Glenn Kubish

Shelagh and I are just back from a quick trip to Portland where we were blown away by, take your pick, the bicycles, the transit system, the proud people, the beer, the coffee-houses, the nighttime rain, the bridges, the avocados, beer at Velo Cult, the Sprocket Podcast guys, Pok Pok, the kind bus drivers.  Here's a lookback.  We went to Portland to watch films at the Filmed By Bike festival at the Clinton Street Theater. And I had a chance to get up on stage and tell my own bicycle story. Here, along with actual period photos, it is. My first bicycle was a green, CCM Mustang. It was the 1970s, so that bike had everything you needed to turn the heads of the ladies. In second grade. It had a banana seat. Those high-rise handlebars. It had what we called in those days a sissy bar on the back. We would attach baseball cards with clothespins to the back of the frame so the spokes would deliver that motorized sound as we pedalled forward. Chasing sp...

Before cable television, and its portal to the wider world (through Washington State's Inland Empire), arrived in northeast Edmonton in the 1970s, my connection to out there was my parents' LP record collection. They didn't mess around. Johnny Cash. The Beatles. The Beach Boys. So, while the neighbourhood cats were thrumming to Led Zep and Pink Floyd, I was listening to Johnny and June sing Jackson, John and Paul sing You Won't See Me, and to the Wilsons sing about the sand and the surf. And to Phil and Don dig into "Walk right back to me this minute/Give your love to me don't send it/I'm so lonesome every day." When the song finished, I would lift up the needle (scratch), bring it back to the groove that marked the beginning of Walk Right Back and drop it (scratch) and listen to it again. And again. It was the way Phil sang his "don't send it." It was the way they sounded together, so close. It was, still is, something I can...

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.  ...