After Ottawa, we went back and spent two nights in Vancouver. We stayed at a century-old, not-too-expensive place called the Sylvia Hotel, next to the water at English Bay Beach.

I’d been planning to meet up with my writer friend Bill Gibson, but as it happened, the page proofs for his next novel arrived at the same day we did, and he only had about three days to fix them, so we couldn’t connect. His two recommendations: Japadogs and the Douglas Coupland show at the VAG (Vancouver Art Gallery).

I had some doubts, but I did get a Japadog on the street—these are gourmet Japanese sausages, many levels above what you expect from street food. Bill loves Japanese things anyway, you might say it’s a cyberpunk country, with the Uniqlo clothes and the Muji housewares. While in Vancouver, Sylvia and I went to one of the best sushi restaurants ever, a place called Tojo’s.

The VAG museum is really a nice place, so European-feeling and civilized. A huge gray stone Victorian pile with a lovely patio cafe, no dirt, no Muzak, pleasant staffers, good food. Sometimes in Canada I’d get the feeling that in the US we’re living like wild animals.

Douglas Coupland lives in Vancouver, the author of Generation X and numerous other novels. One of an aging author’s last resorts is to become a visual artist—like Henry Miller or Lawrence Ferlinghetti, for that matter, me. (Yesterday I revamped my paintings site, making it mobile friendly! Coupland is taking this route with characteristic éclat and élan. I’d had some doubts about his very large show—as well as about the Japadogs—but it’s great. It consists of various rooms filled with riffs he’d done on one art historical theme or another. The one shown above it kind of a masterpiece, a Cubist composition including Twitter icons and such.

Coupland also had a couple of rooms of Lego constructions. This one kind of nails the uniformity of life in a suburban development. Sure this is a stale, whipping-a-dead-horse kind of theme, but the realization of it as identical Lego houses with identical Lego cars is kind of perfect.

And there’s a very funny room of repurposed objects expressing “Canadianness.” Like a locked freezer with a pool of blood on the floor under it, or couches with Hudson’s Bay plaid coverings.

And a really wonderful display, right in the first room, the walls lined with thin gray shelves, and lined up on the shelves are a zillion little bright bits of … plastic crap … that Coupland’s amassed, like parts of toys, or packaging, or game pieces, or wrappers, each of them just so, just sitting there, not attached, they drifted in and landed here, like debris on a beach by the ocean of the Real, and who’s to stop the work’s owner from nudging them or rearranging them, the road goes on forever and the party never ends. (I’m only showing a detail of the work here.)

And a room of Mondrian-like works with those 2D postal barcode thingies in the corners, I think they’re called QR codes. Not all of Coupland’s pastiches work—for instance, his two or three attempts to mimic Roy Lichtenstein’s Ben Day dot mirrors are weak. At times you get a sense that he just put in every single thing he’s ever done into the show. (Clearly any snarkiness on my part is authorial envy.) The overall impact of the show is massive, and I think it’ll get big play when it travels from Vancouver down into the US.

Coupland included a large outdoor sculpture of his head, called “Gumhead,” and people were encouraged to stick wads of chewed gum onto it. Kind of great. So interactive. Andy Warhol would have liked the show, and in fact Coupland speaks of himself as a Pop artist, and he even had a piece consisting of abbot a dozen of blond wigs sandwiched between two sheets of glass—wigs like our man Andy wore. I can’t resist mentioning that Marc Laidlaw and I wrote a story about Andy online, it’s called “The Andy Warhol Sand Candle.”

Wandering around Vancouver we came across what you might call a “floatplane airport” in the harbor, with planes buzzing off every few minutes. Fun to watch from the grassy, civilized waterfront park nearby.

We also hit a tourist-attraction spot called Granville Island, really not that great, and without many locals around, but I got a few photos, like these vines dangling from the roaring overhead Granville bridge. And there was a great food market.

Mysterious art project seen through a window of the Emily Carr University of Art at one end of the island.

And a big buoy or float hauled up from the sea to be an art object.

Heading south from Vancouver on I-5, pounding the Red Bull, we nearly got killed in the insane rainy-day traffic in unbelievably congested Seattle. Switched over to a mellower back road Route 9, leading to a little town called Sandy. I had this moment of Coupland-initiated Pop Art ecstasy walking around the mall parking lot at sunset by our motel. Seen through art-eyes, there’s great beauty and semiotic fun in the so-familiar iconography of the North American sprawl. A motor boat on a trailer with the low golden clouds! Photo taken with an iPhone, yes! Thank you, Doug, for opening my eyes, to this flash of ecstasy.

Then on to Bend, Oregon, which has become something of an outdoor mall, and down into the sparsely populated Klamath Falls, , one of those lifeless, emptied out country towns. This is a Klamath Falls alley. My Louisville high-school pal, Mike Dorris, who later became a famous author, had some Native American ancestors that hailed from the Klamath area. Modocs. There’s even a town called Dorris nearby I’m always a little mournful when I think of Dorris, as he’s not alive anymore. I wish he was still here. By now he’s missed out on a lot.

