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Archive for the ‘British Columbia’ Category

A fanatic of the festival

Posted in British Columbia, Bruce Byfield, folk music, Personal, Uncategorized, Vancouver, vancouverfolkfestival on July 15, 2007| Leave a Comment »

So here I am at home, propped up in a pool of my own indolence, my skin alive with the ultra-violet of a day outside and blissed out from ten hours of hearing some of my favorite music live. This weekend marked the 30th anniversary of the Vancouver Folk Festival, one of the few times in the year that I genuinely relax as opposed to running errands or fulfilling social obligations in my spare time. The folk festival is the nearest thing to religion we have,” a friend once said, and, over the years, I’ve found that true. And, after this weekend, how I’m going to reconcile myself to another week of heavy keyboard pounding is a bit of a puzzlement to me just now.

What makes the folk festival so special in my year? Partly, it’s the timelessness of the event. We live far enough away from Jericho Park, the beach-side venue for the festival, that we usually only get there on the weekend of the festival. The few times we have, the park has seemed ghostly and deserted. We’re used to seeing it full of thousands of people: the straights, the activists, the lesbians, the families, the hippies-for-the-weekend, and all the rest, all dancing and staggering from stage to stage while the ducks collect in the remotest corner of the marsh, quacking nervously at the invasion and the crows and gulls gather, seemingly delirious at the unexpected smorgasbords.

In my mind, Jericho Park is always that way, so that I can barely distinguish one year from another. If I look closely, I notice that the average of attendees is rising (but not mine, naturally). And, if I strain, I can remember a few days when we huddled under umbrellas and wore toques, grimly determined to get our money’s worth even if we froze or caught colds.

Mostly, though, the festival leaves the impression of one continuous long day of sunshine and salt-ridden air and plants. Sometimes, like this year, the sky is full of the billowing clouds that I sometimes think only exist on the ceilings of Renaissance palaces. Other times, the sky is an unbroken stretch of blue glimpsed through the branches of the trees as I lie back in the grass a short distance from a stage, or an oven that seems to flash-bake the grass as we make weary dashes between the too-few scraps of shade, feeling like survivors of a trek across Death Valley.

At times, we’ve frankly chosen a workshop to attend on the basis of whether it was in the shade — and that, too, adds to the feeling of timelessness. Several times each year, I gaze up a stage, half-unsure what year it is. And with the people around me looking the same, and sometimes the same performers on stage, that’s hardly surprising.

Another thing I appreciate about the festival: It’s not Top 40, and you won’t find most of the performers on iTunes, either. You may hear a sarcastic reference to Led Zeppelin in a group’s between-song patter, or hear someone like Billy Bragg explain that he plays the festival “because even hippies deserve to hear good music,” but that’s about as close as you get to mainstream mediocrity at the festival.

Rather, one of the most enduring aspects of the festival is the discovery of new performers. It was at the folk festival that we first saw Stan Rogers, with his brother Garnet playing the fiddle and dancing as the sunset turned the sky red. It was the folk festival where we first heard the sardonic lyrics of Leon Rosselson and learned to appreciate the lyrics of Eric Bogle. We first saw OysterBand inject a bit of hard rock and showmanship at the festival, and heard Ray Wylie Hubbard’s bluesy mix. Some years are better than others, but every year leads to one or two minor discoveries. And if there’s ever an hour when the workshops seem less than intriguing, we can always choose at random to broaden our minds.

From the traddest of the trad to hard driving punk-folk, the entire spectrum of alternative music is available. You might suffer from musical overload, but boredom isn’t a problem.

