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CONTENTS
Granville Island and south False Creek. Philip M. Tong photo.
11
NEWS
Stoner godfather and pot activist Tommy Chong is appearing at this year’s Vancouver edition of the International Cannabis Business Conference. Here’s nine things about him you didn’t know. > BY AMANDA SIEBERT
17
TRAVEL
The Sunshine Coast Art Crawl is back this month bigger than ever, with hundreds of creative types ready to display their works. > BY CHARLIE SMITH
18
COVER
Turkey is the go-to Thanksgiving feast for most, but some Vancouver chefs suggest trying delicious less traditional alternatives. > BY GAIL JOHNSON
19
FOOD
Handy kitchen gadgets help you make tasty, attractive gourmet dishes during the fall season: ergonomic turkey forks, anyone?. > BY TAMMY K WAN
START HERE 15 22 51 51 41 47 51 48 33
Books The Bottle Confessions I Saw You Movie Reviews Real Estate Savage Love Straight Stars Visual Arts
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ARTS
Synthesized voices, keyboards, and data transmissions make sweet music for New Forms fest star Kara-Lis Coverdale. > BY ALE X ANDER VART Y
37
MOVIES
The Vancouver International Film Festival continues with a strong program of artsbased and Canadian short films, plus the ever dependable thrills of Altered States.
43
TIME OUT 34 Arts 46 Music
SERVICES 48 Careers 16 Healthy Living 47 Real Estate
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NEWS pacific centre for reproductive medicine
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Famed marijuana advocate Tommy Chong will share details about his life at the International Cannabis Business Conference.
Chong to talk pot in Vancity > BY A M A NDA SIEBE R T
W
hen Tommy Chong talks about marijuana, all other topics of conversation seem to slip into the ether—albeit a dank, hazy one. More than 50 years of championing the misunderstood herb has made Chong one of the most recognizable pot advocates in the world. It makes sense, then, that the 78-yearold comedian, musician, ex-con, former Vancouverite, and two-time cancer survivor will take to the stage at the International Cannabis Business Conference (ICBC) next Thursday (October 13), where he’ll share with audience members the dirty details of his life as a marijuana user, grower, entrepreneur, and enthusiast. Speaking with Chong on the phone from his L.A. home, we were surprised by three things. First, Chong defied the laws of stonerdom by calling the Straight office 20 minutes before his scheduled interview. Second, Chong’s memories of ’50s and ’60s Vancouver, of his nine-month
sentence at the Taft Correctional Institution, and of his battles with prostate and colorectal cancer were almost entirely devoid of the word maaaaaaan. Finally, our 45-minute conversation yielded so much anecdotal gold that we’re fairly certain we have enough material to write a dissertation arguing that Tommy Chong is the greatest stoner in the world. With that, here are nine juicy nuggets, courtesy of the man himself.
was the only design he knew.”
2. Chong smoked pot for the first time at age 17. “The first time I ever smoked pot was in Calgary at a jazz club called the Fats Five. A bass player by the name of Raymond Ma gave me a joint and a Lenny Bruce record. I put the record under my arm and the joint in my pocket, and then he lit up another joint. As soon as I got high, I said: ‘I know what I want to do.’ The next 1. At 16, Chong accidentally day, I quit school. Everything I had got a white-supremacy tattoo to learn from that point on was on from an ex-con. the street and in the club.” “All my life, I’ve been associated with people who have been in prison for one 3. Chong was kicked out of thing or another. When I lived in Cal- his hometown of Calgary by gary, my parents would let me bring the mayor and the police home strays. Some people brought chief in 1958. home stray dogs; I brought home stray “There was nothing for teenagers felons that had nowhere to stay. My to do in Calgary, and I was playing house acted like a halfway house for music at the time, so I formed a teen prisoners for almost 10 years. I got a club with my friends. It was a chartattoo from one of the ex-cons when I tered club that allowed dancing, and was 16, and I didn’t know until recent- we hosted it at the legion hall. The ly that it’s a white-supremacy tattoo. rock ’n’ roll attracted all these thugs He was a biker from the ’40s, and that see page 13
The Georgia Straight | Vancouver’s News and Entertainment Weekly | Volume 50 Number 2545 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
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Volunteers Needed for Vancouver’s Civic Agencies The City of Vancouver is seeking volunteers from the general public for positions on the following Civic Agencies and Committees: • Active Transportation Policy Council • Arts and Culture Policy Council • Children, Youth and Families Advisory Committee • Chinatown Historic Area Planning Committee • Civic Asset Naming Committee • Cultural Communities Advisory Committee • Development Permit Board Advisory Panel • First Shaughnessy Advisory Design Panel • Gastown Historic Area Planning Committee • LGBTQ2+ Advisory Committee • Persons with Disabilities Advisory Committee • Public Art Committee • Renters Advisory Committee • Seniors’ Advisory Committee • Urban Aboriginal Peoples Advisory Committee • Vancouver City Planning Commission • Vancouver Civic Theatres Board • Vancouver Food Policy Council • Vancouver Heritage Commission • Vancouver Public Library Board of Directors • Women’s Advisory Committee Detailed descriptions of the terms of reference, eligibility requirements and time commitment, as well as the online application and instructions are available at: vancouver.ca/volunteer You must complete an online application form to apply. The deadline to submit an application is 5 pm on Friday, October 28, 2016. We encourage applicants of all ages, genders, racial origins, sexual orientation, gender identity, persons with disabilities, and income levels to volunteer to help shape City policy and services to better serve everyone in our community. FOR MORE INFORMATION: civicagenciesinfo@vancouver.ca or phone 3-1-1 OCTOBER 6 – 13 / 2016 THE GEORGIA STRAIGHT 11
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Vancouver’s Innovation Economy: Mount Pleasant Industrial Area (East of Quebec Street)
The City of Vancouver is proposing changes to the eastern edge of the Mount Pleasant Industrial Area to increase job space and support the innovation economy. Join us at an open house to learn more about: • The City’s efforts to support and grow new types of businesses with a focus on digital and creative industries near Main Street, • Proposed zoning changes for limited blocks east of Quebec Street (see map) • Proposed changes to the street network in Mount Pleasant; and • Proposed expansion of the Southeast False Creek Neighbourhood Energy Utility to serve new development in Mount Pleasant. OPEN HOUSES Saturday, October 15, 2016, 11:30 am - 1:30 pm Mount Pleasant Community Centre, 1 Kingsway Tuesday, October 18, 2016, 4 - 7 pm Anza Club, 3 West 8th Avenue (this building is not fully accessible) FOR MORE INFORMATION vancouver.ca/mt-pleasant-quebec Phone 3-1-1
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Tommy Chong
from page 11
and rough people, and we absolutely packed those dances. We closed at midnight, and after that we’d have all these hoodlums and kids on the street, wreaking havoc on the rest of the city. Since the city couldn’t close our club down, the mayor and the city police chief asked our band to leave. We took them up on it: any excuse to get out of Calgary was a good one. We ended up in Vancouver.” 4. Between 1964 and 1969, Chong ran four different nightclubs in Vancouver. “The Blues Palace at Broadway and Alma was a theatre turned into a dance hall that we took over in 1964. We opened the venue with the Ike and Tina Turner Revue, and it cost us $750. It was a Tuesday night, and their first Canadian show. After that, they came up almost every month. Then we moved to T’s Cabaret in Chinatown, but it was too small and
not in the right district. Then our friend Jim Wisby actually gave us the Elegant Parlour [later the Retinal Circus]. He said, ‘Take it over, see what you can do, and I won’t charge you rent until you start making money.’ We took it over and it became a beautiful cash cow. We gave all the pimps and hookers and hoodlums a place to go after hours, and we had the best music on the West Coast.” (After that, Chong moved the parlour to the Shanghai Junk at 205 East Pender Street, a club owned by his brother, Stan.) “That’s where Cheech and I started, after I turned the Shanghai Junk into Vancouver’s first topless nightclub.” 5. Chong and his friends were avid Georgia Straight readers. “The Straight was the first paper to break the Cheech and Chong story, and it was the first paper to do a story on the Shanghai Junk. It was the only paper that we read, and the only one of interest, because the
off on him. He saw how respected I was, so he asked me what I was doing. He said, ‘Oh, I can write a book.’ At first, he did it like he did everything else—copying other people and shit— so when he showed me a page of his 6. Chong is surprisingly posi- writing, I critiqued it pretty hard. I told tive about his time served in him the harsh truth, because you can talk to geniuses like that.” prison. “It was ordained. I was chosen to have that experience because I was 8. After two cancer diagnothe only one in the pot world that ses in three years, Chong could come out of it and see it for now has a clean bill of health. what it was. It was more like a college (His explanation of how meddorm than a real prison: there were ical marijuana works might no bars or walls, just chalk lines. I just be the best thing ever.) had one bad half-hour on the first “Here’s how cannabis works: it night, but from that point on, jail was works on the brain, and the brain just one exciting day after another.” controls the immune system. When the brain is quiet and relaxed, then 7. During his nine-month the immune system can go to work. prison term, Chong inspired That’s why they put people in inJordan Belfort, a.k.a. the duced comas; it takes the fear facWolf of Wall Street, to write tor of the brain away. When the brain sends out these fear signals, his autobiography. “I was writing my book while he was your body goes into a fight-or-flight playing tennis and trying to be a mode, but when the cannabis hits miniature gangster, but my vibe rubbed the brain, the brain calms down. Province and the rest were all about local murders in Surrey—but the Straight had all the good stuff. We even put a couple of ads in it when I started the Shanghai Junk.”
All it worries about at that point is getting something tasty to eat.” 9. In Chong’s eyes, government intervention will never stop the marijuana industry. “I have no concerns whatsoever about what Justin Trudeau and the government are doing. They’re playing catchup with an industry that has been flourishing for years. We know how to grow it, how to harvest it, how to sell it, and how to use it. They can make all the little rules and regulations they want, but it’s not going to make one bit of difference in how we grow, smoke, sell, and use it. As for trying to regulate it socially—telling people where to smoke it and all that shit—forget it. All the government can really do is to Google pot and learn all they can about it for themselves so they know what the fuck they’re talking about.” The International Cannabis Business Conference takes place at the Hyatt Regency Vancouver next Thursday and Friday (October 13 and 14).
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An Evening With
JOE SACCO Co-presented by SFU’s Vancity Office of Community Engagement
WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 2 7:00 PM – 9:30 PM
Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun, Karen Duffek and Tania Willard Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun: Unceded Territories Figure 1 Publishing and Museum of Anthropology at UBC
Award-winning Graphic Journalist Joe Sacco will talk about his work as a journalist, a cartoonist, an editor and an arts news editor for various comics presses. TICKETS
$13 at sfuwoodwards.ca MEDIA SPONSOR
vancouver.ca/bookaward Phone: 3-1-1 TTY: 7-1-1 Goldcorp Centre for the Arts | 149 W. Hastings St. | sfuwoodwards.ca
14 THE GEORGIA STRAIGHT OCTOBER 6 – 13 / 2016
BOOKS
Brown looks at reality of skin colour RE VIEW BROWN By Kamal Al-Solaylee. HarperCollins, 326 pp, hardcover
Do people from countries as
2 disparate as Mexico, Sri Lanka,
the Philippines, and Trinidad and Tobago share a common state of mind? Is it appropriate to lump their experiences under one theme linked to their skin colour? As bizarre as this might sound, it’s the premise of Ryerson University journalism professor Kamal Al-Solaylee’s Brown: What Being Brown in the World Today Means (To Everyone). And you know what? He succeeds in highlighting the lifelong implications for those who happen to be born brown, rather than black or white. Moreover, he shows that in many countries, those with lightercoloured skin enjoy better economic prospects, leading to a constant worry among some about remaining too long in the sun and getting darker. Yes, for some brown people, he writes, skin colour can be a burden. Nominated as an English-language finalist in this year’s Governor General’s Literary Awards, Brown stirs up brown consciousness unlike any other Canadian nonfiction book. “Brown people seem close to the mainstream, so normal, and many of us are light enough to pass for a tanned white person,” Al-Solaylee writes. “And yet we worship different gods (too many gods), wear strange face covers and write from right to left—all of which designates us as strangers still. We’re hired in different parts of the world for our skills and often recruited (or dragged) from our home countries as temporary or seasonal foreign workers, but the welcome mat is pulled from under us if we want to transition from guests into permanent residents, or if we wish to be united with our spouses, children or parents.” One of the book’s strengths is its on-the-ground reports from 10 countries that Al-Solaylee visited in the course of his research. Readers meet domestic workers from the Philippines who moved to Hong Kong so they can generate sufficient income to keep their families fed back at home. There are the expected sad stories, but readers will be inspired by the women’s courage and the dedication of a nongovernmental organization in assisting them through tough times. He also quotes gay and trans sex workers from the Philippines in Japan, as well as male Sri Lankan construction workers who toil in exceedingly dangerous conditions in Qatar. In these cases, migrant workers are motivated by money: they’re driven out of their own countries by the lack of family-supporting jobs. But the book is more than a travelogue depicting hard-done-by brown people who are exploited in Asia, Europe, and the United States. AlSolaylee also explores the complex and, at times, difficult relationship between people of South Asian descent and African descent in Trinidad and Tobago. Both the brown and the black people in the Caribbean experienced colonialism, but, as AlSolaylee points out, that hasn’t prevented new tensions from arising. His definition of brown does not include indigenous people. Nor do any exceedingly wealthy brown people—like industrialist Lakshmi Mittal or PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi—show up within the pages of Brown. Despite this, Al-Solaylee makes a compelling case that being brown comes with its own set of challenges. If there’s any doubt, just ask someone of South Asian or Arab descent if they feel they’re treated any differently whenever they travel through a U.S. airport.
Yuxweluptun wins city book award
T
> BY STAFF
he winner of this year’s City of Vancouver Book Award isn’t a novel or a collection of poems, but rather an intensely illustrated art-exhibition catalogue. Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun: Unceded Territories—by Yuxweluptun, Museum of Anthropology curator Karen Duffek, and Secwepemc First Nation artist-curator Tania Willard (published by Figure 1 and the Museum of Anthropology at UBC)—was named the recipient at the 2016 Mayor’s Arts Awards, held on October 3 at the Roundhouse Community Arts and Recreation Centre. At the ceremony, Yuxweluptun said, “I dedicate this book to the aboriginal people of this world and to the dyslexic people who have had as hard a time writing as I did.”
The characteristically feisty artist also informed the audience, “You’re on my land. Your rent is due!” He called for a moratorium on logging trucks in the province, opposition to the Kinder Morgan pipeline, action on declining salmon populations, and a change away from the colonial name of this province. “These are some of the problems I paint and this is the reality we live in,” said the artist. Handed out annually, the award and its $3,000 purse are meant, in the City of Vancouver’s own words,
to recognize “works which demonstrate excellence and contribute to an appreciation and understanding of Vancouver’s history, unique character, or achievements of its residents”. The pieces by Yu x welupt u n shown in the book, alongside discussions of the artist’s major themes, u nquest ionably amount to such a contribution, with their sharp, sonorous reflections on Vancouver’s colonial history and the scars it has left on the landscape and aboriginal cultures. “Through his art he offers ways in
which we might think differently,” Duffek said at the ceremony. The retrospective includes commentaries from Michael Turner, Lucy Lippard, Marcia Crosby, and Glenn Alteen alongside Duffek and Willard discussing the meaning of Yuxweluptun’s work amid First Nations struggles for autonomy, justice, and environmental preservation. “I asked them to speak their minds,” Yuxweluptun said. An independent jury picked Unceded Territory from a shortlist that included Lorimer Shenher’s That Lonely Section of Hell: The Botched Investigation of a Serial Killer Who Almost Got Away (Greystone Books) and The Revolving City: 51 Poems and the Stories Behind Them (Anvil Press), edited by Wayde Compton and Renée Sarojini Saklikar. -
> CHARLIE SMITH
OCTOBER 6 – 13 / 2016 THE GEORGIA STRAIGHT 15
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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 WAVAW - Rape Crisis Centre has a 24-hour crisis line, counselling, public education, & volunteer opportunities for women. All services are free & confidential. Please call for info: Business Line: 604-255-6228 24-Hour Crisis Line: 604-255-6344 Healthy & loving relationships alluding you? CODA: Co-dependency Anonymous 12 step Recovery: 604- 515-5585 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
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16 THE GEORGIA STRAIGHT OCTOBER 6 – 13 / 2016
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16 THE GEORGIA STRAIGHT OCTOBER 6 – 13 / 2016
TRAVEL
The Sunshine Coast is home to many artists, including woodcarver and sculptor Keith Burdon, whose work is shown here.
Art boosts Sunshine Coast > BY C HA R LIE SMITH
T
here’s a reason why the Sunshine Coast has one of the highest concentrations of artists in Canada. According to Linda Williams, cofounder of the Sunshine Coast Art Crawl, the region’s natural beauty brings out the creative juices in unexpected ways. The seventh annual crawl takes place this year at 300 venues from October 21 to 23, stretching from Langdale in the south to Earls Cove in the north. Williams said that there will be more than 300 artists displaying their works in several communities, including Gibsons, Roberts Creek, Sechelt, Halfmoon Bay, and Madeira Park, which are connected by the Sunshine Coast Highway. “We have everything that you would expect: visual artists, from contemporary to landscape, and we have a lot of glass artists,” Williams told the Georgia Straight by phone. One of them is Chris Motloch, who owns Molten Spirit Glass Studio in Roberts Creek. Williams said that his specialty is making glass pumpkins. “Kids sign up and he will have them blow a pumpkin and then decorate it,” she noted. “He’s got the kiln right outside and it’s just fascinating for everyone to watch.” There’s also a blacksmith in Roberts Creek, Kelly Backs, who is going to show his creative side. In that same community, Williams said, La Petite Souris Chocolate founder and chocolatier Amber Stoby will hold workshops for people who want to learn how to make their own chocolates. Williams said that there were 27,000 studio visits during last year’s
Sunshine Coast Art Crawl, which is scheduled in the fall because room rates are lower and ferries are less busy. Because the artists’ galleries and studios are indoors, it’s not such a concern if it rains. The art crawl helps boost the economy, and not only for restaurants and bed-and-breakfast operations. “Last year, one of our artists made $45,000 in two days,” Williams revealed. “That was from the sale of a few high-end paintings.” This isn’t the only popular tourist event in the area. The annual Sechelt Arts Festival takes place from next Thursday (October 13) to October 23; this year, the theme is water. One of the premier events will be a presentation of Flicker by the Dancers of Damelahamid at Sechelt’s Raven’s Cry Theatre next Friday (October 14). Showcasing Gitxsan heritage, masked dancers enter into their ancestors’ spirit world. The following night, Juno nominee Kinnie Starr will be at the Raven’s Cry Theatre for a water-themed concert, accompanied by artist Bracken Hanuse Corlett. These are ticketed shows, but several other events at the festival are free. Mushroom lovers won’t want to miss the annual Sunshine Coast Mushroom Festival, which takes place from next Friday (October 14) to next Sunday (October 16). Events will take place at the Roberts Creek Community Hall and the Pender Harbour Community Hall in Madeira Park. There’s also a craft-beer festival taking place in Powell River on November 8. Once upon a time, people in the Lower Mainland thought of the
Sunshine Coast as extending from the town of Gibsons, near West Vancouver, to Sechelt. In fact, this area is now part of what is known as the southern Sunshine Coast. The northern Sunshine Coast includes Powell River, Earls Cove, and Egmont, as well as a popular tourist attraction, Skookumchuck Rapids, in Skookumchuck Narrows Provincial Park. Langdale (near Gibsons) is accessible by ferry from Horseshoe Bay; another ferry from Earls Cove connects motorists to Powell River. Escalating housing prices in the Lower Mainland and Greater Victoria have prompted an exodus of people to this region. The marketing director of Sunshine Coast Tourism, Paul Kamon, told the Straight by phone that this has brought new creative energy to the area. He sees the region undergoing a major transformation, likening it to the shift that happened in Portland, Oregon, as it shed its reputation as an industrial hub and, thanks to its creative class, transformed into one of the coolest cities in America. Kamon grew up in East Van and is struck by some of the similarities that he noticed when he first arrived in Powell River five years ago. “It was like a time warp back to the ’80s,” Kamon said with a laugh. “I felt very comfortable when I got here, right off the bat.” In his words, the old East Van no longer exists because the real-estate market has priced out many of the locals. But in Powell River, he was able to buy a house with an ocean view for just $204,000. “The lifestyle we’re living up here is amazing,” he said. -
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SFU PRESIDENT'S FACULTY LECTURE SERIES PE TER WA LL D OWNTOWN LECTUR E SER IES FA LL 2016
Putting Waste-Heat to Work: The Future of Clean Technologies The push for sustainable energy solutions means clean technology is Canada’s fastest growing sector, and top researchers like SFU’s Majid Bahrami are rising to the Dr. Majid Bahrami challenge. This lecture explores Dr. Bahrami’s Wednesday October 12, 2016 work developing novel clean technologies powered by waste heat, solar and geothermal 5:30 pm: Reception/refreshments energy - that provide drinkable water, air 6:00 pm: Lecture, followed by Q&A conditioning and energy storage. Shadbolt Centre for the Arts Studio 103 - 6450 Deer Lake Avenue, Burnaby
“Anonymous and the Politics of Leaking” Outlaw tactics. Vigilante justice. Website defacement. Data dumps. In this golden age of whistleblowing and leaking, Anonymous has displayed a knack for fomenting controversy and drawing attention to its actions using these unconventional forms of Internet-based political dissent. Dr. Gabriella Coleman will provide a history of Anonymous’ crucial role in establishing a novel style of hacking-for-leaking: public disclosure hacks. Thursday, October 20, 2016, 7:30 pm at the Vogue Theatre, 918 Granville Street. Doors open at 6:30 pm. Tickets are free and can be reserved at pwias.ubc.ca
You can never have complete certainty as to what’s going on, who’s involved, ‘not being able to fully understand who’s behind the mask’ is what gives Anonymous political power.” — Dr. Gabriella Coleman
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The Wall Exchange is a community program created by the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies at The University of British Columbia to provide a public forum for the discussion of key issues that impact us all.
OCTOBER 6 – 13 / 2016 THE GEORGIA STRAIGHT 17
FOOD
Turkey is the centrepiece of most Thanksgiv-
BY GAIL JOHN SON
ing dining tables, but the traditional meal wasn’t something Vancouver chef Felix Zhou grew up with in his native Hunan province. The executive chef and part owner of the newly opened Heritage Asian Eatery downtown has other memories of special-occasion foods. “I never heard about turkey in China,” Zhou says during an interview at the West Pender Street restaurant, which draws on flavours of his home country as well as Japan, Thailand, Vietnam, India, and beyond. “Any special occasions would be duck. It has a long history in China and is considered a luxury item in Asian cuisine.” For anyone seeking an alternative to the usual turkey dinner this year, Zhou suggests Peking duck. He says the golden-brown, crispy-skinned, deeply flavourful dish, which has been served since the imperial era, is easy to make at home. “Usually, the base is Chinese five-spice,” says Zhou, whose new dining spot serves breakfast and lunch items like pork-belly bowls and wild-mushroom crepes. “Add some salt, some sugar, and hoisin sauce and rub the inside, and slowly roast it so the fat renders out. When it’s done, shred it all, combine the juice back into meat, add a little green onion and hoisin, and that’s it.” He’d serve the tender duck in baos, which are Chinese steamed bread rolls, and top them with pickled daikon or maybe simply slender batons of carrots or cucumber “to add that freshness to it”. Add a salad of local greens with yuzu dressing and a lemongrass-coconut tapioca, and you’ve got
Talking more than turkey
For a modern Thanksgiving meal, Heritage Asian Eatery chef Felix Zhou recommends Peking duck breast, Asian five-spice chicken wings, and bao. Tracey Kusiewicz photo.
braise the kale in the stock with a little butter, lemon, and a small amount of maple syrup. When the liquid is almost all gone, season with salt From duck and goose to beef brisket and stuffed-yam roast, and pepper and fold in chunks local chefs offer alternatives to the traditional Thanksgiving of ham hock. Sometimes I might even put a layer of a modern, memorable Thanksgiving meal unlike bread crumb or a good Parmesan gratin on top and any other. put it in the oven till it’s golden brown. When you While turkey is typically a treat made once or cut into it, you’ve got a bit of broth, braised kale, and twice a year, served with as much starch as senti- a little bit of crunch on top. It’s comfort. Green kale mentality, it’s also labour-intensive, with hours- doesn’t disintegrate like spinach, and with a little long prep and a seemingly longer cleanup. Local bit of braising to the right amount, it’s just tender food experts have all sorts of ideas for home cooks enough. When you bite into it, it’s magic.” looking to do things differently this year. Porchetta would also be a top nonturkey ThanksTop of mind for Alex Chen, executive chef at giving-dinner pick for Dan Cheung, founder and Boulevard Kitchen and Oyster Bar, is porchetta. The CEO of Nourish Vancouver, a West Side café and Italian specialty typically calls for a whole deboned cooking school geared to health- and eco-conscious suckling pig, but easier versions consist of cuts like foodies and families. pork shoulder or loin. Chen suggests a mix of cuts, Besides being a delicious main—which Cheung including pork belly, all rolled together with ingredi- would roll with a herbaceous salsa verde and rub ents like fennel seeds, garlic, salt, and pepper. with oil and rosemary—porchetta frees up a lot “It’s a classic,” Chen says on the line from the of time during the day. “Once you throw it in the restaurant at the Sutton Place Hotel. “I’d bake it at oven, you can kind of forget about it,” he says by 300 [° F], then, at the end, put it to 500 degrees to phone. “If you feel it needs a bit more time, you puff the skin so it’s bubbly and crispy and gets really can broil it so you get an extra few bubbles in the crackling. It’s really popular in our household.” skin and it crisps up really nicely. Then rest it for The father of two young kids would serve that aro- 30 to 45 minutes. People love it at room tempermatic main with a dish of Brussels sprouts cooked ature as well, so it’s one of those things that can be with apples and bacon lardons. “I tend to go to local served when everyone’s ready to sit down. It’s not market Richmond Country Farms—it has a great that stressful thing where you’re trying to talk to pumpkin patch—and get whatever is fresh,” he says. people and execute at the same time. Some people “Maybe I’d do a butternut-squash-and-potato gratin might do it along with turkey. If you’ve got 30 with a grated cheese garlic cream, which is a nice people you can do two mains, and this is a little bit little touch. Sometimes when I see some beautiful more fancy than doing a ham, because not everykale, I’ll take some smoked ham hock from my lo- one knows what porchetta is.” For non-meat-eaters, Cheung suggests a vegan cal butcher shop and make a stock out of it. I slowly braise the ham hock with large chunks of carrots, shepherd’s pie with lentils, chickpeas, and root vegecelery, and onion till fork-tender. Then you take lots tables topped with yams—instead of the usual potaof kale, pull stems out, add shallots and garlic, and toes—for a hint of sweetness. “The kicker to it all is to
THINGS TO DO
throw pangrattato on top,” Cheung says, referring to a crunchy bread-crumb topping. “I learned about this in one of Jamie Oliver’s books about five years ago—he uses it on a lot of his pastas—and it changed my life. It’s so easy to make; it’s bread crumbs, herbs, and garlic, and you put some dried porcini mushrooms in there and a little bit of olive oil. You get this textural difference: you have the soft sweetness of yams and then the hardiness of all the beans and root vegetables and the crispness of pangrattato on top. It’s also called poor man’s Parmesan cheese, and it just makes the biggest difference.” Slather that shepherd’s pie with a miso gravy, Cheung says, and “people will be singing your name for weeks to come.” Faizal Kassam, executive chef at West Vancouver’s Terroir Kitchen, will be serving deboned stuffed goose—“the original Thanksgiving dinner, even before turkey”—accompanied by braised red cabbage, preserved black truffles, and Brussels sprouts with pine nuts. “As far as sides go, instead of potatoes you could do smashed celery root or yams or carrots and parsnips,” says Kassam, whose restaurant specializes in small plates influenced by the flavours of southwestern Europe and North Africa. “Bring water to a quick boil from cold salted water, then to a simmer, and once fork-tender, strain and mash the veggies with butter and black pepper. Now that we’re well into fall, potatoes are too pedestrian. These vegetables are more flavourful and more nutritious.” If you’re pressed for time (or simply aren’t inclined to cook a turkey), Kassam suggests a whole roast chicken. For a simple dessert, a seasonal alternative is an apple crumble. “I’d use Granny Smith or green apples because they’re tart, and would do a brown-butter crumble instead of regular butter. The caramelization of the brown butter adds more depth of flavour.” At Ritual in the West End, chef-owner Nevada Cope will be serving braised lamb shoulder, see next page
FOOD
Meal ticket CHARITY DINNER Top chefs in Vancouver are coming together for the 3rd Annual Chefs’ Charity Dinner hosted by Dan’s Legacy—a foundation dedicated to helping youths with depression, anxiety, and addiction issues as a result of trauma and abuse. The gala dinner takes place at 7 p.m. on October 27 at the Vancouver Club (915 West Hastings Street). Guests will be welcomed with cocktails and canapés, before indulging in a fivecourse meal with wine pairings. The dishes will be created by Vancouver Club head chef Sean Cousins (photographed) with junior sous-chef/pastry chef Jessica Caparas, Lee Cooper of L’Abbatoir, Stefan Hartmann of Bauhaus Restaurant, and David Gunawan from Farmer’s Apprentice. Galagoers will also be able to enjoy music and participate in live and silent auctions. All proceeds go toward providing therapeutic counselling and life-skills programs for young survivors of childhood trauma and abuse. Tickets ($250 per person) can be purchased online at www.danslegacy.com/. 18 THE GEORGIA STRAIGHT OCTOBER 6 – 13 / 2016
High five
Five places to find a Thanksgiving dinner in Metro Vancouver
1
JOE FORTES SEAFOOD & CHOP HOUSE (777 Thurlow Street) Offering a Thanksgiving meal (October 10) for lunch and dinner.
