Up in Ontario

Ridge Theatre Closing Forever Dec. 23

After 55 years of operation in Vancouver at the intersection of Arbutus and W. 16th Avenue, The Ridge Theatre will be closing its doors on December 23 for the last time. As loyal Up in Ontario readers will remember, The Ridge is the clear winner of Vancouver's Best Theatre Popcorn and my favourite place to see a picture show. The staff and management of The Ridge have a message on their website for their long time fans, who are loyal and legion:

November 25, 2005: The management and staff of the Ridge are truly heartbroken to announce that in late December of this year the theatre will be undergoing a change in ownership. Lease negotiations between the Ridge and the property owners began this summer in an attempt to deal with a substantial increase in operating expenses, largely tied to a 16% increase in property taxes, but these talks were unfortunately unsuccessful.

When it opened its doors in April 1950, the Ridge Theatre was hailed as “…a miracle of modern architecture and construction” boasting the latest in projection equipment and creature comforts. In the late 1970s the Ridge became a repertory or “second run” theatre, a role that continues to this day. Although the baton has been lovingly passed from hand to hand over the years, those of us behind the scenes at the Ridge have always made it our priority to provide Vancouver’s theatre goers with the best all-around moviegoing experience, a mission we regret deeply that we will no longer be able to fulfill. It’s no understatement that for many of us here, life will not be the same.

The Ridge was recently named “Best Second-Run Theatre” by the readers of the Georgia Straight, a fitting, if somewhat sad, honour under the circumstances. That said, what better way to part company than with the support of the?community we have always cherished and striven to serve.

Our last screening will be long time Ridge favourite the World's Best Commercials on December 23, after which we'll say good-bye and thank you, Vancouver.

Thanks for your support & interest over the years...

...the staff & management of the Ridge Theatre.

Over the seven+ years I've been attending The Ridge they've consistently done a great job of showing interesting (not always in my taste, but always interesting) movies. You could tell they put some thought into how they ran the place and what they showed, and it showed. Their double bills paired movies that either worked well together (thematically, subject-wise, genre-wise) or juxtaposed each other well. I believe the staff and management of The Ridge are set now to run The Park Cinema and Fifth Avenue Cinemas, so let's hope the best is yet to come.

Apparently there'll also be a fire sale when they do close, so I'm thinking of making a bid for their exceptional popcorn machine. Think of the years of seasoning it has accumulated - irreplaceable! We'll be heading up this evening to take in the farewell performance of World's Best Commercials and we may need a moving van or pickup coming back.

Braised Beef Short Ribs Recipe

Almost every Saturday I buy the Globe and Mail weekend edition. I once tried to subscribe to Saturday-only delivery, but it cost more than buying it on the newsstand, and I like going out to get it, so I shlep my way to the corner store or the magazine store every weekend to pick up a copy. Since it's the only paper I read in a week (I find I can only retain one paper worth of information) I read most of it over the weekend. The sections I don't get to, which tend to be the Focus, Books and Review sections, the parts that require more attention and offer less timely stories, I read during the week when I have a chance.

I like the paper. A friend from Toronto recently spent a few weeks here and mentioned how much slimmer the Globe is here. I didn't wallop her with a piece of fresh sushi, but instead thought to myself that I would have to spend more time reading a thicker paper. Ah the joys of staying slim!

I usually read the combined British Columbia and Sports sections, so I see the local stories and the stories to watch for over the weekend in the sporting world. Next I read the Style section, which is wonderfully loathable, with its what-to-buy horseshit, a columnist whose name rhymes with intellectually barren, but who I think is smarter than anyone gives her credit for, and the fashion of Jeanne Beker whose face looks stretched so tight she can hardly blink.

Anyway, loving and sniping aside, I really do dig many of the recipes of Lucy Waverman and the wonderfully nerdish wine column of Beppi Crosariol, who must constantly struggle with how to describe another mid-grade Canadian red wine.

