SAINTS PRESERVE US

L’Affaire Alberta 

One problem with the digital transmission of correspondence is that sometimes people who aren’t supposed to read it can. The current White House administration can attest to this. The cause is usually user error shared exponentially and which is very different from predicated active snooping like steaming opening envelopes. Funny what you come across on social media.

Recently I read through the registration form for the Alberta USA Movement, a “flash mob cookout” to be held on a ranch near Camrose, AB which is southeast of Edmonton, less than an hour’s speed limit drive. The e-mail document could be a fake, but given the state of Alberta these days, unlikely. Regulations specified that Canadian flags were verboten! US ones only! A minor quibble like that could prove irksome to unvaccinated Trucker Convoy veterans who co-opted the Canadian flag as a symbol of protest.

Camrose is one of those Alberta towns whose reason for existing is now a little distant, hazy. It is celebrating its 125th anniversary this year, so it’s five years older than the province. It was a regional railway hub when regional railways existed. It’s all services now: education, health and retail for locals and surrounding ranches and farms. It’s main street, Main Street, has been designated historic, quaint and eclectic. There’s a refurbished art deco movie theatre, a hotel with a tavern, and a Chinese restaurant. There’s always a Chinese restaurant. Main Street began to wither in the 70s when developers erected a mall just outside of town on Highway 13. The mall began to wither when developers erected stand-alone big box retailers beside it and on the other side of 13. Camrose is The Last Picture Show, Winesburg, Ohio and Hal Ketchum’s despairingly catchy “Small Town Saturday Night”: ...you know the world must be flat, 'cause when people leave town they never come back...

Annexation by a convulsing superpower will fix everything. This mentality makes the separatism movement in Alberta very different from that of Quebec’s. Quebec’s separatists demand solitude. Alberta’s secessionists crave some sort of Christian Mingle hook up as comforting as a mom tending to a scrape with a Q-Tip dab of Mercurochrome, a Band-Aid and a kiss. The way things weren’t but could’ve been. In that other god they trust because the only way forward is backward, leveraging complaints and inflating grudges.

Meanwhile, the “Elbows Up!” federal election campaign is underway. It’s proving to be the most memorable one in my years as an eligible voter because the main issues supersede traditional internal bickering. The very nation is being threatened by a friend and ally. Trust has been broken. So much so that even Quebec is exhibiting signs of Canadian nationalism. It’s strictly a two-party race and I suspect the result will be a Conservative or Liberal majority government. Majority governments are rare birds of late. Black is white, up is down.

Closer to home, Alberta Premier Danielle Smith spent the weekend in Florida where she attended a Prager University Foundation gala. Prager, a sophisticated right wing propaganda operation, is as scholastic as Trump University. She also revealed to Breitbart News (Hello Steve Bannon! How was prison? A healthier stint than Jeffrey Epstein’s I’ll bet!) that a Canadian Conservative government would be more aligned with the views of the current White House administration (I since understand der Trumpenfuhrer is jury-rigging a mechanism for an unconstitutional third term). Her intended “Midas Touch” endorsement which might prove the “Kiss of Death” to the Conservative campaign. Reading the room in a closed United Conservative Party town hall meeting in a Camrose motel banquet facility is a little different from having a middle finger on the Canadian pulse. 

Premier Smith, advocate for and author of the “Alberta Sovereignty Act” and slave to her simplistic populist ideology (the “Calgary School” to political scientists), is destined to be remembered as either a heroic diplomat, think Chamberlain in Munich (that worked), or something akin to one of the more salacious footnotes in the Starr Report which went rather deep probing President Clinton’s daily dalliances with a smitten White House intern (Hi Monica!).

Now, the time has come for me to get my drag rags on and perform as a Spice Girl for Premier Smith: Tell me what you want, what you really, really want! I’m speculating now, but I think Premier Smith wished to attend that Camrose cookout. Tricky optics, though. I think the elephant in the Alberta government’s cabinet room is Republican. I think this province’s government has a covert agenda that’s as dirty as a coal mine or an abandoned oil well. I think it’s time for this government to come clean.                           