2
THE CASCADE ROOM (2616 Main Street) Serving a turkey dinner (October 9) complete with mashed potatoes, candied yams, and more.
3
MARKET BY JEAN-GEORGES (1128 West Georgia Street) A three-course set menu (October 9 and 10) of salad, turkey, and pumpkin cheesecake.
4
THE BUFFET AT RIVER ROCK (8811 River Road, Richmond) Indulge in a Thanksgiving buffet feast (October 8 to 10) with turkey, sushi, and more.
5
NOTCH8 RESTAURANT & BAR (900 West Georgia Street) A traditional three-course meal (October 9 and 10) that includes roasted tom turkey with wild leek and fig stuffing.
Beer of the week AUTUMN ALE Summer is now officially gone, but with the leaves mostly still on the trees it’s not time to haul out the rake. And while the fog is pretty guaranteed to roll in at some point between now and Halloween, for now the days and nights are clear. To ease you into the weeks that lie ahead, Stanley Park Brewing has rolled out a new seasonal for those days when you don’t want a headed-for-the-hop-wars IPA but crave something with a little more character than a brown ale. Foghorn India Brown Ale is being billed as “a medium bodied, well-hopped ale that’s perfect for the fall transition”. Clocking in at six percent ABV and using five malts and three varieties of hops in the brewing process, the beer is a ruby-mahogany in colour and flavourful without being overpowering. Think the more mellow cousin of a classic IPA, or the more interesting one of a boring old brown ale. Enjoy Foghorn India Brown Ale now, because soon enough the leaves are going to start to fall and you’re going to become deeply reacquainted with your rake. -
FOOD a dish she says is easy to slow-roast at home. “Then you could add a festive pomegranate-walnut sauce,” she says on the line from her restaurant. “I just think that with fall, braising meats go really well. Even a slow-braised pork shoulder would be nice with root vegetables—parsnips, turnips, celeriac, butternut or acorn squash. Roast them in olive oil with some whole smashedup garlic cloves and rosemary and thyme. You could cut some citrus in half and roast that in with the veg, then when citrus is cooked, squeeze it over top. “You could also do a stuffed-yam roast,” she adds. “Roast yam, cut it in half, and you could add bits of pecanpie crumb.” Accompanying greens could consist of curly endive with shaved apple and pear. Cope will also be serving sugar pie, a traditional Québécois dessert. “It’s sweet and festive,” she says. Jeff MacIntosh, executive chef at Vancouver’s new authentic Texas barbecue spot, Dixie’s BBQ, says his go-to for an unconventional Thanksgiving meal is beef brisket, “best cooked low and slow”. “For home cooks, I’d recommend a slow roast or braise, perhaps,” he says from the East Hastings Street restaurant that specializes in smoked meats, pulled pork, and fried chicken (and that has a plentiful selection of whiskies). “Beef brisket is the breast of the cow. Smoked brisket is my personal favourite, however it’s a difficult cut of meat to master the smoking of. It’s so special and appealing to me because it’s the king of barbecue in Texas, and one of our more sought-after meats here at Dixie’s. Sides I’d recommend would be a smoked-potato pavé, sweetpotato gnocchi with brown butter and sage, Brussels sprouts with smoked bacon and lemon, and either cornbread or Yorkshire pudding.” Bone-in ham is a flavourful alternative to turkey, says Raman Khatar, dietitian and marketing supervisor at Urban Fare. “Make it fancy with a spiked orange glaze—bourbon pairs well—by mixing up some orange marmalade or jam with bourbon, wholegrain mustard, maple syrup or brown sugar, salt and pepper, and lemon juice,” she says. “A delicious vegetarian option is stuffed peppers, and using colourful peppers really amps up the feel of fall and harvest. Stuff with a spiced rice mixture with grilled veggies, and if you want to bump up the protein a bit add an aged cheddar before baking or sprinkle with a feta or goat cheese. You can also add in some lentils or beans.” For a pescatarian feast, Khatar suggests Ocean Wise West Coast sockeye salmon with a simple pesto topping or a balsamic-and-brownsugar glaze. “Serve with some colourful carrots and Parmesanroasted Brussel sprouts to keep the fall harvest theme,” she says. -
Kitchenware to cook fall feasts with > BY TAMM Y K WA N TURKEY ROASTER As Thanksgiving approaches, most people are likely thinking about mashed potatoes, pies, gravy, and the star of the show: turkey. Hosting a dinner at home but uneasy about making the most important dish for the holiday? Check out All-Clad’s stainless-steel roti combi (on sale for $199.99)—a V-shaped nonstick roaster that’s perfect for making turkeys and other meats. It’s stovetop-safe and easy to clean. Add all the spices and herbs you want, and use it for pan gravies after roasting. This roaster set also comes with two stainless-steel turkey forks that are described as “ergonomically designed for comfort”. So after you flaunt your cooking skills to your guests, you can also show off the gorgeous cookware that made your delicious turkey. Find it at Ming Wo (various locations) or online at www.mingwo.com/. CERAMIC PUMPKIN ’Tis the season for everything pumpkin, so it shouldn’t be a surprise that cookware has come in the shape of gourds. Staub’s ceramic mini 24-ounce pumpkin cocotte ($39.99) in a fun burned-orange hue is the cutest nonedible pumpkin you can have in your kitchen. Its glass porcelain finish gives it a beautiful glossy look while staying scratch- and heatresistant. Serve your favourite mini casseroles, soups, or stews in this autumn-themed dish to keep your table setting stylish. If you’re going for minimalistic colours, this cocotte also comes in Clockwise from left: Cuisipro’s three-in-one baster keeps meat succulent, Le Creuset’s enamelled cast-iron a clean, rustic ivory shade. Find it at the Gourmet oval French oven is a durable investment, Williams-Sonoma’s fall pie-crust cutter set makes pies decorative. Warehouse (1340 East Hastings Street) or online FRENCH OVEN There’s a reason why cast-iron it before serving. Zwilling’s pro carving set (on sale at www.gourmetwarehouse.ca/. cookware can be found in plenty of households— for $194.99) consists of a carving knife and fork VERSATILE BASTER For those who don’t it’s durable, functional, and great for making tasty made from a high-performance “no-stain” steel in know, there’s a secret to how a turkey comes out culinary creations. Le Creuset’s classic enamelled Germany. You can expect to be able to cut seamof the oven looking perfectly roasted and juicy: cast-iron 4.7-litre oval French oven ($380) makes lessly into your meat with the strong and semiflexsimply use a turkey baster. Cuisipro’s three-in- everything from roast turkey to beef-brisket stews. ible blade made with a fine cutting edge. Its bolster one baster ($29) can keep your holiday-food sta- There’s plenty of space to toss in your veggies and design with a three-rivet handle will allow for an ples succulent by retaining the juices from the herbs, so no need to hold back. The best part is that easy grasp—so the amateurs can also have a go. meat. This multi-use kitchen gadget comes with you can choose from a large selection of colours to After you’ve sliced the turkey like a professional, a silicone brush for coating the turkey (or any fit your obsession with bright cookware. Be it cherry you can give yourself a pat on the back, add the other meat) for a mouth-watering glaze, and a (a flashy red) or soleil (a blend of yellows), your cast- cranberry sauce and gravy to your dish, and enjoy nylon shower head for quick basting, or you can iron item will make your wallet a little (or a lot) a restaurant-level meal that you were able to make remove the attachments to use it for larger por- lighter, but it’ll be worth it. Find it at the Le Creuset at home. Find this item at the Zwilling Outlet store tions of juice. The body of the baster also comes boutique (2997 Granville Street). at McArthurGlen Designer Outlet at Vancouver with measurements to indicate how much fluid Airport (1000–7899 Templeton Station Road, Richyou’ll be releasing onto your meat. Forget about CRUST CUTTERS Since the arrival of autumn mond) or online at www.zwilling.ca/. clumsily using a spoon to scoop the juice—this has got us digging pies, we’re also going to get into baster is what will make or break your gourmet the intricate details of what makes pies so photo- SLOW COOKING What makes slow cookers dish. Find it at Cook Culture (various locations) genic (especially when paired with vanilla-bean ice useful is that they save both time and money, cream on the side). Williams-Sonoma’s ultimate especially during dinner party season. CROCK or online at www.cookculture.com/. fall pie-crust cutter set ($33.22) has us swooning POT’s cook-and-carry programmable slow PIE PLATE It isn’t difficult to bake pie, but it’s def- over its cute patterns. Designed to cut and stamp cooker ($94.99) is the key to making your fainitely not easy to bake a flawless pie with the right with precision, so you won’t have to worry about vourite dishes when you’re busy, with the option amount of golden tint on its crust. Emile Henry’s ruining your dough with DIY cutters (a.k.a. fin- of taking hot meals with you wherever dinner ruffled pie dish ($43.35 to $57.82, depending on gers). Line your apple pie with mini apple-shaped may be. The handy appliance features heatcolour) can help you create a showstopper pie for crusts, or create a leafy braid on your pumpkin pie. saver stoneware, a locking travel lid, temperthe fall season. The vintage-inspired dish is hand- The set of six designs includes an acorn, pumpkin, ature settings, and a nonstick coating. Prepare crafted in France and made from Burgundian clay apple, elm leaf, maple leaf, and oak leaf. Heck, the dishes like pot roasts, braised meats, soups, and is able to absorb, distribute, and retain heat kids will have a great time being in the kitchen just and curries—the countdown timer will tell you evenly—allowing your dessert to bake to perfec- to make some decorative dough. Because food that when your food is ready. Don’t be surprised if tion. In addition to giving a pie a fancy look, its looks good, tastes good, right? Find it online at you think your cooking has gotten better after ruffled edges are useful for easy cutting and re- www.williams-sonoma.com/. the first bite—slow cookers are known for pushmoving of slices. To keep with harvest colours, ing out all the f lavours in your food. But if your this pie plate comes in shades that range from CARVING SET Besides stuffing, basting, and friends insist that you’ve become a better cook, pumpkin to burgundy and navy. Find it online at roasting a turkey, an important part of creating who is to argue with them? Find this kitchen the ultimate turkey experience is expertly cutting gadget online at www.thebay.com/. www.williams-sonoma.com/.
THE ULTIMATE THANKSGIVING PAIRING Shop the Legacy shelves, or talk to one of our in house experts to find the perfect wine, spirit or beer to compliment your feast.
We’re turning 2! Thank you Vancouver for your amazing support. Come celebrate with us on Sunday October 9th with live entertainment from 7:00-9:00PM. Giving away delicious 2nd Anniversary Hummus Jars with your dinner.
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hile it may be too late for you to get your winter crop on completely—cold-weather growing is all about planning, people—Sharon Hanna, local gardener and author of The Book of Kale: The Easy-to-Grow Superfood, 80+ Recipes and coauthor of The Book of Kale and Friends: 14 Easy-to-Grow Superfoods With 130+ Recipes, notes that fall is prime time to get a jumpstart for spring. Take garlic and broad beans, for example: Hanna says the veggies should be planted by mid-October for harvesting in the summertime. Nonedibles such as “flowering onions” and poppies should go into the ground at this time, too. In addition to beautifying your soil space, these plants help facilitate the work of “good” garden bugs once they sprout in the spring. “They’ve got millions of tiny flowers on them and bees and other beneficial insects love them,” explains Hanna. If you’re looking to protect the edibles you already have growing, the master gardener suggests shielding your herbs from frost. Pots of rosemary, in particular, should be moved to a sheltered area to prevent damage from cold snaps. When putting your garden to bed, it’s also best to leave vegetables like beets, potatoes, carrots, and kale untouched. “Some of them behave as perennials. In the spring, they’ll start to regrow and you’ll get all these little broccolinitype sprouts coming through,” Hanna says of kale specifically, adding that root vegetables simply remain dormant during the winter. It’s also beneficial to leave some foliage lingering in your garden,
For spring harvests, vegetables and nonedibles need to be planted now.
rather than clearing it out completely. Leaves, for example, can be employed in composting or to insulate soil. “Don’t rake them up,” stresses Hanna. “Use them in your compost as layers or put them in a garbage can and use a weed whacker to break them down. You can use this to mulch your garden—it’s all food.” For warm-weather gardeners, the end of summer offers a bounty of fresh produce to be consumed, too. Hanna’s tip for munching up your harvest before it goes bad? Opt for easy-to-make recipes such as tomato jam, sauerkraut, and fermented salsa, which you can pressure- or boiling-water-can to keep for the months ahead. Hanna is also a fan of zucchini-tomato-basil gratin, a layered vegetarian dish from her Book of Kale that’s perfect for anyone looking to cook up their abundance of tomatoes and zucchini. “I’ve made it a bazillion times and it’s always a no-brainer,” she says. -
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FOOD
Wines for your holiday table
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ere we are, on the cusp of Thanksgiving yet again. Of course, the holiday is all about tradition, and that tradition certainly extends to the dinner table. While we never waver from the classics of turkey, gravy, mashed potatoes, stuffing, and so on, there’s nothing saying we can’t mix it up a little with our wine. As we celebrate the holiday, let’s enjoy the opportunity to venture out with what we’re imbibing. This week, some suggestions that stray from the norm.
and food-friendly and can be found on shelves at a fraction of the price of good Burgundy. If you’re not yet onboard, consider this a rollout of the red carpet. Light on its feet but heavy on character, it has an embarrassment of red berry fruit and a smattering of fresh herbs amongst buoyant acidity and just enough tannic character to carry your holiday meal. Fresh and lively, with an amiable, juicy character. Ignore the cranberry sauce and have a slug of this instead. BODEGA SIERRA NORTE PASIÓN DE BOBAL ROSADO 2015 (Utiel-
MONMOUSSEAU TOURAINE CUVÉE J. M. BRUT 2011 (Loire Valley,
France; $22.49 at B.C. Liquor Stores) Cast aside the cava and shelve the Champagne! This sparkler from the Loire Valley is composed of 80 percent Mix it up this Thanksgiving with wines Chenin Blanc and 20 percent Char- by Monmousseau and Jean-Paul Brun. donnay; it’ll hit the spot as an apéritif or wash down any predinner snacks is an exception; it’s a wine made solely with ease. Made in the traditional from Graciano, so those features end method via a second fermentation up being front and centre, resulting in the bottle just like its Champagne in a remarkably fascinating wine that brethren, the wine carries some lovely comes as quite the bargain. With a brioche notes drenched with Ambrosia good lashing of dark berry fruit, it’s an apple, key lime, and ideal wine for those a touch of pink who want a bigger grapefruit. While red with their dinner but don’t want it can be a lovely Kurtis Kolt to smother their accompaniment to your turkey, it’ll be just as enjoyable turkey or the all-important gravy with with the potato chips and roasted nuts anything too heavy. you are scarfing down beforehand.
The Bottle
BODEGAS Y VIÑEDOS ILURCE RIO MADRE GRACIANO 2014 (Rioja,
Spain; $14.99 at B.C. Liquor Stores, $13.99 until October 29) We’re generally used to reds from Spain’s Rioja region being predominantly crafted from the Tempranillo grape, with maybe a little Garnacha thrown in there as well. On occasion, a wine from the region will also have Graciano as a component, a variety that brings a little black fruit and floral characteristics to the mix. Rio Madre
JEAN-PAUL BRUN DOMAINE DES TERRES DORÉES MOULIN-À-VENT 2013 (Beaujolais, France; $26.49 at
B.C. Liquor Stores) We’re past the point of having to tell you that Beaujolais wines aren’t all sweet and confected like those we associate with the Nouveau category, right? Case in point, this charmer of a light red you should turn to if you’re a Pinot Noir fan. South of Pinot Noir’s home in Burgundy, the wines of Beaujolais are arguably some of the most unsung on the planet. They’re every bit as elegant
Requena, Spain; $16.99 at B.C. Liquor Stores) Anyone who says rosé wines are purely for summer is lying to you. They can be some of the most foodfriendly wines out there, particularly with poultry, and this unique bottling from Spain will prove it. When vinified red, the Bobal grape makes a pretty rich, dark, and spicy wine—so we know that this pink isn’t gonna be too wimpy or delicate. Ultraquaffable, the Pasión de Bobal has layer upon layer of dark fruit and even a few darker elements, like hints of molasses and cloves. Once you enjoy this with your Thanksgiving dinner, you’ll be racing to stock up for Christmas. (Oh, God, I can’t believe I’m already mentioning Christmas.) GONZALEZ BYASS NUTTY SOLERA OLOROSO (Jerez, Spain; $15.99 at B.C.
Liquor Stores) Speaking of wines that have a bad reputation for being sweet or confected, here we are with a sherry. Is it ultrasweet and cloying? No, no it’s not. Think toffee-coated hazelnuts with a good lashing of bourbon. This is one of my favourite sherry wines, and I’ve poured it for many doubters. I’d venture to say every single person I’ve shared it with has become a fan. Put a bit of a chill on it, plate your pumpkin pie, and share a few ounces of it with your guests; you have my word, they’ll be delighted. -
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With ingredients like kelp and espresso, B.C. brewers are concocting creative flavours for autumn. Mike Usinger photo.
Local brewskies to fill up fall > B Y M IKE USING E R
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ith fall officially upon us, it’s time to put away the tank tops, camouflage shorts, and dollar-store flip-flops. Out come the grunge-chic flannel shirts, pea coats, and wool tuques. The shifting of the season doesn’t stop with a wardrobe change. It’s also a time when we rethink what we’re reaching for in a beer. Goodbye to mowing the lawn and then rewarding yourself with a cold pilsner. So long, barbecuing with the tongs in one hand and a sour-cherry saison in the other. Or hitting the beach with a brown paper bag and a six-pack of grapefruit radler. Once the days get chilly and the skies go grey, it’s all about the heavy stuff. What better way to reward yourself after an afternoon of endless leafburning than with a smoked porter or an oyster stout? Better yet, double down with two—who needs plates when you’ve got a meal in a glass? Thanks to the craft-beer explosion, we’ve come a long way from the days when dark beers in British Columbia started with good old reliable Guinness and ended with Fuller’s London Porter. Walk into a properly curated liquor store (God bless you, Legacy on False Creek!) and you’ll find yourself standing before an awesome array of homegrown porters and stouts. For the B.C. brewmasters producing those beers, thinking outside the box is half the fun. Why bother going the traditional route
when the gods have given you West Coast kelp, fresh espresso, and salted licorice to work with? So with the weather slowly turning as cold and gloomy as October in Dublin, it’s time to go over to the dark side. Many of the following offerings quite rightly bill themselves as strong beer, which means they’re guaranteed to warm you up from the inside. Just as importantly, they’ll make you realize the world has got a lot more adventurous since porters and stouts first appeared in 18th-century England. If the following beers have something in common, it’s that they offer something new. Now put the sunblock away and get pouring. HOYNE VOLTAGE ESPRESSO STOUT Looking to take the edge off
but still stay sharp while working on that term paper? Made with freshly pulled espresso from Victoria-based roasters Bows and Arrows, Hoyne’s Voltage Espresso Stout is ass-kickingly coffee-forward, to the point where even the most devoted javajoint denizen will snap to attention. The tan head disappears quickly, but that’s somehow fitting, because so will this easy-drinking Irish-style stout—especially if it’s 4 o’clock and you can’t decide between a beer and the day’s fourth latte.
LONGWOOD STOUTNIK RUSSIAN IMPERIAL STOUT Pouring three
shades blacker than Vladimir Putin’s soul, Stoutnik Russian Imperial Stout isn’t something to be reaching for if you’ve got things to do. While
it doesn’t taste overly boozy, this outstanding offering clocks in at 7.5 percent ABV, meaning that shotgunning a bottle will get you staggering up the street like a Moscow barfly. Better to think of Stoutnik as made for sipping, the complex and bold beer resplendent with notes of burnt caramel and soft licorice. Bonus points for packaging: the sparkle-dusted bottle is blacker than the cover of Spinal Tap’s Smell the Glove. Not to mention Putin’s heart.
E XC E P T I O N A L I TA L I A N C U I S I N E
RUSSELL BLACK DEATH PORTER
Russell’s Black Death doesn’t totally live up to its name, the porter pouring with a creamy light-tan head and having a colour that’s closer to a deep brown than the inside of a coffin at midnight. And while Black Death sounds like a great name for a heavier-than-heavy metal band, expect a pleasantly mild-tasting porter with mild chocolate and hazelnut undertones. If the thought of heavy beers scares you almost as much as, say, the bubonic plague, start here. TOFINO KELP STOUT Living in
Vancouver—and, more specifically, the sushi aisle at Fujiya—means you end up eating a lot of seaweed, the benefits of which are legendary. Now, thanks to Tofino Kelp Stout, you can also drink it. Blacker than unrefined oil, and with a healthy toffee-coloured head, the lightly carbonated beer has a pleasantly salty undercurrent. Thanks partly to its lingering chocolate notes, but even see next page
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unpleasantly—with what seems like from previous page sour cherry. Colourwise, Sasquatch Stout is dark to the core, which makes more to a briny finish that becomes sense considering no one’s ever seen a more pronounced as the beer warms Sasquatch sunning itself by a river on up, Kelp Stout is as crazily drinkable a blazing bright summer’s day. as it is unique. Especially if you happen to be of the opinion that there’s DOAN PNW RYE STOUT As anyone no such thing as too much salt, not who’s ever spent time in a suburban Legion will testify, rye tends to make to mention seaweed. normally good people go crazy. This FIELDHOUSE BREWING SALTED lightly carbonated and unusually BLACK PORTER Sometimes high smooth offering from Doan’s Craft expectations ruin everything. Com- Brewing will quite possibly make ing from the farming paradise known you crazy for rye stout. Coffee, caraas Abbotsford, Fieldhouse’s Salted mel, and vanilla flavours all compete, Black Porter is brewed with Dutch but what might stand out the most is “droppies”, which is an exotic way of that this B.C. Beer Awards 2015 winsaying imported salted black licorice. ner isn’t overly boozy. Doan PNW The problem with putting “Salted” Rye Stout finishes with a mild-spice in the beer’s name is that it raises the afterburn, but overall what you’ve hopes of unrepentant salt junkies. got is a dark beer so mellow it doesn’t Especially when we’re talking salted go down like a dark beer. Oh, and an licorice. Instead, you get a perfectly extra shout-out to the trippy label art pleasant and somewhat mild deep- by local artist Ola Volo, mostly bebrown porter where the licorice is dif- cause it’s like Adventure Time stoned ficult to detect, and the salt seemingly on Cheech and Chong. nonexistent. That’s bad news if you are going in expecting the best thing CANNERY BREWING COMPANY this side of the Dutch section of the THORNLESS BLACKBERRY PORCommercial Drive Licorice Parlour, TER At a certain point—namely, after but great if your doctor has suggested drinking bottle after bottle after bottle of stouts and porters for this story— you ease up on the sodium. the last thing you want is another OLD YALE BREWING SASQUATCH beer that tastes like double-strength STOUT On a bottle label depicting espresso fortified with three bricks of the Pacific Northwest’s most fabled unsweetened chocolate. Enter Canmythical forest creature, Sasquatch nery Brewing Thornless Blackberry Stout bills itself as being about “cof- Porter, a brilliantly fruit-forward beer fee, chocolate, & mystery”. No word that smells like blackberry blossoms in if the mystery is how they’ve man- early summer, and tastes like someone aged to get a little bit of Sasquatch in dropped a load of cash on fresh berevery bottle (not to mention where ries at the Trout Lake Farmers Market. Old Yale Brewing found the Sas- One sip of this nothing-less-than-wonquatch). But, as advertised, the coffee derful triumph, and you’ll be ready for and chocolate are pronounced, with next July. Break out the tank tops and things finishing strangely—but not flip-flops. -
Local brewskies
EL TWANGUERO & PAUL PIGAT SAT. OCT. 15 @ 8 PM
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DONNY MCCASLIN • FRI. OCT. 28 @ 8 PM
Grammy-nominated jazz saxophonist blurs the line between jazz and electronica with“A” Band and NiteCap
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24 THE GEORGIA STRAIGHT OCTOBER 6 – 13 / 2016
ARTS
Keyboardist and electronic
B Y ALEX ANDER VAR T Y
composer Kara-Lis Coverdale doesn’t tailor her concert programs to suit whoever’s booking her, yet she’s still a perfect fit for this weekend’s New Forms Festival. Not only is she recognized for her work with new technologies such as data streaming and digital signal processing, she’s going to be presenting a selection of previously unheard compositions. “At this point, I’m kind of sorting through things I’ve created and then grouping them together for a future release, and I’m not yet sure what it is I’ve made,” she explains in a Skype conversation from Montreal, where she’s based. “So I’m using this tour as a workshop to kind of see what I’ve done, hoping for some feedback. But so it goes in the land of experimentalism!” Coverdale does allow that her new pieces are a linear progression from those featured on her recent albums A 480 (2014) and Aftertouches (2015), although that gives only a vague indication of what we can expect to hear at New Forms. The two records are quite different. A 480, for instance, is a spare, even monochromatic collection of ambient works built on sampled and then extensively manipulated data sounds—both synthesized voices and the incidental noise of data transmissions. “I think data is like the medium of our time,” Coverdale says. “It’s the transmission of our time, and I felt that it should be used as a musical source. Any instrument is reflective of its time: the piano, even, or the organ, or the 808 [a genre-defining Roland drum machine], or early Buchla-synthesizer music. These are snapshots into our musical timeline, and you can’t be looking back all the time and using instruments from the ’70s and ’60s. You kind of have to consider what is now.”
