HUMAN WRECKAGE

Cockroaches

I have never joined a political party. I am suspicious of people who actively promote themselves as activists and philanthropists. Corporations with fluffy mission statements are suspect, or worse, inept. Team-building exercises at work? Oh, please. They’re worse than meetings. I’m no plumber or roofer, never been a joiner. Most venerable, long-established human institutions are rotten. In cosmic terms a lifetime is woefully short and ultimately absurd. Dredge your own meaning should you care to; take it where you find it. Stop and smell the dead flowers. And, gee, all things considered, for the most part and way more often than not, it’s fun being on the planet.

Late last century I had a passing acquaintance with a guy whose job was masquerading as Mick in a Rolling Stones tribute band. He called their hardcore fans “freakazoids.” The adjective wasn’t meant as an insult. He spoke it with bemused gratitude; these people paid his wages. I’ve seen his band perform in the three Canadian cities I’ve resided in going back to the 80s; the last time was spring 2022. I’ve seen the actual Stones seven times, dating back to the summer of 1978 but not since autumn 2005.

It's possible I’m a Stones completist. It’s possible I have every album they’ve ever released and multiple copies of maybe more than a few of them. It’s possible there are four or five box sets stashed around the Crooked 9. It’s possible there’s a baker’s foot of DVD and book spines on a shelf in the den; it’s possible some more are down in the basement. It’s possible I have a modest collection of tour posters. It’s possible there may be a couple of Stones t-shirts in my bureau drawer. It’s possible there are some sad sack fanboy “collectible” sundries cluttering other rooms. It’s possible my emotional and intellectual growth, certainly with this particular file, stood on the brakes as I rammed in to puberty. But I am not a freakazoid.

A longtime friend of mine, a Springsteen nut though not an unhinged one, once said to me, “Had the internet existed when we were teenagers, our heads would’ve exploded.” No two-week wait for Rolling Stone’s “Random Notes” tidbits (and porn of course; let’s not forget porn as accessible as guns in the United States). Bless some of the tribes on what Pete Townshend imagined as “the Grid” for the failed “Lifehouse project,” parts of which we know as Who’s Next. There are two internet freakazoid Stones sites I infrequently waste some time visiting. Denizens have been burning up wifi and the wires this week.

“Who the fuck are The Cockroaches?” posters popped up throughout London over Easter like Banksy murals. Freakazoids noted that the type font was the same as the “Who the fuck is Mick Jagger?” t-shirt Keith sometimes wore on the 1975 “Tour of the Americas.” Equally important, The Cockroaches is a not-so-secret Stones pseudonym for secret club shows. Real life “Da Vinci Code” stuff with more gravitas. The pink poster suggested the “Miss You” 45 sleeve. The bottom right, where any graphic designer would place a logo, featured a QR code (those weird pixels – I can’t remember what phrase QR abbreviates anymore). That code led to a static website, a throwback bedroom with a black Bakelite dial phone and Bowie’s “Ziggy” LP visible on a shelf. One click infested The Cockroaches poster on the wall with scurrying vermin.

The Stones embraced the dark art of hype and promotion long ago even though their music and performance did the real talking They morphed into marketing pros with the onset of their corporate era which I date from Steel Wheels in 1989. Clothing lines in IMAX; buy the stemware and cologne; Mick could teach an MBA course. A commercial pop culture juggernaut is very different from an irresistible cultural force. Their last relevant album is the punk-goosed Some Girls dating from the time when Mick realized the Clash could indeed become the only band that matters. And he was right. Nothing the Stones released subsequently defined any of the ensuing decades(!) or any particular era therein. Times changed but the Rolling Stones didn’t.

The Stones are one of those bands poorly served by greatest hits compilations (and good gawd y’all, there’s tons of them). Their magic to me was always the rest of any particular album. To use modern phrases, the “deep dives” into “deep cuts” require patience, repeated plays. The freakazoid demands a couple of obscurities or B-sides in the set in exchange for an expensive ticket and a poor seat – not that I would know. And so… With the release of Emotional Rescue (1980) or maybe Tattoo You (1981) Stones albums had to be picked apart for gems. Inspired individual tracks, never the complete package; the music took a backseat to their status and marketing acumen. And fair enough, the recording industry was flipped on its head in the Information Age. Money-losing tours used to be offset by album sales in the millions.

The Cockroaches yesterday released “Rough and Twisted” in white vinyl in a plain white sleeve. It’s yet to exist in any other format. There’s no other way to hear it. Only available in very limited quantities in certain record shops. Marketing gimmickry up “Andrew’s Blues.” Stones-centric detectives, those internet freakazoids, have drawn comparisons to the “Cook Cook Blues” B-side of the unremarkable and less than memorable “Rock and a Hard Place” 1989 single. (I had to look that one up; flip through the collection not knowing where to start or consult a reference book – it’s possible I own an out of date Rolling Stones encyclopaedia of songs.) The next single may be called “Mr Charm.” The album, slated for a June (or maybe July) release, may be called Foreign Tongues – I can just imagine the deluge of alternate sleeves and related merch. 

I emailed my friends at Blackbyrd Myzoozik hoping for a meaningful and specialized loyal customer Cockroaches trophy in a plain white sleeve, money no object. Seems they’ve ghosted me. All of this makes me feel 16 instead of 66. I have been highly amused this last week and not in a detached way. “Well all right! Are you having a good time?”               

Dispatches from the Crooked 9 is your most unreliable, unbalanced and inaccurate alternative source of everything meaningless. No AI and little intelligence of any sort since 2013! My latest novel Sunset Oasis Confidential is available in multiple formats. Visit my companion site www.megeoff.com for links to your preferred retailer. Of Course You Did is still in print. Be a completist! Be a happy sad sack! Collect the set! 

A FAN’S NOTES

Len Deighton 1929 - 2026

The Associated Press’s canned obituary for English author Len Deighton employed the perfect adjective to describe his unique contribution to spy fiction: “grubby.” He was a contemporary of Ian Fleming and John le Carre. The espionage thriller genre is such that there was plenty of space for three very different styles: comic book, cerebral and detective noir.

Their common thread is the Cold War and Britain’s secret intelligence services (SIS). Should a researcher examine their dossiers (provided they’ve not been purposely misfiled, destroyed or otherwise tampered with), they will unearth some curious, if frayed, tenuous links. Eric Ambler, more a contemporary of Graham Greene’s, was a major influence on our three authors, as was Greene, who himself was an admirer of Ambler. When James Bond must fly to Istanbul to collect a stolen Soviet cypher machine in From Russia with Love, he packs an Ambler novel for first class BOAC distraction.

Fleming, a working journalist like Greene, spent the Second World War in British Naval Intelligence. It’s been plausibly posited he became an MI6 (external intelligence) asset afterward and remained one for the rest of his life. Greene was an MI6 veteran (Our Man in Havana, a scathing satire, did not play well with Britain’s Official Secrets Act). Le Carre worked for both branches of the SIS, MI5 (internal intelligence) and MI6. Ambler and Deighton, military veterans themselves, sprang from the advertising industry, the former a copywriter and the latter a commercial artist.

My father introduced me to le Carre. Even when I was at my most distant and wayward, we always had something to discuss over the phone; me in Montreal, him in Ottawa. Le Carre wasn’t a magazine masthead, there wasn’t a new novel every month. Still too much of a snob to appreciate Fleming’s prose (His time would come by the grace of Calgary Transit), I’d exhausted Greene and Ambler. I needed an alternative to them and the literature I was studying in university (God, if I manage to read 26 books a year now, two per month, I congratulate myself – I keep an annual list).

