Glenn Kubish

My friends Isla and Sue are among the functioning hearts and brains behind Snow & Tell - The Winter City podcast. They asked me for a love story about winter. I'd been thinking lately about public benches and bridges, and the work they do. You can put it like this: "I saw the moon from the bridge." But that's unsatisfactory. Because it's also true that the moon is there because of the bridge. "I saw the moon because of the bridge." Of course, the moon is there even if the bridge isn't. But not for me on that day in November on that bike ride home. Anyways, I wrote a kind of unstructured ode to the moon, trying, too, to account for what's owed to the bridge. Here's the podcast. Here's my part. I fall in love with winter in Edmonton like the coyotes in the MacKenzie Ravine do. It's the moon. You see, I ride my bicycle year round, through the long-light days of summer and, just the same, through the dark days of Nov...

I am beginning to see that in the figure-ground divide, I've long had a soft spot for the ground. For the piece of paper and not just the word printed on it. For the road and not just the bicycle or car or bus. The sky, not just the fireworks. The soil and stake, not just the tomato plant. The rink, not just the hockey players. The background and not just the figure. Paul Simon has a line in a song on the Graceland album. In early memory Mission music  Was 'ringing around  My nursery door.  The words depict a literal image in the listener's mind. This is the what of the verse, or the figure. There is also a how . The figure itself is figured. The how that works on me is in the alliteration of m and r sounds, and the way those consonants, repeated, produce a kind of gentle murmur somewhere in the background of my receiving equipment. As a child I struggled with two speech impediments. I couldn't say my r's. And I suffered with a stutter. Speech the...

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...

Sick with a cold, tired from the non-stop and just a bit weary from the sick and tired, I drove home down 104 Ave this afternoon in a rush hour that felt like a funeral procession. And hungry. Right, no lunch. Add hunger to the list. No doubt, I was suffering. I'm not aware of anyone who suffers quite like I do. Shelagh, sitting next to me in the car, would likely agree. And not on my bike. Let me keep counting the woes. We turned off at 122 Street, parked the car and headed for Blue Plate. I ordered an Old Fashioned. A stabilizer, as my friend Al would say. I sipped it. Contemplated the maraschino cherry pinned between the glass and the ice cube die. Remembered how my parents said mar-a-SHEE-no, but Bogart said mar-a-SKEE-no. We talked about music. Shelagh remembered parties where she first heard Dire Straits and Talking Heads. We've been telling each other stories for 35 years. I hadn't heard that one before. That was nice. I looked out the window at a fi...

There is a quiet urge to sociability built into the open architecture of the bicycle. A bicycle is a pre-social media social medium. The bodily encounters invited by the bicycle are the short waves, hellos, peace signs, thumbs ups, quips, good mornings, traded remarks about the weather, nods, salutes, smiles, knowing glances, short conversations and other gestures and utterances that riders share and use to recognize each other as we go by. The openness of the bicycle—no windshield, no doors, no roof—suggests this way of dealing with each other. This sociability suggestion is enhanced by, call them what you will, protected bike lanes, cycletrack, separated bike routes. I call them "humanfrastructure." This is what I mean. I am not alone. I posted the video, which was shot on the downtown Edmonton bike lanes and on the Oliverbahn, a stretch of protected bike lane that animates the central Oliver neighbourhood. People replied. @bpincott from...

Ask any baba who has done time on a perogy-making assembly line, and she will tell you the trick is in the seal. No perogy worth its salt and flour allows its potatoes and cheese to spill out before being delivered via the fork and opened via the teeth of its grateful recipient. Sealed perogies are on my mind today after I came across a sheet of paper while riding my bike downtown yesterday. Like a postmaster in the 19th century, I sometimes stop to pick up these lost documents and read them. This one was unexpected. Jan 2. 2020 7:25 AM. My Love,  Well, here I am, sitting here, wondering how your Copper score is going? I told you I would go with you to Court, and honestly I am so sorry for the way Ive been treating you these past few days. I am going to do my best to treat you Right. You deserve to be treated with love, respect and of course loyalty. The only way I can tell you what Im thinking when your not around is to write, don't mind the messy hand-writing, Im al...

My winter bicycle is a lot of things. It's my primary mode of transportation. It's how I get exercise for cheap. It's how I have learned not to drive an automobile everywhere. My winter bike is way to save money and stress. It's a conversation starter. It's nostalgia. A way to notice things. A reliable way to feel alive. My bike is also the needle on a turntable. The way the bicycle moves along groves of ice or lanes of snow, and the way it makes a crackly sound when the tires cut into the snow and ice. That precious, scratchy sound sounds like a needle moving across a vinyl record turning around and around. My bike is a radio dial, too. I’m thinking now of the nights as a boy in the basement of the dark house when I would go from station to station and watch the glowing dial move across the grid on the face of the set. This is what I remember as my bike glides across the shadows of the elm trees on 102 Ave. When I sing a bit. ...