Japan

Port Moody

odds n ends

illustrations

In this re-imagining of the White Lunch as a hipster café, using an actual 1918 image of the White Lunch from the City of Vancouver archives, we are viewing the café and its patrons from the outside looking in. In peering through the rain-spattered window, perhaps we wonder if being on the inside is all that it’s cracked up to be.

The White Lunch chain of restaurants was launched in 1913 in Vancouver, with the first location on Hastings Street, just a few miles west of the Japanese Canadian neighbourhood on Powell Street. The name White Lunch advertised the fact that their establishments only served white guests and hired white workers. Chinese, Japanese and Indigenous people would not be served. While excluding people based on their race eventually became not cool, in fact illegal, the racist stigma associated with the White Lunch persisted until the last location closed in the early eighties. My friend Rosemary Georgeson, who is Coast Salish/Sahtu Dene, tells me her father was taken there for lunch and told to say he was Spanish. Apparently the food was very good. Maybe it is better to be on the inside.

Amy and I worked together on these images for her doctoral thesis, A Stone Sings in the Stream: Sounding Timbral Lines in Principaling.

Writes Amy, ‘My study offers three expansive timbral lines of interpretation that provide a methodological pulse to the work. Timbre derives from the Greek tumpanon, or kettledrum. In musical terms, timbre describes the colour, quality or character of sound, including resonances, releases, utterances, ambient silences, and durational moments.

The three timbral lines include a hermeneutical text contained in the thesis itself, holding stories, pedagogical narratives, sensations and memories;  “(topo)graphic” images gathered from fragments of text, photographs and digital textures; and a third timbral line which releases the reader from the page, offering an aural landscape of “soundings.”‘

Visit Amy’s website, soundings.ca, to learn more about her work and for a link to her thesis.