My morning seminar at the University was unexpectedly canceled after my professor's husband called in with news of the flu. Already up and out, I almost immediately started having coffee with Ted, quickly joined by Trevor, who was on his way back to Calgary. Only with the poor driving conditions, we convinced him to stay in town, a notion soon psychically affirmed by his mother.
Moving back to Edmonton after another stint in Calgary, Trevor Anderson has fiercely and consciously embraced this city as his home. This is the place to work! To live! and so, as his very own personal assistant for the day, I stuck with Trevor through a very thorough day of setting up his new life version 5.7.
Between iphone communications, multiple meals, and an Orange Julius break at West Edmonton Mall, we productively and efficiently set up shop with the basic home needs (toilet paper, soap, condoms, etc), dropped off dry cleaning, bought enough socks and gonch to last the week, took a photo with zach efron, found and moved in a beautiful country style german work table along with a red wooden chair from austin, and we did this all before 6 p.m.
Being in Grandin again, where so many of my own memories linger, we walked from his place to Martini's, a trek beneath the trees where it was discovered there are no garbage cans on the east side of the street. It's a trek that recalls various faces, through various times, seasons, and days, and it was good to add to that bank an old new friend.
The day turned into night, a night of beers and cigarettes, a night that had to continue on without me as my cough slid into a full blown flu, but others joined the table that the german table reminded me of, including Ted who left the two of us together some 9 hours earlier. Seeing Ted again, both Trevor and I recognized and verbalized the scope of time, and space, that had spanned since we last saw Ted. A full day missed of assignment that I wouldn't of remembered a week from now, replaced instead with conversations and impressions that will inevitably form my life's work here--and really nowhere else.
Thursday, March 05, 2009
Sunday, November 16, 2008
3 Very Short Thoughts
Being within the University institution has left me mostly out of the loop, but have been reading and writing lots with thought, which is now slower than ever before. but perhaps worth it. but I question my sanity and its relevance.
have been collaborating on a directed reading course on edmonton as model for mid size urban n. american cities, and the product of this research is looking like a creative non fiction manuscript.
thinking about urban identities in terms of social ecology, a city's sprawl is the social ecological equivalent of human obesity.
have been collaborating on a directed reading course on edmonton as model for mid size urban n. american cities, and the product of this research is looking like a creative non fiction manuscript.
thinking about urban identities in terms of social ecology, a city's sprawl is the social ecological equivalent of human obesity.
Thursday, September 25, 2008
maybe it was hitting a car on my bike one day, then getting hit by a car while on my back the next day.
maybe it is the 2 elections going on in North America.
maybe it is losing my Grandma and my Father within months
whatever it is the world seems closer to chaos to me than ever before- in order to fend off the feeling of empending doom I went for a walk one morning.
These photos are from that walk, during which I realized that it had been months since I actually connected with the cement of my city. Walking around downtown Edmonton with my camera was something I once did all the time. I miss those days and the feeling of ownership and pride I had back then.
Looking at these photos a few days later I can see that no matter what is on the horizon- be it doom worthy or not- change is upon us.
Thursday, August 14, 2008
Waxing gibbous moon
the evening started at latitude 53's last patio of the season. a perfect night for martinis, wine, i even wanted a beer, sitting around with good friends and pretty flowers, the day's work done.
you don't get nights like this too often, and the second we got home i was out in it again, walking. i saw a woman standing in her nightgown on her balcony, heavy and backlit by the small apartment behind her. at the polish daycare around the corner, all the little tricycles, strollers and dayglo plastic ride-ons were lined up silently next to the fence, the streetlight bouncing dully off molded conformity. the school next to it, one of those 50s elementary schools, built when the world still believed in glass brick and curves, stood formal and majestic. i saw i saw the glow of cigarettes, brighter, dimmer, and brighter again. i saw sheets hung as curtains, sweet homemade landscapes, chip bags made magical by the moon.
