Translink Scaling Back

Translink is planning to scale down services system-wide between December 24th and December 31st, a move that the Canadian Autoworkers Union says is detrimental to transit users and is in breach of their union’s contract.

“They do not have the unilateral right to introduce this working condition change,” said Autoworkers local 111 Vice President Jim Houlahan. “We have never had a special week sheet in a hundred years of unionized transit work here.”

Arbitration over the alleged breach has been completed and both sides are awaiting a decision.

Translink plans on instituting a modified Sunday level for most bus services across the week, even during rush-hour periods. Other transit systems will be shifted to higher frequency midday.

Stan Sierpina, vice-president of customer service for Coast Mountain Bus Company, said that the adjustments to the schedule will help save taxpayers money.

“As opposed to service cuts,” said Sierpina, “it’s more service rationalization. We’re more closely matching supply and demand during that week as people don’t go to work and don’t go to school.

“We don’t want to have too many seats chasing too few people, it would be just unwise use of taxpayers’ dollars.”

Houlahan urges transit users to be patient with operators and to understand that they have been understaffed for the week.

Originally Published in the 24 Hours Vancouver. Print version available upon request.

A History of the Yale

Since the mid-’80s, the Yale has attracted some of the greatest musicians in the genre, earning a reputation for being the best blues venue in western Canada.

“All you have to do is go down and look at the walls-they’re covered with people who have played the Yale. It’s almost a who’s who of the last of the best blues artists,” says house-band leader Jack Lavin, who has also been involved with the Yale for 20 years.

The pub hasn’t always been a home to the blues, but it has a history nearly as old as the music itself. The building was originally constructed as the Yale Hotel in the mid 1880s as a bunkhouse for CPR workers. One of the few structures that survived the Vancouver fire of 1886, it was quickly refurbished and renamed the Colonial. The name never really caught on, and the bar’s name was changed back to the Yale about 20 years later. Through all of its history, through fires and name changes, the Yale remained a pretty normal working-class pub. That changed when the Chicago-born Lavin began to take an interest in the bar.

“There wasn’t anything happening in those days. It was a blue-collar, working-man’s pub, a pretty regular place. I got involved in it about 1985, when Sam Sorich became the owner; I think he inherited it from his father,” Lavin recalls. “He started hiring some of the local bands. I got hired in there and it looked like a real comfortable place to play the blues. I convinced Sam to make it well known as a blues venue.”

Soon after, Lavin turned his attention to his fellow blues musicians from the States. “I began to bring some of my friends and acquaintances to play week-long engagements with local musicians backing them,” he explains. “This worked out really well, and when the current administration took over from Sam a couple of years later, they had a meeting and asked me to be there. They asked what I thought they should do with it, so I said, ‘Don’t fix it if it isn’t broke. There’s a real good following happening here.'”

Since then, the bar has hosted many blues musicians, including Pinetop Perkins, Koko Taylor, Eddy Clearwater, Jimmy Rogers, and Jim Byrnes. Even Jimmy Page has stretched his fingers jamming at the Yale.

“We’ve had a wonderful representation of world-class blues. Some from Chicago, some from L.A., some from other regions like Louisiana-I could just spout like a fountain for five minutes,” Lavin says.

Originally Published in the Georgia Straight. Print version available upon request.

A Round of Rolf

It wasn’t until I was standing virtually naked in a sky-blue room, with a skinny tattooed man staring at my figure, that I finally realized what I’d gotten myself into. Before this, the only thing I had heard about Rolf Structural Integration, or Rolfing, was that it’s an incredibly uncomfortable last resort for people suffering from muscle pain. As the owner of a chronically aching lower back, I’d decided to take my chances and give it a try.

“You seem to favour that leg,” Bradley Cornwell, a practitioner at the Rolf Bodywork Studio in North Vancouver, said as he pointed to my left one. “It’s also a little bowed. I can work on that.”

Cornwell began to look over my body, assessing the flaws in my natural stance. After this, I lay down on a motorized massage table, wondering what to expect. “If it gets too intense, just tell me to stop,” Cornwell reassured me. “On a scale from 1 to 10, I don’t want your pain to go above a 6 or a 7. If it does, I wouldn’t be doing my job right.”

