April 3, 2010
Skunk cabbage, amanita, slug, trillium. Easter weekend on Southern Vancouver Island, before the high winds hit.
In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt.
March 28, 2010
“Taking a close look at what is around us, there is some sort of a harmony. It is the harmony of overwhelming and collective murder. And we in comparison to the articulate vileness and baseness and obscenity of all this jungle, we in comparison to that enormous articulation, we only sound and look like badly pronounced and half-finished sentences out of a stupid suburban novel, a cheap novel.
December 21, 2009
The late Amelia Charlie, prominent designer and promoter of the Cowichan sweater
Above is an example of the Cowichan sweater (photo courtesy Cowichan Tribes).
October 13, 2009
Bringing a Christmas tree inside is actually a relatively new phenomenon. It does not go back to pagan times. It started in Germany, where one tree was brought into the local guild hall but not into every house.
August 30, 2009
This house is called the Yakisugi or “charred cedar” house. Japanese architect Terunobu Fujimori is using a traditional Japanese technique of charring as a way to finish and preserve wood. See another charcoal house by Fujimori here.
July 23, 2009
A few years ago architect/builder David Hovey designed and built this house for himself and his family in Winnetka, Illinois, just outside Chicago. Like most of Hovey’s buildings the house is constructed of relatively simple materials, including perforated steel I-beams, and all its parts are designed to be pre-fabricated and then shipped in.
May 20, 2009
Goodbye to Arthur Erickson, a native of Vancouver and one of its most famous inhabitants, let alone architects. He died in Vancouver today at age 84.
May 2, 2009
Jonas Salk claimed that it wasn’t until he left his basement lab in the States and went to clear his head in a monastery in Assisi that he was able to solve the puzzle of polio.
April 16, 2009
If tumblr is a bellwether—and it may not be—then the sixties & seventies are back, in style if not in substance. So many of tumblr’s weird little blogs, each of them a kind of eclectic personal bulletin board, feature this kind of rock and roll Hair: The Musical meets back-to-the-land handmade-house thing.
March 26, 2009
When I was a kid my parents had Arlo Guthrie’s record Alice’s Restaurant , a spoken folk song plus narrative set in a converted church in Massachusetts in the sixties, and I knew the full monologue off by heart.
