New Years with neither nostalgia nor resolutions

I’ve never seen an episode of “That Was the Week That Was,” the British comedy series from the early 1960s often referred to as “TW3.” However, I’ve read that each episode always started with a song whose first lines were, “That was the week that was; it’s over – let it go.” Sitting here six [...]

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11 myths about parrots and their care

Humans have been keeping parrots for thousands of years. Unfortunately, though, most of what the average person thinks they know about parrots is incomplete, inaccurate, or just plain wrong. The result of this ignorance is often the mistreatment of birds, made all the sadder (but no less serious) because it is unintentional.
In the hopes of [...]

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Bill Hudson’s “Raven Opens the Box of Daylight”

You don’t have to dig very deeply into Northwest Coast art to stumble across a representation of Raven stealing the light from the chest where its owner has cached it. Whether you’re looking at a print, a piece of jewelry or a sculpture, in any gallery, you have an almost certain chance of finding [...]

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Working in a mall at Christmas

This year, I have no serious work and nothing more pressing than the wrapping of a few gifts for Christmas Eve. I don’t even have to go outside, except for exercise, which is a relief, because what passes for a blizzard is pelting down on the other side of the window. I’m glad to be [...]

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Prices for Northwest Coast masks

Last month, a friend phoned to ask my advice about the price of a Northwest Coast mask that he had commissioned. The price the artist had quoted seemed high to him, but he was still interested in the mask. Thanks to my frequent gallery browsing – both in person and online — I was able [...]

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Where does artistic collaboration start and end?

During today’s Christmas shopping expedition, I witnessed a short scene that taught me something about my concepts of artistry.
I was in a local gallery dedicated to Inuit and Northwest Coast art. A well-known First Nations artist was working in the back, refurbishing the cedar braid on one of his works in the gallery, and doing [...]

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Should you hire a career coach?

If you’re one of the thousands who have been laid off in the last few months, you might be tempted to use a career coach to help you in your job search. But whether that’s a good idea depends on whom you hire as a coach, and what you expect to get out of the [...]

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12 Tips for Writing Free Software Documentation

For eight years, I made most of my income from technical writing. Not the relatively glamorous technical writing involved with writing articles about free and open source software (FOSS) – glamorous, that is, to those who haven’t done it (those of us who have done it are usually considerably less starry-eyed) — but basic how-tos [...]

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Meeting former students

I was at the Simon Fraser University book store downtown this afternoon when the cashier recognized me as the instructor for a class she had taken over a decade ago. That sort of recognition happens less often than you might expect, although I must have taught five or six thousand students overall. But it does [...]

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Ron Telek’s “Transformation Rattle: Eagle to Wolf”

Ron Telek, the Nisga’a carver, can always be counted on for the unexpected – anything from the disturbingly haunting to the eerily beautiful, and in every form imaginable. I’ve even seen a shaman marionette by him. Our latest acquisition, “Transformation Rattle: Eagle to Wolf” is no exception. Only a handful of other Northwest Coast artists [...]

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