There's a Place Called Downtown

The Downtown BIZ is an important and prominent local organization that does great work in the ongoing efforts to promote and improve Winnipeg's perenially troubled downtown core. That's good! It is also a duplicitous little creature, by nature, that blurts out misdirection and falsehoods even when the truth would be a more productive approach. That's bad.

Yes, this is going to be a very long and involved blog post, full of civic discourse and interesting pictures and a couple of outright lies. So before we begin, I think it's only proper that we establish some background to make sure everyone's up to speed.

Hockey Rock, Winnipeg Style! (But Not Really), or: Outlook Not So Good

[Retroactively added to the Slurpees and Murder Record Club.]

Five months to go! The race for the Mayoralty of Winnipeg appears to be set, and there aren't a lot of players to memorize this year. Russ Wyatt and Lillian Thomas, who were polling at a combined nine per cent of the vote a month ago, both decided not to serve as honourary Pollock siblings this year -- so the two remaining choices for the Mayor of Winnipeg are a broken Magic 8-Ball that only coughs up 'ask again later' responses and a broken Magic 8-Ball that flips its answer to whatever you want to see and then flips again as soon as you turn your back.

Neither of the two candidates has laid out any real vision -- in Katz's case, we've been waiting six years -- and neither of the two candidates would get along well with our Provincial Government at all. (It's actually strangely entertaining to consider how ideologically dissimilar the Manitoba NDP is from its Federal namesake.) So aside from the city's nigh-insurmountable incumbent bias, the contest will really just come down to five months of shameless pandering, outright lies, and heelish, slanderous, meanspirited potshots.

Yes, it's going to get ugly and it's going to get personal, so it should be the blissfully dirty kind of campaign that takes a toll on the psyche of everybody involved and makes for decently entertaining politics. And when an increasingly desperate candidate completely loses his or her mind, there's always the nuclear option: a "Bring Back the Jets" crusade, which has never ever backfired on a prospective leader in the slightest.

So just in case the subject comes up, I want you all to be prepared -- and I have just the thing!

A Place in Your Heart (But Not Really), or: I've Got Woes in Different Area Codes

[Retroactively added to the Slurpees and Murder Record Club.]

I've got quite the treat lined up for you folks today! But, first, the obligatory hype segment for my output through other, more respectable channels.



Uptown Magazine! History will be made!

You can read my most recent column here, and I fully recommend you do so in preparation of the inevitable complainfest set to erupt within the next year or two. The addition of an extra area code in the years to come means that we as a city will finally have to dial all ten digits of a phone number, and preliminary internet reaction indicates that we as a city are about to lose our shit about it. So when somebody you know gets particularly uppity about it and insists that we did just fine with seven numbers, or declares that the new area code should be relegated to the outer limits of the province (by which they will mean "everywhere past Perimeter Highway"), please feel free to refer them to this article.

Read that? Good! Then let's move on to the next article of business.

Remember how I'd mentioned my new cassette player in the previous post? Well, it turns out that the thing only spat out sound in the right channel, so after much trial and tribulation I had to take the sucker back and grab a second one. The folks at Nermen's were more than accommodating, of course, and I did eventually walk away with a fully working cassette player, so you get to reap the rewards of my slogging and enjoy the sound files that I am about to present to you.

We as a province are currently still stuck in the throes of Manitoba Homecoming 2010, which is expected to linger until January rolls around and the promotional powers that be realize that they have no commissioned theme song for 2011. So, while we're here, why not explore some of our past attempts at tricking outsiders into visiting our barren, crime-riddled wasteland?

Behold!



Manitoba: A Place in Your Heart, Travel Manitoba, undated. (No, really; neither the cassette itself nor its accompanying materials list a publication date. Strange!)

I seem to recall the "Place in Your Heart" slogan being used in the mid-nineties, let's say 1994 or 1995, but I'm not certain enough about it that I would attempt to stamp the promotional campaign as such. And the rest of the internet, perhaps surprisingly, is no help about it; for better or for worse I'm the de facto online authority about this nonsense, so I'll try my best to be an authoritive resource on the subject.





