Glenn Kubish

Bauke Mollema streaked to victory today in Tour de France stage 15 from Laissac-Severac l'Eglise to Le Puy-en-Velay. He made his move with about 30 km to go, after much of the field had cracked. He was only 100 m or so from the peak. Still, a group of pursuers were only a few hundred metres behind. "Mollema needs a buffer!" said the announcer. I tweeted my thanks immediately. Both announcers, Matthew Keenan and Robby McEwen, liked the tweet. That was fun. I could have a drink or three with those guys, I think. I have been told that the Greek word for clever, deinos , also connotes a sense of terrible. Perhaps that is why those who make puns are routinely greeted with the judgment "that was terrible!" To say that Mollema needed a buffer was accurate if, by it, the speaker simply meant a little extra time and distance from his chasers. But it's clever to choose the word buffer, which carries the extra meaning of being naked. It's doubly clever, ...

Alexis Vuillermoz is streaming down the side of the Col de la Biche this morning. He is at the head of the race. It is stage 9 of the Tour de France. His front wheel slips slightly in the rain on the road. He keeps his balance. Commentator Robbie McEwen explains the French rider's mountain bike resume has prepared him for the sliding and drifting that happen when courage mixes with a wet descent. "It's a huge advantage for him," McEwen says. "When you're used to things getting a little bit loose on you, and staying in control, because it's about staying calm, when it gets loose and you tense up or touch the brakes, that's when you go down. You gotta be able to flow [emphasis not added] with it." Nude Descending A Staircase, Duchamp The trickster Vuillermoz is riding a corridor of humor. The term is from French painter and sculptor and chess player Marcel Duchamp. "While Dada was a movement of negation and, by the very fac...

This morning I am in a happy place. It is an intersection. A listening post. The Tour de France is on TV, and that is a thrill itself. Getting up early on a long weekend Monday to watch the colours of the peloton's men and machines stream and curve through the countryside is time in front of the monitor well spent. I enjoy parades, and bicycles, and TV in the sun. With a mug of coffee, and a book and a sharpened pencil as the broadcast flows in. This morning, the book is Trickster Makes The World by Lewis Hyde. The open pages resemble a gravesite I saw embedded into the earth at the Hillcrest cemetery. The shaft of sunlight stares across the printed words. They are worth standing in front of and staring at. Structures always arise from exclusion. Think, for example, of how one might go about designing a flag. This world has endless color; the palette of greens in field and forest is boundless, as is that of water under changing skies. To make a flag, we select only t...

A little book found me a few weeks ago in a store in Black Diamond where we had wandered on a trip to Waterton. Somehow, I'd never seen unmediated Waterton. That baffled me. The book is by Lewis Hyde and it's about the tricksters among us. Like all my favourite books, Trickster Makes The World has delivered the thrill of approaching something new, while also leaving a residue of regret that it has taken me this long to get there. And the sad certainty that I am skimming the surface of this book, and life. It is by our likes and dislikes Hyde says John Cage says that we isolate ourselves from the wider mind and the big old world. Hyde: Likes and dislikes are the lapdogs and guard dogs of the ego, busy all the time, panting and barking at the gates of attachment and aversion and thereby narrowing perception and experience.  My thoughts fire this way and that. Likes and dislikes —these are the words of engagement in social media. Lapdogs and guard dogs —Plato's Socr...

I don't ride my bike all over the place because it's ecological or worthy. I mainly do it for the sense of freedom and exhilaration.                                                                                   - David Byrne These are preliminary notes on what a different kind of traffic app would feel like. Different because that old coder Hermes isn't in on the development of this one. Old Hermes The cunning Hermes, as Lewis Hyde has shared, has enjoyed quite a life. Wherever trade and exchange and money and the movement of merchandise need protection, he is with us still. Here is Hyde from The Gift: If we imagine an ancient road at dusk, a road passing through no-man's land and connecting two towns but itself neither here nor there, we will begin to imagine the anci...