I first heard the phrase while living in Oregon in the mid-1980's.  In general the word “Californication” was not aimed at current or former residents of the Golden State themselves, but towards local residents who wanted to remake their own landscape in its image.  One night at a drawn-out urban planning meeting, I heard a worried homeowner exclaim “This gated golf course housing development is the last straw in the Californication of the Willamette Valley!” heads nodding around the room in agreement.  What so upset Oregonians then, and soon after, residents of Idaho, Washington and Montana with them, was that their fellows could so blithely trade their own best cultural, architectural and landscape values for a shallow version of the San Fernando Valley, Concord, or Santa Clara, and what hurt worse, that a ready nearby market existed to buy it.   At a time when London has taken the lead as the creative centre for fashion and music, the US Sunbelt is the location of key research and economic action, when new pop culture and dining trends arrive from Asia, what is the continuing lure of the mythology of California that prompts us to remake ourselves, and our home province, in its image?  

A life-long Californian before moving here when his wife received an appointment at UBC in 1991, Vancouver author and editor David Beers agrees that while it has little basis in reality, “Californication does represent our aggregate longings, and can really shape things.”  Californication is a state of mind, not a mass migration in search of greener pastures.  It is not the actual possession of that state’s driving license which functions like a passport, but the passive reception of a set of symbols and values that can apply to anything from restaurant menus and the movie business through to the forms of houses and cities.  The most recent release by the Red Hot Chili Peppers is called Californication, and the word is entering the language as a synonym for turning paradise into something tacky.  There is a kind of sordidness in the very title “Californication,” a sexual act that may or may not be consensual, but which certainly carries a burden of guilt and shame that outlives its garish first pleasures.

We get it all from California, but usually temper it here, make it less outrageous, tweed it up a bit.  Culturally, BC stands for British California.  We’ve got babes on blades, but they are less bronzed, less tall, less loud.  Californication prompts a new juice bar on every trendy corner, but they nearly all serve drinks made from frozen concentrate, not from fresh fruit -- inconceivable in California itself. At the condo project named 1000 Beach (whose actual street address is 990 Beach, a classic Canadian fuzzification) the developer and US-born architect Californicate with palm trees planted out front, plus a direct view to the lipo-suctioned thighs and tightened tummies of residents seen from below, courtesy of their glass-bottomed swimming pool at streetside.  Wraps are but the latest of continuing waves of food and restaurant fads coming from to Terminal City from SoCal, and a telling cultural recipe in their own right:  first take corn tortillas from Mexico, bland them in the white flour versions of Cal-Mex cuisine, then take ALL the spice and flavour out, wave a few Asian ingredients around and presto -- a flat, round and flexible world food is born.   We have preening body culture on Kitsilano Beach, but the body-builders and volleyball players there use weaker steroids than their heroes on Venice Beach.  And then there is Robson Street, our Cloverdale Rodeo Drive.

At first, Californication can seem like so much lifestyle frippery, but it can have enormous social and economic impact.  Just ask someone contributing to the one billion dollar and mounting cost of our leaky condo disaster, the direct result of an entire design and construction industry applying California concepts uncritically, without adaptation.  Today, British Columbia is being Californicated at an increasing pace.  Our finest seaside natural redoubts have been given over to hulking trophy houses, mountain valleys fill with sprawl and strip excrescence, our fashion, food, drug and body cultures are shaped by that Wiltshire Boulevard linkage of 90120 with South Central.  

What is even more remarkable is the fact that unlike the situation in the American Pacific Northwest – where the idea of Californication was first invented -- these shifts are not sparked by a large in-migration into BC of Californians themselves, but operates almost entirely at the level of cultural symbolism, a freely chosen set of visuals combining with actions.  Californication is us.  To understand the range of influences and impacts of the Californication of BC, we need  a critical “disaggregation” of how it represents “our longings” by means of a tour of some of its frontiers.

California Uber alles

Uber Alles California

Zen fascists will control you

Hundred percent natural,

You will jog for the master race

And always wear the happy face.

