Vulcan drug dealers (Sunday Feb 11 2007)

Saturday daytime started with a bit of a meander. Sunny, so we went down to Coal Harbour, one of Sarah's prospects for our neighbourhood when we have to leave this apartment. I wasn't too sold on it. It's a bit Torquay Seafront; some of the tower blocks there are suspiciously cheap-looking. The rule of thumb appears to be: the more glass there is, the newer/shinier/richer/more salubrious it is. There are a few glassy-looking buildings, but there's quite a lot of concrete in evidence, with the real reflective stuff kicking in a couple of streets inland. (I'd like to mention at this point that a block not far from where we are now, on Haro Street, features balcony walls stained in unpleasant shades of green. Either moss has a serious grip on this building, or, I dunno, Vulcan drug dealers are stabbing one another to death on every floor.)

Anyway, Coal Harbour has a lot of green space, a gorgeous view of the north waters, and close access to Stanley Island, but... it doesn't grab me. Not sure why. I suppose it's because there aren't many shops there, and I feel it's a bit much to have to live in a slightly shabby apartment and go down to your local community centre with its faded stucco and one-storey lack of chic, and all the while there are billion-dollar yachts bobbing offensively in the water a few hundred yards away. Coal Harbour Marina is absolutely crammed with sleek boats.

And some not-so-sleek, I grant you:



Bah. I hate the rich. To reassure me on the idea that the rich know nothing about art, Coal Harbour also features plenty of modern sculpture. Here's an example:



Baba Yaga's hut as never seen before - and in aluminium, too! Meanwhile, here's a seafront restaurant's front door sign:



And to make absolutely sure that no incautious rich people drown, how about this for a warning sign:



I can see this being an imposing statement of danger to something the height of a chicken (or a small bunny, I suppose) but really.

Visible from a block inland: the city's pinkest building. Well, there's probably a pinker self-storage place (for some reason these are always garishly-painted, presumably to terrorise would-be thiefs into going off to burgle some less day-glo property (1)) but this is the pinkest apartment block:



And since everyone loves seaplanes - ridiculous hybrids and bad safety records waiting to happen as they may be - here is a picture of a seaplane jetty:



And now: artism!

You often heard it said, usually by grumpy musicians, that "writing about music is like dancing about architecture", the implication being that neither is possible, the extended theory being that music is unreviewable. I read a few years back about a modern dance piece commissioned to celebrate a major London landmark, so as far as I'm concerned you can't take that cliche as gospel. On the other hand, even longer ago, I read an autobiography where a music critic had decided that it was so true that writing about music was impossible that he had actually taken to composing musical pieces as critiques of other pieces. I'll repeat that, as it's a bit difficult to believe: he had, for example, written a piece for the violin which represented his feedback on someone else's violin music.

Question: what the hell does this have to do with anything, Panda? Answer: It sets up my next few paragraphs, as I write about dance, specifically "Orientik/Portrait", a dance show by Co. ERASGA at the Shadbolt Centre for the Arts on Saturday night.

After our trog around Coal Harbour, we trogged out to the supermarket on the Skytrain, trogged back, and then trogged once more to Metropolis at Metrotown. You'll remember that last weekend this was hosting Canadian Idol. Free of an infestation of goths and singer-songwriters (and permutations thereof), the mall was slightly less crowded. We got food in a bit of a hurry, and then bussed ourselves up to the Shadbolt on the 144. We were half an hour early so we explored a bit. Sarah was pleased to find that the Centre has an entire wall dedicated to photos and bios of the resident staff, musicians, and other artistic types. Meanwhile I stood in line, pleased to find that the woman in front of me was about six foot three and wearing a long skirt. I have to write about Vancouver's general and woeful lack of skirts sometime soon. But soon enough I was distracted by Sarah's return (she was also wearing a long skirt) and the theatre doors opened.

When we were here last September (blog TARDIS coming soon, I promise) we saw a fantastic one-woman dance show at the Vancouver Festival Fringe. This show: not quite as good. The positives first.

I'm a big fan of taiko drumming; it's a literally heartstopping experience. It's actually quite thrilling to find your pulse being grabbed and controlled by someone pummelling a drum the size of your lounge. The physical aspect of taiko drumming is thrilling too, both in the highly-ornamented shapes being thrown by the solo drummers, and the general level of fitness implied by that amount of drumming. And it was a female drummer tonight. Female pianist, too, playing some Khatchaturian piano pieces amongst others. As for the dancers: there were two, one male Asian, one female Canadian. I have a theory that this let them represent the experience of being Japanese/Canadian by separately embodying the two conflicting heritages of a single person. If so then this is clever, and I'd hope it was the case as it's the kind of thing that most other artforms would find it impossible to present. Dance, being generally a pretty symbolic thing, is the ideal place for additional symbolism. (Buy into one, symbolise one free.)