And, if this is not enough, the festival is one of the few places where you can hear alternate political views taken for granted. Folk music, as the name implies, is about people and their problems. You don’t hear anyone singing about the joys of capitalism or the pleasure of wielding a CEO’s arbitrary tyranny, because these subjects would only seem suitable to those with a lack of empathy or imagination — and such people don’t become artists of any sort. And should you think that sounds humorless, just drop by one of the sessions where Utah Phillips, the emeritus of the festival, is holding forth about riding the rails or talking about old union figures like Joe Hill or British Columbia’s own Ginger Goodwin. If he doesn’t leave you simultaneously rolling on the grass with laughter, angry at what the history books and newspapers leave out and matter-of-factly convinced of the simple righteousness of his opinions — well, give your address so I can send flowers to your funeral. You can only be dead and too busy to have noticed.

None of this is to suggest that the festival is flawless. I could do without running the gauntlet of ticky-tacky hucksters to get to the gate (although they’re no fault of the festival, to be fair). Inside, the food is over-priced, and, at times, the festival staff picks acts more for their activist credentials than for artistry (I prefer to have both, or neither). And, this year, the outdoor atmosphere was marred by the addition of a giant screen to one side of center stage, which was used to run commercials (excuse me, I mean “public service announcements”) between sets at the evening concerts.

Yet, although I grouse about such things, all of them are too petty to actually spoil the festival. Despite such things, the Vancouver Folk Festival rises effortlessly above all misgivings, as much through luck as any planning by the organizers. Perhaps it’s simply big enough that I can avoid most of what I dislike, even, when, like this year, it’s crippled by debt and on a reduced budget.

But, one way or the other, the festival remains a bubble of timelessness that I return to again and again. It does me good — and, perhaps, makes me good, too.

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Designing buildings for the climate

Posted in architecture, British Columbia, Bruce Byfield, education, environmentalism, Personal, Public Knowledge Project, Vancouver on July 12, 2007| Leave a Comment »

I spent today at the Public Knowledge Project’s conference at Simon Fraser University Harbour Centre, interviewing people and lining up contacts for future articles. Student and instructor, I’ve spent considerable time at Harbour Centre, so going there always stirs memories. But, like most people at the conference, what preoccupied me was the fact that the air-conditioning failed in a humid heat wave in which temperatures were as high as 37 degrees Celsius. Whether the failure was a brownout downtown or confined to the campus, I’m not sure, but it started me wondering: Why doesn’t North American industrial culture ever build for the climate?

The question is worth asking. Place a few hundred people in an overheated, airless lecture theater is a recipe for extreme discomfort at the least. If anyone is old or has a heart condition, it could mean illness or death.

Fortunately, nothing serious happened so far as I could see, but, even so, the inconvenience was there. Many people were skipping discussions they had traveled to hear, so they could stand in the lobby and chugalug the free juice and pop provided by the conference sponsors. Campus security had to rush around more because the open doors brought many of the homeless in (something that doesn’t bother me, but bothers security staff immensely). Students were skipping classes, and campus staff were sweating and short-tempered – all because the summer heat wasn’t taken into account when the building was renovated to house the university. Apparently, the assumption was that the air-conditioning would always be available, and that the ability to open windows would be a security risk.

To be fair, the renovators had the disadvantage of having to work with an older building that was probably designed for the climate of southern England, rather than the Pacific coast of Canada. But Harbour Centre is far from the only example of local construction unsuitable to the climate.

Few roads in the greater Vancouver area are higher in the middle so that the rain for which the climate is notorious will run along the sides instead of creating giant puddles for cars to hydroplane through. And thanks to all the imitators of native son Arthur Erikson, local architects continue to use concrete in buildings that the rain can eventually erode – that is, when they’re not imitating styles suitable for the desert conditions of California and using flat roofs. For years now, leaky condos have plagued the area, and four-story buildings shrouded in plastic and scaffolding are still sprouting up everywhere like multi-colored mushroom.

It shouldn’t be difficult, while architectural students are learning about the tensile strengths of different materials, to teach them some basics about designing for specific climates. Much of the matter is common sense. Yet, so far as I can tell, this basic consideration is far from their minds when they sit down to design. Nor does anyone hold them to account. Instead, the public suffers and shells out for repairs.

Now, if you excuse me, I’m going to drink another three or four liters of Gatorade to restore some moisture to my dessicated tissues.

