclectic mix of mainstage, site-specific, and cabaret shows, including works by Cause & Effect Circus, Delinquent Theatre, Hong Kong Exile, May Can Theatre, and Urban Ink Productions. To May 22, The Cultch (1895 Venables). Tix $20/15, info www.revolverfestival.ca/.

2THIS WEEK

THEATRE AND MUSIC EXPRESSIONS 2016 Arts Umbrella’s annual showcase features five diverse productions performed by young actors in the pre-professional

SONGS OF WORLD WAR I Tenor Ian Bostridge and pianist WenWen Du perform music by Mahler, Stephan, Butterworth, Weill, and Britten. Presented

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daring and innovative improv. Improv After Dark (every Fri and Sat, 11:15 pm); Off Leash (every Wed and Thu, 9:15 pm); Rookie Night (every Sun, 7:30 pm); TheatreSports (every Wed, 7:30 pm; every Fri and Sat, 9:30 pm); Throne and Games: A Chance of Snow (every Thu, Fri, and Sat 7:30 pm). May 18-25, The Improv Centre (1502 Duranleau, Granville Island). Tix $8-22, info www.vtsl.com/.

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SACRED VOICES Padmashri Pandit Umakant, Ramakant Gundecha, and Akhilesh Gundecha perform dhrupad, a type of ancient Indian music. May 22, 7-9:30 am, Laura C. Muir Performing Arts Theatre (Douglas College. 700 Royal Ave., New West). Tix $25, info www.facebook. com/events/1563583137304976/.

COMEDY 2ONGOING EAST VAN COMEDY Improv and standup comedy with Instant Theatre Company (every Sun at 8 pm) and Graham Clark’s Laugh Gallery (every Mon at 9 pm). Every Sun and Mon, Havana Theatre (1212 Commercial). Tix $5-10, info www.east vancomedy.com/. THE COMEDY MIX 1015 Burrard, Century Plaza Hotel & Spa, 604-684-5050, www. thecomedymix.com/. Comedy club with pro-am night Tue at 8:30 pm, showcase Wed at 8:30 pm, and featured headliners Thu at 8:30 pm and Fri-Sat at 8 and 10:30 pm. Cover $8 Tue, $10 Wed, $15 Thu, $18 Fri, $20 Sat. 2IVAN DECKER May 19-21 2MARK NORMAND May 26-28 2GABRIEL RUTLEDGE Jun 2-4 2CHAD DANIELS Jun 9-11 2DEANNE SMITH Jun 16-18 2CHRIS LOCKE Jun 23-25. YUK YUK’S COMEDY CLUB 2837 Cambie, 604-696-9857, www.yukyuks.com/vancouver. Comedy club with Top Talent Tue at 8 pm, amateur night Wed at 8 pm, and professional headliners Thu-Fri at 8 pm and Sat at 7 and 9:30 pm. Cover Tue $10, Wed $7, Thu $10, and Fri-Sat $20. 2CEDRIC NEWMAN May 19-21 2JON DORE May 27-28. LAFFLINES COMEDY CLUB 530 Columbia St., New Westminster, 604-5252262, www.lafflines.com/. VANCOUVER THEATRESPORTS LEAGUE Some of the world’s most

LAUGH LAUNCHER Vancouver’s Ivan Decker is a mean, clean laugh machine—and don’t let his boyish good looks catch you offguard: this guy slays. If you haven’t been following his fast rise on the local live-comedy scene, then you know him from multiple episodes of CBC’s The Debaters. His standup act? It’s a mix of warm likability, spot-on timing, and smarts—whether he’s riffing on riding the SkyTrain or drinking while snowboarding. Catch him Thursday to Saturday (May 19 to 21) at the Comedy MIX.

2THIS WEEK THRONE AND GAMES—A CHANCE OF SNOW The Vancouver TheatreSports League presents improv comedy inspired by TV series Game of Thrones and the epic-fantasy book series it is based on. To May 28, 7:30-9 pm, The Improv Centre (1502 Duranleau, Granville Island). Tix $10-22, info www.vtsl.com/show/throneandgames/. IMPROV AGAINST HUMANITY The Fictionals present an evening of improv comedy based on cult-hit game Cards Against Humanity. May 18, 8-10:30 pm, Rio Theatre (1660 E. Broadway). Tix $12/10, info www.thefictionals.com/.

see page 32

MOVIES REVIEWS A BIGGER SPLASH Starring Tilda Swinton. In English and Italian, with English subtitles. Rated 14A.

Referring to a famously ejaculatory David

2 Hockney painting, A Bigger Splash also de-

scribes the escalating pas de deux between rivals for the attention of aging rock star Marianne Lane, played with almost silent grace by Tilda Swinton. Recovering from throat surgery on the Sicilian island of Pantelleria, she’s comforted by elegant clothing design from Dior and the sexual ministrations of current lover Paul, played rather too remotely by Belgian studmuffin Matthias Schoenaerts. Their sunny idyll is interrupted by the unannounced arrival of Harry, her former producer and partner. Ralph Fiennes here brings the kind of extroverted verve we’ve rarely seen from the English Patient star, and his energy immediately lifts the movie—although not quite enough to carry it for just over two hours. Another surprise is a

Steadfast and true

Ralph Fiennes is in fine comedic form as sad music industry relic Harry Hawks in A Bigger Splash, the latest from Italian director Luca Guadagnino.

new building’s “best amenities”, according to a single mother played by Sienna Miller, Tom Hiddleston and his gorgeous abdomen fit the bill A Bigger Splash will come to your emotional rescue; with just the right amount of society goes to the dogs again in hallucinatory High-Rise opaque moral ambivalence. Not that Laing is welcomed young sprite called Penelope, who may or may not by all inside this Brave New World of self-contained be Harry’s daughter. This is Dakota Johnson, who’s supermarkets, swimming pools, and endless cocktail making a career out of characters seemingly more parties. Even within the professional class, heirarchsubstantial than the movies they’re in. But this time, ies emerge. The building itself is a top-down structhe part is so underwritten it doesn’t matter much. ture with the architect, Royal (a hollowed-out–lookSplash is the English-language debut of Italian ing Jeremy Irons), inhabiting a penthouse that comes director Luca Guadagnino, who already starred with its own horse and peacocks, as well as a wife conSwinton in his murkily enjoyable I Am Love. The temptuous of the lower orders (“The poor are always new film is based on The Swimming Pool, from so obsessed with money,” she complains), and a cock1969, a French tale that had Romy Schneider tog- ney fixer none too shy about shitkicking the rabble. Meanwhile, a hell-raising, super-potent Welsh gling between Alain Delon and Maurice Ronet, with Jane Birkin as the tagalong pixie. The story documentarian from the ground floor named Wilis updated with references to the Mediterranean der (Luke Evans, all sideburns and hip-hugging refugee crisis, although these are tied to an ending slacks) wants either revolution or some material for a new movie. It’s hard to say, and also irrelevant, as that is almost insultingly farcical in tone. The movie’s flashbacks, jump cuts, and shock the film itself seems to yield to the same chaotic subzooms add almost nothing to the uneven script, terranean forces as its characters. In the hallucinabut they do underline the truly exquisite cinema- tory orgy of sex and violence that follows, we learn tography of Yorick Le Saux, who also shot Swin- why Laing is barbecuing his dog in the film’s proton in Only Lovers Left Alive. So now that you’ve logue, and we gradually notice that a portion of the been prepped, go ahead and dive in. Just don’t audience has left in disgust (probably). It’s that kind of film; anything less would have been a failure. pretend there’s actual water in the pool.

born David Dencik, who was a pensive baldy in both versions of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. Gabe’s an intimacy-averse egghead with some success as a writer and teacher. They only have cleft palates and poor people skills in common, but learn they were both adopted, and that their real father resides on a remote Danish island. There, they encounter three bizarre brothers, each with a cleft palate but no other similarities, who live in a crumbling sanatorium—a real place, actually near Berlin—where they’re surrounded by animals, cheese, and extra-creepy lab equipment. Elias fits right in with their tendency to beat the crap out of each other with whatever taxidermy is at hand. But Gabriel digs deeper, yielding increasingly weird revelations on what constitutes family and, some will argue, comedy. It isn’t everyone’s cup of poisoned tea, but if you’re up for some cracked misanthropy, this Chicken’s for you.

> KEN EISNER

RAMS Starring Sigurður Sigurjónsson. In Icelandic, with English subtitles. Rating unavailable.

The big-horned headbutters of the title here

2 aren’t just the prized sheep kept in a remote

Icelandic valley; they are also the two heavily bearded brothers most competitive about them. Turns out the seemingly levelheaded Gummi > KEN EISNER > ADRIAN MACK (Sigurður Sigurjónsson) and the more erratic Kiddi (Theodór Júlíusson), who goes on occasional bendHIGH-RISE MEN & CHICKEN ers, haven’t spoken to each other in 40 years. The reason for this rift is gradually revealed, with viewStarring Tom Hiddleston. Rated 18A. Starring Mads Mikkelsen. In Danish, with English ers getting only the most basic insights required for subtitles. Rating unavailable. The novelist J.G. Ballard possessed a unique grasping life in this quietly unforgiving place. Plunk the guys from Dumb and Dumber on genius for imagining new and exceptionWhen Kiddi’s top ram wins the annual first prize, the Island of Dr. Moreau and you begin to it’s understandable that he is suspicious of Gummi’s ally weird ways to ridicule and torture Britain’s middle class. A notorious triptych of novels from get the kind of extra-dark comedy afoot, or maybe response to nabbing second place. His brother has the ’70s already yielded one controversial, if dry, aclaw, in Men & Chicken. taken it upon himself to examine the winner, findDanish writer-director Anders Thomas Jensen ing signs of scrapie, a fatal disease of the nervous sysscreen outing in 1996 with David Cronenberg’s Crash. For this version of High-Rise, in which an previously scripted such dark comedies as Wilbur tem that, if confirmed, could result in the slaughter ultramodern (for 1975) suburban estate devolves Wants to Kill Himself and The Green Butchers. Those of every sheep in the region. And let’s face it, there’s into ultraviolent tribalism, director Ben Wheat- films share a skeptical eye for human nature, plots not much else for shepherds to do in that wintry ley seems to have been more viscerally affected by built on family secrets, and Mads Mikkelsen. Here, landscape—especially for late-middle-aged bachBallard’s perverse visions, drumming up a true the brooding Dane plays the more absurdly clownish elors nursing spectacular grudges. love-it-or-hate-it proposition as decadent and un- of two antisocial siblings. His Elias is an obnoxious, Generally, the only communication beself-important lout and furious masturbator—the tween the siblings—who live next door to each hinged as the behaviour it depicts. At the centre of it all is Robert Laing, a doctor seen sort who would go on a blind date with a therapist other—comes through notes carried by Kiddi’s early in the film removing “the facial mask” from a for free therapy and then make fun of her wheelchair. wonderful sheepdog. But the messages get more He admires older bro Gabriel, played by Swedishsevered head during a pathology class. As one of the see next page

WEEK IN WIDESCREEN

MOVIES

The projector

1 2 Nomadic gestures LARRY FESSENDEN The Cinematheque has managed to score a rare Skype Q&A with Kelly Reichardt, joined by screenwriter Jon Raymond, when Old Joy kicks off its retrospective of the publicity-shy director’s work on Thursday (May 19). The Straight, meanwhile, managed to get Reichardt’s long-time friend and collaborator Larry Fessenden on the phone. “She’s just a private person. She believes in the work first, and is a little wary of the pomp and circumstance of press,” he told us. Read more at Straight.com. -

What to see and where to see it

Charlie’s his darling

PHIL Greg Kinnear plays a depressed dentist

in this dark comedy, shot in Vancouver just a few months ago. The film gets a test screening at the Vancity Theatre on Thursday (May 19), and if you’re over 30, you’re invited. Emily Mortimer, Taylor Schilling, and Jay Duplass costar.

LEAGUE OF EXOTIQUE DANCERS

Fresh from the DOXA Documentary Film Festival, this fantastic tribute to some of the legends of burlesque receives two screenings at (where else?) the Rio Theatre on Friday (May 20) and Sunday (May 22). Go to Straight.com for our topless review.

ELSTREE 1976 This acclaimed doc tracks

down some of the bit players and extras who found themselves involved in a little picture way back when called Star Wars. Find out what really happened to Biggs Darklighter at the Rio Theatre on Monday and Tuesday (May 23 and 24).

LUCA GUADAGNINO Luca Guadagnino is eager to discuss the Rolling Stones. “They are the alpha and the omega,” he tells the Straight. “The beginning and the end of rock ‘n’ roll, yeah.” Ralph Fiennes plays a record producer who worked with the Stones in Guadagnino’s latest, A Bigger Splash, and he performs a memorable dance sequence to “Emotional Rescue” at one point. “They were great allies,” says Guadagnino, who dishes more on his relationship with the band, including teatime with Charlie Watts, at Straight.com. MAY 19 – 26 / 2016 THE GEORGIA STRAIGHT 29

MOVIES

J.G. Ballard gets a rise out of Ben Wheatley > BY A DRIA N M A C K

he last time somebody adapted a J.G. Ballard novel for the screen, it was 1996, the film was Crash, and it was banned in London. Director David Cronenberg’s solemn take on the material was one thing, but in truth it was Ballard’s perverse imagination that viewers found so upsetting. “His prose style is like X-ray vision that just disassembles the modern world,” says Ben Wheatley, talking to the Straight during a recent visit to Vancouver’s Vancity Theatre. “For me, it felt like fantasy when I read it. It doesn’t feel like fantasy anymore.” The Brit filmmaker is on something of a publicity tour for his own demented version of Ballard’s High-Rise, opening Friday (May 20). The 1975 novel applies the author’s gentlemanly nihilism to a British middle class fractionating into violent hierarchies inside a modern suburban estate that seems to trigger all their worst (and strangest) pathologies. Written by regular collaborator Amy Jump, Wheatley’s take amounts to the kind of wild, orgiastic cinema we don’t really see anymore; a mix of broad humour and shock that unfurls like a Mike Leigh/Nic Roeg two-hander. “It could be one of the last big counterculture books that slips through the system and gets made into a movie that costs more than 10 quid,” Wheatley muses with a smirk. “We all felt honoured that we managed to get it through.”

