Zazel, the Human Cannonball

Zazel, the Human Cannonball at the Royal Aquarium, 1877, Evan.263.

Naseer Shamma, Hilal-alsaba

The oud is one of the greatest instruments in the world. Here it is in the hands of a master: Naseer Shamma – Hilal-alsaba:

The Asahi

 

Originally appeared in The Vancouver Sun, September 17, 2011:

by Brad Frenette

Imagine yourself on Powell Street on a sunny Vancouver afternoon in 1921, past the tea houses and schools, past Morimoto & Co. Dry Goods, into the heart of bustling Japantown. You would hear things typical in any town across North America at the time: the splintering of the baseball bat, the warm thud of a ball hitting a glove, the proclamations of a confident umpire.

At Powell Street Grounds, now called Oppenheimer Park in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, a legion of baseball fans would be crowded around the dirtpatched diamond.

On the field, a remarkable story was starting, starring a band of Japanese-Canadian baseballers called the Asahi.

Birthed in 1914 by Harry Miyasaki, the Asahi assembled the best amateur Japanese players in the area to compete against Vancouver’s Caucasian clubs, at a time when the popularity of the sport was at a frenzy across North America’s West Coast.

Faced with a clear height and weight disadvantage, Miyasaki, a drycleaner by trade, developed a winning strategy dubbed “brainball,” a combination of speed, harmony and a perfected execution of the squeeze play.

“We didn’t have muscle,” says Kaye Kaminishi with a laugh. The Kamloops resident, now 89, is one of only three surviving Asahi. “We usually stole bases and bunted. And squeeze plays. Not too many homers.”

Joining the Asahi as a rookie in 1938 was like being welcomed into the “family home,” Kaminishi remembers. His first hit, a line drive that left the humble boundaries of Powell Grounds, is his favourite memory.

“From first to second base I stumbled. The ball was on the street, so I should have had a home run. All the players gave me a laugh.”

After winning Vancouver’s International League in 1919, the team’s renown grew over the next two decades. Their exploits were praised in the press and by the cross-cultural fan base who packed the humble Powell Grounds.

The field was so small that the Asahi used to break windows in nearby buildings during the games, “so they’d have to pay for a few windows each game,” recalls Grace Eiko Thomson, the former executive director of the National Nikkei Museum & Heritage Centre in Burnaby.

“The bleachers didn’t hold everyone, so there were people all over the place.”

Baseball, notes Thompson, was that rare thing that could close the generation gap between the immigrant parents and Canadian-born children within the Japanese community. It also transcended racial divides. In 1926, the Asahi were voted the most popular sports franchise in Vancouver, at a time when Japanese-Canadians were confronted with rampant and blatant racism: “They responded to the times, and became incredible. When they went home, they didn’t have the right to vote. When they were playing on the field, it gave a lot of hope and pride to the community.” Despite the Asahi’s popularity, there was nothing any baseball team could do against the cause and effect of a world at war. After Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, the Japanese became the enemy, and by proxy, so did Japanese-Canadians. Citizens were forced from their homes and businesses and Japantown soon was emptied.

The Asahi, too, were displaced, sent to internment camps and the “ghost towns” of B.C. and across Canada.

The team’s dominating run ended with their last game on Sept. 18, 1941, but their verve continued. Ex-Asahi, including Kaminishi, soon began to organize games with other interned baseball fans. A makeshift league was born in the camps and by July 1, 1943, a championship series was held in the Slocan Valley, drawing RCMP officers and other white fans and spectators.

The Asahi excelled, says Thomson, because “this was the only place they could level the playing field.”

Despite not being a baseball fan, Thomson’s interest in the team’s story inspired her to curate an exhibit about the team for the museum and in 2006, she petitioned Parks Canada to honour the team. The request was granted a few weeks ago, and on Sunday, a plaque will be hoisted in Oppenheimer Park, 70 years to the day since the team played its last official game.

“Each year it wasn’t easy,” says Kaminishi.

“It wasn’t just playing ball. The fans gave us encouragement – that’s the reason we lasted.”

Pezhham Akhavass,Tombak Percussion Solo

Unreal:

Interview: Esi Edugyan

Originally published in The Vancouver Sun and The Calgary Herald on October 20, 2011:

by Brad Frenette

Imagine you’ve spent years crafting a novel, endlessly poring over drafts and re-drafts and negotiating its publication. Then picture a moment when the phone rings and the voice on the line explains that this novel has been selected by a distinguished panel to compete for the Man Booker Prize, one of the world’s most prestigious literary awards. Imagine then how that moment might be enough to make one’s stomach flip with joy.