 

Dispatches from the Crooked 9 has been your most unreliable, unbalanced and inaccurate alternative source of everything since 2013. Sunset Oasis Confidential is with its publisher. Have a look at the jacket design at my companion site www.megeoff.com. Of Course You Did is still available.

HUMAN WRECKAGE

Indications of Spring 

This past Tuesday morning I spent too much time in the dentist’s chair. I visit frequently because 50 years of black coffee and 25-a-day doesn’t qualify as self-care in certain circles. There’s a flat-screen TV mounted to the ceiling. It’s a SHARP (“From sharp minds come SHARP products”). I’ve never asked for it to be turned on; so many years, so many visits. I play short-rack Scrabble with the brand: I begin with HARP and HARPS and go from there. Time passes. This time was different: I fumbled with the remote long enough to access the wasteland. I found the Chicago Cubs hosting the Los Angeles Dodgers in (“Crumbling guardrail, slow motion car fall!”) Tokyo. Baseball was officially underway. I settled back for a not unpleasant hour and a half.

“Been waiting all winter for the time to be right just to take you along, baby, get ready…” My unofficial spring anthem is “Fishin’ in the Dark” by Nitty Gritty Dirt Band. If that three and a half minutes of euphemistic joy doesn’t make you want to square dance with hillbillies like Bugs Bunny, you’re either unconscious or dead (The Alarm’s “Rain in the Summertime” greets the June equinox). I played “Fishin’” five consecutive times Thursday morning, shoes off on the living room carpet for James Brown-Mick Jagger interpretive dancing. Worked up a sweat.

There wasn’t a whole lot of country music in my record collection when I moved from Montreal to Edmonton in 1990. What I had was outlaw. Hank Williams, Johnny Cash (Thanks, Dad!), a fine early days of CD compilation of Willie Nelson, Steve Earle and Lyle Lovett. I was aware of the Dirt Band of course because Will the Circle Be Unbroken (1972) remains a legendary tribute to traditional country music (Their Dirt Does Dylan from 2002 is worth your time should that combination intrigue). The first “shaker” or hall party I attended was unsettling. A choreographed line dance to the Dirt Band’s cover of Springsteen’s “Cadillac Ranch” filled the floor. I was appalled. Then “Fishin’ in the Dark” came on.

Thursday afternoon I strutted down Whyte Avenue. For the most part, all things considered, I figured I was looking fine. My reflection didn’t crack any display windows. I was wearing my older bomber jacket, the one with the rotted collar and cuffs. Its brown leather has faded to green in some places. My scarf was tied just so, a Eurotrash knot. On my head a salt-stained and sun-bleached Boston Red Sox cap. My destination was Blackbyrd, my preferred indie record store. I overshot it, too distracted by the bright blue sky and the warmth of the sun. I doubled back. I spent almost an hour browsing, something I haven’t done for ages. I bought five discs; some jazz, some blues and a few records by groups whom I’ve heard about more than actually heard. I felt like Hemingway: “It was good.”

Saturday morning, just yesterday, I experienced once again the serendipitous mystic elation of scribbling. My usual cigarette Circle K is on University Avenue across from the dormitories and up the street from the Butterdome, an indoor athletic facility that really does resemble a pound of butter. The young woman who manages the store greeted me warmly. Here comes a regular. She was training a teenage boy. I guessed his first day on his first-ever job. We’ve all been there. I was patient; the day outside was looking to be a fine one, no hurry. I chose a Bic disposable with a Toronto Blue Jays logo on it while I waited. I’m out of Zippo fuel and these days that stuff is a dedicated errand commodity, hard to find.

Once they’d totalled up my cigarettes and applied the bulk discount, I said, “You haven’t charged me for the lighter.”

