The Geist Displacement

Dan Post

These past few weeks Geist moved out of our Gastown office, and by no small feat, we man­aged to pack our whole exis­tence – both mate­r­ial and in essence -  into small boxes, big boxes, piles, heaps, and elastically-bound rolls of lit­er­ary para­pher­na­lia that range from posters and pho­tos, to glass plates, wooden Mounties, mugs, rub­ber rats, pens, pen­cils and poetry. 

As the mov­ing date loomed in the future, for weeks we had been tak­ing stock of our sur­round­ings and dread­ing the task at hand. The office had become the per­fect storm — to the curi­ous out­sider it was in sham­bles and yet to us, every­thing was exactly where it was sup­posed to be. It was the kind of col­lec­tion that takes years, even life­times to amass and even longer to mature. The kind of fine art, one comes upon organ­i­cally through years of pick­ing up each lit­tle piece day to day and set­ting it down some­where else, until that pam­phlet about black bears is sit­u­ated per­fectly beside the empty lighter, a half-full bot­tle of Windex, a pink post-it pad with only one post-it remain­ing and a brown paper towel with one small round grease stain in the bot­tom left corner. 

Three months from now we will move into a brand spankin’ new office with white walls, high ceil­ings, and a nice big cor­ner win­dow. It has been frus­trat­ing try­ing to apply an order to a patch­work and dusty eco-system that resisted every effort to con­tain it, and just maybe the process of rebuild­ing, recre­at­ing and the daunt­ing prospect of start­ing anew will be too much to han­dle; Geist buck­ling under the immense weight. More likely though, the new white walls and steril­ity of empti­ness will yield to the antiq­uity of Geist and before too long we will be right at home again. 

Geist is like an old rotary tel­phone, or a Norman Rockwell paint­ing, or just about any­thing that smacks of nos­tal­gia – the kinds of things peo­ple who pur­chase new con­dos dec­o­rate their house with to ‘give it chrac­ter’. To oth­ers, all the long-time read­ers, Geist is a pock­et­watch attached to a gold chain that you keep tucked inside your pocket; a trusty friend that never lets you down when it comes to telling time, but every now and then you have to take it out and pol­ish it up and wind it with the lit­tle wind­ing key you keep in your night­stand. Right now, in our period of tran­si­tion and until we move into our new home, we wind the watch.

This fall, from the com­fort of ‘the liv­ing room’, Geist will release the Twenty-Year Double-Wide spe­cial issue.

The Twenty-Year Double-Wide

The Editorial We

In 2010, as Geist turns 20 years old, his­tory is repeat­ing itself. 

Geist #1 was pub­lished in 1990, if you don’t count the 10 or 12 years before that when Stephen Osborne, Editor-in-Chief, was con­ceiv­ing the mag­a­zine and con­duct­ing some very infor­mal mar­ket research (among col­leagues, friends and passersby on the street). 

That first issue was com­piled, edited and pre­pared for the printer in the home of Osborne and me (Mary Schendlinger, Senior Editor) right around the time when desk­top pub­lish­ing tech­nol­ogy had evolved to the point where one could crank out a national cul­tural mag­a­zine if one had a vision, a few decades of pub­lish­ing back­ground, and a 386 DOS clone with 640K of RAM, a 20-megabite hard drive and a Hercules graph­ics card.  

We like to say that the first issues of Geist were pro­duced in the editor’s liv­ing room, a cor­ner of which Osborne used as an office (mine was in a cor­ner of the din­ing room), which brings me to the his­tory repeat­ing itself part.

Now, in our 20^th year, we’re back in the liv­ing room. Geist is one of the arts groups that will be mov­ing into the new arts space in the Woodward’s devel­op­ment in down­town Vancouver. Our lease in the funky old brick build­ing with tin ceil­ings (and a mag­nif­i­cent view of the North Shore moun­tains from the wash­room) in Gastown, the old­est part of the city, expired on July 31. That was to have been per­fect tim­ing, but devel­op­ment and ren­o­va­tion being what they are, the Woodward’s move-in date has crept on into September and pos­si­bly October. B-b-b-but what about Geist 78, the fall issue, sup­posed to be ready for mail­ing in September?  Where will we pro­duce it?

Right – in the liv­ing room.

