Glenn Kubish

Here are there things that left behind tracks of gratitude and happiness this week:                                1. Boss   For those of a certain vintage, and I’m checking my look in the mirror here, word that Springsteen is coming to Edmonton in November calls to mind the saga of Pete The Rocker. Back in the early 1980s, Pete engineered a ceaseless lobbying campaign to get Springsteen to play Edmonton. He wrote letters, he hounded his management company, he put together a 50,000 name petition, which I signed. Pete loved the Boss, that was obvious. He also loved Edmonton, and was open about it, which was different. Edmonton was a place to be from, a place to grow up in, a place to get an oilpatch job, but people my age here didn’t seem to love their hometown like people in, say, New Jersey, or anywhere else did. Pete, who I’ve never met, but whose son also rocks and is a friend, turned the equation ar...

Brian Fallon has proven that everything can be done in about 25 seconds. Take this in: Or: Brian Fallon has proven everything can be done in 25 seconds as long as you had prepared for a long time. Or: Prepared truly. I will try to remember the lesson of these 25 seconds in 2018.

NYT photo  This was U.S. President Obama today, the day after the Donald Triumph the night before, with a little bit of campaign theory. We try really hard to persuade people that we're right and then people vote, Obama said.  Salutary. Not quite true. Not quite true if by persuade the president means the process of using reason to convince others of a particular position. This includes convincing others to change their minds. I don't sense much persuasion afoot in our times. I don't know if there ever was much persuasion. Maybe there was, maybe not. But now what goes for persuasion is really engagement. And engagement has to do with likes and follows and friends. Social media in the time of engagement has no button that indicates Good Argument or Convincing or You Helped Me See Things Differently. Or, I Changed My Mind. When engagement is the goal, holding a mirror up is more effective than risking original offence incurred by trying to change a mind. When ...

Springsteen sings Hungry Heart in Vancouver, with, um, well, me. A Springsteen concert is about a lot of things, some of which will be revealed only in the fullness of 4/4 time. Trying to make stand still the essence of seeing him perform live is beyond me. Besides, seeing him is not really about standing still at all. And double besides because another great chronicler of America, John Steinbeck, famously reminded would-be reporters that what is there to be seen depends as much on the seer and the light and the time and the inner music as what is supposedly there. "I discovered long ago...that...what I found was closely intermeshed with how I felt at the moment. External reality has a way of being not so external after all," he cautions. Caution heeded. The best I can do is record that in the screen shot above, not seen but standing beside and slightly down from me, are Mikey and Shelagh. And that we sang our lungs out to Hungry Heart, punctuating Baltimore with a ...