Calgary coffee updates

…but first, my caraganas are lookin’ fine! Relatively easy trim (no ladder work, hooray!) and here’s the result as of this afternoon:

For comparison’s sake, and I know I’ve posted this pic before, but not juxtaposed with the above image, was one year ago:

New fence is also evident. I’m happy. Paint job on the house next door is very nice, too. Our car is the Sonata in the “before” pic, only thing that’s not improved…

And so… coffee news! Exciting times in Calgary for the coffee geek and the geek-in-training. I happened by Caffe Rosso today, which is a charming little coffeehouse in Ramsay, which is directly east of the Stampede grounds and very much up-and-coming, and had a long chat with the owner. I mentioned my research project and how I’ve become resigned, because of my lack of external funding, to doing interviews and fieldwork in Calgary and not in more stereotyped third-wave coffee hubs like Portland or Seattle. But, I noted (and I only really reasoned/articulated this today), Calgary is perfect for my project, because it’s transforming far more than those other cities. A year ago I’d have counted six third-wavers in Calgary: Java Jamboree, Kawa Espresso Bar, Bumpy’s, Phil and Sebastian, DeVille Luxury Coffee, and Caffe Artigiano, with Kawa and DeVille having been open about month. Today? Add to that list a second DeVille location, with their excellent beans from Intelligentsia (with “Chow Bazaar” in the Colours condo tower on 1st Street SW), A Ladybug Cafe, serving JJ Bean coffees made with a La Marzocco FB-80 on the far west side of town (2132 Aspen Stone Blvd, past 85 St SW), a second Caffe Artigiano at Shell Centre (Shell is at 3rd St and 4th Ave, but the entrance for CA will be on the 3rd Ave side of the complex), a retail location (huzzah!) for Phil and Sebastian opening late summer at the Shops of Marda Loop, in the retail level of the new six-storey condo building currently in the final stages of construction at 33rd Avenue and 20 Street SW; a new shop called Insomnia Cafe in the Burns Building (which is the grand old white building attached to the Epcor Centre, right at Olympic Plaza), which opens TOMORROW, and which is pulling delicious (I got a sample) espresso made with Fratello’s “competition blend,” first coffeehouse in town to do so to my knowledge, and then of course there’s the afore-mentioned Caffe Rosso, which started out using the recogizable but not very strong Illy espresso but is now sourcing from Boston’s respected Terroir roastery. So we now can lay claim to no fewer than TWELVE third-wave shops in Calgary. And that’s not even counting Caffe Beano, which does have its third-wave sensibilities, and the ever-improving and even downright “serious” coffee treatment you can find at the many locations of Good Earth Cafes around town.

Let me talk about Rosso a bit, because I’d been avoiding it because I’m not a fan of Illy and I was dismayed to know that a shop with such fine equipment (a Synesso espresso machine) would “waste” it on Illy, which is famed and famous but which is unavoidably stale when it arrives on our shores. I reconsidered this aversion when I realised that Rosso would be an opportunity for me to sample Illy in its best expression and so I decided to give it a try. And… they’re no longer using Illy, but as I mention in the last paragraph, Terroir (and are the only ones in Calgary, maybe in all of Canada, to do so). So here’s my chance to grab some beans from that roaster, and I set off today.

Caffe Rosso is in an odd location, an industrial area that’s across the street from a characterful residential part of an interesting inner-city neighbourhood called Ramsay. The plot it sits on is inside industrial lands slated for massive redevelopment as something to be called “Ramsay Exchange,” and the owners are real pioneers in this regard, but there is lots of housing adjacent and really nothing in the way of retail, so there is method to the seeming madness of their location. Here’s the view as you approach it:

Quite cute, really; look beyond this fence and try to imagine condo towers and a retail village, because that’s the plan and I hope it comes to fruition:

Inside is calm and comfy, and contrary to what the cinderblock facade might suggest, there are big windows on the sides of the cottage and lots of natural light. I took a pic but can’t seem to locate it, sorry, but I encourage folks to check it out; it’s close to Crossroads Market and a unique refuge. I had an espresso and it was very good, nice temperature and very balanced, not unlike Intelligentsia Black Cat. I bought a pound and look forward to trying it at home.

So there are coffee things happening downtown, in the Beltline, in Marda Loop, in the ‘burbs, and even in this unlikely setting in Ramsay. And there’s more to come.

