Attila Richard Lukacs has long been considered one of Canada’s most influential and avant-garde artists. Now, with fellow artists and collaborator Michael Morris, he has launched a travelling show exhibiting the Polaroids he has been creating for over 25 years. Unlimited fired quick questions to the pair about their relationship, how to collect art, how to get good collaboration and why they both should have hung onto their Andy Warhols.

Michael Morris and artist Attila Richard Lukacs
Photography by Malcolm Brown

Unlimited:  How do you get started investing in and collecting art?
Attila Richard Lucas: We’re coming out of an inflated market. And so everything was high, high, high. Prices were high. Now there’s an adjustment. So, it’s not so scary. Won’t be so scary for younger collectors to get into it because galleries, even a lot of galleries in New York, they’re just not doing that well anymore.  So I mean you don’t see the high prices. I started collecting when I was in 13.

UL: Is there a younger market of collectors emerging?
ARL: I find I come across a lot of young people who collect. A lot of young people starting up galleries. You should only buy something you really like. If you’re buying something for speculating you don’t plan to hold onto it for very long and you never really get attached. It  becomes more of an object. A good painting or a good piece of art always takes time to unfold. You see new things in it all the time.

MM: I had an opportunity to meet Andy Warhol when he was first making his Marilyns. The Famous Marilyns. I bought a set of those. Right at the beginning in '68 you could buy them at $200 apiece. In the '70s, I sold eight of the nine for $1000 each and saved one that I particularly liked.

UL: Five times your investment.
MM: A good friend of mine is president of Sotheby’s Canada.  I saw him a few months ago ,and he asked if I still had the Warhol.  He said, “You know I can sell that for you for $100,000 for the one piece.” I said, just out of interest, if I had had that [complete] set, what would it be worth?  Three million, he said.

ARL: The first piece of art I bought was I borrowed $800 from my dad to buy an Andy Warhol soup can.  I started in grade seven.

MM: One of those, especially the early ones, a couple hundred thousand for that now.

Artist Attila Richard Lukacs on the business of buying art

Wale
The Mixtape About Nothing

Wale’s fantastic and free* album delivers, among its many pleasures, a phrase new and essential to the English language: Olsen twinning (verb. To be hungry and still not eat). But it is not even close to the most interesting thing about the latest masterpiece of the Mash-Up era. (Which, as far as I am concerned, starts in 1989 with the Beastie Boys’ Paul’s Boutique.) Wale’s mixtape is the perfect headphone record, exactly the kind of music you can fall in and out of with the ebb and flow of your day. Wale’s conceit is as simple as it is inspired.

The Mixtape About Nothing is based on the famed show about nothing: Seinfeld. In addition to embedding clips from Seinfeld episodes and a cameo appearance by the actual Elaine Benes, Wale samples Kramer/Michael Richards’ famously vulgar and racist rant; and Richards subsequent apology on the David Letterman Show; and the weird reaction of the studio audience. (They laughed.) But it’s Wale’s irresistible flow and ingenious turn of phrase that make the work so distinguished. Being about nothing is much harder than being about something: there are no characters, no story, just Wale, coming off. Alternatively hilarious, bracing, disturbing as well as super catchy, Wale’s opus might even help you forget that it is only 9 a.m. and there is a lot of the day left.

*Not “free” like music is “free” now to anyone with an Internet connection and a conscience-free neglect for copyright, but because Wale gave it away as a free download. U

“We cannot seek or attain health, wealth, learning, justice or kindness in general. Action is always specific, concrete, individualized, unique.” _Benjamin Jowett

Gregorian chants blast from Les Ballet Jazz de Montréal (BJM_Danse) studio. Two male dancers are rehearsing for the show Jack in a Box as a dozen or so sweatpants-clad dancers sit around the perimeter of the room, watching and stretching. The choreographer-in-residence, Aszure Barton, stops the music and walks over to the two men, getting right up close and speaking in a voice so quiet that I strain to hear her from just a few feet away. “I’d like to see you do this instead,” Barton says, grabbing one of the guys by the cheeks with her forefinger and thumb, like you would to a chubby-cheeked boy. The dancers on the sidelines laugh.

