Local Politics, by Fellini

The fog lifted briefly today, and then returned. I picked up some of the local papers, includ­ing the free ones. The Geor­gia Straight is good for the arts, and I sus­pect that the Van­cou­ver Courier, which is pub­lished just a few streets away from here, sees itself as the paper of record for the neigh­bour­hood. The big story for this week’s edi­tion is the results for the local elec­tions.
Since Pam and I can­not vote, we did not spend much time and/or energy fol­low­ing the elec­tions for mayor of Van­cou­ver, the City Coun­cil and the Park Board. The Courier, how­ever, ran quite a few sto­ries about what took place, who won, who lost and why. The other rea­son we didn’t pay much atten­tion to the elec­tions is that there were so many can­di­dates — over 35, and with so many views and groups behind them that it was dif­fi­cult to keep it all straight. Not to men­tion all of those the acronyms. Let’s see: The NPA (that’s the Non-Partisan Asso­ci­a­tion) were the big win­ners of the mayor and city coun­cil. This took the gov­er­nance of the city away from COPE (Coali­tion of Pro­gres­sive Elec­tors). There were no hang­ing chads that I know of, but it was appar­ently a tight race. The win­ner was the NPA’s Sam Sul­li­van, who will no doubt have some per­sonal inter­est in mak­ing the city friendly to peo­ple in wheel­chairs as he cam­paigned in one. His mother Ida is reported to have said at his vic­tory “It’s awe­some. Who would have thought at the time of his acci­dent that a thing like this could hap­pen? As one friend said, ‘He may be sit­ting down on the out­side, but he’s sure stand­ing up on the inside.” On the NPA web page, Sullivan’s smil­ing face is next to a Thank You mes­sage that includes:

You have told us you want a gov­ern­ment char­ac­ter­ized by civil­ity and deco­rum in which everyone’s opin­ions are respected. You have said that you want a gov­ern­ment that makes deci­sions by pol­icy, not pol­i­tics. You want a city coun­cil that is socially, envi­ron­men­tally and finan­cially respon­si­ble. And you share our enthu­si­asm and opti­mism for this great city!

I have to admit, that this sounds pretty good (and awfully lit­er­ate com­pared to the speech I hear from US politi­cians) . I hope he can achieve this. Civil­ity and deco­rum fled the US (pol­i­tics and every­thing else) years before I did.
That’s the clear part of the story; the win­ner. The rest, as Jon Stew­art would say, uh…not so much.
The only non-acronym based group I heard or read about was ‘Vision Van­cou­ver’ (which frankly sounded like a chain of local opti­cians). If the acronyms sound con­fus­ing, the names of can­di­dates were pretty con­fus­ing as well. Run­ning for COPE was Jim Green, who had been a close ally of the cur­rent mayor, Larry Camp­bell. COPE seemed to be very pro-business and was favored by peo­ple who I sup­pose called them­selves con­ser­v­a­tive (although in the US I sus­pect they’d be accused of being flam­ing lib­er­als, but let’s for­get that for the moment — I’ll get back to it, I promise). Jim Green was not to be con­fused with James Green, an inde­pen­dent also run­ning for mayor. Some peo­ple think that he was one of the rea­sons that Green (Jim, not James…oh well, both of them) lost to Sul­li­van.
Besides those par­ties, there were a bunch of other, smaller groups involved. There was the Work Less Party, who’s elec­tion night dance party took place at the Mar­itime Labour Cen­tre near Hast­ings and Vic­to­ria. Many of their sup­port­ers attended in cos­tume (why not; less work, more danc­ing and cos­tume par­ties!). Their may­oral can­di­date was Ben West, who (as one would expect) didn’t work very hard on his cos­tume, wear­ing a T-shirt and jeans. He nev­er­the­less ended up in fourth place with nearly 2,000 votes (Imag­ine if he had worked hard!) The bar­tender and pro­moter of the Asto­ria pub (also known as the Asbalt ) on East Hast­ings was also a can­di­date for city coun­cil. Her name was wendythir­teen and she looks like… well it’s hard to find any pic­tures of her online, so I’ll say that she looks tough enough to beat all of the other can­di­dates to a pulp, and then go on to do a set as Punk Rocker, which she is also. wendy was quoted in the Courier as say­ing “We need more wolves to take care of the sheep prob­lem.” If you think wendythir­teen is an inter­est­ing name, she said she was inspired to run by Joey Shit­head of the punk band DOA. I’m not mak­ing this up; it was in the paper.
Another group that had an acronym I didn’t get until later was VANDU. That stands for Van­cou­ver Area Net­work of Drug Users. Finally, another inde­pen­dent can­di­date for city coun­cil was trans­sex­ual Jamie Lee Hamil­ton, who’s been an activist in the sex worker com­mu­nity. Her cam­paign but­tons read “Vote for Jamie Lee. She’s dif­fer­ent.” Well, not as dif­fer­ent as you’d think. Remem­ber when I said that I’d get back to the COPE peo­ple? About 2 weeks ago, one of the city coun­cilors in COPE, Tim Louis, backed a plan to have the city run a non-profit brothel, so that pros­ti­tutes can work in a safe envi­ron­ment with bet­ter health care. (I did not know that in Van­cou­ver, pros­ti­tu­tion is not ille­gal, but ‘com­mu­ni­ca­tion in a pub­lic place for the pur­pose of pros­ti­tu­tion’ is. So I guess that means that call girls are tax­pay­ing cit­i­zens, but street­walk­ers are not.)
I don’t think that Louis’s ideas are going to get much trac­tion, for bet­ter or worse. The same arti­cle in the Van­cou­ver Sun about those brothel state­ments has this:

