The Georgia Straight - Chutzpah Festival - Oct 17, 2019

FREE | OCTOBER 17 – 24 / 2019

Volume 53 | Number 2700

ANG LEE

Director invents the future

LA TRAVIATA Opera meets Jazz Age

BIG THIEF

Produces deadly double-header

Chutzpah Festival Sandra Bernhard is back with a freewheeling musical-comedy mashup; plus, live film scores and dance

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11

COVER

The divine Sandra Bernhard talks about social media, fame, and performing on the fly at Chutzpah.

By Andrea Warner Cover photo by Brian Ziegler

7

NEWS

Hotel worker Yleine Demasana explains why many room attendants dislike the Green Choice program.

HAVE YOU BEEN TO...

Denman Bikes denmanbikeshop.com

By Charlie Smith

9

BOOKS

Anna Mehler Paperny confronts Canada’s broken system of mental-health care in Hello I Want to Die Please Fix Me.

By Travis Lupick

20 MOVIES

Oscar winner Ang Lee embraces the newest tech and clones Will Smith for his 3-D action flick Gemini Man.

By Adrian Mack

23 MUSIC

FRIGHT NIGHTS WHERE SCREAMS COME TRUE

With U.F.O.F. and Two Hands, Big Thief has pulled off the impressive feat of making two of the year’s best albums.

By Mike Usinger

e Start Here 18 ARTS HOT TICKET 10 BEER 23 CONFESSIONS 9 FOOD 8 HOROSCOPES 18 I SAW YOU 19 MOVIE REVIEWS 24 MUSIC PREVIEW 27 SAVAGE LOVE e Listings 18 ARTS 25 MUSIC

e Online TOP 5

Here’s what people are reading this week on Straight.com.

1 2 3 4 5

e Services 25 CLASSIFIEDS

Vancouver’s News and Entertainment Weekly Volume 53 | Number 2700

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Poll suggests Jagmeet Singh is most popular federal leader.

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The Georgia Straight is published every Thursday by the Vancouver Free Press Publishing Corp. Copies are distributed free every week throughout Vancouver, Burnaby, North and West Vancouver, New Westminster, and Richmond. International Standard Serial Number ISSN 0709-8995. Subscription rates in Canada $182.00/52 issues (includes GST), $92.00/26 issues (includes GST); United States $379.00/52 issues, $205.00/26 issues; foreign $715.00/52 issues, $365.00/26 issues. Contact 604-730-7087 if you wish to distribute free copies of the Georgia Straight at your place of business. Entire contents copyright © 2019 Vancouver Free Press, Best Of Vancouver, Bov And Golden Plates Are Trade-Marks Of Vancouver Free Press Publishing Corp. SUBMISSIONS The Straight accepts no responsibility for, and will not necessarily respond to, any submitted materials. All submissions should be addressed to contact@straight.com.

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NEWS

Room cleaners united in hotel strike

W

by Charlie Smith

hen NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh visited a picket line outside the Westin Bayshore Hotel on October 14, it brought national media attention to a strike that had entered its fourth week. Singh’s presence buoyed the spirits of members of Local 40 of Unite Here, who are also on strike at the Hyatt Regency, Rosewood Hotel Georgia, and Pinnacle Hotel Harbourfront.

One of those workers at the Westin Bayshore, Yleine Demasana, has been a room attendant since 2014. In an interview with the Georgia Straight, she brought up one aspect of the strike that hasn’t attracted nearly as much attention as the union’s wage demands or court orders limiting workers from being noisy on the picket line.

Marriott International, which is Westin’s parent company, offers guests vouchers and loyalty points if they decline housekeeping services under its Green Choice program.

And it’s having a terrible impact on some housekeeping staff’s livelihoods, according to Demasana.

“As a room attendant, I was getting five days a week scheduled,” she said. “But two years after [being hired], it gets bad because of this Green Choice…where I’m only getting two days a week scheduled.”

Demasana, who immigrated from the Philippines in 2008, explained that guests who are enrolled in the Green Choice program might go three days or longer without having their rooms cleaned.

“Well, in my opinion, it’s just moneymaking for the company,” she said. “Because with the Green Choice, the guest is still paying the same amount of daily rate for the room but the expense is lesser because [managers] don’t have to pay a room attendant to do their room.”

Room attendant Yleine Demasana says a hotel’s “green” program has cut her work drastically and is less about the environment than it is about saving money.

Demasana said that when one of these rooms is cleaned, it’s invariably dirtier and requires the use of more chemicals to get rid of any stains.

“It’s all mouldy, especially in the washroom,” she revealed. “And it stinks a lot. Everywhere.”

On occasion, Demasana said, a guest will leave the room in reasonable shape, but most of the time it takes much longer to clean if they’re enrolled in the Green Choice program. This is especially so if they’ve brought pets into their room.

“If it’s a single-bed room, it will take us an hour to finish it,” she said.

“But there are rooms with double beds, so it’s like an hour and a half.”

On October 15, Unite Here announced a tentative agreement for a four-year contract with the Westin Bayshore, Hyatt Regency, and Pinnacle Hotel Harbourfront, with more job security and enhanced protection against sexual harassment. There’s no deal at the Rosewood Hotel Georgia.

Under the expired collective agreement, room attendants were assigned to clean up to 15 rooms per day in an eight-hour shift. This means that they had to complete each room in a half-hour, even for guests who opted for Green Choice.

“Green is money, it’s not about environment,” Demasana claimed.

“It doesn’t help [the] environment.

It helps only the hotel to get more income and cut labour in our housekeeping department.”

Demasana also said that the work is physically demanding. She revealed that she feels pain in her body when she wakes up in the morning, especially in her shoulders, so she does stretching exercises before going to work. She also expressed fears about what all this physical labour will do to her body as she gets older.

Fortunately, her husband is working as a roofer so they’re able to pay the bills. But her son had to take a student loan to attend a 10-month automotive course because Demasana’s income didn’t leave enough in the household budget.

The president of the union, Zailda Chan, told the Straight that the members could have chosen to settle for 50 or 60 cents an hour but they sacrificed in the short term for their long-term future.

“I’m very proud,” she said. “This strike has changed all of us. It’s changed every striker on the picket line. It tells the hotel: don’t underestimate us.” g

Vote daily with your bank acount.

Join www.ccec.bc.ca

604.254.4100

CCEC acknowledges that we are on the unceded ancestral territories of the Coast Salish people OCTOBER 17 – 24 / 2019 THE GEORGIA STR AIGHT 7

Giving up luxury for sustainability (This story is sponsored

by VictorEric.)

A

wareness of more sustainable lifestyle practices may be growing, but drastic action has to be taken if we are to even begin to tackle the monumental threat of climate change.

That’s because everything, from the food we eat to the buildings in which we live and work, can be doing longterm damage to the environment.

Fortunately, there are lots of ways we can make a positive impact, one of which is by starting from the ground up. One business that is raising the bar in terms of what we can expect from our houses and the way they are built is VictorEric. The Vancouverbased company designs and builds custom luxury homes that meet the highest standards of sustainability.

VictorEric was recently recognized by international publication Build Review in its 2019 Sustainable Building Awards. The prestigious awards aim to acknowledge the businesses that work to ensure the global community decreases its collective carbon footprint. VictorEric won best high-performance home design/ build company for its commitment to building houses that are healthy, comfortable, and energy efficient.

VictorEric’s certified Passive House design-build team has spent the past 15 years creating amazing cutting-edge spaces for its clients.

The performance standard of the Passive House is two to three times as strict as conventional code-built houses due to a better performing building envelope, an airtight barrier, a high efficiency heat-recovery ventilator (HRV) system, and highperforming windows and doors. All building components of a home built to the Passive House standard requires testing by the Passive House Institute in Germany before it can be deemed as certified.

The B.C. Energy Step Code, which the government enacted in April 2017, is a voluntary provincial standard outlining an incremental and consistent approach to achieving energy-efficient buildings that go beyond the requirements of the base B.C. Building Code.

At present, builders can choose whether to adopt the code’s series of measurable, performance-based requirements for construction, but bylaw changes will make this mandatory by 2030— with the goal of making all buildings net-zero energy-emitting by 2032.

That means that anyone who is buying a home, working in real-estate development, or concerned with saving the planet should be thinking about future-proofing their properties so they don’t fall out of compliance. The heating and cooling cost savings alone make high-performance homes more cost-effective, not to mention the improved resale value.

Homes certified as Passive House can be complemented with solar roof panels that result in free electrical (EV) charging, making it very easy to achieve net zero performance. They can also come with fully automated climate control using natural light flow, as well as the ability to return energy to the grid and create potential to earn money on your home.

As the recent award demonstrates,

VictorEric’s purpose is to revolutionize the industry by creating amazing spaces that are both sustainable and beautiful. Those who are interested in learning more about the core principles of attractive Passive House design and energy-efficiency regulation in Vancouver are invited to VictorEric’s public-service seminar entitled “Future home—don’t let upcoming bylaw changes strip your home of its value”.

The event—taking place from 1 p.m. to 3 p.m. in the Vancity Room at Kitsilano Neighbourhood House (2305 West 7th Avenue) on October 26—is free to attend and important for anyone interested in being the change they want to see in the world. Anyone concerned with the combined impact of noise pollution, jet fuel and other environmental issues related to the airport expansion should contact us to be included in our invitation-only special event for Richmond and other city officials and other conservation groups—Finding Peace in The Flight Path coming up in November. g To learn more about the Passive House standards, energy efficiency, or how you can own a high-performance home, visit VictorEric’s website at victoreric.com/highperformance/. Or contact VictorEric at 604677-0021 to reserve a seat at the futurehome seminar.

HOROSCOPES OCTOBER 17 TO 23, 2019

C

by Rose Marcus

anadians elect their prime minister on Monday (October 21). Holding court over the peak of Monday, Venus/ Neptune makes for a mostly good flow, smooth running, and perhaps a quiet day. While the advance polling during last weekend’s full moon has siphoned off steam from election day, Venus in Scorpio (Mercury too) suggests that high stakes remain and that a significant gamble is in the works.

Mars in Libra, a many-contenders and many-factors influence, is in critical alignment to the karmic axis.

Results hang in the balance. Venus in Scorpio trine Neptune retrograde suggests electing “the devil you know” but diminishing his power. Justin is under the influence of the solar eclipse on his birthday (December 25). Being the chosen one holds plus and minus under that eclipse; he does not get a free pass. Venus in Scorpio, a betrayal archetype, states that the people’s trust is greatly compromised.

My prediction? Everybody wins, except for Trudeau, who loses but still wins. A minority Liberal government is likely. The sun advances into Scorpio on Wednesday, setting a productive backdrop for the rest of the week.

A

ARIES

March 20–April 20

You’ll start to gain a better sense of what’s more important or worth your while, where the finish line or boundary sits. Saturday/Sunday, the pressure is on. You can feel spent.

Monday/Tuesday, a breakthrough in clarity or opportunity moves you past a dilemma, setting you on your way.

Watch for things to flow, go, or work out, perhaps surprisingly well.

B

TAURUS

April 20–May 21

The end of the week keeps you juggling, perhaps more than you’d prefer. Friday can provide you with a better clue, a fresh insight, avenue, or incentive. Saturday/Sunday, stick with a safe bet or familiar choice. Take extra time with folks and to sort it out. Don’t let fear of the future drag you down.

C

GEMINI

May 21–June 21

Thursday/Friday, you’ll gain a second wind. The moon in Gemini keeps you in full swing. Saturday/ Sunday, don’t take on more than you feel comfortable with. You’ll get just as much out of it when you go with the flow. Monday/Tuesday, your mood is sunny-side up. The moon in Leo provides you with a confidence boost.

D

CANCER

June 21–July 22

Take your mind off it with a good book, a movie, or what have you on Friday. There’s no lack of entertainment choices to distract you from the work or worry. Saturday/Sunday, the Cancer moon sets you onto a bounceback. Despite whatever or whoever is holding you up, Venus/Neptune keeps the door open on potential and opportunity through the start of next week.

E

LEO

July 22–August 23

An evening out or in, Friday night’s entertainment offers good distraction from the week just past.

Saturday/Sunday, take your time; go by feel; replenish as best you can.

You’ll have to build up to it before you’ll feel ready or fully functional.

Monday/Tuesday, the moon in Leo has you hitting all systems go. You’ll also gain favour from Venus/Neptune.

F

VIRGO

G

LIBRA

H

SCORPIO

I

SAGITTARIUS

J

CAPRICORN

K

AQUARIUS

L

PISCES

August 23–September 23

Now through the weekend, aim for short, simple, economical, and efficient. Keep expectations real. Monday should prove smooth-running.

You can feel an energy or confidence boost as the day finishes out. Tuesday onward, you’ll gain better traction.

Starting Wednesday, the Scorpio sun helps you to get a better fix on it.

September 23–October 23

Friday brings the workweek to a relatively smooth finish. Family and the must-do list keep your weekend full to the brim. You can only do so much; don’t sweat the rest. Venus/ Neptune keeps Monday rolling along. After work and into Tuesday, the stars hit an energy perk-it-up.

October 23–November 22

There is always another way to see it, say it, do it, or play it. Step away from it Friday night and enjoy something entertaining. Well-placed effort is never wasted but it does you no good to force it, push yourself unnecessarily, or get knotted up about it. Saturday through Monday, Mercury and Venus in Scorpio keep you sharp and going strong.

November 22–December 21

Thursday/Friday keeps it going strong. You’ll cover plenty of ground. Saturday/Sunday, feel your way along; put personal needs first.

Timing is important. Step in where necessary. Monday/Tuesday starts the week on a positive. The Leo moon and Venus/Neptune boosts confidence and opportunity.

December 21–January 20

Thursday/Friday, a repeat or replay could work out well. Saturday/ Sunday, you are likely to be feeling it more than you let on. To the plus, an emotional connection is readily made.

Monday, Venus/Neptune keeps creativity and potential in good flow. Monday evening through Tuesday, you’ll gain a fresh boost. The Leo moon puts a positive spin on it.

January 20–February 18

The Gemini moon keeps you going full tilt as the workweek finishes. Easygoing suits you well Friday night. Saturday/Sunday, avoid the extra effort or work as best you can. Replenish and recharge. Monday/Tuesday, show up and shine. You stand to gain.

