Thought Patterns
by Emanuel
The end of summer, although only a calendar occurrence at this point, was beautiful.
Eddy Merckx is the greatest cyclist to ever throw a leg over the bike. Getting to meet him was unexpected in itself while having 15 minutes of one-on-one time with him felt surreal.
This past July, a last minute opportunity to interview the man nicknamed ‘Le Cannibal’, which was given to him because of his intense desire to win, presented itself to me and I jumped at the chance. The pride of Belgium was attending his son Axel Merckx’s Gran Fondo in Penticton, B.C., an event in which I was a participant, and Radio-Canada asked me if I could interview the father-son duo for ‘Ouest Express’, a weekly show focused each week on a different topic. Eddy had accepted to do the interview as it was going to be conducted in French, which had made him much more open to the idea of dealing with the media on what was essentially a family visit for him.
As directed by the show’s producer, I was going to interview both Eddy and Axel on the topic of the highs and the lows of cycling and of their careers. I first sat down with Eddy and I must admit it was a bit intimidating to hear first-hand many of the stories that all passionate cyclists have heard of and/or read about: his first Tour victory (1969), his 7 (!) MSR wins, his ’68 Giro performance under the snow on the Tre Cime di Lavaredo, his crash in Blois, etc.
A very pleasant surprise was how cool and articulate Axel was. He was really nice and had many interesting perspectives on cycling. The edited interview of both Eddy & Axel Merckx can be heard in the Radio-Canada archives.
I enjoy riding my bike, often on solo missions. It gives me a lot of time to think, and one of the things I’ve been thinking about is to start documenting my time spent on the bike. Here’s my first shot at it.
As I set out today, I figured I would try riding out and above the clouds. It looked like Mt. Seymour might be a good bet although the wind probably had a better chance of blowing the clouds over Cypress. As the first photo testifies, the top of Mt. Seymour showed no signs of sunshine. The decent was even a little tricky as the clouds were thick and cold today (13C). The next photo is what I was facing while descending.
Luckily for me, by the time I got to the top of Cypress, there was a bit of sun peaking through the clouds and it wasn’t as cold.
All in all, another great day on the bike, as they most often are when I am climbing (although that’s not what I’m thinking during the climb!).
This was the view we had for dinner while in Florence. Florence, OR that is.
My neighborhood is rediscovering its roots. Here’s what was hidden under layers of paint for several decades.
I’ve walked by here a hundred times. Today I stopped and snapped.
Red+Green
Self-explanatory, no?
Spoon meets chopsticks. Simple design, great execution.
More info about the spoonplus.
Behind bars.
A crowd of four to be precise.
I hate crowds. I have a difficult time justifying going places where I know there will be a large crowd so I liked the idea of getting the chance to go to an event where there was going to be large crowds and have the opportunity to be above. Luckily for me, these four individuals were content to watch the crowd go by, letting it become a blur as they stood still waiting for the flow of people to calm down before venturing back off.
That would have been my strategy as well.
The right side of the tracks.
My city was looking good tonight.
My dad was visiting recently and we went to Nat Bailey to catch a Vancouver Canadians’ game. It was entertaining and featured all the musts of a good baseball game, beer & hot dogs included. I’m not much of a baseball guy but my dad has a long history with baseball. His favorite team growing up was the Brooklyn Dodgers, which makes sense as he was born and raised in that particular New York borough. The Brooklyn Dodgers are well-known as the team that broke down racial barriers in sport by giving Jackie Robinson his first shot in the majors. Before getting that opportunity, Jackie Robinson played for the Dodgers’ farm club, the Montreal Royals.
When I think of baseball, and particularly of the Brooklyn Dodgers, what comes to my mind are the Crooklyn Dodgers, specifically the song featured in Spike Lee’s ‘Clockers’.
The Return.
The Original.
Beside the odd Montreal Expo’s memory, this is more along the lines of what the thought of baseball conjures up for me.
