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So you think you eat healthily?

June 19, 2013 in Creativity, Food, Personal, Trending

About ten years ago I moved back to Toronto from a three-year stint in Winnipeg where I was attending the University of Manitoba and sewing my wild oats, so to speak. When I moved back I started to attend another school now known as OCAD University to get my degree in Design. For the first three years I lived in a ridiculously cheap (and small) apartment in an area of Toronto called The Beach. While I was there I literally did not turn on the stove once, not once in three years. I lived on mainly pre-made, microwaved and ordered in and out food that was expensive to say the least, in my defense I was quite focused on my studies.

In my thesis year at OCAD I moved again, close to the main subway lines and about half way through that year I started to actually cook food. It wasn’t good food or food that was good for you but I did use the oven and the burners, along with the microwave and a blowtorch a few times. Long story. I mainly cooked the simplest things possible. Meat: steak, hotdogs, hamburgers. Starch: Rice, Macaroni and cheese. Vegetables…um…no. I was just happy to have some control over what I was eating, and I admit I was pretty proud of myself for even turning on the stove. When I was finished school I moved again (I move a lot) and that’s when I actually started cooking. Not just steaks and random things I knew how to cook, mostly it was things I didn’t know how to cook and the entire process of doing that really appealed to my creative side. It became a sort of relaxation / zen exercise for me. I cooked everything: from rabbit to Cornish game hen, asparagus to bok choy and beyond, so far beyond my knowledge I eventually was just straight out experimenting. I even made and bottled jams and preserves. By doing this I thought I was eating healthily. I knew exactly what was going into my food, I tried to create some sort of balance on the plate between greens, meat and starches and I cooked dinner for myself, from scratch, at least three times per week. Cut to the end of last year, three years after I had started my “Zen and the Art of Cooking” thing and after a few conversations with my sister who is a nutritionist and personal trainer that nowadays owns and runs her own cafe in Toronto called “The Tampered Press” (shameless plug), I realized that my idea of how healthy I thought I was eating was completely wrong.

This is where I will pause the story because I really thought, 100% I was eating in a healthy manner and this was entirely based on the fact that I had been actively cooking for myself and I knew exactly what I was eating. Self delusion is a powerful thing. This is not a “this is what I eat so this is what you should eat” post.  I am not selling anything or representing any diet or way of eating. I don’t take a bunch of herbal extracts or claim that eating meat is bad or good or only eating things without a face is the way to go because, quite frankly I don’t care. What I eat, what I cook and what I do is for me as what you eat and cook is for you. If you think that drinking all of your meals in shake format while wearing weigh loss patches, hanging upside down, drinking lemon juice, and watching Dr. Oz is what works for you, then by all means do it. Eating healthily and living healthily is not universal. Sure there are the basics that build the foundation of a healthy meal or snack, and some things you can obviously do to change your lifestyle for the better, but it is different for everyone which is what I have learned over the past three months. I really have to thank my sister for this because I reached out to her for help. I wanted to change the way I ate, and it has been a complete cold-turkey lifestyle change. I want to be clear: I am not the poster boy for a healthy lifestyle, my goal was not to lose weight it was to be healthier and healthier I am.

So what happened was this, three months ago I emailed my sister a calendar I had filled out in Excel of exactly what I had eaten during each day for three weeks in a row, thinking that I was probably going to have to improve a few things.  However, since I ate vegetables and kept the starches down, I didn’t think I ate that many deserts and I had quit drinking over three years ago so that, altogether had to be good right? Not so much. When I met with her for the first time she had obviously spent a good amount of time going over what I was eating, she had colour coded it. Orange was “not good”, green was “a meal” and blue was “extra’s”. In the three weeks of Breakfast, Snack, Lunch, Snack, Dinner and Snack there was maybe five things highlighted in green. It was a sea of orange, apparently my eating habits were not as healthy as I thought, in fact they were quite the opposite. Granted as I was documenting it all, I could tell it was not going to be as great as I thought, (especially the day I wrote down: Dinner: Steak, Asparagus and Salad then Snack: 1 Whole Pumpkin Pie.)

My sister said to me that I need to be true to myself and either commit to changing my lifestyle or continue to feel like crap 80% of the time. I was already committed in my head and I told her I was committed to it in that first meeting. For the first couple of weeks, the only thing that kept me from going back to my old ways was the idea of disappointing my sister who is one of the very few people I look up to. She had put all this work into helping me understand the error’s of my ways and explaining to me the basics of nutrition. It was truly a night and day experience for me and only now, almost three months later becoming the ‘norm’. I still trip up once in awhile and I still smoke, like I said, I am not the poster boy for a healthy lifestyle but I am doing what I set out to.

Breakfast wasn’t a huge change, I subbed out my daily Vector Bar for a regular high fiber – low everything else granola bar. Vector bars, as it turns out are essentially meal replacements. Since I take vitamins in the morning the additional vitamins in the bars were overdoing it. Add to that my coffee, pre and post biotic yogurt and a Bannana and that’s my breakfast simple and healthy. Snacks, Lunches and Dinners where a whole other story. My snacks went from chips and diet Pepsi to carrots and hummus with water or an apple with water or kale chips with water. Lunches went from microwaved things and diet Pepsi to a turkey or avocado and cucumber sandwich on whole wheat with a salad and water. Dinners, well dinners were my thing. I loved grilling up a big steak slathered in olive oil, oregano and black truffle paste. Topping it with garlic butter and Worcestershire sauce and pairing it with a nice (fake) merlot. Now it varies – last week it was lean turkey tacos filled with lettuce, green salsa and plain Greek yogurt with carbonated water. The week before: sautéed Kale with Cannelli beans, caramelized onions, garlic and a Green Monster smoothie of my own creation (you can google those.) Yesterday I made pork tenderloin, topped it with a chimichurri sauce (made from scratch) and a salad, three weeks ago it was chicken breasts and before that, salmon. Night and day.

Anyways, when it all comes down to it, changing your lifestyle to be healthier, is not easy and there are no shortcuts, really there aren’t I looked. You have to learn and understand what makes food good and bad for you, portion control is so important and commitment is a big part of it. On average now I eat between two and three pounds of Kale per week, I didn’t even know what Kale was a few months ago. I drink 2-3 litres of water a day and when I get a craving for something sweet, instead of downing a small cheesecake, I throw some almonds in a bowl and sprinkle some honey on top. What you don’t want to do is follow trends because trends are by definition: what is popular at that time. Changing your lifestyle for the better is not a trend; it is also not a diet. You do not want to be counting calories with no knowledge of what is bad, what is good and why. Organic food is great and step in the right direction for the world in general but it’s not remotely as regulated as people are led to believe it is. In all seriousness what you really need to do (if you want to) is go and see a nutritionist. They go to school for this and are up to date on everything you will need to know. If they’re even half as good as my sister, they’ll be able to explain what you need to know and teach you so that you can learn how to continue on your own.

I’m 32, I’ve never felt better in my life. My mind is clearer, my overall quality of life has improved beyond what I though was actually possible and yes I still smoke, though I am quitting this year. One thing at a time. Now I have to go, my Kale is getting cold.

Much apologies for the almost two month delay from my last post to this one; I moved, it sucked and I’m still unpacking. I still live in and work out of Toronto, just a different neighborhood. I’ll try to keep up a better schedule in the future.

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For Sale: Canada’s Economy

April 7, 2013 in Advertising, Branding, Business

Thank You!

Before I delve into this post I wanted to take the time to thank all of the subscribers and readers of Social Knowledge.  It has now officially been a year since I started to develop the blog and since then Social Knowledge has attracted a little over 50,000 subscriptions with an average of 78,000 views per article posted. I will continue to post about a variety of topics in the social arena as well as others and as I mentioned in the last post, sneak in a few personal posts as well over the next year. Thank you again for your interest and for coming back again and again to read my musings.

