Category: musing

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Vancouver, British Columbia

To get my work visa for Chile, I had to visit one of the country’s consulates in Canada…and there isn’t one in Alberta. The nearest one is in Vancouver, British Columbia.

I have two cousins, neither of whom I’ve seen in years (because I’ve been in China, they live in Vancouver and Toronto, and I’ve never been home at the same time as either of them!). There’s also a Chilean consulate in Toronto, so I’d get to visit one of my cousins no matter where I got my visa. And it made the most sense, logically, to get it in Toronto, because all flights from Canada to South America go through Pearson airport. However, my cousin there is very busy…he’s an engineer, and he’s planning his wedding…and, really, I wanted to visit Vancouver more.

I’ve been there a number of times now, and I absolutely love it. The stories about the cost of living there are outrageous, and also true. On the cab ride to my cousin’s place, I passed a new condo development on Granville Street, apparently geared towards families…they started at $2 million. There’ve been efforts to control land prices, and taxes for absentee owners who buy property in Vancouver but then don’t live there — many of those investors are of course from China, and are desperate to get any money they have out of that country. But Vancouver has always been expensive, because everyone wants to be there, because it’s beautiful.

Another story about Vancouver is you can go swimming in the morning and skiing in the afternoon, and in winter that is true. It has the Pacific Ocean on one side, and mountains right there on the other! It has Stanley Park, with one of the best aquariums in the world, totem poles, dozens of kinds of wild birds, roses and TREES, on an amazing coastline. Downtown Vancouver has (expensive) buildings right on the water which are all glass, so they reflect the water and the hundreds of boats docked there. They have outrageously good sushi, and the coffee culture is so pervasive I wonder if their blood is half caffeine; I say that having been to three excellent coffee houses in two days. They have salmon, and amazing fruit. There are so many beautiful (expensive) neighbourhoods with phenomenal houses and huge trees. The university of British Columbia sticks out into the ocean, and has its own forest, Japanese garden, and the legendary (notorious) Wreck Beach.

I know that when many people outside of Canada think of Canada, they’re thinking of Vancouver. I love that I got to spend my last few days in Canada there.

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VOTE. You have to Vote. Part 3 – media

Quebec City mosque shooting victims include businessman, professor and fathers of young children
6 men were shot in the back as they gathered for evening prayer, mosque’s vice-president says

FIRST.

Now.

I wanted to know who did it. I was so anxious to know I was on Twitter all day. Which, we should know, is a BAD place to get up-to-date news.

I realized yesterday afternoon I was contributing to the bile by even looking at it, and made myself log out.

In the end, one person was arrested.

From now on, BE PATIENT. Police have a job to do, LET THEM do it.

STOP getting your news off Twitter. STOP. I know that’s hard, given the possible forced deportations which no one can find out anything about. BUT, this happened in CANADA. For right now, we do still have some reliable media outlets. Here they are.

Vote with your money: Start PAYING for news again. We have to. News has gone downhill, and Part of the reason is likely because ad revenue has cratered, so they feel compelled to take “native advertising” and pander to customers instead of sticking to journalistic integrity. PAY FOR reliable news so they can pay reporters and researchers to do the work.

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VOTE. You have to Vote. Part 2 #Canada #voting #nomuslimban #refugeeswelcome

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My goodness. That went well!

MoveOn.org
MoveOn.org

But it’s not remotely over yet. Next: the “hard” part.

Immediately after the inauguration, The Village Voice published a series of mini-interviews done with attendees. The very first interviewee said that the new president’s words were being parsed by the media, and he didn’t believe that all of things the president said were in fact going to happen, that it was his, very good, way of saying he was simply putting the US’s interests first. When asked if he had in fact voted for Trump, this man answered:

“No, I’m a Canadian citizen.”

I’m not linking to that article, because I don’t want to contribute to that person being tracked down and bile thrown at him over the internet — if you want to read it yourself, you’ll have no trouble finding it.

The fact that Canada has not one but two proponents of the new president’s ideology running for the PC leadership (you know who I mean — I’m not furthering the indignity they’ve heaped on other people), and that this ideology has support in Canada, might make clear-headed Canadians panic and say “no, we DON’T have time! It’s inevitable.”

It’s NOT inevitable. If you believe that, you’ve said you’re going to do nothing. Which is what happened before and during WWII. THAT’S were we are now. That is NOT inevitable in Canada, we CAN stop it.

