“There’s a lot of good players who move,” Guillen said. “Bad players, they get released or traded, or they go play in Mexico. Good players, they’re moved to another position. Look at the players who moved. Oh my god. Michael Young. Miguel Cabrera. A-Rod. Robin Yount. Cal Ripken. You’re not talking about Pedro Perez” — a catchall name, it seemed, for a dime-a-dozen major leaguer — “you’re talking about good ones.” *

But oh how I wish I was within the orbit of the hispanic ballplayer. Is Pedro Perez a name those guys throw around like Joe Blow? When some recently called up reliever comes in for the Orioles does Yunel Escobar go over to Alejandro Gonzalez in the ondeck circle and say something like “don’t worry, brother, this guy is just some Pedro Perez.” Does Hanley Ramirez foul off a fastball and then whisper to catcher Carlos Ortiz “tell Pedro he better not give me that shit again.” (I’m translating here). Do they make these statements about white pitchers, the corn-fed pride of Indiana or wherever? I hope so.

—ZECK

When Vancouver concierges draw directions onto tourist maps, they draw a little red box around a certain part of the Downtown Eastside and say: “don’t go here.” The city was under immense pressure to sweep this area under the rug that was the 2010 Winter Olympics. The question: why hide the most compelling neighbourhood not just in Vancouver but the entire country? 

DAY 1: WHAT ARE YOU DOING HERE?

There’s no way to begin other than the checklist. You only get one first shot so don’t blow it circling in a cab with the doors locked like I did. Tell the driver to drop you off at Main and Hastings. Late in the afternoon. The southeast corner. The Carnegie Centre corner. Hastings rises east up the hill, and declines west. Chinatown is half a block south. The mountains are north—and don’t underestimate the thing those peaks do to this corner. Easy and ominous—like the physical downwardness of this strip of Hastings. But you’re just standing right now. On the corner. Making mental checkmarks.

The procession passes in a kind of Kim Mitchell cadence. Walking isn’t the easiest thing for this procession. It limps, staggers, sometimes falls, but flies forward, also, in rapid bursts. The feeling, when you’re in the middle of it is a kind of flying. (A book you see a lot of people reading in Vancouver has the words “Hungry Ghosts” in the title.) If you’ve never been on a street like this—and where would you have?—your heart begins beating at a funny pace. There’s fixing (check), tweaking (check), crashing (check)—all at the same time. One traffic light passes. Then another. This tweaking crashing limp gets inside you a little bit. It feels like dizziness and nausea. Your legs buckle slightly. You have no business whatsoever being here.

TAKE A BREATH: This isn’t supposed to be some feat of machismo. There’s nobody secretly evaluating the way you’re walking. The fact that the misery of others upsets you is an indication that you are human. And if you need a moment to process that, you’re always half a block from Chinatown (walk south). You can pop into Radio Station Coffee for a latte or one of several art galleries (although they have odd hours). I don’t say this with any trace of sarcasm. Because it took me a couple of attempts to make it all the way down the street the first time myself. It's a tragedy to take ever take it for granted.

Deep breaths. Focus on the mountains. The reticulated #3 bus passing up Main Street. The traffic. The pocked sidewalk. Feet. Ankles. Walk. You’re going to want to rush. Get it over with. But you’re going slowly. Trampled work orders and warrants swirl on the ground. Development applications are pasted over boarded up windows. Look up. Eye contact is totally allowed here. Sincere nods. Just don’t gawk. (Gawking’s rude.) Unless you veer down one of the alleys with an intent to buy a ten dollar rock of crack, you’re completely safe. Tomorrow you’ll realize just how safe—how overstated the initial shock of it was—which is little consolation right now in the maniacal cackling, the choking stench of urine on top of fresh vomit, as someone with scabs on their face tries to sell you a maqnequin’s head near Pigeon Park (check), and a fifteen-year-old girl, who looks a little bit like your sister did at fifteen, uses the parking sign like a stripper pole. Check. No idea where she is. Panties at her ankles. Knees pushed together like she needs to pee. Face awash in this alarming bliss. People whispering “up” and “down” as you pretend not to watch. Up is crack. Down heroin, and you worry about stepping on a syringe and getting HIV. Which is preposterous. But nothing in this neighbourhood is out of the question. And the soles of your shoes are so thin.

And as slow as you’re walking—as I hope you’re walking, there’s no way to take in even a fraction of it. Was that Insite? CHECK! Save On Meats? Where they sold pork from the Pickton farm? CHECK! Are you limping now too, legs numb with the images? Almost a hundred women disappeared from this neighbourhood in the last twenty years. Damn straight you’re limping. Do you remember the trial, the phrase dildo on the end of a revolver? (Check.)

“If this place is an isolated ghetto,” the essay that accompanies the famous Stan Douglas photo goes, “it must be the most accessible and well-known in history.”

And then it stops. You’re at Abbott Street, where the 100 Block of West Hastings, the famous Stan Douglas abandonment photo begins. If it’s dusk, you’ll look up and see the scattered murder of crows migrating east. It happens every night at dusk. There’s no special meaning to it. Like the mysterious chalk “tourists stay away drug infested area” cursive that turns up at different arteries off Hastings, it’s just one of those inexplicable East Van things. And just like that you’re at Victory Park and the historic Dominion Building. The finish line. Across the street is the Amsterdam, which is the kind of café you think it is. But also nothing like you think. Grab a cup of tea here. Steady your nerves. Or go to Gastown and take a photo of the steam clock. As the spinning subsides, you’ll relive this flash of images you swear you saw out of the corner of your eye. At the worst stretch—the abandoned lot right beside the depot where there were like fifty stinking carts of bottles lined up and someone tried to give you an About Schmidt video and an F cup bra—were those potatoes growing? In the abandoned lot? (Check.)

It’s that image I’d like you to sleep on.

When you come back in the morning, you’re going to see something entirely different.

And maybe you’ll see someone reading Dr. Gabor Mate’s "In The Realm of Hungry Ghosts." Mate has been the staff physician of the Portland Hotel for ten years. He treats life-threatening drug addictions, mental illness, Heptatis C or HIV—often all four in one patient. Mate’s book is a field guide for understanding this. “The Buddhist Wheel of Life revolves through six realms,” he writes. “The inhabitants of the Hungry Ghost realm are depicted as creatures with scrawny necks, small mouths, emaciated limbs and large, bloated, empty bellies. This is the domain of addiction.”

DAY 2: REALLY, WHAT ARE YOU DOING HERE?

Dawn.  Same corner. (Yah yah, “Pain and Wastings.”) Likely it’s grey. The drizzle is cold. If you’re lucky this will be the Wednesday the cheques are cut. Pension, disability, welfare and a bunch of other ones you didn’t know existed. Magic day.

It’s still quiet at dawn, though. You have this place that doesn’t belong to you almost entirely to yourself, and in the quiet you begin to notice the small town of brick inside the growing metropolis of glassy highrise condos. A couple blocks east from Main on Hastings, the Ovaltine’s going to be open. This is where the gritty detectives literally drink gritty coffee on the gritty detective shows. To the horror of location scouts, the owner once tried to update the menus to some 21st century typeface. The old menus were quickly rescued from the garbage. The coffee tastes better than it looks on TV.

THERE'S SOMETHING DIFFERENT THAN FACEBOOK HERE. At Carnegie, look at the daily and weekly events board. From film series to gallery openings to “big tree” walks to festivals to workshops. There’s a good DIY walking tour, which corresponds to sidewalk mosaics and historical plaques.

Today will be difficult for a different reason. Yesterday was your mulligan. Yesterday you did nothing but stand and walk and gawk. Today is participating. Which means that you the reader and me the writer have to do more than writers and readers do at this moment in the story.

I say this because I think that corner you’re going back to is the trickiest single spot in Canada to be a tourist. (Which is to say nothing, obviously, for living there.) At the same time, though, this corner—the whole DTES—is one of four essential trips a trouist can make if they plan to travel in Canada and acknowledge the year is 2012.

You go, as a tourist to the places you do, for two reasons. You go because (1) that place is so amazing your eyes almost pop out of your head, and (2) the place is evidence of the way the world ticks.

When I mentioned this premise to people who had any kind of affiliation with the DTES, I’d get a dubious scowl. Nobody wants tourists here. At the same time, though, they complain about the way the media depicts the neighbourhood. How nobody really understands. And so when I asked these people where I should send visitors to Vancouver—where they sent their friends—I’d get the same kind of acquiescent shrug, and a “b-b-but—“ Like Fort McMurray, like Indian Reservations, like the disappearing prairie farmland, this is modern Canada.

“So you’re going to send tourists into like Pigeon Park?”

“Well….it is public space,” I’d reply. “And more than that, the people there…they’ll say actually say hello to you. I can’t think of many other places where strangers are so thoroughly welcomed.” When I’d say that, even the most territorial DTESer would smile. Because there is so much magic and wonder here. And I’d ask, “so what’s the secret tour you give your friends?”

ANOTHER WAY TO START. Ask the cab driver to drop you off at The Police Museum (240 East Cordova Street), which does a historical walking tour called “Sins Of The City,” which is really the history of Vancouver, and arguably the most amazing walking tour in Canada. The museum itself is a gem that most Vancouverites don’t even know exists. Located in the old morgue, the highlight isn’t the preserved fetuses and body parts. There’s a whole wall of weapons confiscated by the VPD. Homemade spiked fist rings, body armour made of drill bits, leather and screws. Cross bows. Blow darts. Baseball bats with nails coming out. Cleavers. Homemade morning stars. Motorcycle chain brass knuckles. Your knees feel weak imaginging these Road Warrior weapons is use. On the other side of the room, you'll find confiscated opium pips and vials, coke spoons, crystallized cocaine, syringes, capsules and a bottle of methodone. The museum is across the street from the prison—if you’re wondering about the grey sweats some people wear in the neighbourhood—and kitty corner from St. James Anglican Church, which holds will welcome you to its Sunday services.

The Xs and Os of that tour, as I’m sure you already realize, are incidental. It’s the method that’s important. There’s this kind of downtown hobo chic, for instance where rich kids from the North Shore will spend a Friday night panhandling. Suburban moms will volunteer at a soup kitchen during Christmas. For a $400 donation, you can do a four-day street retreat through the Shambhala Centre. (The catch is that you must raise the donation by begging friends and family for the money, which covers the social services you’ll engage while residing for three nights on the street.) Most residents are tourists when they arrive—it’s the last affordable neighbourhood in Vancouver. (Although at $400+/month for rooms that go 50 to 100 sq ft—with rats and roaches and bed bugs and toilet down the hall—it’s actually some of the most expensive rental property in the country.) Hundreds of retired men live in these old brick hotels. They actually live in these hotels for years and years. And if you’re willing to drink some beer in the bars beneath the rooms, you will hear Jack Londonesque life stories with very little goading. London himself spent time in the bars along Hastings Street, when “skid road” was a reference to the process of literally skidding logs down the brick roads.

There’s such a prescience to the brick right now.

Two hundred disposable cameras were handed out in the DTES earlier this year and given a theme. What I value In My Community. Each camera has 26 exposures and uses 800 speed film. There’s $500 for the best photo. The contest began seven years ago, in part to mitigate the sort of drive-by poverty porn photography by media, arts students and tourists who happened to be slumming in the neighbourhood.

I asked the project’s curator if she had noticed any special pattern to the most recent photos. She thought or a while, then said, “more buildings and structures than before.” Then we both thought for a while about what this meant. And I blurted out the obvious: they’re scared it’s going to disappear.

ONE OF THE NOT FACEBOOK BOARDS AT CARNEGIE is just posters with missing people and entreaties like: "pleas to call home, your family loves and misses you so much." In the cafeteria, there's a poem called "The Hood" written in blue on peach paper: "we are told we are the poorest neighbourhood in Canada/Yah, sure they once said that of Greenwich Village/Poverty is relevant."

The two most photographed structures in the contest were The Hastings Folk Garden and The Carnegie Community Centre. Calling Carnegie a “community centre” is like calling Gretzky a hockey player. The Carnegie is the DTES.  It’s Chinese dudes huddled around tables playing Xiangqi in the basement, it’s old timers shooting pool. It’s lectures and concerts and readings and exhibitions. It’s the library. It’s the patio. It’s a very intricate communication system of announcement boards, personal message boards. It’s where you go to find out what’s going on. If it’s noon, and you’re still standing on that fricking corner, it’s where you’re now going for the best dollar-for-dollar lunch you can buy in Vancouver—and Vancouver’s crammed with cheap amazing lunches.  If you’re lucky, it’ll be Ethiopian spiced fava beans with marinated cheese curd and a salad so fresh it had to have come out of that garden you caught from the corner of your eye yesterday. You’ll climb the steep spiral staircase—and this is the best part—the marble steps are so worn from use, there’s actually a divot. Probably someone’s strumming a guitar at the top. It’s not until you go into the Carnegie that you get a sense of the neighbourhood that exists beyond the dozen block stretch of sketch on Hastings. And you begin talking to people. And it’s not that you realize that she’s exactly like my niece or that could be my grandfather, it’s not that you realize that the world eventually breaks everybody, you realize that there are still places in this world where we are all in it together. You begin to realize why you’ve travelled here. You have come learn what grows out of the broken places.

DAY 3: THE THING YOU’RE DOING HERE

When you come back the next day, instead of Main and Hastings, go back to the steam clock. There’s something unsatisfying about this fricking clock. Cruise ship tourists surround it like arms on the clock itself. Camera flashes overshadow the steam effect. Nobody can quite hide their dissatisfiction. What are you doing here? It’s a tourist stop only because someone labeled it as such.

One thing you notice when you walk around Vancouver—English Bay, Kits, the whole east end, even downtown—is second hand bookstores and thrift shops. I’ve never seen a North American city with more used book and clothing stores. You can chalk that up to a lot of things. Hippy values. Chinese frugality.  Hipster sensibility. And while I’m skeptical about a lot of the so-called Vancouver achievements, there is something very deep here that says you don’t give up on used up things.

As Vancouver edges ever closer to glorified resort town, discussions about the neibourhood inevitably become symbolic of bigger things. The Olympics sped up the gentrification of an area that was already under extraordinary economic pressure. Sure as crystal meth’s replacing heroin, the brick is becoming glass too. And bringing with it the glassier people.

And as you walk now from the steam clock back to your corner, I’ll tell you what you’re doing here. Because despite what the people trying to protect this neighbourhood say—and maybe be I’m wrong—but I think it’s something you can actually start to get in two or three days. If nothing else you know that whatever you thought you knew know about this place is wrong. You know that when the federal government talks about this neighbourhood they’re totally wrong—inarticulately so and destructively so. When  you come here, you learn, for instance, that the VPD officially favours harm reducation and that Chinatown Bussiness Association flipped almost immediately from opposing to embracing Insite. On top of that, the international and national media have framed its DTES discussion incorrectly—stupidly and destructively. Because they begin with the premise—and there’s this palpable glee when they begin—that Vancouver should be ashamed of the community. But it’s not Vancouverites bobbing around like zombies on East Hastings. It’s mentally retarded children from Toronto. It’s Edmonton girls who have been raped by their dad and made to have sex with the family dog in front of his friends. Aboriginal people fleeing the well-documented hell that is the modern Canadian reservation. The people here are from every city and town in Canada that had no place for them. When they finally reach this neighbourhood, they find every kind of doctor, counselor, food, a bed, medicine, friends—they find the only community in the country that can help them.

