First things first.
Listening to at the moment Monsters of Folk, Tunng and Cave Singers.
Picked them all up at RedCat Records on Main and 27th. Best little record shop in town.
Monsters of Folk has a few nice gems, Tunng, and The Cave Singers are an absolute must. Just beautiful music.
My simmering lack of enthusiasm for the West Coast attitude hasn't abated much of late. There are some amazing people in this town and some amazing talent. Much of which is drowned by the mediocre, that should change.
My biggest hopes for the economic downturn were that since the deranged community destroying house flipping trend would have to end we would start seeing some consistent and overt interest in individuality in the home. Since people are (we assume) going to be forced to actually live in their condo for more than the regulated 6 months, there is a good chance they will actually try to make it a "home". Which would express something about them. Not something about whose tastes they have been convinced they should emulate.
My biggest and deepest hope is that the total glut of design by numbers Inferior Designers will be weeded out. Since not everyone will actually want to live in their neutral toned - realtor inspired - Vancouver special without making it personal the vast portion of designers I used to have to deal with will be as far as I can tell incapable of keeping up.
When one makes a career of doing the exact same thing for 10 years straight I suspect adaptation will be hard, especially considering they never had any talent or taste to begin with. Just look at almost any Canadian design magazine from the last 10 years with photos of any Vancouver homes and the consistency and total lack of character is almost nightmarish. In a way reminiscent of Celebration, Florida (the disney themed suburb). Where the idea that if you look the part you become the thing you emulate was made, in a literal sense, concrete.
When I was doing work in Melbourne and in the U.K. customers would come to me and show me a picture of their neighbour's home and say "this is my good mate Tom's house, we want our place to look nothing like this, we want our own flavor". When I first started doing design consulting in Vancouver the exact opposite would happen. People would come to me and say "this is my neighbour's house, could make ours look exactly like it?" Initially I thought they were joking then......I would tell them they might as well skip the designer and just ask their buddy what color paint they used and which 2 stores they bought everything to stage their home. The insecurity was astounding. There really does seem to be a pervasive Canadian insecurity, where so many people are far more concerned with what other people think of their stuff than what they think of their own stuff themselves.
So often people would ask me is this XXXX going to go up in value, is this XXXX going to be suitable in our next place. I could sell them a flat plank that was called a chair as long as they were told it would go up in value. Then they would come back 6 different times with 6 different people to ask their opinion of the piece. The interesting thing is the ones who didn't do that were almost always originally from outside of Canada (or at least Vancouver). The idea of developing an opinion of your own possessions being dictated by consensus is fascinating to me.
Well that aside. Making fun of the lack of Design in Vancouver is a little too easy and way to often done. I've been spending a lot of time trying to understand why Vancouver is both so great and sucks so badly and how to alter the perception.....i will talk about some of the ideas and theories why this is and why I think most of them are pure bullshit.
On the TV.
Check out Radiant City, an interesting documentary much of which was filmed in Calgary.
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