28 faces of the Beckstar!

Another narcissistic trip down memory lane, in honour of my 28th birthday, quickly pulled together before I go to dance dance dance to some Roger Sanchez tonight. Fun fun!

These photos would be slightly better if I had access to my full photo collection. As it still needs to be liberated from the old condo, I am making do with the small box of photos I have access to. There're still some classics here though - no worries.


1. As legend has it, I was born with my eyes open, and, instead of crying, looked around the room. As my personal version of the legend has it, I then gnawed through my own umbilical cord, stitched my mom up myself, and lit my dad's cigar.



2. All you hipster mustache guys, take note. Unless you're growing this kind of man-stache, you've got nuthin. Also notable: kisses from this whiskered face made me take a lifelong anti-mustache policy. Which maaaay have been broken here or there, as all sworn oaths should be.



3. Awwww, it's me and my mom. She looks really beautiful here methinks. It was her birthday three days ago, so.... yay for her!



4. I completely love this photo. Evidently I was jealous of the attention my baby/younger brother was getting, and so I stole his diaper cream and covered myself in it. A narcissistic bitch from early childhood, the headlines will read.



5. Here's my brother and I with Ollie, a demented fuck of a cockapoo with a taste for blood. After the tenth bite or so, our parents told us that he was "adopted by a family that lived on a farm". I think we all know the real story.



Lucky number 6. Wheeeeeee!



7. This photo rules for a few reasons. Obviously the cool matching hats (mine's under my arm), Cam's freakishly dapper hipster persona, and my 'thumbs-up to camping!' gesture are part of the magic. But the coolest thing about this shot? My shirt, which reads 'Think Young'. As our last name is Young, we found it to be probably the most badass hilarious t-shirt in history.



8. Dad. Cutest baby ever. Grandma.



9. Okay, so here's how dumb kids are. I was actually a pretty smart kid (at least that's what grown-ups kept telling me), and I still came to this bird sanctuary with the express plan to record the bird sounds, study them until their meaning became clear, and then be able to speak duck and rule the pond near my house. I dreamed about this plan for months. Also - that's my oldest friend Melissa there - 24 years and counting!



10. So I was about 14 in this photo. Note that I'm wearing a 90210 t-shirt. Now I'm turning twice that age... and season one is JUST NOW coming out on dvd. Damn you Aaron Spelling with your sublime trash!



11. Me at a sleepover. So hyperactive I always got sent to another room. See? They can't even hold me in frame!



12. The coolest thing about this photo is the pants I'm wearing. They're covered in stars, and I made them myself. I made another pair that were bright silver, but I believe they created a gamma ray pulse when photographed with a flash, so no evidence remains.



13. Yeah, sure you're cool and know a bunch of indie designers. But are you fashion international style '86? I think you are not sir.



14. Hey! It's me in Whistler with an alarmingly oversized baseball cap on backwards. Rocking the loser snowboarder styles... nice.



15. Me and the brother like to kick it old school. We like this photo because it looks so seedy... kind of like an expose on babysitters who drink.



16. Me in Paris with chocolate fondue and Mylene - one of the best friends I've known in this life... I miss you girl!



17. Me in an ultra-repulsive male strip club (aren't they all?). This homemade shirt is cut into a sweet fringe, and has 'classy lassy' written on it in marker. I glued some sequins on it to bedazzle the shit out of it, but they fell off at some point.



18. Here I am rollerskating in Beijing. In a rollerskating karaoke arcade. Yes, it did blow my mind.



19. Not too much to say about this one. It was December of my first year here in Vancity. And I loved that visor.



20. I'm in a cab somewhere in Beijing. I find this photo fairly odd-looking, and also that I oddly look sort of like Chloe Sevigny in it.



21. Hey! It's The Beckstar on a boat to Hot Springs Cove in Tofino.



22. Ah the good times in Beijing. This was the infamous 'mould cleaning' evening, where we discovered our illegal chinese housing was full of toxic black mould, and spent the night cleaning it. There may have been some slight paranoia at play here... but hard to say.



This was taken during a road trip down the Pacific Coast. I think this was in Oregon. In any case, it was the most poorly cared for aquarium ever. Right after this photo was taken, this (left) happened. I'm not ashamed to admit - I screamed and ran.



24. I really like this photo. It was taken in my good friend Nat's place, who is ridiculously awesome and yet another person I haven't seen or talked to in years. Le sigh.



25. The Beckstar at the Great Wall.



26. Playing in sand dunes. This photo is nice, but pretty boring. I'll probably swap it with something funnier tomorrow.



27. The package said 'Judy Fruity'... but we all know her as simply 'The Prosti-fruit'.



28. The Beckstar as Rambo. First Blood.

28 random facts about the Beckstar!

