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Vancouver is in the forefront of North America when it comes to illicit-drug harm reduction, and journalist Travis Lupick’s new book, Fighting for Space, details the early days of the DTES activists. > BY JACKIE WONG
11
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FOOD
Whistler’s annual Cornucopia fest isn’t all about overindulgence in food and drink: it has health and wellness events every day. > BY GAIL JOHNSON
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Tom Anselmi joins his bandmates to explain why Slow has returned after three decades to do it one more time with feeling. > BY ADRIAN MACK
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NOVEMBER 2 – 9 / 2017 THE GEORGIA STRAIGHT 5
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DAVID POY CHAN P Passed away peacefully at Delta Hospital, BC at the age of 88 on October 17, 2017. David was born in Vancouver, BC and spent most of his life working in Chicago, Illinois. He is survived by his nieces and nephews, Theresa, Frank (Nellie), Andrea (Kirk), and Minta (Mark), and the families of Tyrone (Jill) and Audrey (Yee); extended family members and friends. Predeceased by his siblings Herbert, Ida, Ada, Ruby, Richard, nephew Tyrone, and niece Audrey. David’s career as a professional portrait photographer, led to a portfolio of work that spanned from the mid 60’s to 2000 with Playboy Enterprises. His notable pictorials with Playboy magazine were the collegiate women and Ivy League series. David has such a gentle soul that will be dearly missed by his family and friends. Celebration of Life Service to be announced at a later date and time. In lieu of flowers, donations in David’s name may be made to the Heart and Stroke Foundation. www.heartandstroke.ca
Weapons sales create havoc > B Y C HA R LIE S M ITH
A
s an African National Congress member of the South African National Assembly from 1994 to 2001, Andrew Feinstein witnessed the impact of international weapons manufacturers in a horrific way. The poverty-stricken country was in the midst of an unimaginable HIV crisis when the government decided to spend $6.2 billion on a so-called strategic-defence package in 1999. It’s a deal that has been marred by serious allegations of corruption ever since. “This was at a time when our president, Thabo Mbeki, was saying we couldn’t afford to provide antiretroviral medication to six million South Africans who were living with HIV or AIDS,” Feinstein told the Georgia Straight by phone from his office in London, England. “According to the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, there were 365,000 avoidable deaths over the next five years.” Since leaving political office in 2001, he’s devoted much of his life to helping efforts to provide support for people with HIV, as well as raising the alarm about the ramifications of international weapons sales. Feinstein’s 2011 book, The Shadow World: Inside the Global Arms Trade, was adapted into a feature-length documentary directed by Johan Grimonprez.
“Despite what our governments, defence companies, and what our military tell us, the global trade in arms actually undermines our democracies, undermines the rule of law,” Feinstein said. “It’s a massive contributor to global corruption and—perhaps most bizarrely of all— makes us less rather than more safe.” He also emphasized that the election of a Liberal government in Canada headed by Justin Trudeau has not resulted in any real change from when Stephen Harper was prime minister. To support his argument, Feinstein pointed to Canada’s export of arms to Saudi Arabia. According to a federal report, 20 percent of Canada’s $717 million in sales of military goods and technology in 2016 went to that country. Feinstein alleged that these arms sales are being used “to violate international humanitarian law, possibly in the committing of war crimes” in Yemen and Bahrain. “It is up to Canadian citizens to do something about this because this is being done in the name of Canadian citizens with the tax dollars of Canadian citizens,” he declared. The Trudeau government has emphasized that unlike its predecessor, it will join the Arms Trade Treaty, which is an international agreement that purports to regulate weapons sales. Feinstein, however, said that although the negotiations focused
attention on this issue, the treaty itself is “incredibly weak”. “It mentions corruption only once in passing,” he stated. “It has no mechanism of enforceability.” In other words, it’s entirely dependent on the political will of governments. “And, in fact, we’ve seen with the sale of weaponry to Saudi Arabia during its bombing campaign of Yemen since March of 2015 that even those countries who’ve claimed to champion the international Arms Trade Treaty, such as the United Kingdom and Canada, are completely violating it in relation to their sales to Saudi Arabia. So the very governments that are at the forefront of negotiating this treaty are, sadly, at the forefront of nullifying it and making it…irrelevant.” He also insisted that the arms trade does not help the economy, noting that the “linkage effects” to growth have not existed since the 1980s. That’s because of the magnitude of state subsidies, among other factors. “It’s an appalling way to try and grow an economy,” Feinstein said. Andrew Feinstein will deliver the Wall Exchange lecture, which is sponsored by UBC’s Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies, at the Vogue Theatre at 7 p.m. on Tuesday (November 7). For more information, visit www.pwias.ubc.ca/.
The Georgia Straight | Vancouver’s News and Entertainment Weekly | Volume 51 Number 2600 1635 West Broadway, Vancouver, B.C. V6J 1W9 www.straight.com Phone: 604-730-7000 / Fax: 604-730-7010 / e-mail: gs.info@straight.com Display Advertising: 604-730-7020 / Fax: 604-730-7012 / e-mail: sales@straight.com Classifieds: 604-730-7060 / e-mail: classads@straight.com Subscriptions: 604-730-7000 Distribution: 604-730-7087 EDITOR + PUBLISHER Dan McLeod ASSOCIATE PUBLISHER Yolanda Stepien GENERAL MANAGER Matt McLeod EDITOR Charlie Smith SECTION EDITORS
Janet Smith (Arts/Fashion) Mike Usinger (Music) Steve Newton (Time Out) Adrian Mack (Movies) Brian Lynch (Books) Amanda Siebert (Cannabis) EDITORIAL ADMINISTRATOR Doug Sarti ASSOCIATE EDITORS
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Tammy Kwan, Lucy Lau, Travis Lupick, Carlito Pablo, Craig Takeuchi, Kate Wilson SENIOR EDITOR Martin Dunphy EDITORIAL ASSISTANT Jennie Ramstad PROOFREADER Pat Ryffranck CONTRIBUTING WRITERS
Gregory Adams, Nathan Caddell, David Chau, Jack Christie, Jennifer Croll, Ken Eisner (Movies), George Fetherling, Tara Henley, Michael Hingston, Ng Weng Hoong, Alex Hudson, Kurtis Kolt,
Robin Laurence (Visual Arts), Mark Leiren-Young, John Lekich, Amy Lu, Bob Mackin, Michael Mann, Rose Marcus, Beth McArthur, Verne McDonald, Allan MacInnis, Guy MacPherson, Tony Montague, Kathleen Oliver, Ben Parfitt, Vivian Pencz, Bill Richardson, Gurpreet Singh, Jacqueline Turner, Andrea Warner, Jessica Werb, Stephen Wong, Alan Woo CONTRIBUTING ARTISTS
Alfonso Arnold, Rebecca Blissett, Trevor Brady, Louise Christie, Emily Cooper, Randall Cosco, Krystian Guevara, Evaan Kheraj, Kris Krug, Tracey Kusiewicz, Kevin Langdale, Shayne Letain, Matt Mignanelli, Mark “Atomos” Pilon, Carlo Ricci, William Ting, Alex Waterhouse-Hayward DIGITAL PRODUCT MANAGER
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Textile artist Helen Hawkett creates souvenir-style pillows digitally printed with historical maps of areas such as North Vancouver and the Okanagan.
Canadian makers get gifty at Circle Craft
V
ancouver’s busy craft-fair Island, the Okanagan, and more. Her season kicks off with the Vancouver cushion illustrates the city Circle Craft Christmas Mar- in 1906, when the area was marked and ket on November 8, when connected by gridlike railroad tracks. over 300 artisans will touch down in Crafted from a linen-cotton canvas, all the city with all sorts of handcrafted Vintage Map Co. pillows are filled with apparel, jewellery, homewares, and down or a synthetic fibre by request. other goods in tow. Arguably the granddaddy of holi- HOWL & HOME When Tina Ng day markets, the 44th annual event and Jérémie Laguette adopted their first pet—an adorwill feature 50-plus able German newcomers from shepherd–Husky across Canada, all mix named Cyof whom are makLucy Lau press—they didn’t ing it their personal goal to have every name on your find many pet supplies and furnishshopping list crossed off well before ings that fit their aesthetic. So they December. Below, a guide to a couple decided to create their own. “We like of our favourite new Circle Craft–ers things to be pretty minimalist and and the old-fashioned pillows and chic low-profile,” says Ng, “and we really pet items they’ll be sharing during the like sturdy design.” With Ng, a full-time graphic defive-day fair. signer, taking on the design duties, VINTAGE MAP CO. Maps are typ- and Laguette, the sign-maker behind ically displayed in minimalist frames, Woodtype, tackling the building side, plastered directly onto walls, or, in the Halfmoon Bay–based duo crafted the case of serious collectors, stored a pared-down dog-bowl stand— in steel cabinets designed to protect equipped with locally made earthensuch pieces from damage. Toronto- ware bowls—that was soon drawing based textile artist Helen Hawkett, the attention of family and friends. however, prefers them emblazed Constructed using pine plywood across plush pillows and cushions. offcuts from Laguette’s sign biz and “It grew from a homemade Christ- coated in an eco-friendly, food-safe mas exchange that we did with family,” finish, the feeding stations come in Hawkett tells the Straight by phone. two different heights that allow your “My husband and I had this idea of four-legged pals to more comfortably putting this cool old map that we had reach for food and water. (The “short” of Prince Edward County onto fabric is ideal for Frenchies and pugs, for and making pillows out of it.” example, while the “tall” is great for Seven years later, Hawkett has larger-sized breeds.) “We wanted the produced hundreds of square and items to a) not be an eyesore,” explains rectangular cushions—and linen tea Ng, “and b) look obviously like sometowels—digitally printed with vin- thing for dogs or for pets.” tage maps depicting Canadian reAt Circle Craft, the pair, known gions such as Montreal, Nova Scotia, collectively as Howl & Home, will and Calgary, the originals of which have samples of their feeders on deck, she sources from eBay and various which shoppers can customize with antique shops. The maps date as far punches of peach, lilac, and other back as the 1800s and, in many in- hues. “The idea is we’re going to alstances, exhibit railways, post offices, low people to choose the colour,” says and the wards, boroughs, or parks Ng. There’ll also be poop-bag storage that made up an area at one time. boxes and, if attendees are lucky, a “I don’t do any old map,” explains sneak peek at Howl & Home’s soonHawkett. “I want it to be unique and to-be-released pet beds. beautiful and evoke some history.” At Circle Craft, Hawkett will be The Circle Craft Christmas Market showcasing her West Coast–oriented takes place from November 8 to 12 at pillows, which are adorned with the Vancouver Convention Centre’s maps of the North Shore, Vancouver West building.
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Harm reduction history revealed in new book > B Y JA CKIE WON G
H
ere in Vancouver, it’s tempting to praise ourselves for our forward-thinking approaches to illicit drug use. We’re home to Insite, the first supervised-injection facility in North America, the success of which paved the way for Health Canada to start approving prospective supervisedinjection sites in other cities across the country this year. We’re also home to the first and only prescription heroin program on the continent, which has proven how life-changing it can be for a person entrenched in opiate addiction to have access to a clean, regulated supply of drugs. But Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside remains the epicentre of a provincewide overdose crisis that killed a record-breaking 1,013 British Columbians through the first eight months of this year. That put us on track to exceed 1,500 overdose deaths by the end of 2017. “That’s hard to even comprehend,” says Travis Lupick, a reporter with the Georgia Straight. His first book, about Vancouver’s history of drug-user activism and its new growth in the U.S., is out this month through Arsenal Pulp Press. The book, Fighting for Space: How a Group of Drug Users Transformed One City’s Struggle With Addiction, delineates how Vancouver became the vanguard of harmreduction approaches to illicit drug use through the advocacy, activism, and actions of Downtown Eastside drug users and their allies in the 1990s and early 2000s. By the late 1990s, the Vancouver-Richmond health board had declared a public health emergency in the Downtown Eastside for its explosion of HIV/AIDS rates among injection-drug users and a spate of illicit-drug overdose deaths that had reached epidemic proportions years earlier, in 1991. “It’s a history that Vancouver takes for granted. We’ve really quickly forgotten how difficult these struggles were for the people who pushed through them,” Lupick says at a West Broadway coffee shop. His book recounts the tense leadup to Insite opening its doors, and the Supreme Court of Canada case that threatened to shut it down. (It didn’t.) He writes about how Portland Hotel Society cofounders Liz Evans and Mark Townsend, fearing jail time for their involvement with opening Insite, sat down with their children to tell them they might have to go away for a while. “You don’t put children through those conversations unless you’re really worried about that happening,” Lupick says. He also notes how Ann Livingston, cofounder of the Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users and a long-time harm-reduction activist, endured years of police harassment for her work. “Twenty years later, all of these people are celebrated and Vancouver is championed as this amazing experiment of harm reduction. But for the people who were pushing it through its earliest days, there were really very real consequences that they faced. And it was not easy for them.” Lupick spent months interviewing Evans, Townsend, Livingston, Insite plaintiff and noted drug-user advocate Dean Wilson, and other Downtown Eastside luminaries for his book. He spent most of the December 2016 holiday break on the phone with Evans and Townsend, who now reside in New York City, and long evenings at Livingston’s apartment, where they would talk late into the night. Livingston turned the contents of her storage locker over to Lupick,
In Fighting for Space author Travis Lupick explores the roots of addiction.
who combed through 20 boxes of handwritten journal entries, flipchart paper containing meeting minutes from early drug-user groups that formed in the 1990s, public-health reports, and newspaper clippings. In the basement of a library at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, Lupick found a trove of the late Downtown Eastside activist and poet Bud Osborn’s writing, and he scoured journalist Johann Hari’s recordings of the final extensive interviews Osborn gave to the press before he died. Fighting for Space, encyclopedic in its research, is a testament to the grit, heart, and relentlessness central to making drug users matter in a society that has, for years, deemed them unworthy of care, dignity, or compassion. Lupick dedicates six chapters of the book to harmreduction efforts gaining momentum in cities across the United States. It’s exciting, important work, but Lupick maintains American harmreduction initiatives are 20 years behind where Canada is now. “There really is so much that other jurisdictions, especially in the United States, can learn from the Vancouver story,” he says. “I hope that policymakers and activists in places like North Carolina and Florida really do pick up on what happened in Vancouver and try and take some of the lessons that we learned 20 years ago and apply them today.” At the same time, Canada shouldn’t rest on its laurels. Most federal politicians don’t seem to grasp the true impacts that a contaminated illicit-drug supply is having on people in B.C., Lupick says. “Canada’s not yet talking about what I’ve reluctantly come to view as the only solutions there are for the fentanyl crisis, if you accept two very simple facts, and I think they are facts,” he maintains. First, he says, people will always use drugs. Second, B.C.’s illicit-drug supply is contaminated beyond repair—and this will soon be the case for the rest of the country. “If you accept those two things,” Lupick adds, “then the only pragmatic, realistic solution I see is to legalize and regulate illicit narcotics.” It’s a solution widely embraced by frontline workers, drug users, and advocates in Vancouver. But the prospect of legalizing and regulating illicit drugs is what “the prime minister has entirely ruled out even a conversation about,” Lupick says. He expects things to get worse in Canada before they get better, particularly in major cities like Toronto and Ottawa. “I just don’t think they understand the extent of how bad this is. But it’s going to get worse [in the] East,” he predicts. “It’s sad that more people are going to have to die before it catches their attention.” Fighting for Space will launch on November 16 at the Beaumont Studios, starting at 7 p.m. The event features a panel discussion about B.C.’s fentanyl crisis and a book signing.
straight stars > B Y ROSE MA RC U S
I
November 2 to 8, 2017
t would be easy to get lost in it on Friday. The sunâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s trine to Neptune dominates the work portion of the day. Let it go or let it f low. Take the easy way out; give in to the inspiration of the moment or the voice of your heart. If you are creative or musical, on worthy rescue missions, or a lover, seller, healer, or spiritual seeker, this day is for you. Sun/Neptune is an especially open, attuned, imaginative, sensitive, and responsive pairing. Go by feel and youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ll get a better handle on what it is worth and how deep it goes. At peak late in the evening, Fridayâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s full moon in sensual Taurus taps from this sun/Neptune transit. It creates great sensitivity to undercurrents, environments, sound, touch, your special one, the audience, and the unspoken. Watch for the full moon to reveal something deeper, richer, more layered, more potent. Adding an energy boost to your Friday-evening entertainment, Venus/Uranus is also a major contributor to the full-moon mix. The duo is a good combination for spontaneity, lighting a fresh spark, cutting to the chase, and innovative solutions. Risk your heart but not your safety, your money, or your health. If you are a drug user, please be extra careful. One way or another, the full moon can break up the inertia or holdup. The clocks turn back on Sunday, but Mercury isnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t wasting any time. Instead, heâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s on the move with Sagittarius. Along with Venus in Scorpio, starting Tuesday, the stars set up a lucrative week for making the most of it.