-“California Uber Alles”

  Dead Kennedys, 1979

LIFESTYLE FASCISM

By some process of psychic self-preservation, I found myself quietly humming along to the lyrics of the above old Dead Kennedys tune in a rear seat of a float plane, enroute to a nearly-completed resort on the west coast of Vancouver Island. This choice of private soundtrack might have been prompted by the presence of the epoxied grin of snow boarding champion Ross Rebagliati in the seat next to me, the goofus babble of Much Music’s Terry David Mulligan in the row ahead, or the soft sell of Reef Point developer Mark Consiglio in the row behind.  The whole adventure had started a few hours earlier, at a fashion show for Roots at their flagship store on Robson Street.  There Rebagliati and others had modeled some of the newest lines of regular guy’n’gal clothes for the successful Canadian retailer.  More spectacular was fellow celeb model and Toronto R&B recording artist Deborah Cox, whose red leather jacket fit so tightly it could have passed as a brightly-coloured skin graft.  The unity of singer with Roots clothes begged questions about whether she had served as designer’s mannequin for the whole line of jackets, or whether a custom version was crafted for the fashion show, followed by wearing it the next day by her performance at the 1999 Lilith Fair. `

During the media lunch after the Roots fashion show, I was invited to take the last seat on a float plane junket to the Reef Point condo development near Ucluelet.   After a drawn out approvals and construction process, plus a change of ownership, Reef Point Resort had entered into a marketing agreement with Roots.  There was a exchange of promotion and symbols here, with the clothes chain’s reputation providing a young and conservative-hip gloss to Reef Point, in return for supernatural West Coast visuals and promotional use of the resort by Roots managers, shills and guests.  This conjunction of celebrity, lifestyle and hard sell is what prompted my memories of “California Uber Alles” by the Dead Kennedys.  The harshest critics of Californication have always been Californians themselves, because they had to go through it first.  It is similarly possible for the all-Canadian production which is Roots’ Reef Point to also be a perfect illustration of the idea of Californication. The “lifestyle fascism” criticized in Jello Biafra’s lyric – which seemed punkily overstated at the time – has two decades later emerged as a kind of conventional wisdom:  “Why, of course the sexual ciphers of celebrity impose an imagined lifestyle, which in turn sells boots, coats and condos.”

As we left the float plane for a zippy zodiac boat trip around the southern peninsula of Ucluelet, in order to approach Reef Point from the water, I fantasized about Jello Biafra himself as alternative Roots spokesman, with his well known taste for leather and his inventive and effective use of language and media events.  This entry from the sea showed the physical setting to be sublime, with a dense ring of craggy, snaggy trees leaning around a rocky cove, a west-facing beach at its focus.  As we pulled the zodiac onto the sand, it was quickly apparent that the same praise could not be heaped on the buildings of Reef Point.   These are split into multiple-unit condos linked by wooden walkways and stand-alone cabins, eventually to total more than 220 units.  

It was obvious that the natural setting and the Roots marketing glitz were the sizzle here, the buildings themselves being not steak but pork cubes.  One of their stranger touches is the loft master bedrooms, linked by an open bridge over the living room to a wooden pad dominated by a large soaker tub in front of a picture window.  Saturday night baths now promise to become a highly visible public ritual as the density of the development increases with future construction.  The other ritual at Reef Point will apparently be shopping, as at the conjunction of the walkways is a café and shops featuring Roots products in crinkly tin-covered mock-industrial sheds. New shops shaped in the form of redundant fish plants; an erotic frisson for modest and plainly detailed high-end shacks; low rent stars as catalysts to signing that sales contract: the Californication of Ucluelet is well underway.   