A haunt of mine in Montreal that was not a record store was the Classic Bookshop at the corner of Ste-Catherine and Crescent. It was proximate to Concordia University and an easy walk from my studio apartment a little farther west, a block north along de Maisonneuve. The Triad Grafton paperback editions of Deighton’s novels jumped and popped from the shelves, facing out. Lots of white space. The author’s name was bold and black, all caps, a sans serif font – I want to say Futura. The title followed the same template although reduced by a few points and rendered in a contrasting colour. The graphic was always a close-cropped, plot-suggestive collage of dirty work: always a revolver, a bullet or two, a cigarette butt and maybe a champagne cork. Their design uniformity reminded me of Paul Hogarth’s often sinister watercolours on Graham Greene Penguins.

What I read when I took a chance on Funeral in Berlin stunned me. The characters weren’t mandarins in public school ties flouncing about and playing at espionage. Deighton’s style evoked Raymond Chandler and Ross Macdonald. This was British Invasion prose: detective noir right back at you from swingin’ London, not from Carnaby Street so much as the shadow of a railway arch on a dreary dead-end street on a rainy night. No place for toffs, just hard-bitten operatives with decent vocabularies. It was impossible not to be reminded of the eloquent grit in the gears of Britain’s class system: Room at the Top; Saturday Night and Sunday Morning; This Sporting Life. Kingsley Amis (a favourite of mine) need not apply.

There are no substitutes for Deighton; indeed, neither le Carre or Fleming. Each writer was unique. Ted Allbeury, a former agent in Churchill’s Special Operations Executive, tried. He attempted to touch all the bases. The words didn’t quite work despite his wealth of inside knowledge and field expertise. I can’t remember the plots or even the titles of the few used novels I’ve read by him.  

Horse Under Water, Deighton’s second novel and one of five or six featuring his cynical, anonymous narrator (Michael Caine as “Harry Palmer” in the movies) is on my night table. Excepting his cookbook, I’ve read everything Deighton has written including his fine military histories. These past few years I’ve been revisiting him in increments, a couple of his titles over the course of a year’s reading.

One of the sustained pleasures of my life has been propping myself up in bed and reading before lights out. The post-midnight stamina I used to depend on has dissipated. My eyes are frequently as tired as I am; I need reading glasses. Staying awake is a chore best left undone, yet some ingrained habits are so hard to break. Deighton used to keep me up well in to the wee small hours; he still gives it his best. In these days of pension cheques and senior discounts, some of the pleasure of rereading him after a gap of 30 or 40 years is knowing I’ve neither school nor work to worry about in the morning. Just my bladder, still, thankfully, as regular as any alarm clock.                                       

Dispatches from the Crooked 9 has been your most unreliable, unbalanced and inaccurate alternative source of everything since 2013. Sunset Oasis Confidential is still out there languishing in multiple formats. Visit my companion site www.megeoff.com for links to your preferred retailer. Of Course You Did is still in print. Collect the set!

HUMAN WRECKAGE

Fleeting Crossword Soul Searching

I was standing at the kitchen sink, a waffled tea towel in my hand. I’d decided I’d give Jesus the morning off from drying our breakfast dishes, what with Easter chocolate on grocery store shelves and Facebook’s “memories” function prepping to remind Him of the worst-ever long weekend of His short life. Ann was seated at the counter, the Crooked 9’s command centre: phones, paper, pencils and pens at hand, the bulletin board and wall calendar hanging to her right. She was studying Sunday’s New York Times crossword: always a themed, expanded grid (21x21 as opposed to the other six days’ 15x15) and generally “Thursday” difficulty.

Ann said, “You should know this one, 98-across: ‘Letters on a crucifix.’”

I said, “Four letters?”

Ann said, “Four letters.”

I wiped my Who logo coffee mug dry. Pontius Pilate’s mocking acronym was just beyond the tip of my tongue, floating there by the cupboard door handle. Oh, God, I thought, I should know this one. I really should.

My father’s parents were both British; they met (in church, as it happens) and married in Montreal. My father was raised in the Church of England. Speaking with him late in his life (and much later in my own), I came to understand that any faith that had been ingrained in him did not withstand night fighter sorties over the Continent, nor even the shocking toll exacted on his squadron by training flights over Scotland and the North Sea. My mother grew up in a Roman Catholic family. Her father was of Irish extraction and her mother was French-Canadian. When my parents married in 1950, the in-laws agreed that the grandchildren would be raised Catholic. I doubt my father cared one way or the other.

There were religious icons in my childhood bedroom, co-existing with the bogeyman in the closet and the monster under my bed. My guardian angel was a little boy in a blue robe with unnaturally large eyes. He had wings of course, and a prop, maybe a harp. He never struck me as entirely fit for the night watch. Beneath his portrait was a wooden crucifix with a bronzed Jesus nailed to it. Above his slumped head was an unfurled though curling scroll of bronzed vellum inscribed with some abbreviated Latin. Four letters.

Judas! It wasn’t long before my guardian angel and the decent fellow who died for the sins I committed even before I was born were replaced by an even bigger superhero, rendered almost half the size I actually was. I don’t know who inked and coloured Spider-Man in the late 60s; Stan Lee, I presume. Spidey was coming to my rescue, on the run. His blue, red and black costume popped from a plain white background. Decades were to pass before I came to appreciate the use of negative space in art and design, and to a certain extent, music and writing. Allow the viewer, listener and reader to fill in the blanks as (and if) required.

The web-slinging, wall-crawler’s flaw (because every hero has one, tragic or otherwise) was his inability to skate. He did not appear on the hockey posters I could get by saving up Coca-Cola bottlecap liners nor was he present on the hockey collectibles my father was handed at the Esso station for putting a “tiger in the tank” of our maroon Beaumont. Spidey did not play for the Montreal Canadiens. The hockey players on my wall had short careers – as most athletes do; Mick Jagger was waiting to go on, coked up and jittery.

I said to Ann, “Can you cross it with anything? I’m wracking my brain.”

She said, “No, but I think there’s an ‘I’.”

“Yeah, yeah.”

IRAE: “Dies – (requiem hymn)”; IRIE: “A-okay in some slang”; INXS: “‘Listen like Thieves’ band”; INRE: “Memo abbrev.”; NIHI: “Bygone grape soda”; INTO: “Fan of”; RANI: “Hindu queen” …

FUCK! (Crude, inappropriate and inarticulate exclamation often indictive of poor education and limited vocabulary.)

When the Tuesday Night Beer Club convenes Stats Guy, Ted and I often stump ourselves talking hockey players, baseball standings, epic war movie casts and celluloid Bond girls. Stats Guy always says, “We can googalize it.” Ted pulls out his phone. I always demure; hungover Catholics instinctively understand instant gratification is sinful. Safer in the long term to wait, believe in the payout at Saint Peter’s heavenly wagering window. I can’t imagine a devoted Roman Catholic signing up for Amazon Prime.

Ann said, “Got it!” She’d crossed the rubric. “INRI.”

“That’s it!” I cried.

“What’s it mean?”

Yessir, that’s my unbaptized pagan baby! I said, “Ah….” The ancient Roman alphabet consists of just 23 letters. Perfectly adequate for writing Latin, I suppose (their numbering system is unwieldy – the concept of zero as a digit in Western mathematics was still centuries hence). “'King of the Jews' or something like that,” I continued. A reminder of Rome’s absolute authority in Judea. Cut to Monty Python’s Life of Brian.

I could and still can see the faded green and yellowing Palm Sunday frond up against the wall in my pale blue bedroom, tucked behind the crucifix. I had to googalize INRI: Iesus Nazarenus, Rex Iudaeorum.

INRE to INRI: Unless 98-across comes up again in the next couple of weeks, I’m not going to remember any of this. Storage capacity is limited and there is more meaningful arcana to retain. Like the running order of It’s Only Rock ‘n Roll. Is “Luxury” on side one or side two? I knew that. Or I did.