The streets of Klamath Falls were empty, with some cool old Art Deco buildings, like this one, the Wilson Building, with pine cones and cow skulls. I always tell Sylvia I want to resettle into a town like this, and she shudders, and I think of Wm. Burroughs’s phrase about his travels through South America in Yage Letters, “nightmare fear of stasis.”

And then we got into a lovely drive across high desert fruited plains towards Mt. Shasta in the golden late afternoon light, staring at that mountain for 60 miles driving towards it, feeling like Neal Cassady and Luanne Henderson, bombing along the two-laner, road trip paradise, what a thing to see a mountain from 60 miles away. I’m so happy/lucky to still be around, running one more trip like this. At the end of the day we reached for good old Weed, California, home of the vintage Hi-Lo Motel and Diner. Fabulous Weed. I always try to stay there, the town name tickles my fancy, and it’s right near the base of sacred Shasta.

And now back to the Los Gatos library. Home, sweet home.

I’m still mentally processing our roadtrip/plane-trip in Canada last month. And generating a few more posts. Today’s post is about the totem poles we saw in Canada.

“Beak Totem,” oil on canvas, August, 2014, 16” x 20”. Click for a larger version of the painting.

Dig the beak on this totem god. I’m not sure what kind of bird he is. Eagle? I just finished painting him today. The background is drawn from a sunset view over Lac Desert, the place that I talked about in the previous post. If you want to buy “Beak Totem,” check out the price-list on my Paintings page.

While in Ottawa, we went to the Canadian Museum of History, all kinds of stuff in there. The place was formerly called the Museum of Civilization. We focused on the First Nations art, like masks and totem poles, some of them antique, some of them newer pieces made by Native Americans, mostly on the west coast of Canada.

I really liked this sculpture of a sinister beaver god, made by the Haida artist Jim Hart in 1993. The object is meant to be a stand on which to place a chief’s coffin.

A side note, we saw the first-ever Canadian stamp, and it has a beaver on it. The Algonquin man, Don, who was our fishing guide told up in Lac Desert, told us a funny beaver story. At certain times of the year, beavers travel, going across the land looking for a new pond or creek to make their own. Don saw a beaver in his backyard, looking over his spring for possible colonization. Don chased the beaver off by brandishing his Whipper Snipper weed cutter. The beaver slapped his tail (their method, in the water, of alerting fellow beavers to danger) and then banged his nose on the ground—in a frustrated attempt to dive. And then the beaver moved on.

I’m very big on crow masks. Those giant beaks! I love fairy tales about crows and ravens as well. If I was ever reincarnated my three top choices are: crow, brown pelican, and a Big Sur cow.

Carving of a fish.

The Canadian Museum of History has a really large hall on one side, with ceiling that’s several stories high. About thirty totem poles are on display here, most of them dating from the late 1800s, which was the heyday of totem-building in the Pacific Northwest. The heyday only lasted a for a few decades.

Before the traders arrived, the west coast Native Americans were carving stone or wooden figurines with primitive knives. But then – then the sailing ships came, and the strangers brought steel axes. And—wow! Huge totem poles, from Oregon to Alaska!

But the traders brought syphilis and smallpox. And the missionaries banned the natives’ religion. The world they knew by heart become someone else’s “New World.” And the white man carried the totem poles off to museums.

I’ve always wanted to write an SF story based on this scenario, and these days I’m working on such a story with Bruce Sterling—the quote above is taken from a draft. In the story, some aliens bring humanity some incredibly powerful tools, and we create amazing stuff, and then it ends with unexpected outcomes.

A view of that pole I painted. One of the totem poles in the museum had a note saying that they’d helpfully repaired the pole, moved it to the museum, and given the Native American village a reproduction of the pole—cast from plastic, I think.

I saw a giant salmon on one totem pole. You see beavers, frogs, wolves, crows, eagles and bears as well. Plus the legendary bird they call a thunderbird—the thunderbird is a little like Jove or Thor, he beats up storms with his wings and sends out lightning bolts.

As a side note, my brother’s wife Joanie has a few nice pieces of Inuit art in her cabin. Like this seal. I remember carving a wooden seal in shop in the eighth grade. I didn’t make mine curvy enough. I liked holding this stone Inuit seal. A power object. A little sculpture like this is in some sense like a phrase or an image or a paradoxical bit of logic—a tradition-polished thought that you can caress and ponder.

A nice curved ramp in some dusty recess of the Canadian Historical Museum.

And a great mural, Morning Star, on the ceiling of the big totem-pole hall, by native artist Alex Janvier. Here’s a video clip of the unveiling in 1993.

Kitwancool by Emily Carr. 1928. Oil on Canvas. About 32″ x 40″. At Vancouver Art Gallery.

In the first half of the twentieth century, the artist Emily Carr, working around Victoria in British Columbia, did some really wonderful paintings that included totem poles and First Nations art. On our way back home, we saw several of Emily Carr’s paintings in Vancouver Art Gallery, and in the past (on an earlier trip to the Northwest) we saw a bunch of them at the art museum on the island of Victoria.

