Melora Koepke

In the Great Hall of LAX’s new Tom Bradley International Terminal, time dances – literally – on a giant clocktower.

Every hour on the hour, the Time Tower, a four-sided, 22-metre screen plays Dance Time, a Busby Berkeley-esque dance number in which the legs of smiling showgirls create a fleshy kaleidoscope inside the clock’s whirring gears. It’s a startling visual interpretation of a travel truth: Our heightened awareness of being on a schedule – of minutes ticking by, carefully monitored and measured – co-opts our perception of time itself.

For years, the Los Angeles International Airport has been avoided by savvy travellers needing a stopover on their way to Asia or Australia. It has become drab and archaic over the decades, and is now a purgatory of curbside snafus, awkward terminal transfers and other faults too numerous to list. At the world’s sixth-busiest airport, it has been clear for many years that the hub needed a major upgrade.

Now, in time for holiday traffic, we have it: Tom Bradley International Terminal opened in September, completing Phase One of a $4.3-billion improvement program meant to improve the passenger experience on every level – from traffic flow to shopping and dining options. Read article

TORONTO – Besides being one of the leading lights in China’s so-called Fifth Generation of filmmakers, Zhang Yimou is also, for moviegoers of a certain vintage, one of his country’s best-loved historical storytellers. His period films often contemplate pivotal moments in China’s past, told from conflicting points of view, offering ways of remembering a past clouded with painful memories. As he’s a professional rememberer, then, it’s interesting that Zhang’s latest, Coming Home, opening Friday (October 2), is about a crisis of memory, in both the actual and metaphorical sense.

The film tells the story of a woman (Gong Li, star of many of Zhang’s most famous films, including Red Sorghum, Ju Dou, and Raise the Red Lantern) who doesn’t recognize her husband when he returns from many years in a labour camp during the Cultural Revolution.

“Right now, Chinese culture is in a process of forgetting,” Zhang told the Georgia Straight through an interpreter during an interview at last year’s Toronto International Film Festival. “The culture is more interested in more superficial things. Movies are like fast food.”

The question is: who will watch a film like Coming Home? Most members of the contemporary moviegoing audience in China were born in the 1990s, so they have little memory or understanding of the Cultural Revolution. Still, something interesting happened after the movie opened domestically in May 2014. As Zhang followed discussions prompted by the film online, he noticed that a lot of young people were saying that they brought their parents with them to see the movie in the theatre, to get their parents to tell them more stories about their history.

Like all good movies about the evils of Hollywood, Maps is an inside job. The A-list cast, which includes Julianne Moore, Mia Wasikowska, and Robert Pattinson, participates with an ill-disguised glee. You get the sense that their performances come from their experience in the industry, a fleeting intuition that Cusack confirmed.

“Every awful thing that happens to our characters are the things that happen to us on all our other movies,” he explained. “Most of my time as a filmmaker and someone who produces, writes, acts, directs—my job is keeping those people away from the actors and the set.” Most of the movies you see in Hollywood, he continued, “got butchered and focus-tested for a committee of senior vice-presidents who didn’t read the script.

“Now it’s just a corporate group idea of ‘Let’s put together an animated version of a face.’ There’s no sensitivity towards letting anything interesting happen. The culture has gotten so debased,” he said.

“For us, that’s what we live in and fight all the time. So to do this film, which was just us and David, that’s real filmmaking. No one fucked up this movie,” Cusack concluded. “Maybe it’s fucked-up. But if it is, it’s us that did it.”

Read article.

TORONTO—IF YOU THINK you know what water is, you don’t. Watermark, Jennifer Baichwal and Edward Burtynsky’s documentary shot in 5K ultra high-def video, brings us on a trip to the hyperreal extremes of what water can be at its most powerful, plentiful—or absent. Burtynsky and Baichwal shot 200 hours of footage in far-flung locations around the world, places where our ubiquitous relationship with H2O is particularly pronounced, and contested. Watching surfers at the U.S. Open in Huntington Beach, soaring above the Stikine Valley in B.C.’s North, or standing under the thundering falls at the Xiluodu mega-dam in China, it’s hard not to be awed by the sheer power of water and the human activity that threatens its purity. But what Watermark—which opens Friday (October 11)—doesn’t do is draw those conclusions for us. These days, it’s rare for a documentary to abstain from spoon-feeding the audience its message.

I landed by private chopper on the helipad at the West Coast Fishing Club’s Clubhouse less than an hour ago, and I’m already suited up in a bright red survival suit aboard a 25-foot Boston Whaler Predator, where three rods bend expectantly into the navy blue water. Each one is fitted with a purpose-built single-action Islander reel, nicknamed a “knucklebuster” for reasons I will soon come to understand.