Of course, a few things have changed in 20 years. We’re got more staff and more stuff (oops, I mean price­less archives). Osborne has moved his office out of the liv­ing room and into a stu­dio in an alley in East Van. Kristin, our office man­ager, inves­ti­gated ways to deal with the phone dur­ing the hia­tus — siphon mes­sages to an online retrieval cen­tre, get them tran­scribed with voice recog­ni­tion soft­ware, for­ward them to a pre­paid cell­phone (that’s the one she picked). But we can’t help being reminded of the old days.

And, as in the old days, when some­thing hap­pens, such as a mile­stone birth­day, we pub­lish some­thing. What, though? How about a 20-year spe­cial issue. A dou­ble issue, com­bin­ing fall and win­ter 2010, quite con­ve­nient because the sum­mer issue was a few weeks late and we love it and we don’t want it yanked off the stands too fast.

So, a spe­cial double-wide Geist. Not just a ret­ro­spec­tive, though. We want new con­tent, with per­haps a hand­ful of our old faves included to give con­text and bestow ven­er­a­bil­ity. Heck, some of our read­ers weren’t even born when Geist started up, and the ones who are old enough to remem­ber the ancient bits aren’t going to fuss. Two times in the life of Geist we have acci­den­tally pub­lished a piece twice, and the only per­son who noticed was one of our young vol­un­teers, Jill Boettger. Whatever does get included from back issues could do with a bit of com­men­tary, which maybe we ought to write from the liv­ing room. 

The double-wide should look and feel like Geist but maybe it should also look like a book and act like a book. Geist is 8¼ x 10 inches and change, not a very booky for­mat — not a very ele­gant booky for­mat, any­way. So let’s say a slightly dif­fer­ent size, but not too dif­fer­ent because then Patty would have to make all new design and lay­out tem­plates for it. And a jazz­ier design, but not too dif­fer­ent because it still has to say Geist.

It would stay on the stands twice as long as a reg­u­lar issue – half a year! – and be a ter­rific gift if we got it out early enough in the hol­i­day sell­ing season.

On the other hand, mov­ing office takes up a lot more time and love than you ever think it will. And it’s hard as heck to do a good job on a book when it’s thrown together, no time to announce it, mar­ket it, build up sus­pense, fool with design, etc.

On the other hand, how many times does a mag­a­zine turn 20? Who knows if we’ll even be alive, let alone com­pos men­tis, when the next mile­stone looms?

On the other hand, why do we have to bring out our 20^th any­thing in the 20^th year?

On the other hand, four fin­gers and a thumb…

Milking at Metrotown

Becky McEachern

So this is what it’d be like to grow up on a farm. Oh.…. 

Yet another visit to the mall. I’m start­ing to see a pat­tern here. There was a fes­ti­val going on this week­end at Metrotown called Agri City, which I was excited about because it was sup­posed to focus on “green inno­va­tions in agriculture.” 

Hm, I didn’t find too much more than a few pot­ted plants, some posters about how to grow things, and this plas­tic cow kids were lin­ing up to learn how to milk. It moos when you, um.., well, you can see. 

Mini-Vegas at the VPL. McDonald's Ad in the Concourse

Becky McEachern

A fas­ci­nat­ing mon­stros­ity has appeared at the VPL this week. The lights flash and everything.

The facil­i­ties co-ordinator says it’s just a source of rev­enue for the library, like the job fairs and infor­ma­tion booths that pop up now and then in the same spot. She also says some peo­ple thought it was a gam­ing machine they could inter­act with to make some­thing free pop out.

She asked if I was dis­turbed by it. Mostly I’m just baf­fled by how odd it is. At first I thought it was a 3-D instal­la­tion. “Must be some artist being ironic.” I said to myself.

Nope. Just a money-maker.

Geist Celebrates Turning 20

Geist

Cool. Soft Serve Empowerment at Qoola

Becky McEachern

Remember Bonanza Restaurants? 175 items in their “ever-changing mega food bar buf­fet!” We used to go for Sunday lunch. They’ve gen­er­ously kept their web­site active, but with the warn­ing that there are no actual restau­rants any­more. It’s prob­a­bly for the best, I remem­ber none of the meals, but I d0 remem­ber the dessert bar; vanilla, choco­late or swirl (where both came out at once) and sprin­kles and choco­late or but­ter­scotch sauce. 

A recent visit to Metrotown Centre revealed a mod­ern, Vancouverized (read: health­ier) answer to the empow­ered dessert expe­ri­ence that was Bonanza: self-serve soft serve frozen yogurt out­let Qoola. (Proud of their Canadian iden­tity, as you can see by the flag.) 

