SAINTS PRESERVE US

An Unnoticeable Major Tweak 

When I began scribbling this blog in 2013, retail giant Walmart appeared in business reporting as Wal-Mart. At some point during the past dozen years the hyphen was dropped and the “M” became lower case. I’ve no idea when I twigged to the change.

My latest memory of Walmart (as it wasn’t then) is from a lifetime ago when I was still living in Calgary. It was coming on Christmas. The outlet was in the former Sears space in one of those fading ring malls outside of downtown; the dying dream of 70s developers, medical clinics and prosthetic limb boutiques eying discounted square footage. Walmart greeters in wheelchairs. The cash register lines snaked throughout the mish-mash of vertical and horizontal aisles. Nobody appeared overly joyous, no, more angry, more miserable, much like the frightful weather outside. Some hardy souls were losing their minds at Walmart’s innovative self-checkouts. Elsewhere in the store a promotions company was giving away paring knives, an encouragement for shoppers to buy the entire set of blades. Eyes down, mouth shut, study the wet tile floor. Everyone around you is packing a four-inch shank.

Walmart stirred social media denizens this week. A press release will do that. The Arkansas-based discounter tweaked its logo. The blue background is a little more intense, brighter, I suppose. The simple sans serif font, yellow, has been bolded as has that asterisk above the name. A major overhaul for those who pay attention to the affectations of design and virtually unchanged to a consumer’s casual glance: same brand recognition prompt.

Designers are a delicate bunch of experts. Some are practical. Some are precious. My advertising expertise was mainly management, projects and production, time and money. A designer’s mind is miles ahead of their tools’ limitations, Pantone markers or Adobe software, and parsecs ahead of printing presses and red-green-blue computer screens. So many conflicted and meticulous designers. So many mechanical limitations from my point of view. I remember one incident (and there were a number of them). Christ.

A point of purchase piece. A bit of co-marketing between a purveyor of sugary soda and a purveyor of amusement park family vacations. A coupon, a contest. A new attraction. My firm’s star designer inhabited an office lit by purple lava lamps. Star Wars and The Simpsons figurines cast shadows. I’d had a mock-up of his stand-up’s design manufactured, six feet of corrugated plastic, die-cut to shape (my main concern), a cardboard easel, lo-res art pixelated because his finished art was behind schedule – probably not his fault because the account manager was indecisive, incapable of directing or even nudging her client forward because deadlines were my problem. He moaned about the reproduction quality of his unfinished artwork. I was very glad in that moment not to have a free Walmart paring knife on me. I said, “Right now, we’re just interested in the die. We’ll be making lots of these in a hurry. I don’t care about the art.” I should’ve said, “Your artwork at this moment is secondary. As long as you’re happy with the shape. We’ve done our best to accommodate your design.” I didn’t. He said, “If it’s going to look like this, you don’t care.” Clearly, we were failing to communicate. I backed out of his office into the common area where production artists were prepping different files for different deadlines. I said to be heard by all, “It’s gonna be in a fucking grocery store. Not the fucking Louvre.” (The delicate boy moved on to another agency shortly after our exchange. Curious. I was gratified to learn through the grapevine that his new party trick was a killer impression of me in that moment.)

I thought of that guy when I read that the Walmart asterisk (buyer beware?) is actually referred to internally as “the spark” because it symbolizes founder Sam Walton’s vision. Of course it does. Who didn’t pick up on that right away? I thought it was a sun because it reminded me of the childishly painted “O” in Eric Clapton’s surname on the cover art of his wretched Phil Collins-doused Behind the Sun which followed the halfway decent Money and Cigarettes which was Backless with a bit more spine.

Reading design rationales and specifications are like sneaking a peek at the minutes of a secret society. Only the in-crowd understands the holy jargon. When I began to work on my agency’s Coca-Cola account, I learned the twisty line on every tin was actually “the dynamic ribbon”, something to be revered as much as the “shield”, that red circle whose Platonic ideal of print reproduction demanded very expensive double hits of Pantone 32. The people who pitch these nuances and nouns are very good at what they do and they almost believe what they say. I’ve seen them in action.

