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Victoria bands make it to Goolden

 

Woodsmen and Leisure Suit
Alix Goolden Hall

Reviewed by Cara Spangler

The “After Halloween Show” on November 2 at Alix Goolden Hall was in many ways much better than Halloween: no “Monster Mash,” no grimacing at awkward costumes; just a celebration of some of Victoria’s finest young musicians.

Alix Goolden welcomed a mixed ages crowd into its wooden pews, creating a mindful, music-focused energy – a welcome change from standing ear-deep in stereo at Victoria’s typical club venues. The century old organ served as a dramatic backdrop for the spacious stage.

“Most Victoria bands aspire to play at Alix Goolden,” says Oliver Brooks, lead singer of Leisure Suit, already seen performing in the Hall at this year’s Rifflandia festival. But for Woodsmen, Dogwood Line, and Bonfire Blondes, the opportunity was brand new and well deserved.

Woodsmen’s burgeoning musical venture has given the six-piece band an astounding confidence that easily filled the Hall despite their usual wall of dancing fans. This time, the fans stood respectfully in the back, swaying to “Wade in the Dark,” akin to ethereal choir music in the pillowy acoustics.

Before the final song, “I Got Time,” lead singer Maryse Bernard announced the possible last performance of drummer Graeme McDonald, which sent fans dancing to the front of the stage for the second half of the song.

“That was surprising,” says McDonald of the tribute. “I looked down for two seconds and suddenly half the audience…”

“I almost started crying,” Bernard finishes.

Leisure Suit followed Woodsmen, bringing the audience into a dreamy, post-rock meditation. “The Whale Song” turned Alix Goolden into a haunted submarine as Brooks’ slid a drumstick across the strings of his guitar to produce a sonar-like echo.

The four members huddled briefly after the last song of the set, offering to play an impromptu encore of a new song, which received encouraging cheers from the audience.

“It was contentious whether or not to play the last song,” says Brooks after the show. “It’s not done yet.”

Members of Leisure Suit met and wrote their first EP while some of them were still attending St. Michael’s University School. Woodsmen, together for just over a year, are to record this week with Sam Weber of Jets Overhead. Alix Goolden Hall may provide the famous acoustics, but there is no faking the talent of these young and motivated musicians.

Cara Spangler is a writing student at UVIC

How Should a Person be?

How Should A Person Be?
By Sheila Heti
Published by House of Anansi
306 pages, $18.95

Reviewed by Jenny Aitken

The cover of this book describes it as a novel from life, and it is certainly that. The novel opens with the protagonist, Sheila, posing a time-worn question: How should a person be?

In How Should a Person Be, Heti fictionalizes actual events and conversations she and fellow artist friends experience over the course of one year, as she grapples with her identity. A combination of autobiography and fiction, the novel is written as freeform prose, weaving in transcribed conversations and actual emails throughout.

The “novel” begins with the protagonist deciding to divorce her husband after realizing they were together more out of convenience than love: “It was like we were afraid of hurting one another. We never fought or pushed, as if the world was hard enough.” After the divorce, Sheila forms a close friendship with a painter named Margaux, despite neither woman having ever sustained a female friendship.

As Sheila struggles to write a play commissioned by a feminist theatre, she looks to Margaux for inspiration, deciding to tape their conversations. Their discussions focus primarily on art and what it means to be an artist, because Margaux, “is made impatient with conversations about relationships or men.” The narrative follows the two women, as they spend their days working in their shared studio, and their nights drinking in hopes of finding inspiration at the bottom of the glass.

Sheila feels worthless in her inability to write and takes on a sadistic lover named Israel, despite knowing – in fact, largely because – he wants nothing from her but sex. She finally ends the relationship by purposefully degrading herself to the point that neither of them could ever feel sexual desire towards the other.

Desiring to create a work of beauty, despite her writer’s block, Sheila begins working as a shampoo girl at a hair salon, where she revels in the opportunity to work at a job where she feels competent. Sheila decides to use her Margaux recordings as source material, which leads to an argument between the friends. Unequipped to deal with the conflict, Sheila succumbs to her usual avoidance patterns by taking off to New York City, leaving the broken friendship behind. Sheila comes to realize, “Margaux was not like the stars in the sky. There was only one Margaux – not Margaux’s scattered everywhere through the darkness.” This realization leads to her return to Toronto, where she fights, and succeeds, at re-establishing their friendship.

