Category Archives: Archive

The Irish Heather’s painting and its story

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Update: raincoaster has discovered that the following is an Urban Legend. See the comments section for an update from Sean Heather, and stand by for a new post with the true story. Live and learn; thus are myths born. 

Wednesday, October 02, 2002Irish Heather Painting

I know a little bit about Sean Heather.

And I know a little bit about Fireman.

And I say it was 50/50. But what do I know?

There's a big painting hanging on the wall of the Irish Heather, a big whopper of a canvas with a lively depiction of the staff, the owners and a great many of the regulars, all much bigger and grinnier than in the life, but then that is how Fireman paints them.

Now, guess what Fireman does for a dayjob. Right the first time! But when he is not climbing ladders to rescue kitties or hauling hose to quench flames he is a painter and caricaturiste extraordinaire, vraiment, and in the true artistic tradition he has been known to be just a bit…sensitive…sometimes. Not that that is bad, but I think we can all give thanks that he does not apply the same exquisite sense of discretion and inspiration to, say, answering a fire alarm as he does to, say, painting the staff, owners and regulars of a pub.

Now they say he did two of them, the big paintings. And they hung one up in the front of the bar, right where everyone could see it and say, gee your chin isn't nearly that pointy or other silky phrases, depending on if they knew she was married. What they did with the other does not matter, which is good, as I do not know.

But they did not pay very promptly, or not very well, or somehow not to the liking of the Fireman, he of the artistic temperament. Oh, can't you just see this coming?

One evening the place was in full swing. The walls can throb, it gets that busy, and it was, it was that busy, that night. And Fireman walks in. Without a word to anybody he walks over to the built-in seating along the wall, hops up on it (being not only artistic but also, apparently, flexible too) stares eye to eye with the image of Sean Heather in his very own painting. Then, keeping the stare going he takes a knife out of his pocket and slowly cuts the face out. He puts the knife back in his pocket. He puts the face in his pocket. He gets down. He walks out.

I believe the bill was settled shortly after that, and the second painting is the one you see.

Four Footed Friends

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Percherons!Date: Monday, November 11, 2002 2:47 AM

A couple of years ago I was sitting in my living room watching Law & Order or somesuch at 2am and I heard clip-clop, clip-clop, a sound which reminded me of racehorses and show jumpers, things you rarely encounter when sitting in your living room watching the telly. It for sure wasn't in the plot [Picture it: Mike gets drunk and drives, crashes, gets his license taken away and must pursue criminals from the back of an elderly cayuse, perhaps the very one from Cat Ballou! And Lenny has to ride shotgun, holding on for dear life].

But seriously, folks.

It wasn't part of the plot, which I think was the erotomania episode that I really like, not that I identify with any of the characters. Not even Claire! Well, maybe a little when Jack gets out the bike…NO! No rice burners for me, nor no slutty DA's neither. I still don't think Claire put out.

But meanwhile, back at the living room, the clip-clop continued. And for sure it wasn't coming from the tv. [Sidebar here, but a virtual sidebar because first of all this stuff you are reading is only photons on a screen, so it cannot really have a "side bar" because there is no physical side to attach it to, and no bar: it's just pictures. Second of all, I don't know how to do a sidebar in HTML, so there you go: nothing. Virtuoso virtuality, meta-metaphosphors. Don't you wish you'd gone to grad school now? Don't you wish I had, so I'd know what I was talking about? But the clip-clop wasn't coming from anything in the living room at all, that's what I wanted to use the sidebar to explain, at least I think that's what I wanted to use the sidebar to explain, but am not sure because I started this o-so-long-ago, somewhat like the Bush family must be feeling right now, but let's get at least one of these things finished, eh?] But if the sound wasn't coming from the tv [oh, wait! Now I remember what the sidebar was for. It was to say that you used to capitalise "TV" and now you don't. "tv." Does that signify a loss of stature on tv's part now that it is running shows like Blind Date or does it signify greater familiarity, to the extent of becoming a regular, rather than proper, noun? Methinks the latter (don't you just hate sentences like "Methinks the latter"? Don't you just want to bitch-slap them a little?) And now, back to our regularly scheduled blog]

So if the sound wasn't coming from my living room and it wasn't coming from my tv (which is in, though not really of my living room) where was it coming from? Not the rest of my house: although well-stocked with four-footed beasts, the place didn't harbour anything with shoes on, nor were any of my mice hefty enough to make such big, beefy clip-clops. There was this rat once…you could feel the floor shake when it gallumphed across the dining room…but he doesn't wear shoes…but anyway, it wasn't me, it wasn't them, it wasn't Jack or Claire or even beefy Mike, so it had to be something Outside.