The medium is the message
Electronic composer Kara-Lis Coverdale, who works with both abstract forms and familiar chord structures, views data as the defining sound source of our era.
preferring to create a to feel,” she says. “Fewer musics are inviting and sonic environment onto allow you to think for yourself and project your The experimental approach of keyboardist Kara-Lis Coverdale which the listener can own thoughts into that particular music. It’s more project his or her own of a communication in the latter, and that’s what I fits the New Forms Festival’s embrace of the sonic vanguard feelings—an aesthetic always try to create. I’m not interested in speaking Aftertouches, in contrast, is more keyboard- that aligns well with her own sense of being “a ves- at someone; I’m interested in discourse.” centric, often taking off from the kind of simple sel” when she plays. but atmospheric chord progressions that typify “I often think that a lot of musics are very ‘hot’, New Forms 16 runs at 560 Seymour Street on Friday radio pop—a genre Coverdale’s loved ever since in that they speak at you, and they tell you how and Saturday (October 7 and 8). her days as a preteen piano prodigy. “It’s not like I’m intentionally doing that; it probNew Forms Fest transforms both sound and space ably just came up quite naturally,” she explains. “There were always a lot of pop-music songbooks The New Forms Festival is best known as a forum for cutting-edge electronic music around my house, and on Saturdays I would play (see Deft feature, page 45), but what makes executive director Malcolm Levy happithrough them for hours. I’ve always had a really est is when audiences recognize the excellence of its media-arts programming, too. close relationship with pop music, but I don’t really “One of the most important parts of New Forms,” he tells the Straight, “is how try to invoke it; it’s just kind of what comes out.” much we work to transform spaces.…That’s always one of the most important What one won’t hear in Coverdale’s music, parts of the festival. And I think the way you design a space, the way that you conceive of a space, and whether she’s working with abstract forms or famthe way that you affect how people engage in that space has a huge amount of potential, in terms of iliar chord structures, is much in the way of tradhow people will be in that space—how they’re going to enjoy it, how comfortable they’re going to feel.” itional virtuosity—even though she’s a very skilled For this weekend’s festival—the last under Levy’s stewardship—New Forms has handed the former pianist and pays her rent by working as a church A&B Sound building and current nightspot FiveSixty (560 Seymour Street) over to architect and designorganist. She does, however, credit teaching herself er Scott Cohen, best known for his atmospheric work at the Fox Theatre, the Waldorf Hotel, and various how to play the organ with predisposing her to an Nuba restaurants. He, in turn, is working collaboratively with an array of mostly local visual, installaalmost scientific interest in tone production. tion, and performance artists, including Eli Bornowsky, Sonja Ratkay, Nancy Lee, and Kiran Bhumber. “When I started working with synthesizers,” “It’s really like an ongoing, process-based artwork,” Levy says of the New Forms site, adding that she notes, “I think it was a lot more intuitive be“not taking ourselves too seriously” is also part of the creative team’s mandate. The look of the festival, cause of that. You have a much more concrete he notes, should reflect the underground electronic scene that’s been a big part of West Coast culture sense of sound-layering and pitching, because since the early 1990s. “Vancouver is extremely well known now for...these small, really cool, beautiful you literally know the difference between a fourlittle rooms where people can enjoy music in a fairly autonomous way,” he says, “and that is sort of the inch pipe and an eight-inch pipe and a 12-inch design framework that we’re really going for in this year’s festival.” pipe, and what that means for creating a timbre.” > ALEXANDER VARTY She also eschews extroverted displays of emotion,
2
THINGS TO DO
ARTS High five
Editor’s choice THE DARKEST HOUR If you’ve never seen Fringe faves James & Jamesy, you’re in for a treat. And if you have, you’ve never seen these physical-comedy geniuses quite like this before. James & Jamesy in the Dark finds the two suit-wearing clowns performing entirely in pitch blackness, the only light emanating from bizarre lampshade headpieces. We can’t promise they’ll fully illuminate the meaning of life, but they’ll certainly search for it with their headlamps, offering generous doses of absurdist fun along the way. James & Jamesy in the Dark is at the Waterfront Theatre on Granville Island to October 16.
Five events you just can’t miss this week
1
HELEN & EDGAR (To October 8 at the York Theatre) One of America’s strangest raconteurs relives a bizarre life in Savannah, Georgia.
2
ANGELS IN AMERICA (To October 16 at Studio 58) How many chances do you get to see this epic work staged?
3
SCREENS AND THRESHOLDS (October 7 to December 4 at Presentation House Gallery) An essential video, photo, and installation exhibit.
4
THE FLICK (To October 29 at the Arts Club Granville Island) Low-wage lonely souls bond at a movie theatre in a sly, edgy Pulitzer winner.
5
PSYCHO (October 12 at the Orpheum) The VSO playing the classic film’s score live should be bone-chilling.
In the news
INTERPLAY RETURNS Mutable Subject’s Deanna Peters is taking over the producer-curator role at the Interplay Project. For the past four years, dance innovators at the Contingency Plan have been running the multidisciplinary series with the Moberly Arts Centre. And true to form, she’s giving the program a few twists. The performances take place as usual on October 14 and 15 at the centre, but they’ll be preceded by workshops at the Dominion Building’s Gold Saucer Studio with some of the artists on the roster. Alex Mah introduces participants to interdisciplinary text scoring on Tuesday (October 11), and Toronto’s Robert Abubo (pictured here) shows Vancouver what his Dance Karaoke is about next Thursday (October 13). Expect other Peters touches, like DJ– amped socials after the shows, and group bike rides, too. -
OCTOBER 6 – 13 / 2016 THE GEORGIA STRAIGHT 25
26 THE GEORGIA STRAIGHT OCTOBER 6 – 13 / 2016
OCTOBER 6 – 13 / 2016 THE GEORGIA STRAIGHT 27
26 THE GEORGIA STRAIGHT OCTOBER 6 – 13 / 2016
OCTOBER 6 – 13 / 2016 THE GEORGIA STRAIGHT 27
ARTS
Arcade meets sound art in Balls > BY A LEX A NDER VA R TY
J
amming shards of glass into your mouth or playing pinball: which would you rather do? That wasn’t a hard decision to make for the Australian sound artist Lucas Abela. His reasons for choosing the obvious, however, are hardly ordinary. It’s not so much that he was tired of cutting his tongue during noise performances in which he played amplified glass like a sharp-edged saxophone, although this certainly factored into his decision. It’s more that he was interested in providing a different kind of experience for his audience—one that was even more visceral, yet considerably less voyeuristic. “I started doing concerts where people would show up and start yelling ‘Blood! Blood! Blood! Blood!’ ” he explains to the Straight in a Skype interview from his temporary Vancouver digs. “But I’m trying to be not as reckless as I was before, because I’m tired of that expectation.” Abela’s “glass-blowing” adventures served a twofold purpose: they sounded unconventionally interesting, and they helped bring him to the world’s attention. “Glass resonates well and sounds beautiful,” he admits, “but I did kind of play up the danger of it, sometimes.” Now, though, he’s dialling down the potential for injury while amping up audience engagement with his pinball-machine sculptures, which combine the flipperflipping thrills of an old-school arcade game with the unexplored territory of avant-garde sound art. Bass Balls, which he’ll unveil at Vancouver New Music’s upcoming Mechanical Music festival, is a good example. He’s building it out of two monstrous Ampeg speaker cabinets, which he’ll fill with tuned bass-guitar strings, ramps and channels for the customary silver balls,
VS
Montreal’s Adam Basanta manipulates small sound sources. Terry Lim photo.
Pinball sculptures become sound-makers in the hands of Australia’s Lucas Abela, the innovator behind the aptly named Bass Balls at Mechanical Music.
and onboard electronics triggered by hitting buzzerlike targets. Like earlier pinball sculptures based on pianos, electric guitars, tuning forks, or gamelan instruments, Abela’s bass rig also upends the usual philistine response to noise music. To the dismissive cry of “Anyone could do that,” the Australian’s riposte is “Why, yes, anyone can. Have at ’er.” “I’ve always thought that noise music is far more rewarding to make than to watch,” he explains. “So when I started doing installation art I wanted to build noise-making instruments that would give my audience the thrill or the sense of fun that I have when making noise. I guess the pinballs are a good way to trick people into making noise music.…And noise is kind of part of the pinball experience, part of the arcade experience as I remember it from being a young lad.” Joy and an escape from virtual, screen-based activities are among the pleasures Abela’s machines are designed to provide. He’s especially
happy when, after setting up his Temple of Din installation in a gallery setting, he finds younger explorers trying out his devices. “You always get big, huge smiles,” he says, contrasting his work to the subdued, ambient sound art that’s more common gallery fare. “And kids love my machines. It’s always a good thing when you get kids into any type of art—especially having a great time and making noise, which kids love to do.” And, true to his democratic and inclusive principles, Abela is going to offer the Mechanical Music audience a chance to get in on the fun. “I’ve been asked to perform for 45 minutes,” he says. “So I’ll play for 15 minutes and then invite the audience in to finish off the set for me.” Vancouver New Music presents Mechanical Music at the Orpheum Annex from next Thursday to Satu rd a y ( O c t o b e r 1 3 t o 1 5 ) , w i t h Lucas Abela performing on opening night. For a full schedule, visit www.newmusic.org/.
2
Vancouver New Music fest gets mechanical
Is it strange to say that Mechanical Music, the 2016 edition of Vancouver New Music’s annual festival, offers something for everyone? After all, the event focuses on “a sonic universe in which mechanical and electromechanical movements and sounds are vital components of the artworks”; we realize that to some this might seem like a celebration of the outré and the obscure. The works themselves suggest otherwise, however. The most populist thing on offer is undoubtedly Lucas Abela’s Bass Balls (see story this page), which combines the nervy fun of playing pinball with the dank, low-frequency rumbling of a dark ambient soundtrack. But there are other options to intrigue the curious ear and the open mind, including Adam Basanta’s small movements, which, like Bass Balls, can be heard at the Orpheum Annex on the festival’s opening night (October 13). The Montreal-based Basanta works with the precision of a surgeon and the unfettered imagination of an assemblage artist in his computer-assisted manipulation of small sound sources, including speaker cones and various “kinetic objects”. Another Quebec resident, electroacoustic composer Jocelyn Robert, will contribute a series of computer-guided improvisations to October 14’s program: the twist here is that in each, the performer will be fed a series of cues to respond to—and while they’re generated by what has already been played, they won’t necessarily make musical sense. Consider it a kind of sonic high-wire act, with the chance of failing or falling ever present. Closing night (October 15) offers an especially intriguing selection of music made for and by amplified loom, homemade beatboxes, and recombinant organs, but let’s flag Vancouver’s own Peter Hannan and Camille Hesketh. The veteran electronic musician and the poet will use text messaging and sound to portray the death of a relationship, with special attention paid to “the four most dreaded words in the English language”. Hint: the piece is called We need to talk. But just what does that mean? > ALEXANDER VARTY
AT THE MOVIES!
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MAJOR MOTION PICTURE
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A SYMPHONIC NIGHT AT THE MOVIES! WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 12
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Scott Terrell conductor Vancouver Symphony Orchestra PREPARE FOR HALLOWE’EN with a very special screening of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. Bernard Herrmann’s spine-tingling score elevates this cinematic masterpiece to new heights in a thrilling big-screen presentation, accompanied by the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra. PSYCHO "A Symphonic Night at the Movies" is a production of PGM Productions, Inc. (New York) and appears by arrangement with IMG Artists.
Classification: 14A. Suitable for people 14 years of age or older. Those under 14 should view with an adult. May contain violence, coarse language and/or sexually suggestive scenes.
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OCTOBER 6 – 13 / 2016 THE GEORGIA STRAIGHT 29
ARTS
Out Innerspace absorbs wide influences Major Motion Picture draws from cinema, surveillance, news headlines, and more in a multimedia work both comic and sinister > BY JA NET SM IT H
T
alking about the new show Major Motion Picture, Out Innerspace’s Tiffany Tregarthen touches on influences as diverse as Charlie Chaplin, Slavoj Žižek, Alice in Wonderland, The Matrix, and Polka Dot Door. Clearly, in conversation, she can draw liberally from popular culture—the same way she and partner David Raymond do in their dance. The Vancouver duo’s breakout piece was their 2012 duet Me So You So Me, a fun mix of cartoon action, silent-movie physical comedy, and wild sound effects. Now, in Major Motion Picture, they explore everything from Big Brother surveillance to cinematic conventions. It’s that playing with pastiche that sets the troupe apart. “David and I are avid movie watchers and news readers,” Tregarthen admits, speaking to the Straight over the phone from Vernon, where the couple is teaching workshops and presenting the piece. “David and I let as many things as possible influence us.” The pair’s ambitious work started, she says, with them wanting to create characters for other dancers. Whereas Me So You So Me played on the dynamics of their own relationship as a couple, they wanted their new piece to ask the same questions of a larger group of people: what tears a relationship apart and what brings it together? Almost instantly, she says, themes emerged: power and fear, and the good-versus-bad of movies like Chaplin’s The Great Dictator. “It was almost like the piece had these legs and started running off,” she says. But that was just the beginning. The company plays with devices on-
Masked figures make up just part of the battle between good and evil in Major Motion Picture. Wendy D photo.
stage here like never before—not just with dramatic cinematic lighting, but with infrared cameras whose projections reveal a backstage world to the audience. When Raymond introduced the cameras one day in the studio, “it sort of brought us into the dark,” Tregarthen explains. “Being able to see in the dark was really exciting and really terrifying at the same time,” she adds. “It made us look at all the cameras around us differently. We started thinking about its [the camera’s] morality and thinking of it as a Cheshire Cat: it
disappears but its smile remains. “Also there’s something terrifying about the camera when you see it move: it’s really a living thing. It becomes a sort of portal.…We felt the most exciting change that’s coming from the world is coming from the dark corners, not coming from the centre stage. So we said we have to see what’s happening backstage.” Masks also make their way into the work, as well as a menacing giant overcoat: three dancers bring it to life, sprouting six legs beneath it. “The coat is that third [character] that allows us not to oversimplify
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the good and the bad,” Tregarthen says. “It’s also a symbol for the paternal master. The coat also creates a sense of the impossible body: while we see that it holds the shape of a body, inside it, a lot can happen. Maybe it’s a literally headless leader.” That disembodied leader seems to almost magically control everything in the world of the show, even its f lickering lights. “As a kid I watched Polka Dot Door,” Tregarthen adds, referring to the 1970s and ’80s educational TVOntario show, “and I realized when Polkaroo showed up at the
door that one of the hosts would disappear. It’s kind of like Agent Smith from The Matrix—that he’s everywhere but nowhere at the same time. Not all of the performers could see him at the same time and that made him more dangerous.” The resulting production, true to its title, is a vividly filmic work full of imagery both threatening and comic. Tregarthen says she and the team posed huge lists of questions about the strange world of the piece. “Can the lights see? Can we hear what the camera is thinking? “That’s the beauty of cinema: there is this fantasy and suspended notion of reality. You have to create a logic to hold on to.” The work comes at a time when the company is busier than ever: anyone who saw Crystal Pite and Jonathon Young’s stunning dancetheatre work Betroffenheit last February will remember Tregarthen and Raymond’s indelible roles as dark, carnivalesque characters who appear to the tormented protagonist. That Kidd Pivot/Electric Company Theatre show journeys through Europe next spring. At the same time, Pite, in fact, is acting as mentor to the Out Innerspace pair. All that, plus running Tregarthen and Raymond’s contemporarydance training program Modus Operandi, keeps the pair moving as they prepare to mount their company’s most ambitious work. But, as Tregarthen puts it, “David and I never feel like we’re on a break from Out Innerspace.” As we said, everything is fuel for their creation. Out Innerspace presents Major Motion Picture at the Firehall Arts Centre from Wednesday to next Saturday (October 12 to 15).
ARTS
The Company Theatre’s Piya Behrupiya pumps up Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night with the music and dance of Indian folk theatre. Company Theatre photo.
Troupe gives Bard a lively Hindi makeover > BY JA NET SM IT H
W
his case to Olivia. And the household servants still wage war against their arrogant boss, Malvolio. But Kumal clearly enjoys upending the classics, telling the Straight that when he studied the works of Shakespeare in theatre school, they never spoke to him. It was only when he started seeing the works reinterpreted around the world—in Japan, Korea, France, Russia, and, of course, in diverse ways within India—that he found them more interesting. “We started liking him more when we made him our own,” he says, then explains wryly: “For the last many years in India I’m known for being a bit blasphemous. I’ve done Shakespeare without words, or I take extremely popular writers in India and turn them upside down.” With works like these, the Company Theatre has made a name as one of the most innovative troupes in India, where Kumar is pleased to now run an artist residency, just outside Mumbai (largely funded by the money from his Globe gig). But there are challenges, of course. “More than 90 percent of our theatre companies are struggling to survive here because we don’t have support from the government and corporations. And for a country known more for its culture than anything else, it’s pitiful,” Kumar laments, but then quickly adds: “I have no vehemence toward the government, because it is a country that allows a great freedom of expression.” The Company Theatre’s expression speaks far beyond India’s borders these days, its unique cultural crossover of Hindi Shakespeare holding appeal far beyond expat audiences. “We just performed in Chicago, and the audience was 70 percent non-Asian, and we got standing ovations,” Kumar says. -
hen London’s legendary Globe Theatre asked Atul Kumar to stage Twelfth Night, he immediately saw it full of song and dance and the vibrant folk colours of India—a change for the veteran actor-director, considering he’d never worked with live music before. A Hamlet cast with clowns speaking gibberish, yes. But never a musical. “I can’t sing to save my life and suddenly I was surrounded by these singers and dancers and composers, and it started rolling in that direction,” Kumar tells the Straight from his home in Mumbai, before the resulting show, Piya Behrupiya, hits Diwali Fest here. (Although his company has already headed to North America for the tour, he’s stayed behind because his wife is due to have a baby.) The Company Theatre’s Piya Behrupiya is a rollicking Hindi translation—notably, not an adaptation—of Shakespeare’s tale of love and mistaken identity. It will be shown here, as it was at the Globe in 2012 and then elsewhere around the world, with English surtitles. It is, you could say, Bard by way of Bollywood, although Kumar clarifies: “The term Bollywood is a very tricky term, associated with things kitschy and not high art.” Kumar actually draws more from the Indian folk theatre that has inspired Bollywood. “But it is Bollywood as well,” Kumar, who is also the Company’s artistic director, admits with a small laugh. “We love Bollywood. We have grown up watching those crappy films.” It’s not so much that his production messes with the script—the story is largely the same—but that it translates it into largely colloquial Hindi, “twice removed” from the original Shake- Piya Behrupiya runs from Tuesday spearean, as he puts it. Lord Orsino (October 11) to October 22 at the still gets cross-dressed Viola to plead York Theatre as part of Diwali Fest.
OCTOBER 6 – 13 / 2016 THE GEORGIA STRAIGHT 31
ARTS
Psycho score will still thrill > B Y JO HN LU C A S
I
t is one of the best-known moments in film history, and also one of the most terrifying. As onthe-lam embezzler Marion Crane (played by Janet Leigh) cleans up in her motel-room shower, a shadowy figure pulls the curtain aside and stabs her repeatedly with a kitchen knife. According to Hollywood legend, director Alfred Hitchcock originally intended this iconic scene from his 1960 thriller Psycho to play out without any music, accompanied only by Leigh’s screams and the sound of running water. It’s almost impossible now to even think of the shower scene without hearing Bernard Herrmann’s score, with its stabbing, shrieking violins reinforcing the on-screen violence. In its list of the top 25 movie scores of all time, the American Film Institute ranked Herrmann’s work on Psycho at No. 4, behind only the music from Star Wars, Gone With the Wind, and Lawrence of Arabia. The jarring terror of the Marion Crane murder scene aside, the music in Psycho is remarkably understated. Eschewing woodwinds, brass, and percussion, Herrmann—who also scored six of Hitchcock’s other features, including Vertigo, The Trouble With Harry, and North by Northwest—composed for strings, creating themes intended to underscore the characters’ psychological states. “The music is another character on the screen, that’s what I think, with this particular film maybe more than any other,” says Scott Terrell, who will conduct the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra in a live musical accompaniment to a special screening of Psycho. “I find it interesting, as I’ve been going through the score more, that he [Herrmann] will take the same theme and change the instrumentation,” says Terrell, reached by phone in Lexington, Kentucky, where he’s
According to conductor Scott Terrell, Bernard Herrmann used dissonant chords to create an unsettling feeling when composing the music for Psycho.
the musical director for the Lexington Philharmonic. “You know, the violas will take it and change the colour, or the violins. It’s pretty much exactly the same music, but it’s in a different timbre because of who’s playing and where they’re playing on the instrument. And just that subtle change is enough to change the impression of what’s happening. Other than simply repeating it, just a little bit of variation goes a long way in keeping the music helping to move the action along. We don’t even think anything about it when we’re listening because it’s so subtle. But when you really dig into it, he obviously was thinking about it quite a bit.” Herrmann’s music is quietly but deeply disturbing for a number of reasons: one is that the harmonies include intentionally “wrong” notes, and another is that its repeating motifs build tension and never release it by, say, resolving to a major chord. “You could do—not that many people would understand it—a harmonic analysis,” notes Terrell. “It’s the parallel motion, usually ascending
from one weird harmony to another across the orchestra. They’re not what I would call consonant-sounding chords. They’re quite dissonant, but he creates a pattern of that dissonance to where it starts to sound normal.…Your ear starts to adjust to it, which I find fascinating. It’s so odd that after maybe about 10 minutes it starts to sound regular. He sort of trains your ear to think of it as normal, and yes, they are very creepy.” Producer John Goberman, creator of A Symphonic Night at the Movies, which is bringing the Psycho screening to Vancouver, agrees with that last point. “Psycho is an extraordinary achievement, musically, and at the same time it’s a pretty scary film,” Goberman says in a separate phone interview from New York. “You’ll never take another shower.” The Vancouver Symphony Orchestra presents A Symphonic Night at the Movies: Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho at the Orpheum next Wednesday (October 12).
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32 THE GEORGIA STRAIGHT OCTOBER 6 – 13 / 2016
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Trauma underlies serenity VISUAL AR TS
KAREN GOMYO PLAYS BERG
EDGAR HEAP OF BIRDS At the Charles H. Scott Gallery until November 6
Walk into the Edgar Heap of Birds exhibition at the Charles H. Scott Gallery and you will be immersed in shades of blue. Emanating from the abstract paintings, text-based monoprints, and blownglass vessels on display, the cerulean, aqua, and powdery blues may lull you into a sense of serenity. That is, if you don’t look too closely at the dead bodies floating across the glass, or read too intently the violent histories and contemporary injustices that are embedded in the text works. That is, too, if you don’t notice the horror and outrage in Genocide and Democracy, the grid of blood-red monoprints mounted on the gallery’s far wall. Handwritten, these pieces employ altered lyrics of patriotic songs to point up the massacres of indigenous people that underlie the American republic. Based in Oklahoma but constantly travelling, Hock E Aye Vi Edgar Heap of Birds is a multidisciplinary artist, writer, curator, and educator of Cheyenne and Arapaho descent. Widely esteemed as a leader in the creation of political art focused on Native American issues, he uses his practice as a way of remembering a tragic and traumatic past while also asserting the living presence of indigenous peoples and cultures, in the United States and elsewhere. (That “elsewhere” includes Vancouver, where he has created public artworks, in the form of signage, that remind us of whose unceded territory this city is built upon.) At the exhibition’s opening, Heap of Birds talked about the methods and ideas behind his artworks. And although he frequently describes
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Edgar Heap of Birds’ Genoicide and Democracy monoprints infuse lyrics about massacres of indigenous people into patriotic songs. Blaine Campbell photo.
himself as a warrior for his people, although, too, the histories of massacres and cultural destruction he recounts are horrendous, he spoke with such a calm intelligence and generosity of spirit that we felt truly welcomed into the circle of his art. Most Serene Republic: Native Bodies of Remembrance is the title of a series of blown-glass vases, created in 2007 when Heap of Birds was exhibiting at the Venice Biennale. They memorialize the 20 or more Native Americans who died in Europe in the late 19th century while touring, under coercion and duress, with Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West show. Each vase is encircled by ghostly figures, arms and legs outstretched, as if flying. Here, it seems, Heap of Birds has freed the dead warriors from their cold, dark, European graves, allowing their spirits to soar homeward. The 48 blue monoprints of Secrets in Life and Death are installed in three sets of 16 each (16 is a number of ceremonial import for the artist). Handwritten in capital letters, the texts take on the urgent, antigovernment tone of graffiti and, at the same time, the confiding nuances of poetry. In a kind of
stream of consciousness that is at once angry and loving, didactic and ambiguous, the words written here interweave the “secrets” of past and present Native American history with the artist’s personal life as a husband and father. As much as his work demands recognition of a bloody and traumatic past, Heap of Birds also offers the possibility of renewal through the natural world. Four abstract paintings from his “Neuf ” series recall a 10-year period when he lived on Arapaho and Cheyenne lands in Oklahoma. (Neuf is the Cheyenne word for “four”, another number of ceremonial significance, Heap of Birds says.) The recurring leafy forms in a range of blues and other hues—both earthy and celestial— are layered over each other, above grounds of ochres, umbers, and greys. These forms evoke juniper trees, flocks of birds, schools of fish, and the movement of clouds overhead. As in other works here, the predominant blue tones allude to sacred elements—the great dome of the sky, fresh water, and the sea. In a very real sense, Heap of Birds’ art is life-affirming—and death-defying.