Although the use of transcribed conversations added to the novel’s raw, confessional feeling, the lack of structure or clear narrative arc made it seem disjointed and scattered. There were often long segments that failed to move the action forward, including several pages spent describing a nightmare, and a ten-page transcription of a conversation between Sheila and the man at a copy store.
Nonetheless, this novel is unabashed and quirky, and although Sheila realizes the impossibility of determining how a person should be, she discovers – along with the reader – that the process of asking is more important than any answer. As for her own life, it dawns on her, “I made what I could with what I had.”

Jenny Aitken is a regular reviewer for the Coastal Spectator

 

Scant Magic Lights Midnight’s Children

Midnight’s Children
Directed by Deepha Mehta
Screenplay by Salman Rushdie and Deepa Mehta
Preview: Odeon Theatre, Nov. 1, 2012

Reviewed by Lynne Van Luven

I’ve always said that Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie’s 1981 book about India’s independence, is the best novel the author has ever written. So you’d expect me to come away from the movie unimpressed, wouldn’t you? Because the book is always superior to the movie?

I was eager to see the movie and wanted to love it. Midnight’s Children is lovely to look at, studded with accomplished Bollywood actors and moments of humour and pathos. But, after what felt like a very long time, I left the theatre feeling somehow manipulated, as if I’d seen a sanitized and too-carefully-handled version of Rushdie’s magic realism. The movie captured the events of the novel but recreated none of its spirit and power.

Perhaps Mehta and Rushdie tried too hard or were too enamoured of each other’s reputation? Perhaps the book’s sprawling timeline is too difficult to manage as a movie? But where the novel manages to capture the teeming vitality of India, of its independence from Britain and the partition that followed, the movie feels as shackled to linear narrative (despite Rushdie’s voiceover) as the book’s characters are “harnessed to history.”

The children born on August 15, 1947, at the stroke of India’s independence, have special powers, and they are the promise of the “new India’s future.” As current events in Pakistan and Bangladesh daily reinforce, that legacy has gone awry. At the heart of the movie lies the “switched at birth” trope: Nurse Mary (played by Seema Biswas) impulsively follows her activist lover’s dictum (“Let the rich become poor and the poor become rich”). She switches wrist tags on the heir of a bourgeois couple with those of the son of an itinerant street musician. So the poor child Saleem “steals the life” of the rich-born Shiva. Saleem (Satya Bhaba) grows up in comfort while Shiva (Siddharth Narayan) rages against his poverty and becomes an acclaimed soldier. Neither boy learns of the swap for many years, but it is Saleem’s magic gift – his ability to summon his midnight-born peers with a snort of his gigantic proboscis – that lifts the show from its torpor.

I’m not saying you shouldn’t see the movie – Zaib Shaikh from Little Mosque on the Prairie has a cameo role – but I won’t leap up and down and urge you to go. It’s not bad, and some might find it educational, a cross between a Knowledge Network feature and a Merchant-Ivory film.

Cenote auctions art to resist Enbridge

Art Against Enbridge 2
Cenote Restaurant and Lounge,
768 Yates Street

Reviewed by Julian Gunn

Last Friday night, my friend Beet and I attended Art Against Enbridge 2, a benefit art auction for the Unis’tot’en Action Camp and the Forest Action Network, hosted by Cenote Restaurant and Lounge.

Our first problem of the evening was finding Cenote. Google Maps put it at the site of the former Office lounge in the Dalton hotel, but Google Maps lied. Finally, we ventured into the hotel lobby, where we found a grizzled concierge who had never heard of the place but obligingly looked it up on his computer.

Cenote is a below-decks lounge with a relaxed DIY feel. (It’s the former Whitebird Lounge, if that helps. And the polenta fries are supposed to be great.) Three hosts greeted us warmly at the door and took our suggested donations. Beet and I captured a table in the back.