Canada is a very patriotic country. We are perhaps not as overtly patriotic as our neighbours to the south but make no mistake, we love our country – what it stands for and all that we are known for. The Canadian Tourism Commission who’s tagline is “Keep Exploring”, recently released a clip/commercial put together by Canadians themselves to show a small part of what Canada is about:

As you can see from even that small amount of visuals, not a bad place to live. When you look into what Canada is known for around the world, that video doesn’t quite hit on everything but it does address a few of the more important and well known ones. If you’re curious what that list actually is, as I was then here are the top 15:

  1. Health Care
  2. Beer
  3. Hockey
  4. Maple Syrup
  5. Being polite
  6. Our winter weather
  7. The Oil Sands
  8. Having the most fresh water in the world
  9. Diversity in cultures and landscapes
  10. The Canada Goose
  11. Basketball (We invented it, literally.)
  12. Blackberry (The smart phone.)
  13. Tim Hortons
  14. Singers (Justin Bieber, Barenaked Ladies, Leonard Cohen, Rush, Michael Buble, Joni Mitchell and the list goes on.)
  15. Actors (John Candy, Ryan Gosling, Michael J. Fox, Ryan Reynolds, Sarah Polley, Jim Carrey, Anna Paquin, William Shatnet, and that list goes on as well.

A few of the well known Canadian companies not on this list are: Lululemon Athletica Inc., Canada Goose, The Hudson’s Bay Company and Sorel. The last three really exude the “Canadian spirit” so I was surprised not to see them up there with Blackberry (formerly Research in Motion). This does bring me to the point of this article. One thing, in my opinion, Canadians are not good at is keeping Canadian businesses, Canadian.

I will give you an example; The Hudson’s Bay Company is the oldest company to be established in North America and one of the oldest in the world. It was established in the year 1670, before The United States of America and Canada were even countries. In 1670 it was called the ”Governor and Company of Adventurers of England Trading into Hudson Bay”, that is quite a mouthful. It is not necessary to get into a history lesson for this topic so I’ll fast forward to why I used them as an example. For hundreds of years, they were the best known Canadian corporation and they still play at that to this day. In 2008, after being founded in Canada and owned by Canadians for the nearly 350 years, the entire company was acquired by an American private equity firm, NRDC Equity Partners. “The Bay” as it is most often reffered to still exists, has stores in canada and have been the official outfitters for the Canadian Olympic Teams in the 1936, 1960, 1964, 1968, 2006, 2008, 2010 and will be in 2020, but they are not a Canadian company and haven’t been for the last five years.

Here are a few more examples. Sorel, the well know producer of footware, specifically winter boots was established in Canada in 1962 and is synonymous with our winter weather. Sorel was bought by Columbia Sportswear, also an American company in 2000 and since then has gone from being “Made in Canada” to producing their goods in China and Vietnam.

The beer that Canada is so well known for that a brand of it is actually called “Canadian” which is produced by Molson, the second oldest company to be established in Canada, is now 42% owned by Coors, an American company.

Tim Hortons, Canada’s most well known coffee and baked goods chain that accounts for 62% of the coffee business in Canada, vs the 7% Starbucks holds was bought in its entirety in 1995, nearly 20 years ago by Wendy’s, the well known American fast food chain. This one is not very well known even in Canada. Most people you ask will tell you it is a partnership, when in fact Tim Hortons is now only Canadian in the lineage of its name.

Perhaps the most recent well known acquisitions of Canadian companies to grace the headlines were the takeovers of Nexen Energy and Progress Energy Resources Corp. Both were Canadian owned energy companies, Nexen operating in the oil and gas markets and Progress in the gas market. Progress was bought out by Malaysian owned Petronas Energy at the end of 2012 and Nexen in February of this year by CNOOC Limited, China’s largest producer of oil and gas. The Canadian government said that they agreed to the takeovers because both the Chinese and Malaysians committed to operating Nexus and Progress in a way that still benefitted Canada and that their business practices would remain at a high level of transparency. None of this is required however by the Canada Investment Act so only time will tell how Nexen and Progress fair as foreign owned companies.

I think you understand at this point what I’m getting at. Canada is a great place to live but we are literally selling our economy to other countries in very large pieces at a time. On top of that, these companies that have already been sold are still playing the “we are Canadian so buy from us” patriotic card when they advertise.

The Hudson’s Bay Company:

Molson Canadian:

Tim Hortons:

I am not saying we (Canadians) should stop buying from these companies, I am not trying to organize a boycott or anything of that sort. What I am saying is as a Canadian you should know where your money is actually going and also as a Canadian you should be aware of how much and how quickly our economy is being sold off to foreign companies. I understand how capitalism works and could even see how an argument could be made that this type of business practices helps to maintain our economy and country as a whole. Don’t you think though that it is a bit shameful that we seem to part so easily with companies that were grown on our own soil? Where is the Canadian pride that is so well known, or is that for sale as well?

In the future, it is number eight on the list of things people associate with Canada that you’ll want to pay attention to, fresh water. It is predicted by the UN that by 2030, nearly 50% of the world’s population will be living in areas where access to clean drinking water will be limited. When the time comes and it will, will Canada be as loose with our water as we have been in the past with our commercial businesses and natural resources? Or will we do business that actually makes sense and honours Canadian interests.

Sources: Reuters, UNwater.org, hbc.ca, youtube.com, wikkipedia, sqwalk.com

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Telling a Story, One Frame at a Time

March 24, 2013 in Art, Creativity, Design, Photography

Most of my posts if not all since I started this blog nearly a year ago have been opinion pieces. As a change of pace and because I’ve been spending a large amount of time in the realm of photography as of late, I thought I’d try a personal post. A bit of an homage to a few people, ones that have modelled for me over the last year, the photographer I currently assist, two professors and the person who helped me understand how WordPress worked when Social Knowledge was in it’s infancy.

If you ever read my bio on SK or one of my portfolios you will know that my ‘background’ is in Design, not Photography. In design, one of the main things I always thought was the most important part of a project was not the end result but the process that got you there. That process is different for each project but imperative to create an end result that has a reason to exist. It quite literally writes the story of whatever you are working on and the same applies to photography, in my opinion. I would go as far to say that without it, I’m not sure I would love photography as much as I do. I love ‘writing’ that story, whatever the plot is about, how I’ll convey it to the viewer and the success that comes from someone understanding it without a verbal explanation.

I’ll admit freely that I have a bit of a flare for the dramatic when it comes to my Photography and the stories behind each shoot. That may come in part from my love for the theatre; musicals, the ballet, plays and the opera, I enjoy taking in a few every year and have since I was very young. Music as well which I listen to whenever I am writing or working has to have an influence there, also anyone who knows me personally may say I enjoy a little drama once in awhile. I also am a bit of an amateur historian, I value history because of the stories locked within it, and there are so many good ones.

Without further ado I’d like to show you some of the photography I’ve done over the past couple of years, just a bit, mainly the shoots I enjoyed most. The rest of what I have deemed as good enough to be publically viewable can be seen in my photography portfolio.

 

 

 

 

 

Thank you…

Models: Jenny Kim, Daniel Brooks, Brian Chen-Tam, Casey Wong, Shaw, Dick Edgewood.

Styling & Makeup for the Succubae Shoot: Carla Gould.

Mirza Noormohamed & Rachel Kubryn @ Wandering Eye Photography

Rob Allen & Rob Davidson @ Ryerson School of Image Arts, Ryerson University

Jake Rosenberg @ The Coveteur

Lauren @ eyesearsmouthlens.com

Todd Falkowsky for teaching me the importance of the process and how to tell a story.

