All posts by Raymond Tomlin

About Raymond Tomlin

Raymond Tomlin is a veteran journalist and educator who has written frequently on the political realm — municipal, provincial and federal — as well as on cinema, mainstream popular culture, the arts, and technology. View all posts by Raymond Tomlin →

Vancouver Votes 2018 | More and More Bizarro

June 3, 2018Vancouver, Vancouver Votes 2018Raymond Tomlin

NPA Councillor Hector Bremner Set to Announce Creation of YesVancouver, a New Civic Party

As per Vancouver Courier civic affairs reporter Mike Howell’s May 25th story, VanRamblings was told yesterday by informed sources that Hector Bremner — current sitting City Councillor with the Vancouver Non-Partisan Association, who recently had his NPA mayoral nomination bid rejected by the party — will hold a press conference tomorrow morning, June 4th, informing the public that he is leaving the NPA to form a new civic party, to be called YesVancouver, for which he will be the party’s Mayoral candidate.

Let’s Fix Housing for the rich, with nary a thought to building social or affordable housing

As per Howell’s story, disgruntled NPA members Adrian Crook, Wade Grant and Scott de Lange Boom, who all intended to seek council nominations with the NPA, are expected to join Bremner. Reports are, as well, that Bremner’s new YesVancouver civic party will run a full slate of candidates for both Vancouver School Board, and Park Board — the star candidate for the latter civic body expected to be disaffected former NPA Park Board member Erin Shum, and current independent Park Board Commissioner.
All of the above comes as bad news for the Vancouver’s oldest and most established civic party, the Non-Partisan Association, who are holding their Mayoral nomination vote today at the Hellenic Hall, in the Arbutus Ridge neighbourhood. The NPA and YesVancouver — both of them corporate parties, arms of the right-of-centre B.C. Liberal party, and largely developer-funded — look to knock each other out heading into the autumn civic election, voting day Saturday, October 20th, with former Vancouver South Conservative MP Wai Young looking to land a knockout blow to both the NPA and YesVancouver, for the right-of-centre conservative crown.
Ain’t politics luvverly in our town?

To make matters worse for the once beloved and still loved by many Non-Partisan Association, sources tell VanRamblings that current NPA members who will vote at today’s Non-Partisan Association mayoral nomination shindig, and who will officially join the nascent civic YesVancouver party tomorrow morning, plan on disrupting the announcement of the NPA’s 2018 mayoral candidate when the announcement is made by NPA President Gregory Baker, in full view of the gathered NPA party members, and more egregiously the media assembled at the Hellenic Hall to report out on the — let’s hope not booby prize — winner of the NPA 2018 mayoral nomination.
Left-of-centre political pundits and party members with the so-called “progressive parties” offering candidates in the 2018 Vancouver civic election — OneCity Vancouver, the Green Party of Vancouver, the Coalition of Progressive Electors, Vision Vancouver, and Team Jean — might set to thinking “Whoopee, the election is ours!“, but, nope, hold on a galldarn minute there, the progressive coalition seems, too, to have ridden off the rails spelling electoral disaster for the left-of-centre progressive parties who seem to be in just as much disarray as the right-of-centre evil-doers, with Vision Vancouver set to go it alone, as would appear to be the case with the Greens, all of which blows the notion of a progressive coalition to fight the evil-doers of Vancouver’s right-of-centre parties to smithereens and back.
Alas and woe is all of us, particularly bewildered civic voters of Vancouver who are set to cast a ballot at the polls this autumn civic election season.
Good thing then, one supposes, that 95% of Vancouver’s voting public could give a good galldarn about all the political shenanigans afoot this civic election season — more focused on going to the pub, falling in love (oh, the spring’s good for that), getting set for the start of the Vancouver Canadians 2018 baseball season, or focused on the Stanley Cup playoffs (yeah Ovechkin! — it’s your year … finally), or just setting about to live their lives, unconscious and socially bereft lives mind you, but lives nonetheless.

Happier times for newly-elected NPA Vancouver City Councillor Hector Bremner at a 2017 civic by-election celebration. The NPA Councillor’s mayoral hopes were dashed when the NPA Board rejected his candidacy in early May. But he seems to be landing on his feet. Photo by Dan Toulgoet, for the Vancouver Courier. Used without permission.

