High Performance Rodeo preview

Man, there is no stopping Father Time. November, that most hateful and hated month of my year, is almost behind us, and in barely three weeks is that beacon of hope known as the Winter Solstice. I’ll even be around to witness it in these northern climes since for the first time since 1999, Brian and I will be celebrating the holidays at home- OUR home I mean.

And after that comes January, which is one of my favourite months. Why? Well, first, my birthday is on the 21st. Second, it’s the first full month after the solstice, which means that for us in the northern hemisphere, the first month in which every day is longer than the one previous. Third, it’s the month of One Yellow Rabbit’s High Performance Rodeo, which is a completely amazing alternative theatre festival. I’ve seen some of the best performances of my life there, including Cul de Sac and In On It by the outrageously talented and very cute Daniel McIvor, The End of the Moon by Laurie Anderson (which was, by far, the best thing of hers among the three performances I’ve seen), and a fun concert by The Hidden Cameras. Amazingly, people who malign Calgary for its supposed lack of “culture” usually have no idea that we have an accessible, world-class event like this. It’s a damn shame.

This year, I’m really looking forward to two shows. Well, one I’m really REALLY looking forward to, and that’s Kevin McDonald’s (yes, the Kid in the Hall) Hammy and the Kids, a monologue that (so I’ve read) is about his life with his alcoholic dad. Anybody recall the “Daddy Drank” sketch? Here it is:

I’m looking forward to some stories about the early days of KITH, which, as any KITH expert knows, was partially born (partial birth, hyuk hyuk) in Calgary since Bruce and Mark met while at Loose Moose, but I digress… this one is a must see, and he’s doing four performances.

The show that I’m really, if not REALLY, looking forward to, is Bash’d, a “hip hopera” with two gay MC’s, Feminen and T-Bag. This would appear to be right up my alley, especially since I now have the goal of becoming the world’s oldest gay beat boxer- more on that later. Maybe.

My new Kids in the Hall (Season 5) boxed set has taught me that wistfulness about a happy past is better than regret about an unhappy one.

The weather has been pretty damn good this month, which is a lucky thing as November here can be a real crap shoot. Last year around this time, we were suffering under highs in the -20s and snow and icy, icy roads; this year, nary a flake (maybe more than nary, but not much more) and I still have not unsheathed my “real” winter coat. So I took the opportunity to take the long walk home after Brian and I had a predictably great lunch at Lina’s Italian Market. That’s in the Tuxedo Park neighbourhood straddling NE and NW Calgary on Centre Street, and the walk home is, oh, 3.79 miles, according to this very cool pedometer that lets you map walking or running, or any, really, route and it calculates distance as you enter “legs.” Very, very cool.

On the walk home I bought season five, the final season, of Kids in the Hall. I already own seasons one, two, and three–somehow four has eluded me–as well as both their Same Guys, New Dresses and Tour of Duty  concert DVDs, their film, Kids in the Hall: Brain Candy, have seen them twice in concert (January 2000 at Massey Hall in Toronto and May 2002 at Northlands Coliseum in Edmonton), saw Bruce McCulloch in Letters to Wendy’s (which as far as I can tell has never been performed outside of Calgary), and accosted Mark McKinney at the corner of Bloor and Bay in TO. So yes, I am a fan. KITH were part of what attracted me to Canada before I ever met Brian. I’d watch KITH marathons on Comedy Central and was over the moon when they used to show two- TWO!- episodes of KITH in CBS late night Fridays. When the show was cancelled (or when the troupe decided it was time to end it- it was never “cancelled” per se), I was mournful.

That was in 1995, and of course  they are still kicking and still performing. I never got to see a show taping (having met Brian and made most of my sojourns to Toronto after the end of the show), but I did, as you’ve seen, get to see them live twice. And thanks to the fact that every bit of broadcast for KITH and pretty much everything else is available on DVD or through the efforts of some intrepid archiver on YouTube, I can relive those happy moments over and over again.

Or can I?

The fact is, reliving the past can be damn depressing. I can never recover what it was like to see these shows for the first time. My epic voyage to Germany struck home the idea that one cannot, as Heraclitus pointed out way back when, stand in the same river twice. I’ve blogged before about how the home and the home town where I grew up no longer exist. Things change. Cities change. People change. The happy memories of yesterday become faded memories of a decade ago. And so we sometimes revisit the past with a sense of melancholy, because we can never fully recover the experiences that we’re trying to recover, or simply to remember.

So yesterday we were watching some travelogue pap on the Food Network, Rachel Ray telling us where to get the best cheap Mexican food in LA or something like that, and I lamented about how I just want to travel more after recovering from a trip, but I was depressed that my recent memories were already shuttling into the past, ever further. So maybe it would be better to not have any special experiences at all, and to never have that sense of melancholy that I get to a paralyzing degree sometimes. I must be the only person who cried when he found this video on YouTube:

Why? Well this was part of my childhood and now I’m 43 and am going to die Quisp- and Quake-less, I guess.