Logo tweaks, modest embellishments, shouldn’t be newsworthy. Usually, subtle changes are made for ease of reproduction. Nobody will notice if they go unmentioned. When I was in the business, no designer I worked with could possibly imagine their creation doubling as a thumbnail app icon. An exception to this would be Starbucks who dropped all the type from the green circle around the mermaid. The company’s (ad agency’s) spin was that the coffee bean fish-lady was so iconic nothing more need to be said; the reality was Starbucks’ aggressive expansion into new markets where English wasn’t necessarily the lingua franca.

So. This Walmart finesse. Designer affectations come with a cost should a company buy in.

I remember sitting in a Calgary pub with my older brother (since deceased). I was the ad man; he was the energy industry executive. He slid his new business card across the table. There’d been a merger. “What do you think of the new logo?” He’d shown me some squibs months before.

I studied it. I said, “The obvious one. Uninspired, but you’re not doing a total rebrand. The agency just sort of squeezed both together. Please everybody.”

He said, “Yep.”

I said, “Given the firms involved, I’d love to know how much you were charged.”

“What do you think?”

“I’m going to guess minimum high five figures augmented by pages of specs and various usage applications.” I pictured the new corporate identity bible, a collated binder with tabs and labeled computer discs inserted in the inside pockets. Hundreds of them. Colour covers.

“Yep.”

I said, “Man, my shop would’ve loved a shot at that. Anyway, you have a new business card. Think of all the stationery that has to be reprinted. The catalogues, technical manuals, office signage, trade show booths, fleet decals, decals on the downhole tools …. God knows what else. It’ll take months, maybe a year or more. Nobody ever thinks about that stuff. It’s like buying a house: you’ve got to pay the movers, the lawyer, the agent, renovate, buy paint, furniture…”

“A waste of time and money.”

I said, “Not from my perspective. But, yep.”                                         

Dispatches from the Crooked 9 has been your most unreliable, unbalanced and inaccurate alternative source of everything since 2013. My companion site www.megeoff.com is a little dusty, but up to date.

SAINTS PRESERVE US

Monday Morning, You Sure Don’t Look Fine

Chrystia Freeland, Canada’s Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister, reached her fuckery threshold a week ago today. She wisely quit her job(s) before having to deliver the government’s fall economic statement to the House of Commons knowing she'd be forced to walk the plank afterward. Just as well. She’d overshot her “guardrail” $40-billion operating deficit by some 50-per-cent.

Freeland has emerged from this fiasco spun as a Liberal with integrity. No mean feat given past shenanigans of Canada’s Natural Governing Party, but something of a mulligan during Justin Trudeau’s third term as prime minister, one which began with a needless and opportunistic post-pandemic snap election. Polls were positive for the former Rolling Stone cover boy then. The result, another minority government, was a high school drama teacher’s elaborate panto production gone horribly awry. Tellingly, Freeland’s not the first rat bent on self-preservation to desert HMCS Sunny Ways. The federal Liberal talent pool has become awfully shallow – I’m talking expertise and practical brains over inherited charisma.

Good government, responsible government, is akin to an engine, whether it powers my lawnmower or car. Size doesn’t matter so long as it’s reliable. While it requires maintenance from time to time, its efficiency shouldn’t cross my mind. It’s just there, dependable. Not a big ask; there are other things to think about. Ottawa has seized up. The fan belt snapped.

Canada is a big country with three coasts. It’s been at sea on Trudeau’s watch these past few years. I’ve never devoted much thought to Canadian foreign policy. We were always a middle power with strong ties to our allies. If we couldn’t always pull our weight, we at least had the moral authority to be heard. Our standing in the world order has slipped.

A convicted felon who holds regressive views on a number of issues including trade is set to assume the presidency of the Hysterical States of America. Der Trumpenfuhrer refers to Canada as his fifty-first state and calls our prime minister a governor. I can’t decide what riles me up about his remarks. Is it my latent soft nationalism or the blatant piling on football flag of his wordplay? Kick ‘em when they’re down, that’s what thugs do. India’s secret service executed a Canadian citizen on Canadian soil. Documents recently released reveal our spies foiled a similar plot by Iran. China habitually interferes with the Canadian democratic process and, like India, harasses its Canadian diaspora. Fuck knows what the Russians are up to.