Here’s the photo that I used as a model for my totem pole painting—I didn’t want to post this image right next to my painting, as the full-blown funky original blows me out of the water. This said, I’m happy with the way mine came out. I think I’ll do a bigger totem pole painting next week, drawing extra inspiration from Emily Carr on this next one.

We drove up to Vancouver and flew to Ottawa. Met my brother there and went up to a cottage on a lake called Lac Desert. Deserted, but no desert!

Nice to be so totally off the grid.

I played with the dogs and they got hyper. Love that crazed, rolling eye.

The only way to get to the cottages was by boat, and they had a generator for power—it went off around 9:30 at night.

“Dog UFO Gub” acrylic and oil on canvas, July, 2014, 40” x 30”. Click for a larger version of the painting.

Getting totally out of sequence for just a minute, here’s a painting that I almost finished in July, right before our trip, and which I just finalized today. I used a new technique for it—I made a squiggly abstract underpainting with quick-drying acrylic paint, then I covered that with a white haze/glaze of acryulic paint, and then put some free drawings on top with thick oil paint. The underlying subdimensional reality in the background. And in the embossed oily top world we see my dog Arf, a UFO, and the spotted gub who stars in my novel The Big Aha. Also an infinity sign in the sky. I find it pleasing to look at. More info on my Paintings page.

We saw a beetle with really long antennae. My brother’s new wife Joanie said these beetles bite, and they like to eat wood. I didn’t touch him with my bare fingers, instead used the ever-present all-purpose cloth hankie I carry in my pocket.

The cabin we were in belongs to Joanie’s family, she’s been coming there for seventy years. Love the slanting afternoon sun on the red doors under the bar.

She had three cool decoys, I think the local Algonquin Indians made them.

My brother Embry and I did a little fishing—this one went back in the water. On two days we went out with an Algonquin guide, a man whom Joanie had known for about fifty years.

I almost caught a pike, a really nice kind of big Canadian lake fish. The epic had four acts: (1) I hook him, about two feet long, get him close to the boat, he’s fighting and thrashing and twists free of the hook. Should have used a net, but we didn’t have one.

(2) Boat back to Embry and Joanie’s cottage, have lunch, rest, and return to this same beautiful little inlet off the intricate fractal river/lake waterways with a net. Our guide Don hooks a pike, maybe the very same one. I get the net, Don reels him in—after letting him run out the line three or four times, tiring him—I get the net half around the pike, the lure snags on the net, the pike twists free.

(3) The next morning Embry and the guide go out without me and return with… “A perch,” Sylvia tells me. “I think it was a big perch.” But, no, it’s a pike! Don cooks him for our dinner, breading him and frying him in chunks in bacon grease, it’s good to eat him.

(4) That evening I motor back to the special inlet with Embry and Don, and I use the same lure that Don used, but the original Magic Pike isn’t there.

The lake water wasn’t all that cold at Joanie’s, and the water had that limp, kind of jelly-like smoothness of fresh water. I went swimming every morning.

They had one antenna with a wireless connection, and we’d walk over to the little log building where it lived, the “temple of the internet” and get our fix. They had cool old junk hanging on the walls in there, just like at Dick Scheinman’s house on the Lost Coast.

Not that anything important was coming in. But at this point we’re so much in the habit of checking email, Twitter, Facebook, etc., that it feels like basic life support.

[This is a cast aluminum house-shaped sculpture we saw in Vancover in the harbor. More about Vancouver in a later post.]

While I was in Vancouver and on the plane to Ottawa, and at the lake, I read Roadside Picnic, the late 1970s Russian SF novel by Boris and Arkady Strugatsky—I’ve heard about it for years, but hadn’t read it, and now I’d picked up a new edition at Powell’s Books in Portland.

A really admirable book, starting with the great premise that some aliens stopped on Earth, as if for a roadside picnic, and left all sorts of debris in a “Zone” they polluted. And the stuff is, for us, incredibly useful and terminally incomprehensible. The Strugatsky boys (and their English translator) made up lots of cute names for the debris. Happy ghosts, empties, golden sphere, grinder, bug traps.

The book has an exhilirating, heart-breaking ending. It’s a masterpiece.

In my current lost-in-the-woods state regarding my next novel, I naturally start thinking that I might learn some lessons from Roadside Picnic.

The miracles in the book are intriguing and staggering, but they’re kind of peripheral. The very fact that the miraculous alien tech isn’t spelled out makes it that much more alluring. The Strugatsky boys leave you the room in which to dream. Borges’s Tlön, Uqbar, Orbum Tertius was similarly sketchy and suggestive.

The emphasis is always on character—with a lot of repeating inner monologues. What I call wheenk. The wheenk is really the core of the book. I typically have a higher action/wheenk ratio than in Roadside Picnic. But perhaps readers like a lower ratio than the one I’m typically using.

And then I read a travel book in the cottage, Evelyn Waugh, A Bachelor Abroad: A Mediterranean Journal. Written in 1929, after Waugh’s novels Decline and Fall and Vile Bodies. Great fun. Love his style, his dry wit, his snobbery.

This is a classic found-in-a-summer-cabin book, a nice clean hardback first edition, inscribed by the original owner on December 25, 1933. Great to spend a week outside of time.