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So you think you eat healthily?

June 19, 2013 in Creativity, Food, Personal, Trending

About ten years ago I moved back to Toronto from a three-year stint in Winnipeg where I was attending the University of Manitoba and sewing my wild oats, so to speak. When I moved back I started to attend another school now known as OCAD University to get my degree in Design. For the first three years I lived in a ridiculously cheap (and small) apartment in an area of Toronto called The Beach. While I was there I literally did not turn on the stove once, not once in three years. I lived on mainly pre-made, microwaved and ordered in and out food that was expensive to say the least, in my defense I was quite focused on my studies.

In my thesis year at OCAD I moved again, close to the main subway lines and about half way through that year I started to actually cook food. It wasn’t good food or food that was good for you but I did use the oven and the burners, along with the microwave and a blowtorch a few times. Long story. I mainly cooked the simplest things possible. Meat: steak, hotdogs, hamburgers. Starch: Rice, Macaroni and cheese. Vegetables…um…no. I was just happy to have some control over what I was eating, and I admit I was pretty proud of myself for even turning on the stove. When I was finished school I moved again (I move a lot) and that’s when I actually started cooking. Not just steaks and random things I knew how to cook, mostly it was things I didn’t know how to cook and the entire process of doing that really appealed to my creative side. It became a sort of relaxation / zen exercise for me. I cooked everything: from rabbit to Cornish game hen, asparagus to bok choy and beyond, so far beyond my knowledge I eventually was just straight out experimenting. I even made and bottled jams and preserves. By doing this I thought I was eating healthily. I knew exactly what was going into my food, I tried to create some sort of balance on the plate between greens, meat and starches and I cooked dinner for myself, from scratch, at least three times per week. Cut to the end of last year, three years after I had started my “Zen and the Art of Cooking” thing and after a few conversations with my sister who is a nutritionist and personal trainer that nowadays owns and runs her own cafe in Toronto called “The Tampered Press” (shameless plug), I realized that my idea of how healthy I thought I was eating was completely wrong.

This is where I will pause the story because I really thought, 100% I was eating in a healthy manner and this was entirely based on the fact that I had been actively cooking for myself and I knew exactly what I was eating. Self delusion is a powerful thing. This is not a “this is what I eat so this is what you should eat” post.  I am not selling anything or representing any diet or way of eating. I don’t take a bunch of herbal extracts or claim that eating meat is bad or good or only eating things without a face is the way to go because, quite frankly I don’t care. What I eat, what I cook and what I do is for me as what you eat and cook is for you. If you think that drinking all of your meals in shake format while wearing weigh loss patches, hanging upside down, drinking lemon juice, and watching Dr. Oz is what works for you, then by all means do it. Eating healthily and living healthily is not universal. Sure there are the basics that build the foundation of a healthy meal or snack, and some things you can obviously do to change your lifestyle for the better, but it is different for everyone which is what I have learned over the past three months. I really have to thank my sister for this because I reached out to her for help. I wanted to change the way I ate, and it has been a complete cold-turkey lifestyle change. I want to be clear: I am not the poster boy for a healthy lifestyle, my goal was not to lose weight it was to be healthier and healthier I am.

So what happened was this, three months ago I emailed my sister a calendar I had filled out in Excel of exactly what I had eaten during each day for three weeks in a row, thinking that I was probably going to have to improve a few things.  However, since I ate vegetables and kept the starches down, I didn’t think I ate that many deserts and I had quit drinking over three years ago so that, altogether had to be good right? Not so much. When I met with her for the first time she had obviously spent a good amount of time going over what I was eating, she had colour coded it. Orange was “not good”, green was “a meal” and blue was “extra’s”. In the three weeks of Breakfast, Snack, Lunch, Snack, Dinner and Snack there was maybe five things highlighted in green. It was a sea of orange, apparently my eating habits were not as healthy as I thought, in fact they were quite the opposite. Granted as I was documenting it all, I could tell it was not going to be as great as I thought, (especially the day I wrote down: Dinner: Steak, Asparagus and Salad then Snack: 1 Whole Pumpkin Pie.)

My sister said to me that I need to be true to myself and either commit to changing my lifestyle or continue to feel like crap 80% of the time. I was already committed in my head and I told her I was committed to it in that first meeting. For the first couple of weeks, the only thing that kept me from going back to my old ways was the idea of disappointing my sister who is one of the very few people I look up to. She had put all this work into helping me understand the error’s of my ways and explaining to me the basics of nutrition. It was truly a night and day experience for me and only now, almost three months later becoming the ‘norm’. I still trip up once in awhile and I still smoke, like I said, I am not the poster boy for a healthy lifestyle but I am doing what I set out to.

Breakfast wasn’t a huge change, I subbed out my daily Vector Bar for a regular high fiber – low everything else granola bar. Vector bars, as it turns out are essentially meal replacements. Since I take vitamins in the morning the additional vitamins in the bars were overdoing it. Add to that my coffee, pre and post biotic yogurt and a Bannana and that’s my breakfast simple and healthy. Snacks, Lunches and Dinners where a whole other story. My snacks went from chips and diet Pepsi to carrots and hummus with water or an apple with water or kale chips with water. Lunches went from microwaved things and diet Pepsi to a turkey or avocado and cucumber sandwich on whole wheat with a salad and water. Dinners, well dinners were my thing. I loved grilling up a big steak slathered in olive oil, oregano and black truffle paste. Topping it with garlic butter and Worcestershire sauce and pairing it with a nice (fake) merlot. Now it varies – last week it was lean turkey tacos filled with lettuce, green salsa and plain Greek yogurt with carbonated water. The week before: sautéed Kale with Cannelli beans, caramelized onions, garlic and a Green Monster smoothie of my own creation (you can google those.) Yesterday I made pork tenderloin, topped it with a chimichurri sauce (made from scratch) and a salad, three weeks ago it was chicken breasts and before that, salmon. Night and day.

Anyways, when it all comes down to it, changing your lifestyle to be healthier, is not easy and there are no shortcuts, really there aren’t I looked. You have to learn and understand what makes food good and bad for you, portion control is so important and commitment is a big part of it. On average now I eat between two and three pounds of Kale per week, I didn’t even know what Kale was a few months ago. I drink 2-3 litres of water a day and when I get a craving for something sweet, instead of downing a small cheesecake, I throw some almonds in a bowl and sprinkle some honey on top. What you don’t want to do is follow trends because trends are by definition: what is popular at that time. Changing your lifestyle for the better is not a trend; it is also not a diet. You do not want to be counting calories with no knowledge of what is bad, what is good and why. Organic food is great and step in the right direction for the world in general but it’s not remotely as regulated as people are led to believe it is. In all seriousness what you really need to do (if you want to) is go and see a nutritionist. They go to school for this and are up to date on everything you will need to know. If they’re even half as good as my sister, they’ll be able to explain what you need to know and teach you so that you can learn how to continue on your own.

I’m 32, I’ve never felt better in my life. My mind is clearer, my overall quality of life has improved beyond what I though was actually possible and yes I still smoke, though I am quitting this year. One thing at a time. Now I have to go, my Kale is getting cold.

Much apologies for the almost two month delay from my last post to this one; I moved, it sucked and I’m still unpacking. I still live in and work out of Toronto, just a different neighborhood. I’ll try to keep up a better schedule in the future.

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For Sale: Canada’s Economy

April 7, 2013 in Advertising, Branding, Business

Thank You!

