SHOP OWNER’S ‘SECRET COMPOUND’ HOLDS TROVE
TIRE-KICKIN’ TIME: Thousands of car collectors attended the Barrett-Jackson auction in Scottsdale, Ariz., this week. Fewer discovered False Creek Automotive principal Vern Bethel’s “secret compound” in Vancouver, where the 40-car lineup includes his own McLaughlin Buick convertible limousine, hand-built for the 1939 royal visit to Canada. For $15,000, a same-make 1926 sedan is original down to the Second World War gas-ration stickers on its windshield. Up to date for $96,000, a 2016 Mustang Shelby GT 350 has 26.5 km on the clock. Everybody’s favourite 1957 Chevrolet two-door stands close to a same-year Cadillac Fleetwood four-door, both hardtops. Not for sale, Vancouver Sun scribe John Mackie’s 1967 Rambler convertible awaits the sunshine. As for a nicely accessorized grey-andblack 1932 Plymouth sedan that cost $635 new and wants $17,500 today, “I always love a cheap car with deluxe features,” Bethel said.
TEN YEARS AGO: There was nothing venerable about the automobiles that Emily Carr University of Art + Design president Ron Burnett showed on Jan. 23, 2007. More modern than tomorrow, the streetscape-recording vehicles were cruising town before Google Street View began that May. They appeared at the launch of ECU’s $4.3-million Intersections Digital Studios that associate dean Dennis Burke said “will enable students to see the convergence between making art and making money.” The varsity’s own street view soon shifted from Granville Island to the near-ready $125-million campus on False Creek Flats.
TUNED IN: Five decades have passed since movies like 2001: A Space Odyssey reflected the psychedelia that LSD protagonist Timothy Leary expressed with: “Turn on, tune in, drop out.” But Vancouver-based Emily Hayes, Michael Nelson and the Drugzndreamz band’s Marc Nyiti didn’t drop out in 2015 when they missed getting CineCoup funding for their indie movie Psychonaut. Echoing Richard Bell’s claim that he could “make a film with Canadian Tire money,” they completed the future-looking sci-fi film (trailer at vimeo.com/ondemand/ psychonautmovie) and premiered it recently at the Cinematheque. Guests then partied at Davie Street’s Score pub, near where original psychedelia fans hallucinated during “light shows” at the Retinal Circus, now Celebrities.
THE RIGHT FORMULA: Last year’s inaugural Science of Cocktails event reportedly raised $189,000 for Science World’s field trips program. No wonder chairs Tristan Sawtell and Warren Tsoi will front a $150-a-ticket repeat of the 20-bar event Feb. 9. They hope to reach $250,000, which would provide full days of handson science education for 6,000 teacher-accompanied students. During a kickoff tasting at the Clough Club recently, wealth adviser Sawtell — commercial banker Tsoi was in Hong Kong — watched a robotic bartender perform while real-life Christopher Enns whipped up apple-green gin concoctions made literally cool by a lab display’s liquid nitrogen.
MUCH ADO: More jolly juice cascaded at the Blue Water Café when Vancouver International Wine Festival chief Harry Hertscheg briefed guests on the Canada-themed event running Feb. 11-19. Bard on The Beach artistic director Christopher Gaze and managing director Claire Sakaki attended — hardly surprising as their theatre company received $230,000 from the 2016 festival. Sakaki said the money helped fund education programs for 3,000 children and teens, sent company actors into classrooms, and let 10,000 students attend shows. Bard’s 2017 mainstage season will feature Shakespeare’s A Winter’s Tale and Much Ado About Nothing, with the latter’s modern-dress actors returning not from war but from à La Dolce Vita-style film shoot, Gaze said.
SOMETHING DIFFERENT: Wine tastings and related fundraisers will soon come thick and fast. The next is due Monday, Jan. 23, when the 8th annual Taste The World will fund medical and education needs for 30,000 children and families in Laos and Myanmar. Breaking the pattern somewhat, wine importer Jeff Curry and consultant-writer Kurtis Kolt’s fourth Top Drop will run at the Roundhouse May 24. It will present 150 or so local and international handcrafted wines from terroirs. With demonstration tables costing $400, vineyard-owning wineries that produce as few as 3,000 cases yearly can afford to pour their wares. More power to them.
NORTH TO SOUTH: Opening the co-owned Blanket gallery in 2006, former international fashion model Sarah Macaulay aimed at “younger folk who would rather go to New York for the weekend than to (South Granville galleries).” Blanket spread to become wholly owned Second-off-Main Macaulay & Co. Fine Art. A weekend-only project space was added “to activate a dialogue between Vancouver and San Francisco.” In that latter city’s Mission District facility now, Kwakwaka’wakw artist Beau Dick’s Supernaturals exhibition of shamanistic masks is extending Macaulay’s dialogue to the hereditary chief’s upcoast hometown of Alert Bay.