The Point

Friday, May 30, 2008

Primed

Admit it. You've been wondering what this sub-prime mortgage crisis thing is really all about. I have too - in fact, I've been looking for a new place myself, and was kind of wondering... how does this affect me? Fortunately, Ira Glass and the rest of the crew at This American Life have summed it up in less than an hour: it's all about a giant pool of money.

You can listen to the program here.

Labels: ,

posted by Christopher at 4:29 p.m. | link | 0 comments

Thursday, February 15, 2007

We have with us tonight

Friends, thank you.

It has been a pleasure having this long conversation with you, and next week I will be taking a long leave of absence. I have some more things up my sleeve before I go, but without further ado, the winner of the Where You Live photo contest. The challenge was to come up with the best photograph of why the place you live is great. And what amazing places they are.

 The winning picture, from Bryna Andressen. Hometown biases aside, this picture from Edmonton has charm, whimsy and melancholy. Bryna has won from the side, though; she writes:
This is a GORGEOUS picture of the clematis by the back gate at my house (see attached). It was taken by my housemate Jenanne, and I was watching, but I wasn't behind the camera. Anyway, it definitely shows exactly why living here is great. There are all sorts of interesting shadows in the yard and patterns in the frost on the kitchen windows and lots of other good things to photograph.
Clever young woman that she is, she noticed I failed to stipulate who the photographer must be. She also sent in a lovely written piece called Fridge Ephemera: Without leaving my house I know the whole universe. An excerpt:
The local garbage and recycling collection schedule for 2006 and 2007 says that this Wednesday is garbage day.

The contents of the fruit bowl are as jumbled and transient as the items on the fridge. Right now there are three pears, two limes, one banana and three avocados piled on top of each other in the bowl.

The other day, Jenanne and I noticed that the last nectarine in the fruit bowl was still mostly green. But it had been there all week, and it was getting soft.

She said, “it’s like when someone tells you about an event and the number of the date and the day of the week don’t match. Will it happen on the 3rd or will it happen on Thursday?”

“What?” I didn’t understand immediately.

“It’s like the nectarine. Do you judge ripeness based on colour or texture? How do you know when it’s ready to eat?”

That’s a difficult question.

A photo of the lilac tree that grows just outside the kitchen window. It’s a record of the exuberant flowers that blossomed at the end of May, just as we were moving in.

I only sing when I’m alone. It isn’t a conscious decision, but I never let a song slip out when I’m in the company of anyone else – even someone I trust. It’s a mysterious reflex. But today I can hear the echo of my voice in this room. The sound reminds me of the character of this space when it was empty, before my housemate and I moved in. Until we started to unpack the boxes labeled “kitchen stuff,” the room was spacious and blank. White cupboards with red handles. Two large windows on adjacent walls. A new fridge.

A distinctive household hum accompanies this subtle and familiar echo. This ambient hum is made up of sounds from the fridge and the furnace, traffic outside and voices coming from downstairs. Am I really alone with so much auditory companionship? These sounds are easily overheard without conscious listening.

Bryna will be the proud new owner of a novel of her choosing from this blog and a brand-new reading list. Because it was very very difficult to choose a winner, here are all of the excellent runners-up.


This picture of Hinton comes from fellow Ultimate afficionado Rob Barchard, who is working near the mountains these days. An admirable inukshuk, and a beautiful view.


An amazing panorama from Vancouver by Sarah Lemmon, a regular contributor to this blog and a dear friend of mine. You'll have to click the picture to see it in its full size, because it cannot be done justice in this little preview.
And wisdom from Edmonton by Lauren. I harassed her into sending something in from among her growing number of photographs documenting the wonderful madness of our hometown.

Every place is paradise. No place is paradise.

Great work, friends.

Labels: , , ,

posted by Christopher at 7:29 p.m. | link | 0 comments

Wednesday, November 08, 2006

Some bright ideas

I wonder where I'm going to end up in the next ten years. I made a list the other night of all of the half-way things I've been or aspired to be in the past year or so. They have included: a poll clerk, a tutor, a youth educator actor sort of person, an amateur journo, a poet, a support worker, a dreamer of places and ideas, and a recluse. Among other things.

One thing I have dreamed deeply about is my city. Being away from it for a while gave me some fresh perspective when I came back this year, and I have learned to love the place I'm from in all its slushy white and brown glory. I know cities are much maligned these days as alienating places, sometimes dangerous, sometimes incubators of poverty, sometimes cruel. These things are true. But there are also strange accidental beauties to this small place that I am from, and reading a bit of Jane Jacobs this fall has given me some hope.

The Death and Life of Great American Cities was published in 1961, while Jacobs was living and learning New York (and much before she became a Torontonian of the best kind in my favourite 416 neighbourhood, the Annex). Many of the ideas in the book seemed at once new and obvious to me, as if these were things I should have intuitively known about how big North American cities work if only I'd been more observant. And yes, while it is about American cities, every one of these ideas resonates with me here in Edmonton, land of the Mill Woods sprawl.

She talks about the conditions that create diversity, which she considers the great bringer of life and health to communities. Jacobs was a great admirer of spontaneity, of the casual meetings of neighbours and strangers on sidewalks and in cafes that lend great cities their ability to be hosts and midwives to the birth and growth of new ideas and fresh perspectives. For her, these things couldn't be planned, only allowed room to grow and to change and to fold over and into one another. I am learning, I guess, that the strength of a community cannot be legislated, although it can be legislated out of existence.

Walking through my now chilly south side neighbourhood, I walk past tall apartment towers mingled with low-rise condos and old, inviting homes with what my friends Norm and Joanne have called 'public rooms,' those kind of porches you can sit and have coffee on and say hello to your neighbours from, watch your kids play from, participate in the life of a street from, and I wonder how she could have known so much about what makes my neighbourhood great 45 years before this moment. She had great admiration for the role of streets in cultivating relationships, in allowing new and creative uses and experiences to emerge. I would truly have liked to have taken her around Strathcona and shown her our cafes, our restaurants, our sidewalks (and lack thereof, in places). What would she have said?

I guess it's immaterial. What makes this city great is not just the river valley, or the bridges, or the Listen birds, or the pyramids being put up and torn down. It is the people. And the people here are a strange wondrous bunch.

I'm going to get to know them better, friends.

Labels: , , , ,

posted by Christopher at 1:28 a.m. | link | 0 comments
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.