These are the front and back, respectively, of the paper inset that came with a cassette I bought for a dollar at a local Salvation Army. These are my credentials.

But don't take my word for it! Outdated and potentially embarrassing as they are, I am declaring the following MP3 files required listening:

Travel Manitoba - Discover Winnipeg! Discover a City with Spirit! (Side One) (Manitoba: A Place in Your Heart, year unknown)
Travel Manitoba - Down Country Roads to the Great Outdoors! (Side Two) (Manitoba: A Place in Your Heart, year unknown)
[ site | normally I'd link here to purchasing info and band websites, but this was free to distribute and its performers are (perhaps wisely) lost to time so oh well ]

ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha

Now, let's put aside for the moment that the whole thing sounds like a 1950s training video. In considering our current provincial promotional campaign, what methods did our forebearers use to draw tourists and travellers to our lands? The answer, as revealed by this culturally and historically significant cassette tape, is twofold. One of the approaches (folds, if you will) involved musical interludes to begin and end each side of the tape; one such interlude sounds suspiciously like a Kate Bush impersonator (check out the beginning of side two -- yeah, that's from the 1990s, all right), and all such interludes sound suspiciously reminiscent of the Most Wanted Music project. But the other approach to Manitoba tourism, as represented by the non-musical majority of this cassette, was founded on a tried-and-true pillar of advertising -- which is to say, outright lies.

Consider the following excerpts:

"Travelling into Winnipeg, you'll see just how exciting a place it is."

This is a lie. (Or a really, really depressing truth, depending on your point of view.)

"Winnipeg, Manitoba's capital city, has something for everyone."

This is also a lie.

"Winnipeg's night spots are just what the doctor ordered."

Yeah, no. Considering the glut of stabbings, Winnipeg's night spots are really the very last thing that any doctor would recommend.

Then a random Chinese woman just starts SCREAMING AT US at 4:24, which is probably better off not being discussed, so let's move on:

"If you love to shop 'til you drop, Winnipeg is the place for you!"

From your own experience -- how many people do you know that drive down to North Dakota just to shop at all the places, and all the prices, not offered here in Winnipeg?

"For a change of pace, take the family to an IMAX adventure! Words cannot describe the sights and sounds of IMAX."

This... is probably more a matter of historical perspective than a modern falsehood, so let's let this one slide for now.

"Winnipeg's festivals are virtually unsurpassed."

Oh, don't even -- are you kidding me? We hold Folklorama in high school gymnasiums, and we always have. Come on, honestly.

"There's always lots to see and do, and experience, in Winnipeg!"

AW HELLLLL NO I CALL BULLSHIT ON THIS

WHERE ARE YOU GUYS HIDING THE NIGHTLIFE THAT WON'T GET ME STABBED

"Few places in North America, if any, rival Manitoba's splendour."

This is subjective, yes. But still pretty false.

"Manitoba has everything you could possibly want in a vacation. (. . .) Manitoba is a tourist's paradise."

I can't even properly start in on these points without giving myself an aneurysm, so let me just say this: what we should have, along all the highways that cross our borders, are giant road signs reading "FOR FUCK'S SAKES LOCK YOUR CAR DOORS AT ALL TIMES".

"We are proud of our multicultural heritage, and it shows."

Yeah, uh, not exactly. A quick glance at the various comments sections of the Winnipeg Free Press website indicate that this statement is extremely false.

"When talking about Eastern Manitoba, one has to mention Steinbach."

haha what

Winnipeggers basically treat Steinbach the same way New Yorkers treat New Jersey, let's not kid ourselves here.

"World-class, and we do mean world-class, fishing is found in virtually every lake in Manitoba's North."

Ouch, 'world-class'. There's that adjective again! At least it's good to know that we're no less relentlessly insecure now than we were fifteen (or so) years ago.

