Literary / Arts
Familiarity Breeds Contempo
David Jure, Victoria
Volume 29 Issue 4, 5 & 6 | Posted: June 30, 2015
In nineteen eighty I had a profound spiritual revelation and turned my life over to Christ. I had been in a boxing match in the Vancouver Coliseum just before and had lost with great elan, barely defending myself and jumping up forthrightly several times, that had the crowd of three thousand on their feet. I had hit my head on the canvas several times and I supposed it knocked some sense into me. I quit smoking drugs that week, went on welfare and changed my wardrobe.
In nineteen eighty I had a profound spiritual revelation and turned my life over to Christ. I had been in a boxing match in the Vancouver Coliseum just before and had lost with great elan, barely defending myself and jumping up forthrightly several times, that had the crowd of three thousand on their feet. I had hit my head on the canvas several times and I supposed it knocked some sense into me. I quit smoking drugs that week, went on welfare and changed my wardrobe.
At this time, the young entrepreneurs, Mel and David, had opened a very hip café where Evelyn’s used to be next to the Odeon Theatre. They played progressive music and soon all the young artists, theatre people and musicians could be found lining the stools and in the numerous small booths. It became my home away from home, and it was in the Contempo that I first started writing my lyrics for British Intelligence, which, by the end of the decade had a small cult following. Fellow Aries David Bruce often brought in his amazing mandalas and carvings. There was no poverty in the city in those days and the ever growing crumbs of mental illness were still being swept under the civic rug. Imagine Victoria with no panhandlers or shopping cart people.
I was absolutely convinced that I would replace Roger Moore as James Bond and dressed in a white biltmore, white runners, white dinner jacket and white slacks. It was thus suitable attired that I found myself standing at the corner of Yates and Blanshard. Suddenly in a flash, looking eastward I had one of those life changing epiphanies that Salvador Dali and all writers write about.
I saw the future. The coming poverty. The dystopia twenty years hence…and I knew at that moment that I would not get the Bond role and travel the globe playing 007, but would spend the bulk of my life in my home town struggling near the poverty line and trying to make a spiritual difference. Oh, I still pursued the Bond role, fitfully and with many hilarious near death imbroglios.
I was mad keen on everything cinematic and found myself analyzing the ambience of mystery thrillers but also the close ties between religion and the battle between good and evil that is portrayed on the screen. There were six cinemas along Yates and the Atlas Theatre boasted a statue of Atlas holding up the world, which at sixty-two, with terrific arthritis pain in neck and shoulders, I can relate to.
I bought a cheap super eight camera and put all my cadres and family members in my movies. The Contempo beat Pagliaccis by one run in a historic baseball game at Beacon Hill Park, where players paused at second and third base to grab a beer and refresh themselves.
It was during 1981 that my belief in Christ was sorely tempted to fail. I knew I had to leave Canada and have one more kick at the cat. It was precisely when I renounced drugs and alcohol that my real troubles began. In some ways with cinema verite style of film-making in so called real life, I was twenty years ahead of my chums in the industry.
God must triumph over weevils. Good must triumph over evil…so I reflect that I didn’t die numerous times on the road to LA and have a studio in my home town and a roof over my head. The Contempo Café is still a restaurant next to the Odeon and if I doubt the divinity in all things, I just have to travel back in my memories to sitting among my mates in December of 1980.
David Jure, Victoria