Feeds:
Posts
Comments

Posts Tagged ‘olympics’

Olympic Excess

Posted in British Columbia, Bruce Byfield, consumerism, olympics, Personal, Uncategorized, Vancouver, Winter Games, tagged , , , , , , , on February 8, 2010| 1 Comment »

Well, that was unexpected.

Passing through downtown Vancouver yesterday on my last errands until the end of the Winter Olympics, I imagined I’d be affected by the games preparations in any number of ways. Not being a sports fan, I thought I might be offended by the waste. I might flee the crowds and the traffic prepared to be a hermit. I might be angry for the sake of the business owners who had to close down because the traffic restrictions mean that their staff can’t get in and they can’t get deliveries. I might even have been blown away by the spectacle and find myself looking forward to the games after all.

What I didn’t expect was to look around and feel that I had been dipped in tacky excess. Everything I saw was so over the top that it might have been orchestrated by Albert Speer.

The first thing that caught my eye were the banners covering a few of the buildings. Do we really need blowups of athletes six stories high? A Canadian flag ditto, covering most of two sides of a building? Boasts that the corporate owner of a building was an Olympic sponsor? Endless urgings to “Go, Canada, Go?”

Descend to the Skytrain stations, and the excess continued. So far as I can figure, three advertisers had each won the privilege of monopolizing a transit station, and responded by covering as much of their station as possible. At Granville, it was Coca Cola, at Burrard, Macdonald’s, and Acer Computers at Waterfront.

Junk food and cheap computers? How does Vanoc square these with the Olympic ideals of athleticism and excellence? And I wonder who first imagined that repeated the same half dozen ads fifty or sixty times in a confined space was effective advertising, instead of an annoyance.

And everywhere, there were the officials and athletes from out of town, wearing their team uniforms that were not only gaudy but usually with the manufacturers’ names as large as the names of the country. Again, the connection to the Olympics eluded me. The out of towners were so gaudy that they might almost have been wearing Hawaiian shirts.

Yet the out of towners were restrained compared to some of the locals. Well over three-quarters were simply going about their Sunday business, but a minority were as gaudy as the out of towners and jingoistic as well, with Canadian flags flying from their cars and the marquees on their buses giving us a “Countdown to Gold” and urging Canadian athletes on. It was like the hockey playoffs, only on a larger scale.

A two year old might be fascinated by all the bright colors and larger-than-life consumerism, but it’s been a while since I was a child. Surrounded by such general tackiness, I could only complete my errands as fast as possible, and get out of the downtown. Except, perhaps, to see the Aboriginal Pavilion, I don’t plan on coming back until after the Olympics, when the city is back to itself.

Read Full Post »

The bid committee and I

Posted in British Columbia, Bruce Byfield, communications, marketing, Personal, Uncategorized, Vancouver, Whistler, writing, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , on January 2, 2010| Leave a Comment »

When the news came that Vancouver would be hosting the 2010 Winter Olympics, I was jogging down from the Stadium-Chinatown Skytrain station to the Yaletown office where I was working. I didn’t hear the announcement, but I heard a cheer go up from the offices on all sounds of me.

Personally, I was surprised. At that point, I had no strong feelings about the Olympics one way or the other. But I had thought that the logistical problems of keeping people moving along the road between Vancouver and Whistler would prevent the bid from being successful. Even more importantly, my own contact with the bid committee hadn’t impressed me much.

About six months earlier, I had applied for a job as a writer on the bid. It wasn’t a position that strongly interested me, but I thought it worth a hour or two of my time to satisfy my curiosity. So, I duly strapped myself into my interview suit, stripped any obvious signs of eccentricity from my person, and presented myself at the Gastown office of the bid committee.

I was interviewed by two women who I quickly classified as marketing and communication workers. That isn’t prejudice; I’ve done similar work myself, after all. But, after a while, you get to know the signs. The two women talked in generalities, and displayed an artificial optimism and enthusiasm at all times. Somehow, I couldn’t imagine them taking part in a casual Friday.

Mostly, the conversation went well enough, so far as conversations during a job interview can ever be said to go well. But when I asked about how the logistical problems might be overcome, the women’s reply boiled down to, “Somehow, everything will work out..” I could also see that, in their minds (and probably on their clipboards), I had set a black mark against my name. That was all right; their replies had cost them points with me, too.

However, two other points were what really disturbed me. First, they said that working on the bid committee would be no guarantee of a continued job if the bid was successful. Since I was sure that the leaders of the committee would land jobs in Vanoc, that seems a lack of loyalty to staff members.

Secondly, as part of the interview, they asked me to go home and write seven or eight pages on how I would promote the Olympics. That is a considerable effort to ask someone to do on spec. Combined with the lack of a guarantee of continuation, I concluded that the request showed a cavalier attitude towards employees. I thought for a couple of days, then phoned the interviewers to say that I would not be responding to their request and that the job no longer interested me.

