Glenn Kubish

Once a week here, I register three things from my little life that left behind signs of happiness and gratitude. Here you go, the U.S. Thanksgiving edition, with some CanCon to bring it home:                         1. Taxes, El Paso   The great French essayist Michel de Montaigne established the voice of conscience as humankind’s absolute sovereign. He wrote to the powers that be: “You may impose as heavy and ruinous taxes upon us as you please, but to command us to do shameful and dishonest things, you will lose your time, for it is to no purpose.” Of the causes of sedition, the great English essayist Francis Bacon included, along with advancement of unworthy persons, taxes. Of taxes, the American DJ Bob Dylan, speaking of the Jamaican singer-songwriter Prince Buster, said:   “Like all great artists he was able to turn things that bothered him into three minutes of musical pleasure.” I was wide awake after midnight ...

  Happy. End. Of. The. Week! This is where once a week I try to remember three little things that made me happy or grateful and then record it in a short podcast. Here's Three Things, episode 53 . 1. Showing your routes I fight in myself the modern impulse to bail out of a newspaper story after the first 10 seconds of reading. I always feel I have something else to look at. I’m a child of print swimming in a visual mediascape designed to keep the attention of goldfish. I mean, look: A 30 second TV commercial for a home exercise machine has 18 cuts and all kinds of effects to keep my attention. Lack of attention is assumed by social media. A typical Twitter user takes about three seconds to decide whether a tweet is worth staying with. We scan, we swipe, we scroll, we, basically, confront written material like we are television viewers, trained to expect a new shot every second. Which is exactly how you don’t read a newspaper. Poor newspapers. All that non-moving black print on un...

We finally met and tied one on tonight. The encounter had been years in the making. I just didn't think it would involve me and the mayor of Edmonton and my wife with a video camera in front of a washroom mirror in an artist's colony on 118 Ave. The Nina Haggerty Centre is a wonderful hub of hope in the Alberta Avenue neighbourhood. Tonight it hosted the Alberta Artists With Brain Injury Society on the happy occasion of its 10th anniversary. Shelagh serves on the Nina board, so I get to hang out there every now and then. Tonight, artists, board members, community leaders met to celebrate the event and there were beautiful words spoken by those who help artists with damaged pathways get around their obstacles and to a place where they again, in paint, plastic, glass, fabric and ink, can make their voices heard and imaginations felt. Mayor Stephen Mandel dropped in again and praised the work of all involved. When he and I had a chance to talk, I took the opportunity to a...

When I saw Edmonton city councillor Ben Henderson at the Nina Haggerty Centre for the Arts 10th anniversary party last night, I decided to speak up. Ben, there's something on my mind! So I did what you do. Waited for him to finish the conversation he was in, called his name, put out my hand, re-introduced myself (when I was in the news business our paths would cross) and launched into a bit of a soliloquy about the sorry state of bicycle route planning and politics and vision in the city. Henderson is an advocate for cyclists, routinely injects the possibility of European city cycling architecture into the conversation here, and, basically, is refreshingly willing to get written off as a looney, pant-clipped, all-weather cyclist because he wants some of his taxes to support his mode of transportation. Shelagh at Nina  For a few minutes, I had the ear of one of the city's most powerful politicians. I don't know what will come of it, but one thing did come of it,...

A couple of nights ago I was standing with my work colleagues in the basement of the Oldtimers Cabin on 99th St., listening to Donovan Workun, Graham Neil and the Atomic Improv troupe explain we were standing on a beach. Or in France. Or on a tightrope over a gorge. Donovan and Neiler  It was a team-building experience, and the lesson was brilliantly simple: if improv comedians can't agree between themselves that the wooden floor is really a sandy strand, then there is no common space, imagined or not, and if there is no common space, there is no improv. That's the fact on which the performance is built. The stage isn't as real as that fiction. Compare for power of spell cast, or not, an actor suggesting to his partner that "the sand on this beach is gorgeous" and being greeted with a delay and silence, or a shrug, or only a tentative nod of consent -- or, then, an enthusiastic, positive tag-taking and a comeback that "the tide is due to roll in in a...