By his very name, Sean Michael David Orr is a protest.
Born into a Protestant Irish family with deep political roots, Orrs father got revenge on that history by giving his son as many Catholic names as possible.
Im a testament to standing up for what you believe in, Sean Orr says as he takes WE on a walking tour in and around Gastown.
The tour itself is the result of Orrs protest against people who say they love the arts and yet do little to actually support artists.
At this springs Pecha Kucha night, he stood up in front of 1,200 people at the Vogue and showed them photos from his Facebook page. The audience laughed at his stories Heres my cat. I love my cat. He tells me when he wants to go out, he tells me when hes hungry because Orr can be disarmingly funny. Hes got a charm that can make him seem sweet and forever youthful. And yet at the end of his 10-minute presentation he revealed he was angry at the audience for paying $15 just to hear him talk about nothing. For $15, he said before taking a swan dive off the stage, hed take people on a personal tour of Vancouver. That $15 in his pocket as well as sales of music and art would be a better way of supporting him as an artist.
I think were being lied to, he says. I think this city is a facade. It only consists of surfaces and it makes me angry. People would rather go to hear people talk about art than go to an art show.
The WE was the only one to take him up on the tour offer.
The rendezvous is at the steam clock in Gastown. Orr chose it as the start of a tour of all the places he loves because its a symbol of everything he hates about Vancouver. The clock is a sham. It looks like an antique, and people gather round it with their cameras, but its new and its digital. It was put there as part of a very deliberate campaign to turn Gastown into a tourist destination by gussying up its history.
Its another facade, he says. Its pretending to be something its not. It was put there in the 70s. Its a lie.
Orr loves that history but he prefers the real version, which is why his next destination is an alleyway. It runs parallel to Blood Alley a made-up name to give the neighbourhood a mysterious yet safe allure and used to be part of the main east/west corridor of the city. The tracks are gone but here Tramway 20 used to run, bringing workers to the factories and sugar refineries along the railway tracks.
But then, Orr says, city fathers and developers decided to create a new downtown, just a few blocks away, even though a real one still existed. Gastown was turned into a tourist destination by celebrating the very history that everyone was so quick to abandon for the next new shiny thing.
We create a city and then abandon it, Orr says of Vancouvers habit of constantly re-inventing its narrative. When are we done defining ourselves?
By now were at Andy Livingstone Park, an example of getting it right.
Its gently sloping banks and meandering walking trail makes it conducive to just hanging out, he says. Standing on its crest, you catch a glimpse of the many faces of Vancouver: Chinatowns gritty brick buildings; the Skytrain that takes commuters to their single-family homes in the distant, less expensive suburbs; the football and soccer fields that create a sense of neighbourhood; and the Expo lands that mark an era of resurgence.
My mother calls Vancouver Potemkin City, he says, referring to the Russian minister who purportedly built a city of facades to fool Catherine the Great. We seem to be doing that here for the world, he adds. Vancouver doesnt have a middle. Its just green-coloured glass.
To read more of Sean Orrs rage against the world, go to ScoutMagazine.ca
