British Columbia

More colonial craft

June 25, 2015

Once you start seeing something, it’s suddenly everywhere (and it doesn’t help that people keep sending me examples). After noticing that we seem culturally obsessed with our colonial settlement of this city/province/country/continent right now, and that this pioneer DIY craft style has spread as far afield as Brisbane and Berlin, based on what people have written me, I feel compelled to keep collecting it.

Categories: British Columbia, craft, design, DIY, graphics and signage, politics, Uncategorised, Vancouver

“When Hipsters Dream of the 1890s” – an abridged version of my hipster essay is now in Briarpatch Magazine

May 7, 2015

Briarpatch Magazine, one of Canada’s oldest lefty political mags, has published an abridged version of my earlier essay on heritage hipsters and colonialism redux.

If you want to read the original and longer post (with a far drier title) it is here: Settler & pioneer “heritage hipster” styles in the age of Idle No More, Chinatown gentrification, &c.

Categories: architecture, British Columbia, cities, fashion, politics, Uncategorised

Murder Murder

April 28, 2015

Apparently this is not a renegade settler war party, it’s a new “bloodgrass” band from Sudbury in Northern Ontario called Murder Murder. You can listen to their banjo-esque non-Northern-Ontario-ish neo-bluegrass murdery numbers at the link above.

Album: Native North America Vol. 1

March 9, 2015

This is a superb and historically important album, a compilation of music by indigenous musicians in Canada 1968-1985. It’s telling that I had only heard one of these tracks before hearing the album; it points to a disturbing lack of airplay of native music during those years.

Categories: British Columbia, Canadian design, music, Uncategorised, Vancouver, video

Post-mortem on the old Eaton’s building: an interview with Cesar Pelli

March 2, 2015

The TD Bank building and Eaton’s building by Cesar Pelli, photo © Michael de Courcy, mid-1970s

This is not a true post-mortem, since Cesar Pelli‘s 1973 Eaton’s building has not actually been demolished—and how rare it is to be able to say that in Vancouver, now one of North America’s capitals of demolition.

Turbo Architecture

January 22, 2015

This example of blobitecture is being proposed for Vancouver, apparently to be squeezed between two older buildings on the waterfront in the historic neighbourhood known as Gastown. There has been no public hearing regarding the building, so the public have taken to social media to express what seems to be more displeasure than pleasure.

Settler & pioneer “heritage hipster” styles in the age of Idle No More, Chinatown gentrification, &c.

October 14, 2014

Men in British Columbia, 1859, one in a newly discovered collection of early photographs of white settlers and First Nations in B.C. Via Vancouver Sun © Royal British Columbia Museum, reprinted with permission

An abridged version of this essay has been published in the May/June 2015 issue of Briarpatch Magazine

I am probably as bored of casual hipster-slagging as you are.

Categories: British Columbia, Canadian design, cities, craft, design, DIY, fashion, politics, Uncategorised, Vancouver

The “Non-Partisan” Association, Vancouver’s zombie political party

August 13, 2014

Full size here

This post is for Vancouverites who are either new to the city, or who are urban or civic politics nerds but aren’t acquainted with the early historical roots of the local civic political party that is known—somewhat hilariously—as the Non Partisan Association (NPA).

Oh Vancouver just stop

Yes, the official ScanBC Twitter account which monitors the electronic communications of BC’s emergency services has reported that Vancouver Police are on scene with a male robbed of his gold chain and his purse and Seymour St & W Hastings St.

Categories: British Columbia, Uncategorised, urban planning, Vancouver

When you have oil pipeline companies, who needs satire?

April 29, 2014

Giant U.S. oil/energy mega-corp Kinder Morgan has applied to triple the size of a pipeline across British Columbia, bringing dirty bitumen-laced oil from the Alberta Tar Sands. “Public” hearings to assess the application have been notoriously non-public.

Categories: British Columbia, design, humour, politics, Uncategorised

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This blog is a long, somewhat messy photo essay on the history and politics of design. Design's socio-historical context—that is, the constraints and influences on the way we make objects, dwellings and cities—seems too often ignored. We no longer know where our styles, tastes or objects really come from, and this damages our creativity and sense of meaning. Historical knowledge is so fugitive in the New World, with everything so decontextualized in the rapid flow of commodities and images. Don't even get me started on tumblr and pinterest. As Fran Lebowitz said, "Designers now, they all have these things called mood boards. I suppose they think a sense of discovery equals invention. It would be as if every writer had a board with paragraphs of other writers—'Oh, I'll take a little bit of this, and that, he was really good.' Yes, he was really good! And that is not a mood board, it is a stealing board." As for the sort of design I'm personally interested in, full disclaimer.....read more ____________________________________

To read about my book project on Vancouver's UN-Habitat Forum event of 1976 concerning just and sustainable urban settlements, click here. Few know that Buckminster Fuller, Margaret Mead, Mother Teresa, Paolo Soleri and Maggie & Pierre Trudeau, along with many thousands of others, came to Vancouver in 1976 to talk about better, safer, fairer and greener cities worldwide. In fact it was the founding conference of UN Habitat, an agency built around a foundational document called The Vancouver Declaration. My book is about what happened that year and is a snapshot not just of Vancouver but of how people around the world began to view cities and themselves differently in the wake of, among other things, the first oil crisis. ____________________________________

British Columbia

More colonial craft

“When Hipsters Dream of the 1890s” – an abridged version of my hipster essay is now in Briarpatch Magazine

Murder Murder

Album: Native North America Vol. 1

Post-mortem on the old Eaton’s building: an interview with Cesar Pelli

Turbo Architecture

Settler & pioneer “heritage hipster” styles in the age of Idle No More, Chinatown gentrification, &c.

The “Non-Partisan” Association, Vancouver’s zombie political party

Oh Vancouver just stop

When you have oil pipeline companies, who needs satire?

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