Blogging Vancouver: Art School Cool, or the Vicarious School of Art

I am a little behind ... the consequence of staying with friends who entertain and talk instead of leaving the lonely traveler to his musings. All for the better, of course. Frobisher and I just returned from a couple of plates of raw fish. As is often the case, we enjoyed the more standard, less cool place than the chi-chi place we dined at the first night I was here. There are three sushi places in a row on Yew Street at Cornwall, right across the street from Kits Beach which is one of the finest uban beaches I have ever encountered.

The main event today was lunch with Gary's mother, IB, and his daughter, DB. I am going to write about that later, but it was a fine affair. Rather longer than I expected, so I had to skip the Vancouver Art Gallery and the current Georgia O'Keefe show ... but the fine company made up for that.

I want to talk about Art School cool. AW showed me around the Emily Carr Institute of Art + Design where he is a fourth year student in the Industrial Design program. AW has that sort of crossdisciplinary plastic talent that awes those of us who have trouble with re-uniting a shirt with its lost button. Everything he touches turns into design. I cannot say why he chose to go to school, but I can say that it has had the effect of organizing and coralling his talent. No doubt it has grown as well.

That is what school should do, and especially art school. I was impressed by the physical plant because it appeared to emphasize collaboration and exchange. Emily Carr in on Granville Island (which is not discernably an island) under the scary and starkly pre-postmodern Granville Bridge. (I walked over the bridge today on the way home from lunch with Gary's folks, and my tendency to a little acrophobia certainly asserted itself, especially when I took a few pix at the apex. The hutling traffic no more than 3 or 4 feet away did not help any fleeting feelings of security.) They have recently completed a new building largely dedicated to Communication Design and Industrial Design. AW complains that the Communication Design people get pots of money while Industrial Design lags ... if MRU is any guide, the key to money is rich alums, and Industrial Design should produce a few of those.

It is a postpostmodern structure of concrete and steel and glass, but there is a lot of natural light. It was sunny the day I was there, but no doubt on the more numerous gloomy days, the light and the concrete merge to produce a visceral spaceship Vancouver. Little art things all over the palce of course, but I was chary of photograhing people's work in progress. I stole a couple of shots, and took photos when AW directed me.

O, to have been an art student ... notwithstanding my complete lack of talent. It got me thinking, then, and later, and especially on Wednesday as I was tooling around the West End in the diminishing drizzle, that creating is about making objects. Writing only makes an object when someone else can look at it. There is more writing going on now, I would assert, than at any time in human history. So making writing into an object is cheper and more vain, in both senses, than every before. I have felt for a while that I have to make some larger writing object ... that is why I started writing this blog, to get in practice as it were. I've written one book ... the hallowed dissertation ... but it is essentially a private book, and it would take little effort to start floggin it ... not to underestimate the slim likelihood that it would ever see print.

So wandering around Emily Carr with AW made me think about making another bigger writing object. I have an idea for it, and I will track it here.

Back to the tour. We wandered through the painting studio where people seemed aloof and didn't look at us ... AW told me that he never goes there, and would have been uneasy doing so today had he not had a visitor to show around. Is this the ystique of painters, do they seek to keep their corner isolated for the purpose of burrowing into their work? AW pointed out a graffitto, and I shot it at his instruction. I missed the perfect framing because I was nervous that the little stud painter around the corner would see me and shoot me a withering eye.

As we left the new building, we stopped by the library that had a bunch of discards for sale at fifty cents each ... cool ... I got three books for less than a twoney, if I am using and spelling the colloquialism correctly.

The other building, the main and original building from when the former Vancouver School of Art moved here in the late 70s, felt more like a school ... lockers, a cafeteria, people bustling about. AW gave me a long tour of the ceramics department where he hopes to spend two years in post-graduate study. They are a much friednlier lot in there, and the vistas of the old building were grittier and more inviting, if just as concrete steel glass. We ended up in a brief tour of the gallery which I promised to re-visit after lunch ... but that was not to be as we headed off cmapus and out to West Broadway to a Singpaore Noodle House hole-in-the-wall which provided a great mid-afternoon Malay treat.

I took a bunch of photos of Granville Island, and I will try to mount a post about them at some point. I want to leave this one about Art School ... maybe the best deal would be just to pretend in the evening that I am an Art School students, and make silly stuff and wonder what imaginary classmates will think of it. At this point in life, that is the most efficacious way to imbibe the joy of creating without pressure ... call it the Vicarious School of Art.

Photos by Arod.