Sled Island 2009

This is me and my friends Glen and Erin at Dicken’s Pub last night, for the Myelin Sheaths.

I have to confess that I hadn’t given Sled Island a lot of thought this year. Even though I’ve been happy to speak to anybody who’d listen about Calgary’s insurgent music (and “arts”) festival that’s a sort of local version of the larger and much more established SXSW or NXNE festivals, even though I had a great time at last year’s event (the “concerts in the park” part at Mewata Armoury), and even though I have now met and even had lunch with local club owner, cultural visionary, chowhound, and (most important in this context) founder of Sled Island, Zak Pashak, I waited until Monday of last week to buy my pass ($99 and an absolutely shocking deal) and didn’t start consulting the festival program until Wednesday. I was expecting to see the Friday (one day only this year) outdoors lineup at Olympic Plaza and, honestly, see a couple of the films on offer of about 30 titles as part of the festival; that’s part of where the “arts” aspect is becoming more apparent.

I ended up doing a lot more, stepping outside of my comfort zone and seeing some club performances, even one at (gasp) midnight. See, I have not seen shows in clubs for many, many years. The last time I was a regular in any club context was for the very short-lived slate of punk shows at the South Shore Inn in Hammond- and that was in 1983. I’ve not seen NOTHING but I’ve avoided clubs because of smoke (now irrelevant of course but this has always been a huge issue for me), but also because shows start too late and also I cannot stand having to strain to hear the band over the chatter that surrounds me at such places. I remember how horrible it was when Brian and I went to see the Hidden Cameras as part of the 2006 High Performance Rodeo (this was at the Big Secret Theatre, not a nightclub, so at least there was no smoke there), and we had to endure screaming “conversations” from so many of the apparently uninterested idiots who showed up for… no reason, I guess. I hate this. I hate it at Folk Fest and I hate it in clubs; the beauty of seeing a concert in a theatre is that nobody TALKS there. And so I don’t see as much live music as I’d probably like to.

BUT all that changed these past few days. I saw outstanding shows by artists like Brasstronaut (from Vancouver) and Calgary’s Azeda Booth on Thursday night; Friday was the Olympic Plaza show, some of which I liked very much but not enough to make the seating un-painful (it’s a sort of stepped bowl, like Portland’s Pioneer Courthouse Square, with plenty of places to sit but none comfortable for more than a short while). I took some pics; first, the delightful, fun, involved Biz Markie:

He put on a great, but too short, performance. Some of what followed was forgettable, but most definitely not the Toronto noisemaker collective, Holy Fuck. They were outstanding:

Headliners were The Breeders, who seem to have a completely new lineup (aside from Kelly and Kim Deal, of course), and I wasn’t as thrilled with them as I expected to be, but they were pretty good, and crowd pleasers for sure. It was almost dark at 11:30 (that’s how it is here in late June!) when I departed. Here’s the scene:

Now, in the midst of waiting for performances to commence (especially The Breeders, who were a good 40 minutes late, pretty galling when I’d been suffering back spasms at the plaza since 4pm), it was interesting to spot so many musicians strolling around. I saw Owen Pallett (Final Fantasy), two people whom I’d see perform the next day as Before Dawn from Austin Texas, members of Azeda Booth (nice guys! I got to shake hands with each of them), Women, Beija Flor, and among all of these talented people I just HAD to ask one, Chad Van Gaalen, for a pic. He seemed a little annoyed at first and then said he’d hold the camera since he towers a good 10″ above me. And then he acted like he was going to toss my camera away- it was actually really funny and ROCK AND ROLL. Then he snapped three photos in quick succession and here I give you his artistry:

So there you go. I joked back that it’s okay if he’d tossed my camera because “I hate this camera,” and he said, “I hate cameras.” So I’m not sure if he wasn’t really annoyed; he’s a very talented (VERY talented) animation artist and so maybe I captured some insight into him. Brilliant artist and musician, and I’m happy to be met (or annoyed) him.

Then yesterday (Saturday) I actually went to shows at three venues, the Lord Nelson Pub, Dickens Pub (to see one of our PhD students, Paul Lawton, with his entertaining-as-anything “garage band,” Myelin Sheaths), and then the always amazing Beija Flor at the Marquee Room. That makes part of FIVE club shows for me, and I also saw a performance at the Plaza Theatre by the punk-metal (for lack of a better descriptor) Calgary outfit, Cripple Creak Fairies, as a precursor to a pretty silly and trite 1977 documentary about “glitter rock.” I wish I’d had had the energy to make it to the Wednesday night performance by Final Fantasy at Central United Church, but youtube comes to my rescue:

Great job!