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OCTOBER 6-12
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ONGOING ARTS ACTIVITIES ARTWALK, GALLERIES, TOURS, MUSEUMS, LOCAL ARTWORK, FIGURE DRAWING, LIVE MUSIC, CULTURE MAPS
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THEATRE 2OPENINGS IN THE DARK James & Jamesy present an adventure about discovery and creation, performed in darkness. Oct 5-16, 8 pm, Waterfront Theatre (1412 Cartwright St., Granville Island). Tix $15-27, info www.jamesandjamesy.com/. MENDING FENCES The Sidekick Players Club opens its 20th season with Norm Foster's play about how the failings of parents are handed down to subsequent generations of parents. Oct 6-22, 8 pm; Oct 16, 2 pm, Tsawwassen Arts Centre (1172 56th St., Delta). Tix $18/15, info www.sidekickplayers.com/. PIYA BEHRUPIYA (TWELFTH NIGHT) Diwali Fest presents the Canadian premiere of the Company Theatre's Bollywoodinfluenced adaptation of Shakespeare's classic comedy Twelfth Night. Oct 11-22, York Theatre (639 Commercial). Tix from $25, info www.diwalifest.ca/.
don’t miss out! For up-to-the-minute, searchable Arts Time Out listings, visit
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Beijing People’s Art Theatre
LOVE, THE SEA Play weaves together collected letters from Virginia Woolf and her contemporaries to explore the moment after the end. Directed by Tim Carlson and Daniel Doheny with the fourth-term students of Studio 58. Oct 11-16, 8:15 pm, Studio 58 (Langara College, 100 W. 49th). Admission by donation, info www.langara.ca/studio-58/currentseason/index.html/.
Starring
LIANG GUANHUA PU CUNXIN YANG LIXIN
TEA H USE by Lao She
An epic drama of Chinese culture & politics
RAP GUIDE TO CLIMATE CHAOS Rapper Baba Brinkman breaks down the politics, economics, and science of global warming in a brand new one-man show. Oct 12-13, Revue Stage (1601 Johnston Street). Tix $25, info www.bababrinkman.com/.
2ONGOING BASKERVILLE: A SHERLOCK HOLMES MYSTERY The Arts Club Theatre Company presents director John Murphy's version of Ken Ludwig's zany whodunit. Based on the Arthur Conan Doyle story. To Oct 9, Stanley Industrial Alliance Stage (2750 Granville). Tix from $29, info www.artsclub.com/. A GOOD WAY OUT Pacific Theatre presents the world premiere of a look into the precarious world of crime and compromise. To Oct 15, 8 am, Pacific Theatre (1440 W. 12th). Tix $23.95-34.95, info www.pacifictheatre.org/season/20162017-season/mainstage/a-good-way-out/. STRANGER TO HARD WORK Canadian actor and comedian Cathy Jones shares her unique perspective on a variety of topics from food to money, and from the troublesome people in her life to the benefits of laughter. To Oct 8, 8 pm, Firehall Arts Centre (280 E. Cordova). Tix from $25, info www.firehallartscentre.ca/. HELEN & EDGAR Catherine Burns directs celebrated orator Edgar Oliver in a production that tells the story of Oliver and his sister Helen’s strange childhood in Savannah. To Oct 8, York Theatre (639 Commercial). Tix from $20, info www. thecultch.com/events/helen-edgar-2/.
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ANGELS IN AMERICA Rachel Peake directs the Pulitzer Prize-winning play set during the AIDS epidemic in Reagan-era New York City. To Oct 16, 8 pm, Studio 58 (Langara College, 100 W. 49th). Tix $15-25, info www.langara.ca/studio-58/currentseason/index.html. COMFORT COTTAGES Western Gold Theatre presents the story of four single
*plus applicable fees
34 THE GEORGIA STRAIGHT OCTOBER 6 – 13 / 2016
EDWARD II UBC Theatre and Film presents Christopher Marlowe's play about a newly crowned king who alienates his queen and court when he recalls his lover from exile. To Oct 15, 7:30 pm, Chan Centre for the Performing Arts (6265 Crescent Rd., UBC). Tix $11.50-24.50, info www.ubctheatretickets.com/.
see next page
straight choices
REAL ESTATE ON-STAGE It really doesn’t get more timely. The Concierge of Vancouver is a new play that satirizes the Vancouver housing crisis and our insanely skyrocketing real-estate prices. And don’t you think it’s better to laugh in a theatre about the fact that you might never own a home than to cry about it on your apartment couch? Shaul Ezer’s comedy links together an expensive near-empty condo building in Coal Harbour, a reclusive donor who gives away millions each year to worthy causes, and a tenacious reporter who’s investigating an international banker. The Matchmaker Productions show hits Studio 1398 on Granville Island from Friday (October 7) to October 16.
MUSIC 2THIS WEEK UBC SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA Jonathan Girard conducts cello soloist Eric Wilson and the UBC Symphony Orchestra in a performance of Dvorák's Carnival Overture, Bloch's Schelomo: Rhapsodie Hébraïque, and Hindemith's Mathis der Maler. Oct 6, 8 pm, Chan Centre for the Performing Arts (6265 Crescent Rd., UBC). Tix $8, info www.music.ubc.ca/. RETURN TO THE COTTON CLUB Jeff Tyzik leads trumpeter-vocalist Byron Stripling, vocalist Miche Braden, tap dancer-vocalist Ted Louis Levy, drummer Robert Breithaupt, and the VSO in a program of favourites by Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, and Cab Calloway. Oct 7-8, 8 pm, Orpheum Theatre (601 Smithe). Info 604-876-3434, www.van couversymphony.ca/.
Stephen Boswell present a Latin program. Presented as part of the Second Sunday Concert Series. Oct 9, 4-5 pm, Roedde House Museum (1415 Barclay). Tix $12-15, info www.roeddehouse.org/.
SECOND SUNDAY CONCERT SERIES An afternoon of classical music in the parlour. Oct 9; Nov 13; Dec 11, 4-5 pm, Roedde House Museum (1415 Barclay). Tix $12-15, info www.roeddehouse.org/.
standup release LIVE and her role on Amazon series Transparent. Dec 14, doors 7:30 pm, show 8:30 pm, Chan Centre for the Performing Arts (6265 Crescent Rd., UBC). Tix on sale Oct 7, 10 am, $35 (plus service charges and fees) at www.livenation.com/.
2ONGOING
THE COMEDY MIX 1015 Burrard, Century Plaza Hotel & Spa, 604-684-5050, www. thecomedymix.com/. Comedy club with WEDNESDAY NOON HOURS: STEVE pro-am night Tue at 8:30 pm, showcase KALDESTAD QUARTET Music by saxoWed at 8:30 pm, and featured headliners phonist Steve Kaldestad, pianist Nick Peck, Thu at 8:30 pm and Fri-Sat at 8 and 10:30 bassist Steve Holy, and drummer Jesse pm. Cover $8 Tue, $10 Wed, $15 Thu, $18 Fri, Cahill. Oct 12, 12-1 pm, Roy Barnett Recital $20 Sat. 2MATT BILLON Oct 6-8 2SEAN Hall (6361 Memorial Rd., UBC). Tix $5 at KENT Oct 13-15 2IAN BAGG Nov 3-5 the coor, cash only, info www.music.ubc. 2BETH STELLING Dec 1-3 ca/wednesday.noon.hours/.
THE VSO AT THE MOVIES: ALFRED HITCHCOCK'S PSYCHO Scott Terrell conducts the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra in a performance of the soundtrack to Alfred Hitchcock's classic thriller Psycho as the film plays on the big screen. Oct 12, 7:30 pm, Orpheum Theatre (601 Smithe). Info www.vancouversymphony.ca/.
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. 2JANE STANTON Oct 7-8
COMEDY
VANCOUVER THEATRESPORTS LEAGUE Some of the world's most daring and innovative improv. Improv After Dark (Fri and Sat, 11:15 pm); Rookie Night (Sun, 7:30 pm); TheatreSports (Wed, 7:30 pm; Fri and Sat, 9:30 pm); Trump Card (Thu,
BURNABY LYRIC OPERA Under the direction of David Boothroyd, the Burnaby Lyric Opera presents an excerpt from Richard Wagner's Die Walküre. Oct 9, 3 pm, Shadbolt Centre for the Arts (6450 Deer Lake Ave., Burnaby). Tix $15, info www.burnabylyricopera.org/.
2JUST ANNOUNCED
SONGS OF JEALOUSY AND PASSION Mezzo soprano Fabiana Katz and guitarist
TIG NOTARO American standup comedian, storyteller, and writer known for her
Fri, and Sat, 7:30 pm); VTSL Presents Late Night Laughs at VIFF (Wed and Thu, 9:15 pm). Oct 5-12, The Improv Centre (1502 Duranleau, Granville Island). Tix $8-22, info www.vtsl.com/.
2THIS WEEK FIRECRACKER! The Vancouver TheatreSports League presents evenings of improv comedy that explore what it means to be a woman in Vancouver. To Dec 22, 9:15 pm, The Improv Centre (1502 Duranleau, Granville Island). Info www.vtsl.com/. OK TINDER The Vancouver TheatreSports League presents an improv-comedy show inspired by Vancouver's notorious and ludicrous dating scene. To Dec 21, 9:15 pm, every Wed, The Improv Centre (1502 Duranleau, Granville Island). Info www.vtsl.com/. VANCOUVER INTERNATIONAL IMPROV FESTIVAL The 17th annual celebration of improv comedy features over 30 interactive performances, workshops, and an opening-night gala. To Oct 8, Granville Island. Info www.vancouver improvfest.com/. MATT BILLON Standup comedian performs a solo show. Oct 6-8, The Comedy MIX (1015 Burrard). Tix $20/18/15, info www.thecomedymix.com/.
see page 38
female friends of retirement age who are unsettled financially and emotionally. To Oct 23, PAL Theatre (8th floor, 581 Cardero). Tix $30, info www.western goldtheatre.org/.
BAD GIRLS THE MUSICAL Play tells the story of a group of prison inmates and their battle against the entrenched old guard system. To Oct 15, 8-10:30 pm, Renegade Arts Studio (125 E. 2nd). Tix $27, info www.dramanatrixproductions.com/. MOTHERLOAD Emelia Symington Fedy, Jody-Kay Marklew, Gillian Bennett, and Una Memisevic star in a dark comedy about the reality of modern parenting. To Oct 15, The Cultch (1895 Venables). Tix from $20, info www.thecultch.com/ events/motherload-2/. FLARE PATH The Slamming Door Artist Collective presents Terence Rattigan's drama that paints an evocative portrait of life in wartime Britain for the RAF bomber crews. To Oct 22, Jericho Arts Centre (1675 Discovery). Tix $15-25, info www.jerichoartscentre.com/. DEAD IN THE WATER The Virtual Stage presents an interactive-theatre adventure in which audience members must defeat a strange new breed of mutant zombie vampires. To Oct 31, Granville Island. Tix from $12.50, info www.zombiesyndrome.com/. DEN OF THIEVES Offside Theatre presents the Vancouver premiere of Stephen Adly Guirgis's play about a recovering kleptomaniac. To Oct 8, 8 pm; Oct 9, 3 pm, Studio 16 (1545 W. 7th). Tix $20, info www.offsidetheatre.com/.
DANCE 2THIS WEEK MAJOR MOTION PICTURE Out Innerspace Dance Theatre presents a performance that explores surveillance, otherness, propaganda, and belief through eccentric and lawless characters. Oct 12-15, 8-9:05 pm, Firehall Arts Centre (280 E. Cordova). Tix $12-33, info www.firehallarts centre.ca/onstage/major-motion-picture/.
Wanna Yuk?
TOP TALENT SHOWCASE EVERY TUES AT 8:00
PRO-AM NIGHT
EVERY WEDS AT 8:00
FEATURED HEADLINERS THURS & FRI AT 8:00 SAT AT 7:00 & 9:30 THIS WEEKEND FEATURING (OCT 6-8)
JANE STANTON www.yukyuks.com 2837 Cambie (at 12th)
OCTOBER 6 – 13 / 2016 THE GEORGIA STRAIGHT 35
FROM THE CREATOR OF DA VINCI’S INQUEST & INTELLIGENCE
36 THE GEORGIA STRAIGHT OCTOBER 6 – 13 / 2016
VIFF ’16
B.C. parades in some fine Canadian shorts > B Y KEN EISNE R
T
he Vancouver International Film Festival always makes a point of sharing its worldly stage with homegrown work. In particular, the fest is a place to scope out future-headed talent that, more often than not, finds its feet in the short-movie form. This year, there are a record 18 B.C.–made shorts sprinkled throughout the usual five or so packages of Canadian fillets, with an increased emphasis on reclaiming First Nations and other identities, plus a lot of cool animation and playful image-making. A program called Kith and Kin is not as family-oriented as you might expect. Some of the locally sourced shorts, like roughly made “The Movieland Movie” (about a Granville Street video arcade) and “Srorrim” (featuring residents of the Downtown Eastside), are really about ad hoc clans. There are two real standouts that say profound, and profoundly different, things about blood relations. The first is Connor Gaston’s “The Cameraman”, a novelistic look back at a family member who carried the clan’s dark streak. The other is Sophy Romvari’s strikingly rigorous “Nine Behind”. The title nods to the time difference between Vancouver and Budapest, with a young woman making a long-delayed phone call to her aged grandfather. The film’s whole 12 minutes happen within a West End apartment, in Hungarian, and with fixed cameras shooting in fine-toned black-and-white. “I only met my grandparents once, when I was very little,” she recalls, “and the film was my attempt to have
Filmmaker Sophy Romvari and her Vancouver peers are bringing true independence and unique vision to Canadian cinema.
the conversation with my grandpa that I never got to have before he passed away.” Romvari, who also works as a graphic and multimedia designer, grew up on Vancouver Island and finished film studies at Capilano just two years ago. Now 25, she recently moved to Toronto and talked to the Straight just before heading back for VIFF. At this career crossroad, she’s pondering changing weather in the industry.
“There is a lot of pressure put on young filmmakers in Vancouver, and Canada in general. We’re told we need to make films that are commercially viable and will please broad audiences. There is a mirage in the distance that maybe if you hit that mark, you’ll eventually get to the stories you want to tell. The contradiction is that you can’t really make something commercially viable with no budget, filming in your mom’s basement.”
M/A/D takes an unblinking look at the image makers Two legendary photographers find themselves on the other side of the camera in VIFF’s Style in Film series > BY KEN EIS NE R
I
n some ways, obviously, all movies are about photography. But the main trick of storytelling is to make you forget how it’s being told. Still, the connection between story and how images are captured gets explicit during this year’s VIFF. Within the motion-picture realm, camera veteran Vic Sarin’s Keepers of the Magic (October 14) looks at how top cinematographers do their things. And the plastic arts come under more scrutiny with 18 entries in the M/A/D program, two of which focus on phenomenal photographers, both born in the 1920s but still alive and busy. Harry Benson: Shoot First (October 8 and 12) looks at the Scottish-born lensman best known for getting Muhammad Ali together with the Beatles during their first tour. He later did some pretty tough crime scenes and such, but this somewhat PBS–style doc spends more time with his cozy portrait subjects, including someone guaranteed to give us the DTs. Robert Frank is a thornier subject, and filmmaker Laura Israel does the Swiss-born photog, who has long lived part-time in Nova Scotia, the service of giving him a spectacularly lively 82 minutes. Don’t Blink: Robert Frank (October 8 and 12) spends as much time with his offbeat movies—including the one famously narrated by Jack Kerouac—as with the still pictures that became famous after his 1958 book The Americans virtually invented the concept of freewheeling street photography. Acclaimed as an astute editor of music-minded docs and videos, Israel finished the feature Windfall, about the effects of wind turbines on the small upstate New York community where she has a rural retreat, about six years ago. “At the same time, I was getting to know Robert,” says Israel, calling from her home in Jersey City. “I was helping to organize his archives, and at one point I half jokingly asked if he wouldn’t mind if I made a film about him. He pretty much laughed off the idea. But then the next time I talked to him, he said, ‘When do you want to start?’ ” Frank was a rather rugged, Philip Roth– type figure when younger. And his provoca-
A cranky legend strikes a pose in Laura Israel’s doc Don’t Blink: Robert Frank.
tive outsider status is shared by other seemingly random shutterbugs like the recently discovered Vivian Maier. In fact, his attention to minority faces—the kind generally excluded from the country’s smiling self-portraiture of the era— contributed to the book’s bad reception in the U.S. “I think some reviewers were uncomfortable just looking in any stranger’s eyes,” Israel continues, “and figuring out for themselves what’s going on. But it’s also the texture of the photographs. The rawness of what looked, at the time, like out-of-focus and stark imagery, regardless of content. But they also convey a lot of emotion, and people were kind of shocked.” That’s one reason she sticks to quick cutting, with lots of antique footage supported by East Coast music from the likes of Lou Reed and Patti Smith, and pretty much skips the background most docs would provide. “This is the scrappy version,” she insists. “A lot of people say they’re glad it’s so lively. And my main goal was to get across a sense of how much work he did in the past 50 years, and how he’s still at it.” Indeed, when Frank finally saw the finished cut, he surprised the filmmaker again with his enthusiasm. “I think he liked it because it moves quickly, gets his sarcastic sense of humour, and was shot from instinct, like his own work when he was more aggressive. In fact, now he’s almost too nice.” For more info on the Vancouver International Film Festival series M/A/D, go to www.viff.org/.
That said, she finds that sharing resources and ideas ups everyone’s game. “There’s a small circle of Vancouver filmmakers who have created a support base for creating unconventional films—mostly short films. It’s a big step forward that this year at VIFF, many of those films have been programmed. For a city that thrives mostly on serviceindustry filmmaking, it’s exciting to see so many unique voices pushing to the forefront. There are big
waves being made now, and it’s nice to have artists to look up to in my own country. I used to think I’d have to move to the U.S. to make the kinds of films I want to make, but I no longer feel that way.” Still, there’s that whole dollar thing. “Obviously, money will always be an issue in film, but I think it’s partly from these limitations that more interesting forms of filmmaking have been discovered. The issue is not just a budget for creating the film itself, but cost of living alone, especially in Vancouver. I know so many filmmakers there who could make incredible featurelength films if they didn’t have to work three jobs to pay their rent. But there are a few filmmakers still making it work regardless, functioning in a whole other mode, creating some fascinating results.” Can that mode sustain itself, or will the cycle do its usual ebb-and-flow routine? The younger players haven’t seen too many turns of the wheel, and the digital domain keeps shifting faster than we can describe what it is. “I think there is a real sense of a Canadian art form that was not present even 10 years ago, and that’s exciting to someone like me who is just starting out. As long as VIFF continues to be a platform for these up-and-coming artists to show their work, there’s enormous potential for Vancouver’s independent cinema to flourish.” The Vancouver International Film Festival presents Kith and Kin at International Village on Thursday (October 6) and the Vancity Theatre next Thursday (October 13).
It’s shock and raw time at Altered States series > B Y A D R IA N M A C K
H
e calls himself a friend, but one of the things Ed Gass-Donnelly did to his poor friend Abbie Cornish was stick her on a huge spit, the bastard. “We called it the car rotisserie,” says the filmmaker, with an evil chuckle, talking to the Straight at the Sutton Place Hotel during the Vancouver International Film Festival. He pulls up an iPhone video of the diabolical contraption his effects people built: a car that spins on a horizontal axis so that Gass-Donnelly could keep his camera locked on Cornish as her SUV does multiple rolls across a highway. It provided the director with one of the many eye-popping set pieces in his new film Lavender, a visually rich psychological thriller screening on Saturday (October 8). When he sent the same iPhone video to his star prior to filming, he recalls, “I got a series of all-caps texts that basically just said, ‘FUCK NO!’ ” Thankfully, Ms. Cornish came around. Lavender comes to Vancouver as part of this year’s ever-memorable Altered States series. This is where VIFF enters the afterdark realm of transgressive subject matter, genre extremes, or—in the case of Mexico’s demented We Are the Flesh (October 8 and 14)—genitals in extreme close-up. Lavender doesn’t aspire to that kind of shock value, but it does bring a hallucinatory focus to the uncomfortable topics of child abuse, trauma, and memory. The Eyes of My Mother (October 7 and 13) covers similar ground as it spans the short distance from childhood trauma to child psychopathy, but with a heavily realized feel for the grotesque that first-time director Nicolas Pesce projects onto a starkly rendered black-and-white version of rural America. It’s an excruciating experience, or a thrilling one, depending on your tolerance for unthinkable matters including babies in peril and extended torture. From the wider margins of American indie film, Zach Clark’s Little Sister (October 6 and 8) offers a bit more light and a few good yucks. As a goth turned nun, Addison Timlin competes with Ally Sheedy for the film’s best performance, the latter going for broke as her bipolar mom (while suggesting, perhaps, one possible future for the weirdo kid she played in The Breakfast
Abbie Cornish goes prettily nuts in director Ed Gass-Donnelly’s psychological thriller Lavender.
Club). Ultimately, the film offers a sober and compassionate view of two generations brutalized by the empty promises of modern life, or worse—as represented by Keith Poulson’s hideously scarred Iraq war vet—by its increasingly insane demands. In previous years, Altered States has tested enthusiastic midnight crowds with aspiring cult raves like Green Room, It Follows, and A Field in England. Its tendency is to grapple with modern anxieties in heightened ways— Operation Avalanche (October 10) goofs around with moon-landing-hoax conspiracies while buzzing with a legitimate distrust of authority—but it’s also a crucible for passionate and highly engaged filmmaking. Indeed, as Gass-Donnelly reveals, he spent 10 years pondering “why I was interested and what I wanted to do with it”, after encountering an early draft of Colin Frizzell’s script for Lavender. “Of anything I’ve done, it was the slowest project,” he says. “I don’t even know if I can call it organic. It was like a slug slowly making its way into another shape.” For more info on the Vancouver International Film Festival series Altered States, go to www. viff.org/.
OCTOBER 6 – 13 / 2016 THE GEORGIA STRAIGHT 37
VIFF ’16
Some raves and a dog in the valley of VIFF
A
lthough it might be the second week of the cinematic cornucopia otherwise known as the Vancouver International Film Festival, there’s still plenty to feast on. Canadian star Eric McCormack, Vancouver band Spirit of the West, fashion designer Yohji Yamamoto, and a lot more besides are featured among the selections we’ve gathered below. For upto-date screening details and further information, be sure to visit viff.org. AIN’T LOVE A MANY-SPLENDOURED THING? (Various) Taxis,
scooters, and cars dominate this unusually high-quality package of shorts ostensibly about the ties that bind. There are some duds from Spain and Brazil, and the French-made “Friday Night”, about an entitled American mom looking for her daughter in Paris during last fall’s terror attack, is marred by bad writing and acting. But there’s a beautifully realized family diary (“When Day Is Done”) and two fully realized comic dramas from England (“As One”) and France, with the light-touch “Après Suzanne” featuring rising star Vincent Lacoste as a young man learning to enjoy life after a bad breakup. Most arresting of all is “The Sparrow’s Flight”, in which American experimentalist Tom Schroeder finishes the blazingly original animated work he started years ago with Dave Herr, his now-deceased partner in cinematic invention. Awesome stuff. SFU, October 7 (6:30 p.m.) and October 9 (1:15 p.m.) > KEN EISNER ALL OF A SUDDEN (Germany/Netherlands/France) The original title of this subtly crafted German thriller also translates as All at Once, which better conveys the shit show one youngish German (played by the incredible Sebastian Hülk) finds himself at the centre of when a young woman
two terrific Brits (Ben Kingsley’s son Edmund and Berberian Sound Studio’s Eugenia Caruso) on a very strange first date. Power dynamics, transgressive fantasies, and legal considerations dominate the dinner conversation, which is in English. Don’t miss it. International Village, October 6 (6 p.m.) and October 8 (12:30 p.m.) > KE GROWING UP COY (USA) A loving, unassuming family in Colorado decides to take to court its transgender child’s fight to use the school bathroom of her choice. Eric Juhola provides an intimate, all-access look at the tribulations that ensue, complete with media frenzy and public backlash. Coy herself is a spunky, hugely sympathetic kid who adores sparkly unicorn backpacks and pink skirts. And you feel for her when she gets sick of the news circus. But the doc is most fascinating as a portrait of a humble family, one with five children—two of them with special needs—scraping to get by, facing a battle they might not be fully prepared for, but ready to go to the wall Ethan Hawke brings a Littlest Hobo meets Man with No Name feel to Ti West’s smart-alecky western, In a Valley of Violence. for a child they love unconditionally. abruptly dies in his apartment. As it sented nightmare. Parker Posey and of a materialistic stick-in-the-mud, International Village, October 9 (7 happens, his girlfriend was out of town, Eric McCormack are note-perfect as dampening our investment in the p.m.) and 11 (4 p.m.) > JANET SMITH and everyone else left a party there be- a chichi urbanite and her all-business couple’s emotional real estate. Playfore it happened, so no witnesses can husband whose marriage gets stuffed house, October 11 (6:30 p.m.); Inter- HUMAN (France) These are the storback up his rather absurd reaction. into a pressure cooker when they at- national Village, October 13 (11 a.m.); ies that should replace reality TV. A Sudanese man whose sisters and He’s also the scion of a wealthy family tempt to build their dream home on Vancity, October 14 (9:15 p.m.) > KE wives were raped in front of him. An in their insulated Westphalian moun- the coastline near Seattle. The heat tain town. Turkish writer-director Asli goes up when they hire an artsy Eng- FRAGMENTS OF MY EXISTENCE exhausted Asian sex worker who sacÖzge harnesses a dazzling array of ar- lishman (Orphan Black’s James Frain) (Various) Shorts from Italy, England, rifices herself to support her parents resting images and smart plot twists. who alternately preys on their weak- and Australia seem more like trailers and children. A Latino woman angry The actors are excellent, too, but there’s nesses and flatters them into tackling for wannabe features than fully real- at watching hotel guests throw away a sense at the end that the main char- an ever-more-expensive monument ized little films. Two American entries food while she remains hungry. Epic acter’s personality could have been a to modernity. Mr. Blandings Builds are well shot but very poorly written in its ambition, this three-hour opus little more clearly drawn. Internation- His Dream House covered similar and acted. Two items stand out, how- intersperses stunning aerial landal Village, October 9 (1:45 p.m.); Rio, territory, but that 1948 classic was ever: the rather Jim Jarmusch–styled scape shots with talking heads from careful to balance Cary Grant’s sens- “Walden Pink”, a black-and-whiter around the world sharing their perOctober 10 (6:30 p.m.) > KE ible conservatism with Irene Dunne’s about a Harvey Pekar–like curmudg- sonal experiences. Stories are organTHE ARCHITECT (USA) If HGTV homey intuition. Here, writer-director eon and other odd characters, by Man- ized according to various topics, such made its own horror movies, they’d Jonathan Parker’s sharply written hattan artist Peter Bolte; and “Éclair”, as love, war, gender, sexual orientalook something like this comically pre- script makes McCormack too much Hugo Keijzer’s Dutch confection with see page 40
“ ++++
“ TAT I A N A M A S L A N Y A N D DANE DEHAAN ARE EXCELLENT”
I M M E N S E LY M O V I N G ”
MARC-ANDRÉ LUSSIER, LA PRESSE
DARREN RUECKER, WE GOT THIS COVERED
Arts time out
from page 35
JANE STANTON Vancouver standup comedian performs a solo show. Oct 7, 8 pm; Oct 8, 7 pm; Oct 8, 9:30 pm, Yuk Yuk's Comedy Club (2837 Cambie). Tix $20, info www.yukyuks.com/vancouver/.
straight choices
TEEN ANGST NIGHT Sara Bynoe hosts an evening that sees people read from their embarrassing old teenage notebooks. Oct 8, 8 pm, Fox Cabaret (2321 Main). Tix $15/10, info www.sarabynoe. com/shows/teen-angst/.