The Circle K lady replied, “I know. It is my gift to you.” I didn’t know what to say. What could I tell her?

My forthcoming novel Sunset Oasis Confidential opens with its hero attempting to buy a Bic in a Circle K. The scene was inspired by my own attempt to buy a Bic in this very store three years earlier. That particular episode reminded me of an uncompleted transaction with a cashier in a Montreal record store 45 years before. Combined, I now had the refreshed genesis of a niggling story: no middle, no end, but a new beginning after two false starts.

I strode out of my Circle K yesterday, a little pumped, a little primped peacock. The strip mall parking lot was Edmonton in springtime, patches of grey and black ice, dunes of non-skid grit and litter. I stepped over all the debris, not because I took long strides, but because I was defying gravity, walking on sunshine.                   

  

Dispatches from the Crooked 9 has been your most unreliable, unbalanced and inaccurate alternative source of everything since 2013. Sunset Oasis Confidential is with its publisher. Have a look at the jacket design at my companion site www.megeoff.com. Of Course You Did is still available. Collect the set!

HUMAN WRECKAGE

Springing Forward, Turning Back Time 

Ann swears daily that she won’t look at the news feeds on her device anymore. Friends and relations report cancellations of home newspaper delivery, news apps and cable news networks. An unrelenting assault of madness agitates. And there’s a secondary factor: consuming reasonably objective information to stay reasonably well-informed is not inexpensive. An ability to afford a ceaseless barrage of bad news is now something of a questionable privilege. We pay to be driven mental.

Ann and I are of our era. Although Ann is more comfortable with small blue screens than I will ever be, we like tactile facts and analysis, the texture of paper. The Crooked 9 receives The Globe and Mail six days a week and The Edmonton Journal on Saturdays (mainly for The New York Times crossword puzzles). We subscribe to The Economist, The Walrus (“a Canadian conversation”) and Alberta Views. The albatross of current affairs – whatever the reporter’s slant or pundit’s point of view – is that they’re current. Sometimes I ache for a different magazine lying around the house. Something new, something less dreadful to peruse.

I am a newspaper and periodical junkie. Not my fault.

The Montreal Gazette was dropped every morning in the house I grew up in. Dad always bought The Montreal Star at Central Station, something to read on the train home from work (Bastard did crossword puzzles in ink, my mother too). Time Canada arrived with Tuesday’s post. My big brother subscribed to Hockey Pictorial. After church he’d buy The Sunday Express, a tabloid whose existence was predicated on Saturday night’s Montreal Canadiens game. My first ever magazine subscription was a gift from my brother, Sports Illustrated with a string attached: he read it first. An American family from Lake Charles, LA lived across the street for a time. Three boys close in age, Doug, Alan and Walter. They devoured Circus magazine, my gateway drug to the music press.

I’ve been something of a moth in my life. I sought the firetraps everywhere I’ve lived or overstayed my visitor’s welcome, shops stocking magazines, newspapers and usually tobacco. Billy’s on Calgary’s downtown Seventh Avenue transit corridor. Mike’s News on Jasper, Edmonton’s main street; Hub Cigar across the river on south side Whyte Avenue. In Montreal there was a place on Cypress behind the Windsor Hotel whose space demanded sideways crab scuttling; I imagine it now as a hoarder’s wet dream. Multimags was street level in the Brutalist building atop the Guy Metro entrance.

Multimags was a constant in my life from 1975 through 1990, Polaris. I lived near it (four addresses), went to university near it and worked near it. It was always there until I left town. I’ve had a recurring dream of late in which I’m in Multimags, its witching hour version I guess because some of the fixtures are from Hub Cigar and Billy’s. I’m browsing for something in-depth about something insignificant. I’m desperate for distraction. I’ve got to get away from it all, flip through a magazine about nothing that matters. I want an issue of Sport, Inside Sports, Crawdaddy, Trouser Press, even a Hit Parader should Mick and Keith be on its cover. The racks are almost empty, no porn in sealed plastic bags even. All I can find are perfect-bind Life commemorative collectibles devoted to Taylor Swift and Jesus. A sleep apnea gasp startles me awake, sudden enough to shake off the night sweats.

