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VIOLENCE
GORE AND FILM I C2

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THE VANCOUVER SUN

ARTS 5 LIFE
LAUGHING WITH MERCER IC5

B O D Y

ARTS EDITOR I MICHAEL SCOTT: 604-605-2130 mscott@png.canwest.com

H E A L

M O N D A Y , O C T O B E R 27, 2 0 0 3

H

THE TRUE NORTH'S G7 I C7

FEATURES EDITOR I DENISE RYAN: 604-605-2615 dryan@png.canwest.com

Two hours
of ranting
that won't be
recovered

The first supper
FAMILY MATTERS I

Performance-art series will
storm the city's galleries,
libraries and streets

22 years after
giving a baby up
for adoption,
a carefully
planned dinner

LIVE
Biennial of performance art
Various locations, until Nov. 29

BY MICHAEL HARRIS
Mo Sa'lemy doled out his performance piece Racism in Empire
last Sunday in one of those bare
r o o m s that make up the catacombs of our downtown library.
After two hours of his obtuse and
turgid ranting, I wandered into
the rain with the mantra of many
performance-art audiences in my
head: "I will never get those two
hours back."
A m e m b e r of t h e a u d i e n c e
came over and hissed, "You're
not going to write about that?"
I wasn't going to.
But congratulations must be
i s s u e d to any a r t i s t w h o c a n
inspire the fervent indignation
that boiled under the library Sunday. With the simple fact of his
body, his costumes, and a vast
a r r a y of i l l - c o n c e i v e d , r e a c tionary dogmas (banged out to
the audience in a slip-shod lecture style), Sa'lemy was able to
infuriate just about everyone.
What fun!
The anthropologist sitting to
my right stormed out halfway
through, mumbling about Zionist conspiracies and the politicalscience student to my left had a
pronounced tick developing by
evening's end.
T h i s m a y h e m was only t h e
beginning, though. LIVE — Vancouver's fledgling festival of performance art, now in just its third
incarnation — will be storming
our galleries, libraries and even
our streets for the next several
weeks. So keep an eye out.
That guy sitting next to you at
McDonald's eating 30 cheese-

BY RANDY SHORE
VANCOUVER SUN

The salmon is marinating. I'm fumbling with knives. Two decades of
doubt and regret play havoc with my
confidence as I try to prepare a meal
for a familiar stranger named Allison,
and her family.
Twenty-three years ago a pair of
smalltown t e e n a g e r s found t h e m selves in a bind; pregnant at 16, the girl
and her 17-year-old boyfriend resolved
that their baby would have to be raised
by someone else. They chose a couple
from t h e L o w e r M a i n l a n d , d a d a
Mountie, mom a nurse. This, they reasoned, was the perfect home to see
their daughter raised safely to adulthood. Dad's packin' heat — that
should give any future boyfriends
pause for thought — and both would
be good in an emergency
Now Fm talking — face-to-face for
the first time — with a young woman
who talks and acts like me, but looks
just like the girlfriend I once loved. My
daughter, Ally. My daughter. Not that
I've been much of a father to her.
This supper is my first chance of
making things right. That is, if I get it
right, I think, as I catch Ally peering
dubiously at the salmon marinade.
•
I saw her only once in a hospital corridor, May 22,1981. That day she was
called Katherine. I never held her.
That baby grew up — with new parents — and Debbie, her birth mother,
and I had long ago gone separate ways.

Randy Shore finally meets Ally, the daughter he'd seen only fleetingly in a hospital hall more than 22 years before.
Fallen in love and married other people, had children.
But Debbie, for the past four years
had been maintaining entries on a
handful of Web sites dedicated to
reuniting birth parents with offspring
they have given up for adoption.
A few months ago she contacted me,
w a n t i n g to know if I was ready to
ramp up the search. I was. Four years

of passively waiting had yielded nothing. We had the name that her adoptive parents gave her and a very old
out-of-date address in Delta. We toyed
with quizzing her old neighbours and
digging for more records.
We wouldn't have to work nearly
that hard.
Across the country in a hamlet outside Halifax, Ally, already married

with two young children of her own,
a girl, four months, and a boy, two
years, was looking for us.
Although Ally had always known
she was adopted, she was apprehensive about searching for us. But Jeff,
her husband, had chided her for not
seeking the truth about her biological
See RECIPE FOR C3

See PERFORMANCE ART C2

The more you toot, the better you'll feel
BY CHRIS ZDEB
CANWEST NEWS SERVICE

BRIAN GAVRILOFF/CANWEST NEWS SERVICE/EDMONTON JOURNAL

The average person farts 13 times a day.