I dashed to the blinds (I'll bet you thought I'd never get there). I peeked out between them. I saw…

You'll never guess what I saw!

At 2 in the morning!

On Pender Street!

A team of tired, plodding draft horses drawing a wagon, with an old man at the reins.

Apparition? A hundred years ago, even fifty years ago such a sight was common enough on this old pavement, but now? The only draft horses in the city of Vancouver pull wagonsful of tourists, but not around here and certainly not in the haunted hours. It's all way west and way earlier. All good Belgians should have been tucked up in bed long since, yet there was no denying that a couple of tons of horseflesh were wearily clipping and clopping down my street, only slightly after the turn of the millennium. Not that one, this one. Well, they might have been Percherons; it was real dark, okay?

After that I used to see them all the time, or rather only at 2 am, but all the time at 2am though not every time. The clip-clop would ring out through the soggy, foggy air and they would plod past, never looking up or even to one side, just nodding their heads in unison as they headed for their mysterious destination. Where they were going I never found out: it's all city for about thirty miles in the direction they were headed.

One cold, rainy night, long about 2am, I heard the now-familiar clip-clop, clip-clop trundling down the street from west to east, just as usual. Then I heard voices.

If you don't live in Vancouver and haven't spent a lot of rainy winter nights sitting up alone reading Victorian ghost stories it probably wouldn't be your first thought that the horses had learned to talk. I, however, live in Vancouver.

Maybe I wasn't surprised to hear my mid-night-mares talking, but I was surprised to hear them use such language. "Motherfucker" did it for me; I had to peek, if only to give them a sharp look. If they were a serious hallucination they would at least know that I paid them the respect of a proper reaction.

I dashed to the blinds…but we've been over this before. And what to my wondering eyes should appear but a pair of scrawny hookers, arguing about a drug deal.

But still the sounds continued.

Clip
Clop
Clip
Clop

Had my horsies become invisible? But no…wait…there was something about the hookers. They'd stopped. The horses stopped. The hookers moved on. The horses moved on.

Of course, hooker shoes!

Hooker Shoes

Cicero and Carnegie

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My friend Carinthia, who has lived in the neighborhood for twenty-very-odd years, went to the Carnegie Library to get a book. Well, you would go to the library for a book, wouldn't you? She had in mind a particular translation of Cicero, the kind of thing that hasn't topped the best-seller lists in a couple of millennia. The kind of thing you expect to have to order from the West End, or the North Shore, but definitely not the kind of thing you think is readily available here on the Downtown EastSide.

She picked her way past the sixty or so drug dealers surrounding the building like a particularly saturnine ring, passed the needle exchange table, and went up the curving stairs into the round tower. Yes, the Carnegie Library had the translation she was looking for. You may not be surprised, but you haven't seen the Carnegie Centre or the Carnegie Library, a tiny subset of the Centre.

When the cafeteria is getting its food delivery they have to have one extra person to stay in the truck and guard everything or that delivery truck would be stripped to the rims in seconds. When it pulls up a crowd surrounds it immediately; exclusively big, burly guys who can lock onto a case of hotdog buns like a pit bull on a postie. They make no secret that they are there for whatever they can get, and if the guy in the truck is too dainty looking or without a 2×4 there could be real trouble.

The only time I've seen anything like it was in Indonesia, in Ambon, the part where they're killing the white people now. I was there just before they started, and as our ferry pulled up to the dock we saw thirty or forty would-be porters scrambling to get onto the staircase to the ship; it was the kind of stairs-on-wheels thing you see in old shots of the Queen. There were two port officials on those stairs, armed with bats, and every time a hand would grasp the rail over the dotted line they would whack it with the bats. We could hear the smack and clang over the throb of the engines. It's like those scenes on CNN when a truck with food pulls into a refugee camp and they try to rush it.

It's much the same outside the Carnegie Centre, except the delivery guys are quite big and they call out half the kitchen staff to help: they form a line like a bucket brigade, and pass the coleslaw and creamed corn or tofu whip or whatever it might be that day along into the kitchen.