Even with a Rolfer pressing my flesh, I still didn’t fully understand what Rolfing was. According to Cornwell and Jessica Silver—two of a handful of local practitioners—it’s the manipulation of the body’s soft tissues into the most efficient orientation. Rolfers believe injuries, stress, and movement habits can shorten and tighten the fascia, a layer of connective tissue that envelops our muscles and internal organs.
“We also kind of reeducate the body to move in a new way,” Silver explained in a phone interview. “For example, a lot of people are sitting when they’re on the computer. You need to sit on your ‘sit bones’, your sacrum. It’s like your feet when you’re sitting down. Usually people aren’t, and that makes them roll forward, which can cause a lot of strain. This reeducation is important because it allows people to live in their bodies more efficiently.”

However, pain relief isn’t the purpose of Rolfing, though Rolfers claim it can be a side effect. When aligning the body’s structure, practitioners try to alleviate unnecessary tension on certain muscles. In my case, Cornwell told me my pelvic area was angled downward, which was pulling on my lower back. By correcting this, he said, he could fix my problem. The work on my pelvis was the most agonizing part of the 10-session procedure: when focusing on the sacrum, the Rolfer applies considerable force to a tender area. Pain aside, this part of the treatment had the most noticeable effect. Just as Cornwell promised, my back pain is now nearly nonexistent.

Still, the medical community does not widely accept Rolfing. SFU psychology professor and well-known skeptic Barry Beyerstein has written a plethora of papers and articles about alternative and complementary medicine. In his opinion, the results of Rolfing have far less to do with the technique itself than with the client’s psychology. Beyerstein recently chaired a committee that advised ICBC on alternative treatments that injured policyholders wished to claim on their insurance. One of these was Rolfing.

“The idea that you develop characteristic plaques and adhesions that need to be torn apart by these deep, deep tearing movements of the therapist just struck the orthopedists on the committee as complete foolishness. As I recall, we recommended to ICBC that they not spend money on a pseudoscience like that,” Beyerstein said by phone.

“Like all placebo effects, if you put out money and you put your trust in somebody and you go through a certain amount of trouble to go through whatever they tell you to do—in this case you go through a certain amount of pain, as the people I’ve interviewed tell me—there’s a certain cognitive dissonance there,” Beyerstein continued. “In the end, if you put a certain amount of faith…and there is no effect, it can be psychologically devastating—so, of course, the placebo effect is very strong.”

As I neared the end of my 10 sessions, I couldn’t help but remember Beyerstein’s words. Rolfing was such a visceral experience that it’s hard for me to believe the work didn’t actually have a physical effect. Still, I can’t tell whether my reaction was completely psychological, as Beyerstein charged. Now that the sessions are over, though, my back pain is gone, and the reason why really doesn’t matter to me.

(Sidebar)

Rolfing: A brief history

Rolf Structural Integration was created by Ida Rolf (1896–1979), an American biochemist who studied mathematics, atomic physics, and homeopathy in Switzerland during the 1920s. After returning to the U.S., Rolf spent the ’30s exploring alternative therapies, partly out of frustration with mainstream medical treatments. She developed Structural Integration over the next several decades, incorporating many other disciplines including chiropractic, yoga, and the Alexander Technique, which purports to improve well-being by changing habitual physical patterns. Rolf founded the first Guild for Structural Integration in 1967. Today, the centre of the Rolfing universe is Boulder, Colorado, home to the Rolf Institute of Structural Integration. For more information, seehttp://www.rolf.org/.

Originally Published in the Georgia Straight. Print version available upon request.

David Byrne at the Queen E

The bright white outfit donned by David Byrne as he walked out on stage Friday night at the Queen Elizabeth theatre seemed to perfectly compliment his recently acquired shock of bright white hair.

Some 25 years after his heyday in the Talking Heads, it would be easy to dismiss the still wire-thin Byrne as a post-career pop star looking to relive his glory days – much like many of his contemporaries. Fortunately, Byrne has always been a few steps ahead of his peers.