Barton has earned the respect of her dancers with this intimate, personal approach. She does a lot of what she calls tasking – asking dancers to do exercises that are more psychological and emotional than physical. This collaborative soul searching is the starting point for many of the best sequences in her shows. “It’s not just me coming in and saying, ‘Do these steps.’ The dancers create the work with me,” she explains

Dance hasn’t been so popular since Michael Jackson moonwalked his way to superstardom, and the Edmonton-born, New York-based Barton has become a kind of It-girl. At 32, she has choreographed a Tony-nominated Broadway show (starring Cyndi Lauper), founded her own dance company, taught at the Julliard School and become the artist-in-residence at the Baryshnikov Arts Center.

Barton is credited with creating some of the most innovative work in contemporary dance. Mischa – as she called fondly calls the iconic dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov – describes her work as “fresh, arresting and fascinating.” Not that she wants all the credit. “I am not just doing it on my own. I’ve been very lucky and successful…” Barton laughs and makes bunny ear gestures to suggest quotation marks. “…whatever that means. But it is with an incredible amount of devotion from the team.”

The organizations who commission shows, however, can’t always offer the kind of lead times that these relationships require, so she will often fi ght for, say, the seven weeks it takes her to create a one-hour piece. With a kind of old school approach to developing talent, Barton likes to get to know her team. Dance troupes are usually referred to as The Company, but Barton calls hers The Family. “I am really interested in the people that I am working with. I am not interested in saying, ‘I am Aszure and this is what I want you to do.’ I want to create an environment where people feel they can bring stuff to it. I don’t
want them to feel like I am on a power trip.”

The personal/business divide can get tricky when you’re so close to your team. “As an artistic director or leader of a group, you have to be able to separate yourself,” Barton says. “There are certain things that just have to be said, or have to be directed, or otherwise there is no focus.” So while she is no whip-cracking dictator, she admits, “I am learning to be a businesswoman, in terms of, you are not always going to make everyone happy. And that you have to detach, though I can never detach completely. I still take everything to heart, and I think that makes a good company, any kind of company.”

Just back from Australia, where she worked on a commission for the Sydney Dance Company, Barton made a quick pit stop in New York before landing in Montreal, with emergency meetings scattered along the way. A workday might go until 10:30 or 11 p.m., then the troupe goes for beers and often heads back to the studio, not because they have to, just because they want to. Still, there can be too much of a good thing. Barton refers to 2006 as a year of “absolute fantasy-hell.” She was choreographing and workshopping a show in Montreal, making a new one for her company, creating a piece for Baryshnikov and choreographing The Threepenny Opera. Then she was asked to do another show and had to say no. “I couldn’t do it and it killed me. Because you want to take everything. You’re thinking: How long is this going to last? How long am I going to have these opportunities? Now I realize that life is what it is and that I have to be patient.

This January, BJM_Danse is touring the shows Les Chambres des Jacques and Jack in a Box in Alberta (they were created at the Banff Centre for the Arts). Barton hopes the tour will break through the stigmas some people have of modern dance and make them see that it’s “not always some weird naked person running around stage. Though it can be, and that can be very, very beautiful.”

Aszure is gratified when audiences not used to contemporary dance are surprised when they actually have a good time. Creating an experience is part of what she considers to be her job. “I’m not trying to do some egomaniacal work, masturbation on stage. At the same time, I’m not trying to create accessible work, but work that people can relate to. Because it’s real people.” And so is she.  U

Paul Myrehaug considers it a good working day if hi spatrons can’t breathe. if they cry hot tears, expectorate on their friends and gasp with pain. the best outcome for this standup comedian is if he kills an entire room of people. With his timing, of course.

“i’m starting to make peace with being a sick bastard,” Myrehaug says from a hotel in red Deer. “being a blue comic means talking about the dark stuff. i used to fight it. i didn’t want to embarrass my parents, but i get more laughs when i’m on the blue side of things.” the 25-year old Camrose-born comic, who won the Yuk Yuk’s Great Canadian Laugh off in 2007 (complete with $25,000 prize) and appears this spring in a series of shorts on the comedy network, moved to Vancouver last summer after a stint in toronto to be closer to the u.s. comedy tour circuit.