LITERARY EVENTS 2THIS WEEK TWS READING SERIES SCHOLARSHIP FUNDRAISER The October reading will be a special event devoted to fundraising for the Emerging Writer and Writing Mom scholarships and highlighting the past recipients. Oct 6, 8-10 pm, Cottage Bistro (4470 Main). Info www.sfu.ca/.
ET CETERA 2THIS WEEK
DANE DEHAAN
NEW FORMS FESTIVAL 16 Participating artists include Robert Hood, Menchess, Convextion, Deft, Pye Corner Audio, Lee Bannon, Untold, Mark Van Hoen, Strategy, Kara-Lis Coverdale, Swisha, Downtown Solutions, Eli Bornowsky, Graham Landin, Jordan Milner, Khotin, Laine Butler, Minimal Violence, and C130. Oct 7-8, 560 Seymour (560 Seymour). Tix $35-75, info www.newformsmediasociety.org/ new-forms-festival-16/.
TAT I A N A M A S L A N Y
GALLERIES SFU GALLERY 8888 University Dr., Burnaby, 778-782-4266, www.sfu.ca/ gallery. 2EROSION (installation by Andreas Bunke explores the interplay between technology, architecture, and the body) to Nov 18 VANCOUVER ART GALLERY 750 Hornby, 604-662-4719, www.vanartgallery.bc.ca/. 2BHARTI KHER MATTER (exhibition brings together sculptures and paintings that represent the diversity of New Delhi-based artist Bharti Kher’s practice) to Oct 10
FROM ACADEMY AWARD® NOMINATED DIRECTOR
KIM NGUYEN
SEXUALLY SUGGESTIVE SCENES; COARSE LANGUAGE
EXCLUSIVE ENGAGEMENT STARTS FRIDAY REALESTATE 38 THE GEORGIA STRAIGHT OCTOBER 6 – 13 / 2016
CHECK THEATRE DIRECTORY FOR SHOWTIMES
MUSEUMS THE MUSEUM OF ANTHROPOLOGY AT UBC 6393 NW Marine Drive, www. moa.ubc.ca/. 2LAWRENCE PAUL
A MOTHER OF A NIGHT OUT If you missed Motherload, the intimate, darkly humorous ode to parenting by four mom-actors last year, here’s another chance to bask in the sweet, sweet pain of parenthood. This time out, Emelia Symington Fedy, Jody-Kay Marklew, Gillian Bennett, and Una Memisevic bring the stories to life, interweaving charmingly personal photos and videos with moving confessions and tales of playground parents and picky eaters. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, and you’ll get to spend the night away from diapers and temper tantrums, at the Cultch’s Historic Theatre to October 15. YUXWELUPTUN: UNCEDED TERRITORIES (works that confront the colonialist suppression of First Nations peoples) to Oct 16
OUT OF TOWN 2THIS WEEK ARTWALK 2016 Arts Whistler presents its annual self-guided walking tour of more than 40 pop-up galleries. To Nov 30, various Whistler venues. Free, info www.artswhistler.com/events/artwalk-0/.
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.
Expand the frame.
Episodic at HUB
Totally Indie Day at HUB
Late Night at HUB
September 29 to October 14 Discover viff.org
Better Call Saul with Gordon Smith Catch Better Call Saul’s Emmy-nominated episode “Five-O”, and talk with Gordon Smith, the writerproducer on the critically acclaimed Breaking Bad spin-off series. FRI. OCT 7, 6:00 PM, $25
Ski, Skate, Ride Join skateboarding legend Rick McCrank, owner of Antisocial skate shop and star of the new VICELAND series Abandoned and Jordan Manley, creator of A Skier’s Journey, shot in the steeps of China and Iran, for an evening of screenings, drinks and a celebration of skating, riding, skiing.
A dynamic day designed to provide real insights and hands-on advice from top experienced industry pros and rising new talent. The best emerging film directors of 2016 (Kevan Funk, Ben Chace, Yan England, Ashley McKenzie), the creators of the hit web series, Second Jen, top distributors looking for the next great indie, legendary documentary filmmaker Nettie Wild, a one of the most successful writers and producers in Hollywood, Krista Vernoff will share their successes, setbacks, what they’re looking for, and what you need to do to rise to the top. SAT. OCT 8, ALL DAY Full Day Pass $125 Morning $75, Afternoon $99
Desi Sub Culture with visuals by Sammy Chien Desi Subculture is joined by Vancouver-based interdisciplinary media artist Sammy Chien who merges cinema, sound art, new media, and dance performance techniques into a new individual practice. THU. OCT 6, 10:00 PM, $15
Skate / Ski / Ride After Party After adrenaline filled films from filmmakers who dare to go further and document it all, hang out at the VIFF Hub with music by Dunks of Vancouver based Funk Hunters and special guests.
Presented by
SAT. OCT 8, 8:00 PM, $25
SUN. OCT 08, 10:00 PM, FREE
Jonathan Parker and Eric McCormack in attendance (Oct. 11)
The Architect
Chocolat
Jonathan Parker – USA TUE. OCT 11
6:30 PM
THU. OCT 13
11:00 AM
FRI. OCT 14
9:15 PM
Franca: Chaos and Creation
Roschdy Zem – France PLAYHOUSE INTL VILLAGE 9 VANCITY
Jonathan Parker’s cutting comedy stars Parker Posey and Eric McCormack as a couple looking to build the perfect home on the Seattle seaside. First they need the perfect architect, but what they get instead is the wildly ambitious, blather-spewing Miles Moss (James Frain) who insists on getting deeply in touch with them in order to realize their dream. As the project spirals out of control and tensions mount, Parker crafts some sharp insights into real estate realities and contemporary romance.
SAT. OCT 8
3:45 PM
PLAYHOUSE
SUN. OCT 9
6:30 PM
CENTRE FOR ARTS
Omar Sy (The Intouchables) is brilliant as the former slave who found fame as a comedic circus performer known only as “Chocolat” in Belle Époque Paris. Together with partner George Footit (here played with an astounding physicality by James Thiérrée, Chaplin’s grandson, who also choreographed the routines), Chocolat had it all—until personal demons and racism brought about his fall. “Roschdy Zem’s bittersweet historical drama is a marvellous showcase for… [Sy’s] talents and effortless charisma.” —Screen
The Girl with All the Gifts Colm McCarthy – UK
Francesco Carrozzini – USA/Italy WED. OCT 12
6:00 PM
CENTRE FOR ARTS
FRI. OCT 14
4:00 PM
SFU-GCA
When fashion insiders want to visit the territory where fashion, art and provocation meet, they pick up Vogue Italia, considered the world’s most important fashion magazine. Since 1988, it has been under the editorship of the formidable Franca Sozzani, whose life, times and flashing intelligence are on display in Francesco Carrozzini’s documentary. Featuring interviews with (among others) Baz Luhrmann, Courtney Love, Jeff Koons, Karl Lagerfeld, Naomi Campbell, Peter Lindbergh and the grande dame herself.
SUN. OCT 9
9:30 PM
CENTRE FOR ARTS
WED. OCT 12
9:15 PM
RIO
The zombie genre hasn’t felt this alive since 28 Days Later! With much of humanity transformed into flesheating predators, a teacher (Gemma Arterton) and a scientist (Glenn Close) believe they may’ve found the key to survival in Melanie (Sennia Nanua), a bright young girl who’s also a “hungry.” When they’re flushed out of hiding, Colm McCarthy ratchets up the tension while fleshing out the human drama in wildly unpredictable ways. “Smartly compelling, emotionally engaging and stylishly executed…”—Screen
Alanis Obomsawin in attendance (Oct. 6)
Julieta
Pedro Almodóvar – Spain
Manchester by the Sea
Seasons
Kenneth Lonergan – USA
We Can’t Make the Same Mistake Twice
Jacques Perrin, Jacques Cluzaud – France
WED. OCT 5
6:00 PM
CENTRE FOR ARTS
THU. OCT 6
6:00 PM
CENTRE FOR ARTS
FRI. OCT 7
6:30 PM
CENTRE FOR ARTS
FRI. OCT 7
1:00 PM
PLAYHOUSE
SAT. OCT 8
2:15 PM
CENTRE FOR ARTS
WED. OCT 12
6:15 PM
VANCITY
SAT. OCT 8
8:45 PM
CENTRE FOR ARTS
WED. OCT 12
8:30 PM
CENTRE FOR ARTS
Pedro Almodóvar’s decades-spanning tale, based on stories by Alice Munro, masterfully blends elements of melodrama and mystery. Middle-aged Julieta (Emma Suárez) discovers that her long-missing daughter has resurfaced, leading her to reflect on her younger self (played by Adriana Ugarte) and the events that drove her daughter away. “A sombre, ravishing study of grief, guilt and burden... [The film] offers a cumulative power that’s finally extremely moving and teasingly free of easy resolution.”—Time Out
An all-star cast, a riveting script and a smart narrative puzzle give Kenneth Lonergan’s (Margaret; You Can Count on Me) drama devastating power. Casey Affleck is superb as a taciturn Boston handyman Lee, who returns to his salty hometown after his brother (Kyle Chandler) dies. There, past and present collide with a force that few could survive. “[An] extraordinary swirl of love, anger, tenderness and brittle humour… [This is a] beautifully textured, richly enveloping drama.” —Variety
Premier Sponsor
Festival Sponsors
A poetic and magnificently shot chronicle of Europe over the past 15,000 years as seen through the eyes of the animals that have lived there, Jacques Perrin and Jacques Cluzaud’s (Winged Migration) latest uses the framing device of the four seasons to explore the habitats and denizens of a vast and varied land. To call this a “documentary” is to sell it short: it plays more like a natural symphony in which the forests, plains, mountains and inhabitants come together in a stunning vision of time and space.
Alanis Obomsawin – Canada THU. OCT 6
5:30 PM
SFU-GCA
THU. OCT 13
12:30 PM
SFU-GCA
In 2007, the Child and Family Caring Society of Canada and the Assembly of First Nations filed a landmark discrimination complaint against Indian Affairs and Northern Development Canada. They argued that welfare services provided to First Nations children on reserves and in the Yukon were underfunded and inferior to services offered to other Canadian children. Veteran director Alanis Obomsawin’s film documents this epic court challenge, giving voice to the tenacious childcare workers at its epicentre.
Schedule subject to change. Visit viff.org for updates and full lineup of 300+ films and events.
Box Office
Premier Supporters
Public Supporters
Regular: Adult $15, Student/Senior $13 Special Presentations: $17 Gala Screenings: $22 Ticket Packs + Passes Available Online: at viff.org
Major Partners
Media Partners
In-person: Vancity Theatre, 1181 Seymour Street, at Davie (Mon-Sat: Noon - 7pm, Sun: 2pm – 9pm) Film Infoline: 604-683-FILM
OCTOBER 6 – 13 / 2016 THE GEORGIA STRAIGHT 39
VIFF ’16 VIFF reviews
from page 38
tion, and poverty. Although there is diverse racial representation, it remains unbalanced: South Asians are concentrated in the sections on farming and factory work; East and Southeast Asians are few; and indigenous people are almost absent. The length is also trying. But despite its flaws, it’s an indelible cinematic experience. The audience that should really be watching this? Fans of the Kardashians and their ilk. Undoubtedly, it’ll never reach them—what does that say about the state of humanity? Centre, October 10 (6 p.m.); Playhouse, October 12 (12:30 p.m.) > CRAIG TAKEUCHI
Chris Haddock has made a career of putting Vancouver’s seedier side in front of a national audience—and he’s continuing in that tradition with The Romeo Section.
Chris Haddock goes down the rabbit hole The creator of The Romeo Section says his mission in life is to recognize that to conspire is to be human > BY A DRIA N M A C K
C
BC’s new season of The Romeo Section starts with a fishy terrorist attack in Vancouver, an even fishier official inquiry, and the reactivation of a disreputable spook who catches the whiff of government mind control. If series creator Chris Haddock isn’t careful, people are going to start using the C word. Conspiracy, that is. Or conspiracy theory, to be more precise, as defined and weaponized by an establishment that would prefer to discredit inquiry into the less savoury aspects of government and law-enforcement work. “My feelings exactly,” says Haddock, in a call to the Straight. “I’ve had this discussion with people on set, and I’m saying that my mission is to recognize that conspiracy is not a bad word. It’s what we do. Monkey 1 is going to conspire with Monkey 2 to steal the food from Monkey 3. That’s a conspiracy. This is in our very nature.” Monkey 4, presumably, tries to figure out the plot. And thus Andrew Airlie is back in the rumpled tan suit as Haddock’s weary intelligence man, Wolfgang McGee. This time, he’s joined by a louche former agent called Norman (Brian Markinson), whose taste for pills and rough trade is matched by his nose for a cover-up. It sets up a perfect dialectic for at least one of Haddock’s concerns, which he traces back to a conversation with a journalist who interviewed Sirhan Sirhan, and was convinced that Robert Kennedy’s accused assassin was a hypno-programmed patsy. “The belief for 50 percent of the audience is probably ‘Okay, this is far-fetched,’ ” says the writer, who raised the bar for Canadian television with Da Vinci’s Inquest in ’98. “The other side of the audience is X-Files–ready and they’re prepared to believe anything. I’m trying to play both sides. Norman fully embraces these theories because he’s seen over time what
very good company indeed. Centre, October 8 (5:30 p.m.); Playhouse, October 12 (3:45 p.m.) > KE
IN A VALLEY OF VIOLENCE (USA) Although perfectly entertaining, this western for wiseacres is also a little undernourished. Ethan Hawke is all squinty as a haunted drifter who stops for water in the wrong nowhere town in New Mexico. In the very slim revenge narrative that ensues (we’ll avoid mentioning John Wick), Karen Gillan and James Ransone are the liveliest participants. John Travolta’s turn as the town marshal is self-defeating, partly because he’s come to symbolize so much of what’s sad and weird and distracting about Hollywood, and partly because this melding of The Quick and the Dead and later Tarantino is already circling the drain of shallow genre irony. Having said all that, one unforgettable, ecstatically cinematic moment between Hawke and Taissa Farmiga shows us what writer-director Ti West—who has his fans, and deserves them—is really capable of. International Village, October 10 (4:45 p.m.) > ADRIAN MACK KING DAVE (Canada) Mesmerizing Alexandre Goyette stars in a highly kinetic film version of his own play about a rather less than ordinary Quebecker whose default self-loathing is aggressively masked by an insanely macho grandiosity that—even just to hear him tell it—is bound to get a guy in trouble! Tell it he does, facing the audience as he slips seamlessly from one setting to the next in what appears to be a single take. And all this while still relating (to put it politely) to the various gangsters, hustlers, drinking pals, and unlikely girlfriends he literally runs into along the way. Like its self-proclaimed monarch, the movie skirts the edges of race, class, and gender stereotypes, but it’s not really about anything at all. Sure is fun, though. Cinematheque, October 7 (8:45 p.m.); International Village, October 9 (3 p.m.) > KE
TEN YEARS (Hong Kong) Some ser-
Spirit of the West’s John Mann faces a health crisis in Spirit Unforgettable.
something that escapes many of us: transformation. International Village, October 10 (7 p.m.) > CT A SIMPLE GOODBYE (China) The
title captures the gentle, thoughtful vibe of this state-of-the-culture movie from China. But that belies the vigorously creative filmmaking and subtle wit that flash throughout this mustsee tale of a young college student who returns to Beijing when she learns that her aged father has cancer. The movie is ostensibly narrated by her, and her fairly acute observations conflict amusingly with the shallow adolescent we see interacting with her parents—long separated, but reunited for his treatments—and with the spurned boyfriend who follows her home from the U.K., where they were going to school. Similarly, the dad, who seems so cruelly taciturn at first, turns out to be a Mongolian transplant who dreams of his youth spent riding horses and making movies—clips of which are included in this tenderly clear-eyed ode to life. Turns out that the vacuous daughter is played by writer-director Degena Yun, who has a faultless eye for startling visual contrasts. Vancity, October 6 (3:30 p.m.) and October 9 (6 p.m.) > KE
(USA/Cuba) In his clever Wah Do Dem, New Yorker Ben Chace followed a white boy lost in the wilds of Jamaica. Here, with an entirely Cuban cast, he sets out to jump through time and space by tracking an old man’s search for closure on a failed love affair with a married dancer back at the start of the Cuban revolution. The nonprofessional actors are engaging, and the settings fascinate, of course. But the period re-creations in his flashbacks are repetitive, there’s a dull subplot about housing, and the film’s visual flourishes are self-conscious nods to stylistic tics of 1960s European fare. MRS. (Philippines) Filmmaker Adolfo International Village, October 7 (6:45 Alix Jr. takes a spare approach to this p.m.); Rio, October 9 (3:15 p.m.) > KE story of an aging widow seeking to hold on to her inherited family home SNOW MONKEY (Australia/NorAfter visiting despite being at odds with her sister way/Afghanistan) (who wants her to sell it). The death of many of the world’s most dangerous her communist-guerrilla son haunts hot spots, Australian multimedia arther days, and she has other worries: her ist George Gittoes has spent almost a housekeeper, Delia, is pregnant and decade in Pakistan and Afghanistan, about to get married, and her daugh- building nonpartisan trust with ter is in a cult. A quiet film that says a the locals. Here, we get the fruit of lot simply by giving ample room for its his labour with Afghan street kids characters and story to breathe. Bonus: (mostly boys) who sell ice cream in watch for a Vancouver reference. Cine- Jalalabad to make ends meet. After matheque, October 9 (4 p.m.); Vancity, some fairly slapdash, many-flies-onthe-wall setups, the film’s two-andOctober 12 (1:30 p.m.) > CT a-half-hour length is justified by the PRISON DOGS (USA) Everyone amount of real-life drama stuffed into loves a comeback story, and this mov- the second half, with bombings, visits ing documentary captures a multi- from the Taliban, and something like faceted tale of second chances in life. hope for the children. Vancity, OcOne segment tells of prisoners who tober 11 (10:30 a.m.); Cinematheque, participate in a program to train pup- October 13 (6 p.m.) > KE pies to help people with posttraumatic stress disorder. The second focuses on SPIRIT UNFORGETTABLE (Canarmy veterans for whom these dogs are ada) Pain, pride, and pleasure being trained. The third is about the intermingle in Vancouverite Pete dogs themselves. A fourth tale is about McCormack’s portrait of Spirit of the passionate, tough-love Puppies the West frontman John Mann, Behind Bars founder, who maintains seen coping with the early onset strict standards to help all the people of Alzheimer’s disease and prepand animals involved. There’s rich ma- aration for what could be the last terial here, full of highs and lows, as tour with his fabled band. McCorthe convicts strive to teach their dogs mack has previously made toughabout 100 commands in two to three minded docs about Bruce Lee and years. Failure means the inmates must Muhammad Ali, and here, in a leave the program, but success means well-paced film that screened once Season 2 of The Romeo Section pre- they must part with the dogs they’ve on HBO, he shows the singer—and mieres on CBC Television on Wed- bonded with. Ultimately, the film of- his stalwart wife, Jill Daum, plus nesday (October 5). fers a humanist look at people seeking bandmates and long-time pals—in was once wild speculation actually turned out to be true. And on the other hand you have this professor who’s supposed to have a little bit of a social scientist in him, he’s fact-based, and he carries the side of doubt. I love working in that ambiguous territory.” Manchurian candidates aside, The Romeo Section is still unambiguously f lavoured by its Vancouver location. In the season opener alone, Haddock’s multilayered plotting takes in the heroin trade and the seamier end of the film industry, not to mention some fine angles on the Waldorf Hotel. Meanwhile, McGee’s old handler, Al (Eugene Lipinski), is plotting to ensnare a political rival in a honey trap using Asian asset Lily Song (Leeah Wong). It’s conceivable that Haddock is channelling some deep political realities in Vancouver that would be a tad, say, indecorous to raise outside of a dramatic venue. “I’m lying in the weeds and occasionally popping up to score a point, I hope,” he says with a chuckle, adding: “I’ve felt the sting of censorship in Canada. When they want to put you off air when you’ve got a good show going, they can do it, and they will. “But,” Haddock continues, “I just really enjoy having something that’s a little bit difficult to tackle and that I’m not quite sure starting out how it is that I’m gonna bring it all home. It’s not [CTV series] Flashpoint, where they created this fiction that Toronto has a 24-hour, 365-day-a-year SWAT squad because it’s necessary. That kind of fiction I roil at. That’s not harmless. That tells everybody that doesn’t live in Toronto that Toronto is this dangerous city full of suicide bombers and all this other idiocy. We’re not that. So I was trying to create something that feels not out of scale with the Canadian reality.” -
40 THE GEORGIA STRAIGHT OCTOBER 6 – 13 / 2016
SIN
ALAS
iously inside–Hong Kong stuff plays out in this collection of five shorts in which different directors look into the unique city-state’s near future. The tales range from the ominously political (the first is like Quentin Tarantino as interpreted by Jim Jarmusch) to the playfully amusing, as in the brief visit with a cab driver who can’t keep up with changes in the language. And the visuals shift from black-and-white to vividly coloured to sombrely monochrome in between—in the case of the artsiest and least successful entry, about a couple who play at being archaeologists after some unexplained upheaval. But the whole package is well worth seeing as a smartly varied projection of anxieties regarding Hong Kong’s future as it gets drawn further into the PRC fold. Playhouse, October 8 (9:15 p.m.); International Village, October 10 (4:15 p.m.) > KE
THANKS, BOSS! (France) Featherruffling documentarian François Ruffin definitely borrowed from Michael Moore, circa Roger and Me, by inserting himself into the quest to confront France’s richest man, Bernard Arnault, over his penchant for buying large companies (especially in the fashion world) and then breaking up their parts, shipping most remaining jobs overseas. The 90-minute f lick initially seems to be spending too much time with a handful of laidoff workers, but then you realize that Ruffin is playing a longer game with his subject. His project’s ethics are occasionally as muddled as its cinematic form, but the result is still an oddly satisfying and frequently amusing look at the utter collapse of industry in the allegedly civilized western world. Rio, October 13 (9:15 p.m.) > KE TO KEEP THE LIGHT (USA) With
her husband constantly sick (or worse), it’s up to Abigail to maintain her lighthouse on the coast of 19th-century Maine. Then a Scandinavian sailor washes up near her, upsetting the local order. Abigail is played by Erica Fae, who also wrote and directed this thin story, based on anecdotes about real-life light keepers. She embodies the part with stolidity but, unfortunately, reads every line like it’s from an NPR news story. It’s her film, and she expects no better from the rest of the cast, which is arrayed in historical tableaux of rugged men and Simon Legree–type villains. There are some strong images, but the dramatic staging is consistently bad; the whole thing plays out like one of those Canadian Moments that used to run on CBC—now with added bodice-ripping. Fae wants to undermine antique gender assumptions, and she goes about it by assembling the weakest clichés she can find. Cinematheque, October 7 (6 p.m.); International Village, October 9 (10:45 a.m.) > KE YOHJI YAMAMOTO | DRESSMAKER (Germany) The clothes
are almost an afterthought in this in-depth portrait of the fashion designer as artist. For a man who says he hates to talk and prefers to use his clothes to express himself, Yohji Yamamoto spends much of this documentary explaining his unique views on life and how they inform his approach to work. His opinions—expressed in awkward English that makes for sagacious sound bites and fresh perspectives—are often surprising, revealing a stark contrast between his public persona and his inner world, his outward benevolence and his inward anger, or how he feels stronger after an unsuccessful show. Documentarian Ngo The Chau’s illumination of Yamamoto’s psyche, which points to even further uncharted depths, parallels the designer’s fashion philosophy: the inside of the clothes is as important as the outside. International Village, October 5 (7:30 p.m.) and October 11 (2 p.m.) > CT
MOVIES
Strange and sizzling Lovers melts ice cap RE VIEW S
slo-mo effects, to score on a deeper emotional level. 12 Years a Slave covers much of the same territory with more profound originality. But really, the fact that we have so few titles to compare in this horrific category is the most outrageous thing about it.