February 18–March 20

You’ll connect the dots readily and well. Friday night, stay in; invite a friend or two over. Saturday/Sunday, go by feel. Emotions and creative inspiration run the show. Monday/ Tuesday, you’ve got great sway. Venus/ Neptune heightens intuition, creativity, appeal, and opportunity. Good feedback comes your way. g

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8 THE GEORGIA STR AIGHT OCTOBER 17 – 24 / 2019

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BOOKS

FOOD

Memoir breaks mental-health stigma Fall food events to look forward to in Metro Van

T

by Travis Lupick

he name Anna Mehler Paperny will ring familiar to Canadian news junkies.

She’s a prolific and awardwinning journalist who has spent the past decade scooping stories for the Globe and Mail, Global News, and her current employer, Reuters, among others. She’s also often on social media under the handle @amp6.

I’ve followed Mehler Paperny on Twitter since 2009 or 2010, my interest caught by an overlap in the topics we cover and her consistent ability to bring original ideas and fresh angles to my attention. In the years that followed, we occasionally replied to each other’s public messages and once or twice compared notes in DMs. During all that time, I never had the faintest idea that Mehler Paperny was fighting for her life.

The first time she tried to kill herself—as Mehler Paperny recounts in her new book, Hello I Want to Die Please Fix Me: Depression in the First Person—it was with a cocktail of sleeping pills and antifreeze. “What scares me most is what I don’t remember,” she writes. “Waking fuzzily in the ICU days later, Velcro ties strapping my wrists and forearms to cold metal railings ringing the bed.…

I discovered I was wearing a hospital gown and attached to a catheter (the latter, especially, not something you want to take you by surprise).”

With blunt honesty, relatable humour, and a journalist’s insatiable curiosity and research skills, the Vancouver-raised, Toronto-based author takes readers along on an expansive investigation of depression, suicide, and our best attempts to treat mental illness.

Since the age of 24, Mehler Paperny has tried eight times to take her own life. She was briefly institutionalized for her own protection. She’s cycled

Anna Mehler Paperny struggled with depression. Photo by Derek O’Donnell

It shows how far we need to come in terms of treating this like a real illness.

– Anna Mehler Paperny

through 14 different medications in dozens of different combinations.

“Some drugs made me trembly, some made me antsy, one made me sweaty,” she writes. “One made me sneeze endlessly; some made me nauseous, especially on an empty stomach, especially with an espresso on an empty stomach, which makes for less than pleasant morning commutes.”

In a phone interview, Mehler Paperny laughs when I suggest she’s gained unique insight into Canada’s

mental-health-care system. I ask her, how do we fix it? She laughs again. Before we attempt to improve or overhaul mental-health care, Mehler Paperny explains, we first have to do a much better job facilitating access to the existing system. “What we have is not good enough, but we’re not even getting what we have to the people who need it,” she says.

“Psychotherapy is only covered if you get it from a medical doctor, which would be reasonable if it were easy to access medical doctors who can provide psychotherapy, but, so frequently, it is not,” Mehler Paperny continues.

“Also, unless you have specialized insurance, drugs aren’t covered. So the two main treatment methods that we have for mental illness—pharmacotherapy and psychotherapy—are not automatically covered by Canada’s health-care system.”

The tone of Hello I Want to Die is often light or casual to a degree that would be painfully insensitive if Mehler Paperny were writing about anyone but herself. But her quick wit and self-deprecating jokes effectively break through the stigma that too often inhibits open discussions of severe mental illness and suicide.

And we must destroy that stigma, she says, because it has very real consequences—for example, Canada’s failure to adequately fund mentalhealth care and make it accessible.

“It shows how far we need to come in terms of treating this like a real illness,” Mehler Paperny adds. “We pay for things that we take seriously, and right now, we are not taking this seriously.” g Anna Mehler Paperny will appear at the Vancouver Writers Fest on Tuesday (October 22). Anyone feeling distress can call the Crisis Line (604-872-3311) or visit a hospital emergency room.

There are lots of options for those in the mood to dine

T

by Tammy Kwan

he leaves are turning auburn, thick sweaters and blanket scarves are being pulled out of the closet, and restaurant menus have switched from patio happy-hour specials to cozy, belly-warming plates. From a 10-day restaurant event to limited-edition menus, there’s no shortage of good eats around the city this fall. Here are four seasonal events and menus for food lovers to check out this month.

TASTE OF YALETOWN

The 15th annual Taste of Yaletown runs October 17 to 27, when a handful of restaurants in the busy neighbourhood will serve up multicourse menus at various set prices ($35, $45, $55)— similar to the Dine Out Vancouver Festival. This year’s theme is “happy hour”, and foodies can expect to find many eateries offering small dishes and drinks from a special happy-hour menu. The participating restaurants include Brix and Mortar, Flying Pig, House Special, Provence Marinaside, Rodney’s Oyster House, the Greek by Anatoli, WildTale, Yaletown Distilling Company, and more.

30TH-ANNIVERSARY MENU AT SEASONS IN THE PARK

smoked black cod, grass-fed tenderloin, carrot cake, chocolate-mousse cake, and more.

BEER MEETS GRILL POP-UP DINNER

Blue Hat Bistro at the Pacific Institute of Culinary Arts on Granville Island will be hosting a familystyle barbecue dinner, Beer Meets Grill ($90 per person, plus taxes and gratuity), on October 29. The meal will feature craft-certified beer pairings from Deep Cove Brewers and Distillers, and guests will enjoy items like cold-smoked house-made gravlax, grilled little fish, smoked hasselback squash with bay laurel, blackened carrots on the grill, charcoal-roasted porterhouse, and smoky rosemary potatoes. The meal ends with some beer floats made with salted-caramel ice cream, chocolate-coconut porter, and double-chocolate-chip cookies.

FALL HARVEST MENU AT HART HOUSE RESTAURANT

Burnaby’s lakeside dining establishment, Hart House Restaurant, will be offering a special fall harvest menu ($36 per person, plus taxes and gratuity) through October 31. The threecourse menu celebrates fall’s bounty, featuring culinary creations like butternut squash soup, sous-vide beef brisket, and herb-crusted snapper. To finish, guests can choose dark-chocolate banana ganache or strawberry balsamic pannacotta.

Queen Elizabeth Park’s restaurant, Seasons in the Park, will be celebrating its long run with a special 30thanniversary menu from October 16 to November 30. The three-course prix fixe menu ($49 per person, plus taxes and gratuity) will bring back favourites and classic dishes from the dining spot’s original menu We can’t think of a better way from 1989. Guests will get to choose to ring in autumn than with good from dishes like beef carpaccio, food. g

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DRINK

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New seal will signify indie craft beers

W

by Carlito Pablo

ith many craft beer brands owned by large brewing corporations, it’s not always easy to tell which ones are independent.

That is about to change when the Canadian Craft Brewers Association (CCBA) launches a new seal during an industry conference in Vancouver.

The independent craft seal will appear on cans and bottles, signifying that the beer was produced by someone who is not part of the conglomerates collectively known as Big Beer.

“It allows the consumers to support local wherever they go,” CCBA founding member Ken Beattie told the Georgia Straight in a phone interview. Beattie is also the executive director of the B.C. Craft Brewers Guild (BCCBG), which is hosting a craft brewers’ conference where the seal will be launched.

The B.C. Craft Brewers Conference is happening on October 17 and 18 at the Harbour Convention Centre (760 Pacific Boulevard).

“A lot of the foreign-owned domestic breweries buy local breweries, and people don’t know that,” Beattie said.

The CCBA was established in May this year. The organization represents more than 700 independent craft breweries across the country.

Hops are an essential ingredient of beer, and a symbol of the plant’s bud is incorporated in the CCBA seal. On its website, the association explains that the seal signifies quality, taste innovation, community-building, independence, and pride and passion.

According to the group, craft breweries are generally small operations and are not controlled by large companies.

In B.C., membership in the guild is limited to brewers who produce less than 200,000 hectolitres per year. A hectolitre is equivalent to 100 litres.

Bauhaus sets a new standard for refined dining in Vancouver. Owned

by German film director Uwe Boll, the award-winning restaurant is known for its modern take on German cuisine and attention to detail. With Bauhaus Restaurant’s seasonal tasting menu, diners are able to mix and match their choices from a three- to six-course meal that will take them through the tasteful journey of European cuisine seen through West Coast eyes.

Bauhaus Restaurant’s executive chef, Christian Kuehnel, had the opportunity to work at some of the best international restaurants, including Dinner by Heston Blumenthal in London, listed on the World’s Top 50 Best Restaurants, and Spices, owned by Tim Raue and featured on the Netflix series Chef’s Table. By joining the Bauhaus team, Christian is continuing on his passion to explore what modern cuisine is while he builds relationships with the best local and organic suppliers from the Pacific Coast. “I want to show how far German cuisine has come— and how far it can go”, he says. You are welcome to discover the tastes of modern German cuisine with Bauhaus Restaurant’s seasonal menus.

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The Canadian Craft Brewers Association’s Ken Beattie says consumers will be able to tell if beers are linked to foreign-owned conglomerates. Photo by Amanda Siebert

The foreign-owned domestic breweries buy local breweries, and people don’t know that.

– Ken Beattie

The B.C. association has 165 members.

Beattie noted that independent brewers are valued because they create jobs in their communities. In addition, the wealth they create stays in the community, unlike with those that are owned by big beer corporations.

Brewers in good standing in provincial associations like Beattie’s

BCCBG will be able to use the CCBA independent craft seal.

The 2019 B.C. craft brewers’ conference is expected to draw more than 600 participants from across North America.

One of the keynote speakers at the event is Steve Beauchesne, who cofounded Beau’s All Natural Brewing Co. with his father, Tim, in 2006. The Ontario brewing company is owned by employees through an employee share ownership program.

Dubbed the B.C. Beer Con, the conference is a highlight of this year’s October celebration of craftbeer month in the province.

B.C. Craft Beer Month offers plenty of opportunities for people to experience the appeal of craft brews, which is taste. g Visit the B.C. Craft Beer Month website at bccraftbeermonth.com to see a list of events taking place this month.

chutzpah fest

Sandra Bernhard adds song to standup

S

by Andrea Warner

andra Bernhard is even cooler than you think.

The 64-year-old actorcomedian got her television start on the short-lived Richard Pryor Show in 1977, appeared in Martin Scorsese’s The King of Comedy in 1983, hit the mainstream in the 1990s with a supporting role on Roseanne (during which Bernhard became one of the first openly bisexual people to play a bisexual character), and is currently featured on the groundbreaking FX series Pose. Throughout her 40-plus years in show business, Bernhard has also performed one-woman shows on Broadway and off-Broadway, written three books, and released more than a dozen albums, and since 2015 she’s been recording her own Sirius XM show called Sandyland on Radio Andy, Andy Cohen’s radio channel.

These milestones of fame have helped cement Bernhard as one of the greats, even if she doesn’t quite get the recognition she deserves. In part, she doesn’t want it. She’s not very interested in adulation or the Hollywood machine.

“Maybe I didn’t get all the roles I wanted, because I wasn’t the girl next door or the ingénue or the sex bomb, but so be it,” Bernhard tells the Straight over the phone from her home. “I’ve had my freedom. I’ve been doing this for a long time, I still feel very vital and very relevant, and I’ve never pigeonholed myself. I’ve also never made myself the victim of the business. When you do your own work, and you can go on the road and you can make money, you’re always your own person. And that’s not an easy lifestyle by any stretch of the imagination. But you have the tradeoff between that and being, like, totally harassed and tortured by somebody.”

Bernhard arrived in L.A. in the mid-’70s. She describes it as a “much, much, much different world”, but, in retrospect, she was lucky.

“I never really had any super traumatic experiences of the #MeToo nature,” Bernhard says. “Of course I got hit on and of course people harassed me a little bit, but I always deflected it with my humour.”

Humour was always one of Bernhard’s best assets. It was a means of escape, a place from which she could cultivate freedom, and it came pretty easily to her. But she didn’t actually want to do standup when she started out.

“By the time I actually got to L.A.

The most important thing for me is that it’s a song that I can tell a story with.

– Sandra Bernhard

Actor-comedian Sandra Bernhard always looked up to entertainers like Barbra Streisand and Bette Midler. Photo by Brian Ziegler

and got on my feet, I kind of just got sent in the direction of standup comedy, even though it really wasn’t my first love,” Bernhard recalls. “My first love was singing. Then people said, ‘Oh, you’re really funny, you’re a natural, so do that and then you can add singing,’ which is what I did. I kind of did it backwards.”

Bernhard wanted to be like Carol Channing, Barbra Streisand, or Bette Midler—funny, complicated women whose spiky genius, artistry, and ambition established them as the ultimate triple threats: musical-comedy actors.

“Music has always been something to me that’s laid the foundation for all my emotions, and all my writing, and just kind of everything in my life,” Bernhard says. “My taste in music is eclectic, it’s all over the place. But the most important thing for me is that it’s a song that I can tell a story with. And that can be just about anything if the lyrics are right. Even if it’s a trashy song or something you wouldn’t expect me to do, if I can do something different with it and turn it on its ear, that’s what I’ve set out to accomplish.”

Bernhard has been crafting musicalcomedy shows since 1985 with her music director, Mitch Kaplan. For the last several years, they’ve put together an annual gig at Joe’s Pub in New York City around Christmas, which they then take out on the road. When Bernhard returns to Vancouver for

the Chutzpah Festival, she’ll be joined

by Kaplan and her West Coast bandmates. She says this concert will be an amalgamation of the best parts of her annual cabaret acts from the last few

years, with plenty of improvised additions reflecting on whatever catches Bernhard’s eyes or ears that day—or even in the moment.

She worries that social media,

Chutzpah TIP SHEET

d MM CONTEMPORARY DANCE COMPANY (November 1 and 2 at the Rothstein) Based in Reggio Emilia, Italy, this honed troupe made a splash with its strange, unsettling imagery and physically pummelling dance at last year’s fest. This time out, it tackles the music of Franz Schubert and Gershwin suites.

The Chutzpah Festival’s celebration of Jewish culture takes over the Norman and Annette Rothstein Theatre and other venues for an entire month, from October 24 to November 24.