Maybe it is as former much-beloved Vancouver Sun civic affairs columnist Allan Fotheringham wrote each early summer for years — and as our friend Mike Klassen also wrote recently in his regular and often poignant and astute Vancouver Courier civic affairs column — summer is the silly season in politics, it’s just arriving quite a bit earlier than usual this unsettling year.

Stories of a Life | My Mother’s Frustrated Dreams | Country Music

June 2, 2018Jude and Megan, Stories of a Life, Vancouver, VanRamblingsRaymond Tomlin

Mike, Mark & Jack, New Westminster’s The Rhythm Pals, Canada’s best country group

In the 1950s my mother sang with the The Rhythm Pals, a New Westminster-based country music trio that was all the rage in the late 1940s, 50s and into the 1960s, in 1965, 1967, and 1968 winning the Juno Award as best Canadian country group, a few years after which they were inducted into the Canadian Country Music Hall of Honour, in 1989.
In my household growing up, it was Mike, Marc and Jack this, and Mike, Marc and Jack that, my mother keeping up her friendship with The Pals throughout the entirety of my young life. My mother loved to sing, sang all the time around our home and in the car, loved music of every description — when she was home there was always music in the house, Patti Page and Teresa Brewer her two favourite 1950s singers, later turning to Patsy Cline, all of whose music invested almost my every waking moment for years.
Looking back on it, I suppose my love for female vocalists originated with my own mother’s, if not exactly angelic but still melodic voice, her entire demeanour the very definition of joy when she sang. Driving around with my parents in the family car, the radio was turned up loud, my mother singing along with all of the artists of the day, save Nat King Cole, who she worshipped, and would not as his daughter did years later, ‘duet’ with him.
Above all else, though, my mother loved country and western music, a mix of Americana, folk and roots music that spoke of struggle and love lost, of tragedy and wont and lives not fully realized, the heartfelt music I grew up on and which, later in life, would emerge as my favourite musical genre, coming around to appreciate country music, after having as a teenager and for many years after rejecting the music my mother loved, finally coming around in my early 40s — I’ve loved Iris DeMent, Alison Moorer, Shelby Lynne, Kasey Chambers, Lucinda Williams, Lori McKenna, Miranda Lambert and Kacey Musgraves ever since. whose music has become the melancholy and thoughtful soundtrack that has informed my life this past 30 years.

In the late summer of 1958, my parents moved the family to Edmonton, to be closer to family and to be closer to the soundtrack of my mother’s life, roots and classic country music being far more popular on the Prairies than would ever be the case in the Lotusland Vancouver has always aspired to.

12221 81st Street, in northwest Edmonton, my family home from late 1959 through 1961

In 1960, with the help of my tall oak of a grandfather, my parents bought a house in northwest Edmonton, at 12221 81st Street, a working-aspiring-to-middle class neighbourhood, where I attended Eastwood Elementary for Grades 5 & 6, the new school and neighbourhood a step up from inner-city Edmonton, where we had rented for a year, and where I attended Sir John A. McDougall school in Grade 4 befriending all of the tough kids in school, helping them with their in-class & their homework, in exchange keeping me safe — to say it was a rough neighbourhood is to dramatically understate the matter. Still, I made it out in one piece, and was glad for the move.
As I say, my mother loved country roots music, the music of her youth, the music she sang, and the music that most spoke to her, that I believe kept her alive and her mind and spirit active — amidst the three back-breaking jobs she always held down, working at a puff wheat factory overnight for the entirety of our three-year tenure in Edmonton, working at a local bakery during the day, and the Swift Meat Packing Plant in the late afternoon and throughout the evening, ambitious and anxious to get ahead, or at least keep hers, and our heads above water, my father continuing his work at the Post Office, and surprising to everyone stepping up to the plate as our increasingly competent and loving father, to whom I’d help teach the ability to read, and with whom I’d spend endless hours quizzing him on aspects of his employment, in preparation for the quarterly tests of competence imposed by a draconian employer, the Canada Post Office.
Every now and then, though, my mother would get an evening off — she didn’t want to sit around the house “wasting time”, as she put it, she wanted to go out into the evening, be with people, to live and to feel free and to feel a part of the community, and if there was a country music concert at the nearby and walkable Edmonton Fairgrounds, all the better.
My mother loved to walk. One early Tuesday evening, she told my sister and I to put on our coats, that we were going out, saying to my father, “You’re coming along, too, to keep the kids out of mischief, to keep an eye on them so they don’t run away” — not that my sister and I ever did, we were homebodies, most evenings both my father and mother off at work, my sister and I at home watching TV or doing our homework, or visiting with friends in the neighbourhood, but back at home never later than 8pm.
On this particularly chill October 1960 evening, we made our way down to what appeared to us to be a deserted Edmonton Fairgrounds, although once inside the grounds and the closer we got to as our yet unknown destination, the clearer were the sounds of guitars being tuned up, and voices testing microphones — until we found ourselves arriving at a small tent, chairs for about 75 people, over the course of the half hour we waited for the evening’s festivities to begin, much to our mother’s displeasure, kicking around the sawdust on the floor, while looking around at the others who were in attendance, a few ragtag kids, but mostly adults in heavy, working class clothing, most drawn and seemingly weary with life, until …

