Fly to London for a Party?

In response to our earlier gushing about the series of DJ podcasts being released by London nightclub Fabric, there was a suggestion that perhaps the strong Canadian dollar, coupled with upcoming cheap spring charter flights, might make a weekend trip to the UK feasible.

While we were intrigued by the idea, in the same way that we were interested in the logistics of summer shopping trips to nearby American cities like Seattle or Las Vegas that purported to take advantage of the exchange differentials between US and Canadian currencies and prices. We were reminded of a recent interview with Thom Yorke of Radiohead, where he discusses the ecological impact of air travel. It's a theme that we heard last fall from George Monbiot as well.

However, the good folks at Dopplr have shown that there doesn't seem to be any real fear at present. The social network is geared towards travellers and their blog has several different interesting (and colourful) charts showing membership travel patterns.

If Charity Begins At Home, Can Sanctions Too?

Federal Liberal hopeful and former astronaut Marc Garneau, floated the idea today that Canada should impose trade sanctions on countries that refuse to reduce their greenhouse emissions. This made us wonder, can the sanctions begin with Alberta?

Alberta Election

As the Alberta provincial election unfolds, it will be very interesting to see what happens in Calgary. Traditionally, Calgary is a very conservative city - the two members of the Liberal Party elected in the last provincial election were the first Liberals elected here in decades. The booming job market, coupled with sky-high real estate prices have wreaked havoc with the city's demographics. While areas of Liberal support used to congregate in predictable pockets, it remains to be seen just how diffuse that support has become owning to housing prices. There were quite a few ridings in the last election that went Conservative by their narrowest margins in years. Has the housing market shifted more Liberal support into these areas?

Added to this has been the failure of the Stelmach government to deal with the needs of Edmonton and Calgary. As we mentioned last week, Calgary mayor David Bronconnier portrayed Stelmach as the villain in the city's inability to manage the infrastructure problems associated with a booming population. Now, Liberal leader Kevin Taft is offering more power to the major cities to do just that. Clearly, the Liberals feel that there are seats to be won in this once Conservative stronghold.

Fabric

The famous London night club, Fabric, first crossed our radar a few years back when the Herbaliser recorded a set under the club's FabricLive imprint. Lately, we've been enamoured of their podcasts, with the two part Jonny Trunk set exploring forgotten and offbeat music being the best of the bunch.

Off to the Polls

As predicted by many, Alberta Premier Ed Stelmach made his election call yesterday, announcing the beginning of perhaps the most anticipated provincial campaign since former Premier Ralph Klein made his inaugural run against Liberal leader Laurence Ducore. Unlike Klein, Stelmach has been unable to form a balanced relationship between the rural communities and the four major urban centres, who have found themselves (relatively) shut out of high profile positions. However, Stelmach has managed to safeguard the precious oil industry from any serious attempts at environmental reform, so the question for this election is essentially just how dissatisfied are Albertans

There have already been several negative ad campaigns, echoed in the newspapers, about Stelmach's failure to provide a clear vision for what to do with a post-debt Alberta. His recent 2020 Vision plan did not to much to generate excite, especially with communities like Calgary already starting to reel from lack of infrastructure and unfilled jobs (perhaps one of the worst Calgary statistics is that 1 in 4 Calgarians to do not have a family doctor). The re-election of Calgary Mayor, Dave Bronconnier offers conflicting interpretations though: either the vast majority of Calgarians do not blame Bronconnier (whose campaign blamed Stelmach) or else they are content to put up with the current problems so long as the oil money keeps rolling in. If the provincial Liberals hope to win their first election in recent memory, they need to somehow mobilize the discontent of Calgary and other similarly stressed communities.

2000 hits!

It was a busy day today, with several lengthy discussions on institutional change and ideas of "cultural sensitivity" that did not equate "culture" with ethnicity, sandwiched between exciting tennis from the Australian Open.