Domestic affairs have descended into dysfunction somewhere beneath the nadir of farce. Prime Minister Trudeau is flailing in deep, rough waters for his political life. His latest lifesaving gambit was to declare a goods-and-services tax (five-per-cent) holiday for the holidays. From now until sometime in February I won’t pay the GST on a case of beer (see opening paragraph; scratch your head). I’ve never been bribed with my own money before. Payment deferred.

A prime example of inept and ineffectual governance is how Trudeau is managing a strike by Canada Post Corporation employees. CPC is a floundering Crown corporation saddled with a nineteenth century mandate and business model. It needs a thorough reset, a proper reboot. Still, I can mail a letter from Victoria, BC to Charlottetown, PEI for a dollar-something. The corporation handles more than two billion such bargains annually. Postal strikes, alas, are a lot like your relatives, they come around with alarming regularity. Now, national mail delivery isn’t overly glamorous, not like mingling in Davos or posing for a G7 group photo-op, it’s like municipal sewage treatment and garbage collection, somewhat essential. Dirty work, but somebody’s got to do it.

CPC employees walked off the job in mid-November. Whatever your opinion of unions, you’ve got to grant them their pressure tactic expertise. Held hostage for four weeks were charity solicitations, small and medium business fulfillments and passport applications for discounted dream vacations in secure tourist compounds during hurricane season. I missed my subscriptions to The Economist, The Walrus and AlbertaViews. No need to bother with Christmas cards this year. I trust the result of the revoltingly awkward home colon cancer test I undertook was negative. Otherwise, somebody would’ve called? Maybe not, health care is a provincial jurisdiction. Except for the funding.

The federal government’s solution to the CPC strike was a pause. A pause, not a resolution. A pause, like its concurrent GST consumer holiday. The postal strike will resume early next year. Another temporary reactive measure, akin to bailing a sinking ship with a milquetoast jug instead of flushing its ballast.

I imagine power is no easy thing to relinquish even if it costs you your common sense, ethics, integrity and marriage. The Globe reports Trudeau will spend the Christmas break pondering his future, fully aware half his caucus wants him gone, a majority of Canadians want him gone and that his government will fall when parliament reconvenes in the new year. Will he choose to lead the Liberals to slaughter on election day or decide to watch the carnage from the sidelines? While the machinery of the state can grind on without a functioning executive branch, the country, especially in times like these, cannot.

Dispatches from the Crooked 9 has been your most unreliable, unbalanced and inaccurate alternative source of everything since 2013. My companion site www.megeoff.com is a little dusty, but up to date.

HUMAN WRECKAGE

The Coffee Maker

Ann “hearts” her morning coffee. Me too. I’ve come a long way from freeze-dried granules of Maxwell House (Good to the last drop!) or Nescafe and hot tapwater. But we’re not precious about our coffee. We brew a 12-cup pot of coffee-flavoured coffee every morning and none of that medium roast stuff. I prepare everything the evening before because it saves nine minutes come dawn. Whoever awakes first hits the BREW button before their ritual ablutions – again, time management is crucial – while the other comes to to a delicious smell.

Late October Ann and I began having to jimmy open the lid of our Krups unit’s cistern with a bread knife. The latch mechanism permanently jammed. After about a week we both got pretty adept at it, one more step added to the routine. We knew something had to give, probably a hard water-encrusted plastic hinge. Disposable consumer durables tend not to fix themselves – especially after their limited warranties have expired. Ann was proactive, researching replacements. We asked around our circle of family and friends for recommendations.

The coffee snobs chimed in. One recommended an elaborate system or solution (no mere coffee maker) retailing for some $500. Another couldn’t get past our electric grinder because, you see, coffee beans require an artisan touch, pressing or crushing. Spinning grinder blades create heat, enough heat apparently to further roast a roasted bean and the desultory result is, of course, bitter. In his defense, he lingers over a cup of coffee while Ann and I swill ours. Also, he hasn’t smoked 25 a day for 50 years. My palate is unsophisticated. All I desire is black diner joe in my Stones, Beatles or Who mug. If there’s an oily slick or Carly Simon clouds on the surface, I’m cool. Ann’s a bit fussier, hot coffee into hot milk, not quite half and half. Her ratio changes with each subsequent cup: less dairy, more joe.

