Author: Chris Reynolds

Derek and Michael Ip spent their Monday baking ice cream-filled croissants out of a bright yellow school bus.

The entrepreneurial brothers, 22 and 20, respectively, are part of a new street food pilot program that runs until April 2011 and is intended to cook up some international alternatives to Vancouver’s much-maligned street menu of hotdogs and chestnuts.

The Ips, in business since mid August, offer fresh-baked goods with an original twist. Be it ice cream, s’mores or mac ‘n cheese, the filling packed into their flaky treats is like nothing the city’s streets have played host to before.

The many influences on PanDa Fresh Bakery—a nod to Derek’s nickname and a pun on both the Japanese and French words for bread—draw at their root on the cuisine of those two nations.

“I was in Harajuku last year,” said Derek, “and there was a little stall in the street that sells Parisian-style croissants. They put the croissant inside a waffle cone, and they put soft-serve on top. So it’s kind of a play on that idea.”

The school bus, located near the corner of Drake Street and Pacific Boulevard, was Derek’s concept. He spent several months with a friend converting it into a workable kitchen, which now wafted out a scent of sugary oven dough and shaved chocolate.

Derek and Michael, like several vendors involved in the process, had mixed feelings about the pilot program and the lead-up to its launch.

“There was a little complication,” Derek said. “During the application they changed the location. We were going to be in front of Granville Station, which would have been great. Then a week into it they changed it without informing us.”

The city removed the Granville location as an option for “motor vehicle” vendors, as opposed to basic cart vendors. There are five of the former, including the PanDa Fresh Bakery, parked around the city for the duration of the pilot program.

Complaints directed against both the timing of the program’s unveiling—only one vendor was up and running by the start date, July 31—and the applicant selection process, which was lottery-based and did not try to distinguish well-prepared entrepreneurs from blithe amateurs, remain fresh in the minds of many Vancouverites.

Far from the other downtown carts and trucks, the PanDa Fresh school bus bookends a long stretch of parked cars on Pacific. Sandwiched between Yaletown’s glass-panelled condo towers and the green plane of David Lam Park, the two young vendors can enjoy a nice view, if not a brisk pace of weekday business.

Beyond, the prows of white-hulled yachts and red-bottomed water taxis point to an unexploited market. Meals on waves, anyone?

The marketing relaunch of Olympic Village scheduled for Sept. 25 has been delayed until sometime next month, highlighting the rental and occupation problems that continue to plague the city’s former haven of international activity.

“If you’re looking for the lineup, it’s going to be a few months,” said Joseph Ciborowski, one of several painters wielding a brush to produce an upcoming BC Liquor Store at 138 Athletes Way. Standing atop a welded steel dock lift, he is among the few labourers still at work in a complex that was completed almost a year ago.

He is also one of the few people visible for blocks.

Across the street Creekside Community Recreation Centre, which opened Sept. 18, is the sole Village magnet.

Its interior smells of fresh plaster. The fitness centre exudes a rubbery odour of unused treadmills, not yet tainted by the sweat of community residents. This second-floor facility boasted a total of three exercisers, and overlooks an empty gym bisected by badminton nets hanging above a newly laid hardwood floor.

In the street below, freshly paved and litter-free, men unloaded a moving truck packed with cables and lighting equipment. Several days of shooting for the television show Fringe began the following day, and the fully constructed but virtually uninhabited site provided a perfect filming location.

Between May 15 and Sept. 1 only 26 Village housing deals had closed, said marketer Bob Rennie. In total, 254 of 727 market-rate suites have been sold, while just over half of the 120 rental units have tenants. A pending deal with BC Housing, a provincial crown agency, will eventually open the door to 252 non-market rate condos.

The Duplo-like buildings that contain these units, externally clad with panelled blocks of neon orange and fern green, invoke a certain PoMo-ism. Both the buildings and the movement have been accused of emptiness and estrangement from ordinary people. For Olympic Village, at least, these characterizations are, at the moment, difficult to deny.

