We the City at SFU

Hosted by Mo Dhaliwal, last Thursday's event followed a city wide art happening called Tilt City, and featured Mo in conversation with three artists who also spoke about their work.   

Image right from modhaliwal.com

SFU President Andrew Petter got the ball rolling with a "Ferlingettiesque" poem he had penned for the occasion on the theme of What makes a city great? Mo Dhaliwal spoke of his mission to, his determination to hold his intention to "create some connective tissue where their was none before," so we can all feel more sense of belonging. His ideal is an "organic reciprocity" between arts and culture, which he described as "the dark matter that lies behind everything."


Image right of Teju Cole from novelbooks.nyc

Writer and photographer Teju Cole showed some of his famous city images, which included an image of a palimpsest, a vellum that has been used, erased and reused, and a "map" of the Anatolian city of Catal Huyuk, so old that it predated the invention of streets; the houses were simply jammed together. Cities, said Cole, are an invention, a technology. Some of the major benefits they provide are to conserve resources and foster tolerance.

The highly original artist Candy Chang is the woman behind the amazing Before I Die...project, which has now spread to 70 countries and presented as a TED talk. Listening to her, one soon realizes how much more friendly and welcoming cities might look if more people--including introverts--had a chance to participate in creating their surroundings.

Image left the Lavina agency
Candy Chang  is also a city planner. "Small experimental interventions," she says, "can lead to better informed bigger ones." Honesty leads to vulnerability which leads to trust which creates a more compassionate society. She shared the advice of Carl Jung: to welcome neurosis as "the arrow that points to the wound, the pain of the soul as yet undiscovered," and that "dying well is a moral obligation for ourselves and others."

Beloved singer-Songwriter Buffy Ste. Marie was encouraged by new thinking about conflict resolution. Candy Chang, an expert at getting people involved in art, then said that doing things quickly and cheaply engaged a different part of the mind, which in turn inspired Buffy to note the value of beginner's mind. Buffy rounded off the evening with a poem, "Cook it up yourself," and a song. And all of us are naturally creative; after all, we are all made in the image of the creator.  

Image right from unl

Artists, she said, are visionaries, on the cutting edge. And they aren't just about the output. They have to be sensitive to what's coming in. This dynamic woman has had the joy of a life "on the edge between music and social justice," and has "tried to cover the bases no one else was covering."

Early in life, this remarkable woman was told many strange lies: "There are no more Indians," and "you can't be a musician because you can't read music." Fortunately she didn't let these things stand in her way. Her closing comment concerned the value of the internet. "Now we can publish what we want, and find one another again."

Transitioning home: Contact! unload

Hall and stairs of Ponderosa Annex F, UBC

As Remembrance Day nears, I wear my poppy and think about war veterans. When Dad returned from World War II, the only support system for men after combat was the Legion, where old war buddies met to remember -- or forget -- by sousing themselves in beer and rum.

Today, thanks to a program developed through Men's Health Research at UBC, there is a better way for veterans to release trauma: Contact! Unload.

November 4, in UBC's shabby but historic Ponderosa F on the ancestral lands of the Musqueam, I witnessed a unique theatre production. Men released their traumatic wartime memories by playing out scenes from their own lives.

This unique intervention was created through a Network devoted to reducing male depression and suicide. An interdisciplinary collaboration involved John Oliffe from Nursing, Derek Gregory from Geography, Marvin Westwood from Counselling Psychology and George Beliveau from Theatre Education. They worked with returned vets to evolve scenes from their lives in combat into a form that they could remember, relive, and perform. In this way, the extreme emotion of the memories became manageable for the participants.

Art was a part of the project as well. Carver Rick Xwalactun created a tribute pole using two caskets. The use of ritual to create and raise this totem pole to honour and release the memories of the men was therapeutic. So, explains counsellor Marvin Westwood, is the dramatic re-enactment.