Amid the music, theatre, dance, comedy, and other offerings, here are some highlights: d AVEVA (November 14 at the Rickshaw Theatre) The Ethiopian-Israeli singer and songwriter (shown here) finds a beat-driven cultural fusion that she dubs “Afro-soul”.

d DIARY OF ANNE FRANK LATINX (November 6 to 9 at the Rothstein) Jewish American director Stan Zimmerman casts Hispanic actors in the iconic story, hinting at Latin-American families hiding out from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. d YEMEN BLUES—HALLEL (November 9 at the Rickshaw) Expect the dance floor to fill up with gyrating bodies as these hyperenergized Chutzpah favourites present a one-of-akind mashup of Yemenite Jewish culture and Afro-funk groove. g

texting, and emailing have stripped people of their spontaneity. To her, texting is a “very destructive way of communicating, and I think that’s why I’m so verbal.

“I like to be either on the phone or in the room with somebody,” she continues. “Texting and emailing is just a way of conveniently getting my work done. I don’t like talking to my friends like that, so I wouldn’t like talking to my audience that way either. To not try to escape the responsibility of being one-on-one with people—it takes a certain kind of discipline.”

Being present is important to Bernhard, and she prides herself on being able to adapt on the fly.

“Things never get boring for me,” says Bernhard, whose act often strays from her written material. “It doesn’t become rote. If I want to kind of go off the beaten path, I will. I’ll go off on a tangent and come back to the material.

That’s how my work has always been, which keeps it very freewheeling and fun—a big difference between doing my own work and doing a TV show or a film, or from a script and there’s other actors, and you kind of have to adhere to what’s in front of you. Which is my least favourite thing to do when it comes to my own work. So I keep it very fluid and always keep it open.”

That openness extends to her own humour. Bernhard doesn’t have much time for those whining about comedy being “too politically correct”.

“Everybody wants somebody to acknowledge them and just give them the room and space to exist,” Bernhard says. “That’s really at the core of what people are looking for, and what I like to honour people with.” g Sandra Bernhard presents Quick Sand at the Vogue Theatre on October 31 as part of the Chutzpah Festival.

Troupe finds way to dance with Beethoven

F

by Janet Smith

or 10 years, Toronto choreographers Roberto Campanella and Robert Glumbek have been creating a work set to Ludwig van Beethoven’s famous Symphony No. 9 in D Minor—“the Ninth”. And at this point they’re more aware than ever of how monumental the undertaking is.

“It was frightening then and it’s even more frightening now,” former National Ballet of Canada dancer Campanella says, laughing, on a break from rehearsals at his company ProArteDanza’s Toronto headquarters. “It’s big. It’s epic.

“It’s had such a political and social impact over the centuries. It’s in the consciousness of a lot of people on the planet,” adds the affable artist. “It’s a masterpiece, to say the least, and here we are, trying to do it justice. That was the motto for Robert and I, to at least do it justice—and we are humbly saying this.”

ProArteDanza brings a symphonic classic to new The pair of long-time collaborators created life in The 9th! Photo by Aleksandar Antonijevic a piece set to the iconic symphony’s first movement a decade ago, and from there, movement tire symphony that will make its world premiere by movement, they have worked their way up at the Chutzpah Festival here. “Robert and I ask to The 9th!, the full-evening piece for the en- dancers to take risks all the time, but Robert and

I are also on the hot seat,” says Campanella, who choreographed for the Oscar-winning film The Shape of Water.

What Campanella and Glumbek have been working against, in part, is the famous work’s long reputation as a piece that’s impossible to dance to. That’s largely because of its daunting musical structures.

“There are fugues all the time, and you either swim through the music or you are a part of the score, and in that case there’s a great deal of details and it becomes tedious,” Campanella says.

Instead, the key for this creative team has been making the pulsing, athletic work for eight dancers an emotional journey, and drawing on the ways it has been associated with political and social action through history. One epic event the choreographers refer to specifically is the fall of the Berlin Wall. Years ago, while working in the German capital, Campanella was struck by an image he saw during a tour of the wall’s remnants. In the photo, taken during the barrier’s earliest stages as barbed wire, a family looks through the fence from the

East German side to another on the West side.

“And the body language was so different,” he explains. “The family in the East had a weight to their body language.”

He and Glumbek decided to weave the idea of the Berlin Wall coming down, as well as metaphors about our own internal walls, into the piece. This was before they found out Beethoven’s Ninth had been played throughout by Leonard Bernstein in honour of the wall’s razing in 1989.

Audiences will be able to read history and emotion into the work, but one thing Campanella hopes they won’t dwell upon is another wall that’s being touted south of the border.

“Our next-door neighbour is putting up walls, while our work is actually celebrating the fall of walls,” he says, stressing: “We’re only celebrating this freedom and unity. Many walls are coming down, and this is about having unity and diversity.” g ProArteDanza presents The 9th! from October 26 to 28 at the Norman and Annette Rothstein Theatre as part of the Chutzpah Festival.

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CHUTZPAH FEST

Live soundtracks bring films into fresh focus

by Alexander Varty

Guitarist Gary Lucas blends composition, improvisation, and an array of electronic effects to accompany vintage silent horror flicks at this year’s Chutzpah fest.

G

ary Lucas was born to make live soundtracks for movies—even if others might know him for his work as guitarist and producer for the likes of Jeff Buckley and Don Van Vliet.

Checking in on his cellphone from New York City’s Hudson Street, where he’s strolling with Bob Dylan archivist Mitch Blank, Lucas remembers being nine or 10 and screening 8mm versions of classic horror flicks for his neighbourhood friends. Flash forward a few years, and one of his first jobs as a musician was creating a soundtrack for a New York State Department of Forestry documentary, Aquatic Ecology. The narrator? Rod Serling, of Twilight Zone renown.

“So that was my first taste of it, and I liked it,” recalls Lucas, the mastermind behind one of two live-music film events at this year’s Chutzpah Festival. “And how I got into it in a big way was back in 1989, I got a commission from what was called New Music America, for the Next Wave Festival. It was like, ‘Please come up with a project that involves another art form and your music.’ So I thought, ‘Hey, it would be really cool to score a silent movie.

What about The Golem?’ ” Lucas laughs, remembering how he used to gawk at stills from Paul Wegener and Carl Boese’s 1920 classic in Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine. “I was like, ‘Wow! A Jewish Frankenstein monster! How cool is that?’ Plus, I worked for Captain Beefheart for five years, and Don used to say to me ‘Don’t you wish you had a golem?’ So that was encouraging.”

For this year’s edition of Chutzpah, Vancouver’s annual celebration of Jewish culture, Lucas is leaving his golem at home and focusing instead on accompanying James Whale’s Frankenstein and George Melford’s Spanish-language take on Dracula, both from 1931. For both, he’ll blend composition and improvisation, using only his guitar and an array of electronic effects.

“I have themes, but I juggle them; I’m like a silent-movie piano player,” he explains. “I change it up every time I play to keep it fresh, but I never know exactly what I’m going to do.

“What I feel in the room, or what I had for dinner, or whatever, it all goes into these editing decisions in my head as I’m playing. The trick is to try and make it seamless—and not be too obtrusive, where people notice the music at the expense of the narrative and the film. I want to, like, reanimate these dead actors, basically, and make them live again.”

Elsewhere at this year’s fest, reanimation is also a factor in The Rescue. But where Lucas’s connection to vintage horror films is primarily aesthetic, brothers Alvaro and Boris Castellanos have a genetic connection to their subject. The filmmakers’ second feature celebrates their late grandfather José Arturo Castellanos, whose most important legacy is how he saved thousands of Jewish lives by issuing forged identity documents

while working as the Salvadoran consul general in Switzerland during the Second World War. To make it, though, the brothers first had to confront their own tangled family history, which included estrangement from their father, José’s son, and a childhood move to Canada during the worst of their country’s bloody civil war.

“I usually tell people that making the film was a very expensive form of therapy for me, because it allowed me—and I think my brother, too—to get over some things that personally we hadn’t dealt with, some feelings,” Boris Castellanos tells the Straight from his Toronto home. “So it was liberating in that way, because we can now embrace our family and we can be proud of our lineage. Whereas before, we were not proud, and we had some resentment.”

I want to, like, reanimate these dead actors, basically, and make them live again.

– Gary Lucas

The brothers Castellanos—musicians themselves, and successful event producers in Ontario—are billing The Rescue as “a film concerto”. Along with several guest musicians, pianist Boris and bassist Alvaro will appear on-stage during screenings, but they won’t play during the entire documentary. Instead, they’ll accompany the photographic montages that punctuate the interviews with Holocaust survivors and Castellanos family members, using the nostalgic sounds of danzón music to evoke the 1940s in which the action is set.

“While we were editing, we were thinking to ourselves, ‘This is great.

This is an incredible story—but there’s still something missing,’ ” Boris explains. “And I think what was missing was my brother and I, our own kind of soul. We were thinking, ‘How do we make this film our own, and how do we tell the story in a way that no one but us could tell it?’

That’s when we decided to bring in the music. ‘Instead of making just a documentary film that people go and watch,’ we said, ‘why don’t we make it an experiential, kind of expanded film piece?’ And when we screened the film for the first time everybody loved it, so we knew we were barking up the right tree.” g Gary Lucas will present Frankenstein and Spanish Dracula at the Norman and Annette Rothstein Theatre on October 30. The Rescue plays the same venue on November 23.

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Opera joins forces for Jazz Age Traviata

Y

by Janet Smith

ou could forgive opera stage director Alain Gauthier for having La Traviata’s famously catchy “Drinking Song” duet stuck in his head from morning to night. For more than a year, he has been dwelling in Jazz Age Paris and the dramatic world of doomed courtesan Violetta and her lovesick Alfredo.

Usually, in the world of opera, directors move from project to project. But because of an unusual collaboration between Vancouver Opera and four other Canadian companies—Pacific Opera Victoria, Manitoba Opera, Edmonton Opera, and Opéra de Montréal—he’s had a more than a yearlong affair with this new production. In each city, there’s a new cast, but the combined resources have allowed the companies to reimagine Giuseppe Verdi’s 1853 romantic classic in the music halls of 1920s Paris.

The splendour, the storytelling, and the singing: it’s not something Gauthier ever gets sick of. “I’m surrounded by Violetta and Alfredo all

In an unprecedented coproduction between five companies, La Traviata makes a stop at Vancouver Opera with its new setting in 1920s Paris. Photo by Nanc Prince

the time,” he admits with a laugh, “but it’s very exciting to go city to city and discover new things about it. To be able to travel with your own production is very unique in opera.

“It’s a fabulous opportunity for me, because how many times do you get to work on the same work with different artists?” he continues. “They all bring something new to the role. For

me, it’s like a gift—I’m receiving a lot from all those artists.”

In other cities, the leading duo have been new to their roles. But here, in Vancouver’s rendition, Gauthier works with two Canadian artists who are well-acquainted with Violetta and Alfredo: Emily Dorn and Andrew Haji (Nemorino in last year’s L’Elisir d’Amore). The major role of Alfredo’s

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father is played by baritone Chenye Yuan, last seen here in VO’s Tea: A Mirror of Soul and Nixon in China.

“It’s nice because they’re kind of relaxed in the roles, in a way,” Gauthier observes. “These are very tough parts for singers—especially Violetta. It’s a huge role, asking for a range not only vocally but emotionally.

“Emily knows the rough corners of the role, and I’m getting to know the role well too,” he adds. “In the first act, she’s treating it in a really light way— she’s like the queen of Paris, with ‘The Drinking Song’ and the aria at the end of Act 1. But then her story gets more and more dramatic and goes in all sorts of registers.”

Pooling resources provides a model that allows Canadian opera companies to stay viable, making it possible to stage a lavish work like this Traviata. “Especially if you want to do all the sets and costumes, there are not many companies in Canada that can even afford one production a year,” Gauthier explains. “So if they put all their effort together, they can

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afford this kind of production.”

But a cross-Canada project like this one also requires all of those companies to agree on an artistic approach— with Gauthier as the unifying force.

Many of the five opera companies he was dealing with had already staged versions of La Traviata—both traditional and modern. “It was quite a challenge to find a setting that would satisfy everyone,” Gauthier admits.

The key was finding inspiration in the era of Josephine Baker, when the American music-hall star scandalized Parisian society but also became a superstar.

Gauthier calls the end result a “winwin” for companies, audiences, and himself. “The more I’m doing it, the more I’m loving it. I’m not surprised, because when you get deeper and deeper into a work you start to like it even more,” he says. “Sometimes you find an idea and it feels perfect.” g

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16 THE GEORGIA STR AIGHT OCTOBER 17 – 24 / 2019

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Tausk finds Bohemian beauty in “New World�

T

by Alexander Varty

he popular wisdom regarding Anton Dvořåk’s Symphony No. 9 in E Minor, commonly known as the “New World Symphonyâ€?, is that it was the great Czech composer’s response to his three years in the United States toward the end of the 19th century. Otto Tausk doesn’t necessarily disagree, but his take on that relationship deviates sharply from musicological orthodoxy, which holds that African-American melodies and Indigenous rhythms are laced through Dvořåk’s score. “I’ve never felt the piece to be North American, somehow,â€? the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra’s recently installed music director tells the Straight, in a telephone interview. “I’ve always had the impression the piece was very much Bohemian, actually. So the whole idea that this ninth symphony was somehow based upon music he discovered‌ Somehow I don’t feel that connection. I feel the connection to folk music or folk tunes, but more folk tunes from his home country, which he wanted to go back to.â€?

There’s musicological evidence for Tausk’s suspicion. It seems that the spiritual “Goin’ Homeâ€?, which many claim was the inspiration for the second movement of the Symphony No. 9, was actually written by one of Dvořåk’s American students, Williams Arms Fisher, many years after his teacher had returned to Prague.

In his published comments on the song, Fisher owns up to borrowing Dvořåk’s melody, alludes to his mentor’s homesickness, and points out that the original composition is “a moving expression of that nostalgia of the soul all human beings feelâ€?.

The Netherlands-born, Amsterdam-based Tausk is quick to dispel any notion that he might be reconsidering his decision to make Vancouver

VSO maestro Otto Tausk sees the folk-music nostalgia in Anton Dvořåk’s ninth symphony.

his second home. “I’m really enjoying my time here!� he stresses. “But I do recognize the feeling of the mother tongue being something that you carry with you wherever you go, wherever you live, and whoever you work with.