Fractured Cityscape

I promised some images to illustrate yesterday's rant, so here they are. The photo above is the house across the street from the new excrescence. I start with it not just to foreground my point, but because I want beauty to top any post here when I can. The folks who live here never say hello when I pass in the morning. There are assorted motorcycles and cars. I know they are devout Catholics by reason of a prominent Mary, and they are evidently heterosexual and be-childed in a neighborhood that is the center of the gay world. Never quite understand why people cannot say a warm hello to a passing neighbor, but of such self-absorption is much urban living made. Besides, it's their right. They can be grim, circle-the-wagon, 'publican Catholics if they want ... it's their right. But I do respect one thing about them. They made a beautiful house for any passer-by to enjoy.

Look at the reflection in the picture window. That is the monstrosity these poor souls must gaze upon daily. There used to be a rock massif there, with a rickety staircase that led to a ramshackle cottage on the top. But they ripped that out, and chiselled out the rock, and then built this ...

You have to realize, of course, that some trained architect, probably in snazzy clothes with a fresh kewel haircut sitting in an Aeron chair in a great open airy office ... some bloody architect actually drew that streetscape. Somebody actually felt that this was what urbanites want to look at. What a scam. A finger in the eye of every passer-by.

I believe that city government should look at plans like that and toss them out the window. Try again, sonny boy, come up something that befits a beautiful city.

Here's one more shot ... looking up at this energy hog of a "home" which bears no architectual relationship to the neighborhood in which it landed like some kind of rogue spaceship. With any bad luck, after the crash, a bunch of latter day hippies will move in and chill out on the great views ... and maybe rip the doors off the garage and make an open market or a crash pad or at least something better than a silo for a planet-destroying pair of giganto SUVs.


Cranky. We should helicopter this thang out to the 'burbs whence it emerged.

Photos by Arod, with his eyes shut.

Rambling

This is about cityscapes, and I will get there eventually.

Ah, the Glorious Fourth. I am a-bed, the dog having worried me out of my efforts around the house to at least a semblance of slumber. Dogs are like that ... they enforce a conservatism upon their owners that may not be natural in the human sense, but is natural certainly in their sense. In this sentence lies a lengthy peroration on the contradictory implications of the natural, but that must lie fallow for a while longer lest I lose my train of thought for the evening.

A-bed though I be, we are surrounded by the muffled crackles of celebratory explosions. The dog is not nervous, leastwise now that I have fulfilled his agenda and retired. He can finally get on with his fevered business of a deep sleep. My first dog, Laddie, was a spectacular beast, but his one flaw was that he was terribly gun shy, and the fireworks of the Queen's Birthday made him a mess. Other than that one evening, he was a model of majesty and service, my best friend for 12 years. But that too is a peroration that awaits some other evening's blogging, and we do not want to get lost.

I took a big step today, a good one, but I am going to leave that too as a mystery. Writing a blog, as I have quickly learned, means always bothering the lines between the private and the public ... well, not so much the public as the available. Something is public, I suppose, when it hits the New York Times, or the local avatar thereof. For the private individual, something is available when folks at work suddenly grow silent as you approach, or when somebody forwards an email, or when your sainted mother calls and asks what the "h" is happening. My mother, probably like yours, doesn't actually spell out the "h" but ya know what ah mean.

A minor step, on the other hand, that I took today was to go to work. It is course catalog time in the life of the course catalog editor ... yours truly ... and there is no end of life-threatening minutiae that need my attention. My assistant, a temp and an old friend, PJL, came in with me. MRU in its wisdom does not pay temps for holidays, and that is the single one thing about MRU with which I disagree ... so I guess we are doing alright. The upshot is that PJL wanted the day's pay, so we went after it. Got a lot done, too, given that we were alone in the office. I am, in that curious new word, "exempt" which means that the hard-fought-for 40-hour week doesn't count for me. I do not blame that on MRU, but rather on the larger America for whom no amount of work is ever too much. Gotta take the good with the bad, I suppose.

A day's good work, followed by a dog walk. And that is what I want to talk about. Notwithstanding a good day, I have to admit that I am filled with foreboding in general about the brinksmanship of this great society. Yes, our great society on its glorious celebration of itself. I may be a Canadian, but I live in this country because I love it, and because I admire its revolution and its Constitution, and because I believe all people should be free. But as we know, all reality is grungily real, and these ideals get trotted out one time for black and the next for white, and mostly for gray and any other color you want. Believing in them is, to misquote Anthony Burgess' inimitable reference to the oneness of god, like proclaiming the wetness of water.

PJL and I, on the way home from our purloined work on the Glorious Fourth, argued that America is a strange place because it is at once the most creative society that ever existed and the most hidebound. RL, my roommate and great friend, and I, later as we prepared for dinner, were listening to a new compilation he is making of Swing and Big Band and female vocalists. We thought about 25 years, from 1930-1955 or from 1981-now which is the period I have lived in San Francisco. How can one compare the history that passed in two such periods. Is the rise of the computer, which was merely a rumor as I arrived here and as Ronald Regan was inaugurated, any greater a revolution than the personal car or the television of that earlier period? And of course, they had that nasty little war the immolated the planet. I'll come back to the notion of 25 years and a peroid in history at some other point ... another promise.

