humour and vancouver

First off, a friend in the Slocan sent me this today about the Spitzer scandal, sort of:

That's almost a Railgate joke, but there's a deadpan about it that's fully in-swing with New Yorkers' ability to joke about themselves. Vancouverites can't, and don't know what to do when somebody else is, especially if the joke is about Vancouver. The two "respectful silences" above to me sound more like "uh, I guess that's funny....is it funny?" and a bit of "I can't believe he said that".

In my travels this year, I've joked that I have a whole stand-up routine about Vancouver and Vancouverites. But nobody who hasn't lived there would get it, and were I to do it in Vancouver I'd be boo'd off the stage, the same way Duchovny was hounded out of town. That coverage of his whole return visit has to do with his "relationship" with Vancouver is just "more of the same". Duchovny's a brilliant, highly intellectual man; and the reporters were only interested in what he thought of Vancouver, or how Vancouver treated him.

I think he probably knew that his lines wouldn't get a laugh, he knows Vancouver that well; he's droll/dry-witted in an almost Wildean way. That he bothered to joke at all is just "playing to the crowd", and he knew it wasn't a laugh-a-minute crowd. Vancouver is a humourless hole, especially when it comes to humour about itself.

As for favourite haunts he doesn't want to take his kids to.....which was it, David? The No. 5, the Cecil or Brandi's? The Balmoral maybe?

Um...

I know there's a lot of evidence that they do, but I still find it difficult to understand why on earth anybody would care a dot or a tittle what any actor has to say on any subject whatever, except maybe acting.

Their whole claim to fame is that they look cute in pictures. They spend their lives trying to pretend to be somebody else, usually somebody fictional. I mean, it's a talent, and it's sometimes a well paid job but it qualifies them not at all to speak on anything at all.

What is it that makes people care what they think about stuff?

untrustingness

In other words, why is that person smiling at me and making small conversation? Is he or she a narc?

Get rid of the corruption that permeates almost every sector and Vancouver will become a friendlier place.

Well, there's just as much drug dealing and drug use in other cities, and nowhere near as much paranoia, and the "every man for himself, God against them all" dog-eat-dog culture that Vancouver has an overdose of. Other cities do not have the same wary, suspicious, ready-to-believe-the-worst and "don't talk to strangers" ethic that permeates Vancouver. Blaming this on the thought that your neighbour might be a drug dealer is a really odd assumption to make; likewise the penchant to looking for a class or sexual orientation/perversion/inadequacy to fear or look down on someone, or some other reason, any reason, to keep to your own little clique. Vancouver is infamous for this paranoia/walled-offness. And it's not to do wth crime; it's do with the media overhyping crime, pedophilia/perversion, pandering to homophobic suspicions while at the same tme pretending to liberality. I've given a lot of thought to how Vancouver went from an easy-going, accepting city to one of the most contemptuous, up-tight places on the continent: and I think I can date it down to the transformation of the once-literate Province newspaper to tabloid format/hype, and the endless torrent of hateful polemic and lowest-common-denominator anti-intellectual reporting; the Sun stayed in broadsheet format but likewise indulges tabloidist hysteria. Being afraid of your neighbour or the friendly person at the coffee shop because they might be a serial killer - when rates of serial killing, child abduction, etc etc have actually fallen over the decades, as with many types of crime hyped in the media as if they were growing/major problems (as a way to get the public to worry about something else than assshole politicians). There's more to it than that, but I submit it's a deliberate creation of the media/marketing crowd. Fearful people look for security in possessions, and in consumer spending.

cont.

I remember UTV's video-coinop had a guy from New York - the Bronx or Brooklyn - who said "you people have a great city here. But what's with the attitude? You people have to lighten up. This could be a nice place...."

New Yorkers in my experience in Manhattan were unfailingly polite; they may give you an immediate reaction of "what, you're talking to me", but once they respond they're not going to assume your request for directions or coffeetable conversationi is a come-on to torture or abduction the way Vancovuerites do. It's written all over their faces.

It was entrenched by '86. I was a pedicab driver and had customers from all over the world. We'd be riding around, smiling and beaming, and pull up at a crosswalk, radiating fun/happy and beaming at the hordes on the Pacific Blvd crosswalks. Those that beamed back at us, returning the pleasure of the day, were from teh States, Oz, the Prairies, Europe, Latin America, Japan etc....those that winced and looked away, as if in pain or fear, were the Vancouverites.

Pointing to crime rates as a reason for paranoia is just buying into the bullshit. Like letting terrorists make your society so fearful that people approve the loss of their civil rights, as well as their social culture. Turn in your neighbour, they might be a "xxxxx" - that's when a socieety allows itself to become a dictatorship, a dictatorship of fear.

As I said, lots of cities, including Halifax where I am right now (with random violence a plenty) doesn't stop people n those cities from remaining human. Vancouver has a social disease, and I don't know the cure. It's why I left.