Pussy Riot retrospective at the Polygon Gallery in North Vancouver; a sourdough sandwich shop on Commercial Drive in Vancouver proper; and Sabalenka vs Swiatek at the WTA Italian Open in Rome.
I’m All Lost in…
The 3 things I’m obsessing over THIS week (Vancouver, B.C. edition)
Week #31
1) I visited Vancouver, B.C. this past weekend. My friend Wendy’s Stealing Clothes, aka, Annie, had tickets to a nostalgic (for her) rock show and a groovy Airbnb. She invited me along; not for her rock show, but for the opportunity to recline in Vancouver: lazy, grand & sparkling Stanley Park; the four-minute-headways SkyTrain (with doner kebab shops built into station platforms); the majority-minority diversity (versus Seattle’s near-70% white), and the people’s SeaBus.
On Sunday morning, we took the SkyStrain five stops to the Waterfront Station and transferred to the SeaBus (the ferry), taking it 10+ minutes across the Vancouver Harbor to the Polygon Gallery (free admission, but $15 recommended) where we saw a remarkable exhibit: Velvet Terrorism—Pussy Riot’s Russia. This was a chronological, hedge-maze-walk-through retrospective of the anti-Putin, anti-war, anti-police state, feminist collective’s obstinate catalog of punk agitprop. Appropriately, their Riot Grrrl-inspired jams blare from video monitors as you take in the show; the person at the front desk warns you about this: “It’s loud,” she said.
Pussy Riot grabbed the world’s attention when they grabbed Russia by the balls in February 2012 after staging a guerilla gig at Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Savoir dressed in simple frocks, colored tights, combat boots, and knit stocking caps pulled over their heads (circle cut outs for the eyes and mouth), performing a manic song called “Punk Prayer”
Virgin Mary, Mother of God, banish Putin
Banish Putin, Banish Putin!
Congregations genuflect
Black robes brag, golden epaulettes
Freedom's phantom's gone to heaven
Gay Pride's chained and in detention
The head of the KGB, their chief saint
Leads protesters to prison under escort
Don't upset His Saintship, ladies
Stick to making love and babies
Shit, shit, holy shit!
Shit, shit, holy shit!
Virgin Mary, Mother of God
Become a feminist, we pray thee
Become a feminist, we pray theeBless our festering bastard-boss
Let black cars parade the Cross
The Missionary's in class for cash
Meet him there, and pay his stashPatriarch Gundyaev believes in Putin
Better believe in God, you vermin!
Fight for rights, forget the rite –
Join our protest, Holy Virgin
Virgin Mary, Mother of God, banish Putin, banish Putin
Virgin Mary, Mother of God, we pray thee, banish him!
Two of the members, Nadya Tolokonnikova and Masha Alyokhina got two-year prison terms after being charged with "hooliganism motivated by religious hatred.”
Pussy Riot’s aesthetic is located somewhere between the spat-out punk of Bikini Kill (though, late-50s-something-me hears the Slits), Charlie Chaplin slapstick, and Alexander Dubček’s popular 1968 Prague Spring revolution, Czechoslovakia’s original Velvet Revolution.
No disrespect to Western punk, but Antifa is real in Russia; when Pussy Riot uses the word “Gulag,” as they did in a series of theatrical protest actions in 2018 and 2019, it’s not a metaphor.
Pussy Riot—originally 11 women, including 22-year-old founder Tolokonnikova—frames things in the 1968 context from the start: their first action, in November 2011, featured their song “Free the Cobblestones,” an echo of the Paris ‘68 student protests slogan: “Sous les pavés, la plage!” Under the cobblestones, the beach!
This electric guitar banger, which also samples a 1977 U.K. punk song by the Angelic Upstarts called “Police Oppression,” urges citizens to throw cobblestones at police during election day protests; the cobblestones represented a crooked, election-year public works project kickback, and Pussy Riot performed the song atop a scaffold in a Moscow subway station while tearing pillows and raining feathers in analogy down (as opposed to actual cobblestones) on the crowd below.
Although my ‘68 comparison casts Pussy Riot as more praxis than punk, it’s hard not to conclude, after walking through this exhaustive (and exhausting) exhibit of high-brow-pranksterism, that Pussy Riot’s real jam is ultimately artistic.