You always have this inside of you, somehow. So the idea is to find that inner voice, that folk-music voice, and Dvořåk really succeeds in that.�

What the conductor calls “one of the best symphonies ever written� is not the only reason for listeners to make the pilgrimage to the Orpheum this weekend. Also in the program are Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings— made famous when the VSO’s 1970 recording of the work was used in Oliver Stone’s iconic antiwar drama Platoon—and Luciano Berio’s rarely performed Folk Songs.

The Berio piece—a cycle of American, Armenian, Azerbaijani, Sicilian, and French folk songs, with two original Berio compositions in a faux-folk style—was written for the composer’s then wife, the revered mezzo-soprano Cathy Berberian.

Here, it will be sung by Dawn Upshaw, herself a noted breaker of genre boundaries.

Thanks to his thorny, complex Sequenza series, Berio is known—in North America, at least—as a composer of demanding technical workouts.

In Folk Songs, however, he’s surprisingly faithful to his rootsy sources, and the work is remarkable for its willingness to set aside the conventions of modernist composition for a much more direct form of address. “It’s very tonal,â€? Tausk says, hinting at a link between the Berio, the Barber, and the Dvořåk. “It’s even more accessible than a lot of classical masterworks, in a way, because it’s so recognizable. It’s like you can almost sing the tunes, even if you don’t know them.

It’s very brilliantly orchestrated.�

Upshaw, he continues, “is in a way the Cathy Berberian of our time.

I mean, she’s done everything from baroque to contemporary; she’s also done musical theatre, she’s done opera. She’s such a multifaceted singer, like Berberian, so I’m really, really happy that she’s coming to sing the Berio songs with us.� g Dawn Upshaw joins the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra at the Orpheum from Friday to Sunday (October 18 to 20).

Back from electrifying performances in New York City and Barcelona

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OCTOBER 17 – 24 / 2019 THE GEORGIA STR AIGHT 17

ARTS LISTINGS

Arts

ONGOING LUZIA Cirque du Soleil presents a poetic and acrobatic ode to the culture of Mexico. To Dec 29, Under the Grand Chapiteau (Big Top), Concorde Pacific Place. $39-$270.

THE BIRDS & THE BEES Play about a turkey farmer who splits up with her husband and moves in with her beekeeper mom. To Oct 26, Granville Island Stage. From $29.

DANCING LESSONS Naked Goddess Productions presents Mark St. Germain’s play about a professor with autism who approaches his neighbour for a dancing lesson.

To Oct 20, Jericho Arts Centre. $15-25.

COST OF LIVING Pulitzer Prize–winning play about relationships and living with physical disabilities. To Nov 3, Goldcorp Stage at the BMO Theatre Centre. From $29.

REPLAY: A BUNCH OF GREAT PLAYS, AGAIN Staircase Theatre presents a collection of favourite shows and artists from this year’s Fringe Festival. To Oct 26, 7-9:30 pm, Havana Theatre. $18-22.

VANCOUVER ART GALLERY aVIEWS OF THE COLLECTION: THE STREET to Nov 17 aVIKKY ALEXANDER: EXTREME BEAUTY to Jan 26 aROBERT RAUSCHENBERG 1965–1980 to Jan 26 aTRANSITS AND RETURNS to Feb 23

HOT TICKET

SOUTH GRANVILLE GALLERY HOP (October 19

on Gallery Row) Vanessa Lam’s swirling, collagelike abstracts, from her show A Handmade Night at the Ian Tan Gallery, are just some of the discoveries you’ll make at this seasonal art celebration. Meet artists, watch live-art demos, and see much more between 10 a.m. and 5 p.m.

TAKE D MILK, NAH? (October

16 to 26 at the Vancity Culture Lab) Jivesh Parasram has described his solo show as “the first IndoCaribbean Canadian identity play”, but he also wants to destroy that definition—and all labels.

But it may be better described as damn funny storytelling. Diwali in BC, Rumble Theatre (of which he’s the new artistic director), and Pandemic Theatre (which he helped found) copresent.

WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 16 MAESTRO IMPRO Crash-and-burn elimination-style improv show, as part of the International TheatreSports Festival. Oct 16, 7:30 pm; Oct 18, 9:30 pm; Oct 19, 9:30 pm, Waterfront Theatre. From $17.

MARGIE GILLIS: EVOLUTIONS Gillis performs accompanied by seven Legacy Project dancers. Oct 16-17, 8 pm, Shadbolt Centre for the Arts. $15-36.

LUCY GUERIN INC: SPLIT The Dance Centre presents Australian choreographer Lucy Guerin’s new work as part of the Global Dance Connections series. Oct 16-17, 8 pm, Scotiabank Dance Centre. $34/25.

Z.E.N. TRIO (October 20 at the Vancouver Playhouse) Brilliantly brought together by the classical station BBC Radio 3, these young artists decided to name their chamber trio after their firstname initials. And Zen describes the feeling you’ll have while watching them at this Vancouver Recital Society concert, a transcendent mix of Schubert, Shostakovich, and Brahms. g

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 17 CHINA DOLL Coming-of-age story follows a young girl’s path to freedom through books.

Oct 17-26, Gateway Theatre. From $29.

WAEL SHAWKY Conversation and opening reception with artist Wael Shawky. Oct 17, 7-10 pm, The Polygon. Admission by donation.

THE BECHDEL TEST Improv show explores the complexities, relationships, and stories of women as part of the International TheatreSports Festival. Oct 17 & 19, 7:30 pm, Waterfront Theatre. From $17.00.

LIFEGAME An improvised staged biography of a guest’s life, as part of the International TheatreSports Festival. Oct 17-18, 7:30 pm, The Nest. From $14.75.

LA TRAVIATA Vancouver Opera gives the perennial favourite a brand-new look. Oct 17, 7:30 pm; Oct 19, 7:30 pm; Oct 24, 7:30 pm; Oct 27, 2 pm, Queen Elizabeth Theatre. $42-180.

THE BUSINESS OF MURDER Richard Harris’s psychological thriller on the theme of revenge. Oct 17–Nov 2, 8-10:30 pm, The Theatre at Hendry Hall. $20/18.

PLAY UNSCRIPTED An improvised contemporary play created from scratch, as part of the International TheatreSports Festival. Oct 17, 9:30 pm, Waterfront Theatre. From $17.

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> Go on-line to read hundreds of I Saw You posts or to respond to a message < I WAS YOUR LEANING POST IN 7-11

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I SAW A: I AM A: WHEN: JUNE 12, 2019 WHERE: Smithe & Beatty Saw you trying to walk into the 7-11 at the corner of Smithe & Beatty around 3pm and I assumed you were drunk because you were staggering and falling down. I asked if you needed help, and you said you wanted a slurpee so I held you up to keep you from falling over while you waited in line to pay for it. Then you asked me to help you get back to your friends place a block away, and instructed me, “Not to take advantage of you!” It took us about half an hour to walk the block because you kept stopping and telling me you were gonna be sick, but never did.

We still had a great conversation that really left a lasting impression on me. After thanking me for getting you back safely, I really wanted to ask for your # but refrained, as I didn’t want to take ‘advantage’ of the situation. If by chance you happen to see this, I would love to get to know you over a coffee (or slurpee) some time.

SWEET CAROLINE BAH BAH

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I SAW A: I AM A: WHEN: OCTOBER 6, 2019 WHERE: Choices on Cambie Thanks for sharing the duet in the check out line... hope the tulips brightened the evening.

ON THE 257 BUS ON THANKSGIVING MONDAY

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I SAW A: I AM A: WHEN: OCTOBER 14, 2019 WHERE: 257 Bus to Vancouver from Horseshoe Bay Can’t stop thinking about our bus ride together today. We were both standing in the aisle and my ring caught your eye. We chatted heirloom rings, travelling Europe & Scandinavia, discussed music from Chet Baker to Rachmaninov.

You sing alternative rock and brew craft beer. I play piano.

Haven’t had a conversation like that in a long time. Would love to keep chatting.

LANE IN KITS

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I SAW A: I AM A: WHEN: OCTOBER 14, 2019 WHERE: Kitsilano I drove past you in a purple Mazda. Blond hair, glasses, black jacket. You might have heard me accidentally honk the horn once I parked as I was trying to get all my stuff out. You were smoking in the lane, tall, blond hair, white T-shirt. Drink?

YOU LIKED MY DOG...A LATTE.

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I SAW A: I AM A: WHEN: OCTOBER 11, 2019 WHERE: Moja on Commercial Drive You politely asked to pet my dog outside of Moja. After introducing you to him, you both proceeded to comically take up the whole side walk while he tried to bully you into just giving him the treats. We spoke briefly about your late Portuguese Water Dog and Cat. You took out a hand rolled cigarette and asked for a light. I should have asked for your name and number at that moment. Instead, I obliged, became a bumbling fool, and upon receiving my light, my dog and I left. I stopped 3 times on the reminder of that walk and asked my furry companion if I should go back in an attempt to ask you for your number, but I decided to leave it up to fate.

Here's hoping you see this.

YOU HELPED WITH MY SHOPPING CART

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I SAW A: I AM A: WHEN: OCTOBER 11, 2019 WHERE: Fraser Street No Frills You helped me get my loaded grocery cart over the threshold to the elevator in the Fraser St. No Frills parkade. Then you warned me that some items from one bag were likely to spill over.

You made sure I knew why I had taken one elevator down from No Frills and another up to Fraser St. It’s been years since any woman has taken care of me, or even wanted to. I liked it. I guess I’ve made the transition from eligible bachelor to rescue dog.

Please take care of me again.

ON THE BUS ON GRANVILLE STREET

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I SAW A: I AM A: WHEN: OCTOBER 4, 2019 WHERE: Granville St. Downtown on the Bus I saw you on the bus. We gazed at each other across the bus many times. As you got up to leave you stood in front of me waiting for me to say something. I said hi. You got off and looked disappointed that I didn’t get off. I regretted not getting off.

WE VOTED TOGETHER AT KWANTLEN COLLEGE

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I SAW A: I AM A: WHEN: OCTOBER 11, 2019 WHERE: Polling Place at Kwantlen College in Richmond We waited together at a small table until the poll was open.

You were so sweet and jolly, I wanted to take you home with me. Can I take you home with me now?

MILLENNIUM LINE TRAIN RIDE

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I SAW A: I AM A: WHEN: OCTOBER 10, 2019 WHERE: Millennium Line SkyTrain We both took the evening Millennium train from Commercial/Broadway just after 11pm Thursday October 10th. You wore a black Cirque sweater. We exchanged glances and stares throughout the train ride. Regretted not approaching you as soon as I got off at my station. Wouldn't let that happen if I were to run into you again.

SERVER AT GREEN TIMBERS PUB

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I SAW A: I AM A: WHEN: OCTOBER 7, 2019 WHERE: Green Timbers Pub You were my server at the Green Timers Pub. I was wearing a grey hoody with short brown hair and a beard sitting by the fireplace. Our eyes met as I walked out and I felt a connection.

Visit straight.com to post your FREE I Saw You _ 18 THE GEORGIA STR AIGHT OCTOBER 17 – 24 / 2019

MOVIES

Colombia’s apocalypse Monos REVIEWS

Oct 18, 8 pm; Oct 18, 10:30 pm; Oct 19, 7 pm; Oct 19, 9:30 pm, Yuk Yuk’s Vancouver. $25.

HOLD THESE TRUTHS Play starring Joel de la Fuente as Gordon Hirabayashi, a U.S. Presidential Medal of Freedom recipient who fought against the mass incarceration of people of Japanese ancestry during WWII. Oct 18–Nov 2, Historic Theatre. $25-50.

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 20

TOURS FOR THE RECENTLY DECEASED The Beaumont Studios, in partnership with the Dusty Flowerpot Cabaret, is pleased to present our biggest, most outrageous Halloween initiative to date—and we cannot wait to see you there. Fifteen days of interactive, darkly comedic, “choose your own adventure”–style guided tours, exploring the iconic characters and creations of Tim Burton. Oct 18-31, 7-10 pm; Oct 18-19, 7-11 pm; Oct 25-26, 7-11 pm, The Beaumont Studios. From $25 (members).

MONOS

Starring Julianne Nicholson. In English and Spanish, with English subtitles. Rated 14A

d LIKE SARA WATSON (Julianne Nicholson), a woman held hostage in unspecified Latin-American jungle, we are mostly in the dark throughout the perplexing and roundly unnerving Monos.

The title refers to the monkeys that scurry in dense green foliage, but it just as aptly refers to the eight teenage guerrillas holding the freckled American, whom they call “Doctora”, as hostage for unknown purposes. And there’s no Sherlock Holmes to explain it to Dr. Watson, or to us.

These ornery girls and boys have names like Wolf, Bigfoot, Smurf, and Boom Boom, and the most macho one, called Rambo (Sofia Buenaventura), is of undetermined gender. The whole group is rather unformed, and the only other adult in their orbit is a tiny man called the Messenger (reallife former insurgent Wilson Salazar), although his only message seems to be that childhood is over. During the day they drill and shoot, again without a stated mission, and at other times they do what teenagers do. Under pressure, they are capable of cruelty, tenderness, capriciousness, and instant betrayal.

The setup, as every reviewer has noted, strongly parallels Lord of the Flies, in that it skips any notion of ideology or national identity in order to look at tribal instincts in their basest form. But writer-director Alejandro Landes, a Brazilian with Colombian heritage, shot Monos in his parents’ country, with a story that echoes the particulars of FARC and other groups that were long part of the chaos gripping a land of drug cartels, paramilitary groups, and factional uprisings.

Landes hints at other specifics, involving race, class, and gender. But it’s hard to parse much of this since the story is buried in a surfeit of sensationalistic style that makes the film feel more like a 100-minute trailer—an impressive one, to be sure—than a coherent movie. His immersive approach (which includes elements of Apocalypse Now, Predator, and The Blair Witch Project) conveys an unusually grim nightmare, but it’s unclear what viewers can do with that when it’s over.

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 18

Julianne Nicholson plays a woman held hostage in a South American jungle by a gang of militant youths in writer-director Alejandro Landes’s nightmarish Monos.

Movies

TIP SHEET

d THE WHALE AND THE RAVEN Visit B.C.’s Great Bear Rainforest when this VIFF favourite gets a final screening at the Vancity Theatre on Thursday (October 17). d WHERE IS MY FRIEND’S HOUSE? Abbas Kiarostami’s feature from 1987 kicks off a retrospective of the filmmaker’s work at the Cinematheque on Friday (October 18). d THE GENTLEMEN HECKLERS PRESENT: TROLL 2 The Best Worst Movie gets the ol’ weisenheimer treatment at the Rio Theatre on Wednesday (October 23).

