Rosanne

Remember the show Rosanne? Remember how revolutionary it was, a funny and smart. The episode where Becky farts in front of the entire school, but her date STILL comes and picks her up, in emblazoned in my memory.

schborgsie schnisie

schborgsie schnisie

Love it. I have this urge to rent all of the Muppet movies tonight and watch them back to back. I watched Muppets take Manhattan last night, and got soooo exccited when the Seasemie Street gang made a cameo at the wedding. I had forgotten about that. I love watching the real people interact with the puppets, making the puppets even more real, and the people more puppety.

Bad Genes

My boss said something today about how this scientist, very well-respected she reassured us, has shown that negative thoughts actually re-shape out genetic make-up, that bad thoughts make us sick on a genetic level. So we shouldn't have negative thoughts, is the logic I guess.

Maybe that's what the downtown east side is, the place where all of BC's negative thoughts go, because they have to go somewhere. Mud piles of negative thoughts composting in the streets. Sopping bad thoughts hanging from the trees. As long as they're out of the way.

I can see how positive thinking helped us evolve as a species. That go-get-'em attitude. Evolution's path is probably lined with the corpses of our early Sextons and Woolfes. Still is, I guess. Someone has to think the negative thoughts for a society that refuses to do so. Who gets stuck with that job?

No, thinking positive is important and necessary and keeps things in harmony and is the word of the ancients. As they say in BC, it's all good.

City Council

I went to a city council meeting tonight, the first I've been to in Vancouver, the public forum doesn't count. I sat in the wrong area the whole time, with the press and the signed-up speakers, totally oblivious that I was in the wrong area. I started to get embarrassed and then realized that I was going to city council meetings for fun, and am past being able to get embarrassed for things like that.

Anyway, it was a specific public meeting about building an apartment building in the Vancouver neighborhood of Dunbar, a community curled around the outskirts of the really rick area of Vancouver, Point Grey. Many residents have been there 20, 30, even 60 years, and would never be able to afford to buy a house there now. But many are urban professionals, lawyers, professors, living in two-story post-war houses under A-shaped roofs, lush, BC gardens spilling out of their front yards. The Knox Unitarian Church has a giant plot of land in the neighborhood, and in order to keep itself out of the red (their halls are near-empty on Sundays,) they have agreed to sell a lot of their land to the developer of a proposed apartment complex for seniors. In exchange for that sale, the developer would build an annex for the church on that land.

Many/most of the residents of Dunbar are opposed to this proposed seniors home. Eleven years ago, a committee of residents got together and created a "Dunbar Vision" document that outlines what they wanted and didn't want for their neighborhood, and it was ratified by council.

This seniors home is technically five stories. No building in the area can be higher than three except seniors homes. It is over what that document outlined in terms of density, except in the case of seniors homes. In other words, if that building wasn't a seniors home, there's no way in hell it would ever get approved.

Also, that annex is going to force a very high brick wall onto the periphery of a few peoples back yards. and they want to put a playground on its roof. The whole building is going to block the sun and dwarf many houses along its street.

So what makes it a seniors home? You have to be 55 or over to live there. That's it. There is nothing else special to the design of the building, including the width of doorways for the inevitable wheelchairs, communal space, library, care attendants, a common kitchen, nothing that actually makes it a seniors home. And if you're under 55, you can pay a fine of an undisclosed amount to an unnamed company that will exempt you from that rule.

It was pretty apparent what the residents thought. The developer (the idea that he was foreign skirting around the edges of their comments) was going to sell his condos for $1.5 million each after having found a way to bust through the laughable "Dunbar Vision" and resulting bylaws for that hood.

It's sometimes boring and uncomfortable at public forums such as these (see last post.) But everyone was amazing tonight. One 90 year old woman walked to the podium and gave a tongue in cheek relaying of what the developers had proposed. "There are plenty of bike racks in the plans for the front this so-called seniors building. Because that's what we seniors need. Bike racks."

Another woman spoke, in an accent that hinted at long-ago Britishness, to all of the points in an astoundingly articulate and thoughtful way (she was the chairwoman of the Dunbar Vision Committee for a reason I guess.) She made the point that there is no law or regulation higher than city council that would force a landlord to stick to an age restriction on a building, making that building a seniors home. It happened to another building in Dunbar - they went back to council and asked that that amendment be changed, and council approved it. This developer can do the same.

The woman sitting beside me, wearing a bright pink scrunchy in her hair and pants that looked as if they were made out of upholstery, was nervous all night. She kept crossing out lines of type on a crumpled piece of paper, then writing them back in. Finally her name was called. She had what sounded like an Eastern European accent. She told council that she had watched as traffic became more and more dense in that neighborhood over the years, and how kids were having too many close calls with cars. That was one reason why she didn't want the thing to go through, the high traffic density.

The other was that in order to build it, they were going to tear down her home, and she had no where else to go. She had been on a waiting list for a co-op, the only other thing she could afford in this city, for nine years. Because her two children are different sexes, by law she needs to find a three-bedroom apartment, and that will be impossible. She is a single mom with two kids in Vancouver. She knows her options.

