Italian Days

Italian Days on Commercial Drive, the first since June 2019.  I was there on Sunday, a half-hour after it opened, and it was packed from Broadway to Venables. As in past years, I moved through about three thousand people, none of whom I recognized. 

The couple above are dancing a tarantella, and that was the Italian Days I remember from the 1980s, when the dine and dance clubs ruled, even though nobody went to them. Wazubee, like Monsoon on Main Street a few years later, marked a "changing of the shops" when it took over an old dine and dance outfit in the block north of 1st Avenue, switching from martinis and Salisbury steak to coffee and french fries. The couple below are a mother (left) and her daughter (right) seconds before the latter made her signing debut. Brava! Brava!

This was interesting:

Cross & Crows

The 2800-block south of East 12th, on the east side of Commercial Drive, is going through some changes. At the southern end of the block, a sudden hole where an automotive shop once stood, and a shop or two north of that, news of a new bookstore.

Once home I searched Cross & Crows and found its "bare-bones, temporary website," which opened with some books for sale, and under the "News" section, a Coast Salish land acknowledgement, then word from Nena, who has worked in indie bookstores since 1995 "and had the privilege of owning St. Johns Booksellers in Oregon for ten years."

Nena goes on to say that she is "queer, Lebanese-American, a parent, an editor, occasionally even a publisher," and has been living in Vancouver since 2016. Following that, mention of how her now adult children were always pointing out vacant storefronts as possible bookstore locations, and Nena's conditions: "I had promised myself and them that if there was ever a next time, it would be different."

It is now "next time," and this "different" store will soon be there for readers of books as well as those whose attention to language has them seeing the text in everything. For it is because of Nena's new store that we can begin to decorate her past stores with everything her new store might not be.

Skaters

Saturday's sun was irresistible. So I went out in it, walking east before making up my mind. A couple blocks in, a text from a friend: "If you're on one of your 'walks', stop by Britannia's tennis courts. My daughter's in a skateboard competition. Just girls."

Hard to call this a competition when everyone was bent-over-backwards supportive of each other, though I suppose you can have it both ways these days.

South of the courts were tables. Goods and good cheer. A boyfriend was selling his girlfriend's crocheted hats (she was competing). I saw one I liked, and was about to meet his price ($40), when I asked about the yarn, and he told me automatonically: "They're a hundred percent acrylic."

I thought of the wool and cotton hats my mother used to make for me, how quickly they lost their shape, only to be reminded by the young man's mother, who sensed my disappointment, that "Acrylic bounces back." She took the hat from my hands and played it like a concertina. "See?"

Sunday's Walk

 

Sundays have always started early for me. I never knew why until recently, when my Mom was telling me about all the partying she and my father used to do when I was a kid, and how good a boy I was because I always slept through it. Could it be that Sunday's early starts were related to another (this time sudden) recollection: Saturday's almost-criminally early bedtimes? What else could account for those early starts, my tip-toeing around the house until my parents got up at noon.

Yesterday I was up at 6am, the sun shining, the birds chirping. Rather than float about in my pyjamas all morning, as is my habit, I decided to get dressed, see what happened. What happened was me leaving the house at 8:30am for a walk that included the length of Commercial Drive, where I spoke with artist Keith McKellar, who was setting up a display of his hand-drawn city scene prints across from Grandview Park, and further south, in front of the post office near Broadway, artist Lobsang Tenzin was doing the same with his small water colours, one of which I purchased (pictured up top). Nice huh? How Ukraine's yellow and blue meet in a restorative green?

Though their work is very different from each other's, both men are in similarly great shape for their ages (early 70s?), with thick heads of (grey) hair, good skin and bone structure, athletic movements and an inner peace I associate with a rich spiritual life.

Aglow with these encounters, and a little hungry, I stopped at Subway for a 6" turkey sub, to eat on my way home. As I was heading west on 13th, a woman rushed past, then quickly turned around to say, "Hey, that smells good," and I told her what it was. "Do we know each other?" she asked, and it turns out I was talking to Denise Britt who, with her co-vivant Trent Hignell, owned and operated Black Sheep Books in Kits in the mid-1990s.

