Dancing with a Star

In Point Roberts, it is now time be be putting away our tents and banners as we look back on the final festival of the 2009 gala season.  The Music and Seafood Festival this past weekend managed a mostly sunny day and stellar performances from both the seafood and the musicians, not to mention a dancer.  Insofar as I am up on the Sunshine Coast and not in Point Roberts, I know this only from reports of friends who had the good sense to stay and participate.

Only a few weeks ago, we had the Music and Arts Festival, and it would appear from these reports that a festival that provides one food for the soul (music) and one food for the body  (the seafood) has the edge on a festival that provides only foods for the soul.  The big feature, say the reporters, was a klezmer band from Bellingham (it is possible that that is the funniest phrase I’m likely to hear this week).  I mean, if you were going to look for a klezmer band, would Bellingham be your first thought?  But Millie and the Menschn, classically trained musicians from Bellingham, also do the klezmer.

And to add to the phenomenon, Ms. B. Hooping Allure dances, at least some of the time, to the klezmer music and she always dances with what appears to be a stainless steel hoola hoop.  I am truly sorry to have missed this. You can see her perform on her website, but I daresay the combination of the dance and the Seafood and Music Festival either before or after the 20 minute downpour must have been amazingly fun.

But it has given me a new idea for a community project that could secondarily contribute to Point Roberts’  economic development.  Ms. Allure, I am told by yet other friends, gives dance classes and she is a great teacher.  So, how about we hire her to come to Point Roberts to teach us to do hoola hoop exercise/dance?  We could all go down to the beach of a morning—say Tuesdays and Thursdays so as not to compete with the Wacky Walkers--like the elderly Chinese practicing Tai Chi in Taiwan parks, and do our hoola hooping en masse.  Given the space requirements, we’d need to be in Lighthouse Park, I suppose.  Or maybe in a great line all around the edge of the peninsula.  (That would make for a great new ‘coastal photo’ project, Ed.)

  Just how long before the National Geographic and the Discovery Channel would be knocking at our doors, begging to interview us and take our pictures?  And then, the tourism to follow.  Well, the mind boggles.  And if Ms. Allure’s general physical condition is any testimony to hula hooping, we could all be looking forward to newer and much smaller-sized wardrobes.

(Thanks to George Wright for the photos!  And to whomever provided the blue skies!)

Non-Stop Fun in Canada

Here it is Father’s Day, and not a festival in sight. The Sunshine Coast, where I am right now, is a genuine tourist economy. Its largest single employer is a pulp mill, of course, which does provide tours on Thursdays, I believe, but that doesn’t make it a part of the tourist industry. In fact, if it doesn’t stop laying off workers (lower demand for wood pulp, I believe), it may not even continue to be the single largest employer.

Nevertheless, because this is a tourist/resort kind of place--what with the ocean and the mountains and with being about the warmest place in Canada—the Sunshine Coast spends its summer doing festivals. All festivals all the time AND a depressed economy. How festively cool is that?

We are just finishing off a Jazz Festival and a Blues Festival, and are now looking forward to Canada Day on July 1 which really begins the festival season. We are going to be having the Showcase of the Performing Arts, the Sea Cavalcade (the Queen of which is an elderly woman with civic spirit), the Bonfire Music Festival, the Wooden Boat Festival, a Country Fair, Creek Daze, something called ‘Commotion on the Ocean,’ the Arts Festival, the Festival of the Rolling Arts (which seems to be about cars), the Festival of the Written Arts, the Fibre Arts Festival, the Chamber Music Festival, the Salmon Festival, another Jazz Festival and the New Moon Festival. And then there’s B.C. Day, which is not in and of itself a festival, but does usually have fireworks, making it pretty festive. Also, now that I think of it, there’s the Okanagon Fruit Stand Man who comes to town every Wednesday in the summer and brings such wonderful fruits that he himself constitutes a one-person festival spread out over time. And then summer is over and the tourists go away.

Having a very good time? Certainly a festive time. At the Salmon Festival, you can decorate a plywood salmon. Unfortunately, the real salmon are rapidly disappearing from these coastal waters so this festival may soon turn into a Salmon Memorial Festival. At the Written Arts Festival, people who are talented writers come and talk. How about a festival where the talented writers come and write? At the New Moon Festival, you get to eat samosas. I don’t know about the connection between samosas and the new moon. But I do believe that the best thing about a Festive Occasion ought to be its food, so I’ll be going to check them out.

Mine, All Mine

Another tourist festival here on the sometimes sunny Sunshine Coast. Rain welcomed the 5-day long, Gibson’s Landing Fibre Arts Festival, which has been an August feature in Gibsons for the past eight or so years. It includes classes, an exhibit, a merchant mall, a film evening, a reception evening, and a variety of demonstrations. It focuses on all the ordinary fibre arts (knitting, lacemaking, rug hooking, quilting, ornamental clothing, weaving, felting, crocheting, embroidery, paper-making, fabric jewelry, and wood-working, because wood, too, is a fibre, as the promotional materials inform us.

