From the window of our 171-year-old hotel, the St James, I looked out onto the familiar sight of the Edmund Pettus Bridge gently bending over the Alabama River, covered in a layer of morning dew, and lit up by a brilliant sunny sky. The previous night’s celebrations left me feeling less than sparkling, but Birmingham was beckoning.

Since the beginning of our trip we had planned to visit the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, which was bombed by members of the Ku Klux Klan in 1963, killing four girls and giving Birmingham the nickname “Bombingham.” When we arrived, the church’s stone steps were warm from the noon sun. The doors were closed, but a sign directed visitors to go through the office entrance. I was expecting a livelier gathering, but the quiet mood was a sign that people were taking a breather, retreating to the smaller communities of their families, and getting ready for the next chapter. (more…)

A photo gallery from Selma, Alabama on the night of Barack Obama’s election victory

SELMA, ALABAMA — “Yes we can. Yes we can. Yes, we did!” The crowd erupted with hugs and high fives last night at The Gathering, a local Selma café, when Barack Obama became the 44th American president.

It had been an emotional day for the city. As if to signal the mood, the usually clear skies were overcast all morning, blending in with the grey Spanish moss hanging limply off oak branches. That evening, some seventy residents, along with reporters from the New York Times and Chicago Tribune, crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge in silence, retracing the steps of those who fought for voting rights and changed the political landscape of America.

Holding candles to light the way, the group assembled on the other side of the Alabama River, where Civil Rights marchers had once encountered violence and hatred. Waiting for them was ninety-seven-year-old Amelia Boynton Robinson, who had been tear-gassed and beaten on March 7, 1965, better known as “Bloody Sunday.” The officer who had repeatedly hit her on that fateful day died recently, she told the crowd, and she attended his funeral as a gesture of forgiveness.

Her message resonated with the residents of Selma, who nodded their heads in approval at her story. However much the city has to contend with its past, residents are hopeful for its future. “Martin Luther King believed that Selma could be a modern Mesopotamia, a melting pot,” said Mae, who has lived here all her life. “Now all eyes are on us. If we can do it…” she trails off, lost in the possibilities, before adding, “It’s not so much about change as hope.”

Taking a smoke break outside The Gathering after McCain’s concession speech, a young, off-duty police officer tells me that this moment marks a new American nationality. His father was one of the organizers for Bloody Sunday, and was in Memphis when Martin Luther King was killed. I ask him how it feels to inherit a narrative he didn’t experience first-hand. “We’re making our own history. There’s so much possibility here, we just have to be creative.”

Obama mentioned Selma last night during his victory speech as being a symbol of his campaign’s maxim, Yes, we can. A few weeks after announcing his run for office, he had visited the city to commemorate the Civil Rights marches, saying, “Don’t tell me I don’t have a claim on Selma, Alabama. Don’t tell me I won’t come home to Selma, Alabama. I’m here because somebody marched. I’m here because you all sacrificed for me.”

Photos by Michael Lasry. Click to see a larger image, or read Alex Redgrave’s first postcard from Alabama.

(more…)

On a road truo to Alabama to watch today’s election, stopping by the town of Selma

“Why Alabama?” asked the border agent on Saturday afternoon. Ah, the trick question. We thought heading for the big ‘A’ might look suspicious because, seriously, why Alabama? When we—that being myself, and my friends Michael and Kristen—set off from Montreal to the Heart of Dixie, it was on a whim with little time to prepare for the question beyond “Why not?”