Classic country music artists extraordinaire, The Wayfaring Stranger, Burl Ives; Montana Slim, otherwise know as Wilf Carter, and the Singing Cowboy himself, Hank Snow.

“Howdy, my name is Burl Ives, and this here to my left is Wilf Carter and standin’ next to him, the singing ranger himself, Hank Snow.”
And with that introduction, the small but fervently enthusiastic crowd came alive, as we were treated to a concert, and musicianship the likes of which I would not hear again till 1998, at a Lucinda Williams concert at The Vogue.
For the first and only time in my life, I saw my mother happy, in her element, dancing off to the side, a look of bliss on her face, her tired and aching bones revitalized with a renewed energy and strength, two and a half hours in my mother’s life that neither she nor I would ever forget, one of the best nights of my life, when I felt safe and loved amidst the music that had long been the soundtrack of my life, as it still remains to this day.

Arts Friday | An Indie Film Preview for the Month of June

June 1, 2018A & E, Cinema, VanRamblingsRaymond Tomlin

A Multi-Billion Dollar Blockbuster Movie Summer
And, the 2018 Must-See Summer Indie Film Alternatives
With the summer movie season already well underway, starting earlier than ever this year, with the release of Avengers: Infinity War on April 28th, the film racing towards the two billion dollar mark worldwide, faster than any movie ever released, you are about to be brow-beaten with one big Hollywood blockbuster spectacle after another over the next three months.
Hollywood is thrilled, needless to say and Disney in particular as the releasing studio, with the record-breaking success of Avengers: Infinity War, a great start to Hollywood’s summer 2018 movie season, the movie studio heads can be heard murmuring, and a sign of good things to come.
Prospects for warm-weather moviegoing in 2018 are significantly better than they were in 2017, a year most studios and cinema chains like Cineplex would like to forget, with one box office blockbuster after another tanking with patrons, the cavalcade of failures foisted upon us last summer including The Mummy, Transformers: The Last Knight, The Dark Tower, King Arthur: Legend of the Sword, Baywatch, and The Emoji Movie.
Quite simply, summer 2017 was overburdened with testosterone cinema.
In 2018, though, the situation is looking better, says the president and CEO of Cineplex Entertainment, Ellis Jacob, who in a recent conference call told Canada’s film journalists …

“This summer’s film slate looks particularly strong, offering something for everyone.”

After a 2017 that saw a 9.3% drop off at Cineplex’s box office, a financial circumstance that has yet to abate thus far in 2018, box office tragedy for Cineplex is partially mitigated by the success earlier this year of Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther and Jake Kasdan’s Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle.
Still, Jacob has more than the usual reason for wanting his prediction of a 2018 big summer box office to come true.
The eight Hollywood titles Jacob predicts will do well this summer …

Ocean’s 8 (June 8), the all-female take on the caper comedy;
Incredibles 2 (June 15), one of Pixar’s best creations makes its way back into the cinema;
Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (June 22), the long-awaited re-invention of the franchise;
Ant-Man and the Wasp (July 6), a reprise of the Paul Rudd starring surprise summer 2016 hit;
Skyscraper (July 13), yet another Dwayne Johnson chest-pounder, this one filmed in Vancouver;
Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again (July 20). Yes, the girls are back, and so are the boys;
Mission: Impossible — Fallout (July 27), another Tom Cruise stunt fest (early reviews are good).

While movie-goers have a tendency to overindulge in popcorn movies during the summer movie season, there are alternatives for adults.