Pussy Riot exhibit at North Vancouver’s Polygon Gallery, 5/12/24
Pussy Riot exhibit at North Vancouver’s Polygon Gallery, 5/12/24
This is meant as high praise. Pussy Riot, now a lose cohort of about 25 woman, most living in exile, is made up of art geniuses—irrepressible creative souls who found themselves trapped in Putin-land. The inexorable result: their oozing creativity manifests as politics.
Constantly facing house arrest and arrest arrest, they persist at a level Elizabeth Warren couldn’t comprehend. But viewed as a whole body of work here, particularly as they focus on high-production videos (shot in forests and sampling Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake), theatrical costumes (such as reclaimed Kokoshniks and comedic police uniforms), colorful paper airplanes (in a protest that seemed prompted by Yoko Ono’s instruction poetry), elaborate hi-jinks escapes (using food delivery guy outfits and decoy suitcases), and songs that re-contextualize fragments of disillusioned letters from the Ukrainian front (“Mom, there are no Nazis here, don’t watch TV”), it’s plain Pussy Riot is a voltaic arts movement.
In 2018, when they plastered the federal penitentiary building with oversized stickers saying: “gulag,” “murders,” “torture,” “slave labour,” a government employee came out and told them they needed to submit all complaints in writing. Alyokhina replied: “that’s exactly what we’re doing, we just enlarged the words so that they would be readable.”
This is a mission statement. Communicating is their mission.
Also in 2018, when the government shut down Telegram, the messenger service that anti-Putin activists used to communicate, members of Pussy Riot showed up at the FSB building (today’s KGB building) and attacked it with paper airplanes; Telegram’s logo is an airplane.
Pussy Riot exhibit at North Vancouver’s Polygon Gallery, 5/12/24
Pussy Riot exhibit at North Vancouver’s Polygon Gallery, 5/12/24, Masha Alyokhina pictured with blue paper airplane.
Pussy Riot exhibit at North Vancouver’s Polygon Gallery, 5/12/24
The text that narrates the exhibit was written by one of the collective’s original members, the poetic Alyokhina, which makes it hard to miss the fact that artistic genius governs Pussy Riot’s overt politics. Juxtaposed against the kidnap letter sloganeering splayed on the gallery walls in green, orange, and yellow masking tape (“Fuck you, SEXisTs, PuTiNists,”), Alyokhina writes the exhibit’s narrative in effortless metaphors
“You can be imprisoned for talking to friends about politics at McDonald’s. For two years I have seen [the prison system] from the inside. It is a meat grinder…”
and default prose poems.
Riot is always a thing of beauty. That is how I got interested. At school, I had this dream of becoming a graffiti artist, and I practiced graffiti in my school notepad. If you start your schoolwork on the first page and do your sketches in the back, sooner or later the two will meet in the middle.
Next to your history notes, graffiti appears. Which turns history into a different story.
If Alyokhina’s magical verse isn’t enough to signal Pussy Riot’s status as high art, her report on Pussy Riot’s 2012 Red Square performance of “Putin Peed his Pants” from atop the historic Lobnoye Mesto altar explicitly spells out the nature of their project:
“The cops got us afterwards for trespassing. We told them we were drama students.”
Doner kebab shop built into the SkyTrain platform, Vancouver, B.C., 5/11/24.
2) Another dispatch from Vancouver—specifically from Commercial Drive, the main drag east of downtown that stretches through the lively yet insouciant Grandview-Woodland neighborhood where the closely packed detached houses lining the side streets translate into a density rate (17,000 people/per square mile) that tops the city average by 3,000 people per square mile.
Trout Lake Park, Vancouver, B.C.
Vegan pizza on the drag, Vancouver, B.C., 5/13/24
Commercial Drive is a two-miles-of-action strip (and notably multi-generational as opposed to teeny bopper heavy) defined by: lefty, used bookstores; secondhand clothing and consignment shops; cafes; an abundance of pizza slice joints (including the Pizza Castle for plant based vegan slices); tattoo parlors; coffee shops; Caribbean, Asian, Mexican, and Roti restaurants (vegan options everywhere); and (too many) sports bars.
It’s bordered on the south by a major SkyTrain stop (the third busiest station in the three-line SkyTrain system, the Broadway/Commercial Station, with roughly 15,000 daily boardings); bordered on the southeast by a gorgeous wooded lake beach (Trout Lake Park); and bordered on the north by a hippie park (Grandview Park).
