Commercial Drive in Vancover B.C.

In "Cultural Workers and Moslem Hats," Bruce Serafin explores an area of Vancouver known as Commercial Drive, a community of university students, immigrants, and society fringe-dwellers. He presents Commercial Drive as a mostmodern city within a city, an alternative to the area's larger urban "downtown." In providing an alternative to the larger culture, Commercial Drive appears to be fresh in spirit and community action, a refuge from small-minded conformity and crass commercialism; in reality, Serafin exposes it for what it really is: a closed-minded community of people who think and dress alike, and have no room for those who differ with their ways--in short, the natives of Commercial Drive have conformed in their efforts to be non-conforming.

Commercial Drive appears as a welcome change from the banality of mall life, a "stage set for the questioning young person," as Serafin puts it (85). All the trappings of middle class existence--unhappy parents, mortgages, credit cards, business suits--are absent from Commercial Drive. Instead, they have been replaced by "Moslem hats and Li'l Abner boots, seventies style tight jeans, and drab (ideologically-driven) working class clothing--all designed to produce a humourless image, one totally self-absorbed and self-consciously hip.

Serafin goes into great detail to describe Commercial Drive because he can't help liking the ordinariness of it, in spite of what it has become. He likes the unpretentiousness of its shabbiness, a

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Category: Foreign - C