Yule Heibel’s Post Studio © 2003-2008

About Victoria

May 18, 2003 at 9:27 pm | In yulelogStories | 11 Comments

In case anyone has noticed, I have two local Victoria bloggers on my links bar at right, Davin and Julie. I don’t know them; I put their links there because, first, they have such great photos on their sites, and second, I wanted to link to some local cyberspace. In that same spirit, I’m really happy to see that my partner in crime from Oak Bay high school days, Betsy Burke, has decided to resume blogging from Florence, Italy.

Blogs, it seems to me, are about these virtual “spaces,” but also very much about actual people moving and meeting in real geography. To the majority of bloggers at Harvard who live in the greater vicinity of the Republic of Cambridge: I know what those real spaces that you occupy smell like, look like, and feel like — in muggy heat waves as well as in cruelly dessicating wind chills. I know how much louder the traffic gets in the warmer months, when heat-prodded drivers bolt and screech, guys roll down the windows and crank up those stupid sub-woofers even more, while suburban matrons keep their a/c on high and their windows firmly shut. I know what it’s like to slog back to Brookline via numerous inexplicable ejections from trains that mysteriously go out of service on the Green Line, or to ride a commuter train to the North Shore, standing up the whole way. I know how long it takes to get from Widener Library to Cardullo’s, and how many gates and intersections at the Yard’s perimeter you need to negotiate to do it, and what a crummy job those snow-cats do in clearing the sidewalks of winter’s ice and snow. In many ways, everything that Wendy or Vernica or Philip (or any of the others I don’t personally know) write evokes a physical memory of this place, even though — and this is the odd bit — they almost never write specifically about place. And while Davin and Julie don’t always include place in their blogs, they do however have so much cool pictorial material — along with their descriptions of a music (sub?)culture — that I felt it made sense to point to them, hoping that others might get a sense of what it’s like in this simultaneously beautiful and odd city.

As William Gibson noted, Victoria is the world capital of Satanism (scroll down a bit). (He also claims that Douglas Coupland, in City of Glass, coined the phrase “tweed curtain” to describe the border between Oak Bay & the rest of the world. Well, I can testify that my friends and I used that phrase back in the first half of the 1970s, and unless Coupland [b. 1961, end of December] has books reaching back to that date, Gibson is dead wrong.) This “global Satanism” business is also silly. Yes, there are many covens in Victoria, but they are simply peripheral to the fact that British Columbians have the highest rate in Canada of non-affiliation to official religion. It’s an alternative kind of place: PETA voted Victoria & Vancouver #2 & #1, respectively, as best places for vegetarians in Canada.

Gibson lives in Vancouver (close enough), and has written slightly snarkily about Victoria — which annoys the heck out of me, because we can’t all afford to live in Kitsilano. In some ways, Victoria is a giant Kitsilano (without the Vancouver clog) that we can at least (still, vaguely) afford. But despite his slights, and in the interest of creating a cyberspacially significant event on my blog, I’ve decided to put William Gibson on my blogs-link bar — besides, I loved Pattern Recognition.

Meanwhile, Vancouver businessmen buy up property to the tune of CDN $7.5m in the Uplands (first planned community in the area in its time, in a section of Oak Bay — behind the Tweed Curtain). And now John Travolta’s agent Fred Westheimer has said no comment to the rumours that Mr. Saturday Night Fever is moving to North Saanich on our peninsula. They have a US$12.5m property for sale.

Victoria: former retirement haven, now a playground for the rich? What do Davin and Julie do here? Check out their sites and the links they have to their friends to find out. They are all looking for work. As was the case in the 70s, there is lots of talent here, much poetry, terrific flair — and not nearly enough opportunity to put it to use. Many of us had to leave, whether we wanted to or not.

Maybe John Travolta or Mr. Anonymous Software Magnate from Vancouver can endow some North American style Money Making Machine agencies to put all that talent to productive use, beyond the tourism industry that Gibson soured on. Maybe we can make our own party, and contribute to decentralization here. Local talent designed the website for the company my husband works for. When their Florida-based ISP went around the corner, a local business seamlessly picked up the slack. It would indeed be great if these were indications that we don’t really need to be mere tourists here.