The precariousness of such a project aside, Wheatley saw the opportunity to indulge a more personal fetish with HighRise, expressed through the film’s garish design, and—in the case of Luke Evans and Sienna Miller—performances that seem to channel Brit actors of a certain era like Oliver Reed and Glenda Jackson. “I was born in ’72 so I’m one of the kids in the tower block,” he says. “It’s kind of that child’s-eye view of what the adults got up to; the children’s experience of the ’70s, which was pretty rough, certainly in the U.K., where every other thing you watched was about drowning in a small pond or being electrocuted or the fear of nuclear destruction mixed with folk music and Nana Mouskouri and Paint Along With Nancy.” With a generous laugh he adds, “And it’s bookended by the Moors murders in the ’60s. This is a proper kind of evil lurking the land, isn’t it?” It’s probably safe to say that the man who made Kill List has a refined sense of evil lurking. While Ballard seemed to understand that the social experiments of the mid-20th century were doomed, albeit in obscure ways, Wheatley and Jump add an epilogue to their High-Rise that’s more direct in addressing the engineers of Britain’s dysfunction. Remarkably, with all that, this most daring of filmmakers is looking at something like his first hit. “People went to see it,” he says, with theatrical emphasis, of the film’s performance at home. “And that’s a relief. It means I can make movies. I’m not just in a corner pleasing myself.” -

Rams

from previous page

hostile when Gummi pushes his brother to meet the legal requirement to destroy everything related to the potentially sick animals. The everupright citizen has his own secrets, though, after hiding his favourite ram and some lucky ewes in his basement. Will the brothers forgive each others’ weaknesses and discover the bond that connected them as children? Rams writer-director Grímur Hákonarson is too unsentimental to offer such a simplistic finish. Still, the superb film’s ending is so primordial you’ll know it’s about far more than livestock and sibling rivalry. > KEN EISNER

THE MAN WHO KNEW INFINITY Starring Dev Patel. Rated PG.

The poetic side of mathematics is

2 extremely difficult to dramatize.

That’s why A Beautiful Mind didn’t even try. The Man Who Knew Infinity gives it a good college effort, actually breaking down some equations and explaining why they might matter to people who understand them better than the rest of us. The movie frequently fails in the drama department, however, although some of the performances reach for higher planes. Here, Slumdog Millionaire’s Dev Patel leaves his Marigold Hotel to play Srinivasa Ramanujan, a real-life math wiz who grew up in Madras, India. He came from a Brahmin family, which writer-director Matthew Brown, making his feature debut, forgets to tell us. The movie also ignores several serious illnesses that would contribute to his early death, and the fact that he mar-

ried a 10-year-old girl (who actually made it to 1994), instead concentrating on his long-distance marriage to a patient 20-something played by U.S.– born Devika Bhise. In any case, Ramanujan’s parents had fallen on hard times by the time he sailed to England in 1914, to work with Cambridge math lecturer G.H. Hardy. Jeremy Irons utterly steals the movie as this learned don with poor people skills. Carrying the intellectual weight and moral queasiness of the British Empire on his slumped shoulders, Hardy comes to see that what he calls “intuition” represents a taller order of mathematical imagination. Meanwhile, the younger man reluctantly adopts the “rigour” of the proofdemanding institution. Unfortunately, the intrusion of the First World War—or “Trouble on the continent?”, as someone helpfully puts it—is handled clumsily, as are many other contextual elements. The flashback visits to India feel perfunctory. The Cambridge scenes feel much more urgent, with interesting side characters, like philosophical superstar Bertrand Russell, well played by Jeremy Northam, and other top Brits huddling in dark, book-lined warrens. Their dialogue sometimes feels forced, but the movie comes alive whenever the screen yields to Irons and his pained dissections of life’s elusive formulations.

> KEN EISNER

MONEY MONSTER Starring George Clooney. Rated 14A.

If you’ve ever watched Mad

2 Money, the stock-analysis show starring the antic, gibbering Jim Cramer, you too may have entertained the fantasy in which an angry lunatic hijacks the set in order to force the host

to confess his sins against viewers—or else be blown into little bits. For the first 20 or so minutes, Money Monster is incredible, setting up this scenario with a glib, smooth George Clooney as Cramer stand-in Lee Gates, Julia Roberts as his unflappable and brilliant director, and Jack O’Connell, sporting an American accent and a suicide vest, as a ruined speculator. Director Jodie Foster plops us into Gates’s world of controlled television chaos, which becomes a place of dark humour as it morphs, in real time, into a hostage crisis. The MacGuffin of the piece is the $800 million worth of value that suddenly evaporated from a stock that Gates had hyped to the gullible masses. The company insists it is a glitch, while Gates asserts that stock prices are merely figments of public will—that these things just happen. The idea that a person’s financial ruination is just that arbitrary was covered much better in the epically entertaining The Big Short. Alas, Money Monster soon settles into a much more conventional and disappointing chase, literally at a walking pace, as the host finds his inner hero and the angry man becomes a folkloric symbol, with meme Vines. Later, someone shouts “He can’t breathe!” to the cops. Gee, thanks for the contemporary references, veteran Hollywood stalwarts! It’s irrelevant whether the cast and crew make this hunt for the missing money credible and interesting. The problem is presenting the follies of Wall Street as an ordinary crime, the fault of one specific villain who just acted incorrectly. Catch that one guy, and I guess everything is just fine. Well, it’s a movie. > RON YAMAUCHI

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“A hybrid of The Three Stooges comedy and the lunacy of The Island of Dr. Moreau.” – RogerEbert.com

Men & Chicken A FILM BY

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Even though he has every reason to be

BY MIKE US IN G ER

excited about the future of a recharged Black Mountain, singer-guitarist Stephen McBean is in a reflective mood when talking about the band’s stellar new full-length, IV. In the beginning, for the release of its 2005 debut, Black Mountain, one of Vancouver’s greatest-ever bands positioned itself as a hippie-commune collective. Black Mountain was, if you believed the press clippings, a mini army of perma-stoned rockers completely devoted to the cause of making music together. Over the years, though, the band would prove anything but a sole obsession for its members. In the mid-’00s, singer Amber Webber and drummer Joshua Wells launched the goldenhued Lightning Dust, a haunting synth project with three full-lengths to its credit. McBean has released four albums under the guise of Pink Mountaintops, as well as re-embracing his inner punk rocker as guitarist for L.A.–based hardcore revivalists Obliterations. Keyboardist Jeremy Schmidt has taken synth soundscapes to mind-melting new levels with his muchcelebrated analogue-obsessed project Sinoia Caves; check out his Beyond the Black Rainbow

Still chasing rock dreams

Black Mountain’s (left to right) Jeremy Schmidt, Colin Cowan, Amber Webber, Joshua Wells, and Stephen McBean have a strict no-shoes-in-the-house policy.

by former Superconductor drummer and man about town Keith Parry. McBean’s affection for that time is obvious, which More than a decade after its debut, Black Mountain partly explain why builds on its legacy as one of the city’s best-ever bands might the Victoria-raised frontsoundtrack for one of the most endlessly trippy man is also nostalgic about Vancouver, which he abandoned for Los Angeles just under a halfrecords of the decade. And because of all these projects, McBean sug- decade ago. With the rest of Black Mountain still gests, Black Mountain is receiving some of the best living in Lotusland, the singer spent chunks of reviews of its career for IV. And that’s reinvigorated last year here while writing IV. “It’s strange how it’s changed,” McBean says. a band that, after 2010’s raging Wilderness Heart, found itself wondering if it had anything left to say. “Gentrification everywhere has reared its head. It’s “After the first record, there was Pink Moun- been kept in check to some degree, but it’s weird taintops, then Lightning Dust, and all these dif- going to Save-On Meats or Funky Winker Bean’s, ferent things,” the laconic frontman says, on his or the Cobalt is a nice bar with nice drinks.” Vancouver has changed, but McBean in some cellphone in a tour van headed to Chicago. “At first, we were like the Black Mountain Army, the little ways hasn’t. While Black Mountain may have gang, and then we separated into all those bands. In been on the back burner for the past few years, hindsight, we wanted all those bands to have their he’s never lost his passion for songwriting, someown identities, which they should. For me, I built thing he’s been doing playing in punk and metal walls—people would always say, ‘Which songs go bands since his teens in Victoria. Being as into it as he sounds on IV probably amazto Pink, and which ones to Black?’ But for this record, we all kinda threw whatever we had in there. es him. The singer is closing in on 50, an age at which Amber would go, ‘I’ve had this Lightning Dust song most have long given up on the rock ’n’ roll dream. “I guess it’s weird because of the whole ageism for years—maybe that will work.’ And we’d be like, thing in rock ’n’ roll or indie rock or whatever this ‘That would totally work.’ ” Overseeing last year’s deluxe reissue of Black is,” he charges. “If I look back to when I was 20 Mountain would also influence IV. Rather than and went and saw some dude playing his guitar retread the riff-monster bombast of Wilderness and shaking his head like a little Muppet at age 47, Heart and its predecessor, In the Future, the band I’d be like, ‘No fucking way. That dude’s a fucking grandpa.’ But in the circles we kind of travel updates the art-weirdo heaviness of its debut. Those looking for deliriously heavy guitar will in, there’s people playing music into their 60s thrill to the back half of the otherworldly “Moth- and sometimes 70s and doing it well. It used to ers of the Sun” or the grey-matter-frying “(Over be you’re 25 and you’re done because you’re not and Over) The Chain”. But more often than not, it’s pretty anymore. “Luckily,” McBean adds with a wry snort, “we’re Schmidt who’s the star of the show on IV, his work awe-inspiringly crazy on the broken-bottle new a really pretty band, so there’s no problem there.” It makes sense that McBean is soldiering on, bewave of “Florian Saucer Attack” and spookily sublime on the black-light mindfuck “You Can Dream”. cause he’s a rock traditionalist at heart. The inargu“Revisiting Black Mountain with the remastering, able strength of the songs makes it clear that Black there was some deep listening,” McBean remembers. Mountain is every bit as important to McBean as it “There was a certain fun and innocence to that re- was in 2005, when the band first arrived on the radar cord that influenced this record. That made me re- in North America. member a lot of bands that I was listening to back “Sometimes, even though I’ll be like, ‘I can’t rethen. It was all krautrock or Swedish psych and Mayo member how old I am, or what year it is, or what Thompson—that was the soundtrack of 2003.” month it is,’ I’ll look at a calendar, or it’ll be my Back then, McBean was doing mail-outs for birthday,” he says, “and then I’ll be like, ‘How am Vancouver’s now-defunct Scratch Records, owned I even here?’ Then we’ll play a place like Madison,

CHECK THIS OUT

DON’T PANIC Chris Martin told BBC Radio’s Zane Lowe

that Coldplay might never release another LP. Sorry, haters, but this doesn’t mean Martin and his bandmates are calling it a day—they’re merely consciously uncoupling themselves from the album format.

THE KISS-OFF In case you’re keeping track, Nikki Sixx

ART BERGMANN “If you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss

also gazes into you.” Friedrich Nietzsche wrote that in the 19th century, but he could easily have been talking about Art Bergmann. Bergmann burned bright in the ’80s and ’90s, first as frontman for the Young Canadians, and then as a solo artist obsessed with suicide, addiction, and Vegas. Then he disappeared, burned-out and creatively spent, living in rural Alberta. We couldn’t be more thrilled that Bergmann is not only back but armed with a triumphant new album, The Apostate, which brings him to the Fox on Friday (May 20). -

Black Mountain plays the Commodore Ballroom on Saturday (May 21).

in + out

Stephen McBean sounds off on the things that enquiring minds want to know.

On technology: “I think there are these different things— phones, and people downloading or streaming all their music—that are coming to a head. That people are going to be like, ‘Okay, this is enough,’ and everyone’s going to take a step back. I’m sure it’s different if you go to a Beyoncé concert or something, but people getting their phones out at shows is now seen as kind of lame.” On Vancouver: “I lived in a house in Strathcona back in, I guess, 2000. It was a big house and the landlord was selling it. He offered to sell it to me and my girlfriend at the time for what I think was $220,000. Even though the house was massive, we were like, ‘That’s ridiculous—we can’t afford that.’ ” On modern music consumption: “I’ve got nothing against people streaming music or downloading it for free, because at least they come out to the shows. What does fucking piss me off is that some suit-and-tie guy is getting filthy rich off the whole scheme.”

MUSIC Let’s talk about

You gotta see

Wisconsin, and Dan from Killdozer will be there going, ‘I love your new record.’ That’s when you’re like, ‘The guy from Killdozer likes our band! How much radder does it get than that?’ “Those are the things that make it special,” McBean continues. “Sometimes you go through the motions and stuff and would rather be sitting on the couch and eating a really good sandwich, because you’re exhausted. But if you go on the road and stay on the road, after a certain point it’s impossible to get off.” He pauses, laughs, and then adds: “And not sexually.” Though Black Mountain might have drawn mightily on the past experiences of its band members for IV, its future is still being written. -

has joined Paul Stanley in condemning Gene Simmons for insensitive comments regarding Prince’s death. We’re still waiting for the bassist from Ratt to offer his equally relevant opinion.

WHERE SCUMBAGS DARE The Misfits announced a classic-lineup reunion, despite founders Jerry Only and Glenn Danzig suing each other repeatedly over the years. Only said he’s always been friends with Danzig, evidently including when he said getting back together would make him feel like a “miserable scumbag”.

NOT QUITE M.I.A. After being reported missing on

Monday when she went for a 6 a.m. bike ride in Chicago, Sinéad O’Connor has turned up safe and sound. Her career, however, remains deader than Prince.

Fresh and local PEACH PIT SWEET F.A. On this sparkling foursong EP, Peach Pit displays a knack for distilling ennui, angst, and disappointment into wistful, melodic indie pop. It’s mostly pretty mellow stuff, but “Seventeen” (not a Sex Pistols cover!) is the exception. The up-tempo jangler sails along on a Johnny Marr–lite six-string line while singer-guitarist Neil Smith deflates drunken teenage declarations of love with “I’m 17, don’t hold your breath.” The most devastating number here is “Drop the Guillotine”, whose narrator stands by and watches in palpable pain while a supposed pal romances the girl he loves. Ouch! -

MAY 19 – 26 / 2016 THE GEORGIA STRAIGHT 31

Arts time out

from page 28

IVAN DECKER Canadian comedian known for appearing on CBC’s The Debaters. May 19-21, The Comedy MIX (1015 Burrard). Tix $20/18/15, info www.thecomedymix.com/.

straight choices

CEDRIC NEWMAN Jamaican-born, Montreal-bred comedian performs a standup show. May 19, 8 pm; May 20, 8 pm; May 21, 7 pm; May 21, 9:30 pm, Yuk Yuk’s Comedy Club (2837 Cambie). Tix $20/10, info www.yukyuks.com/. PENN & TELLER Comedy and magic duo from Las Vegas. May 20, doors 7 pm, show 8 pm, Molson Canadian Theatre at Hard Rock (2080 United Blvd.). Tix $99.50 (plus service charges and fees). SOLD OUT. THE FOUR EYESLY COMEDY CANTINA Vancouver standup comedians present an evening of geek-powered hilarity. May 20, 9-10:30 pm, Seven Dining Lounge (53 W. Broadway). Tix $5, info www.facebook. com/events/908009245983359/. IMPROV X COMICS AKA BOOM! POW! The Fictionals present a night of comedy that sees superheroes defeat villains. May 24, 8-9:30 pm, Café Deux Soleils (2096 Commercial). Tix $7/5, info www.thefictionals.com/.

