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.

Overheard dialogue on Twitter, if Twitter is capable of such a thing as dialogue:

GammaCounter:  Seriously lamenting that I missed out on the era of long Belted Sweaters http://bit.ly/belts
GreatDismal:  LSD was the gateway drug to long, belted sweaters

For those of you who don’t know, GreatDismal is fellow Vancouverite William Gibson.

This post is about design in the broadest sense, as a process of problem-solving that leads to interesting and strangely compelling solutions. Above is an improvised streetcleaner in China found on Street Use, a truly fascinating blog about DIY and general inventiveness. In the words of its creator Kevin Kelly:

This site features the ways in which people modify and re-create technology. Herein a collection of personal modifications, folk innovations, street customization, ad hoc alterations, wear-patterns, home-made versions and indigenous ingenuity. In short — stuff as it is actually used, and not how its creators planned on it being used. As William Gibson said, “The street finds its own uses for things.” 

 Payphone on Lake Victoria in Uganda using GSM technology and solar power; ox used to move truck cab; military frying eggs in shovel blades.

There is something both inspiring and moving about this kind of do-it-yourself. Necessity is the mother of a beautiful, dreamlike surrealism, not merely invention.

From left, Deacon Boondini, the Great Gatsby and Giovanni James of the James Gang, a neovaudevillean performance troupe in NYC in full steampunk gear.

I’m not the first to blog about this, but I couldn’t not jump into the fray. Because look at it! It’s the most fantastical thing to have happened in years.

Steampunk, “the long-lived trend of combining the best of Victorian England with technological advances that didn’t actually take place until a hundred years later,” has its roots in literature: William Gibson, Neil Stephenson and Paul Di Fillipo’s The Steampunk Trilogy (not to mention The Golden Compass). With their own roots in writers like Jules Verne, the novels imagine alternate sci-fi worlds of a past-infused future full of technologies such as diving bells, ornithopters and dirigibles. From its origin in novels, steampunk has blossomed into a multimedia and fashion storm identified by a wide mix of antique and also sci-fi accoutrements: neo-Victorian, neo-Edwardian and 19th C military gear, contemporary preppy labels, monocles, old cogs, and burlap-covered TVs. It’s a post-apocalyptic but gentlemanly version of Mad Max and a million other cultural references, and consequently is a little hard to pin down, which perhaps explains its successes (Google it:  ”Results 1 - 10 of about 3,120,000 for steampunk“) because there’s something in it for almost everyone. Despite its nostalgia/romanticism, somehow it’s more appealing than the Depression-era newsboy-cap chic the hipsters are wearing. Both are pretty earnest, but at least the former has madness going for it.

Source: NYT and brassgoggles.

The James Gang is opening a Steampunk shop in Nolita, and will be selling “brass Rubik’s cubes, riding boots, early-20th-century-style motorbikes, handmade leather mailbags and brass or wooden iPhone cases.”

Steampunk Ornithopter, by Professor Maelstromme:

From The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen:

Steampunk steam-powered insect:

Beautiful “Steampunk Lolita” by Queen of Fantasy on Flickr: