Museum of Vancouver’s Haida Now exhibition opens
HAIDA’S TOUCH: The Museum of Vancouver’s new CEO, Mauro Vescera, got his 100-kilowatt smile to Kitsilano Point just in time to open the Haida Now exhibition that will run until June 15. Guest curated by Kwiaahwah Jones with the MOV’s Viviane Gosselin, the 450-work exhibition opened with singing and dignified conduct that pleased Haida leader and Officer of the Order of Canada Miles Richardson. Thanking organizers for the “proper ceremony,” he said: “Ceremony and spirituality is about we’re all the same.” Haida artists present, some of whom will interact with the exhibition’s visitors, included Corey Bulpitt. He and his Gitxsan wife, Cheyenne Gwa’muuk, brought six-week-old Skil tuu whose Warrior In Training T-shirt hinted at other than ceremonial and spiritual times ahead.
GUNN CONTROLLED: The president of the University of B.C., Santa Ono, and the dean of medicine, Dermot Kelleher, officially opened the Point Grey campus’s 13,480-square-foot Chan Gunn Pavilion that was kick-started by Dr. Chan Gunn’s $5-million donation. It houses numerous physical activity and exercise medicine facilities, kinesiology and physiology labs, and the previously established Allan McGavin Sports Medicine Clinic. Its Gunn IMS wing researches and treats chronic and neuropathic pain using the acupuncture-related intramuscular stimulation system Gunn developed. Also at the ceremony was Darlene Poole, who with her and late husband Jack’s foundation, funded the pavilion’s rehabilitation and research gym to prevent, treat and manage cancer and other medical conditions.
Of his IMS method, Gunn said: “In the old days, treatment with a needle, people thought you were crazy.” Then, to laughter: “They still think you’re crazy.” Still, when wife Peggy’s lungs were filling with fluid a decade ago, “Nothing helped. The books said most people died anyway. When the fluid reaches the top, goodbye.” So Gunn began treating her using his own research, “and next day, half the fluid had gone.” Cheerful and well, Peggy accompanied her husband to the pavilion’s opening.
UP PARRYSCOPE: Good for PuSh Festival founder Norman Armour, who will leave in April after 14 years of doing it right.
FULL FLOURISH: Encouraged by 2017’s debut Flourish gala and outstanding alumni awards ceremony, Vancouver Community College Foundation had 29 faculty and alumni chefs raise more dough at the recent second running. The resultant $30,000 will fund awards to female student leaders. Culinary students joined the pros to serve galagoers. Meanwhile, faculty jazzers Bernie Arai, Daryl Jahnke, Sharon Minemoto and Laurence Mollerup backed singer-alumnus Tom Arntzen to keep the joint jumping. Grad-turned-foundation director Nancy Nesbitt vied with 13 others in a Flourishinspired fashion design contest, then made and wore her entry. Setting an example that similar event speakers sadly may not follow, VCC president Peter Nunoda needed a bare minute at the microphone to welcome guests and praise organizers. Good show all around. ABRACADABRA: Having built a chow-based empire here, VCC grad David Hawksworth operates a self-named restaurant in the Rosewood Hotel Georgia, the adjacent Bel Café (named for wife Annabel), the Hastingsoff-Burrard Nightingale restaurant, and Hawksworth Catering on Granville Island. He’s also readying a spring-releasing coffee table book ghostwritten by former National Post restaurant reviewer Jacob Richler. At a reception promoting his catering business, Hawksworth had mind-reading magician friend Matt Johnson (urbandeception. com) boggle guests with sleightof-hand tricks and by making his many tattoos vanish. Just kidding, folks. However, wife Dana, who heads sales programs head at Abbotsford’s Phantom Screens firm, can make powered window screens disappear like magic.
NO LIMITS: At its recent fourth annual Life Without Limits gala in the Sheraton Vancouver Wall Centre Hotel, the Cerebral Palsy Association of B.C. awarded bursaries to post-secondary students. Knowing the social stigma that neurologically disabled patients can face, executive director Feri Dehdar hoped education “will bring employment, a career, social connections and the dream of living a life without limits.” That worked for right-arm-and-leg-afflicted Paul Weston, 26, whose BFA degree and year at UBC’s Sauder School of Business led to founding the film-video-photo firm Anxious Pineapple. In her own BFA grad-year, Soo Min Park, Weston’s business and romantic partner, won a filmmaking contest with her seven-minute My Mom is An Alien. Parents of cerebral palsy patients doubtless look forward to a time when no one says that about their children.
SOUND ADVICE: After hosting the Juno Awards here Sunday, Michael Bublé may relax in the Burnaby home that city architect and wood-tower proselytizer Michael Green designed. Bublé was still negotiating fame’s lower rungs in 2001 when he sang in West Broadway’s Carnegie’s restaurant-lounge. With him then was sometime mentor Jack Cullen, the soonto-die former Owl Prowl disc jockey, whose popular music sense was acute. After Bublé belted out three upbeat songs in a row, he growled: “Sing a ballad, Michael. A ballad.” It’s a pity Cullen couldn’t have heard his personal sentiments about Bublé echoed in the latter’s recent ballad, I Believe in You. DOWN PARRYSCOPE: All those years of Marxism’s anti-imperialism rhetoric and the world’s largest Communist nation gets a new emperor.