Puppers not Yuppers (On Abstractive Mnemonics)

Matthew Horrigan

Simon Fraser University

“Puppers not Yuppers,” says the motto for the Black Lab. Ten Facebook friends like the place, though I lack the address. It’s somewhere in the Downtown Eastside. “Yupper” means young urban professional; “Pupper” has to do with dogs.

In what some call Vancouver, and some call unceded Coast Salish land, we have a problem with music venues: they get shut down. Do you know the tragedy of the Smilin’ Buddha Cabaret? Bruce Daniel Dyck recounted it in his master’s thesis: two restaurateurs, Albert Kwan and Harvey Lowe, tried to create an upscale nightclub. It is the 1950s, Kwan and Lowe are Chinese, and the municipality withholds liquor permits, though not from nearby businesses, whose owners are White (Dyck 2018, 12–3).

The venue persists, changing hands—it’s the 1960s, and Jimi Hendrix might have played there; it’s the 1980s, and it burns down; it’s the late 2010s, and a strange youth sits beside me, and we dangle our feet over the half-pipe while he talks about MDMA, and skateboarders zip below among the crowd—one crashing in front of the sound engineer, who kicks him—and the last drummer has broken this one’s hi-hat clutch, so the call goes out—another call, too, once crisis averted—“Play Moonrock!”

Despite the engineer’s drowned-out protest, a local legend, a vocalist whose howl belies his size, has clambered to a shelf over the stage, swinging his besneakered feet and shouting immensely at his friends. 

“Play Moonrock!”

And the band plays Moonrock, and Moonrock takes form over cymbal clatter and waves of distortion crush—a lilting rhyme about material consumed through the nose—and distortion and rhyme blend with the Smiling Buddha and the other artwork on the wall in the carnivalesque surge of a playground. Andrew Turner, who co-ran the venue, referred to this building as a “blank canvas,” a turn of phrase Dyck critiqued for omitting the neighborhood’s prior life (Dyck 2018, 96–7). And yet, for a place of such continuous, storied history, the Smilin’ Buddha Cabaret, the SBC Restaurant, is easily overturned. It is the 2020s; the government has intervened again, and the venue is closed (Slingerland 2019); the samsaric cycle goes on.

***

I thought then that I was exhausted, social networks beaten down from years of projects not completed to anyone’s satisfaction, family and oldest friends across the continent in Ottawa. I was not in a program—an academic program. My cowl-esque hoodie testified to a low give-a-shit factor, attracting conversationalists the way ignoring a cat for a while helps it feel safe. I am not here to study you, my shadowed face, and attention to the sanctified object of attention, the music, said to the crowd, united in illegitimacy beyond the eyes of the professional sphere. And it was true, then; I wasn’t there to study, but to be alone.

On that count, even this episode of memoir violates. Now my academic paycheck, even as a TA and doctoral student, so far eclipses the money available to promote, tech, or play “Moonrock,” that, to a mind schooled in identifying meaning with difference, the Black Lab’s comparison is not even vaguely vague. Yupper.

Yupper. So unwelcome. So young; with such aspirations to professionalism, and to urbanism; such desire for land, and belonging; to take a piece of the city and make it mine—my yuppie gaze trades in cultural capital. I can gaze at you, trade in knowledge of you, and even trade in misrecognition of you; I can trade in the report that I was in your presence, while also trading in the symbol as which I have you misrecognized. If I am sensitive and wise, I may remember that you change from moment to moment, so I know of you only in frames. If I am flexible and meet you again, I may notice how each frame proves the lessons of the previous somewhat wrong. If I am humble, I may read you as noumenal, with an interiority beyond my reading. If I am generous, I might try to make myself easy to summarize in return.

I have been talking in a narrative mode, conjuring a sequence of scenes, because this mode feels like truth, and in particular, feels to me truthier than attempting to collect events under the symbol of a transcending theory. The more I just tell you what I remember, the less I make an argument. Maybe, the less I make an argument, the less I deceive you, and the more you really understand what I remember, as you blend for yourself disturbing, colliding details.[1] Maybe, the less the story has a moral, the more you enjoy the story, rather than the moral of the story. Maybe, morals are more than mnemonic, hyper-mnemonic, supplanting memorably the stories they came from; and maybe, stories don’t need morals, even though this statement is a moral, overturning itself. I could tell you that the SBC symbolizes the category of “Vancouver Underground Venues”; but, like Roland Barthes, when I say “symbol,” I at once mean “myth” (1991, 113).

