As I approached the entrance of the Hotel Vancouver, a voice called out behind me. I spun around, semi-dramatically. It was Paul Wong.
"Do that again," he said, "but more so."
So I did. Dramatically.
"Again," he said, and I complied. Comedically.
"One more!" he insisted.
"Three takes," said the actor Callum Rennie -- "I need my third take." I'll always remember that.
The six block walk to the #25 bus, then to King Ed Station, where I travelled three stops (north) to Yaletown Station and walked another six blocks up Davie to Burrard. It can happen in less that a half hour, but I give it an hour at least. You can't be late for these appointments.
If I make all my connections, the walk from Yaletown to St Paul's is a meander. Anything that catches my eye I stop for.
Granville is once again a scary street, scarier than it was before they took the cars off it in 1973, when they tore it up to give us a pedestrian "oasis" -- and one of Canada's largest malls.
Before 1973, Granville was old men in tie-less, crumpled dark blue suits and women in turbans and knee-length coats that hid their dirty hair and moth-bitten dresses. These people spent their days and nights sitting as best they could in tiny, decrepit hotel lobbies with smudged windows nipping at vanilla extract and Aqua Velva, chain-smoking, doing everything they could to not get kicked out. Many of the cheaper hotels where they lived were torn down to make way for retail shops and bars, places tourists like. Most of the people living "on" Granville today are without proper beds to sleep in or hotel lobbies to sit in. Everything now takes place on the street.
Upon reaching Granville I decided not to cross it but walk along it. What I saw more than once were couples or families from Europe or Latin American standing terrified before a suddenly stumbled upon drug-taking cluster of tanned and skinny bodies, some of them completely naked in the scorching 9 a.m. sun. Again, it was not the bodies of those living on Granville that registered, but those of a travelling privileged class who had never seen anything like them.
I was downtown yesterday for Show Canada's gathering of Canadian exhibitors. The Bayshore Hotel is the convention's base camp, but VIFF kindly put on a meet and greet for indies in its lobby. The event was originally charging a $20 entrance fee, which included a drink and a snack, but Telefilm's Barbara Chirinos stepped in and covered the cost on behalf of the agency.
On the way to VIFF I noticed some of what I've been hearing more about concerning homelessness, as well as public drug use, notably outside the "overdose prevention site" at Seymour and Helmcken. Just before that, I happened to look over my shoulder after crossing Granville Street and saw a building I had never noticed before: The Victoria.
Built in 1994, The Victoria appears to me like an even scratchier version of the drawing it began as, the kind that excites developers looking for something more than what they say they want, but are afraid to admit to; in this case, another riff-off of the Hotel Vancouver.
Like Paul Merrick's 1990 Canadian Craft Museum (oddly enough, now the Bill Reid Museum), The Victoria is too much about itself to be occupied. We have people living on the streets and architects designing condo towers not even the rich can fit into.
On Thursday morning I had an appointment I couldn't be late for. So I set out earlier than early and, after getting off at the Granville Skytrain Station, walked south on the Granville Strip, then west on Davie, to the top of the hill looking down at English Bay -- all in the name of killing time.
The usual run of broken widows. Some boarded over, others held together with tape.
The picture up top is a sushi restaurant. The method of repair owes as much to waiting (on an insurance claim, or an owner unable to cover the deductible) as it does to the ancient art of kintsugi. Shades of Imperial Japan's Rising Sun flag? I thought so. But a cracked version.