And when that disappears—and it will eventually disappear—not because mental illness, addiction and homelessness will be solved, but by the sheer relentless real estate speculation machinery, there will be no place left to go.

Want to know why you’re here? You’re here to see the last worthwhile neighbourhood in Canada that won’t go down without a fight.

And you’re here to see and understand a little of that fight back to wherever you live.

—CHRIS KOENTGES

More GHETTOS, ENCLAVES AND SLUMMING*

Entering Malaysia’s Fantastic Pain Parade

Tijuana and the Mythological Border Town Bender

I gave away my forests, oil, jobs and principles...and all I got was this lousy totally cute panda?

Bon jour,
Good morning,
Dajia hao [Ph: DA-JA-HOW.]

[Last syllable is drawn out.]Thank you CS [Leung]for that kind introduction.Greetings also to
Chongqing’s vice-mayor
Mr. Wu WOO-GONGGang. . . [Ph: Woo-Gong]Ms. Hu Zhongpin [Ph: HooHOO-JONGong-Ping PING]
who is vice-president and
Secretary General of the
China Association of Zoological Gardens

Ms. Yin YIN HONGHong,
who is vice administrator of the State
Forestry Administration of China.

And of course,
Li Zhongfu  [Ph: Lee LEE Jong JONG FooFOO]
who is director
of the Chongquing Zoo.

Finally,
our thanks to
Mark Rowswell,
better known to you all here as Dashan,
for acting as
Master of Ceremonies
for us here this morning,
and indeed for everything
you have done to
make for us
during our visit to China.
this week go smoothly.
(!!!)
Thank you all for coming,
and joining us for this special occasion,
for what is actually
a very happy occasion.

C’est un vrai plaisir
pour moi
d’*tre ici,
dans ce cél*bre zoo
et de contempler
les montagnes spectaculaires
qui entourent la ville.

Nous pouvons tous
tirer
des leçons
de la réussite de Chongqing,

l’une des villes du monde

dont la croissance

est la plus rapide.

It’s a real pleasure to
be in this famous zoo
and to see the city’s
spectacular mountains

We can all learn
from Chongqing’s success,
as one of the world’s
fastest growing cities.

Chongqing is
the most shining example

of China’s

“Open the West” campaign.

And the growth here
demonstrates the value
of working to ensure
all regions participate
in the prosperity
of a nation.

In recognition
of the growth here,
our government
is upgrading the
Canadian Consulate

here in Chongqing

to full Consul-General status!

That will mean
more staff
and more resources,
working to identify
trade and investment opportunities
for Canadian companies,
here in Chongqing and region.
In turn,
that means
more export jobs
in Canada
and deeper trade ties
with Western China.

Many Canadian products
already reach
interior China
through the Chongqing port.
In fact,
the port here
has a special relationship

with the city of Winnipeg,

through a 2011 agreement

to increase the export
of
high-quality farm products

from the middle of Canada,

to inland China.

This makes Chongqing
the destination
for many Canadian exports
that make the long journey
from our country
by rail,
and across the Pacific
by ship,
before coming up the Yangtze.

Aujourd’hui,
j’ai assisté * l’arrivée
des livraisonsde porc canadien
en Chine
depuis la levée
de l’interdiction.

Aujourd’hui,

les éleveurs canadiens

peuvent *tre fiers.
La la qualité

des aliments canadiens

a été confirmée

de nouveau.

Earlier today,
I witnessed the arrival
of the first shipment
of pork to be shipped
from Winnipeg to China
under the 2011 agreement.

This is a proud day
for western Canadian farmers.

The quality of Canadian food
has again been
reaffirmed.

And,
we are celebrating
together

an important milestone

in our growing trade partnership

with China.Friends,
I’m proud to note
that
Chongqing
has a
surprising numberof Canadian influences:Five Imax 3-D screens,
a great Canadian invention;
A subsidiary plant to Magna,
a major domestic supplier
of parts to Canada’s auto makers;
Une technologie
de l’entreprise québécoise Ecosystem
qui aide un fabricant
de motocyclettes
* atteindre les objectifs
d’efficacité énergétiqueAn office for Wilfrid Laurier University –
one of several
Canadian post-secondary institutions
with ties to Chongqing;
And even a Maple Leaf School.

And soon,
two very special visitors
representing this city
and this zoo,
will be making
their presence felt
back home in Canada.

Je suis ici aujourd’hui,
pour conclure annoncer officiellement
une entente de dix ans
avec entre Le Zoo de Calgary,
Le Zoo de Toronto,
et l’administration foresti*re d’État
et l’Association chinoise
des jardins zoologiques,
qui permettra
* deux pandas géants
de faire un séjour
au Canada.

Today,
I’m here
to help officially announce
a ten-year agreement
between the Calgary Zoo,
the Toronto Zoo,
State Forestry Administration of Chinaand
and the China Association of Zoological Gardens
Chinese agencies,
for two giant pandas
to visit Canada.

They will arrive next year
and see both
the East and West of Canada -
spending five years
at each of
the Toronto and Calgary Zoos.

And under the terms
of this agreement
both zoos
will invest
in panda research
and conservation.

This will help ensure
that future generations
will know
these magnificent animals.

As you know,
I’ve lived in both cities
and I can assure everyone
that they will be
wonderful hosts …

not only for the pandas,

but also for the many tourists

who will come to see them.

They will be
the first pandas
to visit Canada
since the 1980s.

Of course,
This this is a wonderful
Next next step,
From after Canada wasthe awarding
Of Approved Destination Status
to Canada in 2009.

Les pandas
ont charmé
des gens
de tous les horizons
et tous les coins du monde.

Pandas have charmed
people
from all walks of life
and
every corner of the world.

Feline-lovers like myself
are especially drawn
to what Chinese
have traditionally called
the catlike bear.

The playful “shy lady”,
as the panda
Is also often called,
is a gentle animal
and a symbol of peace.

La visite des pandas au Canada
représente un important pas en avant
dans la relation florissante
entre nos deux peuple

The pandas’ visit
to Canada
represents an important step forward
in the blossoming relationship
between our two peoples.

Canada and China

enjoy a strategic partnership

based on
mutual respect
and collaboration.

Our mutual love for pandas
is one more example
of the goodwill
that underlies the relationship
between Canada and China …

a relationship that,
as the last four days have shown,

continues to mature.

Merci beaucoup.

Thank you very much.

Also: Stephen Harper’s Cat is Watching you Masturbate.

 I. JACKFRUIT AND THE SLUMP

It began on a cold afternoon in January. The coldest of the winter. I hadn’t left my house for several days and, trying to distinguish cabin fever from a more dangerous malaise, pulled on long johns and a balaclava, and set out for coffee.

Ghostly walls of snow swirled through the empty streets. At the entrance to my local cafe, bills and fliers blew out of the mailbox, and a hand-written note explained the business had moved almost a hundred blocks southwest. Icicles had formed on my eyelashes. And I sprinted for a dark lounge at the end of the street. The lounge had a crimson hue.

There are not enough dark crimson places in the world. I like to give them names, and now named this one The Mocking Horse Winner. The Mocking Horse Winner wanted you to drink double scotch; rail scotch, which I think should be ordered with a bit of water. Or soda—or ginger ale—if you have nostalgia. It should come in a stemmed hiball glass. There was a similar joint down the street that served breakfast and used the same stemmed glasses. And another one that was part of a Motor Hotel. I called the one that used to be the lesbian one Leviticus.

When the scotch was done, I ordered another. And then another. By the time I left, the temperature had dropped a few more degrees and the wind swirled more viciously. But I was no longer cold nor, more importantly, malaised. I ended up in the Chinese supermarket—two blocks north of the Chinese supermarket I’d normally shop at—stocking up on provisions. I bought one mangosteen for $1.38, a dragon fruit for $1.22, and 14 more miscellaneous items for $17.37.

Then something caught my eye. From the end of the aisle, it looked like a biological warhead. From ten feet away, a prehistoric blowfish. When we were finally eye to eye, I realized it was jackfruit. I’d only ever seen jackfruit in slices, never a whole. It had to weigh 30 pounds. Possibly 40.

Like everything in the produce section, it had been significantly marked down. I did some calculations, and realized that even if I could roll it 16 blocks through -32C, at $4.99/lb the investment would still be too much to undertake alone. I stopped in at another hole in the wall, where I ordered gin and tonic, and wrote a business plan on the back of some coasters. For the first time in 2008, I felt hope and possibility, and in the morning I typed notes to my investors. Of course I never sent them out. Instead I went for another walk, then back home, to bed, where I stayed for the rest of day, and the next day too. I returned to my alternative Chinese grocery store. Somebody else had purchased my jackfruit.

II. SUPER BOWL SUNDAY

On Sunday, I woke with renewed vigor. In the days of regret at having lost the jackfruit, a new plan had formed. The plan was to take all the hope and love and money I would have vested into the jackfruit and bet it against the New England Patriots undefeated season. I knew one person who would viscerally understand such a bet. “I want history to remember we were against it,” I told him.

He proposed we meet at Legion #1, which I countered with the lounge beside the hooker Mac’s on 4th, right in downtown’s Bermuda Triangle of holes (the vertices I named Bada Bing, The Korova and Moe’s). We needed a place that would not broadcast the American commercials. Our bet was contingent on local furniture ads and boilermakers, on $4.99 steak sandwiches slathered in HP; a naked dive with White Lightning, Tia Maria, rock salt, grapefruit juice, burnt out light bulbs, tins of Jackhammer, boxed Foch, codeine and two or three—but not more—VLTs. (A yellowing edition of Mulligan’s Bar Guide to Mixing, Serving and Otherwise Consuming would hang where the Parfait Amour used to be.) The Christmas decorations would still be up.

There is a vague theory behind such places. “Seediness has a very deep appeal,” Graham Greene wrote one time, “it seems to satisfy, temporarily, the sense of nostalgia for something lost; it seems to represent a stage further back.” These crimson holes, in other words, are our attempt to return to the womb. I believe such places—holes in the wall, dives, public hideouts—become keepers of our forgotten primordial schemes.

You’d think, for instance, it would have been simple to bet a lot of money against The Pats in The Super Bowl—only a sucker would make such a bet—but after setting up an offshore betting account, which requires setting up a non-Paypal-non-Mastercard-non-anything-you’ve-ever-heard-of account that would transfer money to the account offshore, several levels of service charge, verification fees, then finally convincing the people who run your existing accounts that you indeed want to transfer such a sum of money—to bet on The New York Giants—it comes to feel a little suspicious.

Finally my friend said: “I work with a guy who’s got an account.” Because it was a UK account, we made our wager in pounds. When it was complete, my friend finished his bottle of Pilsner and banged it on the table in anticipation. Old world currency against new world deeds. A woman in a leopard patterned hat and matching mittens ordered White Russians. A man with a boiler of a belly offered around cigarettes. The waitress turned on the game, and within the amniotic glow of—let’s call this place The Kamiquasi—our faith grew in The Giants. And as they marched onto the field just before kickoff—before the most famous Super Bowl upset I have  seen or will ever see again—my friend’s colleague called back to say the bet did not go through.

III. SUPER TUESDAY, ASH WEDNESDAY, CHINESE NEW YEAR

I don’t think anyone’s ever specifically defined dog days of winter. There are no official dates.

Like pure righteous holes in the wall, you know when you’re in them. I know the days after that Super Bowl unfurled in a blur. At the miscellaneous joints around the confluence of 8th avenue and 8th street, collectively known as My Dog Karl Rove, I started a scene for a screenplay where Matthew Broderick plays a principal who has been pushed too far and goes on a Columbine like spree. (It’s more redemptive than it sounds.)

On Ash Wednesday, at a diner between the last two pawn shops on 8th Ave—where the name Akimbo rolls off the tongue—I gave up booze for thin Won Ton soup and devised an offence where Shaq would compliment Steve Nash. The next day, in a little hole inside a slightly bigger hole, which you only get in Chinatown, I had dusty jasmine tea and mapo dofu. As a family played mahjong, I decided that miserable January of 2008 was a mulligan, that the year really did begin today. I sketched a prototype for a thousand dollar vibrator called the Cleopatra, its head filled with ancient Nile bees preserved in polished amber. It didn’t matter that it would never be built. It just needed to be inscribed for eternity on a napkin.

Nor did it matter that we wouldn’t collect our 200£ on the Giants nor that I would never own a jackfruit. It was that these things that were seemingly too good to be true—these things had actually begun to happen. In dark crimson holes. That pull us through the dog days of winter to brighter times.
—CHRIS KOENTGES

ALSO: Tijuana and the mythological border town bender.

You will come to the Malay capital of Kuala Lumpur as the constellation Poosam moves into ascendancy during the Tamil month of Thai. It’s shortly before midnight. The moon’s full. The rain torrential. In the next 24 hours, the city’s population will swell by more than a quarter million Indians. Which is to say nothing for the Chinese New Year celebrations this week too.

Come morning, a procession of fanatics will drive metal spears through their faces and stab giant hooks into their backs. They will walk, for miles, some half-naked, on the sharp ends of sandals made from nails, performing feats of self-mutilation. Then, under a near-equatorial sun, they will climb almost 300 steps to the vast limestone Batu Caves, which have been described as “gigantic cathedrals.”

In honour of the birth of the deity Lord Muruga (sometimes called Subramaniam), Hindu devotees—predominately Indian Tamils—seek atonement for the previous year’s misdeeds and favour for the year to follow by performing acts of penance during this 14-kilometre pilgrimage from Kuala Lumpur to the Batu Caves. Approximately 10% of Malaysia’s 27.5 million citizens are ethnic Indians. The celebration is banned in India, where many feel it has become more spectacle than religious rite, specifically with respect to the extreme worshippers who undergo astonishing acts of self-mutilation.

The night before it happens, you will find a lively Chinatown cafe that serves frog porridge. A Boston kid, with dark circles under his eyes, stacks a guitar and duffel bag against the wall, and asks to join your table. “I guess you’re here for that festival too,” he says. He’s hitchhiked from Hanoi. It’s the tail of monsoon season and the dimly lit room buzzes with Thaipusam.

“Spectacularly masochist feats,” an Australian girl reads from a dog-eared Lonely Planet guidebook.

“Pete told me it’s the most stunning thing in Malaysia,” another says.

“Banned in India!” a thick Eastern European accent booms.

“It’s banned everywhere, but Malaysia and Singapore,” someone else chimes in haughtily.

Another voice whispers, “Is it safe?”

There’s a nervous anticipation. Like driving by a traffic accident just as the cops arrive, feeling curious, but a touch apprehensive, about the possibility of seeing a decapitated head in the ditch. As the night wanes, the streets and cafes empty out. Two amputees in drenched and tattered rags belt uneven Beatles songs by the door. Cat-sized rats scurry out from unseen holes.

By dawn, the rain has stopped. Muslim girls in head scarves and school uniforms scuttled along the streets. Carts of exotic produce are wheeled about. Congee and dahl and Penang laksa simmer in big pots. Down one street, a butcher cuts the heads off live chickens. You board a bus, which is quickly snared up in the mounting throng of human traffic — something like 1.5 million people marching towards the Batu Caves. You disembark and march along with them. And then you catch your first glimpse of the “gigantic cathedrals” at the end of the procession. Drums thunder out a hundred different rhythms. People shuffle like ants to the foot of the hill, then up it, as if ascending a giant dragon’s tongue, into a gaping mouth.

