The Party Leader

Carmen Mills' clever use of activism has them dancing in the streets

by ADRIAN MACK

Carmen Mills has spent the day moving house. Since the intercom system in her new apartment isn’t hooked up yet, she instructs SharedVISION to stand on the street and bellow her name until she either hears it, or we’re asked to move along by the local constabulary. Fortunately, it takes only half a dozen attempts before she appears, promptly walking into a full-length, third-floor window with an alarming thump, apparently mistaking it for an open door to the Juliette balcony outside. Holding her forehead and grimacing, she chucks her keys onto the lawn below.

Upstairs, she asks, “Did you see that? I walked into a window.” Then she giggles.

Scattered around are the remnants of the move. A modest number of boxes for a modest bachelor pad in the East End, plus some chairs, the odd lamp, Oreo cookies, and grape juice. There’s no TV. Just some chaos. Nothing overwhelming. Nothing she can’t handle. As she points out, Mills’ line of work requires the ability to “direct chaos.” Instantly, she wants the statement scrubbed from the record. “Actually, don’t say that,” she says, waving her hands as if she’s erasing the words from the air, and not for the first or last time. “You can’t direct chaos,” she states. “That’s totally crazy. But you learn how to nudge it here and there along the way.”

The diminutive 43-year-old has folded herself into an alcove that might make a good place for an entertainment system or aquarium, but Mills has decided it’s her bedroom because she can sleep at an angle and still fit. Strikingly, Vancouver’s art-deco City Hall is visible from this vantage point, across the city’s concrete and rooftop canopy, four kilometres away. The significance isn’t lost on her. “It’s kinda weird,” she says.

Mills could be described as an unelected city official. If that’s a stretch, she has at least made her mark as one of Vancouver’s busiest and most successful guardians, a tireless advocate for better living who “loves cities” but understands that they need more care than they generally receive. “If you don’t love your cities, you lose everything,” she says, passionately. “You can’t let them fall into ruin. You can have urban paradise.” The defining characteristic, for both Mills and the events she co-ordinates through her company, Emerald City Celebrations, is fun. It’s evident in everything she does, right down to her gregarious demeanour and the way she smashes herself into windows.

“When I think about all the crazy things I’ve done, fun-for-free is what it’s all about,” she says. “It’s so subversive. So much of our capitalist grind is devoted to making money so we can have fun and it’s a ruse, because fun should be free. Even millionaires deserve to have fun-for-free, because pleasure is a basic human right. A big part of fun-for-free is reclaiming public space. Public space has always been about a place where you could have pleasure with no admission fee.”

With summer approaching, Mills is elbow-deep in the fun-for-free project that arguably represents her best: the Car-Free Commercial Drive Festival (commercial drivefestival.org). It’s an event that offers, for a few hours, a genuine vision of “urban paradise.” Last year’s attendance was 40,000. Adds Mills, proudly, “and about 300 volunteers, two traffic cops, no security—and no problems.” Asked how something with so much potential for disaster could go so right, Mills shrugs. “Because it’s our community,” she explains, “and we take care of each other. You can do what you want, but you can’t be a jerk.” This year the festival doubles, taking place on June 17 and July 22.

In 2005, when the idea of the Car-Free Festival was pitched to her by Matt Hern, a writer and founder of the Purple Thistle youth centre, Mills was feeling her way around after six years producing graphic design for Emerald City Communications, during which time she also co-founded the cycling periodical Momentum. But the Emily Carr grad decided that throwing big mixers was her real forte. “Two things that merged together were my so-called activist work, and parties,” she recalls. “Jeet-Kei [Leung] is somebody who really inspired me.” Mills met the ultidisciplinary artist through Tribal Harmonix. He told her, “Parties are just practice. Throw a party and deal with all the crazy shit that happens, all the crises that arise, all the personal stuff, and you can be ready for everything. Plus, the stakes are low.”

Hern found a receptive partner when he called Mills, delivering a rant about a dubious provincial project to twin the Port Mann bridge, among other things. Mills was able to extract the following: “Have you heard about this crazy highway bullshit? Well, you know what we gotta do? We gotta shut down Commercial Drive and throw this great big party.”

“I said, ‘Fine. Then let’s.’”

Mills is delighted to report that, this year, representatives from other communities will be at the festival to learn and, hopefully, export the idea to Main Street, the West End, Kits, and beyond. “Activists who are trying to reduce car dependence are cutting right to the marrow of what makes a city better,” she declares. “There’s no question that the more cars you have, the less livable your city is. Try and walk across Seattle…it’s awful, and neighbourhoods that are full of cars are dangerous, unenjoyable, soul-destroying places.”

Mills is quick to point out that she isn’t anti-car. “Just use them intelligently,” she insists. “The most powerful moment in the Commercial Drive Festival is when the cars come back, and we drive up and down with a bullhorn, going, ‘Cars coming back. Everybody clear the streets.’ That’s when people go, ‘Why?’ It’s a heartbreaking moment. We have these parties so you can see what you’ve got, because if you don’t know what you’ve got, you don’t know what you’ve got to lose.”

Her message might have breached the shield of impenetrability around Parliament in Victoria. In an editorial published in The Republic in February, Kevin Potvin wondered if this year’s throne speech indicated a retreat from the Gateway Project—the “crazy highway bullshit” referred to by Hern and the impetus for the Festival. Mills thinks Potvin could be right.

“I think the fabric of denial is growing very, very thin,” Mills offers, about the growing grassroots awareness of our planet’s tenuous health that she calls “an epic crunch.” Let’s hope future historians, sitting in their urban Edens and breathing clean air, will recognize Mills’ eccentric contribution to the shift. “I’ve never been a placard-waving activist,” she admits. Instead, Mills urges “celebration as revolution,” and it sounds like the most sensible thing on earth.

Adrian Mack is a Vancouver writer and musician who hasn’t driven a car in over 16 years.

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