It began with mild embarrassment. The developer-friendly Waldorf hotel, which maintained its vaguely artistic credentials despite hosting a chain Lebanese restaurant and a hair salon, was sold to a condominium company in spite of itself. Even Mayor Gregor Robertson seemed bemused, even sheepish. “To lose such a historic building would be a big blow,” he muttered, eyes lowered, shuffling his John Fluevogs hither and thither. “We need to do what we can to protect it.”
No one really believed him, of course. But it was nice that he offered to save the Tiki Bar, which apparently is the only racist caricature of a colonialism holdover like it left in North America — proof enough Vancouver needs the Waldorf.
Mayor Robertson must have been relieved when the conversation shifted to restaurants in the Downtown Eastside, the only neighbourhood in Canada where the theft of a sandwich board and the price of a pickle plate makes front-page news. Then the narrative could return to the usual lines: “professional” protestors, handwringing about well-meaning but misdirected strategies and straight-up poor bashing.
But over the last two weeks, Vancouver’s downtown and environs have witnessed an unprecedented rash of closures or evictions from community, cultural, artistic and literary institutions. It seems impossible to count, but here is a far-from-comprehensive catalogue: Rhizome, Spartacus Books, VIVO Media Arts, Dan’s Homebrewing Shop, John Production Studio, and The Junction. For those outside or new to Vancouver, these aren’t just an assortment of favourite hotspots for the low-rent hipster set. The years of commitment to the lower mainland’s cultural pedigree collected in this index number approach a century. “The gentrification in the DTES is absolutely relentless,” Spartacus Books wrote on their Facebook page.
It almost defies comprehension; it strains perception. As if while tracing the course of a falling cherry blossom it should suddenly burst into flame. The maths are simple — high rent, no protection. But even Sean Heather, who has nearly run out of monosyllabic aphorisms to name his bistros, has astonishingly concluded that “If we’re not careful, we could end up being Yaletown.” Say it ain’t so, Sean. “I’d push the pause button on new restaurants for the time being,” adds the owner who is one shy of a decalogue. Soberly. Sympathetically.
Marx famously spoke of capitaism’s breathless revolutionary pace. “All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify,” he wrote in the Manifesto of the Communist Party. “All that is solid melts into air.” The rampant destruction apparent in a city besotted with development and firm in the belief that housing prices exceeding $1-million and one bedroom apartments exceeding $1500/month in rent is sustainable indeed leave one breathless. But why is this destruction so boring?
“No Fun City” has long been Vanouver’s bad inside joke, told equally by punks and cynics, club kids and teens. But now the label has become a nightmare not even the mayor or a contrite Sean Heather can shake. Take a stroll down Water or Carrall Streets and you’ll forget the name of three-quarters of the cafés you see, each boasting indistinguishable, bewildering names like Catch 122, Nelson the Seagull, or, er, Fetch. Every establishment seeking the same brand of faux-elite cachet, each securing only the elegant banality of the nonpareil.
This is especially ironic given the chief objection raised whenever Downtown Eastsiders ask to determine the direction of their own neighbourhood: you’ll turn it into a ghetto. How this is inferior to a series of cloned Portlandia caricatures I can’t tell. Even the notorious Pidgin pickle plate seemed so emblematic not because of its uniqueness; but on the contrary, because it was such a perfect stand-in for any amuse bouche in any anonymous Gastown travesty.
In a blog post about post-Olympic London this week, Will Davies writes about how late-capitalist London architecture eerily resembles the pre-fab tedium of communist-era states. “Both aesthetically and politically, this is the nightmare that everyone from Jane Jacobs to Friedrich Hayek was warning us against: the quest for complete control of an economy or a space will result in a uniformity that is at best very dull and at worst very frightening.” The resonances with Vancouver are immediately evident. It’s not so much the topographical transformation of the city that is so arresting in Vancouver, what’s especially troubling is that it isn’t. Everyone is worried, but no one cares.
To deal with the tension between a managed economy and a state who didn’t even try to pretend it had good intentions anymore, people living under Soviet-era communisms developed a deeply ironic sense of humour. (So long as the bosses pretend to pay us, we will pretend to work!) It helped mitigate the accompanying conflictual sense of boredom and urgency. So much to do, so little interest to do it.
I’m tempted to say the same about Vancouverites, except our jokes are inscribed in our public policy: $610 per month for welfare in North America’s most expensive city, with the most progressive option on the table offering a $20 increase. Popular artistic venue courting developer money is itself sold to developers. We go to the polls Tuesday to pick between two leaders with a history of political dishonesty and who neither represent nor even promise actual change. Strong economies, one practical step at a time. It’s perhaps no accident that no one in the city could be bothered to tune in to the Canucks these playoffs. Even our diversions are failing us.
Everyone knows the system is a gold brick, but we’re both too bored and too clueless to do anything about it. Capitalism’s genius is not its addiction to ruin, but its inimitable capacity to insinuate itself into our lives so as to prove at once overwhelming and inextricable. When asked whether or not he believed in the inevitable failure and collapse of capitalism, 1930s American novelist John Dos Passos answered, “Sure, but the question is when. We’ve got the failure, at least from my point of view. What I don’t see is the collapse.”
If Vancouver is unable to perceive the astonishing human cost of its current trajectory — desperate child poverty, homelessness, exploitation of immigrants — they should at least object to the internalized ennui which is becoming the default affective stance of its citizens. Embarrassment has ceased to be a reaction to the latest development-incited incredulity and is now simply the air we breathe: an unsteady mix of shame-tinted dreariness blinking off into the horizon of English Bay. Everyone is expecting something, conclusively, to happen: development to drop off, or even to cover every square inch of the Burrard Peninsula. But the finality we’re expecting is already here: the image of an ambulant Mayor Robertson staring at the ground, interminably waiting for someone to change the channel.
Image: Spartacus Books facebook page
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