mostly quiet, the neighbourhood peeled back for motorcycles. i heard the murmuring of couples sitting on front stoops, the quiet laughter of my neighbours entertaining on the back deck. when i stopped at a 7/11, eyes crazed by fluorescence, the vendor laughed and said, in a thick jamaican accent, "joo got to enjoy de weather now, before da man come again -- old man winter." small dogs, startled by me, registered their alarm. a cat named lexie rubbed against my legs. some night flower wafted by, fleetingly.
you could live a whole life in a night like this, all of it unfolding, lotuslike, under a waxing gibbous moon.
you don't get nights like this too often, and the second we got home i was out in it again, walking. i saw a woman standing in her nightgown on her balcony, heavy and backlit by the small apartment behind her. at the polish daycare around the corner, all the little tricycles, strollers and dayglo plastic ride-ons were lined up silently next to the fence, the streetlight bouncing dully off molded conformity. the school next to it, one of those 50s elementary schools, built when the world still believed in glass brick and curves, stood formal and majestic. i saw i saw the glow of cigarettes, brighter, dimmer, and brighter again. i saw sheets hung as curtains, sweet homemade landscapes, chip bags made magical by the moon.
mostly quiet, the neighbourhood peeled back for motorcycles. i heard the murmuring of couples sitting on front stoops, the quiet laughter of my neighbours entertaining on the back deck. when i stopped at a 7/11, eyes crazed by fluorescence, the vendor laughed and said, in a thick jamaican accent, "joo got to enjoy de weather now, before da man come again -- old man winter." small dogs, startled by me, registered their alarm. a cat named lexie rubbed against my legs. some night flower wafted by, fleetingly.
you could live a whole life in a night like this, all of it unfolding, lotuslike, under a waxing gibbous moon.
Sunday, August 10, 2008
Summer Blues
Surviving the winter and spring mold with no problem this year, summer has been filled with down times. Is there such a thing as August Blues--a symptom or damage done from at least twelve years of structured seasons? The extreme cold replaced by heat waves, always one end of the spectrum. Festivals have taken over every weekend, with everyone at Folk this weekend and Heritage last, a festival city mentality, which someone recently aligned to our boom and bust reality. All or nothing. Concentrated good times to off balance hard living? I found it hilarious when recent artists summed up their week long residence at a brand new downtown housing complex as comparable to a women's prison. Institutional in its uniformity, bare walls, oppression of imagination with no regard for aesthetics, there's not much pretty to view, but you get a lot of work done.
View from 102nd St parkade, one of the best viewing spots in the city. Any higher and you just see flat, from WEM to the concrete and chemical refineries, small lumps jutting from a flat line all so far, far away.
View from 102nd St parkade, one of the best viewing spots in the city. Any higher and you just see flat, from WEM to the concrete and chemical refineries, small lumps jutting from a flat line all so far, far away.
Wednesday, July 30, 2008
Someone please tell me why Edmonton is worth staying in?
From a chorus of discussions over this past week culminating to a quiet corner conversation tonight at Martini's, I have come to a semi conclusion: Edmonton has no heart. People leave, come and go, and it's simply expected. Transient city. No heartbreaks. Shallow ties. Unstable roots and unable to grow.
Talking with Shawna Dempsey this past week, a Winnipegger all the way (from Scarborough), I couldn't help but try and compare Edmonton and Winnipeg as similarities accumulated: both midsized prairie towns, murder capitals of Canada rank #1 and #2, blue collar, unwalkable, frigidly cold. Arts wise, there are opportunities in both cities, where with enough gumption, you can live however you like and curate shows about the city you live in in a major public gallery . . . Only Winnipeg is Edmonton with heart. When people leave, it is heart breaking. People leave Edmonton and rarely look back. People leave Winnipeg fondly thinking of the city in their hearts. Maybe not always, but they stay for heart, not money.
The main difference is the mentality of money. There is money here, meaning potential, prosperity, a boom, that will be eventually followed by a bust. People are attracted by wealth, and a few of them stay after it dries up, having invested time and perhaps property. It's a cash grab, like that vacuum on that old game show where bills swirl and the participant tries to grab as many bills as they can, before time is up and they vacate their hollow tube. There are no foundations in place for real development. I am again thinking of arts, such as real art schools, film schools, contemporary galleries, and an audience that thinks this is some place to be, to grow and spread from the ground up.