Roughin’ it in the great outdoors

Guidebooks tell us where to go

Winnebago Warriors

Littered campgrounds, folding chairs

Feed Doritos to the bears

Honey, quick, the Polaroid

Kill some fish down by the creek

Hang their picture by the sink

Show your grandson who’s the boss

-Winnebago Warrior

 Dead Kennedys, 1979

REAL ESTATE REFUGEES

Down at the end of the road in Tofino, Californication is just as apparent.  The focus for this has been an off-and-on proposal for a miniature golf course, requiring the demolition of several worthy old houses on main street as the highway winds into the centre of town.   Whether or not it will proceed is unsure, but the mere fact that it was seriously proposed how much things have changed here.  Tofino was first a pilgrimage point on the counter-cultural ant trail, with ecological and outdoor recreation activities extending its tourism base over the past dozen years.  With Middle Beach Lodge, the Wickinnannish Inn and other high end properties, Tofino in the past few years seemed well on the way towards also catering to the peculiar peripatetic symbiosis of backpackers with five star luxury travel people who populate many of the world’s most interesting small destinations.  These two groups both travel for ecological and cultural experiences, and revel in the small scale and underdeveloped, but too often close behind them comes a legion of Winnebagos, minivans and SUV’s hauling off-road bike trailers, a much wider group whose infrastructure and entertainment demands destroy the very natural and cultural qualities that first attracted this pioneering combination of rich and poor tourists.  

If a miniature golf development, then why not a water slide, laser tag emporium or shopping mall?   Californication -- with automotive egalitarianism and equality of consumer lifestyle at its heart – is relentlessly middle class, middlebrow and middle path, and quite capable of transforming even so powerful and unique a place as Tofino into something resembling Oregon’s Cannon Beach.   Canada has but only six miles of developable west-facing, sand-surf beach near a road, while the United States has 1500 miles, Mexico even more: watch the Winnebago Warriors win.

Tofino’s Chesterman Beach, like Whistler and much of the Gulf Islands, is one of those rare BC locations to actually receive Californians as investors-cum-residents, be it part of the year or all of it.  Houses built only a dozen years ago there are bulldozed as knockdowns, replaced by larger and more ostentatious abodes.   Recent developments like the South Chesterman Beach and Rosie Point projects by developer Chris Lefebvre recognize where their market is: “Most of the buyers by the time we finish the second phase will likely be from the Pacific Northwest and California.”  It is revealing that as the Salt Spring Island logging protests heated up in the past few weeks, protestors planned to seek support from the Hollywood stars with houses there, including Al Pacino and Robin Williams.  Who knew this before?  A single road near Sooke now includes both actress Sharon Stone and rock singer Stevie Nicks as residents for significant portions of the year.  How many others?

These high profile purchasers are but the leading edge of what continues to be one of the biggest forces on urban development in British Columbia, the real estate refugee.  Entirely too much was made of the handover of Hong Kong to the Chinese in 1997 as motivating force for the large number of its residents who migrated here in the 1990’s.  Many Vancouverites mistakenly think that their new Hong Kong-born neighbours driving prestigious cars and purchasing high end condos or houses are all wealthy entrepreneurs and industrialists.  Not so.  In fact, many of them are former taxi drivers and school teachers, especially those who purchased their apartments under a Thatcherite program to privatize the Crown Colony’s public housing.  At the frenzied height of the Hong Kong real estate boom (and NOT co-incidentally, the height of the emigration boom to Canada) a well-located two bedroom flat could be cashed in for over one million Canadian dollars, more than enough for a fine house, car and living off the proceeds of investing the remainder of this real-estate-boom cash-out. 

With the dot.com-inspired run-up of housing prices in the better zones of Los Angeles, Silicon Valley, San Francisco, not to mention ex-Californians now looking for other Pacific Northwest homes due to the increasing Californication of both Portland and Seattle, even the most expensive of our urban and recreation properties seem ridiculously under-priced by contrast.  David Beers’ most recent book chronicles how defense spending primed the current Silicon Valley boom, but suggests in an era of real estate refugees “Vancouver’s great attraction to Californians and the world is lifestyle, but these days that is critically important; there may be no need for any other infusion.”  We may soon have many more Californians around, but Beers suggests that after settling here, they may be more likely to protest than promote this cultural earthquake.