Dispatches from the Crooked 9 has been your most unreliable, unbalanced and inaccurate alternative source of everything since 2013. Sunset Oasis Confidential is available in multiple formats. Visit my companion site www.megeoff.com for links to your preferred retailer. Of Course You Did remains in print. Collect the set! They're moving faster than gas station hockey posters. While supplies last!

SAINTS PRESERVE US

Mixed Emotions in Alberta

The Iran war is now in its second raging week. Taking my cue from Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, I’m just trying to make some sense of it all. I’m unsure, ambivalent and kind of uncertain all at once.

I don’t believe a fascist and hardline sectarian theocracy that addresses human rights within its borders with torture and guns, wages regional warfare by proxy and who tacitly supports Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and ensuing years of quagmire is a particularly noble national endeavour. I wonder about the end result or even if there will be such a thing. The odious and incompetent regime in Venezuela simply grew another head following the recent American decapitation operation. Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan: plus ca change. I worry too that FIFA, that gleefully corrupt organization behind football’s World Cup, is contemplating rescinding its inaugural “peace prize,” that shabby, ass-licking token it bestowed on der Trumpenfuhrer because the US Congress, the United Nations Security Council and The Hague (where the remanding of alleged war criminals is frequently stymied by lawyers, diplomatic immunity and finessed extradition treaties) may conclude an illegal war isn’t simply laissez-faire.

But, man, typing at my writing table in the Crooked 9 here in the United Conservative Kingdom of Alberta, I know one thing for sure: War in the Middle East is a barrel of oil’s golden goose. Alberta is Canada’s petro-province. An alarming number of residents imagine it as a state of some sort. The fiscal fortunes of generations of provincial governments have been in lock-step with the cyclonic boom-and-bust cycles of the energy industry. Good times are credited to local know-how and Alberta’s can-do spirit. Bad times are blamed on geopolitics and the remote, elitist eastern mandarins (bastards all) in Ottawa, uncontrollable factors. Consequently, a consistent narrative in a one-horse town can get tricky.

The official political discourse the week prior to the Iranian adventure was interesting. Premier Danielle Smith, the Banshee of Invermectin, addressed the province days before her government’s budget was to be tabled in the legislature. Her oratory, always glib, signalled hard times ahead. Serious ground softening, a rhetorical barrage. Tar sands royalties ain’t what they used to be. Assigning blame, she rounded up the usual suspect. Former prime minister Justin Trudeau was allocated his usual place up against the wall. Ineffectual as he was, he of course (and every other Canadian taxpayer) got Alberta’s precious Trans Mountain pipeline extension done. Yarded on it, just gave 'er, bud. But, never mind. Shockingly, Smith’s updated and expanded hit list included recent immigrants to her formerly fair province. It’s important to remember that two successive United Conservative Party administrations paid for “Alberta Calling,” a nationwide ad campaign designed to attract newcomers. Smith is on record as saying she’d like to see Alberta’s population double. Fuck me if she didn’t remember the province’s teetering health care and K-12 education systems. Apparently, they’re strained now.

And then the bomb, assembled by sweaty, unsteady hands, dropped. The ultimate deflection of reality. Potentially explosive. Next October, the Government of Alberta will embark on a direct democracy exercise. Pandering to the lowest common denominator. A referendum consisting of nine questions concerned with curtailing the rights and privileges of newcomers, and that squishy can of often-impotent worms, the morass of documents that comprise Canada’s Constitution. Albertans will have something else to contemplate other than the sheer incompetence of their UCP government. And by the grace of every fiery evangelical preacher who ever lived, the party’s lunatic fringe gets a sanctified bone.   

Smith’s subsequent austerity budget predicted a deficit of some $9.4 billion. This contravened the UCP’s own legislation banning three consecutive annual provincial deficits. Funny thing about laws, if you make ‘em you can break ‘em. Financial analysts were concerned that the UCP numbers were predicated on a blue-sky oil price, one that didn’t jibe with the US Department of Energy’s assessment or those of industry analysts. And fair enough, estimates informed as they may be, are predictions.

Monday morning you sure look fine. The Middle East erupted last weekend. Sometimes circumstances collude and collide and geopolitics shake down on the right’s side: the UCP’s Monday morning caucus meeting must have been jubilant, some kind of stilted bacchanal. Oil is like miraculous ocean surf in this landlocked place, way up. As for the inevitable inflationary spiral that will cause, gasoline, jet fuel, logistics, what have you, Smith will blame the usual suspects, both new and used.

Here at home, I see a provincial government crippled by its own inflexible ideology and thus barely competent. The UCP means well for the most part, all things considered, I think. Broadening my view, I discern a similar pattern the world over although motive and intent for many are definitely suspect. Anyway, a good week for some. And so it goes. More to come.

Dispatches from the Crooked 9 has been your most unreliable, unbalanced and inaccurate alternative source of everything since 2013. Sunset Oasis Confidential is still out there languishing in multiple formats. Visit my companion site www.megeoff.com for links to your preferred retailer. Of Course You Did is still in print. Collect the set! 

A FAN’S NOTES

An Eyemaxful of Elvis

Elvis is alive!

Or somewhat more objectively, the King finally receives his silver screen crown. Australian filmmaker Baz Luhrmann, director of the 2022 atomic biopic Elvis, has graced rockers worldwide with EPiC, Elvis Presley in concert. And somewhat more subjectively, it’s fucking fantastic.

You looking for trouble? Look right in my IMAX face. (Oh, my boy, curl your upper lip.)

What is it with film directors from Down Under and rock ‘n’ roll? Utilizing lost then found audio and video footage, Luhrmann has reimagined both Elvis: That’s the Way It Is (1970) and Elvis on Tour (1972). EPiC is revisionist cinema by an admiring auteur. It is Peter Jackson transforming Michael Lindsay-Hogg’s Let It Be into Get Back in the way Martin Scorsese expanded D.A. Pennebaker’s Don’t Look Back into No Direction Home. Fresh eyes and attitude incorporating discards, celluloid frames swept up from the cutting room floor.

The Elvis songs I heard growing up blared through the speaker grille of the green plastic A.M. radio in the kitchen. Schmaltz and schlock my mom tolerated even though Presley was no Sinatra or Engelbert Humperdinck. And anyway, my big sister had far more interesting music in her pink bedroom; Capitol and Apple Corps. pressings of the Beatles. And he died young, when rock still ruled and punk was on the rise, a doughy caricature out of frame in American Graffiti.

Elvis was problematic at the end of his life. He was (relatively) old for a rocker whereas my second-generation heroes were destined to remain perennially young and glamorous. Ageless: Pete Townshend and Peter Gabriel wouldn’t go bald; David Gilmour wouldn’t conceal his paunch behind a guitar. These guys would never play the oldies circuit, state fairs and casinos. Not in my generation. I never imagined immortality would constitute a band morphing into a brand. When Elvis died, nobody really knew what to make of an aged pioneer. His determination to keep working was somehow undignified. We all know better now.

RCA released The Sun Sessions CD in 1987. I bought it after reading a beyond five-star review in Rolling Stone. The cover is a staid and classic portrait, a high school yearbook photo; hand-tinted with hints of natural blond in his hair. A beautiful boy. The music, notably “Trying to Get to You”, “Mystery Train” and “Baby, Let’s Play House” stoned me to my soul. I’d bought it in part because any decent music library demands some Elvis. But what really blew me away was the revelation that for any revolution, cultural shift or boost in progress, there’s never a single crucible because somehow different people in different places unfailingly tap into the zeitgeist at the same time; a mystical, collective singularity. Elvis was as tuned in as Chuck Berry, Johnny Burnette, Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash, Ike Turner and Little Richard.