It’s been a while since I’ve dedicated time to doing an actual post. 554 days as a matter of fact. That’s how many days have gone by since my last post. You could call it a lengthy pause I guess but I’ve been keeping busy. I thought that I’d share a few numbers that might capture what I’ve been up to since my last post:
This piece of art is from Pascale Monnin, an artist from Port-au-Prince. It was featured today on The New York Times and it had been a while since I had been so moved by a piece of art. I stared at this one for a long time. This powerful piece transported me to a place filled with many haggard looks and profound suffering. It gave me chills.
Earlier this fall I got the chance to be invited to go snap some photos of a Red Bull/Transworld story-in-progress. From what I’ve been hearing, you should be seeing this in the upcoming issue of TWS, or shortly anyhow. It was an incredible set-up and with beautiful Vancouver as the backdrop, you can expect to see some amazing shots from the photographers present. It’s a concept shoot, which I didn’t attempt to capture but I’m sure you will get it once you see the results of the protographers in TWS.
Here’s the view from the beach.
Another perspective.
It was a sunny day only by the power of the drinking of the night before. Let me explain; it often went that whenever the forecast was bad and that a crew of ready-to-shreds went all out at the bar, the forecast would turn out to be great the next day. So it was on the day this shot was taken a few years ago.
I was not there to shred but to manage the shoot and when I surveyed the potential candidates to head up to Snow Park, it turned out that only Wolle and photographer Chris Owen were willing to head up with me. I wanted the opportunity to ride given that everyone was nursing headaches. Without much action going on, Owen offered to shoot some of the FS Inverts I was doing on the QP.
Anytime you get the chance to shoot with lens wizards you know they will make you look good so I was thrilled. The results did not disappoint as this next shot is one of the favorite shots I have of myself on a snowboard. Now only if I could do these on a skateboard…
Subtitled “Reckless Finance, Failed Politics and the Global Crisis of American Capitalism”, Kevin Phillips’ ‘Bad Money’ opens up with a quote from a chief investment strategist:
The “crack cocaine” of our generation appears to be debt. We just can’t seem to get enough of it. And, every time it looks like the U.S. consumer may be approaching his maximum tolerance level, somebody figures out how to lever on even more debt using some new and more complex financing.
According to Phillips, the public and private debt quadrupled from 10.5 trillion to 43 trillion under Greenspan. Of note is that this debt escalation has led to the U.S. financial sector now representing an unprecedented 21 percent of GDP. Although public debt is frequently discussed, less is made of the ballooning of private debt. Coupled with the energy dependence of the U.S. and you have what Phillips calls a “double dislocation” of the state of the U.S. economy. Although U.S. politics might not be “broken”,
both political parties have calcified in terms of interest-group domination and limited strategic capacity. [...] Neither of the major parties will find it easy to discuss long-evolving U.S. predicaments, including energy and financial excess, which reflect on both, if not necessarily equally.
So what is ‘Bad Money’? According to the author:
Money is “bad,” in the historical sense, when a leading world economic power passing its zenith—before the United States, think Hapsburg Spain, the maritime Dutch Republic (when New York was New Amsterdam), and imperial Britain just before World War I—lets itself luxuriate in finance at the expense of harvesting, manufacturing, or transporting things. Doing so has marked each nation’s global decline. To institutionalize the dominance of minimally regulated finance at this stage of U.S. history is a bad idea.
Illustrative of the situation is the estimate that the
debt the United States has been piling on in the last few years has provided only 30-40 percent as much stimulus per dollar to the national economy as did the debt added twenty-five or forty years ago. Why? Because money borrowed in 1970 or 1984 to be spent on factories, new jet fighter aircraft, teachers, or interstate highways had a lot more grassroots impact than money borrowed by tend thousand hedge funds to double the leverage of their various self-serving speculations.
Quoting Yale professor Jacob Hacker, Phillips discusses how securitization has lead to the insecurity of Middle America; not only has income inequality increased at a staggering pace but income instability has grown even faster.