FOR SAMA

A documentary by Waad alKateab and Edward Watts. Rating unavailable

d WAAD AL-KATEAB’S And Edward Watts’s incredible, chaotic documentary reveals the hidden world behind the headlines of an Aleppo under siege. The images are by turns surreal and horrific. Hospital workers laugh and warm themselves over a missile that’s just blown a hole through the roof and landed on the tile floor. Children run sobbing, carrying the limp bodies of their shrapnel-ripped smaller siblings. And old men play chess outside a pink building that bombs have folded like an envelope.

by Ken Eisner Between 2012 and 2016, al-Kateab,

an activist and journalist in her 20s, filmed the siege of the oncethriving Syrian city by the Assad regime’s forces. She traces Aleppo’s path from site for idealistic student uprisings to apocalyptic wasteland under brutal attack.

During those years, al-Kateab also falls in love, gets married, becomes pregnant with Sama, and eventually moves with her doctor husband and newborn baby into Aleppo’s last hospital to treat the wounded. Throughout, the introspective filmmaker asks herself repeatedly, “Why would anyone stay here, let alone bring a baby into this hell?” By the end of it, you’ll fully understand, and your question will be “How could the world have allowed this to happen?”

What makes the documentary stand out is that it is a war story told through the eyes of not only a woman, but a new mother. Her maternal concern for her daughter spreads to the children around her. She talks to one boy, holed up in his apartment, about how sad he is that all his friends have left; another preschooler mimics the difference in sound between Russian missiles and shells. More heartbreakingly, she meets traumatized children and grieving parents at her husband’s makeshift hospital—the only one the Russians haven’t air-bombed.

Throughout, she’s unafraid to stare down images the West would probably rather not see, from children being wrapped in body bags to blood gushing on hospital floors. She wants to show the scale of the tragedy, but she also reveals the resilience: an unforgettable scene in which her husband, Hamza, performs an emergency cesarean on a wounded woman shows, in

HALLOWEEN MOVIE MUSIC! On Friday October 18 and Sunday October 20, it will be “Lights, camera, action!” with the West Coast Symphony Orchestra. Joining forces with guest conductor Hal Beckett, the Phoenix Chamber Choir, and guest solo violinist Nancy DiNovo, be prepared to go on a magical journey through popular film music—with a Halloween twist! Oct 18, 8 pm; Oct 20, 3 pm, Christ Church Cathedral.

By donation.

JON DORE Canadian comedian, actor, and writer performs two nights of standup.

GLORIOUS STRINGS Performances by Quebec’s Saguenay String Quartet and B.C.’s Lafayette String Quartet. Oct 20, 3 pm, Kay Meek Arts Centre. $49/47/19.

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 24 CHUTZPAH FESTIVAL Comedy, theatre, dance, and music, featuring Sandra Bernhard, Iris Bahr, Daniel Cainer, and Gary Lucas. Oct 24–Nov 24, various venues. $24-60.

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 25 HIDDEN WONDERS SPEAKEASY MAGIC EXPERIENCE Hidden Wonders, a speakeasy-style performance venue hidden behind a fake business façade in Vancouver’s Chinatown, features Shawn Farquhar in a 75-minute magic experience with effects Shawn created to impress Ellen, win the world championship, and fool Vegas’s Penn & Teller twice on their TV show Fool Us. Oct 25, 7-8:15 pm; Oct 25, 9-10:15 pm; Oct 26, 7-8:15 pm; Oct 26, 9-10:15 pm, Hidden Wonders Showroom . $45-$60.

ARTS LISTINGS are a public service provided free of charge. Submit events online using the event-submission form at straight. com/AddEvent. Events that don’t make it into the paper will appear on the website.

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Audience chooses its VIFF favourites

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by Craig Takeuchi

adly for cineastes, the Vancouver International Film Festival came to a close on October 11. The good news is that many of the titles will return later in the year, and that the best of the fest was feted with an awards ceremony prior to a screening of the festival’s closing film, France’s La Belle Époque, at the Centre for Performing Arts.

Several Indigenous films made quite an impression upon audiences.

Marie Clements won the VIFF most popular Canadian feature award for Red Snow, a thriller (partly shot in Vancouver) about a solider from the Canadian Arctic who is caught in an ambush in Afghanistan.

The VIFF most popular Canadian documentary award went to Charles Wilkinson’s Haida Modern, a profile of internationally renowned artist Robert Davidson from Haida Gwaii. Both Red Snow and Haida Modern had their world premieres at VIFF. Women in Film and Television Vancouver’s artistic merit award was bestowed upon filmmaker and anthropologist Mirjam Leuze for the German-Canadian coproduction The Whale and the Raven, a documentary that examines the impact that increased oil-tanker traffic has on the people, ecosystems, and sea life in British Columbia’s Great Bear Rainforest region.

Peter Nelson’s American documentary The Pollinators, which had its international premiere at VIFF, received the $5,000 Rob Stewart eco warrior award for its examination of how bees are threatened by current agricultural practices and what farming techniques can help. The film will have a national theatrical release in Canada on November 11. The award, named after the late documentary filmmaker and activist from Toronto, recognizes a filmmaker whose work helps social progress.

The $5,000 VIFF impact award went to German

Vancouver filmmaker Marie Clements bagged the most popular Canadian feature award for her thriller, Red Snow.

filmmaker Michael Wech for Resistance Fighters, an indepth look at the increase in multiresistant bacteria.

Iranian filmmaker Taghi Amirani won the VIFF most popular international documentary award for Coup 53, an investigation of the 1953 coup in Iran that overthrew then prime minister Mohammad Mosaddegh.

South Korean filmmaker Bong Joon-ho won the Super Channel people’s choice award for his thriller Parasite, about a struggling family that infiltrates an affluent home.

The film also won the palme d’or at the 2019 Cannes Film Festival. Bong, who also directed The Host and Snowpiercer, previously visited VIFF four times with his films, and served as a Dragons and Tigers juror in 2010.

Although the festival has ended, many of this year’s audience hits are being shown again in the VIFF Repeats series at the Vancity Theatre until Thursday (October 17). g

OCTOBER 17 – 24 / 2019 THE GEORGIA STR AIGHT 19

MOVIES

Ang Lee catches up with Gemini Man

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by Adrian Mack

ith Gemini Man, now playing, Ang Lee has produced a feature at the absolute vanguard of new cinema technology. So it’s jarring when the filmmaker describes himself to the Georgia Straight as a “low-tech person”.

“I don’t have a scientific mind,” he insists. “I’m just reacting to the hardware companies showing me: ‘We can do this, we can do that.’ My imagination will push me to realize some images, some situations—but that’s all I do.”

Calling from Toronto, the veteran filmmaker has an easy laugh and a self-deprecating style. He’s managed to maintain an almost 30-year career as both a populist and an art-house favourite. Low-tech person or not, he’s also waded into the digital age with gusto, lending credibility to the dramatic possibilities of CGI with efforts like 2012’s Life of Pi. In 2016, Lee shot the 3-D drama Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk at a resolution of 4K and at an unprecedented 120 frames per second—almost three times the frame rate that Peter Jackson was slammed for with the Hobbit trilogy. The film tanked, but the lessons were invaluable.

“People want to see artifice,” Lee concluded. “In Billy I tried to strip it off. Just because 3-D is more lifelike, people don’t, at least for now, take things as they are. You still have to put some kind of artifice in so that they can read the story.

So I chose a genre, big movie star, all those things, and I lit it differently. Adding dimension makes it feel lifelike, but it’s not like life. Life doesn’t have close-ups. People don’t do fantastic things. People don’t look as pretty as Will Smith. That’s

Life doesn’t have close-ups. People don’t do fantastic things. People don’t look as pretty as Will Smith.

– Ang Lee

Director Ang Lee took his lumps after 2016’s Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk and turned his 3-D camera on Will Smith for the sci-fi action thriller Gemini Man.

the movies. But if you get drawn into it, that’s something else. I like to explore that possibility.”

And so we arrive at Gemini Man, which shares the deeply immersive tech pioneered in Billy Lynn, but with the turbocharged thrill of watching Will Smith do relentless battle across the globe with a clone of his younger self. The increased frame rate improves the 3-D effect by eliminating any motion blur in the film’s stupendous action sequences, turning a motorcycle showdown in the narrow streets of Cartagena, Colombia, into a stunningly visceral experience, maybe even a game-changer. Lee chuckles softly and offers a modest “Thank you. Even a simple pull focus, how we do that, just technically we learned a lot more. I think it plays better in terms of the look.”

Laughing to himself again, he

adds: “But Junior is a game all its own. It’s just a different subject matter altogether.”

Indeed, “Junior” is the enemy who pursues Will Smith’s 51-yearold assassin, Henry Brogan, from Georgia to South America and on to Budapest. It gives nothing away to reveal that Junior is Brogan’s 23-year-old self, conceived in a lab as the perfect killing machine, deployed to eliminate an aging spook who knows too much. Smith plays both parts, but the character is an entirely digital re-creation, and the film hinges on its success.

“I think maybe 90 percent of the shots, if not 95, it really came across,” Lee muses. “Whether people accept it or not, like yourself, I cannot tell.” Besides a perilous attempt to cross the uncanny valley, there were subtler aspects to the risk. Lee mentions that an

“unfamiliar actor” would have been the easier choice since we all walk around with an image of young Will Smith already in our heads. (This prompts the director to quip: “Ironically, he’s a better actor now.”)

As such, Gemini Man is a triumph.

It feels like a sci-fi action picture beamed in from the near future, but it’s hardly short on the director’s characteristic investment in character and theme. Along with the timing of its release, the film’s quality demands that we mention Martin Scorsese’s recent dustup with the Marvel fan base. Lee, who made the 2003 misfire Hulk, shies away from the question.

“I dunno,” he groans. “I’m not gonna comment on that. It’s a really complicated question, but I do like the feeling of movie theatres, and as a filmmaker I make the effort to get people into the theatre. My newest effort is a new experience, and you can absorb it differently. If it’s something you can get used to, maybe you can watch movies this way.”

It might be a disingenuous question, in any case. Gemini Man takes a

from previous page

Oct 18 – 24 at the Vancity Theatre.

Discover viff.org Hallowe’en Carnival of Carnage | Oct 25 – 31

breathless detail, the heroic lengths the young holdouts will go to to save a life.

This isn’t polished stuff: amid the blackouts and random bombings, al-Kateab’s handheld-camera work is disorienting and choppy. But no other documentary out there has captured the human cost of the Syrian crisis with such clarity.

by Janet Smith

Before You Know It HANNAH PEARL UTT, USA, 2019, 98 MIN.

FRI 8:15PM | SAT 6:00PM | SUN 3:00PM MON 6:30PM | WED 4:20PM Rachel (Hannah Pearl Utt, who also directs and wrote the script) and Jackie (Jen Tullock, who cowrote) are sisters, all grown up but still living in an apartment they share with their father (Mandy Patinkin) above a small studio theatre.

He writes plays they perform in, but nobody comes to see them. Then, one day, everything changes, and the sisters’ world is turned upside down…”Hilarious scenes that remind us why we love the movies.” Film Threat

BEFORE YOU KNOW IT

Halloween

JOHN CARPENTER, USA, 1978, 91 MIN.

THU OCT 31 - 6:45PM Michael Myers, has spent the last 15 years locked away inside a sanitarium under the care of child psychiatrist Dr. Sam Loomis. On October 30, 1978, Myers escapes and makes his way back home to Haddonfield, turning a night of tricks and treats into something much more sinister for three young women, including Laurie Strode, the star-making role for Jamie Lee Curtis. This restored and remastered digital print was created under the supervision of the worldrenowned cinematographer, Dean Cundey.

Re-Animator

STUART GORDON, USA, 1985, 105 MIN.

Monos

ALEJANDRO LANDES, COLOMBIA, 2019, 102 MIN.

SAT 8:00PM | SUN 7:00PM WED 8:20PM | THU 6:10PM Rambo, Smurf, Lady, Bigfoot, Wolf, Swede and Boom-Boom… these are among the eight adolescent rebel guerillas keeping watch over their American hostage, Doctora (Julianne Nicholson) and a milk cow named Shakira in the mountains of Colombia. These teen insurgents can’t keep their hormones at bay (nor their fingers away from triggers) in this vivid, spellbinding war movie, something like Lord of the Flies mixed with Apocalypse Now… ”A towering filmic achievement.” LA Times

For Sama

WAAD AL-KHATEAB, EDWARD WATTS, UK, 2019, 100 MIN.

FRI 4:00PM | SUN 5:00PM | MON 8:30PM WED 6:20PM | THU 8:15PM In Aleppo, Syrians who demanded Assad’s resignation were rewarded with years of bombardment under siege conditions.

Journalist Waad Al-Khateab lived through this, fell in love and married a brave doctor, and gave birth to their daughter, Sama, even as the fighting closed in. Her dispatches were shared online, but re-edited here as a letter to her infant daughter, For Sama emerges as something more than war-zone reportage. It is a stunningly cinematic experience, visceral, poetic and political.

WED OCT 30 - 6:45PM Driven young scientist Herbert West has made an amazing discovery. This green gloop has properties to revitalize the dead. His new roommate’s cat is the first beneficiary, but Herbert is soon raiding the morgue for human guinea pigs… Updating HP Lovecraft’s creepy tales and injecting large dollops of macabre humour along with oodles of blood and gore, Stuart Gordon’s debut became a cult movie staple in the late 80s. The film has been lovingly restored for this digital resurrection.

Society

BRIAN YUZNA, USA, 1989, 99 MIN.

WED OCT 30 - 8:50PM Hard to believe that Society turns 30 this year….

Brian Yuzna found success producing Stuart Gordon’s Re-Animator and From Beyond in the mid-80s, but for his own directorial debut he came up with a paranoiac’s wet-dream, a political satire about the Beverly Hills upper crust which makes They Live look like decidedly conservative. The climax - designed by Japanese sfx guru Screaming Mad George - has to be seen to be believed - though you will need a strong stomach…

The Thing (1982)

JOHN CARPENTER, USA, 1982, 109 MIN.

THU OCT 31 - 8:40PM American antarctic researchers come across a burned out Norwegian base - and the buried UFO which may be linked to the carnage.