This past Saturday Lucy Waverman hit me with a beauty of a recipe for beef short ribs. I like it so much I went out and bought the ingredients. Monday I seasoned the ribs and set them in the fridge. Last night the big production went down. Today I'm still remembering them and I could gush for a page. But I won't. See for yourself below. The recipe is available at the link below the photo. It's a long recipe to make, but leisurely. And you have to open a bottle of wine for the reduction, so why not pour yourself a glass and enjoy the time? Lots of the steps can be done in parallel so read the recipe all the way through and your total cooking time should end up around 4 hours.

Braised Beef Short Ribs with Swiss Chard

This is the one dish that has never been taken off the menu and once you try it, you will know why.

• 6 beef short ribs, 14 to 16 ounces each
• 1 tablespoon fresh thyme leaves
• 1 tablespoon freshly cracked black pepper
• Salt to taste
• 36 small pearl onions
• ½ cup extra virgin olive oil
• 1 teaspoon thyme leaves
• 1 cup diced onion
• 1/3 cup diced carrot
• 1/3 cup diced celery
• 4 whole sprigs thyme
• 2 bay leaves
• 2 tablespoons balsamic vinegar
• 1½ cups port
• 2½ cups hearty red wine
• 6 cups beef or veal stock
• 4 sprigs flat-leaf parsley
• 2 bunches Swiss chard, cleaned, centre ribs removed
• 2 tablespoons water

Season short ribs with thyme and cracked black pepper, using your hands to coat the meat well. Cover and refrigerate overnight.

Preheat oven to 425 F. Remove short ribs from refrigerator one hour before cooking and allow to come to room temperature. After 30 minutes, season generously on all sides with salt.

Toss pearl onions with 2 tablespoons olive oil, 1 teaspoon thyme and salt and pepper. Spread pearl onions on a baking sheet and roast for 15 minutes or until tender. Cool. Slip off onion skins with your fingers. Reserve.

Reduce oven heat to 325 F.

Heat a large sauté pan over high heat. Add 3 tablespoons olive oil and wait until the pan is very hot and almost smoking. Working in batches, place short ribs in pan and sear until browned on all three meaty sides, about 6 minutes. Remove ribs to a braising pan (ribs should lie flat, bones standing up in one layer).

Reduce heat to medium and add diced onion, carrot, celery, thyme springs and bay leaves. Cook for 3 minutes or until vegetables just begin to caramelize. Add balsamic vinegar, port and red wine. Turn heat up to high and cook until reduced by half.

Add stock and bring to boil. Pour liquid over short ribs, scraping any vegetables that have fallen on the ribs back into the liquid. Stock mixture should almost cover ribs. Tuck parsley sprigs in and around meat. Cover pot tightly with both foil and a lid and braise in the oven for 2½ to 3 hours.

Pierce a short rib with a paring knife to check for doneness; the meat should yield easily to the knife. Let ribs rest in their juices for 10 minutes, then transfer to a baking sheet.

Increase oven temperature to 400 F.

Place short ribs in the oven for 10 to 15 minutes to brown.

Strain broth into a saucepan, pressing down on the vegetables with a ladle to extract all the juices. Skim the fat from the sauce. If the broth seems thin, reduce it over medium-high heat to thicken slightly. Taste for seasoning.

Heat 3 tablespoons olive oil in a large sauté pan over high heat. Tear Swiss chard into large pieces. Add reserved pearl onions and half Swiss chard into pan. Cook, stirring, for one or two minutes. Add water and remaining greens. Season with salt and pepper. Cook, stirring, until greens are tender. Place Swiss chard on a large platter and arrange ribs on top. Generously spoon braising juices over the ribs. Serves 6.

(I also slid some Yukon gold potatoes into the oven with the ribs while they were braising and then served them with the whole shebang and they rocked.)

The original Braised Beef Ribs with Swiss Chard recipe on the Globe and Mail.

How do I learn Ruby on Rails?

Okay, this is full-on nerdery. So anyone out there who can't rhyme off what HTTP stands for, you might want to pass on this post. But you geeks, come get some love!