A fledgling vegetable garden wrapping around a ground floor Athletes Way apartment proves some flora, as well as fauna, do live in the area. Indoors, the turquoise waters of a lap pool lay motionless as the tiles cladding its deck.

Tacked onto a former warehouse nearby, a rezoning application spelled out on yellow Bristol board the site’s future, and, inadvertently, the history of the area’s transition—“from: M-2 (Industrial) to: CD-1 (Comprehensive Development District).”

Now all it needs are the people.

The fedora on Dem Deane’s head nested a single white feather in its crown. Dripping from the rain still misting down, its brim overshadowed a face bracketed by two glass earring studs. Its plaid pattern matched that of the closed umbrella—an antique Burberry—he gripped as a cane in his hand.

Despite displaying the trappings of a TV pimp (minus the mink coat, but including a gold front tooth), Deane has a serious mien and the mind of a compassionate, inquiring citizen. And the job of a male prostitute.

It hasn’t always been this way. Born on a Cree reserve near Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, Deane, 38, studied international relations for four years at St. Francis Xavier University in Antigonish, Nova Scotia. There he debated issues of global inequality and justice with students from India to Mexico, Bangladesh and Guatemala.

Disappointed with the lack of attention paid Canada’s own social disparities, Deane left without a degree. He made his way west over several years, residing in Montreal, Toronto and Edmonton before settling in Vancouver.

Now he stood in an alcove at the corner of Homer and Drake. His cigarette smoke mingled with the steam boiling off a streetlamp which cast his shadow into the road, intersecting a passing blue Chrysler sedan that braked gradually, then carried on.

“Business is slow tonight,” he said.

For several years dozens of Craigslist ads posted daily under “Erotic Services” have presented an alternative to those offered by Deane. Studies assessing how digital media impacts male streetwalkers are nonexistent. Studies in Canada assessing male streetwalkers, period, are rarely on government radar.

But a recent police crackdown on online sex-related ads has likely made some Johns wary of the digital route.

The Erotic Services category now requires anyone posting under it to provide a working phone number and to pay a $10 fee with a valid credit card. Supposedly this allows legitimate escort businesses to continue advertising, while eliminating illegal solicitors.

Craigslist removed the section entirely in the United States this month due to claims it aided in prostitution and human trafficking.

In Vancouver, condominium development and gentrification are more responsible for pushing male prostitutes out of Yaletown than anything else, Deane said. The solicitors who remain come out later at night to avoid confrontations with neighbourhood residents.

A long-haired young man with a moustache walked by Deane’s alcove. The two exchanged nods of recognition.

“He’s probably heading to the shelter,” Deane said. A Covenant House facility two blocks away hosts young people for extended stays and offers weekly HIV/AIDS and Hepatitis C discussion groups for men.

“Never been, myself,” Deane said. The air surrounding him sponged out a smell of wet pavement. His eyes crawled around the corner and back.

“Hope I never have to.”

The larger-than-life sculpture unveiled to the public this week on city-owned lands awaiting development is itself a tool of construction. Or destruction, depending on who you ask.

Whether the fate of southeast False Creek lives up to its artwork’s symbolism is another story.

Adjoining the paved path that rims the inlet, a monolithic brown bulldozer dominates the landscape. This one, however, happens to be devoid of gears or machinery, constructed from recycled wheat board panels and conceived by Berlin-based artists Folke Köbberling and Martin Kaltwasser.

“The symbol of the bulldozer is meant to create a tabula rasa for something new,” said Kaltwasser. “It’s about showing something going from this hierarchical, authoritarian idea of structure into this organic process of decay, this democratic spreading out and regrowth. It’s about being more and more open to outside influence.”

Outfitted with a work belt and boots, blue cargo pants, a “Brasilia futebol” t-shirt and translucent spectacles, Kaltwasser addressed an admiring 40-person crowd Friday evening.