For Victoria-based novelist Esi Edugyan, the movements in her belly were happening well before the phone rang: “I was eightand-a-half months pregnant when I heard. I was humongous. I couldn’t sleep and I was tossing and turning in bed. It was awful. And then the phone started ringing off the hook. My husband ran to get it, came back and said: ‘You’re on the Booker long list.’”

While it was announced Tuesday that the Booker had gone to Julian Barnes, that call from London was just the first of a long list of nominations that have helped make Edugyan’s second novel, Half-Blood Blues, one of the most discussed books of the fall literary season. A few weeks later Edugyan’s daughter was born, and the phone kept ringing.

By early autumn, the 33-yearold had become part of an exclusive list of Canadian writers nominated for the country’s most coveted trio of fiction awards: the Giller Prize, the Governor General’s Award for Fiction and the Writers’ Trust Award.

“What are the chances?” she recalls with a quiet laugh from her home in Colwood, just south of Victoria.

Half-Blood Blues pilots between present-day Baltimore and the smoky clubs of German-occupied Paris at the beginning of the Second World War. The novel tells of a 20-year-old Afro-German jazz prodigy named Hieronymus Falk and his bandmates, as they attempt to record under a regime that dubbed the style fremdländisch, or “alien” music. After young Hiero is arrested by the Nazis, his bandmates scatter, and the band’s only surviving recording becomes a cult hit. Decades later, Sidney Griffiths, one of Hiero’s American bandmates, is forced to revisit the events that led to the young virtuoso’s disappearance.

The idea came while the author was undertaking a residency in Stuttgart, Germany: “It got me thinking of the history of black people in that country,” she said. “I’m very interested in these diaspora histories, so I starting doing research and learning about these amazing people – diplomats and African royalty – and I started specifically looking at the era of the Third Reich.”

Among the stacks, Edugyan read about a small group of men and women referred to as the Rhineland bastards – “children of German women and the French colonial soldiers who were sent over from France’s African colonies to police the Rhineland” – and therein found the genesis for her mixed-race jazz genius.

“The book plays with different identities – Afro-Germans and Afro-Americans, an Afro-Canadian, a blond German-Jewish man, a rich German gentile – all with different skin tones, and examines how that affects how they navigate society. It was interesting to explore.”

The novel certainly deals with heavy material, but moments of lightness spark throughout, often in the playful, colloquial dialogue between the bandmates. To find the cadence of the day, she referenced works such as the autobiography of the great American jazz saxophonist Sidney Bechet, who dictated his book from his deathbed. Given that “there isn’t tons written about what the book is about,” Edugyan says she was free to take some licence. “Half of it is this authentic way of speaking, and half of it is invented. You extrapolate. What would these guys call the Nazis in this patois? I came up with ‘the boots.’ ” Edugyan was born in Calgary, the daughter of Ghanaian immigrants, in 1978.

After high school, she moved further west, enrolling in the writing program at the University of Victoria. There, she worked with the great Canadian novelist Jack Hodgins – “a huge mentor for me. I learned so much from him, and I can’t thank him enough” – and found the man she would eventually marry, poet and novelist Steven Price.

Her debut novel, The Second Life of Samuel Tyne, which focused on the travails of an immigrant from the Gold Coast (modern-day Ghana) and his family, was published in 2004 as part of Knopf’s “New Faces of Fiction” initiative. Well-reviewed in Canada, it was published internationally, nominated for several awards in the U.S., and selected as one of the New York Public Library’s “Books to Remember.”

However, despite the successes of her debut novel, Half-Blood Blues’ path toward the literary limelight was shaky. After buying the book, Key Porter, Edugyan’s Canadian publishing house, went bankrupt. The manuscript was suddenly on the table again, and spent months bouncing around before being sold to Thomas Allen & Sons.

It was “disheartening,” says Edugyan, but she credits an “obsessive” streak in pushing past the setbacks.

“I think you need to be obsessive, or you’re not going to get through it. Writing is such a difficult profession. Actually getting the work written, then on top of that the whole publication situation can be very stressful and unpredictable.”

Though maybe one morning the phone starts ringing and, suddenly, the things you can’t predict become very rewarding.

Half-Blood Blues (Thomas Allen & Sons) is available now.

 

Q&A: Michael Ondaatje

Originally appeared in Vancouver Sun and National Post, Sept 21, 2011:

In Michael Ondaatje’s The Cat’s Table, an 11-year-old boy named Michael boards a passenger ship for a three-week journey from Colombo to England. It is a trip familiar to the author, who, as an 11-year-old, boarded a similar boat, and crossed the same sea. However, the similarities between the two Michaels are divided there – between the real life of the man and the fictional life of his creation.

