Recipes for Trouble

Seven years ago, almost to the day, a secretive group of pampered, aristocratic, well-fed elites visited Vancouver. They were there to see if British Columbia had what it takes - unlimited and exorbitant funds, disdain for the poor and a willingness to create a legacy of oppression and injustice - to host the 2010 Winter Olympics.

They were delegates of the International Olympic Committee, the non-transparent body that, through TV rights, corporate sponsorship, bid fees, corruption and extortion, makes billions (tax free) from each Olympics.

I had just founded a ragtag group of artists and activists to protest Vancouver’s Olympic bid: “Billionaires for the Olympics”. We pulled out our fox furs and leopard skin coats, gilded our ski poles, dusted off our champagne glasses. One of us had a white limousine (he used it for his performance art pieces), someone else made a torch that featured billion dollar bills going up in smoke. In our very first action, we closed down an Olympic Parade on Granville Island. We handed out flyers detailing the monetary, social and environmental cost of this 17-day party:

This [Olympic Bid] comes on the heels of massive cutbacks to the social safety net by the BC Liberals. If there is not enough money ofr education, senior citizens and legal aid (to name a few) why is there money for the 2010 Olympics?

In the intervening weeks and months we made many appearances. People joined us - other actors and performers - wielding cigars and fancy hats and monopoly money. We got some good press, but reporters were frustrated that we wouldn’t give real names, always just Ivanka Strumpet, Max Profit, and Mike McMoney. Onlookers looked, and then looked again - were we the obscene subtext of the Games or were we protesters? We were both - mixing up the message, helping people to read between the lines.

I’ve never had so much fun protesting something. There was joy and passion and creativity among us. My brother Roman, a street musician living in the Downtown Eastside, had died just a year earlier. I was doing it for him, I was doing it for us.

Our only regret was that more artists didn’t join us. I guess they couldn’t have foreseen that 90% of arts funding in BC would be cut in 2009, just months before an Olympics for which the government was happy to blow $7 billion. They couldn’t have known (or could they?) that every single artist appearing in the Arts Olympiad would be required to sign a muzzle agreement, saying that “The artist shall at all times refrain from making any negative or derogatory remarks respecting VANOC, the 2010 Winter Olympic and Paralympic Games, the Olympic movement generally, Bell Canada and/or any other sponsor associated with VANOC”.’

In 2007, long after I’d moved away from Vancouver, Billionaires for the Olympics was revived, and appeared at the unveiling of the ugly Olympic Clock that (dis)graces downtown Vancouver. In their press release, they quoted their own Max Profit “I think it’s great that we’re helping you spend all that money,” said Profit. “That money was in danger of going toward social housing and feeding lazy bums! If they don’t like it, let them eat snow!”

In the end, the Billionaires “won.”

Welcome to todays’ opening ceremonies, a spectacle that costs $1000 to attend and that’s just for the cheap seats. Welcome to the streets of Vancouver, where peacable activists get interrogated and harrassed, to a Downtown Eastside where housing for the homeless has never been so inadequate (while upwards of $115 million was spent housing elite athletes), to a highway to Whistler that decimated forests and wetlands, cost over $600 million, and even cost one First Nations elder her life.

If you didn’t or wouldn’t or couldn’t join our protests seven years ago, then protest now. Make your presence known at today’s march in Vancouver. You might even want to gather some friends, don a tuxedo or a ballgown, and chant, “Luge, Not Legal Aid!”

“TAKE BACK OUR CITY” PROTEST MARCH AGAINST THE OLYMPICS
Fri Feb 12 3PM
MEET AT VANCOUVER ART GALLERY, MARCH TO BC PLACE

It’s funny what stands out when you’re traveling. You plan a great meal and it’s the walk to the restaurant you remember. You see great art but somebody’s poetry muttered on a street corner is what touches your soul.

Pleasant and pretty (free coffee and biscotti! Free box lunches and wine on the flight!) Porter Airlines brings me gently into Newark; trains and subway slide me into Manhattan. I walk two blocks to catch the Q Train, asking directions along the way. A middle-aged white dude walks me there. In that short time I find out he’s a former pro skateboarder and he prefers “my” sport, hockey, to “his”, baseball. At one point he gestures grandly ahead and says with awe: The. Empire. State. Building.I follow his gaze and there it is, looming above 33rd Street, self-important, retro.

I’m in New York, visiting my niece The Redheaded Busker. She needs some lovin’ up after an illness in December and a grisly encounter with American healthcare. She’s a little skinnier than I like to see her, grey shadows under her eyes. But still with the dazzling smile.