Flints and fluid for my Zippo are not easy to buy. Magazines equally qualify as a niche market category. Those dusty, smelly, specialized shops, packed with character and arcana succumbed to the now, our disposable Bic era of simplistic social media misinformation memes. Fahrenheit 451 as ones and zeroes.

Ann and I are not cheap, but we’re thrifty. We frequent three different supermarkets, choosing our primary shop upon review of each banner’s electronic flyer. One store has become a significantly less painful errand experience since the retirement of a morbidly obese, overly curious and infuriatingly slow cashier (God bless you, Jacqueline). And the piped-in music is usually an unexpected treat: I’ve bopped around the store’s perimeter to Nik Kershaw’s “Wouldn’t It Be Good”, Better Than Ezra and Jesus Jones. We always turn up with a list if we’ve not forgotten it. I push the cart, Ann flits about. I look back sometimes and she’s Hall and Oates, gone. That’s when I head for the modest magazine rack. Simple Minds.

MOJO is a British music magazine. Its editorial content reflects my tastes – it’s stuck in the past. It’s also an investment, $18.99 CDN per issue. It’s also a key element of travel extravagance, I usually buy MOJO at an airport newsstand for something else to read should I choose to close my paperback. Our grocer, to my amazement, had MOJO in stock. And the Stones were on the cover as I always imagine them, a promo photo from 1969. The feature story was a deep dive into the recording of Let It Bleed (the sleeve art a leftover from its original Automatic Changer title), a masterpiece and a transitional album welcoming new member Mick Taylor. I was sorely tempted, but I was feeling sort of like Dr John, wrong place and wrong time: Ann and I weren’t going anywhere except maybe stopping for beer and cigarettes on the way home.

Athlon Sports 2025 Major League Baseball Preview caught my eye. It retailed for a dollar less than MOJO. I’d never heard of Athlon Sports. I was sure my friend Stats Guy had and I was sure he already had it. When he and I convene the Tuesday Night Beer Club (my American refugee neighbour, Ted, likes to join us when he can), we tend to revisit the past because any discussion of current affairs seems to act as a potion that turns us into two (or three) angry men. Baseball can be a touchy topic too because the game has changed (for the worse), the rules have changed (mixed reviews) and the money paid to its one-dimensional superstars is obscene (no debate), but we still love the idea of the sport, its essence.

I hadn’t purchased an MLB preview publication in decades. They went the way of the Montreal Expos, ceased to exist. Athlon Sports? The mastheads would be in a Hub Cigar-Multimags Hall of Fame: Baseball America, Baseball Digest, Lindy’s, Street and Smith …. Utterly essential reading although sometimes already stale at point of purchase. Rosters rock and roil. Sports Illustrated and The Sporting News were weeklies, authoritative, sports biblical, venerated. Their previews appeared closer to Opening Day which meant their team assessments incorporated newsy bits from spring training. I miss all these defunct newspapers and magazines; lately I miss paying a bit of attention to innocuous and meaningless stuff. Does anybody really care about the Miami Marlins? I dropped the baseball magazine in our shopping cart.           

Dispatches from the Crooked 9 has been your most unreliable, unbalanced and inaccurate alternative source of everything since 2013. Sunset Oasis Confidential is with its publisher. Almost time to blow the dust off my companion site www.megeoff.com. Refresh coming soon. 

SAINTS PRESERVE US

The Fifty-first Column: A Canadian Thought Experiment 

The news cycle in Canada of late has spun into a cyclone. The Liberal government knows its going to have to give up the shop even as a thug from Queens, NY demands protection money. The extortion The Wall Street Journal called “the dumbest trade war ever” is on hold for the length of the warranty on a shoddily made American consumer durable.

