So the Dayglo Abortions had a semi-secret show last night at the Interurban Gallery, taking the stage (really just the rear half of what looked like it once was a loading bay) just after 6pm. It was postered in the area and discreetly hinted at by Murray on Facebook ("a band I play in will be having a free show this afternoon," nudge-wink) - but overall was kept a bit on the downlow so as not to piss off bookers of the band's current BC tour (Nov. 25th at the Biltmore with the Golers and the Gnar Gnars is going to be a fuckin' cooker, but see the very bottom of this page for other BC dates; they're in Kelowna tonight). I arrived too early, thinking there would be other bands, so got to kill some time walking through the tent city towards the Union Gospel Mission Thrift Store, on the other side of Main... which not only was further away than I recalled, but was closed. There were lots of tents, lots of very poor and miserable-seeming people. I did not document the walk, much, as it seems risky on more than one level to take too many pictures of the things one encounters there (though some part of me is tempted to, to try to register in public just how desperate our city is allowing things to get). As I approached Main, someone on a bike rounded a corner and his box of groceries, bungee-corded onto the back, went flying into the street - "Fuck!" So I helped steady his bike while he loaded what he could back into it (his jar of marmalade was sadly beyond repair). Two other DTES residents helped us out, too, bringing a loaf of bread and box of cereal that had gone flying in opposite directions. He said grateful and somewhat surprised things, but that's been my experience of the DTES: people are actually pretty kind to each other down there, when they can be. Misery brings people together; it's affluence that makes them inclined to put up barriers. Go drop some groceries in the British Properties and see who comes to help you.
Truth is, with my tongue surgery and wrist scars, I actually feel more comfortable walking around the DTES than I used to. I may have privileges and comforts most people there don't, but now I have damage, too: I can feel confident that no one will think ill of me or judge me for the way I speak - at worst, as happened not too long ago, they might get concerned that I'm having a stroke or something (a local expressed concern about my speech - "Dude, are you all right?" - after I agreed to buy him a McDonald's meal, a story I've told previously here). Plus I feel less likely to be mistaken for one of the forces of gentrification and displacement that visit the area; if anyone gives me grief, I just have to speak at them a bit: "Who, me gentrify? I can't even pronounce it correctly."
There were people who were somewhat frightening, of course - one guy was lost in a kind of martial-arts dance in the middle of the sidewalk, whipping out with some piece of cloth, the violence of his gestures such that his arms actually whooshed as they cut through the air, and made you very aware of staying out of his trajectory. But he didn't get in anyone's face, just did his little violent street ballet in his allotted, somewhat-larger-than-usual, space. And of course there were people muttering angrily to themselves, or sometimes yelling at each other, or standing in odd, motionless postures, or digging at crevices hoping for a dropped rock, or using in the doorways... but most people were just minding their own business, some with various goods stretched out on blankets on the wet pavement, hoping for a sale. I perused the DVDs people had, and as ever, kept an eye open in case my long-gone Bison Quiet Earth shirt, stolen from me one night at Funkys, should re-materialize. Sometimes you have to choose between weaving through two tents to pass on the sidewalk, or, if it's too crowded, stepping out into the street, eyes open for discarded needles and oncoming buses, but no one came close to hassling me, and I even got some hellos from a couple of random, friendly strangers I passed.
Truth is, I kind of wish someone would bring film cameras down to the DTES and collect interviews with the people there. How did they end up on the street? What has the city done to help (or harm) them, and what should it do more (or less) of? Mostly I think people prefer to look away, but there is definitely a story to be told here; I just don't know what it is, exactly. How have things gotten this bad? Is this a failure of housing, a failure of capitalism, a failure of government, a failure of our harm-reduction models? There sure didn't seem much of a sense that harm was being reduced for anyone, but I'm not sure that drugs were the main enemy, even without a safe supply.
Something sure as fuck isn't working, in any event.