Out of all the action, the coziest spot to sit down for a glass of red wine or a cocktail is located directly across the street from Grandview Park, a slow-paced hang out called Mum’s the Word. We landed there twice.
First for drinks. I got—per the “or just ask for what you like!” drink-menu option, a custom made NA cocktail. Annie got a “Them Apples”— butter washed Pere Magloire V.S., Merridale apple liqueur, maple syrup, egg white, black walnut bitters, and lemon.
The next night, for dinner. I got the “Hippie Mum”—fried eggplant, tomato sauce, herbs, vegan shredded cheese, served on sourdough.
I don’t know what Annie got, but the comfort food menu includes a long list of grilled sourdough sandwiches: Melted Swiss cheese with onion jam; a field roast vegan sandwich with spicy vegannaise and caramelized onions; a beef patty melt; a BLT; a meatball sub; a smoked turkey with chimichurri; a Gruyere cheese and country ham sandwich; and a “Korean Mum”—Bulgogi marinated smoked beef, kimchi, mozzarella, and mayo.
We sat on the back deck for both visits (for the view of the park), but there’s also low-key indoor lounge that may as well be in Portland with a DJ spinning casual beats and a struggling artist bartender chatting with the regulars.
The New York Times’ “36 Hours in Vancouver,” also highlighted Mum’s the Word, writing: “equal parts cafe and cocktail bar—locals slip into retro easy chairs for drinks like Mum’s Cold Brew Manhattan (14.75 dollars), a potent mix of cold brew, whisky and kahlua.”
The next time I visit Vancouver, I will go straight back to Mum’s the Word.
I’ll also go back to Prado Cafe—one of the 20 coffee shops on Commercial Drive—and the other place I hit twice during this weekend trip, both times for their whopping quinoa and arugula bowl.
Final note: There’s a Kitchener St. in the heart of the Commercial Drive drag; given that there are at least two world music record shops and a Jamaican restaurant called Riddim & Spice nearby, one couldn’t be blamed for thinking this street was named after Windrush Generation Trinidadian London transplant, 1950s Calypso icon Lord Kitchener.
“Isn’t that your guy?” Annie said. (She said the same thing about the President Gamal Nasser LP of speeches we saw!) Kitchener street was established in 1911, so I guess not, but it seems to me that just as Calypsonian, Aldwyn Roberts, aka, Lord Kitch, was sampling and reclaiming the early 20th Century British mustachioed military leader, the pro-immigrant Commercial Drive neighborhood has transformed meanings as well.
SkyTrain, Expo Line, Vancouver, B.C., 5/13/24
3) And now we leave Vancouver, B.C. for Rome. Or at least, for my current obsession with what’s been happening in Rome: Pro tennis’ Italian Open.
To be honest, I’m only paying attention to the women’s side, the WTA, and my favorite player, Aryna Sabalenka, who, in her inimitable, discombobulated style (including faux pas-ing and laughing her way through a sit down interview, and nearly botching her Round-16, 3-set epic by barely fending off three match points) now finds herself in the finals.
Sabalenka (ranked No. 2 in the world) will be facing Iga Swiatek (No. 1 in the world) for the championship on Saturday.
Per usual, Swiatek blazed her way into the finals, handily dispatching all her opponents, including world No. 3 Coco Gauff in the semifinal in two sets. Swiatek also beat Sabalenka last month in the Madrid Open final, 7-5, 4-6, 7-6 (7). And Swiatek holds a 7-3 advantage overall against Sabalenka.
The WTA’s Aryna Sabalenka, ranked No. 2 in the world.
I’m not being 100% fair to Sabalenka; to my glee and amazement, she seems to be in a bad rhythm of her own now. After her close call in Round 16, she went on to win her quarterfinal match against Jelena Ostepenko (the No. 9) in two sets, 6-2, 6-4, and win her semifinal against the streaking Danielle Collins (No. 13), 7-5, 6-2.
Obsessively checking the scores all week has also nudged me back onto the tennis court myself where I pretend I’m Sabalenka as I bash and volley with the practice wall—and when there’s no one else around—cry out: “Sabalenka Afternoon!”