“The first time i got up on a weekend at Yuk Yuk’s in Edmonton, i looked like a homeless guy,” Myrehaug says. “The rest of the guys had nice clothes, and i had on a ball cap, t-shirt and ripped jeans. my first joke got no laughs and it just went into the tank.” he threw in a side gig or two while he built a following and even once worked as an X-ray welding inspector for the pipeline. (“you should not give a kid like me access to radiation.”)

Things picked up though, and myrehaug has cleaned up his appearance, if not his act. his routine centres on the ins and outs of dating cougars (as in women), what it’s like to undergo adult circumcision (insert your own joke here). OK, you kind of have to YouTube it. but it’s not all frat-boy humour. Myrehaug likes to adapt an old Lenny Bruce maxim that the link between pain and laughter in comedy is “tragedy plus time.”

Zak Pashak sounds exhausted. His plan to temporarily swap life as a multiple club owner and booker of indie bands for that of a carefree backpacker has gone awry. He’s been up all night in Kyoto, Japan, making emergency calls back home to Vancouver, where his Biltmore Cabaret, which opened last December, is struggling. He sighs into the phone like he’s wondering why he’s subjecting himself – with his first club, Calgary’s Broken City, finally turning a profit after five years of operation – to this type of startup stress again. After all, admits the Calgary native, “If I’d known how difficult it was going to be with Broken City, I probably wouldn’t have gotten into it. It’s really hard to get a place going.”

Back then, without having studied much business during a degree-less stint at the University of Alberta, nor having done market research, Pashak ignored bar and nightclub failure rates of around 80 per cent. “I wasn’t really thinking about that,” he says. “I was on a mission.” His objective was two-fold. First, Alberta bands he’d discovered while hosting radio shows on CJSR at the U of A and the University of Calgary’s CJSW needed a new place to play. Second, he needed a club that didn’t make him cringe.

“I wanted a bar where people could be comfortable being themselves,” says Pashak, who’s now 28. “The trend of a lot of bars in Calgary was toward a kind of plastic lifestyle: everyone wearing the same clothes and smelling the same way and talking about the same things. There didn’t seem to be a huge support network for individuality.”

Pashak figured he could provide that simply by building a bar where he’d want to hang out, cluttering it with Calgary-esque paraphernalia scored from thrift shops and hanging photos of his friends like he was decorating his living room. “There’s market research and then there’s just knowing what you think is really good and believing in that,” he says. “If a business person really cares about an idea and tailors something to what they would really love, I think that it’s guaranteed to have success. People would latch onto that.” And for four years running, the approach has earned Broken City kudos from readers of FFWD, Calgary’s alt weekly, as the city’s best live music venue.

Money helped, especially given Pashak’s taste for pricey (but nonetheless obscure) headliners for his Sled Island music festival, staged annually in Calgary since 2006. But even ready cash (thanks to mom Jackie Flanagan, publisher of Alberta Views magazine, and stepdad Allan Markin, an oil and gas mogul and part owner of the Calgary Flames) is “definitely not the magic bullet. It’s not like it alone made things work.” Liking hectic schedules and high-stress situations helped, he says. So has being tenacious. While Pashak sees the Biltmore’s value in bolstering Vancouver’s indy-rock culture, not to mention in routing bands out to Broken City that might not otherwise see the Prairies, the municipal government doesn’t, hence those cross-Pacific calls home and, despite minor burnout, a renewed sense of mission.

“I’ve got to slow down and quit opening businesses and get these ones really solid. I think that’s going to happen,” says Pashak. “I’ll fight it out until it does.”  U

issue 8

Scott Messenger: I’ve read a lot about you in newspapers and magazines. I know that you came to Canada in 1951.
Pierre Cochard: I stayed in Montreal one year, between ’50 and ’51. In Montreal, to make my living, it was very tough. We shovelled snow from sidewalks, a dollar a sidewalk in the wintertime. We could do about 20 sidewalks. To us, $20 in those days was like $20,000. We didn’t have [much] money. We were eating in drugstores, at the counters. I think we paid 35 cents for coffee and toast and bacon.

S: You were boxing as well, no?
P: I came here to train. I never fought [in Canada]. I fought in Europe.