So, yeah, our previous attempts at luring tourism and immigration weren't really any more successful than our current one is. But I hope this little historical study was educational, nonetheless; heck, I'd spin these sound files into a techno remix, or something, if I had the tools to do so. Alas, not! Alas not.

Manitoba: A Place in Your Heart!

March is Manitoba Markers Month, or: Apparently Gary Bettman Owns a Cloaking Device

I know what you're thinking, and you're right: March already? When the hell did we get to March, and why is it already behaving like spring outside? It doesn't seem plausible, but sure enough -- it's March, and I have a little project in mind. But I'll get to that in a minute.

As I'd said, it's definitely been spring-like outside lately, and spring is the time when a young man's fancy turns to... completely implausible sports rumours.

Happy Third Annual Louis Riel Day

How time flies! Three years already, holy smokes.

Long-time readers will recall that I had written an Uptown Magazine column for the introduction of Louis Riel Day, then a column the year after that for its second observance. The scheduling just happened to shake out this year that my next column is after Louis Riel Day, so I couldn't really write about it a third time -- but, whatever, two years in a row is still pretty good.

And really long-time readers may even recall as far back as 2007, when I wrote on this very blog about the crucial voting that officially named the stat holiday and established Louis Riel's least depressing legacy yet. It's been a good run so far! (Certainly better than if they had named the thing "Spirited Energy Day" like they had threatened to, I mean. Because, augh.)

So let's celebrate! If you were wondering, yes, I intend to continue my own personal Louis Riel Day tradition: getting good and liquored up and then reading about Manitoba history. But this year is going to be a little different! For the past couple of Louis Riel Days I've been reading secondary sources, but this year my historical research will involve a series of primary documents across a variety of media types. And it's all for the greater good; I created that Manitoba Homecoming 2010 tag specifically for projects like this, so down the line throughout the rest of the year you can expect to see me share a wide selection of hilarious historical Manitoban artifacts with you guys.

But, wait, there's more! Since I'm such a hard worker (and a devastatingly handsome one, at that!), I figured I should get myself a little present -- so I set myself up a Twitter account, finally wandering bleary-eyed into modern civilization for the five or ten minutes before everybody inevitably migrates to Foursquare or whatever. (Of course, the site's servers crashed literally the second after I signed up -- but at least that means people are using it, so I'm not completely behind the times.) I'll have to remember to embed it in the sidebar, once the site is actually working again.

Long-time readers -- who are getting a lot of work today, considering how many times now I've incurred their hypothetical presence -- long-time readers might well be aghast at this news. I know that my previous stance about Twitter was very well defined, and even now I still suspect that the character limit might be rather restrictive to my traditional rambling technique -- so what changed between now and then? Well, Winnipeg Cat happened, basically. I kicked off that project a few months after that column was written, and then one day a little while ago I eventually realized that a Winnipeg Cat entry can only actually contain, at max, maybe seventy characters before it starts to lose its legibility. That's half a tweet. So, if I've managed to pull that off for a few months' worth of entries now, I suppose a hundred and forty characters is probably going to be plenty after all.

(There are FireFox extensions for expanding the character limit, too, as it turns out. It's a strange world we live in.)

So now I've got my bases pretty well covered, I think; anything too long for a Winnipeg Cat, but too short for a satisfying blog post, can be safely farmed out to Twitter for completion's sake. (And at least this way, if I appear to vanish for several weeks at a time, people can check to see whether I'm legitimately dead or just being lazy about posting here.) Bring the noise, new media!

Holy Spurious Speeches, Batman, or: Waugh, Waugh, Wauggggh

February already? My goodness. I'd better get down to business!



Uptown Magazine! Courage now; truth always!

Did you see my column in the most recent issue? Oh my god you have to read my column in the most recent issue. If I'm stabbed to death tomorrow, bury me with this column. It's pretty sweet.

I owe a retroactive debt of gratitude to my good friend Gavin for writing the spiritual antecedent to this piece, but I hope you'll agree I've given it that little extra twist of somethin'-somethin' that makes the exercise worthwhile for local audiences.