But this is the thing: would it be better to never travel, never take risks, never partake of the lotus when it’s offered? A life without pleasure would, it would seem, be a life without that ache for a happy past. Best never to be happy, right?

And then it hit me like a tonne of bricks. Hell, no. That would be a life full of regret. And I know that the regret that I do feel–regret, for example, that I might have chosen a career different from the one that I pretty much settled on when I was 18–is not bittersweet. It’s just bitter.

Wistfulness means that you were happy, maybe more than once. It’s a blessing.

Espresso “esperimentation” with my Leva

I’ve become a member of a prestigious little club called the LMWDP, or “lever machine world domination project.” It’s associated with the lever machines discussion forum, and of course the aficionados who post there, on home-barista.com. My LMWDP number is 119. You probably don’t have one, and that’s just as well.

“Lever machines” are manual espresso machines. Espresso machines work by pushing hot water (NOT STEAM!) through a bed of coffee. The hot water has to be at a pressure sufficient to make it through the coffee (which is finely ground and then tamped to make it relatively impermeable), and the coffee extracted this way is espresso with the concentrated, “syrupy,” crema-crowned qualities of espresso- when the extraction is done right. Most machines provide for the necessary pressure by delivering the hot water via a pump, but lever machines don’t use pumps. Instead, they use either a spring-driven piston which is cocked by an operator who pulls down on a long-ish lever that compresses the spring, or else they entail the operator pushing down on the piston directly, with the aid of a lever of course.

There’s nothing inherently better among pump, spring-assisted lever, and manual lever machines. All can produce outstanding espresso, if the machines are inherently up to the task and if the operator is sufficiently skilled. The enthusiasm and (sometimes) arrogance of the lever crowd is due, I think, to the hands-on nature of espresso making with a lever and the implication that it entails one additional bit of skill–the competent manipulation of the lever–that makes it a less mechanical and more “artisanal” experience. I know that, since I decided to buy my machine (an Elektra Microcasa a Leva, a machine that has been in production since the 1950s in various forms), I feel a lot “closer” to the experience and appreciate espresso on a level that’s more, well, religious than it had been before. And I was a coffee geek way, way before I bought my Leva.

The “experimentation” that I refer to in this post title has to with a suggestion by a poster at HB that suggested a shorter than normal (or shorter than instructed) preinfusion with my machine. “Preinfusion” refers to the few seconds before a shot of espresso is drawn during which water that is under “resting” pressure (the pressure under which the water sits as it’s heated in the machine- heat increases pressure, and the water in the Leva’s boiler is at about 1.2 atmospheres of pressure just sitting there being really, really hot) is allowed to drip into the espresso grounds; after a few second of this “preinfusion,” the operator turns on the pump or pulls the lever down or up or whatever her machine requires to make the espresso itself, utilizing “assisted” pressure of between 6 and 9 atmospheres. With the Leva, it’s recommended that preinfusion take 10 seconds or until the operator sees drips coming out of the portafilter (the thing with the handle that holds the ground coffee). The novel suggestion on HB was to only preinfuse for two or three seconds. Heresy! But I tried it, and it works. I got excited enough to post this vid:

Obsessive? Nah, it’s a hobby. It’s not like I have Asperger’s Syndrome. And even if I do, Aspies need good espresso. More than most people.

Lessons about urbanism from Miami

I returned yesterday after five days in Miami.

My trip was for “work.” Not conference “work,” which (for me) isn’t really work at all but three, four, sometimes five days with soft obligations (like one 90-minute panel, sometimes two, in which my own presentation constitutes about 15 minutes of speaking) and plenty of free time for socializing and other sorts of fun. This was four very intense days of data collection for a project that I’ve been enlisted for. I’ve done very little applied research in my career, and this is very neat. I hope that I can keep this shingle hung outside my door permanently, on a part-time basis I mean. It’s all really fulfilling.

So “work” was engaging and exhausting and didn’t leave me much time- any time, really- to explore Miami. I only got to know my very nice hotel room and the route from there to the study site, which entailed perhaps 10 minutes of walking through downtown. I also had two meals at the Bayside Marketplace, which is a “festival marketplace” with all the trappings that this label implies. Hard Rock? Check. Bubba Gump? Check. Disney Store? Check. I actually had some serviceable Cuban food (stewed pork with rice and black beans) at the food court there, and it wasn’t unpleasant.