So I'm a bit of a passive geek. I love the new new things but I can't program worth a lick, which, if you're a geek and still reading this, you will have been able to tell from this website. It's simple and basic. I stink at design so it's mostly text. It's kinda all about text (stories) anyway, so that makes sense to me. I've done some tiny modifications to the standard MovableType templates and run with it. I haven't upgraded my blog software since I installed it. I still can't get that damned horizontal line to display properly in some browsers on every non-blog page on the site. Okay, you get it.

Now I'm trying to expand my skills. I want to be able to do some of the wow things that I see all the cool kids on the web doing. I want to build some active interfaces. I want to create objects. I want to do things that I know can be done but that I don't know how to do. And I think I want to do it within the Ruby on Rails open source framework. (I could be talked out of this if you have a persuasive argument to make.) I don't have any illusions about being a complete programmer, or getting a job doing software development. But I want to be able to hack around with my own site.

How can I learn to do this? I don't see any courses, seminars or workshops to teach this stuff. The only things out there are for the geeks who already get it. I know that they get together to superdose on caffeine and hyperagree on just how cool programming is with Ruby on Rails. I've been there, listened in and gotten nothing out of it. I need to not jump to advanced-level understanding at level one, but I don't want to be stuck in the class where we learn how push the power button. So, any advice?

Christmas Wishlist

For anyone out there looking for gift ideas for your truly, I have created an Amazon wishlist, accessible through the fancy-pants link on the left of the Up in Ontario blog home page and below.

I've also created a link to my Flickr.com photostream, which I'm still trying to figure out. The photos from our trip to London, Athens, Greece and Turkey, including Istanbul and sailing are available if you contact me and get yourself an invitation. We've made them private because we're private people.

People are Voting Green

Over the past few days I've heard a number of friends say that they're going to be voting for the Green Party candidate in their riding in the upcoming national election. Every single one of them tells me that they want to vote for a party that puts a priority on the environment in every decision they make. Whoa.

Then today I read in TheTyee.ca the reasons Why Raif Mare is voting Green as well. This seems grassroots and growing. Mare makes the sound point that even if a Green candidate does not get elected, each percentage point of the popular vote the party receives translates into funding for their next campaign. So the notion that it's a wasted vote doesn't really make much sense. Proportionally, a Green vote becomes a more significant vote (in terms of funding) that a vote for a more popular party.

I haven't decided yet who I'm voting for. I usually don't until I'm ready to vote, either because I procrastinate or because I don't have to. I haven't figured out which yet. I'll get around to it: the figuring out and the deciding. And when I do, the Green Party will certainly get due consideration.

Patrick Brealey and the Knives: Tonight

Patrick Brealey, of Patrick Brealey and the Knives, writes with these words:

Ahhh....I love this time of year. So much giving. So much receiving. So much socializin'. So much havin'-a-few-too-many-and-gettin'-home-way-too-late-during-the-week-in'. Yes, it is true, I like to have a good time just like everyone else. That being the case, I have a prospect for you. This Saturday, December 10th at the Railway Club is going to be really fun. Why, you ask? Well, Patrick Brealey & the Knives will be playing their last show of 2005 and will be sharing the stage that night with the beloved Salteens and the much-lauded My Project: Blue. You should really arrange your schedule so you can be there. Yes.

Sure, sure, you can say I didn't give you enough warning or that your office party is that night or maybe you planned to craft nifty Christmas gifts for all your family members, regardless it doesn't change the fact that we will be playing and if you can make it then great, if not, well, there's always next year, right? If you can't make it you can always visit www.patrickbrealey.com where the brand new site is mere days from being completed. Excited? I am. I bet you are also excited that the inaugural Patrick Brealey & the Knives t-shirts will be available at the Railway Club show. And so conveniently timed for Christmas!

I won't keep you for long because I know how busy you all are these days. Heck, keeping track of all the parties is a fulltime job in itself. But consider your Saturday planned.

Bye now,
Patrick
www.myspace.com/patrickbrealeytheknives

Harold Pinter's Nobel Acceptance Speech

Nothing pithy today, just a link to Harold Pinter's Nobel Prize acceptance speech, where videos are available in Real Media format. Or, if you prefer, the full transcript entitled Art, Truth & Politics. Many excerpts are available online, so I won't bore you with them. I'll only mention that, agree with him or not, the full message is powerful.