It’s not until mid-afternoon that the horde of pilgrims, who have adopted you, spills into the main procession of devotees. The drums become deafening, the accretion of aggressive whistles and chants alarming. Black clouds of burning camphor shoot through your sinus cavity like a Vicks eight ball. And the motley spectrums of colour whirs even faster: fresh limes and oranges, small brass bells, flowers and peacock feathers, tinsel and tissue paper — all of it skewered into the backs and chests and necks and limbs of human bodies. Kavadis, large, convoluted frames, some metal, some wood, balanced over devotees’ shoulders and “fastened” into flesh, are carried like cubic Christmas trees without branches.

For more than an hour, you will follow the tedious progression of just one devotee. Barely in his twenties. Bare-chested. Scrawny. A meek swath of hair grows above his lip, and thin skewers almost a foot in length pierce both upper and lower lips horizontally in opposite directions. Several ornaments dangle from hooks in his back. He’s flanked by two drummers; driven forward by a spellbinding rhythm that builds to crescendo, then suddenly drops off, depending how much coaxing is needed.

Kavadi is Tamil for “burden.” It’s the boy’s first time carrying such a physical and spiritual weight, and he’s long since retreated into a trance. The chanting and the hypnotic rhythm of the drums coax worshippers into a meditative, trance-like state that helps them to transcend the physical burden. His face contorts, his arms and legs tremble. The temperature had reached the mid-thirties. The humidity is crippling.

To acquire the necessary endurance for Thaipusam, participants cleanse over the month leading up to the festival. They deny themselves alcohol, tobacco and sex. They offer daily prayers, meditate and adhere to a strict vegetarian diet.

At times, when the young Tamil seems to lose consciousness, his family circles around him. Dancing. Singing. Encouraging. Loving. Willing him forward. A spotter braces him until he has strength to move again. Waves of onlookers chant encouragement. (On this day, you will not see a single participant carried.)

In the height of the afternoon sun, the atmosphere feels paradoxically easier. The strange combinations of hues more aesthetic, the aromas less hostile. You have become a cell in the seething Thaipusam organism. With surprising fervour, you find your own head bobbing at the drum’s prodding. You find yourself vested in this boy. Cheering loudly, just like at home in the bleachers at a football game.

When you reach the first of the 272 steep steps that lead up to the caves, the boy smashes a coconut, to symbolize the shattering of ego. As he climbs, wild macaque monkeys screech and jump furiously among the trees and rocks that engulf the stairs. They hurl rocks and bottles.

You will enter the temple, behind the boy and his family, at the back of the biggest cave. You pour cow’s milk over a shrine. An older woman jerks the skewers from the boy’s lips. Quickly, smoothly. There is almost no blood. He wince, then extends his tongue over the wounds curiously. The verve floods back into his eyes. He smiles painfully. He smiles broadly.

SIMILAR: An electric shock machine and the last days of the seedy mythological border town bender.

“To all the f.o.b.ly dressed oriental kids who never take off their heavy backpacks even when they’re getting their faces kicked in.”—Dave Choe

1. ↑ ­KOREA. Between the demise of the despot, who Rick Perry and George Bush the 2nd call Kim Jong Two, and barnstorming First Lady Kim Yoon-Ok’s pledge to do for Korean cuisine what First Lady Michell Obama has done for American gardening, Korea is now positioned to move from state of epic recovery to epic state of mind. Ruth Reichl has prophesized that Kimchi will knock off Sriracha. The bibimbap burger has become the greatest burger in America. Drinking vinegar has replaced the white whisky fad. And David Chang is poised to become the world’s next celebrity chef. Which is to say nothing for the breathalyzer that can detect breast cancer. Or tacos and Hiite. Or blooming Korean indie cinema.

Your task this month is to bury a jar of kimchi under your favourite hole at the pitch & putt. Send us a photo.

↓ TORONTO. The Ford Brothers’ version of Canada’s cultural heart is nicely summed up as decrying “‘there are more libraries than Tim Hortons”, the same way most of us would shake our head and say ‘this neighbourhood has more strip clubs than schools’.” (Perhaps Torontonians will find hope this year in Chang’s new Momofuku.)

2. ­↑ SUCK IT LEVITATION. The practice of hovering in the air and making an X motion downwards across the crotch. In the air, the levitator concentrates on a solitary defenseless object. Using their entire soul, the levitator sends the suck it out calmy into the world. The levitation is ideally undertaken in a natural setting. (Like the last five syllables pull together the preceding twelve in a haiku, so the levitator pulls together the world’s divergent forces.

With your feet in the air, your hands plunging down across your crotch, try this little trick and hover.

Yes, please send us a photo.

↓PLANKING AND TEBOWING.  Taiwan’s famed Pujie Girls have fallen to the hype of Denver’s faithful quarterback. But in the year of the water dragon…both will lovingly SUCK IT!

3. ↑ GLOBAL DOMINATION BY INVESTING IN CULTURE. ­ 

↓ Meanwhile, FLAILING GOVERNMENTS blow their wads on expensive toys—while downsizing the leading instruments of epic culture—and selling off their forests and every other natural resource to those they would seek to vanquish. (Do not incorporate this move into your suck it levitation.)

4. ↑ CAT POWER & MANNY PACQUIAO. (It’s the year of the mother fucking water dragon!)

↓ JORGE & ALEXA NARVAEZ. (Do NOT play this for your water dragon.)

5. ↑ ­THE NENSHI. In his first year as mayor of Calgary, Naheed Nenshi has cut red tape, opened up government, restored faith in politicians.

↓ THE KENNEY. Nenshi’s former University of Calgary classmate, trusted to tend Canada’s flourishing multicultural garden—the model of the world—hasn’t just picked fights with Amnesty International and new Muslims, the Immigration Minister seems to have gone out of his way to instigate the sort of cultural wars that have ripped apart the US and UK.

6. ↑ EATING INVASIVE SPECIES. Really, why haven’t hunters wiped out the nutria, Burmese python, feral hogs and other non-native outlaw species?

Increased demand for invasive species products could overcome those difficulties, for example if more people develop a craving for nutritious meals made from nutria, the large aquatic rodent, or make Everglades python purses the next must-have accessory. But cultural and logistic hurdles remain.

↓BACKYARD TILAPIA FARMS never really caught on like we hoped.

7. ↑RADICAL GROUPS.

↓ WEIGHTY ETHNIC ROLES. Why choose between Mexican and Thai, when you can choose multiple marginalized sexual identities wrapped in major minorities boxed in enigmatic multiethnic foreplay tied back, for good measure, to more than one dark homeland? 

8.↑LAGOTTO ROMAGNOLO. Hypoallergenic. And finds truffles.

9. ↑CURLY HAIR. What do the Circassian Beauties who travelled in PT Barnumesque medicine shows have to do with the way The Afro became synonymous with black power? And the way plumes of smoke curl from the dragon’s nostrils? This year you will discover a secret world connected by curls.

↓ OVERPRICED BARBER SHOPS. A barber sees neither the mystery nor the potential. He sees a poncey periwig. He sees smug pedophilia dripping off an Athenian statue. He sees the spread of communism.The things he sees must be eliminated. The ear he knicked last time? It was no accident. It was a souvenir.

ALSO: Multiculturalism is the art of jamming every culture into one television character.

“Millions of Canadians recently learned they’ll have to change their Tim Hortons coffee order if they want the same volume at the same price to which they’ve grown accustomed. The old extra-large is now large, the old large is medium, the old medium is small, and the old small is now extra-small.”

But there was more.

Two sugars. Two creams. A little bit of something that tastes like coffee. You pay for it with the coins and lint in your pocket. You take it in a cardboard cup. You take it to go. On the first taste, in the parking lot, you burn your tongue. You enter traffic. You wait patiently at a red light. You listen to the hockey scores. You burn your tongue—this time, less sharply. You drive some more. You “support” the troops. You re-elect the Harper Government. And somewhere, in the slow moving traffic, it is ready. You drink the Double Double. You drink the State Koolaid. You head across town to Canadian Tire to look for an extension cord—you get on with all the possibilities of the day.

The next morning, you repeat. The South Asian ladies beam obediently at you from behind the counter, despite their meager remuneration. It confirms the natural order of things. And so you repeat. And you repeat. And you repeat. And then one morning, the lights inside the value proposition are a little lower. It smells like lasagna. They’ve done something to the chairs. Reluctantly, you sit down. You drink…the latte. And in that moment, everything becomes fucked. You’re looking at Premiership scores on the HD ticker above a fake fireplace. South Asian kids are typing on laptops. They are the grandkids of the ladies behind the counter. They are buying and selling your grandkids. Soccer Mom—or whatever you’re now supposed to call this lady—has jackbooted the Harper Government.

It is less simple than it has ever been to tell where Canada ends and this brand begins. (“Why we are Tim Hortons and Tim Hortons is us!” wept one blog.) It’s a barometer brand. It’s a harbinger brand. It’s a brand that feels like a state-owned brand. Above all else, though, it’s a brand that has read the tea leafs. At the exact moment Alison Redford and Christy Clark have taken over a pair of plush armchairs out west, it’s no coincidence that the Timbit world view acknowledges that Soccer Mom is more valuable than Hockey Dad. That Hockey Dad might now himself be something between recyclable and disposable.

Hockey Dad does not want to sit down and contemplate this too thoroughly. Rex Murphy, who pronounces espresso with a sneer and an x, had prophesized this moment for years; alluding to a coming gentrification, to the aggressive yuppie haunts of Starbucks Corp.Less orthodox pundits note the open kitchen and espresso drinks are really about competing with the well-established McCafe. (Toronto Life had a predicable elitist giggle at the notion that any of it could somehow qualify as espresso.) In an online poll, CTV framed the transition as simple vs cozy. As if the two were at odds. (Like plastering 4,000 Tim Hortons across a country only constitutes gentrification once it’s aimed at that 80s demographic known as “Yuppy.”) 65%, in case you’re wondering, preferred cozy.

And so you do what you have been trained to do. You go. You drive. You drive aimlessly this time. You find yourself in an industrial area. Parked in front of the kind of greasy old place that your own dad would take you to. Maybe it’s the exact same place. You sit at the counter. You hold a glass sugar dispenser upside down over your cup. You build a pyramid out of creamers.

ALSO: Lessons from the second most effective multicultural ad ever.

“We’ve been building it for a while, and trying to make it safe,” Gomez told the Straight, explaining that the idea is for people to join hands while a gradually increasing electrical charge is administered. “At some point somebody lets go, and they have to do a shot. The last person standing with the shock machine, well, he’s the most macho. Maybe they get a free drink or something. We’ve got to figure out a prize.”

This, by the way, isn’t just random insanity. The electric-shock machine is actually popular in Mexico. “It’s all part of turning the room into what you would see at a 3 a.m. Mexican-cantina-brothel-type place,” said Gomez, who also promised to beta-test the unit before any of us get our stupid drunk hands on it.

My first personal encounter with the contraption known as Caja de Toques occurred on a slow day in Tijuana.

THE BOX. Metal. Rusted. Dial at the centre, as on the front of a beat-up closet safe. It hangs from the neck of a silent Mexican man like an oversized talisman. Cords extend from opposite ends, a grip at the end of each cord. Hands, not the silent Mexican man’s hands, rather your, the anxious young customer’s hands, go on the dangling grips. Rotating the dial clockwise sends something measured in volts through the cord to the grips. The question: do you tender pesos for the sheer cheeky masochism of this service—or wager them that you can hold onto the ends of the cords longer than the silent Mexican man is capable of turning the dial?

THE JOINT. There’s a lone fly buzzing above shelves stocked with a single brand of Tequila. There’s a spittoon that’s stained—from spit. There’s a live rattlesnake curled up inside a jar. Hard men are drinking tequila and beer alone at different tables. The silent Mexican man is a crumpled man; grey, dusty and gaunt. He is the very best of Tijuana which, by definition, makes him the very worst too. To be a tourist in Tijuana, to be someone who’s going to enjoy “TJ” (as the college kids who cross from San Diego call it), you must forget this silent withered Mexican men with the mousey Fu Manchu might be a real human. The trick of TJ is to think of him as cartoon character. A Jorge, perhaps. You theatrcially roll the ooor in your imagination, which is in overdrive, as it turns these splotchy bits of reality into vivid  animated cliches. TJ is a realm that nobody sees but you.

THE DAY is a Tuesday in the low season. There are no bullfights. No school holidays. No other turistas. It is an overcast day. It is a quiet day.

On a slow day in Tijuana, the young male is a more aggressively sought commodity than on regular days. Over a 45-minute circuit of Avenida Revolución, you pass the donkeys painted like zebras, shoe away runny-nosed orphans hawking Chiclets, talk poontang with scarred night-club owners in gold-chains. You stop to watch the pale ladies with pillowy arms from Central Europe and midwestern America pose clandestinely for photos next to beggars with no eyes or legs. Revolución is the anti-travel experience of, say, visiting a leper colony on the Ganges. The squalor and human suffering is bonafide kitsch.

A large man in a flower-patterned shirt tells you, when you cross the border, that straying from Revolución, is “like sticking your hand into a cockatoo cage.” His tone is more of an invitatin than it is a warning. Off Revolución, where Tijuana is dustier and more blanched, your feet will get itchy, and you will stumble further and further off the circuit. You stumble past the Lorena Hotel, which rents rooms by the half-hour. A scrawny white teenager scrubs blood from his collar on the curb out front. You stumble into the regions of what the AAA TripTik® calls the red-light area north of Calle 1A, west of Constitución. Then down calles and avenidas with no signs. Finally, you are hustled into the somber toon joint by a sneaky señorita who scans the street to make sure nobody had seen you enter.

The dark room is half-filled with very hard men who don’t speak to one another. You refer to them, giddily inside your imagination, as “hombres.” You’ve only encountered such men in Robert Rodriguez films. They wear crisp blue jeans, thick leather belts, heavy patterned shirts and American Stetsons. Dark Stetsons. There’s a tension as you enter. And so you scurry into the booth at the back to regroup.

Your eyes adjust to the darkness.

You drink Tecate.

You wait.

You begin to believe that you yourself are some kind of hard man. A man not to messed with.

Charlton Heston. Moral Mexican narc in brown-face.

The silent Mexican man with the homemade torture device shuffles to your booth. He thrust the grips at the ends of the cords in your direction. With indifference, he thrust them again. The third time, he puts them right on your hands. Harmless as the ends of a skipping rope.

You freeze.

You cannot give the order to your fingers to curl around the grips.

Maybe…you are not some kind of a hard man, after all?

The silent Mexican man mistakes the hesitation for indifference and shuffles towards a sullen Mexican man sitting with a shot glass at another table. To your momentary relief, he is dismissed with some Spanish to the effect of fuck off.

You drink the Tecates faster. You decide that you will spend the rest of the night in the somber cartoon joint to atone. You will wait for another, badder silent Mexican man. Maybe you will stab him with the corkscrew on you Swiss Army knife to show everybody how bad you are.

Except you’ve already left the somber cartoon joint. You’re shuffling down a dirty street as the hawkers pack up for the night. This is character you tell yourself, gazing at a broad angle over the cartoon realm. Then beyond it, up towards the long dusty roads that wind into bleaker hills crammed with corrugated shacks, as if it actually were all strictly for your entertainment.