What under-the-radar, low-budget films are set to break out in the month of June, films that will demand your attention, and your box office dollars?

On Chesil Beach (June 1). Opening today at Fifth Avenue Cinema, there couldn’t be a better way to kick off indie June than with Saoirse Ronan’s latest knock-out, On Chesil Beach, an entrancing adaptation of Ian McEwan’s novella about a young British couple on their honeymoon in 1962. A lyrical and exquisite film — a repressed passion play, funny, delicate and heartbreaking, the film and the story possess an intoxicating quality of emotional wonder, just the sort of indie film that you want to have lead off your summer of worthy and rapturous indie cinema

Hereditary (June 8). The most anticipated indie film to be released in June, a film that took Sundance by storm, and a film that seems poised to conquer the summer horror box office, a fitting follow-up to John Krasinski’s low-budget breakout A Quiet Place as one of the year’s best horror films. Filled with chilling images, a powerhouse performance by Toni Collette, and one eerie young girl, Hereditary is sure to terrify audiences, and emerge as an unforgettable and scarifying experience at the movies.

Won’t You Be My Neighbour? (June 8). Morgan Neville’s new documentary about children’s entertainer Fred Rogers, a breakout doc at Sundance 2018, offers sanity in an insane world, one of the most hotly-anticipated films of the summer. And there’s more to come: a Tom Hanks-led biopic called You Are My Friend, that will follow this documentary from Oscar recipient and recent Cannes casualty Morgan Neville (20 Feet from Stardom).
More, from Matt Goldberg, writing for Collider …

I did not expect to cry as much as I did during Won’t You Be My Neighbor?, Morgan Neville’s documentary chronicling the life and career of Fred Rogers. As a cretinous youth who preferred the colourful Sesame Street to the staid Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, it’s only now as an adult that I can fully appreciate what Rogers was doing with his unique TV programme. And yet as Won’t You Be My Neighbor? shows, Rogers, an ordained Presbyterian minister with a background working alongside child psychologists, lived his values and created something special and enduring as a result. Although the documentary derives a large part of its strength simply from watching Rogers in action, it’s still a moving tribute not only to the individual, but to the kindness and compassion he and his programme embodied.

At Sundance, a standing ovation at the end seemed more for Rogers himself than the film. The image that lingers is a shot of Rogers hunched and cold in a tall field, a lone figure fighting the wind. He couldn’t control life’s storms. But he’d show people how to endure them.

Leave No Trace (June 29). The new film from director Debra Granik (Winter’s Bone) means something unexpected and thoughtfully crafted that you won’t want to miss. With quietly wrenching performances from Ben Foster, as a PTSD-afflicted vet, and newcomer Thomasin Harcourt McKenzie, as his estranged daughter, this one’s a keeper. The last time Granik found a teenage actress to anchor her film it was Jennifer Lawrence. Early reviews indicate she’s found another potential breakout talent with the New Zealand-born McKenzie, the director’s latest a mesmerizing tale of life on the margins, a stunner, poignant, delicate, grim and captivating.
If you haven’t seen two other knockout indie films playing this week at Tinselown, get thee on down to Cineplex International Village now, to see …

Disobedience (Grade: B+). A gorgeously well-wrought film, with outstanding performances from Academy Award winner Rachel Weisz, with Rachel McAdams and Alessandro Nivola giving the performances of their lives, Disobedience marks the North American English language début of Chilean director Sebastián Lelio, who picked up the Best Foreign Language Oscar just three months ago for his breakout transgender tale, A Fantastic Woman. A melancholy story involving an often surprising yet deeply felt romantic triangle, from beginning to end Disobedience exerts a powerful grip on the viewer, offering a love story, as beautiful as it is devastating.