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Free Geek Vancouver

Posted in British Columbia, Bruce Byfield, environmentalism, Free Geek, Free Software, freesoftware, Personal, recycling, technology, Uncategorized, Vancouver on June 19, 2007| 2 Comments »

In part of my never ending efforts to get out of the house for more than my daily exercise, last night I went to a meeting of the local Linux Users Group at the new Free Geek warehouse just off Main Street in Vancouver. I went away more convinced than ever that Free Geek is one of the more innovating activist groups about town.

Free Geek Vancouver, whose origins I’ve written about professionally, is the first Canadian implementation of an idea that originated in Portland, Oregon. Basically, the idea is to combine the recycling of computer equipment with education and the promotion of free software. For a nominal fee, the group will recycle computer equipment, taking care that it is disposed of ethically – and not just dumped in landfill or shipped to a developing nation where recovery of the raw materials becomes a health hazard to those who undertake it. Higher end computers are refurbished and loaded with free software like Ubuntu and OpenOffice.org and sold or donated to charities and other needy groups. Volunteers can also work with Free Geek for a set number of hours in order to get a computer of their own.

Officially, the group is run by consensus. However, if David Repa and Ifny LaChance, the two Free Geekers to whom I’ve talked the most are typical – and they seem to be — I’d say that it’s equally fuelled by apparently limitless supplies of enthusiasm and energy – to say nothing of a talent for principled promotion. Recently, for example, the group turned down coverage in a national newspaper because the journalist wanted to do a stereotypical article focusing on poor people who had benefited from the group’s services. Believing the story would violate the confidentiality in which they pride themselves, the group refused. Of course, with the coverage they are getting in the local media, they hardly needed the exposure, but many groups wouldn’t have resisted the temptation to compromise for the sake of publicity.

And the group is resourceful, too. What other group would turn having one of their members stopped with a bicycle cart full of computers on the way back from a client into an opportunity to enlist the local police department as supporters?

At the same time, the group is far from humorless. So far as I’m concerned, a group that claims to prefer “catalyst” and “primordial ooze” instead “founder” is refreshing in its refusal to take itself too seriously. The same humor is found in the movement’s slogan, “Helping the needy get nerdy since the beginning of the third millennium.”

Besides the resourcefulness and outlook of the people involved, what I like best is the way that Free Geek combines two activist groups that traditionally have little contact. Too often, social activists never think to apply their convictions to the software they use, and geeks never think of applying their equally high ethical standards outside of computing.

For over a year, I’ve been writing about the Free Software Foundation’s efforts to bridge these gaps, and I’ve even made some attempts to help in this effort myself, notably in an article called “Free software!” for the New Internationalist. Now, in Free Geek, I’ve found another group interested in doing the same.

I’ll need to think about it, but I’m seriously thinking that one of the ways I’ll be getting out of the house more is as a volunteer. At the very least, I’ll be sending a cheque once I recover from the shock of paying taxes on my sole proprietorship.

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In a classical Chinese garden

Posted in British Columbia, Bruce Byfield, gardening, Personal, tourism, Uncategorized, Vancouver on May 14, 2007| Leave a Comment »

Located on the edge of the downtown eastside, the Dr. Sun Yat-Sen Classical Chinese Garden is one of the hidden wonders of Vancouver. Like the merchants’ gardens it is modeled after, it is meant to be an oasis in the middle of the city. Look up at some of the three or four story buildings around it (mercifully, anything taller is at least a block away), and the sloping tiles on the walls draw your eyes back down to the gardens. It is a place for strolling, of railings designed for leaning over the waters, and strategically positioned red lacquered benches. The gardens impress me on many levels, and I try to visit them several times a year.

One aspect that never ceases to occupy my mind is that the naturalness of their appearance is an illusion. In reality, they are art raised to such a height that they appear completely uncontrived. The limestone rocks, taken from a particular lake in China, are artfully heaped to appear natural, and every bush and tree is positioned for effect. Accidents happen, such as the turtles and the nesting Canada geese or the blue heron that ate the koi in the ponds one year, but very little is left to chance.