Denise hadn't changed a bit, which, oddly enough, does not account for why I didn't recognize her, at least not right away. After she fetched Trent, the same. Standing with them in their front yard, they told me how the bump that was Denise's tummy the last time I saw them had just completed his first year of university at my alma mater, UVic. So more to glow over as I floated home, alive with my encounters.

Have You Driven a Fort Lately?

The building above sits on the east side of Commercial Drive between 7th Avenue and what remains of the North Grandview Highway. It has been around for as long as I can remember, and contains two visible tenants: a provincial social services ministry and, on the Grandview side, a Mediterranean themed restaurant.

The picture was taken looking southeast, with an emphasis on the grand staircase that once linked the building's roof top parking lot with the sidewalk. A nice way to enter Commercial Drive, no? Particularly for Italians and Portuguese who had done well enough to afford homes on the westside, and who come to the Drive once a week for real coffee, real bread, real meats and real cheese, to connect with their community, to show off a little?

Funny how a little chainlink fencing, razor wire and a locked gate can turn what once looked so inviting into a Belfast constabulary or Cold War-era Berlin. That this modified building stands at what is in effect the southern gateway to the fifteen blocks that make up "Commercial Drive" (8th Ave to Venables) gives it its fort-like presence, as if this building was filled with soldiers who could be deployed at any time, for any reason.

The musician-scholar George Lewis once told me a story about growing up on the South Side of Chicago in the 1960s. In his neighbourhood there was a ground-level, white cube building on one of its corners that had no windows or doors, and had been around for as long as anyone could remember. One day, during a particularly intense week of public protests, vandalism and looting, George was riding his bike by this building when suddenly its front wall lifts up -- and out comes a Sherman tank!

Blockbusting Architecture

The pandemic has taken from us certain freedoms, but it has also provided certain liberties. Because social distancing has increased the ratio of people to metres inside restaurants, local governments have taken temporary measures to allow restauranteurs to build curbside structures, like this one at the NW corner of Grant and Commercial Drive, what I first knew as Cafe Le Grec, then later Bukowski's (not sure what it's called now).

These are not intended to be attractive structures but functional ones. Their function is to make money (for the restauranteur), provide tax revenue (for government) and keep servers off CERB (less successful). That this one looks like a cross between Chicago's Union Stockyards and a Nazi concentration camp should give you an idea of where our world is headed.

Human beings are adaptable creatures who have been known to fall in love with their captors. States of exception, if they go on long enough, are no longer exceptional. The Covid virus is the "star" of our pandemic, but as it is in Hollywood, where the studios and their parent companies gain the most from a blockbuster, the pandemic beneficiaries are those who control over 99% of the world's wealth and, in an effort to keep it, are eager to find new methods of social control. "Patio" seating is another kind of blockbuster: an inadvertent architecture, a vision of a dystopian future.

Signage

I noticed this sign on the 900 block of Commercial Drive last week. The sign is oriented for those on the inside in need of leaving, yet is visible to those on the outside, in reverse. A hangover from the early days of COVID, when entrances and exits were kept apart? Part of me was tempted to "try" this door, but then I would have to touch it.

Sweet Cherubim

I have always admired Sweet Cherubim's outdoor patio at Commercial and Napier. I love its scale in relation to its building; the cut, construction and colour of its wood; its height; and the integration of its flower boxes. Only once have I sat on it, and that was in the summertime, early 1980s, when I stopped to have a bowl of Mulligatawny soup (as food writer Felicity Cloake says of this Indian restaurant staple, it is "always there, never ordered").

In an effort to make life easier for Vancouver restaurants, the City has relaxed restrictions on outdoor patios (see the CoV's Temporary Expedited Patio Program, or TEPP). As a result, we have now some rather awkward looking dining pens, the worst of them beyond the curb where cars park. Though I am sure many servers are happy to be back on the job, it must be hard having to dodge pedestrians who stop to gawk at how unattractive these outdoor patios can be.  

