Olympic City Gussies Up

Today I decided to get off my butt and go to see how things are progressing in the massive re-decoration of Vancouver for the Olympics. I packed my camera, glasses and lip balm (Grandma said never leave the house without lipstick, close enough) and headed to the Skytrain.

I didn’t walk far before realizing I had made a major error. I wore the wrong socks, the ones that end up in a ball under my toes. Then it started to rain, just a light sprinkle, no problem, being a seasoned Vancouverite I had an umbrella in my bag. Walking up Commercial Drive to the station, (sixteen short blocks from my house) there is no sign of the pending Olympics. The decorative lights, swirly things on the street lamps, were put up before Christmas and they are pretty non-descript, neither Christmassy or Olympicky. I'll call them winterish looking. It’s what you get for decoration in a neighbourhood that is so tolerant that it is utterly intolerant.

At the top of the train platform escalator,  I entered the Olympic zone. Ad signs, featuring Icky, Mucky and Yucky, or whatever their names are, the mascots (wait, I’ll google it, Quatchi, Miga, Sumi and Mumuk) line the corridor.

I wonder if Quatchi knows that yesterday there was a guy gunned down just a block away from his big picture?

As the trained passes the Science World  and Athlete's Village everything gets intense, or rather in tents. 

Every direction I look there are tents, huge white tents in all kinds of shapes and sizes. I wish I owned a tent company. Quebec has a very large cube shaped tent with a giant Q on the side. Dwarfed between it and another huge tent  is the practical looking Saskatchewan tent. Even without the benefit of seeing inside, I can’t help but think of how the tents reflect the culture of each province.




 Downtown is becoming less of a construction zone; especially with the fencing on Granville Street that surrounded the Skytrain line construction gone.

 There is still work trucks and men in hard hats everywhere but they’re doing finishing touches; landscaping, building scaffolding for video screens and putting up humongous, skyscraper size pictures and flags.








 The Vancouver Art Gallery, Georgia Street entrance, is wrapped in what cynically could be called Grandma’s bedroom wallpaper.  

 

The Robson Street side, home to annual marijuana protests and pillow fights, houses a large video screen. 

 

 

 Robson square is a waterfall in Olympic colours. Yep, the whole place is tarted up real pretty like.

 On Granville I watched the installation for Lunafest, sponsored by the Public Dreams Society and Asian-Canadian Special Events Association, as part of the Cultural Olympiad. The work made me think of a school science fair, only one where the principal is Terry Gilliam.

At least it’s bright and fun and adds some life to the street that doesn’t include corporate boosterism.

A young Australian man asked me to take his picture by the Olympic countdown clock. The next thing I knew there was a line-up of tourists, most non-English speaking, pointing at me and their cameras and the clock.

I obliged and took their pictures, umbrella in one hand, camera in the other, and a sock slowly rolling under my heel. When I reached down to pull up my sock I was reminded of Gord taking his daughter and friends to a Gwen Stephani concert. He was very funny imitating many of the fifteen-year-old girls at the concert. The ones wobbling on their mom’s borrowed high heels tugging up on their tube tops and down on their mini skirts. I don’t know why my middle-aged sock pulling reminded me of this but it made me laugh out loud. Then the tourists laughed too. This was my favorite Olympic moment so far.

East Van Exists!

On Friday, the Monument For East Vancouver was erected a few blocks from where I live. Vancouver artist, and East Van raised, Ken Lum created it as part of the Olympic and Paralympic Public Art Program. The sixty-foot structure is shaped like a cross, with EAST verticle and VAN horizontal intersecting at the A. It’s a familiar graffiti image to most long time residents of the east side of Vancouver and, some say, a gang symbol that belonged to bunch of up-to-no-good working class kids that liked to rough up the rich west side kids. From what I’ve gleamed, the gang had a couple of tough guys, rumoured to have joined a biker club, and a reputation as racist but it doesn’t compare to today’s gun toting, armoured SUV variety. It fizzled out in the eighties and much of the gang activity has left for the suburbs, but east siders, wanting to differentiate themselves from the white washed west side, adopted the symbol, which usually includes the word “rules”.




The piece is as controversial as art should be. The Jesus lovers and haters object to the use of a cross, especially one with a gang insinuation. Others are afraid it will scare away the tourists and wealthy neighbours. Some think it’s just fugly.

Vancouver has long been divided by east and west, historically the upper classes reside along the water, with the sailboats and the seawall, while the east is working class and rims the port. The east has long history of being overlooked. In the seventies, when the NDP first came to power in BC, Premiere Barrett, angered that only the schools on the west side had gymnasiums, made it a priority to a build gymnasiums in schools in the east. East Vancouver has become relatively affluent since then, but public art still remains something found in the west.