The Presley discography is mainly a morassic quagmire of shitty B-movie soundtracks, shoddy repackages and indifferent live albums. A crying shame. Beyond a couple of stunning compilations (The Top Ten Hits or Elv1s), there are by my count just six Elvis records that matter. I’ve no idea how his early Sun sides are sold nowadays, but you need them. You really, really do. Honest. Trust me. Elvis Presley, his first RCA release, was a long player, 33 and 1/3. I believe that record shook up the business. Young people wanted depth and would pay more for it; the drib and drab of a 45 wasn’t enough: the LP became the cornerstone of popular music. If you can’t picture its cover, there’s no point in me mentioning the Clash’s London Calling sleeve homage. The minor tragedy is that you may now skip ahead from the late 50s all the way to 1969’s From Elvis in Memphis.

There are three live albums too and unsurprisingly, they’re all from the same moment in time. On Stage and In Concert were both released in 1970. These are the Las Vegas shows that EPiC concentrates on. To me, Vegas in that glitzy showbiz era of Wayne Newton and the Rat Pack was about as uncool as it could get, baby. Who knew the city would devolve further into bloated American excess grotesque? And get hip. Elvis performed two and sometimes three shows per day. Each one had to be as fresh and even better than the previous. Elvis neither drank nor smoked. In the film he says he needs five or six hours to unwind after work. Aw, Christ. The viewer knows what’s coming: uppers, downers and more pills in between to take the edge off.

The third live album is Tiger Man, a posthumous release whose cover to my eyes suggests Lou Reed’s Transformer (I think too much). It is the complete second show of the black leather sequence of the ’68 Comeback Special. If you consider what the Beatles and Rolling Stones were concocting for the British Broadcasting Corporation around that time (it's possible both bands enjoyed illicit drugs), The Magical Mystery Tour and Rock and Roll Circus respectively, the white bread mores American network television inflicted on its talent is almost biblical in a satanic way: cheese into smegma. Elvis rose above most of it. Handsome, healthy and fit, armoured by a charming sense of humour, he found his mojo again in the concert settings. Like all of EPiC, that portion of the broadcast is utterly compelling.

Fittingly, EPiC opens with “Tiger Man”: I’m the King of the Jungle/They call me the Tiger Man… Watch out! There’s more to come. Elvis is svelte, still in his thirties. His fringed jumpsuit, especially the high collar, is ridiculous, but Jagger, Bowie and Freddie Mercury dressed funny too. Lemmy from Motorhead once said concertgoers don’t want to see the boy next door up on stage, they’re expecting someone from another planet. That’s the way it is.

EPiC depicts a rejuvenated Elvis in context. There is a slim and unobtrusive underlying narrative to the film and it is universal: frustration and regret – themes of half the popular songs ever written. Elvis in a voiceover says he wants to tour Great Britain, Europe and even Japan. “I’ve never even played New York (City).” The International Hotel on Paradise Road seems a sour compromise. No escape from a trap. “Never Been to Spain” by Hoyt Axton is one of my favourite songs. I must’ve heard it first on the radio or possibly The Midnight Special because if Helen Reddy wasn’t on, Three Dog Night was. The lyrics entrance me. They’re not nihilistic yet nowhere is the destination. The movie’s most poignant moment is when the band, led by James Burton, launches into this one with Elvis at full throttle. He means it, man.

EPiC is exhilarating. Luhrmann carefully crafted “The Wonder of You” and the addictive taste is bittersweet. God, the response overseas would’ve pushed Elvis out of what quickly became a rut. Exiting the theatre I thought about Springsteen writing “Fire” for Elvis and Bowie reputedly writing “Golden Years” for him (!?). And I thought about producer Rick Rubin stripping down Johnny Cash (and even Neil Diamond – the “Jewish Elvis” in dated entertainment press parlance). Oh, well. That’s the way it was then; that’s the way it is now. No point crying in the parking lot. Dry those tears from your eyes.                  

Dispatches from the Crooked 9 has been your most unreliable, unbalanced and inaccurate alternative source of everything since 2013. Sunset Oasis Confidential is still out there languishing in multiple formats. Visit my companion site www.megeoff.com for links to your preferred retailer. Of Course You Did is still in print. Collect the set! 

A FAN’S NOTES

Men’s Olympic Hockey

Is there any other Winter Games sport? Hockey, provided it’s played well, is the most exciting sport on Earth. Non-stop action, skill and violence at high speeds in a confined space. “Quicksilver ballet” is the slickest and most glib descriptor I’ve ever read about the game in any sportswriting; memory fails – I cannot cite its coiner. “Firewagon hockey” was the definitive hyperbolic phrase describing the style of “the Flying Frenchmen” – the Montreal Canadiens in those black and white radio days before I was born (although I can’t imagine “Rocket” Richard keeping up to Connor McDavid). Canada’s preliminary cruise through an admittedly weak 2026 Group A in Milano has been something akin to both to behold. There are words: elan, panache.

The New York City-based National Hockey League always chirps about growing what Canadian journalist Peter Gzowski called The Game of Our Lives. Because its involvement in marquee international events is intermittent, “growing the game” is marketing code for two strategies. In the United States the NHL is the perennial fourth league, possibly the fifth behind souped-up cars turning left, or NASCAR. While the US remains the league’s largest market, the 1980 Lake Placid “Miracle on Ice” probably did more to grow the sport’s audience (and participation) south of 49 than anything the NHL has ever done unwittingly or not. And peddling expensive official fan gear can be lucrative.

The debate whether professionals should be permitted to participate in an Olympiad is dead. When the NHL elects to participate in the Winter Games it encounters a paradox. Its macro product shines on the global stage while casting an awfully dark shadow over its micro North American product. When Canada plays Czechia or Slovakia plays Sweden in a February tournament, fans see what hockey can and should be. They will not see the same sport when Columbus plays Utah on an October Tuesday night even though ticket prices are comparable. A bloated league with an endless and meaningless regular season inadvertently lays bare its woeful shortcomings to its home audience.

It's important to differentiate a love for the game from a love for the NHL. The world’s best league does not embody the sport’s ideal. It has diluted the game. I believe most NHL fans are like me. They love one franchise, despise another and don’t care about the other 30. The last time I was in New York City, the Nashville Predators were visiting. I thought, “It might be fun to see a game in Madison Square Gardens and the Rangers have good uniforms.” And then I thought, “Why bother?” In Las Vegas the following winter I looked into Golden Knights tickets. The St. Louis Blues were in town. I thought, “St. Louis Blues: possibly the best marriage of a city and nickname in all of sports; still, why bother?” Twice a few hundred $US to the good. Admittedly, had one or both of those games included Montreal, I’m there; so there for the belt notch and the war story – I think.

The Milano quarterfinals get underway this morning. Hockey at this level is like an advertising shill. It doesn’t come around often. And accept no substitutes.            

Dispatches from the Crooked 9 has been your most unreliable, unbalanced and inaccurate alternative source of everything since 2013. Sunset Oasis Confidential is still out there languishing in multiple formats. Visit my companion site www.megeoff.com for links to your preferred retailer. Of Course You Did is still print. Collect the set while this exclusive offer still lasts! Accept no substitutes!

HUMAN WRECKAGE

The Second Disc Defense

A snippet of Crooked 9 domestic dialogue from November, 2025:

“Do you mind if we swing by Blackbyrd while we’re out doing errands today? You can wait in the car or circle the block. I’ll just run in.”

“What did you order?”

“Black and Blue; Stones album from ’76; I was still in high school, grade 10. A Stones release was big news then, big, important stuff.”

“Don’t we have it already?”