TWO LOVERS AND A BEAR Starring Tatiana Maslany. Rated 14A
With all that acclaim from 2012’s
2 Rebelle at his back, Quebec film-
maker Kim Nguyen is right on schedule with this endearingly bonkers indulgence. Two Lovers and a Bear is preposterous and too infatuated with itself, but between its appealing leads and a surplus of other pleasures—the super-crisp imagining of the Nunavut community of Apex, for one—it’s also pretty hard to resist. The film begins with Tatiana Maslany’s Lucy telling her lover Roman (Dane DeHaan) that she’s been accepted into a university down south. His reaction is to go on a self-destructive bender that rockets from zero to insane within seconds, but even then we’re unprepared for a blunt left turn into magical realism when it’s revealed that Roman routinely discusses personal matters with a polar bear voiced by Gordon Pinsent—and not just when he’s hammered. Gordon the bear shows up at other key moments, so get used to it. Whatever’s going on here, Nguyen adopts a hyperreal style and lays some vivid physical peril on his lovers after they elect to trek south, notably in a sequence that has Roman trapped in a crevice with his snowmobile threatening to crush his pretty head. It’s only 50 miles outside their “kingdom”, as the bear puts it, that our lovers find an abandoned military base, possibly left over from John Carpenter’s The Thing, and we discover what it is that both bonds and dooms these two. Maslany in particular gets to light some of her impressive thespie fireworks, while Nguyen’s strategy is to continually sideswipe the viewer with outlandish plot developments and epically strange imagery. A suitably
> KEN EISNER
DENIAL Starring Rachel Weisz. Rated PG
Denial is a somewhat plodding,
2 fact-based tale with few tran-
Tatiana Maslany and Dane DeHaan provide the warm centre to Kim Nguyen’s Nunavut-set Two Lovers and a Bear.
haunting soundtrack by Vancouver’s Jesse Zubot includes some of his work with Tanya Tagaq, which couldn’t be more apt here, especially if Nguyen is aiming for that plum market situated between swoony adolescent girls and middle-aged chaos magicians. > ADRIAN MACK
THE BIRTH OF A NATION Starring Nate Parker. Rated 14A
Rarely has a movie received
2 this much contextual hype—
starting with a title referring to D.W. Griffith’s racist masterpiece from 1915 and ending with standing ovations at Sundance and rape accusations against the filmmaker—and then proved to be so flat on-screen. There’s plenty of rage contained in this re-creation of the two-day Virginia slave revolt led by Nat Turner in 1831. The event triggered even more repressive measures throughout the
South, including the rise of armed militias that form the racist basis of today’s Second Amendment obsessives. It produced a contemporaneous telling with 1831’s The Confessions of Nat Turner and, in the next century, William Styron’s Pulitzer-winning novelization. Both emphasized the religious fixations of this born leader—although the real message is that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. One of the few field hands allowed to read, the young Nat is depicted (by Tony Espinosa) as being taught Bible verses by his plantation mistress (Penelope Ann Miller). The older Nat (writer-director Nate Parker) gets to tout the Word to other restless slaves, allowing him (and us) to see how Africans are treated at other plantations. It’s invariably worse, thanks to the relative liberality of Nat’s “owner”, Samuel Turner (Armie Hammer), who drinks mightily
to avoid facing guilt and increasing economic hardships. Nat also manages to talk him into buying a “wench” (Aja Naomi King) to help Sam’s family, resulting in a happy marriage for the plantation preacher. That stability doesn’t last long, as random violence and the creeping horror of this 300-year holocaust take over, eventually making Nat’s blood boil over into pure rebellion. The dramatic high point comes when he trades Old Testament quotes with a crude white preacher (Mark Boone Junior), one wielding biblical imperatives for and the other against slavery. After that, the insurrection itself—which should be an unforgettably disturbing centrepiece—and the subsequent clash with militia types come as anticlimaxes. In the end, this Birth of a Nation is simply too safely conventional in its filmmaking, down to the Spielbergian orchestral music and clichéd
scendent moments in acting or staging that still manages to be oddly satisfying in the end. The title refers to a key subject for historian and professor Deborah Lipstadt, an American (of Canadian and German background) who turned her attention in the 1990s to a growing corps of Nazi sympathizers then attempting to claw back the proven record of the Shoah. Only briefly mentioned in her Denying the Holocaust, British author David Irving sued Lipstadt and her Penguin publishers for libel, exploiting a British law in which the defendant bears the burden of proof. Irving, a self-taught researcher who got cozy with aging ex-Nazis while writing semireputable military histories of the Second World War, later met with infamous shitheels like Ernst Zündel, Fred Leuchter, and our own Doug Christie. Here, the oily Irving is portrayed by Mike Leigh favourite Timothy Spall, who usually plays sympathetic, working-class characters (in Mr. Turner, for example). Much in the manner of Brexit-er Nigel Farage, Irving, as the film avers, has nursed lifelong resentments at being excluded from Britain’s old boys’ club. He also looks less like Spall and more like Tom Wilkinson, though the latter is already engaged here as the American’s chief counsel. see next page
DENIAL’ IS A SIREN CALL FOR TRUTH. Rachel Weisz serves up a forceful presence.” “‘
++++
“
ONE OF THE MOST POWERFUL AND RIVETING COURTROOM DRAMAS EVER MADE.” INESCAPABLY FASCINATING.”
“
“
++++Ɛ
“A NEW LANDMARK IN AMERICAN CINEMA”
Picks
“BEAUTIFUL AND POWERFUL” ACADEMY AWARD® WINNER
RACHEL WEISZ
ACADEMY AWARD® NOMINEE
BAFTA NOMINEE
TOM WILKINSON TIMOTHY SPALL VIOLENCE
STARTS FRIDAY, OCTOBER 7 AT THEATRES EVERYWHERE Check theatre directory or go to www.tribute.ca for locations and showtimes
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OCTOBER 6 – 13 / 2016 THE GEORGIA STRAIGHT 41
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42 THE GEORGIA STRAIGHT OCTOBER 6 – 13 / 2016
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The real-life Lipstadt certainly doesn’t resemble glamorous Rachel Weisz—she’s more of an Imelda Staunton type who’s actually the same age as the codgerly Irving. The reliable Brit does her best, but seems hemmed in by the character’s Cyndi Lauper–like accent—even more so by the fact that, given the peculiar strategy of the trial, which concluded in 2000, Lipstadt had virtually nothing to do. The screenplay by playwright David Hare, therefore, has to work in various middling subplots to overcome dramatic inertia. (His asides about sexism inherent to the case are notably relevant.) And veteran director Mick Jackson—who made L.A. Story and The Bodyguard within a year of each other—struggles to find ways to open this cloistered story. The cloister is where this story belongs, however. As the larger events of the past recede, only language keeps their meanings alive. This workmanlike movie is no thriller, but it respectfully encourages viewers to explore the moral weight of history through the arguments of today. In that sense, its value can’t be denied.
> KEN EISNER
GUN RUNNERS A documentary by Anjali Nayar. Rating unavailable
The clever title tells the main
2 story in this engaging, some-
what vaguely focused doc, which took Canadian filmmaker Anjali Nayar 10 years to complete. Mainly, it follows two warriors from rural Kenya who traded their AK-47s for sneakers, allowing them to transfer their survival
skills to something much more positive for everyone involved. Charismatic Robert Matanda and wiry, easygoing Julius Arile are lifelong friends from a village frequently caught between warring factions. Mainly, they’ve just been driven by economic hardship to steal cattle and worse. But when a government program offers amnesty, Arile makes the jump and later talks his more hesitant friend into leaving the bush. Arile has more talent, and we follow him to New York City and, even more interesting, Prague, for marathons that always find him both excelling and coming up a little short. This latter factor seems to be of primary concern to his extended family, including his extremely aged mother, who don’t hesitate to pile on him for his failures. Some of this stems from the irresponsibility associated with his having a child with a neighbour girl who, shockingly, committed suicide right after birth. Matanda’s skills are more political, and he attaches his charm to a local politician involved in an election fraught with, shall we say, irregularities. These side issues come and go, often with little context or follow-up, and it’s hard to know how seriously to take these folks at their word. The soundtrack’s faux-inspirational piano doesn’t help. Even so, the 90-minute film offers fascinating glimpses of a part of the world that’s deliberately kept in shadows. And that’s why it’s so disappointing to learn, via terse title cards, that four of the principals featured here died after shooting ceased. To tag that declaration on at the end with zero explanation is almost a betrayal of the subjects, and of viewers who began to care about them. > KEN EISNER
MUSIC
When Glass Animals BY KATE W ILSON
frontman Dave Bayley first uploaded some home recordings of his psychedelic indie pop online, his inbox was immediately awash with messages from managers, artists, promoters, agents, and lawyers. Rather than chill the Champagne, however, the young musician took a characteristically unconventional approach. He removed all traces of his songs from the Internet. In the middle of studying for a prestigious medical degree at London’s King’s College, Bayley refused to accept any distractions. Dedicated to his neuroscience program, the budding producer decided to wait until graduation before relaunching his demos. Luckily, his gamble paid off. The revamped tracks caught the attention of industry tastemaker Paul Epworth—the man behind international hits by Adele, Florence and the Machine, Cee Lo Green, Coldplay, and Bruno Mars. He swiftly signed Bayley and his four-piece band to his flagship Wolf Tone label. After releasing its critically acclaimed 2014 debut album, Zaba, Glass Animals spent the next while selling out venues on both sides of the equator, rocking Late Night With Seth Meyers, and performing on The Late Show With David Letterman—a résumé that, despite being the envy of indie bands the world over, did nothing to boost the confidence of the U.K. musicians. “If you think about it, our lack of self-assurance definitely made sense,” Bayley tells the
Singing songs in character Glass Animals frontman Dave Bayley used people he met on tour as the basis for new LP’s narratives Straight on the line from a Boston tour stop. “This is the first group that any of us have ever been in. Being on the road for Zaba was pretty much the only time we’d ever set foot on a stage, and none of us have made any music aside from this project. In many ways we were very cautious, and our music was too.” Fastforward to 2016, and Glass Animals seems like a different band. Releasing its second full-length album, How to Be a Human Being, in August, the group has finally tapped into its creative potential. Trading Zaba’s light-touch synths and bouncy rhythms for rich melodic layers, the new record effortlessly juxtaposes cheeky lyrics and complex synth lines with a healthy dose of hip-hop–inspired swagger. With Bayley at the helm, the album’s slick production creates a new boldness, inspired, the frontman suggests, by his innovative composition process. “All the songs on this album are characterbased,” Bayley says. “While we were out on tour, the people we ran into would tell us their stories. I would record everything without them knowing, and it became the basis for the record. Each track is the voice of a different person, and they each have a unique narrative. All the songs started with the lyrics and vocal melodies—a couple of words or a phrase that came to mind, which became the first nugget. And then I sat around with a guitar and put some chords under it. “I knew everything about these characters,” he continues. “I’d create diagrams that encompassed all aspects of their personality—what they do in their spare time, what they eat, what they wear. I found that when I fleshed out these personas and their traits, I could start incorporating that personality into the music-
CHECK THIS OUT
When they’re not making music, the lads in Glass Animals star in a sitcom about four young men who operate a vintage-jacket shop in Sloane Square.
al sounds we used, and begin to build a real theme song for these people. That gave me the conviction to do some really brave things with
the lyrics and music.” With his forensic obsession with finding the perfect sounds for each individual, Bayley’s commitment drives the band’s production in fresh directions. By imagining each storyteller’s environment and re-creating it through ambient noises, samples, and instrumentation, the singer achieves a unique kind of authenticity. “I really tried to pay attention to the full experience of each character,” Bayley says. “One of the people is a homeless man who lives on the street, for example, so it seemed really obvious to go outside and build a drum kit out of the trash cans and garbage that we found. We recorded it on the side of the road, so there’s the sound of the buses going by and you can hear the background noise of other people talking. If you listen carefully, you can even catch a woman telling us to shut up. I find that kind of fun.” Extending that commitment into the album’s visuals, Glass Animals hired a different model to play each character for the record’s artwork and star in the accompanying videos, and even created a number of eccentric websites to feature the quirks of the fictional individuals. But despite having released what is certainly one of the most cohesive records of the year, Bayley is adamant that How to Be a Human Being is not a “concept album”. “I’d rather veer away from that term,” Bayley says. “I feel that records in that genre are about a central character, but there’s deliberately no one single individual that sticks out on our album. I think that approach allows a much broader range of themes than most concept albums might have. How to Be a Human Being is
TWO DECADES OF DECAY Marilyn Manson will
release a 20th-anniversary edition of Antichrist Superstar, which is possibly the shock rocker’s acknowledgment that he’s spent the intervening 20 years rendering himself irrelevant.
MYSTERY WOMAN After posing for a photo with
indie-pop star Grimes (aka Claire Boucher), Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was heard to remark to an aide, “I didn’t expect Martha Grimes to be that young or that weird.”
PHANTOGRAM The Greenwich, New York, duo Phantogram couldn’t have been more entertaining when it popped up at the Squamish Valley Music Festival in the summer of 2014, with singer-keyboardist Sarah Barthel and guitarist Josh Carter demanding that the girls in the audience take off their tops and the boys drop their pants and underwear. If such demands are a regular part of Phantogram’s shows, the band’s Sunday (October 9) appearance at the Commodore might give us a reason to be thankful for more than that second helping of Thanksgiving turkey. -
Glass Animals plays the Queen Elizabeth Theatre on Wednesday (October 12)
in + out
Dave Bayley sounds off on the things that enquiring minds want to know.
On the difficulty of creating new sounds: “Sometimes when you’re chasing the sound and the only reference you have is in your head, you eventually start to lose it. You end up with something similar, but it’s not quite right. Sometimes it’s frustrating when your original idea eludes you. But I do have this theory that all really great ideas, sounds, and melodies will eventually come back. If they’re inspiring enough, you’ll remember them again at some point in the future.” On How to Be a Human Being’s samples: “There’s some pretty strange ones. There’s definitely a few I shouldn’t name, because they’re just too bizarre. I can tell you, though, that I recorded an owl. I collected its hoot and put it over a keyboard sampler, so I could play all the different pitches as an owl. I basically made a whole owl synth, which was quite fun. Where did I find the bird? Somewhere in America. You can get anything you want in America.” On putting himself into the record’s characters: “There’s an element of me in all of them, probably. A couple of the tracks’ characters are pretty much entirely autobiographical. I’m definitely not going to say which ones—hiding behind these other individuals is what allowed me to be so brave with the album in the first place. It’s up to you to guess.”
MUSIC Let’s talk about
You gotta see
much more about people, life, and the world. It’s definitely something new for us.” -
SPEAKING OF SHIT Iconic director John Carpenter has called rocker-filmmaker Rob Zombie a “lying piece of shit”, adding that he tarnished the Halloween franchise with a 2007 remake of the original. He left out that the franchise was already beyond tarnished by Halloween II and six shit-flecked sequels that followed. SMELLS LIKE NOSTALGIA Spencer Elden—better
known as the naked underwater baby on the cover of Nirvana’s Nevermind—re-created the shot this weekend for the album’s 25th anniversary, jumping into a pool in Rose Bowl Aquatics Center in Pasadena. All it took was a 100-dollar bill on a fishhook.
Fresh and local MASSIVE SCAR ERA 30 YEARS EP Massive Scar Era tends to describe itself as a posthardcore act. That doesn’t begin to do the group justice on 30 Years, which might be the most fascinating dark-horse record to come out of the city this year. The team of Cherine Amr (vocals-guitar) and Nancy Mounir (violin) are doing something legitimately different. Their songs are anything but monochromatic; that’s established right off the top with “Alive”, where thrash-queen guitars are married with Mounir’s atmospheric violin and vocals that flit between menacing elegance and throat-blown rage. “Despite My Will”, meanwhile, cannonballs from a Middle Eastern–tinted exercise in world-music exoticness to a lightning-strike metal meltdown. If your dream concert bill includes Ofra Haza, Brand New, and Lacuna Coil, with openers Cannibal Corpse, Otep, and I Set My Friends on Fire, prepare to be thrilled. OCTOBER 6 – 13 / 2016 THE GEORGIA STRAIGHT 43
MUSIC
Kero Kero Bonito plans to tour North America using the one passport that all three members intend to share. Good luck!
Kero Kero Bonito gets happy > B Y M IK E U S ING E R
A
t a glance, Kero Kero Bonito might not seem like the deepest act in modern pop music, the English threepiece crafting songs that are heavy on toy-store keyboards, too-cutefor-school vocals, and relentlessly upbeat lyrics. But spend 45 minutes on the phone with singer Sarah Midori Perry and programmer Gus Lobban and you quickly realize that the London-based act not only has insightful opinions, but is capable of eloquently voicing them, both verbally and artistically, in a way that’s cleverly subversive. Take the songs on Kero Kero Bonito’s debut, Bonito Generation. That most of them fall under the banner of “blazingly adorable”, for example, can be seen either as buying into millennial positivity or, if one prefers, how the English music landscape is currently ruled by the dour likes of the xx. That Perry flits effortlessly between Japanese and English when she sings is a valid statement on how the world’s various cultures have never been more intertwined. Before the Internet became what it is today, you had to camp out in the import section of Zulu to find a copy of the Zoobombs’ Super Funcy of Zbons, or head to Videomatica to source the Japanese version of The Ring. Now it’s all there with the click of a mouse. And that’s exactly how Lobban and the third member of Kero Kero Bonito, programmer Jamie Bulled, discovered J-pop, which features prominently in the band’s sound. “I think this whole generation of mine had an exposure to Japanese consumer culture that was sort of totally unprecedented,” Lobban says, speaking alongside Perry on a conference call from London, England. “There was this globalization that rose up with digital media and so on. And because the Japanese economy was booming just before that, we bore the full brunt of Dragon Ball, Nintendo,
Solid, and Pokémon. A lot of those things are deeply Japanese culturally, and we were exposed to those aesthetics, which actually were really different from all the things that western audiences were into before. “So in terms of getting into Japanese pop music more deeply, it was totally because of being able to go on the Internet and go on websites like hmv.co.jp,” he continues. “That would give you a couple of threads to go on, and then it was just a matter of diving right in. I learned as much as I could, starting with people who would have had vague western connections, like Fantastic Plastic Machine. When you discover Japanese pop music as a western listener, it’s like discovering a parallel universe of pop music.” Enamoured of that universe, Lobban and Bulled placed a classified ad for a singer familiar with J-pop, hip-hop, and EDM who was capable of singing in both English and Japanese. They got more responses than they could have dreamed, including some from senior citizens looking for new adventures. The winner was Perry, who spent the first dozen or so years of her life living in Japan with mixed-race parents, before moving to England in her teens. “Right before we moved, the film Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone came out in Japan,” she recalls. “I remember going to see it in the cinema and thinking that the U.K. was going to be exactly like Hogwarts. Like ‘We’ll all be in our robes and in dorms.’ The transition was hard—there’s a lot of differences. The hardest thing was to learn to hug people when you say hello and goodbye. In Japan, you don’t touch anyone—you bow.” Right from the start, the members of what would become Kero Kero Bonito had no problem bonding, with both Lobban and Perry confessing to being outsiders growing up. That’s surprising, considering how ridiculously positive they sound on Bonito Generation, with the kickoff track, “Waking Up”,
even making the idea of rolling out of bed seem pleasant. As her bandmates create a sonic backdrop that suggests they’ve got a major fetish for videogame soundtracks and ’80s analogue synths, Perry sings lines like “It’s party time/Eat your breakfast and you’ll be fine” in a voice that’s part Kate Nash and part Robyn, if she’d been born in Tokyo instead of Stockholm. And if you want mission impossible, try staying bummed through dance-floor delight “Trampoline” (sample lyric: “If we all jump together then we’ll go higher”) or the sun-blazed newromantic update “Big City” (“I joined a band and it turned out alright”). During the course of their chat with the Straight, the two bandmates talk passionately about everything from the early DIY brilliance of bands like Scritti Politti to the phenomenon of school bullying, and how bullies often end up tormented later on in life by their actions. “At school I was the kid who would be super-earnest about Pokémon cards or something like that, and then all the other kids would take the mickey out of me,” Lobban remembers. “They’d pretend to be cool and detached—spend their time talking about cars and things like that. Meanwhile, I’d end up waxing lyrical about how fun my favourite game was. And you know what kids are like—they can really go all in and be harsh.” Perry adds: “Living in Japan, I was born to be an outcast. Even looking slightly foreign or having a foreign-sounding name there automatically makes you an outcast in Japan. Anyone who is not full Japanese is not common in Japan, so you get a lot of attention.” Funnily enough, attention is exactly what she and her bandmates are starting to get with Kero Kero Bonito—only this time in a relentlessly upbeat way. Kero Kero Bonito plays Fortune Sound Club on Wednesday (October 12).
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44 THE GEORGIA STRAIGHT OCTOBER 6 – 13 / 2016
MUSIC
Underground star Deft takes a leap forward Underground electronic music
2 is, by its nature, difficult to find.
> KATE WILSON
Deft plays at 560 Seymour as part of the New Forms Festival on Saturday (October 8).
Blaser aims to bring jazz giant into the 21st century Samuel Blaser has been playing jazz innovator Jimmy Giuffre’s music all of his performing life, but the Swiss trombone virtuoso has only recently decided to make a specialty of it. And based on his Giuffrededicated Spring Rain CD, that was a good call: the record strikes a fine balance between Blaser’s outgoing personality and the more delicate shades Giuffre introduced to jazz during the early 1960s. Classics like Fusion, Thesis, and Free Fall weren’t Blaser’s introduction to Giuffre, however. “In the big bands where I used to perform, we
2
Deft figures that if it was good enough for Abraham Lincoln, Captain Ahab, and C. Everett Koop, the mustache-less beard is good enough for him.
used to play ‘Four Brothers’,” says the Berlin-based musician, speaking in lightly accented English from New York City, where he’s exploring a number of different musical settings before embarking on the tour that will soon bring his own quartet to Vancouver. He’s referring to the swing-to-bop hit Giuffre penned for Woody Herman’s band in 1947, and if that were the clarinetist’s only entry in the Big Book of Jazz Standards, his legacy would be assured. But it’s the music that Giuffre would go on to make, especially in conjunction with bassist Steve Swallow and the Canadian pianist Paul Bley, that really caught Blaser’s ear. “I was really impressed by the writing, the delicateness of the music, the sensitivity,” the trombonist explains. “And I think I was happy to see that I could link this music to what I was doing—although that was a bit scary, because I realized that our music hasn’t really evolved from then.” He’s being too modest. Although Spring Rain proves that Giuffre’s vintage compositions still sound entirely au courant, it’s not just an album of covers. Blaser wrote half of the record’s dozen tracks by himself, with the intent being to bring Giuffre’s novel ideas about space, timing, and interplay into the 21st century. He’s succeeded brilliantly, especially on “The First Snow”, which somehow combines a quizzical melody with noisy Moog and electric piano from keyboardist Russ Lossing. Steve Swallow agrees. Tapped to pen the liner notes for Spring Rain, the sole survivor of Giuffre’s classic trio writes, “This CD presents a mature music, one which allows its players to be daring and bold, yet is also respectfully aware of what Jimmy Giuffre and a few other visionaries have bequeathed us.” Blaser is deservedly flattered. “I would love to meet him in person one day,” he says. “Hopefully, that’s a possibility.” With the trombonist rapidly expanding his American contacts— and his Canadian ones: he’s already recorded with Vancouver clarinetist and fellow Giuffre aficionado François Houle—there’s no reason why that shouldn’t happen. But first Blaser has to finish the followup to Spring Rain, which, he reveals, will focus on another of his primary inf luences: the blues. And while a plan to have saxophonist Ravi Coltrane appear on the earlier record didn’t pan out, he’s already contacted a couple of stateside veterans for his next. “I’m trying to have guests that are not too related to what I am doing, so as to have more of a clash of genres,” he says with a chuckle. “So Wallace Roney will be on trumpet and Oliver Lake on saxophone. This will create a nice horn section—and one that is not typical, as well.
“Maybe it will fail,” he adds. “I don’t know, but I’ll give it a try.”
> ALEXANDER VARTY
The Samuel Blaser Quartet plays the Western Front next Friday (October 14).
Mild High Club’s Brettin pulled out all the stops Based on reviews that are part-
2 ly positive and partly puzzled,
there’s a pretty solid case to be made that many don’t entirely get what Alex Brettin was after with Mild High Club’s Skiptracing. The first half of the sophomore outing places the Los Angeles–based quintet in the same neo-slacker
NO COVER
Relegated to basement shows and the fringes of major streaming sites, some of the genre’s most talented artists have little more than a few hundred backers. So when an experimental producer has won support from more than 17,000 SoundCloud followers, created a first-class mix for i-D, and spun a set at electronic music’s mecca the Boiler Room, it’s time to pay attention. U.K. musician Deft is one of the underground’s young elite. Skillfully negotiating a path through a range of genres including hip-hop, house, garage, and footwork, the eclectic musician first made a name for himself through his diversity. Fresh off the back of his latest EP, Blackest, however, Deft—born Yip Wong—has decided to follow a new path. Straddling the line between cinematic hip-hop and halftime beats, the producer has finally settled into a more consistent style. “Writing in numerous genres makes it difficult on the professional side of things,” Wong tells the Straight on the line from a Portland grocery store. “A lot of labels only sign music from one particular sound, and it makes it quite difficult for the booking agents too. After working on Blackest, though, I think my music has settled down a bit. You have an expectation of what you’re going to create, and you know what your audience is looking for. That’s a leap forward for me.” Halfway through his first tour of North America—an eight-date road trip that will take the producer across the continent from New York to Vancouver—Wong has just completed the final portion of the U.S. leg. Playing tracks like the distinctly U.K.–sounding “Vapid (Pt. 2)”, “Promise Me”, and “The Night Time”—each combining elements of English genres ambient and jungle— the producer was initially concerned that his music would not connect with audiences on this side of the Atlantic. He needn’t have worried. “People have been reacting to my sets really well,” Wong says. “One guy liked the performance so much that at the end of the show in Kansas City, he came up to me and said that he’d made something. He brought out a machine that looked like a strange electronic sewing kit, and he presented me with this weird pouch. It was very, very strange. I never anticipated that someone would be knitting whilst I was playing. But it was flattering that he was really into the music. “It’s been great to see how the underground electronic scene is functioning in North America,” he continues, “because in the U.K. there is such a huge stereotype around the continent. In England, Canada and the States are just seen as having an EDM ethos—the big festivals, and bro culture. Being here has really opened my eyes to all the people that are really working hard and pushing nuanced and interesting music. It’s been an enlightening experience.”
