Above is an example of the Cowichan sweater, photo courtesy Cowichan Tribes. The Cowichan tribes are part of the coastal Salish Nation, long renowned for their fine weaving, so it’s not surprising the Cowichan people quickly adapted their own designs to the knitting they learned from white settlers. The Cowichan sweater is unique in that it has a collar and was traditionally knit all in one piece, and while nowadays the sweaters sometimes have a heavy metal zipper, they’re otherwise unchanged. Many sweaters have traditional Salish motifs on front and back, often killer whale, salmon, eagles or deer. I grew up with one of these – a proper pullover one with no seams – and many British Columbians would have had a similar one. The wool is not dyed – darker sheep produce the dark brown and grey wool for the designs. Natural lanolin is left in the wool so that the sweaters shed water in the wet BC climate. These sweaters show up in popular culture all the time, though most of them are cheap knockoffs – to a British Columbian eye, the ones in The Big Lebowski and Starsky and Hutch are obvious fakes. Updated designs are fine, but it’s the quality and weight of the wool that counts; the fibres should be natural in colour, not dyed; and banded arms with traditional Salish weaving patterns.

Since it’s one of the most iconic BC designs it seemed fitting that a custom-designed Cowichan sweater would be proposed for the Olympics, as part of the giant merchandising circus we’ve been subjected to here in BC for the past few years. Well-known Cowichan knitter Emily Sawyer-Smith, above, produced the Olympic design sweater you can see being presented below to BC’s premier Gordon Campbell, at left, and Jacques Rogges, IOC president, at right. This actually seemed like a great development but to the shock of many, and despite the fact that the well-organized Cowichan bands had assembled enough knitters to supply the Olympics with these sweaters, The Hudson’s Bay department store created controversy by claiming the Cowichan knitters’ output would be too small and instead having odd faux Cowichan sweaters made for their official line of 2010 Olympic clothing - in China. (Photo at bottom). However, despite that fact that the public considers The Bay’s sweater to be a “cowichan,” The Bay claims it is not – and in some ways it’s right. Many however still consider their design to be theft. More here about the conflict over trademark and cultural property, and you can also read about the meeting held between the Bay and the Cowichan band here. In the end, after threats of Olympic relay disruptions and a lot of media coverage, an accommodation was reached at the end of October – real Cowichan sweaters will be sold at two Olympic pavilions as well as at the Hudson’s Bay. But the story doesn’t end there for First Nations art at the Olympics, where many other imported art objects are being sold as “authentic aboriginal art” and are edging out true First Nations art. See that story here.

Above is the weird hybrid knockoff being sold at the Hudson’s Bay Company as an official 2010 Olympics souvenir. It clearly references the Cowichan sweater, but it has the look of those mass-produced curling sweaters (often with belts), and its wool is dyed, unlike the wool in an authentic Cowichan. Maroon is just wrong. While there is no completely standard design for these sweaters – they are after all a culturally hybrid product – the above knockoff seems poor on many levels, and as a British Columbian I’m a bit embarrassed that this is how the world is going to see our craft and design. What was the Hudson’s Bay Co. thinking? For successful innovations in Cowichan designs , Emily Sawyer-Smith’s Olympic rings design is great, and so is CBC broadcaster Grant Lawrence’s sweater, below. Further below is Canadian WWII officer Cecil Merritt in a Cowichan sweater sent to him by relatives in Vancouver – he’s photographed here in a Nazi prisoner of war camp along with fellow officers.

For more discussion on the sweater and its appropriation, see KnowBC and UBCWiki. Authentic Cowichan sweaters can be found at places like Authentic Cowichan Indian Knits, 424 W. 3rd St, North Vancouver, 604-988-4735, or online from individual makers, like this. Below is a somewhat odd pair of sweaters, given the fraught historical relationship of the church to First Nations (photo from Wikipedia by Marg Miekle):

City of Vancouver, why not just demolish the Planetarium, too, and all our other iconic, distinctive buildings while you’re at it? Do we even deserve architecture in this town? See news story here. In short, last night it was decided in a 4-3 vote amidst raucous public opposition that the dome should be closed. This decision should be appealed.  The Bloedel Floral Conservatory is a beautiful glass conservatory sitting at the top of Queen Elizabeth Park which is situated in a high, disused quarry with a panoramic view of the city in all directions. (PS Technically, as a nerdy aside, the dome is a triodetic and not a geodesic dome.) The Vancouver Parks Board has already removed the fantastic 60s/70s minimalist wooden pavilions and water features that surrounded the conservatory, and now they actually want to close it permanently, which will no doubt also mean its demolition. It needs a 2 million dolllar roof re-fit, it’s true, but the cost of re-modelling the top of the park will cost much more than that. The city and province are currently awash in shortsightedness and ideological budgetary inanity. They like to claim “expense” and “recession” but they can’t even turn their own stunning assets into worthwhile ventures because they put dusty, creativity-deficient accountants in charge of civic life and aesthetics, and they support the wrong things. This building is a huge asset and any other city would be capitalizing on it. City of Vancouver, take over responsibility for the Conservatory from the Parks Board, which clearly doesn’t have the budget or the vision, and do the right thing – you have an enlightened mayor, finally, so perhaps we can be hopeful. What this city really needs is an advisory group of experienced architects and artists who can actually provide some informed guidance – developers and accountants have run the city long enough. If you care, sign the petition. Photos by nep, keepitsurreal, eldan, worldofjan, arsidubu, and marcinchady.

