Icon or Eyesore? Frank Gehry’s Living Laboratory

It’s a little hard to find given the trees and the high wall, but there it is, architect Frank Gehry’s Santa Monica family home, smack dab at the corner of 22nd and Washington Streets. Frank and his wife Berta bought their conventional Dutch colonial family home in 1977 and quickly started to tinker with it, adding corrugated steel cladding, chain link fencing and angular protrusions which drastically altered the look of the place.

Burton Cummings: Stand Tall

“I’ve worked on this poetry book for seven years now. It’s finally ready,” says former Guess Who lead singer Burton Cummings about his book of poetry entitled The Writings of B.L. Cummings. The collection of 52 stories in rhyme and free verse is available at www.burtoncummings.com “If it’s on any shelves, it’ll be next to e.e. cummings,” he laughs, pondering a release to book stores. “Then alphabetically, you’ll be first,” I say. “I guess that’s right,” he replies.

Lured to L.A.

Los Angeles is a city where the buzz never stops. It’s a hot and happening place. Sure, the soaring mercury and continuing drought have led to wildfires in the hills around town, but the art scene is equally ablaze. For artists hoping to make it big, it’s increasingly a place to be. And that includes a significant roster of Canadian artists. Megan Abrahams, the editor of Fabrik, a leading Los Angeles art and design magazine, is one of those artists. “The art scene here is thriving,” she says. “

Carving Out a Legacy

Low hanging clouds envelop the Maplewood mud flats, a tidal plain that skirts Burrard Inlet east of the Ironworkers Memorial Bridge. Sam Clemens steps gingerly around the washed-up logs, trying to get abetter view of the western sandpipers that normally reside here. The mud flats are a conservation area now, home to dozens of birds, but Clemens has been here before - decades ago when he was a toddler and the flats were a hippie haven to about 25 artisans, their partners and their children.

Wild Child

It's hard to imagine Canada's chat queen, the princess of gab and arguably British Columbia's favorite broadcaster was a bit of a stinker but there it is. I`m a show-off. I can`t help it,`admits Vicki Gaberaeu, the former host of Gabereau on CBC Radio for 12 years and CTV`s Gabereau Live for eight, and the more wild the situation gets, the wilder I get. It used to drive my mother crazy. `Don`t be so wild, Vicki, she would tell me. Now when I look back on these things, the chances I took and the perilous situations I put myself in, I mean you gotta be a crazy person, but it all ended up quite well.