EDMONTON — Here's a
shocker: T h e average p e r s o n
farts 13 t i m e s a day. And you
thought it was a problem.
"I don't think you ever have to
be physically concerned about
it," says M i c h a e l Levitt, t h e
world's leading and sole
researcher of flatulence. (Hippocrates once noted that "Passing gas is n e c e s s a r y to w e l l being.")
"It's the [North American] idea
of social propriety that makes
you think you have a problem.
Some people pass gas a couple of

times a day and it's too often for
them."
Space is also an issue.
"If you're working outside on a
road paving crew, it really doesn't make much difference. It's
people with sedentary occupations, with a lot of people around,
where the same problem
becomes a complaint."
For more than 40 years, Levitt,
a gastroenterologist and associate chief of staff for research at
the Minneapolis Veterans Affairs
Medical Center in Minnesota,
has studied what makes people
poof, toot, rip, break wind, cut
the cheese. The work has earned
the 68-year-old the wrath of the

Build up a library.
And build their future.

lactose intolerant and the praise
of the American Gastroenterological Association, which gave
him its highest research award
and the endearing nickname "Dr.
Fart."
Who better, then, to give us the
lowdown on coughs', yawns' and
sneezes' embarrassing cousin?
What is gas?
To have gas, and we all do, you
need foods containing carbohydrates that are not absorbed in
the small intestine. These carbs
then move into the large intestine
w h e r e bacteria ferment t h e m
into hydrogen gas which expands
and eventually erupts. The average fart contains 110 ml, or half a

cup, of gas for men and 72 ml, or
o n e - t h i r d of a cup, of gas for
women. (Who says girls don't
fart?
• The Fuel
Vegetables such as beans —
they don't call it the musical fruit
for nothing — are rich in carbohydrates that nobody can digest,
so n o b o d y can a b s o r b t h e m ,
Levitt says. Which means vegetarians are more likely to pass gas
than meat eaters, but there's less
odour.
• The Air
Levitt once had a patient who
farted an average 170 times a day.
See IF FARTS C4

Brought to you by

TD Canadian Children's Book Week
November 1-8f 2003

www.bookweek.ca

Pick up this Saturday's paper for the Raise-a-Reader Book Club Pick of the Week.
Children's

Book Club

The Canadian Children's
Book Centre

Bank Financial Group

C2

THE VANCOUVER SUN, MONDAY, OCTOBER 27, 2003

.ARTS & LIFE
•

Blood and gore has
lost it shock value
MOVIES i With

Chainsaw leading
at the box office,
killing still sells
BY MICHAEL BOOTH
DENVER POST