Oh, Ann. Oh, poor, poor Ann. Of course we do. We have the original vinyl pressing from 1976. And we have a digitized edition from the early 90s when Rolling Stones Records released the group’s entire post-London/Decca catalogue on CD under a new distribution deal with CBS. To my credit, I did not buy the Japanese SACD version I found at Velvet Records, a funky shop in Amsterdam, in the summer of ’24. Furthermore, time, the great revisionist (and Dirty Work 10 years later), has been kind to Black and Blue.

I said, “Yes.” And because there’s always a “but” I added: “It’s the second disc that interests me. There’s a couple of outtakes, cuts that didn’t make the album. They were auditioning guitarists at the time because Mick Taylor had just quit and so there’s a few studio jams with Jeff Beck and whoever.”

Blackbyrd Myoozik (the spelling of which irks me no end) is on Edmonton’s south side, convenient to us. There are other shops in town, but not many and not walkable except for Curmudgeon Records and Posters, farther up Whyte Avenue across the CPR railroad tracks, just past the A&W beside the European appliance store. When I’m in Blackbyrd I feel as if I’m in a community outreach centre, not a commercial establishment. I know two of its clerks, Mustafa and Nolan, well enough to pass the time of day with without out them squinting at their watches with gritty, heavy eyelids.

March, 2025: I wandered into Blackbyrd. Nolan asked me how I was enjoying the Nils Lofgren album. I said, “How did you know?” I hadn’t bought it. “Your neighbour (Ted, the American refugee) was in looking for a birthday present for you.” Nolan went on, “My recommendation; I thought you’d like it.”

Well, “Gee!” on so many levels. And Blackbyrd stocks Muster Point Project vinyl too.

The last week of January, 2026: Ann wondered over The Globe and Mail and between sips of coffee if I’d like to go to Blackbyrd later on, before noon. I said, “Hell, yes! Get out of my head.” Ann lives up there, but never trashes the place. And I understood her motivation for departing Crooked 9 property. Even as the sky blues and the days lengthen, January in Edmonton is an oppressive, cabin feverish commencement of a new year. Our weather apps suggested a sunny, decent day. There’s a Winners outlet in the old Chapters bookstore space, a half block from Blackbyrd. And we have a third grandchild on the way. We would split up on Whyte; divide and conquer – we’d both have at least an hour in our preferred stores.

The last time I was free to roam the racks of Blackbyrd I spent a couple of hundred dollars on music ranging from a Mose Allison compilation to a Sex Pistols live album – three complete poorly recorded shows from their disastrous and ultimately fatal American tour. I bought new pressings of Coney Island Baby and The Wild, the Innocent and the E Street Shuffle. My brother-in-law Al haunts me in Blackbyrd. He gave me his double of Pat Garret and Billy the Kid a few years ago: “It was on sale and I forgot I had it.” I was grateful; about the only Dylan album we didn’t have. When I saw him again a year later (we live in different provinces), he handed me another sealed copy. I said, “Don’t tell me you bought it a third time?” He answered my question with a panicky 1000-yard stare.

Music is a passion project; the artists who set me aflame in my late teens and twenties continue to reverberate. I’m self-aware of petrification; I am a fossil. But, man, the good old stuff still matters to me. It has never gone the way of childish things. And what I cannot discard in its various formats chews up valuable interior real estate. Accessible storage required provided it's relatively attractive. And I know my runway’s shrinking and after my dark crash, my survivors will likely view the record collection as debris for disposal. Fair enough.

Tuesday night I handed Ted a CD of Who Are You. “Double?” 

I said, “Sort of.” More like a triple. I continued, “If, God forbid, I end up living alone in a seniors’ assisted residence, I’ll have to cull the herd. There’ll be no space for everything. On the other hand, I’ll be able to play anything I like as loud as I like; everybody else will be deaf.”

Ted said, “I’m not sure, Geoff. Hearing aids have come a long way.”

Eh? Well. Gee. I suppose they have.

On this particular day in Blackbyrd, Nolan and I chatted about Springsteen’s folky “Streets of Minneapolis”, Cheap Trick, the Guess Who and the Doobie Brothers. I browsed the jazz, blues, Americana, punk and reggae sections, both vinyl and CD. The new Lucinda Williams album wasn’t in yet. I contemplated the box sets. A Kinks album I don’t have briefly intrigued me. I fondled a Joy Division CD, but felt no nostalgia toward the suicidal tendencies of my university days. Nothing sang to me even just to have for the sake of having it forever in its cellophane for indifferent future generations.

Blackbyrd is like Audreys Books, a local and specialized retail business that deserves to thrive in these times of Amazon Prime. My hour was winding down. Time was getting tight; I had to buy something, but not anything. Just when the rock racks’ alphabet was about to dumb down into emojis I stumbled across last year’s remastered reissue of Who Are You; the quartet’s final album with doomed drummer Keith Moon and the Who as a complete, fractious band and not a survivors’ brand. I was 18 when it was originally released (1978) and although I prefer its predecessor Who by Numbers (1975), my brand-new red vinyl copy was something of a landmark because rock’s jaded aristocracy wasn’t overly prolific back then; years between albums and subsequent supporting tours.

This 2025 Who Are You was no DELUXE EDITION like my Live at Leeds, but enhanced nonetheless. The bonus disc contained demos, outtakes and live rehearsals for a tour that never happened. Could be dross, could be gold for the aficionado and, boy, the expanded packaging sure looked fine.

I met up with Ann in Winners. She’d done very well on behalf of our grandchildren, energetically alive in the moment or en route. We stowed her packages in the back of the Honda. We smoked cigarettes by the car and proximate to a trash bin. Ann asked me, “Any luck? What did you get?” I told her. Ann said, “Hmm!”

This “Hmm!” is not the pensive “Hmm...” of thoughtful consideration. This “Hmm!” is criticism, condemnation delivered. Ann and I learned this haughty snort from my mother. We ape her. Mom was not a happy soul the last few years of her life. Sometimes mom’s “Hmm!” would be followed by an inarguable and emphatic “Bullshit!” Sometimes Ann and I spit that each other too. And then we laugh. It’s impossible to frown when we think about my mother.

We got into our car. Ann stared straight ahead over the top of the steering wheel. “Don’t we have that one already?”

I glanced out the passenger window and then glanced at her profile. Poor Ann. “But not with a second disc.”

Ann said, “Hmm...”

Dispatches from the Crooked 9 has been your most unreliable, unbalanced and inaccurate alternative source of everything since 2013. Sunset Oasis Confidential is still out there languishing in multiple formats. Visit my companion site www.megeoff.com for links to your preferred retailer. Of Course You Did is still print. Collect the set! Collect multiple editions!

SAINTS PRESERVE US

Ain’t that America

It ain’t no secret/No secret, my friend/You can get killed just for living/In your American skin – Bruce Springsteen, “American Skin (41 Shots)”

The threat of a seismic event is usually somewhat predictable. Pinpointing the actual, animating flashpoint is trickier. History, even as it unfurls, is ultimately a forensic pursuit. So many threads, so many factors leading to a decisive moment that could go either way: a footnoted riot or fully-fledged rebellion.

Minneapolis: man, it’s Mary Tyler Moore, Prince, the Replacements and maybe Twins baseball. In the spectrum between BlackLivesMatter and the White House, American citizens have been shot to death by men in uniform. Their crimes dystopian science fiction vague in that they were prevented with lethal force before the would-be “perps” could perpetrate.