You have given the realm—the whole notion of the seedy border town bender—a mythology and vividness that might not actually have existed at that precise moment. You realize now that you’re merely two blocks off Revolución. Your rapidly evaporating hardness has come down to TJ’s reputation for sin and debauchery. Your personal TJ is Herb Alpert, who named his brass band after the realm across which your eyes now flit. His silky elevator music, its magical jauntiness never let you doubt that TJ could be anything but a place where, no matter what kind of potential harm you might throw yourself at, there could never ever be any real consequences to anybody. Everybody who’s allowed to goes back when the sun sets. You simply click your heels three times, wave your  passport and recross the border.

You simply click your heels three times, wave your passport and recross the border.

There’s a desperation to Tijuana at dusk. Of not having sold enough trinkets. Children tug at the cuffs of your cargo shorts, pleading for nickels.Their noses run. Their lips are cut. You didn’t see the donkey show. You didn’t buy contraband erection pills. Your pockets haven’t been picked. You’ve eaten more authentic tacos in Boise. You might be the only tourist left in Tijuana right now, and the high-pressure sunglass vendors are trying  to buy your bug-eyed snowboarder shades. You have, in short, failed to consummate any kind of significant relationship with TJ whatsoever. You cannot flee fast enough.

"It’s all part of turning the room into what you would see at a 3 a.m. Mexican-cantina-brothel-type place."

But before you go back to San Diego. Before you even leave the somber cartoon joint, you witness the silent Mexican man approach an older, stately Mexican man sitting at the bar. He has a weathered face, shrouded beneath a black Stetson that is less crisp than the other Stetsons. You tell yourself that this man is a rancher. He nods slowly at the enigmatic box and solemnly he places a stack of fresh American bills atop the counter. The silent Mexican man passes him the cords, and surreptitiously, painstakingly, every head in the bar shifts to the money, then the box, and then the hombre rancher. Your heart explodes up into your throat as you watch him, almost regally, take the ends of the cords.

The expression on the silent Mexican man’s face never changed as he rotates the dial. At first, the hombre clenches his teeth. Then, as the dial’s turned further, he maneuvers his arms up and down as if driving a truck off a cliff. Further still. He’s up from the stool to his feet, body tensed. And then a slow smile cracks. And then, the dial cranked, a powerful grin. And then he lets go, shaking the pain out of his hands, rolling what stiffness is left out of his shoulders.

The silent Mexican man grabs the money and hobbles out of the joint.

Still shaking his hands, wiping sweat from his brow, the rancher looks to a younger, tougher looking hombre two stools down. The gaze is held for an instant, the younger nodding in quiet acquiescence to the older. And all is silent again on a slow day in Tijuana.

ALSO: Korean Pop, Levitation & Eating Invasive Species. 

Via a curious new project from Fast Company:

Fashioning his own menstruating uterus by filling a bladder with goat’s blood, Muruganantham went about his life while wearing women’s underwear, occasionally squeezing the contraption to test out his latest iteration. It resulted in endless derision and almost destroyed his family. But no one is laughing at him anymore, as the sanitary napkin-making machine he went on to create is transforming the lives of rural women across India.

Only 12% of India’s 355 million menstruating women use sanitary napkins. Almost 90% use alternatives like unsanitized cloth, ashes and husk sand:

Incidents of Reproductive Tract Infection (RTI) is 70% more common among these women. Inadequate menstrual protection makes adolescent girls (age group 12-18 years) miss 5 days of school in a month (50 days a year). Around 23% of these girls actually drop out of school after they started menstruating.

A high school dropout, Muruganantham taught himself English, started Jayaashree Industries—and pretended to be a millionaire to get American manufacturers to send him samples of their raw material. This story shows the strength that can come from diversity of perspective:

Quite honestly, as a middle-class male in America, I had personally never considered this problem. I never considered the cost or availability of them. There are some problems that can never be solved by the top earners, because we often don’t know there are problems! Of course, this is why we also fail so spectacularly when architecting solutions for hunger, education, sanitation, etc in other countries. We don’t really understand the problems, so how can we make solutions? I’m also stunned at the inventor’s wife, since she left him thinking this was just a ruse to meet younger women, but perhaps there’s something cultural there that I’m unaware of.

Today our government is placing a ban on face coverings (such as niqabs) for Canadians swearing their oath of citizenship. Immigration Minister Jason Kenney’s speech:

I’m here today to talk about the incredible importance of Canadian citizenship. Every year, Canada welcomes over 150,000 new members of our Canadian family, people who came from over 180 different countries of origin with a hope of living in this free and prosperous land, to respect its laws, its customs: to become good citizens.

I’ve been so honoured to act as our minister of citizenship for the past four years, three years during which time we have tried to reinforce the value and a deeper understanding of Canadian citizenship rooted in our history. So many who went before us made sacrifices to build this country. We owe it to them to ensure that we always respect the incredible value of Canadian citizenship.

There are four legal requirements to become a Canadian citizen: firstly, to have a basic knowledge of Canada; secondly, a capacity to speak one of our two official languages; thirdly, to have been a resident in Canada for three out of five years, to have actually lived here and demonstrated a commitment to the country and finally, to take the oath of citizenship.

All we ask of people is to fulfil the requirements of citizenship and to swear an oath before one’s fellow citizens that one will be loyal to our traditions that go back centuries. This common pledge is the bedrock on which Canadian society rests. That is why starting today, my department will require that all those taking the oath do so openly. From today, all persons will be required to show their face when swearing the oath.

I have received complaints from members of Parliament, from citizens, from judges of the citizenship court that it is hard to ensure that individuals whose faces are covered are actually reciting the oath. Requiring that all candidates show their faces while reciting the oath allows judges and everyone present to share in the ceremony, to ensure that all citizenship candidates are in fact, reciting the oath as required by our law. This is not simply a practical measure. It is a matter of deep principle that goes to the heart of our identity and our values of openness and equality. The citizenship oath is a quintessentially public act. It is a public declaration that you are joining the Canadian family and it must be taken freely and openly.

To segregate one group of Canadians or allow them to hide their faces, to hide their identity from us precisely when they are joining our community is contrary to Canada’s proud commitment to openness and to social cohesion. It’s important to note that this is an expectation. If Canada is to be true to our history and to our highest ideals, we cannot tolerate two classes of citizens. We cannot have two classes of citizenship ceremonies.

Canadian citizenship is not simply about the right to carry a passport or to vote. It is also about responsibilities and obligations. It defines who we are as Canadians including our mutual responsibilities to one another and a shared commitment to values that are rooted in our history. At its best a citizenship ceremony captures the profound nature of this shared commitment.

We believe that this new rule is the best way to be faithful to that ideal. What I am announcing today makes part of our broader action plan for Canadian citizenship to ensure that we truly value this great gift that we share. We’ve done this first of all, by improving the knowledge requirement with a new test and the new study guide Discover Canada which goes much more deeply into our history, shared values, institutions and symbols. We’ve done it by announcing that there will finally be third party consistent testing of language ability in French or English. We’ve done it by addressing the problem of fraud in demonstrating permanent residency in our citizenship program.

Last week, we announced that our investigation has identified some 6,500 individuals who have been engaged in such residency fraud using crooked immigration consultants against whom we are taking enforcement action. Finally we are ensuring that the citizenship oath itself is properly respected by all of those who take it so that they in taking a solemn commitment, being a witness publicly to the rest of their fellow citizens, demonstrate who they are and their commitment to Canada.

She hinted of a secret world connected by curls. The Circassian beauties who travelled in PT Barnum medicine shows had something to do with the way the afro became synonymous with black power.

I was not raised to be fancy. I was made of snips and snails and puppy dog tails. My hair, however, grew in curls. I’d outwardly gnash my teeth at the sort of grown woman who took curls as an invitation to cleanse her fingers of life’s let downs. When a strange woman strokes a little boy’s curls, what she is really attempting is to physically feel potential. She is also massaging—deep into his scalp—a certain kind of expectation. And though the curly haired boy understands none of this at the time, he does know one thing: it’s just dumb stupid hair. That will not stop him, of course, from growing up to believe it’s more. From chasing the endless potential of those curls himself.

My mom, who had olive skin and tight loopy locks, knew what was in store. She’d periodically sit me on a tall chair in the kitchen, and gently trim my curls with the same squeaky scissors we used to cut Christmas wrapping and the fat off chicken thighs. The look on her face at the end of each snip was a mix of dissatisfaction and uncertainty. One day we pulled into a parking lot outside a strip mall and sat silently. She eventually sighed and said: “please just ask him not to take too much off.”

Like that I had entered the care of the barber, who not only took too much off, but took a chunk of ear with it.

A barber sees neither the mystery nor the potential. He sees a poncey periwig. He sees smug pedophilia dripping off an Athenian statue. He sees the spread of communism. The things he sees must be eliminated.

The ear, I realized years later, was no accident. It was a souvenir.

Not long after, our curly cocker spaniel curled up under a weeping willow in the backyard and died. Make of that what you will.

The hair that had covered my ear shrank in the years that followed, from wild to shorn to shaved, first with #4 shears, then the 3. By the time he got to 1, the price of a cut had reached $15, and I realized I could do the same elimination myself with a $30 electric razor. Thus I did. Until the razor caught fire, plugged into a badly wired Casablanca hotel socket, singing my damaged ear. I went out to the street. I entered to the first barbershop I found. The first one in six years.

The man inside refused to touch my hair.

“Because I’m not Moroccan?” I asked.

“No,” he replied. “Because you do not need your hair cut.”

I pondered this for a very long time. As I pondered, my hair grew very long. And gradually, the world began to reform around me.

You'll recognize me. I’ll be in a corduroy jacket. I've got a beard. And dark curly hair. Like Jesus.

The curls—which I forgot even existed—were magnificent in that next year. Strange women again dipped their fingers into the potential. That is, until the hair became too long. Dry and knotty and asymmetrical. I remember standing beside a barbershop in Istanbul with the same dissatisfaction and uncertainty I’d seen on my mom’s face all those years before. An hour later, the hair in my nostrils and ears had been torched with a BIC lighter. I’d been doused with enough cologne to stun a giant squid. Every bone in my head and neck had been shifted some place else. I did not need to look in the mirror. I knew I’d had my first real hair cut since the kitchen chair.

The barber—it feels wrong to call him that—nodded confidently behind me. He seemed not just to be in touch with some great secret of the earth, but more of it himself than anybody I had met. I tried to ask him what he knew. He dismissed my questions with a knowing chuckle.

After that, I paid closer attention to the curls of other men. I made friends easily with such men. In Mediterranean countries they were confident. In North America they were weird and conflicted. We never talked about our curls. Except for Dave, who was more comfortable with his curly hair than anyone I’d met. “I haven’t combed my hair since I was 18,” he told me. “I once grew it out for a year, a wild mane. Since then I’ve kept it relatively short. It’s unruly and weird. I feel lucky to have it. I’m losing it on top, which doesn’t worry me. When I’m 50, I’ll have bushy curly sides and a bald top and wild eyebrows—and weird will still reign.”

Though he spoke of weird and wildness, Dave’s comfort really came from the fact that he had accepted the implicit fanciness of curls. He was my only friend who had set foot in a salon. He wasn’t bound to the same $25 cap the rest of us had put on a haircut. He didn’t hesitate to pay twice, even three times that. But he did not use, nor even dabble in product.

"A curly haired person is more vivacious," Ouidad exclaimed. "Let’s do a study! Meet me at 8:30. We’ll walk up and down the street, watching the body language. It’s a whole different world.”

When the strange women who stroked curls re-entered my life, they re-entered it with product. “Product” constitutes anything more excessive than a shot of Holiday Inn shampoo. Even though it’s sold to both men and women, product does not smell unisex nor is its packaging anything but fancy and fruity. And of course, it never works alone. Once you’ve got the conditioner, for instance, there’s a series of “finishing products.” (Which is to say nothing for the shampoo.) Sometimes only one of the products in the combination seems to work, but because you’re never sure which one, you faithfully go through the entire chain, hoping one of them will work again. I don’t know why the strange women became so giddy when they smelled the jasmine and strawberry shortcake scents of these products in my hair. Maybe the indication that I was a least attempting to unlock the potential inside the curls was more than they’d previously hoped. A European woman with straight blonde hair went so far as to book me an appointment with her 10th Avenue stylist. “He’s the best in the city,” she said.

I scrunched up my face to indicate—it’s too fancy.

“Shut up,” she said, putting her hand over my mouth. “It’s a gift.”

“But it’s your birthday,” I protested.

“I know,” she replied.

“Never blow dry it,” Ouidad suddenly said. “But I live in a place where it’s freezing—I'll catch a cold." “Who told you that?” she snapped.“My grandfather!” I snapped back. She exhaled impatiently and replied, “My grandfather lied all the time too.”

As fancy and overblown—and superficially emasculating—as my first salon experience turned out, the cut was good. The stylist would periodically tilt his head, exchanging conspiratorial gestures with the European girl, who smiled maniacally over the new Vanity Fair. As if they each knew a secret that I did not know myself. When it was done, curls hung from my head like the long tight waves that never totally break off the South African coast—the metaphor for potential—in Bruce Green’s Endless Summer. The cut was so good, in fact, that I felt a kind of empowerment. This did nothing but add to the mystery. And I now had a real problem, though: in the days and weeks and, ultimately, months that followed my salon cut, an unbearable craving curled up inside for another.

If you’re stubborn and resourceful, there is a haphazard trail of affordable black market salon quality cuts that you can piece together—without ever having to enter a salon. I was introduced to a stylist named Romeo, whose beltline condo was filled with big colourful paintings. He made a wonderful ceremony of pouring rare white tea while a small terrier nipped at my heels. Though I was prepared to pay far more, Romeo would never take more than $20 for what I knew he charged $75+ for at his salon.

“What kind of product do you use?” he asked one afternoon, clearly unsatisfied with the results it was producing.

“Which product should I be using?”

He said a strange word. Sheepishly I asked him to repeat it as I was leaving, but with no pen and paper, and a sudden gust of wind that blew freshly styled hair into a horizontal mullet, I quickly forgot.

“You patented ‘carving and slicing’?” “Yes.” “What if I go home and do it?” “Then I’ll send you a letter saying cease and desist.”

Because our hair is never quite complete we have the myth that it grows on after we ourselves are dead. It’s something that defies our own mortality. I thought this, when I arrived in Manhattan, and mentioned—to yet another strange female—that surely there was some old school place that did $20 cuts on The Lower East Side, a neighbourhood teeming with men with lushly styled curls—but no evident money to have paid for them. An hour later, there was an email from the woman. No words, just, but a url. The url led me to to a page for a Midtown salon, where the cost of a cut was $125.

I chastised the girl for sending it to me. “You know my policy,” I said

“Whatever,” she replied. “Think of it as a once in a lifetime experience.”

I clicked the url several times that day, drawn further into the site with each click. The salon was the crossroads for stylists who specialized in curly hair. Twirling my finger through my hair, like a chopstick through thin frizzy spaghetti, I caught myself sounding out the exotic syllables: “WEEEE-dad…OY-DID…way-DAAAAD…” And it dawned on me I was trying to say the word Romeo had said.

I was five subway stops from Mecca.

I should confess that I didn’t know Ouidad was an actual person. I though it was a string of syllables some straight hair corporate P&G person came up with to represent curls. A cross between a ouji board and an effete Italian father.