And it’s, again, very simple, BUT. Turnout for the 2015 federal election was the highest in ages, yet over 30% of voters still didn’t show up. The only way to prove to the right-wing that the majority does not agree with them IS to utterly prove the majority is against them…that is, to VOTE AGAINST THEM.

The only way to not let either of those potential PCs have power, is to NOT let them have that power. If the majority of Canadians don’t vote for a party, they don’t get the power to enact what they want to do.

See? Simple.

Yes, we have first-past-the-post, we’ve had minority governments in recent history, blah blah. We somehow allowed Harper in power for 10 years, and finally, enough Canadians got sick of him to hand him a resounding Defeat. We can, and we must, keep fascism out of the Canadian parliament. And we can. By voting.

So do it.

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VOTE. You. Have. To. VOTE. Part 1 #vote #canada

The horrors have been coming so thick and fast that no one can process them all. Which is part of the strategy, clearly: throw in all the immigration, abortion, and press bans, one right after the other, and there are too many things to nail down and protest.

Which is why I am — for the moment — still happy and relieved to be Canadian. Because we still have time.

The solution is very simple, so simple we already know what it is, but it does take work. Part of the issue has been simple complacency, the old “we took for granted” that racism, sexism, and hate speech weren’t as bad in Canada, and we made the false assumption that “not as bad as” meant “no problem at all.” Pretty obvious now that assumption was incorrect. So the obvious, simple way to combat all that is to: STOP. IT.

People who aren’t white are being harassed. When you see that, stop it. Call the police. Yell. Start carrying a black marker with you, and when you see hate propaganda posters anywhere, DON’T tear them down, but write this across them: Section 319 (1) . That’s “hate speech”, in the Criminal Code of Canada.

CANADIANS EVERYWHERE, in Canada, living outside of it, ALL OF YOU:

Write to your MLA, your premier, your MP, and the Prime Minister. Today, every day. Tell them that what it happening in the US will not happen here.

And if the new president wants to get shirty, I am willing to live without avocados. I survived without a car most of my adult life. If things get so tough that I can’t get a job in Canada, I now have the ability to teach pretty much anywhere in the world, and come back…thanks to my Canadian passport. That’s how lucky I am.

Refugees — NOT “migrants” for god’s sake! — are worse than unlucky. They are in danger. People who are anything but white-Caucasian, are in danger.

Canada is better than the US. Prove it, and make the people we elected to represent us prove it.

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Best friends: A very small note for Andrew Ridgeley and Mark Hamill.

My mom died when I was fourteen.  Remember that for later.

When I was 17, I knew a guy at my Roman-Catholic high school named Jason. He was tall, nice-looking, and the prototypical life of the party. He died of a massive heart attack when we were in grade 12. He’d had a congenital heart defect which he and his family knew about — but very few people at school did. Our school held a memorial service for him, and I happened to sit near the front. I clearly saw Jason’s closest friend, and later wrote in my journal “Please help him God, he looks like I did three years ago.”

He was sitting in the pews beside the altar. With the family.

My first thought when George Michael died was for Andrew Ridgeley.  Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go was released in 1984. I was 9 years old, in grade 4. I loved George, obviously, but it was Andrew I had a crush on – he looked more attainable to me (for a superstar adult who lived in Britain). He looked nice. It always bothered me a bit whenever I heard a joke about him years later (“the other one from Wham!”), because I had felt overlooked all the time too. But think about this: they’d known each other since they were 17 years old. He was likely the first person George ever told he was gay…in the early 80s.  Yes, George Michael was the utterly talented, charismatic sex symbol. Yet I think it’s now very clear, there would have been no George Michael without Andrew.

And in the same week…Carrie Fisher. Whom I adored so much in When Harry Met Sally, but who had to forever after be Princess Leia. Princess. A princess who can lead an army, shoot a laser, fix a spaceship… oh that’s not normal? Oh well, that’s what 10-year-old me thought a princess was.  Sorry Disney.  Another reason I looked up to her: she was so pretty, yet not unachievably beautiful, like the supermodels my sisters and friends and I were inundated with in the 80s and 90s. , Carrie Fisher I could actually look like! (I didn’t remotely resemble her, but I felt I could.)

Amongst the explosions, taun-tauns, Ewoks, and VADER, my favourite scene in all the  Star Wars movies is Luke asking Leia about her mother. Yes, I loved, loved, loved Han and Leia, but I identified with Luke and Leia. They were destined to be best friends. And I always felt that same twinge about Mark Hamill whenever I heard a joke about him.  Whatever else happened (or didn’t) after, he was Luke Skywalker.  And there would have been no Princess Leia, no Carrie, without Mark.