They’ve got six dif­fer­ent flavours of frozen sweet­ness  (original,country vanilla, choco­late, mango, wildberry and raspberry) and a plethora of top­pings. There’s a lot of fruity choices, but the choco­late and cereal theme is more intrigu­ing. Suddenly I real­ize I’m about to be given com­plete cre­ative lib­erty with my yogurt. The thought makes me giddy.

I opt for some of all six flavours (duh) and top them off with a clas­sic Reese’s Pieces-Oreo-Crispy Crunch-Fruit Loops-Lucky Charms-chocolate sauce com­bi­na­tion. But then I spy some fun lit­tle white jujube-like can­dies labelled mochi. So I throw some of those on too. (They may once have met, but are not at all close to the Japanese gluti­nous rice cake they’re named after, but are a tex­ture adven­ture and very tasty.) 

The result is com­plete chaos. It looks like the phys­i­cal embod­i­ment of the inside of my head. “Yes, world, I would like  some of every­thing, please.” But in all my sugar-fueled life I’ve never tasted any­thing sweeter. 

Hail at St. Mary's

Becky McEachern

I know you’re tired of hear­ing about how wild the weather is this spring. But there was a lot of hail around Vancouver this Easter weekend.  

Of course, a day off is a day off, so I go hik­ing any­way out in the sticks of Mission, B.C., with my umbrella. 

The day stirs up some curios­ity for me about religion. A trail from the Fraser Valley Heritage Park park­ing lot takes me up to the Westminster Abbey, where Benedictine monks still run the Seminary of Christ the King. Apparently, you can take high school or post-secondary stud­ies there, they even offer a Bachelor in Theology. But only for boys. When I was a kid and liv­ing in Maple Ridge, just down the high­way, I knew there were monks doing some­thing up the hill behind Mission because they would come down to do their gro­cery shop­ping at my family’s store. I remem­ber being fas­ci­nated by their brown robes and unusual haircuts. 

The trail also takes me past an old, empty school. This is the phys­i­cal reminder of the orig­i­nal mis­sion that the city of Mission is named after. It was first called St. Mary’s Indian Residential School and was started in 1861. It hit me as I stepped out of the woods into the school­yard that I don’t know enough about what hap­pened in those schools to even open my mouth, and that our gov­ern­ment has only just begun apol­o­giz­ing (Stephen Harper, 2008.)

Local farm­ers could pick up mail there if they had it deliv­ered to The Mission. But here’s an inter­est­ing detail: it’s not named after the Virgin Mary, but rather the Saint Mary of Egypt, who, accord­ing to the Fraser Valley Heritage Park web­site, was “saved from pros­ti­tu­tion and did penance in the desert for 47 years.”

The St. Mary’s res­i­den­tial school was founded by a French Oblate priest named Father Leon Fouquet. 

Hiking always gets me in a thinky mood. This time I don’t reach any con­clu­sions. I feel somber, hum­ble and hailed on.

Choose your own (theatre) adventure

C.E. Coughlan

On Friday night I went to see Hive 3: a show in a ware­house space on the BCIT cam­pus with twelve the­atre com­pa­nies per­form­ing simul­ta­ne­ously.  If you go, you bet­ter be ready to inter­act, because like it or not, you’re going to be part of the ‘shows.’

Someone hands you an info guide at the door that lists the twelve per­for­mances with a brief descrip­tion and a bunch of sym­bols beside each.  At the bot­tom is a leg­end that explains what the sym­bols mean: con­fined spaces, dark­ness, dif­fi­cult exit, flash­ing lights, loud noise, mild group par­tic­i­pa­tion, phys­i­cal inter­ac­tion, social inter­ac­tion, wheel­chair assis­tance nec­es­sary.

Gulp.

I don’t rec­om­mend the bar area if you’re look­ing to hide, that’s where you’ll most likely get approached, like my friend Lisa did, by a bearded man wear­ing a set of wire­less head­phones.  Throughout their stilted con­ver­sa­tion it became obvi­ous that some­one some­where was telling him what to say.  He told a joke that went like this:

“Knock, Knock.”
“Who’s there?”
“Panther.”
“Panther who?”
“Panther on or off, I’m going swim­ming.”