Pink Floyd the Wall LIVE STAGE ADAPTION

Pink Floyd the Wall Live On Stage was so f-ing awesome. It was a Rushmore-esque, jazz-hands interpretation of the mother-blaming, angst-ridden epic. The wall was made of Styrofoam, and got nudged rather than torn down; the Mother lost her voice so silently gestured her part while someone sang her lines backstage. I saw my high school theater exercises incorporated into the choreography. Two "roadies" changed the sets by walking the furniture in front of the actors. Long minutes passed when no one was on stage at all. The school kids did clumsy jazz circles as they sang "Another Brick in the Wall." In other words, it's the best night of musical theatre I've had in a really long time. The only thing about it that wasn't so-bad-it's-good was the band. They totally rocked it, got every note of the album, brought it all to life. That album rocks, the movie doesn;t exactly hold up. But the stage adaptation will live on forever.

Support your municipality

Right now, the City of Vancouver is $50 million in the hole. By law, municipalities aren't allowed to run a deficit, so they have to find a way of balancing the books. The city has been holding a series of public forums for citizens. What they want to know is kind of basic. Would you rather cut services or raise property taxes? They assume that people don't want property taxes raised more than 2%. But this means services are going to have to be trimmed.

Last night, I went to the open forum in my neighbourhood. Yes, that is now how I spend my Friday nights. In a small, back room of the Kensington Community centre, myself, an elderly couple, three men with obvious mental illnesses, a librarian, and a couple of blue-collar types listened to the power point presentation. The talk was conducted by two city councilors, and half way through, a slightly tussled Mayor Gregor Robertson tip toed in. He had biked the 40 minutes up hill from downtown. Basically, the city is $50 mill in the hole, they have trimmed as much "fat" as they could, which accounted for about $20 mil of that. They need to do something. They need to hear from us.

The councilors looked tired and as if they were going throug the motions. Periodically through the power point, various angry citizens, mostly the three representing the mentally ill, interupted to make a point about what the city was doing wrong. The councilors were respectful, nodding their head and asking people to save it for the end.

The power point illustrated for me how hugely important the mechanism of municiple government is. Water, garbage, libraries, community centres. One woman commented that since the recession, and Vancover has been hit bad, demand for community services has risen sharply. People depend on these services when times are rough. But it's when times are rough that the city cuts their funding. The councilor shrugged. She knew, but that's why we were all there - to find a solution. It was a bit depressing that more people wouldn't turn up for something so important. It felt good to be in a forum where our officials HAD to listen to what we had to say, no matter how rambly and whack-job it was.

One man with a pronounced stutter started to give a speech on loopholes in municiple serivce charges, and how they're related to the work of Hobes. I turned around and recognizedhim immediately. It was William Lim, a bird-like man with a white monk's crown of hair and his pant legs bound up in reflector tape. Back when I was a kid, he was a Ph. D student of my step father's, a Chinese poet who would send boxes of real holly to us for Christmas, and leave poems composed in Chinese script on our fridge. By the time he got to the erosion of democracy in his speech he paused, and said "you want me to sit down now, don't you?" Everyone laughed, because we all kind of did.

After writing out my comments, I turned to leave. I realized I had forgot my helmet and turned back to look for it. "Looking for this?" the mayor asked me. "I'm looking to buy a helmet. Is this a good one?"

"Haven't had to test it yet, sir, luckily for me," I replied.

Mayor Robertson went on to tell me that thhis was a typical croud for the open houses they had been putting on, how disappointed he was. He thanked me profusely for coming. I think he was truely appreciative that I wasn't a 65 year old man with a chip on my shoulder.

Mayor Robertson has been enacting real change within city hall, and it seems as if he's been paying a price for that. There's been an old guard in for 50 years now, one that doesn't question where election funds come from, one that turns a blind eye to conflict of interest and suspicious transactions. Vancouver may be one of the most corrept municipalities in Canada, with no real regulation or oversight. The province has approved a look into municiple election reform, which is sorely needed.

I'm starting to have a bit of empathy for city politicians. They opened up the floor for recommendations, no one came, but when they make their decisions, the general public are going to get all up in arms. Why not be a part of the entire process rather than only indulging in anger once the decisions have been made? Mayor Robertson talked about how the province and the feds have cut billions in community servcies and expect the coty to pick up the slack. But the cities don't get any bigger of a piece of the tax pie.

As I walked out, William Lim ran out of the room calling my name. We exchanged numbers. Gerry still had a few of his poetry books from twenty-five years ago, and he wanted them back.

Yay BC!

Gordon Campbell's Liberals hate poor people. And those who work to save people's lives. And people who make art. Oh, and the mentally ill. But we've got a $500 million roof on the sports dome, and the Olympics are in 100 days!

Adrian Mole is 40! Holy crap!

Rainbow Brite

It makes me sad that dimply, five-year-old looking Rainbow Brite has been made over into this. Why do all representation of girls have to be sexualized? Where oh where has our innocence gone?