Skip to content
Join our Newsletter

Pssst, this year’s password is sturgeon

By G.D. Maxwell Three weeks ago, it looked as though the 10 th anniversary of the World Ski and Snowboard Festival was going to break new ground yet again.

By G.D. Maxwell

Three weeks ago, it looked as though the 10 th anniversary of the World Ski and Snowboard Festival was going to break new ground yet again. This time by embracing such genre-breaking snow sports as extreme golf, team suntanning and dirtboarding.

But in a post-ironic world where Canada’s federal ruling-party-for-life can claim to be the victim of an elaborate scam – hatched, of course, by themselves – to funnel taxpayers dollars through bagman ad agencies straight into their own party coffers and the pockets of Big Jean Chrétien’s close, personal friends, assistants, thugs and, for all we know in our porous publication ban ignorance, wife’s handbag, a major visitation by winter in the early days of spring makes at least as much sense as holding the best damn mountain kulture celebration in the middle of April.

Party on, Dude!

Roll out the cake, blow out the candles, ooh and aah about the precocious little Party That Could, fighting off the forces of infant mortality, commercial morality and entropic replication and instead, living to celebrate 10 years of music and mayhem without becoming a jaded caricature mired in mindless repetition and golden oldies.

This year’s WSSF – pronounced locally like the excitedly inhaled exclamation of an Econobrit tourist gasping "What’s This!" upon discovering the day’s special at his bargain basement, all-inclusive chalet is dog stew and chips – is just like last year’s WSSF only with a whole bunch of changes, deletions and additions. In other words, Doug Perry and his harem have reinvented what was and launched what will be.

What will be – must resist the urge to finish that sentence with "will be" – is even more art, more partying, more festiveness, more coming together of the clan of shredders and wannabe shredders and those poor, deluded souls who just want to make "the scene."

What won’t be is the mondo Big Air, drunken naked clambake at the base of Whistler Mountain. There are at least three good reasons for this glaring, epoch-defining omission. First, it made the athletes feel cheap, like so many hoppin’ and jumpin’ hunks of meat on display for a ravenous, NASCAR-tinged crowd just waiting for a pileup in the second corner. Second, it’d been done to death. Even with last year’s emergency room Big Splat of the security-dodging financial wizard whose buddies bet him into thinking anyone, even he, could hit a kicker at warp speed and stick the landing, there was an abiding sense of déjà vu to the Big Air events and a curious, nostalgic desire to start a snowball riot just for old time’s sake.

And third, there wasn’t any snow.

Okay, maybe it had more to do with the no snow thing but hey, there’s snow now. Boy, is there snow now. In a season with a premature climax in early December, an endless, teasing, wet-spot-of-the-world January, April in February, and March to destruction, winter has arrived like the second hump on an unfiltered camel’s back to bury the crocuses and tulip leaves tricked into making an early appearance in our flower beds. And those of us who take our religion with a soupcon of skepticism are only left to shake our heads in reverent wonderment at the coincidence of the Single Best Day of Skiing Ever – April 2 nd – and the death of PJP II. The Lord really does work in mysterious ways, eh?

Of course, the copious amounts of snow in Whistler’s many bowls and on Blackcomb’s excellent fall-lines is no good reason for those of you who mainly came to party to get up early and stagger bleary-eyed onto the gondola. Sleep in. Enjoy whomever you came home with last night – Helpful Hint: It’s not important if you remember his/her name. Actually, that just puts unwarranted pressure on him/her to remember yours back. Better to just roll over and whisper in a whisky voice, "Dude/Dudette, that was magnificent… but I’ve gotta go; I’m meetin’ my friends for some frosted flakes." – and whatever you do, don’t rush to get up the mountain. We’ll leave plenty of powder for you to enjoy après noon. And, we’ll respect you in the morning while we’re putting the cheque in the mail, suckah.

But since this is the 10 th anniversary of WSSF, it’s a fine time to gaze back through the veil of nostalgia obscuring the veil of second-hand smoke that nearly cost Ross his gold medal and ask ourselves this question: "What was the question again?"

Oh yeah, WSSF. The nostalgia thang belongs to the photographers this year. No showdown, no wild card, no hot young cameraslinger punk slithering out of the darkroom to blow the world away with images so good they make us wish we could sleep with our eyes open. This year, it’s the best of the best, all winnahs all the time. Seems fitting since it was the Photographer Showdown the festival wetted its toe on in an effort to get more arty in the first place. I’m not sure Doug would have gone down that road if he’d have known it would single-handedly lead to magazines totally devoid of words for a postliterate generation whose parents mistook Sesame Street for educational television, but hey, no one’s parsing blame here.

Art’s art and as my buddy Martin says, "There ain’t no bad art, there’s just art you don’t like." Being an artist, Martin says things like that with a hard-earned gravitas.

Hell, even the dogs are artists this year. There’ll be dog singing as well as dog tricks and rumour has it that Christo’s planning to mine the Dog Parade route with coloured, powdered chalk and paint the town with a rainbow of canine paw prints. He was bristling the other night at Dusty’s when someone irreverently asked if he was going to call it The Gaits. He’s not.

So whether you’re into the on-mountain athletics, the daily fix of new music throbbing Skier’s Plaza, the Urban Rail Jam, the photography, film, words and stories, the pathetic sight of solitary writers squirming in a goldfish gondola trying to do in public what they usually only do in private, the nonstop parties – Helpful Local’s Hint: This year’s password is sturgeon – scamming as much as possible from the Logo Farm, running confidence games on the rubes, skiing like there’s no tomorrow or trying one last desperate time to score, WSSF and Whistler is the place you want to be.

Like Doug always says, "Yer money’s no good here." I don’t know what he means by that and, come to think of it, I’m not sure he’s ever said it but let’s be honest, money can’t buy the kind of fun that’s about to take over this town for the next 10 days. It’s gotta be magic.