An Interview with Diane Switzer (VHF Executive Director) An Interview with Michael Kluckner (VHF Historian)      ...

“On Kindness” An Interview with Brock Tully By Katja De Bock Photos: Noriko Nasu-Tidball After cycling 50,000 kilometres through North America and organizing 12 major concerts, Brock Tully’s journey to his spiritual self is ongoing. The Vancouver peace activist and public speaker with the landmark moustache sat down with Kerrisdale Playbook editor-in-chief Keiko Honda and reporter Katja De Bock to speak about the world’s need for affection and his new book The Great Gift, a collection of reflections from the heart. The book launch was celebrated on October 28 with a Kindness Sings concert at Unity Theatre. The concert featured remarkable Canadian artists like Métis singer Andrea Menard and 14-year old Cole Armour, who both evoked standing ovations. “It’s unselfish to be selfish” Though he is keen on getting the word out about his books, Tully seems to be free from striving for material success. “My only goal, really, is to be connected to my heart,” Tully says. “That’s a full time job, because I lose connection all the time . . . What it means is to be selfish about doing what makes me happy.” His upbringing in a well-off, but emotionally cold West Vancouver family almost brought him down, before it enlightened him. As a young man, Tully struggled with depression and suicidal thoughts. However, he managed to fight his demons by cycling through North America three times, the first time in 1970, spreading the message of kindness. “Depression is really positive to me, because it is a signal to me that something is going on in my life that I need to look at,” Tully says, adding this applies to anger, too. “We avoid it, and become time bombs. Whereas I think anger is the connection to my deeper spiritual self.” “I don’t...

  By Melissa Maan   “Mellie’s Munchies” is a small entrepreneurial company, based in Burnaby that offers artfully baked delights and delectable munchies for individuals, parties and events.Growing up in a household where creativity was strongly encouraged, I was always thrilled by the freedom and limitlessness of art as I molded and manipulated different materials, watching my ideas blossom before my eyes. Not completely satisfied with just arts & crafts, I wanted to learn more, and I quickly became fascinated watching my mother and grandmother cooking and baking. Seeing my interest, they taught me their recipes. I spent many hours learning, and testing those recipes, wanting to achieve perfection. To me, this was another form of creativity with endless possibilities, and I was ready to keep discovering more! This love for food continued into my adult life, with cooking and baking like old friends I could count on to get me through tough times. When I was invited to parties, I would get a rush of excitement trying to decide what I could make to impress everyone with my culinary delights. In recent years, I began attending dinner parties with a wonderful circle of friends (and true foodies), and for each party a theme ingredient was chosen. Our challenge was to invent a dish using that ingredient and present it to the group. I decided to take the challenge one step further, and with each successive party, combine the ingredients together into a new dish (my own personal version of “Chopped”) This was how my famous “Bacon Brownies” were born! At these parties, no idea was too far-fetched, in fact we each encouraged each other to play with our food, and be inventive! Last year, after numerous successful dinner parties, including one that was entirely...

“Becoming Art” An Interview with BRF by Raffi Wineburg Photos: Noriko Nasu-Tidball 1. Pioneer “Part of what makes him so special is that he is doing something that no one has considered art before.” -Melissa Mann With short blond hair, bulging muscle, and Clooney-esque laugh lines etched into an otherwise youthful, clean-shaven baby-face, Brent Ray Fraser looks like an Aryan superhero. In reality, Brent is a multidisciplinary erotic performance artist. But he doesn’t like labels. Few labels, if any, do him justice. “I don’t even like to be called and artist,” he said. “Art is just what I do.” There is no one who “does” art in the same way as Brent. The first such example is Ecdysiart: for these live shows, Brent simultaneously paints and strips naked—a literal and metaphorical take on art as an act of self exposure. At the end of an Ecdysiart performance Brent often creates “[object] D’art.” where he imprints his body part onto a canvas (“like a self-portrait of arousal”). Brent has also pioneered an art form called “[object] paintings” where he uses his body part as a brush to create portraits or landscapes. Brent’s art is truly unique and regarded as such: He has performed (not always naked) in hundreds of venues and garnered international acclaim for his works and performance pieces. His art is both experimental and boundary pushing. It forces us to reexamine what we believe art is. It challenges us to recognize the human body as an object of art. And it dares us to celebrate sexuality in new, provocative ways. “When you take away things that push the envelope, then we will just crumble,” said Brent. “Sexuality is something that is swept under the rug, but if you take that away we will...

By Katja De Bock Photos: Noriko Nasu-Tidball Travelling between international film festivals in Vancouver, Montreal and New York, Oliver Hockenhull’s independently funded documentary From Neurons to Nirvana: The Great Medicines made a pit stop in Kerrisdale and sparked a debate about the pros and cons of psychedelic drugs. From Neurons to Nirvana: The Great Medicines is an eye-popping feature documentary about the resurgence of psychedelics as medicine. The film explores powerful psychedelic substances such as LSD, psilocybin, MDMA and ayahuasca by speaking with scientists, (scientific) users and shamans. The executive producers of the director’s cut are Mark Achbar (The Corporation), Betsy Carson and Jon Schultz. Interestingly, there are two versions of the film. A 68-minute version, Neurons to Nirvana: Understanding Psychedelic Medicines is an advocacy film making the plea for more research into substances that have been used for thousands of years. The film is available online atmangu.tv for a fee of US $15. A DVD for US $25 includes additional interviews. However, festivalgoers and conference delegates are treated to the 108-minute director’s cut The Great Medicines, which has a more experimental format. Hockenhull travelled to conferences to speak with the leading experts in the field. His main motivation to make the film was as a means to educate about the power of these medicines to relieve suffering. “Both films are not so much about drugs but about the possibilities inherent in consciousness itself. Banned worldwide from research labs for nearly 35 years, psychedelics are again becoming the focus of serious scientific study. Researchers in several centers, including John Hopkins and the University of California, are conducting clinical trial to treat a range of afflictions: Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), addictions, and the psychological stresses suffered by late-stage terminal cancer patients. The initial results of all these studies...