The Crooked 9’s kitchen was designed and built before either of us were born; working space is limited. A countertop appliance is no easy purchase. It must fit into its designated place; its footprint must be compact. A coffee maker’s height is of particular concern: it cannot obstruct the kitchen light switch (the second thing to be turned on each morning) nor interfere with the bottom of the cupboard door where we keep our mugs. We elected to buy a Braun unit. German again. According to the email I received, Ann and I are now part of the Braun family which, I suppose, is less lucrative but morally superior to being welcomed to the Krupp family whose company armed all of Europe in the two centuries prior to this one.

Our morning coffees are my gig – even if I forget to add water from time to time. Ann suggested I might read through the operator’s manual and do the set up for our new machine, learn its ins and outs, which I did. Simple stuff. I scanned the instructions in the way I look at most posts on my Facebook feed, blankly. I wasn’t exactly going to Mars with Elon or even booking a domestic flight and hotel room.

My first task was to set the unit’s digital clock to Mountain Time. The display read 10:28 out of the box. I plugged the unit into the wall socket under the cupboard on the backsplash and depressed the CLOCK button for three seconds. I jigged local time. Cyan lights flashed but the clock didn’t move from 10:28. Jesus Christ, this thing’s going back to the store. A fresh off the assembly line dud. I got my face up real, real close to the clock and saw the actual functioning clock face was protected for shipping by an opaque black cling decal reading 10:28. Well, fuck.

Next up was programming for water hardness. Some new-fangled function. The unit’s default setting was H3, Alberta hard, eh, bud? Mineral content. The button I was supposed to depress didn’t work. I thought: Fuckit, it’s the default anyways.

The third button was for setting the temperature of the hotplate. That button didn’t work either. The default heat setting was MEDIUM. Ann had wanted it set to LOW. I thought: Fuckit. We always pour the pot into a different carafe so it won’t stew on the burner anyways. The clock’s working and we won’t have to open the lid with a fucking knife.

Ann was in the kitchen too, her back to me, taking care of other business. She asked, “How’s it going?”

I said, “Good, good. I’ve got this.”

The fourth button was STRENGTH. This button was the subject of some previous discussion because ROBUST takes twice as long as REGULAR and time is a delicate subject for seniors. Waiting on a ROBUST brew might not see us out one morning and I can’t imagine facing Judgment Day without a couple cups of coffee and a few cigarettes first. Must present at my absolute best; seconds count. I couldn’t set the strength button either but its default setting was in our favour: REGULAR. I thought: Fuckit.

Ann said, “All set up, ready to go?”

I replied with my favourite hedging portmanteau, “Welp.” I continued, “I got the clock working, but the other buttons don’t seem to function, so I’ve left them on their default settings.”

Ann said, “Would you mind if I take a look?”

I said, “No, no, not at all. Have at ‘er. I think I did everything right. I read the instructions.”

We switched places in the kitchen. I got out of Ann’s way.

Ann said, “Geoffrey.”

I thought: Uh-oh.

“Did you turn the power on?”

I said, “Coffee makers don’t have power buttons. You just plug them in, the clock lights up and then you press START or BREW or whatever, whenever.”

“This one does.”

“Fuck me. That’s two buttons to press in the morning now.”

Just yesterday, our new machine in service for more than a week, Ann showed me how to remove the filter basket.                  

Dispatches from the Crooked 9 has been your most unreliable, unbalanced and inaccurate alternative source of everything since 2013. My companion site www.megeoff.com is a little dusty, but up to date.

EDMONTON EXISTENTIAL

Two Paintings on a Wall

Our bedroom is at the rear of the Crooked 9, a corner room. The window on Ann’s side of the bed, in the far corner beside a vanity, overlooks our backyard. My window above my night table stacked with books is directly diagonal. My view is Mosquito Alley, a semi-neglected space between our home and that of our miserable solitary neighbour whose dog is some sort of large and expensive poodle cross bred without a brain. Mosquito Alley is where I upend the wheelbarrow for the winter and stack firewood that’s too risky to burn during spring, summer and autumn months; embers float and Edmonton’s been awfully arid these past years. Mosquito Alley has no sky, it’s umbrellaed by an overhanging branch of mountain ash. The red clusters of fermented berries are especially plump now. They weren’t plucked by a cartwheeling flock of waxwings on a bender this season. There’s been nothing to see. Instead, I’ve been looking to my left, studying the pair of paintings hung stacked perpendicular to my window.

