The Georgia Straight - Power Shift - Nov 29, 2018

FREE | NOVEMBER 29 DECEMBER 6 / 2018 Volume 52 | Number 2655

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Power Shift The Burnaby–New West corridor is home to two new regional kingpins: Metro Vancouver chair Sav Dhaliwal and TransLink Mayors’ Council chair Jonathan Cote

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4 THE GEORGIA STR AIGHT NOVEMBER 29 – DECEMBER 6 / 2018

NOVEMBER 29 – DECEMBER 6 / 2018 THE GEORGIA STR AIGHT 5

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CONTENTS

13 COVER

Burnaby councillor Sav Dhaliwal and New West mayor Jonathan Cote are the region’s new power brokers.

Contact us to learn more about the

By Charlie Smith Cover photo byShimon Karmel

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17 FEATURE

Reconciliation continues to elude Asian women who were taken as sex slaves during the Second World War.

By Sylvia Yu Friedman

21 FOOD

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By Gail Johnson

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Vancouver’s News and Entertainment Weekly Volume 52 | Number 2655

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

1 2 3 4 5

Social housing to replace historic Japantown building.

Ex-politician Roslyn Cassells says otter shouldn’t be moved.

Green Leader Elizabeth May will marry Margot Kidder’s brother.

Recipe: Cedar Sour cocktail drives away West Coast chill.

Syrian who’s marooned in Malaysian airport coming to Vancouver.

GeorgiaStraight @GeorgiaStraight @GeorgiaStraight

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NEWS City staff propose hike in spending of 7.8 percent A briefing on the budget will be held on December 3

by Carlito Pablo

V

ancouver’s new mayor and council are scheduled to vote on their first budget on December 18.

The draft budget for 2019 prepared by staff proposes a propertytax increase of 4.9 percent. The increase is higher than the 4.2-percent hike approved for the 2018 budget by the previous city council.

The proposed 4.9-percent property-tax increase represents a bill of $2,322 for a single-family home assessed at $1.8 million, or $108 more compared to the current year.

For a residential unit assessed at $1.2 million, the tax will amount to $1,621, for a $76 increase. Owners of strata units worth $700,000 will get an invoice for $887, or a $41 increase over 2018.

The draft budget notes that in 2018, 42 percent of residential properties in Vancouver were single-family homes, 53 percent were strata units, and five percent were other forms of housing.

A business property assessed at $855,300 will get a property-tax bill of $4,139, which is $193 more than this year.

According to the budget book, half of the property taxes funds city services. The rest goes to regional services, provincial school taxes, transit, and B.C. Assessment.

The draft budget explains that the 4.9-percent tax increase covers inflation (2.2 percent), the provincial government’s employer health tax (1.7 percent), and investments in infrastructure renewal (1 percent).

In addition to property taxes, utility fees are also proposed to

increase in 2019, at a combined rate of 8.7 percent, representing the average for the following hikes: water, 9.7 percent; sewer, 11 percent; and solid waste, 3.1 percent.

Moreover, user fees charged by the Vancouver board of parks and recreation will increase by two percent.

“Over the past several years, Vancouver has consistently had one of the lowest average property-tax increases among Metro Vancouver municipalities,” the draft budget states. “Even when combining municipal taxes with utility fee increases, Vancouver continues to be in the mid-range among the municipalities in Metro Vancouver.”

An operating budget of $1.5 billion is proposed for 2019. It represents an increase of 7.8 percent, or $109 million, over the current year.

The Vancouver Police Department is being allotted 21 percent of the operating budget. For 2019, the police will get $317.2 million, a 3.2-percent increase over this year’s $307.3 million.

“While crime is estimated to be lower in 2019, as compared with that in 2018, the total number of calls for service continues to trend higher,” the draft budget explains.

“As the expectations and complexities around policing evolve, the addition of staff will help the VPD achieve the desired trends.”

A budget briefing for the public will be held on Monday (December 3) at City Hall, from 5:30 to 7 p.m.

Members of the public have to register online if they wish to address council at a special meeting on December 11.

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shared its space for two years, and the relationship has become strained, street-market staff told the Straight.

“It was supposed to be temporary,” Laura Lennie, a vendor and assistant to the market’s executive director, told the Straight. “Everything was supposed to move inside. But that never happened.”

In December 2017, the Overdose Prevention Society’s supervisedinjection services did move indoors, into a building at 58 East Hastings, two doors down from the market. But due to smoking laws, the supervised-inhalation component remained on the market’s property.

The market’s executive director, Constance Barnes, stressed that its members do not want the inhalation site to close. “We absolutely support what she [Blyth] does,” Barnes told the Straight. “But where should it go?”

Lennie noted that many vendors who sell goods at 62 East Hastings— herself included—are recovering addicts who are trying to get away from drugs.

“I’m an ex-addict, and smells trigger me,” she explained. “There are a lot of people who have smells that trigger them. And there is a lot of smoke [at the supervised-inhalation site].”

Both Blyth and Barnes said a solution would be for the regional health authority, Vancouver Coastal Health (VCH), to work with the Overdose Prevention Society to move supervised-inhalation services indoors.

Blyth revealed that an architect has already sketched rough plans for a powerful ventilation system that could allow drugs to be smoked indoors safely. But even with such a system, the bylaws would remain in the way.

“We are trying,” Blyth emphasized.

Dr. Mark Lysyshyn is VCH’s lead on harm reduction and substance use. While declining to comment on specific complaints about the site, he expressed support for the inhalation facility as it exists now.

“Here’s a solution that works, is not bumping up against bylaws, and it’s acceptable from an occupationalhealth-and-safety point of view,” he said. “They are supervising inhalations, have supervised tens of thousands of them; they are reversing overdoses, and nobody is dying.”

N EW

RICHMOND

N EW

RICHMOND

ore than 4,800 people in B.C. have died of an illicit-drug overdose since 2013, the year that the dangerous synthetic-opioid fentanyl arrived.

In the epicentre of the crisis, Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, residents have responded with community-led harm-reduction programs. Activists like Sarah Blyth established pop-up injection sites, where people could use drugs under the supervision of staff trained in overdose response.

After Blyth opened the first of these sites in September 2016, the province established several more.

But only one location in B.C.—and only two in all of North America— permits clients to smoke drugs in a supervised setting. That’s because although supervised-injection facilities like Insite can get around Canada’s Controlled Drugs and Substances Act with a federal exemption from the law, they cannot avoid a provincial law that forbids smoking indoors.

And so Vancouver’s only supervised-inhalation site exists outdoors, under a tent, at the back of a vacant lot at 62 East Hastings Street. (The other is in Lethbridge, Alberta.)

“We decided, ‘Whatever kind of drug you’re using, that’s fine, and we’ll figure out how to monitor you using.’ Because you can overdose by smoking, snorting, or anything,” Blyth, executive director of the independent Overdose Prevention Society, told the Georgia Straight.

According to preliminary data supplied to the Straight, the society’s facilities (both the injection room and supervised-inhalation tent) saw more than 94,500 visits between April 2017 and April 2018. Staff responded to 36 overdoses among people smoking drugs and 172 overdoses where someone was injecting. Every intervention was successful. No one has died at a supervised-consumption site in B.C. Although there is evidently a need, Vancouver’s only supervisedinhalation program is receiving pressure to relocate or shut down.

The tent was pitched upon, and remains on, property that the City of Vancouver has designated for sanctioned street vending. The Downtown Eastside Street Market has patiently

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HOUSING

More housing options delayed

by Carlito Pablo

A

n unfinished rezoning by the previous Vancouver city council may have to wait some more.

It’s the blanket reclassification of certain portions of Kitsilano and Kensington–Cedar Cottage to allow additional housing options.

Had the changes been approved, some areas in west and central parts of Kitsilano would have had additional choices, like two single-family homes on a single lot.

The same choice of more than one principal building would also have been available in certain sectors of Kensington–Cedar Cottage.

In addition, duplexes were to be deemed outright uses in sections of these two neighbourhoods. Laneway houses would also have been allowed.

However, the expansion of housing choices in these low-density areas is on hold. The last council decided this September that there wasn’t time to consider the matter in a public hearing.

A new council was elected in October, one that seems more interested in first having a citywide development plan than going in piecemeal by neighbourhood.

As far as housing advocate Brendan Dawe is concerned, the proposed changes in Kitsilano and Kensington–Cedar Cottage are “incremental and modest”.

According to the founding member of Abundant Housing Vancouver, it doesn’t look like there’s a lot of difference if the rezoning has to wait for the citywide plan.

“It can sort of feed into that process of developing a plan from here on out,” Dawe told the Georgia Straight in a phone interview.

On November 15, council directed

Coun. Colleen Hardwick favours a citywide planning process. Photo by Stephen Hui

staff to come up with a program to create a vision for the city’s future, in cooperation with residents and other stakeholders.

Staff will report back to council in early 2019 on what is expected to be a multiyear effort.

The motion to formulate a city plan was put forward by Green councillor Adriane Carr and seconded by Colleen Hardwick of the Non-Partisan Association.

In her first motion as a councillor, Hardwick had sought to reverse the previous council’s mass rezoning of all single-family properties for duplexes.

However, council voted for a measured approach and will examine options to be presented by staff on December 18.

Hardwick was sought for comment on how she thinks council should proceed on the deferred consideration of zoning changes in certain areas in Kitsilano and Kensington–Cedar Cottage.

“The big question now is should, in fact, this whole subject be integrated into the citywide planning process?” Hardwick asked the Straight by phone. “Because it would be nice to start with a clean slate, rather

than, you know, breaking it down into specific areas like Kitsilano and Kensington–Cedar Cottage. Should we not be reconsidering this in the larger context of the citywide plan?”

According to the first-term councillor, what the city needs is a plan that “recognizes the nuance of neighbourhoods”.

“What I heard from people across the city was, ‘We recognize that we need to have greater density. We just want to have a role in shaping how that density plays out in our neighbourhoods,’ ” Hardwick said.

A staff report on the proposed changes in Kitsilano and Kensington–Cedar Cottage that are now on hold points to some tradeoffs for more housing options.

These include the likely demolition of small character houses in Kitsilano.

In Kensington–Cedar Cottage, older homes could be knocked down for “more viable duplex development”, according to the staff report.

More homes will also lead to pressures on street parking. Trees may be cut to create space for new buildings.

According to the staff report, there will be less green space and natural light and more concerns about privacy.

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feature

Regional kingpins plan for the future Metro Vancouver’s new chair, Sav Dhaliwal, wants to make the climate a high priority

by Charlie Smith

M

any Lower Mainland residents have probably never heard of Sav Dhaliwal. The softspoken Burnaby councillor was first elected in 2002, and even though he’s been an influential local politician, he was often overshadowed by outspoken mayor Derek Corrigan.

Dhaliwal has been president of the Union of B.C. Municipalities and the Lower Mainland Local Government Association. He has also chaired the Federation of Canadian Municipalities’ standing committees on municipal finance and municipal infrastructure and transportation.

But now Dhaliwal is about to assume a much higher profile after Corrigan’s defeat in the October 20 election. That’s because on November 16, the retired Telus employee was elected as chair of Metro Vancouver by his fellow directors. This means that he will oversee the appointments of mayors and councillors across the region to committees overseeing everything from drinking water to sewage treatment to regional parks to air quality to social-housing projects.

“Two-thirds of the board are firsttimers sitting around the table,” Dhaliwal told the Georgia Straight by phone. “I felt that as someone who has been there for 10 years, it was important to put your name forward.

Some stability and some continuity would be helpful.”

Dhaliwal made the comment shortly after a photo shoot in Westminster Pier Park with New Westminster mayor Jonathan Cote, who has been elected chair of the TransLink Mayors’ Council. Both are progressive politicians—Dhaliwal is a former B.C. NDP president—and their elevation to these two key positions indicates a regional power shift to the Burnaby–New West corridor.

“All cities have something to offer.

It’s not necessary that the largest cities should be in charge all the time, whether it’s Surrey, Burnaby, or Vancouver,” Dhaliwal said. “The mayors’

Burnaby’s Sav Dhaliwal and New West’s Jonathan Cote both see transit as the key to a livable region. Photo by Shimon Karmel

council basically said, ‘There’s enough on the larger cities’ plate; we need someone who has some handson experience and also offers a bit of, let’s say, a common-sense approach to doing things and is able to bring parties together.’ ” Dhaliwal also has a knack for getting along with people from across the ideological spectrum. He attributed this to his diplomatic skills, though he acknowledged that it can be difficult gaining consensus when there are many people at the table.

“My job is to listen very effectively—and carefully—and seek out why somebody is saying ‘no’ to something,” he said. “What’s behind that ‘no’? And if you understand that, then generally you can find some solutions to it.”

Dhaliwal said he feels that the regional district is functioning well in its mandated areas of responsibility. Part of the reason is that under his predecessor, former Port Coquitlam mayor Greg Moore, Metro Vancouver approved a regional growth strategy to guide development until 2040 and accommodate up to a million new

jobs over that period. The strategy imposed rigorous requirements on local governments to preserve industrial land that wasn’t close to rapidtransit stations and to protect green belts and agricultural land by concentrating multi-unit housing projects in compact urban areas. In addition, Moore oversaw the approval of a solid-waste management plan.

When asked about his objectives, Dhaliwal responded by saying that Metro Vancouver must focus on helping the province achieve its goal of reducing greenhouse-gas emissions to 40 percent below the 2007 level by 2030.

“It’s part of our regional-growthstrategy goal, but the local governments have, obviously, been very busy on other things,” he said. “We haven’t really picked up on a full set of strategies and an action plan to respond to climate change.”

It’s an issue close to his heart. Back in 2013, he seconded a motion by his Burnaby council colleague Dan Johnston calling for a moratorium on fracking for natural gas. Dhaliwal recalled that some asked him why he

was worried about this topic, because there’s no fracking in Burnaby.

“It isn’t about what happens in my back yard,” he said. “Is it good for the climate?”

As chair of Metro Vancouver, he aims to persuade directors to work cooperatively on reducing greenhouse-gas emissions by adopting best practices from other regions. “I think there’s a fair amount of leadership and coordination that could happen at Metro so each one of the local governments are meeting those 2030 targets.”

The first order of regional business facing Dhaliwal as the new chair is a staff presentation on Friday (November 30) about the 2019 budget. It will include reviews of annual work plans and five-year financial plans for the regional district’s four legal entities.

Metro Vancouver includes 21 municipalities, one electoral area, and the Tsawwassen First Nation and has a $75.2-million annual budget this year. This pays for such things as regional parks, air quality, regional emergency management, regional planning, and general government.

In addition, there are 18 munici-

palities and one treaty First Nation in the Greater Vancouver Water District, which draws drinking water from the Capilano, Seymour, and Coquitlam reservoirs. Its operating budget for 2019 is $289.1 million and it treats and distributes a billion litres of water per day.

Next year’s water-district capital budget is $231.4 million, covering a long list of projects, including commencing construction of Jericho and Fleetwood reservoirs.

Another large entity is the Greater Vancouver Sewerage and Drainage District, which serves 17 municipalities and one electoral area. It has more than 530 kilometres of trunk sewers and 33 pump stations, and it treats about 1.2 billion litres of wastewater every day. Its planned expenditures are expected to reach $308.6 million this year. And Metro Vancouver Housing Corporation owns and operates 3,400 units of affordable housing at 49 sites. Its operating budget for 2019 is $51.3 million, with $21.3 million allocated on the capital side.

Dhaliwal said it’s crucial that regional-district directors back the TransLink Mayors’ Council on its plan for completion of Phase 2 of the regional transportation strategy, even if there may be “some issues of difference”. It’s a diplomatic nod to the debate over whether Surrey mayor Doug McCallum should be able to substitute SkyTrain down the Fraser Highway in place of the $1.65-billion Surrey-Newton-Guildford light-rail line, which is fully funded.

“I’m hoping that we can create a fair amount of support quickly for whatever the TransLink mayors decide,” he said.

Dhaliwal traces his roots back to Punjab and has been living in Burnaby since 1968. He’s the first nonwhite person to become chair of Metro Vancouver, but he doesn’t feel that this is particularly newsworthy, given the diversity of the region.

“Your skills and talents and experience and work habits matter more so than the ancestry,” he said.

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Cote aims to expand transit system

W

by Charlie Smith

hen New Westminster mayor Jonathan Cote was recently elected chair of the TransLink Mayors’ Council, the media focus was on expansion of rapid transit in Surrey. Specifically, journalists wondered whether the regional transportation authority would accommodate Surrey mayor Doug McCallum’s demand to substitute SkyTrain for an approved and fully funded $1.65-billion light-rail line connecting Guildford and Newton with Surrey Centre.

In a phone interview with the Georgia Straight, Cote said that it appears as though the provincial government wants the mayors’ council to take the lead in that discussion, which he welcomes.

“There is a recognition that the region has been able to secure $1.6 billion to invest in rapid transit south of the Fraser River,” he said.

“In my opinion, that investment is best placed to stay south of the Fraser River, given that that part of our region is seeing significant increases in population and does need to have better access to the transit system.”

However, Cote emphasized that a great deal of work needs to be completed to understand the implications of cancelling the light-rail project and switching to building SkyTrain from King George Station down the Fraser Highway, as McCallum desires. According to Cote, this will include examining the implications for air

The TransLink Mayors’ Council has to deal with Surrey’s demand for SkyTrain. Photo by Stephen Hui

quality, land use, and transit-ridership numbers.

At the same time, he’s feeling excited about becoming chair in an era of expansion.

“The mayors’ council and TransLink are in a really good position right now,” the New Westminster mayor stated. “We are seeing record public-transit ridership in our region.

And we also have very supportive provincial and federal governments that have put forward a lot of new funding for investments

in public transit in the region.”

However, his enthusiasm is tempered somewhat by a realization that the regional transportation authority could face future funding problems. In 2017, TransLink forecast that 21 percent of its revenues—$384.56 million— would come from fuel taxes (before any gain or loss on disposables). This money is generated through a 17-cent-per-litre levy.

Cote acknowledged that this may not be a “reliable and stable” source of funding as more motorists switch to electric vehicles, which would mean they would buy far less gasoline.

“It’s not going to be one of our easier conversations,” he said. “But it’s one we can’t shy away from because if…we start to see a dip in those revenue sources five or 10 years in the future, that’s when we really end up in a funding crisis for transportation in the region.”

Earlier this year, an independent task force released the Metro Vancouver Mobility Pricing Study, which concluded that “regional congestion point charges” could generate $1 billion to $1.5 billion annually. These fees would also reduce traffic congestion by 25 percent, thereby improving the economy. But they would come at a hefty cost to the average paying household: $5 to $8 per day.

“Out of that work, we recognized the region isn’t quite ready to jump in headfirst into mobility pricing,” Cote conceded, “but I think we

need to continue to have that discussion. As other revenue sources—mainly the gas-tax revenue—become less reliable and potentially decline into the future, we’ve got to ask ourselves: what are the appropriate other mechanisms?”

The mayors’ council is focused on completing Phase 2 of TransLink’s 10-year transportation strategy, which includes a sharp increase in bus-service hours. But Cote, who has an SFU master’s degree in urban studies, is also eagerly looking forward to shaping what might come after that work is done.

“Transportation isn’t going to remain static,” he said. “The electrification of vehicles to ridehailing to even the advancement of autonomousvehicle technology—these are all unknowns but very transformative in terms of how people get around in the future. I would like to see our region start putting some thought behind those and potentially being leaders about how these new innovations in transportation can fit into our Livable Region Strategy and our vision for the future of Metro Vancouver.”

Another one of his goals is to have more nonmarket and affordable housing located in areas that are well served by public transit.

“I think those are two critical issues facing the Metro Vancouver region but they’re often discussed and dealt with separately,” Cote noted. “To me, those two matters actually need to be combined into the same conversation.”

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NOVEMBER 29 – DECEMBER 6 / 2018 THE GEORGIA STR AIGHT 13

The holiday season has arrived at Point Grey Village on W10Ave!

OPINION

Killing light rail would result in fewer stations

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urrey residents are eager to have a SkyTrain extension, judging by the October 20 election result. The winning party, the Safe Surrey Coalition, pledged to dump a fully funded light-rail line connecting Guildford and Newton to Surrey Centre. The party’s mayoral candidate, Doug McCallum, promised to use this money to develop SkyTrain along the Fraser Highway to Langley.

But do Surrey residents realize that this will mean far fewer rapidtransit stations?

There were 11 planned stops along the $1.65-billion Surrey-NewtonGuildford light-rail line. Four were on 104th Avenue at 152nd Street, 148th Street, 144th Street, and 140th Street.

Seven more were planned along the King George Highway between 72nd Avenue and Surrey Central Station.

The next phase was going to be light rail from King George Station to Langley. The Hatch report, which was done for TransLink in 2017, noted that this $1.64-billion lightrail line would include nine stations.

That would have given Surrey 17 additional stations, not counting King George and Surrey Central, which already serve SkyTrain passengers.

The nine along Fraser Highway would be at King George, 140th Street, 152nd Street, 160th Street, 166th Street, 68th Avenue, 64th Avenue, 192nd Street, and Langley Exchange.

TransLink has estimated that it will cost $2.9 billion to develop SkyTrain from King George Station to Langley.

That’s about $175 million per kilometre.

If only $1.65 billion is spent—the current funding envelope for the suspended Surrey-Newton-Guildford light rail—the SkyTrain line will

only extend about nine kilometres down the Fraser Highway, based on TransLink’s estimated cost. That wouldn’t even make it to 68th Avenue, which is 12.4 kilometres down the Fraser Highway.

That means, at most, there will likely be two or three SkyTrain stations in addition to King George Station if the TransLink Mayors’ Council agrees to reallocate the funding from light rail to SkyTrain. This is because SkyTrain stations tend to be placed at greater distances from one another, in comparison to stations on light-rail routes.

Of course, this estimate of two or three new SkyTrain stations is predicated on TransLink’s financial estimate being correct—something that McCallum has disagreed with. He maintains that by building part of the line at grade beside the highway, the cost can come down significantly. But that doesn’t take into account the cost of building huge parking lots for motorists who want to park and then ride the SkyTrain.

So there you have it: nine new rapidtransit stops with LRT from Guildford to Newton via Surrey Centre (in addition to LRT stations at King George and Surrey Centre). And possibly only two or three new rapid-transit stops with the same amount of funding going to SkyTrain down the Fraser Highway.

It raises serious questions as to whether a truncated SkyTrain line that stops before 88th Avenue would attract anywhere near as many riders as an 11-station LRT line that brings hordes of passengers to Surrey Centre.

The TransLink Mayors’ Council hasn’t approved SkyTrain in Surrey.

The mayors merely suspended light rail after more than $50 million was spent, pending further study.

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14 THE GEORGIA STR AIGHT NOVEMBER 29 – DECEMBER 6 / 2018

HIGH TECH

Website identifies retouching Vancouver company verifies whether images have been Photoshopped

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Trusting Pixels CEO Alexander Jacquet has created a way to quickly show if a model’s body has been airbrushed or edited.

hotoshopped images are everywhere. From glossy magazines to curated Instagram accounts, individuals smooth out their skin, tame their hair, alter their makeup, and transform their bodies. As filters and photo editing become the norm, anxieties about body image—particularly among women and young people—have skyrocketed.

Alexander Jacquet knows firsthand how easy it is to alter pictures.