Before I delve into this post I wanted to take the time to thank all of the subscribers and readers of Social Knowledge.  It has now officially been a year since I started to develop the blog and since then Social Knowledge has attracted a little over 50,000 subscriptions with an average of 78,000 views per article posted. I will continue to post about a variety of topics in the social arena as well as others and as I mentioned in the last post, sneak in a few personal posts as well over the next year. Thank you again for your interest and for coming back again and again to read my musings.

Canada is a very patriotic country. We are perhaps not as overtly patriotic as our neighbours to the south but make no mistake, we love our country – what it stands for and all that we are known for. The Canadian Tourism Commission who’s tagline is “Keep Exploring”, recently released a clip/commercial put together by Canadians themselves to show a small part of what Canada is about:

As you can see from even that small amount of visuals, not a bad place to live. When you look into what Canada is known for around the world, that video doesn’t quite hit on everything but it does address a few of the more important and well known ones. If you’re curious what that list actually is, as I was then here are the top 15:

  1. Health Care
  2. Beer
  3. Hockey
  4. Maple Syrup
  5. Being polite
  6. Our winter weather
  7. The Oil Sands
  8. Having the most fresh water in the world
  9. Diversity in cultures and landscapes
  10. The Canada Goose
  11. Basketball (We invented it, literally.)
  12. Blackberry (The smart phone.)
  13. Tim Hortons
  14. Singers (Justin Bieber, Barenaked Ladies, Leonard Cohen, Rush, Michael Buble, Joni Mitchell and the list goes on.)
  15. Actors (John Candy, Ryan Gosling, Michael J. Fox, Ryan Reynolds, Sarah Polley, Jim Carrey, Anna Paquin, William Shatnet, and that list goes on as well.

A few of the well known Canadian companies not on this list are: Lululemon Athletica Inc., Canada Goose, The Hudson’s Bay Company and Sorel. The last three really exude the “Canadian spirit” so I was surprised not to see them up there with Blackberry (formerly Research in Motion). This does bring me to the point of this article. One thing, in my opinion, Canadians are not good at is keeping Canadian businesses, Canadian.

I will give you an example; The Hudson’s Bay Company is the oldest company to be established in North America and one of the oldest in the world. It was established in the year 1670, before The United States of America and Canada were even countries. In 1670 it was called the ”Governor and Company of Adventurers of England Trading into Hudson Bay”, that is quite a mouthful. It is not necessary to get into a history lesson for this topic so I’ll fast forward to why I used them as an example. For hundreds of years, they were the best known Canadian corporation and they still play at that to this day. In 2008, after being founded in Canada and owned by Canadians for the nearly 350 years, the entire company was acquired by an American private equity firm, NRDC Equity Partners. “The Bay” as it is most often reffered to still exists, has stores in canada and have been the official outfitters for the Canadian Olympic Teams in the 1936, 1960, 1964, 1968, 2006, 2008, 2010 and will be in 2020, but they are not a Canadian company and haven’t been for the last five years.

Here are a few more examples. Sorel, the well know producer of footware, specifically winter boots was established in Canada in 1962 and is synonymous with our winter weather. Sorel was bought by Columbia Sportswear, also an American company in 2000 and since then has gone from being “Made in Canada” to producing their goods in China and Vietnam.

The beer that Canada is so well known for that a brand of it is actually called “Canadian” which is produced by Molson, the second oldest company to be established in Canada, is now 42% owned by Coors, an American company.

Tim Hortons, Canada’s most well known coffee and baked goods chain that accounts for 62% of the coffee business in Canada, vs the 7% Starbucks holds was bought in its entirety in 1995, nearly 20 years ago by Wendy’s, the well known American fast food chain. This one is not very well known even in Canada. Most people you ask will tell you it is a partnership, when in fact Tim Hortons is now only Canadian in the lineage of its name.

Perhaps the most recent well known acquisitions of Canadian companies to grace the headlines were the takeovers of Nexen Energy and Progress Energy Resources Corp. Both were Canadian owned energy companies, Nexen operating in the oil and gas markets and Progress in the gas market. Progress was bought out by Malaysian owned Petronas Energy at the end of 2012 and Nexen in February of this year by CNOOC Limited, China’s largest producer of oil and gas. The Canadian government said that they agreed to the takeovers because both the Chinese and Malaysians committed to operating Nexus and Progress in a way that still benefitted Canada and that their business practices would remain at a high level of transparency. None of this is required however by the Canada Investment Act so only time will tell how Nexen and Progress fair as foreign owned companies.

I think you understand at this point what I’m getting at. Canada is a great place to live but we are literally selling our economy to other countries in very large pieces at a time. On top of that, these companies that have already been sold are still playing the “we are Canadian so buy from us” patriotic card when they advertise.

The Hudson’s Bay Company:

Molson Canadian:

Tim Hortons:

I am not saying we (Canadians) should stop buying from these companies, I am not trying to organize a boycott or anything of that sort. What I am saying is as a Canadian you should know where your money is actually going and also as a Canadian you should be aware of how much and how quickly our economy is being sold off to foreign companies. I understand how capitalism works and could even see how an argument could be made that this type of business practices helps to maintain our economy and country as a whole. Don’t you think though that it is a bit shameful that we seem to part so easily with companies that were grown on our own soil? Where is the Canadian pride that is so well known, or is that for sale as well?

In the future, it is number eight on the list of things people associate with Canada that you’ll want to pay attention to, fresh water. It is predicted by the UN that by 2030, nearly 50% of the world’s population will be living in areas where access to clean drinking water will be limited. When the time comes and it will, will Canada be as loose with our water as we have been in the past with our commercial businesses and natural resources? Or will we do business that actually makes sense and honours Canadian interests.

Sources: Reuters, UNwater.org, hbc.ca, youtube.com, wikkipedia, sqwalk.com

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Telling a Story, One Frame at a Time

March 24, 2013 in Art, Creativity, Design, Photography

Most of my posts if not all since I started this blog nearly a year ago have been opinion pieces. As a change of pace and because I’ve been spending a large amount of time in the realm of photography as of late, I thought I’d try a personal post. A bit of an homage to a few people, ones that have modelled for me over the last year, the photographer I currently assist, two professors and the person who helped me understand how WordPress worked when Social Knowledge was in it’s infancy.

If you ever read my bio on SK or one of my portfolios you will know that my ‘background’ is in Design, not Photography. In design, one of the main things I always thought was the most important part of a project was not the end result but the process that got you there. That process is different for each project but imperative to create an end result that has a reason to exist. It quite literally writes the story of whatever you are working on and the same applies to photography, in my opinion. I would go as far to say that without it, I’m not sure I would love photography as much as I do. I love ‘writing’ that story, whatever the plot is about, how I’ll convey it to the viewer and the success that comes from someone understanding it without a verbal explanation.

I’ll admit freely that I have a bit of a flare for the dramatic when it comes to my Photography and the stories behind each shoot. That may come in part from my love for the theatre; musicals, the ballet, plays and the opera, I enjoy taking in a few every year and have since I was very young. Music as well which I listen to whenever I am writing or working has to have an influence there, also anyone who knows me personally may say I enjoy a little drama once in awhile. I also am a bit of an amateur historian, I value history because of the stories locked within it, and there are so many good ones.

Without further ado I’d like to show you some of the photography I’ve done over the past couple of years, just a bit, mainly the shoots I enjoyed most. The rest of what I have deemed as good enough to be publically viewable can be seen in my photography portfolio.

 

 

 

 

 

Thank you…

Models: Jenny Kim, Daniel Brooks, Brian Chen-Tam, Casey Wong, Shaw, Dick Edgewood.

Styling & Makeup for the Succubae Shoot: Carla Gould.