Both of these oils are older than Ann and me. They’re modern in a way because the reputation of the artists supersedes the merit of their works. One was painted by Ann’s father Alec. He dated the signature on his canvas: 1935. He was twelve. The other was painted by my mother’s father, my grandfather Charles. It’s undated and he has abbreviated his given name (my middle name) to Cha’s, bottom right. Both paintings are landscapes.

If I were to see Alec’s painting in a museum, I would pause before it. It’s a rugged, wild, Alberta scene, mainly sombre colours. The sky above and behind the Rockies is white, cumulus clouds inflating and billowing, weather’s blowing in from further west. The closest peak to the viewer is purple-blue, one slope crusted with a glacier. The entire scene is divided unequally by a river, a ribbon in varying shades of blue, darkening toward the far bank, highlighted by delicate suggestions of whitewater. The river’s source must be the distant glacier. The balsam firs in the foreground on the near bank, evergreens, are half black. Their pine cone clusters are a ripened beige, almost glowing in the late September or early October morning sun behind the artist.

Books on art, the masters, comprise more than a few volumes in the inherited portion of our library. While I completely comprehend how economic depression in a remote Canadian prairie province quickly followed by a war overseas may impact a boy’s plans for his future, I am compelled to ponder, speculate about a road not taken.

Cha’s chose to paint a winter scene in rural Quebec, perhaps even just outside Montreal’s early to mid-twentieth century city limits. Even now the island is still not entirely urbanized. A sleigh-rutted road winds through a stand of patchy birch trees and past a farmhouse toward a wooden bridge. The cloudless sky is a hard pale blue. The snow shadows the same freezing shade. Charles’s perspective is hopelessly skewed, the road widens as it recedes. Maybe it’s a trick of the light the artist was working in at the time, but a rut becomes a snowbank on an S-turn or vice versa and sort of goes uphill from there. Charles did render his firs as Alec did, heavy with the black paint.

I was born in February 1960. Charles died in March. I don’t think it was my fault; most newborns are ugly or at least peculiar looking but I wasn’t exactly Rosemary’s baby either. The painting hung in my big brother’s Montreal bedroom while I was trying to grow up. It came to me when he moved to Edmonton in 1972. I wanted it because it was his. I wanted it because it was my only connection to a grandfather I never knew – a wit, I’ve been told, a charmer, something of a character; beloved. Charles’s landscape has hung everywhere I’ve ever lived since I left home in 1980. Its ornate frame, some type of plaster composite, is disintegrating – perfectly square chips decide to fall from time to time and lay where they may.  Prior to my moving out, his work wasn’t able to compete with the crucifix over my bed, a portrait of my guardian angel, Esso hockey posters, Spider-man and Mick Jagger.

I’ve seen all the things depicted in two paintings of disparate quality. Most of them I can see from the front porch of the Crooked 9 where I spend too much time smoking cigarettes and simply gazing at my surroundings. I’ve watched the puffy skies, thunderheads gathering, weather rolling in. I’ve seen skies so hard and blue I believe I could reach up and scratch them. I’ve studied the blue spruce towers along our street, black in most light yet ripe with brown cones or yellow with pollen; our front lawn birches’ papery white bark with artists’ sketchpad charcoal studies on it amid ochre stains left by running sap; blue and purple shadows cast on ice and snow.

I’ve seen all these things myself. These things or something like them are there for you too should you care to pause for moment and not take in the view so much as absorb it. The wonder of it all is I’ve also seen these things through the eyes of others, and I can’t help but see them differently. Alec and Charles taught me to look at things twice.          

Dispatches from the Crooked 9 has been your most unreliable, unbalanced and inaccurate alternative source of everything since 2013. My companion site www.megeoff.com is a little dusty, but up to date.