Now listening to Piano Sonata No. 18 by Ludwig van Beethoven and March Of The Saint by Armored Saint...

On Drake Street in Downtown Vancouver. Autumn of 2018.

Drake Street is a major east-west street in downtown Vancouver, running from Burrard Street in the west to Pacific Boulevard in the east. It’s part of the city’s urban core, near key areas like Yaletown, the False Creek waterfront, and the Granville Street Bridge.

The City of Vancouver is undertaking phased upgrades to Drake Street, particularly between Burrard Street and Pacific Boulevard. These improvements are part of a broader infrastructure project coordinated with the Granville Connector, a significant transportation initiative in the area.

As of the web results, Drake Street is being transformed into a one-way street for eastbound traffic only from Burrard Street to Hamilton Street. This change is part of the ongoing construction, expected to be completed by 2024.

Between Hornby Street and Howe Street, Drake Street is temporarily designated as one-way eastbound for motor vehicles during the construction period to manage traffic flow and reduce disruption.

The upgrades aim to enhance traffic flow, pedestrian safety, and connectivity, particularly in coordination with the Granville Street Bridge construction at its north end.

Drake Street is also noted for its "protected views" and "public views," as referenced in the City of Vancouver’s planning documents. For example, there’s a specific "Drake Street (K) public view reference photo" from 2024, indicating the city’s efforts to preserve scenic vistas, such as those from the Seawall near Drake Street, as part of its urban design strategy.

These efforts reflect Vancouver’s commitment to balancing urban development with maintaining aesthetic and recreational value, particularly along the waterfront and in densely populated downtown areas.

Drake Street serves as an important arterial route, connecting key parts of downtown Vancouver, including residential, commercial, and recreational areas. Its proximity to the Seawall, Yaletown, and False Creek makes it a vital link for both vehicular and pedestrian traffic.

The coordination with the Granville Connector suggests that Drake Street’s upgrades are part of a larger plan to improve transportation infrastructure, potentially including bike lanes, public transit access, and pedestrian pathways.

While the web results focus on current infrastructure projects, Drake Street’s location in downtown Vancouver places it in a historically significant and rapidly evolving part of the city. Yaletown, for instance, was once an industrial area (home to rail yards) that has transformed into a trendy, mixed-use neighborhood, and Drake Street plays a role in this urban renewal.

 

Now reading Time magazine Vol. 111 No. 9: The Age Of Miracle Chips (February 20, 1978)…

 

Did Count Leo Tolstoy have Asperger’s syndrome, (ASD) or just eccentricity with depression

Tolstoy was one of the greatest novelists of all time and also a social reformer with his followers sometimes being called ´Tolstoyians´.  He was as famous as the Tsar in Russia during his lifetime.  He was a huge landowner and became very critical of landowners and their properties while continuing to live in his original house.  He continued to live there until his flight from his house in the middle of the night, just before his death.  He was a massively contradictory personality, as many great artists are.  He was an out-of-control gambler, a sex addict, into his third decade of life with an extremely high sex drive.  He went from sexual addiction to puritanism.  He was a good soldier but had death anxiety.  He turned his back on riches for poor people’s lifestyle.  He had a tendency to go from one extreme to the other.  He went against institutional religion and created his own form.  He was oppositional and defiant.  He had some insight because he said ´surrounded by human offal and the biggest offal of all is me´, (Troyat, 1967).  He also asked ´am I am monster?  I am probably lacking something´, (Troyat, 1967).  Many great writers have contradictory personalities, (Fitzgerald, 2004) but Tolstoy was probably the most contradictory of them all.  These contradictions were critical to the superb literature that he produced, possibly the greatest literature of all, for example, ´Anna Karenina´ and ´War and Peace´.

Background and childhood:

He had private education and was a shy child.  He became a university drop out.  For many years, he led a wild out-of-control life, became a gambling addict, engaged in promiscuity, abused alcohol and was delinquent in a variety of ways.  He showed evidence of conduct disorder and antisocial personality.  Nobody could give up such an extreme, debased addicted antisocial lifestyle except by a mechanism of conversion, for example, conversion to his own brand of religion.  Tolstoy said ´I believe in one, incomprehensible God´.  Indeed to many people, Tolstoy was incomprehensible himself.  Troyat (1967) stated that a Tolstoy novel was ´dominated by the idea that a man’s real life begins when the spiritual forces in him triumph over his animal nature´.  This of course, is the central event in his own personal history.   His time in the army gave him experience of military life and battles.

Travelling:

He went on a kind of ´Grand Tour´ between 1857 and 1861 and met many great writers.