Legendary for the shocking creature fx created

by Rob Bottin, the 1982 Thing is now widely perceived as a classic in its own right, one of the scariest films ever made.

1181 Seymour St | 604-683-3456 | viff.org

20 THE GEORGIA STR AIGHT OCTOBER 17 – 24 / 2019

Starring Hannah Pearl Utt. Rated PG

d THE BEST THING in this uneven dramedy is the sheer novelty of the setting, built around two sisters who work and live with their single dad above the Greenwich Village theatre he has run (at a loss) for decades.

Played by a mugging Mandy Patinkin, the dad’s an irascible crank who wears his failed-artist status as a badge of honour. Well-organized younger daughter Rachel (Hannah Pearl Utt), a stage manager and budding wordsmith, has arranged for him to get a fellowship to fund his new play. He screws that up in no time.

(The play is called The Way I See It, which competes with Before You Know It for instantly forgettable blandness.)

Rachel’s sister Jackie (Jen Tullock) is a ditsy motormouth, would-be actress, and perennial screwup, the

perfunctory chase story and turns it into elevated pulp, tickling the intellect with existential questions about aging, life experience, even a kind of parenthood in the fitful relationship between Brogan and Junior. All techno-wonders aside—and they are considerable—it’s still the work of a thoughtful artist answering the demands of both the industry and the audience, even culture itself.

“Even in the ’90s, when I started making movies, nothing seemed to change for a long time,” says Lee. “Now it’s not only changing but fundamentally changing. It’s mindboggling. People communicate differently. The essence has changed, not just the superficial stuff.”

He almost sounds nervous about it, conceding that Gemini Man “is a different level of putting myself out there”.

In this light, it’s poignant to hear Lee fantasize about the lives of classic-era Hollywood filmmakers—“I think I could be a really happy filmmaker in the ’50s, a big-shot director in the ’50s, just shoot four or five movies and then go home, sleep in my bed,” he jokes—but even more so when he’s asked, per Gemini Man, what advice he would give to the younger version of himself.

“I would hope I was more diligent, more grounded,” he answers.

“I was a very spaced-out person.

Now I feel I’m really inept and trying to catch up with things. Enthusiasm and dreaming—it’s okay when you’re young. When you get older, it gets harder. I wasted a lot of time.”

No kidding. If he hadn’t been such a slouch, maybe Ang Lee would have a dozen best-director Oscars instead of a measly two. g

accumulated effects of which are starting to rankle her 12-year-old kid (cast standout Oona Yaffe). We don’t spend much time exploring their offbeat family dynamic before fate and/or contractual obligations remove Patinkin from the picture. A change in their financial situation forces the sisters to discover that the mother they’d been told was dead is very much alive, and starring in a long-running daytime soap, conveniently shot nearby.

Broadway doyenne Judith Light, who got her own start in soaps, plays the mom, and this offers some nice harmonies, but things soon go sideways. The movie was directed by Utt, who wrote it with Tullock, and they turn a potentially complex family journey into silly farce and still expect you to care. The sisters never stop bickering, with an insistent supply of sitcom punch lines that rarely land right. The main characters aren’t particularly engaging, or well-designed. Rachel is supposed to be a talented writer, for example, so it’s odd that when she stumbles into a chance to work on her erstwhile mother’s soap, her best pitch involves, yup, an evil twin!

Alec Baldwin and Luke Cage star Mike Colter have cameos as a child psychologist and an accountant, respectively, but neither the subplots nor the main story pays off with significant laughs or insight. At 98 minutes, the whole thing feels like a short theatre sketch that, before they knew it, got out of hand.

by Ken Eisner

Happy Science bridges East and West (This story is sponsored by HS Productions.)

R

yuho Okawa was studying finance and working for a Tokyo-based trading firm in 1981 when the true purpose of his life became clear to him: to spread happiness. Five years later, he renounced a promising career in business to launch Happy Science.

Japan’s fastest growing and most influential spiritual movement, it has gone on to attract more than 12 million followers around the world. Now, the organization is bringing its mission to unite religions and cultures to live in harmony to Western Canada with a new, inspirational film.

Immortal Hero—which opens in Vancouver on October 18—is based on the true story of a near-death experience Okawa had in 2004.

In the film, the founder and CEO of Happy Science is portrayed as a successful writer named Makoto Mioya (played by Hisaaki Takeuchi) who beats the odds by recovering from a fatal heart condition. Having been visited by powerful spiritual beings throughout his adult life, Makoto is reminded by those otherworldly figures at his hospital bed that he can cure himself with the power of his own mind.

Just as Okawa did, Makoto emerges from the visitation transformed and as an enlightened teacher. He promises to use his second chance at life to share his message of love and peace to the world and with as many people as possible.

“What happened to Master Okawa in May 2004 was a miracle in modern days,” Takeuchisays in an interview.

“As the film portrays, Master Okawa determined himself that ‘I will not die because I still have a mission to do.’”

That mission has unfolded in multiple ways. Okawa has given over 3,000

Executive producer Ryuho Okawa, founder and CEO of Happy Science, paid a visit to Cineplex Cinemas Yonge-Dundas and VIP on October 3. Immortal Hero will open in Vancouver on Friday (October 18). Photo by HS Productions

lectures and produced more than 2,500 books, many of which have consistently ranked in the annual bestsellers list in Japan. Combined, they have sold over 100 million copies worldwide and have been published in 31 languages.

He also is the founder of Happy Science University, Happy Science Academy (a junior and high school), Happiness Realization Party (polit-

ical party), and more. Happy Science has also created 17 award-winning feature-length films.

Taking on the role of Makoto in Immortal Hero was a challenge for Takeuchi, but not in the conventional way that other performers might experience. Rather, Takeuchi admits he is a devoted believer in Happy Science and not an actor.

“In playing as lead actor in this movie, I pledged to act as a religious person,” Takeuchi, also a general producer of the film, says. “I pledged myself to face God as a religious person and to lay down my life for this acting.”

With that kind of conviction, Immortal Hero is sure to spread the Happy Science message of harmony across different cultures and religions.

Happy Science is based on four tenets: love (without expecting anything in return), wisdom (distinguishing good and evil by learning the laws of the mind and gaining spiritual knowledge), self-reflection (purifying the mind and correcting negative thoughts and actions) and progress. That last fundamental teaching involves making concrete efforts to create a happy society while improving one’s own character.

“I cannot put in words how thankful I am that we can show the world the truth that has occurred to Master Okawa through the story of Makoto Mioya,” Takeuchi says.

“I am proud to say that we might be able to show people around the world one part of God.” As Happy Science continues to gain traction around the globe, the team wanted to share the film with North American audiences to further expand its unifying reach.

“We encounter sufferings and difficulties in our lives,” Takeuchi says. “In particular, most people are unable to overcome middle-age despair, such as illness, separation from family, bankruptcy, or demotion. But there is a hope. With the power of mind and the power of belief, we can find hope in life. And God exists. The God of Love always watches over us.” Directed by filmmaker Hiroshi Akabane, Immortal Hero has earned 23 awards from six countries to date, ncluding Best Director of a Foreign Language Feature Film at Madrid International Film Festival. It was also chosen as Official Selection in Narrative Feature category at 2019 San Diego International Film Festival. g Immortal Hero opens October 18 at Cineplex Odeon International Village Cinemas. For more information, visit on immortal-hero.com/.

OCTOBER 17 – 24 / 2019 THE GEORGIA STR AIGHT 21

MOVIES

The Cinematheque Spark festival puts focus on female animators And Life Goes On: I The Films of Abbas Kiarostami Begins October 18

by Adrian Mack

1131 Howe Street, Vancouver thecinematheque.ca

nstantly winning the hearts of attendees at this year’s Spark Animation 2019 conference, film festival, and career fair, “The Butterfly Affect” opens with an image of a Main Street sign and then cuts to a city block lined with Vancouver Specials. The rest of director Stephanie Blakey’s almost five-minute short—about 23-year-old Jesse, a worm “living in a world built for butterflies”—charms on its own considerable, pastel-coloured merits.

Because it’s the inaugural animation project of the Five in Focus initiative—a team effort designed by Women in Animation and Women in View to support gender equality in the industry—the film’s themes of inclusion and self-acceptance feel especially apt. Viewers can learn more when “The Butterfly Affect” gets its world premiere at the top of Spark’s Mothers of a Medium shorts program at the Vancity Theatre next Sunday (October 27), with Blakey in attendance along with her partners, Jen Davreux (writer), Amanda Konkin (producer), Kaitlin Sutherland (animation director), and Maisha Moore (art director).

As ever, Spark offers a feast of viewing, learning, and networking opportunities for the city’s evergrowing community of animators and VFX professionals, and the emphasis on women in the field is felt across the board. For Thursday’s gala opening (October 24), first on the docket is a lifetime-achievement award presented to Oscar-nominated producer Bonnie Arnold, whose credits include Toy Story, Tarzan, and the How to Train Your Dragon franchise. (A 20th-anniversary screening of Tarzan follows on October 26 at

“The Butterfly Affect” arrives courtesy of B.C.’s Five in Focus: Animation initiative.

the Vancity Theatre, with directors Chris Buck and Kevin Lima in attendance.)

Among the other highlights of the four-day festival: the Canadian premiere of Anca Damian’s Marona’s Fantastic Tale (October 26) and Kat Alioshin’s profile of festival pioneers Spike and Mike, Animation Outlaws (October 27), both screening at the Vancity Theatre. The creator of Despicable Me, Sergio Pablos, will also be on hand to discuss his buzzy Netflix project, Klaus, with “Dear Basketball” director Glen Keane on October 24 at the Scotiabank Theatre. Closing the film festival at the Vancity Theatre on October 27 is the Hindilanguage Bombay Rose—a handpainted feature from yet another woman, actor Gitanjali Rao. g Presented by Spark CG Society, Spark Animation 2019 runs at various venues from October 24 to 27. More information is at www.sparkfx.ca/.

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Big Thief pulls off an impressive feat

by Mike Usinger

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Big Thief has made two great 2019 records with U.F.O.F. and the just-released follow-up, Two Hands. Photo by Michael Buishas

s accomplishments go, it’s pretty major—releasing not only one of the best records of 2019, but two of them in a span of six months.

That’s what the Brooklyn-spawned Big Thief has pulled off with a double shot that started in April with the release of the glowingly received U.F.O.F. Recorded at the iconic Bear Creek Studio outside of Seattle, the record was immediately hailed as a masterful distillation of urban-grit folk, splintered-pine country, and off-key alt-rock.

Reached in his adopted community of Topanga, California—where he’s a Texas native trying to master the art of surfing—guitarist Buck Meek describes the sessions for U.F.O.F. as magical. One reason was the setting: a farm with a family-run studio that’s hosted everyone from Foo Fighters and Soundgarden to Lionel Richie and James Brown.

“We were there in June, and although it rained a lot, there was also lots of sunlight and dew and a really crisp feeling in the air,” he recalls.

“We spent a lot of time outside between takes and I remember the cool temperatures and rolling wet grass.

It was such a beautiful place to make a record.”

And immediately upon wrapping up recording, Big Thief—which is rounded out by singer-guitarist Adrianne Lenker, bassist Max Oleartchik, and drummer James Krivchenia—promptly loaded into the van and headed to Texas, where it got to work all over again on songs that would eventually become the justreleased Two Hands.

“Adrianne writes a lot, so when we were ready to think about a record we had 50 or 60 really strong songs that were ready for a record,” Meek says.

“So we went to a cabin in Topanga and demoed all the songs—45 or 50 on 8-track in the cabin. From that, these two records kind of emerged.”

The studio setup for Two Hands was once again completely idyllic, with Sonic Ranch—which has been utilized by acts ranging from Cannibal Corpse and Ministry to Jenny Lewis and Bon Iver—located on a pecan farm in Tornillo, Texas.

Beautiful as everything was, from the setting to the vintage gear, Meek recalls the sessions having a different energy. That, he notes, might have had something to do with being in Texas at a time when America was being told—by no less than the man occupying the White House— to change the way it views its neighbours to the south.

U.F.O.F. is often preoccupied by that which awaits us all—namely, death.

Lenker also ruminates on life after death, and the supernatural forces that might make such a thing possible.

Two Hands is different in spirit.

While Big Thief isn’t a political band, it comes across as a political record—beautiful but defiant. Lenker deals with such issues as gun violence (“The Toy”), police brutality in America (“Shoulders”), and chasing the American dream while living on the streets (“Forgotten Eyes”). Tellingly and importantly, she’s not interested in pitting one

More thought-out and deliberate was how Big Thief approached things when the tape was rolling for both records. The band’s members were raised on everything from classic country to hardcore punk to goldenera college rock, and you can hear that in their songs. Nowhere are its various influences better encapsulated than on “Not” off Two Hands, where—powered by Lenker’s wavering and always emotive vocals— things start off as languid as Up on the Sun Meat Puppets and then crash into a hailstorm of no-wave guitar violence.

The idea is to look at what’s underneath all the discord in this country—the fear that’s causing all the division.

– Buck Meek

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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.

Scan to confess Yes I did I actually sold some drugs and never got caught. I needed the money and it was of a one off.

Too much to handle side against the other, preferring to take an approach that’s poetic instead of polemical. One of the album’s most potent moments comes in “Rock and Sing”, where she wrings maximum emotion out of the lines “I don’t want to be scared of/Anybody coming in/I don’t want to lock my door anymore.”

“Going to Texas to record was not a direct political statement at all—that’s not how we operate as a band,” Meek says. “But to ask about that is a good question. Some of these songs do seem like they are making a statement. I think Adrianne has described it as being political without using political language. The idea is to look at what’s underneath all the discord in this country—the fear that’s causing all the division.”

Noting that Tornillo is a town with one of the migrant detention camps set up by President Donald Trump’s far-right administration, the guitarist continues: “I think that had a big impact on us during the process. That those camps are there was something that was palpable, and that empowered the songs. So in hindsight, it was a political record, but more for the creative process than for the one album statement.”

The stunning thing about U.F.O.F. and Two Hands is that neither record is perfect. Vibe and feel trump razorsharp execution on offerings like the former’s mesquite-sunset lullaby “Cattails” and the latter’s fabulously ragged “Shoulders”.