But symbolism is its own punishment. The downside of almost all modern dance is that if you don't get it, you're basically watching a lengthy and slightly strange-looking workout, and it's not often that they're good enough to do it to a recognisable tune. Non-narrative dance annoys me - which is why I get bored during dance breaks in musicals. Yeah, OK, so twenty people are dancing. So bloody what. They have to be dancing *really, really well* for me to care. Ideally, they have to be telling a story, and not in a patronisingly obvious way. But, it gets worse. Not only do I demand a story, I demand a self-decoding story. This is why I detest ballet; you have to buy into the conventions of ballet, wherein a particular step is deemed to mean some specific thing, a thing which is rarely obvious from the music nor from the acting. Watching a ballet piece is like watching a skate-dance routine at the Olympics; it has to push a bunch of standard buttons, and the rest is filler. I'm just not interested. And I never will be. What interests me is dance where the piece comes with its own dictionary; the title of the piece and the interaction of the dancer with the music combine with my own intelligence and ongoing thought processes to give me one or more possible meanings, which I can ponder as the dance progresses. At its best this gives me a considerable rush during the piece, plus a postmortem period in which my brain is still ticking over plenty of ideas.

For Orientik/Portrait... well, the title is what put me onto my initial theory about duality, and as for the individual pieces, I'm pretty sure there was something about a Japanese warrior spirit, something about a tea ceremony (with a couple of butterflies paying a visit), and something about Hiroshima and Nagasaki (a suspicion enhanced by that piece of music dating from 1946). And as far as I can say that I understood these, I liked them. The dancers' physical skills were certainly on point. However, there was also a lot of noisy cymbal-smashing towards the end which didn't seem to signify anything much. It's a shame, and it may well be because I know some key points of Japanese history but hardly anything about Canada, and certainly nothing about being a Japanese immigrant to Canada. Perhaps the rest of the audience lapped it up on those terms, although the comments we overheard as the lights came up and the 90-odd people in the theatre went wild were mostly to do with the dancers' physical prowess, rather than their work's deeply symbolic (or cymbalic) meaning.

So I dunno. Which is hardly an overwhelmingly intellectual conclusion, but if you wanted one of those you should have read Post-Modern Culture. There's actually a course on offer to improve one's writing about dance. Looks expensive, but as Sarah points out, it includes a lot. And as you can tell, I probably need it. For one thing, I'm still at the stage where the pretentiousness of a group's name directly affects my enjoyment of the show. "Co.ERASGA" indeed.

After all of that high-falutin' palaver, I can't find much to say about Sunday. There follows an important announcement: don't go to the Kirin Mandarin Restaurant on Alberni and order crispy rice with three kinds of meat. What I got was a bowl of extremely crispy rice which was immediately drowned in a second bowl of hot water and (get this for three kinds of meat) prawn, ham, and chicken. Ham. HAM!!!! Sarah says my face was a picture. It was pretty grim. I finished it; probably very healthy for me, but I tell you, thin slices of chicken look and taste unappetising as hell when floating in hot water. And did I say HAM? And peas. Pauvre panda! Sarah's pork dish didn't fare much better when put through the Kirin Unlikelihood Filter... it came shredded and mixed in with a large plate of hitherto-unmentioned noodles. Actually I ate more than she did. Pauvre lapin!

She did get a cheap MP3 player earlier in the day, though, as her reward for using the treadmill in the Electra's exercise room, and as an incentive for using it some more. Ever such an athletic rabbit...

We went to a Compline service in the evening. Compline is one of the traditional, and I mean back in Brother Cadfael's day traditional, services of the Christian day. The modern-day version is, I suppose, a way of closing down on the day, meditating, chilling out, and preparing for an early night. (I guess this last bit because there was no midnight service, which I'm sure Cadfael would have attended.) So we sat in the church, and we listened. It's a little silly to say, but I was expecting twenty monks in big robes with hoods to sing the chants. Instead there were four women. Sarah had a few bones to pick regarding their choice of music - apparently there was some Thomas Tallis in there, which is anachronistic but tolerable, and also some Purcell-type stuff with an organ accompaniment and harmony and everything, which is much less so. Quite restful in its way - its way being religious, so ultimately not for us.

And aside from using our 2-cents-a-minute calling card to contact numerous surprised people in England and Ireland, that was Sunday. Another weekend comes crashing to an end, and work starts again tomorrow. Cheers, all.



(1) A little piece of nostalgia: back in Littlehampton there was a secure self-storage place advertising itself just up the road from us, in Wick. For anyone who hasn't been there, Litlehampton is commonly known as LA - as in "Little'Ampton" - which would make Wick the equivalent of South Central. I had wondered just why anyone would put their valuable property into storage in Wick, but then it occurred to me that a self-storage place in Wick advertising itself as secure must be very secure indeed.