The chaos created by the only billionaire in history who bankrupted his own casino resort (if you’re going to stack the deck, it’s at least got to be full), has forced a dormant, complacent Canada to take stock of its very essence. Maybe global affairs should matter more to a middle power. Maybe we should live up to our NATO treaty obligations. Maybe the absence of free trade within our borders is inefficient. Maybe, as a trading nation, we push harder for closer ties with the European Union (a pact is in place – as yet unratified by six or seven members). With eyes wide open, maybe we defrost our relationship with China if only because the enemy of our enemy is our friend.

Shame if the shop happened to catch fire.

Der Trumpenfuhrer says his blustery existential threat, this existential angst and dread he’s generating, could all be swept away simply by Canada agreeing to join the United States of America as its fifty-first state. And to be fair, eliminating the border would, in way, virtually erase the scourge of illegal American guns in this country. I’ve devoted some thought to this worst-case scenario. It’s going to be a bit more complicated than one more star on Old Glory. The odious vulgarian could actually end up fucking himself, his party and his country with unintended consequences. But maybe, just maybe, the felon’s big imperial idea is only half-insane from a north of 49 perspective.

Canada and the United States are wealthy Western democracies with dissimilar political traditions. For my thought experiment I will assume Canada cedes its Westminster system to our neighbour’s republican model. Alaska and Hawaii were the last two states to join the Union. That was 1959. The even number matters here. Legislators at the time, partisan even then, assumed one new member would lean Blue or Democrat and the other Red or Republican. They would cancel each other out in the United States Congress.

The US Congress is like a Montreal duplex, one up and one down. The upper storey is the Senate; every American state has two elected senators. The House of Representatives is the street level unit. There states are represented by their populations, so California will have more congressional districts than Rhode Island or Delaware. Majority margins for either the Democrats or Republicans overall tend to run lean.

Canada’s awfully big, ten provinces and three territories. Unwieldy. Regionalized. Diverse. The melting pot chime of Manifest Destiny never rang true up here. And a fifty-first state, an odd outlier rife with socialists just wouldn’t do. Checks and balances. My thought experiment assumes that Canada’s northern territories would be relegated to the status of Guam or Puerto Rico, or perhaps stitched to Alaska. I’m still left with ten new states (six if Quebec finally achieves independence and the four Atlantic provinces are mashed into one), a nice round partisan number to stitch on the Stars and Stripes. But six or ten new states with an overwhelmingly progressive bent because the Liberal Party of Canada wasn’t dubbed “the natural governing party” for nothing.

Imagine twenty new US senators, maybe fourteen or sixteen of whom will be certified pinkos. Sure, gerrymander former federal ridings into congressional districts, go crazy, make some cuts. There are currently three hundred and thirty-eight seats in Canada’s House of Commons. Slash that to a lower number easily divisible by two. Still, an alarming number of freshly minted Dems and habitual libs suddenly sitting in the House of Representatives. We’d control Congress. Both chambers. And since we’re Americans, why, we could run one of our own, saved by God to be reborn in the USA, for president (not Ted Cruz).

Someone’s knocking at the door. Let us in. We’re going to burn your nice white playhouse down. From the inside this time.                     

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 that will change in the coming months.

THE MUSTER POINT PROJECT

Compendium and Consolidation 

It Was Here He Received His Only Formal Education is the latest vinyl (blue) offering from Calgary indie rock act The Muster Point Project. Released around the date of Keith Richards’s eighty-first birthday, the album was swept aside somewhat by the avalanche that is Christmas, a frenzy of marketing and grandiose domesticity. It’s possible TMPP did itself no favours dropping two new songs (“It’s Gonna Be Christmas” and “Darlin’”) so soon afterward. It ain’t easy keeping up with a prolific artist now realizing his full potential.