ARIES
TAURUS
March 20â&#x20AC;&#x201C;April 20
Sun/Neptune can make for a smooth finish to your workweek, but donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t underestimate the full-moon potency. Whatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s lost can be found or revived again. Trust what you feel, but also keep a grip on whatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s real. Social, sexy, or on your own, Friday night can dish up a good perk-me-up. A full-to-thebrim, right-time/right-place week lies ahead. April 20â&#x20AC;&#x201C;May 21
Friday/Saturday, the full moon can hold especially high impact for you if you are born on or around April 30, but with sun/ Neptune in the mix, we are all on the download. What you lock into and/or set in motion holds good promise. Once youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve nailed it down, expect to hit an instant fast track to uncover more, get further, and/or gain more.
GEMINI
May 21â&#x20AC;&#x201C;June 21
Quality time to meditate, create, study, replenish, or feel your way along is ideal on Friday. By late evening, Venus/Uranus and the full moon are good for a latenight energy boost. Starting Sunday, Mercury begins an extended visit to Sagittarius. Along with Venus in Scorpio, starting Tuesday, the next week or few set you up to make faster and more substantial gains.
CANCER
June 21â&#x20AC;&#x201C;July 22
LEO
July 22â&#x20AC;&#x201C;August 23
Take your time; go by feel; keep it simple; and donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t load up your Friday. Save room and let the full moon deliver. Watch for something lucrative, timely, or extra. Spontaneity makes for an entertaining evening. Mercury in Sagittarius, starting Sunday, puts matters of heart and wallet into full swing. When it comes to putting on the show, Mercury loans you the Midas touch.
VIRGO
LIBRA
SCORPIO
SAGITTARIUS
CAPRICORN
AQUARIUS
PISCES
August 23â&#x20AC;&#x201C;September 23
Quiet time to think, feel, conjure, or wander is ideal on Friday. Have you lost your way or your groove? The full moon can help you find it again. Once Venus/Uranus hits refresh, youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ll feel as though you never skipped a beat. As of Sunday, Mercury in Sagittarius sets you onto a final stretch, a fresh trajectory, or both. September 23â&#x20AC;&#x201C;October 23
Friday you can easily lose track of time, but otherwise you wonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t miss a thing. Expect to uncover more than you assumed was there to begin with. Insight runs deep into anotherâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s soul or your own emotional core. Mercury in Sagittarius, starting Sunday, sets you and your daily get-go onto full steam ahead. Venus increases your resourcefulness and intuitive smarts. October 23â&#x20AC;&#x201C;November 22
Sun/Neptune can make for an easy finish to your workweek. Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s especially ideal if you have the day booked off and can devote it to yourself. By evening, youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ll be ready for more action. Mercury in Sagittarius, starting Sunday, increases your creative flow and your intuitive sensitivity. Venus into Scorpio, starting Tuesday, gives you an even better feel for how to play it next. November 22â&#x20AC;&#x201C;December 21
Thereâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s value in the act. In fact, on Friday/Saturday youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ll get more than you bargained or hoped for. Working it out can go smoother and easier than you may have thought possible when you first uncovered it. Mercury in Sagittarius, starting Sunday, keeps you on a good roll and going strong for the next several weeks. Venus into Scorpio, starting Tuesday, takes you deeper. December 21â&#x20AC;&#x201C;January 20
Quality over quantity is your motto, and itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s the right way to play it regarding Fridayâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s full moon. What you invest can be hefty, but your reward can be too. Once you make a commitment, youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ll hit full steam ahead. Mercury and Venus keep you quick on the uptake. Trust your decision-making process, your heart, and your intuition. January 20â&#x20AC;&#x201C;February 18
On Friday, slow down; take more time for yourself; donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t rush; donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t push; and donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t overload. Allow for things to take on a life of their own or for others to figure it out. As the day progresses, Venus/ Uranus and the full moon will pick up the speed and intensity. The next three weeks keep you/it going strong. February 18â&#x20AC;&#x201C;March 20
The sunâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s trine to Neptune on Friday has you conjuring it up, soaking it in, and loving it/them up. By evening, Venus/Uranus and the full moon kick up the energy, interest, or excitement. Setting plans, prospects, and the holiday extras into full-swing go Sunday onward, Mercury and Venus switch the future to the forefront. -
Once you have made a full commitment to it or settled on a course of action, a chain reaction occurs. Fridayâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s full moon can get something especially lucrative or opportune off the ground. Once that happens, itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s up to you to make the most of it. The next three weeks Book a reading or sign up for Roseâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s are prime. Take your best shot; aim free monthly newsletter at www. rosemarcus.com/. to get ahead of the game.
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> Go on-line to read hundreds of I Saw You posts or to respond to a message < OUTSIDE KINGSGATE MALL
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I SAW A: I AM A: WHEN: OCTOBER 30, 2017 WHERE: Kingsgate Mall I was pulling out of the Kingsgate Mall in a Car2go. LOL. You gave me a lovely long lingering look and smiled. I’d like to get to know you. Meet me for a coffee or a drink?
EDDIE BAUER COQUITLAM CENTRE
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We chatted about luggage and travelling to Vietnam and Thailand. My last post I put the date in as October 22 by accident, it was October 29. I would like to talk to you some more
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I SAW A: I AM A: WHEN: OCTOBER 29, 2017 WHERE: Eddie Bauer Coquitlam Centre
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HALLOWEEN CLUB CRAWL
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I SAW A: I AM A: WHEN: OCTOBER 28, 2017 WHERE: The Portside You were with the bachelor party at the Pint and the Portside, dressed as Thor. I was the girl who lend your friend my red lipstick.
BEARDED, BESPECTACLED BEAUTY AT DEPECHE MODE
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I SAW A: I AM A: WHEN: OCTOBER 25, 2017 WHERE: Depeche Mode Concert Top row, section 324, row 15. You were sort of strange, but very charming and charismatic. I was there with my brother.
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10 THE GEORGIA STRAIGHT NOVEMBER 2 – 9 / 2017
MAIN ST BUS STOP
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I SAW A: I AM A: WHEN: OCTOBER 28, 2017 WHERE: Main St. bus stop Giving this a try! We made eye contact at the Main St. bus stop. I think you took the #3 bus? I was wearing a brown leather jacket, carrying a fedora. Shied away from locking eye contact as my mind was on plans with friends that night. Needless to say, reach out if you want to get coffee sometime.
YOU BOUGHT ME A CAKE
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I SAW A: I AM A: WHEN: OCTOBER 28, 2017 WHERE: Breka Bakery on Davie To the gentleman in the line up at Breka bakery on Davie, we talked about the pastries, the German cake looked good, they didn’t sell it by the slice. We joked about how one wouldn’t be able to eat that whole cake. You bought 6 cookies and the German cake,I said oh I hope you find somebody to eat that cake. The employee said "sir would you like to pick your cake". You said, pointing at me, "oh no, she can pick it up, it’s her cake. I bought it for you.” I blushed. You made my day. You should’ve stayed to share a piece. Coffee sometime ?
KISSA TANTO RESTAURANT FRIDAY NIGHT
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I SAW A: I AM A: WHEN: OCTOBER 27, 2017 WHERE: Kissa Tanto Restaurant I’m not sure if you read this kind of stuff but I’ll try anyway. Fingers crossed. You were sitting with a male friend at the top of the stairs waiting for your table. At approx 7:30. I came up the stairs with a friend to get a spot at the bar as we didn’t have reservations. We made eye contact and smiled at each other. I have to mention I have a sneaker obsession and liked yours! We were told a 40 minute wait for a seat at the bar. Far too hungry to wait so we left. Let’s do coffee.
THROUGH THE WINDOW...
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I SAW A: I AM A: WHEN: OCTOBER 24, 2017 WHERE: Bao Down Snack Bar on Carrall St. I was walking down Carrall St. with a friend and passed by Bao Down Snack Bar. I gave a quick look to that place while I was walking and I saw you, sitting near the window with a guy friend. We made eye contact for a few seconds but I can’t stop thinking about it since. I hope that our paths will cross again or that you will read this post and reply to it. :)
DEPECHE MODE: SET LIST
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I SAW A: I AM A: WHEN: OCTOBER 25, 2017 WHERE: Rogers Arena We interacted at corner of runway stage at Depeche Mode. You showed me the set list on your phone and kept saying things about next songs etc. I barely heard you, but wished that we could have talked more. You handed me a paper set list during‚ "Everything Counts". Security intervened and swiped it away from me, then told you not to... ‚"The grabbing hands grab what they can..." ;). Anyway, I thought that you looked like "Somebody" nice and invite you to contact me for more conversation, if nothing more. Thanks
LOVE TATTOO BEHIND LEFT EAR
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I SAW A: I AM A: WHEN: OCTOBER 25, 2017 WHERE: Corner Store: Commercial and Venables You: Long grey coat, tight black pants (maybe yoga pants), all black Nikes. You couldn't decide what candy bar to grab. Me: green jacket, blue scrub pants, looking haggard after long day. You looked at me, I looked at you. I wish I said something. Looked for you after I left. Hopefully I'll cross paths with you again.
BELMONT INTERVENTION
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I SAW A: I AM A: WHEN: OCTOBER 25, 2017 WHERE: The Belmont Bar We met at the Belmont Bar in downtown Vancouver a few months ago. You were new to town, only a few days in. While we were smoking outside, you tried to intervention a homeless drug addict. The guy almost went with you to drive him to a reservation, since you offered. We swapped stories about trying to help homeless people, and you talked about wanting to own a farm, and maybe I could work for you one day. My contact in your phone is LuisGranville.
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FOOD
Cornucopia toasts self-care
W
ith dozens of food and wine events, Whistler’s Cornucopia festival is 11 days of high-altitude hedonism. But the fest has another side that helps bring balance to the gourmet extravagance. The Nourish: Health and Wellness series features workshops and activities centred on healthy living. Although not an exhaustive compilation, the following are some suggested self-care and selfindulgence pairings.
abundant in enzymes and probiotics Table Luncheon by Carmen Ingham of Villa Eyrie Resort’s Summit Restauthat improve digestion. rant or the Truffle Dinner at Quattro BASICS, THEN A BLOWOUT Cave- Whistler. Drink seminars that day inman Grocer cofounder Kara Mc- clude Vermouth’s Bittersweet Revenge Master will go over the building blocks and Guilty Pleasures: Wine and Junk of healthy, tasty food in her Mastering Food. Then there’s the Crush Grand the Basics workshop (November 10). Tasting, the festival’s flagship event, a You’ll want to get back to basics in the lively night of food and wine tastings. kitchen after indulging in events like Peak to Peak to Peak: A Four Seasons HEALTHY SNACKS, REEL FOOD, Mountain Collection Chefs Collabor- FEMALE INFLUENCE At the Energy ative, taking place at Sidecut Modern in Motion session (November 12), Steak + Bar. Whist- Whistler Blackcomb executive chef ENJOY WINE, ler Four Seasons Wolfgang Sterr will share recipes for DINE, AND FIZZ Resort executive simple pick-me-ups for sustained Called Icons of chef Eren Guryel energy to get you through the day. Gail Johnson the Okanagan, the hosts American col- (A vegetarian and athlete, Sterr is first of the Cellar by Araxi Intimate leagues from Vail and Jackson Hole, also leading Nourish’s November Wine Dinners (November 9) high- each with a knack for steaks. Another 14 Plant-Based Deliciousness worklights wines by von Mandl Family option that evening is an intimate shop.) Once you’ve got those healthy Estates—Mission Hill, CedarCreek, four-course paired dinner at Legs Dia- recipes in your back pocket, move CheckMate, and Martin’s Lane— mond Supper Club, an Upper Village on to the Fairmont Chateau Whispaired with dishes by acclaimed Araxi restaurant that gets its name from a tler’s ELLEvate TogetHER collaboraexecutive chef James Walt. At Ferment Prohibition-era New York bootlegger. tive fundraiser that evening. Three Inc., you can develop an understandaccomplished female chefs—Nicole ing of how “good” bacteria contrib- FUEL FOR A FULL DAY Start off Gomes, recent Top Chef Canada: Allute to better health in a workshop November 11 with Farmer’s Breakfast, Stars winner; Melissa Craig, executive with healing-foods specialist Astrid a wholesome meal by Venue Restau- chef at Bearfoot Bistro; and the ChaCameron-Kent. Here’s where you can rant chefs Ryan and Melissa Leitch at teau’s executive chef, Isabel Chung— learn about making effervescent items the Whistler Conference Centre. You’ll will each create two courses with the like sauerkraut, salsa, and pickles, just have enough energy to take in several assistance of female apprentices. With a few of the fermented foods that are events that day, whether it’s the Chef’s wine being provided by Quails’ Gate
Best Eats
MOVIES ARTS MUSIC THEATRE FOOD
Whistler’s annual celebration of food and drink, otherwise known as Cornucopia, brings epicureans together for fabulous food and wine.
of featured dishes. And on November 16, the Whistler family behind the Green Moustache will share ways to prioritize organic and local produce and food that nourishes and detoxifies the body. Knowing that life is all about balance, you can head with a clear conscience to Beer Pairing Dinner, a four-courser with pairings by Whistler Brewing Co. The collaborative event with Blacks Pub and Restaurant will include on the menu curried TO VEGGIES, WITH A TOAST At roast-pumpkin soup and pan-roasted Meatless Mondays (November 13), a duck breast. plant-based lunchtime cooking demonstration and tasting, three regis- Cornucopia runs from next Thurstered holistic nutritionists will talk day (November 9) to November 19 about the nutritional benefits of a trio in Whistler.
winemaker Nikki Callaway, the evening will not only highlight women in the food and wine industries but also turn over all proceeds to cancer research. Another hot ticket that night is for Sensory Cinema: Lost in Translation with Harajuku Izakaya. Sofia Coppola’s 2003 hit will play alongside a tasting menu inspired by the Japanese tapas and sake bar team’s favourite moments from the film.
9th Year Anniversary
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Erick Lichte
CHOR LEONI MEN’S CHOIR 25TH ANNIVERSARY SEASON
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ONE LAST SONG 25th Annual Remembrance Day Concerts
COMING UP
November 11
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Sat Nov 4, 7:00pm
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Presented by Just For Laughs Arguably the biggest and most-loved comedic star in France, Elmaleh was the first person to sell out Paris’ Olympia for seven consecutive weeks, and has appeared in more than 20 films.
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TEXAS TROUBADOURS
1:30 PM | WEST VANCOUVER UNITED CHURCH 2062 ESQUIMALT AVE, WEST VANCOUVER
8 PM | ST. ANDREW’S-WESLEY UNITED CHURCH
Wed Nov 8, 8:00pm
Presented by the Chan Centre Three of the Lone Star State’s finest singer-songwriters, Ruthie Foster, Jimmie Dale Gilmore, and Carrie Rodriguez, join together for an evening of swapping songs and collaboration.
VA N C O U V E R A R T GA L L E RY P R E S E N T S UBC SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA: ROBERT SILVERMAN Fri Nov 10, 8:00pm
Presented by the UBC School of Music The UBC Symphony Orchestra is joined by pianist Robert Silverman for a program of Sibelius, Beethoven, and Tchaikovsky.