Oct Oct Oct Oct
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ballpark as acts like Mac DeMarco and Mikal Cronin, both of whom the band has shared stages with. Things kick off with the languid and lovely “Skiptracing”, where Brettin’s daydream vocals are set to summerhazed guitars and cloud-soft drums. From there, “Homage” is ’70s AM radio infused with a quarter-ounce of Acapulco Gold and “Head Out” filters soft jazz through the same sensibilities that gave birth to Ween’s The Mollusk. Where things get really interesting, though, is on the back end of Skiptracing. Brettin serves notice that things are going to get weird halfway through the record when, in “Kokopelli”, he announces “Welcome to my twisted cabaret.” Given how many reviewers have argued the record eventually goes off the rails after an easily digestible start, it’s obvious that heads-up is getting missed. “I really enjoyed every moment of the recording because I was pulling out all the stops,” Brettin says, on the line from a tour van wending its way through Vermont. “I was pushing myself, using stuff that I’d learned in school. I had the idea that it was going to polarize whoever listened to the record. It’s something that you can try and wrap your head around, or it’s something that’s really going to turn you off because it’s not your thing. “Not to be elitist or anything,” he continues, “but the record can go over people’s heads if they’re not really paying attention. There are themes in there that are really meta, where I’m turning the whole process in on itself, almost having an inner dialogue with myself.” Elaborating on that, Brettin suggests that the first half of Skiptracing finds him attempting to craft pop songs that are mini-tributes to different eras. As for the record’s home stretch, his training as a jazz musician definitely colours things, with “Whodunit” a freeform technocolour blur of crazy drum violence,
space-phaser synth bursts, and jungle-bombed percussion. “Ceiling Zero” unspools like the 5th Dimension taking a kick at the Taxi Driver soundtrack, while “Chasing My Tail” starts out as a country sleeper and ends up a peyote-drip dream. “There’s everything from the bossa nova thing to Bach or whatever,” Brettin notes. “But things are set up the way that they are for a reason. Kokopelli is like the sage, the investigator. And once we get to ‘Kokopelli’, the sage sort of alerts the student that it’s okay to push things out, and that the record doesn’t have to be a start-to-finish banger.” It’s worth noting that the first album Brettin ever latched on to was the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, which he discovered as a small kid. Steely Dan was often in heavy rotation on his parents’ turntable, the singer also having a casual obsession with the likes of Brian Eno and Marvin Gaye. If something binds those acts together, it’s that they’re from a time when people actually made cohesive records with a start, middle, and end, as opposed to something to be chopped up into playlists on an iPod. “When people don’t understand the back half of the record, it just means that they don’t have the patience nor the will to get through it,” Brettin argues. “I guess I don’t expect them to in this day of short attention spans and screen time and me time. The record is also for my own enjoyment. I’m interested in showing a sort of dynamic range rather than hitting the wall with things all the time. It’s okay to start in one place and end up somewhere completely different.” > MIKE USINGER
Mild High Club plays the Biltmore Cabaret on Saturday (October 8).
68 LIPS FRONT PAGE BAND SONS OF THE HOE HARPDOG BROWN & GUEST
THURSDAY: POOL TOURNAMENT DAILY DRINK SPECIALS 1038 Main St • (604) 608-1444 1 block North Main St SkyTrain
FRI OCT 7
BANANA MAMA SILVER PANTS * THIS GUN FOR HIRE * ANTIPOLITIC SAT OCT 8
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ALCHEMY CHAMBER * GANGLYON * WRAITHS * SAT OCT 15
* THE SUNNYVALE LIQUOR TOUR FEATURING * DOUG CRAWFORD AND THE SECRET SOCIETY * KNUCKLEHEAD [TYRONE FROM TPB] * RUDE DOWG * LUCID AFTERLIFE * CALM LIKE A BOMB [RAGE TRIBUTE] * ILLVIS FRESHLY *
OCTOBER 6 – 13 / 2016 THE GEORGIA STRAIGHT 45
Desi Subculture joined by Vancouverbased interdisciplinary media artist Sammy Chien (Oct 6), and music by Dunks of the Vancouver-based band Funk Hunters (Oct 8). To Oct 8, Vancity Theatre (1181 Seymour). Info www.viff.org/festival/.
music/ timeout CONCERTS < CLUBS & VENUES < OUT OF TOWN <
CONCERTS 2JUST ANNOUNCED CRX Los Angeles–based rock band tours in support of debut album New Skin. Nov 30, doors 8 pm, show 9 pm, Biltmore Cabaret (2755 Prince Edward). Tix on sale Oct 5, 10 am, $15 (plus service charges and fees) at www.livenation.com/. LIZZO American rapper tours in support of upcoming EP release Coconut Oil. Jan 27, doors 7 pm, show 8 pm, Alexander Gastown (91 Powell). Tix on sale Oct 7, 10 am, $15 (plus service charges and fees) at Red Cat Records and www.ticketweb.ca/. DIERKS BENTLEY American country singer-songwriter tours in support of latest album Black, with guests Cole Swindell and Jon Pardi. Feb 9, 7:30 pm, Rogers Arena (800 Griffiths Way). Tix on sale Oct 7, 10 am, $30.50-80.50 at www.livenation.com/. THE WOOD BROTHERS American rootsblues band featuring Oliver and Chris Wood tours in support of latest release Paradise. Mar 12, doors 7 pm, show 8 pm, The Imperial (319 Main). Tix on sale Oct 7, 10 am, $25 (plus service charges and fees) at Red Cat, Zulu Records, and www.ticketweb.ca/. BASTILLE British indie-pop band tours in support of latest studio album Wild World. Apr 27, doors 6:30 pm, show 7:30 pm, Thunderbird Arena (6066 Thunderbird Blvd., UBC). Tix on sale Oct 7, 10 am, $55/45/35 (plus service charges and fees) at www.livenation.com/.
2THIS WEEK LATE NIGHT @VIFF HUB Highlights include DJs Trevor Risk and Christa Belle spinning tunes from films (Oct 5), musician
JAPANDROIDS Local rock duo composed of guitarist-vocalist Brian King and drummer-vocalist David Prowse. Oct 5-8, doors 8 pm, show 9:30 pm, Cobalt (917 Main). Tix $20 (plus service charges and fees) at www.ticketweb.ca/. DANNY BROWN Hip-hop artist from Detroit performs material from latest album Atrocity Exhibition, with guests Maxo Kream and ZelooperZ. Oct 6, doors 8 pm, show 9 pm, Vogue Theatre (918 Granville). Tix $42,50 (plus service charges and fees) at www.ticketfly.com/.
SCENIC ROUTE TO ALASKA Edmontonbased indie-rock trio, with guests Peach Pit. Oct 8, 8 pm, Media Club (695 Cambie). Tix $12 (plus service charges and fees) at www.ticketfly.com/. MILD HIGH CLUB American funkpsychedelic band, with guests Kim Gray and Tanglers. Oct 8, 8 pm, Biltmore Cabaret (2755 Prince Edward). Tix $10-12 (plus service charges and fees) at www.ticketfly.com/.
GUY DAVIS The Rogue Folk Club presents the American blues guitarist and banjo player. Oct 6, 8-10:30 pm, St. James Hall (3214 W. 10th). Tix $26/22, info www. roguefolk.bc.ca/concerts/ev16100620/.
BEACH FOSSILS New York indie-rock band, with guests Joyce Manor and Frankie Cosmos. Oct 8, doors 8 pm, show 9 pm, Rickshaw Theatre (254 E. Hastings). Tix $20 (plus service charges and fees) at Red Cat, Zulu Records, and www.ticketweb.ca/.
KING Los Angeles-based R&B trio tours in support of debut release We Are King, with guest Eryn Allen Kane. Oct 6, doors 8 pm, show 9 pm, Alexander Gastown (91 Powell). Tix $16 (plus service charges and fees) at Red Cat Records and www.ticketweb.ca/. BIRDS OF CHICAGO The Rogue Folk Club presents the American roots collective based around JT Nero and Allison Russell. Oct 7, 8-10:30 am, St. James Hall (3214 W. 10th). Tix $26/22, info www.roguefolk.bc.ca/concerts/ev16062320/. RYLEY WALKER Chicago indie-rock musician tours in support of new release Golden Sings That Have Been Sung, with guests Circuit des Yeux. Oct 7, doors 7 pm, show 8 pm, Fox Cabaret (2321 Main). Tix $12 (plus fees and service charges) at Red Cat, Zulu Records, and www.ticketweb.ca/. MARLON WILLIAMS AND THE YARRA BENDERS New Zealand folk-rock musician tours in support of debut self-titled release, with guest Julia Jacklin. Oct 7, doors 7 pm, show 8:30 pm, Biltmore Cabaret (2755 Prince Edward). Tix $18 (plus services and fees) at Red Cat, Zulu Records, and www.ticketweb.ca/. 54-40 Vancouver guitar-rock legends, featuring frontman Neil Osborne. Oct 7-8, doors 7 pm, show 8:30 pm, Commodore Ballroom (868 Granville). Tix for Oct 8 show SOLD OUT. Tix for Oct 7 show $39.50 (plus service charges and fees) at www.livenation.com/.
EVERY 2ND WEDNESDAY ■
THE JULIE RUIN New York rock band tours in support of upcoming release Hit Reset. Oct 7, doors 8 pm, show 9 pm, Rickshaw Theatre (254 E. Hastings). Tix $20 (plus service charges and fees) at Red Cat, Highlife Records, and www.ticketweb.ca/.
ADAM GREEN'S ALADDIN A screening of Adam Green's film Aladdin will be followed by a concert during which Green performs music from the film. Oct 6, 8 pm, Rickshaw Theatre (254 E. Hastings). Tix $16, info www.rickshawtheatre.com/.
JOIN US October 12 + 26
STICKY FINGERS Australian reggaefusion band tours in support of upcoming release Westway (The Glamour and the Slums). Oct 7, doors 9 pm, Vogue Theatre (918 Granville). Tix $20 (plus service charges and fees) at Red Cat, Zulu Records, and www.bplive.ca/.
November 9 + 23
■
December 7 + 21
SANDER VAN DOORN Dutch house superstar, with guest Kryder. Oct 9, 10 am, Venue (881 Granville). Tix $40, info www.venuelive.ca/. GOJIRA French heavy-metal band tours in support of new LP MAGMA, with guests TesseracT. Oct 9, doors 7 pm, Vogue Theatre (918 Granville). Tix $39.50 (plus service charges and fees) at Red Cat Records and www.ticketfly.com/.
on the web!
For up-to-the-minute, searchable Music Time Out listings, visit
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BRUTTO Punk-rock band from Minsk, Belarus, with guests Lyapis Trubetskoy. Oct 9, doors 7 pm, Rickshaw Theatre (254 E. Hastings). Tix $55 (plus service charges and fees) at www.rickshawtheatre.com/. WHITE FANG AND NO PARENTS American rock bands coheadline, with guests Birth Defects. Oct 9, doors 8 pm, show 9 pm, Cobalt (917 Main). Tix $10 (plus service charges and fees) at Red Cat, Zulu Records, and www.ticketweb.ca/. PHANTOGRAM American electronic-rock duo tours in support of new single “You Don’t Get Me High Anymore”. Oct 9, doors 8 pm, show 9:30 pm, Commodore Ballroom (868 Granville). Tix $35 (plus service charges and fees) at www.livenation.com/. CARSICK CARS Beijing-based alt-rock band tours in support of third album 3, with guests Chui Wan and Alpine Decline. Oct 10, 8 pm, Rickshaw Theatre (254 E. Hastings). Tix $15 (plus service charges and fees) at Red Cat, Highlife Records, and www.rickshawtheatre.com/. GROUPLOVE Los Angeles-based rock band tours in support of upcoming release, with guests MUNA. Oct 10, doors 7 pm, show 8 pm, Commodore Ballroom (868 Granville). Tix $30.50 (plus service charges and fees) at www.ticketmaster.ca/. THE PROCLAIMERS Scottish folkpop band (“I’m Gonna Be (500 Miles)”, “Sunshine on Leith”, “I’m on My Way”), with guest Jenny O. Oct 11, doors 7 pm, show 8 pm, Commodore Ballroom (868 Granville). Tix $35 (plus service charges and fees) at www.livenation.com/. NAHKO AND MEDICINE FOR THE PEOPLE L.A.-based world-roots collective, with guests Hirie. Oct 12, doors 7 pm, show 8 pm, Commodore Ballroom (868 Granville). Tix $25 (plus service charges and fees) at www.livenation.com/. BASIA BULAT Canadian folk singersongwriter tours in support of latest studio album Good Advice, with guests Oh Pep! Oct 12, 7 pm, Vogue Theatre (918 Granville). Tix $20 (plus service charges and fees) at www.ticketfly.com/. GLASS ANIMALS English indie-rock band tours in support of upcoming album How to Be a Human Being. Oct 12, 7 pm, Queen Elizabeth Theatre (650 Hamilton). Tix $35 (plus service charges and fees) at Red Cat Records and www.ticketfly.com/. THE INTERRUPTERS Los Angelesbased ska band tours in support of sophomore album Say It Out Loud, with guests Bad Cop/Bad Cop and the Brass Action. Oct 12, 8 pm, Rickshaw Theatre (254 E. Hastings). Tix $15, info www.rick shawtheatre.com/.
THANKS FOR VOTING US BEST STRIP CLUB!
CLUBS & VENUES
2TERRA LIGHTFOOT Oct 19 2AN EVENING WITH DAVID RAMIREZ Nov 11
ALEXANDER GASTOWN 91 Powell, 778379-0407. 2KING Oct 6 2WALDO Oct 29
MOLSON CANADIAN THEATRE AT HARD ROCK 2080 United Blvd., 604-5236888. 2GREAT WHITE & SLAUGHTER Oct 14 2DWIGHT YOAKAM Oct 28 2ROGER HODGSON Nov 25
BACKSTAGE LOUNGE Arts Club Theatre, 1585 Johnston, Granville Island, 604-6871354. Vancouver's only live-music venue on the water, with music nightly. Hot Jazz Jam night on Tue. 2THE PHONIX Oct 6 BILTMORE CABARET 2755 Prince Edward, 604-676-0541. 2MARLON WILLIAMS AND THE YARRA BENDERS Oct 7 2MILD HIGH CLUB Oct 8 2PANTHA DU PRINCE Oct 12 2TAL WILKENFELD Oct 13 2HONNE Oct 18 2HOW TO DRESS WELL Oct 20 2BLIND PILOT Oct 21 2DANCE YOURSELF CLEAN AT NITE*MOVES Oct 22 2THE BOXER REBELLION Oct 23 2K.FLAY Oct 29 2NIYKEE HEATON Nov 1 2DUOTANG Nov 3 2DUOTANG Nov 3 2BUSTY AND THE BASS Nov 9 2BULLY Nov 11 2DUNE RATS AND DZ DEATHRAYS Nov 12 2THE SUFFERS Nov 13 2JENNY HVAL Nov 16 2WATERSTRIDER Nov 18 2MR LITTLE JEANS Nov 22 2PAPER LIONS Nov 26 2CRX Nov 30 2THE CAVE SINGERS Dec 2 2THE DEAD SOUTH Dec 3 2WILD CHILD Dec 6 2LEE FIELDS AND THE EXPRESSIONS Dec 7 2ROONEY Dec 10 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. BLUE MARTINI JAZZ CAFE 1516 Yew, 604-428-2691. Live jazz, soul, and blues. COBALT 917 Main, 778-918-3671. 2JAPANDROIDS Oct 5-8 2WHITE FANG AND NO PARENTS Oct 9 2THE FELICE BROTHERS Oct 14 2CHIXDIGGIT Oct 15 2POSTER CHILDREN Oct 16 2JEREMY ENIGK Oct 20 2FLOCK OF DIMES Oct 21 2JACUZZI BOYS Oct 22 2THE SHRINE AND HO9909 Oct 26 2MANGCHI Nov 5 2DAUGHTERS Nov 12 2BIG BUSINESS Nov 13 2PUP Nov 21 2THE JAPANESE HOUSE Dec 1 2PERE UBU Dec 2 COMMODORE BALLROOM 868 Granville, 604-739-4550. 2TOKYO POLICE CLUB Oct 5 254-40 Oct 7 2PHANTOGRAM Oct 9 2GROUPLOVE Oct 10 2THE PROCLAIMERS Oct 11 2NAHKO AND MEDICINE FOR THE PEOPLE Oct 12 2COLD WAR KIDS Oct 13 2I MOTHER EARTH Oct 14 2THE STRUMBELLAS Oct 16 2STIFF LITTLE FINGERS Oct 19 2AGAINST ME! Oct 25 2YOUNG THE GIANT Oct 26 2SUM 41 Oct 28 2BOY & BEAR Oct 29 2THE BACARDI BOOHAHA Oct 29 2MAJID JORDAN Oct 30 2NICOLAS JAAR Nov 1 2HANNAH GEORGAS Nov 2 2NOFX Nov 4 2SHOVELS & ROPE Nov 9 2LAPSLEY Nov 11 2THE TREWS Nov 12 2YELAWOLF Nov 13 2ANIMALS AS LEADERS Nov 16 2PORTUGAL. THE MAN Nov 17 2A TRIBE CALLED RED Nov 18 2WINTERSLEEP Nov 19 2GORD BAMFORD Nov 22 2JAMES VINCENT MCMORROW Nov 24 2JULY TALK Nov 25 2BROTHERS OSBORNE Nov 30 2THE DANDY WARHOLS Dec 6 2ANDRA DAY Dec 12 2IN FLAMES AND HELL YEAH Dec 14 DOOLIN'S IRISH PUB 654 Nelson, 604605-4343. Live music Sun-Thu, with acoustic soloist or duo Sun-Wed and live band Thu DJ Fri-Sat. FORTUNE SOUND CLUB 147 E. Pender, 604-569-1758. 2KERO KERO BONITO Oct 12 2HAYDEN JAMES AND ELDERBROOK Oct 25 2THE VEILS Nov 11 2TIMEFLIES Nov 12 2THE GOTOBEDS Nov 16 2LEMAITRE Nov 17 2THE PACK A.D. Nov 26 2MERCHANDISE Dec 2 FOX CABARET 2321 Main. 2RYLEY WALKER Oct 7 2ONLY A VISITOR Oct 10 2ANDY SHAUF Oct 14 2ANDY SHAUF Oct 15 2RACHAEL YAMAGATA Oct 18 2KISHI BASHI Oct 19 2KROY Oct 22 2SUNFLOWER BEAN Oct 28 2HISS GOLDEN MESSENGER Oct 29 2ELEPHANT STONE Nov 8 2DONOVAN WOODS Nov 11 2MAX FROST Nov 12 2HANNAH EPPERSON Nov 18
MALE DANCERS: 8:30-10PM FEMALE DANCERS: 10PM-CLOSE
46 THE GEORGIA STRAIGHT OCTOBER 6 – 13 / 2016
CONTACT WINTER MUSIC FESTIVAL Electronic music festival features performances by Flume, Disclosure DJ, Marshmello, Zeds Dead, Baauer, Gareth Emery, W&W, Hucci, Getter, Slushii, and Big Wild. Dec 26-27, BC Place Stadium (777 Pacific Boulevard). Tix $150 (plus service charges and fees) at www.contact-festival.com/.
PRINCETON PUB & GRILL 1901 Powell, 604-253-6645. 2PALOMARS Oct 6 2HONKY TONK DILETTANTES Oct 13 2SAINTS AND SINNERS Oct 14 2SICK BOSS Oct 20 QUEEN ELIZABETH THEATRE 650 Hamilton, 604-665-3050. 2TEGAN AND SARA Oct 5 2GLASS ANIMALS Oct 12 2NORAH JONES Oct 18 2ALICE COOPER Oct 19 2PET SHOP BOYS Oct 24 2IL DIVO Nov 6 2MS. LAURYN HILL Nov 8 2DAUGHTER Nov 25 REPUBLIC 958 Granville, 604-669-3214. House, hip-hop, EDM, chart, and reggae. Open nightly from 10 pm to 3 am. RICKSHAW THEATRE 254 E. Hastings, 604-681-8915. 2DISCHARGE Oct 5 2ADAM GREEN'S ALADDIN Oct 6 2THE JULIE RUIN Oct 7 2BEACH FOSSILS Oct 8 2BRUTTO Oct 9 2CARSICK CARS Oct 10 2THE INTERRUPTERS Oct 12 2THE WORLD HAS NO EYEDEA Oct 13 2GORGUTS Oct 14 2CJ RAMONE Oct 15 29TH ANNUAL PETER TOSH TRIBUTE Oct 21 2HELL ON HASTINGS Oct 22 2BONGZILLA Oct 24 2FACE TO FACE Oct 26 2FULL MOON Oct 27 2THE KING KHAN & BBQ SHOW Oct 28 2THE RITUAL Oct 29 2NIK TURNER'S HAWKWIND Oct 31 2DESORDEN PUBLICO Nov 11 2EPICA Nov 15 2AGENT ORANGE Nov 15 2OFF! Nov 18 2OM Nov 19 2PUSSY RIOT: A CONVERSATION WITH RUSSIA'S CONTROVERSIAL PUNK ROCK BAND Nov 21 2DARK TRANQUILLITY Nov 25 2THEE OH SEES Nov 26 2REVOCATION AND ABORTED Nov 29 2THE SLACKERS Dec 3 2COUSIN HARLEY Dec 9 2THE ALBUM LEAF Dec 13 2HED PE Dec 18 2BLACK WIZARD AND BLACK BREATH Dec 31 RIVER ROCK SHOW THEATRE 8811 River Rd., Richmond, 604-247-8900. 2DONNY & MARIE Dec 20-22 ROGERS ARENA 800 Griffiths Way, 604-899-7400. 2KANYE WEST Oct 17 2CHICAGO AND EARTH, WIND & FIRE Nov 7 2FLORIDA GEORGIA LINE Nov 12 2STEVIE NICKS Dec 9 THE ROXY 932 Granville, 604-331-7999. 2ZULU PANDA, RAZORVOICE, AND EVA SMITH Oct 5 2SUBCOASTAL Oct 7 2ALYSSA BAKER, FINTAN O'BRIEN Oct 8 2JARON CHIDIAC Oct 11 2GARRETT, ARMY OF SMILES Oct 14 2DERREK PITTS Oct 16 2BEYONDTHEEYES Oct 18 2THE TREBLE Oct 19 2HIGHKICKS, THE MOTORLEAGUE Oct 20 2MARRY ME, ALBION Oct 21 2CAROUSEL SCENE, WIELER AND COMPANY Oct 22 2HORSE OPERA Oct 23 2THE LEGEND OF SHUICHI Oct 26 2DREW ROUSE Oct 28 ST. JAMES HALL 3214 W. 10th, 604736-3022. 2GUY DAVIS Oct 6 2BIRDS OF CHICAGO Oct 7 2THE BUMPER JACKSONS Oct 14 2JEZ LOWE Oct 19 2ROY FORBES Oct 22 2JAMES KEELAGHAN Oct 28 VENUE 881 Granville, 604-646-0064. 2SANDER VAN DOORN Oct 9 2DIRTY MIKE AND THE BOYS Oct 14 2SHE WANTS REVENGE Oct 20 2STORMZY Oct 21 2BUCKCHERRY Oct 31 2PETER HOOK & THE LIGHT Nov 1 2ME & MAE Nov 5 2COLEMAN HELL Nov 10 2JAI WOLF Nov 16 2NICK CARTER Nov 23 2SONATA ARCTICA Nov 28 2NEUROSIS Dec 20
VOGUE THEATRE 918 Granville, 604-5691144. 2FLIGHT FACILITIES Oct 5 2DANNY BROWN Oct 6 2STICKY FINGERS Oct 7 2GOJIRA Oct 9 2BASIA BULAT Oct 12 2GHOST Oct 13 2ZIGGY MARLEY Oct 16 2PURITY RING Oct 18 2ANONYMOUS FUNKY WINKER BEANS 37 W. Hastings, AND THE POLITICS OF LEAKING Oct 20 604-764-7865. 2BANANA MAMA SILVER 2MATTHEW BARBER AND JILL BARBER PANTS, THIS GUN FOR HIRE, ANTIPOLITIC Oct 22 2ANJELAH JOHNSON Oct 26 Oct 7 2RAISED BY CAIN, UTILITY 2DANNY BHOY Oct 27 2THE NAKED PROVIDER, DARK SUN PROFITS Oct 8 AND FAMOUS Oct 28 2POST MALONE 2ALCHEMY CHAMBER, GANGYLON, Oct 30 2CL Nov 1 2CHARLIE PUTH Nov 4 WRAITHS Oct 14 2DOUG CRAWFORD 2A$AP FERG Nov 5 2MAC MILLER Nov 6 AND THE SECRET SOCIETY, KNUCKLEHEAD, 2LUKAS GRAHAM Nov 10 2TERRI CLARK RUDE DOWG, LUCID AFTERLIFE, CALM Nov 12 2TORY LANEZ Nov 14 22016 JUST LIKE A BOMB, ILLVIS FRESHLY Oct 15 FOR LAUGHS COMEDY TOUR Nov 18 2THE LIFE AQUATIC: A TRIBUTE TO DAVID THE IMPERIAL 319 Main, 604-868-0494. BOWIE Nov 20 2YG Nov 21 2MØ Nov 2H'ARTS FOR THE HOMELESS Oct 6 23 2AURORA Dec 3 2MARK FARINA Oct 14 2QUANTIC Oct 15 2MARGO PRICE Oct 19 2STRIKE WISE HALL 1882 Adanac, 604-254-5858. A CHORD Oct 20 2TOM ODELL Oct 2LAL Oct 5 2JOEY ONLY OUTLAW BAND 21 2BAD SUNS Oct 23 2WET Nov Oct 7 2 DAVID SIMARD Oct 14 2OLD 2 2CLASSIXX Nov 4 2KIIARA Nov 8 TIME DANCE PARTY Oct 21 2DAN BERN 2THE STRUTS Nov 9 2AUTOGRAF & Oct 23 2KOO KOO KANGA ROO Oct 29 GOLDROOM Nov 11 2THE JEZABELS Nov 13 2DRAGONETTE Nov 23 2RÜFÜS DU OUT OF TOWN SOL Nov 24 2MICHAEL KIWANUKA Dec 7
PANTHA DU PRINCE German techno musician tours in support of latest release IVANHOE PUB 1038 Main, 604-608-1444. The Triad. Oct 12, doors 8 pm, show 9 pm, Biltmore Cabaret (2755 Prince Edward). Tix No cover. 268 LIPS Oct 7 2FRONT PAGE $20 (plus service charges and fees) at Red BAND Oct 8 2SONS OF THE HOE Oct 9 Cat, Zulu Records, and www.ticketweb.ca/. 2HARPDOG BROWN Oct 10 2RHYTHM ST. Oct 14 2RICCOCHET RABBIT Oct 15
2UPCOMING HIGHLIGHTS
ORPHEUM THEATRE 601 Smithe, 604-6653050. 2JAMES BLAKE Oct 13 2OPETH Oct 26 2THE HEAD AND THE HEART Dec 5 2HALF MOON RUN Dec 16
LAMPLIGHTER PUBLIC HOUSE 92 Water, 604-687-4424. Pub trivia with Nice Guys Inc. Tue; bourbon and bingo Wed; Rocksteady with DJs Arems, Hoppa & Rexx Thu; FKYA DJs Fri; DJ Antonia & Friends Sat. MEDIA CLUB 695 Cambie, 604-608-2871. 2SCENIC ROUTE TO ALASKA Oct 8
2THIS WEEK MAROON 5 American pop superstars, with guests Tove Lo and Phases. Oct 11, 7:30 pm, Key Arena (Seattle, Wash.). Tix from US$26.50 to US$122 (plus service charges and fees) at www.ticketmaster.ca/.