Now, there's something to be said for blind luck; deadline schedules meant that I wrote this column a couple of Fridays ago, to be published this past Thursday, and it just so happened that between the creation and the publication of this column the Mayor made a ridiculous spectacle of himself. Totally saved me the trouble of worrying that people might think I was exaggerating! Ha!

Yes, last Tuesday saw the Mayor give his bizarre, rambling, inexplicable State of the City speech -- an event so uncomfortable and ill-advised that nobody has any idea, even a week later, just what in the hell the Mayor was going on about.

It wasn't just that Katz played the victim card like it was the only kind ever included in the deck. (The other levels of government don't give me enough money! The media reported on my personal life! One guy at one event made one sign that called me a mean name! bawwwwwwwwww) That much is par for the course, by this point.

And it wasn't just that he made a specific point of targeting potential rivals in the upcoming election before they've even formally declared themselves as candidates. If that sounds like a strange development, it gets stranger; actual legitimate news reports were written about polls that nobody has ever actually seen the numbers from, so now we're speculating on imaginary results of an undisclosed survey about multiple unconfirmed candidates. You tell me why nobody bothers to vote in this city!

No, the absolute best part of the speech -- the real slam-dunk humdinger of a character note -- was when he dramatically strode away from the podium, wrapped himself up tightly in the dual cloths of dutiful outrage and moral superiority, and totally flat-out lied to the entire city. Just straight-up lied. It was tremendous, oh my word.

Those of you who know me know that I do so hate to belabour a point, but you know who else goes up for his big definitive rabble-rousing speech and launches into a flurry of deliberate mistruths and bafflegab?



Yeah, huh. I don't know why I even tried to write a column about this, in retrospect, when it very obviously writes itself.

I mean, I might have thought that I was being really clever, or whatever, but it's clearly out of my control when the similarities are so pronounced to the point that the Mayor even dresses like the Burgess Meredith Penguin.





He's not even subtle about it, really, is he? Subtlety's a lost art, mind you.

Now, part of the fun at the State of the City address was that the Winnipeg Free Press helpfully contributed videos shot on site, including footage of the media scrum afterwards -- which meant that we got the rare and hilarious opportunity to watch the Mayor weasel furiously about his talking points.

"For whatever the reason, the NDP have decided that they want to take over, take control of City Hall. Along with a left-wing group. [. . .] The NDP have said that, as well as the left-wing--a, uh, a left-wing group as well. And if you aren't aware of that, then you should be."
"Who in the NDP said that? Who do you mean? Like the actual party itself? Or--"
"No! Not the NDP -- members of the NDP, have basically said..."

Oh, man! Good times, right? Good times. But even better was that these videos also gave us, the viewing public, the rare and hilarious opportunity to see how local media reacts when you lie directly to their faces.



And they... don't seem to appreciate it, but at least they're polite enough to not make a big deal about it while the guy's talking.

I'm sure Kives knows that I appreciate his work, so I hope he doesn't think I'm knocking on him or anything, but I swear -- if you can watch those Free Press videos and not get at least a chuckle out of his facial reactions to Katz' half-delusional grousing, you're clearly better disciplined than I am.



You'll kindly note, if you were drawing the wrong conclusions from the above image, that I'm not purporting to speak on behalf of Kives or of anyone else; I threw that sucker together for fun entirely because I thought it was funny, which is pretty well the attitude you have to take if you're going to try and follow politics around here.

Do you know how little actually happens in this political sphere? Manitobans as a collective, and Winnipeggers in particular, are famously timid milquetoasts when it comes to electoral decisions post-WWII; the provincial government has only changed hands between parties twice in my entire lifetime, and Winnipeg hasn't voted a Mayor out of office in literally over half a century.

(That's a li'l bit of interesting trivia for you Homecoming 2010 folks. Good to be back, right? Literally nothing is different from when you left!)

So no matter how little I may think of the Mayor's performance thus far -- and it doesn't help that he's recently been shanking my profession, librarianship, like he asked it for money outside the Health Sciences Centre -- no matter how I might feel about the guy, the overwhelming odds are that he's just going to be re-elected again with an easy majority because that's how this city works.