The most-thoroughly Californicated landscape in British Columbia may be the northern Okanagan Valley.  Highway 97 north from downtown Kelowna is one enormous franchise-fest, a collection of imported concept retail dreck and effluvia only rivalled in its completeness by the strip which pours north out of Nanaimo.  Landscaping is minimal but signage is maximal on both strips, and their enormous width, flanking parking lots and non-stop traffic make them impenetrable barriers to pedestrians.   With only a few patches of winding road and vestigial orchards to break its progression, this vile slash continues from Kelowna to Vernon and on through Armstrong.  In the 1940’s and 50’s California pioneered the triumph of automotive accommodation above all other urban values, and today—with its innovations spreading around the world to the point that we forget their California credentials—addresses in the Southland are still given in reference to conjunctions of strip malls and freeways (“I live at La Cienaga and the Santa Monica Freeway”).  Community? Neighbourhoods?  Go with the flow, baby, I’m out of here…

The southern Okanagan is now the focus of the most intense development pressures, and its current choices can be boiled down to one between a future as either the San Fernando or the Napa Valley, California uber alles.  Residents of the Okanagan Valley from Peachland south are quick to point out their lower level of uglification than the north.  They rightly celebrate the more dramatic collisions of rock, lake, forest and garden which characterize theirs, one of Canada’s most sublime climates and landscapes.  Local orchard owners wanting to cash out and developers wanting to exploit up-zoned lands would replicate the northern Okanagan’s linear strips and housing tracts from Penticton to Oliver to Osoyoos, and fill them up with largely retired real estate refugees from Calgary, the United States and the Lower Mainland.  The revocability of the Agricultural Land Reserve demonstrated in the fractious skirmish several years ago near Kamloops will wither in comparison with the battles to come in the Okanagan, especially with a change of provincial government.  Similarly, the long fight over a golf course/housing development in Naramata shows how few planning tools residents of the Okanagan now actually possess to control valley-wall-to-valley-wall development.

Resisting this future are the wineries, tourist operators and regional planners who suggest the maximum long-term benefit – even, especially, economic benefit – will be to preserve the orchards and vineyards, accentuate existing heritage and landscape values, and impose design controls to improve the quality and coherence of new construction.  This alternative future never comes without a reference to the Napa Valley, which as recently as the mid-1970’s was as low key and Ma and Pa as Oliver or Naramata is today.  Calgary architect and oenophile Richard Lindseth describes his design for the Tinhorn Creek Winery near Oliver as a “California concept,” and is encouraged by other wineries such as Borrowing Owl following his lead with expensive—if largely imported—architectural imagery. Given this architectural direction, its vintners might think about changing the name to “Borrowing” Owl. Possessing tight planning and design controls inconceivable in the BC Interior today, and coupled with an increasing commitment to high end tourism, the Napa Valley is now the world’s most successful wine-based tourism region, and local landowners have never done better.  The southern Okanagan’s Valley is dramatically more beautiful than Napa’s, its sage-brushed hills, lakes and forests afford a wider range of recreational possibilities, but local resistance to the limits on individual property rights means that the area will remain Ma and Pa, but Ma and Pa with new money.

This issue is born out with a vignette about Harry McWatters, the patriarch of the Okanagan wine industry and the creative force behind countless industry quality-control and marketing initiatives.  McWatters recently sold his interests in the company he founded—Sumac Ridge Wineries near Summerland—to industry giant Vincor.  Touring a major addition to his winery under construction several years ago, I asked Harry if he had used an engineer in his expansion design and layout: “Of course, you gotta have an engineer, or the thing might fall down.”  I then pointed out avoidable problems in site layout that would restrict tour bus access, internal visitor flow conflicts, and the wasted promotional possibilities of blank walls which now face busy Highway 97 immediately adjacent, and asked if he had hired an architect:  “I don’t need some goddamned architect to tell me how to run my business -- I’ve had a hammer in my hands since I was 12 years old!” replied McWatters.  Anyone interested in the future of the Southern Okanagan should spend some time in Vernon or Armstrong to see the cumulative effect of a lot of guys who have had hammers in their hands since they were 12.