Amidst all this then, we almost didn't notice that The Daily Wenzel crossed the 2000 hit threshold earlier today. For some, with much broader appeal, and a large blogger network of cross-advertisers, two thousand hits may come a lot faster, but we are absolutely thrilled.

Feel free to tell your friends about us!

In the Thicke of It!

We were a little hesitant after the CBC aired the first episode of Douglas Coupland's TV adaptation of Jpod, but the return of Alan Thicke to primetime television has completely won us over. Perhaps things are made easier by the fact that he is playing an aging actor aspiring to be . . . Alan Thicke. Brilliant.

What the World Needs Now, Is Songs, Sweet Songs

Someone brought in violinist Sarah Chang's recording of Antonio Vivaldi's The Four Seasons, and a comment about her dress sparked an interesting exchange.



The comment was related to an observation about the marketing of young classical musicians in the mid-1990s, with women often dressed in "sexy" evening wear, or in a few cases, nothing at all. Part of this was the attempt to make these artists appear as "edgy" as their rock n' roll counterparts.



The exchange then centred around the different expectations audiences have for classical vs. rock musicians. In the classical musical idiom, the emphasis is on technique and conveying emotion, not songwriting. There is little expectation that a musician as talented as say, Chang, would be equally talented as a songwriter, and Chang can comfortably expect to make a living essentially by playing covers. In rock however, a musician who played primarily covers would be scoffed at, especially early in their career (please note this expectation is different in pop music), or at least would rarely be considered "elite". The expectation for rock n'roll artists is clearly that they write their own material, with the subtext being that the music somehow reflect the "spirit of the age". This was articulated by famous rock critic Lester Bangs in his reaction to early 1970s "prog rock" (perhaps not so ironically the moment when rock stars started to consider themselves the equal of classical musicians, such as with Deep Purple's Concerto for Group and Orchestra) in large part perhaps because rock emerged during periods of social change and has often served as the soundtrack to that era in our collective consciousness.



Few us quiver in our aristocratic boots at the playing of Figaro these days.

Top Ten Lists

We recently jibed fellow Daily Wenzel stalwart Sean Marchetto for his Top Ten Albums of 2007 list in Fast Forward Weekly as being perhaps the most mainstream of the bunch, with his inclusion of Feist, Modest Mouse, Arcade Fire, etc. While Marchetto shrugged off our good-natured ribbing, what followed was a good discussion of such "lists", as one of our favourite past times (or time-wasters, really) is comparing "All Time Best" lists from different years and trying to tease out social and political reasons as to why particular cultural artefacts appear at specific points. In defense of his own 2007 Top Ten list however, Marchetto pointed out that he listened to over 70 new albums this year - number we find logistically staggering. Essentially one and a half albums per week. Now, it's no secret that Marchetto's journalistic activities are a side-line to his education day job (We don't call him Il Professore for nothing), but it's easy to imagine that he can't sit around all day listening to music, making his actual music-listening time rather valuable. The decision to re-listen to a particular album then means sacrificing time that could be spent listening to an incoming album and requires making a committment to make up for that time at the expense of some other activity.



"After listening to two dozen middle of the road albums," Marchetto explains, "You really want to listen to something that stands out. It makes it really easy to appreciate something like Peter, Bjorn, and John, even if everybody else is listening to it."



On another note, here is our own 2007 Top Ten list, but of our most frequently read postings. Chances are you dedicated readers have already seen them, but maybe something flew under your radar the first time around:



1. Paul Virillo vs. Facebook
2. New Days for the Old Republik
3. Adios! Heidi and Howdy
4. A Good Cup of Kimbo
5. Vancouver, City on the Edge of Tomorrow
6. Federer Wins Again
7. Woodpigeon CD Release Party
8. Nights of the New Republik
9. Brain Heart Guitar; Dudes Bringing It All Back Home
10. We Are In Spooky Country

The Speed of the Age

There are books one reads that contain messages so profound, they force into the brain new visions of how the world might be, others present messages that must be decipher and considered, but ultimately yield dramatic insights. Then, there are books whose message is mainly banal, but contain perhaps a chance phrase or random association of words that spark entirely unintended lines of thought.