Comedian Robin Williams once likened Canada to an apartment dweller living above a meth lab. Another country’s affairs aren’t generally my affair, but the United States of America is awfully close and awfully big. Not the elephant in the room so much as the elephant on the right side of the bed. Some of the spillover has been positive, from pop art and baseball to Muddy Waters. Much of it has been what gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson might describe as “bad craziness.” For instance, Alberta Premier Danielle Smith recently suggested she’d prefer Alberta’s independent judiciary to align more with her populist party’s values. This is a page torn from der Trumpenfuhrer’s playbook (which he hasn’t read). And there is a fifth column of support here in this province for joining the USA although American guns have yet to cascade over the border. 

Archaic documents are confounding talismans: revered as gospel while open to interpretation. The Second Amendment to the US Constitution, ratified in 1791 reads: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” Different versions of that sentence have been ratified by various state legislatures resulting in a tragi-comic cornucopia of capitalization and commas. Essentially, a collective right to defend, itself a human construct, has over time, been whittled down to an individual right. That individual right has in turn mushroomed into open-carry laws in many states and worse. Shoot first and God bless the National Rifle Association (NRA), the gold, or at least silver bullet, standard of political lobby groups.

An acquaintance of mine who taught in New York City’s education system told me he regularly conducted and participated in “shooter” drills. I said, “Like fire drills?” He said yes, adding he’d been shot at himself. The NRA’s and MAGA White House’s solution to this social scourge is arming teachers. A little training and a whole load of thoughts and prayers.

Operation Metro Surge is the name of the MAGA immigration clampdown in Minnesota. Its latest victim, Alex Pretti, shot to death in a one-sided scrum with ICE agents, was branded a “domestic terrorist” by the White House. Pretti worked as an ICU nurse in a veterans’ hospital. This calling suggests a streak of altruism, perhaps even a response to John F. Kennedy’s rhetoric: “…ask what you can do for your country.” Nobler than many. Pretti was also a licensed gun owner in an open-carry state. Now, it’s a bad idea to bring a knife to a gunfight. It’s probably an even worse idea to pack heat while protesting jittery, trigger-happy federal thugs. Especially as their previous trophy, Renee Good, shot in the head while attempting to turn away from an ICE dragnet, was dismissed by the Vice President of the United States (!) as a victim of an insidious progressive disease, some pathogen of liberal origin.

I paid for my university education with part-time wages from an A&P grocery store (yes, it was possible 45 years ago). The usual store detective whom shoplifters learned to recognize quickly enough had crapped out of the volunteer Canadian Forces. No police service would touch him. This fellow with his see-behind wraparound shades was Rambo on the soup and crackers aisle. Pure farce – except for the violence. I’d forgotten about that July trench coat guy until now. It strikes me that the US Department of Homeland Security is staffed with the skimmed cream of the dregs. Psychopathic failures welcome, please apply. The rancidness comes from the absolute top.

Pretti, like Good, an American citizen, exercised his constitutional rights to assemble and to bear arms. Nothing illegal. Yet the fault line between tragedy and comeuppance seems canyon-like, somehow worthy of absurd non-debate. J’accuse! Black and white and blame. This is the new American paradox, that and U.S. Immigration killing its own. Federal authorities will investigate themselves should they be so inclined, shamed into it. It’s no secret now what the apparatus of the State can and will do with impunity to anybody living down there in their American skin.

The Boss works weekends. A decent man speaks out. Rush released yesterday: "Streets of Minneapolis".     

Dispatches from the Crooked 9 has been your most unreliable, unbalanced and inaccurate alternative source of everything since 2013. Sunset Oasis Confidential is still out there languishing in multiple formats. Visit my companion site www.megeoff.com for links to your preferred retailer. Of Course You Did is still print. Collect the set while there's still time! Offer ends soon. Operators standing by.

EDMONTON EXISTENTIAL

Mean Streets

Our American refugee neighbour Ted flew his family south of 49 for the Christmas holidays, however reluctantly. We look after one another’s properties. We are good friends. Ted has joined Stats Guy and me in the Tuesday Night Beer Club. It snowed on Christmas Eve. Heavily. I shovelled two properties, back and front and in between, and the stretch of public sidewalk linking our addresses, an explicit civic obligation. The snow came again on Boxing Day and kept falling for the next thirty-six hours. That amount is problematic to shift, disperse. Snowfalls like that never fail to remind me of Wallace Stegner’s brilliant Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Angle of Repose (1971). Should you be curious about life out west on both sides of the Medicine Line, read Stegner (I especially recommend Wolf Willow). Ted’s wife texted Ann: “We’ve been checking the weather in Edmonton. Has Geoff run out of swear words yet?”

Fuck, no, never. I can curse in both of Canada’s official languages. And I welcome the exercise, but maybe not the endless reps.

“Edmonton House,” a fur trading post, was established on the flats of the North Saskatchewan River in 1795. Winter came that year, just as it had for thousands of years prior to the colonial commercial initiative. And it kept coming. Winter came when Edmonton was incorporated as a city in 1904. When the province of Alberta was carved out of Prince Rupert’s Land and Edmonton designated its capital in 1905, winter came anyway. Winter has come ever since. It’s as reliable as sunset and sunrise, and full moons. And, curiously, it snows in wintertime.

Edmonton is a young city, even by Canadian standards. It came of age holding hands with the combustion engine. The automobile suggested Edmonton grow out instead of up because there’s a whole heck of a lot of space on the northern prairie. Its populace, now in excess of 1.1-million souls resides on some fantastically botched experimental alien ant farm – a big, very big, spread. Drivers need roads. Lots of them. And roads need to be like car tires in much warmer climes – all season, passable.

Collisions are inevitable. City council, often inert, sometimes inept and frequently nonsensically pro-active, works to rectify a century’s legacy of short-sighted and misguided urban planning. The addition of bike lanes and loosening of zoning and development regulations to encourage population density are inherently good things, attempts to undo unintended consequences dating from a different era. Contemporary retro-fitting and jury-rigging unzip their own duffle bags of gremlins. Bike lanes further constrain already congested arteries. Multifamily dwellings mean multiples of cars in neighbourhoods never designed to accommodate them.

And then it snows like a bastard. As it often will in Canada’s largest northernmost city. The snow abated 27 December, 2025. New Year’s Day brought freezing rain, icing on the cake. Saturday’s 17 January, 2026 Edmonton Journal front page headline: PLOW CREWS FACE THREATS. Verbal abuse of course and shovels as weapons. Alert readers will note the gap of 10 days between accumulation and clearing. Taxes imply a transaction; payers have a right to expect something in exchange for an arbitrary income skim. Efficient services, for instance. While local politics may be a springboard for those with greater ambitions, managing a city is an unglamorous grind. Banning plastic bags except for dog shit in dandelion dog parks is all very well, sort of a bullet point added to an incoherent mission statement affixed to the inaugural charter, but symbolic grandstanding doesn’t make snow evaporate.

Every Edmontonian knew the all-weather fat tire bicycle boys would be looked after first. Bike lane grooming requires a tiny, tank-tracked Bobcat only, not a giant Volvo grader. Those yellow machines, however late to the game, need space to do their jobs – hence parking bans (with generous notice). The gist of the Journal’s story was the breakdown of a tacit social contract. Citizens, already irate with the City’s service lag, were infuriated by its request for their cooperation to speed the tardy clean up. “Move your car, somewhere else, please.” “Fuck you.” Of course, in days like these, manners and civility are rare commodities. “Can we at least agree to talk about winter weather?” “Fuck you.”

The surface of the North Saskatchewan is always an intimidating and fearsome sight to behold once the spring melt commences. Its thick ice crust heaves into snaggled, jagged shards. Sometimes they’re as cloudy as an antique mirror. Sometimes they’re a shade of wedding dress white. Sometimes they’re grey and sometimes their sun dappled spectrum ranges from powder blue to royal purple. Ann and I never expected a view like this outside our front window.