A visual-effects artist by trade, he spent more than a decade in the field working on high-profile TV and film productions like Jurassic World, Godzilla, and Game of Thrones. As he found himself developing increasingly violent content, however, he began to question the ethics of his craft. While privately searching for a way to deploy his knowledge in a way that could help others, Jacquet one day stumbled on an article about celebrity retouching and how so few people realize the extent to which photos are edited by marketers.

“I grew up in an era where Photoshop became a part of advertising,” he tells the Georgia Straight on the line from his Vancouver office.

“Now kids are born into this world and they don’t see the transition.

We consume so much content that isn’t authentic, and it particularly affects youths’ perception of what people look like. That’s been a huge driving motive. I call it an epidemic, because for me it is. And that’s when it hit me—what if people could just look at content and know if it had been edited or not?”

Jacquet’s epiphany became the foundation for Trusting Pixels, an image-verification company.

Launched about a year ago, the business teams up with influencers, photographers, and brands to test and confirm that their pictures do not include alterations to their subjects’ bodies or features.

Jacquet, as the company’s CEO,

designed a unique way to determine how real an image is. Asking individuals and organizations to send the raw file taken directly by the camera alongside the edited version, Trusted Pixels runs forensic tests to confirm that the original is legitimate, then compares it to the final picture.

In order to classify the edited shot and award it the Trusted Pixels watermark, Jacquet created a strict set of criteria.

“When we did our research, we found out that people responded differently to retouching,” he says.

“Some people would look at the same image of a person and say it looked drastically different, while others would say it was very similar. That’s why we developed our

After the company has classified the picture, it’s uploaded to the website’s gallery. Dubbed the “final seal of approval” by Jacquet, having a photo placed in the searchable database allows companies to confirm that their picture is authentic, and it prevents photographers from simply Photoshopping the Trusting Pixels logo onto the bottom corner.

With shots of a number of models already in the gallery, the CEO envisages a number of industries that would benefit from his service.

“For anyone involved in the beauty, fitness, or health-andwellness industries, all the content is based around what people do or what they wear or how they look,” he says. “A fitness instructor can validate their photos to prove that

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feature

Reconciliation elusive for sex slaves

O

by Sylvia Yu Friedman

n August 14, 1991, a slight, pepper-haired woman in white traditional Korean dress took the stage at a news conference in Seoul, Korea.

With a brooding intensity in her wrinkled face and hollow eyes that belied her ordinary appearance, 68-year-old Kim Hak-soon did something completely out of character for women in her culture. She testified tearfully that as a 17-year-old, she was forced into sex slavery by the Japanese military in northern China.

She was raped by up to 30 Japanese soldiers a day in Manchuria during the Japanese war against China.

Japanese ultranationalists and right-wing conservatives called Kim and others like her voluntary prostitutes when they bore witness in the media about being forced into sexual servitude for the Japanese military before and during the Second World War. Kim refuted that she was a willing prostitute.

“How did I become a public witness? When I read newspapers and watched the news, Japan kept denying the truth,” Kim said. “They took us forcibly, put us directly in the military compound, and turned us into comfort women.”

Kim suffered profoundly with her secret for 50 years before breaking her silence. You could say Kim had the very first “Me Too” moment in Asia.

I WAS 15 when I first heard of comfort women and Kim Hak-soon from a Korean newspaper article that my mother shared with me.

“Comfort women” was a euphemism for tens of thousands of young women from Pacific Asian countries who were forced into wartime sexual slavery by the Japanese military from 1931 to 1945. For 14 years, girls and women were raped by as many as 60 soldiers a day.

There were more than 1,000 “comfort stations” in China alone.

The girls were intended to “comfort” lonely and traumatized Japanese soldiers to prevent military secrets from being leaked and to protect the men from sexually transmitted diseases, leading to an increased demand for younger girls and women who were virgins and disease-free. The victims included Koreans, Japanese, Dutch (in Indonesia), Taiwanese, Chinese, Eurasians, Filipinos, Burmese, Malays, Vietnamese, Thai, and Pacific Islanders.

I found no mention of “comfort women” in my high-school history books or in the index of any warhistory book in the library. I was disturbed by what seemed like the erasure of suffering Asian women, many of whom were enslaved when they were my age.

Growing up in an all-Caucasian neighbourhood in Burnaby, I was the only Asian girl in my grade. I became disconnected from my Korean heritage, mostly because of the humiliation of racial discrimination. I was called a “chink” and asked, “Is Korea in China?” Some classmates betrayed my trust by making fun of the kimchi jars in my fridge and laughing that I smelled like Korean food. I was mortified. Ashamed of my Korean heritage, I vowed to never speak Korean at home and asked my parents to never address me by my Korean name, Saejung, ever again. I joked that I was a white person trapped in a Korean body—a “banana”, white on the inside, yellow on the outside.

Then I learned about the comfort women. A profound generational anger, seemingly embedded in my DNA, cropped up. Although I experienced no racial tension with a good friend who was a Japanese Canadian, I suddenly began to feel uncomfortable around

So-called comfort women are still waiting for a sincere apology more than seven decades after the Second World War.

the Japanese man and his family who rented the basement in our house. As I learned more about the experiences of the wartime sex slaves in the United Nations reports, I felt an inexplicable pain and anger toward the culture responsible for these and other wartime atrocities that seemed as if it had been passed down from my ancestors.

I also noticed the anti-Japanese attitudes of those around me. I recalled that my great-uncle spoke fluent Japanese but owned no Japanese electronics and vowed he would never buy a Japanese car. He drives an American car to this day. Growing up in South Korea under the Japanese occupation, he experienced unjust treatment from the teachers at his Japanese government-run school.

Young and old in the Chinese and Korean communities whispered that no one liked the Japanese. No one wanted to date Japanese men. I heard multiple stories of grandparents and parents in the Chinese and Korean communities who distrusted the Japanese. Where did this come from?

WHILE WORKING as a TV reporter in Victoria, I heard that Kim Soon-duk, an 80-year-old survivor of Japanese military sex slavery, would speak at a news conference at the U.S. State Department in Washington, D.C. Three hours later, I was driving to Seattle to catch a flight. I met Kim, who asked me to tell the world about her experience: at 16, she was deceptively recruited as a nurse in Japan, then forced into sexual servitude for Japanese soldiers.

After hearing Kim’s horrific testimony of enslavement, I learned of the Japanese government’s unwillingness to accept unequivocal responsibility for direct involvement in forcibly and deceptively recruiting girls and women into this sextrafficking system and to apologize without ambiguity for destroying the lives of so many girls and women. I decided to write a book.

I moved to Beijing in 2004 to do more research. I asked people daily what they thought of the Japanese.

Young and old, Christians and atheists, even pastors all said they hated the Japanese because of what they did to the Chinese during the war, such as enslaving women and the Rape of Nanking. The Chinese learn about Japanese war crimes as early as kindergarten. “The Japanese government hasn’t made a proper apology to us,” I heard repeatedly. “They need to apologize!”

Over the years, Japanese prime ministers and politicians have repeatedly and publicly denied historical facts and direct responsibility for forcing women into military sex slavery. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has said there’s no evidence that Japan’s wartime government coerced

women into prostitution for the Japanese Imperial Army.

As a result, the Japanese government has refused to give symbolic government compensation to victims.

Prime Minister Abe has even said he wants to revise the Kono Statement, the first apology given by the Japanese government in 1993, which was rejected by survivors and activists for its ambiguity and an insincere tone. Survivors still await an official apology from the prime minister that honours and fully acknowledges the survivors and victims of imperial Japanese military sex slavery.

Since 2007, the governments of Canada, the Netherlands, South Korea, and Taiwan and the European Parliament have all passed resolutions demanding that the Japanese government take moral and legal responsibility for directly planning and implementing the military-sexslavery system. They called on the Japanese government to offer an unequivocal apology and compensation to the survivors.

For a Ricepaper magazine article in 1999, I interviewed leading civilrights lawyer Gay McDougall, who authored the second report on Imperial Japanese military sex slavery as a UN special rapporteur in 1998.

She told me that the Japanese government had spent a lot of time and money trying to bury her report.

This year, during a two-day review of Japan’s record, the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination urged the government of Japan to do more for victims of wartime sexual slavery and offer full redress and reparations. McDougall, one of the 18 UN committee members, said: “I think it is a wound that has been festering for far too long.”

Prime Minister Abe would have?

I later filmed a different reconciliation team for a documentary.

They bowed on the ground and held a sign of calligraphy that expressed how deeply sorry they were for Japanese war crimes against humanity such as the comfort women.

Their humility and love transformed lives. Wherever they went in China, people wept after reading their sign.

Their sincerity touched ancient pain.

As an ancient Jewish poet described it: “deep calls unto deep.”

Sadly, the Japanese involved in grassroots reconciliation face intense persecution and rejection by fellow Japanese and family members. One woman in Tokyo was ordered by her husband to never participate in the reconciliation work again and asked us to blur her face in the documentary.

Online attacks and harassment from the right wing or ultranationalists occur regularly to Japanese involved in raising awareness of comfort women and World War II war crimes.

They said that most Japanese have not learned about comfort women or other Japanese war crimes in their history books, so they don’t understand the issue and how it impacts other Asian people. This same harassment by the Japanese right wing happened during the debate surrounding the proposed comfortwomen memorial statue in Burnaby.

When I showed my documentary about the Japanese reconciliation team at schools and universities in China, Hong Kong, and the U.S., many wept during the film, even teenagers. One student said she was touched that there were Japanese willing to apologize and that she didn’t know there were good people in Japan. Others said their grandparents or parents were affected by the Japanese invasion of China and they hated the Japanese still.

I also experienced angry reactions when my book was published.

I hid my identity for a year and wrote under a pen name to protect myself from harassment. An American who had lived in Japan for many years angrily confronted me at a conference and asked why Korean soldiers weren’t being held accountable for raping Vietnamese women during the Vietnam War. I told him that he was repeating Japanese right-wing “comfort-women denier” arguments word for word. He had no idea.

After my book is published in Japanese, I’m planning to go to Japan to speak on the issue and call for racial reconciliation (or racial justice).

(It would be like an African-American going into the heart of segregation in the Deep South during the Jim Crow era to talk about lynching.)

WHEN VISITING Hong Kong in 2008, I attended a meeting with a reconciliation team, a group of Japanese civilians who travelled to China in an attempt to heal the divide between the Japanese and the Chinese. During our meeting, they apologized sincerely to the Chinese audience for killing and torturing people during the war and for forcing women into sex slavery. The Chinese wept.

I sat rigid and stony-faced as they faced me to apologize to the Koreans.

I doubted their apology would affect me, the “banana” who had no connection with the place of my birth.

Besides, no civilian apology could ever replace an official apology from the prime minister, despite the sincere intentions of the Japanese team.

To my surprise, I wept until I had no more tears to shed. Their simple apology triggered a profound release of pain and generational racial hatred toward the Japanese. Imagine the profound depth of impact that IN ONE of the few existing photos an official government apology from of comfort women, four women in

tattered clothes with traumatized faces stand against a hillside. One is obviously pregnant, her expression anguished.

More than 50 years later, that woman made an emotional journey back to China to testify about her years as a military sex slave.

Pak Yong-sim was 17 when she was abducted from her village in northern Korea in 1938. She and 15 other Korean girls were taken by train and truck to Nanjing, China. When they arrived at a three-storey brick building, Pak was placed in a tiny room with a bed, where she was forced into sexual servitude for the Japanese military. She was raped by up to 30 soldiers, on average, every day in Nanjing and then later in Myanmar.

“One day I begged mercy from an officer, as I was dead tired from the continuous rapes and humiliation,” she said. “He held his sword to my neck, threatening to kill me. Then he beat me viciously before gratifying his sexual lust.”

Pak was the only wartime sex-slavery survivor to identify the current location of a former military brothel, or “comfort station”, in Nanjing. The Chinese government later turned it into a comfort-women museum. A striking bronze statue of Pak and two other wartime sex slaves sits in front of it.

I attended the opening ceremony in December 2015. As I viewed the haunting exhibits featuring the testimonials of the comfort women, I was struck by the faces and stories of the victims and the unspeakable suffering they endured. For more than 10 years, I had interviewed survivors for my book, but to be in the actual building where girls and women were raped daily was harrowing. I renewed my commitment to help bring justice and peace to this unresolved human-rights issue in Asia that still affects Asian race relations today in the West.

Reporting on these survivors changed my life. Meeting these women helped me see that the cycle of slavery continues and inspired me to continue writing and producing films on the issue of human trafficking and human-rights violations. I’ve interviewed girls and women forced into prostitution, and interviewed traffickers, “mamasans”, and pimps in Asia.

The UN says there are 4.5 million children and women suffering in sexual enslavement in Asia and around the world. How can the nations of Japan, China, and Korea cooperate to fight sex trafficking today if they cannot agree on what happened in history?

Seventy-three years after the Second World War, I share my journey of raising awareness of the comfort women to say we also need to heal the divisions within the Asian communities in Canada. For inspiration, we could look to the recent national Truth and Reconciliation Commission that called our government and churches to acknowledge and educate others about atrocities committed against Indigenous peoples throughout history.

There are fewer than 50 confirmed survivors of Japanese military sex slavery around the world. Only 27 survivors left in Korea have reported to the government. In China, survivors are still coming forward. Most of the survivors I interviewed have, sadly, passed away. For many years, these elderly women in their twilight years have fought for a sincere apology that brings healing.

Closure, healing, and reconciliation are urgently needed.

Sylvia Yu Friedman is the author of Silenced No More: Voices of Comfort Women and is currently producing a movie on comfort women.

NOVEMBER 29 – DECEMBER 6 / 2018 THE GEORGIA STR AIGHT 17

GIFT GUIDE

What to give folks who live for hitting the slopes

by Tammy Kwan

B

Surprise them with Von Zipper’s Jetpack Snow Goggle (left) or Anon’s Raven Helmet.

eing in such close proximity to local mountains— and world-class resorts that are a bit further away (we’re looking at you, Whistler)—means that we know one or a handful of avid skiers and snowboarders in our lives. With the holidays and snow season approaching, plenty of sporting-equipment shops have already filled their window displays with the latest winter gear or thermal apparel.

Shopping for presents for active individuals can get overwhelming, so we’ve made it a little easier by rounding up our favourites that are slopeappropriate. Here are five gifts that every skier and snowboarder will put to good use.

COLOURFUL EYES

The weather can get extreme on the mountains (think strong winds, heavy snow, blinding sunlight), so it’s best to protect the eyes whenever you head up. Von Zipper’s Jetpack Snow Goggle ($216.99) works as protective gear and serves as a fashion

statement. With its ergonomic frame design and multihued lens—conveniently antifog, with 100 percent UV protection—whoever is wearing this will be the envy of everyone else on the slopes. Find it at the Boardroom (1755 West 4th Avenue).

HEAD ON

One of the first things that anyone attempting to ski or snowboard will learn is they will fall, a lot. It’s one thing falling onto your behind on fresh snow, but injuries can escalate if you accidentally hit your head on a hard patch of snow or other mountain hazard. Anon’s 2019 Raven Helmet ($139.99) doesn’t sacrifice style for security—three colour options (black, purple, and light grey) are available.

Its Endura-shell construction guarantees durability and protection, while its magnetic-snap helmet buckle provides easy accessibility, and a built-in fleece liner offers warmth and comfort. Find it at Pacific Boarder (1793 West 4th Avenue). see next page

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18 THE GEORGIA STR AIGHT NOVEMBER 29 – DECEMBER 6 / 2018

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GIFT GUIDE

Clockwise from left: Airhole’s Ergo Polar Airtube; MEC’s Pom Pom Hat; the Y1 4K camera.

WARM BREATH

Even when a person is wearing the warmest snow jacket, pants, and tuque, one body part can still be exposed to cold conditions: the face.

Airhole’s 2018 Ergo Polar Airtube ($20.99) solves that problem by providing comfortable face protection without affecting mobility. Its fleece fabric showcases a winter sweater pattern, is water-resistant, and features a silicone-airhole mouthpiece for easy breathing. Without a doubt, the receiver of this gift will appreciate your thoughtfulness. Find it at Comor Sports (1787 West 4th Avenue).

WINTER ESSENTIAL

There’s more to cold-weather sports than just skiing and snowboarding— snowshoeing and winter hiking are also popular among Vancouverites.

Mountain Equipment Co-op (MEC) is the cult-favourite shop for adventurers, so we suggest heading there for any general outdoor-activity-related gifts. Its Unisex Pom Pom Hat ($29) is a good place to start—made of a merino wool and acrylic blend,

it keeps heads warm while showing off the MEC mark. The co-op’s diehard fans love flaunting the establishment’s logo whenever they get the chance, so don’t be surprised if your gift recipient never removes this headwear. Find it at MEC (130 West Broadway).

SNOW TECH

There’s a fair number of high-definition videos that showcase skiers and boarders expertly carving down the slopes or showing off their impressive jumps. Filming oneself is also a great way to learn and improve technique and stance. Most of these clips are likely recorded on a GoPro action camera, but YI Technology offers a more affordable alternative that produces similar-quality results.

The YI 4K action and sports camera ($190.99) is equipped with advanced video stabilization, touchscreen LCD, and built-in Bluetooth and WiFi for instant sharing. Be sure to pair it with a waterproof case and selfie stick for the ultimate gift. Find it online at www.amazon.ca/.

ARCTIC STORIES

with Inuit storyteller Michael Arvaarluk Kusugak

Join us on Sunday, December 2nd at 2pm for this unique salon-style storytelling event intended for all ages.

Vancouver Maritime Museum 1905 Ogen Avenue, Vancouver ARCTIC STORIES is free with museum admission.

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NOVEMBER 29 TO DECEMBER 5, 2018

s of Friday, Venus in Libra opposes Uranus in Aries for the third and final time since September. This transit has been largely responsible for keeping the high stress and roller coaster going strong, especially regarding money matters, contracts (karmic and actual), emotions, and key relationships. This last pass jettisons Venus, the evaluation and survival archetype, over a critical threshold and on to a next-implementation phase.

There is one more week of Mercury retrograde to go. As of early Saturday morning, Mercury backs into Scorpio.

It will finish the retrograde cycle next Thursday in this sign and leave Scorpio altogether the following week.

The transit extends bargain-shopping opportunities. Scoop it up while the Mercury getting is good. On another note, Mercury retrograde in Scorpio can keep you digging through some deep, perhaps painful, emotions, in search of answers and solutions that are still hidden from full view.

While Mercury retrograde is working the back end, Venus, leaving Libra for Scorpio on Sunday morning, will now work the front end of this sign.

Sunday’s Sun/Mars is mobilizing. We’ll feel this in a push-past-it, tension-diffusing, or ease-up kind of way. Look beyond the immediacy of today’s pain or conflict and pin your hope and aspirations on the potentials that lie ahead. Monday/Tuesday can be lucrative and/or enjoyable. Spending comes easily too. Favouring creativity, volunteering, performances, musical events, romance, and the spiritual side of life, Neptune takes the reins as of Wednesday.

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In the works since September, Friday night sees Venus on a breakthrough with Uranus. You can feel it as finally surpassing a creative block or a roadblock regarding a contract, personal issue, relationship, or money matter. As of the weekend Mercury retrograde and Venus into Scorpio gift you with more resourcefulness, better sway, swagger, and staying power. Get your sexy on!

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SCORPIO

October 23–November 21

Immediately following the end of the month, you are onto the next item on the list, pronto-quick.

Friday through Monday keeps you going strong with one thing after another. Ending retrograde next Thursday, Mercury’s backtrack into Scorpio and Venus on a fresh trek through your sign gift you with extra fuel, great incentive, sway, and savvy.

Monday/Tuesday, you’re hot stuff.

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It’s time to resurface, revisit the conversation, get back in the game, or give it another try. Don’t assume you’ll meet up with more of the same. Folks can have a change of heart or mind; you can too. Friday, social and/or spontaneous hits it right. Sunday, aim to let off steam in a healthy way. Wednesday onward, ease up; go with the flow.

Whew! It’s the end of the month and you are still standing (even though you’d say barely so).

Unwind Friday night with something social or with something different than your usual choice for entertainment. Saturday through Tuesday, you should find yourself on an upswing.

Helping you to stand in your power better, Venus and Mercury retrograde freshly into Scorpio loan you more personal effectiveness.

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LEO

July 22–August 22

Too much to do? Added pressure is a given at this time of year, but

20 THE GEORGIA STR AIGHT NOVEMBER 29 – DECEMBER 6 / 2018

September 22–October 23

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April 20–May 20

June 21–July 22

*Some Exceptions Apply.

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LIBRA

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TAURUS

CANCER

w o rr o m o T s t r a t S A

You’ve got it going on Thursday/Friday. The moon in Virgo and Uranus puts you on go in some spontaneous or unexpected way. Trust your instincts and your ability to read people and situations. Reviving your social life and increasing your decision-making smarts, Mercury retrograde and Venus in Scorpio put you back in the game in some switch-track way. Monday/Tuesday, you stand to gain.

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Things can change; minds can change; people can too. Follow instinct and impulse; timing is everything. An inspired moment, a surprise breakthrough could kick-start something pleasing or lucrative. Friday can produce a breakthrough with someone or something. You could strike flint on a good creative idea or moneymaker. Over this next week, you’ll gain a better feel for how to play it.

It may be the end of the week, but social and spending stars are on the gear-up. You should have no problem getting the party started Friday night. The weekend keeps you busy with one thing after another. Sunday/ Monday, pick your battles and ease up on expectations, plans, or rules; follow your instincts. Tuesday onward, you can be easily swayed or sold.

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Uranus/Venus will help you to get it out of the way and move on to other things, perhaps faster than you anticipate. Something unplanned does the trick quite nicely Friday night.

The stars keep you on a roll through Tuesday. Wednesday onward, you are especially soft around the edges.

SAGITTARIUS

November 21–December 21

Venus/Uranus can let you off the hook and/or get something unexpected off the ground Thursday/ Friday. A great idea, good price, sudden whim, or instinct is worth acting on, especially through Tuesday. Mercury retrograde backs out of Sagittarius on Saturday, but it will be back by midmonth. By all means, take a hiatus from the world and the holiday overload; reprioritize and regroup.

CAPRICORN

December 21–January 19

Are they holding you to high expectations or are you putting yourself under too much pressure?

Perhaps it is a bit of both. Have you reached your spending or tolerance limit? Let yourself off the hook Friday night. Enjoy. Saturday through Tuesday, you’ll have good executive control. Wednesday onward, go easy on it and yourself.

AQUARIUS

January 20–February 18

Never enough time; never enough money—don’t let it stop you from having a good time Friday night!

Venus/Uranus can spark a good idea, a great conversation, an impulse purchase, or a spontaneous get-together.

Venus and Mercury retrograde on sign changes help you to get a better fix on it or them. Tuesday onward, guard your health; ease up.

PISCES

February 18–March 20

For the past couple of months, Venus has been in a challenging position with Uranus. Likely, you have felt it as an emotional or financial roller coaster. As of Friday evening, Venus hits a breakthrough point. Saturday/ Sunday, Venus and Mercury retrograde move into Scorpio, an empowering and confidence-boosting inf luence. Make the most of it through Tuesday.