It’s the edge of the world

And all of western civilization

The sun may rise in the East 

At least it settles in the final location

It’s understood that Hollywood 

Sells Californication

-“Californication”

  Red Hot Chili Peppers, 1999

HOLLYWOOD NORTH

Depending on one’s point of view, the biggest economic achievement or most obscene cultural disaster caused by the Californication of British Columbia is the current state of our film industry.  It can be more properly seen as both of these at once, a windfall of work for our trades unions, bit-players and sound stages, but simultaneously a parade of hugely lame productions whose key creative decisions are made elsewhere, a growing mountain of dramatic series, TV movies and minor features staggering for their near-total lack of intellectual ambition, engagement with real issues, or pride of place.  The high-tech belt west of Ottawa tried to be known as “Silicon Valley North” without much success, and Toronto for a while toyed with the same name, but there is no question now that the BC film industry has truly become Hollywood North.  

The border is seamless for countless L.A.-based producers, writers and directors, but few here or there debate the assertion that we are mainly a low-dollar job shop for them, albeit a particularly talented and friendly one.  A worrisome model for our other emerging cultural industries, our film industry is not just LIKE Hollywood, it IS Hollywood: the same structure, values, ideas, even people and companies. The Canada-US Auto Pact and the follow-on sections of the Free Trade Agreement ensure that high quality research and product development jobs stayed in Ontario and Quebec for our continentally-integrated automotive industry. With no such protections for film and television production, we have allowed ourselves to be permanently typecast as hewers of filmsets and drawers of four-hour union minimum call-out paycheques.   As any writer knows, naming is important, and with Hollywood North we have now got exactly what we wished for. 

Ian Caddell—executive editor of local film industry organ Reel West Magazine and Hollywood feature writer for the Geogia Straight—maintains that the current avalanche of Hollywood-controlled production has benefit to local creators.  He cites the low film-equipment rental rates, minimum cost post-production facilities, availability of contact-rich trades jobs, all of these used by independent local producers and only made possible because the industry is thriving and can afford such in-kind generosity.   Caddell asserts that the Hollywood-based producers and companies “have to give something back,” but also worries about both government intervention in creative affairs as well as diminution of the public subsidies that sparked the film boom: “Look at Alberta -- the Klein government tried to leave it completely to the private sector and abolished the Alberta Film Development Corporation -- it nearly killed their entire industry.” 

Ironically, the current flowering of Hollywood North is in part the product of the particular investment strategy for public funds by a social-democratic government.  Film-maker and director of SFU’s Praxis screenwriting institute Patricia Gruben notes that if BC film and television production has been Californicated, “You can’t blame the individuals working in the industry.” She instead suggests that “The provincial government has been blindsided; they just didn’t understand the cultural issues.”  Provincial government production subsidies, training programs, tax relief and the like for largely US-dominated film and television production now constitute 90 percent of all cultural spending by the government of British Columbia.  Culture Minister Ian Waddell convened a press conference last year to announce that the total of all British Columbia film and television production had for the first time topped one  billion dollars, but chose not to mention that the vast majority of this figure is for products with no effective high-level creative input by Canadians.  Ian Caddell and his magazine have long waged a war against Telefilm Canada, which he says views British Columbia as incapable of producing culturally significant films, with the total proportion of their funds spent here only rising from 6% to 9% of total Canadian feature funding through the 1990’s.  Unfortunately, this perception is self-perpetuating, and without significant internal investment we shall remain Hollywood North.

First as cabinet minister, then as premier, Glen Clark was a huge champion of the current system, which allows significant flows of grants through the many film unions who supported his government, while at the same affording him the borrowed charisma of photo ops with Hollywood stars.  BC funds individual artist grants at one of the lowest rates in Canada, offers a pittance for screenwriters and the development of scripts, has nothing at all for high level skill development for directors of photography and production/costume designers (though lots for their unionized assistants), and seems to put cultural priorities last when allocating tax relief subsidy.  With economists predicting a Canadian dollar at least ten cents higher within two years—which would drive some of the California-based productions away as fast as they arrived, no matter what our government does—a distressingly familiar image emerges: a large ship with an expensive union crew and no management, a kind of cultural fast ferry going no-where.   Ian Waddell and Glen Clark: Californicators extraordinaire.

