Glenn Kubish

As a boy, I learned my love of urban light from the CN Tower logo in downtown Edmonton. What I didn't know all those years ago was that Slavo was staring at the building, too. The logo came into the world four years before I was born into a north-end railroad (yes, Canadian National) family. I learned later that some critics dismissed it as twisted paperclip. That's good, too, but, just not as good as the logo. The tower went up two years after I was born. We've been in this together. I didn't see it a lot, but, on the special evenings we were downtown for dinner or a musical performance, I would always make a point of looking up at it. And it burned its way in. Because it wasn't just a lit logo that sat there like an unblinking eye. And it didn't flash manically like lights at a car dealership. Elegantly, it revealed itself. Fluidly, it moved from the C into the N, taking my eye with it, forcing an inaudible voice inside me to say C-N. Its path, of co...

The channel has been changed, for now, on the image of our Edmonton winter, thanks to a 90-second Apple commercial called Misunderstood: The spot tells the story of a seemingly self-absorbed teenager who appears to care only about communing with his technology. As it turns out, however, he is actually playing the role of family memory keeper, using his iPhone to record those emotional sights and evanescent sounds of family togetherness. The video was shot in Edmonton, and that makes this winter city the background of an Apple ad. The significance of it all is at the forefront of discussion this evening in social media. After all, the iconic images of Edmonton are river valley in the summer or fall. Celebrating winter is more than a bit out there for us. Paula Simons, the Edmonton Journal's best connection to the reality of this place, put it this way: "All that snow. That blue sky. Those icicles on the eaves. It seems Apple, with the almighty power of its global bra...

The Tour of Alberta has almost toured through Alberta and soon the usual questions will come into view: was it worth the investment? should it be an annual event? are you really trying to tell me the peloton has a mind of its own? And, of course, what the hell is a peloton and is it native to Alberta? But there is another question that has been quietly dropped into the mix, or maybe it's a reminder, or a challenge or a nudge. And it came from Alex Stieda, the driving force behind the Tour of Alberta. It hasn't gotten much attention. What has gotten the attention are those usual questions. The economic development questions. They are legitimate questions. Here is where I am going: @jdkrabbe asks @ doniveson What can you do as Mayor to make the Tour of Alberta an even bigger success in 2014? 11:20 PM - 3 Sep 2013 @doniveson is a thoughtful city councillor running for Edmonton mayor. He rides a bike, his wife is a bicycle-riding blogger, he routinely leaves us wi...

Cycling has for me long been connected to the movies. Or, closer to what I mean, the spinning wheels of the film projector. (Cycling, for me, is also about writing, especially on a blank-sheet-white road across which I leave a mark of my meanderings. But that's a winter thought. For now, it's movies.) Some times that sense of being at the movies while sitting on my saddle happens when the morning September sun projects my moving shadow, just slightly ahead, onto the McKenzie Ravine bridge fence. Last night, on my ride home from downtown, it was less that feeling of making movies as watching them unfold in short scenes as I pedal by. This sense is doubtless aided by the fact I typically have a GoPro rolling from my handlebars, but this, in eight short scenes with a director's commentary added in the frame's upper left corner, is what I mean: Being open to the time that cycling provides to see things, and see things not whiz by, is its only price of admissio...

In the rush to brand the flood disaster in southern Alberta, devise slogans, whip up Twitter momentum, come up with T-shirts, and then move on to the Stampede, High River has been forgotten. No, not completely forgotten, but certainly not a beneficiary of the buzz that helped neighbourhoods in Calgary bail out, mop up and make waves nationally.  Basement muck High River is a disaster. For sure, the Highwood routinely floods. And if it's true, as was explained to me by locals, that the riverbed becomes a troublesome, undredged deposit of silt that regularly pushes water over the banks, there are questions to be answered. But there are also basements to be pumped dry, mould to be outrun, drywall to be crowbarred, and mud, mud, and mud that is almost alive to be moved.  Twisted rails Along with some mud-non-averse colleagues from ATB Financial, I went down to High River yesterday to help. We were welcomed into the waterlogged homes of Sandy and Craig.  ...

Paul Lorieau, the tenor who could make you forget there was a faceoff only a minute or so away, has died, and Edmonton today is full of stories and memories of the anthemic voice for decades of the Edmonton Oilers. In the Oilers' 2006 Stanley Cup run, Lorieau left us spellbound with his raised microphone, an invitation to the fans, so rousingly accepted, to sing the national anthem together. Think about that for just a second. The trained voice, the student of voice, the artist with the camera trained on him freely chooses silence, so that the full-throated, beer-holstered hockey throng could experience the joy of singing themselves into a northeast Edmonton night. Now, we contemplate the meaning of the silence choosing Paul Lorieau. Countless times on TV and many times in person in the Coliseum I experienced Lorieau's singing O Canada. Once, I met him. It was on a small rink that a band of friends at CTV Edmonton (Hoop, Raymo, Dub, Kobes)  watered into being on...

As we bused back north up Highway 2, the military vehicles streamed south. I was with some ATB Financial colleagues who were finishing up the first leg of a province-wide tour to mark the 75th anniversary of the financial institution born in a disaster of too little water. Now, a disaster of too much.  Heading to Calgary The camouflaged vehicles presented both a welcome and an eerie prospect. Yes, the uniformed men and women were bringing their engineering skill and sandbagging brawn, but the movement of those same vehicles whispered that this was, maybe, a state of nature (and not of the tourism variety) they were heading toward.  Back moving through Edmonton on that Friday afternoon, a scheduled drink at Latitude 53 just ahead of me, the scenes through the bus window were jarring. Not because they were hard to see. They weren't. They were the easy images of friends talking on the steps of the Hotel Macdonald. And of a businessman running to get a waiting cab. A...