Personality:

He described himself as a young man, (Troyat, 1967) as ´awkward, untidy, socially uncouth … irritable and tiresome to others, immodest, intolerant and shy´ … a ´boar´ … ´unstable´, ´stupidly aggressive´ … ´I am so lazy that idleness has become an ineradicable habit with me.  Yet, there is one thing I love more than virtue:  fame´.  Many of these traits could fit with autism.  He also stated that because of his incessant gambling ´I am sick of myself that I would like to forget I even exist´ (Troyat, 1967).  In conversation, he was often oppositional with people, contradicted people and engaged in endless quarrelling.  He was easily bored and needed novelty-seeking and sensation-seeking, which he got in his writing (Fitzgerald, 2008).  He was very undiplomatic.  He did not even bother to go to his brother’s funeral, and simply made excuses for this.  He threatened someone who criticised his work to a duel but didn’t carry it out.  He was described as a ´megalomaniac´, (Troyat, 1967).  During his out-of-control period, he tended to build ´castles in the air´ (Troyat, 1967).  He was at that time, the eternal optimist.  He would say ´I know you won’t believe me, but I’ve changed´ (Troyat, 1967).  Of course, at that time, he hadn’t changed.  He always showed vicious misogyny and ´regarded women as a necessary evil´ (Troyat, 1967).  He blamed women for his sex addiction.  He was a very emotional man and found it hard to control his emotions.  He had a piercing gaze, which is common enough in persons on the autism spectrum.  He was fascinated by colour and was a sharp observer.  Some  accusations that he made against himself include ´vanity´, ´boasting´, ´sloth´, ´deceitfulness´, ´waiting for miracles´, ´contrariness´, ´excessive self-confidence´, ´passion for gambling´ (Troyat, 1967) were correct.  He made some progress with some of these traits when he converted to peasant values.  It’s hardly surprising that he had at one time, VD.

Teacher:

He became fascinated with the education of peasant children.  He dressed like the parents of those children in shabby clothes and refused the privileges of the nobility.  He gave up alcoholic drinks, refused to eat meat.  He took on a more ascetic life.  In history, a number of Christian Saints behaved in the same way.

Personality and marriage:  

He was impulsive and rushed in marriage to an eighteen-year-old at a time when he had lost all his teeth and was in his third decade.  Both wanted to be loved by the other, but they didn’t manage to achieve this.  In Tolstoy’s novels, he shows a great understanding of the female mind, but could not apply this knowledge to his wife.  After an initial period, he could only see marriage as a prison with his wife as a jailer.  For Tolstoy, marriage was a kind of death in life and a destroyer of creativity and was simply human bondage.  He had severe deficits in the marriage, in personal and social relating and gross empathy deficits and an incapacity to love his wife.  He lacked a Theory of Mind in terms of understanding his wife and the hurt he was causing her.  It was a most terrible emotional marriage for her.  He could only think of the pain she caused him and indeed, he often drove her to behavioural outbursts, threats of suicide, immaturity and what they called at that time, hysteria.  Of course, Tolstoy was emotionally immature himself.  He damaged the marriage right away by forcing her to read his diary of all his sexual and abusive exploits.  Tolstoy forced her into thirteen pregnancies, and it was lucky that she did not die from constant childbearing, as so many women did.  It’s hardly surprising that in one late pregnancy, she tried to abort herself.  In relation to the pregnancies, Tolstoy was sadistic and callous.  He was also a depressive spouse.  Tolstoy stated, when in a melancholic state ´art is not only useless but even harmful´ (Anargyros-Klinger, 2002).  His wife thought he had a ´mystics stare´, (Troyat, 1967).  This peculiar stare is common enough in ASD.  Tolstoy also showed ´coldness towards his children´ (Troyat, 1967).  Tolstoy (Meyers, 2005) told her that the very air ´around (her) was infected´.  In some ways, they could not live with each other and could not live without each other.  They would both threaten to leave the home.  Neither couple could understand the other.  Certainly, Tolstoy was right in the novel, ´Anna Karenina´ that ´all happy families are alike, but an unhappy family is unhappy after its own fashion´.  Tolstoy created in his own marriage, a colossally unhappy marital state.  Even worse, he made a savage and direct attack in his novel, ´The Kreutzer Sonata´, about a man murdering his spouse.  Readers saw this novel as related to his wife and his marital situation.  She was massively humiliated.  Then, Tolstoy moved out of the marital bed which further humiliated her.  He was extremely misogynistic.  Tolstoy wrote (Meyers, 2005) that ´woman is generally stupid … she cannot understand the simplest thing … (and) for seventy years, I have been lowering and lowering my opinion of women … they should stop ruining´ life.  His wife (Meyers, 2005) said ´he is a beast, a murderer, I cannot look at him´.  Finally, Tolstoy left home in the middle of the night and stopped at Astapovo Railroad Station.  He became ill, refused to see his wife and died.  The marriage had lasted about fifty years and was a sadomasochistic marriage.  Sometimes, these sadomasochistic marriages have very long duration.  They quarrelled about ´sex, love, property, art, family and religion´, for about fifty years (Meyers, 2005).