I used to believe that in order to stay, you had to leave. Often. As the opposite seems ridiculous: that once you leave, you visit. Often. So why stay at all? I have been fighting the urge to leave for years, resisting the collective push to think elsewhere has to be better than here. I still don't think elsewhere is better; it is simply elsewhere.
It is a beautiful summer and the people are always solid, yet, I continue to question why I remain still and what I anticipate to come of this next year.
Talking with Shawna Dempsey this past week, a Winnipegger all the way (from Scarborough), I couldn't help but try and compare Edmonton and Winnipeg as similarities accumulated: both midsized prairie towns, murder capitals of Canada rank #1 and #2, blue collar, unwalkable, frigidly cold. Arts wise, there are opportunities in both cities, where with enough gumption, you can live however you like and curate shows about the city you live in in a major public gallery . . . Only Winnipeg is Edmonton with heart. When people leave, it is heart breaking. People leave Edmonton and rarely look back. People leave Winnipeg fondly thinking of the city in their hearts. Maybe not always, but they stay for heart, not money.
The main difference is the mentality of money. There is money here, meaning potential, prosperity, a boom, that will be eventually followed by a bust. People are attracted by wealth, and a few of them stay after it dries up, having invested time and perhaps property. It's a cash grab, like that vacuum on that old game show where bills swirl and the participant tries to grab as many bills as they can, before time is up and they vacate their hollow tube. There are no foundations in place for real development. I am again thinking of arts, such as real art schools, film schools, contemporary galleries, and an audience that thinks this is some place to be, to grow and spread from the ground up.
I used to believe that in order to stay, you had to leave. Often. As the opposite seems ridiculous: that once you leave, you visit. Often. So why stay at all? I have been fighting the urge to leave for years, resisting the collective push to think elsewhere has to be better than here. I still don't think elsewhere is better; it is simply elsewhere.
It is a beautiful summer and the people are always solid, yet, I continue to question why I remain still and what I anticipate to come of this next year.
Friday, July 25, 2008
seeing what i need to hear
“Any closer, any wiser and you would be dangerous” he said to his daughter- a tiny bald baby in a car seat.
I wanted to hit him but since I was another car and not driving I couldn’t.
Nor could I be sure that is what he said but while we were both sitting there, waiting for the light to turn green, green against the grey sky of summer weather, a rain storm to disrupt barbeques and baseball games I thought I could read his lips. I thought I could sense what asinine things he would be saying to her, her whom I assumed was his baby.
When the light changed and my friend started driving again I said to her, “Did you hear that?” to which like a sensible person she replied, “heard what?” We were in a silent car with not much noise coming in from the outside. Anything for the most part that our ears were picking up was urban white noise and not much to notice. “Well I guess you couldn’t hear it, “ I said “but that father in the car next to us was already berating his baby daughter with sexist remarks”.
By the time I got the sentence out of me and it hit her ears I was over it and pretty sure I was wrong. Now my mind was wondering and I was thinking about an old dollar store I use to go to in a mall I once worked in. the Dollar Store was near a tailor shop where the owners had a photo up of them with Elvis Presley. It was an enlarged photocopy of the photo really that it its self had already gone yellow and flakey but still it was exciting and provided a good prompt for small talk while the foreign workers who worked for the tailors would collect the repaired garments.
It was one of many dollar stores that existed in the mall. 1 of 3 actually at the time. Now it along with the other two are closed and in its place is another one, a mega one with seemly countless isles with product placed together with no rhyme or no reason.
At first when it opened I was glad for it. Before when there was more than one store I use to have to go to all 3 to get everything that you wanted and even though they were called dollar stores they all carried things at slightly different prices- the cheekiest among them, a family run dollar store use to charge as much as $9 for things.
The mega dollar in the food court changed all that. Now there was one stop where everything was a dollar.
A friend of mine who I always mean to call says that dollar stores are a sign of a blue-collar community and sinking economy. He says a lot of smart things because he is smart but more than that he is a reader, and understander and a thinker so when he says something I am not afraid that I am hearing recycled ideas I am hearing the real deal from the horses mouth. When it comes to his theory of dollar stores I agree.