S: Why not in Canada?
P: First of all, the prize in Canada for boxing, if you were the first time here in Canada, they gave you 60 bucks, 70 bucks for the fight. In Europe I had $2,000 for a fight.

S: But you were a boxer of some skill. You had championship titles in Europe? 
P: I was the Intercontinental Army Champ. I was in the army in 1944, ‘45.

S: So after Montreal, you headed west?
P: I knew a guy in Edmonton, he said, “Pierre, you come over here, there’s lots of work.” So I came here with my three buddies. We bought a car in Toronto, a 1929 Buick, and we drove that thing over here and we made it. The cooling system didn’t work; one guy had to sit out between the front and the motor and pour water while we were driving so the motor kept cool, on the highway. The highway was not like the Trans-Canada, no. You got about 3,000 miles from here to Toronto. About 2,000 was paved and the rest was gravel. They were building the Trans-Canada then, piece by piece, so you had stretches of 500 miles or more of gravel, holes and pits and all kinds of stuff.

S: You’re 83 now, so how old would you have been when you arrived in Edmonton?
P: I would have been 26.

S: Is that when you started with the truck, going to construction sites?
P: Chuckwagon lunch. They’d never seen that before here in Edmonton. I picked the idea up in Toronto, to go to construction sites and service stations at 10 o’clock, 11 o’clock and sell coffee and hot dogs and hamburgers, doughnuts, cigarettes.

S: And you did that for 17 years?
P: Yeah.

S: And then you started a club in Grande Prairie?
P: In 1968.

Ah, holiday traditions at the office. Don’t they bring a tear to your eye? The receptionist dragging boxes of plastic pine garlands from storage, the mandatory compilation of client addresses for greeting cards, the exchange of anonymous gifts valued at $20 or less, and, the real tree-topper, the holiday work party. It’s the evening we look forward to with a mix of excitement (no real work needs to be done) and dread (a new variable is introduced into the workplace mix – alcohol). In each of us resides two beings: a sobriety angel and a drunken devil. The first is the persona you’ve spent your whole career crafting: the professional, the model employee. On the weekend, however, you’ve also become acquainted with its antithesis. Here are some common situations where the voices may speak to you. The mission: keep the two forces in balance.

SITUATION: AN OPEN BAR
Sobriety Angel: You’re allowed one drink. After that, switch to water.
Drunken Devil: It’s free booze. Party on!
Balance the forces: Count each drink you have. If necessary, keep a pen and notepad in your pocket or purse and mark every trip to the bar.

SITUATION: YOU RECEIVE A DISAPPOINTING SECRET SANTA GIFT
SA: It’s the thought that counts.
DD: Tell everybody how much the gift blew and how you can’t wait to unload it.
Balance the forces: Your Secret Santa might very well be sitting at your table, so don’t complain. If you don’t want your present, re-gift it to your mom. But don’t fake interest in that crappy gift, or you might set yourself up for a lifetime of jasmine bath bombs.

SITUATION: YOU’VE WORN SOMETHING RACY
SA: Hoist up that boob tube or borrow a cardigan.
DD: If you got it, flaunt it, baby. That neckline really shows off your… eyes!
Balance the forces: Slinky evening wear is appropriate – within reason. Avoid outfits that require you to tug, tuck or, worse, suck in. After a few drinks you’ll stop caring and your wardrobe malfunctions will call attention to your inebriation.

SITUATION: YOU’RE SITTING NEXT TO THE BOSS
SA: Just smile pretty and nod when she talks.
DD: No way, man! You are the smartest person in this company. Let her know who isn’t pulling their weight and where she should be trimming the fat. And say it loudly so those jerks can hear.
Balance the forces: Your boss is usually too busy to get to know you. Use this time to reacquaint yourselves. Even talk shop a little (if she brings it
up first). Just don’t be a tattle-tale.

SITUATION: A CONVERSATION WITH COLLEAGUES BECOMES A WORK GRIPE SESSION
SA: Be the better person. Walk away from this conversation with your arms crossed and an incredulous look on your face.
DD: Dishing the dirt, eh? You have soooo much to contribute.
Balance the forces: The holiday party is about getting to know your colleagues. Griping about work is the lazy way to establish a comfort zone. When the conversation veers in that direction, steer it into an entirely un-work-related topic.