From a theatrical point of view, challenges arose in choosing and shaping scenes from the all-too-real memories of the participants. The goal was to give the audience an experience by proxy, to let them witness at close hand what it feels like to belong to a "band of brothers."

This unique veterans' program has helped many men to overcome depression, anger, addictions and other symptoms that typically follow the trauma of combat, and 580 men have already benefited.

Such interventions are sorely needed. In 2014, we were told, 56 Canadian vets took their own lives. Not surprisingly, these men are at a much greater psychological risk than the average person, yet many other Canadian men also suffer alone in silence.

An important aspect of the learning experience was to listen to the men answer questions after the "show." They balanced the heavy experience of acting out their remembered traumas with zany jokes and laughter. One fellow mentioned that two core personality characteristics required by the special forces are cheerfulness under adversity and a sense of humour.

Naturally there was a serious side to the conversation. One young man who had volunteered for military service at age 18 clearly thought of it as his calling. He spoke of the leadership skills he had learned, and of securing combat zones to keep women and children safe. Hard as I found it to imagine being called to such service, I had no trouble at all believing in his passionate conviction.

This unique show will be performed again on December 10 - 12 at the Davie Street Armouries. The group is also on schedule to share their show in London, at Canada House. The devoted volunteers and professionals who did the hard and emotionally groundbreaking work behind it deserve great credit, and the groups that supported it--Movember, the Peter Wall Institute and more--deserve warm thanks. May the courage of the men who have overcome trauma by voicing it inspire other depressed sufferers to be brave enough to step up and ask for help.

Walking at dusk across the leaf-strewn lawns of the campus of my first alma mater, I was plunged into memory. For a long time now, a book I've been planning to write based on my father's letters from convoy duty in the WWII North Atlantic has been sitting in the proverbial drawer.

Maybe it's time to get out that manuscript. Sitting in the car, I remembered the sudden knowing I felt working on Letters to the Twentieth Century a few years ago. Intimately connected to my veteran father and his war service was a lostness I carried with me, and couldn't seem to shake.

As the cozy darkness fell along Marine Drive, I was filled with gratitude, knowing that whatever caused that lostness and whatever it consisted of, I have finally left it behind.

The Hotel on Place Vendome by Tilar Mazzeo

Image from amazon

The Hotel Ritz of Paris legend is the hostelry in question. The book highlights its history from its image as the "mirror of Paris," before World War II -- an international mecca for artists, writers as well as old aristocrats and the newly rich.

Tilar Mazzeo describes the WWII Ritz as the meeting place of the mavens of journalism and politics, couture and culture. The hotel stayed open during the occupation. On the surface, the privileged oysters-and-champagne life of fashionable elites carried on much as before.

After the 1940 occupation, high ranking Nazis moved in. The morphine-addicted Reichsmarschall Hermann Goering had an enormous bathtub built into his room to facilitate a new treatment that was supposed to help him get off the drug. Headquartered at the Ritz, he ate, drank, looted French art and helped run the Nazi war machine.

The Ritz was also rife with collaborators, although their cooperation with the Nazi conquerors would later be hard to prove. This was especially true of the Coco Chanel. Openly anti-Semitic, she tried to use the German occupation to have her Jewish business partners stripped of their assets. The lover of German diplomat Hans Gunther von Dincklage, whose loyalties were also uncertain, she travelled to Berlin twice during the war, assisted by Abwehr head Walter Schellenberg.

Spies on both sides, including both employees and guests, spent the war at the Ritz. Jews and even some downed pilots were hidden for long periods in concealed wings of the hotel. Meanwhile, two factions of German spies watched each other in the Place Vendome, and some German agents doubled as informants to MI6. Ritz guest and Abwehr head in Paris, Wilhelm Canaris acted as a double agent for the British until he was caught in 1944.

The failed Operation Valkyrie that was supposed to kill Hitler, replace the government and make peace with the Allied side was planned in part at the Ritz, where its architects included Colonel Hans Speidel, Carl-Heinrich Stulpnagel, and Caesar von Hofacker.