Presently, the other two members of our party arrived—Beet’s boyfriend S. and his friend X. They had just come from an intervention and were feeling a little shaky. Cenote didn’t have a fixed drinks menu. Instead, X. described the uplifted mood she wanted her drink to embody, and our server brought her a mojito. Then we approached the art.

Artists at all levels of experience—from student to autodidact to professional—had donated pieces. Most of the works either celebrated the natural world or measured the depredations of industry, and were realistic in approach. This wasn’t a show of academic defiance, technical play or formal rupture, but of passion and craft—sometimes mastered, sometimes still in progress.

I liked Eli McGinty’s “The Scourge Heads Westwards,” with its Cthulhu-Illuminati vibe. Alongside were traditionally rendered West Coast works by Wes Walkus and Blake Norman Lepine; a graceful drip watercolour by Judy Kozler; and a scattering of other media, including my favourite thing ever: purple fairy wings by Amira Abdel-Malek. Abdel-Malek has been organizing an art group at Camosun College using reclaimed materials. Beet bid on a forest print and Amira’s wings. I bid on a small print, Neurozyme, by Mokii Glyphix, with a soft bronze sheen and a pattern both organic and geometrical.

Every so often the organizers stepped up, cheerfully exhorted us to get our bids in, and gave away more door prizes. Over the evening, they closed the auction one wall at a time, like the Sybil burning her scrolls.

By ten-thirty, the event was winding down. I wandered up to check our bids. Beet did not win the print, but she won the wings. Someone named Martin, my new arch-nemesis, outbid me on everything. When I turned to see if Beet was ready to go, she was carefully affixing the wings to her head.

“Do I look like some kind of demented rabbit?” she asked eagerly.

“No-o…” said her boyfriend. “Just a rabbit.”

It seemed fitting. The grassroots improvisations of artists and activists, both foolish and sublime, have sustained us for a long time. This is the second Art Against Enbridge that Cenote has hosted, and we’re looking forward to the third. Especially now that we know how to find it.

Julian Gunn is a Victoria writer completing his master’s degree in English

Lovely listening but no easy answers

 

 

 

Terra Hazelton and Her Easy Answers
Herman’s Jazz Club October 26, 8:00 pm
Terra Hazelton, vocals
Nathan Hiltz, ukelele, guitar
Kelby McNair, drums
Bruce Meeko, bass
Patrick Boyle, trumpet

Reviewed by Jennifer Messelink

We sometimes forget what a vast country Canada is, but Terra Hazelton reminded us how far she had to come from Toronto, in her Ford Escort, to get here, to Herman’s Jazz Club. Hazelton, along with her musical partner Nathan Hiltz and local musicians Kelby McNair, Bruce Meeko and Patrick Boyle, performed a fabulous selection of 1920s jazz combined with distinct expressions of Canadian culture.

The multi-talented Hazelton is described by some as a Renaissance woman; she is a Canadian singer, Genie-nominated actress, and radio personality originally from B.C. Now a staple on the Toronto jazz scene, she leads her own band ‘Terra Hazelton and Her Easy Answers.” Victoria was the final stop on tour to promote her new recording “That’s All,” a trio album recorded live off the floor, and as she explained, the most sentimental recording she has done.

This is for all the broken hearts out there.

Hazelton is at home when singing love songs. Her powerful, sweet and growly vocal range perfectly combines old-school jazz with a modern cynicism. Speaking of her repertoire of love songs, she explained, “I can’t afford therapy, so I do this.” The first song of the evening “I’m Confessing,” by Louis Armstrong began with Nathan Hiltz on the ukelele, accompanied by an easy drums and walking bass. The ukelele was a popular standard instrument during the jazz age, and Hiltz played it with style and depth. Throughout the 1920s, the ukelele was popular with musicians and amateur players, higher pitched than the guitar, less resonant but with a light, transparent sound. Hiltz moved easily to the guitar on the popular songs “You’re Driving Me Crazy, and “Trouble in Mine.” The ensemble (who had never played together before Friday) communicated playfully with the audience and each other.

Hazelton’s original song “There’s a Cry,” based on the Canadian poet Robert Service’s poem “The Lure of Little Voices,” expressed her Canadian voice. The solo guitar, and folk-like character, was distinctly Canadian, but the dissonance and jazzy chords at the end were unique to this ensemble. She spoke highly of the next song “Keeping You in Mind,” written by Mary Margaret O’Hara, an established musician, songwriter and sister of SCTV cast member Catherine O’Hara.