SITUATION: MIDNIGHT APPROACHES AND A CO-WORKER GIVES YOU A COME-HITHER LOOK
SA: Workplace relationships never work out and they bring down the whole organization.
DD: Pfffffft. Green light means go!
Balance the forces: There’s plenty of debate on the ethics of workplace relationships (see “Your Cubicle Or Mine?” page 50). For many of us, work is just another way to meet people. If you’re certain your soulmate shares the same lunchroom, then your best bet is to pursue the mutual interest at another, more sober time. U

issue 8

Sports fans have pubs. Book lovers have libraries. Film buffs have festivals. And gamers have darkened rooms, crammed with computers, where the air rings with cries of “damn! I died again,” and everyone understands what that means.

The walls of the SwitchBox Videogame Palace are deep red and the blinds are shut tight. Like a movie theatre or a bowling alley, it’s one of those places where you can forget the time of day. A flat-screen television the size of a shower curtain hangs on the wall, but with 67 computers in the room, it’s rarely watched. This hybrid arcade/internet café on MacLeod Trail SW is where Calgary gamers go to escape their basements. It’s open until 2 a.m. every night – unless there are more than seven patrons, in which case it stays open even later. After midnight, you’ll see everyone from scruffy teenagers drinking Red Bull while checking their email to off-duty police officers re-living high-speed chases.

The centre’s first incarnation opened in 2002. Four friends – Steve Chaba, his brother Shane, Rob Stevenson and Gavan Brown – figured, hey, why not start a business? “We didn’t have a lot to lose,” Steve recalls. “We were all under 35 and single.” He pauses. “Well, except for Gavan and Rob.”

Gavan was a hard-core gamer. The others liked video games, sure. But there was no driving (or, one might say, blinding) passion. This breaks a couple of stereotypes about entrepreneurs: one, that they must hedge and fret before they take that giant step; and two, that they must be crazy about their business to survive those nail-biting early days before the cheques begin to balance the bills.

That laissez-faire approach was familiar to Rob and Steve. They’d started a business in 2000. Both were employees at a Calgary glass company: Steve in web development and Rob in sales. They quit the same week and launched Eclipsion, a web development business, where they did things like put paper surveys online for the City of Calgary and Shell Canada. The timing sucked. Steve had just bought a house; he quit the glass company on a Friday and threw a housewarming party on Saturday. Rob’s wife had a baby the day before he gave notice. But who says you can’t combine overwhelming financial obligations with the autonomy of entrepreneurship?

Eclipsion’s business was good – until their reliable corporate clients began to cut budgets. “We needed a way to pay the bills,” Steve says. Gavan, one of Eclipsion’s part-time employees, suggested opening a gaming centre. It wasn’t an untested idea; there’s even a U.S.-based organization, iGames, that helps promote and support the industry. Christine Goutaland, iGames’ marketing director, says that SwitchBox’s approach was the right one. “The people who have a successful gaming centre bring a very practical approach to business,” she says. “It’s not for the love of video games. That has been the downfall of some of them.”

But armed with solid business plans, many outlets do well. Despite the bumpy economy in the U.S., Goutaland says that new games centres are opening all the time. Her organization estimates that there are between 1,000 to 1,500 in North America. Back in 2002, though, Alberta bankers didn’t like the sound of a gaming centre. “The appeal is the fast internet connection and [space for] your buddies,” Steve says. “The banks, however, didn’t understand why people would pay us to play games they have at home.” The Canadian Youth Business Foundation (CYBF), a non-profit that finances new businesses, understood, granting the partners a $15,000 loan. They pooled together another $12,000 and were in business.

“Our original plan was to keep doing the web development in a back office,” Steve says. “We figured it’d only take one guy up front to manage the store. We weren’t planning on cutting off our major source of income and were just hoping that SwitchBox worked out, too.”

But you know what happens to the best laid plans. Business exploded, and the back office sat empty. So they added more computers. They opened a second location in 2004, which was a very good year: they were named Emerging Enterprise of the Year by the Calgary Chamber of Commerce and won the CYBF’s 2004 Best Business Award. In 2006, they closed the first store and opened SwitchBox 2.0 at Southland Crossing. They’ve since connected both outlets to Enmax’s Envision fibre optic network, the fastest public internet connection in the city. In both cases, streets were closed while workers dug up the road to connect SwitchBox to the network. The Enmax bill came to $3,500 a month for five years. But it’s a core part of their business, and with 8,000 members paying $35 for yearly memberships (in addition to hourly fees), that’s more than $23,000 a month in automatic revenue.