“It’s such a deep process, being in the studio, where half the time you don’t even know what the result is going to be,” Meek offers. “Most of the time it’s about locking yourself in the studio and having no expectations. And you have to accept the process. We’re always fighting the idea of perfectionism. We’ve learned to remind each other that what we’re after is a kind of almost ephemeral power. And that’s a big part of what we do.”

He continues: “Often we’ll record a song a first or second time, we’ll feel dissatisfied, and then continue for an hour or two, doing take after take after take,” Meek says. “Then we go into the control room and realize the first take was the best, not because it was flawless, but because it had a real living energy—which is pretty much the only thing that matters.” g Big Thief plays the Vogue Theatre next Friday (October 25).

My grandmother was cremated after she died because that’s what she requested. We still have her ashes in our house but it is so painful looking at the urn day in and day out. I feel like I just want to take her ashes and scatter... (con’t @straight.com)

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Shovels & Rope ambitious on Blood

T

by Mike Usinger

he greatness of Shovels & Rope’s ambitious By Blood is in the way that it’s challenged not only the band’s long-time fans, but also the couple responsible for bringing the songs to life.

Back when the husband-andwife team of Cary Ann Hearst and Michael Trent found themselves filed under “minimalist Americana”, the task of re-creating their records on-stage was relatively easy.

But one listen to By Blood shows that the duo have a challenge on their hands, something that Hearst knew would be the case during the recording process.

“Michael essentially produces our records in the backyard,” the singer and multi-instrumentalist

says, reached in New York City on a conference call with Trent. “I’d come into our studio there on a Monday and hear something interesting, and then pop in on a Friday and really start to hear what he was conceptualizing. Constantly checking in with fresh ears really helped me appreciate the growth on this record. I felt thrilled every time I heard the songs.

And that made me really excited to perform the material. I feel like it’s the best record we’ve ever done.”

That contention is borne out by the amount of ground Shovels & Rope covers on the album’s 10 songs.

Hearst and Trent haven’t complete- Shovels & Rope’s married duo of Michael Trent and Cary Ann Hearst call By Blood ly forgotten their roots, with the the best record that they’ve ever made. Photo by Leslie Ryann McKellar swamp-blues thumper “Mississippi barbecues in the Deep South, and important and impactful on-stage.

Nuthin’ ” perfect for backwoods the country sleeper “C’Mon Utah!” But even though each one of us is made for midnight drives down usually playing two instruments at rural gravel roads. the same time, sometimes you gotta But what’s really noticeable is that strip things back a bit.”

Shovels & Rope continues to light And sometimes you have to acout for bold new territory—a trend cept that re-creating studio magic is that started with 2016’s equally ex- impossible. cellent Little Seeds. “I’m Comin’ “We’re really busy on-stage, and Out” works a frazzled analogue- our limbs are busy,” Trent says. “Like, electro vibe that post-Stripes Jack I’ll be playing guitar and then bass White would approve of, “The Wire” with something I’m stepping on, or plants a tattered flag in Brooklyn’s Cary will be playing the keyboards rawk revival of 2001, and “Twisted and the drums. We’re not killing it Sisters” bridges two dusty worlds on either instrument, but at least with authentic Tex-Mex horns. we’re getting the point across. If that As gratifying as the artistic sounds less than what you hear on growth is , both Trent and Hearst ac- record, that’s okay. There’s nothing knowledge that it’s indeed presented wrong with stripping things right something of a challenge. back to voice and guitar.”

“A song sounds one way when Hearst laughs, and then adds: “And you first start writing it, then it not having to do everything is actually goes through a number of evolu- a blessing. We’re getting to the point tions when you’re working on it,” where our bodies are starting to break Trent says. “After that, it’s got to down. Sometimes it’s good to know somehow live on the stage. On that you can decide to step back on a this record I played bass on every song and take a knee.” g song, and there are extra layers all over the place. The key is to focus Shovels & Rope plays the Commodore on the things that are the most Ballroom next Friday (October 25).

ACCOUNTING CLERK The Georgia Straight is currently accepting applications for the position of Accounting Clerk.

This role is responsible for payroll, accounts payable and accounts receivable.

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No phone calls, please. We thank all applicants for their interest; however, only those candidates selected for an interview will be contacted.

24 THE GEORGIA STR AIGHT OCTOBER 17 – 24 / 2019

CONCERTS JUST ANNOUNCED

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 17

HOGAN SINGS HOLIDAY Vocalist Alison Hogan performs a joyful romp through the early years of the Billie Holiday songbook. Oct 20, 8 pm, Frankie’s Jazz Club. $16.

YOUNG FRIEND Local indie-pop singer-songwriter, with guests Michaela Singler, Scribbly Doodle, and Tessa. Oct 17, Railway Stage and Beer Café. $10.

JIMMY RANKIN Folk singer-songwriter from Cape Breton, formerly of the Rankin Family.

Oct 17, 7:30-10 pm, Chief Sepass Theatre. $45.

THE LEGENDARY DOWNCHILD BLUES BAND Canadian blues veterans, with local guest Jim Byrnes. Oct 17, 8 pm, River Rock Show Theatre. $59.50/49.50.

MARTIN SIMPSON English folksinger, guitarist, and songwriter. Oct 17, 8-10:30 pm, St. James Hall. $30/26.

CORY WONG Guitarist, composer, and producer from Minneapolis, with guest Phoebe Katis. Oct 17, 9 pm, Fox Cabaret.

JADE BIRD Indie-folk singer-songwriter from South London, with guests Flyte. Oct 17, 9 pm, Imperial Vancouver. $20.

TODDCAST PODCAST PRESENTS Featuring performances by local rock bands Dead Quiet, Woodhawk, and No Liars. Oct 25, Railway Stage and Beer Café. $8.

JONATHAN BAUER PROJECT NOLA–based trumpeter leads his jazz quintet. Oct 25, 9 pm, Tyrant Studios. $12.

PARK SOUND HALLOWEEN SHOW Featuring performances by Sleepy Gonzales, Zach Kleisinger, and Hello Victim. Oct 26, 7 pm, Park Sound Studio. $10-15.

THE DIME NOTES Small band, huge swing!

London’s blues-drenched, clarinet-driven, hard-swinging 1920s vintage jazz band is coming to North Van! The Dime Notes present a fresh take on a timeless style, emphasizing the propulsive grooves and sultry melodies which made early jazz revolutionary, controversial, and wildly popular. Oct 26, 7:30 pm, Centennial Theatre. $37/32.

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 18

GLASS FOREST Local indie-pop band, with guests MONOWHALES, ease, and Emma Alves Music. Oct 27, Railway Stage and Beer Café. $10.

RUBY & SMITH Daphne Roubini and Andrew Smith perform original tunes and reinterpreted folk classics. Oct 27, 7 pm, ANZA Club. $15/20.

THE PAUL McKENNA BAND Folk quartet from Glascow, Scotland. Oct 27, 8-10:30 pm, St. James Hall. $26/22.

NOAH REID Canadian actor and musician performs on his First Time Out tour. Feb 11, 8 pm, Imperial Vancouver. Tix on sale Oct 18, 10 am, $25.

TONES AND I Australian pop singer-songwriter Toni Watson. Feb 12, 9 pm, Imperial Vancouver. Tix on sale Oct 18, 10 am, $21.

ILLITERATE LIGHT American rock duo performs tunes from self-titled debut album. Feb 14, 9 pm, WISE Hall. Tix on sale Oct 18, 10 am, $15.

DONNY BENÉT Postdisco recording artist from Australia. Feb 21, 8 pm, Fox Cabaret. Tix on sale Oct 18, 10 am, $14.

HOLLOW COVES Australian indie-folk group.

Feb 29, 8 pm, Venue. $18.50.

BRENT FAIYAZ American R&B/hip-hip singer, with guest Grip. Mar 21, 9:30 pm, Commodore Ballroom. Tix on sale Oct 18, 10 am, $35.

ALICE COOPER Legendary shock-rocker from the ‘70s, with guest Lita Ford. Apr 18, 7:30 pm, Abbotsford Centre. Tix on sale Oct 18, 10 am, $125/99.50/79.50/45.

WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 16 SABATON Power-metal band from Sweden, with guests Hammerfall. Oct 16, Vogue Theatre. $39.50.

THE INTERRUPTERS Ska-punk band from L.A., with guests Skinny Lister and Sharp/ Shock. Oct 16, 7 pm, Commodore Ballroom.

CÉCILE MCLORIN SALVANT Grammywinning jazz vocalist. Oct 16, 17, 8 pm, BlueShore Financial Centre for the Performing Arts. $48/$45.

BLACK PUMAS Psychedelic soul band from Austin, Texas. Oct 16, 8 pm, Rickshaw Theatre. $25.

Employment EMPLOYMENT Careers

Chrome Dome Enterprises Inc.

is HIRING a Construction Estimator, Greater Vancouver, BC. Perm, 30 hours/week Wage: $39.50 per hour. Main Duties: Understanding of the requirements of the construction projects; Analyze data and prepare estimates of probable costs; Examine and analyze tenders, perform risk analysis; Obtain best bids from vendors and subcontractors; Establish and maintain tendering process; Co-ordinate construction projects, prepare construction progress schedules.

Requirements: Several years of experience, High school diploma,Completion of a college program in related field is an asset,Good English.

Business address and job location: 20181 48 Avenue, Langley, BC V3A 3L3 Please apply by e-mail: hralandome@gmail.com

Eurohouse Construction Inc.

is looking for MARBLE SETTERS, Greater Vancouver, BC. Perm, F/time Wage - $ 30/h, extended medical benefit package.

Main duties: Lay out wall patterns or foundations; Cut, polish and fit marble or granite; Mix, apply and spread mortar, cement, mastic, glue or other materials; Install marble or granite slabs, architectural panels & moldings; Chisel, dress, and shape stone; Install of natural stone; Set vertical and horizontal alignment of structures; Dress the joints and wipe excess grout; Smooth marble or granite surfaces.

Requirements: 2-3 years of experience, good English, high school.

Company’s business address: 2474 Marine Dr, West Vancouver, BC V7V 1L1 Please apply by e-mail: admin@eurohouse.ca

THE DEAD SOUTH Folk-bluegrass group from Regina. Oct 19-20, 9 pm, Commodore Ballroom. Oct 19 SOLD OUT, tix for Oct 20 $30.

JONATHAN BREE Composer, multi-instrumentalist, and producer from New Zealand.

Oct 23, 9 pm, Fox Cabaret. $15.

MONDAY, OCTOBER 21

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 24

THE WHO British rock legends, featuring original members Pete Townshend and Roger Daltrey. With special guest Liam Gallagher. Oct 21, 7:30 pm, Rogers Arena. $304/203/153/103/83/53.

LUCY DACUS Indie-rock singer-songwriter from Virginia. Oct 21, 8 pm, Rio Theatre. $18.

MILD ORANGE Pop band from New Zealand.

Oct 21, 8 pm, Fox Cabaret. $17.50.

THOM YORKE Leader of Radiohead performs tunes from latest solo album Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes. Oct 21, 8 pm, Orpheum Theatre.

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 26 MUMIY TROLL Rock quintet from Russia. Oct 26, Vogue Theatre. $39.50.

THE LEGENDARY PINK DOTS Anglo-Dutch experimental rock band, with guests Orbit Service. Oct 26, Biltmore Cabaret. $25.

ALIEN WEAPONRY Metal trio from New Zealand. Oct 24, Biltmore Cabaret. $30.

THE WILD! Rowdy rockers from Kelowna. Oct 24, Railway Stage and Beer Café. $12.

LAST DINOSAURS Indie-rock quartet from Australia, with guests Born Ruffians. Oct 24, Imperial Vancouver.

JUDAH & THE LION Americana/alt band from Nashville. Oct 24, 8 pm, Orpheum Theatre. $29.50/39.50/49.50.

DINOSAUR JR. American alt-rock band, featuring guitarist-vocalist J. Mascis. Oct 24, 9 pm, Commodore Ballroom. $35.

NOAH KAHAN American folk-pop singersongwriter. Oct 26, 7 pm, Commodore Ballroom. $25.

WHITNEY Indie-rock band from Chicago, with guests Lala Lala. Oct 26, 8 pm, Venue. $30.

BROCKHAMPTON Rap collective from Texas. Oct 26, 8 pm, PNE Forum. $56.50.

HALLOWEEN AT THE COMMODORE Halloween bash featuring performances by Stickybuds, Moontricks, Dirtwire, and Rumpus & Sivz. Oct 26, 10 pm, Commodore Ballroom.

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 25

TUESDAY, OCTOBER 22 TYLER CHILDERS Country and bluegrass singer-songwriter on his Country Squire Tour.

Oct 22, 8 pm, Commodore Ballroom. $36.

WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 23 JERRY PAPER Synth-pop songwriter and producer from L.A. Oct 23, Biltmore Cabaret. $14.99.

TEENAGE BOTTLEROCKET Wyoming punkrock veterans, with local guests Isotopes Punk Rock Baseball Club and Modern Terror.

Oct 23, 8 pm, Rickshaw Theatre. $17.50.

THE WAILERS Roots rasta reggae. Oct 23, 8 pm, Imperial Vancouver. $36.75.

JEREMY DUTCHER Classically trained Canadian Indigenous tenor, composer, musicologist, and activist. Oct 23, 9 pm, Commodore Ballroom. $27.50.

BIG THIEF Brooklyn-based indie-folk/rock band. Oct 25, Vogue Theatre.

JORDAN RAKEI Australian soul-jazz singersongwriter. Oct 25, Biltmore Cabaret. $19.99.

KERO KERO BONITO British indie-pop band.

Oct 25, Rickshaw Theatre.

HALLOWEEN WEEN TRIBUTE NIGHT Three local acts perform Ween’s hits, misses, Bsides, and rarities. Oct 25, 8 pm, Pat’s Pub & Brewhouse. $10.

PETER BERNSTEIN Guitarist performs with CapU jazz ensembles. Oct 25, 8 pm, BlueShore Financial Centre for the Performing Arts. $32/29.

BRET MICHAELS Former frontman of ‘80s glam-pop band Poison. Oct 25, 8 pm, Hard Rock Casino Vancouver. From $69.50.

SHOVELS & ROPE American country-folk duo, with guest John Paul White. Oct 25, 9 pm, Commodore Ballroom. $30.

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 27 TIFFANY YOUNG K-pop/synth-pop artist from California. Oct 27, Vogue Theatre. $35.