Sam Sul­li­van, the may­oral can­di­date for the centre-right Non-Partisan Asso­ci­a­tion, said he was appalled by Louis’s com­ments.
“The goal should be to help these women get out of the sur­vival sex trade, not keep them in it,” he said. “I’m run­ning to be mayor to help peo­ple, not to get into the busi­ness of being a pimp.“
He said Louis, whom he once described as hav­ing warped prin­ci­ples, is giv­ing vot­ers a taste of what he’d be like if elected to another three-year term.
“It doesn’t sur­prise me that he is say­ing these things. I’ve been lis­ten­ing to these kinds of crazy ideas for three years, and it’s only dur­ing a gen­eral elec­tion that peo­ple get to appre­ci­ate what I’ve been going through,” Sul­li­van said.

The quote that seems to sum up this bizarre and colour­ful elec­tion is this one by NPA cam­paign direc­tor Michael Hill­man: “There’s a say­ing in pol­i­tics, ‘You don’t elect a gov­ern­ment, you defeat a gov­ern­ment.“
Con­grat­u­la­tions to the van­quisher, I sup­pose, are in order. As for me, I’m a lit­tle relieved that I sat this one out. I have no idea how I would have fig­ured out who to vote for.

In the Fog

This has to be the fog­gi­est day we’ve ever seen here. Vis­i­bil­ity is about 1 block. You can see your breath.

The cam­era trained on the Bur­rard Bridge caught this after­noon. Click on the thumb­nail for a big­ger (and just as foggy) ver­sion:

Good Tastes

We had Matt and Oana over last night for din­ner and Scrab­ble. I’m happy to report that the Cas­soulet was enjoyed by all. It’s rich, but smokey and herb-y. The var­i­ous meats (Duck con­fit, duck sausage, Toulouse-style pork sausage, smoked pork chops) all worked together with the white beans. After some cream of broc­coli soup (got some great fresh stuff from my ‘cel­ery’ guy at the mar­ket), we ate it with baguettes, red wine, and roasted aspara­gus and toma­toes. For dessert, there were straw­ber­ries and figs with warm cus­tard. I can’t take credit for the Cas­soulet, but I feel like I’m really get­ting the hang of this kitchen.

Oh, Oana beat every­body in Scrab­ble, although accord­ing to one set of rules, she and Matt were really tied. Pam and I chal­lenged each other’s words (i still say there is such a thing as a ‘sealiner’) but effec­tively knocked our­selves out of the game. A fun thing to do when you play Scrab­ble, we agreed, is to try and make up the words you put on the board into a sen­tence. Try it the next time you play for a laugh or two.

The Cul­ture Crawl
Today we decided to take advan­tage of the last day of the East Van­cou­ver Cul­ture Crawl. Rather than a Pub crawl, were you go from bar to bar, the Cul­ture Crawl is a few days in Novem­ber each year where the artists who live in the bohemian neigh­bor­hoods east of Van­cou­ver down­town open their stu­dios to peo­ple who wan­der in from the streets. So, in the fog, we ambled from sculp­tor to painter to pot­ter in a charm­ing res­i­den­tial area which I’m sure would be absolute par­adise on a warm sum­mer day. We didn’t buy any­thing, but it was great to see so much good art made locally. It reminded my that Richard Florida wrote on how Van­cou­ver has one of the high­est ‘bohemian indices ’ of all cities in North Amer­ica. Funny thing, but I noticed that about a week after we left Boston, The Boston Globe pub­lished an arti­cle cit­ing Florida’s work about the flight of cre­ative types from Cam­bridge to places abroad. Go figure.