Why am I asking this? Because a rational thinker cannot help but fear the imminent dark cloud that hangs over us now. A day's good work followed by a dog walk. The dog and I walked past this monster new two-unit building that some cynical builder squashed onto Beaver Street. The place has no soul, but it has size, and that is what counts in "fin-de-siecle" America. No class, just a big wad-a-bucks. The place is on a modest street, facing a beautiful old stucco building that has been lovingly restored and painted. The new place crowds the street with two giant garage doors that leave only the narrowest passage for an entryway. I have been held up several mornings as the new debt-ridden owner slowly, slowly eases his gigantic black dark-window-tinted SUV out of the garage ... the vehicle is so vast that it has no more than an inch or two of clearance on each side notwithstanding that the garage alone would house fifty in the Third World.

No class, no taste, no sense of proportion.

So we are walking by today and it appears that the proud new owners are having a Glorious Fourth celebration. It is loud, it is way up there because this edifice has no contact with the street but rather looms over it like some sort of ghastly Gormenghastian nightmare. I stopped as the dog scanned for odors I thankfully cannot perceive. All the voices were young. I strained to hear someone who at least seemed past 40 ... no one. Why does this matter? This is bubble wealth where folks on a little insubstantial economic high get way over their heads in debt, sink it into an energy sump architectural monstrosity, and hope for the best.

I hope for the best, but it doesn't add up.

I think cities need scale, they need great public spaces, they need street views that welcome and energize. They need a citizenry that melds and contradicts and roils and creates. Cities do not need obese architecture and unsustainable debt and callow bubble life.

So a good day and a sallow day, all wrapped up in one.

Still, I plan shortly to sleep the sleep of the just, so long as the crackling celebration erupting around me starts to fade out in good time.

The pics are of cityscapes with soul. I will mount a picture of the monstrosity tomorrow.

Photos by Arod.

An Architectural Desecration

Unhappy walk today ... didn't start out that way. Some young female twit blew a stop sign without looking while we were in the crosswalk at Octavia and Hayes ... the dog and I were five feet away. I yelled and she stopped and then gave me a little dismissive flip of the hand. Driving some obscene SUV. It's always somebody else's fault nowadays ... the little shit.

But that was nothing compared to an architectural desecration at Buchanan and Grove, a few blocks away. There is a magnificent old brick building there with a faded tile sign that says "Hebrew Free Loan Association" and a cornerstone that says 1925. This part of town is the Western Addition, and for many decades, especially after the Second World War, it was a relatively poor and very multi-ethnic neighborhood. In the late 40s and early 50s, it was largely razed and turned into ugly subsidized housing, and much of it remains an architectural scar ... opposite the building in question on both Buchanan and Grove are subsidized housing units, albeit in pretty good shape and well-maintained, but nothing compared to the fabulous Victorians that were destroyed in the 50s.

The Hebrew Free Loan Association building had long seemed empty, but in the last year or so several signs in Korean sprouted, and there is one rather weather-beaten metal sign that says "Korean American Residents Association of San Francisco Bay Area."

All well and fine, except ... today they started to paint the ancient bricks a hideous cheap yellow ... and a crappy amateurish paint job to boot. These magnificent bricks have never been painted before. They have already painted over the inlaid "Hebrew Free Loan Association" logo. Do they plan to rip out the iron grates with the stars of David? It is a brutal, bloody-minded assault on San Francisco's architectural heritage, and an assault on historical memory. What are they thinking?

The only organization with online contact information in this location that I can find is the Korean American Women Artists & Writers Association. It is possible that the organization is actually called the Korean American Community Center of San Francisco and Bay Area, but it has no readly accessible online presence. Whoever it is has committed a crime against art. It is bizarre that this is an Asian organization considering the recent, stirring world premiere of After The War by Philip Kan Gotanda (pdf) at San Francisco's American Conservatory Theater which treated of the multi-ethnic community and its destruction in the 50s ... now some short-sighted organization does more damage. Shame on them.

I have sent some notes to sundry parties and will post any results here. If this building has already been declared worthy of historical preservation, whoever mucked it up will have some expensive restoration to do.

I have photographed the building numerous times ... it is a difficult subject because it is dark, close to the street and shrouded by trees, so I have mostly shot details. I mounted a folder of photos before the desecration here or just click on the photo. I think I have more photos but I'll have to hunt them down and will post them if I find them.