So I have a minor pre-occupation at the moment with the concept of remaking a movie shot for shot. This process is not as common as one might think. Remakes of movies occur all the time in Hollywood, far too often by some people’s standards and usually with the sole intention of cashing in on a franchise that has proven itself successful in the past or with a foreign audience. But typically, the aim of the film is to re-imagine the original, infusing it with a modern day perspective or …

Saturday evening. My cab cuts through Yaletown, dipping down under the Granville Street Bridge towards the marina. The heat of the day has begun to wane but the sun is still blazing low in the sky transforming the vehicle into one great entropic bath. My cabbie is going on about how Gregor’s bike-loving City Hall has taken out a vendetta on Vancouver taxis, about how you can barely pick up a fare without some meter-maid writing you up and mailing you a ticket for an illegal stop. They are mad …

It is snowing again here in Vancouver. Giant flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the streetlight. We are now into our sixth consecutive week of uncharacteristic and rather unsettling weather patterns. Last week we experienced something called a temperature inversion where it was 27 degrees Celsius on the ski hills and minus eight in the city creating a fog that made skyscrapers disappear into thin air.
Strange times indeed. My thoughts tonight are further derailed by an advertisement, on the back cover of a magazine that splays itself across our …

There are people wandering along the side of the freeway.
This is my first impression upon our arrival in Beijing. It strikes a deep set horror in me. Caught in the headlights, choked on the edge of the 10 lanes that spew out an air that you wear like another layer of skin, they look displaced, lost, left behind.
My god, I think to myself, 1.3 billion is too many; China’s population is supersaturated; the levee has broken; people are spilling out everywhere.

“Ladies and Gentlemen, Greenland is melting!”
This was how Lorraine Gauthier and Alex Quinto introduced themselves at this year’s ICOGRADA in Seattle. It was early in the conference and the first statement that truly made us sit up and take notice. We would learn that the pair had worked on Bruce Mau’s exhibit Massive Change, a massive undertaking unto itself tackling the world’s most critical problems from a designer’s perspective. They then went on to create Work Worth Doing, a design studio “working at the …

I have just returned home and begun an intensive recovery that is befitting of the work hard / play hard ethic with which I tackled these past four days at ICOGRADA’s Design Week in Seattle. The news has been on the television all evening: looping footage of the escalating tension between Israel and the Hezbollah; of blown out Lebanese neighbourhoods and clips of Anderson Cooper chasing after the next ground zero. After dinner, we rent Syriana, remembering its scenes of a claustophobic and heavily armed Hezbollah-occupied Beirut; trying to make …

This past summer, on the balmy shores of Lake Huron, I took part in a wine tasting where the libations in question were all by the same wine maker, they were all from the same grape and all bottled in the same year. The defining difference between the three bottles was one of geography. The first bottle had been cultivated from the grapes on the southern hillside of the winery; the second bottle’s fruit had matured in the valley while the last bottle had …

“The most beautiful chord is made from dischord” -Heraclitus
On May 29, 1913, ‘The Rite of Spring’, performed by Diaghiler’s inimitable Ballet Russes made its world premiere at Paris’ Théatre des Champs Elysées. The physically unnatural choreography accompanied by the atonal, rhythmically ambiguous music of Igor Stravinsky was too much for the audience’s sensibilities. Hissing and booing grew to such a volume that the dancers were unable to hear their cues and the performance eventually dissolved into a state of chaos and rioting in the theatre. …

Climbing into the back of the pickup truck on the dusty street, a trio of tribes women surround us wearing clothes of bright yellows, magentas and cyans, and black hats decorated with jingling tokens and coins. Their smiles are stained red with bettlenut juice and they thrust toward me their handfuls of bracelets and scarves all the while whispering under their breath the mantra on their true intent: “Opium….o..p..i..u..m..”
We were leaving Muang Xing in the north of Laos, thirteen miles south of the Chinese border. This was one of the …

There was little coverage to be found in the mainstream media prior to the release of the independent mockumentary It’s All Gone Pete Tong. Not that it deserved to be overlooked. The movie, about an Ibiza deejay, Frankie Wilde, who has to deal with going deaf, is not your average party flick. Picking up awards at a number of festivals, it is beautifully filmed and touches on a far deeper level than just spinning records and snorting lines. There is redemption in this movie. …