Anyhow, I walked between Carrall to the UGM, just past Gore I think, then walked back, to still find myself early for the Dayglos (who were in fact running a bit late). But stuff was happening at the Interurban, as the Heart of the City festival got underway: an older Asian man in a tiger costume was playing a flute when I took my seat. Other openers included a DTES guitarist named Mark McLeod (which I may be spelling wrong), who sang original songs, weird and witty and slightly off kilter; the most memorable was about how he was "just a tiny weed" growing in the heel of a shoeprint in the mud, though he also mused about what life would be like if he were Elvis, offered a fantasy about quitting his job to become a cowboy, and expressed ironic sympathy for the Canucks. He was an eccentric player, seemed to know his fair share of chords - some kinda jazzy, even - but had a sense of timing that suggested someone who doesn't play with other people very often, strumming in odd places to accompany his line deliveries, which also didn't always scan, such that his sense of rhythm seemed located somewhere on a spectrum between the Minimalist Jug Band and Jandek. But the songs were surprisingly entertaining - in his own singular way, he had an artistry to him (Murray Acton also could be seen to laugh and applaud).
Mostly the other Marc - Blind Marc, the Dayglos drummer, who had begun setting up his kit with a bit of help from Murray - sat poker faced through Mark's set. Marc would be a formidable poker player; while he CAN be quite expressive, he can also be strikingly blank. Was he amused by the other Mark's songs, or was he meditating, or thinking about dinner, or...?
Mark was followed by a standup comedian named Nick (Nick Fury, did I get that right?) who joked about working in the DTES and told a story about buying a hammer (for five bucks) off a mildly deranged local who was brandishing it, the punchline of which ran along the lines of, "anyone want to buy a hammer? Only fifteen bucks!"). He cracked wise about the Canucks, too ("How are the Canucks not like a triangle? A triangle has three points!").
Then someone named Ashtrey (sp?), whose birthday the event honoured, took the stage. Murray, being interviewed by a Co-Op host for the event, had started giving a spiel about Ashtrey's famed GG Allin imitation, which involved him stashing peanut butter in his underwear, but seemed to stop short of the punchline he was heading for when Murray realized Ashtrey was in fact in the audience. Ashtrey then gave a little speech, veering a bit into DTES politics, with a positive namecheck going to Jean Swanson and a couple of digs being offered at the police; but I wasn't trying to document the whole night, didn't take notes, don't remember what-all else he said. He didn't seem to like the cops very much. Was he a former member of the Fuck You Pigs? I think I still have a Fuck You Pigs t-shirt, somewhere.
Sadly, I didn't stick around for the whole Dayglos set. The band - a four piece, featuring some member of the Jaks on rhythm guitar (Mike with a haircut, perhaps?) - mostly focused on old songs for the half hour I was there, plus "I Love My Mom" - I didn't get to hear a single thing off Hate Speech, their killer new album (which I discuss with Murray here) or any of the promised covers by the Fuck You Pigs or the Neo Nasties. Matt was dressed in his Sketchy the Clown outfit for the occasion; I never did get to see Power Clown, so that was fun to see. I shot a little vid, which I see Youtube has set to "age-restricted". Takes awhile for the songs to start, but - well, I'd had a pot cookie, so everything was interesting; you get to see the finishing touches being put on Marc's kit and what little soundcheck there was. There might be some Blind Marc developments here in the next while!
But I had a date I had to be at, and ducked out very soon after "I Love My Mom." I'd been invited to the Cinematheque to participate in the horror trivia contest, and didn't know it wouldn't start til 7:30 (I probably could have seen the whole Dayglos set, had I realized that). As it was, I had time to get coffee and take a pee in the Cinematheque's now-gender-neutral washrooms. They've tarped-over the urinal in the former men's, which was busy enough after the screening that I made my first trip into the former ladies' room, which I learned has AN EXTRA TOILET on the former men's. Maybe they'll replace the urinal in the men's with a third stall as well? I felt some toilet envy, to tell the truth!
In point of fact - appropriately enough, given my costume choices from the other night - it was my first venture into a former ladies' room to urinate, which I felt a bit self-conscious about, since I think Cinematheque habitues are inclined to respect the old gender demarcations, generally. But pee is pee, a toilet is a toilet, and no one was around to stinkeye me when I came out. I do know that some women feel a bit weird about men being in their (previously exclusive) spaces, and - regardless of the obvious improvement for transpeople - I can sympathize; we men tend to have poor aim, and we're sometimes pervs, for whom entering "the ladies room" might contain some weird thrill. Who wants that in your private space, when you're trying to do your business...?
As for the trivia event, there were questions in various categories: attach the quote to the movie, and for a bonus, name the character (not the actor) who says it; name that soundtrack clip; match the vagina-like thing to the Cronenberg movie it appears in; name that international movie posters - quite a few categories, really. Absolutely the best poster was this one, which you should be able to guess. It's exactly the film you'd hope it would be.
