Creature of the Shade

we are the folk

Folk music festivals do change, but it's easy to imagine they don't.  Going to the Vancouver Folk Music Festival last weekend, I told myself I wanted to check out new music, but I really wanted the sound of my own memories.  Not to hear exact songs that I knew, but even better, new songs that sounded exactly like hearing a new song for the first time 30 years ago.

So I steered away from the big dancing stages with their rockish worldish electro folk, which were all in glaring direct sun anyway.  The shade was set aside for the old fashioned stuff:  men and women who dared to get onstage with nothing but a guitar.  Nothing today comes closer to the cultural milieu of my childhood -- my memory's conflaton of art fairs and protest concerts.  And while the politics could be sentimental at times, I knew without a doubt that if things got rough, I'd want to be with these people.  I would rather endure their earnest impracticality than the efficiency of their enemies.

Jericho Beach is the perfect site.  A north-facing beach, gentle in the summer, it looks across English Bay at the towers of downtown Vancouver, and above them the impossibly sheer mountains of the north shore, the beginning of a thinly inhabited glacier-and-fjord country that extends up the coast to Alaska.  Gazing out on the water, most of inhabited North America is behind us.  With home at our backs, we can all feel like exiles, even the Canadians, as we sing of our lost loves, distant battles, and dreams as persistent as weeds.

great wet hand

Autumn in Vancouver won't pose for a photo.  No image will capture how rapidly and firmly the day closes upon us, like the hand of someone who has enjoyed the summertime play of tiny people in its palm, then suddenly tires of them.  No image will show you how the day loses all its dimensions at once:  shorter, of course, yet also randomly darker at midday.  I can't show you that mid-afternoon moment when seventeen layers of gray cloud converge right above us, plunging us into near-darkness that might be an eclipse.  (For I have been through real eclipses from under layers of cloud, and the effect is much the same.)  Nor can I render the joy of the "relative sunbreak", when twelve of seventeen layers give way, yielding what seems like a burst of white light, and people look up, breathe deeply, loosen their scarves. 

There is such consolation in this great, wet hand.  We can curl up in it, even as it closes upon is.  The clouds are blankets, wrapping us close, keeping us warm.  Thus wrapped on all sides, we walk comfortably in shirtsleeves under light but solid raincoats, frail exoskeletal creatures of the damp.

These diminishing days are so close, so warm that the rare total sunbreak is not quite good news, any more then childbirth is for a fetus.  In a moment, it is impossibly bright and dramatically colder.  Over and over we get this message: Brightness = cold.  To stay warm, stay with the fleeing darkness.

skyline as still life

Amid the vertical rush of spectacle that is Vancouver, may I praise the most banal, predictable, and deeply reassuring Prominent Landmark?

To see it, look out my window and to the right.

Those are the green-glass towers of Yaletown in the foreground, then Vancouver's great livingroom of a waterway, False Creek.  And between False Creek and the layers of city beyond, a little hard pea between the mattresses.

Yes, it's much less appealing from up close.  But it is what it is:  Science World, Vancouver's perfectly adequate and predictable place where "young people of all ages" can taste the thrill of scientific learning.  Most important, it has one of those essential science-museum installations out front:  A  sculpture in which shiny balls roll about eternally in cleverly designed channels and bowls. 

Those red and pink banners beneath the dome have pictures of happy people and giant imperatives like "Discover!" and "Create!"  I often pause on the barren colonnade beneath one such enormous 9-year-old girl, to watch the sun set over downtown.  It's always a peaceful scene there, long after closing; the roar of the city fades to the oceanic, so that all I really hear are the elevated trains whooshing past, and the seagulls, and the commands of rowing-team captains far out on the water, and the gentle bump-and-ding of the balls in their certain Newtonian paths.  There are few better places to perceive that all's for the best in this best of all possible worlds, where even modernist architecture has its God-given place.