Lululemon Stretches for $108 million

In the pages of the business section today I found an article reporting that Lululemon, the trendiest of the trendy yoga-bunny wear makers / lifestyle enhancers, has sold 48 percent of itself to two U.S. private equity investment firms out of Boston for, exhale slowly, $108 million. The deal values Lululemon at $225 million. Who knew?

I remember when Lululemon first started just up the street from our apartment. They operated on the top floor of a retail space at Arbutus and W. 4th, where every operation for the company happened in the same space. On sunny days they opened a big garage door out the back and wheeled display racks onto a small parking platform to sell their gear. Now they have 33 retail stores in Canada, the U.S., Australia and Japan.

I report all of the above with some trepidation. I'm not really a fan of Lululemon clothes for me. I mean sure they're great on other bums, but I always find the men's gear is an afterthought, it doesn't fit me well and it's overpriced. Personal taste aside, I do admire their product marketing and promotional skills. They've done an incredible job of positioning Lululemon as a very specific brand, with a distinct character and selling proposition. It always seemed like such a great idea to see that in their retail store on W. 4th they did active product development. They had a whole section with a table and racks and gear dedicated to discussing their products with their customers. They participated in the community they wanted to reach. They tapped the yoga bandwagon zeitgeist at the perfect time and have ridden along since. Good for them.

But: here's the rub. In the article on the Globe and Mail they mention that Lululemon "aims to become a global brand as familiar as Nike or Reebok." Today most of their production is done in Canada, yet, "a small percentage is manufactured offshore, as it has become infeasible for us to produce everything in Canada. We are committed to maintaining the same high working standards at our off shore factories as at our Canadian ones." This is a great sentiment, but will it fly? At the boardroom table when someone asks a question about maximizing shareholder value but cutting costs, what will be the response? I guess only time will tell.

The last Vancouver company acquired and positioned for international sales was Arc'teryx who were bought by SolomonAdidas two years ago. I watched the acquisition like a hawk because I really love their gear - I challenge you to find pieces that do what they're supposed to do better than Arc'teryx pieces - and they operated the whole business here in Vancouver: design, head office, manufacturing, distribution. Since the acquisition it seems to me, through nothing more than casual label sniffing, that their manufacturing has migrated moreso offshore, but they still make a lot of their gear here in Vancouver, and they've kept the head offiice and design here as well. I guess we'll just have to wait and see how long that lasts.

So here's to hoping that the price of success for these two Vancouver clothing companies isn't the loss of what made them great in the first place, their souls. In as much as a company can have a soul, of course.

Mondegreens: The Words We Get Wrong

Some friends of mine are terrible song singers (they know who they are). They'll be bopping along to a tune without a clue what they're singing. The words that come out of their mouth, they're just wrong. The duck has trouble with nursery rhymes like Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star. Today, courtesy of the CBC Radio 3 website, home of the best podcast to be found anywhere, I learned that there's a word for this phenomena: Mondegreens.

One of my favourite songs for mondegreens is O Canada, in both French and English. I love that it's a song we hear so often yet we screw up to frequently. I make all kinds of mistakes in singing it, which is why I mumble it before they drop the puck. In fact, I think that most Canadians would have a lot of trouble getting all the O Canada words right. We stand on God for Thee and all.

An infamous mondegreen from my late teen years was derived from the 1981 Harlequin song Innocence, which goes something like this:

Innocence, yes that's all you ever pleaded
Innocence, yes that's all you ever plead

But what my friend heard on the classic rock station playing in the family minvan he drove at the time, and what he sang back out loud in public was:

Anal sex, yes it's all you ever wanted
Anal sex, yes it's all you ever needed

True story. And if you read the full lyrics to Innocence by Harlequin you may find that the second mondegreen chorus works better too.

Do you have any good mondegreens you know?

Racing a Ferrari Through Paris

Here's a 10-minute quicktime video of C'était un rendezvous. Why do you want to watch it? Well, read on, Peanut, to find out if you do.