[cough] Blog [cough]. Also, [blog] cough [blog].

I hate it when people use that “[cough] word [cough]” construction when they’re trying to be clever, like writing something like “I hate bad reality tv [cough] Big Brother [cough].” You’ve never seen it? I have. Anyway, today’s post title is a little riff on it AND a reference to this damned cough (and associated sputum-iness) that I’ve been enduring for about a week and a half now. I caught this bug from Brian, who started to get sick right after I came home from Seattle, so I can look at him and see that a week from now (I started getting it about a week after he did, see), I’ll be not a whole hell of a lot better. In fact we seem about “even” in the cough arena, waking up hacking like mad. Is this H1N1? Could be, though neither of us had much in the way of fever and neither had any real nausea or diarrhea (these are apparently more common with H1N1 than with most seasonal flu), but we HAVE had massive, just massive, amounts of coughing and lots of wet coughing at that. Nothing like a “cold.” First couple days saw us both with wracking body aches too, which is of course more like flu. But it’s too late to test for it and in any case Alberta Health is saying that even if we feel we might have it, and this is good advice, if we’re not experiencing high fever or respiratory distress, no need to tax the system. Brian and I are both pretty much able to be out of the public realm, he because he works at home most of the time, and me because I don’t teach summers. Anyway, hopefully by my next post I’ll be back to normal, or close to it. Meantime: COUGH.

So I’ve been delinquent in the blogosphere of late; most of this is because I’ve been sick and not up to it, but a lot of this is due to my “where do I start?” feeling. I mean, so many things, personal and political, are upsetting me these days and I could write forever about them.

Personal? More online harassment. I’ve come to realise something, and this goes without saying and is a complete “I told you so” thing, so don’t tell me so, but I really wish I’d done a better job of masking my identity sometimes. Online, I mean. This is the thing: People know who I am. I use my real name all over the place, or I link to this blog in which I make zero effort to hide who I am, and the people who hate me–and gosh, there are lots of them–use this against me. They attack me and are themselves anonymous. Now, I had the happy occasion to find out the real name of the person who was leaving tons of hateful messages in my comments here; I say “happy,” because it wasn’t anybody I knew, no disgruntled former student or anything like that, just some unattractive, bespectacled nebbish who never learned how to turn his privacy settings on for his facebook account. Seeing the person behind that campaign rendered him harmless, and so I decided to try the same course of action (meaning to use my internet sleuthing skills) to find another, more recent hater, somebody who has been trolling comments of mine on skyscraperpage and skyscrapercity for about a year and a half, mocking my use of the term “cappo” for “cappuccino” or “resto” for “restaurant,” and yes, he REALLY HATED that I used these terms.

He took this vocabulary, which is nothing but convenient foodie shorthand for crappy foodie typists like me, to mean that I am arrogant and pretentious. And he found my blog to be, surprise, indulgent and just a terrible read. And he let everybody know it and proffered links to this blog to show the world what an arrogant bore I am. And he posted links to my youtube videos, the ones where I make espressos with my Leva, to point out what an obsessive and pretentious person I am. And he did this under the guise of three separate identities, so it could look as if it was more than just him (and this very angry misfit from Thunder Bay) ganging up on me. This went on all over the net, I found by searching his username. There were people on “british expats” being apprised of what a horrible “arrogant pretentious” person I am. A site devoted to reviews of Toronto escorts–yes, a whore review site–had entries where he joked about what a pretentious arrogant coffee person I am. I had to find out who this person was, to render him as harmless as I had done with that stalker from last fall. But no happy ending here, because as it turned out, this troll was one of Brian’s best friends, somebody who had been close enough to him (and, I thought, to us) to have attended our wedding, in Ottawa. Yes, somebody I know quite well. This hurt, it hurt badly enough to prevent me from sleeping for two straight nights, it ended one of Brian’s oldest friendships, and all because this guy couldn’t bring himself not only to bring these issues up with me directly if they offended him so much, but also to stop a campaign–no other way to describe it–against me, with stabbing comments peppered all over SSP and SSC about “I’m enjoying a cappo at a third-wave coffeehouse, wink wink, that’s what that PRETENTIOUS John Manzo would say, LOL,”  after I messaged him privately begging him to stop. The guy set up fake accounts for the sole purpose of harassing me. And while he’s acknowledged what he’s done, I don’t understand why, and I can say, claiming the status of morally superior here, that  I would NEVER do this to one of my friends’ spouses. It’s horrible and there can be no happy ending.