Our street was graded Sunday, 18 January, 11 days after the storm. The snow on the road was alive during this period; it evolved. At first the ruts were like slot car tracks, the mound between them neatly scraped true by undercarriages. Wheeling in or out of them at the end of our driveway was a slippery and sliding hard turn requiring an unsafe rate of acceleration. Workaday traffic eventually compacted the snow into a slick highway. The sidewalks might as well have been ditches. The grader peeled the packed ice from the road as if it was citrus rind, right down to the asphalt. I admired the operator’s precision. I wondered too if operating heavy machinery while wearing earbuds might constitute some form of impairment before deciding the union man was everyman, just hearing what he wants to hear.

Windrows, those manmade banks of snow on the road and against the curb, are officially frowned upon in Edmonton because they narrow the width of a street and inhibit parking. Homeowners are exhorted to heave the snow from public sidewalks onto their front lawns instead of pushing it into the gutter. Springing ahead, the volume of meltwater is always a concern: better to top up the groundwater than overwhelm the sewer system.

The grader operator (sounds like a misheard lyric from Nick Lowe’s “Switchboard Susan”) left the Platonic ideal of windrows in his wake, left and right. Our street is now a one-and-a-half way and pedestrians sidle sideways like crabs – fitting in my case – the crabby part. He did his best at the foot of our driveway; I cleared the remaining chunks of ice by hand because our scooped snow shovel was inadequate for either pushing or cradling and heaving. I enjoyed the exercise.

A renowned winter city’s excuse for its inability to provide essential services was a tired cliché, the “perfect storm.” A perfect storm is the same thing as one of those “100-year events” that seem to occur on a weekly basis here, there and everywhere. I have it on good authority that Alvin Toffler, Faith Popcorn and Nicholas Negroponte were never once employed by the City of Edmonton. But you shouldn’t need a futurist to instruct the municipal council and the bureaucracy it oversees to plan ahead. With a little foresight, what cannot be prevented can at least be mitigated. Edmonton has no plans to collect or dispose of the shark’s teeth windrows. They, like January, the advent of a new year – all 41 days of it – are destined to overstay their welcome. 

Dispatches from the Crooked 9 has been your most unreliable, unbalanced and inaccurate alternative source of everything since 2013. Sunset Oasis Confidential is still out there languishing in multiple formats. Visit my companion site www.megeoff.com for links to your preferred retailer. Of Course You Did is still print. Collect the set! "Alaska Highwayman" a song I co-wrote with the Muster Point Project is now on YouTube and available on Spotify and all those other streaming services.

A LONG WAY FROM MANY PLACES

Airports

A soul in tension that’s learning to fly/Condition grounded, but determined to try/Can’t keep my eyes from the circling skies/Tongue-tied and twisted, just an earthbound misfit, I – Pink Floyd, “Learning to Fly”

Broaching bureaucratic bafflegab with puffed-up, pimply little popinjays with fancy epaulettes on their uniforms or with similar, sterner authoritarian figures whose first language isn’t English is beyond futile; pointless semantics, even though liquids and gels are very different from pastes, lotions and ointments. Just bag it in order to move forward with ongoing clarity.

Flying ignites my inherent misanthropy. I won’t inflame that statement with any snotty remarks about body mass, armrests and manners. No, this is about raising cabin pressure, pushing the envelope of perceived entitlement with a Tetris stack of carry-on worthy of an employed bearer. How did it all get beyond the gate and the jetway, let alone past security (not to be confused with a Peter Gabriel album)?

Canada’s airport security agency is known by the acronym CATSA. I think of it as CATSASS. TSA is the American one and that sounds like a Canadian income tax form, one of those slips you’re missing when you file. The European Union’s open borders Schengen Area is an entirely different kettle of monkeys. Time is your enemy should you be travelling with a Canadian passport and intent on making a tight connection through Brussels: a stifling bureaucracy exists outside of its dimension. Proud to say I’d never been fingerprinted before. Thank you, Osama bin Laden, your legacy endures.

Airport security screenings are different the world over. In Canada they’re like a legacy family recipe no ever thought to write down. Federal regulations somehow receive an interpretive twist between provinces, cities and airports; regional attitude and size are factors. What amuses me is the inconsistent application of stern standards at the same airport on a different day.

Unheeded warnings, I thought I’d thought of everything…

My personal carry-on tote is a blue nylon knapsack that fits beneath the seat in front of mine. It always contains a pouch of wet wipes because airplane cabins rate with public toilets for cleanliness. A sandwich baggie of Kleenex pairs nicely with the wipes because there’s some sort of unnatural relationship between canned air and the viscous fluid sloshing around in my head. There’s a book, always a book, but never a hardcover, they weigh too much. The other standard item is a miniature iPad. Its operating system is MS-DOS. The only application that still functions is Boy Howdy Solitaire (the “hard” levels of Forty Thieves and Spider are going to be the death of me). This electronic item once required its own grey tub at a security checkpoint. These days it’s ignored; it might as well be a brass telegraph key. Or it was until I turned up at Flughafen Wien to board an Austrian Airlines flight to Brussels.

The woman who unpacked my knapsack at security was tall. I wasn’t surprised, everybody on the streets of Vienna was taller than me. She was very attractive and her grey uniform added a certain je ne sais Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS quoi. She was an archeologist, examining my iPad mini like the relic it is. I tried to explain: “In Canada, nobody cares about…” And for once my faulty oral filter was tripped, mouth flange, because I didn’t ask her if, perhaps, I deserved some punishment? I wasn’t dying for it, more like wishing and hoping. Besides, she was okay with my ankle boots.

Trips are about arrival and departure and the generally happy space in between. Winter travel skews more fraught, you need proper footwear to walk the unguided walk. I favour shoes by Clarks. And I think the coolest shoes ever created are desert boots. I have three pairs. My red suede ones are just beyond. I have a winter pair too, rough brown leather, well-oiled and lined in a houndstooth pattern. “Tundra” boots, I guess. They passed muster in Vienna; I didn’t have to undo the red double-knotted laces to remove them. Canada was another story: CATSASS consternation.

Edmonton International Airport (YEG) is a long way from many places. No hub. Ann and I decided to segment our journey to Vienna. We spent a couple of nights in Montreal with my sister and her husband before the four us carried on to the Continent. For our return trip I booked a night’s stay for us at Montreal’s in-terminal hotel, a Marriot (I still think of YUL as “Dorval” and not Trudeau). We did this for the benefit of our backs and knees and because we’ve learned that we both might become a little tetchy when the hours between cigarettes reach double digits. (Aside: I’m convinced air rage incidents would be halved if smokers could conveniently light up inside airports. I mean, emotional support ratdogs and their dangerously fragile shepherds are granted better facilities, piss pads, Astroturf and rubber rooms. Fuck me.)

There’s no sensation to compare to this…

My Clarks tundra boots were an issue departing Edmonton. I was ordered to remove them, but at least the floor was dry. Nobody remarked on my boots in Montreal en route to Europe. That indifference, that hunky doriness, that sensible laissez-faire attitude proved to be a pop-up, gatecrasher oversight or a CATSASS rookie mistake. Flying home from Montreal to Edmonton my winter boots in a winter country at winter’s onset were suspect this time. I took my boots off. They’d be maybe four or five grey tubs behind the knapsack carrying my pathetic iPad mini. And my belt. I couldn’t hang myself then and there. At least the floor was dry.

"Ooh, they were never as good after Syd flipped out." "They're a non-entity sans Roger." A bit Floyd formulaic perhaps, but still worthy of headphones and hashish.

Dispatches from the Crooked 9 has been your most unreliable, unbalanced and inaccurate alternative source of everything since 2013. Sunset Oasis Confidential is still out there languishing in multiple formats. Visit my companion site www.megeoff.com for links to your preferred retailer. Of Course You Did is still in print. Collect the set!

