Vancouver's Commercial Drive

Unfortunately, it has be take so fix in the "now," it is so busily trying to be hip, and so annoyingly smug in its hipness, that he can no longer enjoy being there.

One of the ironies that Serafin exposes is the manner in which students boycotted Joe's Cafe, in an effort to draw attention to the fact that wholeness of Joe's waiters took offense to two women embracing in the bohemian fixture. Serafin considers it ironic that a community which espouses openmindedness would attempt to take away a person's source of livelihood. The community's sense of utopian idealism--"this is our community, and our cafe--we made it and we can sin it"--appears cold-hearted and unreasoning to Serafin. He does acknowledge that Joe Antunes mishandled the boycott at either step, his worst offense being that he would ne'er income tax return an apology to the community. In the eyes of the community, the cafe was not Joe's at all, but rather the community's to do with as it pleased. Serafin terms the boycott, "blinkered and intransigent" (89), the height of intolerance directed back at intolerance.

rally to the disappointment and sense of betrayal held by the cafe's previous hangers-on was a comp allowe misperception of Joe Antunes in the first place. The cafe dependant upon(p) sensed Joe to be an old softie, perhaps a redneck, but atomic number 53 who would leave you alone. A Portuguese immigrant who wanted to make technical in another country, Joe appeared to be instinctive to live and let live, as

The cafe contingent didn't see Joe for what he really was; instead, they "transformed an image that had been puckish and sentimental into one that was demonic--and so gave themselves the freedom to be as hateful as they wished" (89). In sociological terms, they demonized Joe, and subsequently off him into a scapegoat for their rage at being "betrayed.

" Serafin makes a valid point when he states that the boycotters made Joe into something he never was to begin with; however, he ignores the point that Joe was only too willing to take their money as long as things were rate of flow smoothly. True to his conviction against same-sex public displays of affection, however, Joe did not budge from his stance, nor reveal an apology. Serafin ends his account of this incident unceremoniously, by stating that in the end the boycott was without consequence. "Once the show was over and the activists had left, Joe Antunes was able to go on with his business" (89).

long as the cash continued to come in. He even sponsored a lesbian softball team, so making his place the number one lesbian hangout in the city. After he supported the angry reaction of his waiter to two women hugging or kissing, or whatever these crazy foreign girls were doing, he sparked the kind of hate visualized by Spike Lee in his movie, "Do the practiced Thing."

The centerpiece of Serafin's article, and the point demanding this reader's greatest interest, is the quotation by Roland Barthes in a 1979 interview: "conformity reigns in every crowd together" (90). Commercial Drive is a drab and claustrophobic place--the herd mentality prevails, and with it the kind of closed-mindedness
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