SwitchBox’s founders have their eye on expansion, but they’ve scaled back their “try it and see” business style. They won’t grow until they can do so without loans. That day may not be so far away. The gaming industry is the Mac in the room of PCs that is the entertainment biz. In 2007, video games receipts totalled $8.7 billion, more than nipping at Hollywood’s $9.7 billion box-office take. And each time the vid industry scores a hit, SwitchBox wins, too.

“Attendance spikes when new games come out,” Steve says. “World of Warcraft, that was a big title. And – what was that Xbox game that came out recently? You know, that really big hit?”

“Halo?” I ask.

“That’s it! Halo.”

That’s funny. Halo 3 is legendary: it raked in $194 million in first-day sales in October 2007, more than any other movie or video game before it. Someone in the gaming industry forgetting Halo, even momentarily, is like an actor forgetting Steven Spielberg’s name. But the SwitchBox crew have proven that passion is not a necessary ingredient for business success. Far more important are good ideas, an eye for the market, and the chutzpah to say, “What do we have to lose?”  U

issue 8

The Dumbest Generation:
How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future
By Mark Bauerlein [Tarcher/Penguin]

Mark Bauerlein is dumb. And I don’t mean that he is unable to speak. But only a dumb man would lament the decline of society’s vocabulary while simultaneously bastardizing it. When he says my generation (I’m 25) is the “dumbest,” what he really means to say is “least knowledgeable.” His argument, essentially, is that the internet has turned today’s youth into vapid narcissists – as if his generation spent Saturday nights at home reading about their mayoral candidates. Please. Bauerlein says his book is not just one more “curmudgeonly riff,” but I’ll bet his VCR’s clock is always flashing; he should ask one of us 20-somethings to fix it for him. While we’re at it, we could Google the quote “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” The date? 1905. My point? This book really doesn’t offer anything new. It’s an age-old argument: Teenagers will always disappoint their parents, and older generations will always complain about kids these days. Had Bauerlein employed less rhetoric, it might have been clear why exactly Gen Y is dumber than the generation that fell in love with The Beatles. As it stands, this book is kind of, well, dumb. _Lindsey Norris

Mad Men
[AMC/Lionsgate Television]

In the Emmy Award-winning drama Mad Men, series creator Matthew Wiener does for
Madison Avenue what his mentor David Chase did for the mob in The Sopranos. Set inside a New York advertising agency just before the deaths of John Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe, this is an America on the cusp of radical change, yet still a place where secretaries are referred to as “girls” and African-Americans only operate the elevators. Watching the first episode, I wasn’t sure whether I could overcome my repulsion to the historical accuracy. In this era, “man’s man” seems to mean adulterous, binge drinking, chain smoker. (In a recent episode, an alcoholic copywriter is invited to “make a night of it” with the bosses after receiving his pink slip.) One of Mad Men’s charms is its central conceit: it’s about the ad biz, and we are treated to a parade of product placement and shout-outs to classic marketing campaigns. We’re also reminded that generational conflict at work is nothing new. When the firm hires two fresh, young creatives, they inform the boss that the younger generation is looking for authenticity in their experiences, and don’t want to be told what to do or how to act. _Joyce Byrne

Night On Earth
Directed by Jim Jarmusch [The Criterion Collection]