I fucked up just enough questions - guessing that the French poster for a William Castle film was for 13 Ghosts and not the obvious film that it actually was for (one which I never cared about, to be honest) and flat-out failing to recognize the audio clip of the music from Don't Look Now, to my shame - that I did not feel I deserved remotely to win against my fifty-odd competitors, all teamed up, each having given themselves a name (I just went as Allan MacInnis, though the emcee, with a television on his head, read my parenthetical note aloud - "I am my own team" - and perhaps appreciated the doodle I drew of him while I'd waited for things to commence). I mean, I did ace all the Cronenberg questions, the film lit questions, and made a lucky guess about the Sam Neill clip (which was from a movie I'd seen, but not a scene I remembered, so it was still only a guess, really). But I left a ton of blanks, a shameful number. As our emcee read from the bottom to the top of the list, he didn't mention scores or prizes or tiers, so when he got to my name and stopped, it was in no way clear that he'd announced the winner: we all lingered, expecting the next tier to follow, until someone from the marking team, still down front on the floor, said of me, "He won. By a lot."
Well then!
And the swag that I won was super cool: a blu-ray for the Criterion The Brood, which I gave promptly away to the first audience member who said they needed it - since I have it already; a poster and a mug for The Fly; a copy of Cronenberg's novel, which I have not yet read; a t-shirt; some Cronenberg stickers, pictured above; and Cinematheque passes (and tote). Plus there was a t-shirt that announces that the wearer is "A David Cronenberg film." It's only XL, but - thanks, cancer! - I can fit into it no problem now. And if the cancer comes back, it will be good to have something slightly smaller to get into than my even-now-slightly-floppy closetful of 3XLs. I'll keep it with the Rebel Spell and Nomeansno shirts that I'm just a tad too big for, at present.
Of course, there is something that seems very fitting about identifying myself as a David Cronenberg film, given the year I've had; and indeed, I thought about cancer and decay and the state of my flesh throughout The Fly. That's another story, really, though incidentally, you may wish to know that, while I did contemplate doing so, I have not actually saved any of the pieces of my tongue graft that have peeled off mysteriously since the operation last December. There is no Brundle museum with my detached bits in my desk. The medicine cabinet in the bathroom contains mostly medicine and some makeup products (not mine) and tweezers and such. There are no baggies with bits of my former self in them anywhere in the apartment, though if you look long and hard enough, I might have an extracted tooth I kept around somewhere. I think I even threw away my kidney stones (unlike Cronenberg himself, whose stones were actually much cooler-looking than mine, more, uh, "Cronenbergian").
For an extreme contrast with my walk through the DTES, after the movie, I walked back through the Hallowe'en crowds on Granville, which, it turns out, have changed considerably since I last lived downtown (2007-2009): the party demographic is now maybe 85% brown, which was not the case back when. While there was the odd white male couple holding hands and the odd white or Asian girl in costume - and one dude in a pretty great Spiderman getup whose ethnicity I did not inquire into, but who broke out a few cool Spidey moves for us, getting cheers from the onloookers - the vast majority of the Hallowe'en revellers appeared to be from India, maybe some from the Middle East.
This shift in demographic meant, happily, that as long as I caught a Production Way train, I had an uncrowded ride home, since the vast majority of people on the platform were waiting for a train to Surrey. Not that I would have minded a busy (or predominantly brown) car, but a seat is a seat. In fact, the change in demographic may have even been a positive thing, as things seemed a bit more peaceful than they did back in 2009, where I remember witnessing at least one brutal fistfight (between white guys) outside one of the many bars, remember a more aggro vibe to the crowds. It was still a bit noisy, with loud pockets of random whooping emerging from this cluster or that - one friend whooping inviting another friend to whoop (something I personally do not do outside rock concerts, but whatever, it was Hallowe'en). I snapped a few covert photos, which felt a little less risky than trying to exploit the miseries of the DTES, but mostly they came out a blur.
It made for an interesting contrast with my previous walk, in any event. It turns out that I feel more at home, more comfortable, more relaxed walking on Hastings between Carrall and Gore than I do on Granville between Nelson and Georgia. Maybe it's just that it was less crowded?
Somehow I don't think that's it.
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