SEONG-JIN CHO
Sun Nov 12, 3:00pm
A CONJURING ARTIST BARS
Grape Witches (Nicole Campbell + Krysta Oben, with coven members Lisa Haley, Maude Renaud-Brisson and Layla Smith) Erika Holt
Wed Nov 29, 7:00pm
DANCE MUSIC
CHRISTMAS AT THE CHAN
Simranpreet Anand | Kate Barry + Michael-Ann Connor Stacey Ho | Tsēma Igharas | Stephen Murray Kelly McInnes + Rianne Svelnis Hick | Minimal Violence | Soledad Muñoz | Yusu
Sun Dec 3, 2:30pm
MIXED REALITY
Presented by Trinity Western University Choirs Award-winning conductor Dr. Joel Tranquilla brings together five choirs and full orchestra in an exquisite annual program featuring Christmas music from around the world.
Shawn Hunt (back by popular demand!)
ART MUSIC PERFORMANCE
FRI NOV10 $͎
BUILDING A BETTER CANADA Presented by UBC Join President Santa J. Ono for a dynamic and forward-looking evening featuring Order of Canada recipients David Suzuki, Shelagh Rogers, Sophie Pierre, Trevor Linden, Wade Davis, and Robert Silverman.
PERFORMANCES
TICKETS
Presented by the Vancouver Chopin Society This celebrated South Korean pianist was awarded the 2015 Gold Medal at the Chopin International Piano Competition in Warsaw. Program: Beethoven, Debussy, Chopin.
29
8PM– 12AM
TICKETS AVAILABLE AT THE DOOR (THIS IS AN EVENT FOR AGES 19+)
NOT A MEMBER? JOIN TODAY: vanartgallery.bc.ca/membership Entry with Adult FUSE tickets only. No passes or discounts valid for FUSE admission.
FESTIVE CANTATAS Sat Dec 23, 7:30pm
Presented by Early Music Vancouver Celebrate the holidays with a new perspective on old favourites. Violinist Monica Huggett leads readings of joyful works as they were originally heard, performed entirely by women.
CHAN CENTRE FOR THE PERFORMING ARTS 6265 Crescent Road, Vancouver (UBC)
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12 THE GEORGIA STRAIGHT NOVEMBER 2 – 9 / 2017
ISCM 2017
It’s all new, and almost a hundred years old. B Y ALEX ANDER VAR T Y
When the International Society for Contemporary Music convenes World New Music Days 2017 in Vancouver, it will present 35 concerts, soundwalks, and seminars, along with several hundred compositions, almost all of them previously unheard in these parts. But the society itself dates back to a time when giants walked the earth— giants with names like Arnold Schoenberg, Anton Webern, Alban Berg, and Leoš Janáček, who convened the ISCM in Salzburg, Austria, circa 1922. Somewhat surprisingly, given who was involved, it wasn’t all about the music. “These legendary figures in European art music, back in the 1920s, saw this as an opportunity to work towards peace,” explains Music on Main artistic director David Pay—who, along with the Canadian League of Composers’ Jim Hiscott and Elektra Women’s Choir artistic director Morna Edmundson, is responsible for bringing the world’s largest new-music festival to Vancouver. “So of course it was aesthetic; it was music; it was about sharing what’s going on between countries. But in every country, whatever our overriding desires are around sports or culture or music or food, we think that’s the best. We like that other people do what they do, but we think ours is the best. And one of the ideas of ISCM is that we can actually all hear what each other is doing. And this is one of the founding principles—that somehow, through listening to each other, we’re all going to get along better.” It’s not that there haven’t been battles between serialists and minimalists, atonalists and neoclas-
Embarking on an aural adventure
Music on Main’s David Pay is one of the key people bringing the world’s largest new-music festival to Vancouver. Below left, local standouts Red Chamber.
thing newly composed the National Arts Centre Orchestra’s Life Reflected for the occasion, or an concert program.) The province of Quebec’s impresISCM World New Music Days hosts concerts, soundwalks, electric guitar sharing a sive and comparatively well-funded arts scene will and more as the globe’s composers converge on Vancouver stage with a harpsichord. be represented by, among others, Montreal’s imAnd while one of the maculate Ensemble Contemporain de Montréal and sicists, or spectralists and champions of aleatory functions of World New Music Days is to showcase Quatuor Bozzini, a string quartet with a particumusic: lively debate has been one of the ISCM’s works from the ISCM’s 50-plus member nations, larly ambitious commissioning program that has hallmarks since the beginning. But there’s a grow- Pay and his associates have taken pains to celebrate resulted in work for composers from coast to coast. ing consensus in contemporary composition that several different streams of particularly Canadian Closer to home, there will be concerts by Vancouver all forms have value, from music for prepared creativity. Featured will be three symphony or- chamber ensembles Standing Wave, Turning Point, piano, found objects, and sewing ma- chestras, from Vancouver, Victoria, and Ottawa’s and Driftwood Percussion; by the NOW Orchestra chines to more conventional symphonic National Arts Centre. (See page 14 for a feature on see next page and chamber styles. Pay argues that this makes Canada— Local composing stars Morlock and Miller weigh in with ISCM picks and Vancouver, in particular—the perfect place for the world’s composers to hold It’s not the ISCM World New Music Days’ push for gender parity that makes Jocelyn court. “In Canada, we try to be transparent Morlock and Lisa Cay Miller two of the busiest people in Vancouver: it’s that each is an about aesthetic diversity and geographic exceptional composer (and, in Miller’s case, pianist). As composer in residence with the diversity,” he contends. “Do I think there Vancouver Symphony Orchestra, Morlock will present That Tingling Sensation at the is a distinctly Canadian sound? No. I Orpheum on Sunday (November 5) and has a piece on the bill for the National Arts Centre think there are diverse sounds. But I Orchestra’s opening-night gala (see page 14). Miller will help present some of the festival’s most provocathink perhaps there is a distinctly Cantive sounds when the NOW Society Ensemble blurs the line between composition and improvisation at the adian method or feeling around how we Orpheum Annex on Saturday (November 4). She’ll also contribute a score to Redshift Music Society’s presentacan create music. tion of spatial music for 18 guitars, at the Vancouver Public Library central branch atrium at 1 p.m. on Tuesday “Improvisers in Vancouver will go (November 7). Busy as they are, the two creators found time to list their first-choice pick for festivalgoers. to scored concerts; people who play Tops, for Morlock, is the double bill—at the Roundhouse Community Arts and Recreation Centre on Friday and write more modernist music will (November 3)—of the Hard Rubber Riot Ensemble and otherworldly clarinetist Lori Freedman. Morlock admits be showing up for something that is more some bias in the matter: Hard Rubber leader John Korsrud is her boyfriend. “But our relationship sprung from melodic… This embracing of people who are me trying to get to know him because I loved his music so much,” she explains, adding that Korsrud and crew making the music, I think, is what defines us— will be previewing Riot, a multimedia investigation of the 2011 Stanley Cup rampage. As for Freedman, Morlock this embracing and support of everybody wanting describes her as “an incredible, ferocious composer and clarinetist” and “a force of nature”. to find their own voice.” Miller, in turn, is looking forward to the 16 new works “from composers all around the world” that
2
MUSIC ON MAIN’S programming, under Pay’s
direction, has been emblematic of this approach. It’s not uncommon to find, on a single program, a work by Johann Sebastian Bach snuggling up to some-
THINGS TO DO
will be heard in A Kind of Magic at the Vancouver Playhouse on closing night, Wednesday (November 8). Performing will be “four of the best pianists on the planet (who happen to be Canadian)”: Rachel Kiyo Iwaasa, Eve Egoyan, Megumi Masaki, and Bang on a Can’s Vicky Chow.
> ALEXANDER VARTY
ISCM WORLD NEW MUSIC DAYS High five
Editor’s choice WORLDS COLLIDE International Society for Contemporary Music programmer David Pay is relieved that we’re not going to force him to pick his favourite children from the acts on view during World New Music Days 2017, Thursday to Wednesday (November 2 to 8). We, though, have no such qualms. If time or money limits you to a single concert, make it the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra showcase: not only will you hear new works from Friedrich Heinrich Kern, Charlotte Bray, and VSO composer in residence Jocelyn Morlock, you’ll also be present for the world premiere of John Oliver and Mohamed Assani’s Pressed for Time, a concerto for sitar and orchestra with Assani in the soloist’s role. Worlds will collide—and combine, beautifully. The Vancouver Symphony Orchestra is at the Orpheum on Sunday (November 5) as part of ISCM 2017.
Five offbeat picks you can’t miss at ISCM this week
1
POWELL STREET FESTIVAL (November 7 at the Orpheum Annex) Half-broken iPods in surround sound? Count us in!
2
QUESTION NOTIONS (November 5 at the Orpheum Annex) Don’t miss the chance to see one of the world’s foremost—it’s true!—sewingmachine players.
3
BIOPHILIA (November 2 to 5 at the Western Front) Floral and faunal sounds create a strange old-growth world in this meditative installation.
4
RIOT (November 3 at the Roundhouse Community Arts and Recreation Centre) John Korsrud’s musical response to the Stanley Cup mayhem.
5
BREEZE (November 2 to 8 at the Roundhouse) Five music stands come eerily to life with motion sensors.
In the news
GOING DIGITAL The International Society for Contemporary Music World New Music Days event is going digital. The largest summit of contemporary music in Canada’s history is trying to reach far across the Great White North (and even into California) with live-viewing events and live streaming. The organization is also creating a behind-the-scenes documentary—a film aimed at re-creating “a day in the life” of the festival. Two concerts will offer viewing events: New Vistas—Vancouver Chamber Choir and musica intima with guest Elektra Women’s Choir happens Saturday (November 4) at 3 p.m. Pacific time; then Ensemble Contemporain de Montréal (ECM+, shown here) and Turning Point Ensemble hit the interweb on Monday (November 6) at 7:30 p.m. See iscm2017.ca/ for details on these and other live-viewing events being held from Manitoba to San Francisco. -
NOVEMBER 2 – 9 / 2017 THE GEORGIA STRAIGHT 13
ISCM 2017
NAC Orchestra serves up a multisensory spectacle > B Y A LE XAN DER VAR TY
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ife Reflected, the National Arts Centre Orchestra’s 2017 touring program, promises to be a multisensory spectacle, with film, dance, spoken word, electronic music, and a glittering, scrim-fronted stage all adding visual and sonic heft to the Ottawa ensemble’s symphonic prowess. It seems like a bold package, closely tailored to fit today’s media environment—but, according to music director Alexander Shelley, it might not be quite as new as all that. “Some of the great music of the last century and the century before was written for ballet, and secondly for opera, which is a feast of audio, visual elements, and storytelling,” Shelley reminds the Straight from a Calgary hotel. “So, in fact, audiences are very, very comfortable with hearing music while absorbing visuals, while absorbing movement, absorbing changing lights, and so on and so forth. It’s something that we’re actually very trained in. So I wanted to use all the skills and the technology that we have in the 21st century to create that kind of environment where music and words and visuals all played off one another.” The conductor had a few other things to consider. For one, Life Reflected is the opening-night concert for the International Society for Contemporary Music’s World New Music Days, the largest new-music festival ever held in this country, which takes place here over the next week. It’s also been made possible by Canada 150 funding, and so it was incumbent on Shelley to find four composers who reflect Canada’s cultural and sonic diversity and give them stories to illustrate that do the same, all while locating himself in his new country and in his new position, which he assumed in 2015. “I was coming in as a Brit; I had all the clichés in mind of, you know,
A SYMPHONIC TRIBUTE TO THE
MUSIC OF PRINCE
Aural adventure
from previous page
MONDAY, DECEMBER 4 8PM, ORPHEUM. ONE NIGHT ONLY! William Rowson conductor Mackenzie Green vocalist Nisan Stewart drums/music director Jairus Mozee guitar Andrew Gouché bass Kevin Randolph keyboards Aubrey Richmond violin/vocals
A Symphonic Tribute to the Music of Prince invites audiences to experience the musical legend like never before. Featuring a powerhouse band and the full Vancouver Symphony Orchestra, it includes most of Prince’s greatest hits: Let’s Go Crazy, Little Red Corvette, Raspberry Beret, Purple Rain, 1999, Delirious, and many more. This authentic and affectionate tribute features original members of Prince’s band, the New Power Generation, including bassist Andrew Gouché (who played with Prince on the last show before the artist’s untimely death in April of 2016), and the inspired and authentic performance of L.A.-based vocalist Mackenzie Green.
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TICKETS: vancouversymphony.ca
14 THE GEORGIA STRAIGHT NOVEMBER 2 – 9 / 2017
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Ensemble, the flagship group of an improvising musicians’ collective that celebrates its 40th anniversary this year; and by Red Chamber, a seriously underrecognized quartet specializing in new music for Chinese instruments. GETTING THE WORD OUT about
Mounties and moose and maple syrup,” he says. “But at the heart of it, in terms of what we wanted to create, was that we wanted a vehicle for new music that would appeal to connoisseurs.…But that would also take the hand of people who maybe found it more difficult, or who wouldn’t attend a concert normally, and guide them forward.” No moose, so far as we know, will decorate the Centre in Vancouver for Performing Arts stage. But connoisseurs and neophytes alike will be treated to the music of Zosha di Castri, Nicole Lizée, John Estacio, and Vancouver’s own Jocelyn Morlock—and to aspects of the lives of, respectively, short-story maven Alice Munro, scientist and astronaut Roberta Bondar, the late First Nations poet and activist Rita Joe, and teenage bullying victim Amanda Todd. These are important Canadian stories, but not necessarily the kind that prompt flag-waving and huzzahs. Estacio’s I Lost My Talk, for instance, is built on Joe’s experience of the residential-school system, while Morlock’s My Name Is Amanda Todd functions as a eulogy for the Port Coquitlam teen, who committed suicide after speaking out on video about being sexually harassed and cyberbullied. “There’s friction in these stories, and of course any mature society is kind of described by how it deals with friction,” Shelley says. “Coexistence is not an easy thing.…And these stories do talk about that. They engage with the friction, and they engage with elements that could and should be criticized.” So the program is both a celebration of our country and an apology for its worst aspects. What could be more Canadian than that? The National Arts Centre Orchestra’s Life Reflected is at the Centre in Vancouver for Performing Arts on Thursday (November 2), as part of ISCM 2017.
we can have more international relationships and do more international copresentations—and where we can have enough staff to do the 30-odd concerts we do each year. “The more important legacy for the Canadian League of Composers and the musicians is establishing these international relationships for people who are from Vancouver who don’t necessarily have the chance to showcase around the world…and then also another legacy is that there are more collaborations. This festival could never happen without our concert partners: the Vancouver Symphony, the Powell Street Festival, the NOW Society… All these people are partnering with us, and that level of collaboration, with that many different Vancouver musicians and ensembles in one festival, I don’t think has ever happened before.” -
Vancouver’s flourishing contemporary-music scene is one of Pay’s aims. So is learning about all the other amazing music out there; he cites rising star Stefan Prins, a Belgian composer, as an artist he was introduced to by sitting on an ISCM jury. And he looks forward to learning what the next few days will give him in terms of renewed energy and expanded possibilities. “There will be a number of legacies,” Pay says. “At Music on Main, we’ve ISCM World New Music Days 2017 is worked for the last four years to leave at various venues from Thursday to us in a transformed position, where Wednesday (November 2 to 8).