LITERARY EVENTS 2THIS WEEK LITFEST NEW WEST Celebrate readers and writers with a two-month exhibit, a multilingual poetry event, a communication workshop, a literary marketplace, vendors, local authors, author workshops, author readings, and a singersongwriter panel. To May 19, various New Westminster venues. Info www.litfestnewwest.com/. ANNE FLEMING BOOK LAUNCH: POEMW Anne Fleming launches first book of poetry poemw. May 18, 7-9 pm, Our Town Café (245 E. Broadway). Free admission, info www.annefleming.ca/. ABORIGINAL STORYTELLING IN DIGITAL MEDIA Share examples and discover opportunities for storytellers working in transmedia, digital formats, and online media. May 24, 6:30-8 pm, Vancouver Public Library Renfrew Branch (2969 E. 22nd). Free admission, info www.vpl.ca/. RESOURCES FOR WRITERS Learn about print and online resources for traditional publishing and self-publishing. May 25, 10:30 am–12 pm, Vancouver Public Library Central Branch (350 W. Georgia). Free admission, info www.vpl.ca/.

straight choices

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32 THE GEORGIA STRAIGHT MAY 19 – 26 / 2016

GAME OF THROWN Puppets, projected visuals, and percussion music are all part of a traditional Javanese shadow play, but what Gamelan Alligator Joy has in store for you this weekend is just a little bit different. Okay, make that a lot different: composer, narrator, and would-be ventriloquist Michael O’Neill’s Ventriloquial Investigations is part multimedia spectacle, part philosophical discourse, part newmusic masterpiece, and quite unlike anything else you’ve ever seen. (But, then, what else should one expect from a composer who’s best known for writing avant-garde bagpipe quartets?) Andreas Kahre’s stage design, Sammy Chien’s digital projections, and some clever electronic interventions lend extra depth to O’Neill’s challenging work, at the Western Front on Saturday (May 21).

A NEW SWAN Aside from The Nutcracker in December, there are few opportunities to see full-length story ballets in Vancouver. Coastal City Ballet happily finds its niche by premiering one new classical story each spring with its preprofessional company of local and international talent. Argentine dancer Lucila Munaretto, the 21-year-old who was in a near-fatal rollerblading accident last summer, makes a comeback with a character role in this fresh version of Swan Lake. Iconic scenes, such as swarms of white swans and a prince troubled by love, remain, but German choreographer Irene Schneider has given the traditional tale a modern twist. Catch it at the Vancouver Playhouse on Saturday (May 21) and at the Surrey Arts Centre on June 10.

ET CETERA 2THIS WEEK TAGORE SPRING FESTIVAL 2016 A multicultural celebration of spring through dance, music, and poetry. May 21, 7:3010 pm, Surrey City Hall (13450 104 Ave., Surrey). Admission by donation, info www.vancouvertagoresociety.org/. GROTTO: VENTRILOQUIAL INVESTIGATIONS Michael O’Neill presents a 40-minute musical theatre performance for speaker, ventriloquist’s puppet, Javanese gamelan, and live video score. May 21, 8 pm, Western Front (303 E. 8th). Tix 18/15, info www.gamelanmadusari.com/. JESSIE AWARDS NOMINATIONS PARTY The Jessie Richardson Theatre Awards Society will be announcing the nominees for the upcoming theatre awards honouring Vancouver’s vibrant artistic community. May 24, 5 pm, York Theatre (639 Commercial). Info www.jessies.ca/.

GALLERIES VANCOUVER ART GALLERY 750 Hornby, 604-662-4719, www.vanartgallery.bc.ca/. 2MASHUP: THE BIRTH OF MODERN CULTURE (exhibition offers an international survey of mashup culture) to Jun 12

MUSEUMS THE MUSEUM OF ANTHROPOLOGY AT UBC 6393 NW Marine Drive, 604822-5087, www.moa.ubc.ca/. 2IN THE FOOTPRINT OF THE CROCODILE MAN: CONTEMPORARY ART OF THE SEPIK RIVER, PAPUA NEW GUINEA (exhibition features the carvings of Papua New Guinea’s Iatmul people) to Jan 31, 2017 2LAWRENCE PAUL YUXWELUPTUN: UNCEDED TERRITORIES (Vancouver-based artist is showcased in a presentation of works that confront the colonialist suppression of First Nations peoples) to Oct 16

TIME OUT ARTS LISTINGS are a public service provided free of charge, based on available space and editorial discretion. Submit listings online using the event-submission form at straight.com/AddEvent. Events that don’t make it into the paper due to space constraints will appear on the website.

MUSIC

Supermoon branches out

upermoon may have evolved from Movieland, but don’t confuse the two bands. Yes, three of Supermoon’s members—multi-instrumentalists Adrienne LaBelle and Alie Lynch, and drummer Selina Crammond—were also in the earlier group, but thanks to relative newcomer Katie Gravestock and some crafty instrumentswapping, Supermoon has developed its own distinct sound. That sound is heard to good effect on the local quartet’s soon-to-be-released Mint Records debut, Playland. All four members of Supermoon will admit to being utterly traumatized by “This album for sure feels like a the memory of riding the harrowing Wild Mouse roller coaster at Playland. definite extra step beyond Movieland,” LaBelle says when the Straight two guitars playing, but rather than days gone by—cub’s Betti-Cola was rings her up during her lunch break. dividing the labour up into a rhythm released in the same format in 1993— “In Movieland we had a rule that no part and a lead part, Supermoon but it’s also practical. The demand for song should be over two minutes long; more often intertwines a pair of mel- vinyl LPs has outpaced the producthey should just be short, poppy songs. odic lines that occasionally clash in tion capabilities of pressing plants to We just wanted to do fun, short pop unexpected but not unpleasant ways. such an extent that it can take months songs. Our songs are all still pretty “There’s not been any game to get a full-length record manufacshort, but we don’t plan where we tured, and Supermoon wanted to put have that same m a s t e r m i n d e d Playland out now, not in the fall. idea anymore. It’s the whole thing,” The double 7-inch idea actually a bit more open LaBelle says. “It’s came from Mint Records founder John Lucas and we’ve explored just what happens. Randy Iwata (who also happens to songwriting in a different way. We’ve When Katie does play a chord, be the brother of cub member Robyn taken a bit more time with it on this re- they’re always discordant. She al- Iwata). According to LaBelle, Supercord, so I think our sound has changed ways goes for the Sonic Youth–y moon was happy to run with Iwata’s a little bit. It’s a bit darker in parts. It’s kind of thing. And then Alie plays suggestion, especially given how still poppy, but it’s a bit more experi- guitar, but she always comes up hands-off the folks at Mint are when mental for our purposes. We definitely with really poppy riffs. it comes to artistic matters in general. have branched out in songwriting.” “One thing that happened on this “They’re not trying to take any creIndeed, songs such as “Night Div- record is that we switched,” LaBelle ative control or anything, so that was ision” and “Bottle Ships” are carried continues. “I was the bass player really nice,” she notes. “It’s basically along by chiming guitar licks that for all the songs before, and on this just like having friends help support wouldn’t have sounded out of place album Alie and I switched for four you with your music, and just an extra on a Cure record circa 1985. The lat- songs. I think part of what has hap- set of hands and all that sort of stuff. ter track ends in a swirl of dissonant pened is that I was originally a violin They were always around for the past feedback and fuzz that leads natur- player, and this is my first time play- two years as friends and supporters, ally into the next cut, “Stories We ing guitar on a record, at all. I think and we knew that they liked our music, Tell Ourselves About Ourselves”, I play guitar like a violin a little bit. because they kept asking us to play which somehow blends stop-start I’m just straight-up not good at play- things, so eventually we signed the postpunk riffs with surf’s-up drum- ing chords. It doesn’t come naturally deal with them, and that was nice.” ming and Middle Eastern six-string. to me. So by default I play riffy bits.” What truly sets Supermoon apart Playland will come out this week Supermoon plays a record-release is its seeming disregard for the rock as a pair of 7-inch records. This is a show for Playland at the Astoria on ’n’ roll rulebook. There are invariably flashback to a Mint Records classic of Thursday (May 19).

Local Motion

VISIT TO WIN A PHILLIPS BACKYARD WEEKENDER GETAWAY! COURTESY OF MAY 19 – 26 / 2016 THE GEORGIA STRAIGHT 33

34 THE GEORGIA STRAIGHT MAY 19 – 26 / 2016

MUSIC

Bird relishes connecting with human beings “This is all nonfiction,” declares

2 Andrew Bird during the ques-

tion-markless title tune of his bold new album, Are You Serious. This time around, the veteran singer-songwriter could be fighting a battle between artifice and truth. But can both sides win? “I’m still myself,” says Bird, on the line from Dublin, Ireland, just one stop on his long, multinational tour. “There are certain words and images I’m drawn to, and they can be pretty obscure, I guess. But I definitely had a desire to communicate something more specific here, which is unusual for me. I normally work my way from sound to sense.” The instantly catchy songs manage to be spare and luxurious at the same time, redolent of wry futurism and the belle époque. Sometimes you can hear Bird’s conservatory training, especially when his violin takes over, and some swinging impulses recall his early tenure in the Squirrel Nut Zippers. But this is by far his rockiest offering to date. Dig the heavily filtered guitar sounds of “Truth Lies Low” and the bluesy imprecations of the temposhifting “Left Handed Kisses”, a duet with Fiona Apple. Two sanctified numbers, “Saints Preservus” and “The New Saint Jude”, have the pop clarity of Paul Simon. As usual, Bird’s lyrics contain scientific metaphors, from the particles of “Puma” (“she was radioactive for seven days”) to the neurotransmitters of “Chemical Switches” (“all it takes is a spark”). “I don’t know why,” he observes, “but I’m just drawn to themes that haven’t been considered as much as they maybe should be—things that talk about what we’re made of.” In the 2011 documentary Fever Year, the heavily sweating tour warrior, sick at the time, fretted about “turning into a different animal” on-stage. But that was before he met elegant fashion designer Katherine

Savages’ Adore Life focuses on most complex emotion As Savages has been surprisingly

2 up-front about admitting, Adore

When he’s not busy in the studio or on the road, Andrew Bird likes to pretend he’s a gentleman hog farmer, even though he actually can’t stand pigs.

Tsina, and they had a child and moved from the Chicago area, where he grew up, to sunny Los Angeles. He may sing that he still feels like a “stranger in a land that’s anything but strange”, but now he’s more happily whistling in the dark. “I’ve always preferred the studio; for people who have trouble interacting with large groups of people, or even just other humans, it’s the perfect way out,” he says. “But I can honestly say I’ve never felt more comfortable performing. There’s something about making a real connection with a living, breathing audience. Maybe it’s just a thing of the moment, but maybe not. It could be an infinite well.” This philosophical bent can make a long-time Andrew Bird fan wonder if he has entered a period of reevaluation. But almost exactly 20 years into his slowly but steadily building

career, he simply hasn’t had enough time to look back. “I only hear my older music by accident,” the 42-year-old admits. “But when I do, I’m always surprised that my memory of it is so different from how it really sounds. Some of the old stuff sounds really reckless and young.” Does that mean the new stuff is settled and old? “No, not at all. It’s just that with the early things I can hear the excitement overtaking the music at times—mostly by cramming so many ideas into a single tune. There’s an impatience that’s probably normal at 22. I wouldn’t say that I’m settled now; there are just different things I value these days.” > KEN EISNER

Andrew Bird performs at the Orpheum on Saturday (May 21).

we learned to give more to the audience. As we met a lot of our fans, we started to really be more open. I think that exploring the subject of love, in the context of the band that we are, was something that we saw as a bit of a risk. It’s not a subject that we thought we’d ever cover, and here we’ve covered it on our second record, which is quite exciting.” Adore Life is not only exciting, but also one of the best records of the year. The album starts out with the grimy retro grunge of “The Answer”, which careens to a halt with Beth howling “If you don’t love me, you don’t love anybody/Ain’t you glad it’s you?” What follows is pure catharsis, as Savages takes things to a molasses crawl on “Slowing Down the World”, gets aggro to the max on the raging “T.I.W.Y.G.”, and retools postpunk for a new generation on the thumping “Evil”. The album’s most powerful moment comes at the three-minute mark of “Adore”, when, over nothing but fleshscrape guitar and doomsday bass, Beth turns the words “I adore life” into a desperate mantra. The best part? That sentiment couldn’t be more true, not just for her, but for her bandmates as well. “Everything we’ve done till now is all about enjoying the experience of life and having fun,” Hassan says brightly. “We’re all about immersing ourselves in the moment, and that really comes across in how we are as people.”