Anyway, the Carnegie Centre. I wouldn't be surprised to hear there is a dressage outreach program in there, bringing German equestrianism to the Downtown EastSide. They have such a variety of amazing things inside this rundown, haunted and hunted building that it's like nothing so much as Mary Poppins' carpetbag. Reach in and pull out anything in the world. An art gallery? Sure. Martial Arts studio? Sure. Live nude drawing classes? Two-dollar meals? Gym? Computer labs? Symposiums? Meditation room? Senior's services? Youth services? Immigrant services? Sure, all that and the ghost of the old cleaner, too. If I needed a white rhino for any reason that's the first place I'd go, because if they didn't have it they would surely be on the White Rhino Network mailing list, and could give me a referral and probably some coupons to boot.

They also have a library, but perhaps I mentioned that. The library is about the size of a large bedroom, with special sections for books on the Downtown EastSide (quite a lot, actually; I guess we're famous) and for new immigrants and gender studies and other marginalized literature; here minorities are the majority, so this represents the majority of books in the library. Marginalization is standard; mainstreamers are outnumbered and so by definition also marginalized.

So the Carnegie had the Cicero, were in fact the only library around that had the Cicero. The Ancients are surely a marginalized group, if ever there was one, so the Cicero was bound to be there, since everyone on the Westside only reads Oprah's books. Only, it wasn't there.

There were six people on the waiting list for the Cicero.

So Carinthia put her name down for number seven and walked back home, past the largest open-air illegal drug market in the world, past the junkies tweeking on the sidewalks, past the hookers working all the angles of all the corners, past the empty park that smells like beer every morning, past the Chinese restaurant where OD's get locked in the bathroom until closing time whereupon the police are called, through her eight-foot high steel security gate and her deadbolted front door, and she made some tea and she sat down and she wondered what she really knew about her neighborhood.

Rock Solid Stories

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Siwash Rocks!Siwash Rock, according to the agency of the Canadian Government that puts up bronze plaques in parks, and as copied down in my Handspring today on a skate:

Siwash Rock

Indian legend tells us that this 50-foot high pinnacle of rock stands as an imperishable monument to 'Siwash the Unselfish,' who was turned into stone by 'Q'uas the Transformer' as a reward for his unselfishness.

Well isn't that special? That's also NOT how I heard the story. This "Siwash the Unselfish" must have one helluva PR, that's all I can say.

The way I heard it was this:

So there's this guy, Siwash. He's a lazy ass. A good-for-nothing. Everybody else is out busting their butts collecting salmon, collecting oolichans, collecting cedar bark, weaving and knitting and pounding and carving and jerkifying sorry, dunno what else to call it as if their lives depended on it, which they do, and Siwash, the lazy ass, just lays around asking them to keep the noise down.

So the other people in the village go to the Chief and they say Look pal, this here Siwash is a drain on our resources. I mean, we're not gonna let him starve, but sheesh Chief, can't you do something? So the Chief goes hmmmm, lemme see and he calls on the Shaman.

And he says Shaman, buddy, we got this Siwash and as soon as he starts the Shaman is like Whoa man, I know all about this Siwash guy, you don't need to tell me. So the Chief's like what do we do with him? and the Shaman goes well I guess you gotta call on the spirits (like a Shaman is gonna tell you to do anything else, right?). So they do.

They call on the spirits. The Spirits are like Yeah, what? and the people go we got this Siwash and as soon as they start the spirits are all like Oh yeah, we know all about him, waddaya want from us? and the people are like, well, we want you to make it so he doesn't bug us with his laziness but we don't gotta feed him and shit. So the Spirits are like okay, let's talk to Siwash and see what he says.

So the Spirits call on Siwash and he's all like Man, I was just gonna call you and they're like whatever Siwash, we gotta talk to you. And he's like yeah, what? so they tell him the people of the village are tired of looking after your lazy ass. You don't help with the fishing, you don't help with the work around the longhouse, you don't do art, you aren't pretty to look at, nothin'! So they want to stop feeding you but they're all like we don't wanna kill him.

And Siwash goes um, well I guess that's good… but you can tell he's not having the best day right now, and the Spirits say Awww, Siwash, dude, what would you like most in the world? If we could grant you a wish – and he's like you're the Spirits, man, YOU CAN! -and they're all like stay on topic for a minute, okay pal? and he's got, like, no choice, so he does.