Lesson here? I am very good at finding people. Sometimes, I guess, I’d rather not know the truth. But you mess with me “anonymously,” and I find you. I found the student who was sending me gay-bashing emails a few years ago and it almost cost him his degree. I found my expletive-filled comments stalker. I found Brian’s ex-friend. I never do this anonymous cowardice and anybody who does should be ashamed.

Public? Oy, where to start? We got gay rights formally and explicitly added to our provincial human rights code in Alberta, 14 years after the federal government “wrote it in” following the famous “Vriend” decision. And to appease the PC party’s hard right–specifically, to appease the very hard-right Ted Morton, so he won’t jump ship and run for head of the ultra-right Wild Rose Alliance–they included a provision to allow parents to remove their kids from school when the curriculum addressed issues relating to religion, sexuality or sexual orientation. Okay, parents ALREADY had that right. Parents had the right to enrol their kids in Catholic or Christian or any other religious schools, as well as to educate them at home. What happens now is that if kids are exposed to the knowledge that same-sex couples can legally marry–and THIS is the point that gives Morton a religious hissy fit, let’s be frank–then, get this, the teacher can be brought before a human rights tribunal! It’s so twisted. So if Johnny calls Joey a “faggot,” the teacher can’t use the insult as an object lesson about tolerance and difference, because they didn’t get prior approval for it, and you know that radical right-wing nutbar terrorists like Focus on the Family are just champing at the bit to bring cases forth to scare those liberal-loving teachers. It’s sick and makes me so, so ashamed to be Albertan.

Other political stuff: Certain groups seem to be falling over one another to castigate the progressive members of Calgary city council these days, with the guns aimed at John Mar, Joe Ceci and especially Druh Farrell, because they actually believe that moving this city forward and making it a place to LIVE with public life and public amenities and curbside recycling, finally and thank God, is not in line with “taxpayers’ interests,” when we already pay the lowest property taxes in the entire country. There are too many people in this city whose interests are nothing but selfish and suburban and this backlash is really getting tiresome. All these people care about are car-friendly policies and screwing anything and anyone progressive: No funding for transit, no parks, no recycling, no high-density housing, nothing but wide-lot suburban me-me-me-me-me-ME. They are a cancer in every city and unfortunately for a unicity like Calgary, the suburbanites share the same municipality as we live in and we have to appease them. They choose unsustainable lifestyles and then complain because Calgary Transit won’t pick them up at their front door, tranport them to work, feed them and wipe their fat suburban asses. You want a better commute? LIVE CLOSER TO YOUR WORK. And don’t give me this “the inner city is too expensive” bull. Nothing is free, but when we moved to Calgary the inner city was a ridiculous bargain and near the best schools in the city to boot. I could go on and on but that’ll do. Somebody has to scream on OUR side, the RIGHT side, and I’m about to start it.

10k! (Well, 9.967k)

I walked home today from the U. It was my first time at my office in a couple of weeks, since I’d been in Seattle all of last week and in any case don’t make it to my office much over the summer. I’m happy to note two things about campus: (1) the Taylor Family Library (or is it still Taylor Family DIGITAL Library?) is not just topped off, but is also having its beautiful aluminum and glass cladding/windows installed and will look FANTASTIC, and (2) the air conditioning is back on in my office so I might be spending more time there over the next few months.

Summer is too short.

Anyway, here’s the route I took, with stops for lunch at Shawarma Station on 10 St in Kensington, then an ice cream cone from a truck that sells those cones with the striped deals (I got butterscotch and this soft-serve is rrrrich and delicious), then a pretty disappointing espresso at Artigiano (too long, too hot) and a little double-back to check out the construction on their new location in Shell Centre, on the 3rd Ave side (so it’ll be at 3rd and 3rd SW), then a little Italian juice bottle and chat at Kawa, then home. Nice day for it, to put it too mildly- brilliant perfect weather.