Yes folks, it's my 28th birthday. Why not finally respond to the screaming hoardes, and give up some info about me, the eminent and glorious creature known as The Beckstar?

28. Due to watching a solar eclipse on May 10, 1994, I have retinal damage in the form of a faint bunch of crescent moons floating around in my right eye.

27. I quietly believe that the above scenario has given me special powers.

26. My Chinese name is Ming Yue, which means Bright Moon.

25. My favourite number is 6.

24. I often silently dance like crazy in elevators, stairwells and other concealed public locations.

23. I don't have a cell phone or driver's licence.

22. I have a top secret myspace profile I use strictly for creepy lurking.

21. My eyes change colour depending on light and outfit.

20. I am never as good in hip hop dance classes as I think I'm going to be.

19. I often daydream about getting interviewed for profiles in important magazines.

18. I can competently and safely fire dance.

17. If the chips are down, I will watch Full House.

16. I grew up with one brother, and after 28 years, he's still one of the coolest and smartest guys I've ever met.

15. I really, really liked school and tests as a kid. I still do.

14. I'm quite picky about spoon size.

13. I once gave myself a bullring (nose piercing through the middle) with just an icecube and a sewing needle.

12. I chew my fingers like those fabled cats chewed off their dead owners face. Hey - everyone has one bad habit, no?

11. My secret guilty pleasure music? Phil Collins.

10. I can't really get serious about a future with a guy until I know his feelings on interplanatary colonization. Not even joking.

9. I really like robots.

8. I started eating meat again about 6 months ago, after being a vegetarian for most of the last 10 years. What broke me? A pile of salami after a night of hard drinking rye.

7. I always eat the batter when I bake. Even with pancakes.

6. I tend towards inappopriate over-sharing. Always.

5. I have a strong and irrational hatred of rubber bands, wet newspapers and the smell of microwave popcorn.

4. I was born at 10:28 pm in London, Ontario.

3. I love drinking from baby bottles. I used them until quite late in childhood; my dad my mom - she just called with clarification - finally threw all of my bottles into a field on a road trip to stop my incessant whining for them. I even secretly drink from the children's bottles when babysitting.

2. I find it almost impossible to say no to costumes, dancing or glitter.

And the number one random fact about the Beckstar is..........

1. You tell me! Post a random Beckstar fact in the comment section, and win something really cool! Like my undying love and friendship!

Winnie Cooper - renaissance woman

Hey - it's celebrity of the week time! Okay, that isn't actually a feature on my blog, and I'm actually not a big fan of salivating celebrity content (except for R Kelly, obviously), but this is some good business.


Hey! Remember us? Remember how awesome Kevin's brother Wayne (left) was? That haircut is one of the seven wonders of the world.

Danica McKellar, formerly known as Winnie Cooper, lover of nerds and Fred Savage on The Wonder Years, is actually a big hot nerd in real life. She's still acting, but she also has a Bachelor's Degree in mathematics from UCLA, and has co-authored a math proof: Percolation and Gibbs states multiplicity for ferromagnetic Ashkin–Teller models on Z2. She also tutors people in math on her website.


Hey baby - wanna do some math?

Here is an article from NY Times about her math excellence. Don't have a password/account? Try Bug Me Not - an archive of usernames and passwords for similar sites.

Light and Magic

So the field of technology and textiles is very exciting right now. No, not the bizarre satrire proposed by The Yes Men in disguise as WTO representatives at the 2001 Textiles of the Future conference.

Rather I'm talking about all the absolutely amazing research and development happening internationally in material/textile design, creating wearable garments and textiles that communicate/interact/change etc. based on environmental inputs of various types. There's so much radness going on in this medium that you should probably make that cup of tea you were thinking about, and get ready for a long read. Check it:

The Interactive Institute

This Stockholm-based school is blowing minds on a daily basis across the new media/technology fields. Definitely worth cruising around the research section of their site... some really amazing work.

Their IT + Textiles research design program in particular is doing some great work:


This bag is intended for use with several sensors that react and reflect the environment. Light strips react to sensors that measure sound level, light, temperature.


Reach around scarves reveal or create patterns and even hidden messages based hanging on environmental conditions (sunlight, temperature, wind). The first sketches provide warmth in addition to changing the pattern of the scarf based on temperature. When it gets cold outside, the scarves heat up and chage patterns.

The Banff New Media Institute

Close to home, and doing really cool stuff too, is this great school out in Banff. They don't have much in the way of images on their site, but are definitely working on some cutting edge stuff. The following is from a collaborative project called Code Zebra, which is very cool, despite its terribly optimized and slow-loading website.