Cabbies, those scruffy ferrymen of the lonely, the drunk and the lost, are quintessential nighttime workers, and Jim Jarmusch’s bittersweet 1991 film Night on Earth is the quintessential cab movie. The film follows five cab rides taking place simultaneously in five cities: in Los Angeles, a tomboyish Winona Ryder takes casting agent played by Gena Rowlands home from the airport; in New York, the only cab willing to stop for Giancarlo Esposito is driven by German immigrant Armin Mueller-Stahl, a former clown who barely knows how to shift gears; in Paris, Isaach De Bankolé is bewitched by beautiful, blind passenger Béatrice Dalle (and gets nothing but abuse in return); in Helsinki, weary, walrus-moustached Matti Pellonpää tells a carful of drunken Finns a heartbreaking story about his dead daughter. But the best segment takes place in Rome and stars Life Is Beautiful’s Roberto Benigni as a motor-mouthed driver who’s amusing himself so completely barrelling the wrong way down narrow one-way streets and delivering a stream-of-consciousness monologue into the rear-view mirror that he almost resents having to pick up a customer. Working nighttime hours can turn anybody a little crazy, but Benigni probably needed less of a push than most people. _Paul Matwychuk

Start & Run An Adult Boutique
By Karen Bedinger [Self-Counsel Press]

Snicker all you want – I did, a little – but adult boutiques are big business. Not only that, but as the cover of this new release from business and legal publisher Self-Counsel Press proclaims, there’s no competition from big-box stores. This classic how-to book is packed with logical, thorough advice from an entrepreneur who ran her own successful sex shop for 25 years. (Brainstorming ideas for a business to open, it was her husband who suggested an adult boutique. A “classy” one, mind you.) Karen Bedinger walks readers through everything they’ll ever need to know about opening a small retail operation, regardless of what they’re selling – with detailed attention to the unique aspects of this particular type of business. She offers legal tips (look into local zoning restrictions) and stresses the importance of researching the competition. Beyond careful business and financial planning, and displaying merchandise properly, starting an adult boutique presents a unique staffing challenge; employees must maintain the right atmosphere. And the range of products, which Bedinger painstakingly catalogues, is an eye-opener. I’m sure there’s merit in Self-Counsel’s Start & Run A Bookkeeping Business, but hey, sex sells. _Dan Rubinstein

PREVIEW

Aurora Borealis
[Look up, waaay up]

On a chilly winter night, some people pop a season of Lost into the DVD player and curl up on the couch. But why stay indoors when one of the best (and cheapest) shows in the world is playing right above our doorsteps? The aurora borealis, a.k.a. the northern lights, blazes the night sky year-round, but it’s brightest in winter. Robert Service described this optical effect as sweeping “the sky like a giant scythe / it quivered back to a wedge; / Argently bright, it cleft the night / with a wavy golden edge.” It’s also better than Laser Floyd at the planetarium. In laymen’s terms (sort of), this geomagnetic light show occurs when super-charged electrons created by the sun hit the earth’s atmosphere. These auroras shift and “dance” through currents that can hit 20 million amperes at 50,000 volts (the circuit breakers in your house cut out when the electrical system exceeds 15 to 30 amperes at 120 volts.) In Alberta, prime viewing spots include Slave Lake, Peace River and Athabasca. Travel Alberta has even put together a self-guided three-day trip north from Edmonton to Fort McMurray. So don your puffy coat and boots to brave the sub-zero temperatures, and leave everyone else to hide inside. Wimps. _Craille Maguire Gillies U

Issue 8

RIGHT OF WAY: Tom Yohemas lends an arm(our) to his mother, Dorene

Tom Yohemas, knighted in 2003 as Sir Thomas of Strathcona by Calgary’s Knights of the Wild Rose, doesn’t consider chivalry the stuff of myth and legend. Though the Edmontonian may have started anachronistic club Knights of the Northern Realm in 2000 mostly as justification to invest more than $3,000 in a suit of newly forged steel armour, circa 14th century Europe, a more noble mission has emerged. Despite the violence and gore of medieval times, Yohemas associates the era with honour in service. Now, with a background as an environmentalist and sights set on charity work, he seems convinced that if the Middle Ages gave us the enlightened years of the Renaissance, a revival of sorts might be worth a try. Even if wearing the armour while driving laid waste to the interior of his ’92 Grand Am. _Scott Messenger

I’m an interviewer at Statistics Canada, one of those people who calls to talk to you about labour or farming or health or the environment. I’ve been there a year and a half, almost full time. It’s to open doors. I’d like to work for charitable organizations as I have in the past. I’ve done a lot of environmental work over the years. For 13 years I worked at Edmonton’s Environmental Resource Centre. I did environmental education in schools, travelling around Alberta, working with everyone from kids in Medicine Hat to parents in Peace River. But I decided that a lot of those kinds of activities, I need to do them on my own, at home, to make sure I’m acting on what I’ve believed in since becoming an environmentalist when I was 17.