From its bustling blue collar cities, to the eerily silent cotton fields, Alabama is haunted by history. It was here that Rosa Parks defied racial segregation laws, inciting the Montgomery Bus Boycott that went all the way to the Supreme Court. And it was here that Martin Luther King led marches for the Civil Rights Movement from Selma to Montgomery, where he gave the “How Long, Not Long” speech and later wrote his “Letter From Birmingham Jail.” Through the lens of this turbulent past is a presidency that means much for the future of the Deep South—a region defined by loss and resurrection. We wanted to witness this historic election for ourselves. (more…)

My co-interns and I played rock, paper, scissors for the media tickets to this year’s Giller Prize readings at the International Festival of Authors. I lost. So I went to the Rock, Paper, Scissors Championships instead. Then the next day, I went to watch Sarah Vowell discuss her new book, The Wordy Shipmates, and how the founding of America was influenced by Calvinist ideas of predestination. Coincidence?

“Rock, Paper, Scissors is not a game of chance,” one of the Founding Fathers of the World RPS Society, Graham Walker, tells me, in the cavernous back room of the brewery where the championships are being held. Mathematically speaking, he’s right. In a coin-toss, the results are random: there is a fifty-fifty chance of heads or tails, and each flip of the quarter is an independent event. Even if the last hundred times you flipped the coin, it came up tails, on the hundred-and-first flip the odds are still fifty-fifty. It’s senseless. Meaningless. Non-narrative.

RPS, on the other hand, is a system governed by choices. Human beings, as anyone who studies probability knows, are incapable of generating random sequences. Our deepest brain structure won’t allow it. Like the decision to gather up the family and sail to the New World, the decision to throw “Rock” is not a random event. It’s all in accordance with a Plan. (more…)

For those of you who missed the Obama love-in that was the “America Votes” IFOA event this past Saturday afternoon, let me assure you that it warmed the hearts of every Democrat supporter in the room (i.e. everyone in the room). Postulating on the impending election hoopla were Hugh Eikin, senior editor of the New York Review of Books; economics writer Jeff Madrick, author of The Case for Big Government; and host Michael Tomasky, the colourful editor of Guardian America, who promised to resort to “cheap punditry,” should he be prodded to do so. He was and he did, making the wise suggestion to “choose the smart guy this time.”

(more…)

“Let her pound your gavel over and over!” Just one of the suggested uses for the This is NOT Sarah Palin Inflatable Love Doll, now available for mail order from adult product manufacturers Topco. (Link NFSW.)

According to the item’s description on Topco’s website, “Sarah Palin makes sexism sexy” and is “the hottest thing to come out of Alaska in years.” And these are some of the website’s tamer descriptions of the product, with others listing the various ways you can, ahem, ‘enter’ the doll. (There are three, by the way).

Wow. If only women had as many ways to enter the White House. (more…)

Talking to writer/director Paul Gross about his epic new World War I movie

“I liked it because it’s Canadian.”

Apparently this was the wrong thing to say about Paul Gross’s new film Passchendaele, or so I learned from one of my Walrus colleagues the other evening over beer and nachos. “Trust me,” one of them said, Heineken in hand, “there’s no more back-handed compliment than saying you like something because it’s Canadian.” Hmm. I pondered the statement, growing a little red in the face. “Girls say it to me all the time,” he added with a sigh.

Did I play the fool for admitting I liked something simply because it came from the same place I did? Was I judging this film using criteria that disregarded artistic merit, that paid no attention to script, cinematography, or even (gasp) acting? Do we, as Canadians, observe our own creations through maple-leaf coloured glasses?

(more…)

I moved to Toronto from Vancouver a couple of weeks ago, and one of the things I miss most about home is the daily commute that took me over the Cambie Street Bridge and into the downtown core each morning. I’d hop on my trusty ten-speed (minus one brake cable, but who’s counting?) and rocket down the hill, past the all-too-familiar yellow and red safety vests of the Canada Line construction workers, and onto the wide bike-friendly path speckled with self-propelled individuals on their way to work. On rainy days my view from the bridge was limited to the slippery pavement in front of me, but on the rare and much celebrated occasion of a clear, sunny Vancouver morning, the city would rise up before me in all its tall, glassy glory.

