July 2012

Win a seat on a private patio with 100.5 The PEAK during The Celebration of Light Fireworks!
100.5 The PEAK wants you to experience The Celebration of Light Fireworks in VIP Style at The Museum of Vancouver's Fireworks Patio Party!

On August 1st, Brazil will be lighting up the sky and you and a guest could be enjoying it from The Museum of Vancouver's private patio in Vanier Park with 100.5 The PEAK. You'll get a gourmet Brazilian BBQ courtesy of The Butler Did It Catering - voted Vancouver's Best Catering Company - and Lonsdale Event Rentals will be donating all the party supplies.

The only way to join 100.5 The PEAK at The Museum of Vancouver's Fireworks Patio Party is to win your way in!

Listen to PEAK Mornings at 9:30am to win a spot for you and a friend on the exclusive guest list and keep your eye on The 100.5 The PEAK - World Class Rock Facebook Page because we'll be giving away a few invites there too. Plus, we have some spots saved just for PEAK VIPs, so increase your chances of joining us by entering online now. Not a PEAK VIP? sign up today.

* The Online Contest closes Sunday, July 29 at Midnight.
* You Must be 19 + to attend this event.

Learn more using the The Museum of Vancouver as a venue to host your next event.

Find out more about The Butler Did It Catering - Affordable Elegance at butlerdiditcatering.com and Lonsdale Event Rentals at lonsdaleevents.com.

Thanks also to Mark Anthony Wines and R&B Brewing!
 

Over the last year I’ve certainly come to love the couch from our 1960s/70s gallery, So You Say You Want a Revolution. “I think my friends have a couch like that,” many people say, laughing about the longevity (albeit tattered condition) of the old sofa and how it seemed to symbolize every student household or artist space even through to today.

Sadly, last week, the old brown couch had to go into retirement. The sofa was from around 1935, and lived in the “hippie house”, where it served for many years as a back drop to photo shoots and children playing dress up.

We’re now on the hunt for a new (to us) sofa, and maybe you can help!

We’re looking for a vintage sofa that is pre 1960s (afterall, hippies in the 1970s didn’t have money for new couches!). Something that might be living in your basement or attic will be suitable. Ideally it will be well-used, maybe even a few tears, certainly some stains, but please, not re-upholstered.

Have a couch? Email Director of Collections and Exhibitions, Joan, at jseidl (at) museumofvancouver.ca.  

Vancouver is changing and growing so fast that, as Gordon Price reports, its newest neighbourhood doesn't even have a name yet. But if we look closely, we can see that a lot of our old ideas and landscapes are actually being repurposed, redesigned, and redefined. This week's MOVments explores the ways Vancouverites are reusing old spaces, re-imagining affordable housing and urban planning, and putting a new spin on a time-honored tradition: the business lunch.

Redefining Growth. Much to our delight, SOLEfood, Vancouver's largest urban farm, has outgrown its first home in a parking lot on East Hastings. Using a social enterprise model and employing over 20 people from the Downtown Eastside, the urban farm just opened its second location under the Georgia Street viaduct. As The Tyee explains much of SOLEfood's success has come from from garnering community support; the farm has received multiple grants, help from local business owners, and a free three-year lease for its new spot on Pacific Boulevard.

Video Stores Live.  With the demise of big-chain stores like Blockbuster and Rogers, They Live (formerly Cinephile) is one of a handful of independent video rental shops in Vancouver that is still making a go of it in an increasingly Internet-dominated business. Like Black Dog and Limelight Video, They Live is filling a niche, catering to those who are searching for hard to find titles and a little personal interaction. And as with other local businesses and art spaces, diversification is the name of the game; They Live will also be offering live music and film screenings.

Rethinking Homelessness. In the midst of so much change, UN representative Miloon Kothari says one thing has stayed pretty much the same since his last visit to Vancouver in 2007: the city's affordable housing crisis. In his interview with The Tyee, Kothari gave a sobering account of the crisis, which he says is caused in part by too much emphasis on market solutions. He suggests that it's time to completely re-frame the housing issue: "What you see in Canada and what you see in the United States is that housing is seen as a commodity and not as a social good. If it's treated as a social good, then the whole thinking will change."

Shifting Planning Policy. Judging from our situation in Vancouver, it looks like the new generation of Canadian urban planners have quite a task ahead of them. This fascinating Globe and Mail article explores the shifts currently taking place in urban planning policy and power assignment. While cities across the country face diverse challenges, Vancouver's former co-planning director, Larry Beasley, is excited at the prospect of a new generation of Canadian urban planners taking on roles as visionaries and risk takers.

The Evolution of Lunch. And finally, on a lighter note: the Vancouver Public Space Network and Space2Place are co-hosting communal outdoor lunches every Thursday this month. Long cafeteria tables, food specials from local vendors, and musical entertainment are making Abbott Street the place to be for an afternoon meal, whether you work in the area or not.

At the MOVeum:
August 18 - MEMBERS ONLY Art Deco Chic: Talk & Tour with Ivan Sayers

[New SOLEfood location on Pacific Boulevard. Photo by David Niddrie]

While reading Greg Smith’s post on the Sex Talk in the City blog, I got to thinking. Greg’s idea of sexual “hang-ups” seem to have a lot to do with the process of medicalizing sexuality in the 19th and 20th century.

The medicalization of sexuality is not only the construction of sexuality in medical language or the act of mandating interventions (which has led to significant public health improvements), it is also the introduction of pathology and medical explanations used to frame “deviant” behaviours. Hysteria, homosexuality, and transsexuality have a history of being explained as medical disorders in order to defend what is thought of as normal sexual behaviour and what isn’t. As Sex Talk in the City will remind us, these constructions are felt in the present day and do affect our sexual experiences – they lead us to understand ourselves within these medical terms, sometimes out of necessity, due to a lack of alternative language.

When discussing sexuality we can’t forget the work of French philosopher and historian Michel Foucault. Foucault demonstrates how “repressive pathology” has a quality of administrative inquiry into our private lives. It confines sex to the 'privacy' of the home while maintaining a wider, external world of repressed sexual expression. Pierre E. Trudeau's famous declaration in 1967, "There's no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation," highlights the tension between the state and the individual, and through omission suggests that sexuality and sexual expression belong only in the bedroom.

Sex Talk in the City isn’t necessarily unique. It is a process of construction, deconstruction, and reconstruction of the meanings attached to sexual experience and sexual conduct. Through its position of authority (coming from a museum), the exhibition can’t help but be part of the medicalization of sexuality. However, the exhibition also provides space to negotiate how authorities have affected our individual impressions of sexuality.

Knowing that the development of vibrators was an experiment in speeding up the female orgasm and finding out the “hidden truth” of a woman’s sexuality changes the ritual and may bring up new questions to the visitors. Will the audience second guess its usage? Or maybe the historical element will enter the arena of new fantasies, a new taboo? I wonder how the exhibition and the knowledge it produces will challenge power (the institution, the tools) and how might it be the same mechanism that misrepresents. 

Sex Talk and the City is a self-reflexive exhibition. It’s conscious of misrepresentation by defining itself in these fluid terms, using humour to suggest another world to be probed. It’s radical but careful. The multi-media nature of the exhibition “allows” multiple access points to sexual discourse. The history of the vibrator installation not only uses dresser drawers to augment mom and dad’s secret treasures (Joy of Sex, anyone?), but can also act as a sexual confession, a clinical codification behind the doctor’s door. The museum itself waits, coyly, for our attention.
 

Danielle LaFrance is a digitization assistant at the Museum of Vancouver, and is the author of Species Branding (2010).