For us, Vince Poscente's The Age of Speed, was this sort of book. Aimed primarily at the business set, it functions as a basic time-management primer for the 21st century. Readers are encouraged to adopt new technologies and strategies to minimize time spent "at work" and to maximize time spent "at leisure". Poscente makes the most of the fact that mobile technologies have caused the work/home, labour/leisure divide to become porous. If I answer emails at home, am I working? If a client contacts me for consultation while I'm on a weekend getaway, am I working? Does it have to be one or the other?

Aside from urging readers to reflect on the nature of their work, hoping that individuals find themselves doing work they love to do, Poscente also strongly recommends businesses move to a task-based, instead of a time-based system. This was something we used to argue back when we worked in the parking lots. Our employer paid us to park cars and direct traffic, if no cars or traffic appeared, then we were free to spend our time as we liked, provided we were available should a car or traffic appear. Thus parking truly did blur the leisure/labour divide, as most of our "work" hours were spent in various forms of leisure (working as we did in rarely frequented parking lots). Within a more professional context, a task-based system would appear to encourage decentralized decision making, as individuals made choices about their time. Clearly spending eight hours at a desk with very little to do is not anyone's best use of time.

Our main benefit from The Age of Speed however, was a confirmation about the the importance of time. It might be cliche to refer to time as the new wealth, but the fact remains that this is where the culture appears to be headed. In the pre-modern era, wealth was based on land, during the transition to capitalism, the accumulation of cash was often spent on acquiring the trappings of aristocratic wealth (ie. land, Thorstein Veblen has written much here), but at some point things changed, "the edges of the map were filled in" (to quote our favourite volume of The Pirates of the Caribbean), and there was no more unclaimed land to possess. Perhaps this explains the mid-century fascination with space travel with its promise of new sources of land. At any rate, the emphasis shifted from land to time, and cash was used to shortcut the consumption of time, where possible, via faster travel, personal chefs and personal telecommunications, etc.

This is an idea that Poscente attempts to evoke, and fails, but a chance encounter for us that saw Paul Virillo follow Poscente helped organize these ideas somewhat better.

Oddly, this is not a 21st century idea, but rather a more 19th one, prior to the onset of mechanization where the assembly-line required precise timing of labour. ,

Imagine a better city

It is hard to picture the amount of change necessary in the attitudes of Calgarians for the following to become an eventuality, but it is easy to see how the benefits might play out. As traffic becomes more and more of an issue in major urban centres, the talk of "congestion charges" surfaces more and more frequently. A congestion charge, like that recently adopted by the city of Milan, is essentially a tax on driving downtown during business hours. In some cities, it is enforced at parking meters based on license plate numbers or special stickers. Here in Calgary, despite some progress being made towards carpooling, and increases in transit ridership, the average car occupancy rate is still considerably less than two people per vehicle.

In Milan, the congestion charge is $14 a day, the monetary equivalent of adding over three round-trip passengers to the transit services, as well as encouraging an increase in actual passengers. While the city actually does as fairly efficient job of moving people from the periphery to downtown, especially in peak hours, travel across the city, from east to west without stopping downtown, is rather poor and could benefit from expanded services, helping to alleviate congestion on major arteries like Glenmore Trail or McKnight Boulevard.

Of course, many Calgarians will argue that perhaps we already pay too many taxes, or that we should simply increase parking rates, allowing the market to decide. But the fact remains that Calgary has the largest carbon footprint of any Canadian city and we tend to be spoilt by the luxury of our lifestyle.

Christmas Wish Fulfilled!