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food

Christmas Market offers gourmet holiday eating

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by Tammy Kwan

ne of the city’s most popular holiday attractions has returned, meaning we can start stuffing our faces with its delicious food offerings. The annual Vancouver Christmas Market at Jack Poole Plaza (1055 Canada Place) is known for its kid-friendly activities, artisan goods, and festive décor, but its gourmet eats are always the star of the show. From authentic German fare to Austrian sweets to classic Indian bites, guests will find it difficult deciding what to indulge in as they roam through all the culinary huts. We suggest heading to the market wearing loose clothing, because your waistline Chimney cake is a Transylvanian treat. is guaranteed to expand. Here are nine tasty foods to try at the annual VEGAN DOSAS Vegans and vegetarians have a new Yuletide celebration. vendor to visit at the holiday attracSCHWEINSHAXE tion this year that serves up tasty You can’t go wrong with this Ger- items like dosas, vegan burgers, man delicacy: a large pork shank tacos, wraps, and organic veggie roasted on a special rotisserie until juices. These dishes will attract even the meat is golden brown and crispy the biggest carnivores. Find them at on the outside, juicy and tender on Organic Villa Vegan Haus. the inside. It’s a real treat—you won’t want to share. Pair this Bavarian- RACLETTE style pork hock with a cup of mulled This Swiss dish consists of freshly wine and you’re good to go. Find it at melted cheese scraped from the wheel and served on a dish filled with Haxen Haus. items like potatoes, pickles, cured ROASTED CHESTNUTS meats, and more. It’s a little slice of Even those who don’t normally enjoy Switzerland in the heart of Vancouchestnuts will change their minds ver. Find it at Cheese Me Raclette. when they get a whiff of these freshly roasted nuts at the Christmas mar- SCHNITZEL ket. These European chestnuts are This vendor promises to treat guests to one of the tastiest snacks on a chilly an authentic experience of classic Gerwinter night, best enjoyed while still man schnitzel (fried thinned meat), hot. Find them at JJ’s Fresh Roasted and we believe them. This warm and crispy food item can be enjoyed with Chestnuts. mushroom gravy or in a wrap, and has CHIMNEY CAKES been popular at the market since 2012.

Originating from Hungarian-speak- Find it at Das Schnitzel Haus. ing regions, kürtőskalács (“chimney cakes”) are a highly addictive treat. AUSTRIAN CHOCOLATES Made with sweet dough that’s dust- These 100-percent-organic and faired with sugar and paired with your trade Austrian chocolates make for choice of filling—think custard or a great dessert or holiday gift. Zotter Nutella—they’re flaky and crunchy Chocolate’s flavours include cocoon the outside, with a soft and fluffy nut, bacon bits, raspberry, and goji interior. Find them at Transylvanian berries in sesame nougat. Choose from more than 400 kinds of confecChimney Cakes. tionery at Zotter Chocolates.

BRATWURST

Freybe has been making sausages for the past 172 years, so we don’t doubt they make delicious meats. Their German-style bratwurst, Das Brat, returns to the menu—remember to add sauerkraut and mustard for the perfect combo. Guests will also find other traditional sausages, dried pepperonis, and savoury landjaegers (semidried sausage) on offer. Find it at Freybe Brat Haus.

Dinner and a tableside show

Some restaurants give diners the chance to watch as dishes are prepared

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by Gail Johnson

uring his victorious appearance on the inaugural season of Iron Chef Canada, Boulevard Kitchen and Oyster Bar chef Alex Chen prepared a salmon dish that wowed: he wrapped the fish in fig leaves and then clay, which hardened as it baked.

When someone orders this item at the restaurant now, it’s served tableside, with a waiter breaking open the dish’s terra-cotta-coloured exterior with a wooden mallet, then peeling back the steaming leaves to reveal the juicy, wild fish as mouthwatering scents waft into the air.

It’s a dramatic dining experience and just the latest addition to the roster of dishes you can find in Metro Vancouver that are prepared or plated right in front of your eyes.

Here are a few places to go when you’re looking for a dinner with a tableside show.

ATLAS STEAK AND FISH

(4331 Dominion Street, Burnaby) This Delta Hotels Burnaby restaurant (which recently celebrated its first anniversary) serves several dishes at the table, including caesar salad (barring occasions when romaine lettuce is off the menu due to nationwide health concerns), with the dressing made from scratch, all creamy, garlicky, and lemony and finished with cracked pepper. Another salad is spinach: working over an individual gas burner, a server heats up the dressing, setting it aflame with a splash of brandy, the warm sauce hitting cold, crisp spinach leaves along with mushrooms, sun-dried tomatoes, and egg for a textural starter that fills the room with head-turning scents.

Then there’s the restaurant’s bestselling dessert: baked Alaska. The meringue gets a spritz of caramel liqueur that’s lit on fire, giving the top its characteristic golden tips. Seasonally, cherries jubilee gets a similar treatment. “If you want to make people happy when you’re entertaining them, flambé some good fruit, pour it over ice cream, and you’re going to have a quiet room with just the sound of spoons hitting bowls,” said Richard Goodine, Delta Hotels Burnaby’s food and beverage senior operations manager. “I think BERLINER KRAPFEN the single greatest thing that tableside German cakes and pastries never service does is increase engagement disappoint, especially Berliner krap- with the table, and the heart of great fen (strawberry-jam-filled dough- service is engagement.” nuts). Soft and fluffy, with a fruity interior, these babies are always BOULEVARD KITCHEN AND satisfying. Other specialty treats at OYSTER BAR this cake house include apple stru- (845 Burrard Street) del, bienenstich (bee-sting cake), Chef Roger Ma created the Iron Chef– and German-style cheesecake. Find winning clay-baked salmon dish in homage to his mentor, Daniel Boulud. them at Das Kuchen Haus.

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Marcello

Clockwise from left: Mott 32; Atlas Steak and Fish; Hy’s Steakhouse and Cocktail Bar.

The wild Pacific salmon is cooked medium-rare and served with millet risotto in the clay-breaking presentation that he describes as fun and theatrical. It’s not the only dish that Boulevard serves at the table, however.

Glazed veal shank is another. After the meat is cooked with herbs sous-vide at a low heat for 36 hours so it’s luxuriously tender, a server pulls it apart at the table and serves it with butter-sherry vinegar and vegetables. From there, the bone goes back to the kitchen, where chefs knock out the marrow, season it, and scoop it onto grilled sourdough.

Boulevard also offers hay-smoked strip loin, made with roasted prime Holstein. To finish the cooking process, hay gets added and lit on fire.

After a few minutes, the hay attaches to the outside of the meat, suffusing it with flavour. A covered pot is brought to the table, the lid is lifted, and smoke billows out; a server then carves the meat.

HY’S STEAKHOUSE AND COCKTAIL BAR

(637 Hornby Street) Tableside service is part of Hy’s history. Staff members go through intensive training to serve caesar salad, spinach salad (with flambéed dressing), steak tartare (cubes of beef served with crostini), classic Chateaubriand (the fat end of the fillet

roasted, then brought out to the table in an oval copper pan), and steak Diane, named after the Roman goddess of the hunt. The meat is seared on a grill and cooks quickly while the server prepares a mushroomshallot cream sauce.

“A lot of these dishes create a certain contagion in the restaurant; when you’re cooking, everyone’s wondering what the delicious smell is,” said Hy’s general manager Chris Langridge. “Making food for each other is intimate, and when it’s being prepared in front of you with grace and charm, it adds another element.”

MOTT 32

(1161 West Georgia Street) Preparing Peking duck is a time- and labour-intensive process. At Mott 32, the bird is air-dried, brine-rinsed, dried again, then, on the day of applewood roasting in a special oven, fandried so that the skin puffs up and separates from the breast. At the table, the skin is served first, to be dipped in red sugar; the breast and back meat come next, for diners to wrap in the restaurant’s signature paper-thin pancakes with sauces, scallions, cucumber, and other ingredients.

Whole fish maw is a highly prized delicacy in Chinese cuisine that comes in a clay pot and is served tableside.

There’s also mimosa tableside service here, while summertime calls for the restaurant’s rosé rickshaw.

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DRINK

Fruit shines with Petit Verdots

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by Kurtis Kolt

Authentic Greek Food

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got my hands on a couple British Columbian wines recently, two bottles that weren’t exactly common pours.

We often get the opportunity to compare and contrast local Pinot Noirs, Merlots, Rieslings, and so on, but the two wines in front of me were single-varietal Petit Verdots—definitely outliers when it comes to what we’re used to on the home front.

When it comes right down to it, it’s rare to see single-varietal Petit Verdot from anywhere. For many years in the Vancouver market, Pirramimma’s Petit Verdot out of McLaren Vale, Australia, has had a cult following. Many have enjoyed its inky intensity, blueberry compote, dashes of barbecue sauce, and spoonfuls of molasses.

Although I’ve had the odd local example of the grape (Sandhill has featured it as part of their Small Lots program for many years), it is only recently that I’ve seen other wineries take the leap to see what they can do with it.

Most of us know Petit Verdot as a supporting player in red Bordeaux blends. Red wines from the iconic French region are generally composed of a mix of Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, and Cabernet Franc, but the secondary grapes that round things out are Malbec and then Petit Verdot.

In the vineyard, the grape buds pretty early, but it’s late to ripen. Its hallmark is deep, dark berry fruit, often carrying a pinch of spice, and it carries a good balance of alcohol, tannin, and acid.

The reason it’s not a marquee name is likely that propensity for ripening late, making it not an ideal variety for a good handful of global regions. As well, although its richness and intensity make for a good blending grape,

Two examples of B.C.-made Petit Verdots

on its own it may be a little much for the common palate.

When it comes to the geek factor, sure—there’s a lot to play with since it’s usually thought of as a blending grape, rarely basking in its own spotlight.

The opportunity to try two of them from the same part of the world—from different producers, side by side—rarely comes up, but here’s our chance to play.

First up, we have Moon Curser Petit Verdot 2016 ($30.99, www.mooncurser. com/). Proprietors Chris and Beata Tolley are no strangers to homing in on obscure varieties, as glances toward their Arneis, Tempranillo, Dolcetto, and Tannat attest. The fruit for this wine comes from Osoyoos, in the deep south of the Okanagan Valley, where the sandy loam and granite soils are dotted with wild sagebrush and cacti, culminating in a rugged setting for a concentrated, rich, wintery wine.

Aging in French oak, 25 percent of it new, frames mulberries, blueberries, and deep, balsamic flavours, all rich and jammy but tethered to tannins that give great texture and an acid component, bringing a liveliness to the wine. It’s big, and you can feel the purpleness of it seeping into your teeth at the first sip, yet it still glides across the palate, not sinking in too deep.

Next, over the mountain pass is Corcelettes Estate Winery Petit Verdot 2016 ($52.09, www.corceletteswine.ca/), a Similkameen Valley gem that’s, wait… 52 bucks?

The price on this struck me as being a little ambitious until I dug a little deeper, uncovering its exclusive nature. Coming from just under a half acre of plantings, this Petit Verdot grown in stemwinder soils is the epitome of a limited release: only three small barrels were made, which translates to just 70 cases of unfiltered, handcrafted deliciousness.

There’s an elegance here, with violets and dusty cocoa on the nose, then truffles, stewed raspberries, cherries, and currants on the palate. Although the tannins are wellplaced, the wine’s structure is that of a bottle maybe a couple years older, a little more ready to drink.

Perhaps it’s the limestone-rich soils, but there’s a liveliness of structure here, crushed rocks and brilliant acidity rising to the surface.

The fruit shines with both wines, in their dark, berry-driven ways.

The comparison—which is recommended as part of these cozy winefriendly, wintery days—ends up being more of a glance at the Okanagan and Similkameen valleys through this Petit Verdot lens.

Moon Curser’s take is a little more in that hotter climate’s opulent, fruitforward style, whereas Corcelettes’s is a tad rustic in some components, providing a little more nuance.

Really, it doesn’t come down to one versus the other, because whichever one you might choose, they’re both winners. The real win is in nabbing a bottle from both wineries, and enjoying the exploration of this unique variety, from two wineries that handle it well.

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24 THE GEORGIA STR AIGHT NOVEMBER 29 – DECEMBER 6 / 2018

arts

Christmas classic celebrates flawed hero

Peter Jorgensen weaves nostalgic tunes into new musical rendition of It’s a Wonderful Life

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by Mike Usinger

plifting as it ultimately is, It’s a Wonderful Life has a dark underbelly, with Frank Capra’s tale of a bigdreaming everyman from Bedford Falls filled with lost opportunities and serious life regrets.

What makes the main character of George Bailey so fascinating is he spends years unable to see all that he has, his endless trials leading him to that fabled sequence on the bridge where suicide seems the only way out.

Bailey is a man pushed to the point where he ends up in bar fights, kicks the furniture around in front of his kids, yells at his wife, and generally wakes up convinced he’s missed every boat that’s ever sailed from the crummy little town that he’s spent his life in.

Flawed? Absolutely, which is what makes him, and the movie, so captivating. On some level there’s a bit of George Bailey in all of us—a guy doing the best he can in a world where things seldom go according to plan.

And it’s that relatability that Vancouver’s Peter Jorgensen first picked up on when he set about reimagining Capra’s sprawling classic as a musical.

“We’ve been talking about this in rehearsals—he’s full of flaws,” the writer and director says from Saskatoon, where he’s also juggling a Prairie production of Fiddler on the Roof.

“But that’s what makes the story so great. He’s not this perfect hero.

He’s really an everyday guy with all sorts of everyday stress. He’s not the perfect family man, and he’s not the perfect person, yet he still manages to do incredible kindnesses for the people around him and the people that he loves. He makes the world a better place in all the small ways that he takes for granted.”

Jorgensen isn’t the first playwright to give It’s a Wonderful Life the musical treatment—in fact, he even acted in a musical production of it during his younger years. When it came time to create his own version, he was determined to do things differently than past outings, one of his biggest challenges being to capture the many dramatic peaks of the film.

Erin Aberle-Palm and Nick Fontaine take on the iconic lead roles in It’s a Wonderful Life. Photo by David Cooper

“We’re dealing with human emotions that can be really hard to put your finger on,” says Jorgensen, who’s also co–artistic producer of Vancouver’s musical-happy Patrick Street Productions. “And music can help you get beyond words into a deeper meaning and a deeper expression. That’s what we’ve tried to employ here.”

To accomplish that, Jorgensen’s production—which he first staged in Chemainus to great reviews a few years back—leans heavily on songs

from the ’20, ’30s, and ’40s, with Christmas standards sprinkled throughout and arrangements and orchestrations by Nico Rhodes.

“I had to strip down the dialogue from the film quite significantly,” he says. “The screenplay was written at a time when people liked people talking a lot in films, so there was a lot of redundancy, people making the same point over and over again.

So it wasn’t too hard compressing the dialogue. Our adaptation

is a few minutes shorter than the movie while still making space for the songs. And I didn’t want blocks of songs, so we arranged them in a way—as we always try to do with musicals—that they flow naturally out of the dialogue. Sometimes we hear a verse or two and it flows back into the scene so that the emotional ride follows the lives of the characters.”

As all obsessives know, the town of Bedford Falls looms just as large in It’s a Wonderful Life as George Bailey,

Uncle Billy, and Old Man Potter do. The film wouldn’t be the same without the phonograph-powered chicken roasting on the fire at the drafty Old Granville House or angels getting their “wings” at a raucous Nick’s Bar in the alternative universe known as Pottersville.

Jorgensen is well aware of that, and the look of his It’s a Wonderful Life is almost as important as the script and the music.

“It’s a beautiful set by Brian Ball, and I’m really, really happy with it,” he says. “It manages to incorporate both the city of Bedford Falls as well as a bridge unit that also has the feeling of the inside of the house— there’s a stairway coming down from the bridge that becomes the staircase in the Old Granville House.

We’ve tried to pull all of the flavours of all of those things into the piece.

We’ve got all the moments, like the loose knob on the banister. I tried to keep as many signature moments from the movie as possible in the show—the ones that people stop for when they’re wrapping presents and watching the movie.”

Count Jorgensen as a fan. He admits he discovered It’s a Wonderful Life in adulthood, finally watching the movie after landing a part in the adaptation he starred in 15 years ago.

“I remember the first time I watched it, thinking, ‘I wonder where this is all going to go?’ ” Jorgensen says. “Then it’s such a big, emotional ending, and I think that’s the strength of the story. Once you’ve sat down and invested in the life of George Bailey, you get this huge, emotional payoff.”

Yes, despite the dark periods, George Bailey (played here by Nick Fontaine) eventually comes to appreciate what he does have instead of what he doesn’t. And that’s a lesson that’s just as important today as it was in 1946, when It’s a Wonderful Life began its long journey to becoming a holiday classic.

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It’s a Wonderful Life plays at the Gateway Theatre from next Thursday (December 6) to December 31.

Montreal’s Gravel gets real in This Duet

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by Janet Smith

rédérick Gravel is the rare Montreal dance artist Vancouverites have gotten the chance to know really well— quite intimately, in fact, because of the raw nature of his work. The love affair started in 2014, when his Usually Beauty Fails detonated at the PuSh International Performing Arts Festival. Crowds here ate up its liveconcert mashup of electric guitars and dance that drove its performers past the point of exhaustion.

Since then, the conversation has continued, from the Jimi Hendrix–pumped Thus Spoke… at Dancing on the Edge to the beerand-baseball-fuelled look at masculinity that was All Hell Is Breaking Loose, Honey at the Cultch. Then audiences saw more of his work earlier this year at PuSh, when Some Hope for the Bastards ignited a party on-stage.

But fans have never quite seen Gravel like they will in This Duet That We’ve Already Done (so many times). Rather than a big, bombastic rock ’n’ roll show, the contemporary-dance renegade will deconstruct and put his own real-feeling spin on the pas de deux when the production opens at the Cultch.

No live guitars here; Gravel triggers most of the playlist through an on-stage iPad. (Think Joy Division and Last Ex.) And there’s

Brianna Lombardo and Frédérick Gravel go beyond the clichés of duets. Photo by Nans Bortuzzo

another big difference for the hilariously dry, famously self-effacing artist who’s wellknown for picking up a microphone and directly addressing his viewers. The microphone

is often one of Gravel’s central set pieces: in Usually Beauty Fails, he would often stop the movement to converse with the crowd.

“I don’t talk in this one, there are no words, no MC, nobody speaking to the audience,” he reveals over the phone from Montreal, where he’s just taken on the position of artistic director at Daniel Léveillé Danse (DLD), a sort of umbrella group for dance creators in that city. He goes on to explain that in This Duet That We’ve Already Done (so many times), he didn’t want to be separate from long-time company dancer Brianna Lombardo, in that way. “I wanted two people equal on-stage.”

Physically, though, Gravel is on familiar terrain. Gravel is all about keeping it real; his work digs at human nature in all its raw, messy authenticity. At the same time, he wanted to challenge all the clichés around duets in dance.

“I thought, ‘Can we make it equal? Can we make it so it’s not like the woman is this light, flying dancer and the guy is this solid guy who would catch her?’ ” he relates. “ ‘Can we be after first love, after the passion? What would be something that’s still there?’”

The duet ends up being a little bit clumsy, credibly laid-back, and painfully natural.

And, perhaps not so surprisingly, that’s very

hard work, Gravel says. “In dance, you think you have to be talented and beautiful, and you have to work against that a bit,” he says.

“You have to try to be relevant and just be there. Mostly, it’s trying to restrain yourself.

“We’re really simply and stupidly looking at one another,” he adds. “As dancers we tend to look at hips or arms—at what we will grab or avoid, but when you look at someone socially, you look them in the eye.”

Gravel has formed a tight off- and on-stage bond with the muscular, auburn-haired firecracker that is Lombardo, a standout in his troupe who recently returned to the stage after having twins. “We were in Paris this year and she brought her twins, and I was doing cooking for the whole bunch, and it’s kind of like it’s your second family,” he muses. “They really know what you’re going through, trying to make this thing live. And though I can’t have a contest in Montreal about who’s the best dancer, she would be a finalist. She’s so technically strong and fast and graceful, and I’m kind of awkward and not that precise and not that technical.”

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This Duet That We’ve Already Done (so many times) is at the Cultch Historic Theatre from Tuesday to Saturday (November 27 to December 1).

NOVEMBER 29 – DECEMBER 6 / 2018 THE GEORGIA STR AIGHT 25

ARTS Ed the Sock returns, grouchier and smellier

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by Guy MacPherson

he lifespan of your average sock is six months to a year.

Even if you stretch that out to two years, or longer, it’s doubtful you have any that last 31 years. That’s Ed the Sock’s age. But he’s no ordinary sock. He’s been a Canadian institution since 1987, a greenhaired, cigar-chomping grouch of a puppet who has interviewed celebrities, been a VJ (remember those?), and hosted both a late-night talk show and one in prime time. Only in Canada!

Mr. The Sock predates another cigar-loving celebrity puppet, Triumph the Insult Comic Dog. His early series featured hot tubs and dancers before The Man Show did.

He was as innovative as any sock in the history of sockdom. And then, darn it, he went into exile, spending 10 years in the top drawer.

But he’s back, grouchier and smellier than ever. The Straight spoke to Ed on the phone from his home in Toronto. Sometimes it was unclear when it was our beloved puppet and when it was Steven Kerzner, the man with his arm up Ed’s butt, but they have similar viewpoints, so we’ll just say it was Ed. “There’s no better time to return to the world, because the world has never needed me more than it does now,” he said. “I went away and look what you’ve done with the place!

The world today is like the aftermath of a frat party in an ’80s teen comedy. It’s just chaos and anarchy.

It’s not so much that people are more stupid today; it’s that people are willingly embracing their stupidity. Because ‘stupid’ isn’t about intellectual capacity; ‘stupid’ is about willingly operating beneath your intellectual capacity.”

Those are some fancy words for a puppet. “It’s my ethnicity, but I’m not defined by it,” said Ed, who looks remarkably good for his age. “Anger is timeless. But what people don’t realize is that I smile a lot; it just doesn’t really look like a smile. If I’ve aged at all, I’ve aged better. I’m kind of like the George Hamilton of puppets, without the inhuman tan.”

Ed the Sock is embarking on a western Canadian tour: 10 dates in 11 days, hitting Vancouver on Thursday. He’ll be spouting off on today’s sorry state of affairs and showing classic videos from MuchMusic encounters with celebs that haven’t been seen in years, while giving the behind-the-scenes accounts of what the viewers didn’t get to see.

These are “clips that we were able to air in prime time and afternoons on MuchMusic 10 years ago, but today you couldn’t put them on television because the world has become so constricted and people are so afraid to talk about anything”.

Ed’s curmudgeonly rants are more progressive than you might think, given the manner in which they’re delivered. “I like to think I’m not the old racist uncle or grandpa. I’m not the old intolerant one. But I’m somebody who speaks with the same vocal tones they do, the same wording, the same pacing. I’m just using that to say things that are a little more positive than things that reflect ignorance. So I’m like a sheep in wolf’s clothing,” he said. “Whether you’re on the right or on the left, I’ll be spilling your KoolAid. I like to call it therapeutic ridicule to open people’s minds.”

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Ed the Sock’s War on Stupid tour plays the Biltmore Cabaret on Thursday (November 29).