TMPP is essentially Kevin Franco augmented by some well-known hired guns. He writes the songs and plays most of the instruments. Kevin and I have been friends for, Jesus, thirty-five years now. One of my newer friends. We’ve worked together in past professional lives. He’s promoted my fiction since and I’ve co-written a few songs with him. We were sitting in a bar years ago, talking. Kevin said, “You know you’re better than this.” I had filters then, sort of. I thought, “Who the fuck are you to lecture me?” even though grocery flyer prose didn’t quite fulfil me (Pork butt whole – missed a comma, genius, whoops). I didn’t understand then that the guitar riff on his recorded Code-a-Phone “I’m-not-here” message was more than just a lark.

TMPP has been compared to Steely Dan. I don’t hear it unless “Steely Dan” is some sort of internet shorthand for literate, carefully constructed and well produced. The songs aren’t slick so much as sophisticated, and curious listeners do expect some context from which they can dip a foot in cold water. The real deal is the “The Singing Mailman”, the song of praise and thanks to John Prine which closes side one: And now, I wanna be like John/Telling stories and spinning yarns …

“Old Black Suit” reminds me of O. Henry’s short fiction. The fabric of a lifetime. Bought stylish and new for celebration days, eventually relegated to funeral wear and then ultimately forgotten in the back of a closet. “This Town Has Changed” suggests that maybe it’s not the site or the city itself shifting so much as the observer. My Gen X friend is feeling his age. Welcome to the club, new member!

I tend to date the birth of rock ‘n’ roll, rock music, from 1951 with the release of “Rocket 88” by Jackie Brenston and his Delta Cats who were actually Ike Turner and his Rhythm Kings playing behind their vocalist. Someone else might argue for “Earth Angel” by the Penguins. Nothing’s firm some seventy-five years on except that rock is now a subgenre of popular music. Its roots in blues, country and folk proffered subjects beyond automobiles and teenage wildlife; worksongs dedicated to its high culture outlier status: chain gangs, railway and highway construction, factory work.

Khakis forever! “Now We’re Successful” bleaches blue-collar lament white. There’s no satisfaction anywhere; things are tough all over. Rock has grown up. “Don’t Give Me Anything” lacerates a typical business meeting: Big words, you think you’re the tops/You even fool some with your malaprops. I’m not a particularly sensitive soul, but that line triggered some professional PTSD for me, having sat downwind around a few boardroom tables. A close friend (not Kevin) informed me once, very cheerfully, that working as an ad man made me worse than a whore. Ipso facto in vino veritas: these days even sex workers have better PR. There’s a loose but not lurid theme to It Was Here He Received His Only Formal Education: the right-brain directive to pursue the muse over career opportunities.

TMPP is an indie act releasing songs with actual bridges and verses into the Spotify and YouTube realm in the post-album era. The dozen songs on the LP have been surfing the ether faster than 33 and a 1/3 RPM these past 12 months. It Was Here He Received His Only Formal Education is, at its heart, an annual report: TMPP consolidated; 2024 was a very good year.

If you’re intrigued, the best place to start is musterpoint.bandcamp.com. Other sources of music and information include Spotify, YouTube, Facebook, iTunes, Pandora and fuck knows what else. What's App and TikTok for all I know. Bluetooth and cable TV. Radio, newspapers and magazines.                 

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

The Addictive Flavour of Tasseled Gucci Loafers 

Her voice still rings down the telephone line; the memory still makes me laugh. My sister calling from Montreal: “Ha-ha, Quebec’s no longer the national laughingstock!” What could I say? I was embarrassed for Alberta.