A LONG WAY FROM MANY PLACES

Viennese Victuals

Fretting the exchange rate of a Canadian dollar against the euro is a pointless exercise. Especially for math-challenged people like me. While cash is kaiser in Vienna, baby, Ann figured out that for any electronic transaction we were better off deferring the conversion rate to our Canadian bank or credit card provider rather than obeying the instant skimming prompts of an Austrian ATM or handheld device. My sister Anne’s philosophy was much simpler for me to grasp: “A euro equals a dollar. It is what it is.” Her attitude led to my heartbreak. Bushmills Irish whiskey was on sale in every grocery store we ventured into, less than twenty euros. Trouble was our stay in Vienna was nine or ten nights and it takes me nine or ten months to work my way through a 750 mL bottle.

Leisure travel is paradoxical. You splurge for the trip well aware you will splurge on the trip and yet you try to economize. Once Ann and I settle in to our accommodation, we source the location of the nearest grocery store (and newspaper and tobacco shop). Our go-to was a SPAR Gourmet on Fleischmarkt; so proximate to our hotel there wasn’t time enough for me to enjoy an entire cigarette between doors.

The Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company paid for my university education. The last ad agency I worked for specialized in everyday retail. “Busy mom (who’s active, fit and cares deeply about her family) is the gatekeeper” in the jargon of a boardroom brief. I’m always curious in foreign grocery stores, their shelf alignment and the brands – some local, some intriguing and some distressingly familiar. I was surprised to find Driscoll raspberries in SPAR, their provenance Morocco rather than Mexico. Made sense. A daily stroll to a grocer is very civilized, you buy what you need and leave the rest. Of course, hotel rooms aren’t living quarters, merely comfort havens.

Social media is something of a scourge. One of its mixed blessings is the “absolute must” designation on some travel site or toddler attention span app. Edmonton Ann and I and our brother-in-law Al and Montreal Anne refuse to queue with digitized sheep. And the four of us were mystified by the prevalence of Starbucks cafes in Vienna, a city renowned for its coffee. Was it American corporate hubris or idiocy? We found a proper refuge that suited us.

The only acknowledgment of modernity in the Café Hawelka are dates, but you have to know where to look. Some of the theatre posters on the wall by the foyer are relatively recent. The other visible dates warmed my heart. The mastheads of some of the world’s most famous dailies draped majestically from a rack of slotted wooden library poles. World news on a stick as long as a pool cue. Like the curtain discreetly concealing the water closets, the Café Hawelka is draped in atmosphere. The establishment opened for business in 1939, the year following the Nazi-engineered Anschluss. Whether you request a demi-tasse of high-octane coffee, a bottle of pilsner, a plate of strudel or a bowl of goulash, the formally attired waiter presents your order on a silver tray slightly larger than the dimensions of a hardcover book. All that’s missing is a low hanging cloud of blue tobacco smoke. You long to be part of a bygone intelligentsia and earnestly discuss philosophy, politics and psychoanalysis; sausages, waltzes and whiskers on kittens. Some topics will drive you to drink.

Ann and I patronized Loo’s American Bar (cash only) twice; we’d stumbled across a local watering hole. Both times we sat outside on a narrow rectangular terrasse. The awning was black canvas, the suspended electric heaters were white, their filaments orange. The faux fur rugs draped over our black stools were grey. The ashtrays were silver. The pilsner was gold. The soda citron was clear. The regulars, about seven of them, granted us suspicious sideways glances the first time. A few of them made eye contact on our second visit. My penchant to listen in on other peoples’ conversations was stymied by the language barrier. What were they talking about? They watched the street and their conversation struck me as running commentary. Had our time permitted a third respite at Loo’s, I like to think Ann and I would’ve warranted curt nods of vague recognition. Maybe as far as tourists went, we weren’t so bad. I almost literally bumped into one of the regulars in the tiny, geometrically awkward space outside the water closets and he was visibly stunned when I gave way, made myself small against the wall. He said, “You are so mannered.”

Old Vienna is quaint in an imperialistic way, an architecturally stunning reminder that empires and the dynastic families who created them inevitably must fall. Proximate to Stephansdom is a fine example of latter day quaint. Steffl is an actual department store. Given the area, it’s necessarily a purveyor of “luxury lifestyle” – whatever that may mean to shallow, aspirational acquisitors. A social media photo op? Anyway…. the top storey, the seventh floor, hosts Sky bar, famed for its cocktails. It promises a panoramic view of the city’s First District provided its expansive terrasse is open in late November and it’s not dark out. Very swish.

Edmonton Ann and Montreal Anne ordered Cosmopolitans. Al ordered a Vieux Carre. I, not seeing a Corpse Reviver No. 2 on the menu, followed his lead. Al is a master toxicologist, an autodidactic bartender. He’s got the books, the utensils, the vessels, the glasses and all those other obscure and essential ingredients in his kitchen bar. “Pale Hecate” has patiently summoned some wondrous improvised concoctions in ours too. A Vieux Carre is essentially whiskey, brandy and vermouth further flavoured by an array of accents, stuff Ann and I don’t stock in our fridge or pantry. Al pronounced Sky’s Vieux Carre the best he’s ever had; they’re in his repertoire and he’s savoured them in their birth city of New Orleans. Cocktail tumblers aren’t bottomless. You begin by sipping a Vieux Carre before allowing it to evolve into a great a novel, you slow down because you don’t want it to end. Then again, I’m the type of fellow who rereads his favourite books.

Austrian food is dense, deliciously so. So much so that you’re inclined to sit with it afterward. When our quartet went out for supper, we’d turn up somewhere shortly after six without a reservation. Restaurant margins are slim and the key to profitability is turnover. Viennese waiters possess extrasensory perception. Our meals arrived before we’d time to close our menus. Our waiters had already moved onto seating and serving the next party who’d yet to arrive. If you’re ever in Vienna and planning to break some heavy news over dinner and expecting earnest, lengthy discussion, don’t.

Twelve Apostles was the most memorable restaurant. It wasn’t the food although, like every other place, its specialties fell within “good” to “very good” parameters. No, it was the setting. A deep subterranean network of brick-vaulted chambers whose primary foundations likely date from Roman times. Medieval mortar. And a fine mid-twentieth century air raid shelter. The four of us wished to linger. Our waiter grudgingly acquiesced to a second bottle of wine and a second beer for me. We were on his clock.

Should your palate be a tad more sophisticated than mine, you will sneer, but I’m no schoolboy and I know what I like. There is a hot dog stand on Schwedenplatz, a transit hub, at the foot of a bridge over the Donaukanal. It was there I ate a fiery red bratwurst rammed into a reamed-out baguette. A neat and elegant delivery system. The condiments were Dijon mustard and curry ketchup. Ketchup on a hot dog is normally a felony, a capital crime. But on this damp, chilly evening by the water, the mildness of the curry combined with the spicy heat of the sausage and the tang of the mustard strived for the sublime. Had my timing been better, by forty years, say, I would’ve inhaled two of them.

Holidays in their way, as memorable as they are, are reliable sources of regret. I don’t mean inflated credit card statements; I mean things left undone. It’s New Year’s Day in Edmonton, the snow is falling down as is the temperature, and I’m thinking about that kebab stand beside the hot dog stand. I never did get there.                                                                                              

Dispatches from the Crooked 9 has been your most unreliable, unbalanced and inaccurate alternative source of everything since 2013. Sunset Oasis Confidential is still out there languishing in multiple formats. Visit my companion site www.megeoff.com for links to your preferred retailer. Of Course You Did is still in print. Collect the set!