Well, he says after a long long time of thinking, for he is indeed not a dude to be rushed, and he knows damn well these are immortals who have time to burn, well he says, I suppose I'd like to skip this migration stuff and just stay in one place all the time, and not be bothered by the change of seasons or any of that, not have to work, not even have to feed or dress myself, and if the villagers would get off my case and not think of me as a burden then yeah, that would be paradise!

And the spirits go Okay, you're a rock.

Adventures in Yaletown: From the Archive

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Monday, September 09, 2002

For this I must thank my friend Dale, who, as a former Beagle owner and hunter, came up with this brilliant get-rich-slowly-but-amusingly scheme.

Yaletown mosaic view

CoyoteCoyotes; heard of them? Fine critters, no doubt, just right for wandering the arid prarielands, rustlin' groundhogs and chasin' rats, but somewhat out of place in the Wired World of Yaletown.

Yaletown; heard of it? fine neighborhood. Full of rich, beautiful people who have the most amazing manners and who are really, really nice. Really. You want to send cards to their parents or something, they all turned out so well. Nothing bad ever happens there; I think it's a bylaw. All the buildings are either spankin' new fiberoptic wonders or reconditioned SOHO style lofts in old brick lowrises with professionally tended flowerboxes above and Starbucks below.

Yaletown is infested with coyotes.

How can this be? you ask. Easy. Easy peasy. The fact is that Yaletown is built right next to, or even on, the old Expo 86 grounds, most of which still remains barren. Sure, there are glossy highrises, but most of the area is still either a twenty-year-old deconstruction ground of broken paving and scrub grass, or it's Indy track, which is about as close to a desert plain as you are going to get in a temperate rainforest. So really, all you need are a couple of coyote singles getting together over a sixpack of Smirnoff Ice down by False Creek and next thing you know it is a Playboy Mansion for four-footed 'uns. The whole place is ringed with a fence that keeps people out, leaving it free day and night for coyote goin's-on. Gawd only knows whut them critters gits up ta.

So now when the sleek Iranian princesses go out in the mornings to walk Fifi the Maltese they must keep a keen eye out or Fifi may be dejeuner pour un petit loup. Merde!

Yaletown, the Mild West

Alors, my friend Dale put that whole grim tragedy together with the tourist trade and the money in being a hunting guide and came up with this:

The British are slowly losing the legal right run around with a pack of dogs and chase things to their deaths, and are missing the whole hound-hunting experience. Dale suggests that we get a pack of de-accessioned hounds and some old horses that don't mind tourists and one of those cool horns and we conduct a hunt through Yaletown and the old Expo lands. This would have to be done at night, as that is peak coyote-huntin' time.

Happy Coyote Hunters, perhaps with their Mount Pleasant kills?

Picture this: a dead-black night, with a cold, hard rain driving down relentlessly. A bitter wind sweeps the historic streets of Yaletown, setting the lofts to shivering on their firm parkade foundations. A lone creature stalks the night, skulking from Dumpster to Dumpster, gliding like the shadow of a ghost. It pads wetly on its four miserable paws, water pours like slowly waving icicles off its hollow belly. A flare of headlights, and two eyes glow in the darkness, pinpoints of seeking, of hunger.

Suddenly, a sound! Faint trumpeting in the distance, a gaggle of indecipherable noises. The coyote pricks its ears. The cacophonous music comes closer, invisibly, sourceless in the darkness, as if the Great Hunt of the Celts had descended to spread terror through modernity itself. As the mists part and the rain relents, for just a moment the coyote sees.

Hounds, dozens of them! Tall, strong, and hungry, a pack of foxhounds tears down Hamilton Street in a berzerker blood-rage! Behind, as many as twenty fat, rich tourists on horseback, wearing scarlet coats and bowlers and yelling "Tally Ho!" at the top of their lungs, with a guide and hunter tootling on a tiny horn that somebody used to use as a Christmas ornament. The coyote runs, past the Nygard showroom, past the Home Shop, past the yuppie brew pub and Beautymark Cosmetics, past Seattle's Best Coffee and Bar None, past Rodney's Oyster Bar and the neogothic building with the twirling letterblocks that must be art, they're so palpably useless. Can he make it across Pacific Avenue to the wastelands?

No! He has forgotten to push the button for the pedestrian light!

They bring him to ground just outside the Jugo Juice.
 Yaletown, primo huntin' territory!