Mirza Noormohamed & Rachel Kubryn @ Wandering Eye Photography

Rob Allen & Rob Davidson @ Ryerson School of Image Arts, Ryerson University

Jake Rosenberg @ The Coveteur

Lauren @ eyesearsmouthlens.com

Todd Falkowsky for teaching me the importance of the process and how to tell a story.

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Who’s Behind Deception in Advertising?

March 8, 2013 in Advertising, Branding, Business, Design, Trending

Today is International Women’s Day and on this day I would like to discuss a well known advertising campaign that has targeted women for nearly 10 years, since it’s creation in 2004. The reason I want to discuss this is that not only does it show the level of pure deception a client chooses to propagate, the purveyors of the campaign recently created a new video that puts blame for this deception on the wrong people.

The campaign I’m talking about is ‘Dove’s Campaign for Real Beauty’. If this one has slipped your mind, here is one of their well known commercials that has come out of the campaign:

You’ll probably remember this commercial because it was blasted all over Facebook and Twitter a couple of years ago and still pops up on occasion. It presents a very compelling argument against the manipulation of photos for advertisements meant to target everyone who thinks that they need to look like the women (or men) you see in advertising. What makes this a compelling commercial and advertising campaign is that they are right, pictures are retouched all the time. Everyone that works in these industries knows this, including myself.

Recently, Dove took an even more aggressive approach to this by targeting the people they would have you believe is responsible for this: Art Directors, Graphic Designers and Photo Retouchers.

As you can see from the video, they created a ‘Photoshop Action’ that didn’t do what it said it did, almost like malware, and put it on Reddit. This created enough waves that sites like Mashable covered it.

Here are the two reasons I chose to post about this: Firstly, in the video they place blame on the wrong people. Graphic Designers and Photo Retouchers are way to far down the food chain from who is making the decisions on how an advertisement will look. Even Art Directors have to answer to someone, they may have more power than the aforementioned designers but they still have to please the client.

If you really want to blame someone for how advertising appears in the media, blame the people that are paying for it because in the end they’re the ones that dictate what the public see’s.

The advertisements where photo manipulation is used wouldn’t even make it to the public space if it wasn’t paid for and then approved by the client. So the next time you look at an advertisement showing a model that you think has been retouched, don’t blame the advertising industry or the people within it, blame the people it was created for.

The second reason I chose to post about this is that Dove’s Campaign for Real Beauty really exemplifies just how deceptive the client, Unilever is. Unilever owns Dove, along with about 400 other brands, one of which is Axe. You’re familiar with Axe right? If not here is a bit of a refresher of their advertising, keep in mind these was paid for by the same people who pay for Dove’s Campaign for Real Beauty. 

Wow, those are so respectful of women and convey the idea that ‘real women’ are what should be used in advertising…oh no, actually that’s as close as you’re going to come to the exact opposite of Unilever’s Dove Campaign. Talk about mixed messages, with one brand they’re saying to women that they should be confident of their looks because even the models that are used in advertising don’t look as they appear in what makes it to the public space. With another brand they’re telling the average everyday man that if they use Axe products this will give them super powers, attracting billions of not-so-average women.

Unilever: does the idiom “People who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.” mean anything to you?

I should point out that this level of deception is nothing new and definitely not limited to Unilever, however being a designer and having retouched photos myself, I take a bit of offence when a company uses designers as scapegoats for something they are doing. If I want you to take anything away from this post it is that when it comes to advertising, the clients are the ones trying to sell you on a product or service, they use advertising firms and designers to do it but in the end, it is the client that makes the big decisions regarding what you see in the public space.

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Selling a Lifestyle, Part 1

January 7, 2013 in Advertising, Branding, Business, Trending

Branding has long been an all-encompassing term used when referring to how a company or person presents themselves. Made up of advertising, marketing, business practices and overall style, it is how the person or company in question connects with their audience. Differentiating the importance of all of these parts from the overall term is difficult and some would say irrelevant. The streams that come together to make a good brand and what a good brand actually is, could be likened to a house of cards and is as fragile as one as well.

The areas within branding that come to most consumer’s minds when the term is used are usually advertising and marketing. In what is becoming more and more a media-driven society, it is the visuals that the consumer bonds with. All of the planning for that visual, strategising into what will come in the future, the style that is trying to be conveyed to the consumer that is the result of research into the specific demographic and about a dozen other streams of input usually don’t come to mind when they see the end product. That doesn’t mean any of those parts of process are less important than what they come together to produce, it just means that the end product is what is seen as important by who it is meant for.

When you buy a car, do you care about the thousands of parts that went into making that car get the fuel economy you were looking for or the aesthetic you wanted, no. You may care about a few of them but it is the end product that you’re buying and you’re buying it because of all that went into making it happen, whether you’re aware of it or not.

Branding simplified, is the selling of a lifestyle or image. I hate to keep using the same example in posts about topics similar to this yet the reasoning is not without merit. Apple, a company, a lifestyle and yes a brand that we are well familiar with is one of the very few that you could say has ‘written the book’ on this topic, or at least a few chapters. Most notably the ones that address creating a culture around their brand. They were not the first to do it but were/are one of the few that have infiltrated multiple generations on a cultural level. What I mean by that is their customers actually adopt or merge parts of Apple’s brand identity into their own lifestyles, defining them as not just customers but part of a culture. How many times have your heard someone refer to themselves as “an Apple”? They don’t mean they’re round and delicious, though some may be, what they mean is they are actually aligning their lifestyle, their individuality with Apple’s own brand identity. This is a truly amazing feat that has been studied and written about by authors and social researchers. This is why Apple is such a good example when writing an article like this.

The importance of what apple has done for merging individual culture with brand identity has not gone unnoticed. Many other companies have tried to achieve what Apple has done and continues to do, some have succeeded. Coca-Cola, Nike, and Ikea or what I like to call ‘the usual suspects’ come to mind. They have all achieved some level of cultural integration and all have maintained that integration longer than Apple has. You just happen to hear about Apple more often because of the area of business they operate in which may be technology but as far as the branding goes, is putting the ability to access and effect media into the hands of their followers. Don’t get me wrong though, Nike is no slouch either.

A recent advertising campaign by Nike is what originally gave me the idea to write about this to begin with. As many know the latest NHL Lockout has effectively killed consumer trust in the purveyors of professionally played hockey in the USA and Canada. Even though the lockout has apparently ended now,  I am going to briefly address an interesting advertising campagin that one of the usual suspects, Nike, created based on the lockout itself.

This is an interesting one partially because I can’t find any other references to a similar approach to advertising by a company as large and well known as Nike. You could almost call it protest advertising. The motivation behind it not unlike the slew of television shows in the states that appeared during the last few years that have been grouped into what is being called recession-tv. It’s advertising based on a negative event that has effected a large amount of people.

That commercial came out around two weeks ago, created under Nike’s general brand and if you watch it, you’ll notice they’re not actually selling any specific products in the commercial. What they’re selling is a cultural idea that they’re ‘with you’. They want you to know, that they know, even if there aren’t any NHL games being played right now, the lifestyle of hockey and love for the game still exists. Put simply they’re targeting your love for the game and hoping that by visualizing it in a commercial, they’ll be able to partner with you on a cultural level so that you’ll think they care like you do.

I’m not completely sure if they succeeded in their goals with this one and I believe it is in the way they went about it. First off this commercial was only officially targeted at their Canadian audience (even though once it was on YouTube that really didn’t matter.) The commercial itself is called “Hockey is Ours” right off the bat one would think that they mean Canada owns the game in one form or another. The commercial’s cast of players includes Alex Ovechkin, Steven Stamkos, P.K. Subban, Tessa Bonhomme and Mark Scheifele. All except Ovechkin are Canadian players, and the overall theme of the commercial is that “..you can take away” everything that allows you to play hockey but Canadians will still find a way. All told on the surface it seems like an almost noble statement paying homage to both Canada and the game itself. Then there’s that one statement that isn’t going over very well with Canadians: “Take away Canada, I’ll just go to Russia. I’d rather not but I will.” That is were it goes a bit sideways.