Life—the U.K. band’s second fulllength—is a record that revolves around love. If that theme is somewhat unexpected, it’s only because the band’s Mercury Prize–nominated debut, Silence Yourself, wasn’t exactly anyone’s idea of romantic mood music. When the group seemingly arrived out of nowhere in London in 2013, its songs matched postpunk abrasiveness with lyrics that suggested someone had been reading from the bible of I Hate All Authority. But bassist Ayse Hassan suggests there’s more than one way to come at one of the most complex of all human emotions. “The record’s about all shades of love and the human condition, really,” says the outgoing Londoner. “With love, there’s so much you can take from it, and also there’s so many angles you can see things from. For us, there are some personal experiences. Or I should say many personal experiences. But there’s also something more there.” Expanding on that, she reveals that Savages found itself in the middle of a media-hype hurricane after the release of Silence Yourself. At first, the band members—Hassan, plus singer Jehnny Beth, guitarist Gemma Thompson, > MIKE USINGER and drummer Fay Milton—closed ranks, becoming a fiercely insular unit that relied on each other for strength. Savages plays the Imperial next Then they realized there was some- Friday (May 27). thing positive to be gained by opening up to their fellow human beings. “I feel like when we first started the band, we were trying to protect ourselves from splitting up,” Hassan adAlthough Lau Nau is relatively mits. “We had a lot of outside pressure unknown in North America, around us that could have broken us up early on. But we started to get more one look at the website belonging to see next page comfortable as a group, and as a result

Finland’s Lau Nau promises a kind of secular vespers

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tickets in stores: ZULU red cat | NEPTOON MAY 19 – 26 / 2016 THE GEORGIA STRAIGHT 35

Lau Nau

from previous page

the woman otherwise known as Laura Naukkarinen proves that sheâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s been busy at home. Playing with noisy rock bands, improvising with like-minded experimentalists, writing beautifully fragile songs, and crafting soundtracks for award-winning films occupy her time. Her creative practice is so diverse that it seems only natural to ask just which Lau Nau weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ll get when she makes a rare Vancouver appearance next week. â&#x20AC;&#x153;Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m playing my songs on the guitar, with some toys and small sound objects,â&#x20AC;? Naukkarinen answers in lightly accented English, by way of a

glitchy Skype connection from her home on a Finnish island somewhere west of Helsinki. â&#x20AC;&#x153;Theyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re really quiet songs,â&#x20AC;? she stresses. â&#x20AC;&#x153;Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s not like a big rock-club thing; itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s more like sitting down, listening. If it was religious, it would be like a vespers, you know. But itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s not!â&#x20AC;? What kind of subjects will she sing about in this small, secular ceremony? â&#x20AC;&#x153;Thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s a hard one, because Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve done a few records already and they all had their own theme,â&#x20AC;? she says. â&#x20AC;&#x153;The latest album of songs, Valohiukkanen, came out in 2012, and the lyrics were about different characters, and maybe also things that happen in the dark side of our livesâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;melancholia and so on. But itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s really about persons who

cannot live inside society. The texts are really not that straightforward, but that was the theme of that album. â&#x20AC;&#x153;I try to say a lot of things with a few words,â&#x20AC;? she adds. â&#x20AC;&#x153;So in that way, the songs are quiteâ&#x20AC;Ś I donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t know. Intuitive? Dreamy? Something like that.â&#x20AC;? Naukkarinenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s penchant for crafting atmospheric music has also served her well as a soundtrack composer, with HEM. NĂĽgonstans a good example of that. Lotta Petronellaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s film is set on the outer islands of the archipelago that Naukkarinen calls home, and her score is perhaps the best example of how Lau Nauâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s environment has shaped her recent compositions. The music is built up from layers of small sounds, with Pekko KĂ¤ppiâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s fiddlelike

jouhikko contributing a strong human element as well as a direct connection to their countryâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s rural past. â&#x20AC;&#x153;That was made for a film about three men and their daily life. One is a fisher, a hunter, and another is a postmanâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;he has to deliver the mail over the ice or by boat,â&#x20AC;? Naukkarinen explains. â&#x20AC;&#x153;Nature is a huge factor in their daily life, and you can hear it in the music, I guess, too. The sea, nature, the roughness of the weather, and the surroundings.â&#x20AC;? Whether depicting a landscape that can kill or the workings of her own mind, Naukkarinenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s music almost always exhibits a relaxed sense of time that is perhaps the most profound link to her island life.

â&#x20AC;&#x153;Thereâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s no hectic city life around me. The cycle is more slow, even though life with small kids can be busy,â&#x20AC;? she says. â&#x20AC;&#x153;Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m quite a slow worker when Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m doing Lau Nau stuff, so it suits me well that I can live at a slower pace here in the countryside. When Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m working with bands or improvising, things can happen really fast, but when Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m working alone I require a lot of time. I have to think about things!â&#x20AC;? With contemplative moments at a premium here in busy Vancouver, Lau Nauâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s upcoming show offers a welcome chance to slow down and dream. > ALEXANDER VARTY

Lau Nau plays the Lido next Thursday (May 26).

MAY 19 THE PHONIX

THURS MAY 19 * THAT FILTHY SHOW * BURLESQUE COMEDY MUSIC * BLOODY BETTY * PICKLES LAVEY * STEVIE SLEEZBURGER * HOSTED BY DAVID DJ ROY * $7 ~ 9PM * FOLLOWED BY KARAOKE * FRI MAY 20 * DEFILING THE NASMA * SHITLIVER [ONT] * MASSIVE SCAR ERA *

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36 THE GEORGIA STRAIGHT MAY 19 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; 26 / 2016

TICKETS & SCHEDULE: EDULE: LEVITATION-VA LEVITATION LEVITATION-VANCOUVER.COM VA VANCOUVER COM

2CHICAGO Jun 16 2DIANA ROSS Jun 30 2DONNY & MARIE Dec 20

ROGERS ARENA 800 Griffiths Way, 604899-7400. Concert venue and home to the Vancouver Canucks. 2HEDLEY May 20 2CITY AND COLOUR Jun 3 2JAMES TAYLOR AND HIS ALL-STAR BAND Jun 11 2DIXIE CHICKS Jul 7 2ADELE Jul 20

music/ timeout

THE ROXY 932 Granville, 604-331-7999. House band Tattoo Alibi Sat & Mon; country band Locked & Loaded Sun; the Bulge and DJ Joe Pound Tue; Troys ‘R Us WedThu. 2TODD KERNS Jun 2

CONCERTS 2JUST ANNOUNCED HALL PASS Free monthly music festival features local bands the Faceplants, Actors, the Prettys, Fashionism, Catlow, Eric Campbell and the Dirt, No Sinner, Dan Moxon, Louise Burns, and Star Captains. May 28, 11 am–11 pm, Cloverdale Fairgrounds (17798 62nd Ave., Cloverdale). Free admission, info www.freeshows.ca/. DISCHARGE British punk band, with guests Toxic Holocaust, Mass Grave, Old Derelicts, and World View. Jun 1, 6 pm, Rickshaw Theatre (254 E. Hastings). Tix $28, info www.rickshawtheatre.com/. SEAWAY Canadian pop-punk band tours in support of latest release Colour Blind. Jul 19, doors 8 pm, show 9 pm, Cobalt (917 Main). Tix on sale May 19, 9 am, $13 (plus service charges and fees) at Red Cat, Zulu Records, and www.ticketweb.ca/. MISERY SIGNALS American hardcore band plays songs from entire discography, with guests Neck of the Woods and World View. Jul 30, doors 7 pm, show 7:30 pm, Biltmore Cabaret (2755 Prince Edward). Tix on sale May 20, 10 am, $20 (plus service charges and fees) at Red Cat, Zulu Records, and www.ticketweb.ca/. AWOLNATION Los Angeles-based rock band tours in support of new album Run, with guests the Darcys. Aug 11, doors 8 pm, show 9 pm, Commodore Ballroom (868 Granville). Tix on sale May 20, 10 am, $35 (plus service charges and fees) at www.livenation.com/. TURNOVER American rock band tours in support of latest release Peripheral Vision. Aug 27, doors 7 pm, show 8 pm, Cobalt (917 Main). Tix $17 (plus service charges and fees) at Red Cat, Zulu Records, and www.ticketweb.ca/. BARNS COURTNEY British indie musician tours in support of first full-length album. Sep 3, doors 8 pm, show 9 pm, Media Club (695 Cambie). Tix on sale May 20, 10 am, $15 (plus service charges and fees) at www.livenation.com/. THE TEMPER TRAP Australian rock band tours in support of upcoming third studio album Thick As Thieves, with guests Coast Modern. Sep 21, doors 7 pm, show 8 pm, Commodore Ballroom (868 Granville). Tix on sale May 20, 10 am, $32.50 (plus service charges and fees) at www.livenation.com/. YOUNG THE GIANT As part of the Straight series, Los Angeles-based rock band performs in support of upcoming studio album Home of the Strange, with guests Ra Ra Riot. Oct 26-27, doors 7 pm, show 8:15 pm, Commodore Ballroom (868 Granville). Tix on sale May 20, 10 am, $29.50 (plus service charges and fees) at www.livenation.com/. MØ Danish electropop singer performs tunes from first studio album No Mythologies to Follow Nov 23, doors 8 pm, show 9 pm, Vogue Theatre (918 Granville). Tix on sale May 20, 10 am, $25 (plus service charges and fees) at Red Cat, Zulu Records, and www.ticketfly.com/.

2THIS WEEK DIANA ARBENINA & THE NIGHT SNIPERS Russian rock band. May 19, 7 pm, Rickshaw Theatre (254 E. Hastings). Tix $59.52, info www.facebook.com/ events/1675937726017066/. BIG BLACK DELTA Los Angeles electropop musician Jonathan Bates tours in support of upcoming album Trágame Tierra. May 19, 8 pm, Biltmore Cabaret (2755 Prince Edward). Tix $12 (plus service charges and fees), info www.ticketfly.com/ event/1093855-big-black-delta-vancouver/. YOUNG EMPIRES Canadian rock band tours in support of first full-length album The Gates, with guests Blajk. May 19, doors 8 pm, show 9 pm, Fortune Sound Club (147 E. Pender). Tix $18 (plus service charges and fees) at www.livenation.com/. CHARLES BRADLEY AND HIS EXTRAORDINAIRES American soul singer-songwriter tours in support of upcoming third album Changes. May 20, doors 8 pm, show 9 pm, Commodore Ballroom (868 Granville). Tix $35 (plus service charges and fees). SOLD OUT. HEDLEY Canadian pop-rock group tours in support of sixth studio album Hello, with guests Carly Rae Jepsen and Francesco Yates. May 20, doors 6 pm, show 7 pm, Rogers Arena (800 Griffiths Way). Tix $75/55/39.50 (plus service charges and fees) at www.livenation.com/.

LOUIS THE CHILD Chicago electronica duo, with guests Yurie and LeChance. May 20, Fortune Sound Club (147 E. Pender). Tix $15, info www.fortunesoundclub.com/.

three-room party with Vinyl Ritchie, Casual Encounters, and ping pong/arcade games Fri; Tiki Bar Sat. 2AN EVENING WITH May 19 2HIATUS MUSIC FESTIVAL Jul 23

ART BERGMANN Vancouver punk-rock legend performs tunes from new album The Apostate, with guests Gerry Hannah and the New Questioning Coyote Brigade and Mac Pontiac. May 20, 7:30 pm, Fox Cabaret (2321 Main). Info www.facebook. com/Art-Bergmann-1419077358314563/.

BACKSTAGE LOUNGE Arts Club Theatre, 1585 Johnston, Granville Island, 604-687-1354. Vancouver’s only live-music venue on the water, with music nightly. Hot Jazz Jam night on Tue. 2WORLDBEAT SESSIONS May 21

NO SINNER Canadian rock band celebrates the release of latest album Old Habits Die Hard, with guests Shelter and Old Soul Rebel. May 20, doors 7 pm, show 8 pm, Cobalt (917 Main). Tix $15 (plus service charges and fees) at Red Cat, Highlife Records, and www.ticketweb.ca/. SHILOH LINDSEY Canadian country singer-songwriter, with guest Rodney DeCroo + the Wise Blood. May 20, 8:30 pm, LanaLou’s (362 Powell). Tix $10, info www.shilohlindsey.ca/. BLACK MOUNTAIN Vancouver psychedelic-rock band tours in support of upcoming release IV. May 21, doors 8 pm, Commodore Ballroom (868 Granville). Tix $23.50 (plus service charges and fees) at Red Cat, Zulu Records, and www.bplive.ca/.

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BUZZCOCKS U.K. punk band tours in celebration of 40th anniversary, with guests Residuels. May 21, doors 8 pm, show 9 pm, Rickshaw Theatre (254 E. Hastings). Tix $35 (plus service charges and fees) at Red Cat, Zulu Records, and www.ticketweb.ca/. ANDREW BIRD American indie-rock musician, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist tours in support of new album Are You Serious. May 21, doors 7 pm, Orpheum Theatre (601 Smithe). Tix $37/32 (plus service charges and fees) at Red Cat, Zulu Records, and www.bplive.ca/. SAINT MOTEL Los Angeles-based indiepop band composed of A/J Jackson, Aaron Sharp, Greg Erwin, and Dak, with guests Phases. May 22, doors 8 pm, show 9 pm, The Imperial (319 Main). Tix $22.50 (plus service charges and fees) at www. livenation.com/. MODERAT Berlin-based electronica group composed of Sascha Ring, Gernot Bronsert, and Sebastian Szary. May 23, doors 8 pm, show 9 pm, Vogue Theatre (918 Granville). Tix $30 (plus service charges and fees) at Red Cat, Zulu Records, and www.ticketfly.com/. THE BRIAN JONESTOWN MASSACRE American psychedelic-rock band. May 23, doors 8 pm, show 9:30 pm, Commodore Ballroom (868 Granville). Tix $30 (plus service charges and fees) at www.ticket master.ca/. MACKLEMORE & RYAN LEWIS Grammy-winning hip-hop duo from Seattle (“Thrift Shop”) performs tunes from new album This Unruly Mess I’ve Made, with guests Raz Simone and XP. May 25, doors 7 pm, show 8 pm, PNE Forum (2901 E. Hastings). Tix $60.50 (plus service charges and fees) at www.livenation.com/.

BILTMORE CABARET 2755 Prince Edward, 604-676-0541. Resident DJs My!Gay!Husband!, Sincerely Hanna, and Rico Uno Sat; burlesque with Burgundy Brixx & the Purrrfessor Sun; tropical, electro, goth, world, and rudeboy with DJs Peter & Robbie (Humans), DJ Bee, Wobangs, and Basedgoth Tue. 2BIG BLACK DELTA May 19 2NEXT MUSIC FROM TOKYO VOL 8 May 25 2THE TOURIST COMPANY May 26 2LA LUZ May 27 2WE LOVE DRAKE III May 27 BIMINI PUBLIC HOUSE 2010 W. 4th, 604733-7116. Twenty-four taps of rotating and interesting craft beers. Pub trivia Mon; beer club Tue; Wing Wed; dance party Fri-Sat; happy hour 3-6 pm. COBALT 917 Main, 778-918-3671. Live bands some nights, DJs other nights. Karaoke Mon, classic tunes and free pizza Tue; live painting art raffle Wed. 2NO SINNER May 20 2THE SO SO GLOS May 29 2ADIA VICTORIA Jun 12 COMMODORE BALLROOM 868 Granville, 604-739-4550. General admission venue with 900-person capacity features live performances by touring bands and musicians from across North America and around the world. Tix at www.commodoreballroom.ca/. 2 CHARLES BRADLEY AND HIS EXTRAORDINAIRES May 20 2BLACK MOUNTAIN May 21 2THE BRIAN JONESTOWN MASSACRE May 23 2MATT CORBY May 26 2OH WONDER May 28

MEDIA CLUB 695 Cambie, 604-608-2871. Live music most nights. 2BRIMSTONE May 21 2SHAUN RAWLINS EP RELEASE PARTY May 27 2VAN DAMSEL May 28 2KEVIN MORBY Jun 7 2BENJAMIN FRANCIS LEFTWICH Jul 22 2BARNS COURTNEY Sep 3 MOLSON CANADIAN THEATRE AT HARD ROCK 2080 United Blvd., 604523-6888. 1,000-seat entertainment venue showcases leading Canadian and international acts. 2PENN & TELLER May 20 2THUNDER FROM DOWN UNDER Jun 17 REPUBLIC 958 Granville, 604-669-3214. House, hip-hop, EDM, chart, and reggae. Open seven days a week from 10 pm to 3 am. RICKSHAW THEATRE 254 E. Hastings, 604-681-8915. Live bands some nights. 2DIANA ARBENINA & THE NIGHT SNIPERS May 19 2METALOCALYPSTICK FESTIVAL FUNDRAISER May 20 2BUZZCOCKS May 21 2CARAMELOS DE CIANURO May 22 RIVER ROCK SHOW THEATRE River Rock Casino Resort, 8811 River Rd., Richmond, 604-247-8900. Thousand-seat venue features live performances by touring musicians and comedians from across North America and around the world. Tix for all shows at www.ticketmaster.ca/.