Until recently, if you visited Vancouver and consulted the tourist sites you would not have any information about the east side. Most erroneously associate it with the notorious downtown east side, despite the fact that a million dollar loft owner in Gastown has a much closer proximity to the human horror show than anyone living on the east side. To me, the Main Street and Commercial Drive areas of the east side are two of the most vibrant interesting neighbourhoods in the city. Both a ten-minute cab ride from the centre of Vancouver, they are full of unique restaurants and shops with a vibrant street life. You can’t throw a rock in my neighbourhood without hitting a musician or filmmaker or visual artist. (Of course, you may also hit a mom with a stroller the size of a Volkswagen or the panhandler with the pigeon on his head.) It’s about time East Van got some attention.

The Monument For East Vancouver is at the corner of Clark Drive and Great Northern Way. It is on the hillside beside a busy three-way intersection of the major truck route from the port south and an artery to the west. It borders the train tracks and the light industrial area that divides downtown from the east side. It's a gritty, graffiti riddled site which evokes of the rough east side's past. The letters face the west and, when the lights that form each letter and the cross are lit at night, it is visible to many areas of the west, virtually none in the east. It isn’t a piece that east siders can sit on a bench and eat their lunch beside, or even see unless they go west, but it’s definitely provocative rising up to warn that it’s different over here.

Driving up the hill toward it at night I felt like I was approaching a church in a David Lynch movie. It's an interesting piece. East Vancouver is the home of many of the lefty, we don’t trust corporations and hate the Olympics, crowd but I think that they might appreciate this bit of Olympic swag.

Rich vs Poor

How can anyone support the Olympics when people are suffering in Haiti? Twice this weekend I overheard such a comment and I was immediately reminded of my mother telling me to eat my vegetables because children were starving in Biafra. (I know I dated myself, google it)

Later, I was having lunch with friends and they were chuckling about the weather being too warm and delighting in the potential disruption and fantasizing about ways to breech security or generally mess with the games to embarrass them. I laughed but didn’t really feel good about it. I know they were kidding, the real implications are that the only ones that will end up paying for any misfortune to befall the Olympics will be the people trying to get to work to pay the tax bill. I doubt the Crown Prince of Denmark will be that inconvenienced, in his limo, stuck in traffic. I’m hoping for perfect weather and inept vandals.

Much of the protest and unease about the Olympics is about rich verses poor. The two most visible bumper stickers belie this “Health Care before Olympics” and “No Olympics on Native Land”. I heard an interview on CBC with a Native woman that was against the games, stating that many members of her reserve had scored jobs working on the Sea to Sky highway expansion and that it was a terrible thing. They blew their money on trucks and drugs and generally were causing havoc. To me, these are issues about poverty and I certainly understand using the games, as a symbol of wealth and corruption to create awareness and a conversation about the destitution most in the world experience, but I’m not sure health care and Native land protests are that effective. I doubt that without the Olympics any of that money would have been spent on health care and Native leaders, eager to create some economic activity, are very visible in their support for the games. Unfortunately, the poor can’t afford the marketing expertise to sell their message and most of the super rich is too short sighted to see anything beyond today’s bottom line. The Big Three car company’s being great examples of that. No one, with a functioning brain, couldn't see the end of the gas guzzling SUV coming?

My stepdaughter, a couple of years ago, suggested that I stop writing and get a job at Safeway so that we won’t be poor and could buy a house like all of her friends live in. (She also lives with her mother in a neighbourhood not unlike the opening credits to Weeds with the ticky tacky houses and both parents being lawyers that all look the same. I doubt any of them worked at Safeway to afford their lifestyle, but she was twelve and Safeway somehow seemed glamorous.) We rent an apartment with rent controls in a mixed inner city neighbourhood with zero hope in ever being able to afford a house. It is a rare year that we make enough to stay out of debt but I explained to her that we’re not poor and we made a choice. I don’t have to follow my artistic muse and work in a field that is freelance and fickle but I choose to. That’s who I am and it probably has a lot to do with why she likes me. (She now professes to want to be an accountant but knowing her artistic sensibility I doubt this Alex P. Keaton tendency will endure. I hope it does, I'll need somewhere to live when I'm old) I could choose to go to an Olympic event if I wanted to. I’m certain that the Olympic partners at VISA would be happy to lend me the money, at 18%. People in Haiti are too poor to have the privilege of choice.

Gord and I went to a birthday party atop Grouse Mountain on the weekend. I fretted about what to wear worrying that my last year sweater wasn’t respectable enough for a party thrown by people that can afford such an extravagance. I caught myself before we left remembering that we were invited because they like us and they are nice people and no one cares about my sweater.

On the way up on the gondola kids, in expensive snowboard gear, chatting and having a good time, surrounded us. I think I was the only one listening to the guide point out the white Olympic rings in the inlet. Over the din, I think I heard him say that the rings will turn from white to coloured when the games start and then turn red every time Canada wins gold. I am sure that will be moving. In the time that I wrote this blog I’ve watched a twenty-story banner cover the side of the Royal Bank building saying it supports Team Canada. That’s nice. We’re awesome. Yeah us.