I was not prepared, rising in an elevator up above 57th street, a block up from Tiffany’s, for Ouidad to be a woman. I expected abstract version of a human being, but Ouidad was anything but that.

“Look in the mirror,” she ordered, after I sat down. “Describe your hair.”

“It’s curly.”

“Yes.”

“It’s kind of puffy. A little ragged.”

“Puffy’s a good word. Tell me texture.”

“Kind of thin.”

“You’re very intuitive,” she said, observing me for a moment. “You have tight and loose curls.”

“Do I want tight or loose?”

“You want whatever you have, and you want it to perform.”

Then she scowled a little impatiently and asked what I had done to it that morning.

“Done?”

“You know what I mean.”

“I used some product.”

“Which one?”

It was impossible to deceive Ouidad. I told her that though normally I used an Aveda product called Be Curly, that morning I had been nervous about my appointment and done something different. I was staying with a Cosmopolitan magazine editor, whose shower was jammed with samples of all the latest products, which smelled like every kind of rare fruit and flower. After several washes with my own, I became frustrated and simply started mixing a bunch of hers together—hoping for the best.

Ouidad’s impatience suddenly softened into a kind of protective knowing. “I used to do the same,” she said. “I’d buy existing products and combine them to see what really worked—because there was nothing out there. I would mix like a L’Amour with a couple of others until I got the consistency and performance, then go to the chemist and say ‘I like the way it works, but I need it to do a little bit more of this.’ They would break it down and find out exactly what’s in it.”

Not only had Ouidad patented the results of her experiments, she’d trademarked the techniques of cutting curls hair. She’d written books on curls. I wanted to run all the mystic theories I’d concocted about curly hair by Ouidad. Was it a coincidence, for instance, that the Greek symbol for infinity resembles two perfect curls? And that when you stood that symbol up vertically it was luckiest number in ancient Chinese culture?

The curls that will never stop growing. RIP.

The world famous stylist looked at me for a long time. Not just the top of my head, but my entire being. She squinted a little. Finally she nodded. “You have great hair,” she said.

Now it was me who looked her up and down, attempting to understand what that meant. “You say that to everybody,” I replied.

“No. I don’t,” she shot back angrily. “You do not know me.” 

“Those girls who got you the product and sent you to those salons,” Ouidad asked. “How did it feel?” I hesitated, knowing that I was supposed to answer one way, but instead replied, “I guess it made me feel good…that someone cared—“

“—no!” she interrupted, “they were telling you were inadequate!”

Ouidad was suddenly lost in the locks of her own memory now. “Curly haired people feel like they don’t fit it. They feel like they’re not accepted because everything’s straight straight straight, which is the opposite of how it should be. Even today, if you go to a hair dressing school, when they talk about curly hair they talk about how to straighten it.”

I won't tell you about the products that were bestowed on me, some still in experimental phase, about the secret techniques I learned, about how soft and right my curls feel right now, how the way I walk down the street and confront my adversaries has changed.

It’s the strange exotic women who had come to study with Ouidad that I cannot stop thinking about. They wore black caftans and practiced the trademark techniques with monastic concentration. As one hour unfolded after the next, I could not take my eyes off this rare tribe of creatures dedicated to the practice of achieving the utmost from their curls.

“Not everyone who works here has curly hair,” I whispered, as one of them tilted my head back gently into a sink. She looked around. “We can’t discriminate,” she whispered, in an Eastern European accent.

I asked her if Ouidad favoured the curly haired. She turned the water on full blast so nobody could hear. She leaned in, and with the joy of a girl who has been given a baby unicorn for her birthday, whispered: “Yes.” And then she smiled at me. Becauase I felt the same glee. I felt like reaching up and sticking my hands into her hair. Ouidad understood us. And what’s more, until that moment I had no inclination that I needed understanding.

-CHRIS KOENTGES

ALSO: Exotic Food Literature. 

AND: Grandma’s Lessons About Recycling And Living Large.

Grandma math. Smaller quantities of better > bigger quantities of worse.

Frugal is different than cheap. My grandma is frugal [1]. She’ll eat one tiny piece of chocolate over a month. She works it, shard by shard, along the roof of her mouth, once a day, late in the afternoon. Over that month, she’ll also cram every ounce of cutting board debris into empty yogurt containers in her freezer. When the house is cold, she turns the heat down and puts on another sweater. And though she doesn’t have the best sense of irony, she knows that if you’re in a place that sells tomato soup and a grilled cheese sandwich for $15 that you’re not in on some post-modern joke—but the butt of it. [2]

Because my grandma is frugal—and probably not unlike your grandma—she’ll bite the fingers off anybody who attempts to pick up the tab before she can. She tips generously—when the service is good. She spends extravagantly on exceptional tea—because exceptional tea lasts longer and provides more nourishment than bagged dust. The vegetable stock she makes from the frozen debris is what most people pay $8 for a carton of at fancy grocery stores. She does not add salt to her stock. She does a crossword puzzle while the stock simmers.

Frugal is finding a way to get a lot from a little. Cheap is expecting something out of nothing.

Frugal means never having to say you’re sorry.

~

We’ve learned, as a culture this decade, that there is no such thing as nothing for something. To be frugal, you actually need to spend a little bit more. Frugal is the art and science of leveraging what you do spend.

Take coffee. Or rather, stop taking it. If you’re taking coffee to go you may as well make it yourself. (Otherwise stay and enjoy the ambience, which makes up the bulk of a cup’s cost.) If you end up making it yourself, know that you can make a better cup with a $10 French Press from Value Village than you can with a $200 machine. (Which is to say nothing for buying and disposing of filters.) If you need more than three coffees over the course of the day—notwithstanding the occasional all-nighter when you’re on deadline—your consumption is excessive. In my experience, those who consume excessively are also drinking bad coffee. There is no point to bad coffee. If you get beans from a place near you that roast themselves, you’ll suddenly find you don’t need to spend money on cream and sugar to mask the burnt taste of your Starbucks bean [3]. You don’t get as twitchy drinking good coffee. You end up meeting more interesting people at the independent places who sell it. Over time, interesting people add unexpected opportunities (ie: value) to your life.

But you’ve only just begun to leverage your coffee experience!

When you remove the grounds from your French press, mix them with a bit of olive oil and raw sugar. And forgo the trip to the Aveda store for exfoliates. Supposedly the coffee concoction also breaks down cellulite. And if you leave it on the body—again, supposedly—for 30 minutes, a couple times a week, it’ll save your trip to the tanning salon. (But never tell my grandmother you spend money at tanning salons.) And if that’s all too fancy, the grounds can be used to enrich the soil beneath your rose bushes. Or as an ant repellant. Or to remove grease from pots and pans. (That last one will save $20 on scrubbers and dish detergent this year—and will open up more space on your counter too.)

And guess what? You don’t have to wash your mug every time you use it either. This is a waste of time and water.  A quick rinse every other day is fine. Water your plants with that rinse, though. And guess what else? You find more unique glassware and mugs at garage sales than IKEA. (If you have more glasses than you need, have a garage sale.) Frugal is saying no to glasses you don’t need. Really, it’s saying no to life’s preposterous proposals.

By preposterous proposals, I mean the overpriced Molson product at hockey arenas and Coke product at multiplexes. When encountered with such proposals, you’re in your rights to bring a flask or smuggle in your own bottle of root beer. [4]  (Trust me, none of the underpaid staff at any of these venues could care less if you smuggle anything, just be polite and discreet.) In fact, actively subverting preposterous proposals is how we’re going to get things back on track as a culture. (Emphasis on: preposterous. Don’t BYO to little theatres and community hockey arenas.)

If you walk into a place and the menu seems even slightly preposterous, you’re under no obligation to stay. Because frugal is also showing a little goddamn restraint from time to time. You don’t, for instance, have to quit smoking this year. But if you consider one less cigarette a day and two on Sundays—416 x 52 weeks—most people on the planet don’t spend that much on food in an entire year. Restraint is drinking smoothies made from seasonal fruit. It’s scheduling a rendez-vous during happy hour. It’s picking pubs you can walk to—because DUI fines are expensive. (Not to mention parking and gas and cab fare.) Plus stumbling home on a crisp night is one of life’s great pleasures. (Life’s greatest pleasures, sex and sunsets and the morning chorus of bird songs, tend to be free.)

And because we’re being sensible, you won’t ruin complex gin by adding tonic. And while there is a difference between a $20 bottle and a $50 of wine, a $50 and a $100, I know few people who can really appreciate that difference.  More money doesn’t mean better wine. Good wine stores mean better wine. Good wine stores—use Yelp to figure out where they are in your city—simply don’t carry bad wine. [5] For $10-15 you will always get an excellent bottle. Ten-to-fifteen at Liquor Depot, on the other hand, is a crapshoot. Which is to say nothing for the way such chains bully small local producers. When you buy products that have succumbed to aggressive middlemen, you pay the difference in other ways. Waiting in lines. Recovering from hangovers. Having your imagination winnowed to nothing.

Frugal is having a little imagination. It’s reading the tea leaves with your family after dinner instead of plonking down on the couch to flip through channels of bad television you overpaid. It’s substituting 50 cents worth of lentils the next time your recipe calls for eight bucks worth of  “lean” ground beef.  It’s planting mint in April, so you can drink generous Mojitos through August. Frugal, in the end, is being generous. It’s tipping well because, when you do, you always get a little extra in the glass, something off the tab, more olives in the martini. A genuine smile in return. It’s the genuine things that are priceless.

______

 1. Cheap is overtaxing your expense account on $40 entrees that don’t hold a candle to any of our grandmother’s kitchen sink soups. (Frugal is me selling my shares in your badly managed company.)

2. And even though she’s got a bad hip, she’ll walk three blocks rather than blow $12 on parking. You can buy a six-pack of the best beer on the market for $12. And have enough left over for bus fare next time.

 3. I don’t mean to always pick on Starbucks. (Partly it’s because Tim Horton’s and Second Cup aren’t worth the time.) It’s that Starbucks once came so tantalizing close to a good thing. Or as a friend of mine who writes about business pointed out during a trip to Seattle: “People with some smarts and some money are beginning to equate Starbucks as a McDonalds-type. If an espresso at Artigiano is $2.50 and one at Starbucks one is $2.15, and one is good and one now tastes like piss by comparison…I don’t see a lot of hope for Starbucks.”

 4. The world is divided between kids who get the newest toy first and kids whose moms sent them to movies with big bags of homemade popcorn. Of the adults I now know, it’s the kids who got the popcorn that turned out all right. (Ten years from now, it’ll be the kids who drank tap water instead of bottled.)

 5. I’d suggest that now is as good a time as any to dip into the cellar too.

ALSO: Fiscal Conservative, working class families and Naheed Nenshi.

]]> http://veryethnic.wordpress.com/2011/11/16/occupy-2-0-grandma-math-frugal-means-never-having-to-say-youre-sorry/feed/ 2 veryethnic Smaller quantities of better things. http://veryethnic.wordpress.com/2011/10/20/slavic-peoples-get-their-physical-characteristics-from-potatoes-their-smoldering-inquietude-from-radishes-their-seriousness-from-beets/ http://veryethnic.wordpress.com/2011/10/20/slavic-peoples-get-their-physical-characteristics-from-potatoes-their-smoldering-inquietude-from-radishes-their-seriousness-from-beets/#comments Thu, 20 Oct 2011 23:32:36 +0000 veryethnic http://veryethnic.wordpress.com/?p=592 ]]> A strange thought’s taken root in my head this fall: I can remember every beet I’ve ever eaten. Maybe not to rattle off the top of my head. But if there was a Sporcle quiz with a 12-hour clock—or if I could spend a warm night in a small town jail—I’m confident I could recall every beet I’ve ever eaten. And place them in a kind of hierarchy too. I couldn’t tell you the last time I went to 7-11 or Tim Hortons. Or who won the last three World Series. But I can crisply remember scrubbing Chioggias at 2am the first time I heard Jeff Tweedy sing “Shot in the Arm.”

If a thousand pointless thoughts pass through a human brain every day, why should the one about remembering beets take hold? Do beets flashing before one’s eyes mean that death is near? (If so, I wish I would have started eating more beets sooner.) A tale that begins with a beet will end with the devil, warns the old Ukrainian proverb that inspired Tim Robbins’ Jitterbug Perfume. “The beet is the most intense of vegetables,” he writes, dismissing tomatoes for their lack of lust, and radishes for their misleading fire. Beets, he concludes, are deadly serious. The vegetable most willing to suffer. You can’t squeeze blood out of a turnip. And I think that’s the thing that’s gotten hold of me.

Since the Harper Government’s begun steamrolling the darkest elements of its agenda, between remembering beets, I now have dreams of hunting urban creatures with bow and arrow. Sometimes the creatures are rabbits and geese. But more often, homeless people. Terminally ill homeless people, who can’t find medicine. Nobody who will be missed. The beet is the murderer returned to the scene of the crime, is another thing Robbins wrote.

The beet is what happens when the cherry finishes the carrot. The beet is the ancient ancestor of the autumn moon, bearded, buried, all but fossilized; the dark green sails of the grounded moon-boat stitched with veins of primordial’s plasma; the kite string that once connected the moon to the Earth now a muddy whisker drilling desperately for rubies. The beet was Rasputin’s favorite vegetable. You could see it in his eyes.

When I hear Jeff Tweedy sing Shot in the Arm, reaching for the line, “there’s something in my veins, bloodier than blood,” repeating it again, and again and again and again, teasing out something more visceral each time, I know now that he meant beets.

I. THE VOTER

A highly educated, fiscally conservative multicultural meritocracy average age 35.7 elects a fiscally conservative 38.7-year-old mayor who graduated from Harvard. The fact that he is pious, possibly gay and lives with his parents did not register. We picked the best person for the job. We sometimes do that in Calgary. Or so we like to tell ourselves.

The question then: why was everybody—including the people who built the campaign—astonished that it happened?

II. THE CANDIDATE

A political campaign is a series of very intentional bets. You bet that you understand the people in your city more profoundly than every other candidate in the election. Ric McIver, the heavy favourite, bet on who we’ve always been told we are. He did this because he’s not an idiot. You don’t win an election in Calgary by telling people what you are for. We are raised, as Calgarians to vote against. We vote against Liberals, against Central Canada, against Edmonton and rural Alberta, against misspending, against anyone that would take away our proverbial latte or crap in our cornflakes.

Consequently, the actual ideas that swell inside Calgary—“innovative, risk taking, not afraid of change” (to quote the candidate’s stump speech)—do not always match the brand of Calgary. We are seen by outsiders as predictable, short-sighted, greedy and bitter. We have, for three decades, bought into the stereotypes others have placed on us. You get dismissed enough times as the soulless bad guy in the world around you, your instinct is to go against.

Thus we find ourselves in the bizarre situation of being praised for, well, something. The redneck image is gone. We’ve done what the self-proclaimed progressive cities only talk about. They’re in awe that we’ve elected this precocious ethnic kid from NE Calgary, and though that may be his most outstanding qualification, it’s not what we voted for. None of us—least of all those who live in NE Calgary—voted for brown.

When the campaign team set to branding its candidate in mid-July, brown was not seen as the first, nor even the second issue. Despite the fact polls had him in 10^th place with less than 4% support—directly behind Alnoor Kassam and the urban chicken advocate Paul Hughes—there was “an arrogance over confidence issue.” The candidate, whose sense of humour takes some getting used to, would start sentences with the words: “Here’s why you’re wrong…” As the campaign progressed, he had to force himself to pause when asked about, say, the SW ring road. He’d bite his lip a little bit, and begin: “You’re not going to like my answer.” We liked this about their campaign. The world has become too urgent for pandering.