OUT OF TOWN 2UPCOMING HIGHLIGHTS PEMBERTON MUSIC FESTIVAL Huka Entertainment presents Canada’s biggest camping, music, and comedy festival. Lineup includes Pearl Jam, J. Cole, Kaskade, Snoop Dogg, Bassnectar, Wiz Khalifa, Ice Cube, and Halsey. July 14-17, Pemberton Valley (Pemberton, B.C.). Info at www.pembertonmusicfestival.com/, info www.pembertonmusicfestival.com/.

TIME OUT MUSIC LISTINGS are a public service provided free of charge, based on available space and editorial discretion. Submit listings online using the event-submission form at straight.com/AddEvent. Events that don’t make it into the paper due to space constraints will appear on the website.

MONDAYS

MAY 21

MAY 20

FORTUNE SOUND CLUB 147 E. Pender, 604-569-1758. Located in the heart of Chinatown, Fortune Sound blends high and low by bringing up-from-the-street ambience into a modern setting, complemented by the Funktion One sound system. Featured nights include Happy Ending Fridays, Sup Fu? Saturdays, Hip Hop Karaoke, and live shows covering electronic, rap, hip-hop, dubstep, and metal. 2YOUNG EMPIRES May 19 2LOUIS THE CHILD May 20 FOX CABARET 2321 Main. Multi-room arts and culture venue in Mount Pleasant showcases live music, DJs, comedy, and performance, including monthlies HEAVEN, Rapp Battlez, and Motown Party. Sunday Service improv comedy Sun; Séance with DJ Darwin Meyers Sun; The Zodiac Club with DJ Magneticring Wed; The Warm Up with DJs Neighbour & Kut Thurs. 2COCO JAFRO May 19 2ART BERGMANN May 20 2RAPP BATTLEZ WEZT COAZT May 21

VOGUE THEATRE 918 Granville, 604-5691144. Entertainment venue specializing in allages concerts by touring acts from around the world. Tix at www.voguetheatre.com/. 2CHE MALAMBO May 20 2MODERAT May 23 2COMEDY BANG! BANG! LIVE! May 26 2THE SMOKERS CLUB TOUR May 31

JUNE 3

wisehall.ca

CONCERTS < CLUBS & VENUES < OUT OF TOWN <

VENUE 881 Granville, 604-646-0064. Live performances by international touring acts, local indie rock, electronic artists, and world-class DJs. WTFridays with DJ Johnny Jover and guests playing favourite tracks; resident DJ Darylo and rotating guests playing fave rap, dance, and club anthems Sat. Tix for all events at www.venuelive.ca/ and www.bplive.ca/ 2AUTOLUX May 28 2PRONG May 29 2CHUCK RAGAN Jun 10

MAY 29

JUNE 2

FUNKY WINKER BEANS 37 W. Hastings, 604-764-7865. Evil Bastard Karaoke Experience Sun-Thurs; Sunday afternoon blues with Leonard & the Lab Rats 3-7 pm; metal Mondays, football Tuesdays, live punk, metal, and alternative bands Fri-Sat. 2THAT FILTHY SHOW May 19 2SHITLIVER, DEFILING THE NASMA, MASSIVE SCAR ERA May 20 2ZUCKUSS, ASSIMILATION, REGRETS, DREGS May 21 2MOTHERFUCKERS, RIOT PORN, SPREE KILLERS, THE GNAR GNARS May 26 269 GUNS, THE FOUL ENGLISH, WAR AMP, UP PERISCOPE May 27

2UPCOMING HIGHLIGHTS

THE IMPERIAL 319 Main, 604-868-0494. Vancouver’s newest midsize music venue VANCOUVER FOLK MUSIC FESTIVAL features live bands and DJs. 2SAINT Performers of the 39th annual folk fest MOTEL May 22 2NOTHING BUT THIEVES include Martin Carthy, Shane Koyczan, May 25 2SAVAGES May 27 2YEASAYER the New Pornographers, Jojo Abot, Lisa May 28 2CHELSEA WOLFE May 29 2DIRTY O’Neill, Lakou Mizik, Ajinai, Yemen Blues, RADIO Jun 3 2PLANTS AND ANIMALS Bruce Cockburn, Oysterband, the Bills, Jun 16 Emilie & Ogden, Lord Huron, Little Scream, the Harpoonist & the Axe Murderer, and IVANHOE PUB 1038 Main, 604-608-1444. Pub Samantha Parton. Jul 15-17, Jericho Beach with live bands on weekends and open (1300 Discovery). Tix at thefestival.bc.ca/. jam night Sun from 4 to 8 pm. Open at 9 am with breakfast and daily food specials. Pool CLUBS & VENUES tourney Thu. No cover. 2RHYTHM ST. May 20 2HONEYBOY WILSON May 21 2SONS ALEXANDER GASTOWN 91 Powell, 778OF THE HOE May 22 2PURPLE GANG May 379-0407. Gastown club, lounge, and live 27 2FULL MOON May 28 music venue featuring weekly club nights LAMPLIGHTER PUBLIC HOUSE 92 Water, and various concerts. 2PRINCE TRIBUTE 604-687-4424. Pub trivia with Nice Guys Inc. NIGHT May 19 2OG SATURDAYS May 21 Tue; bourbon and bingo Wed; Rocksteady 2VICTORIA DAY LONG WEEKEND May 22 with DJs Arems, Hoppa & Rexx Thu; FKYA AT THE WALDORF 1489 E. Hastings, 604DJs Fri; DJ Antonia & Friends Sat. 253-7141. The Waldorf has been a Vancouver LIBRARY SQUARE PUBLIC HOUSE mainstay since the late 1940s with its retro 300 W. Georgia, 604-633-9644. Free pinand Polynesian décor. Three separate ball Wed, Show Me Love ‘90s party Fri; rooms, including Tiki Room, Tabu, and Saturday Night Special dance party Sat. the Hideaway. Woo Hoo Simpsons Trivia Canucks and Whitecaps pregame. every third Mon, Tank Gyal and guests Thu;

MAY 19 – 26 / 2016 THE GEORGIA STRAIGHT 37

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Poll shows complex market

very month, the Real Estate Board of “acted in a deceptive manner” when he allowed Greater Vancouver (REBGV) does a his name to be used for a transaction in which he wasn’t involved. small poll of its realtor members. Currently with Macdonald Realty Ltd., Yang The survey basically asks agents to describe their most recent buyers. For example, admitted the wrongdoing in a statement of facts 226 realtors sampled in April reported that he submitted to regulators. While licensed with New World Realty Ltd. more than 24 percent of their clients were firstin 2014, Yang agreed to another realtor’s retime home buyers. Another class of almost 24 percent were quest to have his name registered as agent of a property owners moving to other, compar- buyer purchasing a Burnaby property listed for $1.3 million. able, homes. The other realtor, idenIn addition, more than tified as Kelly Kong of 22 percent of buyers were Royal Pacific Realty Corp., local or domestic investCarlito Pablo inserted Yang’s name withors. Coming in fourth at almost 11 percent were owners of either con- out the buyer’s consent. According to the statement of facts, Kong dos or townhouses who were moving into detached homes. Also, almost six percent of wanted it to appear that the buyer had an agent buyers were owners of detached homes who so the vendor would not attempt to negotiate with her the commission payable from the sale. were downsizing to condos. (Commission rates aren’t fixed by law. Foreign investors made up four percent of buyers, according to this latest REBGV survey. Typically in B.C., a realtor charges seven Based on the association’s polling going percent on the first $100,000, and 2.5 percent back two years, from April 2014, the pat- on the balance. If a buyer has a realtor, the tern hasn’t changed. First-time purchasers, commission is split between the agents of the homeowners transferring to similar proper- purchaser and seller.) Even though Yang had neither met nor ties, and local investors are the most active buyers. The level of participation by foreign spoken with the purchaser, Yang went along investors over the past two years hovered be- with Kong’s idea, supposedly as a favour. Yang’s licence is suspended for 45 days, tween 1.5 percent and six percent. REBGV president Dan Morrison has been from May 18, 2016, to July 1. During this in the realty business for 25 years. According period, he has to complete a remedial realto him, most of his clients are locals who are estate trading-services course at UBC. As either going to live in the homes they’re buying well, he must pay enforcement expenses of $1,500 to the regulators. or are purchasing for investment. Morrison said the provincial government’s move to collect citizenship information from THE HISTORIC Wilmar Estate in the old buyers, starting in June this year, is a sound call. Southlands neighbourhood of Vancouver “Everybody is looking for one reason why may get a new life. Developer and heritage advocate James the market is going crazy, and, you know, there is no one reason,” Morrison told the Georgia Evans told the Straight by phone that he is Straight in a phone interview. “There’s many hoping to start construction this year. The almost one-hectare property with a 1925 different reasons, but the more facts we can get about it, the more we can better understand it.” mansion is associated with Willard Kitchen, According to Morrison, B.C.’s good econ- then a director of the Pacific Great Eastern omy and low interest rates are among the fac- Railway, which became B.C. Rail. Evans bought the property in 2015. Under tors behind the active real-estate market. his plan, the heritage home will be restored THE REAL ESTATE Council of B.C. is tem- and converted into two residences. In addiporarily suspending the licence of a Vancou- tion, five new single-family homes will be built on the remainder of the estate. He’s ver realtor for professional misconduct. The regulatory body found that Yang Yang waiting for permits from city hall. -

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ROYAL LEPAGE WESTSIDE

SOLD

1855 CREELMAN AVENUE 111 36 E 14TH AVENUE I $298,000 1 bedroom, 1 bathroom, 556 Sq. Ft. Condo with a private south facing patio Fully renovated featuring new appliances, new cabinetry, quartz counter tops and bleached white oak hardwood floors. Parking & storage included. Rentals allowed, sorry no pets. 19+ age restricted building Proactive building, many upgrades done

OPEN HOUSE: Saturday, May 21st, 2 - 4pm OPEN HOUSE: Sunday, May 22nd, 2 - 4pm 38 THE GEORGIA STRAIGHT MAY 19 – 26 / 2016

SOLD

STONEHOUSE T E A M R E A L

E S T A T E

A D V I S O R S

604 255 7575 EMAILUS@STONEHOUSETEAM.COM

Sutton West Coast Realty I 301-1508 W Broadway

1311 OCEANVIEW DRIVE I BOWEN ISLAND

CAREERS & EMPLOYMENT CAREERS Hiring one full-time Thai Traditional Massager $25/hr. Must have completed Thai Traditional Massage course. 3 yrs exp. Speak basic English/Thai an asset Duties: Provide professional therapeutic Thai traditional massage to clients for wellness and relaxation Smile Thai Wellness Spa 235 Robson St, Vancouver, BC V6B 0E7 Call 604-630-3808 Email: info@smilethaiwellness.com

SALES/MARKETING

GRAPH TECH

OEM and Dealer Sales Positions Turn your passion for guitar into a rewarding career with the world’s largest guitar nut and saddle manufacturer. If guitar is your passion,then we have a dream job for you! Please apply at Indeed:

OEM: http://ow.ly/HWxD300itKu

Dealer: http://ow.ly/wvSV300itpi

HELP WANTED

NOW HIRING Master Mechanics & Bike Mechanics!

Email your resume to:

WORK FROM HOME

sourcing@mindfieldgroup.com DOMESTIC/HOME SUPPORT Full time in home care giver

HOME BASED BUSINESS!

■ Enjoy freedom as a home inspector ■ Complete training & certiﬁcation ■ BC Gov’t Licensing ■ LIMITED SPOTS AVAILABLE!