The fragment of conversation is from 2019. The nascent United Conservative Party (UCP), an uneasy coalition of traditional Tories and the lunatic fringe, had been handed its first mandate. Premier Jason Kenney commenced the province’s populist reset. The good old days had returned because the people were galvanized by a common enemy: everybody else in Canada and a minority of Albertans who couldn’t quite fit into his regressive narrative. Kenney’s tragic flaw is that he was a tad too sensible for the more extremist elements gathered underneath his big tent. God-fearing rural folk such as Alberta’s current premier, the Banshee of Invermectin, Danielle Smith, didn’t just jiggle Kenney’s highwire, they cut it.

Smith’s first piece of major legislation, passed in November, 2022 was the Alberta Sovereignty Within a United Canada Act, essentially a pre-emptive complaint about every potential bit of federal legislation real or imagined. Despite the “United Canada” phrase in the act’s official title, it’s better parsed as “fuck off and die Ottawa”. Hello, bonjour Quebec! But Quebec too can fuck off along with everyone else. Smith once suggested that had her Sovereignty Act been in place she would’ve used it to dispute Ottawa’s attempt to curtail the scourge of single-use plastics, shopping bags for instance and, notably, drinking straws. Hills to die on.

Something happened Monday in Washington, DC. Something alarming in the Capitol’s Rotunda. A really anemic sequel should mob violence be your particular peccadillo. Traditionally the inauguration of the US president-elect is like John Lee Hooker’s “House Rent Boogie”: outdoors, y’know, people. Der Trumpenfuhrer’s second one was moved inside to the scene of sedition because of chilly weather. The change of venue was something of a snub to Premier Smith, she being one of the 250,000 ticket holders who, unlike former Edmonton Oiler and whine merchant Wayne Gretzky (bland, big nose), didn’t make the A-list cut. Premier Smith watched the ceremony at the Canadian Embassy, a turn of events that can only be described as ironic in the full, complete Alanis Morrisette definition of the term.

Just last weekend Premier Smith was socializing at the Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach, Florida, licking the designer footwear favoured by an odious, vulgar felon who was saved by God to fulfill his mission of making America great again. I never guessed Smith had a foot fetish. Maybe she even paid out of pocket for a $TRUMP, a fungible token which should not be confused with a cryptocurrency. All of this fawning diplomacy to persuade der Trumpenfuhrer not to levy a 25-per-cent tariff on Alberta's energy products. As for trade goods from the rest of Canada? “Just fuckin’ yard on ‘em, eh, bud!” Yes, because the rest of Canada funding an Alberta oil pipeline to Pacific tidewater to the tune of some $30-billion just wasn’t good enough.

What’s particularly irksome about Premier Smith’s lost weekend is that the Thursday prior, 16 January, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and all of Canada’s other premiers signed a NON-BINDING declaration of unity against the massive economic threat suddenly posed by my country’s largest trading partner and greatest ally. This document was facilitated by a prime minister whose career trajectory is eerily similar to the fate of a certain Norwegian blue parrot and whose country is incapable of facilitating free trade within its borders; yet somehow some stuff gets done - if only symbolically. But my sense is that Quebec Premier Francois Legault and Ontario Premier Doug Ford are prepared to shut off light and heat throughout the northeastern United States to make a point, to counter der Trumpenfuhrer’s blanket tariff (due 1 February apparently) in our national interest. Quebec acting for Canada! C’mon! Alberta Premier Smith refused to sign the document although she mused that maybe Canada could erase some of its trade surplus with the US if it bought more, like, American food?

I don’t know, Madam Premier. It might taste leathery with hints of crow and humble pie.   

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. New fiction coming this year.

NONSENSE VERSE

DJT 

Disavowing democratic dealings

Dilettante doyen denizens

Desire diktats doling

Dollar days disbursements

Delicate doves decrying

Disastrous damage decreed

Destructive deportations

Dripping darkness descending

Demonic drones dueting

Discourse disinclination

Digging dirty deeds down deep

Dismembering decapitated DC

Deferring decency dispensing dirt

Disrespecting dedicated departees

Devilish dotard demanding

Denigration deployment

Despair despair despair

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

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.