Vancouver writer William Gibson with BC artist Ron Terada’s “Big Star.” Photo: Candace Meyer, all rights reserved.

A number of Vancouver’s most high-profile cultural figures have spoken out recently about the British Columbia government’s recent assault on arts and culture. To read their statements, click here or on the image above. I temporarily thought of apologizing for using this blog for political commentary, but then I remembered that design and art are not divorced from each other nor the world in which they occur; that our cultural environment is deeply formative of all our thinking and our relationships and needs to be protected – especially on this anti-culture continent; and anyway, this is my blog. A couple of friends and I, like many thousands of others, were so fed up with the arts in our province being administered (slashed to nothing) by an arts-hating, anti-intellectual, ex-insurance adjustor Arts Minister who’s more or less a marionette operated by an increasingly corporate, right-wing unaccountable bunch of cowboys misnamed the BC Liberals, that for our part in this struggle we decided to gather written statements against the assault on arts from eminent members of the BC arts community. (And that we would start writing incredibly long sentences.) I’m not sure if these short statements are interesting to anyone outside British Columbia, but I think it’s always compelling when any prominent arts figures step into politics, because it’s not as if art and politics are ever divorced, and at times like these it’s helpful to be reminded of that fact. The only person on this list who’s not a British Columbian is Margaret Atwood, who’s from Toronto, but as far as we are concerned she is an honorary Vancouverite. (To read more about her interest in social and economic issues see her Massey Lectures on debt here). Please visit our site for more information and spread the word, if you can. We’re on twitter too. Thanks again to everyone who has spoken out on Stop BC Arts Cuts. It’s interesting how active all the writers have been, in particular. Not only do they say yes, but they deliver their statements within 12 hours. But you know who spoke out first? Kim Cattrall, who grew up on Vancouver Island. I don’t even have TV and I never did watch Sex and the City, but I love her for using the podium at the Canadian Walk of Fame to do that. If anyone knows others whose name should be on our list, tell them to contact us! Email is on the website.

This is by far one of my favourite houses in Vancouver. It’s in the municipality of West Vancouver, home to many of the best modern houses in the city, and it belongs to the novelist Douglas Coupland. He grew up in West Vancouver, not far from this house. Just as beautiful as this place is the house below it, a beautiful midcentury modern post and beam house designed by the architect Ron Thom. That’s the house Coupland actually lives in with his architect partner David Weir. Coupland is an artist and designer as well as a writer, and the house shown here serves as his gallery, guest house, and many other things. One of the reasons Coupland bought a second house is that the rate of demolition of midcentury modern houses in Vancouver is accelerating, and he wanted to preserve what was in his own back yard. Everything in the house is original – the flagstone floor, the carport, the railings. Lastly I’m sure it’s partly my visual OCD or some pyschedelic tendency, as well as of course their beauty, but his collections of shapes and objects are completely mesmerizing to me. Spools of thread, lego, polyhedra, modernist vases: I’m fixated. There are informative captions on the NYT blog – click on photos to go there (or link at bottom), and see my previous post on Coupland here. The fantastic photos are by Vancouver photographer Martin Tessler for the New York Times.

For NYT captions, click below:

(more…)

Today we spent the afternoon diving down and ripping out water lily roots from the muddy bottom, because even though the lilies are beautiful, they’re an introduced species and they’re filling the lake. It’s hard and slightly creepy work, but the wine afterward makes up for it. You actually need the wine after fumbling around with weird, stubborn roots in the murky, existential depths. Photos are of my favourite handmade house, situated on a warm Vancouver Island lake, August 2009.

Erickson’s Filberg House, posted here on May 20, is actually for sale. A friend found it online by accident, while idly searching for midcentury modern houses outside Vancouver. (Above photo by MidCentArc on Flickr; below from realtor.ca.) It’s near Comox on Vancouver Island. I’m ambivalent about this era of Erickson, or maybe it’s this material; I prefer the Graham House, which has unfortunately been demolished, or one of his other cedar houses. But still. In any case at 6 million it’s pretty hypothetical.