Let me, then, mythologize once more, of something I will call “abstractivism.” An oil company extracts oil from under farm fields and Indigenous lands; that is extractivism. A researcher visits a community and abstracts from its practices concepts; that is abstractivism. Like many “isms,” abstractivism has a dogma at its core, the dogma that from each thing some production and transference of symbols is prosocial. When I use you as a symbol; for example, when I, or Pierre Bourdieu (1988), use the way that you act/think/write as a symbol of being an academic, of the way that academics act/think/write, I am symbol-making, enacting my “symbolific impulse,” as Susanne Langer (1954, 130) might say. But when Langer says that humans are inherently symbolific, that we want and need to make symbols, and make them all the time, she also implies that using you as a symbol is about as altruistic as eating. I need to eat, and I need to make symbols, but making you into a symbol is no gift. As most people avoid being eaten, though symbol-making is perhaps subtler, perhaps more reversible than eating, each person has ways in which they should not be symbol made.

***

You may be familiar with the topos of the “Manic Pixie Dream Girl” (c.f. Feminist Frequency, 2011), a woman whose adventurousness and creativity make her the ultimate girlfriend, but only to the extent that she is seen as a symbolic Manic Pixie, and not as a changing person independent of her partner’s dream. Gazing retrospectively at the patrons of the SBC, I see Manic Pixie Dream Bands, Manic Pixie Dream Skaters, a Manic Pixie Dream Sound-tech. I lived in the sound of the manic dream of “Moonrock,” a dream of my own making, which means my own projection.

In a previous, shorter, version of this narrative, I cited a memory, in which the vocalist sitting over the bandstand said not “Play Moonrock!” but “Play Moolah!” Moolah, meaning money, in a punk version of a Broadway topos, the “I want” song. I played freely with this idea—a punk song about money—money in the song, money for the song, money for analyzing the song, money in my paycheck. Then I looked up the band, and the song, and learned, through some internet vestige, how I was objectively wrong; although, on its own line of flight, the memory seemed right. It was a meal of a symbol. Must I forget who you are to learn what you mean to me?

Amid my education’s rich lexicon for poetic drives to symbolic reductions, amid constellating terms like objectification, reification, and “vicious abstractionism” (James 1909, 240), lies an understanding that you speak best for yourself, in the venue and mode of your choosing, which might be a productive/destructive misreading, of something someone else imagined as something it wasn’t quite. These notes that are my memoir of the SBC must be read as a confession that I don’t know what I witnessed. Rather, merely, I was there. In fact, maybe that, and nothing more, was what my fellow audience welcomed. Those dangling their feet beside me had no warning that I was one want to misremember.

***

I’m walking with my parents, who have flown over to visit. A concert promoter says “hello” on the street. I don’t recognize him right away.

References

Barthes, Roland. 1991. Mythologies. Translated by Annette Lavers. New York: Noonday Press. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1988. Homo Academicus. Translated by Peter Collier. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Dyck, Bruce Daniel. 2018. “Three Reincarnations of the Smilin’ Buddha Cabaret: Entertainment, Gentrification, and Respectability in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside 1952–84.” MA thesis, Simon Fraser University. https://summit.sfu.ca/item/18027

Feminist Frequency. 2011. “#1 The Manic Pixie Dream Girl (Tropes vs. Women).” YouTube Video, 5:35. March 23, 2011. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uqJUxqkcnKA

James, William. 1909. The Meaning of Truth. London: Longmans, Green, and Co. http://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.264519

Langer, Susanne K. 1957. Philosophy in a New Key: A Study in the Symbolism of Reason, Rite and Art. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Mackin, Nancy and Deanna Nyce. 2021 “Menu for Survival: Plants, Architecture, and Stories of the Nisga'a Oolichan Fishery.” In Social-Ecological Diversity and Traditional Food Systems, edited by Ranjay Kumar Singh, Nancy J. Turner, Victoria Reyes-Garcia, Jules Pretty, 237–260. Boca Raton: CRC Press.

Nyce, Allison. 2020. “The Written versus Oral Conundrum of Working with Adaawak, Nisga’a Oral History.” Lecture, Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, BC, January 28, 2020.

Slingerland, Calum. 2019. “Vancouver’s Smilin’ Buddha Cabaret Announces the End of Live Shows.” Exclaim!, October 31, 2019. https://exclaim.ca/music/article/Vancouvers_ smilin_buddha_cabaret_announces_end_of_live_shows.