Narrow interests:

He wrote a vast amount and did not like wasting time on social chit-chat as his wife did.  He hated himself for the time he wasted on this.  Life was meaningless for him if he was not writing.  Nevertheless, his wife was important in completing novels and on one occasion, she ´copied the almost illegible manuscript of a massive novel seven times´ (Meyers, 2005).  This bordered on masochism.

Peasant life - The life of the peasant:

Meyers (2005) notes that in 1883, Tolstoy ´came to the conclusion that property was evil and suddenly decided to give up the management of his house, his land and literary copyrights´.  This became an obsession for the rest of his life, and he handed all the work of his assets and estate over to his spouse.  He began to dress like a peasant and developed followers which were called, ´Tolstoyians´ many of whom exploited him and invaded his home which upset his wife.  He was naïve about their exploitation of him.  He became a kind of ´saint-like´ figure.  The contradiction was that he still lived in the estate.

Conclusion:   
        
He was extremely eccentric and showed evidence of a pathological creative personality.  There was also evidence of the autism spectrum with severe social relationship problems with severe social reciprocity problems, some naivety, gross empathy deficits, Theory of Mind deficits especially in his marriage, narrow interests and a piercing gaze.  He was extremely visual, which is often one of the strengths of ASD.  Its very difficult to put great geniuses like Tolstoy into a single category because they are in many ways, all over the place and this is what gives them their great creativity.

- Michael Fitzgerald, Former Professor of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry

Now listening to My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy by Kanye West and Turbo by Judas Priest...

On Granville Street in Downtown Vancouver. Summer of 2018.

Granville Street is a major street in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, and part of Highway 99. Granville Street is most often associated with the Granville Entertainment District and the Granville Mall. This street also cuts through suburban neighborhoods like Shaughnessy, and Marpole via the Granville Street Bridge.

The community was known as "Gastown" (Gassy's Town) after its first citizen - Jack Deighton, known as "Gassy" Jack. "To gas" is period English slang for "to boast and to exaggerate". In 1870 the community was laid out as the "township of Granville" but everybody called it Gastown. The name Granville honours Granville Leveson-Gower, 2nd Earl Granville, who was British Secretary of State for the Colonies at the time of local settlement.

In 1886 it was incorporated as the city of Vancouver, named after Captain George Vancouver, who accompanied James Cook on his voyage to the West Coast and subsequently spent 2 years exploring and charting the West Coast.

During the 1950s, Granville Street attracted many tourists to one of the world's largest displays of neon signs.

Towards the middle of the twentieth century, the Downtown portion of Granville Street had become a flourishing centre for entertainment, known for its cinemas (built along the "Theatre Row," from the Granville Bridge to where Granville Street intersects Robson Street), restaurants, clubs, the Vogue and Orpheum theatres, and, later, arcades, pizza parlours, pawn stores, pornography shops and strip clubs.

By the late 1990s, Granville Street suffered gradual deterioration and many movie theatres, such as "The Plaza, Caprice, Paradise, [and] Granville Centre [...] have all closed for good," writes Dmitrios Otis in his article "The Last Peep Show." In the early 2000s, the news of the upcoming 2010 Winter Olympic Games, to be hosted in Whistler, a series of gentrification projects, still undergoing as of 2006, had caused the shutdown of many more businesses that had heretofore become landmarks of the street and of the city.

Also, Otis writes that "once dominated by movie theatres, pinball arcades, and sex shops [Downtown Granville is being replaced] by nightclubs and bars, as [...it] transforms into a booze-based 'Entertainment District'." In April 2005, Capitol 6, a beloved 1920s-era movie theatre complex (built in 1921 and restored and reopened in 1977) closed its doors (Chapman). By August 2005, Movieland Arcade, located at 906 Granville Street became "the last home of authentic, 8 mm 'peep show' film booths in the world" (Otis). On July 7, 2005, the Granville Book Company, a popular and independently owned bookstore was forced to close (Tupper) due to the rising rents and regulations the city began imposing in the early 2000s in order to "clean up" the street by the 2010 Olympics and combat Vancouver's "No Fun City" image. (Note the "Fun City" red banners put up by the city on the lamp-posts in the pizza-shop photograph). Landlords have been unable to find replacement tenants for many of these closed locations; for example, the Granville Book Company site was still boarded up and vacant as of July 12, 2006.

While proponents of the Granville gentrification project in general (and the 2010 Olympics in specific) claim that the improvements made to the street will only benefit its residents, the customers frequenting the clubs and the remaining theatres and cinemas, maintain that the project is a temporary solution, since the closing down of the less "classy" businesses, and the build-up of Yaletown-style condominiums in their place, will not eliminate the unwanted pizzerias, corner-stores and pornography shops - and their patrons - but will simply displace them elsewhere (an issue reminiscent of the city's long-standing inability to solve the problems of the DTES).

 

Just finished watching Babette's Feast (1987) and The Abyss (1989)...