Nowtopian

Been home over a week now, and fully immersed in projects that had built up in my absence (two book design jobs, two periodicals), and haven’t had much time to come up for air… But the Nowtopia tour ended in Victoria, a town that didn’t really thrill me. I’d heard a lot about it in terms of its quaintness, its “Britishness”, etc., but overall it was just a small town in Northwestern N. America, big yards, quiet streets, typical modern shopping district to attract tourism, etc. We had a great host in Peter and his family, and he was also our host for the reading at Camas Infoshop, a recently opened anarchist-inspired bookshop on Quadra Street.

We tooled around town a bit too, and came upon this elderly woman’s front yard. She was smiling to us from her window as we photographed her signage. The first one is in regard to the Winter Olympics coming in 2010 and some recent regulatory changes, the second is self-evident I hope!

Thanks to a good article written in the local Monday Magazine, we had a decent audience of about 20+ folks. The conversation after the readings turned to our recurrent theme in the northwest: End of Civilization, armed self-defense, that sort of thing… another old draft dodger refugee, now in his 60s (I was told he was an old Trot), argued that it “wasn’t time yet” to pick up weapons, vs. a young punk queer anarchist covered in tattoos who urgently insisted that we had to prepare immediately. He also was a fan of Derek Jensen’s End Game, which he assured me is much more sophisticated than the Original Sin orientation of John Zerzan… he also insisted that Jensen is not misanthropic and that he is very enthused about First Nations peoples… just not too fond of anyone who is a product of our current world!… hmmm…

Continue reading A Belated Conclusion to the Tour

I realized soon after arriving that the last time I was in Vancouver was all the way back in 1986 for a conference called “Split Shift: The New Work Writing” when I came up with several Processed World colleagues and we did an early version of the Attitude Adjustment Seminar. In a restaurant downtown I came upon this scrawled graffiti, which echoed that long-ago visit:

Obviously the city has changed enormously since the mid-1980s. I also have another layer of memory from my first “independent” journey as a young fella, in 1973, when I came up here to hang with a high school crush while she visited her boyfriend at Simon Fraser University… that tells ya something, not sure what!!

Anyway, Vancouver is situated in a place that makes it endlessly beautiful to move around and see views of mountains and sea, but it’s also weirdly ugly, with an incredible number of Hong Kong-style glass highrise apartments having taken over a lot of the shorelines here. The area known as False Creek is remarkably similar to San Francisco’s Mission Creek, huge construction underway, up here they’re building the Olympic Village for 2010 Winter Olympics (much teeth gnashing about the waste of resources, and urban history getting bulldozed for the spectacle).

In fact, the building boom here continues what we’ve seen along the whole trip, Portland, Seattle and here, not to mention home in SF, where the financial crisis and plunging real estate values have not halted the frenzied efforts to build still more condos and offices. Here in Vancouver the sense of real estate opportunity is palpable, what with a spectacular setting, a relatively healthy local economy and a relatively small urban space (under 2 million, compared to Bay Area’s 6+ million)… But that’s just one part of the story.

Just below where I was taking these photos was a small park with a dozen junkies in full view shooting up.

There is also an intense outdoor drug injection culture that we stumbled onto as we were cruising through alleys looking for stencils. Suddenly we were dodging dozens of folks who were ignoring us entirely, but many of them were in mid-shoot, blood and needles everywhere… really gross! Here’s the People’s Pigeon Park where a Food Not Bombs-like food table was working.

A short distance away were the alleys full of junkies. On the wall behind this odorific scene were many images, but one odd poster at the top of the right corner caught our eye:

Continue reading Exploring Vancouver