Glenn Kubish

It has become a bit of technological ritual to listen to The Writer's Almanac podcast before we drift off to sleep. Garrison Keillor reads out the literary birthdays of the day, and shares a little bit about each author, and then reads a poem. Last night the poem was Key to the Highway by Mark Halliday. It's a memory of a highway drive years ago, and it's a meditation on forgetfulness. Meditation isn't the right word. Because there's anger lined with bewilderment. I am upset by the fact that that night is so absolutely gone. No, "upset" is too strong. Or is it. But that night is so obscure -- until now I may not  have not thought of that ride once in eight years -- and this obscurity troubles me. Death is going to defeat us all so easily. Obscure, from the Latin obscurus, meaning dark. One of the most common questions you hear is, where did the time go? Time, like sound, vanishes. Sound can be recorded, but time can't. Sound is always pla...

They don't have quite the hold in the academy anymore, but cyberneticians still rule in the marketing world, where "noise" and "cutting through the noise" and "being heard with all the clutter" are the way, the only way, that many see the world. Over the weekend they ran Indianapolis 500, a celebration of speed and colour and daring -- and noise. And when it was over, and Dario Franchitti had roared to his third title, and the cameras had taken a break from capturing Ashley Judd, it was Tony Kanaan, who finished third, who cut through the noise. The sub-plot of the final laps of the race was which of the late Dan Wheldon's friends, Franchitti, Kanaan, of Scott Dixon, would win at The Brickyard. Wheldon was a popular driver killed last year in a crash at Las Vegas. They were all in or close to the lead at one point. For Kanaan, it was a chance to win his first Indy 500. The commentators underlined both emerging stories. Franchitti won. Whic...

So that I don't forget this, I am going to write it down. There is a great scene in Mad Men season 3 in which a hungover Kinsey sits at his desk, devastated. He is working on a project for Western Union and is actually competing against Peggy for Don's approval on it.  He is as upset this morning as he was elated the night before when the idea, maybe the best idea in his life, had come to him. But now it is gone. Not because it wasn't good. But because he didn't write it down. It is a short scene. Kinsey recounts the empty outcome of the conversation with the office custodian, Achilles. Peggy: Are you ready? Don's expecting us. Kinsey: I've got nothing. Peggy: What a relief. Mine's garbage, too. Kinsey: No, I had something, something incredible. But I lost it. I didn't write it down. Peggy: Oh, I hate that. Kinsey: It might have been the best idea I ever had. I did everything. I talked to Achilles. I spent last night recreating every detail...

It is mid May in Edmonton, the days are longer, the light is more confident, and that makes it the perfect time to watch hockey on television.  And to think about slow motion. This evening, I am struck by how quickly technology that is good shows its age. Bam, you're old! For as long as I can remember, this has been the speed of video dissection. It is from tonight's Memorial Cup game between the Oil Kings and the London Knights:  It's very good. Instructive. Cool. Dramatic. Until it's not so much any of those. Until it's up against a bigger, stronger, slower opponent. This is from tonight's Stanley Cup semi-final match between the Coyotes and the Kings: The same game becomes a different game when viewed and shared differently. The nature of the moving image allows this kind of division. He wasn't talking about hockey at the time, but Ong (1982, p. 31) makes the point that unlike sound a moving picture camera can stop (or, in our cas...

As far as 3D movie experiences go, The Avengers was good, not great. But while Hulk was swinging wildly this way and that, busting out of his small shirt and the big screen, protecting New York City from a spectacular,  alien,  airborne invasion, it was also good to think about 3D itself, or, at least, the attempt to break out of the rectangular dimensions of the screen. Or the frame. Or the page. Or just think about breaking out. Ted Nelson wrote what the editors of The New Media Reader  call "the most important book in the history of new media," Computer Lib/Dream Machines . They write: "He believed the importance of computers lay not in their capacity for calculation, but in the fact they would enable new generations of media." (p. 301) At the beginning of a Youtube video about a project called Xanadu, Nelson shows his resistance colours as he finds insufficient the page itself. "It seemed to me that paper was a prison.  Four walls, right?  ...

Driving home Highway 2 at between 121 and 130 kmh, the sun starting its dip down in the west, Lyle Lovett on the car stereo, clouds shuttling across the sky -- what a time. It's two hours and 25 or 30 minutes of waiting for thoughts to arrive at between 121 and 130 kmh. The lanes remind me of lines in a measure of written sheet music, the sports cars, sedans, pickups hauling trailers, semi-trailers the various lengths and kinds and vintages of notes. A silent music moving in both directions. A collision involving a horse trailer near Didsbury in the Calgary-bound lanes stalls traffic. Four bar rests. Some of the notes are packed with meaning not immediately discernible to the first time listener. Lovett is singing South Texas Girl . It is a powerful song, and it's about everything. It's a prayer for travellers, a memory of childhood, a tribute to faded cowboy voices, it's a meditation on the passage of time, and it's pure poetry. And it all seems to...

This blog is meant to do a few things. Capture my thoughts and pain as I train for a half-marathon. Make sense of my high school years. Figure out what is going on in the Duckett Cookie Episode video . I am confident of only the first. But on I slog. The Duckett Cookie incident is important to me because I sense that it contains key aspects of our current mediasphere. Or, at least, I am betting three years and a few thousand dollars toward a Masters of Arts in Communication and Technology degree on that sense that it contains key aspects of our current mediasphere. I use as a point of departure the words Premier Ed Stelmach shared with the legislature earlier on the day he fired Duckett. He said that he thought "everyone in Alberta watched and saw the offensive comments. I'll just leave it at that." The truth is nobody left it at that. Stelmach didn't. He booted Duckett hours later. Those captured by the story didn't just watch and see. They watched, saw...