No Fun City
And so we drove on. Winding our way down through Switzerland, past France and into Spain as the countries bled into one another. Trying in my mind to switch back and forth from German to French to Spanish finally at a loss with Portuguese of which I knew no words when we finally arrived in each burg. Thank goodness for laptops, iPods and sleep to pass the hours in between. John will often regale us with tales about touring with Annihilator at very little prompting and tell us about how your communications with home were limited to payphones and postcards, not Facebook and SMS. I can see what he is getting at, but having never toured in that time, all it serves to do is to cause me to roll my eyes and turn the volume up on my iPod and regard him as a rock and roll Methuselah.
Chief among these distractions I like best is watching movies. I rarely find time to watch movies at home, and as the skies get dark so soon at this time of year movies keep our faces illuminated at the back of the bus, with anywhere up to four laptops going at any one time. It pretty impressive for five people so close to be able to ignore each other so totally. But it’s an indulgence for me, along with catching up on my reading. But another is having a filmmaker as a dance partner who has movies she’s made that I’ve not yet seen…
That’s right: I’m from Vancouver, and I hadn’t seen No Fun City.
For someone such as myself who held the 2010 Winter Games in such distaste for all it inflicted on the Great Unwashed in my town, missing out on this was disgraceful. The premise of this documentary follows four groups operating music venues in Vancouver and their struggle with the city to champion a home for live music. It made me smile and a little teary since I have watched the Cobalt be shut down (which is a legendary home for hardcore) and reopen under new (universally questioned) management. Seen the rise and fall of the Sweatshop and happily seen the rise of the Rickshaw.
When I saw the footage of Richards On Richards being torn down I actually felt sick, having had performed there myself many times. Now I know as well as anyone that very few things are static. But after visiting Europe and spending so much time recently in so much history it feels like a very flimsy excuse for not attempting to preserve live entertainment as you would an old church. But where Vancouver Politian’s and homeowners groups want to usher in a new quiet and suburban era to the city, we have seen a number of other venues grow stronger: Funky Winkerbeans, Pat’s Pub, The Chapel, and Brandiz. If the Granville entertainment district is where you go to hear top 40 played over and over at length, East Hastings street is now where you go to see bands. A new Renaissance is at hand.
But throughout our travels, we have heard the same story told worldwide: noise curfews, television and red tape have become assassins in the increasing deaths of live music venues. It is no longer confined just to Vancouver, but that’s only one city’s story told. From Cologne to Porto to Helsinki there is a scary echo. Live music is struggling to keep it’s foothold as cities wear down the venue owners and operators with rules and bylaws. The grace of why any of these people stay open at all is that people do keep coming out to support the live shows. Every time I walk into the room before any show and I see bodies in it I breathe a sigh of relief and thank my lucky stars that people still believe in live entertainment.
This is partly why I need to drive as many people to see No Fun City as possible. Tell your friends, siblings, lovers that conservation isn’t just about being green and recycling to help our natural resources. Creativity is still one of our greatest global elements and we should strive to protect it as we would the polar ice caps, an endangered species, or a dwindling fossil fuel supply. I think it would be just as sad to sit and tell our children about when we used to go see live shows in the same breath as when we used to have rainforests but both died out because no one thought to save such precious ecosystems.
No Fun City the movie: www.nofuncity.org
Little Miss Risk