In the Imperial Gardens, I understand, every item in the pavilions had a mark on it indicating where it should go, and, while the Dr. Sun Yat-Sen gardens are not quite so rigidly controlled, I am always left smiling and dumbfounded when I consider artistry on such a scale. I have my doubts about feng shui as a form of divination or luck, but, after all my walks through the gardens, I have no doubt whatsoever about feng shui‘s power as an aesthetic theory. The paradox of appearing contrived through every possible contrivance runs through each step of the garden – and it is both absolute and utterly convincing, even with the little I know of the philosophy behind its construction.

One of the main principles, though, is contrast. Whether it’s the difference between the pebbles and the ridges of teacups that form lotuses in some of the paving, the differences between the granite bridges, the slate tiles, and the ceramic ones, the profusion of trees and plants, diversity rules the gardens. It’s a place of winding walks and suddenly changing views, whether through turning a corner, or peering through the diversely patterned frames in the leak windows that line the corridors. It’s a place that brings out new wonders in the rain as opposed to the sun, in the night with the lanterns lit as opposed to the dew of morning or the heat of afternoon.

At every season , too, one plant succeeds another, and new smells and sights are revealed. Inside and outside, too, are blurred by the pavilions whose doors can be thrown open or barred against the cold depending on the season. Look out one window, and you see a stand of plum – outside the one next to it, a pine tree or perhaps a plum.

I could walk the length of the garden in less than two minutes and not be winded, but instead I take hours, meandering in all the possible pathways and retracing my steps over and over. There’s no place you can see the whole of the garden at once, so you have no choice. You have to both slow down and keep moving if you want to see everything.

With so much contrast, choosing a favorite part of the garden is impossible. If I expressed a preference for the grotto in the main part of the garden, where small birds bathe in the waterfall, I’d be leaving out the t’ing, the spirit pavilion that sits high above the rest. If I favored the t’ing, I’d be doing an injustice to the jade waters, through which the koi glide in and out of visibility past the sublimely indifferent turtles sunning themselves on the rocks; put your fingers in the water, and the koi will nibble gently at them, seeking food.

And what about the main pavilion, where on winter days, the cold blends with the scent from the rosewood rafters? The austere tiling of the new pavilion? The round moon gate? The intricately carvings on the open pavilion where you can see the free gardens by looking to one side and the Sun Yat-Sen gardens by looking at another?

Still, if I had to choose, it would be the scholar’s courtyard. As the name implies, the scholar’s courtyard is where the owner of the garden would come to work on his writing or his calligraphy. It features a small pavilion overlooking a courtyard, with a small raised area at the end of the walkway for a musician to serenade the scholar. I always imagine myself at work there, or my late friend Paul Zimmer in a Chinese robe – and, on my visit two days ago, the fantasy became even easier to sustain, because the pavilion is now furnished with a chair, footrest, and a long narrow desk, complete with an inkwell and stand for calligraphy brushes. It’s a place where I could get some clean, honest work done in a state of utter composure.

All too often, though, this fantasy is interrupted by a well-meaning but loud tour guide, or a gaggle of tourists whose lack of appreciation shows in their fast pace or casual conversation. The garden is as much theirs as mine, of course, but I find myself resenting their apparent lack of appreciation, and, when I can, I take care to stay well away from them. If anybody cannot appreciate the gardens enough to give in their atmosphere and slow down or talk in hushed tones, then, so far as I’m concerned, that person is next door to dead. To me, it’s as simple as that.

Still, these intrusions lack power to spoil my pleasure in the gardens. After the first fifteen minutes, I am too relaxed to do more than sigh briefly over their lack of aesthetic judgment and stroll slowly to a less crowded part of the garden. Within a breath, usually, I forget all about them.