There is a truism in that statement but the insinuation that Canada’s love for hockey exceeds the love for their own country brings in a bit of confusion to the Canadian targeted ad. So you have to ask a few questions, one of which is who is the “Hockey is Ours” statement reffering to, Nike or Canada? If it is Canada since they seem so committed to using our country’s alignment with the game of hockey to sell the statement, why put the idea out there that we love the game more than our own country?  The idea alone certainly wouldn’t fly in an ad targeting an American demographic. Also Nike abandoned its singular hockey related brand, Nike-Bauer in 2007 so they’re not associated with Hockey as a brand nearly at all in Canada, but they are associated with athletics in general. Next question, are they trying to use the lockout as a jump-off point to re-enter the minds of hockey lovers in Canada with their athletic-culture based branding? If so will Canadians go for it while swallowing the slightly insulting nature of the ad?

Tune in next time when we’ll look at Coca-Cola, one of the western worlds oldest brands, the challenges they face in the future and Ikea, king of merging the physical with the cultural.

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Failure is Good

September 21, 2012 in Art, Business, Creativity, Design, Internet, Technology

Anyone who has an academic past where critiques of their work were part of their education can attest that failure is simply part of the process. The word itself has such a negative connotation, nobody starts out their day thinking “Today I’m going to fail!” It may surprise you though that many of the large and most well known companies consider failure to be a part of their process. A few years ago I worked on a project that allowed me to interview some of the great minds of the tech industry in Canada, one of which was the Products Manager at Google Canada at the time. Something he said during the interview when I asked him how he would define Google’s internal culture has always stuck with me:

It’s the willingness to tolerate failure in the pursuit of innovation.  If you look at where we are, we need to innovate, and that’s what we offer our users. We offer innovative solutions and simple solutions and in order to innovate, I believe you need to tolerate failures. You need a lot of failures for every big success.

(Personal opinion)

I found that to be a very powerful statement coming from someone who was at the wheel of a company that three years later is still considered to be a  profound creator of user experiences and provider of widely used technology. If you look at Google’s past, they have definitely had failures but they’ve learned from them and really that is how the majority of businesses grow. Whether the failures are small or large and if they can fail in a smart way, by that I mean, recover quickly and learn during the process, failure becomes the fertilizer for success.

A good example of this is Google+ which has attracted 400 million active users in the 14 months since it’s launch. To put that in perspective, Facebook has an estimated 950 million active users and it was launched 8 years ago. Before Google+ there was Google Wave and before that Orkut. Orkut can’t really be considered a failure since it still exists, even though it’s active user base in North America has diminished greatly since it’s launch in 2004. Wave was definitely a failure. It was launched to select groups of people, much like Google+ first was, then it was promptly shut down not long after. However the base ideas behind Orkut as a social network and the communication abilities that Google Wave allowed it’s users were combined (along with other feature) into Google+. That is failing in a smart way.

Recently it has come to light that Apple’s own social network of sorts, Ping will be shut down at the end of September. Never heard of Ping you say, well that is probably one of the reason’s that it has failed. Yes the greatly coveted, king of branded culture Apple does fail as well. Ping is Apple’s attempt at creating a social network inside iTunes based on music. It has actually been around for a little over two years yet it’s active user base is somewhere in the neighbourhood of less than 1 million users (Apple isn’t super forthcoming on statistics.) Ping was supposed to allow users to connect with each other and with the bands, singers and celebrities they covet and integrate that into the sharing of those connections through other services like Twitter and Facebook. It simply didn’t work, mostly due to its exclusivity and lack of PR in my opinion. Supposably it will be replaced by further integration of iTunes into Facebook and Twitter. It will be interesting to see what Apple has learned from this failure and how quickly they put what they’ve learned into practice.

There are numerous other examples I could site but what I’m really trying to get across here is that failure really is good. It is perhaps not something you wan’t to shoot for but it’s not a dead end either. With a bit of creative thinking and business knowledge whether you are a singular person, a small company or a large one, one can separate themselves from that failure and in doing so look at it for what it can offer. One of the first things you learn as a designer is you cannot take critiques of your work personally as they’re not meant for that purpose. The critique is of your work not you, and you can trust me as someone who has pursued art and design academically; that is a hard idea to accept. Once you do, and see failure as part of the process of creation you will be able to put into practice the idea of failing in a smart way and your future endeavours will benefit from that, greatly.

 

Image Credits: yanilavigne.net, ijafri.com, shipmentoffail.com

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What We Don’t Need is More Condos

July 24, 2012 in Business, Future Forcast, Trending

It is a well known opinion among local Architects and anyone that can see, that Toronto has ruined it’s waterfront. As you drive into Toronto from the east or west, an ominous double wall of condominiums split in two by the Gardiner Expressway looms before you. The latest development in that area of the city was supposed to contain the tallest condominium building in North America. September 11th came and that idea went.  Now that particular developer continues to develop their 18 hectare (44 acre) property which includes 17 condominium buildings. Buildings that have no identity or character whatsoever, just more additions to the wall of bad planing.

    

These are buildings where a parking spot will cost you $40,000 and the maintenance fees are around $0.50 per sq/ft. The newest 1 bedroom units are 545 sq/ft and right now going for $300k which is on the cheaper end of the scale. The condos being built on Simcoe St., a block west of University Ave. closer to the core of the downtown start at $400,000 for a 500 sq/ft unit. Since those are close to parking garages that charge $28/day and $20/night and are nearly kitty corner to the Toronto Opera House and a bit farther down the road, the epicentre of the downtown, I suspect the units will rise well into the millions, even though the entire lot is only 60′ x 250′ at best. Then there is the Trump tower which just finished construction this past year and recently started another advertising campaign to get people to buy their units. Perhaps even more opulent, the Living Shangri-La Tower, where at 66 stories the Penthouse suite will garner a cool $10,000,000.

These aren’t New York or Tokyo Prices, but these are buildings that are located in a city that can’t populate them to begin with. This is not because there aren’t enough people trying to move into Toronto, it’s because it is unaffordable for the people that want to live within the downtown to move close to where they work. Toronto has an average commuting time of aprox. 1.5hrs per day as long as you live within the downtown, outside of that the range is a bit more at 1.5-7hrs per day. Three and one half hours in a car each way. Really? Granted, some of the people who do this, do it by choice as the city is surrounded by a plethora of beautiful towns, farming communities, beaches and lakes, I’m just saying I couldn’t put that amount of time into rush hour traffic, per day.

This is not a new dynamic though, New York is a perfect example where the downtown is incredibly expensive to live in and therefore area’s around the city have developed into populated areas that have the dynamic of a city. This is true to some extent in Toronto as we have the downtown, midtown and uptown, all being developed with new condominium buildings each day however the communities outside of that are a long enough commute where till recently, unless you worked near or in them, you wouldn’t be living in those locations. One of the major contributing factors is that unlike New York, Toronto has a terrible transit system, it hasn’t grown with the city and now that they’re trying to grow it they’re finding out just how much money/time that waiting is going to end up costing the city.