Humorous and sarcastic with a sweet disposition, Hazelton is at ease performing and fun to watch. Throughout the evening she expressed her hatred of love, in a tone that was a bit sweet and a bit salty. She asked if anyone in the audience was in love and was shocked when some answered yes; allegedly, Torontonians don’t believe in love. The Ballad “Am I Blue?” moves through minor keys to end with a bright timbre on a major chord. Does Hazelton really hate love? The repertoire she chose said it all. Although she confessed that she is “not a therapist, just a sad, sad girl,” I think that, like the rest of us, she would rather have heartbreak than nothing.

Jennifer Messelink is a Victoria writer

 

 

Down With The Downward Dog!

By Jenny Aitken

No. I don’t do yoga. Yes. I am aware that it is good for you, and wow it can even be done in warm temperatures, how neat, but I am also aware that I will spend the entire time in fear of farting and trying not to laugh at the symphony of mouth breathers. That’s deep breathing, you say; it’s good for you. So are brussel sprouts, but you don’t see me trying to shove them down your throat. My friends do yoga, and I swear for every minute they spend in warrior pose, they spend five minutes bragging about it to me after. My whole body just feels so loose right now. I don’t really know what that feels like, but it seems slightly terrifying.

As for the “yoga clothes,” it would be nice to be able to walk into a store like Lululemon without the peppy preaching of a sales employee, or random enlightened yogi, on the benefits of ooommmming and aaahhhing. All I want is a tank top that doesn’t require me to wear a bra, and a pair of those spandex pants that actually make me look like I have a butt. Instead, I am besieged with upbeat life lessons on the importance of stretching. I am reminded to take a few minutes out of my day to breathe. Pretty sure I do that all day, every day. It’s called being alive.

But yoga is s relaxing, it soothes the mind.

Personally, I don’t find it soothing watching people bend their spandex-clad bodies into contortionist pretzels while I struggle to even touch my toes. The only soothing part comes at the very end, when they just let you lie there and the instructor uses that wispy voice and says things like, “Feel your body sink, sink, sink into your mat.” But, why should I suffer through 50 minutes of discomfort and boredom to get there? It’s called lying on my bed. Done.

Jenny Aitken is third-year writing student at UVIC

 

Exploring Vancouver: The Architectural Guide

Exploring Vancouver: The Architectural Guide
By Harold Kalman and Robin Ward
Photographs by John Roaf
Douglas & McIntyre, 336 pages, $24.95

Reviewed by Candace Fertile

Exploring Vancouver: The Architectural Guide is a highly readable and informative guide to Vancouver’s buildings, both old and new. And while the city has not been known for its architecture, except perhaps the Vancouver Special, a two-story, basement-less house put up by the block in the seventies because of its low cost, Harold Kalman and Robin Ward manage to integrate Vancouver’s buildings with its history in an engaging way. And the authors do not shy away from difficult topics, such as racism and homelessness.

A brief introduction guides readers into the book. The authors indicate their intention for their work: “Exploring Vancouver reveals the architecture and urbanism of the city, its history and the people and the society that made it.” And they have excelled at this task. The book is arranged into 14 chapters by location, and each building has a short explanation and a colour photograph. Each chapter includes a map and a suggested route to take advantage of the information within the pages. And the chapters are letter- and colour-coded to make navigating the book about as easy as possible.

I was surprised to learn that Vancouver is the only major North American city without a freeway through it. In 1967, the Strathcona Freeway plan was blocked, thus saving the neighbourhoods of Chinatown and Gastown, which the freeway would have cut through. The lack of a freeway contributes to an emphasis on livable housing density, “Vancouverism,” as the ideology is known and admired internationally. The authors are clearly in love with their subject and present Vancouver as a model for the world, with its eco-friendly attitude and residential downtown. What doesn’t come up much is the traffic problem, which is one of the worst in North America.