BUILT TO SPILL Indie-rock band from Boise, Idaho. Oct 27, 8 pm, Rickshaw Theatre. $32.50.

SLOAN Canadian rock band on their Navy Blues Tour. Oct 27, 8:30 pm, Commodore Ballroom. $35.

MUSIC LISTINGSare a public service provided free of charge, based on available space and editorial discretion. Submit events 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.

“Uplifting and upbeat; it's the sharp-suit Saturday night to Buena Vista Social Club's Sunday morning” – Uncut

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 19

DONAVON FRANKENREITER Soft-rock singer-songwriter from California, with guest Christina Holmes. Feb 26, 8:30 pm, Imperial Vancouver. Tix on sale Oct 18, 10 am, $27.50.

HERB ALPERT & LANI HALL Iconic trumpeter performs with his vocalist wife. Apr 9, 8 pm, Chan Centre for the Performing Arts.

Tix on sale Oct 18, 10 am, $85/69.50/55.

MATING RITUAL Dance-rock outfit. Oct 18, Biltmore Cabaret.

CLASSIC RONSTADT THE MUSIC & LEGACY OF LINDA Classic Ronstadt pays tribute to Linda Ronstadt Oct 18, 7:30-10:30 pm, Centennial Theatre. $35.

HOZIER Irish indie-rock singer-songwriter, with guest Freya Ridings. Oct 18, 8 pm, Doug Mitchell Thunderbird Sports Centre. $69.50/59.50/49.50/39.50.

LISTENING LOUNGE—THE JOHN STETCH TV TRIO +1 Canadian jazz pianist leads his combo in TV theme songs of the ‘70s and ‘80s. Oct 18, 8-10 pm, The ACT Arts Centre. $27.50/22.50.

THE SOJOURNERS Local gospel trio, with guest Tonye Aganaba. Oct 18, 8-10:30 pm, St. James Hall. $24/20.

JUSTIN RUTLEDGE Juno-winning singersongwriter, with guest Oh Susanna. Oct 18, 8-11:30 pm, WISE Hall. $20/25.

JESSICA BEACH Canadian soul-blues artist, with guest Raene. Oct 18, 9 pm, Tyrant Studios. $15.

MUSIC LISTINGS

LUKE COMBS American country artist, with guests Morgan Wallen, Jameson Rodgers, and Dee Jay Silver. Oct 19, 7 pm, Rogers Arena. $55/40/30/20.

FELABRATION 2019 Celebrate Fela Kuti, creator of Afrobeat, and the powerful African women behind him at the Afrika Shrine. Live music, traditional Nigerian dance, music, food, and more. Hosted by Kara-Kata Afrobeat Group and Kara-Kata Afrobeat Society and featuring the Boom Booms, Queer as Funk, Mostly Marley, Tonye Aganaba, Kesseke Yeo, and more.

Oct 19, 7 pm, Imperial Vancouver. $40.

JIM BYRNES Vancouver blues legend. Oct 19, 7:30 pm, Genesis Theatre. $35.

WEST COAST GUITAR NIGHT Solo performances by acoustic guitarists Kent Hillman, Andre Stepanian, Jacob Seyer, Luis Medina, Edgar Avelino, and Les Finnigan. Oct 19, 8 pm, Historic Theatre. $29.

PUNK ROCK PING PONG #2 Ping pong and punk rock by You Big Idiot, ATD, Normal People, and Die Job. Oct 19, 8 pm, Pat’s Pub & Brewhouse. $10.

DAKHABRAKHA Kiev-based quartet fuses beguiling beats and traditional Ukrainian folklore. Oct 19, 8 pm, Chan Centre for the Performing Arts. From $46.

EAST VAN OPRY Local roots and country artists, hosted by Charlie Demers. Oct 19, 8 pm, The Rio Theatre. $24/28.

Laser and Anti-Aging Medicine Centre and Doctors Gym LTD o/a Medical Spa Club is hiring Weight-loss clinic manager Perm, F/time. Wage - $31.00 /hr Requirements: Good English; Experience as a weight-loss clinic manager or similar position.

Education: high school; A college diploma is an asset. Main duties: Plan, and control the operations of the clinic; Establish and supervise weight-loss procedures schedules; Manage staff and assign duties, hire and train of new employees; Resolve work-related problems and customer complaints; Develop marketing strategies; Plan and control budget and inventory.

Job location and company’s business address: 6611, No 2 Road, Richmond, BC V7C 3L5 Please apply by e-mail: hiring@medicalspaclub.com

Child Care

CHILD CARE

Jiang Residence is looking for a Responsible Caregiver for 2 kids. Duties: Cooking meals, housekeeping, take children to and from school and appointments and maintain a safe environment in the home. $14.5/h, 40h/week. Minimum 1yr college diploma required, can travel with family. Please contact at v63744@gmail.com

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Support Groups

Professional EMPLOYMENT Services

Events - Upcoming

Musicians Wanted (Free)

A MDABC peer-led support group

Dating Services

G.R.O.W.- Greatness Resides and Originates Within - An Evening of Keynotes featuring author, speaker and 7 time Mr. Nude North America, Marcus Anthony Ray. Hot off the release of his second book, Seven Years of Skin.

October 25, 6:30 PM @ The Justice Institute.

Tickets on Eventbrite

Can you sing and play like John, Paul, or George?

Drummer seeks to form a tribute band with a difference. Text or call 778-628-6240

is a safe place to share your story, your struggles and accomplishments, and to listen to others as they share similar concerns. Please Note: Support groups are not intended to provide counselling/therapy. ?

Please visit www.mdabc.net for a list and location of support groups or call 604-873-0103 for info.

DATE LOCAL RUSSIAN LADIES 604-805-1342

Annoucements EMPLOYMENT Notices

NOVENA

APARTMENTS FOR RENT

West End Apartments. HERITAGE. QUIET. 1Bd/$1575, 1B/d plus Den/$1725, 2 Bd/$1950.

Updated Suites. H/Wood Floors, Granite Counters, New Appl's Etc. Heat & Hot Water Inc. E/mail:

queenanneapts@gmail.com

EMPLOYMENT Callboard Volunteers Free

SHELTER MOVERS,

a volunteer based organization that provides moving and storage services at no cost to women and children fleeing abuse, is looking for volunteers to help with these moves. We ask that you be able to lift 20 lbs. This is a great opportunity to make a BIG impact in a small amount of time. To apply email volunteervan@sheltermovers.com

O most beautiful flower of Mount Carmel, fruitful vine, splendor of heaven, Blessed Mother of the Son of God, Immaculate Virgin assist me in this my necessity. There are none that can withstand your power. O show me herein you are my mother.

O Mary conceived without sin, pray for me who has recourse to thee (say 3x). Holy Mary, I place this cause in your hands (3x). Sweet Mother, I place this cause in your hands (3x). Holy Spirit, you who solve all problems, light all roads so that I can attain my goal. You gave me the divine gift to forgive and to forget all evil against me and that in all instances in my life you are with me. This prayer must be said for 3 days even after the request is granted, and then you must have this prayer published in some paper.

NOTICE TO NEXT OF KIN of SHERGAR JAMAICA, deceased, formerly of 415 Alexander St, Vancouver, BC, who died on March 28, 2018, are required to contact Coast Foundation Society (1974), trustee of the Shergar Jamaica Trust, at 293 East 11th Ave, Vancouver, BC V5T 2C4 (Attention: Trust Administrator), on or before September 30, 2020, after which date the trust assets will be distributed having regard only to those next of kin whom the trustee is aware and whose relationship to the deceased has been verified.

WITNESS NEEDED

MVA September 23, 2019 at approx 9:15pm, a black car rear-ended a white 2017 Toyota Corolla at the intersection of Canada Way and Edmonds Street in Burnaby.

Call Julia 604-336-8006

EMPLOYMENT Music Repairs

Beatles Tribute Band Forming Web Artists

Youtube - "Early Rolling Stones Tribute Concert Mick Believe and the Charming Deviates Sundquist Blues"

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A relationship doesn’t have to end in a funeral home with one person in a box to have been a success. If you have three or four great years together before the window in which your relationship makes sense closes, ILS, then you had some great years together. People get it into their heads that they can’t enter into a relationship unless they can picture it lasting “forever”, when really nothing is forever.

To quote the great James Baldwin: “Love him and let him love you. Do you think anything else under heaven really matters?” g

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N OW H IR IN G

from page 27

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26 THE GEORGIA STRAIGHT OCTOBER 17 – 24 / 2019

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PLATINUMCLUB.NET

SAVAGE LOVE

High standards will disqualify lovers

by Dan Savage

b I’M A SEATTLE local who basically grew up reading your column. I think you’ve always given really sound advice, so I’m reaching out. My boyfriend and I have been together for two years.

We started out poly, but I was clear from the start that when I fall in love with someone, I lose all attraction to anyone other than that one person. I fell in love with him, and we decided to be monogamous. But I know he’s still attracted to other people, and it makes me feel like ending the relationship. I love him like I’ve never loved anyone else, but because he doesn’t feel the same way I do on this subject, I don’t believe he loves me at all. I don’t feel like I can bring it up with him, because it will just make him feel bad for something he probably can’t control, and I don’t think I can make him love me. But I also feel like I’m wasting my time and living a lie. Help!

- Heartbroken Over Nothing This thing about you—how being in love with someone renders you incapable of finding anyone else attractive—that’s pretty much a unique-to-you trait.

The overwhelming majority of even the blissfully-in-loves out there still find other people attractive. And you should know that if you grew up reading my column. You should also know that a monogamous commitment doesn’t mean you don’t want to fuck other people, HON, it means you’ve promised not to fuck other people. We

wouldn’t have to make monogamous commitments if sincere feelings of love extinguished all desire for others.

Since no one is ever going to love you in precisely the same way you love them—since no one else is ever going to meet the impossible standard you’ve set—every person you fall in love with will disappoint you. Every potential love arrives predisqualified. You meet someone, you fall in love with them, they fall in love with you, you are not attracted to others, they still are, you have no choice but to dump that person and start all over again. Lover, rinse, repeat.

Zooming out: people who create impossible standards for romantic partners—standards no one could ever hope to meet—usually don’t want to be in committed relationships but can’t admit that to themselves. We’re told good people want to be in committed relationships, and we all want to think of ourselves as good people.

So someone who doesn’t want a longterm commitment either has to think of themselves as a bad person, which no one wants to do, or has to redefine for themselves what it means to be a good person, which can be hard work.

But there’s a third option: set impossible standards for our romantic partners. And then, when all of our romantic partners fail to meet our impossible standards, we can tell ourselves we’re the only truly good person as we move through life breaking the hearts of

anyone foolish enough to fall in love with us.

So while my hunch is that it’s not your partner who is incapable of loving you, HON, but you who are incapable of loving him, you’re free to prove me wrong. One way we demonstrate our capacity to truly love someone is by believing them when they say they love us. That’s step one.

Step two is accepting that someone’s love for us is legitimate even if they don’t experience or express love in precisely the same way we do. b MY FATHER passed away recently. I received a contract to sell his house, and soon I’ll have to clean the place out. My question is this: what to do with a dead relative’s porn? I don’t want to keep it; I don’t want to waste it by just putting it in the trash; I can’t donate it to the library. There’s nothing especially collectible in it, so eBay is out. Maybe someone would buy the lot of it on Craigslist, but I’m not entirely clear what the legalities are for selling secondhand porn out of the back of a car, let alone what the potential market might be. I mean, how many folks are looking to buy a deceased elderly man’s former wank bank? I’m certain I’m only the most recent in a long line of folks to find themselves in this situation. Any advice for finding the porn a new home, or is it a bad idea to even try? Added difficulties: smallish town, Midwestern state, and I’m his only liv-

ing family member.

- Rehoming Inherited Pornography You would be in the same predicament

if you had lots of living family members. I have an enormous family—lots of aunts and uncles, countless cousins—and “Who wants the porn?” isn’t a question I’ve ever heard asked at an elderly relative’s wake. And that can’t be because none of my elderly relatives had porn stashes; the law of averages dictates that at least one and probably more dead Savages (RIP) had massive porn stashes, which means whoever cleaned out the apartment or house quietly disposed of the porn. And that’s what you should do.

If you’re concerned about your dad’s porn “going to waste”, dispose of it in a conspicuous manner, e.g., drop it off at a recycling centre in open boxes or clear bags. Maybe a worker or someone else making a drop-off will spot the porn and decide to rescue it from the pile. And, hey, my condolences on the death of your father. b I WENT ON Grindr just before Xmas last year; this handsome dude messaged me and we ended up hooking up at his place. It was apparent from the get-go that this was no regular hookup.

We didn’t even have sex. We just kissed and talked and cuddled for six straight hours. Sounds perfect, right? Well, at about hour five, in the middle of this surprisingly deep conversation, he said

something that made my head spin. I asked him how old he was. “Twentyone,” he replied. Holy shit. He asked how old I was. “Fifty.” Neither of us had our age on Grindr. He looked about 30 to me. He said he thought I was in my late 30s. It was basically love at first sight for us. After nine months of trying to keep a lid on our feelings, he moved away and found a guy close to his own age, which I strongly encouraged. Before they became an official couple, we went on a goodbye walk, which was full of love and tears. We agreed to do the “no contact” thing for one month (he thought three was extreme). But here’s my issue: I’m in love with him. I’ve been incredibly sad since we last spoke about three weeks ago. It’s a week until the agreed-upon day when we can say “Hi” if we want to, and I don’t want to. I can’t. I have to let him go. I know he’s going to want to talk, but I’m afraid if I have any contact with him, it will set me back and I won’t want to stop. It’s taken all my willpower to not contact him so far. My question: how do I let him know I don’t want any further contact without hurting him?

- Impossible Love Sucks Call the boy, ILS, ask him to meet up, and tell him you made a mistake. Yes, you’re a lot older, and the age difference may be so great that you two aren’t going to be together forever. But maybe you’re perfect for each other right now.

see previous page

, E L I M S , P U E K A W “ , F L E S R U O Y L L E T AND ” !

Y A D Y M S I Y A D TO

LET’S GET MOVING, VANCOUVER! 1807 West 1st @ Burrard, Kitsilano | www.ronzalko.com | 604.737.4355 OCTOBER 17 – 24 / 2019 THE GEORGIA STRAIGHT 27

28 THE GEORGIA STR AIGHT OCTOBER 17 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; 24 / 2019