To the city planners of Toronto, I know it isn’t this simple but you have to see the problems that this influx of condominiums to the downtown is causing. In the first quarter of 2012 alone there was a 59% decrease in condominium sales in Toronto and yet the price of condominiums rose 2%. Just because there is an empty piece of land or an aging walk-up, that doesn’t mean you need to allow a developer to fill it with a condominium. News flash, with the new mortgage rules that were just implemented last week in Canada, the amount of people that will be able to afford to buy is going to decrease beyond the numbers that are already low. The numbers are staggeringly obvious which is why I don’t understand it every time I walk past a “Coming Soon” condominium site.

Let me break it down for you, in 2011 the average price of a condominium in Toronto was $459,122, the average cost per square foot was $550, that means that, that average condominium is around 800 sq ft. Most likely at that size it is a 2 bedroom condominium so we’ll say for this example that it may be a couple that would buy it. That said lets pick two normal careers, a teacher in Toronto on average in 2011 made $83,000 (before taxes) and an experienced  TTC Operator (Driver) made an average of $117,500 (Before taxes), after taxes that is a combined income of around $151,690 (Calculated at 22% for the teacher and 26% for the TTC Operator). If they can afford a minimum of 20% down, that means their downpayment will be $91,824 or 60% of their combined yearly income. The payments will be around $2900 per month, $34,800 per year based on posted interest rates for a five year term, although lenders may offer a lower interest rate, land tax about $10,000 per year and condo fees of $400 per month or $4800 per year, and that’s not including any other living costs.

The other option is to go with the Federal Government and get an insured mortgage, most likely from the CMHC (Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp). If you are reading this in the states, you will be familiar with this as insured mortgages were the largest contributing factor to the housing crash in 2008 in the USA. If you go this route in Canada, you will only need a 5% down payment which in our example is $22,950, considerably less than the 20% you would have to put down with a regular mortgage, the payments would also be different. The problem here is that in Canada its been a belief by the uninformed that we have somehow dodged the bullet that killed the housing market in in 2008, this is not the case as we can see in the 59% decrease in the condominium sales in the first quarter of this year. This is also the reason that many believe the federal government has imposed these new rules on mortgages capping them at 25 years as well as more stringent qualifying variables.

So in short a couple that makes a combined income of $151,690 per year after taxes, will have to save $91,824 for a downpayment on their condo if they can afford a regular mortgage or $22,950 for an insured mortgage. If they qualify for a regular mortgage it will cost them a minimum of $50,400 per year which is a third of their combined salary and that is assuming their credit is in good standing. If they qualify for the the insured mortgage, this will contribute to the brewing problem in Canada that mirrors that which caused the housing crash in the USA in 2008. Does any of that sound realistic or a good idea to anyone?

I do understand that a city is like a living organism in that it is always growing, we see it every day. There are more cars on the roads, more of the roads are in disrepair and therefore there is more construction. I have seen more bicyclists this year than any other year taking to the streets and although we’re still in a recession, in the second quarter of 2011 alone, over 44 condominium projects were started in the city. Stop building condo’s downtown, just stop.  Look at how other cities have grown, where they’ve failed and succeeded so that we don’t end up a city of empty buildings.

 

Image Sources: urbantoronto.ca & torontosnaps.com

Statistical Sources: cbc.ca, RealNet Canada, Ontario Public Sector Salary Disclosure 2012, nucleuslearning.com, The Canadian Revenue Agency, The City of Toronto

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Nice Cans From “TheVinylkiller”

July 17, 2012 in Business, Design, Music, Technology

Awhile ago I started writing an article with the idea to provide recommendations for buying a set of headphones. I love music more than I can describe, and in order to enjoy it, you do really need a decent pair of cans. What I learned was that there is so much more involved in picking a good set of headphones than you think, its really a much better idea to go to an expert.  An expert with the sort of genius that cannot be found at your local big box store, expert that you have to seek it out. Where I found it was at a well known audio store/brand in Toronto’s Queen West neighbourhood called MOOG. For me as well, I was lucky enough to have a good friend who’s partner is that kind of expert so I got the down low on various picks ahead of time so I was able to combine that with the ridiculous selection at MOOG and found a pair I love, and use every day.

So, getting back to the article, I wanted to provide you, the reader, a decent range that would match your personalities, budget and needs and to do this I once again went to my audio guy who I’m now going to share with you through his gracious contribution to this article.

Lee Chung “TheVinylkiller” is one of Toronto’s audio specialists with over 18 years in the industry. He divides his time between teaching kids how to dj, disassembling electronics, and generally nerding out. For more information check out:

https://www.facebook.com/theVinylkiller

https://www.facebook.com/pages/Udj/15268175446

Here are some factors to consider when buying a set of headphones beyond how they look. The fit: try them on, you may be only wearing these one or two hours a day or six so it is important how they feel on you.  Durability: especially if you’re like me and aren’t super delicate with your electronics, you want them to last awhile and  not bite the dust if you pull them off quickly or toss them on the couch. That leads to warranty: does the brand have a good track record in this department? Will they replace or repair without charging you an arm and a leg? Lastly, what are the features you want out of your new headphones? Replaceable/removable cables, would you like those cables to be flat and therefore tangle free? Do you want your headphones to fold up so that you can shove them in your already packed to the brim bag or is it alright if they remain static?

More specific factors revolve around how they’re going to be used, for example do you want them to have a mic? If so, is that a mic for use with a phone or for broadcasting, if you’re a sports caster for example. If you’ll be using them in a situation where you need total isolation from any outside noises you’ll want to take that into consideration just as much as if you’re a musician and need to hear your band members. In that case you’ll want less isolation.

It is also important to note that headphones much like many other things are only as good as the weakest link in the chain. That said, though you may have a great, high-end pair of headphones if your source (what you’re plugging them into) isn’t powerful enough to drive them, then they will never be able to operate at their full potential. For example, say you’re hooking them up to a MacBookPro, the MBP’s can only put out a dynamic range of between 20hz and 20,000hz so if your high end set of cans can handle between 16hz and 22,000hz you’re not going to get that, which is where something like a headphone preamp would come in. Also how good is that audio file that you’re listening to? Is it a crap 128kb MP3 or a sweet FLAC file? Lastly one of the main factors that nobody thinks about is how well your ears can differentiate between frequencies. I.E. if you spent your youth standing next to speakers at raves and concerts, its probably not the headphones that are to blame if the music isn’t sounding as crisp as it should.

Lee’s Recommendations

For the budget conscious music lover that wants good sound and range but still wants money in their wallet after buying them you’ll want to check out the AKG K 518 LE’s I would also consider these a bit fashionable in the sense that they come in a variety of colours. These will also work with most MP3 players / phones and are pretty rugged so you shouldn’t have any issue throwing them in your bag or on your desk.

 

 

 

If you’re listening on the go, most likely on your phone or i-something, a set of the Shure E-Series will do the job. These will work very nicely to isolate you from the crowds on a subway as well as not advertise to the world you’re carrying something of value, which may or may not be something to consider, depending where you live. On top of that, they’re only about $20 more than the ones above but do offer the sound isolation and a Kevlar® reinforced cable, so you won’t have to worry about their durability.

 

 

 

For all of the audiophiles out there, you’re probably familiar with the Pioneer HDJ-2000′s which Lee says are decent though he recommends the Sennheiser HD-25′s. These are a fine set of cans, and since there’s not much detail on MOOG’s site, I would encourage you to check them out on the Sennheiser product page to see just how awesome these are. These will be my next set of headphones.

 

 

 

 

Last but not least for the DJ’s out there, you will definitely want to check out the Audio-Technica ATH-M50SLE’s. Lee also mentioned the Pioneer HDJ-2000′s in this category as well, but the Audio-Technica’s are what he would recommend. If these aren’t good enough for you, you aren’t doing it right.

