Glenn Kubish

And that’s a wrap on another week, friends! Here are three things that left behind tracks of happiness and gratitude... Three Things, Episode 123:                              1. Classics   From a table at the back of the Starbucks on Bellerose Drive in St. Albert, I wrote an email to a perfect stranger last week. Richard F. Thomas is a classics professor in the green pastures of Harvard University. I was reading his book Why Bob Dylan Matters. He mentioned a Dylan concert in Taormina, Sicily, in 2001. In my note, I hazarded my theory that Mark Knopfler, in his song Lights of Taormina, is singing about Dylan.  Dylan is the unidentified “he” in the song. Knopfler sings “he” wants to know if anyone has seen her. I hear, if you see her, say hello. Knopfler sings seems like another lifetime when “he” rambled across the shore, and I hear ‘twas in another lifetime and circled by the circus sands.   Knopf...

  It’s probably the truth that there’s something wrong with you if there’s nothing wrong with you these days. Making note of three things that made me happy or grateful means only that, as Craig Finn has said, there’s some comfort in the ritual. Here is this week's Three Things podcast . 1. A proposal The wind blew and door chimes jingled madly. The wind blew and snow came unfastened in sheets from the street. The giant elm trees in the wind were just giant elm trees in the wind, but they were also, for a second or two, ancient pens, their top branches lashing back and forth like quills chasing turbulent thoughts. All around was wind. A siren rose in the dark. We were in the elements, Auntie Shelagh and I, as we walked down the aisles of snow on 148th Street. It was cold, this wind with teeth from the north. From the sidewalk, I saw people inside their living rooms. A man with the back of his bald head to the front window sat bathed in the blue pulses of his television. At a din...

Speller explains that Hank started as a film camera news shooter. Hank shot on a CP-16 with a supply of film that lasted 10 minutes. Back in those days, most camera guys were frugal with the footage. Shooting more than 10 minutes of film meant you would have to load up a new magazine using the black bag procedure, and that was a pain in the ass. Economy was a way of being, as Fitz says. I got to know Hank in 1995 when I started working in the ITV newsroom. I was the assignment editor. My job was to match all of the incoming stimuli—news tips, scanner chatter, stories that Speller thought were important, reports of stuck trucks in underpasses—with available camera resources. I assigned the shooters. Korbs, 10-6 at 137 Ave and 66 St, go.  Hamish, can you get six shots at the cake cutting, please. Rudzy, golf highlights at the Belvedere. I once sent Chuck to a house fire in northwest Edmonton. It was actually a forest fire in Chisholm. He got back three days later. I think...

This afternoon there is again a Yield To Bicycles sign standing in its rightful place on the Oliverbahn, the stretch of mostly protected bicycle lane that runs along 102 Ave in Edmonton's Oliver neighbourhood. The sign is now dog-eared, as if to mark a page that contains a lesson worth re-reading and thinking about. The sign is again doing what it was designed for, which is to remind motorists not to turn left into the path of bicycle riders like me. This is all very remarkable.  It is remarkable that Edmonton has a mostly protected bicycle path in the neighbourhood. Last year, there was no bike lane here. Riding east on 102 Ave toward downtown was a take-your-chances proposition for bike commuters who became skilled at threading the needle between parked cars on the curb and moving cars in the lane. It’s something, too, that the asphalt is clear in winter. This is because the City sends out pickups with calcium chloride sprayers onto the bike lanes before the morning commut...

In my quest to combine feeling, thought and reflection into one activity, and thereby save time to watch more sports on TV, I have cycled back to cycling. You see, cycling and making imaginary movies in the theatre of my own skull have somehow merged into the same activity.  I am not the first one to attempt this fusion of self-propelled movement and visual storytelling. Years ago, the girl on rollerskates in Knopfler's Skateaway gracefully moved in and out of London gridlock, Walkman-fed music in her ears, the effect being a different sort of motion picture: a thrilling, dangerous self-produced "I see" version, which is what "video" literally means. But instead of just seeing, she is also the director and the camera and the writer and she does her own stunts, and she does it all without the safety of or need for an editor. Indeed, She's making movies on location/ She don't know what it means.  On my Making Movies-red bike, I get the s...