ARTS
Ballet BC rolls out bold opener > BY JA NET SM IT H
O
ne big, thick charcoal carpet is unfurled along the back of the Ballet BC rehearsal studio, with dancers’ feet sinking slightly into it as they move across its soft surface. Another rug sits, rolled up at one side, with another performer emerging from inside it. It’s immediately obvious that the company is embarking on a new adventure for its season-opening performance. And it becomes clear its members have entered the surreal, comedy-touched, and oh-so-human world of Swedish-born choreographer Johan Inger. His presence also explains the laughter rippling regularly throughout the room as the former Nederlands Dans Theater dancer and onetime Cullberg Ballet artistic director works on the details of his piece B.R.I.S.A. “He has incredible humour. He’s so light when he walks into the room,” says dancer Brandon Alley of the indemand choreographer. “His work is so human, and then there are very technical moments in the piece as well. A lot of it is human interactions and about how people grow—that they can connect through simple gestures.” The North Carolina–born Alley, who’s become a magnetic on-stage presence since joining the troupe in 2015, adds that the cozy new dance surface affects the entire mood of the piece—and of rehearsal: “You can be more reckless and free. It’s like a cushion. There are mornings when the sun’s coming in, and we’re all just lying around, stretching out on the carpet.” Inger explains in a separate interview at the studio that B.R.I.S.A., which he first created for NDT2 in 2014, came from the idea of change and awakening: “how it can be the smallest things that trigger the bigger changes”. He points to everything from the Arab Spring to the #metoo social-media campaign as examples.
Johan Inger brings humanity, humour to B.R.I.S.A. Michael Slobodian photo.
Alley notes a similar theme between Inger’s B.R.I.S.A. and Cayetano Soto’s as-yet-untitled premiere, which shares the program. This, even though the two choreographers are so stylistically different—Inger’s work so earthy and human, Soto’s a whirlwind of partnering and push-pull tension. “Both pieces deal a little bit with fear. In B.R.I.S.A., people are afraid to open up to other people or joy or sexuality, but there’s this ripple effect and they want to go to the other side and experience this bliss,” Alley explains. Then he turns to Soto’s work, which is based on a serious illness that put the choreographer in hospital: “Cayetano talked about when your inner cries are saying you can’t do something. He was afraid that he was never going to dance again or choreograph again.” The troupe is taking on these two new works on the heels of a tour to California and New York City, where it performed the equally diverse and challenging Solo Echo by Crystal Pite and Bill by Israel’s Sharon Eyal and Gai Behar. The season doesn’t open until Thursday (November 2), but it’s already been an incredibly demanding fall for Ballet BC. “Really, I do a lot in both pieces, so I’m exhausted,” Alley admits with a smile. “I’m just trying to find the pleasure and the joy in it.” From the point of view of Inger, dancers here are handling themselves exquisitely under the pressure that comes from growing. “I see a high level of working and a commitment I think stems from [artistic director] Emily [Molnar], an approach to the work you don’t always see everywhere,” he says before heading into the studio to join the dancers on the carpet. “I find it very stimulating and very inspiring to come here.” -
To create the piece, he assigned the dancers different ages and personas, with the “younger” characters more eager to embrace change than the older ones. But slowly, the little community he builds on-stage starts to transform. “I always try to create journeys for the dancers if I can,” Inger says. “This piece starts really closed, and then I really try to create an extreme curve—a dramatological curve. “If I can have humour in it then I do that, too; I like when you are moved and when you laugh,” he says with a smile, and dancegoers will immediately recognize that mix from his only previous work for Ballet BC—the farcical yet melancholy audience favourite Walking Mad. “But it’s the hardest thing to do to be funny.” Inger says that, in his dance, feeling comes first. “In order for me to get a humanity out of the work I cannot only really do steps,” he says. “I like to see people dancing. And I love the Ballet BC presents Program One at the beauty between the highly technical Queen Elizabeth Theatre from Thursday to Saturday (November 2 to 4). thing and something very plain.”
“Faced with such excellence, a mere critic can only abandon paper and pencil and listen to this heroic but deeply moving artist with awe and amazement” - Gramophone
Vancouver Moving Theatre with the Carnegie Community Centre and the Association of United Ukrainian Canadians with a host of community partners presents
I4th Annual DOWNTOWN EASTSIDE
HEART CITY FESTIVAL OF THE
October 25 to November 5 FINAL WEEKEND! MISSING Marie Clements (libretto), Brian Current (composer) City Opera Vancouver/Pacific Opera Victoria Nov 3, 7, 9, 11, 8pm; Nov 5, 2pm York Theatre, 639 Commercial Dr. Tickets: thecultch.com
ILLICIT: STORIES FROM A HARM REDUCTION MOVEMENT Thurs Nov 2, 6:30pm. KW Production Studio, 111 W. Hastings By donation BREATH-AHHH Theatre Terrific explores breath: something we all share Fri Nov 3, 6pm; Sat Nov 4, 2pm. KW Atrium Studio, 111 W. Hastings Free JAZZ CONFLUENCE Carnegie Jazz Band & Brad Muirhead Quartet, Nikki Carter, Dalannah Gail Bowen, Lorae Farrell, Ellen Marple Fri Nov 3, 7pm. Carnegie Theatre, 401 Main Free UKRAINIAN HALL CONCERT & SUPPER Barvinok Choir, Dovbush Dancers, Sawagi Taiko, Raven Spirit Dance Sun Nov 5, 3pm. Ukrainian Hall, 805 E. Pender Tickets $25, 604.254.3436
HISTORY WALK
$10. For start location and further details visit website. SNEAK PEEK OF CHINATOWN Judy Lam Maxwell, Steven Wong. Sat Nov 4, 11am
604.628.5672 heartofthecityfestival.com over 100 events over 50 locations Music • Dance • Opera • Spoken Word • Film • Theatre • History Walks • Art Talks • Gallery Exhibits
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PAUL LEWIS piano
SUN NOV 19 at 3pm I VANCOUVER PLAYHOUSE An exciting musical journey into the late piano music of Beethoven, Haydn & Brahms.
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1967 to 2017 Celebrating Our 50th Year in Business
Sale ends December 31, 2017
J&M 2017 1.5 oz. .999 Silver $50 medallion. Sells for $50 and is redeemable for $50 worth of merchandise at J&M until 2027 or redeemable as 1.5 ounces of .999 silver. Makes a great gift certificate.
20% Off Almost All In-Stock Jewellery
Our Biggest Sale Ever Come in and take advantage of the savings and see our huge selection of fine jewellery, new and reconditioned classic watches.
Brand New Watches Discounted. 35% Off Tissot and Longines, 40% Off Seiko and Citizen Watches
Regular Price: $2,999.00
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J&M’s every day low prices give you true value. Shop online at jandmcoins.com 16 THE GEORGIA STRAIGHT NOVEMBER 2 – 9 / 2017
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Marie Clements goes in search of the Missing > B Y A LE XAN DER VAR TY
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s a playwright, director, and multimedia artist, Marie Clements is known for her fearless determination to tell Indigenous stories—but even she was hesitant, at first, to explore the new-toher world of opera while writing about missing and murdered women. “When you’re asked to write on this theme or this reality, sometimes your first response is ‘Oh, I don’t know if I can go in there,’ just because of the gravity of it,” she tells the Straight from Toronto. But the story needed to be told. The result is Missing, her collaboration with Toronto composer Brian Current, City Opera Vancouver, and Pacific Opera Victoria, in partnership with Vancouver Moving Theatre/ DTES Heart of the City Festival. “A lot of times, in thinking of opera, I would think that it was just for people who had money, you know,” she says. But Clements adds that it’s a multimedia art form, which fits in with her preferences and with First Nations storytelling tradition. Missing unfolds in Vancouver and along the Highway of Tears in northern B.C., but it also takes place in the realm of dreams and myth. At its core, though, is something very real: how our culture stereotypes Indigenous women and puts them in constant danger of rape or worse. That’s why Ava, the young, non-Native woman who is one of the opera’s two protagonists, does not, at first, extend empathy to the “unnamed Native girl” Missing is at the York Theatre every she sees hitchhiking in the North. “There’s a moment where she’s other night from Friday to next Saturfeeling ‘Well, should I pull over?’ ” day (November 3 to 11).
Morphed and META make striking impacts DANCE MORPHED A Tero Saarinen Company production. A DanceHouse presentation. At the Vancouver Playhouse on Friday, October 27. No remaining performances
META A Mutable Subject production. At the Scotiabank Dance Centre on Saturday, October 28. No remaining performances
In its Vancouver debut, Fin-
2 land’s Tero Saarinen Company
OTTO TAUSK
MOHAMED ASSANI
SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 5 7:30PM, ORPHEUM Bramwell Tovey conductor Mohamed Assani sitar* JOCELYN MORLOCK That Tingling Sensation CHARLOTTE BRAY At The Speed of Stillness FRIEDRICH HEINRICH KERN Indigo MOHAMED ASSANI & JOHN OLIVER Pressed for Time (World Première)*
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From November 2–8, 2017, Canada welcomes the world as Vancouver hosts the ISCM World New Music Days 2017. Since its founding in 1922, the International Society for Contemporary Music has been the world’s premier network for new music. In 2017, the Canadian League of Composers and Music on Main welcome nearly 50 countries for a festival of new music and a celebration of new ideas, new collaborations, and new fusions. This concert epitomizes this celebration, with extraordinary new music from Canada and around the globe.
Presented with the support of the Department of Canadian Heritage, the Canada Council for the Arts, Creative BC and the Province of British Columbia, the City of Vancouver, the Deux Mille Foundation, the Hamber Foundation, the SOCAN Foundation.
TICKETS: vancouversymphony.ca 18 THE GEORGIA STRAIGHT NOVEMBER 2 – 9 / 2017
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Clements says. “But it’s getting dark and she’s a bit scared, so she doesn’t pull over‚ and that’s how the story begins.” Over the course of Missing, the nameless hitchhiker gains a posthumous identity, and Ava develops an understanding of her complicity in the events that led to the girl’s death. “I think it’s important that it be told everywhere and anywhere, because we’re tired of having to tell this story and tired of it happening,” Clements says. “To me and to so many other people, this is not an Indigenous issue; it’s a human issue.” In a separate interview, Current admits that he was initially ignorant of the extent of the dangers Indigenous women face, but that his dawning understanding helped shape the musical language he’s opted to use. “The very first performance of this will be for families of the victims, right?” he says. “A closed event with grief counsellors, and it’s going to be intense. And if we’re going to talk directly to them, then I don’t want it to be in some big avant-garde, complex language. I want them to understand it the very first time that they hear it.” Much of Missing will be sung in Gitxsan. “Half the cast is Indigenous, and there is something extraordinary about seeing these beautiful performers who come, many of them, with their own cultural positions and also this trained voice out of the European tradition,” Clements says. “For me, it’s a gift—and something that in itself would make you want to sit up and go ‘What’s going on here? I want to see that.’ ” -
dug into many shades of masculinity in Morphed. Across town, local emerging choreographer Deanna Peters debuted the female-powered META, finding surreal and sometimes strikingly intimate moments. The visually stunning Morphed started with its seven hooded men striding like automatons across the stage, marching along set paths. Later they broke into rough-and-tumble struggles, and eventually into wild, bare-chested chaos. But the most transcendent element was the fragility the men found, in a midsummer-dawn blast of light, by the end of the work. Choreographer Saarinen celebrated his dancers’ raw, brute-force muscularity as much as their capacity for delicacy. (Note the trembling, articulated fingers of one moving solo.) But the work also read as an earnest call for men to rethink their roles in society, moving beyond stereotypes of aggression and emotional toughness. The piece maintained a hypnotic, mysterious quality and a rigorous abstract feel. Three sides of the stage were surrounded by thick hanging ropes that started to sway like long grass. Eventually, the performers used them as props, twisting the ropes around their torsos and swinging from them.
Adding to the haunting feel was famed Finnish composer-conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen’s lush score, with its whirling horns, rippling marimbas, and racing angular strings. The diverse dancers were topnotch, capturing Saarinen’s shifting balance of brutality and grace and his seamless meld of influences as far-flung as ballet and butoh. Morphed was a serious work, and not always an easy one to consume. But if you submitted to its mesmerizing world of oscillating ropes and lunging men, its rewards were deep. Over at the Dance Centre, Peters explored the idea of the body as fluid, performing herself, along with Kim Sato and Justine A. Chambers. One of Peters’s signatures is surrealism, and it was in full use in META’s props: set designer Natalie Purschwitz’s movable curving fringe-fabric miniproscenium; a bobbing white round screen that suggested a secret unseen performer on-stage; and a microphone with a mirror that obfuscated the head of whoever was using it. DJ ICE-B added a cool live energy to the show, spinning everything from African producer Boddhi Satva to This Mortal Coil. These were all effective devices, but no single element was more striking than the complex sculptural play Peters made with her dancers’ intertwining limbs and hands, wonderfully confounding perceptions of where one person stopped and another started. There was also a quiet moment when the women felt themselves, their hands pushing repetitively over their breasts and arms and butts, as a woman might do alone and lost in thought. It felt private and provocatively unperformancelike. In all, the work could have flowed together more fluidly, like all those hands and fingers—but Peters has a real talent for building atmosphere and warping our point of view. > JANET SMITH
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Charles III imagines a royally haunted future T HEAT RE
the bill restricting press freedom. The play is never quite as clever KING CHARLES III as it wants to be, despite there being some fascinating potential to explore Written by Mike Bartlett. Directed in its themes: the culture of stoicism by Kevin Bennett. An Arts Club and its influence on toxic masculinTheatre Company production. At the ity (Charles’s “softness” is repeatedly Stanley Industrial Alliance Stage on brought up, and his emotions are Wednesday, October 25. Continues to often coded as feminine or weak); November 19 censorship, press, and people as “The queen is dead, long live brands; power and corruption. Like the king… That’s me.” its depiction of the man himself, this These are fitting words for a prince King Charles III is fine but flawed, turned king whose whole existence has never quite living up to its potential. > ANDREA WARNER been “a lingering for the throne”. In real life, the long-running macabre joke is that spite has been the sustaining factor THE LONESOME WEST in Queen Elizabeth II’s lengthy reign. By Martin McDonagh. Directed That she’s punishing Prince Charles for by Evan Frayne. A Cave Canem bringing so much scandal to the royal Productions production. At Pacific family with his rocky marriage to Prin- Theatre on Saturday, October 21. cess Diana, their various affairs and Continues until November 11 subsequent divorce in 1996, and her “That’s the great thing about death a year later following a car chase being Catholic. You can shoot by paparazzi. In King Charles III, playwright Mike your dad in the head and it doesn’t Bartlett imagines a not-too-distant even matter at all.” Coleman (Kenton future wherein Prince Charles (Ted Klassen) cheerfully shares this realCole) finally has the crown within his ization with his brother, Valene (John grasp—only he isn’t quite sure what to Voth), in Pacific Theatre’s The Lonedo with it. When the new king receives some West. He has, in fact, just shot a bill from the prime minister (Simon their father, kicking off this muscular Webb) that will limit the freedom of play thick with violence, fraternal the press, he refuses to sign it, eventu- animosity, and potato hooch. ally igniting total political upheaval. The two brothers live in a vilKate (Katherine Gauthier) is thinly lage in Connemara, in the west of reimagined as a power-hungry seduc- Ireland. They’re idle, unemployed, tress who wants the crown to pass to and spend their days drinking a lot, her husband, Prince William (Oliver fighting with each other, and, to their Rice), while Prince Harry (Charlie endless dismay, not having sex. Gallant) falls for Jess (Agnes Tong), a Their father’s death upsets an unyoung art student who offers him hope steady détente in their tiny house. of a “normal” life outside the palace. The frequent visits of the weepy, Bartlett’s play is meant to evoke oft-fermented parish priest, Father William Shakespeare, and it does so Welsh (Sebastien Archibald), only with some success, but the pacing of increase the domestic tensions. this production feels off, and it’s hard The play, by Irish/British bad boy to know if that’s a problem with the Martin McDonagh, is tons of fun. writing or with Kevin Bennett’s dir- The writing vibrates with lethal ection. At times, King Charles III verve. It’s wordy and full of Irish feels laboriously slow. Bartlett has slang, but the plot barrels along and some good lines and dialogue but not expects the audience to just keep up. enough to sustain its three hours. There’s a lot of George F. Walker’s Of course, because it’s a Fake- combative, working-class tales to the spearean Tragedy, there’s a ghost. play, as well as a little of TV’s Father Ghost Diana (Lauren Bowler) ap- Ted. (Father Welsh memorably yells pears separately to both Charles and “Feck!”, covering one-third of Father William, and it’s frustrating to see her Jack Hackett’s vocabulary.) Mcreduced even in death to the role of a Donagh went on to write the film In loving prop validating men. Arguably, Bruges, another very black comedy there’s a malicious edge to her valida- featuring a pair of surly Bickersons. tion, since she tells both of them that The cast rides this devil’s wheel they are destined to be the “best king” very well. Klassen and Voth find the and chaos ensues, but that’s not really right kind of chemistry—sometimes how the scenes are staged. Her appear- chummy, sometimes vicious—and ance feels exploitative, particularly execute their frequent wrestling since her death is invoked by the prime matches with a lot of skill. Kudos to minister as a reason for Charles to sign fight choreographer Josh Reynolds for configuring their donnybrooks so they’re convincing from both angles Kol Halev Performance Society Presents of the theatre’s alley stage. Archibald brings a sardonic humour to what might have been a cliché of a role. The text is challenging, and in the early minutes the cast struggled to find its rhythm. They were rescued by Paige Louter, who has a hilarious turn as a foul-mouthed local schoolgirl and purveyor of Irish moonshine. From the moment she steps on-stage, Louter inhabits the character effortlessly. She also had the best Connemara accent. In fairness, she studied theatre in Galway, so she has E E H T TH a leg up on the rest of the cast. I was skeptical when I first saw Sandy Margaret’s set—a naturalistic rendering of an early-’90s tiny Irish house. The playing space at the PacifTwo surprising stories ic Theatre is small to begin with, and behind the legendary the set seemed overly busy. Instead, it worked very well, accomVancouver landmark. modating all the brawling and other physical business the play demands. A musical/play I was reminded of watching a benchNovember 8-12 clearing brawl in Junior B hockey. My Waterfront Theatre one small complaint was the lack of lamps. Every rural Irish house I’ve visited has been full of them. Pacific Theatre often punches above its weight, and The Lonesome West is no exception. You wouldn’t expect patricide and Catholicism to be this much fun.