Five years ago I started my own ethical video store called Video Solutions, in east Edmonton, taking an alternative video store – you know, foreign films, Canadian films – and merging it with the social and environmental consciousness of something like the Body Shop. I gave discounts to people who took transit or worked at the food bank. A percentage of revenues went to charities like youth and homeless shelters. We tried to limit our ecological footprint through recycling and renovating with non-toxic paint and salvaged materials. But a slum landlord was the end of everything in April 2005. The walks never got shovelled, the bathrooms smelled terrible. The roof even collapsed from water damage. Sixty thousand dollars and two years of my life. It was my baby.

When I started doing the Knights of the Northern Realm in 2000, I was still at the Environmental Resource Centre. People still say to me, “You’re an environmentalist, why are you doing this knights thing?” I say, what is the difference? When you’re talking about ethics and morality and society, it’s all part of the whole to me. I saw a connection. A knight who really tried to live by the codes he swore to when knighted is really no different than the way animal rights activists see themselves, fighting for their ethics and morality. One of the things I learned as an environmentalist was that change happens on many fronts, regardless of what armour you wear, whether it’s a business suit or chain mail.

In the Middle Ages, when men were knighted they took oaths to defend the church, to protect widows and orphans, to provide for the poor, and, at least in spirit, that’s kind of what our organization still does. If we’re doing business or private events, we charge, but for fundraisers we always perform for free. We herald people as they arrive, mix and mingle, stage sword-fight performances. It’s living history. Rather than role-playing, we’re trying to reenact the real history, learn what actually happened, wear real armour, hold authentic medieval feasts, learn real sword fighting. Basically, we’re trying to relive the 14th century as much as we can.

People, mostly guys at the moment, are drawn into our group because of that. Some are interested in the medieval dancing or the old languages, others are into the martial arts or sword fighting. Guys will tell you they’ve always wanted to be knights since they were boys. Buying a suit of armour isn’t enough. Knighthood is supposed to be about achievement. Sure, it’s a lure: people are like, “Wow, I can become a knight,” but it’s not really what it’s about. You have to be committed to the group and involved in our charity work. Those ideas of being able to give back to the community – we’re more in need of that now than ever.

In our group, knighthood isn’t something you ask for, it’s something you’re granted, like any kind of distinction. We know from stories of the Knights of the Round Table with King Arthur, many of them failed on their quests, because as humans we all have faults. What matters is whether or not somebody is driven to rise above those, to do and succeed, even if we’re not knights in our real, day-to-day lives. I’d like to be. It’d probably pay more bills than my current job.

We’ve been doing school visits for six years, sometimes as many as 10 a year. Do we teach them how historical Aragon’s sword was in The Lord of the Rings films? Do we describe the rules for role-playing an elf in Dungeons & Dragons? No. None of those things are practical. But what’s interesting is that all of those things, even if they’re fantasy, have a thread that goes back to real history. One of the things we do during a school visit is a show-and-tell of historical armour and we talk about some of the weapons that came to Europe from the Crusades and use those to discuss the misnomer in the West that civilization as we know it developed in Europe, when in fact it happened in the Middle East. Besides weapons, they’d developed medicine, science, mathematics, spices for cooking. We try to dispel some of the myths the kids might have seen on TV and in movies. I’ll even often explain to the kids that the Crusades are still going on in the Middle East – of course, I do it in a tongue-in-cheek way.

We do a battle as well. But as part of the presentation, we get the kids to take an oath that they’ll never use what they see in the playground or at grandma’s. We talk about the fact that weapons were made to kill. We let them know that we don’t just get together and bash each other in the backyard, but that we have a club where we’re learning and teaching and training.

For me, I’m anti-war. People will sometimes say, “You guys are promoting war.” No. What we’re doing is learning about history, and we know very clearly from the wars that we’ve seen in the last hundred years that we’re doomed to make the same mistakes unless we’ve learned from them. The things we were doing in the Middle Ages, warring over religion, or resources, or a boundary line, are the same silly things we’re still doing today.  U