Hug your closest friends. Be the best friend who becomes family.

 

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Kabuki Theatre and Oiwa #theatre

I am a theatre junkie. Kabuki is at least as old as Shakespeare.  It’s one of THE drama traditions I heard about as soon as I decided theatre was my life. Going to a kabuki play was on my must-do list while I was in Tokyo, but it was also felt, for me, like going to a cathedral and I hadn’t been to confession.

The Kabuki-za Theatre in Ginzu, Tokyo, the largest in Japan.
The Kabuki-za Theatre in Ginzu, Tokyo, the largest in Japan.
Billboard for the show outside the theatre. Of course no photos were allowed during the show.
Billboard for the show outside the theatre. Of course no photos were allowed during the show.

It was utterly amazing. It was actually four short pieces I saw, which — with intervals when you could get full meals and beer to have at your seat! — was three and half hours long. The style of acting and the men playing women (I’ll need to post about that separately—because) took some getting used to, because it’s so utterly different from any show I’ve ever seen before, and that’s part of the reason it was enthralling.

One of MANY screens hiding the stage over the performance.
One of MANY screens hiding the stage over the performance.

Everything I felt seeing my first kabuki was wrapped up in what I’d felt earlier that day while trying to track down Oiwa…the main character in one of Japan’s creepiest ghost stories, most famous kabuki plays (I didn’t see that one, sadly), and many of the country’s successful horror films.

There are a few different versions of Oiwa’s story: here’s one of the shortest, yet best and scariest. Horror and/or Japanese film fans will recognise her likeness from the Ringu series.

I have presumed to put her into one of my stories…the short film I started work on in France over the summer, and the related feature-length screenplay I just drafted. They both concern domestic violence, culture clashes, racism, sexism, revenge, and guilt.

Theatre people are, put mildly, superstitious. We call it “The Scottish Play” or “McBoo”. We leave a “ghost light” on in the middle of the stage when the theatre is otherwise empty and dark. And in Japan, whenever an actor onstage, or an actress on film, takes the role of Oiwa, they go to her shrine in Tokyo and ask Oiwa’s permission to play her.

And that’s what I did too.

The shrine in Yotsuya, Tokyo.
The shrine in Yotsuya, Tokyo.

The trope of the Maiden Ghost, based on Oiwa, has appeared in so many incarnations now that she’s thrown the first pitch in a baseball game. Which sounds silly, but I find it actually shows that Japan takes her as seriously as kabuki; she is embedded in Japanese culture — everyone knows her, and everyone, in a strange way, loves her. She embodies something genuinely wrong — vengeance — but it’s something everyone understands and has, at some point, wanted against someone else. I’m frightened by and enthralled by her.

I hope it’s not cultural appropriation — Gore Verbinski’s remade Ringu, quite well, I thought. Yes, I went to visit Tokyo to see the city, yes I met up with an old friend who’s been in Japan 14 years. However…I also went to Tokyo specifically to visit Oiwa’s shrine and ask “is this okay?” I hope it is.

A closer look at one grave.
A closer look at one grave.
Cemetery behind the shrine.
Cemetery behind the shrine.
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Photos of #Japan : #Asakusa , #Tokyo

Asakusa is the neighbourhood where I stayed, still very much Tokyo, but quiet and hip. It’s where I had the best burger, doughnut, and sushi of my life (so far).

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Photos of #Japan : The East #Imperial Gardens, #Tokyo

The East Gardens of the Imperial Palace of Japan…distinct from THE Imperial Gardens because those are immediately around the current Palace, and are off-limits.  And what you do get to see is utterly magnificent, and huge — I was there nearly three hours and didn’t see everything.

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Photos from #Japan : #Kategawa Castle and Shrine

My first full day in Japan, I visited a university friend who’s been teaching English since 2002. He lives in Shizuoka Prefecture, and we met up in Kategawa, 90 minutes south of Tokyo by train.

This is what Japan’s “countryside” looks like, and this area grows mostly buckwheat. However, industry is never far away – my friend teaches Yamaha employees at the local plant.

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Photos from #Japan : #Tokyo

There are only two substantial holiday periods in China – the reason they’re called “Golden Weeks” – and one was this past week, so I went to Japan! I was there four days; I saw some of Tokyo, and an old friend in Shizuoka prefecture, an hour and a half from Tokyo by train.

Several days of photos coming – here first are the random things I saw and loved in Tokyo itself.