2
2
culturecrawl.ca
VI TWO EWS
FROM
A SYLVI
sylviamusical.com
> DARREN BAREFOOT
20 THE GEORGIA STRAIGHT NOVEMBER 2 – 9 / 2017
THEATRE DANCE MUSIC COMEDY ET CETERA GALLERIES MUSEUMS
ar ts/ timeout
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and Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical about the rags-to-riches story of Joseph, his brothers, and his coat of many colours. Nov 3-18, Michael J. Fox Theatre (7373 MacPherson Ave., Burnaby). Tix 27-39, info www.alignentertainment.ca/.
THEATRE
2ONGOING
2OPENINGS JOSEPH AND THE AMAZING TECHNICOLOR DREAMCOAT Tim Rice
KING CHARLES III The Arts Club Theatre Company presents Mike Bartlett’s political satire about what happens when Queen Elizabeth II dies and her son
Charles ascends the throne. To Nov 19, Stanley Industrial Alliance Stage (2750 Granville). Info www.artsclub.com/.
HONOUR: CONFESSIONS OF A MUMBAI COURTESAN In association with Dipti Mehta, the Cultch presents a testament to the humanity and lives of sex workers. To Nov 4, 8 pm, Vancity Culture Lab (the Cultch, 1895 Venables). Tix from $35, info www.thecultch.com/.
DANCE 2THIS WEEK BALLET BC PROGRAM 1 Ballet BC presents the North American premiere of Johan Inger’s B.R.I.S.A. and the world premiere of a new work by Cayetano Soto. Nov 2-4, 8 pm, Queen Elizabeth Theatre (650 Hamilton). Tix $30-100, info www.ballet bc.com/performance/program-1-2017/.
straight choices
COAT CHECK When we reviewed Align Entertainment’s rollicking rendition of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat last year, we called it “the perfect treat for musicaltheatre fans in the mood for some zany fun”. Turns out we weren’t alone: the show was such a hit, the troupe has brought the blockbuster back. Stuart Barkley (The Drowsy Chaperone) returns in the lead role, with the retro Bible bash running Friday (November 3) to November 18 at the Michael J. Fox Theatre.
MUSIC 2JUST ANNOUNCED MEI LANFANG BEIJING OPERA TROUPE Combining music, drama, martial arts, and acrobatics, Beijing opera was declared as “Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity” by UNESCO in 2010. Directed by maestro Ye Shaolan and starring Li Hongtong. Dec 22, 7 pm; Dec 23, 2 pm; Dec 23, 7 pm, Queen Elizabeth Theatre (650 Hamilton). Tix $38-268 (plus service charges and fees) at www. megaboxoffice.com/, info 604-343-6260.
2THIS WEEK ISCM WORLD NEW MUSIC DAYS 2017 The International Society for Contemporary Music presents over 30 new music events featuring more than 135 composers from
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SFU Woodward’s Holiday tradition featuring over 30 live music numbers!
PRESENTS:
Starring JIM BYRNES Award-winning Musician & Storyteller Friday, November 17th, 2017 | 8:00 pm | VANCOUVER PLAYHOUSE
IRD LY B EAR KETS TIC OW! LE N A S 5 ON NOV IL UNT
BAH HUMBUG!
Tickets & More info
www.vlacc.ca
An Eastside Christmas Carol directed by Jessie Award-winner James Fagan Tait DECEMBER 7 – 16 EVENINGS & MATINEES
SFU’S GOLDCORP CENTRE FOR THE ARTS 149 W. HASTINGS ST, VANCOUVER
SFUWOODWARDS.CA Image Richard Tetrault, Alley Variation #3, woodcut and metal print 2012, with photo of Jim Byrnes by David Cooper.
Program 1 Eight Years of Silence Cayetano Soto B.R.I.S.A. Johan Inger
November 2 Queen Elizabeth Theatre balletbc.com PERFORMANCE SPONSOR
COMMUNITY BALCONY SPONSOR
HOTEL SPONSOR
MEDIA SPONS S OR
S BEEN GENEROUSLY PROVIDED BY
DANCER BRANDON ALLEY. PHOTO MICHAEL SLOBODIAN.
NOVEMBER 2 – 9 / 2017 THE GEORGIA STRAIGHT 21
Arts time out
from previous page
around the world. Includes Wolfgang, Emily Carr String Quartet, Red Chamber, Turning Point Ensemble, Standing Wave Ensemble, and Aventa Ensemble. Nov 2-8, various Vancouver venues. Info www.iscm2017.ca/.
Present this Ad at the VAFF 21 box office from Nov 2 - Nov 5, 2017, receive “BUY ONE GET ONE” for the screening tickets. (except opening night screening and closing night screening)
Create Visual Landscapes with the 21st Annual Vancouver Asian Film Festival November 2nd - 5th, 2017 Cineplex Odeon International Village Cinemas in Vancouver 88 W. Pender St., Vancouver BC
PLAY IT FORWARD
VAFF.ORG | @VAFFVANCOUVER | #VAFF2017
THE DREAM OF GERONTIUS Bramwell Tovey conducts soprano Susan Platts, tenor Anthony Dean Griffey, baritone Nathan Berg, the UBC University Singers and Choral Union, and the VSO in a performance of Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius. Nov 4 & 6, 8 pm, Orpheum Theatre (601 Smithe). Info www.vancouversymphony.ca/. ALBAN GERHARDT AND STEVEN OSBORNE The Vancouver Recital Society presents cellist Alban Gerhardt and pianist Steven Osborne in a performance of works by Bach, Beethoven, Debussy, and Brahms. Nov 5, 3 pm, Vancouver Playhouse (600 Hamilton). Info www.vanrecital.com/.
COMEDY 2ONGOING
ET CETERA 2THIS WEEK FIGHT FOR BEAUTY Exhibition features public art projects undertaken with worldclass creatives, architecture from architects who are artists in their own right, and fashion by some of the greatest designers in recent history. To Dec 17, Fairmont Pacific Rim. Info www.fightforbeauty.ca/. 14TH ANNUAL DOWNTOWN EASTSIDE HEART OF THE CITY FESTIVAL Twelve days of music, stories, songs, poetry, cultural celebrations, films, theatre, dance, processions, spoken word, workshops, gallery exhibitions, mixed media, art talks, and history walks. To Nov 5, various DTES locations. Free admission and by donation, info www.heartofthecityfestival.com/.
YUK YUK’S COMEDY CLUB 2837 Cambie, 2UPCOMING HIGHLIGHTS 604-696-9857, www.yukyuks.com/vancouver/. Comedy club with Top Talent Tue at 8 pm, SEASONS: A MAGICAL MUSICAL amateur night Wed at 8 pm, and profesPrepare to be immersed in this inspirational sional headliners Thu-Fri at 8 pm and Sat and heart-warming epic production that at 7 and 9:30 pm. 2ROB PUE Nov 2-4 includes choreographed contemporary dance, stunning magic and illusion, and 2DARREN FROST Nov 9-11 a spectacular original score performed THE COMEDY MIX 1015 Burrard, 604by the Vancouver Metropolitan Orchestra. 684-5050, www.thecomedymix.com/. Nov 25, 8 pm, The Centre in Vancouver for Comedy club with pro-am night Tue at Performing Arts (777 Homer). Tix from $38, 8:30 pm, showcase Wed at 8:30 pm, and info www.magicalmusical.ca/. featured headliners Thu at 8:30 pm and Fri-Sat at 8 and 10:30 pm. 2IAN BAGG GALLERIES Nov 2-4 2TRACEY MACDONALD Nov 9-11
straight choices
OH MY GAD! He was a movie star who went on to become the most beloved standup comic in Europe. Talk about your charmed life. While not exactly throwing it all away, Gad Elmaleh decided he wanted more, so he boned up on his fourth language (English) and moved to New York in an effort to slug it out in the clubs. And damned if he hasn’t succeeded, now touring theatres all over North America—including the Chan Centre for the Performing Arts on Saturday (November 4).
22 THE GEORGIA STRAIGHT NOVEMBER 2 – 9 / 2017
VANCOUVER THEATRESPORTS LEAGUE Improv Wars: The Laugh Jedi (Thu, Fri, and Sat, 7:30 pm); #NoFilter (Thu, 9:15 pm); Ok Tinder (Fri and Sat, 11:15 pm); Rookie Night (Sun, 7:30 pm); TheatreSports (Wed and Tue, 7:30 pm; Wed, 9:15 pm; Fri and Sat, 9:30 pm). Nov 1-8, The Improv Centre (1502 Duranleau, Granville Island). Info www.vtsl.com/.
VANCOUVER ART GALLERY 750 Hornby, www.vanartgallery.bc.ca/. 2ENTANGLED: TWO VIEWS ON CONTEMPORARY CANADIAN PAINTING (exhibition offers insight into two distinctly different modes of painting that have come to dominate contemporary painting in Canada) to Jan 1
MUSEUMS THE MUSEUM OF ANTHROPOLOGY AT UBC 6393 NW Marine Drive, 604-822-5087, www.moa.ubc.ca/. 2AMAZONIA: THE RIGHTS OF NATURE (Amazonian basketry, textiles, carvings, feather works, and ceramics) to Jan 28
TIME OUT ARTS LISTINGS are a public service provided free of charge. Submit listings online using the event-submission form at straight.com/AddEvent. Events that don’t make it into the paper due to space constraints will appear on the website.
MOVIES
Unfocused Novitiate leaves us nun the wiser RE VIEW S NOVITIATE Starring Margaret Qualley. Rated PG
Religious impulses are hard to
2 capture in movies, so kudos to
Novitiate for attempting to impart some of the interior motives driving the spiritually minded to be, well, not so driven by society. Despite having been raised with no particular religion in the 1950s, one rural youngster is drawn ever closer to the church. Young Cathleen is played initially by Sasha Mason and then by Margaret Qualley—Andie McDowell’s model-turned-actor daughter, who has expressive eyes but not a lot to say. Her scholarship to the local Catholic school leads her to a nearby convent, where she eventually signs on to be a novice, or nun-in-training. Cathleen gets some guidance from a benevolent nun (Glee’s Dianna Agron). But she starts butting up against the order’s tough Mother Superior (Melissa Leo), who has a serious sadistic streak; she encourages the newcomers to confess salacious sins, and keeps a braided whip handy, for “extreme penance”. This is all reasonably engaging. First-time feature director Margaret Betts has a strong feel for her protagonist’s moral dilemmas. But the largely pedestrian dialogue is packed with TV modernisms, like “What’s with these habits?” And there’s little sense of the Cold War environment these novice are escaping. When the subject of Vatican II finally comes up, the Reverend Mother tries to suppress it, but we don’t necessarily get what the big deal is. It’s a meaty role for Leo, who imbues the number one nun with a modicum of sympathy, but it’s not clear why we’re supposed to care. In the end, you simply have to wonder
fact, she finds her when she runs away to nearby New York City. Ben, too, heads to then-grungy Manhattan in search of that absent daddy but not before suffering a freak accident that likewise leaves him deaf—one of numerous coincidences, most of which are unnecessary and require laborious voiceover explanations at the end. The kids are all right, and it’s obvious that Haynes enjoys the juxtaposition of radically different film styles, with the 1920s material supported by Carter Burwell’s purposefully melodramatic music and the faded-Kodachrome sections beefed up by David Bowie songs. The final act includes a massive diorama and small, antique-style puppets as a bonus. But the constant cutting back and forth for two hours grows tiresome, and there’s nothing Margaret Qualley plays Cathleen, a young woman in 1960s America who in the script to match the wonder of signs up for life in a convent for reasons not made entirely clear in Novitiate. what’s on-screen. if Cathleen’s ultimate decision to stay variation of tone and mood—even At least when Ben Stiller’s around, or go isn’t really religious, but simply if everyone keeps ending up at vari- museums come to life. Here, they a question of management styles. ous museums, cinemas, and curio just sit there and look important. > KEN EISNER shops presented as repositories of all > KEN EISNER worthy human endeavour. WONDERSTRUCK The new film operates on two time THE KILLING OF A SACRED tracks, one set in the summer of DEER Starring Julianne Moore. Rated G 1977 and the other exactly 50 years Starring Colin Farrell. Rated 14A Superstylish director Todd earlier. The dominant part centres Partway into The Killing of a Haynes is better known recent- on Ben (Oakes Fegley), a rural MinSacred Deer, someone mirthly for highfalutin, if camp-tinged, nesota boy who has grown up fatherfare like Carol. But his first feature, less and then loses his librarian lessly watches a scene from GroundSuperstar: The Karen Carpenter mother (Michelle Williams, in flash- hog Day. No one can say Greek filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos—writStory, was told entirely with Barbie backs) just after his 12th birthday. dolls, and there’s a strong element of The other, set at the end of the er-director of thorny art-house fare play to his work. So it didn’t seem too silent-movie era, involves a same- like Dogtooth—isn’t well versed in unlikely for him to take on a youth- aged Hoboken, New Jersey, girl who mythology or western tropes, since aimed story like Wonderstruck. happens to be deaf. She’s played by the scene is one in which Bill MurMore worrisome was the fact Millicent Simmonds—who in real ray asks Andie McDowell if she can that screenwriter Brian Selznick life is hearing-impaired—in a sub- be sure he isn’t god. A god complex meets Sisyphean also penned the story that turned plot told in black and white with no into Martin Scorsese’s insufferably dialogue. The seemingly mother- punishment as a skilled heart sursticky Hugo, and, in fact, many of less girl is stuck on a famous ac- geon sees his life suddenly unravel. that period piece’s gooiest features tor (Julianne Moore) glimpsed in Returning from Lanthimos’s Engare repeated here, albeit with more magazines and on marquees. In lish-language debut, The Lobster,
2
2
a bush-bearded Colin Farrell plays Dr. Steven Murphy. In an unnamed city, he shares a superdeluxe suburban dwelling with his glamorous ophthalmologist wife, Anna (Nicole Kidman). Teenage daughter Kim (Raffey Cassidy) has musical talent and longhaired preteen son Bob (Sunny Suljic) is a bit of a scamp. For reasons initially hard to grasp, the good doctor spends an inordinate amount of time with a strange 16-year-old named Martin (Barry Keoghan). Sometimes the kid appears to be an idiot savant, other times just an idiot. Again, difficult to know for sure, since everyone speaks in polite commonplaces shot through with occasional bouts of TMI, as when, on their first meeting, Kim tells Martin she just had her first period. In Lanthimos’s world, everyone seems to be imitating normal human behaviour, from the bloodless speech patterns to the Murphys’ sex life. Long, Kubrick-ian tracking shots take us down spotless hospital corridors as first Bob and then Kim collapse from mysterious maladies that only Martin seems to comprehend. There’s something here about divine retribution, and this takes the movie into violent genre territory. But viewers are unlikely to feel fear or empathy in a tale so drained of sense and sensibility. The sacrificial references to Iphigenia and Isaac elevate the tone but don’t really bring extra meaning to a tale that is cruel and vaguely satirical without really being about anything at all. > KEN EISNER
UNA Starring Rooney Mara. Rated 14A
Una arrives at a particularly moment in malefemale relations. This can be said of
2 fraught
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Leonard Cohen wires Jewish film festival > BY KEN EIS NE R
T
he soul of any culture is its music. This year’s edition of the Vancouver Jewish Film Festival has a whole tsimmes of Judaic-tinged movies, and almost a third of the roughly 30 features on offer November 2 through 12 are devoted to makers of music, art, and dance. No one embodies the secular, if still highly spiritual, soul of Jewish creativity better than the late Leonard Cohen, who excelled as a poet, novelist, and printmaker aside from his long career as one of the top singersongwriters of any era. Cohen, who died last year at age 82, didn’t always have confidence in his musical abilities. And Bird on a Wire, screening here November 7, captures him at his most ambivalent—and his charismatic best—on a 1972 tour that follows him through Europe and Israel. After being lost for decades, the documentary was recently restored by original U.K. director Tony Palmer, who’ll be here for the festival.