TIME OUT MUSIC LISTINGS are a public service provided free of charge. 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.
HOUSING
604.730.7060
REAL ESTATE
CLASSADS@STRAIGHT.COM
Developer tax reviewed
V
ancouver may collect more money know, we’ve seen…the price of housing rise from developers to pay for additional and rise and rise. I don’t think these charges services for residents. are what determine the final price of housing. City hall is currently reviewing the The price is determined by supply and demand development cost levy (DCL), which is charged in the marketplace.” per square foot on developed properties. The DCL review is expected to be completed “If we are taking too little for DCLs, we’re in April 2017. effectively subsidizing the development sector, and we shouldn’t be doing that,” Coun. Geoff HOUSING OF SOME form may yet be built on Meggs told the Georgia Straight in a phone Granville Island. When the former industrial site was transinterview. Depending on the area and type of develop- formed—starting in the 1970s—into a popular ment, the city charges different rates, which are shopping and cultural destination in Vancouver, adjusted annually for inflation. limited housing development For example, the DCL for was one of the intended land residential and commercial uses. developments in most areas None was constructed, but Carlito Pablo of the city for a building that with the ongoing federal planhas a floor-space ratio (FSR) larger than 1.2 is ning exercise to chart the future of Granville Is$13.91 per square foot as of September 30, 2016. land, there is a chance that some might be built. (The floor-space ratio is obtained by dividing Michael Stevenson, a former SFU president, the combined area of all floors in a develop- is leading the project on behalf of the Canada ment or building by the area of the site upon Mortgage and Housing Corporation, which which it is built.) manages the federal property. Further, the DCL for the same type of deAccording to Stevenson, who spoke to the velopments is 90 cents in the Grandview High- Straight in a phone interview, the ongoing way and Boundary Road area. In the Dundas imagination of what Granville Island may and Wall streets area, it’s $3.56. In Downtown look like by 2040 isn’t going to stray from its South, it’s $19.09. current status as a hub for culture, recreaIn 2015, the city collected $94.7 million in tion, and education. development levies. Monies collected from de“Because it’s public land, it’s not governed by velopers help pay for parks, childcare facilities, the normal forces of the market.…It’s a space social housing, and engineering infrastructure in which a great deal of innovation and exlike transportation, water, sewer, and drainage. perimentation can take place.…That character In addition to the rate structure, city staff ought to continue in the future.” have also been directed by council to look into With regard to housing, Stevenson indicated new types of allocations for DCL money. that there may be short-term-lease units for “It could be whether or not there should be artists or workers in innovative industries. other functions of the city that are necessary,” “That’s just my own, you know, stargazing Meggs explained. “It could be public-realm idea,” he emphasized. “Nobody’s pressed the improvements that are not in a park. Plazas. point so far, but…I will at least ask the quesIt could be public art, which is now paid, nor- tion as particular uses and projects or proposmally, by community-amenity contribution.” als start to surface as to whether they could be Community-amenity contributions are made advanced by some form, as I say, of innovative, by developers in rezoning projects. DCLs are temporary housing arrangement.” paid for most developments, including those A reference document submitted by Grancovered by rezoning. ville Island trustees to the City of Vancouver in “I’m sure they would prefer it would stay 1978 indicated that up to 25,000 square feet of lower,” Meggs said about the development in- residential development can be built. dustry in connection to a possible DCL rate Emily Carr University of Art + Design leaves increase. “But that’s just too bad. I don’t see an Granville Island next year for its new Great impact [on housing affordability] because, you Northern Way campus. -
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OCTOBER 6 – 13 / 2016 THE GEORGIA STRAIGHT 47
straight stars October 6 to 12, 2016
or catching up on sleep. The important stuff can wait for another day. Happy Thanksgiving to those celebrating!
A
s of Friday, Mercury leaves Virgo for Libra. Usually a quick transit, due to last month’s retrograde, Mercury has tenanted Virgo since the end of July. If your chart has been targeted, you’ve been hard hit with added stress and problems. If it has been a productive transit, you’ve sorted through, healed, or solved plenty. Perhaps you’ve experienced a mix of both. Mercury in Libra, the balancing-act sign, brings a much different feel. For the next two-ish weeks, Mercury hits the swings with the sun and Jupiter. There’s more emphasis on the people rather than the things. It’s a social, accommodating, receptive, and relatively easygoing placement for Mercury. Communication tends to run smoother. Connectivity, cooperation, and common ground are more easily established. The general atmosphere favours diplomacy, alliances, justice, and more harmony. At least, that’s the case over most of this next week. Also on Friday, sun/Pluto are on a momentum shift. It’s a good lead-in for our Thanksgiving long weekend. Saturday’s Capricorn moon keeps a good handle on the day. Sunday has less going for it than Thanksgiving Monday, but it is still all good. Monday/Tuesday, the Aquarius moon makes for a social, upbeat, and on-the-go day or two. Conversation and stimulation stay lively. On Tuesday, Mercury teams with Jupiter while Mars/Neptune are also open to suggestion. It’s a good day to engage in talks, to conjure and consider options. Wednesday is good for romance, spiritual replenishment,
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ARIES
March 20–April 20
For the next few weeks, Mercury in Libra boosts social prospects. This transit can also occupy you with legal or contract matters. Friday is a switch-track day. Saturday is as productive as you make it. Sunday/Monday, in the moment is the best way to play it. Monday/Tuesday are optimum for creativity, romance, and expressing how you feel. Wednesday simply evaporates.
ﺏ
TAURUS
April 20–May 21
Jupiter and the sun are already tenanting Libra, and as of Friday, Mercury joins them. While all three can enhance job prospects, health matters, and relationships with folks that populate your dayto-day, they also increase attention on imbalances that need to be corrected. Friday/Saturday loans you better self-control. Sunday through next Tuesday are ideal for trying something new on for size.
ﺐ
GEMINI
May 21–June 21
While there’s really no getting away from the busyness of life, you are likely to feel an easeup as Mercury advances into Libra. Relationships with family members and lovers can hit an upswing. The start of this long weekend can keep
> BY ROSE MARCUS
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LIBRA you busy with personal priorities or September 23–October 23 duty’s call, but overall, it’s all good. Thanks to Jupiter and the Monday/Tuesday provides a freshsun in Libra, your physical activair boost. ity, social involvements, confidence CANCER level, and ability to attract are on the June 21–July 22 upswing. As of Friday, Mercury also Don’t let the added pressure tops you up with fresh fuel. Monday/ get to you. Worry is unproductive. Ac- Tuesday are particularly smoothtion can kick-start something good. running. Relationships, activities, Now through mid next week, the stars and communications maintain an launch you on an information-gath- easy flow. Someone or something ering and problem-solving mission. brand-new could grab your attenSaturday, Monday, and Tuesday are tion. Wednesday comes and it goes. your best days to reach out, apply, inSCORPIO vestigate, share your thoughts, broach October 23–November 22 a conversation, or try something fresh. As of Friday, Mercury LEO leaves your social sector to dip July 22–August 23 into the background for a short You’ll get even more out of while. It’s an appropriate inf luyour conversations, visits, and read- ence for tending to private mating thanks to Mercury’s advance into ters. Gift yourself with more time Libra. Contract negotiations, legal to get a better feel, to study, ref lect, dealings, studies, and paperwork mat- or create. Saturday, the job’s done ters can hit a faster move-along, too. well. Sunday through Tuesday, reSaturday, get it done and out of the freshment and good ideas are easy way. Monday/Tuesday, synchronicity to come by. Wednesday, go with is at play. You could hear or run across the f low. something that hits the target well. SAGITTARIUS VIRGO November 22–December 21 August 23–September 23 Mercury will spend the Mercury leaves your sign next few weeks stimulating your inon Friday but you are likely to feel it come and social life. Fresh ideas and more like a plus than a minus. Along interests are worth pursuing. You with the sun and Jupiter in Libra, never know where a conversation or Mercury will help you to better rec- look-see can lead. Thanks to Meroncile with yourself and to create bet- cury aligned with Jupiter, Monday/ ter inroads with others, too. Saturday Tuesday gives you a lot more to think through Tuesday, you’ll get pleasure about or to aim for. These are good and good value out of conversations, days for travel or for putting yourself activities, and creative projects. out there.
ﺑ ﺒ
ﺖ
ﺓ
CAPRICORN
December 21–January 20
More sharing, cooperation, and pooling of resources and responsibility is the aim of Mercury’s advance into Libra, starting Friday. Saturday, take charge; put it into drive and reap the reward. Sunday through Tuesday, your people connections are optimized. Mercury, the sun, and Jupiter also put a major purchase, bank loan, or professional contract into full swing. AQUARIUS
January 20–February 18
Whether you celebrate Thanksgiving or not, a long weekend can certainly be put to good use. Libra month is always one of your best for socializing, travel, and exploring new relationships or financial potentials. Friday/Saturday, tend to what’s required. Sunday through Sunday, the Aquarius moon keeps you and synchronicity on great perk-me-up.
ﺌ
PISCES
February 18–March 20
Friday brings a change of plans, mind, or momentum. Saturday, you’ll get plenty accomplished. Sunday, spontaneity delivers best. Mercury, the sun, and Jupiter in Libra enhance financial prospects and intimate or close relationships. The more you put into it, the more you get out of it. Monday/Tuesday, dive into it fresh. Wednesday, go by feel. -
B o o k a re a d i n g o r s i g n u p f o r Rose’s free monthly newsletter at www.rosemarcus.com/astrolink/.
CAREERS & EMPLOYMENT
COACH. MENTOR. LEADER. We don’t build athletes, we build people. As one of Canada’s top gymnastics clubs, we’re passionate about inspiring a lifelong love of physical activity in kids and youth, and helping them become successful people. Great coaches are the key, so we work hard to attract good people - and keep them - with a positive, rewarding workplace. We offer in house training, development, mentorship and advancement opportunities to ensure all our coaches are professional and experts in the fields of gymnastics and physical literacy.
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CHILD CARE Looking for a Responsible Nanny for 2 toddlers in Vancouver. Duties: Feeding, housekeeping, cooking meals, maintain a safe environment in home, assisting with bathing and bedtime. High School required and 1 year exp. or 6 mon. professional training. Permanent F/T, $11/h. Optional accommodation available at no charge on a live-in basis. Note: This is not a condition of employment. Please contact Mr. J. Jiang at v63744@gmail.com
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LINE COOK Central City Brewers and Distillers Ltd. Surrey,BC Permanent, F/T, $13.00/hr High School required & 1 year exp Main duties: Prepare & cook complete meals according to recipes, product quality & completed according to Food Safe guidelines. Cleanliness of restaurant & ensure that food & service meet quality control standards. Maintain inventory & records of food, supplies & equipment, establishing methods to meet work schedules. Must have Food Safe Level 1 To apply please send your resume and cover letter to: hr@centralcitybrewing.com
HAIR STYLIST Female Hairdresser Required for salon opposite BC Place, Vancouver. Send resume to frank.khodab@gmail.com or matthouse@live.ca
HOME & GARDEN SERVICES
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DATING SERVICES
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ANNOUNCEMENTS GeorgiaStraight Joe Fortes
COMING EVENTS West End Community Centre Flea Market Sunday, Oct. 23rd! Funds raised from flea markets go to WECC Youth Programs and the King George Secondary School Grad Committee. Flea markets are held in the West End Community Centre Auditorium. Admission is $1/person. 10 am to 3 pm. 870 Denman St. Vancouver
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48 THE GEORGIA STRAIGHT OCTOBER 6 – 13 / 2016
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savage love A question on
your favourite topic, Dan. Just kidding, it’s a question about my vagina. I’m having a problem with the microbiome of my vulva and vagina. I’ve been going to my gyno for the last six months for recurrent bacterial vaginosis and yeast infections. She shrugs, gives me a script, the symptoms go away for a week or so, then they come back. I understand the infections are likely due to an imbalance in my vaginal pH, but I don’t know what to do to fi x this. I’ve used probiotic suppositories to boost the amount of lactobacillus, and these help more than anything else, but the problem remains. I also wear cotton, loose-fitting undies and practise good hygiene and never douche or use anything scented. The problem started when I stopped using condoms with my partner, but it’s not an STI. We’ve both been tested. There’s tons of sites online talking about this problem, but no one has a solution that I’ve found. How the hell can women with this problem fi x their pH?! Thanks a ton if you read this far, and thanks a million tons if you or one of your experts has any ideas to help. > VEXED UND LACKING VAGINAL ANSWERS
“I love that she used the word vulva,” said Debby Herbenick, a research scientist at Indiana University, a sexualhealth educator at the Kinsey Institute, and the author of Read My Lips: A Complete Guide to the Vagina and Vulva and numerous other books. “Most people have no idea what that even is!” I know what that is! (Full disclosure: I know what that is now. I didn’t know what that was when I started writing this column.) The vulva is
(the vulva are?) the external genitalia of the female—the labia, the clit, the vaginal opening, some other bits and pieces. (Fun fact: vulva is Latin for “wrapper”.) The vagina, a.k.a. “the muscular tube”, runs from the vulva to the uterus. (Fun fact: “vagina” is Latin for the sheath of a sword.) People tend to use vagina when referring to a woman’s junk generally, and while meaning follows use and I’m inclined to give it a pass, saying “vagina” when you mean “vulva” makes scientists like Herbenick rather teste. (Sad fact: teste is not the singular form of testes.) Now back to your vulva and vagina, VULVA… Herbenick recommends seeing a “true vulvovaginal health expert” (TVHE) about your problem, VULVA, and your gynecologist, presumably, qualifies as a TVHE…right? “Not necessarily,” said Herbenick. “Gynecologists know far more about vaginal and vulvar health issues than most health-care providers, but many gynecologists haven’t received deepdive (pun not intended) specialized training in difficult-to-treat vulvovaginal health conditions. And if they have, it was likely when they were in med school—so, years ago. They might not be up-to-date in the latest research, since not all doctors go to vulvovaginal-specific conferences.” Is there a fi x for that problem? “Yes! If everyone lobbied for their doctors to go to events like the annual conference of the International Society for the Study of Vulvovaginal Disease (ISSVD),” said Herbenick, “we would live in a country with millions more happy, healthy, sex-interested women and others with vaginas and vulvas, too, like trans men.”
> BY DAN SAVAGE As for your particular problem—a tough case of bacterial vaginosis— Herbenick, who isn’t a medical doctor but qualifies as a TVHE, had some thoughts. “There are many different forms of bacterial vaginosis (BV) and different kinds of yeast infections,” said Herbenick. “These different kinds respond well to different kinds of treatment, which is one reason home yeast meds don’t work well for many women. And all too often, healthcare providers don’t have sufficient training to make fine-tuned diagnoses and end up treating the wrong thing. But if VULVA’s recurrences are frequent, I think it’s a wise idea for her to see a true specialist.” A TVHE is likelier to pinpoint the problem. Even so, Herbenick warns that it may take more than one visit with a TVHE to solve the problem. “I don’t want to overpromise, since BV remains a challenging diagnosis and often does come back at some point,” said Herbenick. “There’s no one-size-fits-all approach to BV, which is also why I think VULVA is best off meeting with a health-care provider who lives and breathes vaginal health issues. The ISSVD is full of health-care providers like that—they’re the Sherlock Holmes of vaginas and vulvas, none of this ‘shrug and here’s a script’ business. VULVA can check out ISSVD.org for more information.”
I have a question about biking and
female genitalia. I’m a woman in my 40s, and I love biking! My husband and I often go for long rides on the weekend. Unfortunately, this makes various parts of my crotch sore, especially the clitoris. Certain bike
seats are better, but none eliminate the soreness. Two years ago, we had a baby, which not only made my crotch more prone to soreness but makes it a lot less likely that we’ll have sex except on weekends, often after biking. The sore clit makes sex more painful, but it also increases sensitivity, so the whole thing can be an alternating experience of “Ow!” and “Wow!” Am I causing my clit any permanent damage by the biking and/or the postbike poking? Any suggestions for decreasing crotch soreness?
To decrease your risk of un-fun genital symptoms, BRITCHES, Herbenick recommends mixing it up. “Go biking some weekends and try other activities on other weekends—maybe hiking or swimming? You might also take Dan’s ‘fuck fi rst’ Valentine’s Day advice and apply it to your weekend rides. And if you’re prone to post-intercourse semen leakage (and, really, who isn’t?) use a condom or have him come elsewhere pre-ride so you don’t have the semen seepage issue to contend with on a long ride. I hope this helps!” > BIKE RELATED INJURY TO CLIT; Follow Debby Herbenick on TwitHELP EASE SORENESS ter @debbyherbenick.
“I love biking, I love vulvas, and I love babies (mine, and I’m sure I would adore BRITCHES’ baby, too!),” said Herbenick, “so I appreciate being asked to chime in on this question. That said, there’s not a ton of research on female genital health in connection with cycling.” There’s far more research on men and cycling, due to the risks of bikeseat-related erectile dysfunction specifically and our society’s tendency to prioritize boners generally. “The few studies that have been conducted on women and cycling—generally cisgender women, as far as I can tell—found that cutout seats are linked with a higher risk of genital symptoms, as are handlebars that are lower than the saddle,” said Herbenick. “So broader saddles and higher handlebars may be the way to go. Some of the research notes higher rates of genital symptoms among people who go on longer rides, spending hours in the saddle.”
YOU CAN HELP: Wherever you fall on the debate about sex work—it should be decriminalized; it shouldn’t be decriminalized—everyone agrees that women who engage in sex work shouldn’t be punished. Yet thousands of women are incarcerated for prostitution or prostitution-related crimes. The Sex Workers Outreach Project (SWOP) has launched a pilot program to help these women. Go to swopbehindbars.org to send a book to an incarcerated sex worker (books are in great demand), become a pen pal, or donate a book to a prison library. Since everyone agrees sex workers shouldn’t be punished, everyone should be able to get behind SWOP Behind Bars. I donated a book to an incarcerated sex worker today—it was easy!—and you can, too. On the Lovecast, Dan talks guns and spit with the “Liberal Redneck” Trae Crowder at savagelovecast.com . Email: mail@savagelove.net. Follow Dan on Twitter @fakedansavage.
The Georgia Straight Confessions, an outlet for submitting revelations about your private lives—or for the voyeurs among us who want to read what other people have disclosed. > Go on-line to read hundreds of I Saw You posts or to respond to a message < TWO PARROTS PERCHED IN A COFFEE SHOP
8:45PM 502 BUS HEADING LANGLEY WAY.
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I SAW A: I AM A: WHEN: OCTOBER 1, 2016 WHERE: Granville & Davie You were sketching designs. I was scanning the festival guide. We were looking out those big windows. It's a great place to people watch. The pedestrians passing by noticed your classic beauty. Giving you a second or third glance the occasional jaw did drop. Oh so stunning, oh so alluring. I'm sure many give praise and tell you are beautiful. Beyond the surface colour of your painted lips, can they see a deeper you? Sitting next to you, I was feeling a tad shy and not wanting to bother. Genuine connections can interrupt our lives in delightful ways. I'm new to the city; I should have said hello. I want to learn about your world. Clothing has a language all of it's own. There is a transformative quality of dressing up. When did you discover your passion for fashion? From where do you draw your influences? If nothing else, I do hope you stumble upon this and realize how your feminine radiance shines. I felt you; I saw you.
POINT ROBERTS YELLOW VW
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I SAW A: I AM A: WHEN: SEPTEMBER 26, 2016 WHERE: 502 Bus Going to Langley You were wearing a big cozy looking, blue sweater. You have your bridge pierced and you were sitting in the far back corner of the 502 headed towards Langley around 8:45-9pm. I was the girl wearing all black and grey drawing in front of you. You were getting off the bus when we made eye contact and then you gave me a silly face as you walked away. I thought you were cute and it would be cool to actually meet, if you ever find this that is. I really should have said hello!
ELEVATOR RIDE WITH A SMILE IN A BEATTY STREET BUILDING
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I SAW A: I AM A: WHEN: SEPTEMBER 28, 2016 WHERE: Beatty Street Building You entered the elevator, my friends and I were messing around making jokes about the padding on the walls. I was being silly and we exchanged smiles. You were on your way to work, I wished I asked what your name was. Coffee sometime?
I SAW A: I AM A: WHEN: OCTOBER 2, 2016 WHERE: Shell Station in Point Roberts
THE PRETTY GIRL WHO LIFTS (AND DOES CROSSFIT LIKE A BOSS)
You stood behind me in line for our packages. Then we passed each other several times on the highway back to Richmond. I admired your determination.
I SAW A: I AM A: WHEN: SEPTEMBER 2, 2016 WHERE: Crossfit Gym in East Van
MYSTERIOUS GUY
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I SAW A: I AM A: WHEN: OCTOBER 2, 2016 WHERE: Kitsilano - West 4th We work on the same street. You have a beautiful smile. Sometimes we talk a lot, and other times we don’t talk a lot. You’ve noticed when I’ve been away for a while, and or when I am doing a different job at my store. You are tall with dark-features. This is a long shot, but if you see this. I’d really like to see you in a more private setting, maybe for coffee?
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You do crossfit, you lift heavy things. You work out at the same gym as I do. You’re blonde with spacers and the cutest smile. This is a long shot but maybe we could go out?
HARVESTHAUS BEAUTY WITH LONG DARK HAIR
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I SAW A: I AM A: WHEN: OCTOBER 1, 2016 WHERE: Vancouver Harvesthaus You came over and linked arms with us for one of the songs. Loved your spirit and your smile. Tell me more about our encounter and lets link arms for a night on the town.
STARBUCKS AT METROTOWN
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CUTE SMILE GREY KNIT SWEATER
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I SAW A: I AM A: WHEN: OCTOBER 1, 2016 WHERE: Metrotown Starbucks (by SkyTrain) You were in front of me in the line up at Starbucks. We were waiting for so long because the lady in front was dealing with her online banking while paying. You were wearing gray gym shirt/shorts lined with neon green (Asian - 5’11 athletic build) buying a psl pack, holding gifts and wrapping paper. I was standing right behind you looking not impressed (in a suit) but trying hard to look nice because you were so cute. I’d love to take you out for coffee!
LOTION SAMPLES AT WHOLE FOODS
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I SAW A: I AM A: WHEN: SEPTEMBER 30, 2016 WHERE: Whole foods Burnaby You’re the gorgeous, sweet girl who was sampling lotions at Whole Foods Burnaby. Would like to meet up and show you how pretty my skin has become :)
CUTE BUTTON BOY
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I SAW A: I AM A: WHEN: OCTOBER 1, 2016 WHERE: Main & 6th I was working on Main and 6th and you came in with a bearded buddy to buy a snack. You (somewhat nervously?) made conversation about your buttons from HotArt, I thought you were cute. You sat around with your friend for a while and waved goodbye when you left. Maybe I’m crazy or maybe you would want to grab a drink?
SKYTRAIN. SEPTEMBER29 MIDNIGHT
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I SAW A: I AM A: WHEN: SEPTEMBER 30, 2016 WHERE: SkyTrain I think you watched me the entire train ride then you got off at Royal Oak and motioned for me to get off. I would have missed my bus connection or I would have. This is a long shot I was the girl in the single seat in a purple shirt you were in a suit and have a cute smile. This is a long shot but I would regret it if I didn't. Coffee?
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I SAW A: I AM A: WHEN: SEPTEMBER 30, 2016 WHERE: SkyTrain On the SkyTrain this evening, you got on the train with your friend. You: nice dark blue jeans, grey knit sweater very sweet smile Asian guy, you kept yawning. Me: all black, shorts, tattoos, bear. didn’t want to bother you :) your friend got off at science world we transferred at Commercial. Would like to grab a drink/ dinner some time
209 VANCOUVER BUS
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I SAW A: I AM A: WHEN: OCTOBER 1, 2016 WHERE: 209 Vancouver Bus Saw you sitting with a friend on the 209 Vancouver bus from Lynn Valley. Blue ball cap, white shoes, and a black jacket. You were 10/10 and I wish I said something as I got off!!!!
KINGSGATE BUY-LOW FOODS
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I SAW A: I AM A: WHEN: OCTOBER 1, 2016 WHERE: Kingsgate Buy-Low Foods You look like a sexier Johnny Depp/Javier Bardem. I said “thanks” for holding the door and you slyly replied “no problem, it’s actually automatic”. I wanted to keep the conversation going but I was mortified cause I should not have been in public cause I was essentially naked under my coat. Long story, hopefully we can chat about it over your bag of cheese buns.
JOEL AT EASTSIDE FLEA
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I SAW A: I AM A: WHEN: SEPTEMBER 25, 2016 WHERE: The Ellis building on Main We chat ted about Lighthouse Labs and the Yukon. Like a true Darbyshire gentleman, you gave me your number but you must have mis-typed it, because it led to a text from someone named Yoko ?? My reply was ‘O no’. Hope you see this, would love to go for a coffee.
Visit straight.com to post your FREE I Saw You _
Scan to coonfess Sleep for coffee Since coffee keeps me up at night I only drink it in the morning. This may indicate my life is incredibly sad, but sometimes in the late evening I start feeling like I can’t wait to go to bed so I can wake up to have coffee.
Art Imitates Life At least I know that when I’ve moved away form Vancouver, I can always watch any crappy sci-fi show and see views of my old home.
You know that feeling... when you look at your life and you just wonder, how did I get here?
drinks Confession Two today: I can’t drink anymore. I went out with my friends on Saturday and had two beers and had a way better time, remember everything, didn’t spend a ridiculous amount of money, and didn’t feel like a bag of garbage that burst all over the side of the road the next day. Two beers is the key to an enjoyable but not overwrought good time!
tickets I saw Dinosaur Jr at the Commodore on Friday and, quiet vocals aside, it was one of the best rock concerts I think I’ve ever seen in my life. The best part was it was only 40 bucks, not cheap, but also not the eye-gouging prices that I seem to be forced to pay to see way less powerful acts from the peanut seats, going through the motions at Rogers Arena.
Alley cat... There is this cat that lives in my back alley. He has no tail, he is black n white, and is not a big cat, but he has swagger!! I often wonder if just came back from getting some...at least one of is satisfied!? I’ve named him the pussy whisperer...
ok so Why is it so hard to get laid? I’m not that picky.
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