I dump my stuff at her Brooklyn apartment and then we’re off, back into the subways. As we sit on an outdoor bench waiting for the Q Train she points at the tracks flanked by graffitti and crumbling brick and says, I. Love. This. In the summer it’s full off birds.

That day I see a video installation by Omer Fast at The Whitney Museum that plays hard and fast with the protocols of racism, as well as work from Biennials past, glowing iconic pieces by Jasper Johns, Matthew Barney, Barbra Kruger. The Whitney has and continue to be, my alternative art school, a place that has always taken on gender and race by showcasing artists who dare confront taboos.

We walk streets lined with haute fashion and haute art, eat salmon ceviche, talk. It’s all wonderful. But what stands out from that day is a shoe repair shop deep in the bowels of Lexington & 63rd subway, where The Redhead Busker stows her amp between performances. I go with her to pick it up and am proudly introduced as her aunt (full disclosure: we’re not blood relations but I’ve know her most of her life). I shake hands all round, am warmly welcomed to New York.

While I’m waiting for The Busker as she meets and greets, I decide to have a shoeshine. I climb up into the tall chair and a young Latino man spends ten minutes buffing and polishing, putting his heart and soul into it. By the time he’s done my dull brown boots look like patent leather. He smiles shyly but firmly refuses my money, and The Busker tells me not to force the issue: It’s. A. Gift. Because. You’re. My. Aunt. she says.

Later, as we head home I say to her: I. Feel. Like. We. Scammed. Them. I mean, we’re. not really related. The Busker looks genuinely puzzled. She scans my face to see if I really mean it.

But. Marus. she says emphatically It. Wasn’t. A. Scam. We. Are. Family.

This week I wondered, what are you supposed to do with this feeling art can give you? What if it follows you, to the office, to the classroom? What if it exceeds the space of a page, or a room?

I read a novel this week, A Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore, that exceeded its rectangular papery space each time I picked it up.

“Regret - operatic, oceanic, fathomless - seemed to stretch before her in every direction. No matter which path she took regret would stain her feet and scratch her arms and rain down on her, lightlessly and lifelong…”

This book made me want to write, made me thirst for the river of words that could, if there was time for it, come out of my pen.

I went to an art gallery this week, for the first time in months, saw a show of Micheal Snow’s recent work. One piece, “Condensation - A Love Story” was a projection of a kind of time-lapse of weather in a Nova Scotian cove. Sun flew across field and ocean and then receded into a curtain of fog and rain; light remerged, and revealed the cliffs to have different colours before rain shrouded them again. I felt moved by a natural world so enduring and fine.

I saw a Play, Cloud 9, by Caryl Churchill, that failed to move me despite enormous resources and a cast of highly experienced and talented actors. I saw a one-woman show, Everything I’ve Got by my friend Jess Dobkin, and got to enter into a magical world of unicorns, vaginas, clown cars, and lavish artistic imagining.

Seen any good or bad art lately? How did it make you feel?

Days in the city have been marked by pale, blank skies, temperate weather and a damp chill. A new semester begins, and the hallways of my workplace are feverish with students. No marking yet, so there are tiny bits of time to cook, or read a novel, between writing and festival submissions and the day-to-day admin of a part-time artist’s life.

There is good food in this city, and people to share it with. Izakaya (Japanese tapas) at the freshly-minted Guu on a chilly night with The Librarian. A room full of noise (the wait staff shout greetings and orders in unison), and eager smiling people at long wooden tables. We adore the BC tuna sashimi, the grilled black cod with miso and white wine sauce, and the grilled oysters with spinach, garlic mayonnaise and cheese. A few days later, hole-in-the-wall Mexican with The Tennis Player: pozole soup, enchiladas with mole sauce, and a colourful melange of Christmas and Mexican decorations.

And a tuna salad sandwich, shared with The Queer Organizer as we take a pause from skiiing in the hills near Mansfield, in the fresh, astringent air, is as delicious as anything I’ve eaten all week.

I’ve been making salads, too. A Waldorf-ish quinoa-apple salad; retro mushroom and spinach; a beet-fennel-carrot slaw. I cook wholesomely and earnestly, in this first month of a new decade: sweet potato and chickpea curry; pasta puttanesca. Tomorrow I will make minestrone soup, and later go to an Indian Harvest Dinner for which the Diasporic Filmmaker has requested perogies. I will walk through Trinity-Bellwoods Park to the Czech deli on Queen Street to purchase them, and then I’ll fry them up with onions and serve them with sour cream.

A good week of food and friends, in a troubled world.