Everyone’s favourite Montrealer returns in the restored tour flim Bird on a Wire, from 1974.
Although he was no Lenny-like bard, a highly influential producer and songwriter (“Twist and Shout”, for one) gets his due in Bang: The Bert Berns Story, one of three music-themed films screening Sunday (November 5). A Quiet Heart is a fictional feature about an Israeli concert musician shunned in her Orthodox neighbour-
hood for playing pipe organ in a local church. And the eclectic Dreaming of a Jewish Christmas is the latest docstravaganza from Toronto’s Larry Weinstein. He’ll also be on hand for his latest mixed-media presentation, set mostly in a faux’50s Chinese restaurant, with celebrators enjoying tunes written by such non-goyish Yuletiders as Irving Berlin and Harold Arlen, performed by the likes of Steven Page and Kevin Breit. Going further afield is Mandala Beats (November 6), which follows virtuoso bassist Yossi Fine—whose background is Euro-Jewish and African-Caribbean—on a trip to India. Eva Hesse (November 12) looks at a late and woefully underrecognized multimedia artist. And closing the shebang that night is Harmonia, another Israeli film set in the classical-music world. As always, there are also tales taken from the Second World War. The must-avoid in this department is The Bloom of Yesterday (November 9), about two Holocaust researchers whose grandparents were on opposite sides of the war. More offensive than forced attempts to satirize Shoah business are its bizarre sexual politics. Is
the movie crudely sexist or does it simply have no respect for its characters or basic common sense? Of notably higher quality is A Bag of Marbles (November 6), from Quebec director Christian Duguay, about two brothers on the run through Vichy France. Best of all, and also with guests in attendance, is the wonderful Bye Bye Germany, which follows a ragtag band of Jewish entrepreneurs as they make a go of it in Frankfurt just after the war. This beautifully crafted effort gives us a career-topping performance from star Moritz Bleibtreu, better known for punkish characters in The Elementary Particles and Run Lola Run. All in all, even with the painful parts, there’s a lot here to celebrate. Or as Cohen put it in “Chelsea Hotel”: “For the ones like us/who are oppressed by the figures of beauty/…you said, Well, never mind/We are ugly, but we have the music.” The 29th Vancouver Jewish Film Festival runs from November 2 to 12 at the Cineplex Fifth Avenue Cinemas and the Norman Rothstein Theatre. For more information, go to www.facebook.com/jewishfilmfest/.
87 Fresh Films Live Music Epic Events And You Visit whistlerfilmfestival.com
#ittakesavillage NOVEMBER 2 – 9 / 2017 THE GEORGIA STRAIGHT 23
Australiaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Ben Mendelsohn (Rogue One) plays Ray, now called Peter, after his stint in prison. Una has almost every movie, but Unaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s need tracked him down to the modern to push those buttons is practically warehouse where heâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s some kind of written in neon. manager. Does she want revenge or The film started as a play called to say sheâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s still â&#x20AC;&#x153;in loveâ&#x20AC;?? Blackbird, about a young woman The director makes remarkable use who tracks down the middle-aged of this industrial backdrop, and the > BY ADRIAN MACK man who exploited her when she was temporal and geographical changes 12. The claustrophobic tale has been create intense visual interest throughuge thanks to all the opened up cinematically, but not in out. But this has the perverse effect of people of Nelson,â&#x20AC;? the usual ways, with Aussie theatre devaluing the former playâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s language. reads a title card at the veteran Benedict Andrews shooting Regardless of sexual politics, itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s end of â&#x20AC;&#x153;Imaginationâ&#x20AC;?, in a variety of alienating settings in the mostly about two people struggling Surrey/Kent area of southern England. over time to get away from each other. one of the killer shorts playing at the Everything is here multiplied by Many viewers will be glad to be shut of Vancouver International Mountain Film Festivalâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s annual Fall Series. an enlarged cast, including Roon- them as well. > KEN EISNER â&#x20AC;&#x153;Especially the ones who let us jump ey Mara as the present-day Una. off your houses.â&#x20AC;? You could imagine that city planners down in the Kootenays were pretty drunk on the outdoor life as Nelson evolved into what we see R R here, which is an enormous urban e i playground for Whistler-based v s filmmaker Dave Mossop and the o i artistsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; collective Sherpas Cinema. l n As two parents bicker in the u g The Cinema That Shook the World t front seat of a wood-panelled stai tion wagon (â&#x20AC;&#x153;I have priorities too; NovEMBER 2-19 o I understand prioritiesâ&#x20AC;Śâ&#x20AC;?), their n bored son imagines a compana ion for their journey in the shape r Battleship Potemkin of genius freeskier Tom Wallisch, y Salt for Svanetia Old and New the man who holds the record for The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr. West... the longest rail grindâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;an insane The Man with a Movie Camera Outskirts 424 feet. Fragment of an Empire New Moscow Aelita, Queen of Mars Wallisch traverses the mountainA Sixth Part of the World The Tailor from Torzhok Bed and Sofa side community through a seamless combination of parkour and freestyling, hitting a dizzying number of FREE! landmarks (hello, Roxanne fire station!) via a lot of conveniently placed flatbeds, overturned garbage cans, and all those rooftops. It ends with an ecstatic vision of South Nelson NOT A LOVE STORY: A FILM NEW RESTORATIONS! Nov 3-5 elementary buzzing with airborne ABOUT PORNOGRAPHY + â&#x20AC;&#x153;A gem of a vintage Mexican Western." skiers and wide-eyed kidsâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;all of it BĂ&#x203A;CHERONS DE LA MANOUANE - Hollywood Reporter set to the Avalanchesâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; rapturous â&#x20AC;&#x153;BeSat, Nov 4 - 2:00pm TIME TO DIE cause Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m Meâ&#x20AC;?. The most influential Spaghetti Western you This small masterpiece of pacing have never seen! and cutting screens at the Rio TheTHE GREAT SILENCE atre Wednesday (November 8) as part of the VIMFFâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Ski Show 1, followed by another effort by the Sherpas, this one directed by Nelsonite Eric Crosland, who pitched in with camerawork on â&#x20AC;&#x153;Imaginationâ&#x20AC;?. â&#x20AC;&#x153;Tsirkuâ&#x20AC;? captures the gruelling 60-kilometre snowmobile route from base camp at Haines Pass to the peak named Corrugated and the glacier of the title that spans the B.C. and Alaska border. â&#x20AC;&#x153;The most unique mountain Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve ever seen,â&#x20AC;? skier Hadley Hammer puts it as we eyeball breathtaking aerial shots of the uncanny curtains of snow that drape the monolith like a Lawren Harris painting. As if thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s not enough, Ski Show 1 is headlined by a visit from Sylvain Saudan, the Swiss â&#x20AC;&#x153;pioneer of extreme skiingâ&#x20AC;?, who comes to Vancouver at 81 years young with two films about his adventures on the Grandes Jorasses and Denali. The full program for this yearâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s VIMFF Fall Series includes a second Ski Show at North Vancouverâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Centennial Theatre next Thursday (November 9), this one featuring the premiere of Coast Mountain Epic, a multimedia presentation chronicling the almost sixmonth-long traverse of the Coast Mountains by Invermereâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s motherdaughter team of, respectively, Tania and Martina Halik. They will be in attendance for a program rounded out by four shorts, including â&#x20AC;&#x153;The Curve of Timeâ&#x20AC;?, a gripping film essay on climate change featuring pro skiers Chris Rubens and Greg Hill and directed by North Vanâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Jordan Manley. Stretched across the entire festival at both venues, the Reel Rock 12 program brings five shorts premieres to Vancouver and a notable emphasis on the distaff side of climbing. â&#x20AC;&#x153;Break on Throughâ&#x20AC;? captures 19-year-old Margo Hayesâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s efforts to achieve a â&#x20AC;&#x153;5.15â&#x20AC;? (the highest-difficulty grade in the sport), while one-armed climber Maureen Beck aces a 5.12, among other feats, in the wryly titled â&#x20AC;&#x153;Stumpedâ&#x20AC;?. -
Una
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Todd & The Book of Pure Evil
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24 THE GEORGIA STRAIGHT NOVEMBER 2 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; 9 / 2017
from previous page
Killer shorts at Mountain film series
â&#x20AC;&#x153;H
The Soviet Fi lm Vanguard
The Vancouver International Mountain Film Festival Fall Series takes place November 7 to 10. More information is at www.vimff.org/.
MUSIC
The inevitable fall and unlikely rise of Slow
I
> BY A DR IA N MA CK
’m barrelling down Vancouver’s East 2nd Avenue listening to the first new music Slow has made in 31 years. The song is called “The Asphalt Plane”, and even though it was recorded in a basement on an iPhone, this driving, alchemical wedding of melody, mystery, and sweet Stoogeslike violence sounds unmistakably like Slow. It’s ferocious. I want to pee my pants. When I convey this information a few days later in separate calls to Sub Pop president Jonathan Poneman and Elliott Lefko of mammoth, L.A.– based concert promoters Goldenvoice, they both respond in exactly the same way: with a reverent “Wow”. To clarify: receiving a field report on the developing reunion of a fabled Vancouver band that existed for less than three years in the ’80s has prompted two of the heaviest hitters in the U.S. music industry to both lose their shit just a little bit. Rumours floating across Vancouver have thrown the local seismograph into a similarly twitchy condition. And now, well—it’s official. Slow has returned, and the band wants to talk. “Never imagined it in a million years. Never,” says my driver, Tom Anselmi, who also happens to be the man on the car stereo yowling the lyrics to “The Asphalt Plane”. After some 30-and-a-half years of saying “absolutely no” to a Slow reunion, he’s as surprised as anyone—mostly his bandmates—that Tom Anselmi has finally said yes to a Slow reunion. “There was no way that I was interested in doing that,” he continues. “I mean, I just…was…not…interested.” A little later, the five members of Slow—vocalist Anselmi, guitarists Christian Thorvaldson and Ziggy Sigmund, bassist Stephen Hamm, and drummer Terry Russell—are hanging in the backyard of a house in deep East Van, cracking each other up with half-remembered stories, bickering amiably over details, and trying to get their heads around this most unlikely of second acts. “I think we’re all pretty surprised that it’s happening,” says Hamm, who’s only half joking when he describes Slow, at the time of its breakup in 1986, and with stiff competition coming from Glass Tiger, Luba, and Corey Hart, as “the biggest thing in Canada”. That untimely flame-out came after a catastrophic cross-country tour, booked on the heels of the band’s defining moment, when Slow both inaugurated and destroyed the Festival of Independent Recording Artists at Expo 86—on their singer’s 19th birthday, no less—with a hopelessly inebriated display of teenage nudity and, as legend has it, “Sieg Heil”s delivered to Bennett and Vander Zalm, the twin Bills behind Expo’s bloated tribute to upwardly mobile wealth. “Oh, it was nuts,” Zulu Records
Slow, in its grunge-prefiguring, Expo-destroying heyday. June Boe photo.
head Grant McDonagh will later tell the Straight. “It was a mess of a show but a phenomenal art piece. They fucked everything up, but it was funny as hell. That’s the thing about Slow. They were always entertaining.” REACHED IN NEW YORK, Poneman
is apparently still kicking himself for not making the trip from Seattle to see one of his favourite bands at its most ill-tempered, lamenting: “Because we all love to witness history, right?” For the band, “history” meant the avid blessing of the legendary Creem magazine (“Why in tarnation they don’t rule this stink-ball of a planet is beyond me!”), but also the threat of indecency charges. It also meant national infamy. “We’d just ruined Expo, we’re headline news, we’ve got an independent video on heavy rotation on MuchMusic [“Have Not Been the Same”]—we’re, like, famous, kind of,” Anselmi continues, about the doomed tour that followed. “In Vancouver we’re just reprobates. We go to Toronto and people think we’re rock stars or something.” Road stories of Olympian teenage decadence and magnificent stupidity duly spill out in a wild blur, most of them related to either drugs, booze, violence, driving without a licence, or trying to cross the border with a Videomatica membership card for ID. We can report that on at least one occasion there was sex in a mansion with a Sears catalogue model. When guitarist Ziggy Sigmund finishes telling us about the bouncer who broke his arm in Hamilton, Hamm pipes up: “And you had syphilis too, didn’t you?” “I didn’t have syphilis, fuck you,” Sigmund shoots back. “I had gonorrhea.” Slow was young, fascinating, beautiful, and dangerously smart, with the chops and the musical intelligence to back up its endless naughty-boy shit. Anselmi refers to their “prankster mentality”, but here was the perfect picture of reckless angelic insolence, the kind that might have inspired an admiring chapter in Greil Marcus’s Lipstick Traces, if he’d ever heard of them. Sometimes the audience didn’t
know what was in store. Pulling up to one club, the band discovered it was billed on the marquee as “Flow”. “So we were like, ‘Fuck them,’ ” says the singer. “We never thought about the people that paid money to come see us. ‘They got our name wrong, so we’re doing Flow tonight, and this is Flow’—which was, of course, some ungodly noise that no one would ever want to listen to.” That adventure ended with guitarist Thorvaldson getting shitkicked by Toronto band Bunchofuckingoofs. It all came together for at least one knockout show with their friends Soul Asylum at Toronto’s RPM Club. After that, the tour ground to its ignominious end in rural Quebec with the penniless band camping on the side of the road trying to eat from a field of corn signposted “not for human consumption”. (Hamm nostalgically refers to it as “cow corn”.) By that point, the ’69 Econoline van they’d cadged from drummer Russell’s parents had lost its muffler, exhaust system, starter, and clutch. Wonders Hamm, idly, “Didn’t someone hotwire a steamroller? I remember at one point waking up in the middle of the night and there was one of those big steamrolling machines driving by and one of you guys had hotwired it.” After returning to Vancouver, Slow played one last show at the Town Pump before Anselmi called it quits. “THERE WERE LOST opportunities there,” remarks Grant McDonagh, three decades later. “But they made waves. They only played Seattle once, I believe, but man, they made a difference.” In reality, Slow played in Seattle at least half a dozen times, and the band’s impact on what would emerge roughly three years later as grunge has become something of a truism. “We didn’t go back to our grunge laboratory and go, ‘Gee, flannel!’ ” says Poneman, who would know. “But were Slow influential? Absolutely. When I was coming up in the early and mid’80s, everybody went to every good show, and whenever Slow came to Seattle, they put on a great show.”
