king of sweets

convivial endings of a no-fly-zone season -

betrayal of a ham-hued tongue slack with crusted sugar...

move on, move on, king of sweets, 

to the cloying call of bloated suburbia -

the overall of the sticky much-too-much...

[lane behind Fraser Street]

downtown westside:: the sexy sixties [episode two]

 You may not see the rigid concrete forest for the trees, but the impenetrably dense massing of reinforced concrete soars upwards as high as the old growth in the lush forests that MacMillan Bloedel had been sawing through for decades...
The late venerable Arthur Erickson [1924-2009] designed this raw concrete tapering tower back in the still freshly brewed essence of modernistic grinding through the 1960's - and steeped in his immersion of Japanese aesthetics, he applied the dictate of material integrity to his Emily Carr-inspired vision of gargantuan nature dominating the west coast landscape...

the offset halves of the west side facade with slim ribbons of glazing running down like rivulets of rain water...

27 storeys of deeply recessed windows with 7 foot square panes of glass create vertical waffled pools of watery reflections...

the offset halves of the east side facade ascend as tapering trunks of denuded giant firs...

around back, the brutalist effect of a medieval fortification is tempered by the elegant grey smoothness of sandblasted concrete and the bush-hammered texture of a solid elevation...

despite the thickset gridding and massive heaviness of concrete, there is a repetitive grace and a certain meditative quality to the geometrical formation that is the main facade of this stripped down monolith to a once ruthless clearcutter of tall trees in ancient forests...

"I don't think concrete is beautiful per se, but I think if one accepts it as the building stone of our century one find beautiful qualities in it - its earthiness, its mass, its traces of how it's made - I really do like it."
[Arthur Erickson from Seven Stones, a Portrait of Arthur Erickson by Edith IGLAUER]

MacMillan Bloedel Building
1075 West Georgia Street
Arthur Erickson and Geoffrey Massey, 1968-69

duchampion ready-made jeu de boites...

...and oh so last century...

*"5. Many ready-mades had an intentional, aesthetic quality as their origin and were not mere anti-artistic gestures, as was frequently thought during the 1950s and '60s. It is also necessary here to distinguish between examples. In any case, it seems essential to elucidate in each particular case what is the exact nature of the aesthetic meaning and what is its likely evolution."

[*from 'The Meaning of the Ready-mades', p.29 in Duchamp: Love and Death, even by Juan Antonio RAMIREZ, translated from the spanish by Alexander R. Tulloch, Reaktion Books, 1998]

[corner of East 21st Avenue and Prince Edward Street]

sleuthing through finn slough...

A few minutes south from the glitzy hustle-bustle of Richmond central flows a murky narrow slough off the Fraser River into a falling-down rustic clump of a fishing village more than a century old...
A few kilometers from the end of the towering concrete pylons of the Canada line skytrain is sited a marshy block of patchwork cabins and rusting boats that is a world and a half away from the big box chains, the asian megamalls, the multi-glut of restaurants, and the monstrous maxi-mansions...

But here, on a sun-drenched late summer's day, the micro community of Finn Slough chills to the ebb and flow of the tide, the soft whirring of swallow wings, the gentle swishing of boats tied up, the creaking of worn boardwalks across muddy stretches...

Here, too, the wary inhabitants tolerate dog walkers, excursion cyclists, curious history buffs, enthusiastic sketching artists, over-excited photographers tired of urban scenes, the odd blackberry picker, and first-time sleuths from the sympathetic republic of East Van...

And here, this picturesque mucky strip of a historical Finnish settlement is now threatened by encroaching development and the "raze the rotting pile" mentality of short-sighted, quick-buck, bottom-line feeders with complete disregard of history or ecology or conservation, and obviously a most insensitive lack of appreciation for its rusticated nordic-riverine splendour...

This Dyke Road flopdollhouse comes complete with a dirty mattress on the floor, miniature bottles and syringes strewn about, streaky walls, an unused bird's nest in a corner and billowing lace curtains...and also, a proud canadian flag tucked above the front door...

Finn Slough along Dyke Road at the south end of No. 4 Road, Richmond