While the joke wasn’t very funny, his reac­tion to hav­ing to tell it was.  Eventually, he linked arms with her and lead her away.  I have no idea what hap­pened to her next, but I wasn’t on my own for long.  A woman dressed as a doc­tor who had been lurk­ing nearby came over and said, “I’m afraid you’ve been exposed to a virus and need to come with me to the infir­mary”.  This inter­ac­tive ‘show’ took place out­side in a tented area with space heaters, ele­va­tor music was play­ing on a small stereo by the door and the recep­tion­ist, a man in a white coat wear­ing a face mask, told me to use the hand san­i­tizer and to take a seat where six other peo­ple sat wait­ing.  Someone gig­gled.  A notice board in front of us read: Polite Reminder: Quarantine Zone.  Please refrain from: Smoking, Eating, Drinking, Loud talk­ing, Spitting on the floor, Suggestive danc­ing, Annoying the recep­tion­ist.  

Inside, we lay down on cots and were wrapped in blan­kets.  The nurses put lavender-scented eye masks over our eyes and head­phones on our ears and a story began, a story in which we all died a slow, sad and beau­ti­ful death.  At times, I smelled ever­green and lilac – they must have been using aro­mather­apy – and at one point, the mask was removed and the nurses held mir­rors to our faces and grad­u­ally pulled them away to sim­u­late what you might see as you leave your body.  

Back in the build­ing, I watched a bur­lesque strip tease, reverse bid­ding in which an audi­ence mem­ber got his head shaved; I got inter­viewed, saw a man on a tread­mill run­ning through Iraq, lis­tened in on a phone con­ver­sa­tion about a woman pass­ing out in front of the Dalai Lama and ‘acci­den­tally’ smelling his armpit, went to a birth­day party, and rode a bike dur­ing a pup­pet show.

Not bad for one evening – and appar­ently I only saw half the shows.

The Rapid Denoument of the Vancouver Olympics

Thad McIlroy

It’s been a week since it ended, or rather since the only part that millions 

were inter­ested in see­ing ended (the Paralympics start on March 12, not 

that the media or the politi­cians can muster any inter­est in this token event).

 

It took me a week or so from the start of the real Olympics to recover 

from the three hun­dred First Nations’ dancers sur­round­ing by awkwardly 

shuf­fling Caucasian Star Wars storm troop­ers, who I assumed had tasers 

at the ready should any­one pause in the festivities.

 

 

I still haven’t mem­o­rized the names of the cor­ney mas­cots. I found 

them on the VANOC site: Miga, the sea bear, Quatchi, the Sasquatch, 

and Sumi, the ani­mal spirit. Not memorable.

 

My shock at the open­ing cer­e­monies was soon to be over­whelmed by 

my hor­ror at the clos­ing cer­e­monies. I still wake up at night screaming 

at the mem­ory of those giant beavers, which looked like they had 

drowned a month before and become hor­ren­dously bloated.

 

 

(Note the cap­tion: “Entertainers dressed as lum­ber­jacks perform.” 

Aside from the fact that there’s hardly a lum­ber­jack in sight, just bloated 

beavers and a danc­ing maple leaf, I won­dered also whether in fact they 

were lum­ber­jacks dressed as enter­tain­ers per­form­ing – think Monty Python.)

 

Anyway, things dete­ri­o­rated from there, and soon we were the laugh­ing­stock of the world. What could they have been think­ing in Tanzania or Tajikistan after this:

 

 

I won’t even men­tion Mr. Bubbly.

 

However, the point of this blog entry is not the spec­ta­cle itself so much as the after­math. I went down­town on a few errands the morn­ing after the close and 

thought I’d entered the Twilight Zone. The city cen­ter was all but deserted. 

Talk about “Apologies, but I must eat and run!”

 

 

No stand­ing on cer­e­mony at London Drugs. We’ve got too much leftover 

plush, the Paralympic vis­i­tors are not going to snatch it up, and we’re 

clear­ing it out of here – fast!

 

The ploy was a suc­cess. It was a mob scene:

 

 

I asked one excited buyer what she expected to do with her 50%-off 

tro­phies and she said imme­di­ately, “Sell them on eBay!” Disappointing 

news for her there. While the last win­ter Olympics four years ago in 

Torino, Italy, did not seem to gen­er­ate any squishy dolls (pos­si­bly because 

they lacked Italian ver­sions of Miga, Quatchi and Sumi), I can report that 

the “offi­cial” pins are mostly up for bid at $3.99. The few avail­able items 

of cloth­ing appeared to have retained their value, but will not make any­one rich.

 

Meanwhile a dis­play of London Drugs’ half-price plush got lonely:

 

 

But not for long:

 

 

Some of this junk was not gen­uinely endorsed sou­venirs, but it was 

head­ing out anyway:

 

 

It took some of the other stores and restau­rants a few 

hours to catch on, but they soon were smit­ten with the clear­ance spirit:

 

 

 

 

I love it that below you can still see “Welcome World” under “Good-Bye, World!”