 

Once again I want to thank Lee Chung for all the help in writing this article,

here again is where you can find him:

https://www.facebook.com/theVinylkiller

https://www.facebook.com/pages/Udj/15268175446

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My 2¢: The Differences Between Art and Design

June 27, 2012 in Art, Business, Design, My 2¢

Before I get into this, I would like to emphasize this is purely my opinion based on personal experience. 

I spent the majority of the last decade studying art and design, three years for art, five for design. During that time I was also working and have been relatively successful as a designer for around eight years. I say relatively since there really is nothing to compare a design career to anymore. Used to be you could compare what you’d done to various “superstar designers” but that era has/is quickly disappearing. Now, if you have a goal or mantra that dictates what you’d like to do with your projects, that is more commonly how designers will gauge success.

Outside of the people and companies who hire designers and artists, and the design and art communities themselves, the two area’s still aren’t hugely respected as career choices. Anyone who has taken either in school has experienced this in the form of questions like: “What are you going to do for work?” or “Is there a market for that?”. Unfortunately with the economy in the state it has been since 2008, and will be for at least a few more years, the questions do hold value. On the plus side, if you are currently in school for either of these, fear not. If you put your creatively advanced minds’ to it, you should be able to come up with some in and out of the box answers. That said, don’t let my comment on “creatively advanced minds” go to your head. I am of the school of thought that really anyone can be an artist or a designer, whether you will be successful at either venture depends nearly equally on how good you are, who you know, how hard you’re willing to work and just random dumb luck.

Artist and designers do share a few commonalities, one that they don’t however, is that design is a service industry, art is not. The majority of projects that you will do as a designer are not for you, they’re for someone else. This means the following: you can’t fall in love with the project, it is not your baby, it is someone else’s. Although, you should love what you do enough to put all you can into the project as if it is your baby and you are in love with it, it is a thin line that you have to walk. You can’t dwell on a project for as long as you want, the industry simply doesn’t allow it. You have deadlines and just like any other job, if you don’t meet them, there will be consequences. This is why you have to be efficient and think on the ball, so to speak, so that you can timeline your projects to include the proper process so that the story of the end product can be properly written.

I didn’t spend enough time as an artist to explain the following as specifically as I did with design but there are small similarities and large differences. Like a designer, an artist can have a contracted or commissioned project, in which case you will also have a deadline. Artists however are allowed to fall in love with their work, actually its really more of a requirement to do what they do, in whatever media they are working in. As an artist you can take critique personally because whatever you’ve done has come from a place not necessarily motivated by servitude so much as a straight shot from your creative epicentre. From someone who came from an artistic background into design, it took me a long, long time to not be attached to a project as I would to a sculpture or painting I’d done. I won’t lie, it still occasionally happens and I doubt you could find a designer with or without an artistic background that hasn’t had the same problem.

The funny thing is even with all of the differences between art and design, the two are grouped together as many times as they are compared. It is true, the world needs both art and design just as it needs every other creative venture like music and architecture. Unfortunately all of the above are easily effected by economic trends and, that is the commonality that they all share. When it comes down to it and a person or company is looking at the bottom line, they need to weigh their “wants” and their “needs”. More often than not, a creatively motivated item will fall in the “want” category which is why the ones that survive in creative industries really have to love what they do, and think on their feet. If they don’t they will fall victim to rejection, money troubles and eventually look for a way out, which is a shame.

Img Sources: Art Is Everywhere, isleofideas.com,

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Canadian Creative Pride

June 17, 2012 in Creativity, Film, Music, Trending

Today I am inundated by the echoed sounds of rehearsals from down the street. I live about a block from MuchMusic, and tonight is the “MMVA’s” or Much Music Video Awards, held annually on Father’s Day since 1990.  Unlike the MTV awards which are sequestered away inside a theatre and performed to an audience of nominees, celebrities and fans; the MMVA’s are held outside and the music is for anyone willing to brave the elements and crowds. I supremely admire this idea, it is a very Canadian thing to do and one of the few that is not a stereotype.

The entire production has a very welcoming vibe, and has come a long way from its first airing over two decades ago in 1990 when it was called “The Canadian Music Video Awards”. In 1990 the dynamic was as public as it is today, albeit a little more eccentric. The CMVA’s actually took place on a train (thats not a typo) which traveled across Canada over the course of a week, visiting various cities where the musicians would perform. For obvious logistical reasons, the next year the awards took place in the iconic century-old ChumCity Building at 299 Queen St. West, where both the awards and MuchMusic hail from today (along with about a dozen other media broadcasts).

The ChumCity/MuchMusic Building normally…                  …and during the MMVA’s…

 

 

 

 

 

 

Throughout the 22 years of the MMVA’s there have been performances by many, many musicians. The Crash Test Dummies in ’91, Bryan Adams in ’92, Treble Charger and Alanis Morissette in ’95, Sheryl Crow in ’96. Blur, Bush, Greenday, The Smashing Pumpkins, A Tribe Called Quest, Alice Cooper, David Bowie, Christina Aguilera, Britney Spears, The Red Hot Chilli Peppers, Lenny Kravitz, The Guess Who, Korn and I’ll stop there because there really is too many to list. The reason there’s too many to list is that the MMVA’s are more akin to a concert or music festival than an awards show. There are no official hosts, the MuchMusic VJ’s take care of that. The main stage is literally in the parking lot of the building and the red carpet is an entire street covered in red vinyl where the artists are known to arrive in various eccentric modes of transport. from hearses to human sized hamster balls. Each year sees around 10 musicians perform, this year gracing the stages will be: LMFAO, Katy Perry, Justin Bieber, Kelly Clarkson, Flo Rida, Hedley, Ed Sheeran, Carly Rae Jepsen, Nelly Furtado and Marianas Trench.

Speaking of festivals, this past week and weekend also marked the arrival of North by Northeast (NXNE), a live music and film festival that has lived in and around Toronto since 1994. The festival’s roots came from the South by Southwest festival in the US but have grown to include, (as of this year) 650 bands/musicians, all performing in and around Toronto, in bars, clubs, on the street, in squares and parks. One of the unique attributes of NXNE is that its entirely volunteer driven making the majority of the performances free to the public. Another is that it promotes and allows musicians and bands yet to “be known” to perform in a festival that is coveted by those that are already “known” bringing together an unprecedented eclectic mix of people from all over the world. For example this year has seen performances by The Flaming Lips, Raekwon & Ghostface Killah and Bad Religion. It has also seen The Stanleys, a pop group from Australia, The Aves, an indie group also from Australia, and Ben Caplan w/ The Casual Smokers who hail from Canada’s east coast.


I would be remiss to not mention that this past week Toronto was also host to Luminato, the Festival for Creativity (its been a busy week). Although not nearly as accessible as the MMVA’s and NXNE, still home to many very interesting, sometimes obscure performances, in many different creative arenas. I took in one of the performances, a supposed opera by Phillip Glass called Einstein on the Beach. I won’t go into what I thought about the performance here since I reviewed it for one of Toronto’s destination blogs, WhatToDoToronto.com, you can find the review here.

The mix of creativity that has descended on Toronto this week is astounding. Canada’s love for fostering creativity in all areas was undeniable. Though our reputation has been ridden over time with stereotypes; to those who think we are too nice or a trusting people, have a variety of different accents (that are commonly made fun of) and yes some of us do live in igloos, those aren’t bad things. Canada is home to hundreds of different cultures and we covet the immensely creative blood lines that run from the Maritimes, through the Great Lakes, across the prairies and to the mountains in the west. We are proud of this and are a strong country, full of good people who will not be phased by “Canadian, eh?” jokes. Come for a visit sometime, perhaps then you will understand.

Image Sources: era.on.ca, muchmusic.com, luminato.com, nxne.com

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