The thing is, Miami challenges some of the lessons about urbanism that planners (among other urbanists) take for granted, because the “urbanity” of downtown Miami just doesn’t seem to work. Is downtown “urban”? Most definitely. Miami has an abundance–an absurd abundance, in fact–of residential projects going up in and around downtown. It’s reminiscent of Vancouver or Honolulu (or Calgary) in that regard, and for a skyscraper geek, it’s inspiring. With this buildout, one would expect to find the street-level amenities and street life to reflect that population boom. And here’s where the story goes in an unexpected direction, and there are some concrete reasons for that.

1. Miami is overbuilt. This is probably not only the case downtown, but one can see it acutely downtown. The towers under construction are largely unsold; completed towers are largely empty; planned towers are being cancelled all over the place; speculators are losing money (LOTS of money); even developers are forced to cut prices (I saw 30% markdowns on unsold units, something I’ve never seen in Calgary except for the very last unit in an otherwise sold-out project); and the bottom line is that Miami is the centre of the US burst-bubble mortgage crisis. So, yes, there are buildings, but they don’t lend to an urban (meaning “peopled” in this case) atmosphere. It’s all surreal and kind of sad.

2. There isn’t a lot going on at the street level. We complain about this sort of thing in Calgary a lot, but I saw nothing in the way of retail, storefront, streetside retail, that was in any way commensurate with what I saw above the street. We worked on Saturday and Sunday, and I could only see open businesses in the hotels. Yes, Bayside was open, but Bayside is basically a mall. A special sort of mall, but a mall. I saw nothing inviting at street level despite the presence of huge, HUGE hotels and thousands of guests there, all seemingly scurrying for cabs and tour buses. The Starbucks in my hotel had an interior entrance in a sort of retail court in the hotel, not a streetfront entrance like at the new Starbucks in Calgary’s downtown Westin. All of this lent to a pretty much pedestrian-free, and empty and dangerous-feeling, urban environment.

3. The pedestrian experience in Downtown Miami, for the route(s) that I attempted from hotel to meeting site, was very unwelcoming, and was at times terrifying. Part of this was because of the lack of other street life, including other pedestrians. Another part, perhaps a larger one, was that pedestrians have to compete with cars in a ridiculously one-sided battle. I had no choice at several places to cross at unmarked intersections or, for heaven’s sake, to cross in the middle of the street. Then I had to race against three or four lanes of one-way traffic. Then I had to contend with the fact that those lanes of traffic are all racing- RACING- to get onto the expressway. A colleague and I once crossed one of those unmarked intersections when the coast was clear, and a left-turning car stopped to let us cross without being killed. At this point a truck behind that car laid on its horn. He could see quite clearly why the car had stopped, but the message was clear: You don’t give pedestrians the right of way, and that experience, more than any other, soured me on Miami.

I’m sure there are areas around Miami, maybe even in the city proper, that are wonderful and even pedestrian friendly and all of that. But what I learned from my limited experience there is not really about Miami at all. It’s about the importance of factors, sometimes unanticipated ones, in making an area walkable, and “walkability” lends to livability. For me, at least.

It’s great to be home.

Ratatouille en français- magnifique!

I posted a few months ago about what a great experience I had seeing Ratatouille, and I’m now a happy owner of the DVD. Not only does this mean that I can watch the film ad nauseum, but it also means that I can, and did, watch it with a French language track. No, I don’t speak French, although I’ve picked up a fair amount through mere exposure living in Canada (yes, even in Alberta). But this is a French movie- it takes place in France with French rats and French food and mostly French people preparing, eating and critiquing it, and other French people trying to either kill or sometimes befriend the French rats. It’s an homage to Paris to boot. Now, I love Patton Oswalt and have ever since I saw him in those short films he did with Blaine Capatch on Comedy Central in the mid-90s… SOMEBODY HELP ME FIND THESE! YouTube and Google are not being my friend here. But as much as I love Patton’s voicework in the English soundtrack, I really loved this opportunity.

This film really holds up to repeat viewings- well, for me, since I love it so much.

Why’s that?

I’ve been thinking about this a lot. I love the themes of the underdog (well, under-rat) who is so committed to his passion that he will literally risk his life to pursue it. I love the tension between his going after his dreams and having to maintain social conventions, which, for a rat, means NEVER leaving home. I love how loyal and loving his brother is even though he can’t understand Remy at all. I love the dad’s redemption, when he comes around to helping and supporting Remy in the end. I’d love to say that I see a lot of myself in this little blue rat, but the fact is that I have never had such an all-consuming need to be creative as Remy does. Some of the themes, about leaving home and leaving family behind to take a path that no one else in the “colony” follow is part of my story, to be sure, but I think I really am just drawn to it because it is a damn beautiful story.

I’m off to Miami for work (more of the same project that took me to NYC in August) from the 14th through the 19th; since I haven’t figured out how to do WordPress entries with the Palm browser, I’ll probably have to make this my last post until I return home. Stay warm, everybody.