For people who want to know what they are looking at while on a walk, this book is splendid: it works well for the Vancouverite or the visitor or the armchair traveller. Strolling around is one of the most pleasant pastimes in a city that is relatively safe, clean, and ice-free. Reading about the city is fun as this book has a lively and crisp tone. Anyone familiar with Vancouver will find iconic buildings, such as the Europe Hotel at 43 Powell with its flatiron design and the Marine Building at 355 Burrard with its gorgeous Art Deco features, along with newer buildings such as One Wall Centre at 938 Nelson with its controversial two-tone glass compromise in its 48 towers and the Olympic Village at False Creek, described in a clear, no-nonsense fashion. I will definitely take this book with me whenever I go to Vancouver and will explore some of the sights with attention.

The authors have scoured the city for buildings to include, from the soaring towers of downtown and the West End to the old Woodward’s store to the mansions of Shaughnessy and numerous other private dwellings of all sizes. Bridges are included. Skytrain stations are also included. The scope extends as far as Richmond, New Westminster, and Burnaby. The breadth is remarkable. It’s no surprise that the book is endorsed by the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada.

And to round out the informative value of the volume, the authors include a glossary, a list of books for further reading, and a detailed index. Put all that on a high quality paper with sewn in signatures, and the result is a beautiful, durable – and affordable – book. And that’s kind of ironic. As the authors note, Vancouver is an extremely “livable” city but only for those who can afford the high cost of housing.

Candace Fertile is a contributing editor of The Coastal Spectator and teaches English at Camosun College

 

Wise Food for Urbanite Thought

Digging the City: An Urban Agriculture Manifesto
By Rhona McAdam.
Rocky Mountain Books, 168 pp., $16.95.

Reviewed by Susan Hawkins

Rapidly increasing urbanization is a global phenomenon that increasingly challenges human society. In Digging the City: An Urban Agriculture Manifesto, Rhona McAdam takes a critical step toward a new “urban agriculture manifesto” by placing the urban human/environmental interaction at the center of new attempts to deal with the current urban food dilemma. McAdam argues that the current “culture” of imported food has resulted in the decimation of the once thriving, sustainable, and local farming industry. This has resulted in the “majority of us having no idea what the ecological consequences of our food choices are.” To remedy this, McAdam calls for a “new food ethic,” the proliferation of small, sustainable, local, urban food producing gardens, and a return to the “virtuous cycle” of producing the food we eat.

Between tending her small Victoria garden and exchanging garden tips with her neighbourhood gardening collective, McAdam travels, researches, and writes on growing urban habitation and the current global food crisis. McAdam recounts her personal journey of discovery of the “good food” and “slow food” movement and her subsequent training in ‘Sustainable Local Food’ from St. Lawrence College. She reports on current food-safety issues, describing the historical sources and the issues around food production. As well, McAdam spotlights such new directions in the field as urban allotment gardens, edible landscaping, kitchen gardens, urban fish farms, meatless Mondays, and vertical farming, while providing an insightful analysis of the negative environmental consequences of the mega-agro industry.

Throughout, she is both thoughtful and informative, as evidenced in her final chapter, The Future of Urban Agriculture, in which she urges us to look beyond the immediate and envision “the future of food secure cities – and food production in general.”

You don’t need to be a “Guerrilla Gardener” to enjoy reading Digging the City. The book is appealing for its personal narrative, informative analysis, and for its contribution to the growing literature on the sustainable food movement that seeks to change the way we eat.

Susan Hawkins is completing her History in Art PhD and is a trained gardener

New novels launched with suitable enthusiasm

Bill Gaston and Marjorie Celona

A Reading Hosted by Penguin Canada and Munro’s Books

Wednesday, October 17/12, Bard and Banker

Attended by Garth Martens

Novelists Marjorie Celona and Bill Gaston were in high cheer at the launch for their respective books, Celona’s debut novel Y and Gaston’s latest achievement The World. Relegated to the heat-lamped Hobbit hole upstairs, one hundred bodies crammed intimately together on benches, wicker chairs and between shelves of books, with pints in steady supply and higher demand. If a packed house is a recipe for an anxious sweat, the claustrophobic constraint of the venue added an uncommon ebullience to the usual wafty social cocktail that precedes such events, with every effervescent embrace an affirmation of tribal reliance.

