I was coming back from Vancouver Island this weekend, expecting an easy trip, but was thrown a curve by the fact that BC Ferries had a couple of ships unexpectedly out of service.

I was able to minimize the hassle by racing from Departure Bay over to the unknown-to-ferry-neophytes terminal at Duke Point. Nonetheless, I can't help thinking that the Ferry Corp could have retained a few cards up it’s sleeve for these sorts of circumstances.

I'm referring specifically to the Fast Cat ferries.

Yes I know, they didn't work that well. They made big waves, they didn't carry large freight, and sometimes logs got stuck in their intake...whatever the hell it was. I've been on them a few times and was never a huge fan.

Nonetheless, considering the pittance they fetched when actioned off, would it not have made sense to keep one or two of them on hand as a backup, at least until the new wave of German uber-barges arrives?

In fact, for a time a few years ago the Ferry Corp was doing exactly that--quietly, of course--until the BC Liberals stopped them and hawked the ships.

Let me use an analogy.

I play the electric guitar. Let's say I'm looking for a new amplifier. I get one custom made. It's supposed to cost $2000, but ends up costing $4000. I'm steamed by this, but am looking forward to the amp nonetheless. It's powerful, but you can switch wattages between 12 different tube combinations. It's not hard to carry, as it floats above the ground like a hovercraft, controlled by a small remote that fits in the palm of your hand. And it has a built in wah-wah feature that alters the signal in accordance with your facial expression.

Finally I get the thing, and I'm disappointed. The tube combinations only work with hard-to-find Albanian valves, and the face-wah feature requires Jim Carrey-like contortions that my stoic visage is not capable of. Not only that, but the hovercraft component is useless on stairs, and I end up carrying it most of the time anyway.

"To hell with this," I think. I try to sell the amp, thinking I’ll just stick with my old one, but the best offer I get is $50.

What do I do? Sell it for $50, or keep it around as a spare? After all, it's not all it’s supposed to be, but it’s still useable. It amplifies sound. And my other amp is an ageing tube combo which, though it is a decent workhorse, could cause problems at any time.

Doesn't the same logic work with the Fast Cats?

Now, I realize that if you posited this query to the current government you'd get a response something like this:

"We feel the service-to-use ratio is such that any functionality derived from employing the Fast Cat ferries on an as-needed basis would be offset by demands on payroll, disproportionate activation costs, as well as the requisite imposition on available moorage facilities. Further, a study conducted for BC Ferries by the consulting firm of Sycophant and Suckage found that the average wait time for BC Ferry customers during periods of aggressive non-availabilty totals 5.2 hours per person per month when spread across the British Columbian population, which falls within acceptable parameters according to comparisons with similarly configured ferry fleets operating in Madagascar, New Guinea and Sri Lanka.”

Translation:

"We used this issue to hammer the crap out of the New Democratic Party in the last election, and we frankly feel that we'd like to keep it in reserve for use in future election rhetoric. In fact we intend to wring more mileage, politically speaking, out of the Fast Cat ferries than an impoverished WASP spinster gets out of a premium tea bag. As a result, any effort, no matter how modest, to rehabilitate the image of these vessels is contrary to our partisan agenda and thus completely unacceptable."

There are some payoffs to this situation. The more difficult it is to get to the island, the fewer miscreants I have to put up over in paradise. The problem is, this kind of disfunctionality may lead to the nightmare scenario, in which an engineering consortium with the inevitable close ties to the provincial government gets a contract to build a bridge.

I can see the future article in the Vancouver Sun:

“Although the fixed link to Vancouver Island has gone over budget by a mere 285 trillion dollars (USD), we feel that this will prove negligible when set against the stimilus it will provide to the provincial economy,” said Premier Carole Taylor, still looking lithe and sexy at age 97.

“We feel that this will usher in a new era of hope and prosperity for the Province of British Columbia.”



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About ten years ago, Vancouver civic planners decided to allow developers to turn a small, industrial sector of the city called 'Brewery Creek' into a enclave for artists. It would be similar to what had been started in a number of American cities. Down went the sheet metal shops and garages, and up went four and five story concrete apartments, full of open floor-plan lofts.

To ensure that artists lived there, a bylaw was passed. Seventy percent of the floor area in each unit had to be for work purposes. Only 30 percent could be used as living space. And by 'work,' the City meant something creative. A list of suitably artistic occupations was drawn up by City planners, and hammered Moses-like into the Zoning and Development By-law.

Now, the only artist I have ever know who had 70/30 work/live split in his pad was the drummer in a band I was in when I was a teenager. We used to practice in his bedroom. He had enough room for a bed and a dresser, the rest was full of amplifiers and drums.

Most of the time, though, it's a bit difficult to achieve that kind of neat demarcation in one room. Do you draw a line across the floor, splitting the 'live' from the 'work' area? Do you measure the cumulative total floor area of 'living' features, like televisions or kitchen tables, ensuring that they never exceed 30% of the total space?

And who enforces all of this anyway? Can you picture groups of inspectors bursting through the doors, demanding to see works of art? Demanding to know whether that kitschy coffee table is a product of your creative imagination, or merely something you picked up at a rummage sale to put beverages on?

So it didn't quite pan out. Brewery Creek today is certainly a funky little area, inhabited by people who (unlike many artists) are affluent enough to afford property, prefer a stylish and unique space, and who lean toward the creative side. People like the ones you'll find in most urban planning departments.

But is it any more artistic than any other neighbourhood? Generally artists come in all shapes and sizes, and don't necessarily confine themselves to chic enclaves.

The closest thing to an artsy neighbourhood that I've ever lived in was the suburban one I grew up in. With a ratio of about three wanna-be rock stars per block over about one square kilometer, it was like a punk/metal version of New Orleans' French Quarter circa 1900.

"Ah, but it's different," you say. "Artists need to be free of repression and confining norms. They need an environment that is open-minded and allows them to flourish. You didn't have that in suburbia."

Actually, I did. You could hear our band all the way up the block and no one complained once. New Year's Eve could be particularly raucous, but the folks in our neighbourhood took it in stride.

I was thinking of this just last New Year's Eve. I was at a party in a loft building in Brewery Creek. There was live music; jazzy, well-played, not especially loud, happening in the building's common room. Just after midnight, a guy called down and asked that the music stop. He was the strata president.

It was too late, he said, noting the time. We were in violation of strata bylaws.

I figure every neighbourhood is potentially full of artists, whether or not it’s
been designated as such by the trendy or the bureaucratic. And the artier neighbourhoods are not necessarily free of suburban-style constraints.

I think Bjork puts in nicely: 'In all the bedrooms all around the world, there are people so busy doing so many things...

‘I stopped walking past houses thinking, "Oh this is just a place where people are couch potatoes and lead mundane lives".'



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