No doubt of it: When the gardens have had a chance to work their magic on me, I am calmer, less opinionated person, and nothing can really disturb me while I’m there, or for hours afterwards. The gardens do me good, and, if I lived closer, I would visit weekly or even daily. I’m sure that I’d always emerge refreshed.

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The cherry trees of Vancouver

Posted in British Columbia, Bruce Byfield, gardening, Personal, Uncategorized on April 17, 2007| Leave a Comment »

The Vancouver region has more trees than any other North American city. This fact is never more obvious than in early spring, when thousands of ornamental cherry trees start to blossom.

Younger, white blossoms come first. Some years, they come as early as mid-February, but mid-March to early April is more common. Whenever they come, after the winter’s dark days and constant rain, they are a shock to the eye, an extravagant explosion of life, all so unexpected and so seemingly symmetrical in their thousands that they leave me breathless with admiration and surprise. It’s hard talking about them without sounding trite, but they always seem such a revelation that finding suitable words to describe them is as difficult as it is urgent.

This first wave brings people out by the dozens. One of the most popular spots is the the Burrard Street Skytrain station, where the trees arch over about a walkway of about sixty yards. There, especially on weekends, you can always find a couple of dozen people, often in couples, often Japanese in origin, strolling back and forth and snapping dozens of pictures.

Then, gradually the other trees come out, the west side of the city up to a week ahead of the east: next the younger magenta ones, then, just as the blossom season seems over for the year, the gnarled old trees of both colors. In dozens of streets, the ramshackle houses of the east end are suddenly obscured for a couple of weeks by the trees that line their sidewalks. In Centennial Park on Burnaby Mountain, people amble the tree-lined walkways that line the cliffs overlooking the Deep Cove and Belcarra. For a couple of weeks — maybe a month in good years — everywhere you go in the area, your eyes are ambushed by a profusion of color that has stood dormant and forgotten for most of the year. You’ve need the brain-damaged soul of a hockey enforcer not to notice and feel blessed.

Then, as suddenly as they came, the blossoms are gone, replaced by leaves as the year goes deeper into spring. Sometimes, a high wind sweeps them away in a day, and we are left on with a carpet of blossoms half an inch thick in the streets and gutters, looking around in amazed dismay at a brief display made even briefer by a freak in the weather.

Nobody seems to know why Vancouver and the surrounding cities are so full of cherry trees. I think it’s become the region was settled by three garden-mad cultures: the Chinese, the English, and the Japanese. In the last few years, a Cherry Blossom Festival has started up in minor imitation of the famous Japanese festival. And a few years ago, David Lam, the former lieutenant-governor of the province, was talking of donating another thirty thousand cherry trees to the city of Vancouver.

I don’t know what happened to Lam’s offer, but it met with almost universal approval on the streets. In recent years, the existing cherry trees are part of what makes us locals so smug when we talk to less fortunate friends in the wilds of Calgary and Ottawa.While they’re still trudging through dirty-gray snow and nursing a thousand yard stare that is the first sign of cabin fever, we’re shuffling along kicking up blossoms, having shoved our winter coats to the back of the closet for the next eight months.

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Time-travel by paddlewheeler

Posted in British Columbia, Bruce Byfield, history, Personal, Uncategorized on April 1, 2007| Leave a Comment »

On Saturday evening, I went time-travelling. Not through Dungeons and Dragons or the Society for Creative Anachronism, although I’ve done both in my time. Nor did I get a temporal lift, which, despite its name, is not a form of chronic hitchhiking, but a form of cosmetic surgery for those who want to revisit their starry-eyed youth. Instead, this jaunt was up the Fraser River by paddlewheeler to the annual Candlelight Tour of Fort Langley, where historical re-enactors create an illusion of time-travelling to 1858 and the night before the declaration of the Crown Colony of British Columbia through series of vignettes around the fort.

