Ignoring the problems of hosting the Olympics, which are serious and many (and as a Vancouverite I’m speaking from experience), let’s just compare the graphic design from two different Canadian Olympics. The Montreal graphics were uniformly brilliant. It’s considered bad form to criticize the Vancouver 2010 graphics because of the tragic death of the head designer at a young age, but I don’t know, this is not a 2010 Olympics-promotion blog. Pax all those people who like the Vancouver 2010 Olympics graphic identity – and the corresponding new 2010-related City of Vancouver signage – but to me they all look very strongly like the unfortunate love-child of feminine hygiene packaging and corporate clip art designed by committee. Messy, busy, commercial, and they look like the bad Illustrator photo-traced layers they are. Vancouver, how many more design failures will you tolerate? Of course, a city that will build a dried-blood-coloured main library in the shape of the gladiatorial coliseum in Rome (and I can hardly believe I’m describing reality in that sentence: a library in the form of a blood-sport arena!) is capable of large-scale mistakes. See a longer post on the beautiful Montreal Olympics graphics on this blog, and more Vancouver 2010 Olympics graphics on the CDR. For the politically-incorrect 2010 Olympic logo debacle, see the CBC. [Update Feb 13: Douglas Coupland had this to say in conversation with the New York Times:

NYT: I see there is controversy over the design of the official Olympics logo, which is based on the Inuit stone marker known as an Inukshuk.
DC: Inuit culture is north of here, in the Canadian Arctic, and it has nothing to do with the lives of anyone in British Columbia. If you want to use the First Nations motifs for your logography, use the ones that are actually from here. A lot of people are kind of cheesed off.

I voted against these Olympics and am extremely annoyed by their crippling social and financial costs, their corporate profiteering and their draconian trouncing of free speech, but if they’d had good graphic design, I could have put politics aside and given them credit for that at least. Instead, Vancouver has been handed what it perhaps deserves, weak design that wouldn’t even make the qualifying round for a design Olympics if there were such a thing.

Feminine hygiene packaging. That’s what this is.

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:

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Ann Margret as Nora Walker Hobbs in Ken Russell’s 1975 film “Tommy”. This scene, not to mention the whole film, was absolutely formative for me (and apparently I’m not alone). It opens with a drunk Nora watching TV in her all-white glam boudoir; on the screen is an ad for baked beans, “Fit For A Queen.” Nora throws a champagne bottle through the TV set, soap suds and baked beans pour out into the white bedroom, and she writhes, laughing, in the surreal, psychedelic mess.

 See Hilly Blue’s excellent collection of film stills at  Flickr.

The writer Douglas Coupland (“Generation X”), who has been interested in Canadiana for a long time, recently went about finding a classic 70s “builder’s special” house slated for demolition, filled it with objects constructed from the Canadian paraphernalia of his childhood, and then staged a party in it. He called the sprawling art installation “Canada House” and its eccentrically decorated rooms contained numerous sculptures assembled from items that only Canadians would really fully understand. Coupland’s Canadiana is not really the hunting lodge/maple syrup Canadiana of the East, but a specifically West Coast version referencing the ocean and all other things British Columbian. It’s a lesser known fact that Coupland had a career as an artist before he became a writer, graduating from the Emily Carr College of Art and Design in Vancouver where he grew up. Coupland’s interest in Canadiana, a lot of it quite odd, first appeared in his two books “Souvenir  of Canada.” The book and his “Canada House” installation spawned a recent film called Souvenir of Canada in which the entire process described above is documented. It’s a strange combination of dispassionate irony and deeply personal nostalgia. An interesting CBC review is here. These fantastic photos were shot by well-known Vancouver photographer Martin Tessler who has also shot covers for Metropolitan Home and many other shelter magazines. Photos, in order: fishing float lamps; whale vertebrae made from styrofoam jetsam; mussel shell midden; Haida button blanket.