I’ve never fished for anything larger than rainbow trout. But these waters off the coast of Langara Island, on the northern tip Haida Gwaii, a remote archipelago off the northern coast of British Columbia, are home to the legendary tyee: giant Chinook salmon weighing over 30 pounds. This is the best salmon fishing in the world, accessible only by boat or float plane. Obsessive anglers from all corners of the earth pay top dollar to do what I’m about to do.

It’s highly unlikely that you’ll ever venture further off the map than Haida Gwaii. It’s a landscape formed from jagged black volcanic rocks, old-growth cedar forests and beaches never walked upon by human feet. The land’s first inhabitants, the Haida people, were nicknamed the “Vikings of the West” for their fierceness and bravery on the open water. They still live well off the land and the ocean up here, just a few nautical miles from Alaska, and have been pulling sustenance from these waters for over 13,000 years. Read article

Biodynamic, holistic Rafter 25 Ranch makes their money where their mouth is

In the remote Chilcotin plateau, ranching is a way of life. Along Highway 20, the two-lane road that stretches across the Chilcotin Plateau between Williams Lake and Bella Coola, the million-dollar views of the Coastal Range and the rolling green rivers by scenery of ranch life: Lodgepole-pine fences, grazing  beef cattle, barns.

Over the past few years, some decidedly un-barn-like buildings have popped up along the stretch of the highway between Alexis Creek and Redstone: A settlement of cabins around two large modern pine buildings with moss, grass and wildflowers growing right out of their roofs, fronted by a big patio overlooking a man-made pond, which is an energy-efficient (and pretty) way to cool the building. Read article

MONTREAL – Though we live in an age where information is constant and ubiquitous, how much do we really know about our own neighbours?

The artists and philosophers at SenseLab, a “laboratory for thought in motion” at Concordia University, think that finding common ground is more important than information exchange.

Through Three Mile Meal, its public event this weekend, SenseLab is inviting people in three adjacent neighbourhoods — Outremont, Mile End and Park Extension — to explore their curiosity about each other through artistic and social means. The event takes place over three days at three sites, where three versions of bread — challah, dosas and crêpes — will be served by members of Friends of Hutchison in Outremont and community leaders in Park Ex. (The Outremont food will be kosher on Friday and Sunday, and the Park Ex food will be halal.)

The public kitchens will be linked by mobile “lack-of-information booths” — adult trikes with spice-, seed- and drink-distribution capabilities that will circulate between the sites, and will connect the sites via handlebar-mounted iPads that will share video linkage throughout the three-day event.

The hope is that this event can bring people together who might not otherwise socialize, as a starting point to discover common ground and foster future collaborations. Read article

This is one from the vaults; my first glossy feature and first National Magazine Award win. Being in Vancouver again makes me think about how much has changed since this was published-  and how nothing has.

Images from Stan Douglas and Lincoln Clarkes.

“Beyond the search for the corpus delicti—beyond headlines about the “pig farm killer,” the accused Robert Pickton, and the certainty that this is the largest serial murder investigation Canada has ever known—this search is about a crisis of meaning and reconciliation in a city where, for years, the very absence of these bodies had to be insisted on. In a sense, Vancouver is discovering its entire body politic, the unacknowledged parts of its anatomy—vulgar and dangerous—that polite discussion always avoids. Ironically, the women who disappeared are more present now than they ever were when alive”. Read article here.

Photo: Justin Tang

MONTREAL – The giant windowed storefront of Boucherie Lawrence is situated on a stretch of the upper Main where high-end designer shops are lined up next to sparse art galleries and mid-century modern furniture stores. The row of window-facing counter stools in its well-designed, airy interior, with meat-specific wall art and a wide pine “merch table” populated with a carefully arranged display of silkscreened tote bags, small-batch organic stone-ground flour and bottles of craft canola and sunflower oils make it feel a bit like a high-end épicerie.

But when you enter the shop, a huge walk-in fridge full of hanging meat carcasses is visible through a glass door, and in the large tiled workspace, several butchers and associates are at work, cutting meat to order for customers from the primal cuts hanging in the cooler, or transforming leftover offal and scraps into value-adde d products like patés, terrines, sausages and charcuterie for sale from the display case.

It’s clear right away that there is real meat work going on here; the store’s good looks are merely a by-product of its owners’ esthetic interests.

Sefi Amir, one of the shop’s four co-owners, asserts that Boucherie Lawrence is “just a regular butcher shop,” and not a boutique or, worse, a gastronomic destination.

“We want to make this a populist business, we don’t want it to be expensive and inaccessible,” she says. “We want to promote the idea of better meat, but we don’t want it to only be for those who can afford it.”

Read Gazette story (p1) and B3 (p2) here.