Call Dave NOW to book your franchise presentation. (778) 996-0369 • www.bc.abuyerschoice.com

BEST REAL ESTATE AGENT WINNER 2010-2015

for a 350 lb., 69 year old male with a disability. Caregiver must help with clients personal care, day to day duties and have patience as client has short memory difficulties. Hourly wage 13$ an hour. 2 year experience is a must. Live-in/live-out options at the choice of caregiver. Location: Maple Ridge, B.C. Contact: Macrina Aird 604-460-0132 renren16v@ymail.com

HOSPITALITY/FOOD SERVICE Hiring one full-time Cook $17/hr, 3 yrs exp. Speak basic English/Thai-an asset Duties: prepare and cook complete Thai meals, oversee kitchen operations, supervise & train kitchen staffs, maintain inventory & records of food, supplies & equipment Thida Thai Restaurant 1193 Davie St. Vancouver BC V6E 1N2 Email: wanchawee_t@hotmail.com

4 COOKS Needed for PinPin Restaurant

“Let’s Have a Coffee and Talk Real Estate” www.toffoli.ca 604.787.6963 email: paul@toffoli.ca Master Medallion

Fraser, Vancouver At least HS Grad with 2 yrs. Experience. Permanent F/T, $16.00 per hour Duties: Prepare/Cook complete meals or individual Filipino/Chinese dishes & Supervise kitchen helpers. Maintain inventory, Records of food, Supplies and Equipment. May help clean work area. To apply please send resume to jlee_pinpin@yahoo.ca

TRADES Traffic Control Flaggers Needed!! Call Eva at Third PersonTraffic Control for 2 day Training Course. 604-700-9397

EDUCATION GeorgiaStraight Vancouver, BC

LANGUAGE INSTRUCTION IMPROVE YOUR ENGLISH British English Speaker with a neutral accent wanting to help you improve your confidence speaking English. Overcome fear of speaking at work or in social settings, prepare for a presentation or generally chat. Get in touch and let's start talking. Call/text Phil on 778-868-9031 or email psh0687@yahoo.ca

NOTICES CALL FOR ARTISTS A new not for profit web portal to promote Vancouver artists and galleries and their events is now in beta testing and looking for participants.

www.vancouverart.info

HOME & GARDEN SERVICES

CLEANERS

NURTURING TOUCH

REPAIRS

CALLBOARD

Over 20 yrs exp. 604 739 6002 Mon-Fri Kitsilano

BASONE

ROXANNE'S DAY SPA Professional & Therapeutic Massage. 1743 Robson St, D/town. RoxanneSpa.com

604-682-1278

• GUITAR SHOP •

EVERYTHING YOU THINK A

GUITAR

SHOP

LD BE! SHOU

318 E. 5th Ave • 604.677.0311

BASONEGUITARS.COM

MOP-n-BUCKET.com

MUSICIANS WANTED

MOVING & STORAGE

The Main on Main St. is looking for Wednesday through Saturday night acts. All Genres welcome. For more info email mainbooking@hotmail.com

COMPASSIONATE and FEMININE Certified massage and sensual bodywork Beautiful, quiet studio Main and Broadway. 778-863-1852 blissfulgrace.com

Jass & Blues Vocalist

Relax & Enjoy

Jazz trio seeks female vocalist 604-727-0893

NAHANEE MOVING Professional Movers 604-782-3973

ACCOUNTING Professional Services Advertise your business in the Georgia Straight in print & online! Call 604-730-7064 for details

DATING SERVICES

MEET BEAUTIFUL EUROPEAN LADIES

Musicians LLBOAR- D CAMusic

WANTED & AVAILABLE it d Players Presents nite

AUDITIONS

McLaughlin nt by the Sun Director: Liz Men/Women aged 25-70 t only ntmen appoi by read Cold 22 Running date Mar 30 - April 604-224-8007

place your

FREE AD (max. 5 lines)

erranean male. n for role in new play. Medit ensated. Send yrs. old. Actor will be comp otmail.com. so@h nd resume to peter_gras

www.straight.com/classiﬁeds

UTOMOTIVE

604-805-1342 or 604-873-8266

PERSONAL SERVICES

ANNOUNCEMENTS

DATING SERVICES

SERVICES

FREE CLASSIFIED AD

www.straight.com/classifieds click place an ad, then FREE ads •Ads must meet criteria in available categories. •Ads will be published online. •Ads will be published in print if space is available.

MARKETPLACE

STYLE

M.S. Oriental Dating Service For singles looking for meaningful relationships. All Nationalities Welcome. Since 1987.

604-583-8800

PERSONALS

BODYWORK NEW AD!! ASIAN MASSAGE $40/hr 604-782-9338 Surrey

MALAYSIAN MASSAGE 604-700-8260 10am - 10pm

Foil Patch Printing Workshop Learn to make your very own foil patches out of recycled denim and holographic foil. May 31, 2016 June 28, 2016 6:00 PM - 9:00 PM $85+GST info@blim.ca

★ Relieve Roadrage ★

WEB DIRECTORY

COCO'S THAI MASSAGE

www.straight.com

BBY. $40 & up! No F/S 10am - 8pm 604-619-7453

MUSIC

202-1037 W.Broadway 604-739-3998 Hotel Service

Lily’s Bodycare

CHINESE, JAPANESE & KOREAN MASSAGE

RECORDING STUDIOS M R & D Studios Vancouver's most comfortable 2"-24 track, ADAT & ProTools HD. Mastering $55/hr eng, prod. & arranger incl. 604-421-2988

604.986.8650

SERVING NORTH VANCOUVER FOR 16 YEARS

1050 Marine Dr. North Van

LOTS OF PARKING AT THE REAR

REHEARSAL SPACE Renegade Productions Inc. www.renegadeproductions.net 604-685-0435 www.facebook.com/RPInc

$60 / 30min (incl. tips) Massage E/49th Ave. Vancouver 604-500-9082

TwoGuysWithATruck.com

PROFESSIONAL SERVICES

778-871-9809

10am - 9:30pm 7 days/week

Cleaning Service: Move in/out, one time, AIRBNB Call Gem 604-724-4130

Moving & Storage, Free EST. Visa Okay. 604-628-7136

Lisa Great Mix - Certificated Nice Female Masseuse in Richmond provides effective deep tissue, relaxation, sensual & prostate health maintenance massage. Waxing & scrub etc available. Info @ www.healthyaction.ca Text/call @

Monica M onica Beauty MASSAGE MAS M MA S SPA

1235 Kingsway Vancouver

604-568-8999 www.TheDonSpa.com

Gemini Studio EXCELLENT MASSAGE SPECIAL PACKAGES

D-768 Princess St., New Westminster (@ 8th St. between 6th & 7th Ave behind Save-On Foods)

604.523.6689

SPRING SPECIAL

Reg 120

BODY SCRUB (Incl. 45 min. Hot oil massage) NOW $

75 MIN

COMFY WELLNESS SPA 3272 W. Broadway

(& Blenheim)

604-558-1608 WWW.

COMFYSPA .CA

Lotus Beauty Spa NEW GIRLS

$ 70 /30 mins (incl. tips)

10:30am-8pm Daily 5336 Victoria Dr. Vancouver A/C AVAILABLE 604.327.8800

ORGANIC

TOUCH H EALT H ❀ CENTER ❀

15244 Russell Ave White Rock

6 604-261-8818 04 0

102-5701 Granville St. G

((@ 41ST AVENUE)

Parking Avail. at Back

604.998.7831

Aqua Spa

NEW!

BLISSFUL MASSAGE

Promo $30/45 mins

7750 likes #GeorgiaStraight GeorgiaStraight give us a follow @GeorgiaStraight

20437 Douglas Crescent, Langley (@ 204th St. beside HomeHardware) Front & Back Door Entrance Free Parking

SHOWER &PARKING AVAILABLE

604.243.7885 | 9 am - 9 pm

604.510.6689

Hiring

MAY 19 – 26 / 2016 THE GEORGIA STRAIGHT 39

CLASSIFIEDS ................................................................................................................................................................ Curious? Straight? BATH HOUSES Chinatown $60 $

I Spa

19+ SWEET GIRLS

STEAM 1 MEN’S BATH HOUSE

M2M Erotic Massage Yaletown Ric 604-719-3433

CuriousButStraight.com

778-323-0002 20 E/Pender, Van

COMPANION

SWEET ASIAN ANNIE (25) VAN D/T In/Out

SEXY ASIAN MALE

778-706-1816

Cute, Smooth, Hung. East Van

STEAM 1

(ONE GIRL FREE) $25/30MINS

✿ ✿ ALL NEW GIRLS! ✿ ✿

BLACKOUT PARTIES NOW TWICE A MONTH SUNDAY, MAY 29 & SATURDAY, JUNE 11 11AM ‘TIL 7PM

10AM - 10 PM Hiring

MR. SENIOR TOP DOMINANCE Nice & Naughty! 778-895-1951

Anonymous Check In Avail • All Rates with Current Membership

604.568.9238

Drop In Fees May Apply Now no ID needed for entry

$80/30 min.(incl.tips)

PERSONALS

#3-3490 Kingsway

TANTRA

WWW.STEAM1.COM New Westminster, 430 Columbia Street 604 . 540 . 2117

NEAR JOYCE NEXT DOOR TO SUBWAY

MASSAGE

GAY PERSONALS

BUTTERFLY MASSAGE

PREM. EJACULATION or ED? SacredTantraMassage.com

Mr. BALDNUTZ

PERSONAL SHAVING SERVICES FOR MEN ★ SAFE ★ CLEAN ★ DISCREET ★

open 10am - midnight 4536 Hastings St.

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DAILY 9am-9pm

Divinea

W 16th Ave / Main

604-788-7723

Tantra Massage

604-767-8625

Absolutely Wonderful, Healing & Joyful!

Burnaby near Willingdon Ave. Hiring BACK ENTRANCE + FREE PARKING

Zara 604-222-4178 Westside

MASSAGE

604-299-1514

EMPLOYMENT

BODYWORK MASSAGE In a peaceful setting in Langley Because you deserve it! 9am - 8pm

NEW GIRLS 19+

30 a.m. ek: 10:30 a.m. - 12: Open 7 Days a we

604.569.2087 604.299.7888 109-3701 E. Hastings, Bby

Robert 604-857-9571

CoverGirlEscorts.com is now Hiring.

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Call 604-438-7119

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BUSY ESTABLISHED AGENCY

Sensual Massage

Professional, experienced, discreet, 4 men only by mature male, 9am - 11pm. In Calls & Hotels. Student rates. Burrard & 6th.

Alex 778-828-4683

Seeking all nationalities 19+ No experience necessary.

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CALL 604-723-4614

HAPPY HOUR WEEKDAYS 5pm - 7pm

604-681-0823 4th Floor 595 Hornby St, Van. Mon-Fri • 10am-Midnite Sat-Sun • 12pm-Midnite

www.theswedishtouch.com

Always Hiring | Accepting all major CC’s

Platinum

MANY AS IAN GIRLS 5 DIFFERENT GIRLS DAILY 8642 Granville St., Vancouver

604-568-6601

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OPENING MIYA GRAND $10 OFF

778-863-0811

BEAUTY SENSATIONAL MASSAGE

For Older Gentlemen

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miyabeauty@hotmail.com

RELAX with THAI GIRL JUDE

N/Van. 604-618-1384

Rose Body Massage

Lisa available for OVERNITE 24 hrs

778-707-9887

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Call Lini 778-668-2981

City

BETTER than

604-568-2248

BEST

TOKYO Body

3488 MAIN ST. @ 19TH AVE 10 AM TO 10 PM

Massage 604

Best Kept SECRET

PROSPER

@ Quebec St. open 7days/9am-midnight

BDSM

Chinese Top XXX Service

at Manitoba

49 E. Broadway

NOW

MASSAGE

121 W. Broadway

HIRING

NEW ASIAN GIRL E/Van 778-708-2728

604 879 5769 ANGSANA $70/ SPA

HIRING

30 mins

438-8979

Sensual Domination & BDSM

Monday - Friday 10am - 2pm & Saturday & Sunday 12pm - 4pm

LUXURY • FREE SHOWER • FREE PARKING

Elmridge Way Richmond 45 mins / $40 778-990-8136

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EARLY BIRD SPECIAL

NEW! PROSTATE TREATMENT FAST & BEAUTIFUL

Please Call 604-558-0228

EXOTIC DANCERS WANTED

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FREE BIRTHDAY MASSAGE (WITHIN ONE WEEK)

Come and Enjoy undiscovered pleasure with 100% satisfaction guaranteed! 3517 Kingsway,Van.

PROFESSIONAL MASSAGE

GAIN CONTROL – CONFIDENCE - VITALITY SIMPLE SECRETS – RESULTS GUARANTEED OPTIMIZE ABILITIES $165/1.5hrs $210/2hrs

SERVICES

Updated Space & staff

SHOW THIS AD TO GET $10 OFF

4 HANDS 50% OFF

Call Li 604-401-5401

EVERY DAY flat rate pricing! Anytime 24/7 Lockers $12 | Rooms from $20

NOW HIRING!

28/50 MIN

1 FREE AFTER 5 SESSIONS! SPECIAL!

101-5623, Imperial St. BBY (Across Macpherson Ave)

Sa Sa Massage

3021 Cambie St., Vancouver

10:30am - 8pm • 7 days/week

HIRING

604-876-6431

Free Parking

Grand Opening

VARIETY OF GIRLS (19+) V.I.P. ROOM $80/30 MIN INCL. TIPS

604.433.6833

(incl. tips)

3519 KINGSWAY, VAN NEAR BOUNDARY • HIRING

PANTERA SPA Good Price, Good Service D931 Brunette Ave. 7 Days a Week

604.553.0909

RAINBOW MASSAGE

Club

$80/30 MIN (INCL. TIPS)

604.430.3060

LINGERIE FRI & SAT OPEN TO CLOSE

SPRING SENSATION!! MON - FRI, 10AM TO NOON $50 FOR 1/2 HOUR PLATINUMCLUB.NET

CHINESE, THAI, SPANISH & CAUCASIAN GIRLS

4969 Duchess St. Van. Just off Kingsway NOW HIRING Between Earles & Slocan

604.436.3131 www.greatpharaoh.com

5-3490 Kingsway, Van.

604.683.2582

426 HOMER STREET HIRING 604 683 2582 All credit & debit cards accepted 426 Homer St. Welcome to

HI N OW RI NG

The TIGERSpa WE HAVE MIXED, ASIAN , CAUCASIAN CASIAN ASIAN MASSEUSES WHO ARE PATIENT, FRIENDLY, SERVICE ORIENTED.

A MASSAGE SESSION with them will give you a fresh, rejuvenated feeling. You will be happy and smile, relaxed.

YOU DESERVE THAT !

4532 MAIN ST. (Main + 29 th), VAN. | OPEN EVERYDAY: 10am-10pm

778.379.5969

ESTABLISHED 1993

✦ ALL

HIRING: 778.893.4439

#100 - 1727 WEST BROADWAY 5 MINS FROM D/T

((19+) 19 )

5281 Victoria Dr., Van. Free Parking at Back

604-738-6222

New Star Massage

GRAND OPENING SPECIAL! $79 / 30 min (incl.tips) BEST PRICE & SERVICE IN TOWN! BEAUTIFUL, YOUNG & SWEET INTERNATIONAL MASSEUSES

DAY SPECIAL ✦

Different Packages For Sale Underground Parking

XANADU

MASSAGE

Ocean Relaxation Centre

Grand Opening • $30/30min. Open from 10am

10am Midnight

604-998-7677

604-780-6268

HIRING

3468 E.Hastings/Skeena. Van.

Front & Back door entrance. Free Parking

PHOENIX MASSAGE

New Back Door Entrance from Underground Parking

1st Time Visit FREE HIRING

FOR NEW CLIENTS Mon - Fri 12pm - 6pm

2263 KINGSWAY

FREE PARKING HOTEL SERVICE

NANAIMO

6043770028

40 THE GEORGIA STRAIGHT MAY 19 – 26 / 2016

30 mins full body scrubbing in a Private steam room or 30 mins professional massage (C.M.T.) HIRING

between 11am & 4pm

Serving Van. for 19 years! Best Experience! Best Service! Best Choice! Steam Room and Sauna! Free underground parking. NOW

HIRING

2070 2070 7 W. W. 10 10thh A Ave v V ve Van an an

60 4 7 604 738 38 3 3302 3 02

............................................................................................................................................................... CLASSIFIEDS www.sweetsolaya.com 604.782.5329 & NEW..NEW..NEW..MASSAGE CREDIT CARDS ACCEPTED

R I L E Y

Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Vietnamese & Philippines Girls (19+) In/Out calls

604-600-6558 NEW HOT ASIAN GIRLS No Restrictions. Good Service! Joyce & Kingsway. 24 Hrs.