In the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre released 29 years ago, a deranged
hitchhiker shocked movie audiences in
the opening minutes by pulling out a
knife and cutting his own hand.
In the opening minutes of the new
Texas Chainsaw Massacre, a deranged
female hitchhiker reaches between her
bloody legs, pulls out a gun and blows
off the back of her head. Cut to close-up
of gun smoke wafting from her suddenly lifeless mouth.
Today's audience is so turned off by
the escalation of violence that it made
the new Chainsaw the No. 1 box office
draw last week and the third-highest
October opening in history. The remake
raked in as much in its first three days
as the 1974 version did in its entire run.
Performance artist Lucio Madriz.
We are so numb it no longer hurts
when people call us demented. Onceunspeakable violence has moved from
the unbalanced fringe into the middle
of our surround-sound home theatre
systems.
We've gone from from Animal House
to House of the Dead, from the postSept. 11 death of irony to the postmodbetter
way
than
marching
Weidenhammer's
100
ern
death of revulsion.
From CI
a performance down a Housewives which is
Kill Bill features a mother shot in front
burgers in a row is proba- main street as Dick Averns s t a g e d at t h e YWCA of her child, a girl cowering under a bed
bly a well-respected artist, did last Saturday for The Thrift Store (4399 Main) while her parent's blood drips onto her
performing an "endur- Armchair Terrorist?
Oct. 25, and includes copi- face and a comatose woman raped for
ance" piece. The woman
"There's more at stake ous quantities of costum- four years in a hospital. It climaxes in 88
singing Christmas carols in a performance," insists ing, wiggery and makeup; gangsters losing heads and sundry limbs
between gulps of vodka Yonge. The proximity of a Radix Theatre's driverless in a literal bloodbath.
on the street corner may real person means we can- car circling audience
The palpable tension of Miramax
well be a recent Emily not ignore our connection. members; and a closing executives wondering if Tarantino's latCarr graduate. You never We don't have the luxury. night performance by a est film was too violent lasted about five
know.
So, on Sunday eve when certified international art minutes, as Kill Bill opened huge and
Performance art, says Mo Sa'lemy informed a star and his crew: the Rod- reduced critics to cheering the emerLIVE d i r e c t o r David live audience that Jewish ney Graham Band, Nov. 29 gence of female slasher heroines like
Yonge, has its roots in people have no right to at 9 p.m. at a site to be Uma Thurman.
shock — explicit sex live in Israel, everyone determined.
In the United States we used to worry
s c e n e s and v i o l e n c e took it personally.
As the LIVE festival whether Ronald Reagan, who parented
played out in the 1960s.
Art, as the title of this continues to grow — cur- a chimpanzee on screen, could make a
But that has resulted in a festival would suggest, rently it only appears credible politician. Just a generation latwary public, hesitant to comes alive. It turns to us b i e n n i a l l y — Yonge er, there were apparently few such
receive these perfor- as we're riding the bus, hopes that a broad demo- r e s e r v a t i o n s a b o u t A r n o l d
mances fairly. It's become minding our own busi- graphic of Vancouverites Schwarzenegger, who killed thousands
something of a joke. "Even ness. It taps us on the w i l l b e c o m e involved on screen and allegedly assaulted
in academic circles," shoulder, says 'Boo!'
both as performers and women in real life.
laments Yonge "they're
Many of Vancouver's audience members. The
As movies referring to the Columbine
very derogatory."
most influential artist-run next five weeks are our shootings multiply rapidly, the parental
But that's where LIVE spaces are participating, chance.
fervor over violent video games like
intends to change things. including Access, ArtsLIVE runs (like a mani- Quake and Duke Nuke 'Em seems
In a city like Vancouver, peak, Centre A, Grunt, ac through our streets) till quaint. The new improved version of
where a highly academic Helen Pitt, Or, Video-In the end of November.
Soldier ofFortune offers 27 separate gore
school of photo-based art- and Western Front, along
For more information, zones on a victim's body, customized to
making still dominates the with big-leaguers such as visit the festival's Web site explode according to rules of anatomy
scene, the new project is the Contemporary Art at
and the calibre of the incoming bullet.
to convince the rest of us Gallery and the Vancou- www.livevancouver.bc.ca.
And just two years after the televised
that art can effect our ver Art Gallery. Some
Michael Harris is a Vancouver violence of 9/11 brought a temporary
world, our situation. What highlights include Lori
freelance writer. truce to the escalation of small-screen
gore, the most popular and proliferating
TV shows are graphic crime scene
investigations such as CSI that make Leatherface, in Marcus Nispel's Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
Silence of the Lambs seem like counting
sheep.
of the first steps is self-awareness.
able increase in media violence has not
"Why do we need more media vio"What we have to stop pretending as yet turned us into more violent people
lence and more graphic media vio- consumers is, Tm not affected by it.' We in real life. Countless studies show that
lence?" asked Douglas Gentile, director all choose to be affected," Gentile said. children exposed to higher levels of
of research at the National Institute on "If we're not affected, we say it was a media violence have more aggressive
Media and the Family in Minneapolis. waste of money."
thoughts and act more aggressively
"Because we've gotten bored by the old
What troubles us in sorting this all against others. Yet evidence of a societal
stuff."
out, and perhaps what should please us retreat from generalized violence is
As with all escalating addictions, one even as it mystifies, is that this undeni- hard to refute.
The benchmark survey of violent crime, compiled by the U.S.
THE VANCOUVER SUN
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Performance art something
of a joke, director laments

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