RBG (Grade: A+). Must, must, must viewing — if you have a daughter age nine or older, if you’re a young woman with agency attending secondary school, college, university or striking out on your own, if you’re a woman who during the course of her life has lived as a feminist, whether quietly or as a community activist, run right out to the theatre right now, don’t wait, because RBG is essential viewing, a certain nominee for a Best Documentary Oscar, and a film that will see you leaving the theatre on a high, the likes of which you won’t have experienced in years! Go, now.
At the age of 85, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has developed a breathtaking legal legacy while in recent years becoming an unexpected pop culture icon. But without a definitive Ginsburg biography, the unique personal journey of this diminutive, quiet warrior’s rise to the highest court in the United States has been largely unknown, even to some of her biggest fans — until now.
Funny, sweet-natured, offering a love story for the ages, a women’s movement history lesson that will reside in you for years to come, RBG offers an unapologetic valentine to Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, but a sharp and spiky one too, in a fist-pumping, crowd-pleasing documentary that will have you talking with your friends and family for hours afterwards, as I witnessed at a screening last night, when groups of animated filmgoers looked for the nearest coffee shop to continue their passionate discussion of the feminist movement and women’s history and the monumental formal written legacy of a clear-eyed force of nature, the badass but even-tempered Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a figure of immense power in bringing about all that we now seem to take for granted in how women lead their lives, when only 40 short years ago, when many women, far, far too many women, were viewed and lived their lives merely as chattel, the powerless appendages of unremarkable, unforgiving men.
RBG excavates the truth buried below the surface in the late 20th century women’s movement: Ginsburg isn’t just an 85-year-old cultural icon, she’s also an 85-year-old cultural icon who spent a lifetime opting for litigating over protest, for painstaking incremental legal work that took years to bear fruit, who still feels more comfortable in the world of words and text than in the world of fame and notoriety. RBG captures that paradox beautifully.

Vancouver Votes 2018 | June Civic Party Candidate Nominations

May 31, 2018BC Politics, Politics, Vancouver, Vancouver Votes 2018Raymond Tomlin

June is a big month for Vancouver’s civic parties, and all the candidates who are vying for a nomination with One City Vancouver, the Vancouver Non-Partisan Association, the Green Party of Vancouver, Vision Vancouver, COPE, and the good folks who are organizing with TeamJean 2018.
Each of the above named registered Vancouver civic parties will meet in June to select their candidates for City Council, Vancouver School Board, and Vancouver Park Board, with a surfeit of candidates likely to emerge.
Throughout the month of June — and into July, should it become necessary — VanRamblings will report out on the upcoming nomination meetings for each civic party, giving our readers fair notice of each nomination date.

June 3rd | The Vancouver Non-Partisan Association (NPA) Mayoral Nomination

First off the mark in the race to get their nominated candidates chosen is the Vancouver Non-Partisan Association, but not in a conventional sense.

John Coupar, NPA Mayoral nomination candidate introduces himself to party members

This upcoming Sunday, June 3rd, at what is scheduled to be an all-day nominating meeting that will be held at the Hellenic Hall, in the beautiful Arbutus Ridge neighbourhood, the NPA will choose only their party’s 2018 mayoral nominee — a choice between former Cedar Party candidate Glen Chernen; recent Park Board Chair and current Commissioner, the affable John Coupar; and the NPA’s corporate-backed-and-funded candidate for mayor, Ken Sim. The successful mayoral nominee will then set about to choose the team he wishes to run with in the 2018 Vancouver civic election.

Glen Chernen wants to lead the NPA, but says he’s battling ‘forces’ within the party

Democracy, thy name is not the Vancouver Non-Partisan Association.

Vancouver entrepreneur Ken Sim introduces introduces himself to party members

Vancouver Non-Partisan Association Board of Directors President, Gregory Baker — despite our being somewhat snarky above — weighs in kindly with the correct information in respect of the voting for the party’s mayoral nomination, with voting to get underway at 10am, and closing at 8pm.
For the record: members of the NPA, past and present, and their elected contingent represent as a group some of the most compassionate, heartful persons of conscience and integrity we have run across in civic life — we remain grateful every day for their humanity, community spirit, ‘can do’ spirit and attitude, and their commitment to making life better for all of us.

Speeches begin at 6pm, ~~with voting taking place immediately afterwards~~. Please note the correction above, from 2014 NPA mayoral candidate, Kirk LaPointe, and current NPA Board of Directors President, Gregory Baker.
The three NPA mayoral candidates have reportedly signed up in excess of 3,000 new members, with each candidate hoping and praying their supporters turn up for the vote. That’s unlikely, though — attendees at Sunday’s nomination meeting can reasonably expect many fewer that 1,000 party members to arrive to cast their ballot; it’s just a fact of life.
VanRamblings will be present for the NPA’s mayoral nomination meeting, and will report out online throughout the afternoon, and into the evening.