VETTA CHAMBER MUSIC 2018 - 19 33rdSeason J Joan Blackman Artistic Director

CHOR LEONI MEN’S CHOIR ERICK LICHTE ARTISTIC DIRECTOR

CHRISTMAS WITH CHOR LEONI December 14 | 8pm December 16 | 8pm December 17 | 5pm & 8pm ST. ANDREW’S-WESLEY UNITED CHURCH

December 15 | 3pm WEST VANCOUVER UNITED CHURCH

PIANO QUARTET FAVOURITES JANE HAYES piano JOAN BLACKMAN violin DAVID HARDING viola EUGENE OSADCHY cello

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26 THE GEORGIA STR AIGHT NOVEMBER 29 – DECEMBER 6 / 2018

ARTS

“The Dream Comes To Life”

Art plays with fitness mandates

A

by Robin Laurence

GohNutcracker.com

caution.” Their art is open and participatory, and represents “a vision of a new kind of collectivism, one that is voluntary and apolitical”.

Song Dong said that because art “is impossible to define, it has offered us a vast space in which we can explore”. PSFO activities have included aspects of the everyday—eating, talking, reading, even playing Ping-Pong.

“Each of us is quite unique—we’re very different from each other,” Song continued, then added: “The collective helps to develop the individual, and, at the same time, the individual helps to develop and grow the collective.” Because of the participatory nature of their installations and projects, Freundl said, the audience also becomes part of the collective.

The title of the Offsite work, Fitness for All, is borrowed from a Chinese slogan intended to promote physical exercise among Chinese citizens.

Fitness is encouraged through the placement of free workout equipment in public places throughout the country, and it is this workout equipment that PSFO references in its tongue-in-cheek installation.

(Each of the five pieces is doubled, so that participants can exercise side by side with a companion.) On the south wall of Offsite are the English and Mandarin words “WE is the distinction of I.” And on the west wall is a large portrait of the fictional Mr. Zheng, whose face is a digital composite of the features of each PSFO member. Mr. Zheng’s image and his Big Brother–type presence here riff on large public portraits of Mao Zedong, and the subordinating of the individual to the old idea of the collective. Yet the text and the way the image is constructed assert individualism within the new collectivism.

“In China in the past,” Xiao Yu observed, “the collective was always considered right.…Every individual was called upon to make contributions to this great collective, maybe even make personal sacrifices to it.”

He paused, then added: “Through art and through PSFO, I came to realize that greatness resides within me.”

DECEMBER 21–23

STARS from AMERICAN BALLET THEATRE ARTISTS from NATIONAL BALLET OF CHINA LIVE MUSIC performed by the VANCOUVER OPERA ORCHESTRA

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The Vancouver Art Gallery presents Offsite: Polit-Sheer-Form Office's Fitness for All to March 31, 2019.

“A holiday hit for the whole family” —Vancouver Sun

*NOT INCLUSIVE OF SERVICE AND FACILITY FEES. CASTING SUBJECT TO CHANGES. PRESENTING HOST: GOH BALLET VANCOUVER SOCIETY

Polit-Sheer-Form Office’s Fitness for All is interactive. Photo by Maegan Hill-Carroll/VAG.

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s photo ops go, this has to be one of the most unusual— and amusing. Four Chinese artists, all members of the collective known as Polit-Sheer-Form Office, are demonstrating the uses of their installation of bright blue, lowend outdoor exercise equipment. In the rain. In downtown Vancouver.

Across the street from what is allegedly the most expensive fitness club in the city. What the privileged folks are doing behind the tinted glass over there, well, who knows? But here, legs are swinging, hips are gyrating, arms are rowing—all for free. Everyone is wet and everyone is laughing: artists, journalists, photographers, and Vancouver Art Gallery staff.

We’re at Offsite, the VAG’s public art space on West Georgia Street, having just walked over from a media preview at the gallery. Artists Hong Hao, Xiao Yu, Song Dong, and Liu Jianhua have been speaking through a translator about their Offsite work, Fitness for All, and the activities of Polit-Sheer-Form Office (PSFO), which was founded in 2005. (The fifth member of the collective, Leng Lin, was not able to attend.) Diana Freundl, the VAG’s associate curator of Asian art and curator of the Offsite program, also spoke. “While each member of PSFO has his own art practice,” she said, “they share a common experience of growing up during the Cultural Revolution in China.” They also attended university in the 1980s, when China was just opening up to the West. Fraught memories of forced collectivism underlie their work, which suggests parallels with western ideas and art movements, such as conceptualism and relational aesthetics. “While the artists philosophically support liberalism,” Freundl added, “they also approach it with a sense of

taxes included

Music by Alan Menken Lyrics by Howard Ashman & Tim Rice Book by Linda Woolverton

Dec 1–Jan 6 Michelle Bardach and Jonathan Winsby; photo by David Cooper

playing at stanley industrial alliance stage

granville island stage

goldcorp stage at the bmo theatre centre

NOVEMBER 29 – DECEMBER 6 / 2018 THE GEORGIA STR AIGHT 27

TICKETS:

.ca

604-876-3434 COMING UP AT THE VANCOUVER SYMPHONY

DEC 6/8

Paula Kremer, Artistic Director

YEFIM BRONFMAN PLAYS BRAHMS

MASTERWORKS DIAMOND One of the greatest pianists of our time performs the monumental Brahms Piano Concerto No. 2.

DEC 7/8

HOLIDAY HOORAY!

TINY TOTS Let’s play in the snow! Sing-along to frosty favourites while you move-along with miniatures from The Nutcracker and other sparkly holiday classics.

IN CONCERT: FILM WITH LIVE ORCHESTRA

DEC FROM JOHN HUGHES 14/15 HOME ALONE®

Get tickets early to avoid disappointment.

CHRISTMAS REPRISE XVI SATURDAY DECEMBER 22, 2018 2PM

IN CONCERT: FILM WITH LIVE ORCHESTRA Watch the holiday classic on the big screen at the Orpheum with the VSO playing John Williams’ beautiful score live.

BROUGHT TO YOU BY Film Concerts Live © 1990 Twentieth Century Fox

DEC A TRADITIONAL CHRISTMAS 12–22 VARIOUS VENUES & TIMES

The Lower Mainland’s most beloved music tradition, the VSO’s Traditional Christmas concerts, feature heartwarming music associated with Christmas, carols, and plenty of audience sing-alongs.

Holy Rosary Cathedral 646 Richards St. Vancouver

SATURDAY DECEMBER 22, 2018 7:30PM Queens Avenue United Church 529 Queens Ave. New Westminster

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DEC VIVALDI’S FOUR SEASONS! 21-23 Hailed as one of the most significant artists of his generation, young American violinist Benjamin Beilman makes his VSO debut leading a performance of Vivaldi’s timeless classic, The Four Seasons, in an enduring VSO Holiday Season tradition.

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BACH • HANDEL • VIVALDI Masaaki Suzuki music director | Joanne Lunn soprano

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28 THE GEORGIA STR AIGHT NOVEMBER 29 – DECEMBER 6 / 2018

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Hir plies gender, trauma, and laughs

Deb Williams, Victor Dolhai, and Andrew Wheeler (from left) form a beyond-dysfunctional family in Hir. Photo by Tim Matheson

THEATRE HIR

By Taylor Mac. Directed by Richard Wolfe. A Pi Theatre production. At the Orpheum Annex on Saturday, November 24. Continues until December 8

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HIR’S AWARD-WINNING playwright, Taylor Mac, uses the gender pronoun judy. Genderfucking theatre and art worlds—which are still heavily binary and heteronormative—is a creative and political act, and it’s vitally important.

Hir takes its title from the portmanteau of him and her, and is pronounced “here”. Hir and ze are the pronouns for Max (Jordan Fowlie), which comes as a surprise to Max’s brother Isaac (Victor Dolhai) upon his return home after three years at war. In Isaac’s absence, teenage Max has come out as a gay trans man, their abusive father, Arnold (Andrew Wheeler), has had a debilitating stroke, and their mother, Paige (Deb Williams), has become a bit unhinged.

Hir is supposed to be a dark comedy, and there are quite a few funny moments, but it’s also devastatingly sad and complex, exploring the intersections of class, gender, queerness, familial violence, PTSD, trauma, addiction, and the patriarchy. Isaac’s return disrupts the fragile and fraught new reality his family has created without him.

The legacy of Arnold’s violence is everywhere, as is the extent to which it’s been normalized. Max recoils every time Arnold grunts, but also raises hir fist to the older man as a threat frequently, and swats hir mom almost as a ref lex.

Isaac, who’s coping with addiction, has internalized his father’s anger and made it his own. Paige insists that the house be kept an untidy disaster—Arnold would break fingers for dirty dishes—and now she derives pleasure from humiliating and emasculating Arnold. She makes him wear a dress, hoses him down naked in the back yard, and sprays him with a water bottle whenever he does something she doesn’t like.

But Paige and Max are also free, sort of, both in their relative safety and in the life they’ve cultivated since Arnold’s stroke—a life largely built around Max’s transitioning.

“Max saved me. I didn’t have to be beat up by your father. I was a father,” Paige tells Isaac as she attempts to explain the gender and queer theory she’s been learning and appropriating from the homeschooled, Google-educated Max. It’s telling that Paige positions her newfound safety in relation to claiming her own masculinity, and then to witness how she and her sons perpetuate the cycle of

violence in so many different ways.

Leaving the performance, I overheard some 60-something audience members talking about Hir, calling it “edgy, risky, and provocative”. It is provocative—in some powerful ways and in others that are frustrating—but Hir also feels outdated because the language around gender and sexuality has evolved as more trans women and trans men are telling their own stories and taking control of their narratives.

Pi Theatre’s casting of Fowlie, a trans man, in the role of Max is important, and it’s also an excellent creative choice. Fowlie is fantastic and his performance is nuanced and vulnerable. And what Williams does with Paige is remarkable. Whatever wacky, smart, cruel, incisive, generous, or horrifying thing Paige does is rooted in her own trauma, and Williams never lets us forget that. The entire cast is riveting, and under Richard Wolfe’s direction, the two hours f ly by.

Hir premiered in the United States in 2014, and this production in 2018 marks its Canadian premiere. Four years have changed everything and nothing, depending on who you are and the space you claim with your privilege. Hir doesn’t ref lect where we are now, but it does ref lect some aspect of where we’ve been, and the incredible performances by this cast are worth your time.

by Andrea Warner

SOUL SAMURAI

By Qui Nguyen. Directed by Nathania Bernabe and Mayumi Yoshida. An Affair of Honor production. At the Nest (Studio 1398) on Friday, November 23.

Continues until December 2

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THE VIRTUOSITY on display in this show is dazzling; the script is a bloated mess. The night is long, but it’s lively.

Soul Samurai, by New York playwright Qui Nguyen, is a mashup in both form and content. It’s a lesbian love story, a samurai epic, and a postapocalyptic urban vampire fable told through a mix of live action, film, and animation, as Dewdrop and her sidekick, Cert, wage war on the Longtooths, a gang of vampires who have taken over Brooklyn and killed Dewdrop’s girlfriend, Sally December. Early on, Dewdrop greets the audience directly—“Moshi moshi, motherfuckers”—and tells us about her revenge mission. This is followed, graphic-novel-style, by a long series of flashbacks that fill in the details of the heroes’ and villains’ pasts.

From the perspective of conventional narrative, Nguyen’s script is frustrating: the f lashbacks and sidebars keep reestablishing details

we already know without shedding new light on the plot. But it’s easy to understand the play’s appeal to Vancouver theatre producers Affair of Honor, a fight- and movementbased company that seeks to showcase diversity, strong female leads, and emerging artists. All laudable goals, and Soul Samurai vigorously ticks all those boxes.

The combat scenes are expertly choreographed by Nathania Bernabe, who also plays Dewdrop, and Jackie T. Hanlin, who plays Sally. As actors, they both create nuanced, sympathetic characterizations, and their resources as fight directors seem limitless. One of the most arresting movement sequences is a fan dance reinvented as a display of gang aggression; it’s fantastic. The company repeatedly displays a jaw-dropping level of physical skill. But if you can’t stomach watching people kick, punch, stab, and bite each other for a couple of hours, consider this your warning.

Under Bernabe and Mayumi Yoshida’s direction, there are other standout performances in this solid ensemble. Lou Ticzon provides comic relief as wannabe samurai Cert, with his hip-hop pretensions and impeccable timing. Playing Dewdrop’s martial-arts instructor, Master Leroy, Maxwell Yip has a magnetic stillness. And Romuald Hivert displays his versatility, playing both the fanged and feral Boss 2K and his mild-mannered pre-vampire counterpart, Marcus Moon.

We meet Marcus mostly in Nach Dudsdeemaytha’s film sequences, some of the highest-quality film work I’ve seen in a theatre production, which are often integrated with the live action. Chad Cuthbertson’s animation sequence late in the play is also exceptional.

The scope of ambition—and achievement—in this production is off the charts. I look forward to seeing what this company can do with a tighter story.

A FIREHALL ARTS CENTRE PRESENTATION

ARTS

“harrowing, unsettling and mesmerizing”

BOMBAY BLACK

Andrea Warner The Georgia Straight

ANOSH IRANI

DEC 5-15 TUE - SUN

2 8 0 E C o r d o v a S t re e t

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firehallartscentre.ca Arshdeep Purba and Munish Sharma

Photograph: Raymond Kam

by Kathleen Oliver

DOUBT: A PARABLE

By John Patrick Shanley. Directed

by Bill Devine. Produced by Seven Tyrants Theatre. At Tyrant Studios on Saturday, November 24.

Continues until December 14

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PREACHING FROM the pulpit, Father Flynn (David Thomas Newham) says “doubt can be a bond as powerful and sustaining as certainty.” Those two ideas—doubt and certainty—do battle in this tense midcentury drama.

Flynn is the parish priest at St. Nicholas Church School in 1964.

The school is run by Sister Aloysius (Tallulah Winkelman), a Victorian disciplinarian who tolerates no see next page

NOVEMBER 29 – DECEMBER 6 / 2018 THE GEORGIA STR AIGHT 29

from previous page

tomfoolery, not even the Christmas pageant.

When young Sister James (Olivia Lang) brings Sister Aloysius suspicions that Flynn has “interfered with” an altar boy, she flies into action. The rest of the play is a kind of four-way boxing match of accusations and recriminations, with Liza D’Aguilar as the boy’s mother joining the fray.

Sister Aloysius is the linchpin of Doubt, and the actor who plays her must carry the show. Winkelman plays her with steely resolve, and despite how unlikable the nun seems, we still feel empathy for her and her certainty about Flynn’s guilt. All the performances are persuasive, but hers stands out.

This was my first visit to Tyrant Studios, a recently created venue above the Penthouse nightclub on Seymour Street. It’s composed of a Tallulah Winkelman makes Doubt’s Sister Aloysius persuasive and steely in her resolve. Photo by David Thomas Newham charming, old-timey speakeasylike bar and a cozy little theatre. These of Louis Armstrong, Frank Sinatra, seeing a Catholic school set above a Set designer Lynda Chu makes upstairs rooms once hosted the likes and Ella Fitzgerald. The irony of strip club was not entirely lost on me. the most of the pocket-size stage.

ON STAGE NEXT WEEK!

She and director Bill Devine manage to convincingly carve three distinct spaces—an office, a garden bench, and a pulpit—on a stage the size of the average family room.

Doubt is a modern American classic. Playwright John Patrick Shanley won both the Pulitzer Prize and the Tony Award for best play when it ran on Broadway in 2005.

It’s been adapted into an opera and a 2008 movie, starring Meryl Streep and Philip Seymour Hoffman.

A lot has happened since the play debuted in 2004 off-Broadway—not only for the Catholic Church, but overall in the culture around accusation, truth, and falsehood. I knew the play, and I feared that my perspective from a world of President Trump and #MeToo might make it feel a little dated.

It did not. The beliefs that drive each character’s contradictory interpretation of the play’s events feel all too relevant in our posttruth society.

by Darren Barefoot

MISS BENNET: CHRISTMAS AT PEMBERLEY

By Lauren Gunderson and Margot Melcon. Directed by Roy Surette.

An Arts Club Theatre Company production. At the Granville Island Stage on Wednesday, November 21.

Continues until December 30

HISTORIC TH THEATRE

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The Daisy Theatre Presents

A Christmas Carol

Little Dickens’ unmatched puppetry and vaudevillian details make it a real gift.

PRODUCTION SPONSOR

T ICKET

—KATHLEEN OLIVER, THE GEORGIA STRAIGHT

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Dec 04– Dec 22, 2018

FROM

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Created and Performed by Ronnie Burkett (Toronto) A raucous, adults-only holiday treat!

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CHRISTMAS PLUS Jane Austen equals bankable, crowd-pleasing fare. This production of Miss Bennet: Christmas at Pemberley delivers on the play’s featherweight ambitions.

Set two years after the conclusion of Pride and Prejudice, Lauren Gunderson and Margot Melcon’s 2016 script sees four of the five Bennet sisters reunited for Christmas at the home of Lizzy and her husband, Mr. Darcy. Our heroine is Mary, the bookish middle sister, still unattached. When Mr. Darcy announces that he’s invited Arthur, a distant relative, to join them for the holidays at Pemberley, and when Arthur turns out to be a socially awkward intellectual who’s reading the same natural-history book as Mary, it’s easy to see where things are headed.

For much of the first act, the play threatens to be all trimmings, no tree. Sure, there’s some witty period dialogue (“I would rather marry an interesting plant than an idiot man,” asserts Mary; “I’m as large as a cottage,” complains a very pregnant Jane) and some metatheatrical winks at the script’s own contrivances (“All this seems a bit too orchestrated to be real,” one character observes), but there’s virtually nothing at stake until the end of the first act, when Arthur’s cousin, Anne, shows up, claiming she’s his fiancée. “His what?!?” everyone exclaims—and things pick up considerably after intermission, though the obstacles to true love are still no more substantial than snowf lakes.

There are some strong performances in director Roy Surette’s production. Matthew MacDonald-Bain’s Arthur is endearingly clueless: “I often find myself unprepared for the complexities of, uh, people,” he confesses as he jots social cues in a little notebook. And try not being charmed when he finally declares his feelings. Kate Dion-Richard’s Mary comes off as a bit arch in the early going, but her warmth emerges as the play unfolds. As the f lirtatious younger sister, Lydia, Baraka Rahmani steals many scenes, but she also reveals a more vulnerable side in some tender exchanges with Jane (Leslie Dos Remedios). Lauren Jackson’s Lizzy is an emotionally stable anchor, while Tim Carlson is a very funny bundle of nerves as expectant father Bingley.

Ted Roberts’s set and Conor Moore’s lighting push the festive spirit: snowf lakes are perpetually falling outside the big drawing room window, which frames a Christmas tree. It’s cozy and romantic, the way we always hope the holidays—and true love—will be.

by Kathleen Oliver

30 THE GEORGIA STR AIGHT NOVEMBER 29 – DECEMBER 6 / 2018

ARTS

Chotto Desh reignites wonder

by Janet Smith

In the animated world of Chotto Desh, dancer Dennis Alamanos comes face to face with an elephant. Photo by Richard Haughton

DANCE CHOTTO DESH

An Akram Khan Company production. Presented by DanceHouse, Théâtre la Seizième, and SFU Woodward’s Cultural Programs. At the Fei and Milton Wong Theatre on Wednesday, November 21. No remaining performances

A MELD OF visual magic and cross-cultural storytelling, Chotto Desh makes a fantastic introduction to dance for kids. For adults, it’s a stunning physical feat—a seamless mashup of different forms, unlike anything you’ve ever seen.

U.K. choreographer Akram Khan knows how to build a sense of lowtech wonder—a novelty for kids bombarded with digital imagery. At one moment, the dancer is hopping through an ever-moving, animated, hand-drawn forest when he reaches an

arm up to pet an elephant; at another, he paints a stern face on the top of his shaved head and bends down toward the audience to morph into his father.

The autobiographical story also carries moving messages about identity, culture, and growing up. Khan is portrayed as a hyperenergized little boy whose interest in the arts disappoints his hard-working dad.

In the show’s framing device, he’s a Bangladeshi-Filipino British adult struggling to unlock his cellphone.

When he calls the tech-support centre, he reaches a 12-year-old in Bangladesh, kicking off a flowing swirl of memories, first of his childhood visits to his father’s home country. The lithe, versatile Dennis Alamanos (who rotates the solo part with Nicolas Ricchini here) is suddenly dodging the noisy traffic we hear over the sound system, shape-shifting easily into a beggar on the street and a cop directing traffic.

That leads into memories of an old story about a boy who goes hunting for honey in the forest, setting off a

god’s anger. Yeast Culture’s mesmerizing animated illustrations, projected in black-and-white, bring it to life like a moving, three-dimensional storybook. The curling waves bob Alamanos across the surface of a hand-drawn sea under a night sky; later, a storm cloud lowers in on him and pummels him with rain.

The storytelling is simple, its idea of a child who follows his own dreams—to be an artist—poignant in the least patronizing way possible.

When Alamanos becomes the boy, struggling to sit still for one second in the little chair he’s been consigned to, he’s speaking to every kid directly.

What children might not grasp is that Alamanos, by way of Khan, is channelling everything from the refined Indian classical dance kathak to contemporary dance, martial arts, and even hip-hop, all with equal skill. But what they’ll totally get is that all our cultural influences live in our body, ready to pop out at any moment. And it’s best when we embrace them.

“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

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Choreography Galina Yordanova & Nina Menon Composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky

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“PICTURE PERFECT” —THE GEORGIA STRAIGHT

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PHOTOS LEFT/CENTRE: RWB COMPANY DANCERS. PHOTOS RIGHT: LIANG XING AND YAYOI BAN. PHOTOS BY DAVID COOPER.

NOVEMBER 29 – DECEMBER 6 / 2018 THE GEORGIA STR AIGHT 31

ARTS LISTINGS

THE ENEMY Political drama adapted and directed by Firehall Arts Centre artistic producer Donna Spencer. To Dec 1, Firehall Arts CURIOUS IMAGININGS Vancouver Biennale Centre. Tix from $20.

2018-2020 is excited to present the groundPINOCCHIO The Karen Flamenco Dance breaking immersive sculpture exhibition Company performs its latest production. To MUSEUM OF VANCOUVER WILD THINGS: Curious Imaginings. For the first time ever, Dec 8, 5-6 pm, The Improv Centre. Tix $10/$15.

THE POWER OF NATURE IN OUR LIVES to renowned Australian artist Patricia PicSep 30 HAIDA NOW: A VISUAL FEAST OF cinini is taking her hyperrealist, fantastical WINTER TREASURES ARTISAN MARKET creatures outside the museum. The intimate INNOVATION AND TRADITION to Dec 1, 2019 Boutique-style show featuring locally handIN/FLUX: ART OF KOREAN DIASPORA to setting of a wing of 18 rooms in Strathcona’s crafted gifts, art, décor, and fine crafts. To Dec Jan 6 historic Patricia Hotel will be transformed 23, Port Moody Arts Centre. Free. for the Curious Imaginings exhibition. To VANCOUVER ART GALLERY A CURRING OF FIRE, THE MUSIC OF JOHNNY Dec 15, Patricia Hotel. Tix $16-40.