Undeniably, with its first single, “I Broke the Circle”, and the astonishing EP that followed, Against the Glass, Slow had the attention of anyone who mattered. McDonagh financed and released both recordings in 1985 after an excited Anselmi handed him a demo rejected by CiTR for “sounding like Goddo”. He glommed immediately onto a sound and vision defiantly at odds with the grinding orthodoxies of punk. “The difference,” explains McDonagh, amazed that a bunch of teenagers could arrive so fully formed, “was they loved soul music, they loved jazz, they loved Stax. ” Indeed, from the riveting first bars of “Have Not Been the Same”, Against the Glass still sounds staggeringly original; like Alice Cooper doing the Stones doing the most dissolute R&B you’ve ever heard, powered into delirium by Anselmi’s incomparable bellow. On a good night, which was most nights, “they were phenomenal, a killer live band with just an incredible underground buzz,” says McDonagh. He has done his bit for the reunion, handing the master tapes from both sessions to Toronto’s Artoffact Records for a just-released, deluxe reissue of Against the Glass that also includes both “I Broke the Circle” and its Bside, “Black Is Black”. It was an Instagram account announcing the rerelease that smoked out Poneman, who sent a message pleading: “Please say you’ve got the reunion bug.” An intrigued but still skeptical Anselmi subsequently approached his old friend Lefko, the Canadian-born promoter who’d booked Slow into Toronto’s RPM Club back in ’86 and let the band crash at his apartment for a month. Lefko’s clients over the years have included Leonard Cohen and Nick Cave, so it’s not like he needed to do this, but he subsequently crunched the numbers and persuaded Anselmi that a Slow reunion was not only viable, but maybe even profitable. “I just thought they were so good,” he says. “I always looked at them as embodying the great spirit of rock. Just always flying that flag for rock and living it all the time.” Slow in 2017 looks amply prepared, once again, to fly the flag and live it all the time. What was initially envisioned as a short reunion tour has evolved into a longer-term project that begins with a debut show at the Fox Cabaret on December 2 followed by studio time with Dave “Rave” Ogilvie. The timing is genius. As the sun sets behind the skyline on this beautiful Vancouver fall day, stories are traded about one of Slow’s legendary punk residences, “the Terrible House of Sickness”, where bathtub speed was being run out of one door and fenced goods out of another, and where Thorvaldson recalls peering up from his guitar during practice one day to see armed cops bursting into the living room.
Ani DiFranco has never been shy about
powering young women in the music industry, battling the death penalty, or fighting for the preservation of reproductive rights. But her focus appears to have changed with the release of her 19th studio album, Binary, or so it seems from “Terrifying Sight”, in which she expresses her intent to “make a grateful sound/and back it up with a grateful soul”. Is that her mission statement for this phase of her life and work? “Sure! I’ll go with that,” the happily extroverted performer tells the Straight from her home in New Orleans. “Yeah, I think that I’m more conscious than I’ve ever been about not just what I’m singing about or what the hell I’m trying to express, but the place that I’m singing from, you know. Where I’m standing when I’m saying whatever it is I have to say. So, yeah, there’s probably a higher level of awareness on this record, to that effect. I’m coming from a place of gratitude and compassion, and hopefully I’ll be able to get some stuff out over the Net regarding that spirit.”
It’s not that the political is taking a back seat in her new material; Binary’s title track takes a pointed jab at “despots in diapers”, while both “Play God” and “Alrighty” call out the sexists who would deny women control over their own bodies. (“You don’t get to play God, man,” she sings in the former, “I do.”) But there’s a new sweetness here that emerges most strongly in the near-ecstatic love song “Even More” and in the overall sound of the album, with its nods to jazz and New Orleans funk. In recent years, DiFranco says, the AfricanAmerican tradition has given her a true template for making music of hope and purpose in hard times. “On the record before this one, Allergic to Water, I have a song called ‘Happy All the Time’, and nobody knows it but me—I don’t think anybody ever asked—but it’s really a song of deference to African-Americans,” she explains. “It’s basically a song about how struggle breeds wisdom and profound grace. “I live in New Orleans, you know, in the Deep South, among some of the longest-suffering people in North America, and the transcen-
ANSELMI CHARACTERIZES EXPO
as “a manifestation of everything that was ugly, of the spectacle and the lie, the beginning of ‘World Class City’ ”, while Hamm asks how anything, let alone a band, can take root in a Vancouver that’s since become the so-called most livable city in the world to nobody except the rich. “We were on welfare and we’d rent a warehouse for, like, nothing,” he says. “If you gotta go to a rehearsal space and pay $75 to practice for three hours?” He shakes his head, sadly. “Now you gotta make your art between 7 and 9.” “And you gotta have three jobs to afford that,” adds Anselmi. Says Russell, rather succinctly: “Our base is a lot less placated than it was during the Obama administration.” Nobody’s turning back the clock, of course, but for anyone feeling some dismay over what looks like a decades-long effort to turn Vancouver into the plaything of global capital, then maybe these guys can deliver a savoury “Told you so.” And if that all sounds a little high-minded, Anselmi is ready to get a bit more personal about his very sudden drive to conjure high-quality chaos all over again. “At the end of the day,” he begins, “it’s not about fuckin’ society, or Vancouver, or Canada, or the U.S., or any of it. It’s about the fact that I need some time to get fuckin’ lost and have the experience of not thinking about anything, and to just be in the moment. And nothing creates that kind of visceral experience, for me, like singing rock ’n’ roll.” After sitting quietly for the most part, Thorvaldson offers his own poignant coda. “I think it was a really great band,” he says, softly, “and personally it’s just always been a huge regret that it didn’t go further than it did. I’ve regretted it enormously. So, I would have been ready to do it anytime in the last—how long has it been? Thirty years? I would have jumped at it.” And with that, Slow descends to the basement and piles straight into “Against the Glass”. There isn’t even a count-in. It just seems to happen, and it sounds monstrous, like Vancouver eating itself alive in 2017, or maybe a hotwired steamroller fuelled by cow corn. Mostly it sounds like Slow. -
☞
DI FRANCO EMBRACES A G RATE F U L S P IRIT >>>
2 defining her purpose, whether it be em-
Drummer Russell describes the “running tally in the Meter Achievers Club”, which required occupants to vomit from the porch onto the gas meter. Only a stone’s throw on Windermere Street from where we’re all sitting, the Terrible House of Sickness is “probably worth $3.5 million now”, remarks Anselmi, darkly. In some ways, it feels inevitable that the band that exposed Expo in a historic act of Dadaist piss-taking has returned to Vancouver at this specific moment, like earthquake lightning produced by the city’s collective psychic stress.
dence that has been a byproduct of that—jazz, for instance—has been a gift to the world.” Former James Brown bandleader Maceo Parker plays sax on Binary, and in Vancouver her accompanists will be drummer Terence Higgins and multi-instrumentalist Ivan Neville. “I’ve always been a fan of funk and of jazz, from old-timey Dixieland to the avant-garde, but living here, I think, it soaks in deeper,” the singer-guitarist says. “I’m literally soaking in it.”
> ALEXANDER VARTY
Ani DiFranco plays the Vancouver Playhouse on Monday (November 6).
Rothman believes there’s always light at the end of the tunnel Looking at the difficult times that’ve
2 been part of life for as long as they can
remember, it would have been easy for Lawrence Rothman to go the maudlin route with The Book of Law. After all, if we’ve learned
anything from the Smiths, Nirvana, and Joy Division, it’s that morbid sadness and selfpitying introspection sell. Rothman—one of the most fascinating new voices in pop music—wasn’t interested in that. What stands out on their debut is the way that there’s a beautiful hopefulness to the songs, even when the lyrics tend to look dark when read on paper. Prepare to get chills when Rothman turns the line “I’ve lived long enough in shame” into a mantra in the synthetic soul number “Jordan”. Or when they deliver a crazily timely message in “Geek” with “Don’t let them bully you/I know what it’s like to feel confused.” “You gotta believe that there’s always light at the end of the tunnel,” Rothman says, on the line from a Washington, D.C., tour stop. “Even when I’m in a cave in the dark with the blankets and pillows over my face, the only thing that can pull me out is keeping in mind that light is always there.” Log onto their Facebook page, and you’ll see next page
NOVEMBER 2 – 9 / 2017 THE GEORGIA STRAIGHT 25
Lawrence Rothman
from previous page
get the following description: “Lawrence Rothman is a singer songwriter from Los Angeles, California.” That tells only half the story. Rothman is nonbinary, which explains the gender-neutral plural pronouns. They also have nine alter egos, including the old-school-elegant Elizabeth and GG Allin look-alike Aleister. The less open-minded among us don’t always get it, and that includes members of Rothman’s own family. For years the singer’s father was unable to cope with them. “As far as other parts of my family, a lot of them still don’t talk to me
or are in denial about it,” Rothman says. “Whatever. I’m fine with that, because better to live completely your authentic self than to be hiding behind some sort of mask—I think that causes people more pain. I’d rather get rid of people in my life who aren’t supportive of who I really am.” To listen to The Book of Law is to be left confused as to who Rothman might be, but for reasons that have nothing to do with gender identity. By design, the album’s 12 tracks are a clinic in the power of genre-jumping. Rothman starts out dabbling in lounge-tinted MOR with “Descend”, rolls out the retro-jazz horns for the sepiatoned “Ascend”, and goes Broadway musical for the enchanting “Walking
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My Tears Across Manhattan”. What binds the songs together is that they are, entirely by design, deeply confessional. “The whole record, lyrically, is me writing about what I’ve gone through,” Rothman says. “That’s what ties together all the genre-hopping in the music.” That willingness to open up isn’t something Rothman has always been comfortable with. “For a long time, I didn’t feel like it was something that I needed to talk about publicly,” they say. “I sort of had it in my head that as an artist, or, you know, a musician, you can sort of dance between what you want to reveal about your inner being and your personal life, and what you want to leave at bay. For a long time I’ve identified who I am and how I am by being gender-fluid. My close circle of friends have all known this. I didn’t really feel like it was something that needed to be explained in public. “When I first started this project in 2013, I also felt like maybe it was a hard thing for people to understand,” Rothman continues. “I just sort of saw, even seeing friends going through the same struggle that I’ve gone through, that in the last few years it’s become a thing that’s a little more open and a little more talked about.” Part of that realization came from looking at their audience. “I was playing a bunch of shows in late 2014, going into 2015,” Rothman remembers, “and I just started running into people who were coming to my shows who identified as genderfluid, but were sort of insular about it—who were embarrassed and having problems with their family trying to explain it. Things like that. People were reading into some of my songs and visuals, and wondering. I began developing a bond with them, to where I went, ‘I should be a little more forward.’” So Rothman’s narrative began to change. Thanks partly to a close relationship with boundary-exploding video director Floria Sigismondi (Marilyn Manson, the White Stripes), they began generating a buzz a couple of years back. Early features in publications such as New York’s iconic Interview magazine tended to focus almost exclusively on their music. These days that’s shifted to where interviewers are talking about more than what goes on in their songs. But that shouldn’t distract from the fact that Rothman very much is poised to become a 2017 breakout artist. The devastatingly accomplished The Book of Law attracted some heavy hitters on the supporting-cast front, with guest musicians ranging from Sonic Youth pioneer Kim Gordon to indie-rock chanteuse Angel Olsen to Guns N’ Roses bassist Duff McKagan. But what might be most important to Rothman is the example they’re setting for others. “We’re at least in a time where you can be more open about your true inner self,” they muse. “And there are now resources, or support groups online, or in real life, where you can kind of be your authentic self completely 100 percent. You can find a community of like-minded people, and that definitely wasn’t around when I was in the fifth or sixth grade. Now in schools, things like being a trans kid are acceptable. When I was growing up in Missouri, that was definitely not the case.” > MIKE USINGER
Lawrence Rothman plays the Biltmore on Saturday (November 4).
Vancouver’s Vicious Cycles ain’t so tough after all The Vicious Cycles Motorcycle
2 Club has a pretty tough image. TIX $25 / BILLETS 25 $ www.fromthenorth.ca
Its 2014 long-play, Bad News Travels Fast, boasts cocky rockabilly-inflected punk anthems like “You Ain’t So Tuff”, which seems to challenge any takers to a scrap. The cover of the group’s previous LP, 2011’s The Strange and Terrible Saga of…, shows a biker fist fight. And on-stage, frontman Billy Bones, with slickly styled hair and a leather jacket, presents as a classic ’50s brawler. So just how tough is this band, see next page
26 THE GEORGIA STRAIGHT NOVEMBER 2 – 9 / 2017
anyway? The question is answered when Bones shows up to our interview, downstairs at Neptoon Records, with his young son, J.J., who, Bones explains, was named for Joe Strummer and Joey Ramone. J.J. and his dad have a sweet rapport that quickly undermines any tough-guy image Bones might have had. As for “You Ain’t So Tuff”, Bones gestures toward his son, who is exploring Neptoon’s overstock. “I wrote it about that guy!” His voice gets gentler when addressing J.J. “Do you know that song’s about you?” “Because of my muscles?” “No, because sometimes you’re difficult.” “Like you!”
“No, because sometimes being a dad is hard, and”—turning to me, he continues—“I wrote it meaning that everybody’s got stuff that’s tough, and I kinda hoped people could hear that song, and whatever is tough for them, they could holler that song at it.” Sometimes, live, Bones strategically shares credit for the tune. “I wrote that song, but when I introduce it, if we’re in a room and there’s a bunch of skinheads, I’ll pick one of the other members and say, ‘This is a song Rob over there wrote, it’s for all the skinheads in the room, and it’s called ‘You Ain’t So Tuff!’ ” Rob is bassist Rob “Beardo” Wright; lest any Nomeansno fans get confused, no, he is not that Rob Wright. Along
with Bones, he’s one of the Vicious Cycles MC’s founders, though keyboard and theremin player Norman “Motorcycho” Anderson was the reason the group came together 10 years ago. “We basically made this band as an excuse to hang out with Norman. And we thought songs about motorcycles would be hilarious.” Bones estimates that between him and Anderson, they must have close to 30 bikes. “A couple of newer guys don’t come from a motorcycle background, but they’re rockers.” Like Ben Frith, for instance? Son of Neptoon’s Rob Frith, the former drummer of Thee Manipulators can be seen often enough on the bus that I doubt very much he’s
got a bike. “Actually, Ben’s girl, Melissa, has a Honda CB350. So to me, that’s close enough.” The other new member of the band, Nick Thomas, is a draftee from Vancouver mod revivalists par excellence the Tranzmitors, whom the Vicious Cycles have squared off against at Mods Versus Rockers–themed shows. “We’re friends with all the mods, and we respect the way they do bikes,” Bones says. “But it’s fun to play off of it, to pretend that that’s still a deal. And Nick is a phenomenal guitar player.” The Vicious Cycles’ love for motorcycles often bleeds over into music, including gigs where they’ve actually ridden their bikes into the club. “I love that we can do that,” Bones
says, grinning. “At Antisocial, the skateboard shop down the street, I think there’s still a burnout in the middle of the shop from when we played there once, and while we’re playing, I’m basically singing into this guy doing a burnout with the back end of his bike fishtailing in front of me…that’s the stuff that I really love, that’s the whole point of us having a motorcycle band, that we can do these stupid things.”
> ALLAN M AC INNIS
The Vicious Cycles MC plays its 10thanniversary gig at the SBC Restaurant on Saturday (November 4). See Straight.com for an expanded version of this article.