The readings were brilliant as expected, beginning first with Celona, an emerging astonishment who flew in from Banff that morning, followed by local treasure Bill “The White Bear” Gaston, typically self-effacing in unshaven assemblé. Whether from the unrelenting heat lamp or the friction of flawlessly tempered prose, even the bodies lollygagging on the patio were unbuttoning their varied cardigans, dismantling their paisley silks, each set of thick-rimmed glasses sliding from the bridge of the nose, the product-rifled coifs losing their curated weave. Verily, the autocracies of style disunited in sweat.

Following the readings, of course the rabble queued, blank pages folded open, eager for a bit of chat or the commodified stamp of an author autograph, no one saying what everyone was thinking: if you back the right horse you can supplement your retirement fund on Ebay, or at least pay the rent this winter. The hooch was bankrolled by Penguin Canada, so I ordered another pint, its sedimental froth
churning like butter on the tongue. A good piss up, as my uncle might say. And two books that deserve it.

As the night staggered to an end, Gaston offered me a plate of fries, half-eaten. “Don’t take it if it’s gross,” he said, pointing to his mouth. “You can have half of the burger too, if you want it.” I took the fries. As Bill shambled to the bathroom, I picked at the plate with a gamesome friend, wondering when Bill’s partner Dede Crane might turn, mid-conversation, to find an alien person eating from her
husband’s plate. When we exceeded the budget for the liquor, the assemblage began to rotate and disperse. The moon looked like getting out of there. I kicked it to the street with a pair of books, a full belly, and a great night put to rest.

Garth Martens has an MFA in Poetry from the University of Victoria. He is a former member of the poetry editorial board at The Malahat Review. His first book of poems, Motive of Machines, will appear in spring of 2014 with House of Anansi Press.

The Hungry Heart Motel: Where Guests Die of Laughter

The Mystery of the Hungry Heart Motel
Written and performed by Chris Wilson and Peter Carlone
Phoenix Theatre, 8 p.m. Until Oct. 20

The comedy pair Peter N’ Chris, UVic alumni Peter Carlone and Chris Wilson, take audiences for an energetic ride in The Mystery of the Hungry Heart Motel. The play is a creepy Nancy and Drew murder romp, where two actors take turns being possessed by hilarious characters.

A self-conscious satire where slow-motion murder makes you guffaw and blood shoots out in shiny confetti, The Hungry Heart Motel spoofs horror classics like Psycho and The Shining. One can’t help cracking up at Chris’s Jack Nicholson impressions and Peter’s regrets about hiding from the murderer in a frozen maze. It’s clever, witty, and plays on larger-than-life archetypes.

Few props haunt the stage, but I never missed them. There’s an interactive, improvisational feel as the actors morph into human showerheads or break out into spontaneous sound effects. Clearly, the play is well choreographed. Peter and Chris are in perfect synch from their Sesame Street-style boy band moves to a Scooby Doo-inspired chase scene that knocked my socks off. Jinkies!

This play knows it’s a play as characters comment casually on backstory and seem aware of how ambient sounds heighten their fear. The foggy void on stage makes space for the limitless imagination. We even get to see the Heebie Jeebies, Chris’ fears personified, in a dynamic use of lighting and acting. The plot almost takes a back seat to the characters who explore the stage together like an overactive imagination. Still, just when we think we know where the road is curving, the plot takes a sharp, three-dimensional jump to the right.

There’s something for everyone in the show: physical comedy for some and wordplay for others. The snappy dialogue had me feeling I was part of a looped laugh track. I giggled like a little girl throughout. But I’m not totally convinced that the old codger/storyteller needed to lead us into the creepy tale. Yes, he sets the tone and invites us to follow, adding layers during a physical rewind of the story later, but the play could have revved up without him. However, the pained painter, who feels more alive than ever while dying, made the play for me.

The title track from Bruce Springsteen bursts in and out, a thematic trigger for murder. It will haunt you for hours later! Murderer and victims all have a hungry heart in one way or another, even if it’s just for clean bedsheets. My main complaint is I didn’t get to clap enough at the end. This show left me hungry for more Peter n’ Chris.

Leah Callen is a fourth-year writing student