Partially because we enjoy our complacency very much, yes -- but also in large part, and I will give credit where credit is due, because the man does know how to run a winning campaign.



"Double the assessments! Triple the size of the posters! Quad-rupple the number of campaign buttons! We'll give the voters of this city the kind of campaign that they want! Plenty of girls, and bands, and slogans, and -- lots of HOOOM-LAAA~! But remember -- no politics! Issues... confuse people. So a big smile, a high handshake, and a really catchy campaign song -- that's the way to win an election!"

So what are Jennifer Jones and Fresh I.E. up to these days? We'll find out! That election's just a mere six months away, folks -- and if there's one thing that I know you're looking forward to, it's six more months of this!

Winnipeg: Like Silent Hill, But Harder to Navigate

Okay. Winnipeg, atmospherically, is a strange and frightening town; we've previously established that it's basically Silent Hill. I would like to think that this much is common knowledge by now, but I believe I'll take this opportunity to really hammer at the point for a while.

Today was quite a miserable day for weather in and around Winnipeg, you see. You might have already
heard something along those lines today. But Winnipeggers are a notoriously tough, if stubborn and somewhat foolhardy, bunch -- which is why the Royal Canadian Mounted Police eventually had to step in and politely request that we geniuses of high standing please stop trying to drive on the god damn highways before we get ourselves killed.

Now, let me tie that back together. Do you remember the early scenes of the original Silent Hill, when the story begins with a car crash and then the viewer's initial introduction to the town is comprised entirely of frighteningly poor visibility and completely unusable roads?

The Province of Manitoba helpfully maintains a Road and Traveller Information Map online, which will let you check the highway conditions and plan a safe route ahead of time for your long-distance travels. Yellow diamonds on the map indicate "Caution", red triangles indicate "Travel Not Advised" -- which, considering the usual expectations around here, is a threat to be taken seriously -- and red circles indicate "Closed", because somebody didn't pick up on the Travel Not Advised part.

So here was what the government highway conditions looked like this afternoon.



Welcome to Winnipeg. I don't know how you got in here, but you're definitely not getting back out.

'Peg at Two-Two and the Voted Game, or: Love Me, Love My Illinois Avenue

Every workday so far this month, at my workplace, I have had the strangely satisfying privilege of writing out the Merriam-Webster Word of the Day on a whiteboard strategically positioned near the south entrance. This past Wednesday being the thirteenth of the month, its Word was "triskaidekaphobia" -- the fear of the number thirteen, a totally legitimate word that I am not making up in the slightest.



(If you were wondering -- the fear of Friday the 13ths is "paraskevidekatriaphobia". That wouldn't have made as much sense on a Wednesday, though.)

But if we as a city -- Winnipeg as a hypothetical single-entity conglomerate of the hearts and minds of its citizens -- if Winnipeg was worried about the number thirteen, it had its priorities out of order. The real number we need to watch out for is twenty-two; judging by the news this past couple of days, our civic self-esteem could be in for a rough ride with that one.

Don't Call It a Comeback (It's a "Homecoming")

To You and Yours This New Year from James Howard,
Self-Professed Unknown Underground Indie Sensation:



Happy Two Thousand and Ten, everyone!

Well, I'd say that was a reasonably satisfying couple of weeks off. How were your holidays? Good, good. But, back to work! It's been a good couple of weeks since you folks have heard from me, so I figured that I was obligated to check in and confirm that I'm alive. (This is more often than I usually check in with friends or family members, so consider it a privilege.)

I would go on about my personal resolutions or my end-of-year blog plans or whatever, but by now it's the tenth of the month and nobody gives a crap. So instead rest assured that I'm just going to keep doing what I do, only changing plans in those occasional instances when my snarling, fearsome expansionism rears its dirty head. Life ain't easy as a small fish in a small pond!

It's going to be another big year, so let's get down to business.