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For those interested I will be reading tomorrow at the Café for Contemporary Art, 140 East Esplanade (Lower Lonsdale), North Vancouver, 7PM, part of Capilano University’s “Prosethetics” series.

While stir-frying vegetables I noticed a patch of ceramic missing in the middle of my six-month-old lifetime warranty pan. After lunch I cleaned up the pan and drove it back to Kerrisdale, where I bought it.

Travelling west on King Edward I turned left on Marguerite, a few blocks east of where I usually turn, to see what’s new in a neighbourhood I rode my bike through as a kid. At the southeast corner is Shaughnessy Elementary, where my Little League baseball team practiced forty years ago, the bucktoothed grin of Nicky Dimitri looming large.

The field as I remember it was an expanse of dirt and gravel, where sliding into second base meant the destruction of one’s pants, or at the very least their reassignment to the laundry hamper that night. But this field was covered in the deepest greenest grass. The backstop was still there, but the baseball diamond was not. A girl stood by the fence, checking her messages.

At the shop I told the manager that I was at a loss as to why my pan had chipped. I assured her that I did not start the pan on HIGH, nor did I use anything other than non-metal utensils. She nodded and said that she would “put a work order on it,” have the rep check it out the next time he was in. Because they don’t provide loaners, I purchased the next pan up.

On Saturday evening I attended an opening at The Apartment, a group show of recent San Francisco art entitled 11 Lights on the Bay and a selection of Fran Herndon lithographs that found their way into Jack Spicer’s book Heads of the Town Up to the Aether (1962).

This being an opening, and The Apartment being a small space, I had few opportunities to view the work, though I did spend time with Colter Jacobsen’s corner piece, a selection of newspaper obituaries mounted at right angles on the wall and window, with the trimmings and unused obituaries crumpled below.

The elevation – and thoughtful arrangement – of the dead was both respectful and expected. However, it was the presence of that which fell away as dross that gave the piece its gravitas. A simple gesture, one that caught me off-guard.

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Also in 1977:

On April 6 Jack Wasserman, Vancouver Sun columnist and broadcaster, died in Vancouver, aged 50.

Wasserman was born February 17, 1927 in Winnipeg. He came to Vancouver with his family in 1935, aged 8. He dropped out of law school to take a reporter's job with the Ubyssey. Wasserman graduated from UBC (1949), and joined the Vancouver Sun, becoming a police reporter. Legend has it that he was covering the 1951 royal visit of Princess Elizabeth and Prince Philip somewhere in the Interior (before their arrival in Vancouver) and, rushed for time, simply phoned in his notes. The notes were so good, the story goes, the Sun ran them verbatim. Then, starting May 12, 1954, they gave him a man-about-town column, and he hit his stride. His column on “the second front page” of the afternoon paper, often detailing the city’s underbelly, became a hugely popular feature. His biggest scoop was the death in 1959 of Errol Flynn in a West End apartment.

Wasserman hosted an open-line program with CJOR, later hosted Hourglass on CBC TV. He was fired by the Sun in 1967 for hosting his radio show but rehired 18 months later. He died of a heart attack while speaking at the Hotel Vancouver during a roast for Gordon Gibson, Sr.

Last night’s screening of Skip Tracer (1977) went well -- a good turn out (including cast members Sue Astley, David Peterson and Stephen Miller) and a lively discussion after.

While preparing my introduction, specifically the question of how this film relates to Vancouver then and now, it occurred to me that the story is not of a debt collector out to “win,” as Charlie Sheen might say, but the nature of debt relative to a city born and raised on speculation, a life based on what is going to happen.

Debt, or outstanding debt, is that which has not happened -- the failure to repay. Rather than seek gold or fish or timber, rather than buying and selling stock or real estate, the film’s protagonist is out to make his bones collecting debt. And like Charlie Sheen in Wall Street, he has his reckoning: that sociopathy is not for everyone.

Thank you to Steve Chow and Sonya William at the Pacific Cinematheque and Elizabeth Park and Kathleen Ritter at the Vancouver Art Gallery for making last night happen.