To my left, the expansive curve of English Bay’s shores would wind beneath the Burrard Street Bridge, where tiny rainbow-coloured ferries shuttled market workers to Granville Island. To my right, the waters of False Creek would reach into the city, before ending abruptly at the foot of the Expo ‘86 architectural orb known as Science World. And in front of me, clusters of residential towers would form a shining wall across the horizon, some so distant that only the sharp glare of their reflections would register, others so close that I could see through their windows smartly dressed couples making breakfast and preparing for the day. It was easy to see how Vancouver earned the Coupland-coined moniker “City of Glass.”

(more…)

Last night, I watched Barack Obama’s acceptance speech, streamed over the Internet to my room in Toronto by Al-Jazeera. I was thinking of my younger sister, who lay in a delivery room in America at that moment.

She gave birth to her first baby girl at 9:51 p.m. last night, nine minutes before Obama took the podium at Mile High Stadium. I was thinking about how this man will have a disturbing amount of influence on my newborn niece’s life. That 8-pound-6-ounce baby girl doesn’t have the power to mitigate carbon emissions, find alternative sources of fuel, or repair a broken financial system. Opening her eyes for the first time, she has no idea what she’s being born into. She’s relying on Obama and his promise of genuine leadership to create a situation in which she can live a decent life. It’s the current policymakers, more so than her hardworking parents, that are going to decide how bad climate change gets and where our energy comes from and which wars, if any, we are embroiled in. Of course, the US is ostensibly a democracy, so it is impossible and unfair to put the burden on Obama’s leadership alone: it requires all US citizens to support him, influence him, challenge him, and go beyond him. (more…)

A couple of weeks ago, and with bittersweet irony, on the day I found out that one of my favourite aunties had passed, this photo (above)

“If you must put me in a box, make sure it’s a big box. With lots of windows. And a door to walk through.” —Dan Bern

A couple of weeks ago, and with bittersweet irony, on the day I found out that one of my favourite aunties had passed, this photo (above)—cyber-bounced around my family—made my own impending aunthood a reality. So in the spirit of looking at how far we’ve come, baby, and within the real-meets-conceptual space that this genderless creature exists, I’m wondering: when, how, and why do we ascribe gender?

It seems appropriate that this photo would find a semi-permanent home on the Internet, given that it’s likely had more web-fame than most unborn babies have (can I get a fact check?). And though said fetal celebrity has been mostly confined to my family, that’s not always as simple as it sounds. (To get a glimpse of her great-grandfetus, my eighty-five-year-old grandmother, for example, had to track down her computer teacher to unlock the shared computer room* on her kibbutz, but I digress.) Once we all successfully sorted out how to get a hold of this black and white blob—the question on the tip of our tongues was, without hesitation, Is it a boy or a girl? (more…)

It was in spring that I heard about the inaugural All Points West Music & Arts Festival. I was examining Radiohead’s website in hopes their tour would bring them close to my locale (then Winnipeg), within a couple of thousand kilometres even. I looked to August’s North American schedule and was puzzled to see not one but two dates booked at something called All Points West. Two consecutive concerts in one place—that must be something special, I thought, before looking up the festival. Little did I know that I would make it to New York—via Toronto—for those very shows. But while they may have been the festival’s biggest attraction, All Points West (APW), August 8-10, was more than a double dose of Radiohead. (more…)

Would your country ever steal a colour from another country?

Granted, from a twenty-first century perspective, the question doesn’t make perfect sense. One pictures a team of graphic designers pitted against another team, in some skyscraper in Shanghai or Mumbai or New York, concocting trademark colours for branding purposes. (Canada’s pretty much got the red-and-white scheme cornered, but did Mexico and Italy ever have a design conflict over the red-white-green of their flags?)

However, colour used to be more of a physical commodity than it is today. The raw materials used to produce colourants were costly: costly to produce, costly to transport, and costly to the environment. And, like any precious substance, they were subject to conflict, contention, and theft. Red was one of the most precious colours during colonial times, so an intense rivalry grew up between England and Spain over the mysterious red substance called cochineal. (more…)