But I enjoy Science World more from further away, as I suspect many Vancouverites do.  It sits comfortably in all kinds of urban compositions, the perfect roundness that throws perfect squareness out of line.  With Science World on the table, a skyline can become a still life.

 

in which i meet the resident artist

So the other day, I went looking for the arts in Vancouver. Visual arts, at least. So I figured, start at the main museum.

There are two, and the apartheid they imply is at once a little spooky. There's a world class museum of this region's aboriginal arts, known as the UBC Museum of Anthropology, which curates not just pre-contact cultural artefacts but also the arts of Aboriginal descendants.  The UBC museum is a great place, and more about it later.

(Still, did I get that right? If you're anglo, your work is art, but if you're of aboriginal descent, your work is anthropology?)   
 

Then, as the central all-purpose art museum of the city, there's the Vancouver Art Gallery.  It certainly looks like the official city museum:  A bannered historic building on a central square, facing a park, complete with a dramatic sweeping stairway leading to a permanently locked door, and sign telling you to enter around on the side.  Looks like the major museum to me.

 

What's here? Four floors, of which three are visiting exhibitions. Currently, we have one floor of Table Scraps from Great Museums of Europe (currently Rodin, whose method of casting threw off lots of table scraps on the way to each Great Work). Then, we have two floors of Transgressive Postmodern Terminal Hipness, also mostly from Europe. Then, on the top floor, we have the permanent collection and the the sole exhibit area devoted to British Columbia artists.

 

It consists of one artist: Emily Carr. If you come looking for some sense of the range and diversity in the history of BC arts (as opposed to anthroplogies!), this appears to be it. And if you look around the rest of the arts scene, well, if it isn't Emily Carr, then it probably graduated from Emily Carr Institute, the leading local art school. Her name is a little like the name Washington in America; so ubiquitous that it's hard to focus on what if anything it means.

I like Emily Carr. Certainly, her biography appeals, perhaps because it is almost stereotypical for a great artist: a family ignorant of the arts, financial and health struggles, belated recognition, and above all a searing lifelong solitude. Photographs of her as an old woman, an obviously prickly character living in a camper in the rainforest, could almost have been Georgia O'Keeffe -- just subtract money, and add water.

Her hard-textured expressionist landscapes capture the enclosing and disorienting quality of the coastal rainforest, where even the outdoors is divided into hallways, rooms, closets. She renders foliage as cloth, but the cloth never flows; it feels more like velvet: heavy, static, suffocating. Sometimes it seems to be laminated or shellacked. You can walk in her rainforest and feel the repressions of her rural childhood. In short, this is classic mid-century expressionism. She learned it in Europe, brought it home, applied it to her world, and created something that met the need when BC finally became urban enough to need a great local artist.

In short, like anyone else that we'd call a success, she found a need and filled it, or perhaps a need, seeking fulfillment, found her. Either way, she has a permanent floor in the center of Vancouver, and more power to her. Still, I wonder how she'd feel to know that decades after her death, she'd still be the last word in official BC arts.

 

 

 

forth, back

Tonight, all the streets of Vancouver's dense West End are closed.  Earlier tonight, 100,000 people walked across the area, from east to west, from the downtown transit stations to the manicured shore of English Bay.  Two hours later, they all walked back.

As someone with a deep fear of crowds, I can recommend this meditation: 

If you find yourself in a large flowing crowd, and you reach a spot where it's safe to stop, then stop and turn your body 90 degrees.  Look back.  You'll look like you're waiting for somebody to catch up, so nobody will think this is odd.   

Let faces flow across your field of attention.  Focus on each face just for a moment, then let it go.  This is much the way we look at oncoming faces on the street, but do it without the fear, and with no intention but to perceive what that face has to offer.

Resist the temptation to facilitate.  Wherever you stand, families will come at you four abreast and you'll feel like you're in their way.  Don't ... just be a tree ... they'll go around you.

Anyway, that's what I did tonight.  And the fireworks were great, too.