ATOR’S VIEW: IAN THOM SELECTS to Mar 17 CASH First Impressions Theatre presents a GUO PEI: COUTURE BEYOND to Jan 20, 2019, celebration of the life and music of Johnny DOUGLAS COUPLAND’S VORTEX Douglas 10 am–5 pm DANA CLAXTON: FRINGING Cash. To Dec 1, Deep Cove Shaw Theatre. Tix Coupland’s radical art installation takes an THE CUBE to Feb 3 THE METAMORPHOSIS $25/$23. imaginative journey to the Great Pacific to Mar 17 Garbage Patch, immersing viewers in the MISS BENNET: CHRISTMAS AT PEMBERocean-plastic pollution crisis. To April 30, VANCOUVER ART GALLERY’S OFFSITE LEY The Arts Club Theatre Company presents 2019, Vancouver Aquarium. $22/39.

POLIT-SHEER-FORM OFFICE to Mar 31 Lauren Gunderson and Margot Melcon’s holiday confection filled with classic Jane TITANIC: THE ARTIFACT EXHIBITION Exhib- THE POLYGON GALLERY LOOKING AT Austen charm. To Dec 30, Granville Island ition focuses on the legendary RMS Titanic’s PERSEPOLIS: THE CAMERA IN IRAN 1850Stage. Tix from $29. compelling human stories through more than 1930 to Jan 13 HANNAH RICKARDS: ONE 120 authentic artifacts and extensive room CAN MAKE OUT THE SURFACE ONLY BY PLAKEVIN SCHMIDT: RECKLESS A new art re-creations. To Jan 11, 2019, Lipont Place.

CING ANY DARK-COLOURED OBJECT ON THE installation by Kevin Schmidt entitled GROUND to Jan 13 BATIA SUTER: PARALLEL “Reckless” wraps the exterior of the Polygon THE MUSEUM OF ANTHROPOLOGY AT ENCYCLOPEDIA EXTENDED to Jan 13 Gallery, produced in collaboration with the UBC IN A DIFFERENT LIGHT: REFLECTING Burrard Arts Foundation. Blinking, coloured THE SUPPLIANT WOMEN Aeschylus’s ON NORTHWEST COAST ART to spring 2019 lights are timed to a soundtrack composed MARKING THE INFINITE: CONTEMPORARY tragedy from 463 B.C., which looks to find

by Schmidt, based on an album by former WOMEN ARTISTS FROM ABORIGINAL AUSmeaning in forced migration. To Dec 2, 8 am, North Vancouver resident Bryan Adams. The TRALIA to Mar 31 Jericho Arts Centre. Tix $22-28. work is on view from 4-11 pm daily. To Mar 10, 4-11 pm, The Polygon Gallery. By donation.

MERRY KISS-MAS New Christmas parody melts TV tropes and Christmas clichés together. To Dec 24, The Improv Centre. Tix from $15.75.

SOUL SAMURAI Samurai revenge epic set in a post-apocalyptic Manhattan. To Dec 2, Studio 1398. Tix $27.

HIR Pi Theatre presents the Canadian premiere of American playwright Taylor Mac’s Join the United Voices, Orchestra and Soloists for a special work. To Dec 8, Orpheum Annex. Tix from $26. aŌernoon singing Messiah in a beauƟful sacred space BLIND DATE The Arts Club Theatre Company presents Rebecca Northan’s fly-by-the-seatof-your-pants fusion of clown, improv, theatre, and social experiment. To Dec 30, Goldcorp Pacic Spirit United Church (formerly Ryerson United) Stage at the BMO Theatre Centre. Tix from $29.

2195 West 45th Ave, Vancouver BC ANONYMOUS ART SHOW FUNDRAISER Purchase original art by local artists. To Dec Scores will be provided (or bring your own!)

22, 7 pm, Cityscape Community Art Space.

Free.

Tickets $20 at PacicSpiritUC.com or at the door Christmas treats to follow DOUBT: A PARABLE Seven Tyrants Theatre presents John Patrick Shanley’s Pulitzer Prize-winning drama. To Dec 14, 7 pm, Tyrant Studios. Tix $32.

A CHARLIE BROWN HOLIDAY DOUBLEBILL Carousel Theatre for Young People presents “A Charlie Brown Christmas” and “You’re a Good Man Charlie Brown”. To Dec 30, Waterfront Theatre. Tix $35/$29/$18.

ROYAL CITY YOUTH BALLET PRESENTS THE NUTCRACKER Full-length Nutcracker ballet. To Dec 23, Various Lower Mainland venues.

ALL TOGETHER COLLECTIVE POP-UP SHOP Works by Amy Stewart, Shira Gold, and Crissy Arseneau, To Dec 24, 11 am–6 pm, Granville Island. Free.

THIS DUET THAT WE’VE ALREADY DONE (SO MANY TIMES) Frédérick Gravel and Brianna Lombardo create a tableau in which movement portrays the poetry of everyday life. To Dec 1, 8 pm, Cultch Historic Theatre.

Tix $24-$51.

ONGOING

BILL REID GALLERY OF NORTHWEST COAST ART BODY LANGUAGE: REAWAKENING CULTURAL TATTOOING OF THE NORTHWEST to Jan 13 INTERFACE: THE WOVEN ARTWORK OF JAAD KUUJUS to Jan 9

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Arts HOT TICKET

is close enough in age to make Amy Rutherford’s funny but deeply affecting play sing, and the set, at the bottom of a swimming pool, is metaphorically brilliant.

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CHRISTMAS WITH THE BACH CHOIR (December 2

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United Voices Choir invites you to our

Sing-Along Messiah with Orchestra & Soloists Sunday, December 2nd at 2pm

WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 28 ROUGHING IT IN THE BUSH, EPISODE 3 Susanna Moodie’s feminist firsthand account of a badass pioneer woman. Nov 28, 7-8:30 pm, The Heritage Grill. Pay what you want.

EAST VAN PANTO: WIZARD OF OZ When a pipeline bursts, Dorothy and Toto are flung to the magical Land of Oz, aka Nanaimo and Hastings. Nov 28–Jan 6, 2019, 7 pm, York Theatre. Tix $10-$69.

SOUNDS OF CHRISTMAS The Vancouver Welsh Men’s Choir performs. Nov 28, 7:30 pm; Dec 1, 2:30 pm; Dec 2, 2:30 pm, Michael J. Fox Theatre. Tix $30/$15.

YUNDI “TOUCH OF CHOPIN” 2018 WORLD TOUR Pianist performs with the Vancouver Opera Orchestra. Nov 28, 7:30 pm, Queen Elizabeth Theatre. Tix $49 - 249.

MUSIC FOR WINDS, BRASS AND PERCUSSION Performances by the Douglas College Concert Band, the Percussion Ensemble, and the New Westminster Secondary School

32 THE GEORGIA STR AIGHT NOVEMBER 29 – DECEMBER 6 / 2018

BOMBAY BLACK (December

5 to 15 at the Firehall Arts Centre) Rohit Chokhani’s hit version of Bombay Black deservedly nabbed the Pick of the Fringe Award at last year’s Vancouver Fringe Festival; at the time, our reviewer raved, “This is one of the most harrowing, unsettling, and mesmerizing plays I’ve ever seen.” Anosh Irani’s award-winning script tells the story of a girl who dances for men and whose mother is, essentially, her madam. When the blind Kamal arrives for his appointment, he upends their lives in unimaginable ways. Don’t miss this darkly poetic work this time around.

MORTIFIED (To December 2 at Studio 58) Just a few more days to catch this stunning play about a teenage girl struggling with sexual awakening, consent, and shame. Studio 58’s young team Concert Band. Nov 28, 7:30 pm, Laura C. Muir Performing Arts Theatre. Free.

FUTURE SHOCK Authors explore societies experiencing rapid change on a massive scale. Nov 28, 7 pm, Vancouver Public Library.

Free.

ASIAN AMERICAN COMPOSERS & THEIR CELLO WORK UBC cellist Yijia Fang performs cello work from various composers. Nov 28, 8 pm, Roy Barnett Recital Hall. Free.

THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 29 VETTA PRESENTS Piano quartets by Mahler, Mozart, and Dvořák. Nov 29, 2 pm; Nov 30, 7:30 pm, West Point Grey United Church. Tix $20-25.

MUSEUM WITHOUT A HOME Join Oxfam Canada for an evening of art, food, and music.

Nov 29, 6:30-9 pm, Museum of Vancouver.

Free.

NOMADOS BOOK LAUNCH Poetry readings

by Jami Macarty and Jacqueline Turner. Nov 29, 7 pm, People’s Co-op Bookstore. Free.

FUSIONFEST 2018 The Music Technology Diploma Program presents performances by the Douglas College Fusion Bands. Nov 29, 7 pm, Laura C. Muir Performing Arts Theatre.

Free.

AN OCEAN OF MINUTES Writer Thea Lim presents her new work. Nov 29, 7 pm, Vancouver Public Library Kitsilano Branch. Free.

ALTITUDE AESTHETIC Photographic prints

by Noel McDonald and Peter Fitzpatrick. Nov 29, 7-10 pm, Arc Apparel .

COMEDY OF TERRORS Cabaret show pays tribute to low-budget horror. Nov 29, 8 pm, Fox Cabaret. Tix $20/$25.

SAY WHA?! Sarah Bynoe hosts readings of deliciously rotten writing. Nov 29, 8-10 pm, Hood 29. Tix $10.

JANE STANTON Vancouver comedian performs three nights of standup. Nov 29-Dec 1, Yuk Yuk’s Comedy Club. Tix $10/20.

GINA BRILLON New York comedian performs three nights of standup. Nov 29-Dec 1, The Comedy MIX. Tix $15/$18/$20.

at the Orpheum) Four hundred voices—count ’em—blow the roof off the Orpheum in a wideranging program of holiday choral fare. Keep your ears open, for a newcomer amid the traditional compositions: gifted local composer Roydon Tse’s Glorify! won the Vancouver Bach Choir’s seasonal competition for a new work, and his energetic and radiant celebration of Psalm 34 should be a treat. In it, the adult choir is joined

by A Touch Of Brass and organist Edward Norman.

GINA BRILLON (November 29 to December 1 at the Comedy MIX) Last year, Rolling Stone listed her as one of its “10 Comedians You Need to Know”—and for good reason. The eminently likable Gina Brillon, born in the Bronx of Puerto Rican heritage, is smart and relatable, whether she’s talking about owning your crazy in a relationship or growing up with girls who all sound like Rosie Perez. You’ve probably seen her on Chelsea Lately, The View, and Late Night With Seth Meyers; now is your chance to see her live.

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ED THE SOCK’S “WAR ON STUPID” TOUR Comedy show featuring an angry sock that talks. Nov 29, 9 pm, Biltmore Cabaret. Tix $20-$45.

JOKES PLEASE! Standup comedy show hosted by Ross Dauk. Nov 29, 9-10:45 pm, Little Mountain Gallery. Tix $7.

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 30 URBAN SCREEN: DANA CLAXTON, A GUERILLA SEEKS A MORE TRAINED LESSON Launch of Dana Claxton’s new video A Guerilla Seeks a More Trained Lesson. Nov 30, Emily Carr University of Art + Design. Free.

ONLY JOY ALOUD Pandora’s Vox and Espiritu Vocal Ensembles perform seasonal songs.

Nov 30–Dec 1, Kay Meek Arts Centre . Tix $36/32/15.

COQUITLAM CHRISTMAS CRAFT FAIR Over 100 vendors sell locally handmade artisan crafts. Nov 30–Dec 2, Poirier Forum. $3.

TREASURE ISLAND Seasonal pantomime.

Nov 30–Dec 16, The Theatre at Hendry Hall.

Tix $12/$6.

THE ART AFFAIR CHARITY ART AUCTION 2018 One hundred works by 18 artists in support of Westcoast Family Centres. Nov 30, 6-9 pm, Hootsuite. $20 - $40.

TOQUE Western Front’s annual fundraiser and craft fair. Nov 30, 6-10 pm; Dec 1, 11 am– 5 pm; Dec 2, 11 am–5 pm, Western Front. By donation.

HANDEL’S MESSIAH AND SAINT SAËNS’ ORATORIO DE NOËL United Voices and Chamber Orchestra present a program of music by Handel and Saint-Saëns. Nov 30, 7-9 pm; Dec 1, 2-4 pm, Pacific Spirit United Church. Tix $20.

JAZZ AND COMEDY NIGHT Jazz by Radio Cascadia and comedy by Kevin Von Helvete, Steev Letts, and Dave Harris. Nov 30, 7-10 pm, The Tipper Restaurant & Review Room.

Tix $14.

HOLIDAY POTTERY SALE Works by members of the pottery club of the West End

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ARTS LISTINGS

Community Centre. Nov 30–Dec 2, 7-4 pm, West End Community Centre. Free.

SACRED MUSIC FOR ADVENT Works ranging from Renaissance polyphony to contemporary praise songs. Nov 30, 7:30 pm, Holy Rosary Cathedral. By donation.

DOUGLAS COLLEGE STUDENT COMPOSITION CONCERT Performances of new compositions written and performed by Douglas College Music Students. Nov 30, 7:30 pm, Laura C. Muir Performing Arts Theatre. Free.

KERRISDALE PAINT NIGHT Engage with professional art instruction while enjoying wine, punch, appies. and music. Nov 30, 7:3010 pm, AOMA Studio Kerrisdale. $75.

BUILDING BRIDGES Brian Tate and the City Soul Choir perform songs about reaching out and making connections. Nov 30–Dec 1, 7:309:30 pm, Canadian Memorial United Church.

Tix $30/25/15.

COSI FAN TUTTE Opera Mariposa presents Mozart’s comedic opera. Nov 30–Dec 8, 7:3010:15 pm, Marpole United Church. Tix $18-28.

BLOOD FROM STONE Contemporary dance work by choreographer Donna Redlick. Nov 30–Dec 1, 8 pm, Scotiabank Dance Centre. Tix $30/$25.

THE LION, THE WITCH, AND THE WARDROBE Re-imagining of C.S. Lewis’s classic tale of hope, change, and sacrifice. Nov 30– Dec 29, Pacific Theatre. Tix $20-$36.50.

OKANAGAN INVASION Gavin Banning hosts performances by Okanagan comedians Josh Ashton, Jordan Strauss, Andrew Verge, Matt Baker, and Andrew Crone. Nov 30, 10:30 pm, Yuk Yuk’s Comedy Club. Tix $15.

SATURDAY, DECEMBER 1 DISNEY’S BEAUTY AND THE BEAST The Arts Club Theatre Company presents the beloved fairy-tale musical. Dec 1–Jan 6, 2019, Stanley Industrial Alliance Stage. Tix from $39.

FLEETWOOD MAC BURLESQUE April O’Peel Productions presents a burlesque tribute to Fleetwood Mac. Dec 1, 8 am–11 pm, The Red Gate Revue Stage. Tix $20/$25.

THORNHILL ARTISAN FAIR 2018 Sixth annual artisan fair. Dec 1-2, 10 am–4 pm, Von Hardenberg Beeswax Candles Studio. Free.

ETSY VANCOUVER MARKET Winter craft market includes live music and DIY make-and-take crafts. Dec 1-2, 10 am–5 pm, Wesbrook Village.

COMPLETING THE JOURNEY TO PUBLISHING YOUR FIRST ROMANCE Interactive workshop with writer-in-residence Stella MacLean. Dec 1, 10:30 am, Vancouver Public Library. Free.

DECK THE HALL FAIR Tenth annual Xmas craft fair features works by 50 local artisans.

Dec 1-2, 11 am–5 pm, Heritage Hall. Tix $2.

PINOCCHIO Theatrical flamenco dance performance. Dec 1, 8, 2 pm, The Improv Centre.

Tix $10/$15.

JUNO VALENTINE AND THE MAGICAL SHOES Vancouver illustrator and designer Derek Desierto launches his picture book.

Dec 1, 2 pm, Indigo Robson. Free.

WEST SIDE WRITERS’ CIRCLE: DROP-IN Writers meet for encouragement and conversation. Dec 1, 2:30 pm, Vancouver Public Library Dunbar Branch. Free.

NUTCRACKER SUITES Karen Flamenco Dance Company presents Spanish dances performed to the melodies of the Nutcracker suites. Dec 1-29, 5-6 pm, The Improv Centre.

Tix $10/$15.

SHIAMAK VANCOUVER WINTER FUNK 2018: THE AWARDS SHOW More than 300 students perform tributes to their favourite Bollywood actors. Dec 1, 6 pm, Bell Performing Arts Centre. Tix $19.

NEW WEST CRAFT WINTER MARKET Shop over 50 handmade vendors and enjoy live music, food, and drinks. Dec 1, 6-9:30 pm, River Market . Free.

THE INFINITY MOSAIC The SFU Concert Orchestra presents its end-of-semester concert.

Dec 1, 7 pm, SFU Theatre. By Donation.

ART SHOW: FANCY PANTS New paintings

by Troy Terpstra. Dec 1, 7-11 pm, SOMA. Free.

O CHRISTMAS TEA: A BRITISH COMEDY James & Jamesy presents a British comedy.

Dec 1, 7:30 pm, Massey Theatre.

DONA NOBIS PACEM Works by Vaughan Williams and Poulenc. Dec 1, 7:30 pm, Chan Centre for the Performing Arts. Tix $25/$15.

HANDEL’S MESSIAH The Surrey City Orchestra presents Handel’s Christmas favourite. Dec 1, 7:30 pm, Fleetwood Christian Reformed Church. Tix $30/$20.

BAROQUE BRILLIANCE Capilano University Choirs present a Baroque program. Dec 1, 8 pm; Dec 2, 3 pm, BlueShore Financial Centre for the Performing Arts. Tix $30/$25/$10.

GERSHWIN’S RHAPSODY IN BLUE & MORE Early 20th-century gems traversing French opera, New York jazz, and an evocative London symphony. Dec 1, 8 pm, Shaughnessy Heights United Church. Tix $20/$15.

ALICIA TOBIN’S COME DRAW WITH ME Alicia Tobin hosts an event that’s part comedy show and part art class. No talent required Dec 1, 8 pm, Little Mountain Gallery.

Tix $10/$12.

COMEDYPANTS Standup comedy show hosted by Alistair Ogden. Dec 1, 8-10 pm, The Avant Garden. Tix $10.

THE COMIC STRIP Standup comedy featuring headliner Byron Bertram. Dec 1, 9 pm, Tyrant Studios. Tix $18.

SUNDAY, DECEMBER 2 SHAKEUP: PRESERVING WHAT WE VALUE Exhibition explores the convergence of earthquake science and technology with Indigenous knowledge and oral history. Dec 2–Sep 1, 2019, The Museum of Anthropology at UBC. CHRISTMAS WREATH-MAKING WORKSHOP Learn to make your own wreath with Kimskreations. Dec 2, 1 pm, Delbrook Community Recreation Centre. $100.

VETTA DOWNTOWN Piano quartets by Mahler, Mozart, and Dvořák. Dec 2, 2 pm, Pyatt Hall. Tix $25.

CHRISTMAS AT THE CHAN Christmas concert brings together four choirs and a full orchestra. Dec 2, 2:30 pm, Chan Centre for the Performing Arts. Tix $25.

VIVACE CHRISTMAS Pop and classical vocal quartet. Dec 2, 2:30-4:30 pm, United Churches of Langley. Tix $25/20/$15.

TAKACS QUARTET String quartet performs works by Haydn, Shostakovich, and Brahms.

Dec 2, 3 pm, Vancouver Playhouse. Tix $55/$60.

DARK NIGHT, LUMINOUS NIGHT The Chalice Choir performs seasonal music. Dec 2, 7:30 pm, Unitarian Church of Vancouver.

Tix $20.

EAST VANCOUVER IMPROV LEAGUE Instant Theatre presents a battle between two groups of Vancouver improvisers. Dec 2, 7:30-8:30 pm, Havana Theatre. Tix $12.

THE ANXIETY SHOW—F* THEM HOLIDAYS! Comedy show featuring mental-health triggers. Dec 2, 8 pm, Kino Cafe. Tix $13/$17.

JOKES N TOKES Marijuana comedy show.

Dec 2, 9, 16, 23, 30, 8 pm, Cannabis Culture Lounge. Tix $10.

MONDAY, DECEMBER 3 CHRISTMAS CONCERT The New Westminster & District Concert Band performs. Dec 3, 7 pm. Free.

TUESDAY, DECEMBER 4 WRITER-IN-RESIDENCE CONSULTATIONS Receive feedback on your writing from a published author. Dec 4, 10:30 am, Vancouver Public Library. Free.

BOARDLINK VANCOUVER Connect with 20 arts organizations seeking new board members at a networking event. Dec 4, 6-8:30 pm, VSO School of Music. Tix $10.

CANTO VIVO: VANCOUVER LATIN AMERICAN COMMUNITY CHOIR Songs in Spanish and Portuguese by singers from 11 different countries. Dec 4, 6:30 pm, Vancouver Public Library TOP TALENT SHOWCASE Vancouver comics develop their craft. Dec 4, 8 pm, Yuk Yuk’s Comedy Club. Tix $10.

LITTLE DICKENS: THE DAISY THEATRE Ronnie Burkett’s raucous, adults-only take on the beloved holiday classic, A Christmas Carol. Dec 4-22, 8 pm, Cultch Historic Theatre.

Tix $24-$69.

WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 5 AMATEUR NIGHT Amateur comedians at their best and worst. Dec 5, Yuk Yuk’s Comedy Club. Tix $7.

BOMBAY BLACK A searing play set in the bitter reality of present-day India. Dec 5-15, Firehall Arts Centre. Tix from $20.

STORY STORY LIE: FAMILY FEUDS Christmas comedic storytelling game show. Dec 5, 7-8:30 pm, Rio Theatre. Tix $10/$12.

SCRIPT TEASE Actors for a cold reading are cast blindly from those in attendance. Dec 5, 7-8:30 pm, Heritage Grill. Pay what you want.

THURSDAY, DECEMBER 6 HOLIDAY BAKING TIME Tim Webb and Kim Selody’s family-oriented play in which young audience members are invited to become bakers and join in the sugary joy. Dec 6-16, Presentation House Theatre. Tix $10-20.

THE BEST CHRISTMAS PAGEANT EVER The “worst kids in the history of the world” take over a Christmas pageant. Dec 6-16, Havana Theatre. Tix $24/$18.

IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE New musical adaptation of the holiday classic by Peter Jorgensen, based on the Frank Capra film. Dec 6-31, Gateway Theatre. Tix from $29.

Nathalie Paulin soprano

Daniel Cabena countertenor

Isaiah Bell tenor

Stephen Hegedus bass-baritone

8pm Friday, December 7, 2018 The Orpheum Vancouver Chamber Choir and Orchestra Pacifica Singers | Nathalie Paulin, soprano Daniel Cabena, countertenor Isaiah Bell, tenor | Stephen Hegedus, bass-baritone Jon Washburn, conductor In this 48th season of the Choir, Jon Washburn will conduct his 48th performance of Messiah, Vancouver’s perennial Christmas favourite. It features the Vancouver Chamber Choir, Pacifica Singers, Vancouver Chamber Orchestra and a stellar roster of Canadian vocal soloists.

CAG THURSDAY LUNCH TIME TOURS Join CAG assistant curator Julia Lamare for a lunch time tour of the current exhibitions. Dec 6, 12:30-1 pm, Contemporary Art Gallery. Free.