The second issue was a “gay issue.” A gay issue has to do with inflection and mannerisms. With exuberance. His face becomes animated, for instance, whenever he makes an excessively valid point. “Gays and nerds are closely-related species,” a University of Calgary Sociologist who goes by frege64 half-joked on the Calgary Flames discussion forum calgarypuck.com 48 hours after the polls closed. The candidate is an exuberant nerd, who started his academic career taking drama classes. And though the team worked on his mannerisms, there is not much that can be done about exuberance. From a distance, in the purple, he and his team looked like a grown up version of Barney and friends. “Women seem to like that he’s the biggest nerd in the world,” the campaign strategist said, shrugging his shoulders. He is who he is. And if you still need to know, “the answer’s no—and why does it matter?”

It is this precise way of answering that lies at the heart of their campaign. The stress in the sentence is not on the “no,” but the “and.” Candidly answered, but forcefully reforming the conversation. It may seem like a small thing. But when do you ever hear a Canadian politician answer questions this way? To transform the conversation the campaign sought first to change the way politicians talked to the people they represented—and vice versa. (Those inside this campaign will argue whether getting the candidate elected was even the ultimate goal.) Instead, their proposal, to again quote the stump speech, was “politics in full sentences.”

Unlike the two bigger rival campaigns, who bet on what Calgary had always been told they were, this campaign bet that it knew Calgarians better than they even knew themselves. It was an audacious bet. To stand any chance, they would have to teach us something that we didn’t yet know about ourselves. They placed their bet on a Calgary that was about to exist.

III. THE HANDLER

Two blocks south of City Hall, in a minimally furnished headquarters underneath 11^th Avenue, at a little before 11pm the night before election day, there was a 27×34” sheet of paper on the back of the candidate’s door. At the top, were four headings in sharpie marker representing Higgins, McIver, Their Campaign and Voter Turnout by percentage. Down the left were the names of each member of the team, several of whom were crammed now into the candidate’s office, trying to figure out what had been missed. Really, though, they’re eyeing the election pool, calculating how to tweak their personal bets. It was not always clear where the act of creating this campaign ended and consuming it began.

More than anybody was nervous or optimistic, they were profoundly curious. Whose campaign WOULD win? Maybe that’s a detachment, which comes from living on twitter and Facebook. (We’ll argue this later.) Maybe it has something to do with being the perpetual outsider. It seemed more urgent, for instance, that the candidate reach 10,000 Facebook friends than the highest vote tomorrow. Higgins had leveled out around 1,700 earlier in the week. “After that Thursday nobody wanted to wear her as a badge of honour,” the team’s pollster said.

“Team,” of course, implies something uniform. Despite the big mass of purple you would see on TV, this was far from uniform. Think of the movie Sneakers with Sidney Poitier and you get a sense for the adept winging it that drove them to this point.

A white Jack Russell Terrier named Jack sniffed through the office. Someone asked about the schedule Monday night. Like…what happens after 8pm? Who to phone, who to invite? Different speeches would have to be made. “If it’s Ric,” the candidate said, to the chagrin of his campaign strategist, “I’d like to do it in person.” The others in the room nodded. “If it’s Barb, I’ll phone her.” Though the margins varied wildly on the back of the door, each member of the team had Barb a distant third in their pool.

“The handler” had her candidate getting 36% of the vote, McIver 29% and Higgins 23%, with 47% voter turnout. The handler moved to Calgary five years earlier. Before that she worked, building eBay during the height of the Silicon Valley rush. She never connected to Calgary. She would find small pockets of people who wanted to do better in a social way. There was a frustrating kind of overregulation mixed with a certain kind of greed. Where were the big conversations that had taken place in the Bay Area?

She was not ready to go home to Ontario, though. Vancouver was too wet. On a whim, she boxed up all her possessions and bought a ticket to Peru. Three days before leaving, a trip to the doctor turned into a very rare diagnosis of colorectal cancer. Not only was she going to die, she was going to die alone in a place she had come to despise.

This, above all other measures, though, is where Calgary excels. She lived ten minutes from the Tom Baker Centre, where one of the world’s foremost experts ran a clinic. She had surgery in December. Chemotherapy. Radiation. It would have cost her several hundred thousand dollars in the US. People she barely knew came out of the woodwork to support her. Halfway through treatment, she made a deal with herself to embrace Calgary with her entire being. And so in April, still weak from treatment, she found herself dragged to a Calgary incarnation of the TEDx lecture series. It is a very hard ticket to get. In some cities, hopeful attendees need to submit a written proposal just to get in the door. The candidate gave one of the lectures. Thirteen minutes after it had begun she knew how she was going to make good on her deal.

She would be one of two handlers. She has the energy and deportment of a Barb Higgins. (The other is an engineer the candidate met years earlier in a group called Canada25.) The handler’s job is exactly as it sounds. Survey the room, the potential pitfalls, the opportunities to lay on the nerdy charm. Pull him out of conversations that are going nowhere. Insert him into the ones that can make a difference. Above all, make him look like the mayor of Calgary. (He would sometimes show up in an untucked shirt and crooked tie, still looking like “the professor.”) Depending on the living room, the handler might play a mother hen role or act as a surrogate sister. At Seniors facilities, she’d be asked: “are you his girlfriend?”

“I’m a very close friend,” she’d answer with a wink. Then they would all drink tea and figure out why Calgarians had come to pay for the water and sewer infrastructure that connect their city with the private developers’ highly profitable sprawl. (The candidate was careful not to demonize developers, insistent only that better models of higher density win-win projects existed.) These conversations were only the start.

What had initially made Higgins so untouchable as a candidate was that she’d existed, night in, night out, for years, in our living rooms. The campaign could never touch a living room like Higgins had. So instead they sent the ballyhooed social media candidate in as Brownie Wise, the woman who sold Tupperware through the 1940s. The team created a program where people who don’t normally get involved in an election could meet the candidate for a coffee party. If you still have no idea what twitter is—and don’t worry, most people who voted for the candidate wouldn’t know a retweet from a hashtag—these sorts of small focused gatherings in living rooms are its methodical flesh and blood precursor. The coffee parties became akin to mini editorial boards. (Invariably longer and more grueling.) Plain old Calgarians would vet this very unique candidate. They would report back to their friends. They would become vested in a real political campaign.

Sometimes he’d hit a coffee party with a hundred supporters, other times he’d get less than half a dozen conspiracy theorists demanding to know about fluoride and mind control. But it was always a two-way conversation. Politics in full sentences means that you the citizen must talk back. In contrast, the unspoken message throughout the Higgins campaign was: Barb is appearing at a certain location—come meet Barb. Traditional, passive one-way dialogue. A candidate talking at us, but we don’t talk to them. By Labour Day, he was spending as much time at these parties as the more public appearances. He stood in our living rooms and proposed to build a city where you can walk to the grocery store. If there is an amazing thing in this election—and a reason not to feel too smug about ourselves—it is that we had not voted for such an idea before.

IV. THE CAMPAIGN DIRECTOR

A little after 1:15pm on Election Day, things had begun to pick up at the basement HQ. TV reporters were arriving, the hashtag #yycvote was trending on twitter. The campaign director slipped up to the street for a leisurely stroll in the sun. He strolled up Macleod Trail, then down Stephen Avenue. The air was warm. The sidewalks were covered with purple chalk. An old friend nodded at the director, complimenting him on the campaign. He strolled for another block, before entering Winners. His iPhone would periodically vibrate. No disasters yet. He stopped in front of a rack of ties. “Half the ties on this rack are purple,” he mused. The realization made him giggle. His giggle is infectious, it sounds like something between hiccups and the squeak in an old wood floor, and a temperate rainforest at sunrise. It is easy to underestimate this gentle giggling man.

He had been a partner in the law firm Fraser Milner Casgrain. He had to cut back on hours, before finally taking time off to direct the campaign once it hit full stride. (He’d also cancelled a long-planned trip to Africa.) Like everybody on the team, except the strategist, he was a volunteer. It is also fair to say he is one of the two savviest political minds in Calgary right now. He, not the candidate, had the last word on every single decision made on the campaign. He troubleshoots with eager volunteers. When the strategist became too aggressive, the director would tell him to wait. A political campaign in the year 2010 moves at a reckless speed. The director spent a lot of time telling the team around him: wait a second.

Exactly 24 hours earlier, he was inside a big purple warehouse on Macleod Trail and 24^th. He wore a conductors cap and thick black glasses. He had just given the rah rah speech to 75 volunteers who would act as scrutineers the next day. “Your job is to make sure the election is fair tomorrow,” he told them. “An election is run by humans and humans make mistakes.” Again, it’s a subtle thing, but this is the tone of politics in full sentences. Humans make mistakes. The goal is to find the mistake, correct the mistake. If the mistake is repeated, then the goal is to correct the system. The goal, in these conversations, is never to assign blame. Modern politics has replaced ideas and solutions with the assignment of blame. We are being eaten right now, as a culture, from the inside out by blame.

To look at the director on that last Saturday before the election, you would not know that there was a crisis back at HQ. You can never tell when he is dealing with a crisis. Even at the end of the afternoon, when he would have to phone the candidate, who is also his best friend—and worries too much about this kind of thing—there is not a trace of dread nor worry. He giggled a little bit and asked: “soooo….what’s the worst thing that could go wrong today?”

“Umm…” the candidate answered, “the phone bank crashed?” He kept going. “The web site’s down?” The candidate was giggling now himself. “Our rogue volunteer shot somebody!” (Yesterday’s crisis involved a guy in purple yelling obscenities at strangers at the Brentwood Mall parking lot.) The candidate kept thinking of funnier things that could go wrong, while the campaign director whispered, louder and louder—“it’s the first one.”

“Oh,” the candidate finally said, then paused. “That’s not good.”

Volunteers had arrived at 10am to start making calls. It was now 2pm. The director had a shiver of deja vu. He had last directed Kent Hehr’s improbable Calgary Buffalo campaign. The phones had gone down on election day. He had promised—vowed—that would not happen again. “I don’t want it to crash” was the only thing he said, when stipulating what he wanted in a phone system. He was assured that the network hadn’t been down in fifteen months. The day before, his volunteers had begun calling McIver supporters. It’s a seemingly brash tactic—reminding your opponent’s supporters “to come vote in the election the next day.” During their afternoon debriefing, he’d shown the candidate one of the call sheets. He giggled as the candidate counted. The candidate hadperfected a way of trying not to look surprised by anything. As if everything had gone exactly as planned. “We’re getting a conversion rate of 20%?” he finally asked in disbelief. This was just a little better than planned.

The candidate and campaign director met their first year at the University of Calgary. They had a mutual friend named Lori, who for months said the two should meet. They hit it off. And then never saw Lori again. “We like to say she fulfilled her mission,” the candidate said. By their fourth year, the candidate was the president of the SU, the director was VP. After graduation they backpacked across Europe. Every four years since—in the Olympic/World Cup year—they go on a trip. Cross Canada. South America. Australia/South East Asia. This summer was supposed to be Africa. Instead they found themselves on this journey of purple ties and crashed phones, and impatient volunteers eager now to use their iPhone and Blackberries.

“No!” the campaign director told them. “It’ll be too expensive.”

“We have free evenings and weekends!”

He thought for a second, then shook his head wildly. “I don’t think you should call people from your personal phones.” Like surely there are rules against that. So with less than 36 hours to go in the election, he stood in front of a Wireless Wave kiosk in Marlborough Mall trying to get a deal on a contingency bank of ten cell phones. It is tricky in such moments not to let your mind wander to what’s going on at McIver HQ. The campaign director had never been inside McIver HQ, but heard the rumours about a hundred live lines. “Not robodialiers,” he said. “Live people.” He was running a campaign against two of the most successful strategist—not just in Calgary but all of Canada—a campaign that had spent three years raising money, and was now outspending its rivals at a rate of three to one, plus was seen to have the indirect backing, expertise and whatever comes with it of the reigning government of Canada, and some of its key MPs. The campaign director giggled. For clearly, he had them exactly where he wanted.

~

In a typical campaign, phoners and door knockers are given sample scripts (“I’m calling on behalf of…”). In this campaign, they were also expected to take a look at the candidate’s “Better Ideas.” After that, they could talk about whatever they wanted. The volunteers on this campaign were a weird mix of intelligence, naivete and sincerity, which you seldom find in life, let alone politics. They’d knock on doors at the edge of Southeast Calgary, in the McIver heartland—in the most dramatic election in anyone’s memory—and, you know, it’s the warmest fall anyone can remember, they’re really kind of having fun. If they find out you’re undecided or that you’re thinking of voting McIver or Higgins, the first question—and this is not on the script—is why? It’s neither condescending nor confrontational. It’s honest to god curiosity. There must be some very good reason. Something this volunteer in the purple tshirt is missing. There is a genuine sense that in these conversations, you have an opportunity to change their mind just as they do yours. Instead of one Calgarian trying to bully another into voting for a certain candidate—or even worse, a political party—in these conversations you help each other find some kind of higher truth. They’d talk about how low property taxes are in inner city Detroit. They’d talk about traffic solutions from Curitiba, Brazil. The thinking is that the smartest, most articulate candidate with the best and most detailed ideas should win an election. In the old conversation, you would tell them, “well, Barb’s a really good face for the city and I like her moxy” or “Ric’s a Conservative and I only vote Conservative.” If you’re replying to politics in full sentences, though, what’s your next sentence?

You might have the impression watching TV that the campaign was stacked with students and the candidate’s endless cousins. But there were corporate lawyers working from home on maternity leave as schedulers, firemen pounding signs into strategic corners, retired professors out knocking on doors several hours a day for close to three straight months. People who invariably watch Colbert and Stewart, have a sharp wit, an eye for hypocrisy, and—above all—have had it with the buffoonery that is party politics in Alberta (forget about Ottawa). They find authenticity and sincerity immensely appealing. They can get behind a municipal candidate.

Maybe the most important quality, though, that differentiates them from the McIver and Higgins people, is what they do after work. They go to community theatre and cheer for the Stamps at McMahon Stadium, line up for tarp rush at Folk Fest, and attend the city’s various lecture series. They know where to find the best Vietnamese sub in town. Which is to say, they vigorously participate in the experience of Calgary. All of its opportunities. Whereas—and sorry for the generalization—the other people drive a long way home after work, and spend the night watching Dance With The Stars, Hawaii Five-O and Men With Brooms. (The shows the  three big “local” TV stations Global, CTV and CBC were broadcasting as election results came in on election night.)

The campaign director’s goal from the beginning was to have detailed conversations with that first set of people. He called them hyper-engaged voters. Something akin to the mavens in Gladwell’s Tipping Point. These are the people you go to the week before an election and ask, “who should I vote for?” (The hyper-engaged have very little agenda beyond being annoyingly right.) There is, of course, a catch, in targeting the hyper engaged. “You can’t be flippant with them,” said the campaign director. “They are critical.”

And so the team encouraged them to be critical. They’d release policy with the words: “is this a good idea?” The idea would get discussed. They didn’t delete negative comments. After it was discussed, it was no longer a single candidate’s better idea, nor the better idea of a strategy team of half a dozen—seven total votes on October 18—it had become a much better idea that belonged to several dozen hyper-engaged, who now went about selling it to the next ring of slightly less engaged Calgarians. At its lowest, the campaign was mocked for polling at 1%. But they had the exact 1% they wanted.