Be it be a critique of the Consumer Price Index and the statistical debasement that has gone along with it to ‘ease’ inflation or the consequences of Peak Oil, Kevin Phillips writes a powerful book that should not be ignored by anyone trying to understand the crisis that made its public debut in August 2007. I will end with another of the book’s quotes, this one from Joseph Chamberlain, the British colonial secretary in 1904:
Banking is not the creator of our prosperity, but it is the creation of it. It is not the cause of our wealth, but it is the consequence of our wealth.
I already wrote about Rawi Hage’s award winning first book, DeNiro’s Game, and although it took me longer than I had expected to get around to his sophmore literary work, I’m glad I did at last. Going from writing about survival in his native Lebanon to the immigrant’s quest for survival in Montreal’s cold winters, the landscape changes but the struggle remains.
Fighting for his existence in the ‘underground’, Hage’s main character flirts with insanity while crossing over from the world of cockroaches and the world of humans, all with a very visual prose. While ‘DeNiro’s Game’ felt like it was written in one sitting as an outpour of the heart, this second novel displays a methodical approach to capturing the environment with Hage’s signature visual metaphors.
Cockroach confirms what I thought after reading his first book: Hage is a literary talent and I will be looking forward to his writings for a long time to come.
In heavy rotation in my headphones for quite a while already now, K’Naan has been bringing me a lot of energy these past few months. This Somali-Canadian artist has a lot of soul and he communicates it very well through his music. I haven’t heard anything this powerful in a long time. Not only does he shine musically but his lyrics actually have a meaningful presence as well. Pictured above at the 2009 United Nations General Assembly Millennium Development Goals Awards, his African experience and political awareness permeate everything he does, be it his music or his interviews. I played his latest album for a friend not too long ago and it was only after his comment that I realized that this wasn’t a ‘straight-up hip hop’ record but that K’Naan actually sang quite a bit on it. The music is so powerful I had not noticed, to me it simply was great music!
Growing up in Somalia until his teens, K’Naan (his real name, which means the traveler) had the chance to leave right before the hell of war broke loose (remember Black Hawk Down?). Nonetheless, he was diagnosed with PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) and only his music writing helped him emerged from what must have been a very dark place. He talks about it during a great Democracy Now interview, which is available on-line.
The previous album is really amazing as well, although not as mature musically, and one bit in it that has really stuck with me is
Until the lion learns to speak
The tales of hunting will be weak
My poetry hails within the streets
My poetry fails to be discrete
K’Naan recorded his latest album in Bob Marley’s house in Jamaica and “Wavin’ Flag” captures an international feeling reminiscent of the Legend himself. Check out another of his tracks off of his latest album, ‘Dreamer’. This is the first song my recently born daughter Miro had the pleasure of hearing while we were still in our delivery room at BC Women’s:
As I await the impending celebration of life coming my way, I did get to celebrate my own day of birth with some majestically orchestrated fireworks. Of course I like to think that the city of Vancouver had planned this for me, alas it was mere coincidence. This did not stop me from enjoying the opportunity to snap a few photos as I had the privilege to be invited to catch the festivities at a particularly good viewpoint. Here are two of my shots, although not the best ones as I’m for the meanwhile keeping them for another purpose.
A great adventure is about to start and I’m guessing that you can tell what I’m referring to based on the picture. My focus this past month has been about getting our environment ready for our little one and of course trying to make the most of these last moments of ‘before’.
Less time on here consequently. Enough to switch things up a little with a new look and some new features. The Twitter feed is the obvious one and it’ll be a good way to share imminent updates about the birth and surrounding details. Get it here or follow my Twitter feed directly.
Here’s another belly shot to give you another perspective on the silouhette shot from above.
They are both recent meaning they’ve been taken during the current heat wave Vancouver has been experiencing.
Not the best conditions (38!) to be sporting such an appendage yet after our time in Africa last year, less complaining has been the frame of mind all around, all the time. M. has been amazing. I guess we’re as ready as we’re going to be. Minus my paper and its data disaster and my finals in the next two weeks, preparation is complete.