1.855.985.ARTS (2787) vancouverchamberchoir.com

OPEN BOOK: AN EVENING WITH KAI CHENG THOM Celebrate works written by and about trans, gender-variant, and TwoSpirit people. Dec 6, 7 pm, Vancouver Public Library.

ARTIST SALON TALK Canadian artist Adad Hannah discusses his work. Dec 6, 7-9 pm, Richmond Art Gallery. Free.

THE WRITER’S STUDIO READING SERIES Featured reader is Lise Weil. Dec 6, 8 pm, Hood 29. Free.

A HEARTWARMING HOLIDAY MUSICAL FOR THE WHOLE FAMILY

RYAN STOUT Comedian performs three nights of standup. Dec 6-8, The Comedy MIX. Tix $15/$18/$20.

ARTS EVENTS are a public service provided free of charge, based on available space and editorial discretion. We can’t guarantee inclusion, and we give priority to events taking place within one week of publication.

Submit events online using the eventsubmission form at straight.com/AddEvent.

Events that don’t make it into the paper due to space constraints will appear on the website.

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DECEMBER 6 – 22 EVENINGS & MATINEES

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Background image: Richard Tetrault, Alley Variations #3, Woodcut and metal print 2012 with photo of Jim Byrnes by David Cooper, digital collage by John Endo Greenaway Background image: Richard Tetrault, Alley Variations #3, Woodcut and metal print 2012 with photo of Jim Byrnes by Tom Quirk, digital collage by John Endo Greenaway

Nick Fontaine.

Photo: David Cooper.

NOVEMBER 29 – DECEMBER 6 / 2018 THE GEORGIA STR AIGHT 33

music

Sounds a lot like Christmas already

W

e’ve got a pretty good idea what you’re thinking: November hasn’t even rolled up its rain-soaked carpet yet, which means it’s too early for Christmas.

Wrong. As Canadian Tire shoppers know, the fake Scots pine and Douglas fir trees are typically rolled out before the Halloween decorations have been removed from the shelves. And explaining why half the Straight’s staff currently looks like the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man with bad beer bloat, Avalon Dairy eggnog has been on the shelves of finer local grocery stores since early October.

So, sorry—as sure as The Grinch is now playing at the local multiplex— it’s now the most wonderful time of year. To get you through the glorious weeks ahead, we’ve rounded up a selection of this year’s Christmas albums and then assigned each of them one of three handy-dandy ratings. The crap gets a sad Charlie Brown tree, the middling offerings get functional but not terribly exciting tighty-whitey underwear, and the gold-standard triumphs are granted a shiny present.

Happy holidays. And our deepest condolences for the fact that you’ve had to listen to Taylor Swift’s “Last Christmas” in drugstores and supermarkets since the middle of August.

DIANA ROSS

Wonderful Christmas Time (Universal)

Full of lush orchestral arrangements and choral backing vocals, this is as thoroughly old-fashioned a Christmas album as you’re likely to hear this year. And that’s hardly surprising; the record is almost a quartercentury old. So how come you’ve never heard of it? Maybe because it was initially released, with a different track sequence and under another title, to the international market.

This isn’t an old-school Motown record—if you want girl-group vibes, go to the Supremes’ 1965 LP Merry Christmas—but an oddly ethereal one. An exception is Ross’s cover of John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s “Happy Xmas (War Is Over)”, which gains a measure of melodramatic solemnity from a martial beat and children’s choir. John Lucas

SERENA RYDER Christmas Kisses (Universal)

RuPaul’s Christmas Party and Serena Ryder’s Christmas Kisses are among this year’s crop of holiday-themed releases.

inevitably entails, you’re probably somebody’s grandpa. And that’s okay, because so is Clapton. Old white guys represent a seriously underserved segment of the holidaymusic market, so thank the suckling infant Christ we have Happy Xmas to set things right. It sounds exactly how you would expect it to. Does it feature Clapton pals like Jim Keltner and Doyle Bramhall II? Yes. Yes, it does. Does it include pentatonicscale solos that will make your dad climb up on the Christmas dinner table and shred away at an invisible Stratocaster? Uh-huh. Does it feature Clapton’s take on “Merry Christmas Baby”? Oh, you bet your sweet Dockers-wearing ass it does. JL JD McPHERSON Socks (New West)

Rather than take a bunch of already overroasted chestnuts and slather them in six coats of circa-now production, JD McPherson has done the opposite. On the endlessly delightful Socks, the Oklahoma-based singer-guitarist and bandleader has crafted 10 brand-new songs that sound like lost B-sides from another era—specifically, the late 1940s to mid-1950s. “What’s That Sound?” is toe-tapping rockabilly, “Hey Skinny Santa!” is a jump-blues joint that swings hard enough to wake up the Ghost of Christmas Past (or possibly Louis Jordan), and “Santa’s Got a Mean Machine” is what folks used to call rock ’n’ roll when the likes of Fats Domino still walked the earth.

Slip a few of these songs onto your INGRID MICHAELSON retro-Xmas playlist alongside cuts by Ingrid Michaelson’s the Moonglows and Mabel Scott and Songs for the Season you might even be able to sneak them (Independent) past that cousin who is convinced Clearly someone who thinks ahead, that music died the day Buddy Holly Ingrid Michaelson is careful to stepped aboard an ill-fated Beechavoid disappointing folks here by craft Bonanza. JL stating that her 12-song entry into THE MAVERICKS the Christmas-album sweepstakes Hey! Merry Christmas! consists of her songs for the season.

(Mono Mundo) If you’re looking for new renditions of personal faves like “Here Comes For a band that started out in the Fatty Claus” or “Fuck Christmas”, Florida punk scene—sometimes playgo elsewhere. Those who appreci- ing bills with a young Marilyn Manate immaculately retro renditions of son—the Mavericks as mainstream chestnuts like “Looks Like a Cold, America knows them don’t have a lot Cold Winter” and “I’ll Be Home For of bite. Blame a move to Nashville, a Christmas”, meanwhile, will find city where you either play by the slick lots to love on this instant classic. and safe rules of modern country or Michaelson has a thing for Cinema- end up squatting in a coal-heated Scope strings and brash classic-jazz shack three trailers down from Hank horns, and she sings like an emis- Williams III. The first half of Hey! sary from a time when three-martini Merry Christmas! weirdly sounds like lunches were a thing and every home the Mavericks are taking their musichad an art deco ashtray. Invest in a al cues from legendary barbershopUSB–modified vintage radio, whip quartet revisionists 5 Neat Guys—the up a pitcher of old fashioneds, and downside being there’s nothing as fun you’ve got the makings of a throw- as “Patsy Has the Largest Breasts in back Christmas that would impress Town”. Things at least pick up on the back end, with the bluesy title track Frank Capra. Mike Usinger rollicking enough to crack open that ERIC CLAPTON jug of moonshine you’ve squirrelled Happy Xmas (EPC away since 2001, and “Christmas Enterprises) (Baby Please Come Home)” the kind If the thought of an Eric Clapton of love letter Phil Spector might have Christmas album jingles your bells, concocted if he was spending his days with all the slick blues-rock guitar in ’60s Motown instead of a circa-now and easy-listening arrangements it California state prison. MU 34 THE GEORGIA STR AIGHT NOVEMBER 29 – DECEMBER 6 / 2018

THOR

Christmas in Valhalla (Deadline Music)

Notwithstanding its title—to say nothing of the heroic cover art by Welsh comic-book artist Simon Williams—Christmas in Valhalla has next to nothing to do with Norse mythology. Well, okay, it does make a sort of sense for the local rocker who named himself after the god of thunder and lightning to sing an ode to “Donner and Blitzen”. Oh, and “Our Last Christmas” and “If Tomorrow Never Comes” may or may not be about Ragnarök (a.k.a. the Viking apocalypse). Probably not. In any case, it’s kind of fun to imagine Santa Claus as an Odinesque figure, white beard flowing in the night sky as he flies his mighty eight-legged steed Sleipnir (who needs reindeer?) to the rooftops of children everywhere, leaving salted fish and dried lingonberries in the stockings of all the good kids while Christmas in Valhalla blasts away in the background. JL VARIOUS ARTISTS

Dr. Seuss’ The Grinch Soundtrack (Columbia)

Traditionalists will be predisposed to hate The Grinch, primarily because there’s only one version of the Dr. Seuss classic that matters. (Correct, if you guessed the 2000 one starring Jim Carrey, who masterfully showed why the Onion once crowned him America’s favourite rubber-faced fartsmith.) In the trailer and on the movie posters, the most famous fuzzy green misanthrope this side of Oscar the Grouch looks just a little too cute. As for the soundtrack, you’ve already heard half of it, from Run-DMC’s essential “Christmas in Hollis” to Jackie Wilson’s timeless “Deck the Halls”. The smattering of new material includes Tyler, the Creator’s reimagining of “You’re a Mean One, Mr. Grinch” as something dreamed down between bong hits, and a Danny Elfman phone-in—“A Wonderful Awful Idea”—that sums up this whole endeavour more concisely than mere words could ever hope to. MU MIKE LOVE

Reason for the Season (Meleco)

It’s easy to throw shade on Mike Love. Too easy, probably. After all, he’s the Beach Boys singer-songwriter who isn’t Brian Wilson. Wilson, of course, is generally viewed as a popmusic savant, while Love is the guy who shook hands with Ronald Reagan, played with John Stamos, and sang “Kokomo”. Maybe the man is unjustly maligned, but the mediocre Reason for the Season isn’t going to change that. The only good song on the album is “Little St. Nick” (which Love cowrote with Wilson, it should be noted), and the Beach Boys already released the definitive version of that one in 1963. JL

MARK VINCENT

The Most Wonderful Time of the Year (Independent)

As hinted at by its title, The Most Wonderful Time of the Year won’t win any awards for the most groundbreaking Christmas record of 2018— or any other year, for that matter.

Despite the white tux he wears on the album’s cover, Australian tenor Mark Vincent looks like someone who grew up cracking spines on the rugby pitch. In the studio, though, he’s completely old-school—like someone fired up a Parliament, poured a double Scotch on the rocks, and then set about creating a perfect distillation of Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, and Sammy Davis Jr. Which is all fine, except the last time Santa Claus, Burl Ives, and Buddy the Elf checked, all three of those legendary crooners had dozens of perfectly serviceable Christmas collections.

Still, if you need a 200th rendition of “O Holy Night”, “Silent Night”, or “White Christmas”, you’ve come to the right place, mate. MU RUPAUL

Christmas Party (RuCo)

I’m guessing this one only really works if you’re a fan of RuPaul’s Drag Race, because I’ve never watched the show and I don’t quite get it. It’s a fun enough listen, though.

“Christmas Queen” is a pretty good Missy Elliott pastiche, and the sassy “Hey Sis, It’s Christmas” wrings maximum mileage out of seasonal double-entendres like “gay apparel” and “hot roasted nuts”, along with an exhortation to “Ride that candy cane good and long.” In other words, this ain’t the one to put on when the kids are unwrapping their Scruff-A-Luvs or Poopsie Slime Surprise Unicorn or whatever other mass-produced plastic crap will end up joining the Great Pacific Garbage Patch in a decade’s time. JL THE MONKEES

A Christmas Party (Rhino)

The Monkees were once described by drummer Mickey Dolenz as an imaginary band “that wanted to be the Beatles that was never successful”. Rounded out by original members Peter Tork and Michael Nesmith (Davy Jones died in 2012), the onetime TV sensations are still plugging away in 2018, unleashing their first-ever Christmas record.

Some of alt-rock’s heaviest hitters adore the group, with Weezer’s Rivers Cuomo gifting the refreshingly snotty “What Would Santa Do” and XTC’s Andy Partridge contributing an appropriately paisley-patterned “Unwrap You at Christmas”. Add Jones returning from the grave for a hard-to-mess-up “Mele Kalikimaka” and Nesmith giving loping country the Irving Berlin treatment on “Snowfall”, and you’ve got a record that—considering the origins and age of the Monkees—is more enjoyable than it has any right to be. MU

If you’re being honest with yourself, you’ll admit that Christmas isn’t really about what you need. It’s about what you want. Oh, sure, it’s also about love of family and the joy of giving and all that Hallmark stuff. But it’s also about celebrating things that are truly, deeply unnecessary. Do you really need to eat that entire plate of rum balls when you’ve already washed a box of shortbread cookies down with a litre of eggnog? Of course not, but you want to and it’s the holidays, so what the hell, right? Serena Ryder gets it. She’s certainly well aware that the world doesn’t actually need another album’s worth of loungetastic, jazz-inflected renditions of “White Christmas” and “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town” and “I’ll Be Home for Christmas”.

Diana Krall already made that album in 2005, after all. But Ryder steps out of her indie-folk comfort zone and proves herself more than capable of holding her own in the overcrowded holiday-crooner field.

Much like snowman-shaped sugar cookies, another one won’t hurt. JL WALK OFF THE EARTH Subscribe to the Holidays (Independent)

As album titles go, Subscribe to the Holidays is about as festive as Only 23 More Business Days Until December 25. That’s entirely forgivable, though, considering that this six-song EP is bright-eyed enough to put a smile on the faces of Ebenezer Scrooge, Scut Farkus, and that miserable asshole in the apartment below you who’s always banging on the ceiling with a broom. A reggaefied “Happy Hanukkah” finds the famously positive Burlington, Ontario, five-piece lighting up the menorah on the beaches of Jamaica, and a crazy angelic “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” turns the spotlight on young guest vocalist Giorgio Michael, the child of band founders Sarah Blackwood and Gianni “Luminati” Nicassio. Walk Off the Earth finishes things up with a Calypso-tinted “Linus and Lucy”, by which time you’ll be ready not only to subscribe to the holidays, but also to think maybe you’ll one day make your own Christmas record, if only because you’ve already thought of a title: Your Amazon Order Has Been Processed. MU WILLIAM SHATNER

Shatner Claus (Cleopatra)

There are only two possible conceptual problems with a William Shatner Christmas album. First of all, the man known to millions as James Tiberius Kirk is Jewish. That never stopped Neil Diamond, Bette Midler, Bob Dylan, Barbra Streisand, Dinah Shore, or Barry Manilow from putting out Christmas songs (or Irving Berlin or Johnny Marks from writing them), so why should it stop the Shat? A slightly bigger problem is that the Canadian-born performer couldn’t carry a tune if the fate of all the Whos down in Whoville depended on it. He doesn’t even bother to try on Shatner Claus, which is probably for the best, leaving the actual melodic work to singers like Brad Paisley and, uh, Iggy Pop, along with guitarists including Elliot Easton (the Cars) and Billy Gibbons (ZZ Top). Mostly, though, listening to this record is akin to hanging out on Christmas Eve with a drunk uncle who, after a few too many Very Merry Ornamentinis, refuses to shut up and leave the crooning to Bing. JL see next page

MORMON TABERNACLE CHOIR

A Merry Little Christmas (Intellectual Reserve)

The Mormon Tabernacle Choir has put out a lot of Christmas albums over the decades—over 30 of them, but who’s counting? The latest, A Merry Little Christmas, suggests that the operation is running out of both good gimmicks and, well, Christmas songs.

There are no Muppets or American Idol also-rans on this one, just Downton Abbey star Hugh Bonneville and Sutton Foster, who is a Broadway star (thanks, Wikipedia!) with an unbearably hammy way of selling a melody. Foster gamely grins her way through John Denver’s “Sunshine on My Shoulders” and “Pure Imagination”, which may trigger nostalgia for anyone with memories of Gene Wilder singing it as Willy Wonka. In that case, it was merely setting the stage for a series of scenes of gluttonous children getting their just desserts.

And while there’s probably a metaphor in there somewhere for the consumer frenzy that takes place every year about this time, it’s still a weird choice for a Christmas album. JL THE HOUND + THE FOX Songs of Winter (Independent)

Some band names are so interesting that they get you thinking. Consider, for example, the Hound + the Fox, which sounds like the name of a pub you’d find somewhere on West Broadway in Kits. Take the issue of who is the “hound” and who is the “fox” in the Oregon husband-and-wife team of Reilly and McKenzie Zamber, one possible answer being that someone has come up with the most disrespectful name this side of Anus Presley.

Then there’s the question of whether or not the band’s name is meant as a sly tribute to the 1981 Disney film The Fox and the Hound, once famous as the most expensive animated film ever made. Unfortunately, Songs of Winter is nowhere near as interesting as such big questions. The standards on the duo’s ethereal, 12-song baroque-pop release are well-meaning and expertly recorded, but ultimately forgettable.

Yes, it’s lovely stuff—especially if you love Sarah McLachlan and Michael Bublé—but the problem is that it’s been done before just as well, if not better. MU OLD 97’S

Love the Holidays (ATO)

In some ways, it was a savvy move for Old 97’s to record an album made up (almost) entirely of original songs. After all, no one really needs another recording of “Silver Bells” or “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town”.

In that regard, Love the Holidays is basically just a new Old 97’s record,

John Legend’s A Legendary Christmas is a smart and classy seasonal collection.

one that just happens to feature a bunch of songs about Christmas.

The only possible downside is that there are plenty of folks who don’t give a fiddler’s fart about Old 97’s and would rather hear “Silver Bells” or “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town” than shitkicking new tunes like “Rudolph Was Blue” and “Hobo Christmas Song”. (For them, the band has cannily included a bunch of bonus tracks, including familiar numbers such as “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen” and “Blue Christmas”.) JL

the title. If you were a member of Pentatonix, you’d be pretty stoked at the thought of the holiday season coming around. At the risk of sounding cynical, let’s just say the a cappella group knows full well which side its bread is buttered on—in its four-year recording career, Pentatonix has already put out three Christmas albums. The latest one includes some dubious choices (the Neighbourhood’s “Sweater Weather” isn’t even remotely a Christmas song, and Danny Elfman’s “Making Christmas” sounds JOHN LEGEND better with monsters singing it), A Legendary Christmas but it’s hard to find fault with great (Columbia) singing, on ample display here.

Like it or not, we’ve all experienced Bonus points for roping in Kelly a legendary Christmas. The kind Clarkson to belt the shit out of where it snows harder than the “Grown Up Christmas List”. JL opening of Rudolph the Red-Nosed PREDATOR DUB Reindeer, leading to a six-car pileup ASSASSINS on the Alex Fraser Bridge. Or where A Very Dubby Christmas Sailor Jerry ruins yet another December 25 by turning Uncle Frank (Dublife Muzik) into the second coming of Barfly’s Yah, mon. It’s gonna be a green Henry Chinaski—right down to the Christmas, if you know what I mean. carpet-cleaner comment at the din- Irie! Big up yourself. Et cetera. The ner table. Even if it’s meant as a clever cover of A Very Dubby Christmas play on his name, John Legend has a will probably tell you all you need big pair of sugarplums for naming to know about the album before you his first foray into holiday-season even hear a note: it pays homage to music A Legendary Christmas. At Bing Crosby’s Merry Christmas LP, least he’s not far off the mark. The but where Der Bingle had a bow tie new-school R&B singer is smart made of holly, the dread-headed Penough to pack standards like “Sil- Dub sports one crafted from canver Bells” with bold Stax-style horns nabis leaves. If spliffed-out reggae and cinematic strings, and then versions of “Last Christmas” and round things out with classy obscur- “Jingle Bell Rock” sound like your ities (Marvin Gaye’s “Purple Snow- bowl of sensimilla, fire up a fat one, flakes”) and silky originals (“Wrap pour yourself a rum-and-eggnog heavy on the Smith & Cross, and Me Up in Your Love”). MU drift away to Ocho Rios. In your PENTATONIX mind, I mean. If you’re paying VanChristmas Is Here! (Sony) couver rent, there’s no way you’re There’s a damn good rea- getting out of this rain-soaked hell son for that exclamation point in for the holidays. JL

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NOVEMBER 29 – DECEMBER 6 / 2018 THE GEORGIA STR AIGHT 35

MUSIC LISTINGS

MUSIC

Ralph digs deep on A Good Girl

A

by Kate Wilson

fter experimenting with a range of genres in Toronto’s music scene, the most important thing to Raffaela Weyman—known on-stage as Ralph—is having creative freedom.

Beginning the project after meeting a producer on a date that lacked a romantic spark, Weyman initially added vocals to the beats she received from him over email. It didn’t take her long, though, to realize that she had to be involved in all stages of the writing process to connect with the tracks.

Taking the plunge as a solo artist with a backing band, songs that she created caught the ear of Vancouver’s 604 Records, where she inked a deal that indulged her need for artistic autonomy.

“We wanted the label we were going to sign with to allow us to have a lot of freedom,” she tells the Straight on the line from her tour bus in Alberta. “604 were great because they were like, ‘You guys have been working on this for nearly two years already. You have a clear aesthetic; your videos are great, your songs are great, and we just want to facilitate more.

We don’t want to control it.’ That was music to my ears, because I don’t want a 60-year-old dude telling me what’s cool. They’ve been really supportive with that. The deal was really good.”

Unlike that of labelmate Carly Rae Jepsen, whose bubblegum pop is a staple on club stereos, Ralph’s equally mainstream sound is more slow-burning, with whispers of R&B. Progressing from her first release— a self-titled EP in the ’80s-revival tradition—the performer has spent the past two years making her new material feel more mature in both its music and lyrics. Last September the singer dropped her debut album, A Good Girl, which she hopes captures her evolution as an artist.

Raffaela Weyman—known as Ralph—inked a deal with Vancouver’s 604 Records.

“On the EP I think I played the victim card a bit more, and there were a lot of songs where I was like, ‘You did me wrong, you broke my heart,’” she says. “And maybe I’ve done more living and growing in the past year, but I realized that I wanted this album to explore more of an honest relationship, which means that you’re at fault often too. You’re not always the good guy. I wanted to talk about complicated relationships with yourself, with your friends, mental health—I wanted to touch on deeper content.”

Part of Weyman’s newfound maturity involves consciously embracing and celebrating people from all walks of life. Boasting a large LGBT following, the singer deliberately writes tracks that don’t just depict heteronormative love, and hopes that her catalogue can touch those from all cultures.

“It’s really cool having that community invite me in as an ally and as a guest,” she says. “It’s important to me to honour that, and make sure

that when I’m writing my songs and making my visuals I’m doing it in an inclusive way. So I stay away from too many gender pronouns, and in music videos, I make sure that any characters and relationships are of different types. That’s really important for me.

It’s been such a wonderful community to have on my side, because at every show the most excited people in the audience are queer men who come with these amazing outfits and makeup jobs, and they want to take pictures and spread the word.

“I want people from all around the world to have access to it [the album], and to connect with the music,” she continues. “I love the idea of people in Asia hearing the songs and connecting with this girl from Toronto.

I want people in different communities hearing these tracks, and letting them uplift them, and tell them that they’re good enough.”

g

Ralph plays the Biltmore Cabaret on Saturday (December 1).

CONCERTS JUST ANNOUNCED

WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 28

GORD GRDINA NYC QUARTET VANCOUVER local legend and CapU alumnus Gord Grdina teams up with his quartet of world-renowned New York City–based performers. Presented by the BlueShore Financial Centre for the Performing Arts. Dec 8, BlueShore Financial Centre for the Performing Arts. Tix $28/25 at www.capilanou.ca/centre.

THE STEVE KOZAK BAND Local blues band featuring singer-guitarist Kozak. Dec 9, 7-10 pm, Blue Martini. No cover.