It looks like Lucy, over at Good Grief Lucy was listening to our appeal for fiction and has forwarded a copy of David Liss' The Coffee Trader to us. Set in seventeenth century Amsterdam, Liss tells the tale of the birth of the coffee industry, mixing in elements of the burgeoning stock futures market as well as the city's Portguese Jewish diaspora. A fascinating introduction for us to Liss, who's debut novel, A Conspiracy of Paper, won the Edgar Award for Best First Novel, and makes us thirsty for his next book, due in September 2008, entitled, The Whiskey Rebels.

Christmas Kino

There's nothing like gathering around the ol'yule log the day before Christmas with a group of friends, all the hectic Christmas shopping and baking done, to enjoy a lazy afternoon of classic Christmas cinema, like Tony Jaa's heartwarming tale of a boy and his elephant, Tom Yum Goong.

Alright, yes, we're being a wee facetious here, but The Protector (as it was known here) offers stunning martial arts sequences, brought to you by the same people who helped choreograph Ong-Bak, as well as elements of District B13 and Casino Royale. Granted the following is a bit like admitting one buys Playboy for the articles, but one of the things that we rather enjoyed about The Protector, was the way it built a theme established in Ong-Bak, namely the modernization of Thailand. While we don't mean to suggest that director Prachya Pinkaew has his finger on the pulse of a Thai generation, but he nevertheless appears to be building up slowly a body of work documenting some of the transition problems Thailand is going through.

In Ong-Bak, who's plot we found rather confusing, these elements are limited to rural vs. urban, with Tony Jaa's character trying to adjust to life in the city after leaving his rural home to find his village's religious relic. Here, "modern" urban life is presented with all of its vices, gambling, drugs, prostitution, and the abandonment of religious values. In The Protector, this theme of decadence is taken one step further, as Jaa's character travels from "pre-modern" Thai village, to "modern" Thai city, and then to the global ("post-modern?) city of Sydeny, Australia featuring a transexual crime lord.

Nights of the New Republik

We're living in the past while the kids step into a brand new era.

The Republik hosted one of its first events last night, a Junior Boys DJ set.

Our friend Mike Bell has a story about the nightclub sitting at a generational crossroads as he talks to club owner Victor Choy.

Booked Up For The Holidays

As most of us came through the Calgary Exhibition & Stampede Parking Deptartment, a strange institution around which to form an intellectual coterie for sure, we were naturally attracted to Simon Henley' The Architecture of Parking. Henley shares our love of parking structures, but while ours exists in a more philosophical, abstract manner, for Henley, the parkade in its numerous forms offers examples of alternative architectural frameworks, composed on an altogether different scale from most of the buildings that surround us. Comprised largely of short essays and photo-investigations, Henly explores the development of the car park over the last century, looking at changes in design, use, materials, and forms, dipping into the rival conceptualizations of car park as urban hub, blight, or reluctant necessity.

Two other books that are working their way through our office are Benjamin Barber's book on consumption patterns in developed capitalist economy. The title and subtitle pretty say it all: Consumed: How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantilize Adults, and Swallow Citizens Whole. We're still too early into it to offer any critical insights, but it is riveting, and one of our fellow readers, Sean Marchetto claims it has already helped him firm up ideas of the post-WWII visual culture that he talks about at www.explodingbeakers.blogspot.com.

The other book, Steven Pinker's The Stuff of Thought, has us a little bogged down in the meaty subject of grammer construction. Pinker promises to reveal how language shapes our thoughts and conceptualizations of reality, but without relying on the arguments of Wittgenstein, or the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. We suspect he might be a closet Chomskyite, but will have to see, for The Stuff of Thought has offered many fascinating insights into the construction of language, it has yet to wrap things up into a big picture framework of reality.

As the holidays rapidly approach, and we look at the other books lining our reading shelves, we can only hope that Santa, or somone, leaves us some fiction beneath our Christmas tree, or perhaps a little poetry in our stockings.

New Days For The Old Republik?