The sold out show was bristling with energy and originality while still keeping in line with Byrne’s well established signatures.

The show opened to Byrne promising the show would span his career, “skipping the Reagan and Bush eras,” to the uproar of cheers from the generation spanning crowd.

The old Talking Heads hits accompanied songs from his recent work with Brian Eno on 2008’s Everything That Happens Will Happen Today flawlessly.

You would think the energy level and emotion would dip in his performance of his post Heads work.

Surprisingly, however, Byrne’s most impassioned performances were for his more recent work. That being said, the energy level never seemed to dip.

Acoustically the show, as expected, was spot on. Byrne’s vocals pierced the rich layers of sound accompanying him with the same pitch-perfect fervour as he did during the Stop Making Sense era.

It wasn’t just the flawless sound or the high energy that Byrne’s seemed to still posses from that seminal live performance; many of the rich visual cues set up on the Queen E’s stage were nods to the past.

Byrne was accompanied by a host of musicians including two percussionists, a trio of back up singers reminiscent of Motown and a dance troupe all who on occasion would make direct visual reference to the performance in Stop Making Sense.

For example, during “Life During Wartime” everyone on stage, Byrne included, began to jog in place in unison to the funk-rock beat; a move any Talking Heads fan would instantly recognize.

The crowd seemed insatiable, storming the stage and using the front row as a makeshift dance floor first during a raucous performance of “Cross Eyed and Painless” and remaining there for the duration of the concert.

They wouldn’t let up even after Byrne’s first encore of “Take me to the River” and “The Great Curve,” prompting a second encore of “Air,” and of course, possibly his greatest hit, “Burning Down the House.” But Byrne still wasn’t done. Even after the lights went dim for a third time, the crowd erupted with cheers in the hopes of a third encore – and Byrne listened, finally ending the performance with a passionate rendition of his latest album’s title track “Everything that Happens.”

It was a perfectly fitting end for the performance, followed by a bow worthy of broadway.

Byrne’s show was a unique audio and visual experience that achieved what so many comeback classic acts fail to do so – an experience that transcends the fame and glory of the act and would stand on its own in any musical generation.

Originally Published in 24 Hours Vancouver. Print version available upon request.

An Interview with a Dissident

Imagine a state ruled by a theocratic, pseudo-dictatorship that silences its press, arrests its opposition and trounces the rights and freedoms of its own people.

Akbar Ganji, a pro-democracy dissident, journalist and writer, lives under such an oppressive regime in Iran.
Ganji has won Right’s & Democracy’s 2007 John Humphrey award and spoke yesterday at UBC in a 3-week tour of Canada to promote peaceful means of democratizing Iran.

“Iran has the social prerequisite to be a democracy,” said Ganji. “It is like a plant that is trying to grow in a certain field. It of course needs a prosperous soil. Iran’s field is prepared for growing the fruit of democracy.”

Ganji feels that dissent over democracy and human rights in Iran is widespread, but international pressures may jeopardize the movement – especially the United State’s aggressive stance on Iran’s nuclear program.

“It’s not just the soil. Other elements like oxygen and light are important too. They’re external,” Ganji continued. “The environment, especially internationally, should be ready for [a democratic Iran] as well. A militaristic approach, environmentally, is killing the plant. That should be removed from the equation and all the pressure should be focused on democracy.”

Ganji urged Canadians to be vocal about avoiding any military action against Iran, and to petition the Canadian government to do the same.

“I’m fighting for a peaceful transition to democracy for Iran, therefore I’m asking the international community’s help for this regard. Simultaneously, we keep reminding people that even talking about a military strike is making our life very difficult,” Ganji said.

After exposing rights abuses by the fundamentalist regime in Iran in 2000, he was sentenced to six years in prison for “propaganda against the regime and its institutions.”

He protested his imprisonment with a hunger strike in 2005, and continued to write political manifestos while imprisoned – many of which were smuggled out and published on the Internet.

University of California Press will publish a collection of these pieces in English.

Originally Published in 24 Hours Vancouver. Print version available upon request.