Ondaatje has worked this tricky space before – poetically transmitting his interpretation of the life of an outlaw in The Collected Works of Billy The Kid, of a missing Canadian theatre magnate in his novel In The Skin of The Lion, and of a desert-roaming count in The English Patient. With The Cat’s Table, Ondaatje serves forth another work based on real events; however, as the author assures, this book too is a “work of fiction.”

Love among the ruins

Originally appeared: The Vancouver Sun, June 17, 2011

Following the riots in Vancouver, one photo was shared more than the rest among users of Twitter and other social media.

The photo shows a young couple tangled in each other’s arms on the street, kissing, while the police and mayhemmakers clash all around them.

“I was trying not to get my ass kicked,” says Vancouver freelance photojournalist Richard Lam, who took the photo, when asked if he had stopped to talk to the couple.

Indeed, it was a hectic and unexpected path that led to the photo, he explains: “I was shooting the game -and me and another photographer decided to go. By the time I got out there it was out of control. I started out in front of the Sandman Hotel and ended up at the Bay. There were still looters coming out, two cars were on fire.”

Soon, he was forced onto Seymour Street, corralled by the tide of rioters and police, who were “waving sticks and shields.” There, between Georgia and Robson, he spotted the couple.

“I thought people were hurt. Next thing I knew there was some guy running toward the riot police, another waving a mannequin leg. I really didn’t know what they were doing.”

Lam got the shot, and several more, and didn’t think much of it. He returned to the media room at Rogers Arena, where his editor took his memory card and imported it.

“I didn’t even look at it. A colleague said, ‘Nice photo.’ Then I went back to the editing room, and looked at it. My jaw dropped.”

The photo has kept Lam busy, with media outlets such as NPR and MSN interviewing him.

“I’ve been fascinated by [the response]. I don’t want to sound idealistic, but I was just doing my job.”

Man and Machine: Dr Henrik Scharfe

Originally published in The Vancouver Sun
Wed Mar 23 2011
b y Brad Frenette

Last year, Dr. Henrik Scharfe, of Denmark’s Aalborg University, e-mailed an order for a new gadget to a Japanese manufacturer. It was a gadget with a considerable price tag, the kind of cost associated with luxury: an Italian sports car, a precious stone, a flight to space on Virgin Galactic.

Dr. Scharfe’s order was a rare thing. In his e-mail, sent last May, he asked for an android, one designed as a physical replica of the professor himself.

The order went to a Japanese company called ATR, and specifically to Prof. Hiroshi Ishiguro, a leader in robotics, and the inventor of robots he calls geminoids.

Starting in 2005, and working with the Tokyo-based company Kokoro, Ishiguro had already built two previous geminoids — androids designed to be lifelike replicas of their owners, and operated via a sophisticated motion capture system.

The Geminoid DK would be Ishiguro’s third project, and the first using a Caucasian model.

Despite being one of the few humans able to boast about having an android simulacrum, Dr. Scharfe, who serves as director of Aalborg University’s Center for Computer-mediated Epistemology, assures his motives are scientific.

As he awaits the delivery of his tailor-made android, the professor tells The Vancouver Sun in an eimail exchange how he got involved in the project, and how he hopes his geminoid will help open up new discussions about the emotional connections possible between man and machine.

Q: How did this project begin?

A: We have been following Professor Ishiguro’s work with the geminoids for years. What really fascinates me it is how easy it is to open really deep and interesting conversations with people about it. Regardless of background. It is very hard not to react to this kind of technology. But honestly, I thought about the implications for a long time before I decided to go ahead with it.

Q: Aside from the research, you now have an animated version of you. Any plans to send it anywhere in your stead?

A: We plan to send it to different places. For instance, we will feature the Geminoid on some national TV programs here in Denmark. We have two confirmed agreements with the Danish Broadcasting Cooperation at the moment — one in the vein of (popular BBC news show) HardTalk, with the Geminoid in the chair, and one more family-oriented program that I visited before (this time we’ll both be in the chair).

We are also taking it to a combined scholarly conference and art exhibition called IRL: In Real Life 2011 in Dublin this summer. I’ll give a keynote there, and guests and delegates will have the ability to interact with the Geminoid personally.

Also, we have an agreement with a shop owner here in Aalborg (a men’s fashion shop). The Geminoid will be in the shop window, and customers can interact with it inside the shop as well. Previous research on interactive technology in shopping windows mainly focused on screens facing the street. In this case, there is also an incentive to enter the shop.

Q: Did you have to pitch yourself as a model for this Geminoid? Was it a bidding process?

A: The robot is manufactured by Kokoro, the same company who built Geminoid HI-1 and Geminoid-F. Essentially, I sent them an email placing an order for a geminoid.

