Three Things from Edmonton podcast - Episode 81: flowers, documentaries, timelines

Happy end of the week and happy Folk Fest is back (more about that next week), friends. Here are three little things from my life that I noticed I noticed made me feel happy or thankful.

Three Things, episode 81: 

                               

1. Flowers 

There are days, like last Monday, when my angle on things is obtuse enough to let me make believe that I am underwater, that all of this is underwater, that the sky, as I ride my bike, isn’t as much the sky as the top skin of the ocean stared up at from its asphalt floor. The illusion is enhanced by the flow of automobile traffic that carries along the leviathans of the road, the delivery trucks. Pickups emit inky exhaust. Motorcycles dart in and out of their lanes, rapidly. Boulevard trees sway like seagrass. 

Sea anemone, downtown Edmonton

At the front of a yard in Glenora, a bee floats through the thin stems and the tiny bell-shaped flowers of the Heuchera undulating in the current. I know the flower is called Heuchera, or coral bells, because the woman who lives in the house I had stopped in front of had read my interest in the pink flower and had come out to tell me its green and gold story. 

“It has a lot of history,”  she said. “I’ve had it for about 50 years.”

Five decades ago she got the gift of a slip of the plant from the University of Alberta where it grew in the garden of Canadian mathematician and University president Max Wyman. She planted the flower at her own home and then transplanted it when she moved. Elegant, fragile, willowy, it’s been a perennial conversation starter.

“It is the most wonderful, wonderful plant,” she said. “I just leave it there and I don’t do anything. One thing I do try to do is deadhead it, because the more I deadhead it, the more it blooms.”

The more it bloomed this summer, the more it quietly insisted that I stop for a closer look. Last Monday, I finally didn’t keep riding by. I turned back against the tide. The flowering Heuchera sits in a small plot of brick-bordered earth where the front sidewalk meets the city sidewalk. I thanked the gardener for planting it there, so close to the bicycle riders paddling by. 

2. Documentaries 

My friend Jim hit the road for holidays last week, which meant he had enough free time to DM back what he was watching: 60 Cycles, the National Film Board documentary from 1965 directed by Jean-Claude Labrecque.

Now streaming, the 17-minute, trippy-soundtracked film tells the story of the 12-day, 1,500-mile Tour du St. Laurent amateur bicycle race on the Gaspé Peninsula. The movie gets out of the gate with a 94-second opening shot. My photographer friends explained that the director used a lens like a telescope to give the impression of moving cyclists never moving forward. It’s remarkable to watch all the work and all the getting nowhere.  It’s like the racers are treading water. The film ends with another inventive shot, as the cyclists ride across some kind of piece of transparent, hard plastic below which the camera is placed, shooting up. The effect is dreamy, other-worldly, ethereal. The heroic bicycle racers glide over the camera, free from the gravel and asphalt roads, free from the world of friction. They have escaped from the realm of pain that is an epic bicycle race. I wondered how they did it. Not the peloton. The film crew. What surface did racers ride over? Was a cameraman in a pit below or just a camera? Did it work the first time? 

For $12 at the hardware store I bought an 8x10-inch piece of hard, clear plastic. Shelagh spotted it after I had eyed and hauled down an $80 version. Back at home, I found a pothole in the alley into which I placed my iPhone on record, covering it with the layer of plastic over which I pedalled, trusting that if I crushed my phone, it would somehow be covered by a warranty upgrade. The plastic held. The phone stayed in one piece. I had hacked my version of the documentary’s oneiric, as Jim would say, closing shot. 

I captured a few more shots from different angles and then loaded the files onto my computer where I edited them into a 12- second summer bicycle short as a tribute to Labrecque, and with thanks to Jim for getting me rolling on the home movie of what we did on his summer holiday.

Self-portrait in bubble

3. Timelines  
 
Compared to the spectacular Cartwheel galaxy in the constellation Sculptor 500 million light years from Earth (and, yes, of course, eternal thanks to the James Webb project), the sight of rainwater running down the gutter on 148 Street is somewhat down to earth, mundane, even. What does city rain have to recommend itself as a viewing experience? Well, I was out there on the sidewalk during one afternoon storm last week, and here goes. First: it’s a true live stream and live streams are fun to watch. Water-borne bubbles inhale and exhale themselves. Tiny twigs twist. The audio is good, too, especially the dry sewer pipe gulping the water down. It’s a low-level spectacle, for sure. But it’s nearby and it’s free and it’s refreshing and there’s no narration other than the surprising voice that reminds me that rainwater flowing past the house in Parkview is a kind of timeline set to fast forward.

Thanks for being out there, friends. See you next time.
Three Things, episode 81, set to original music by Edmonton composer Brendan McGrath and punctuated by end bells courtesy Edmonton metal artist and humanitarian Slavo Cech: https://podcasts.apple.com/.../three.../id1550538856...
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