Many politicians visited the Ritz during WWII. British wartime Prime Minister Winston Churchill spent time there, as did Georges Mandel, the man he hoped would lead post-war France. Indeed Mandel, a Ritz resident, persuaded Swiss owner Marie-Louise Ritz to keep the hotel open when France fell to the Nazis. Vichy collaborators Pierre Laval and Paul Morand were at the Ritz too.

This work reveals a darkly clownish side of Charles de Gaulle. Having remained safely in England during the occupation, he returned during the liberation of August 1944, causing much trouble for his allies by delaying their entry into Paris and courting the very real danger that Hitler's instructions to burn the city would be carried out before help arrived.

He then  made a rousing speech about how France had liberated itself, making no mention of the Americans or other allies. This astonishing blunder reminds Canadians of how he provoked a diplomatic incident by shouting "Vive le Quebec libre!" from a Montreal balcony during Expo '67.

Winston Churchill's wife Clementine gave de Gaulle a piece of advice he didn't take: "General, you must not hate your friends more than you hate your enemies." An interesting historical footnote: then-President de Gaulle fled to Baden Baden at the onset of the student riots in Paris in 1968.

The Duke and Duchess of Windsor, decided Nazi sympathizers, spent time at the Ritz until the British government shipped them off to Bermuda, far from their Nazi friends, in the hope of minimizing the trouble they might cause.

Naturally, the hotel was full of international journalists covering the war. Ernest Hemingway was the most famous of this motley crew of raucous boozers, jealous lovers, and determined scoopers. "Papa" fell out with Robert Capa when his longtime photographer buddy befriended Hemingway's jilted third wife Martha Gellhorn. Later Capa had an affair with Ingrid Bergman, whom he met at the Ritz.

The actress Marlene Dietrich deserves special mention. Though this Hollywood siren caused bitter jealousy among Hemingway's women, she was one of the few at the Ritz who chose her side without waiting to see which way the wind would blow. Passionately anti-fascist, she took out American citizenship "in defiance of Adolf Hitler."

The heyday of the Ritz ended with the peace. It went quietly downhill until the eighties, then enjoyed a resurgence when Mohamed al Fayed bought and renovated it. Tragically, it was from there that his son Dodi and Princess Diana fled before the fatal crash that killed them both.

Since then, it has been resold, re-renovated and is about to be re-opened once again. What will be the future of this historic Paris luxury hotel?

Japanese red maple in its season

The same Japanese maple in the front garden is seen in its glory from without and within.

Kits Beach revisited in an autumn dusk

Melton Court, a Kitsilano landmark

Melton Court on Cornwall Avenue in Vancouver is a building I have noticed when I arrived in the city in the late sixties, and this ornate brick structure still holds a unique appeal. I love the two wings that face the beach, the fancy cornices and well-established gardens. I've never been inside.

These days, this building with its near-perfect location across Cornwall from Kits Pool and the beach is a Housing Co-Op. Like so many of our Canadian buildings and streets, this name originated in the UK. Melton Court has a counterpart in Poole, Dorset. It bears a slight resemblance to the Kitsilano version.

Another Melton Court, probably the original of this one, can be seen on Old Brompton Road in London.

Hiding from Halloween and starting Nanowrimo

This year, we hid from Halloween. Instead of gutting pumpkins and carving lanterns, I enjoyed an afternoon walk in Holland Park.

An afternoon trip to the movies proved good timing. The parking lot and movie theatre were quite empty for the 4:30 showing of Truth, and we returned home to discuss this interesting film over tea.

We didn't miss out on the pumpkin entirely -- I made a pumpkin curry to enjoy tomorrow.

Today is the first day of Nanowrimo, and I'm in. Have to get something down of the next novel up, no matter how rough. Deadlines are brilliant for making that happen. The first step is to sketch out a rough map of the story on tracing paper; then I crank out my first 1667 words. I'm pumped!