No, I don't know what these garments do either. Yeah, no, I wouldn't wear them... hells no.

XS Labs

XS Labs is a design research studio where "we develop artifacts that are extra soft and react in weird ways to our bodies and our environments. We play, we experiment, we develop new technologies, we make art, and we design prototypes in electronic textiles and wearable computing."

I'll be honest - a lot of their stuff is just fucking weird (like their worst-idea-ever Inflating Hips Dress). But you've got to love these Montreal kids for being this out there.


These neckline flowers open and close in response to heat levels, on a 15 second cycle.

Commercial Products

On left - the shirt is a working equalizer - responding to music and sound. On right - hey, it's a clock yo. Out-doing Flava Flav, one shirt at a time.

Rachel Whigfield and loop.ph

This is my favourite of the IT+textile designers. A british artist/designer, she is absolutely amazing. Below is just a small sampling of her work, some done in collaboration with her partner in Loop, sound/interactive artist Mathias Gmachl.


Light Sleeper is an illuminating, personalised alarm integrated into bedding that gently wakes in the most natural way. This pillow and duvet simulates a natural dawn that eases you into your day


The History Table tablecloth signals how long things have been left upon it. If an object is left on the table for a while, a glowing halo forms beneath it that grows slowly over time, until the object is moved.

Sonic City Project

This is a pretty cool project - still at the prototype stage. They have put together a jacket that creates electronic music based on sensing bodily and environmental factors. Mapping these to the real-time processing of concrete sounds, Sonic City generates a personal soundscape co-produced by physical movement, local activity, and urban ambiance. The video below is an outtake from a testing series, showing roughly how the whole thing works.

More Nike goodness

In line visually with their excellent Sculptures campaign is an older Nike campaign for the '05 All Star Game.

I hadn't seen this before, but I like it. It's done in a more sophisticated way in the Sculptures stuff, but I think it's still great. The concept of solidifying motion is really smart and appropriate for the sports/athletic industry. A good solution to the 'how do we represent kinetic energy in a static medium?' problem. This campaign was done by DDB Paris.

Give them a hand - United Way campaign

Here is a great campaign that won Best of Show at the Extra Awards, the Canadian Newspaper Ad Awards. Dry stuff, I know, but bear with me, the images are beautiful.







DDB Vancouver has had their account for a while, and has been absolutely bang on in their work. Good stuff.

In the realms of the fun-real.

So during a delightful little jaunt down to Seattle, I managed (despite the best efforts of Quick Shuttle - grrrrrrrr) to catch the last day of the Henry Darger Folk Art Museum touring show at the Frye Gallery. Which is a great (and free!) space by the way.


Mommy, why do the little girls have boy parts?



Never mock a janitor - he could be making beautiful things like this.



If I remember correctly, this is a good guy. One of the few adult protagonists.

Henry Darger intrests the hell out of me for a few reasons.

First, his story is captivating. A reclusive janitor, he died at 81, leaving behind a massive amount of artwork, including a 15,000 page illustrated novel of considerable weirdness, called The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What is known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinnian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion. His life is summarized pretty well on his wikipedia page, and excellently in the amazing movie made of his life - In the Realms of the Unreal.

Secondly, his stuff is almost more psychology than art. The Story of the Vivian Girls is an incredibly rich system of symbols which stand so clearly for his own internal issues. The same themes he struggled with at 15 - oppression and totalitarianism within the asylum in which he was institutionalized at 13; a conflicted and intense relationship with the Catholic church etc. - are replayed and explored as he writes the book over 65 years. It gets really meta at points too - where he writes himself into the stories, and

Thirdly, whether he intends to or not, he asks some pretty challenging questions around media and culture. The faces and images he's blatantly traced and re-used from advertising and other sources take on an entirely different tone in his surreal environments. At the same time, they're inherently contextless. They're no less connected to Darger's bizarre epic than they are to their original 'sources' - the happy beach scene in the Coppertone ads etc.


This is the trailer - but it hangs a bit at the beginning. Come for the outsider artist - stay for the Dakota Fanning narration.

Okay, I'm babbling. Moral of the story? His work is fascinating, and I'm really glad I got a chance to see it in person.

Why Tyra ain't never gonna be Oprah...

Oprah gave away a Pontiac G6 to every member of her studio audience. And then Tyra... well... just watch the clip.


Three words: Bat. Shit. Crazy.

Do androids dream of electric scotch?

Well, I don't really get the connection between Johnny Walker and a robot with flesh-envy, but I'm really glad this spot got pushed through. It's pretty lovely, especially to a robot-fetishist such as myself.


What is this thing you humans call... love?