Buckling Sidewalk

Walking south on the east side of Commercial Drive, between 13th and 14th Avenues, just before it turns into Victoria.

The tree up top is about time. Ringed with years, it casts the hour of the day (1:03 p.m. when I took its picture). To determine its exact age, you'd have to cut it down.

Saturday Walk

Yesterday afternoon was perfectly rainless, so I set off at noon for a walk to Commercial Drive, eventually to the Liquorice Parlour where I bumped into Veda, who I hadn't seen in years, and then back, with stops at the People's Co-op Bookstore, which was doing good business and where I purchased books by Claudia Rankine (Citizen: an American Lyric), Phyllis Webb (a collected) and the first two books by Danielle LaFrance, whose recent Just Like I Like It I thought so much of.

From there to the government liquor store where I picked up another bottle of that nice Latour Bourgogne Gamay 2018 and, at the produce stand just south of it, some fresh vegetables -- before stopping once more outside that failed instance of street access rooftop parking between 7th and Grandview, a building that, at its south end, is a "craft brew house + kitchen" known by its possessive -- St. Augustine's. How odd to name a bar after a saint known for his Confessions. Do I regret stopping there? No!

Impressionism

Looking west down East 4th Avenue from Commercial Drive last Thursday. The picture is darker than how things looked, but some of us "want it darker," according to Leonard Cohen, and besides, it's how I felt at the time.

Thursday Walk

Yesterday afternoon. Another break in the weather. Out the back this time, down the lane, left onto Clark to 11th, right to Commercial, where I turn left again, keeping to the east side of the street, the sunnier side, stopping outside Pulp Fiction Books because JP's behind the desk, and I have never seen that before: JP at the Commercial store.

On the desk, a display of Metatron titles, the first I have seen from this press I have heard so much about. But these books -- like the Pocket Poets series City Lights puts out. 6.5x4.75. An ideal size. A true pocket book! Twelve titles, of which Aja Moore is the only writer I am familiar with, whose work I have read, so it is Aja's book -- hotwheel -- that I set aside in the midst of my conversation with JP about the leap between poetic lines -- how hard they can be to stay with, as a reader, and harder still to trust, as a writer.

"Like an enthymeme," says JP. "You know what an enthymeme is," he says, and I confess that I don't. "A suppressed premise," he says, writing it down (at my urging), and from there he tells me what he learned from Aristotle's Rhetoric, a 4th century B.C. treatise on persuasion.

Further on, crossing 1st, my mind turning, coming up with stuff, "dumb shit," as George Bowering would call it -- or "a lot of dumb shit" as he once called Kevin Davies's "script" as he tossed it from the podium after Kevin aggressively read from it at the Western Front in October 1983, a benefit for a firebombed MacLeod's Books that Peter Culley used as a lede years later for his contribution to the Western Front's Whispered Art History: 1973-1993 (Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp, 1993).

I stop, write in my notebook

when missing you (withers?) into heartbreak

when I notice a picture of Pete Fry on the cover of a free daily. Inspired, I add

green critique of capital-is-him/patriarchy

and in re-reading these lines I feel nothing for the space between them.

A couple blocks later I am outside the People's Co-op Bookstore, and in the window is Byung-Chul Han's Psycho-Politics (London: Verso, 2017), which I grab without cracking and pay for. Later, over coffee, I flip through both books and turn down a corner in each. In Han's book, the opening page of Chapter 5, "Foucault's Dilemma", where he tells us how Foucault got it wrong: that it is not biopolitics (in relation to neoliberalism) but psycho-politics. In Aja's book, halfway through her poem "After I Definitely Can't Afford to Study w/ Sharon Olds" -- this:

I avoid my body     its triumphs and

its defeats

If I think of you at all

it is to wonder just how badly

I wanted a proper and final

grief

And all the ways we feel about it