Warning: Silliness Ahead

Not much to talk about today. Except for this silly web site: www.warninglabelgenerator.com . Made this one:

A Bunch of Evening Events and A Hill of Beans

Mon­day: STC
I’ve already been to the offices of ActiveS­tate half a dozen times. The Ruby on Rails, Van­Tech and other groups meet there, and it’s a great loca­tion — cen­trally sit­u­ated on Granville street, a block away from the Sky­train sta­tion down­town. It takes all of 15 or 20 min­utes to get there, depend­ing on how long I wait for the bus. So tonight, Pam and I both attended a meet­ing there, this time a joint one for STC (which Pam is already very active in) and a group I had not heard of yet, the HTCE (Hi-Tech Com­mu­ni­ca­tors’ Exchange). The meet­ing topic was ‘Online Influ­ence: What Blogs Mean to Your Busi­ness’ and was given by Susan­nah Gard­ner of Hop­stu­dios . She gave a great talk about Blog­ging for Busi­ness and how to use this new com­mu­ni­ca­tions medium as a busi­ness for mar­ket­ing, cus­tomer engage­ment and other stuff that blogs do so well, if you are will­ing to give up a lit­tle con­trol. Most mem­o­rable quote of the evening from Susie (as I think she’s known around here): “I was in Sin­ga­pore, and they asked me what gov­ern­ment min­istry was in charge of blog­ging.” Yikes.

Wednes­day: The Van­cou­ver Art Gallery
We took advan­tage of a free entry to the Picasso exhibit at the VAG (sorry if this page shows as a big blank. It seems to be bro­ken at the time I’m writ­ing this.) as part of an evening spon­sored by sev­eral Travel Agen­cies, who showed up with moun­tains of travel brochure. It was jammed with peo­ple, who lined up for food and wine (bad BC Vine­gary stuff, I’m afraid). We had a brief taste and then went straight to the exhibit.

The exhibit was pretty good — mostly draw­ings, par­tic­u­larly from the 20s and 30s. It’s always amaz­ing how large Picasso’s out­put was; he must have cranked out these draw­ings at 3 or 4 a day, and some are quite intri­cate. Some nice stud­ies for Guer­nica, as well as many pieces that reminded us of work we’d seen at the Picasso Museum in Antibes this summer.

We did stay for one pre­sen­ta­tion, an older cou­ple where were adver­tis­ing their Culi­nary ‘tour’ of Spain. They had an old mill in Malaga that was con­verted for tourists to come stay and learn Span­ish cui­sine as well as paint­ing. After a few min­utes, it was pretty clear that this was not for us. The Eng­lish cou­ple were very sweet but also very flakey. They claimed that some­one had made off with their pre­sen­ta­tion DVD, so they showed another, which was a slideshow of the inn. They bragged about how old the place was. I’m sure that it was prob­a­bly a very pretty place, but supremely uncom­fort­able, and the Eng­lish like both of those things, par­tic­u­larly when they occur simul­ta­ne­ously. Any­way, we know for sure what culi­nary tour we won’t be taking.

Tonight: The Van­cou­ver Blog­ger Meetup
I sus­pect that this will be the last time this takes place at Steam­works. It’s cen­trally located, but kind of expen­sive, and you really are partly pay­ing for the pretty view (the Bur­rard Inlet, with ships, Seabus, Sea­planes land­ing and tak­ing off, etc.), which we never see because we’re there at night and down­stairs in the base­ment of the brew­ery. It’s all also kind of noisy. Even Heather and Jamie (film­go­er­juan) say they’re not com­ing because nei­ther of them like the venue. So, the next venue will require a vote, or at least an agree­ment by some of the peo­ple. Hope­fully, things will revive after the move, as these mee­tups seem to be get­ting a lit­tle less atten­dance each month.

The Cas­soulet is Here!
About a month ago we signed up with the sausage ven­dor at Granville Pub­lic Mar­ket for some Cas­soulet as part of their annual fes­ti­val of this dish. As Wikipedia says:

Cas­soulet is a rich slow-cooked bean stew or casse­role orig­i­nat­ing in the south­west of France, con­tain­ing meat (typ­i­cally pork sausages, mut­ton, or goose), and white hari­cot beans.
Numer­ous regional vari­a­tions exist, the most notable being from Castel­naudary, the self-proclaimed “Cap­i­tal of Cas­soulet,” where the casse­role con­tains only beans, pork and the local sausages, from Car­cas­sonne, or from Toulouse, where, if it is not cooked with spicy Toulouse sausage and con­fit d’oie, it is not a tra­di­tional cas­soulet Toulou­sain.

All the recipes I’ve seen for Cas­soulet seem to be multi-day affairs involv­ing lots of difficult-to-get ingre­di­ents if you’re not on a French Farm and have a wood-fired oven. I remem­ber hav­ing it when I vis­ited my Grand­par­ents and I dragged them (my Grand­fa­ther in par­tic­u­lar) to a French Restau­rant in Philadel­phia called The Gar­den (which appears to be long-gone, sadly). I dis­tinctly remem­ber the meaty and rich-tasting bean casse­role and have not had it many times in the inter­ven­ing years. The dif­fi­culty of prepar­ing the dish, along with the rise of lighter French fare has seen a decline of Cas­soulet on menus out­side of Langue­doc.
So we picked up our Cas­soulet today (we were num­ber 13 on the list, bien sur), along with some Duck con­fit and Duck sausage that goes on top of it when serv­ing. For­tu­nately, my par­ents brought some red wine and good French bread is nearby, so we are all set for a great high-class bean feast.