Releasing big meaty policy is nothing new, especially as an outsider. The year Bronconnier won from third place on nomination day, he’d released a thick booklet. The director likes to remind anyone who might think this came out of nowhere that Don Iveson became a 28-year-old alderman three years ago in Edmonton with reams of detailed information. (He and the candidate were heavily influenced by Iveson’s campaign, and even borrowed one of its central lines, the one about “politics in full sentences.”)

Most of the other candidates, on the other hand, waited until after Labour Day to release their platforms in order to maximize more traditional media attention. It was too late. Within hours, the platforms—many of them high on platitudes and short on specifics—were eviscerated by the hyper-engaged, who suddenly found themselves tweeting and retweeting on the campaign’s behalf. It was the first time in their life these people knew a campaign was transparent because, well, they had become the campaign, and surely they had no secret agenda. The campaign director underestimated the breadth of local discussion online. The hyper-engaged on calgarypuckorum.com, for instance, strongly championed the candidate, who is a self-professed transit geek. As did the automobile discussion forum beyond.ca.

The campaign director giggled now in Winners in front of the rack of purple. “It’s the same thing at Harry Rosen,” he said, shaking his head in disbelief. “purple is actually in this season.” A stranger overheard him and added: “The Bay’s line is all purple too.” When all is said and done, there is sometimes just something much bigger and impossible to account for on your side.

V. EAST CALGARY

The last coffee party on the last Saturday afternoon had ended in Rocky Ridge. Afterwards, they zigzagged a long way west towards the mountains in order to go a much longer distance East. Stoney Trail NW was empty. “There was the red sun,” Dickens once wrote, “in a purple haze, fast deepening into black.” They cut over 32^nd. Their evening was about erupt into the dazzling multi-hued mayhem of Saturday night in NE Calgary—a character in Calgary unto itself.

The great misconception throughout this election was that because he’s brown and his campaign director’s black, and half the people on the team are some shade in between, that would somehow add up to having the NE in the bag. Anybody who said this has never campaigned in East Calgary—nor probably ever spent more than a few hours exploring it. Over they years, the campaign team has had their individual asses handed to them by the knee. The director and the candidate finished fourth in their first civic campaign; Ward 3 in 2004. The strategist ran a competitor’s campaign that same election and finished second. Despite the scars—and despite the fact they all believe in sophisticated statistical analysis, social media, robodialling, and all the post-millennial campaigning tools—there is an edge of excitement when they talk about the NE. Campaigning in NE Calgary is an art. Nobody was better at it going in than McIver. McIver got the NE in a traditional way. He was connected to the community leaders. He’d come through for them. Most importantly—and this can’t be overstated—he’d been the perceived frontrunner since February. If you live in the NE, it’s not a stretch to say that your people have come from somewhere, at some point, where voting for the winner was essential to you survival. “They know how to read the tea leaves,” the campaign strategist had said. They always vote for the winner.

The candidate and his handler cut through an empty industrial area, into a jammed parking lot. “I assume it’s very casual, but one must be ready for anything,” he said giddily. Yesterday he arrived late at a mosque for Friday prayers. “To my untrained ear it sounded like he was prolonging the prayer until I got there.” They now climbed the stairs now to a Hindu temple. It was the last night of the Durga Puja, which was a whir of gold and red—and yes, some purple—saris. There are garlands of fresh flowers. Strong incense. Kids on their parents’ shoulders rang a big bell as they entered. Vettivelu Nallainayagam waited inside. He teaches macro economics at Mount Royal University. He is an earnest man, who has written a book about his contribution to civic discourse in Calgary. “It’s called My Contribution To Civic Discourse In Calgary,” he said. He is most proud of the essay: “’Saying No To Politically Correct Christmas.’” Nallainayagam was going out on a limb for the candidate. People across the city had gone to the end of these tremendous limbs for this campaign. The candidate shook some hands. “I hope you’re having a wonderful Puja,” he said. They were worshipping the Goddess of Learning. This was a reoccurring theme in NE Calgary. Reverence for learning. Education as the equalizer. In such a context, the notion of the candidate, whose rivals had tried to dismiss him as “the professor,” seemed less preposterous. At the feast, his senses seemed heightened, his body language more alert. He popped a samosa, and commended it as the second best he has tasted in NE Calgary. (“My mom, of course, makes the best samosas in Calgary.”)

“In 2004, we didn’t know what were doing,” the campaign director had said. “Door knocking in NE Calgary doesn’t work.” People don’t really answer their doors, and on those occasions they do, you can’t count on communicating complex ideas in English. “You have to go through various mosques, churches, temples because that’s where the community leaders are.” They put their signs in the wrong place in that campaign. Worst of all, it was a race for alderman, but the candidate was putting forth policies that you’d expect to hear from the mayor. Nobody cared. They wanted potholes fixed. Money for seniors facilities.

To show these communities they were serious, the campaign team published the better ideas in a dozen different languages. They used a free google app to crowd source each translation.  On Sunday morning, one of the candidate’s cousins would drop off some better ideas that had been translated to Farsi for a small group of Afghans who worship at the mosque. It’s a community of 2,000. One phone call sets off a chain of phone calls through the community.

Driving deeper into the NE night, they passed a few blocks from the candidate’s home on route to the Falconridge Community Centre for a fundraising event with Jay Bal, who was running for alderman. “Where are the Punjabi brochures?” the candidate asked. McIver had already been here that night. There were lots of blue button, hardly any purple. “Sat-sri-akal,” the candidate said as he rushed into the community centre. Jay Bal’s aunt Nina Bhullar hovered near the door. “Sat-sri-akal.” Welcome. There was a meticulously choreographed Bhangra routine on stage. Bhullar, who had been a psych nurse for twenty years, watched the candidate cautiously move through the room. “He has so much knowledge,” she said. Why would she support McIver then?  “I’ve known him for a very long time. He’s very approachable. He’s reliable. He listens.” She had three children—all voting age—“they’re voting for him,” she said, pointing to the candidate, and smiling. “They’re very Calgarian.”

The 31^st leadership forum of the election was at Marlborough Park on Wednesday October 13^th. The candidate likened it to a wrestling match. It was the only forum where anyone brought droves of supporters. There was a large group of Sikh taxi drivers wearing Higgins tshirts. They yelled for the candidate to come pose for a photo when he entered. He leapt into the middle of the frame, making a kind of tada gesture, and they pretended to beat him up. The president of Associated Cabs watched. There were layers of subtext that are difficult to unravel.

“You have to understand East Calgary in order to understand what was happening in that forum,” he said. A writer spent 72 consecutive hours shadowing the campaign, and this was the only instant the candidate was reluctant to go on record. “The cab industry is horribly broken,” he later said. The candidate grew up in Marlborough Park. His grandmother’s wake was in the gym he now circulated. He likes to talk about two other kids from working class families who grew up in NE Calgary, and won scholarships to Harvard. (Which also happens to be a nifty way of working Harvard into the conversation without someone like Jason Kenney jumping on you for being elite.) He ends the anecdote: “two of us have moved back.” Throughout his stump speech, throughout every conversation he has had in this campaign, he pounds the word “opportunity.” There is a hint of Obama’s narrative in this stump speech. “Every single kid deserves that opportunity.”

At his first opportunity in the forum he likened Barb Higgins to a tourist in NE Calgary. While it made a convenient political point—“that was very calculated,” he later admitted—it was also tricky in that moment to differentiate the candidate from the kid who grew up in Marlborough Park, whose feelings might have actually been hurt that a popular anchorwoman and serious candidate for mayor would introduce her vision for East Calgary by talking about social workers and crime. (Though he grew up in NE Calgary, the candidate was tagged as a gifted student; he went to Jr. High in Altadore, then to Queen Elizabeth, where he was Prime Minister of the school’s 10th mock parliament.)

If you want to understand NE Calgary, he’s got a tour. The abridged version begins east off 28th Street and Memorial at a strip mall called Short Pants Plaza. You must take transit to get there. You buy a patty at Lloyd’s Patty Plus, sfeeha from Village Pita, purple yam ice cream from Lolit’s. Try Safari Grill for East African if you want to sit down. Spend a couple hours at Forest Lawn Library after that. Read up on something you’ve always wondered about. You’ll eventually head to Westwinds/McKnight, which is the Northern terminus of the North East Line. The station is shaped like an upside down canoe. There is a time capsule that tells the story of the people in the community. The $15-million Baitan Nur mosque, built entirely through donations from the community, is there. The second best samosas in Calgary are at The Samosa Factory. If it’s the summer, find a soccer field. Sit on the grass. Watch what will seem like the whole world kicking a ball at that moment. And then hit up Sunridge Mall. It’s a mall like every other mall in town. There is an Old Navy like all the other Old Navies. It is a mall that is full of people who live in the NE. If you’re really serious, you’ll end the day at Village Park Leisure Centre, where people swim in all manner of bathing attire. In the change room, you realize your similarities.

VI. THE COLOUR PURPLE

February 24, 2010 was one of those where-were-you days. Canada was about to play Russia. The candidate stood in line at Japadog on Burard Street in Vancouver with the pollster. (Vancouver was in the process of easing restrictions for all manner of street food carts.) His iPhone vibrated. His jaw dropped. Bronconnier wasn’t going to run again. He hung up, turned to the pollster, and half asked, half stated: “I wonder if I should run—you’re on the team right?” By the time the puck dropped, he was at the ANZA club, which is a bit like a rumpus room, about half a dozen blocks from the Athletes Village, at a table full of expat Calgarians. It was 6-1 Canada, four minutes into the second period. His iPhone kept vibrating.

Months before the mayor’s announcement, he had an idea to build a slate of intelligent people to run for different spots on council. He’d quietly been asking around, specifically someone for mayor. Nobody wanted to do it. They fight too much. It’s unglamorous. There’s a huge pay cut. He’d asked Wayne Stewart, who wasn’t ready to commit—but declared much later, with a promise to bring the Olympics back to Calgary. (Stewart withdrew with a week left in the campaign and emphatically endorsed the candidate.)

After the game, one of the people at the table asked the others what they thought. He was not The Candidate yet. If there was a unifying thing about these Calgary expats, they had vigorously committed themselves to the city in their early 20s, whether as writers or architects or lawyers or musicians or doctors of some form of community activist, but Calgary had disappointed them. So they headed to New York and Toronto and Vancouver to find that thing missing at home. For lack of a better word, let’s call it potential-that-was-actively-being-fulfilled. This phenomenon they found in those other communities made them resent the time they’d invested trying to build it in Calgary.

“But that guy could be the next mayor of Calgary,” someone said. There was a round of mean, dismissive laughter. It’s that smug thing you hate so much about people in Vancouver. Calgarians would never vote for an articulate, righteous, brown guy.

The candidate hadn’t known it, but Bev Longstaff, who had run for mayor against Bronconnier, had been trying to draft a similar group of intelligent people. She’d asked a very senior manager at City Hall. He wouldn’t run, but had a candidate in mind.

“Who?” the candidate asked.

“That would be you,” Longstaff said. She spent rest of lunch trying to convince him to run for alderman instead. Meanwhile, there was an informal scout, who had been doing a similar draft in his imagination—it’s a conversation we all have in our heads: who would be the dream mayor—but the scout didn’t ask the candidate. Instead he created a Facebook page titled “Draft Nenshi.” 900 people friended the site. McIver wrote an OpEd piece, questioning the prospective candidate’s credibility as a pundit, calling him out as a failed candidate in Ward 3. On May 25, the candidate said: “let’s do it.” The scout had no idea what came next. He built a web site, which was blue and gold.

“I hated those colours,” he said

~

The scout imagined a street corner in the height of the election. With Bronconnier out, several established aldermen clamoring for the job, he imagined up to a hundred different candidates running for mayor, alderman, school trustee. “We needed something to stand out on that corner.”

He looked into the political implications of purple. For no other reason than he knew nobody else would pick purple. Purple wouldn’t help with the image obstacles. But he learned it had no political connotations either. (No serious movement in history had wanted to touch purple with a ten-foot pole.) Swing States are often marked by purple, which struck the scout as appropriate. And then it dawned on him. You make purple by mixing blue and red. The colours that traditionally represent the right and the left. (McIver and Higgins both used blue.) Purple had a profound meaning for those who would join the campaign—they just didn’t know it yet.

In those days at the end of May, they were still trying to figure out who they were. The early volunteers had been involved in a small group created during the previous civic election called “Better Calgary.” A sort of urban think tank. Half of that group were disillusioned refugees from Jim Dinning’s provincial leadership campaign, the other half had spent their lives losing in various campaigns to Conservative candidates. Better Calgary was a mish mash of academics, lawyers and community development types, who were a little right on the spectrum on certain issues, and a little left on others. Their conversations and ideas were apolitical. They’d complete each other’s sentences on transit-oriented development. Better Calgary gave way to Civic Camp.

The candidate likes to argue that is had been an ideas campaign. The strategist calls it “the first brand election in Alberta.” In truth, it is hard to tell where one begins and the other ends. Think about the conversation you had over Thanksgiving dinner. (And remember, a Calgary civic election is a calculated race to become the Thanksgiving conversation.) If you discussed the purple candidate surging from behind, it was a brand election. If you discussed the specifics of his better ideas—not that he had them, but what they were—it was an ideas election.

The poll that came out after Thanksgiving had the candidate in a dead heat—for the first time—with his two rivals, which meant their campaign had been the Thanksgiving conversation. More importantly, it meant that Calgarians did not have to vote strategically. Given the city’s average age, it would be the first significant election in Calgary where the outcome hadn’t already been decided. The moment that poll came out, one of the Calgary expats emailed from Vancouver:

I can’t believe it. It is amazing. It makes my eyes explode out of my head and almost puts me on the verge of tears. I am Calgarian. This is amazing. I am a loser for not helping more.

If you were to sift through the candidate’s donor list that morning, you would have found the expat’s name. It had been there since August. He had not given up on Calgary. Not entirely.

~

The campaign’s donor list was remarkable, on one hand, for the sheer volume of donors—as opposed to fewer donors making bigger donations to other campaigns—but also for the fact that the public could even view such a list during the election. The Better Calgary campaign had put immense pressure on civic politicians to publish their lists. This campaign took it one step further, though, by attempting to update day-by-day.

In what’s come to pass for a “normal” campaign, candidates try to hide their lists until the end of the election. They don’t want voters to know who is funding their campaigns. Donors likewise don’t want to be seen as trying to buy influence. Those who donated money to the purple campaign—and this must surely be unprecedented in modern Canadian politics—actually phoned to complain that the campaign hadn’t published their name on the web site fast enough. Such was the intensity they identified with this brand of politics in full sentences.

By Monday afternoon, before voting ended, the candidate’s sister sat in the campaign director’s office, trying to hold back tears. She had just put down her phone. “People are calling my mom,” she said. They had looked up the number in the phonebook and called to say they voted for her son.

The Youth Calgary Youth Can Vote “mock election” results were released the day before. The candidate got 41% of the vote. In the last week of the campaign, he’d still  been giving speeches in elementary and junior high schools. It’s said this election was won with social media and better ideas. But it was also won with tea parties, samosas and 11-year-olds girls going home and telling their parents about the candidate’s better ideas.