WINTER BANG! FESTIVAL A day of electroacoustic music. Dec 12, 12-1 pm, 2-3 pm, 7:308:30 pm, Roy Barnett Recital Hall. Free.

MARIA HO QUARTET Local jazz vocalist celebrates Christmas. Dec 16, 8-10 pm, Frankie’s Jazz Club. Tix $16.

UGLY CHRISTMAS SWEATER PARTY Fundraiser featuring house band Groove & Tonic supports Make-A-Wish BC & Yukon. Dec 20, 8 pm, Venue. Tix $33.50/$55.

NEW YEAR’S EVE 2019 GLITZ & GLAMOUR GALA Top 40, funk, Latin, old school. and Caribbean music on four dance floors. Dec 31, 9:30 pm, Hilton Metrotown. Tix $60.

BOWIE BALL Eighteen local bands perform at a David Bowie-inspired cancer benefit. Jan 12, 7 pm, Rickshaw Theatre. Tix $15/$20.

COIN Indie-pop quartet from Nashville. Feb 24, 8 pm, Venue. Tix on sale Nov 30, 10 am, $25.

DARLINGSIDE Indie-folk quartet from Boston. Mar 9, 7:45 pm, Biltmore Cabaret. Tix on sale Nov 30, 10 am, $20.

JEREMY DUTCHER Classically trained operatic tenor and composer. Mar 9, 8 pm, Rio Theatre. Tix on sale Nov 30, 10 am, $20.

IL DIVO Multi-national classical crossover vocal group. Mar 13, 8 pm, Queen Elizabeth Theatre. Tix on sale Nov 30, 10 am, $49.

VIAGRA BOYS Punk band from Stockholm, Sweden, plays tunes from latest album Street Worms. Mar 25, 8 pm, Fox Cabaret. Tix $15.

MARIANAS TRENCH Local pop-punk quartet. Mar 29, 8 pm, Orpheum Theatre. Tix on sale Nov 30, 10 am.

CHELSEA AMBER Singer-songwriter performs tunes from new album Face the Waves.

Mar 30, 7-9:30 pm, Bez Arts Hub. Tix $12.

JON AND ROY Folk-rock and reggae trio band from Victoria. Apr 6, 9:30 pm, Commodore Ballroom. Tix on sale Nov 30, 10 am, $25.

WHITE DENIM Rock band from Austin, Texas, plays tunes from latest album Performance.

Apr 19, 9 pm, Rickshaw Theatre. Tix on sale Nov 30, 10 am, $20.

BUDDY GUY American blues legend. Apr 22, 8 pm, Orpheum Theatre. Tix from $63.

SNOW PATROL Alt-rock band from Scotland.

May 13, 8 pm, Queen Elizabeth Theatre. Tix on sale Nov 30, 10 am, $65/49.50/35.

PLATO/MADDOCK/RUSHKA JOY OF JAZZ CONCERT Celebration of bebop queen Sheila Jordan’s 90th birthday. Nov 28, 7:30 pm, Hood 29. Tix $15.

POP EVIL Hard-rock/alt-metal quintet from Muskegon, Michigan, with guests Royal Tusks. Nov 28, 8 pm, Venue. Tix $25.

TANIKA CHARLES Edmonton-based soul singer and bandleader. Nov 28, 8-9:30 pm, Shadbolt Centre for the Arts. Tix $40.

WINGTIP L.A.-based dance-electronica artist and producer performs material from latest release Ghosts of Youth. Nov 28, 9 pm, Fox Cabaret. Tix $13.

THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 29 THOR Christmas In Valhalla CD release party.

Nov 29, Donegals Irish Pub. Tix $17.50.

JOE BONAMASSA American blues-rock singer and guitar wizard. Nov 29-Dec 1, 8 pm, Queen Elizabeth Theatre.

CONCERTO INVIERNO Guitarist Daniel Bolshoy performs works by Astor Piazzolla and Joaquin Rodrigo. Nov 29, 10 am, The ACT Arts Centre. Tix $25.

FUSIONFEST: MUSIC TECHNOLOGY CONCERT Concert by the Douglas College Fusion Bands Nov 29, 7-9 pm, Douglas College Laura C. Muir Performing Arts Theatre. Free.

JOHN STETCH Jazz pianist fuses melodies from all around the world. Nov 29, 7-10 pm, Old Crow Coffee. Tix $20/$25.

INDIE NIGHT AT THE ANZA Featuring local bands Dark Dials, Rat Silo, and Gun Control.

Nov 29-30, 7 pm–2 am, ANZA Club. Tix $15.

KLEZMER & YIDDISH FOLKSONGS Songs of political and social resistance. Nov 29, 7:30 pm, Or Shalom. Tix $18/$36.

JASPER SLOAN YIP Local musician celebrating the release of Post Meridiem on vinyl, with guest Wallgrin. Nov 29, 7:30 pm, The Red Gate Revue Stage. Tix $10/$20 with vinyl.

MARY GAUTHIER American folk singersongwriter. Nov 29, 8-11 pm, WISE Hall. Tix $30/$35.

THE WASHBOARD UNION Local country band, with guests Aaron Goodvin and Nice Horse. Nov 29, 8:30 pm, Commodore Ballroom. Tix $29.50.

6LACK Hip-hop artist from Atlanta, with guest Summer Walker. Nov 29, doors 8 pm, show 9 pm, Harbour Event Centre. Tix $40.

CHRIS ROBINSON BROTHERHOOD American blues/psych-rock band featuring former Black Crowes singer Chris Robinson. Nov 29, 9 pm, Venue. Tix $27.50.

STIFF LITTLE FINGERS Irish punk rockers from the ’70s, with guests the Mahones. Nov 29, 9 pm, Rickshaw Theatre. Tix $39.50.

see page 38

The Georgia Straight Confessions, an outlet for submitting revelations about your private lives—or for the voyeurs among us who want to read what other people have disclosed.

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No No No to the Ho Ho Ho December is getting filled up with office holiday initiatives: gift exchange, lunch, dinner, wear a Santa Hat day. It fucking horrible. Yeah, like I want to exchange gifts with people who fucked me over for the last 11 months. Are people that lonely at Christmas that they have to lean on colleagues for Christmas emotional fulfillment? I’m sorry you never had a good childhood Christmas but you’re not going to replicate it as an adult by the photocopier.

HAVE YOU BEEN TO...

Banana Leaf bananaleaf-vancouver.com

Sex and weed I’ve had sex while smoking marijuana and for some reason it seems to help my drive. Smoking weed seems to make me feel horny and a lot more aroused. I find that it just helps liven up the mood.

DEC

1 AT LANALOU’S:

Back off

DEC

Unless you can be absolutely, 100% sure there is a ton of room around you and you’re not disturbing anyone, take off your backpack! I am tired of trying to dodge dirty, massive back packs on transit.

DEC

Disrespectful Concert Goers

DEC

I attended the Ty Segall acoustic gig recently. 75% of the crowd didn’t listen to the artist they paid to see, instead they talked to each other. I could barely hear Ty over the crowd’s chatter. I don’t pay to hear your drunk chatter, I pay to see accomplished musicians do their thing. Were half of you there simply to look cool? Shut up, listen, and be respectful at concerts.

DEC

Visit

SKATING POLLY & POTTY MOUTH

1 TRIATHALON & THE MARIAS

to post a Confession

2

JOHN MAUS

W/ THE FURNITURE

W/ KEVIN KRAUTER

W/ ACTORS

DEC

7 ARMY OF SASS: DANCE SHOWCASE

8 DEATHMAS FESTIVIUS II

THE HALLOWED CATHARSIS, GROSS MISCONDUCT AND MORE. PROCEEDS GOING TO THE FOOD BANK

9 LUCITERRA STUDENT SHOWCASE: WHITE RAVEN REVUE

DEC

14 THE SLACKERS

DEC

15 KEITHMAS IX

DEC

W/ LOS FURIOS, BREHDREN, YOUNG ROYAL AN ANNUAL FOOD BANK FUNDRAGER FEATURING RICH HOPE, LA CHINGA, LITTLE DESTROYER, SORE POINTS, OSWALD, CHRIS & CORA, THE RENTALMEN, ELLIOT WAY & WILD NORTH, FORD PIER VENGENCE TRIO, WAR BABY

16 STORY PARTY VANCOUVER: TRUE DATING STORIES

DEC

29

THE DUDES

W/ SKYE WALLACE

JAN

11 THE BROKEN ISLANDS VIDEO RELEASE PARTY AN ANNUAL FUNDRAISER CELEBRATING THE LIFE AND MUSIC OF DAVID BOWIE WITH PROCEEDS GOING TO THE CANADIAN CANCER SOCIETY. THIS YEAR’S LINEUP FEATURES THE POINTED STICKS, LA CHINGA AND 16 OTHER BANDS.

BOWIE BALL 12 2019

JAN JAN

18 ENSIFERUM & SEPTICFLESH

JAN

19 THE GATEWAY COMEDY

W/ GUESTS

HOSTED BY BILLY ANDERSON

PETER MURPHY 40 YEARS OF BAUHAUS, 19 AT THE VOGUE RUBY CELEBRATION FEATURING DAVID J

JAN JAN

W/ HAWTHORNE HEIGHTS, AS CITIES BURN, CAPSTAN

JAN

SCRAPE RECORDS ‘THE LABEL’ LAUNCH SHOW

25 SILVERSTEIN

26 ZIMMERS HOLE

JAN

31 OZOMATLI

W/ SALSADANCEHALL COLLECTIVE

Additional show listings, ticket sale info, videos and more: WWW.RICKSHAWTHEATRE.COM 36 THE GEORGIA STR AIGHT NOVEMBER 29 – DECEMBER 6 / 2018

movies

REVIEWS

A Turkish master and a Wild Pear Tree Donovan out weirds the pedestrian script and gets under your skin in the process. (“We didn’t get along so well,” remarks the 66-year-old star, with a resigned smile, when Nagra scans a photo of Rourke from his days as a doomed beauty.)

He makes it all worthwhile, but in the end, the film also has something nice to say about Nagra’s loyalty to his community in contrast to Doyle’s aggro superindividualism.

(But remember, America’s a great country.) It probably shouldn’t step into the ring with Creed II, but Tiger could probably go a few rounds with Rocky III, say.

THE WILD PEAR TREE

Starring Dogu Demirkol. In Turkish, with English subtitles. Rated PG

d

IN FILMS like Distant and Winter Sleep, Turkish writer-director Nuri Bilge Ceylan showed his instinct for ferreting out the humour and the sadness in strained relationships set against unforgiving landscapes. He pushes this even further in The Wild Pear Tree. And, at more than three hours and taking place over several years, it feels more like a classic novel than a movie, even of the art-house variety.

If this saga of a young man’s search for meaning feels like a literary throwback, modern chaos keeps intruding on the reveries of Sinan Karasu (Dogu Demirkol), a slouchy 20-something who has just written his first book and can’t get it published. He’s finished his teacher training but worries about being posted in Turkey’s rural regions.

(People mention “going east” the way Germans once talked about being sent to the Russian front.)

The youngster is in uncomfortable thrall to his father (Murat Cemcir), himself once a respected educator in the port town of Çanakkale, where he (and the director) grew up. Now he’s a local joke, thanks to gambling debts and too much time spent at his own father’s crumbling farm. For years, Dad’s been digging a well that never yields water—a metaphor for all striving here, especially the young man’s attempts to find expression through the antiquated mode of books.

The film’s episodic structure primarily consists of long, highly detailed conversations between two or three people. The elusive nature of art, struggles against conformity, and the ultimate meaning (if any) of religion are among the topics argued about. Sinan’s knowledge of women is notably childlike, and he manages to insult people he asks for help. If writing doesn’t work out, he admits, he could just join the riot police, like one of his college friends who couldn’t find a job.

Ceylan sets this chatter against ever-shifting backgrounds in differently hued seasons; we are aware of the beauty and depredations of the characters’ surroundings, but they are not. Some images are unforgettable, as when Sinan pokes his head out of the side panel of a gigantic Trojan horse—built for a Brad Pitt movie shot in the area, but now kept as a tourist attraction near sites of several famous battles.

The director’s approach is largely austere, though, with repeated snippets from Bach’s Passacaglia very occasionally sweetening the scenes.

This suggests influences from Pasolini, who depended on Bach, and Bergman, who counted on silence.

But for viewers with the patience to hear him out, Ceylan has a voice like no other.

by Ken Eisner

PROSECUTING EVIL: THE EXTRAORDINARY LIFE OF BEN FERENCZ A documentary by Barry Avrich. In English and German, with English subtitles. Rated PG

d BEFORE THE end of the Second

World War, there were few set standards for determining evil on an international scale. Banning chemical weapons (including those just tossed across the U.S. border into Mexico) was something participants in the previous war had agreed to, though there was little mechanism to apply pressure to

by Adrian Mack

CLARA

Starring Patrick J. Adams. Rated PG

d

Slouchy Dogu Demirkol in The Wild Pear Tree (top); cosmic Troian Bellisaro in Clara (bottom left); roguish Mickey Rourke in Tiger (bottom right).

warring nations to abide by rules of engagement regarding civilians.

The Geneva Convention came about in 1949, three years after 27-year-old Harvard Law School grad and former U.S. army private Benjamin Ferencz was tapped by Gen. George Patton to investigate conditions at the newly liberated concentration camps. After that, he helped track down the records of genocide—meticulously kept by the German hierarchy, true to cliché—used to convict first- and second-tier Nazis who orchestrated the Holocaust.

Born in Transylvania, a land of shifting borders and allegiances, he came to the U.S. in 1920, and his family lived in some of the poorest quarters of New York, which gave him a lifelong abhorrence of crime.

He learned English on the street and French from Charles Boyer movies, and turned out to be a gifted student. “I didn’t know what that meant,” Ferencz tells director Barry Avrich in this well-above-average documentary. “I mean, nobody ever gave me any gifts.”

The Montreal filmmaker specializes in shooting Shakespeare productions, and Ferencz’s story has all the gravitas of a tragic history play, leavened by incredible humour and good fortune, as radiated by the super-diminutive subject, who had to stand on books to reach the podium as one of the lead prosecutors at the Nuremberg war-crimes trials.

He is now an incredibly busy 99 years old, and lives in an unassuming Florida bungalow with his wife of 72 years. His saga will be familiar to people who’ve read about the fall of the Third Reich. (I have a special attachment to it, since my own father, born three years later, attended Ferencz’s Bronx middle school and his Harlem college. My uncle would later be with the army group that first entered Dachau.)

The procedural and moral aspects of Nuremberg are equally compelling; less known is his role in resettling displaced people after the war, and in the establishment of the International Criminal Court—something he and Robert McNamara, of all people, pushed Bill Clinton to join, only to see George W. Bush blow off its main tenets during his disastrous Iraq adventure.

Although Ferencz radiates gratitude for a life well lived, he has become increasingly outspoken about signs emanating from his current government. “Because,” he says, “I’ve seen it all before.”

by Ken Eisner

TIGER

Starring Prem Singh. Rated PG

dTHERE’S

NO boxing-movie cliché left unturned in this biopic about flyweight champ Pardeep Singh Nagra, renamed “the Punjab Tiger” here, but it’s an amiably rousing effort all the same. Soft-faced Prem Singh stars as Nagra alongside Michael Pugliese as Brian Doyle, his biggest rival in the ring and in other Syd Field–oriented matters.

(The duo also supplied the screenplay.) Grizzly old Michael Harrity and grizzlier Mickey Rourke add up to one Burgess Meredith as Nagra’s trainers, who see something special in the angry young Sikh when he wanders into Rourke’s low-rent boxing club one evening.

Real life aside, the story here writes itself: Nagra has to defeat his own demons and, worse, the prejudices of his opponents and (worse still) the “American Boxing Commission”, which goes out of its way by several orders of bullshit to stop Nagra from entering the ring because his beard is such a major

safety concern, unlike all those concussions.

Nagra’s counterargument—essentially, “But I’m Sikh, fuck off”— is considerably more convincing.

Thus we have a courtroom drama to beef up the routine smash-edited pugilism, which perhaps elevates the new kid to the national tryouts a tad too quickly to invoke any real sense of his development in the ring.

But whatevs. The bigger story is all that bigotry, which has Nagra defending himself in street fights while he pleads that he’s just a regular American and “This is a great country!” Which makes him sound a bit dim, sadly, but also reminds us that Canadians Singh and Pugliese had to de-Canuck their screenplay and relocate it to Ohio from Nagra’s native Ontario.

Perhaps that’s how they got the dandified Rourke onboard. Ever more roguish in a way you’d expect from Keith Richards and not the owner of a back-alley boxing club, Rourke not surprisingly sucks up all the attention whenever he’s onscreen. With the actor’s life and work seemingly indivisible now, his unwholesome charisma is partly down to sheer otherness—that little Chihuahua never leaves his arm, even when he’s sparring with Nagra—but mostly because the crazy fucker can still act. Silently suffering from the onset of Parkinson’s, his Frank

Movies TIP SHEET

The European Union Film Festival rolls into its second week at the Cinematheque with a whack of great titles. Here are just a few.

c THE LINE With all eyes on Ukraine,

this, award-winning crime family saga set on the border with Slovakia arrives with timely mojo.

Screens Friday (November 30).

c STEFAN ZWEIG: FAREWELL TO

EUROPE The inspiration for Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel, author Stefan Zweig is the subject of this somewhat less fanciful biopic and Austrian Oscar entry. Screens Saturday (December 1).

c THE PAGAN KING A huge hit

in Latvia, this historical epic is

about real 13th-century pagans confronting the Northern Crusades, not those idiots who went and got tattoos in the ’90s.

Screens Sunday (December 2).

c RUSTY BOYS Old men behaving very badly is the theme of this raucous comedy from Luxembourg, which also takes a few swipes at the country’s iniquitous banking system. Screens Monday (December 3).

c OMNIPRESENT Bulgaria’s

official submission to the 2019 Oscars concerns a man who, in the midst of trying to catch a thief, gets a little too much into his security cameras. Screens Tuesday (December 4).

AS A SCI-FI–MINDED character study, Clara doesn’t lack ambition. But even its most earthbound ideas fail to find real footing. The movie probably needed more money, better actors, and zippier special effects to compete in the stargazing category. But what it’s most obviously missing, ironically enough, is imagination. It fails to envision a story, let alone a world, not built upon embattledloner clichés and exhausted gender stereotypes.

Edmonton-born writer-director Akash Sherman is young, but already has a long-standing interest in scientific and philosophical ideas. His first feature, 2015’s The Rocket List, was about the need to preserve human knowledge before losing the planet—a concept that grows more prescient with every fast-passing year. Sherman’s follow-up is about the compulsions to make contact with alien life—“illegal” or otherwise. Shot in Toronto, Clara offers Suits lead Patrick J. Adams as Dr. Isaac Bruno, an astrophysicist so dedicated to searching the stars he gets fired from his university gig for hogging too much telescope time. (We’re not told, but maybe that’s why his ex-wife dumped him, too.)

So sure is he that he’s discovered some breakthrough data, the neatly bearded and bespectacled astronomer sets up his own operation at home. He advertises for an assistant to help track data—because, let’s face it, most space work is mathematical plotting—and seemingly gets just one reply: from a dark-haired free spirit called Clara (Troian Bellisaro, of Pretty Little Liars). She has no experience with scientific stuff, but has done some pretty neat cosmic paintings.

The woman whose first name suggests transparency and light owns no last name, although she does have an unspecified disease— not that she shares this with her new boss. He’s all numbers and logic, and she’s all about feeling and intuition. Women are from Venus, men are from Mississauga. But hey, she can start tonight, and needs a place to stay. Our guy’s skeptical, but pretty soon she’s the apple of Isaac’s eye. (The fact that they’re a couple in real life actually makes this slightly creepier, like metaphysical cosplay.)

Sherman’s own interest in space exploration seems genuine enough, and he comes up with attractive images on a limited budget. But the notion of stuffy dude magically transformed by a disposable female would be beyond tired even if the main cast had sufficient charisma and marquee value. Sometimes you have to recognize what’s in front of you before staring up at the sky.

by Ken Eisner

NOVEMBER 29 – DECEMBER 6 / 2018 THE GEORGIA STR AIGHT 37

MOVIES

Whistler Film Fest after dark Explicit sex, alcoholism, and politics make for grown-up subject matter

T

by Adrian Mack

he Whistler Film Festival always offers the chance to catch a few highly touted films before they hit the multiplex, with Mary Queen of Scots (starring Saoirse Ronan and Margot Robbie) and If Beale Street Could Talk (from Moonlight director Barry Jenkins) among this year’s big-ticket items. But it’s the under-the-radar product that WFF does best. Here are three recommendations to get your chilled-out festival started. The Whistler Film Festival runs from Wednesday to Sunday (November 28 to December 2).

VIFF‘18

NEVER BE DONE: THE RICHARD GLEN LETT STORY (Canada) Local

standup comedian Richard Lett lost an upwardly mobile career to alcoholism and drug abuse, which this doc captures in gruesome detail, rock bottom included. By the time filmmaker Roy Tighe began pointing his camera at Lett in 2009, he’d been banned from every club in the city except one. Lett’s infamous bit “The Ballad of Bobby Pickton” is perhaps the stress test here for the curious. As an expression of all the rage and disgust that Lett would habitually turn on himself and everyone else, it’s painfully true, if you have the stomach for it. Homelessness and psychosis would follow as the abuse wore on and the gigs dried up, but this is a redemption story, and a particularly poignant one for Vancouverites familiar with some of Lett’s local contemporaries who line up to either praise or condemn the man. (The Straight’s Guy MacPherson sticks to the facts.) With comedians imploding all over the place right now, Lett’s postrecovery insights about a business that seems to thrive on the self-loathing of its participants feel especially relevant. November 29 and 30

VIFF‘18

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

DON’T MISS ONE OF THE MOST IMPORTANT FILMS OF THE YEAR!

HUGH HEFNER’S AFTER DARK: SPEAKING OUT IN AMERICA (Can-

“INSPIRING AND ELOQUENT”

ada) The recently deceased Playboy honcho produced two dazzlingly great TV series in the late ’50s and late ’60s, Playboy’s Penthouse and Playboy After Dark, catching America in key moments of postwar upheaval. Whatever your opinion of the reptilian creature who finally shed his mortal smoking jacket just over a year ago, Hef in his prime was really something, appealing to Americans yearning for sophistication and playing sincerely engaged host to

Brad Wheeler, The Globe and Mail

“AVRICH HAS MADE ONE OF HIS FINEST FILMS” Marc Glassman, Classical 96.3

from page 36 FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 30

“BEAUTIFUL AND POIGNANT. THIS DOCUMENTARY IS ESSENTIAL VIEWING” Photography: Robin Utrecht

Raquel Stecher, Quelle

OPENS TOMORROW INTERNATIONAL VILLAGE CINEMAS FOR TICKETS & SHOWTIMES VISIT: CINEPLEX.COM 38 THE GEORGIA STR AIGHT NOVEMBER 29 – DECEMBER 6 / 2018

TIM HICKS Canadian country singersongwriter performs on his Get Loud tour.

Nov 30, 6:30 pm, Abbotsford Centre. Tix $30.50/40.50/46.

THE WATERMILL PROJECT Vocalist-arranger Sara Kim blends traditional South Korean music and jazz. Nov 30, 7 pm, Museum of Vancouver. Tix $16-$19.