Destruction leads to a very rough road

But it also breeds creation

And earthquakes are to a girl’s guitar

They’re just another good vibration

And tidal waves couldn’t save the world

From Californication

-“Californication”

  Red Hot Chili Peppers, 1999

NEW MYTHOLOGIES

It is important to point out that Californication is an elective affinity, one which is produced in our own hopes, wishes and lifestyles, more than put upon us from without.  There is no campaign from some secret bunker in the Golden State for the hearts, minds and discretionary income of British Columbians, only a long Canadian tradition of lacking confidence in our own best qualities and filling that gap with E-Z Kwik imports.  Of course, BC’s tendency to take cultural cues from our southern neighbours is found in slightly different variations elsewhere in this country.  While British Columbia calls out to be Californicated, Toronto wants to be Newly Yorked again and again, and Calgary begs to be Dallassed  to its cowboy capitalist firmament.  The only thing which may have held Canada together through the past few fractious decades is the fact we cannot get together – in true Canadian fashion – to agree on just which version of the various regional American colonialisms we would like to permanently invite into our home.

As places like British Columbia bypass the industrial era of human development entirely, and turn directly from wealth based on natural resource extraction to an information economy of symbolic analysts, our own economic needs may at last stunt this ongoing cultural colonialism.  It is now in our rational self interest not to download so many of the high paying jobs in design, marketing, cultural production and the like which we implicitly import through the ideas and lifestyle goods from California.  The conventional tools of the liberal state – enforced planning regulations, architectural design review, investments in original cultural production, homegrown marketing initiatives—can only go part way to stem the tide of Californication.  As a mythology, Californication can only be repelled through other, new mythologies.

There are some encouraging signs on the mythological front.  The huge impact of the “I am Joe Canadian” advertising campaign is based on more than its wit and ingenuity as a commercial, but taps into huge reservoirs of latent pride, one of the most powerful of human emotions.  Coming as no surprise to those who note a compensating new commitment to community and identity of place amongst the most information-saturated, it is the hyper-linked, voraciously culture-consuming under-30’s who have cheered the loudest for Joe Canadian, then Rocket Richard.  This is even more impressive coming from a generation who have only known the last quarter century of political and cultural continentalizing (“It should be called ‘Lincoln Continentalizing’” insists a young friend.)  Toronto is now abuzz with a new breed of Canadian nationalist, one that is being noticed by higher-ups because of the centrality of cultural industries to the new economy, an economy which will fail if we cannot establish our own mythmaking.  True to its past, the mythologies that will be generated here in the West may have less to do with the idea of nation than eco-region, or focused rather on the titanic city-state of the Lower Mainland.

Visit some gift and souvenir shops in Vancouver, then find an equivalent sample on your next trip to Seattle.  As demonstrated by what we can buy here for aunt Bertie or the St. Louis sales manager, our mythologizing of Vancouver and BC is entirely visual – photos, calendars, knicknacks adorned with pix – but bereft of anything conceptual celebrating who and what we are.  Our twin city Seattle, by way of contrast, has the confidence to mythologize its raininess, its Gore-tex and Nike fashion sense, its caffeine and microbrew addictions in the keepsakes locals produce and pass on to visitors.  Vancouver, led by its softer media voices and outlets, is so self-consciously trying to trend-monger and be hip that it does not know who it is, and consequently is more willing to import an identity than live one. 