Across the street from me was a dollar store in the new urban strip mall that was actually a perimeter of 1-story buildings that surrounded a parking lot. Aside from the grocery store that had good cheese buns, the best cheese buns there was also a great dollar store that for me replaced the 3 dollar stores in the mall long before they closed and the mega dollar store opened up. It was all-cheap, though not all a dollar didn’t smell like cheap candles (wasn’t open long enough to) and had everything I needed.
Soon after I mover into the neighborhood and begun taking the place for granted it shut down. For the longest time the space it once took up stood empty and I took it as a sign that if the area couldn’t even sustain a dollar store than it would never make it.
Not soon after that thought came the new business that would take over the space- Marble Slab- an overpriced ice cream shop that caters to those who think they deserve to treat themselves.
While the dollar store was never busy the ice cream shop was never really dead- even in the winter when it was too cold to be outside people would wait in their cars and stare into the shop not going in until there was enough to form the line inside and not outside like the summer.
It was during the winter and witnessing all the idiots idling for ice cream while I schlepped my groceries home that maybe my friend was wrong. Maybe dollar stores are just markers of a time. Maybe the truth was the area couldn’t sustain a dollar store because it thought it was better than cheap Chinese made goods. Maybe the neighborhood wanted overpriced empty calories in stead. Not having to pay for bad choices was the providence of the rich so I guess my area was moving on up
In the summer the ice cream place is such a hot spot that people park their trucks and cars backwards and treat the parking lot like a park, which is sad because there is a park right behind the ice cream place but people either didn’t know or care about it or want to be by their cars.
I guess a season after realizing that my neighborhood was changing I realized that I was becoming disenfranchised with it. I use to feel like I lived alone in the area, like woman in Wigginstien’s mistress who thinks that she is the last woman on earth and basically writes that on the streets in front of the Louver in Paris.
Seeing people hang out in parking lots made me realize that whether or not I liked it I belonged in the neighborhood because by being- even if I was never acknowledged or liked or thought of I still existed in the same space and there for still was a part of…
Full parking lots typified the overall dissatisfaction I was having of no longer being able to convince myself that I was all-alone. While I use to actually love parking lots because their emptiness as proof of man gave me hope, seeing them filled with lard chomping idiots filled me with doom.
Same thing happened when all the cranes on main street disappeared and where once stood derelict buildings and then gaping holes with cranes emerging now stood forgettable impenetrable buildings of banality lacking in imagination and humanness- not to mention humor.
I stayed here for so long because I thought it was going to become something that I could believe in. I thought because I had spent so much time scaling its walls and traipsing through its streets it might in the smallest and most magical of ways reflect me or at least on some level serve me but it doesn’t and it hasn’t and it won’t.
Getting out of the car as my friend drops me off I feel bad for spending our last few minutes in the car daydreaming about how miserable I am, acting like a disappointed hippy father whose kid grows up to be a model or politician walking around begrudging my own youth, wondering where all the time went and craving the dirty past that probably never existed the way I wanted it to.
Ted
I wanted to hit him but since I was another car and not driving I couldn’t.
Nor could I be sure that is what he said but while we were both sitting there, waiting for the light to turn green, green against the grey sky of summer weather, a rain storm to disrupt barbeques and baseball games I thought I could read his lips. I thought I could sense what asinine things he would be saying to her, her whom I assumed was his baby.
When the light changed and my friend started driving again I said to her, “Did you hear that?” to which like a sensible person she replied, “heard what?” We were in a silent car with not much noise coming in from the outside. Anything for the most part that our ears were picking up was urban white noise and not much to notice. “Well I guess you couldn’t hear it, “ I said “but that father in the car next to us was already berating his baby daughter with sexist remarks”.
By the time I got the sentence out of me and it hit her ears I was over it and pretty sure I was wrong. Now my mind was wondering and I was thinking about an old dollar store I use to go to in a mall I once worked in. the Dollar Store was near a tailor shop where the owners had a photo up of them with Elvis Presley. It was an enlarged photocopy of the photo really that it its self had already gone yellow and flakey but still it was exciting and provided a good prompt for small talk while the foreign workers who worked for the tailors would collect the repaired garments.