It’s easy to blame the Olympics as a symbol of everything bad, but I think that lets us all off the hook a bit. We’re all so concerned with which new cell phone to get that we forget the implications. I feel sad for the plight of those with less than me. Olympic partner VISA allowed me to send money to the Red Cross, guilt assuaged, not really. One of the snowboarders had a curling iron in her back pack. How could she be so concerned about her après snowboarding hair when people in Haiti don’t even have brushes? It’s hard to get my head around, but maybe Mom had a point about Biafra and the vegetables.

Where Are We?

Gord and I just returned from a restful sunny week in Sayulita Mexico. Leaving from the Vancouver airport was routine, same old security gates, maybe a few new Haida art pieces, but the airport looks pretty much the same as it did last time I left the country. Arriving everything was different. For starters, two CBSA (Canadian border Security Agency) guards with a large brown dog sniffed at us as we stepped off the plane. Isn’t that supposed to happen before you get on the plane?

Entering the terminal, huge light blue banners hang from the ceiling every ten feet or so on either side of the corridor. In large lettering across the top it reads, no not “Welcome to Vancouver” but “Samsung.” Gord turned to me and said “we took the wrong plane we’re in Japan!”

The place has really been spiffed up for the Olympics and, despite the crazed footrace to be at the front of the customs line; I had to stop (not for long I am still a competitive beast) to look at a beautiful tank with giant jellyfish wafting up and down in the water. Actually, the whole terminal gives you the feeling of being inside an enormous sparkling aqua fish tank. It’s quite lovely. Cha ching!

Leaving customs and entering into the confusing zone that is the site of the infamous tasering incident, the whole area is unrecognizable. It’s been renovated into a large open space with a massive information desk, visible to the public area and seemingly impossible to get lost or hidden in. This is an improvement that it is easy to appreciate.

It’s obvious that a lot of attention and money was spent and the hordes coming to the big event should, as long as they have no raw meat in their carry on bags, have a comfortable arrival here in Samsung.

Olympic Curiosity

For me, Olympic fatigue set in years ago. Ever since the Olympic Committee selected Vancouver for the 2010 Olympics it has been, along with the endless winter rain, a black cloud hanging over the city. I think of it with dread; the traffic, all that money for a big party for the rich, the homeless rounded up, the tickets are too expensive, the Olympic committee is corrupt. It was this thing that we’d have to pay for and endure but not be part of. Then, there was the media’s relentless obsession, reporting every little construction burp or protester’s fart. Every partisan became more so, blaming or crediting everything to the Olympics. Hardware stores did a roaring business selling spray paint used to write “Stop 2010” on the fences, roads and stop signs. My neck was getting sore from looking up at the helicopters rehearsing the security procedures that will save us from potential doom.

Vancouver is a strange city. It reminds me of a hipster twenty something that thinks the only music that’s cool is the stuff no one else has heard. It’s a cynicism that permeates almost everything. I don’t know if it’s all the lattes or the pot but people here are not big participators. We even had a civic election campaign fought over Vancouver being a “no fun” city. The overwhelming collective is one of protest. We’re very good at being anti. Maybe it’s the rain or our grossly absurd and nasty political history that makes us negative and suspicious. I don’t know, I’m not a journalist; I’m just a woman with a great view from her deck.

From my perch I can see the new athlete’s village, the opening ceremony venue, and the sacred hockey rink and, as folks are running and cheering the torch as it travels across the country, all I feel is disconnected. If I am going to survive the games I need an attitude adjustment. Why not change the dread to curiosity? At least there is something to observe besides mould growing on my windows.

With the games only a month away, a manic spit shine, with corporate branding, is evident everywhere. The other day I took the skytrain to Granville Station, the main stop in the downtown core. The pristine white tiled corridor of the station is overwhelmed by huge ads featuring Canadians in the stands of an unknown sporting event all decked out in red and white and cheering wildly. On further perusal I realized that it’s an ad for Coke. They must be thrilled that our country shares their colours. Then I noticed someone had used a back felt pen to make juvenile squiggles haphazardly on most of the signs. I thought that’s a rather silly form of protest and a waste of a felt pen until I got to the last poster. The squiggles had stopped and the culprit had blackened out the odd tooth on the screaming fans. I’ll admit that’s kind of witty.

I have trouble with the idea of jumping on the Olympic bandwagon. It has the stink of being run by an elitist bunch of creeps but it’s coming and there’s nothing I can do about it. So, with a month to go before the opening ceremonies, I’ve decided to stay curious and write down my thoughts and observations as this reluctant Olympic city morphs before my eyes.