I have no idea whether those particular women found work with Vanoc. I no longer even remember their names. But it seems to me that their attitudes are echoed in everything I’ve heard from Vanoc ever since, from the feeling that problems would work themselves out to the assumption that local residents will put their lives on hold for the duration of the games next month.

It is not an echo that promotes happy thoughts about how the games will be organized and what the after-effects will be. Frankly, it has kept me from supporting the games ever since. I might talk about the financial and social costs, but behind them is an emotional core of distrust based on this one brief encounter.

This attitude puzzles people from outside the Vancouver area. When I was in Calgary last spring, people were surprised by my lack of enthusiasm. Remembering the Calgary games twenty years and the very different social attitudes in which they took place, everyone assumed that I must be looking forward to the occasion. They were surprised by my lack of enthusiasm, even when I explained my reasons. I’m not sure they ever did understand.

However, I don’t think my attitude is unique in anything other than its origins. No doubt it’s the company I keep, but I’ve found that only one in four – or thereabouts – actually supports the upcoming games. The intial cheering at the news of the bid just doesn’t seem to have lasted.

In fact, I’ve only found one person who defended the games with any passion, and her criticisms were bizarre – she argued that nobody who objected or even questioned the games should use the newly improved highway to Whistler (never mind that she also insisted on the official line that such improvements were not part of the costs of the games). But of eight or nine people in the store, nobody felt like taking her side in the discussion.

Maybe more people will show enthusiasm as the games approach, but, I don’t expect that most people will. The average person in the Vancouver region seems resigned to the games, largely indifferent and if anything mildly hostile, although you wouldn’t know that from the media.

You might say that, for most of us, 2010 will be divided into two parts: enduring the preparations and the games themselves, and the rest of the year. And, like most people, I find myself looking forward to the rest of the year far more than the preparations and the games. If I became dubious earlier than others, it is because I was exposed to the spirit of the games earlier than others.

Read Full Post »

The Vancouver 2010 Aboriginal Art Exhibition

Posted in Aaron Nelson-Moody, aboriginal art, Alano Edzerza, art, art exhibits, British Columbia, Bruce Byfield, Corrine Hunt, Dean Heron, First Nations art, Northwest Coast Art, olympics, Personal, Vancouver, Vancouver 2010 Aboriginal Art Exhibition, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on October 18, 2009| 4 Comments »

I’m not looking forward to the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver. I never watch sports, and I’m concerned about the costs, traffic, and the virtual declaration of martial law during the games. The fact that I once dreamed of being in the Olympics myself only makes me angrier at the travesty that they have become.

Still, I could almost reconcile myself to the games for the sake of all the First Nations art commissioned for them. Some of that art was on display this weekend at the Aboriginal Art Exhibition at Canada Place this weekend, and I thoroughly enjoyed it – even if the lack of organization at the event seems ominous if it is a foretaste of how the games themselves will be run.

Being appreciative of the commissioned art is something you can file under No-Brainer. I mean, what’s not to like about the art? There’re medals with Corrine Hunt designs, commemorative coins by Jody Broomfield. The snowboarding pavilion at Cypress Bowl will have a wall graced with a new work by Dean Heron. GM Place will have a new work by Alano Edzerza, Nat Bailey Stadium a new work by Aaron Nelson-Moody, and the list goes on and on.

After fumbling badly by making the symbol of the game the inukshuk – a symbol that has nothing to do with British Columbia, much less Vancouver – the games organizers have had the sense to commission locally, focusing on less established artists and on members of the Salish nation, whose territory the Vancouver venues are on. I understand that some 45 works of public art will be added to the Lower Mainland as a result of the games, and I consider that an unalloyed good.

Sadly, though, the Olympic organizers fumbled again in their first efforts to bring most of these works to the public. The display was almost completely unpublicized except for newspaper stories just before the event and some Internet transmission. Even then, it was called an exhibition, so that most people arrived unaware that most of the work on display was for sale – an oversight that bitterly disappointed the artists who had taken tables and paid the exorbitant prices charged for parking at Canada Place.

Even worse, the management of the event was haphazard. I heard artists complain that they were unable to set up for credit or debit cards, and the rumor was that the one bank machine in the exhibit hall required a substantial surcharge to use.

And perhaps the worst thing was that, in order to fill up the hall, the organizers seem to have let anyone exhibit who cared to pay for the table. As a result, many tables displayed tourist junk that did not belong in the same exhibit as the commissioned artists.

For me, the incompetence of the organizing was summed up by the sight of two singers on the stage gamely belting out songs to rows of empty chairs, and a snack bar that had closed down at least two hours before the end of the show. Meanwhile, the exhibitors were strolling around talking to each other.

Such poor planning undermines the celebration of the artists. My impression is that the exhibition organizers couldn’t have cared less if the artists were treated with respect.

Perhaps the organizers can learn, but if this is how they put on such a relatively small event, then we should expect chaos during the games themselves. I might be lured downtown to see the aboriginal market at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre, but I, for one, plan to spend the three weeks of the games bunkered down safely in Burnaby, far away from the insanity.

Read Full Post »