604-562-3371

MIA AVAILABLE

$100

Alejandra Perotti

Mix Spanish/Italian. 36c'25-38.Check my new video! Massage and Gfe. www.alejandraperotti.com

604-786-4132 Surrey BC

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Emax Massage

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TOP CL ASS SERVICE!

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Out Call Service to Hotels or Residence Discretion Assured

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#3 - 3003 Kingsway @ Rupert, Van. - N/E Corner

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SURREY CC accepted

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2 NSeww eeet

Asians

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778-318-3607 or 604-360-1833

SARAH in SURREY

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GET YOUR FREE TRIAL TODAY

WEBSITES

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More local numbers: 1.800.550.0618 interactivemale.com

www.EuropeanLady.ca www.stripperplaymates.com www.stress-awaybodycare.ca

GENTLEMEN

www.EuropeanLady.ca

PHONE SERVICES

IN/OUT CALL MetroTown, Burnaby

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ANGELA

778-317-3888

2200 0220 588 02 778-858-

EAST INDIAN BOMBSHELL

DISCREET ATTRACTIVE EUROPEAN LADY OFFERS DELIGHTFUL RELAXATION SESSIONS.

For polite gentlemen Accompanied shower Submissive or curious also welcome Discreet,North Burnaby location Parking available Actual Recent Photo. Fluent in English.

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INTERVIEWS DAILY C OV ERGI R LES C ORT S .C OM

Try FREE Now: 604-639-3011 More Local Numbers: 1-800-700-6666

redhotdateline.com 18+

SPRING SPECIAL! Burnaby 604-364-1462

MAY 19 – 26 / 2016 THE GEORGIA STRAIGHT 41

savage love Over the years, I have consumed what I believe to be an average amount of porn for a 44-year-old hetero guy. I have never paid for it, and I am now facing a troubled conscience for that fact. I could obviously just subscribe to some site or other now, but that would benefit only one company and/or set of performers. Is there a Dan Savage–approved charity relating to the adult film industry to which I could donate? > SEEKS PENANCE AND NEEDS KNOWLEDGE

“Porn performers almost never get royalties for their scenes when they work for big studios,” said Conner Habib, a writer, activist, and porn performer. “If you buy into the trickle-down theory of things, then more money for the studio should mean more money for the performers. If you don’t buy into that—and not everyone does—there are other options.” To get your money directly to the performers whose work you’re currently enjoying/stealing, SPANK, you can patronize smaller studios run by performers, book time with independent webcam models, and purchase porn created by performers on sites like Clips4Sale.com. To atone for your years of freeloading, SPANK, you can and should make large donations to two organizations. “The Adult Performer Advocacy Committee [APAC; apac-usa.com] is the largest performer-based organization in the world, and its membership is made up entirely of performers,” said Habib. “Full disclosure: I’m the vice-president, but no donation money

goes to me or any board member. It all goes to the organization, which works to improve the working conditions, quality of life, and safety of performers, as well as to fight anti-porn laws and stigma.” Habib also recommended donating money to the Sex Workers Outreach Project (swopusa.org). “This isn’t a porn-specific organization,” said Habib, “but it works to protect and fight for the rights of all sex workers. Since many performers are doing other forms of sex work, donations go a long way to help porn performers.” Habib will be hosting an online lecture/seminar about the upside of porn on Sunday, June 5. His talk is titled “Pornworld: Why Pornography Is a Healthy Part of Our Culture”, and you can find out more about it by searching “pornworld” at Eventbrite. com. You can—and you should—follow Habib on Twitter @ConnerHabib.

> BY DAN SAVAGE be able to stand up for myself and say, “That is not appropriate.” But when he says creepy stuff, Dan, I’m a deer in the headlights. I go silent, it’s awkward, and I keep hoping he’ll understand how weird he’s being. I would say something, but bringing up things that anger me causes him to act overly sorry, and that routine is annoying too. I asked my mom (they divorced a long time ago), and she had no suggestions. She was just like, yeah, he’s like that. Any suggestions on what to say? > SEEKING HELP REGARDING UNPLEASANT GUY

“Dad! It creeps me out when you make comments about women you wanna fuck. I realize you’re a sexual person, and I honour that, and blah de blah blah blah. But these are thoughts you share with friends, Dad, not with your adult children. There’s no need to go into your ohso-sorry routine, Dad, we just need I didn’t talk to my nearly- to change the subject.” 70-year-old dad for most of my 20s. Now that I’m back trying to main- My husband and I have been tain relationships with my parents, married for 16 years. We have been I am struggling. My dad is the king of polyamorous for the last five years. the overshare. He makes creepy com- We are a bit mismatched sexually in ments about women who are about many ways. Polyamory was our solu30 to 40 years younger than him—in- tion. For much of this time, my huscluding women who were kids when band had a girlfriend. Before I go on, he met them but are now grownups. let me say that I adore my husband Not something I want to hear. I don’t in all ways except sex. We are raisthink he is abusing anyone, just being ing a child together and are a good creepy, but I desperately want him fit otherwise. I no longer have any to stop with the inappropriate com- desire to have sex with my husband. ments. He makes about one creepy Lots of men and women write in to comment per phone conversation. complain about their partner’s low liIf he were a person at work, I would bido. This is not the case. My libido is

fine. I just don’t want to have sex with my husband. Whenever we would have sex in the past, I would get anxious and try to avoid it. We each have our issues. He feels insecure and has trouble maintaining erections. I always felt desexualized—not by him, but when I was younger. Being a poly woman dating in my 40s has been incredibly empowering and sexy. But my husband’s experiences have been different. He is frustrated because it is hard for him to meet women, and his frustration is made worse by the fact that I don’t want sex with him either. When he had a girlfriend, our sex life wasn’t as much of an issue. What should I do? He’s unhappy. I’m frustrated. Neither of us wants to divorce. Should I force myself? > LADY IN BALTIMORE ISN’T DESIRING OBLIGATORY SEX

It is a truth universally acknowledged—in the poly universe, anyway—that a married poly woman will have an easier time finding sex partners than a married poly man. Some men in open/poly relationships present themselves as dishonest cheaters rather than honest nonmonogamists because women would rather fuck a married man who’s cheating on his wife than a married man who isn’t cheating on his wife. Go figure. Anyway, LIBIDOS, the answer to your question—should you force yourself to fuck your husband?—depends on your answer to this question: How badly do you want to avoid divorce? Because if your husband can’t or won’t pretend to be cheating,

LIBIDOS, and if women won’t fuck him because he’s in an open marriage, your refusal to fuck him could wind up incentivizing divorce. So to save your marriage, LIBIDOS, you might wanna fuck your husband once in a while. Forcing yourself to fuck someone is tiresome and dispiriting, I realize, but you can always close your eyes and think about someone you’d rather be fucking—a time-tested stratagem employed successfully by millions of people in loving, stable, and sexually enervating/dead marriages. And since you’re off the hook when your husband has a girlfriend, LIBIDOS, you might wanna do everything you can to help him find a new one—a stratagem employed by tens of thousands of women in poly relationships. You don’t want your husband stewing alone at home while you’re out fucking your boyfriend(s), LIBIDOS, because that ups the odds of your resentful/unfucked husband asking you to close up your relationship again or asking you for a divorce. So help him craft messages to women he contacts online, go to play parties and poly mixers with him, and vouch for him to women he’s interested in. But between girlfriends, LIBIDOS, you’ll probably wanna fuck him once in a while. Lube for you, Viagra for him, pot for you both. Jillian Keenan, author of Sex With Shakespeare, on the Savage Lovecast: savagelovecast.com. Email: mail@savagelove.net . Follow Dan on Twitter at www.twitter.com/fake dansavage/.

Hook an American

Scaan to conffesss The Georgia Th G i St Straight i htt C Confessions, f i an outlet for submitting revelations about your private lives—or for the voyeurs among us who want to read what other people have disclosed.

I’m An Introvert Yes I am an introvert but I can hold my own at any event (yes I will probably leave early). I don’t come across as shy but different. I can hold a conversation. I am polite, kind, loyal and more thoughtful than most people realize even if I don’t call or text constantly. Please stop calling me standoffish. I will connect with you on a deeper level in time, at my own pace or I won’t. I just vibrate at a different frequency. Please stop judging me until you really know me. I try harder than you realize.

I am so attracted to single men who own and love a cat.

I’m going to sign up for that new online dating site that pairs Americans with Canadians. It can’t be worse than the local dating scene, and while it sucks Trump might become President, it’s a good opportunity to potentially meet someone.

Sometimes i like to sit at a bus stop and see how many distracted drivers are whizzing past. Not as many as there used to be, so it seems.

I Watch Porn sometimes to distract myself from the horrific nightmare that is online dating.

Still Love Ya We broke up 20 years ago. I got a misdiagnosis and thought you’d be living with a monster if we stayed together. I feared love. I still love you and I think about you in ways I probably shouldn’t.

What Happened? I watched an old home movie of my family recently that I had never seen before. It was decades ago, I was 8 or 9 years old at the time. All I did was sing, laugh, dance, joke, and play! I was totally free. It was heartbreaking, because I realized those parts of myself have been so suppressed and underused that I don’t even know if they are there anymore.

Bowie I still feel so sad about David Bowie’s passing. It’s as if there’s a hole in the sky now that cannot be filled.

Stuck I am in my mid forties and unemployed. I feel like my life has ended. Being unemployed is a horrible experience. It is a soul crushing experience. I am volunteering and the teens are getting the attention. I just smile and do my volunteer work.

Interview I went to a job interview. It went well. The interviewer said that I made it to the next round. This was two weeks ago. I left a nice email following up. Nothing. I see the job posted today. Say What? I do not understand why companies just be upfront with applicants. Stop wasting my time and energy. Good grief?!

Some days

Long Distance Relationship

Some days I feel like I’m over you and other days it’s like everything fell apart yesterday. I know I don’t even want to see you again though, so there’s that.

We used to have entire email threads dedicated to when we would be able to skype next. What a waste of effort.

STOP TEXTING AND DRIVING

Desperately..

Despite the warning of higher penalties for distracted driving, people are still pulling out their devices. I saw at least 4 people texting and driving on my morning commute to work today. It makes me incredibly nervous to be sharing the road with people that have their eyes glued to their phones.

I desperately do not want to go to work tomorrow....I suffer from anxiety..and some days I just want to stay home.

Follow your instinct I’ve been seeing several confessions relating to feeling butterflies and energy from your crush. I here to tell y’all to go and follow that instinct. Just last night the dude that I’ve been CRAZY about for 4 years confessed that he’s liked me since we met. We are coworkers and I’ve always had that feeling for him. Tried to hint about it for several years, but lasts night at a get together, he confessed how he felt. We made out and it was pure magic. The only regret is that we didn’t act on our feelings sooner.

42 THE GEORGIA STRAIGHT MAY 19 – 26 / 2016

Scent Free Spending the day in a scent free zone allowed us to enjoy some fresh spring air. I wish there were as many scent-free signs as there are smoke-free signs - this would be a huge health benefit to Everyone.

Visit

to post a Confession

straight stars

> BY ROSE MARCUS

May 19 to 25, 2016

This Venus/Mars opposition requires to point the way. What a difference that we speak and listen openheart- a couple of days can make. he sun moves forward as edly, to evaluate in objective and CANCER of Friday; Mercury moves level-headed terms. June 21–July 22 forward as of Sunday; and ARIES The full-moon weekend Venus does so as of next March 20–April 20 can see you make a significant stride Tuesday. We still have Mars on a If you haven’t been able regarding the handling of a problem, backtrack, though. How does it all add up? If you have lost ground or hit to find enough cause or enough mo- a work situation, or a health matter. a holding pattern, you’ll now pick up tivation to get a move on, you will While the “it” moment can go pop or better speed. One way or another, it’s now. Look to Gemini month to get snap suddenly, it’s likely been in the you mobilized. Watch for choices works for a while. Tuesday/Wednesmobilizing, energizing time. Places to go, people to meet, things and best options to pick themselves. day can also see you make headway to say, shopping to do, news: the sun’s Mars retrograde boosting the full- regarding an air-clearing or a negoadvance into Gemini on Friday mor- moon weekend is good for a fresh tiation. Sign off, sign up; get it done. ning pumps extra air in the tires for infusion. You could feel it as a sudLEO a get-your-fill weekend. Expect more den flash, a turn-on, or a provoking July 22–August 23 volume of everything, everywhere. cut-to-the-chase moment. You’ll see the pace pick The weekend is ideal for a getaway, a TAURUS up better speed as of the hot-wired special event, a back-yard barbecue, April 20–May 21 full-moon weekend. Mars keeps the or for putting passion into play. Even It’s on to next, pronto. Sat- spark fresh and the conversation if the plan was to log off for the weekend, expect to get swept into some- urday’s full moon and Sunday’s sun/ lively. Watch for the opportunity thing. Saturday afternoon delivers a Mars instigate in some striking, per- to speak up, to take your best shot, full moon in game-for-it Sagittarius. haps sudden way. Watch for some- or to get it off your chest. The sun Lighting a spark or a fuse that stretches thing to jump up at you, for an event, (Thursday) and Venus (next Tuesthrough Sunday morning, Mars loans a meet-up, revelation, or conversation day) newly into Gemini stimulate extra turbo to both the full moon and to hit with impact. There’s more than your social life, creative ideas, and the transiting sun. Spontaneity, impul- meets the eye, and more on the way. moneymaking prospects. siveness, or impetuousness can strike. Venus into Gemini, starting Tuesday, VIRGO gives you more to go on and to aim for. You/we/it could go all night. August 23–September 23 Sunday marks the halfway peak GEMINI Mercury in good shape of the Mars retrograde cycle. Since May 21–June 21 with Jupiter in Virgo boosts your mid-April, Mars has been sidetrackEnjoy a get-away-from-it- confidence and can-do. Whether ing. It has also created a questioning and soul-searching time. Th rough all weekend or let adventure come you feel provoked, forced, or turned the end of June, Mars moves to the fi nd you. Your birthday month gets on, the full-moon weekend is sure review-choices, sort-it-out portion of off to a rousing start, thanks to Sat- to get you/it moving. One bulthe cycle. Also on Sunday, Mercury urday’s full moon and both Mars let can hit several targets at once. and Venus striking fl int through You’ll cover a lot more ground ends retrograde. Venus into Gemini, starting Tues- Tuesday. There may be things to say than you aim for. Saturday/Sunday, day, has something to work out with or a decision to make. If unsure or know it’s easy to get overly carried Mars before she’s on to a clear sail. uncertain, wait for circumstances away or to project more than is.