SHAH DJS PRESENTS ABSTRACT SONANCE - NOV 10 NOV
1 BUTCHER BABIES
NOV
HELLCHAMBER AND ANARCHEON
2 NOMADIC MASSIVE
NOV AN EVENING WITH
3 DEER TICK
NOV
2 THE PHONIX 10 THURSDAY
FRIDAY
BACKSTAGE LOUNGE PRESENTS
SHAH DJS PRESENTS
VANCOUVER’S BEST FUNK AND SOUL PARTY BAND DOORS 9 SHOW 10:00PM $7 @ THE DOOR
3
FRIDAY
MEATPLOW CIVILIAN AUDIOSLAVE TRIBUTE & BONNIE SCOTT
STONE TEMPLE PILOTS TRIBUTE,
(FEMALE-FRONTED AC/DC TRIBUTE) DOORS 9 SHOW 10PM $10
9 TOY ZEBRA THURSDAY
BACKSTAGE LOUNGE PRESENTS
POP AND ROCK COVERS DRINK SPECIALS DOORS 9 SHOW 10 - $7
THE MAIN EVENT:
4 TRIBUTE
ABSTRAKT SONANCE
(DEEP, DARK, DANGEROUS/HATCHED/ SOUTHSIDE DUBSTARS) MYLES AWAY, BARLEE - KNAUTIC ERSKI TANK GYAL MAIN ROOM VISUALS BY JOHNNY ERWIN OF INEO STUDIOS • PK SOUND UPSTAIRS DOORS @ 10PM - $15
11 VALTER 17 BABY HARRY SATURDAY
BACKSTAGE LOUNGE PRESENTS
DOORS 9 SHOW 10:00PM-$15
JB THE FIRST LADY, KIMMORTAL, MISSY D., DJ SU COMANDANTE
JENA FRIEDMAN EMCEE BOIN3RD, DJ SEKO
NOV
8 PROPAGANDHI (SOLD OUT)
NOV
FESTERVAL
10 NIGHT 2
NOV
11 SILVERSTEIN
12 VINTAGE TROUBLE DESI VALENTINE NOV BLOODLETTING NORTH ORIGIN, ARCHSPIRE, DEFEATED SANITY, DYSCARNATE, VISCERAL DISGORGE, 15 AMERICA TOUR XI THE KENNEDY VEIL, ZUCKUSS NOV DEAD QUIET WAINGRO, WE HUNT BUFFALO, 17 (ALBUM RELEASE) HERON, BLACK THUNDER NOV
18 DESERT DWELLERS
NOV
23 GARY NUMAN
ALLEGAEON, DEAD ASYLUM, RESURGENCE
NOV
DEAD KENNEDYS, THE DWARVES, DIARRHEA PLANET, DIRTY FENCES, FASHIONISM, SORE POINTS, THE SHRINE
NOV
9 NE OBLIVISCARIS
NOV
RVIVR, BAD COP/BAD COP
NOV
SEAWAY, CEDAR GREEN, CHIEF STATE
NOV
24
25
& MORE
ME NOT YOU
THE DREADNOUGHTS (ALBUM RELEASE)
COUSIN HARLEY
(ALBUM RELEASE)
NOV
28 BELPHEGOR
& MORE
THE ROCKET REVELLERS, THE WHEELGRINDERS
CRYPTOPSY, PENZERFAUST, KAFIRUN
PERE UBU
30
FRIDAY
BACKSTAGE LOUNGE PRESENTS
NEW ALBUM - 20 YEARS IN A MONTANA MISSILE SILO
FUNK, ROCK AND SOUL DOORS 9 SHOW 10:00PM - $7
WITH GUEST
DIMINISHED MEN
TICKETS: RED CAT, HIGHLIFE, ZULU, NEPTOON & WWW.RICKSHAWTHEATRE.COM
FOOD. DRINK. LIVE ENTERTAINMENT. *** VISIT US ONLINE FOR UP TO THE MINUTE LISTINGS, DRINK SPECIALS AND MORE www.thebackstagelounge.com ***
Ruby’s Ukes proudly presents
THU NOV 2 FRI NOV 3
Boogie Nights presents
Kutapira & Kristie McCracken Live Acts and The Live Agency present
BEST IN VANCOUVER BAND COMPETITION 1pm-4pm
SAT NOV 4
Blues brunch w. rob montgomery 4:30pm-8:30pm
saturday sessions the original jam session 9pm-late
BEST IN VANCOUVER BAND COMPETITION
Featuring
5XE\ VPLWK and 5XE\½V SLHFH
SUN NOV 5
8NXOHOH 2UFKHVWUD
The Railway Stage presents
NIRVEMBER ROCK BAND KARAOKE
Nov 6 The Take Back w. EMCEES KHINGZ & MIC FLONT Nov 9 Boogie Nights Afrobeats special w. CAMARO ‘67 Nov 10 Live Acts & The Live Agency pres. BEST IN VANCOUVER
showTIME 7:30pm tickets $25 TICKETS AVAILABLE IN ADVANCE FROM THE YORK THEATRE Part of the proceeds go towards Ruby’s Ukes Ukulele OutreacH
The York Theatre
639 Commercial Drive
@RailwaySBC
579 Dunsmuir St
NOVEMBER 2 – 9 / 2017 THE GEORGIA STRAIGHT 27
and Shannon Straw, with guests Shannon and the Clams. Feb 10, doors 8 pm, show 9 pm, Vogue Theatre (918 Granville). Tix on sale Nov 3, 10 am, $45 (plus service charges and fees) at www.livenation.com/.
MØ AND CASHMERE CAT Danish electropop singer-songwriter coheadlines with Norwegian DJ on their MEØW Tour. Feb 11, doors 7 pm, show 8 pm, Vogue Theatre (918 Granville). Tix on sale Nov 3, 10 am, $32 (plus service charges and fees) at Red Cat Records and www.ticketfly.com/.
music/ timeout CONCERTS <
CONCERTS 2JUST ANNOUNCED CORY WEEDS’ LITTLE BIG BAND EXPLOSION This stellar 10-piece features special guests PJ Perry, Steve David, Joe Magnarelli, and Gary Smulyan with the cream of the local crop. Presented by Coastal Jazz. Nov 10-11, 8 pm, Frankie’s Jazz Club (765 Beatty). Tix $30, info www.coastaljazz.ca/. BIG BOI American rapper, songwriter, record producer, actor, and Outkast member performs on his Daddy Fat Saxxx Tour Sack 2. Jan 9, doors 8 pm, show 9 pm, Commodore Ballroom (868 Granville). Tix on sale Nov 3, 10 am, $45 (plus service charges and fees) at Red Cat Records and www.ticketmaster.ca/. K.FLAY Los Angeles-based hip-hop artist tours in support of latest release Every Where Is Some Where, with guest Sir Sly. Jan 21, doors 8 pm, show 9 pm, Commodore Ballroom (868 Granville). Tix on sale Nov 3, 10 am, $29.50 (plus service charges and fees) at Red Cat Records and www.ticketmaster.ca/. WALLOWS Los Angeles-based alt-rock band performs on its North American Winter Tour. Jan 27, doors 6:30 pm, show 7:30 pm, Rio Theatre (1660 E. Broadway). Tix on sale Nov 3, 12 pm, $20 (plus service charges and fees) at www.livenation.com/. DRIVE-BY TRUCKERS Southern rock band tours in support of latest release American Band, with guest Lilly Hiatt. Feb 2, doors 8 pm, show 9 pm, The Imperial (319 Main). Tix on sale Nov 3, 10 am, $30 (plus service charges and fees) at Red Cat, Highlife Records, and www.ticketweb.ca/. DAN AUERBACH American blues-rock vocalist-guitarist performs on his Easy Eye Sound Revue Tour featuring Robert Finley
SABATON AND KREATOR Swedish heavy-metal band coheadlines with German thrash-metal band. Feb 14, doors 6:30 pm, show 7:30 pm, Vogue Theatre (918 Granville). Tix on sale Nov 3, 10 am, $40 (plus service charges and fees) at www.livenation.com/. BAHAMAS Toronto-based folk singersongwriter tours in support of his upcoming fourth full-length album Earthtones. Mar 1, doors 7 pm, show 8 pm, Queen Elizabeth Theatre (650 Hamilton). Tix on sale Nov 3, 10 am, $49.50/39.50/29.50 (plus service charges and fees) at www.livenation.com/. BRANDI CARLILE American folk-rock singer-songwriter tours in support of latest studio album The Firewatcher’s Daughter. Mar 3, doors 8 pm, show 9 pm, Commodore Ballroom (868 Granville). Tix on sale Nov 3, 10 am, $46 (plus service charges and fees) at www.livenation.com/.
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THE DEARS Montréal indie-rock band tours in support of seventh studio album Times Infinity Volume Two. Mar 9, doors 7 pm, show 8 pm, Fox Cabaret (2321 Main). Tix on sale Nov 3, 10 am, $20 (plus service charges and fees) at www.livenation.com/. ROD STEWART British rock-pop singersongwriter known for hits like “You Wear It Well”, “Young Turks”, and “Forever Young”. Apr 10, doors 6:30 pm, show 7:30 pm, Rogers Arena (800 Griffiths Way). Tix on sale Nov 3, 10 am, $250/149/99/79/49 (plus service charges and fees) at www. livenation.com/.
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savage love I am a pretty handsome gay (I have been told) and I am dating a gorgeous man. I am 34, and he is 31. I am bottom only, and he is top only—so it’s a good match. He seems sincerely interested in me and we are talking about being together. But here is the thing: he noticed that I have a rather small penis. I am under the average, and his dick is quite big and long. Since he discovered this, he fancies about “humiliating” me about my “small pee-pee”. He would even like me to show it to his friends. I am not ashamed of the size of my penis because it’s how I am made and I can’t change it. But I wonder what this idea means for him. I would somehow understand that he would put me down if he suffered from a “small dick complex”, but since he is so well-endowed, I don’t get it. Is it a common turn-on for some top guys to imagine that their partner is smaller than them? Does it hide something else maybe? > HUMILIATED OVER TACKLE
P.S. English is not my mother tongue. I apologize for this. I don’t have a problem with your English. I have a problem with your potential boyfriend. Small penis humiliation (SPH) is a kink popular enough to have spawned a porn genre. There are more than 76,000 SPH-themed porn videos on XTube—and XTube is just one of the various porn tubes out there ruining everything for everyone. Over at PornHub, there are SPH videos with more than two million views. That’s all anecdote, not data, HOT, but it’s
anecdote enough to confirm that, yes, small penis humiliation is definitely a thing. And it can be a very good thing for guys whose erotic imaginations transformed their anxieties about having small dicks into a kink they enjoy. But you are not one of those guys. You like your dick fine, and you’ve got the exact right attitude about your dick—indeed, all men everywhere, regardless of size, should embrace their dicks the way you’ve embraced your own. Your dick is your dick, you can’t change it, and you shouldn’t be ashamed of it. And big or small, HOT, your dick has all the same nerve endings as that big and long thing on the guy who might be your boyfriend someday (but who’s definitely a presumptuous asshole right now). As with most kinks—bondage, cuckolding, foot fetishes, diapers, pup play—subs/bottoms are way more common than Doms/tops. So it’s usually the guy with the small dick who initiates small penis humiliation games with his partner, HOT, not the boyfriend with the bigger dick and/or the girlfriend with the pussy and/or the bigger dick. (Some women have dicks, all women can purchase strap-ons.) While there are SPH tops out there, their numbers are far smaller. But the issue here isn’t stumbling over a rare small penis humiliation top in the wild, HOT, but whether or not you’re into it. Are you into power play? Do you like being degraded? Does the thought of this dude ordering you to show your dick to his friends—friends who presumably want to see your
> BY DAN SAVAGE dick—turn you on in any way? If the answer is no, no, and FUCK NO, then tell your potential new boyfriend to stop making fun of your cock. If the answer is maybe, maybe, and maybe under the right circumstances, then talk it over with him and work out when, where, and how you’re willing to indulge his SPH kink. If you stay with him, you’re also going to need to have a conversation about consent. SPH isn’t something you surprise someone with. Like most kinks, it requires advance discussion, the setting of limits, and the consent of both parties. It’s worrisome that this guy didn’t bother with obtaining your consent in advance. If he doesn’t recognize that he made a mistake and swear not to make a similar mistake in the future, then you’ll have to DTMFA.
but the act nevertheless falls outside the realm of safe sex. Very little actually exists in the realm of purely safe sex. There’s always risk, we can mitigate for those risks, we can make sex safer, but save for solo and cyber, sex is rarely ever 100 percent safe. 2. This is technically three questions, PUSSY. You find that person by putting ads on hookup sites and/or by putting yourselves in places where you might meet that person, i.e., pickup joints, sex parties, swingers clubs. There are lots of apps out there for couples seeking thirds, you can even advertise as a couple seeking a third on big dating sites like OkCupid. It is a degrading thing to ask someone to do—but since there are lots of people out there into erotic degradation, that’s a potential selling point.
I’m sorry to be graphic, but it can’t be avoided. I’d like to have my fiancé come on my pussy and then have someone else lick it off. My two questions: 1) Does that fall in the realm of safe sex for the extra person? 2) How do we find that person? Is there an app to meet a third or how do we find swinger parties in our area? Is that a degrading thing to ask someone to do?
I am in a relationship with a lovely and amazing man. Everything could be really good, if only his father would stop being a creep. He’s constantly telling me how beautiful, smart, and attractive I am. Last year around Christmas, I sang a few songs when we were visiting my boyfriend’s family, and his father commented that I have an “erotic” voice. A few days later, I received an email from him. Attached was a poem about my singing, where he called my voice “angelic” and “pure”. It made me really uncomfortable and I told him that I don’t want to receive poems from him and that he should stop complimenting me all the time. He didn’t. When I told him again to stop commenting on my appearance, he
> PERSONALLY UNDERSTANDS SERIOUS SEXUAL YEARNINGS
1. Nope. Various sexually transmitted infections—gonorrhea, syphilis, chlamydia, herpes, HPV, et cetera—could be contracted by the extra person and/ or passed on to you and your fiancé. There’s low to no risk for HIV, PUSSY,
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responded that I must not like myself very much. I talked to my boyfriend’s mother, and she said she’s “given up” and ignores her husband’s behavior. It turns out that he behaved similarly with ex-girlfriends of my boyfriend’s brothers. I’m so angry and don’t know what to do. My boyfriend supports me, but it’s hard to talk about the topic. > FUCKING ANNOYED THAT HE ENGROSSES RIGHTFULNESS
I’m curious what your boyfriend’s “support” looks like, FATHER. Does he tell you privately that his father is a creep and that he wishes his dad would knock this shit off ? Or does he tell his father directly that he’s being a creep and insist he knock it off ? The latter is support, the former is not. I’m thinking there’s a reason your boyfriend’s brothers only have exgirlfriends—you don’t speak of any currents, FATHER, a highly revealing detail—and it’s not just because their dad is a creep. It’s because no one in the family is willing to stand up to this creep. Not his wife, not his children. If your boyfriend refuses to run interference and/or shut his father down, I would advise you to join the list of exes. However “lovely and amazing” your boyfriend might be when you two are alone, if he’s useless in the face of his father’s sexual harassment, you’ll have to DTMFA too. On the Lovecast, Minneapolis mayor Betsy Hodges: savagelovecast.com. Email: mail@savagelove.net. Twitter: @ fakedansavage. ITMFA.org.
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Addiction we are not just treating addiction we are treating people...
MIND, BODY & SPIRIT The More You Know About Addiction Recovery, The More We Make Sense The Program: Our exceptional success rate sets us apart from other recovery centres, because our long term program gives the brain the opportunity to heal, but that is only the beginning. Program participants also: · Advance their education · Receive extensive career training · Develop leadership & social skills · Build strong character
The Cost: The John Volken Academy is a registered not-for-profit society funded by private charitable foundations, friends of the Academy, supporting businesses and government. Therefore, except for a one-time intake fee, the program is free. To be eligible you must be: · Committed to change your life · Between the ages of 18-32 · Able to participate in the program
Program Participants Adopt a Whole New Life-style
Vancouver, BC. Oct. 21, 2014
His Holiness the Dalai Lama honored our founder John Volken with the Dalai Lama Humanitarian Award for effectively changing lives.
6911 King George Blvd. Surrey, BC. V3W 5A1
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32 THE GEORGIA STRAIGHT NOVEMBER 2 – 9 / 2017
604-592-2050
www.volken.org