At 2:16pm on Monday the basement headquarters erupted in applause. The candidate had made his 10,000^th Facebook friend. The million-dollar question, not just for those in the campaign, but for those who had already begun to study it had already become: how could you duplicate it? “There is so much energy and equity we have with these people,” the pollster said. “It would be a shame to waste it.”

“I believe it’s possible to do this again,” the scout said. The catch is, well, there was only one person the scout wanted to draft when he came up with the Facebook page. It was one thing to put the candidate inside temples and living rooms and Facebook dens. “But he converted people when they heard him speak.”

“But,” he said, “but this movement—it sort of has become a movement—if we can keep engaging Calgarians with real information…” He didn’t finish the sentence. But the implication would be that it wouldn’t matter who the candidate was once Calgarians figured out the dialogue that was finally in their city’s best interest.

The strategist came into the scout’s office. “That’s possibly the greatest brand presentation I’ve seen in politics,” he said.

“You too,” the scout replied.

“But I do it for a living.”

VII. THE STRATEGIST

Three days after the election, the strategist was looking for his next job. Even though he finished second last in the team’s election pool, there was no shortage of offers. It’s worth mentioning that the team was not initially sold on the strategist. He is sharp and quick. He was the camapaign’s only paid member. He’d recently had some problems with the Dalai Llama. He’d also headed up Alnoor Kassam’s $1.5 million run for mayor in the last election, the antithesis of their campaign in every way. For whatever combination of reasons—and one reason is that he genuinely liked the candidate—the strategist came cheap.

In the Kassam campaign, he’d essentially been given a blank check. There had never been any hope of winning. He spent nearly $1.5 million for 35,442 votes. (More than 42 bucks a vote.) But in doing so, he learned everything—everything—there was to learn about getting the next candidate elected for mayor. He tested the effectiveness of billboards, brochures, ads in every form of media. While the exact tally’s still being calculated, this campaign spent approximately $300,000 for 140,263 votes. $2.10/vote. It is still gross for the average citizen to contemplate, but the lower end of gross.

The strategist’s ties to Conservative politics also made people on the team suspicious. He had run the Conservative gamut from helping Joe Clarke to working as Wild Rose leader Danielle Smith’s chief of staff. He grew up in Calgary and knows conservatives intimately. Even after the election, he did not quite know how to define this candidate. “He’s not a Liberal,” he said. He stopped to think. He shook his head. He smiled. “I don’t know what he is.”

Others in the campaign hoped to redefine what was meant by Liberal and Conservative. To make the two labels as relevant as gender, race, sexuality and religion. To annihilate them as issues in any serious conversation. Because for all the self-satisfied talk right now about our cozy little meritocracy on the Foothills, we know damn well the best person does not always get the job in Calgary.

The strategist compared the Wild Rose party’s new leader to the candidate. He used the term “whip smart” to describe each of them. “If they got into a debate, it would be a debate to the death.” But there is a lot they would agree on too.

“Their fiscal conservatism has to do with a hatred of waste.” He said this in a way that implied the hatred came from somewhere deep in their souls. (Combine that hatred of waste with Nallainayagam’s notion of “no to politically correct Christmas,” and you have as honest a definition of populist conservative identity in Calgary as you’re going to find in 2010.) Throughout the election, the candidate kept repeating: “you can’t really call yourself a fiscal conservative unless you grew up in a working class family in Marlborough.” When the candidate talks about sustainability he’s not talking about destroying jobs in oil and gas. He’s talking about spending a buck right now to save a hundred ten years from now. Though he was seen to have ties to the provincial Liberal party, it was impossible to pin him down on any discernable ideological politics beyond frugality. In the end, this complex identity worked to the campaign’s advantage.

The problem with identifying yourself as a Conservative in municipal politics is that you lose credibility with your base by questioning anything to do with brave men and women in uniforms. Calgary, it must be emphasized, is blessed with a police chief who speaks to the public in full sentences. But if you had to pick a single turning point in the election, it was the moment the candidate questioned the police budget. It was done with thought and grace. The chief refuted the assertion, but he never publicly corrected the candidate. Higgins and McIver leapt to defend their chief. The candidate didn’t waver.

At the coffee parties you’d see these very intelligent men in their 50s and 60s seeming to peer deeply into the candidate’s soul. These were Conservative men. Men who wouldn’t hesitate to spit on Trudeau’s grave. More than the students raised on John Stewart, these men, who on some level still haven’t given up on the promise of Preston Manning’s Reform movement, have waited a long time to hear full sentences. The fact that a candidate could respectfully question a chief of police was mind blowing. But also confusing. Invariably these men who would also ask, “isn’t it too late to build the airport tunnel?” The candidate would tell them the airport authority doesn’t get to hold a gun to the head of Calgarians. The airport authority works for Calgarians. The Stampede Board, which has destroyed historic communities to build casinos, works for Calgarians. Transit works for Calgarians. The institutions that nobody in Calgary ever questions need to work for Calgarians.

At those coffee parties on that last weekend, the candidate had begun to hint that 5% of his brain was already drifting to the day after the election. He wanted to start in Transit. There would be a lot of easy wins in Transit. There would be a good photo op of him smashing down the park and ride meters. Reprogamming the ticket machines on the platforms. “People ask me why the machines don’t give change at transit stations,” he’d say. Like you have to make a machine that specifically doesn’t return change. “They’d rather have the extra quarter than a happy customer.”

While McIver had support from Federal Conservatives, he also seemed to be beholden to forces that did not necessarily have the best interests of Calgary in mind. He bet on who we’ve always been told we are. He couldn’t question the chief. He couldn’t campaign at a Pride Parade. He was seen to be fighting for private developers “freedom” to build communities in any way they wanted. The tragedy of Ric McIver is that, deep down, he doesn’t seem to be that guy.

The Conservative men at the coffee parties—who are most certainly not that guy either—but usually end up voting for the McIver-du-jour, have become ashamed of what transpires from that vote. The juvenile screaming matches that pass for discourse in the House of Commons and Alberta Legislature. Which is nothing like the screeching halt America has ground to in the destructive Democrat/Republican dialogue. Enough!

Of all the limbs people went out on for this campaign, in the end, the proudly right wing Calgary Sun, which emphatically endorsed the candidate at the 11^th hour after having donated money to McIver’s campaign weeks earlier, went the farthest. They’d lose advertisers and long-time subscribers, and still they did it because this was a once-in-a-lifetime moment in Calgary that trumped the pro wrestling absurdity of their national media brand.

~

So what happens next?

There is a temptation now to drawn an analogy between the candidate/campaign director and Rod Love/Ralph Klein.

“No way,” the strategist said. “Nenshi’s his own man.”

Asked the same question, the candidate interrupted: “—I’ll tell you why you’re wrong. We alternate being the front man. I do the civic. He does the provincial.”

Three days after it was over, the strategist emphasized that the campaign director “has a lot of power right now.” He outlined a couple of scenarios where the director could become premier. The continuation of the purple revolution. “Already people on twitter are saying, ‘we’re lost.’”

An oddly overlooked fact in the aftermath of this campaign is that at the same time the candidate was gaining traction with the hyperengaged, the campaign director also launched a new provincial party called the Alberta Party. They’d been going around the city, using the coffee party model to meet people. They called it the Big Listen. In seemingly ideological Alberta, there is this swell of a populist movement with roots in Edmonton and a momentum now in Calgary.

VIII. THE APATHETIC YOUTH

There are a handful of bars and cafes in the beltline where ideas are discussed fervently. Kawa, Beano, The Ship & Anchor, Hop N Brew and Broken City. The long Saturday before the election ended, well after midnight, at Broken City, the candidate was three hours late for the arts forum. MIA’s “Paper Planes” blared from inside. There was a line out the door. He wondered how he would get in. Further up the line, a guy looked back. Then he looked back again. His eyes got wide. “Oh my God,” he shouted. “It’s fucking Nenshi!”

In the line, the pollster had been talking about the shift in cool. Even a few years ago, something like TEDx never would have happened in Calgary. He talked about the rock star status of the people giving the lectures. “Every one of those guys got beat up in high school for being smart.” At some point  that month the candidate had gone from nerdy to charismatic. A curl would sometimes falls over his forehead like Superman. The Christopher Reeve Superman. He was pushed now into the bar in a bit of a daze, mobbed by women, clamoring to have their photo taken with him. He didn’t have to remind them which day to vote. Some had already voted. Others were stressing how high the stakes had become, how close it was, how many people they had told the better ideas to, how happy they were to meet him, but he needed to get moving now. Though he makes a point of not ever seeming surprised, his eyes grew wider and wider. Like the day Canada beat Russia. “The apathetic youth vote,” he whispered.

In his address to the U of C class of ‘94, which graduated into a recession, he tried to challenge the growing apathy: “We are to believe that we are part of the so-called Generation X, a group of slackers who will never amount to anything. I don’t buy that…it’s up to us to fight for our beliefs, for our values, and for the challenges that must happen.” He referenced a Tracy Chapman song. Earlier that day the MC Ricca Razor Sharp released a video on youtube, which sampled “I Wanna Rock Right Now” as “I Wanna Vote Right Now…sending my x to my man Naheed.”

The candidate and his campaign director went back to HQ to debrief. Further down 11^th, two men got into cab. One shouted: “yo Nenshi!” They left the cab door open, and crowded around him for a photo. The handler got two purple badges on them. By the time everyone turned around, another group has jumped into the open cab, which was pulling away hesitantly, the driver looking at the candidate, as the two guys ran after the cab. “Nenshi!” one of them shouted, but didn’t quite know what to ask yet. “Can’t you do something, man?”

And that, in the poist-coital glow of an internationally recognized campaign, is the only problem with this. It’s not the candidate who is supposed to save the day. The point of the campaign is that you have to do something, man. “It’s important to us—everyone who is a part of this,” said the scout. “This is what Obama neglected to do.” Obama had mobilized an army of people to affect change, only to use his email list over the next two years to spam them for $5 donations.

IX. THE PURPLE ARMY

You had to be in the purple warehouse on the eve of the election if you want to know why that won’t happen here. Something called “Operation Purple Dawn” was supposed to take place. Nobody at downtown HQ knew exactly what it was. They assumed it would be a good thing. They hoped it would be a good thing. They went with the candidate to see what was happening. There was an enormous cheer when he entered, his first time ever in the warehouse. He gave a gracious speech. And then another volunteer got up to explain what was about to happen. “I went to Toys R Us, and I bought up their entire supply of sidewalk chalk.” They would go out at midnight and write the better ideas on the sidewalks of Calgary. The city would wake up later that morning, streets covered in purple chalk:

-Calgary city council will be more transparent, more efficient, and easier to engage.

-Calgary transit will be a preferred choice, not the last choice.

-Calgary will be the best place in Canada to start and grow a business.

-Common-sense policy on secondary suites.

-Calgarians will have convenient, quick access to their airport.

-Audit changes; transparency to city hall. 

-Calgary will be a city of sutainable, walkable, livable, complete.

-Calgary will be a city where every neighbourhood is a safe neighbourhood. 

-Calgary will be a city where its citizens are enriched by outstanding libraries, recreation amenities, and a vibrant cultural scene.

-Calgarians will reduce the number of people living in poverty and ensure opportunity for all.

-Political campaigns should be about the best ideas, not the most money.

~

In the warehouse, the candidate’s eyes kept wandering back to an older man in a purple turban, with a gray beard down past his chest. The man stuck out among other volunteers, who were dividing into small teams, heading out into the night. The man, who is powerful among a certain group of taxi drivers, had left NE Calgary and come to the edge of downtown to see what was happening with his own eyes. The politics—the way of engagement—had literally changed before his eyes. The man had a brief conversation with the candidate. He nodded at him approvingly. While pundits, voters and the candidate’s team was still uncertain, the old man in the purple turban knew who the winner would be tomorrow.

X. THE HOURS AFTER

An hour before 8pm, there was a copy of the Election Bylaws on the campaign director’s desk. There was a dog leash. There was a five-dollar bill. There was a photo of someone’s front yard with a homemade sign that read: “Hey Sign Thief. I’m Still Voting For Nenshi.”

His notebook was open. He had begun making a list of people to call. At the top of the list he had started to write “M-a-y—,“ and then crossed it out, and printed “Dave Bronconnier” underneath. The aldermen who would win were next. Then Premier Stelmach. Danielle Smith. David Swann. Brian Mason. It says something about being lifelong outsiders that he listed the opposition. This is how the establishment falls. It happens, as any real change does, slowly, then suddenly. And even, when it became hypersudden, it happened in freeze frame too. At 11:49pm, Don Braid tweeted: “In nearly 40 years of covering politics, truly the most astonishing thing I’ve ever seen! #yycvote #yyccc #yyc.” The candidate began showing up on BBC and CNN, he did one-on-one interviews with every major news show in Canada. “I thought I knew how to do media,” he said. There was not an arrogance-over-confidence issue in those moments. It’s impossible to say exactly what that sudden media attention is worth—the message of grassroots reform triumphing over whatever they assumed Calgary to be—it’s worth millions of dollars more than what we spend advertising Stampede. His message was: you don’t know Calgary. Calgary would write its own story from here on out.

There is a sense now too of new gatekeepers in Calgary. In the midst of the most important political moment in Calgary in decades, the three big “local” TV stations Global, CTV and CBC were broadcasting: Dance With The Stars, Hawaii Five-O and Men With Brooms. (Shaw, on the other hand, covered Calgary non-stop.) At its most dramatic moments, the scout observed two #yycvote tweets per second. In those moments it looked like the scout’s head might explode.

Normally you put a candidate in the mayor’s office so he can help you out with land deals or do some kind of favour. At the victory party, though, there was a sense that he better not change. He would still have to show up early and do the tarp run at Folk Fest. His niece and nephew expected a babysitter.

A volunteer named Jeff arrived late at the headquarters. Jeff had knocked on doors. He’d handed out flyers in front of big box grocery stores. He had talked about the better ideas on SkyscraperPage. He had stayed up past midnight, writing the ideas in purple chalk. He had worked as a scrutineer all day. He worked until his cell phone had died. He hadn’t heard who won until that moment. All those things that frustrate us about the old conversation had been seemingly destroyed, and what came next would either be a scenario in which Calgary laid out a model of citizen engagement that the rest of Canada could follow—or else something like season four of The Wire.

Jeff didn’t congratulate himself. He didn’t congratulate Calgarians for doing what everyone outside Calgary called amazing. He said he would be at City Hall the next week. He would wear his purple volunteer shirt. He would listen to and watch the candidate he helped make the mayor. He would watch the mayor’s new council. As closely as the candidate had watched the previous mayor and council.

“He’s still a politician.”

“I’m going to watch him very closely.”

That is this movement.

(Published with permission of author.)

~

ALSO: Deciphering the peculiar new Tim Hortons doctrine.

I’ve read a hundred times–I’ve been told at least a hundred times–that a life does not come down to, of all things, one’s “battle with cancer.” You know what? It doesn’t and it does.

The prognosis for GBM is, as I said, six months, give or take. She went 36, and if you’d been around for those 36, you’d know what I mean when I say that they say “everybody’s different.” And you’ll also know what I mean when I say that I don’t mean that in the way that they think I do.

If you don’t know what any of that means, don’t worry. Because this is what you should know, this is what she taught me in those 36 months. It’s what I’d like you to learn because I know you’re facing your own indestructible acronyms, and every little trick helps.