We first started to wonder when we saw someone downtown wearing what looked like a brand new t-shirt with the logo for the old Republik night club. A staple of the 1990s music scene, many of us cut our teeth in the converted maison-cum-rock-mecca, with it's gutted concrete basement and built-over garage, turned into a stage. Outside, around back, the rear of the house sometimes functione as an after-hours/informal nightclub, the Delux a precursor to the Embassy.

The t-shirt was soon followed by rumours that the Republik was re-opening, and a full-page ad in this week's edition of Fast Forward confirmed everything. No date was given for the opening, but something should surface soon.

The Good German

Perhaps we've been hanging out with too many math folks lately, but we felt naturally inclined to express our views of the George Clooney/Cate Blanchett "The Good German":

f'(The Good German): S(Chinatown + The Third Man)

Fusion Infusion?

Despite our well-earned reputation as espresso lovers, we have been known to poke our heads around the local tea shops to investigate what's brewing. Quite often, as we stare at the loose tea leaves, we imagine packing them into our espresso machines to see what would happen. Obviously, certain teas, such as green and white tea, require a temperature range below that which our espresso machines operate, but perhaps some sort of herbal concoction might work? We've never been brave to work, but part of the allure is the supposed properties of many herbal teas.

Recently, a B.C. based coffee company has apparently been wondering the same thing, though in a slightly different way. Fusion Coffee infuses their beans with some of the same herbs that show up in teas. This week, The Daily Wenzel has been test driving their "Extreme Blend", that contains extracts of ginseng, yerba matte, and guarana, for added boosts of clarity, energy, and concentration (all this plus caffeine). Sadly, we report no insanely creative bursts of anything, though we suspect the recent sub-zero weather, dark skies, and occassional flurries may have more to do with our unusuallyt high degree of lethargy. Tastewise, the coffee is a somewhat lighter roast than our usual espresso flare, definitely sweeter, and took a little work to find the right degree of grind, but even without any supposed benefits, it is a satisfying taste alternative.

A Strong Wind A-Comin'?

The UN Convention on Climate Change starts today in Bali, a two week process searching for a successor to the Kyoto Accord. As with the opening of other such conventions, there seems to be an expectant hush as the world hopes that this time something will happen. Meetings this year, such as those of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, have brought public opinion one step closer to accepting the need for some kind of dramatic change.

Things began optimistically today, with Australia announcing that they would sign on to the Kyoto Accord, a tacit announcement that they are rejoining the world community. Canada meanwhile is showing it's increasing reluctance to remain a part of this group.

Music, Music, Everywhere

It's been a long time since we talked music here, and a lot of musical water has passed under the bridge. A few of the notable discs that have stayed resolutely in our players include Feist's The Reminder, alternating as it does between dirgy tunes like "Brandy Alexander" and poppier masterpieces like "1234" (available on seemingly every Apple commercial). A rough and tumble live album, recorded by Tokyo Police Club at the Chicago Lollapalooza stopover, has sparked our enthusiasm for their Saddle Creek full-length, duo out early next year. Similarly, Bassano del Grappa gets voluably excited everytime Stars' In Our Bedroom After the War comes on, speaking passionately about some kind of Dr. Zhivago-esque grand romance movie script locked up inside his head. Apparently only Stars hold the key.

Other noteworthy releases include Radiohead's In Rainbows (see earlier post). We finally got around to listening to Bright Eyes' Casadegga to only lukewarm response, but the Broken Social Scene's Introducing Keven Drew has grown somewhat on us.

A charming little surprise came to us in the form of New York anti-folketeer Jeffrey Lewis' acoustic covers of Crass songs entitled, surprising, 12 Crass Songs. Stripped of the screaming vocals, and buzzing guitars, couched in softer tones for more suburban surrounds, Lewis helps us think of a time when we were better (and poorer and more radical) people. Generally we solve this problem by listening to Nico's Chelsea Girls, and just descending into a deeply morose spiral best counter-balanced by more uplifting fare, like Tokyo Police Club.