Planners and developers from California and elsewhere flock to marvel at ours, the youngest and densest city on the continent, one that thrives while questioning  conventional urban wisdom from freeways to low density sprawl to de facto racial discrimination, neighbourhood by neighbourhood.  Every time I go to Los Angeles it looks more like Vancouver, with its new rail transit, densifying Wiltshire corridor, and diminished pressure to assimilate new immigrants.  In my experience, Americans – led by Californians – are more able to acknowledge an emerging mythology of place here than are Canadians, and the cruise industry has sent our urban stock sky-high as a desired tourist and living destination from Hyannisport to Marina Del Rey, and soon, Vladivostok to Valparaiso.  

At the risk of importing some new, more subtle virus of Californication, I think we would do well to preserve and enhance those qualities our new visitors find so attractive about us: untrammeled nature, ethnic and lifestyle tolerance, racial and class integration, dynamic public spaces, high living densities, public-health guarantees, quirky cultural production, public safety, a diminished star system and so on.  The default option, the passive path, is simple and found in another Red Hot Chili Peppers’ lyric: “Give it away, give it away, give it away, now!  Give it away, give it away, give it away, now…”

NEW COMMENTARY

I first got to know Michael Sorkin while teaching at UBC in the mid-1980s. My writing was shifting ever more from architectural history to criticism, so I was keen to forge links with a peer, as there were none then in Western Canada.  In the 1980s Sorkin was combining a string of short teaching contracts with a continuous output of criticism, anchored with a regular and high profile gig as architecture writer for the New York urban weekly, The Village Voice.  He gave me two pieces of sage advice about critical writing then, starting a dialogue that lasted until his death from Covid-19 in 2020.

Sorkin told me to get over academic inhibitions about writing for newspapers, general interest magazines and urban weeklies.  “Those outlets are more important than any learned journal or professional press glossy,” he told me, “As architecture critics we have to go where the people are, because ours is a public art.”  Sorkin’s writing uses humour extensively, and often abounds with pop cultural references to music, film, and literature, both high and low. “Trevorino (his favoured name for me), you can be just as smart writing things that your friends will enjoy—it is harder to write this way, but you have the writing talent do it.”  His next suggestion was just as salient “But be forewarned that the architectural profession and its schools talk a big game about supporting criticism, but don’t believe it for a second.  If you are doing your job as a critic there will be those who will try to get you fired,” mentioning his nearly twenty years of separate one-year teaching appointments, not renewed because some departmental noses were regularly put out of joint.  He did not begin receiving fulltime ongoing appointments until his 50s, after laundering his reputation with several years of teaching in Vienna, finding an academic home at the City College of New York, where he continued until his death.

“The Californication of British Columbia” was my summation of the changes in the cultural landscape after a dozen years away teaching architecture in Oregon, Manitoba, Carleton and Toronto.  I was doing occasional arts criticism of various kinds—opera, fringe theatre, urbanism, visual art, travel—for my two ex-Edmontonian contacts at the Globe and Mail, editor-in-chief William Thorsell and arts editor James Adams.  Writing for Western Living as well as the Canadian Architect, Architectural Record and other magazines, while consulting for architects and developers, I gathered material for a synoptic look at the state of B.C.  The Georgia Straight gave me the word count and play necessary for the story, and commissioned some brilliant cartoons for the cover and inside illustration from cartoonist Rod Filbrandt.

The real triggers for the story was encountering a word I had not heard since teaching at the University of Oregon in 1986, in a song and album of that name from the Red Hot Chilli Peppers: Californication.  This led naturally to recalling Jello Biafra’s punk-rock critiques of California—I had seen him and his band “The Dead Kennedys” play while studying at the San Francisco Art Institute in 1979.  I found lyrics from both bands that matched the key sections of my article—fil-making, exurban development, food, lifestyle.  The invitation spontaneously received at a media event for the new Roots store on Robson Street to fly to their new resort that day in Ucluelet on the west coast of Vancouver Island gave me the picaresque opening I wanted.  “The Californication of British Columbia” had a second life when the Postmedia chain of newspapers picked up a shortened version for their various Saturday feature sections.  It was awarded the best arts feature prize in the 2001 Western Magazine Awards, which is judged by my fellow writers.