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LIBRA

September 23–October 23

Get away for the weekend or stick around town. Even if you have nothing special planned, watch for the full moon and Mars/ sun opposition to stir up action and excitement. As of Tuesday, Venus enters Gemini and dukes it out with Mars. A communication, relationship, or money matter may need to be sorted out. Once you’ve addressed it, the tension immediately dissipates.

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SCORPIO

October 23–November 22

The full-moon weekend is hot-wired. Mars is overly quick to rile or rouse, but while it’s easy to fly off the handle, Neptune and Saturn can snuff you/them/it out early. Aim for instantaneous effect or result; get in and get out fast and you stand to gain. Tuesday could produce a relationship or financial push/pull, but as of Wednesday/ Thursday, it’s under good control.

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SAGITTARIUS

November 22–December 21

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CAPRICORN

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AQUARIUS

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PISCES

December 21–January 20

Is there another way to go, something that does the job better, or another way to frame it or say it? While you may be preoccupied with more questions than answers, the full-moon weekend begins a cut-to-the-chase, work-it-out upswing. By midweek, you should have a good handle on what’s right or best for you. January 20–February 18

Whether it’s a long weekend for you or not, it’s over in a flash. Enjoy it to the fullest while it lasts. Tuesday, take it on, dive into it, or clear it away. Past the opposition to Mars, Venus in sunny Gemini brightens social life, moneymaking prospects, and romantic interest. Wednesday/Thursday stay organized and practical, aim for efficiency. Solid gains can be made. February 18–March 20

A burst of extra vim and vigour can overtake you this fullmoon weekend. It might not last too long, so take your best shot when the moment or impulse strikes, or count to 10 and let it blow over. Tuesday, you may have to talk yourself into it or to confront someone or something, Wednesday/Thursday brings results. -

If you are born at the start of Sagittarius, you’ll feel the energizing effects of Saturday/ Sunday’s stars the strongest. With Mercury retrograde now over and Mars in action, it’s decision-making time. Don’t hesitate to trim or cut away. Past Tuesday, Venus into Gemini brings you fresh options and prospects. By Wednesday/ Book a reading or sign up for Rose’s Thursday, you should feel it’s shap- free monthly newsletter: www.rose marcus.com/astrolink/. ing up well.

> Go on-line to read hundreds of I Saw You posts or to respond to a message < URBAN DEC UBC 7:15

I SAW A: I AM A: WHEN: MAY 16, 2016 WHERE: Ubc - Arthur Lord field NE You: Babe looking fly in your leopard sportsware, snagging grounders at second and batting your way into my heart. Me: Adonis, wearing pants and chewing tobacco. Let’s get to third base?

TINDER DATE FROM HELL

I SAW A: I AM A: WHEN: MAY 14, 2016 WHERE: High Point

I walked in my local East Village liquor store and there you were, tall dark and handsome and giving away free samples of Big Rock Cider. Never made it to the Brighton cause shortly after we left I decided to ditch my drunken Tinder date from hell. He couldn’t hold his liquor and puked ten minutes after we left. Should have slipped you my number when I had the chance? I will give you a sample of my heart straight up.

SAVE ON CHECK OUT LINE

I SAW A: I AM A: WHEN: MAY 10, 2016 WHERE: Main and 13th

You were being checked out while I was waiting in the line over. You have short, dark brown hair and were wearing a black shirt. I have blond/red hair and was wearing all black yoga gear. We made eye contact and smiled many times and I think you might’ve tried to come say hi but chickened out? When I was leaving I saw you drive away in a big black pick up truck with a big piece of furniture strapped in the back. Message me with the type of furniture it was and let’s grab a drink!

STOPPED BY THE I AM A GIRL GIRL

I SAW A: I AM A: WHEN: MAY 13, 2016 WHERE: Bute and West Hastings...ish? You: cute chick that stopped me in the streets Friday on your first day of work; Me: chick that spent 30 minutes chatting with you in the streets about mental health and charity, I was giggling nervously tell whole time. You gave me two lovely hugs and said you hoped you would run in to me again. I wouldn’t normally do this but my roommate told me I bombed hard by not giving you my number and I agree. You are beautiful and pleasant, and I am probably misreading our conversation but if I’m not, send me a message?

SATURDAY EVENING ON COMMERCIAL DR

I SAW A: I AM A: WHEN: MAY 14, 2016 WHERE: Commercial Dr Fire Pizza I was leaving Fire Pizza as you were walking by with two of your friends. We made eye contact and shared a smile. It took me by surprise and I didn’t react but I took a stroll up the street hoping for a second chance.

DRUMMER AT GUILT & CO

I SAW A: I AM A: WHEN: MAY 12, 2016 WHERE: Guilt & Company You really caught my eye. It was my first time at guilt and co, you had a great set. You: wearing a paperboy hat, black shirt. Me: drinking wine in the back. Let’s get a drink!

YOUR BOSS WANTED TO THROW YOU OFF YOUR GRANDPA’S BOAT...

I SAW A: I AM A: WHEN: MAY 13, 2016 WHERE: St John’s Liquor, Port Moody ...but I would rescue you, and give you mouth-to-mouth for good measure. You; gorgeous, smiling, flirty brunette at St John’s Liquor Store, Port Moody. You have a boat at Point Roberts and have been dry for six months. You told me you were off work soon, and wondered if I was too.... Me; an occasional customer...not sure if you’re into me, or if you’re just this super-sweet to everyone. If it’s the latter- kudos to you. If it’s the former....well, you know what to do!

UNDERCUT AND BURRITOS.

I SAW A: I AM A: WHEN: MAY 7, 2016 WHERE: Mexico

My dinner date last weekend tried to impress you with a demented pick up line. Did it work? If not maybe this one will...Your undercut and chiseled to perfection features make me want to talk about astrology in stretch velvet onsies with you. Are you into it? If yes, keep breathing. -BlueHairedFemmebot

YOU WERE CAT CALLING ME!

I SAW A: I AM A: WHEN: APRIL 17, 2016 WHERE: the Rio Theatre I was on-stage at the Rio Theatre, April 17th at VanChan. You were a really pretty girl with dark hair cat calling me. Maybe we could meet up at the next screening? I hear there is one on May22nd at the Rio Theatre? See you there??

WALK UP A HILL AGAIN? JESSICA?

I SAW A: I AM A: WHEN: MAY 11, 2016 WHERE: Kits walking uphill from beach to 4th You asked me for the time ... You asked for a different way up the hill . You decided to walk up together and Tough it out. You went for reflexology earlier that day and I worked . I should of got your contact details although you don’t have a phone to check the time. Great smile I hope to see again!!!

SKATEBOARDING IN GRANVILLE ISLAND

I SAW A: I AM A: WHEN: MAY 9, 2016 WHERE: Granville Island

WEDNESDAY NIGHT WAITING

For all I know a woman of your calibre is already spoken for but I’ve occasionally admired your style and beauty from afar on my morning commute and wished it were easier to start a conversation on a crowded bus. Today you got on at Main and sat down beside me after a few stops listening to music on your phone. You were wearing ox blood coloured oxfords and carrying a canvas tote with an illustrated print of the alphabet. I was the loser in the navy cardigan, wearing Persol sunglasses, a black five-panel and black Asics trainers.

GREY FORD TRUCK. NICE RACK ; ))

I SAW A: I AM A: WHEN: MAY 11, 2016 WHERE: 216th

RBC ON W HASTING STANDING IN STAIRS

WINNERS! A CASUALLY BEAUTIFUL BLONDE!

You were standing on the staircase inside the building. I had to walk beside you to go downstairs and that’s when you said HI and smilled at me. Maybe you mistaken me for somebody else? When I left, you were on the phone, so I didn’t want to interupt. I was the blondie in the blue dress, with her younger friend and her dog. Would love to go for coffee if you are not taken!

THE PRETTIEST LADY I EVER DID SEE

I SAW A: I AM A: WHEN: MAY 11, 2016 WHERE: Scott Road Station Guys. Gals. Seriously. She’s prettiest Lady ever. She got off the train at Scott Road at 10:50pm tonight, Wed. May 11. She was wearing her black hair down with a long black dress to match her black framed glassee, and denim jacket. Oh and did I mention she was the prettiest Lady I Ever did see? I couldn’t help but smile when she caught me creepin’. And as luck would have it I got one back. But I let her go; slipped away back into the unknown. I had the blue sweater, black hair, and dropped jaw. If this works, there is a (insert diety here). Thank you for your time.

@ Columbia waiting for the skytrain to King George, you got off at Gateway you were wearing some nice nike air max and had a few tattoos. You bumped in to someone as you were leaving. Hope you have a lovely day, if you see this stranger!

I was making my way to an event while staring at my phone to find my way there. When I looked up I saw this super cute guy holding a camera on a tripod while skateboarding. I think he was Asian and for the life of me I can’t remember what he was (or what I was) wearing. I was the little Asian with blonde shoulder length hair.

I SAW A: I AM A: WHEN: MAY 2, 2016 WHERE: 99 UBC B-Line

I see you at Starbucks and I saw you at the gas station to. You are tall, great looking with a smile to die for. Your eyes have to be the kindest eyes I have ever seen. You made me get goose bumps each time I have seen you. Your demeaner is calm cool and collected. I hope I see you again. I might have the courage to say something intelligent haha. You really have made my days brighter

I SAW A: I AM A: WHEN: MAY 12, 2016 WHERE: RBC 685 W Hasting

CAT EYES ON THE 99 B-LINE

I SAW A: I AM A: WHEN: MAY 11, 2016 WHERE: Columbia Skytrain

I SAW A: I AM A: WHEN: MAY 6, 2016 WHERE: Winners Robson and Granville St. I was standing out side Winners, at Robson and Granville St. waiting for a bus to take me to a meeting, and saw this Beautiful woman in rolled up jeans, sandals with her hair up. Breath taking! She took the escalator up and came right back down. I was running late!!!! Missed an opportunity.

SERVER AT THE UNION

SMILING IRISH

I SAW A: I AM A: WHEN: MAY 10, 2016 WHERE: Granville and 7th bike route You, Irish (I think if you’re Scottish I owe you a beer), live in point gray, smiley on your bike, me mint green scooter, and bright summer dress on my way to meet a friend. You were thinking about buying one and we chatted for a bit and I zipped off as I was running late. In hindsight, should have grabbed your number! DOH! Let’s see if this thing really works :)

PITCHER AT UBC GAME MONDAY AT 5:45 - URBAN REC

I SAW A: I AM A: WHEN: MAY 9, 2016 WHERE: UBC

Babe throwing some great pitches and hits for the Home team. You, looking good with Tom Selleck-est moustache and tattoo on your leg. Me, tall blonde swinging oppo and playing rover/3rd. Private practice?

IS ANYONE WORTHY OF YOU

I SAW A: I AM A: WHEN: MAY 6, 2016 WHERE: The Union (Union St.)

I SAW A: I AM A: WHEN: MAY 5, 2016 WHERE: Cresting Victory Square

I was captivated by your perfect man bun/beard combo that I’m sure you get 1,000 compliments a day on. You were real tall and very friendly, and I was with a group of ladies (we were all wearing white shirts for some reason) that stopped by for drinks and food on Friday evening. I wish I had chatted with you more than the standard server-patron interactions - my friends made convinced me to post in here (in the slight chance you’re single!) because I wouldn’t shut up about the “server with the perfect beard” all night. Maybe we could grab mangaa lasings when you’re not working?

You: the ultimate Nordic goddess prototype for all time - pure blonde hair and your face the perfect realization of the most beautiful child’s face, flawless and perfectly symmetrical in every way, a radiant testate to the fact that there seems to be no limit to how beautiful a woman can be. Me - it’s inconsequential really - just another an involuntary gawker - a mortal trying to hide been totally blown away by you - a desperate wannabe to the guy accompanying you (who was probably your boyfriend) - wondering how he managed to rate for the greatest privilege of all time?

COOLEST NYRSD EVER AT VGH ON MOTHER’S DAY

I SAW A: I AM A: WHEN: MAY 8, 2016 WHERE: VGH Emergency check in You came out to chat to me from around the EMERG counter cause of my sexy raspy voice. You were funny, kind and a vegetarian. I was the chef with food poisoning. I’ll make the vegetarian dinner and you bring the wine and we’ll both bring the laughs and the mischief.

BIG BLONDE DOOR MAN @ SBC

I SAW A: I AM A: WHEN: MAY 6, 2016 WHERE: SBC 109 E. Hastings You hold the door for all the girls. You keep the bad guys honest. You run the best joint in the city. You’re polite and strong and funny and beautiful and I WANT YOU!!! Im the mature curvy redhead. You told me I was your viking goddess. See you on friday. Drinks after the show???!!!!

NICE SMILE

I SAW A: I AM A: WHEN: MAY 8, 2016 WHERE: Guildford Wal mart Waiting in line, you; blk bzd, tan pants, brn deck shoes,leopard print key loop, aviators w lady. Me 6’ brn jacket blonde blue w Asian family. You were helpful with the divider we exchanged a Cpl smiles...Coffee?

YOU COMPLIMENTED MY BOWTIE AND SAID YOU LIKED IT

I SAW A: I AM A: WHEN: MAY 9, 2016 WHERE: Yaletown

You were one of our Customers that came in and bought Gelato at my workplace around 8pm ish maybe? You were Asian wearing a Nurse Uniform, I’m guessing you work at St. Paul’s? anyways Thanks for complimenting my Bowtie. I wanted to say that I like your smile too and its cute but I didn’t 'cause I got shy. Hope you see this! Coffee??

RED HAT, BEARDED SKATER ON MILLENIUM LINE

I SAW A: I AM A: WHEN: MAY 6, 2016 WHERE: Millenium Line Skytrain You are a guy with a beard, white baseball style shirt, skateboard and red hat. I have blue hair and tattoos. We made eye contact a few times at about 5:30pm on the Millenium line, but I was too shy to do anything about it. Anyways, you’re kind of a babe.

Did you see someone? Go to straight.com to post your FREE I Saw You _ MAY 19 – 26 / 2016 THE GEORGIA STRAIGHT 43

44 THE GEORGIA STRAIGHT MAY 19 – 26 / 2016