In keeping with the illusion, we took the paddlewheeler The Native upriver from New Westminster. In the days that we were travelling to, paddlewheelers were the main form of transport through the largely roadless interior. These paddlewheelers were not the grandly appointed queens of the Mississippi, but smaller, shallower-draft vessels built for work, with few cabins and a mixture of passengers and livestock as often as not. Originally built as a yacht and just refurbished, The Native is more luxurious than the boats it is modelled on, with amenities that include a kitchen and washroom and comfortable seating for maybe fifty passengers.

Tens of thousands pass over the Fraser River everyday. Thousands more drive along each bank. However, if they haven’t been on the river, they probably don’t know how much of a working river it is. The Fraser is not one of those picturesque rivers surrounded by cobblestoned walks and dockside patios where you can sit under an umbrella and watch recreational boaters zoom by. Recreational boaters do use the Fraser, but they are outnumbered by the tugs and the barges pulling containers. Many channels and shores are floating banks for the forest companies, and the shore is crammed with heavy industry. The canneries that lined its shores for much of the last century are long gone, but in the rotting pylons and shorings that litter the shore, you could still read their history.

Hearing that history, and watching the industry gradually recede as we passed upriver, I could almost believe that we were moving back through time, safely ensonced in a cabin where we could eat and drink the afternoon away while looking for herons and eagles out the window.

Arriving at Fort Langley, we found the gateway to the dock locked, so the paddlewheeler reversed itself for a hundred yards and tied up at the rowing club dock – a flimsy ramshackled built on two logs that was probably much closer to the spirit of 1858 than our original mooring.

In previous years, the tour started at sunset. The conceit was that visitors could go back in time to watch, but could not interact with the inhabitants of 1858 in any way. Both the dark and the conceit added greatly to the atmosphere, but this year both were gone. Daylight saving time came earlier this year, and, to compensate, the tour was more interactive, with the re-enactors talking to the guests and even dragging them into a barn dance led by a half dozen fiddlers.

Yet even these handicaps could not destroy the gentle fantasy of the evening. Travelling in groups of fifteen with a couple of guides, visitors were met at the entrance to the fort by members of the Royal Engineers, the regiment sent out to construct an infrastructure in the new colony. In 1858, they were the only group capable of keeping order as the Barkerville Gold Rush brought a flood of miners and hangers-on – mostly Americans, who were darkly regarded as the forerunners of an attempt by the United States to take over the territory.

Assured that we were neither unregistered gold miners nor Americans, the Royal Engineers let us in. Inside the fort, we passed from building to building, witnessing such vignettes as a cooper’s apprentice arguing with his mother about travelling to the gold fields, and a blacksmith teaching an apprentice to make nails. We heard a boat-builder who doubled as the fort’s schoolmaster talking about tomorrow’s proclamation of the new colony, and, at The Big House, the Chief Factor for the Hudson’s Bay Company – formerly the chief official in the region – announce his resignation and express his appreciation of our work as his underlings. In a warehouse, we heard pre-adolescent girls of the period talking about the men they admired and their prospects for husbands, while nearby in a parlor, whose out-of-tune piano had been carried upriver by canoe, mothers talked about the lack of cultural prospects at the fort. In the center of the fort, newly arrived voyageurs gossiped and grumbled, while, outside the fort, good time girls from San Francisco and a disreputable miner in a slouched hat talked about their plans.

The tour took an hour and a half, but all too soon we were back in the world of flash cameras and cell phones (both had been banned on the tour). We descended the rickety – and railess – gangway to the yacht club dock, and boarded the paddle-wheeler for desert, more wine, and the trip back to New Westminster.

Despite the lights on either side of the river, the return trip was dark. The stark ugliness of the industrial sites was made mysterious, and around us the river swirled like black oil. Inside the main cabin, pop hits of the last forty years were playing, and a few people were dancing.

Most of us were content to watch and talk, but one couple in their sixties danced to almost every tune. They would have been young in the 1960s when the earliest of the tunes first came out, and every now and then you could see from a smile or a dance move how they must have looked forty years ago when they first danced to them. I suppose, in their way, they were time-travelling, too.

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