It was one of many dollar stores that existed in the mall. 1 of 3 actually at the time. Now it along with the other two are closed and in its place is another one, a mega one with seemly countless isles with product placed together with no rhyme or no reason.
At first when it opened I was glad for it. Before when there was more than one store I use to have to go to all 3 to get everything that you wanted and even though they were called dollar stores they all carried things at slightly different prices- the cheekiest among them, a family run dollar store use to charge as much as $9 for things.
The mega dollar in the food court changed all that. Now there was one stop where everything was a dollar.
A friend of mine who I always mean to call says that dollar stores are a sign of a blue-collar community and sinking economy. He says a lot of smart things because he is smart but more than that he is a reader, and understander and a thinker so when he says something I am not afraid that I am hearing recycled ideas I am hearing the real deal from the horses mouth. When it comes to his theory of dollar stores I agree.
Across the street from me was a dollar store in the new urban strip mall that was actually a perimeter of 1-story buildings that surrounded a parking lot. Aside from the grocery store that had good cheese buns, the best cheese buns there was also a great dollar store that for me replaced the 3 dollar stores in the mall long before they closed and the mega dollar store opened up. It was all-cheap, though not all a dollar didn’t smell like cheap candles (wasn’t open long enough to) and had everything I needed.
Soon after I mover into the neighborhood and begun taking the place for granted it shut down. For the longest time the space it once took up stood empty and I took it as a sign that if the area couldn’t even sustain a dollar store than it would never make it.
Not soon after that thought came the new business that would take over the space- Marble Slab- an overpriced ice cream shop that caters to those who think they deserve to treat themselves.
While the dollar store was never busy the ice cream shop was never really dead- even in the winter when it was too cold to be outside people would wait in their cars and stare into the shop not going in until there was enough to form the line inside and not outside like the summer.
It was during the winter and witnessing all the idiots idling for ice cream while I schlepped my groceries home that maybe my friend was wrong. Maybe dollar stores are just markers of a time. Maybe the truth was the area couldn’t sustain a dollar store because it thought it was better than cheap Chinese made goods. Maybe the neighborhood wanted overpriced empty calories in stead. Not having to pay for bad choices was the providence of the rich so I guess my area was moving on up
In the summer the ice cream place is such a hot spot that people park their trucks and cars backwards and treat the parking lot like a park, which is sad because there is a park right behind the ice cream place but people either didn’t know or care about it or want to be by their cars.
I guess a season after realizing that my neighborhood was changing I realized that I was becoming disenfranchised with it. I use to feel like I lived alone in the area, like woman in Wigginstien’s mistress who thinks that she is the last woman on earth and basically writes that on the streets in front of the Louver in Paris.
Seeing people hang out in parking lots made me realize that whether or not I liked it I belonged in the neighborhood because by being- even if I was never acknowledged or liked or thought of I still existed in the same space and there for still was a part of…
Full parking lots typified the overall dissatisfaction I was having of no longer being able to convince myself that I was all-alone. While I use to actually love parking lots because their emptiness as proof of man gave me hope, seeing them filled with lard chomping idiots filled me with doom.
Same thing happened when all the cranes on main street disappeared and where once stood derelict buildings and then gaping holes with cranes emerging now stood forgettable impenetrable buildings of banality lacking in imagination and humanness- not to mention humor.
I stayed here for so long because I thought it was going to become something that I could believe in. I thought because I had spent so much time scaling its walls and traipsing through its streets it might in the smallest and most magical of ways reflect me or at least on some level serve me but it doesn’t and it hasn’t and it won’t.
Getting out of the car as my friend drops me off I feel bad for spending our last few minutes in the car daydreaming about how miserable I am, acting like a disappointed hippy father whose kid grows up to be a model or politician walking around begrudging my own youth, wondering where all the time went and craving the dirty past that probably never existed the way I wanted it to.
Ted
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