The exhibit is the part I’m mostly interested in, but it has a checkered record. The goal of the exhibit is to attract high-quality stuff from off the coast, but that has not been easy to achieve. There are no significant prizes, no significant publicity, and no significant ease for getting your work to and from the festival. It is a juried exhibit, but some years the jurying appears to be non-existent with plaintive letters going out to various fibre groups on the coast begging for submissions. Other years, the quality is very good. I’m just one of the tourists they’re attracting so I don’t know much about what’s behind it all, but this year, things took another turn downhill from my perspective.

The exhibit was excellent. I took my camera with me because I have lots of friends who would like to see what was on display, friends who don’t live on the Sunshine Coast, but who might try to get here if they saw the quality of the display. ‘No Photographs,’ I was told. ‘Copyright issues,’ was added vaguely, as if that explained everything, as if there were no such concept as ‘fair use.’ One of the attendants went on to explain that I, personally, could give the Festival permission to use a photograph of my quilt (I had one quilt in the exhibit), and that a professional photographer would take such picture. Hardly a response to my request, I thought. In any case, since I had just sold that quilt, I suppose the ‘copyright’ (whatever that might mean in this situation) would be going to the person who bought the quilt.

Intellectual property is what we were dealing with here. Thoughts, images, ideas: all mine, or all somebody’s, never to be touched, seen, thought, or even imagined without giving that unknown ‘ME’ credit or getting ME’s permission or providing ME with money. I heard that the festival had run into some difficulty earlier when they had used a photograph of a quilt from a previous year’s exhibit in their publicity materials. Apparently, the quilt was made from a copyrighted design (dear lord, you can copyright almost anything, including the simplest quilt design), and the brochure had not given credit to the copyright holder nor, I guess, had anyone asked the copyright holder's permission to use a photograph of a quilt made by somebody else in the festival’s brochure: I mean, why would they? TOO bizarre for me. I take a picture of a deer in someone’s yard. Does the image belong to the person who owns the front yard? Surely not. Maybe we should be getting the deer’s permission to take the photo in the first place, and then pay or give credit to the deer when I put the photo on my blog, in the second? Does the image belong to the deer? Have I captured its soul? Should Dorothea Lange’s estate have ensured payments to the woman whose photograph Lange made famous throughout the world?

I know there’s another side to all this, but I’m not persuaded much by that side, at least not when it's exercised in unreasonable ways. I’m happy to think that images (and information), as the phrasing goes, would like to be free. That’s what is destroying newspapers, I am assured, but it seems to me that newspapers, e.g., have done a very good job of destroying themselves by their mediocre display of journalism. I hope the Fibre Arts Festival doesn’t go the same route. Images are what is on view at an exhibit. Surely, the purpose of an image is to be seen?

Celebration of a Sort

This weekend is Point Roberts’ traditional International Arts and Music Festival, a phenomenon that is organized by three or four people in the community every year. It can only be a phenomenal amount of work to get a couple of dozen vendors, food sellers, and musical groups to come down here or up here, as the case may be, and do their thing, such as it is, to the limited audience of Point Roberts.

We went over to Lighthouse Park, the park with no lighthouse, this afternoon to watch a couple of groups, including a sorority of belly dancers, and to see what food and craft were on offer. Lighthouse Park normally is a series of small buildings and boardwalks on the beach that house, most memorably, an Orca Center. But today, there were tents and sound systems and a filled parking lot in addition. And a respectable crowd of visitors, but not an overwhelming one.

The grandchildren, who come from bigger places than this, were underwhelmed, but one takes what one can get here if you, as taker, are a resident. For anyone to come here from outside to work, whether selling hammocks or a group’s latest CD, requires that anyone to cross the border at least once and, in the case of U.S. residents, twice on their way up, and to do it again on their way back down (or up, depending upon which way they are going). And to do it in the heart of summer when the lines at the border are at their very longest. And no going in the fast Nexus lane because you can’t be in the Nexus lane and have items related to your work. That is, no business materials. And if you are Canadian, I am not at all sure how you come down here to sell your goods or your time (if you are a performer), but I would bet a lot that it involves more than just mentioning to the border guards that ‘you’ve got a gig in Point Roberts.’

So it amazes me that the organizers can get anyone at all to make the effort to entertain us at such an event. But it is probably the case that those who are willing to make the effort didn’t have a significantly better offer. Nonetheless, we appreciate the effort. Like the Fourth of July parade this year, better this festival than no festival.

I walked by one lady who was watching the belly dancers cavort while herself knitting a tweed wool sweater. Dozens of little girls crowded the boardwalk stage to take digital pictures of the belly dancers. What will they do with those pictures? A ton of shaved ice, at least, made its way down the gullets of young and old alike, festooned with syrups of colors that don’t even vaguely resemble anything seen in nature. It is hard to imagine exactly what we were celebrating, but perhaps just a sunny day in August.