Never leave home without your camera. Well I should have listened to my own advice and perhaps I would have had my tripod with me. I got lucky anyhow with this shot of downtown Vancouver. We rarely get storms with as much lightning as we got last night and it was quite spectular, specially after an orange glow had covered the entire city at sunset for the better part of a full hour. I also managed to snap a shot in the last moments of this spectacular light, right after rallying home to gather my camera.
I wish my my camera would have been able to capture what my eyes were seeing as I had never experience such en eerie yet beautiful light. This video a friend found does a pretty decent job of capturing the experience.
I used to ride this road near the Annecy lake quite frequently and it was with great envy that I watched the Tour de France time trial this week. This is Andy Schleck going faster that I ever did. I obviously never got the chance to ride it with the road closed although I did have some early morning rides where it was quiet by the lake, unlike on any summer weekend when doing the ride around the lake became more of a traffic management experience.
This year’s Tour was a great one and the organizers did a great job with the course, besides having the Tourmalet in the middle of a stage, which took it out of it usual key role. One of my favorite aspects of the Tour is the photographs. You have the classic ones that rapidly get boring, shot by AP photographers that need the ‘news’ shot, and then you have the creative ones.
My friend put me on to a great project by Brent Humphreys that all should check out, and then there’s the reliable Boston Globe Big Picture. They do an amazing job each year. Here are my favorites and, of course, you can head over there to see the rest.
Peloton leaving Marseille.
Lance in Monaco.
God of Thunder in Green.
Marc Cavendish’s own Stage Wins delivery Team.
50 years ago was an incredible year for jazz music. Many of my favorite albums are from 1959, which is considered as a pivotal year for jazz music, yet it was only recently brought to my attention that another of my favorite records, released in 1960, was actually recorded in 1959 as well. Add another one on the great 1959 vintage.
During Vancouver’s upcoming Jazz Festival, I will have the thrill to attend ‘Remembering the Miles Davis Classic: Kind of Blue @ 50′ headed by legendary drummer Jimmy Cobb, the only surviving member from the original recording. I’m really looking forward to hearing the five classics featured on this groundbreaking album, as well as the other classics that will be played by Cobb and his So What Band.
“Kind of Blue” has a unique and ongoing place in jazz. It is almost certainly the biggest selling jazz album of all time with sales of over 20 million (though no-one in the industry seems to have been keeping an accurate count). Nearly fifty years after its original release it is still selling at a rate of about 5,000 per week. “Kind of Blue” is widely held to be the first album based on modal jazz, establishing a basis for much of the jazz of the 60s and 70s, the jazz revival of the 90s and signposting the free jazz movement. In bringing modal forms to a wide audience, it has also been influential in the development of rock and world music. This reputation is large and deserved. “Kind of Blue” is simply one of those epoch making albums that continues to grow in stature.
Coltrane’s ‘Giant Steps’ was released in 1960 but was actually recorded in 1959, merely a few weeks after Coltrane recorded ‘Kind of Blue’ with Miles..
Brubeck’s ‘Take Five’ might be one of jazz music’s most recognizable singles, and it sure was in 1959 as this track became the first jazz single to sell a million copies.
My favorite track on this Mingus album, ‘Pedal Point Blues’, was not actually on the original release but was later added on a reissue. Here’s the story behind the original name of the album:
The title of Mingus Ah Um is derived from a Latin study form. It is common for Latin students to memorize Latin adjectives of the first and second declensions by first saying the masculine nominative singular form (usually ending in “-us”), then the feminine nominative singular ending (“-a”), and finally the neuter nominative singular ending (“-um”). Thus the adjective “magnus” (big, great) is memorized as “magnus”, “-a”, “-um”; this would be pronounced like “magnus ah um”.
‘Free Jazz’ was launched by this Ornette Coleman record with a self-explanatory title of what he thought about the direction of jazz.
Of course this is not an extensive list but simply some of the often played jazz records in my collection. If you haven’t heard some of these, go check them out. If you are already familiar with them, keep enjoying them as they are well worth it.