He explained how soil piled into the sculpture’s interior would assist in its decomposition. Wind and rain will begin to eat away at the panels, made almost entirely of compostable wheat straw salvaged from Olympic Village construction refuse. His audience’s lycra leggings and thick-rimmed glasses stood in marked contrast to the hammers and drill guns lying atop a smattering of makeshift particle board tables.

Other Sights for Artists, a non-profit arts organization, presented Köbberling and Kaltwasser’s The Games are Open in part to address issues of sustainability in the development of southeast False Creek.

Despite the project’s name, the chain link fence enclosing both the sculpture and the barren city lands behind it will remain in place.

For over a decade the city has been launching official development plans and bylaws, conducting environmental assessments and discussing waste management and green building strategies for the 50-acre area.

It remains desolate, punctuated only by the recently built Olympic Village, yet uninhabited, and a decaying bulldozer.

That contraption, usually associated with rapid and drastic change, will gradually transition into a pile of soil and eventually a plant nursery. Its contents will be spread throughout the city’s green spaces, Kaltwasser hopes.

Less identified with rapid action, the city has further delayed its bid process for future operators of the Village housing units, extending the deadline last week to the end of September due to confusion over complex leasing demands.

A timeline for shovels—aside from those used for the sculpture—in the ground comprising southeast False Creek has not been specified.

The city’s waterfront property may resemble its decomposing art work for some time to come.

A film panel presentation focussing on the plight of marginalized Latin American communities shed light yesterday on urban development issues, while simultaneously casting doubt on the effectiveness of footage in helping resolve them.

The omniscient voice of a Canadian narrator rippled intermittently from in-ceiling speakers. Beneath them sat roughly 100 local audience members sporting thick-rimmed glasses, silk-embossed scarves and Gucci handbags. They watched as a 66-year-old Brazilian fruit vendor pushed his cart across the screen, silently churning up dust in his wake.

“Having a camera just creates a different fabric, a different way of engaging,” said Jonathan Frantz, participatory filmmaker and adjunct professor at the University of British Columbia’s School of Community and Regional Planning. “Through video we’re trying to frame some of that and share it to instigate social change.”

Participatory Filmmaking: Activism or Art comprised just one slice of the eighth annual Vancouver Latin American Film Festival. Its workshops, seminars and 59 short films and features draw on the varied experiences of people from over a dozen countries well south of the 49th parallel.

On this cool Wednesday evening inside the performance hall of Yaletown’s Roundhouse Community Arts and Recreation Centre, an impoverished hillside community was clinging to the patchwork outskirts of São Paulo.

Unregistered bairro residents, depicted on a retractable projector screen, sought decent roads and electricity, clean water and government recognition. Documentary footage told “their story through their own voice, in their own words,” Frantz said.

In between video clips, four 20- and 30-somethings including Frantz pontificated over the hardships of deprived communities in Brazil, Cuba and El Salvador, as well as the purpose of capturing their situation on film.

“It’s about hearing those whose voices might not usually be heard,” said Sarah Shamash, a UBC Film Production graduate. “You know, because perception is dynamic depending on our position in time and space.”

Sitting in red-cushioned chairs, the other panellists nodded their heads as Frantz said that “if collaborative films are going to be used as a political tool, like ours, they have to be done artistically.”

In response one grey-haired audience member asked what concrete effect their artistic work had on the communities portrayed. “It’s hard for me to track the impact of these videos,” said Frantz. “Very little tangibly, I guess.”

“I’ll show a documentary to politicians, planners or engineers,” he said. “But the funders like the government have to be aware that they may end up with a piece that is more artistic in nature. They have to appreciate that we might just be spreading awareness.”

An extended applause followed the panel presentation. Further discussion surrounding post-production contact with the communities, donation options or government aid was overshadowed by other topics.

“My participatory filming doesn’t seem to fit the mould of information presentation,” said Frantz. “And you just sort of lose touch with how the video ends up working.”

More information on VLAFF, which runs September 2-12, is available at vlaff.org.