 

 

Apparently Steamworks does not think of the Paralympic participants 

as from this world.

 

Perhaps they’re more open-minded at the other Steamworks in 

Vancouver, over on W. Pender “…a gym/sauna/bathhouse for men 

18 years and older with pri­vate mem­ber­ship options. Now open to 

the pub­lic, Vancouver is open 24/7, 365 days a year! Steamworks is 

a clean, safe place to hang out, work out, meet guys, watch porn, play, 

or what­ever.” Welcome World (or aleast the male half).

 

The Hudson’s Bay Company, “the old­est com­mer­cial cor­po­ra­tion in 

North America,” pur­chased in 2008 by the U.S. firm NRDC Equity 

Partners (from another American firm, The InterTech Group), 

was declared “the…Online (empha­sis mine) Store for the Vancouver 

2010 Olympic and Paralympic Games.” VANOC couldn’t quite bring 

itself to award­ing the entire retail fran­chise to one American company, 

so The Bay cre­ated “The Olympic Superstore” at Granville and 

W. Georgia Street “a one-stop shop­ping des­ti­na­tion for all offi­cial licensed 

mer­chan­dise of the Vancouver 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games.”

 

Trying to exit the SkyTrain dur­ing the games I walked inad­ver­tently into The Bay 

and I thought for a moment that I’d stum­bled into New York’s Macy’s on Christmas Eve. The esca­la­tor on the main floor from the Granville Station had been blocked off with steel con­struc­tion fenc­ing: man­age­ment had moved the sole entrance to Seymour Street, where there was a huge line-up patrolled by police and security.

 

The esca­la­tor to the sec­ond floor was bro­ken. I stood in fren­zied despair for sev­eral min­utes, push­ing at the bar­ri­ers. Throngs of shop­pers stared at me with a com­bi­na­tion of fear and puz­zle­ment. Two young women appeared sud­denly beside me, but appar­ently found humour rather than peril in the sit­u­a­tion. Finally I sum­moned the strength of the truly des­per­ate and man­aged to move one of the fences just far 

enough to slip through. Now the shop­pers were look­ing thor­oughly fright­ened. A ter­ror­ist per­haps. I stum­bled around the offi­cial mer­chan­dise, search­ing fran­ti­cally for an exit. A bright-faced uni­formed young woman approached me and offered me an Olympic pin with the VISA credit card logo attached. I grabbed it while blurt­ing out, “How the hell do I get out of here?” She cheer­fully pointed to the Seymour street door­way and I ran for it, jostling many, and did whatI was told dur­ing the clos­ing cer­e­monies the night before, as a true Canadian: I said “sorry” twenty times 

while I pushed the zombie-like shop­pers out of my way.

 

Outside the main door, gasp­ing for breath, I found this sign in the window:

 

 

I was reminded that the Olympics are all about the heights of human endeav­our, about being your best.

 

It took The Bay a few days to get with the pro­gram and real­ize that the disabled

and their fam­i­lies were not going to shop in suf­fi­cient num­bers to clear all that crap out of the store. By Wednesday I spotted:

 

 

But let me leave the final word to she who looks after (most of) our Olympic athletes:

 

 

I guess Presbyterians don’t care much about the Paralympics either.

An Awfully Canadian Occurrence

Dan Post

          I couldn’t help but think of Shane Koyczan’s poem “We Are More” this morn­ing as I watched the bus dri­ver pur­posely ignore a man try­ing to get her atten­tion to open the doors and let him on. I was think­ing about this whole Canadian iden­tity thing, this sup­posed polite­ness we are proud enough appar­ently to broad­cast to the whole world viz a vis a poorly-executed clos­ing cer­e­monies, and was begin­ning to doubt it’s ver­ity as I watched him whistling, yelling, and flail­ing his arms to no avail. Why didn’t he just bang the win­dow? That would surely have got her atten­tion she was pre­tend­ing to with­hold. A block away and he hadn’t given up chas­ing down the bus to the next stop.

“He’s still run­ning” a middle-aged pas­sen­ger behind the dri­ver said. “It’s so pathetic.”

She was laugh­ing in a twisted way, but I sus­pected it was only to cover up her true feel­ings of sym­pa­thy. I could see she was con­cerned, but also try­ing to avoid con­fronta­tion with the surly driver.