ST. PAUL’S LABYRINTH LIVE MUSIC: DAWN PEMBERTON Musical accompaniment to walking meditation. Nov 30, 7-9 pm, St. Paul’s Labyrinth. Free admission.

NEARVANA Nirvana cover band. Nov 30, 7-11:30 pm, WISE Hall. Tix $15.

KWEKU COLLINS Rapper from Illinois, with guest Joseph Chilliams. Nov 30, 8 pm, Biltmore Cabaret. Tix $15.

RICHARD TICHELMAN & THE BAND Local country artist, with guests Mr G & the Grand Ensemble and Jessica Barbour. Nov 30, 8 pm, The Flamingo Events Centre. Tix $10.

NOVO AMOR Welsh folk singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist performs tunes from debut album Birthplace. Nov 30, 8 pm, St. James Hall. Tix $20.

JANA SEALE Vintage acoustic pop and folk.

Nov 30, 8 pm, The Coach House Lounge. No cover.

MAGIC SWORD Electronic trio from Boise, Idaho. Nov 30, 8 pm, Fox Cabaret. Tix $18.

ECHO NEBRASKA Vancouver folk-rock band, with guests Marsalis and Kellen Saip Music. Nov 30, 9 pm, Railway Stage and Beer Café. Tix $8.

FRIDAY JAZZ New Orleans jazz and blues by Marc Lindy and guests. Nov 30, 9 pm, Tyrant Studios. Tix $10.

FRIDAY NIGHT SOUL Music by local dance band Ardent Tribe. Nov 30–Dec 1, 9 pm–1:30 am, Backstage Lounge. Tix $10.

Papa and daughter get matching tats in the doc Never Be Done: The Richard Glen Lett Story.

guests—many of them black—who couldn’t otherwise get air time.

From our vantage point here in the Age of Stupid, the level of discourse for syndicated television is phenomenal, with people like Joan Baez, actor David Hemmings, Boston Celtics centre Bill Russell, Woodstock director Michael Wadleigh, and virtually everyone else demonstrating an eloquence and political savvy that’d give Jimmy Kimmel a stroke. Inevitably, a clip job like this is circumscribed by access and the filmmakers’ own tastes. Lengthy detours on Country Joe and the Fish and Steppenwolf are considerably less bracing than footage of Sarah Vaughan, Taj Mahal, Nina Simone, or Jerry Garcia, not to mention the remarkable sight of Moms Mabley reducing Sammy Davis Jr. to tears with “Abraham, Martin and John”. Furthermore, the film squanders the chance to examine how all this beautiful, blooming social consciousness collapsed into the feeble liberalism of today.

Instead, we get the loathsome Bill Maher and not-much-better Whoopi Goldberg flapping their gums about freedom of the press. And a brief contemporary interview with Miss Sweden 1964, Sivi Aberg, assuring us that she really didn’t mind being Hef’s mute arm decoration, is no way to address the hard-circuited sexism on display. Still, big reservations aside, this is well worth your time.

November 30 and December 2

THE NATURALLY WANTON PLEASURE OF SKIN (Canada) Kudos to

WFF for consistently programming provocative numbers like this one, in which a middle-aged scientist-academic-mom pursues a variety of (fairly explicit) sexual encounters while researching the physiological effects of desire. Actually, put aside that contrivance and you still have a film that takes worthwhile risks with some dangerous subject matter. As played by a fine Brigitte Poupart, MarieClaire sees her open marriage hit the rocks when a sexual harassment suit takes down a university work colleague. The professor in question happens to be one of her regular lovers. The accuser’s boyfriend is also boning Marie-Claire on the side, but while writer-director Renée Beaulieu abandons that promising angle, she makes hay with what’s left, giving no compact answers for the pathological behaviour of her heroine or anybody else in the film. It seems that no one comes out of all this rutting on top, as it were, including Marie-Claire’s promiscuous 14-year-old daughter.

And yet Beaulieu musters sympathy for all of these characters, except, notably, the student making the accusations. Confused? Counterrevolutionary? Honest? Take your pick! But the overall Pleasures here can’t be dismissed. December 1 and 2

g

FRIDAY NIGHT HOUSE Resident DJs Darius Kramer and Dezyman, with guest DJ Bagera.

Nov 30, 9:30 pm, MagnetiQ Club Lounge. $10.

UNDERGROUND ACID-HOUSE AND TECHNO WAREHOUSE RAVE Featuring Abasi, Overland, Kasey Riot, and Mankeen.

Nov 30, 11:55 pm, 333. Tix $10.

SATURDAY, DECEMBER 1

Music c

ABRAHAM, HOLLOW TWIN, WIRED TO THE SKY Dec 1, 7 pm, The Toast Collective.

Tix $10.

PALE WAVES Indie-pop band from Manchester, England, with guests Kailee Morgue & the Candescents. Dec 1, 7 pm, Venue. Tix $22.50.

HOT CLUB SWING’S HOLIDAY PARTY! Holiday swing dance with the New Orleans Ale Stars. Dec 1, 7:50-11:55 pm, Roundhouse Community Arts & Recreation Centre. Tix $15.

c

DELHI 2 DUBLIN Vancouver world-music group. Dec 1, 8 pm, Fox Cabaret. Tix $32.50.

SKATING POLLY Alt-rockers from Oklahoma City, with guests Potty Mouth and the Furniture. Dec 1, 8 pm, LanaLou’s Restaurant. Tix $13.50.

MINT RECORDS MANDATORY HOLIDAY FUNCTION AND AWARDS SHOW Featuring DUMB, lié, woolworm, Faith Healer, NEEDLES//PINS, Energy Slime, Kellarissa, and Necking. Dec 1, 8 pm, Astoria Pub. Tix $10/$12.

HOMMAGE À JACQUES BREL/TRIBUTE TO JACQUES BREL Performances as part of the 24th edition of the Coup de coeur francophone de Vancouver. Dec 1, 8-9:30 pm, CBC Studio 700. Tix from $10.

THE MARIAS & TRIATHALON Psychedelicsoul band from L.A. coheadlines with New York soul-pop trio, with guest Kevin Krauter.

Dec 1, 9 pm, Rickshaw Theatre. Tix $20.

c

TIP SHEET

WASHBOARD UNION (November 29 at the Commodore) It’s a funny thing how a trio of beard-sporting hillbillies with West Coast roots can do country better than 90 percent of the clowns in Nashville.

STIFF LITTLE FINGERS (November 29 at the Rickshaw) If the Clash was the only band that mattered, Stiff Little Fingers were a close second, records like the essential Inflammable Material inventing the template for punk.

PALE WAVES (December 1 at Venue) Halloween’s come and gone, but that shouldn’t stop you celebrating its spirit by breaking out the black lipstick for the U.K.’s dreamy postwavers Pale Waves.

DADDY ISSUES Grunge-pop band from Nashville, with guests CLONE and the New Black.

Dec 1, 9 pm, Pat’s Pub & Brewhouse. Tix $12.

ESETTE Calgary techno artist, with guest Max Ulis. Dec 1, 10 pm, Open Studios. Tix $20/$25.

SUNDAY, DECEMBER 2 ALL STAR BRASS Trumpeter Jens Lindemann and friends. Dec 2, 3 pm, Kay Meek Arts

see page 41

WIN PASSES TO SEE

Enter at STRAIGHT.COM/CONTESTS NOVEMBER 29 – DECEMBER 6 / 2018 THE GEORGIA STR AIGHT 39

Destigmatizing disability

T

by Craig Takeuchi

CROATIA

DENMARK

Quit Staring at My Plate

Walk with Me (De standhaftige)

Family is a prison in Croatian writer-director Hana Jušić’s stellar debut feature, a delayed-coming-of-age story with feminist potency.

THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 29 - 8:40PM

(Ne gledaj mi u pijat)

A Danish serviceman and a rising-star ballerina form an unlikely bond in this affecting, slow-burning romantic drama.

THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 29 - 6:30PM

SLOVAKIA

ITALY

The Line (Čiara)

I Can Quit Whenever I Want

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 30 - 6:30PM

A band of underemployed academics enter the lucrative designer-drug trade in Salerno-born Sibilia’s crowd-pleasing caper comedy.

Slovakia's lawless borderland in the lead-up to EU accession sets the stage for Peter Bebjak’s brawny, breakneck crime thriller.

(Smetto quando voglio)

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 30 - 8:40PM

SWEDEN

A Serious Game

(Den allvarsamma leken)

Hjalmar Söderberg’s 1912 novel gets an unabashedly old-school adaptation in this evocative, understated costume drama.

SATURDAY, DECEMBER 1 - 4:00PM

IRELAND

GERMANY

Stefan Zweig: Farewell to Europe (Vor der Morgenröte - Stefan Zweig in Amerika)

Actress-turned-filmmaker Maria Schrader directs a handsome dramatization of the tragic final years of Austrian writer Stefan Zweig.

SATURDAY, DECEMBER 1 - 6:30PM

LATVIA

The Drummer and the Keeper

The Pagan King (Nameja gredzens)

SATURDAY, DECEMBER 1 - 8:40PM

SUNDAY, DECEMBER 2 - 4:00PM

Musician-turned-director Nick Kelly brings his rock ‘n’ roll know-how to bear on this poignant tale of friendship and mental health.

POLAND

Latvian writer-director Aigars Grauba's lavish, big-canvas historical epic was a box-office behemoth in the Baltic state.

LUXEMBOURG

Breaking the Limits (Najlepszy)

Rusty Boys

SUNDAY, DECEMBER 2 - 6:30PM

MONDAY, DECEMBER 3 - 6:30PM

A longtime heroin addict turns his life around and becomes a world-champion triathlete in director Łukasz Palkowski’s inspiring drama.

BULGARIA

Omnipresent (Vezdesushtiyat)

Our perilous digital age offers provocative subject matter in Bulgaria’s official submission to next year’s Oscars.

TUESDAY, DECEMBER 4 - 6:30PM

A rebellion by fed-up seniors is comic fodder for director Andy Bausch, foremost native chronicler of Luxembourg's humorous side.

SLOVENIA

Slovenia, Australia and Tomorrow the World (Slovenija, Avstralija in jutri

ves svet)

Economic inequality and the disappearing middle class are the backdrop of writer-director Marko Naberšnik’s social drama.

TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 27 - 8:20PM

40 THE GEORGIA STR AIGHT NOVEMBER 29 – DECEMBER 6 / 2018

he sexuality of people with disabilities is underrepresented—or not represented at all—in contemporary culture, which can lead to people with disabilities either feeling invisible or being treated like an anomaly when it comes to their sexual lives.

However, a Toronto advocate has been raising awareness about sex and disabled people, and a Canadian film about him and his work is now available for online viewing.

On November 19, the National Film Board of Canada (NFB) released Jari Osborne’s short documentary “Picture This” for free online streaming. (Osborne’s previous NFB documentaries include Unwanted Soldiers and Sleeping Tigers: The Asahi Baseball Story.)

The 33-minute film profiles Toronto disability-awareness consultant and podcaster Andrew Gurza—who

identifies himself as a “queer cripple”— as he prepares for the second edition of a sex-positive play party, which has been labelled a “handicapped orgy” by the media and garnered international coverage.

Gurza held a discussion in Vancouver in 2016 in conjunction with Vancouver queer organization Health Initiative for Men that was filmed for and is featured in the documentary.

Among the topics Gurza discusses in the documentary is the awkwardness and discomfort he has witnessed potential sex partners being unable to hide (not to mention his own heartbreak) once they find out he is disabled.

In addition, he talks about the challenges of being both gay and disabled.

“Picture This” can be viewed at www. nfb.ca/film/picture_this/, and is also available on iTunes and Amazon.

g

A lbum OF THE WEEK

from page 38

Centre . Tix $19-$48.

WEST COAST CHICAGO Tribute to ’70s pop-rock legends Chicago. Dec 2, 4:30 pm, Fairview Pub. Tix $10.

BIRDS OF BELLWOODS Toronto-based alt-rock band, with guests Daysormay from Vernon. Dec 2, 7 pm, Railway Stage and Beer Café. Tix $10.

CHRISTMAS JAZZ CONCERT Jazz featuring local artists Miles Black, Glenda Rae, and Brett Wade. Dec 2, 7-9 pm, The Sanctuary at Brentwood. Tix $25/$30.

WAFIA Brisbane-based pop singer performs tunes from latest release VIII. Dec 2, 8 pm, WISE Hall. Tix $15.

JOHN CRAIGIE Americana singer-songwriter from Portland, with guest Ben Morrison. Dec 2, 8 pm, Imperial Vancouver. Tix $20.

CASSANDRA MAZE ASYMMETRY

MONDAY, DECEMBER 3 THE TENORS Vocal group consisting of Victor Micallef, Fraser Walters and Clifton Murray performs a Christmas show. Dec 3, 8 pm, Orpheum Theatre. Tix $125/90/66/36.

HOW TO DRESS WELL Experimental musician, composer, and vocalist Tom Krell. Dec 3, 9 pm, WISE Hall. Tix $18.

TUESDAY, DECEMBER 4 ELVIS COSTELLO & THE IMPOSTERS British new-wave/power-pop legend leads his current band. Dec 4, 8 pm, Queen Elizabeth Theatre. Tix $128.50/113.50/103/88.50/ 68.50/48.50.

JMSN R&B/soul singer-songwriter and record producer from Detroit. Dec 4, 9 pm, Fox Cabaret. Tix $20.

SAWDUST COLLECTOR Weekly performance series at the Gold Saucer. Dec 4, 11, 18, 9-11:45 pm, The Gold Saucer. Tickets $5-$10 at the door.

NOT SO SILENT NIGHT Performances by Black Pistol Fire and Hollerado. Dec 6, doors 8 pm, Commodore Ballroom. Tix $25/20.

WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 5 SULTANS OF STRING—CHRISTMAS CARAVAN Original world-music inspired classics and seasonal favourites. Dec 5, 7 pm, Centennial Theatre. Tix $28/$20.

WASIUM: GATHERING LIGHT Indigenous music and art ranging from powwow dancers to Métis jiggers, storytellers to soulful blues, spoken-word to hip-hop. Dec 5, 7 pm, WISE Hall. Tix $25/$30.

YUKON BLONDE AND THE ZOLAS Local indie-rock bands play a coheadlining bill. Dec 5, 9:30 pm, Commodore Ballroom. Tix $29.50.

THURSDAY, DECEMBER 6 MICHAEL KAESHAMMER Pianist performs boogie-woogie blues. Dec 6, 7:30 pm, Kay Meek Arts Centre . Tix $19-48.

To get some idea of the sort of artist that she is, check out Cassandra Maze’s YouTube channel.

There you’ll find videos like the one for the live version of her song “Die Wondering”, which shows the Coquitlam-based singer standing on the rocky banks of a creek, belting the lyrics accompanied by only her own acoustic-guitar strumming.

You will also find a bunch of videos of Maze performing cover versions of pop songs (including Ed Sheeran’s “Shape of You” and Camila Cabello’s “Havana”) in what might be her living room, armed with a Nord Lead 2 synthesizer, drum pads, and an array of looping pedals.

Maze is clearly very versatile,

FRIDAY, DECEMBER 7 QUEEN NAIJA American R&B/soul artist performs material from self-titled debut release.

Dec 7, 7:30 pm, Fortune Sound Club. Tix $20.

SULTANS OF STRING—CHRISTMAS CARAVAN Originals, world-music inspired classics, and seasonal favourites. Dec 7, 8 pm, The ACT Arts Centre. Tix $38/$33.

CHILDISH GAMBINO Singer, songwriter, and rapper from the States, aka actor Donald Glover, with guest Rae Sremmurd.

Dec 7, 8 pm, Rogers Arena. Note: POSTPONED from original date of Sep 30. Tix $139.50/89.50/59.50.

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EMPLOYMENT Music Instrument Lessons

Drum & Guitar Teachers Wanted. Port Moody

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Send resume. crossroadsmusic17@gmail.com

by John Lucas

TRIBUTE TO THE LEGENDS OF THE ’50s & ’60s CHRISTMAS SHOW Tributes to Elvis, Roy Orbsion, Connie Francis, Patsy Cline, and Brenda Lee. Dec 8, 7-10 pm, Royal Canadian Legion, Crescent Branch.

Tix $20.

BILL MAYS & THE TORONTO CHAMBER JAZZ SEPTET Holiday celebration includes a jazzy version of Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker Suite. Dec 8, 8 pm, The ACT Arts Centre. Tix $28/$33/$38.

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

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not to mention prodigiously talented. She could probably make an entire album of unplugged tunes, but her new four-track EP, Asymmetry, is far from that. Instead, it’s a collection of fully realized and impeccably produced modern electronic-pop tracks. These songs are slick enough to hold their own on playlists that also include selections from heavy-hitters like Charli XCX and Rita Ora. Yes, they sound that polished, but it’s not all about the production. Maze has a powerful, confident voice and her lyrics make it clear that— whether she’s singing about selfempowerment (“I Don’t Need Your Love”) or the various ways humans are fucking up the environment (“Wasteland”)—she has something to say.

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b I’M A 30-YEAR-OLD Asian-American,

hetero-flexible cis woman. I’m also newly diagnosed with bipolar II. I’m on medication—the doctor is trying to figure that out—but no talk therapy for right now, as my last therapist wasn’t great and I haven’t managed to find a new one. My question for you is regarding the relationship between bipolar and kink. One of the common symptoms of the manic stage of bipolar is “risky sex”. I equate risk with “likely to blow up one’s personal or professional life” and have always answered “no” to that question when asked by doctors. I’ve had the occasional hookup, but otherwise I’ve consistently had sex in the context of closed, monogamous relationships, i.e., the opposite of risky sex. However, it recently occurred to me that I’m fairly kinky (BDSM, role-play).

Nothing I’d consider a varsity-level kink, but what do I know? I have outthere fantasies that are varsity-level, but I’ve never done them. Am I just bipolar and kinky? Are the two related somehow? Should I be concerned that I’ll go into a manic state and start enacting (or trying to enact) some of the varsity-level fantasies in my head?

- Kinky And Bipolar

P.S. I asked my doctor this via email, but I haven’t heard back yet and have no idea how sex-positive he is. So I thought I’d get a second opinion.

P.P.S. I’m currently manic enough that it’s hard for me to edit, so there may be weird/confusing shit in my letter. Sorry for that!

“I’d like to congratulate KAB for seeking help and for the work she’s doing to get stable,” said Ellen Forney, author of Rock Steady: Brilliant Advice From My Bipolar Life, an award-winning

self-help guide to maintaining stability, and the best-selling graphic memoir Marbles: Mania, Depression, Michelangelo & Me. “I’d also like to welcome KAB to BIPOLAR! Toot! Toot! Confetti!”

The specific manic-stage symptom you’re concerned about—engaging in super-risky sex—is called “hypersexuality”, and it’s what happens when the extremely-poor-judgment match meets the supercharged-libido gas.

“But it’s only ‘hypersexuality’ when it gets in the way of a reasonably well-functioning life,” said Forney. “Picture masturbating all day instead of going to work, or having relationship-wrecking affairs or unprotected sex with strangers.”

If your diagnosis is correct and you have bipolar II and not bipolar I, KAB, you may be less susceptible to out-of-control hypersexuality.

“Strictly speaking, a bipolar II diagnosis means she cycles between ‘hypomania’ (mild mania) and depression,” said Forney, “so her highs aren’t going to be as acute as they would be for someone diagnosed with bipolar I, where hypersexuality can really get dangerous.”

Forney warns that misdiagnoses are not uncommon where bipolar is concerned, so you might want to get your diagnosis confirmed.

But your long-standing kinks all by themselves—varsity and otherwise—aren’t necessarily related to your condition, KAB, and so long as they’re safely expressed and explored, you aren’t doing anything unreasonably risky or wrong.

“Kinky sex in itself doesn’t count as symptom-worthy risky sex—no matter what her doctor emails back,” said Forney. “Like for anyone else, there’s

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sense of humour, both books are a help your boyfriend realize he does delight to read. want to be with you forever—it’ll help him “know”—and if you haven’t b I AM 36 and female, and I’ve been realized in the interim that you don’t with my current boyfriend for seven want to be with him, you can move years. We were friends for four years back in (and move on) together down before we started dating. He is very the road. But unless inheriting the slow at making decisions and not a family property is a sure thing—a risk taker, and I am somewhat oppos- sure thing you’ll both benefit from in ite. I think there are times when you the long run—he needs to pay his fair have to take a leap of faith, and if it share. No more freeloading. turns out it was a mistake, you learn and grow from it. We lived together b WHY SHOULD I, a feminist, be okay on his family’s property the first six with drag? How is it any different years after I moved to his hometown. than blackface?

- Tough Question He’s waiting in hopes that the property gets handed down to him. I don’t live my life in hopes that something Drag can be sexist, TQ, but it doesn’t will happen that’s out of my con- have to be. And when done right, it trol, so I purchased my own home. isn’t. Blackface is always racist. Drag He moved in. We have not split all celebrates the craft of hyperfeminine costs in half because he said he needs presentation. Drag demonstrates that to take care of the other home. It’s so much of what we think of as “naturbeen six months, and I’m growing ally” feminine is not just a social conimpatient for him to commit. We’ve struct, but quite literally a construchad several conversations, and I’ve tion. Drag has the power to explode given him until the end of the year sexism, to expose it, by complicating to decide if we should go our separ- people’s preconceptions and misconate ways. I said if we are going to be ceptions about what it means to be a together, we need to be a team and woman. Blackface can only reinforce support each other. He was actually and amplify racism. taken aback because he thought we were doing fine. One thing he said In the Lovecast studio…Stormy Daniels!: made me question it all. He said, “I savagelovecast.com. Email: mail@savage feel that you’re supposed to know and love.net. Follow Dan on Twitter @fake have this feeling when you’re ready to dansavage. ITMFA.org. move forward to be with a person forever.” I was so confused by that comment. My friends say it can’t only be MORE me who wants this; he has to want it too. Is it time for me to just move on?

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nothing necessarily wrong with feeling uninhibited enough to pursue varsity-level kinks, so long as they’re not putting her or anyone else in danger.

Ultimately, KAB’s goal is to be stable enough to trust her judgment. For now, she might weigh the risks while she’s feeling stable, so she can make some levelheaded decisions about what might or might not be too risky.”

Forney also recommends having a discussion with your partners and friends about what your limits are—a discussion you’ll want to have when you’re not horny or manic or both.

“That way, her partners and friends can help her recognize if she’s crossing her own lines,” said Forney.

“And realizing that she’s suddenly tempted to cross her own lines could be a signal to her that she’s getting hypomanic and needs to take steps to stabilize—steps like getting better sleep, adjusting her meds, and others I explore in Rock Steady!”

P.S. If your doctor won’t answer your sex questions—or only gives you unhelpful, sex-negative, kinkshaming answers—find yourself a new doctor.

P.P.S. There are letters I have to read three times before I can figure out what the fuck is going on. Your letter was as lucid as it was charming.

P.P.P.S. Therapists across the country are recommending Rock Steady to their patients with mood disorders, and Forney won a Media Partner Award from the National Alliance for Mental Illness for her work on Rock Steady and Marbles.

If you haven’t already, KAB, please pick up Forney’s books. You’ll benefit from her insights, her advice, and her coping strategies.

And thanks to Forney’s art and

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