Because the geminoid is custom-built we had many conversations about the details, especially the face, during my visits at the factory, and also via email. This geminoid is the first with a Caucasian face, and that calls for several different design solutions, compared to the previous geminoids. Regarding the exterior, this has to do, of course, with details from the moulding of the head such as shape and size of the eyes, and density of the beard. Regarding interior, we considered especially the range of movement in the face and in the torso. Western people tend to use the upper half of the face significantly more than people of Asian origin, and we needed to make sure that this geminoid was equipped to perform the communicative tasks we wanted it to in a Western setting.

Including the equipment needed to control the geminoid in the lab, the price tag is in the area of $200,000 US.

Q: That’s a hefty price tag. Who paid the bill?

A: The Geminoid project is funded by a local foundation, who supports many different research activities, and by Aalborg University.

Q: How long did it take to finish?

A: It takes about six months to build such a geminoid. My first visit at the factory in Japan took place in September 2010. That’s when we did the moulds of my hands and face. Creating the face is an extremely complicated process with many steps, beginning with a complete mould of the entire head. I have come to greatly admire the artisans at Kokoro.

Q: Does the robot function with artificial intelligence (AI), or only via motion capture?

A: Not really AI, but there is some simulation going on here. What people will experience when they go into the geminoid lab is a mix of two things. First, some movements are pre-programmed, such as the breathing system and blinking at random intervals. Secondly, some movements are read directly from the face of the operator, and transferred onto the robot.

Q: You posted a video of the android on YouTube, and have been updating people throughout the process. Much of the public discussion about the Geminoid DK seems to tend toward the sarcastic, the fearful and the humourous; but there is serious research to be done with this robot.

A: Correct. We have used social media to show parts of the process, and this nearly finished result. To me, this is an important part of the project, and I enjoy taking this kind of research to a broader audience.

Interview: Christy Turlington

Originally appeared in The Vancouver Sun, Jun 5, 2011

A career shift from supermodel to super-advocate is unusual, and for Christy Turlington Burns, it is also deeply personal.

In 2005, after suffering complications after the birth of her daughter, she embarked on a mission to understand the global epidemic of maternal mortality.

She went back to school to study public health at Columbia University, and began working with organizations such as CARE as Advocate for Maternal Health, and in 2008 began work on her first directorial effort -a documentary called No Woman, No Cry. In it, Turlington Burns travels around the world to share the stories of pregnant woman at risk.

Turlington Burns spoke to Postmedia News Service from her home in New York about how she got involved and how the film came to be.

Q: How does one transform from a supermodel to an expert on maternal health?

A: When I evolved and became a mom and learned that the (medical) complication I had was linked to the leading cause of maternal mortality in the world, that made me want to dig deeper. I had the opportunity to travel with the aid organization CARE a couple of years after I had my first child, and was pregnant with my second.

We travelled to El Salvador, where my mother was from, and being in that country with poor women living in rural areas while pregnant, that was the ‘a-ha’ moment.

Had I had the experience I had with my daughter Grace in that community, I would have died. I thought I could help other women make that connection, to bring it closer to them.

Q: You travelled to Bangladesh, Guatemala and Tanzania. Why these locations?

A: In Bangladesh, we wanted to show an urban story.

It was in the slums of Dhaka, and through a community health worker we met Monica, our main mom.

Her story turned out in a way that helped us communicate the cultural limitations in her area, which are the biggest mysteries of all working on these issues.

I chose Tanzania because it’s (among the countries) with the highest maternal mortality rates.

Its president has been incredibly vocal and taken a leadership position.

It’s a sub-Saharan African country where there are high rates, but political will, and (we wanted to) find out what is the big gap. And that is the human resource gap -that women live in rural areas and are way too far from the care that they should have access to in an emergency.

In Guatemala, the physician we focused on is an obstetrician who worked for Planned Parenthood.

She was eight months pregnant herself when we filmed with her.

I wanted to pick a country that had a large indigenous population, and that has grappled with some of the ideology that is so present in Latin America that is a barrier to care for so many women.

What it means to write from the coast

Originally appeared:
National Post
Sat Apr 30 2011

by Brad Frenette

One of the first writers to document Vancouver also gave the city his name. “To describe the beauties of this region will, on some future occasion, be a very grateful task to the pen of a skilled panegyrist,” wrote George Vancouver in 1792. Of course, Captain Vancouver would have little notion of the city that would swell in the centuries beyond him -a place of glass and grit, of social woes and woeful real estate prices, a city encased in natural beauty and consistently named the most liveable place in the world.

George didn’t stay in Vancouver, though, so the task indeed had to fall to the pens of other panegyrists. And there has been no shortage of talented writers to help describe the place in recent years. Home to Canada’s greatest creative writing school (UBC), Vancouver-based writers have shone brightly in the past decade’s CanLit year-end lists and shortlists.