As Jerry Kindall tells us:

On an August morning in 1978, French filmmaker Claude Lelouch mounted a gyro-stabilized camera to the bumper of a Ferrari 275 GTB and had a friend, a professional Formula 1 racer, drive at breakneck speed through the heart of Paris. The film was limited for technical reasons to 10 minutes; the course was from Porte Dauphine, through the Louvre, to the Basilica of Sacre Coeur.

No streets were closed, for Lelouch was unable to obtain a permit.
The driver completed the course in about 9 minutes, reaching nearly 140 MPH in some stretches. The footage reveals him running real red lights, nearly hitting real pedestrians, and driving the wrong way up real one-way streets.
Upon showing the film in public for the first time, Lelouch was arrested. He has never revealed the identity of the driver, and the film went underground until a DVD release a few years ago.

In online discussions some folks dispute the actual top speed the car obtains in the film (is it 100 mph? 140 mph?) while others dispute the type of car used - whether it was a Ferrari or director Claude Lelouch's own Mercedes with Ferrari sounds added. But I don't really care. The sound is that of a Ferrari, unmuffled, and glorious, and the speed is exhilirating. I watched it fairly breathlessly for the first third, then the car goes through a tunnel / gateway and my heart leapt. This took it from incredible! to holy crap!! A few misses on pedestrians, hot laps the wrong way along one-way streets, blown red lights and tires squealing and the payoff at the end. It was all for...

Watch it, you'll see.

Incidentally, I saw an advertisement for Project Gotham Racing 3 last night on TV. All the footage in the ad was of current exotic cars racing through the realistic streets of London (Look kids Nelson's Erection! Big Ben, Parliament!). I was pretty jazzed because the racing looked realistic and the scenes were stunners. But it doesn't really hold up to the real thing, where crashing doesn't just mean pushing the restart button.

Detouching Celebrity Mythology

Over at Worth 1000 they've been running contests to see what popular celebrities would look like without all the aesthetic work they undergo: the skin treatments, plastic surgery, needle-smoothed brows, coloured hair, trimmed orifices. It quite disarming to see the results, which they call Detouching: removing the retouching from airbrushed celebs.

I love the subversive element to this initiative, and the way that the same images used to build up careers and drive all the satellite vanity industries of fame can be subverted with simple tools and the same techniques. All these familiar faces look like they could be people you met on the street, not just people we see in a mediated way - in magazines, on television.

While we travelled through Greece a few months ago and learned about the pantheon of Greek gods it struck me that the role their ancient gods played and the role our modern celebrities play was the same. For some reason we need to believe that a select group of us are elevated beyond our status, untouchable and better than us. And at the same time as we follow and glorify their every move we love to hear how similar to us they are and we love to watch them fall.

Last week I heard Margaret Atwood on CBC radio talking about her new book The Penelopiad and, though her habit of asking herself questions and then answering them was incredibly annoying ("And what do we mean by this? We mean to share our experience of the world as..."), like she was delivering a homily on Sunday morning, she did succinctly tie up the origin and reason for mythology's resonance for me in a way I can remember. Our myths, she said, embody our wishes and fears.

So I think our celebrity culture embodies our wishes and fears. The stories that we pay attention to, that become the big celebrity stories that drive the recycling news culture to the frothy point, are the ones that most deeply reflect our wishes and fears. Young actors having their first big hit, established players redeemed for their long hard work with recognition, the star abusing their privilege and their talent and having it come back to bite them, affairs and romances and break ups and marriages.

How many times have you heard someone say, whether self-consciously in jest or not, that their situation or the situation of someone they know reminds them of a parallel celebrity story? These stories saturate our culture and thinking. I've heard it, I think I may have even said it. I think that celebrity is our main mythology, certainly more pronounced and universal in our culture than any religion or education. Now what does it mean?

Dec. 3: Buy Local, Support Yourself

I just came across an advertisement for the Business Alliance for Local Living Economy (BALLE): Buy Local, Support Yourself. Tomorrow, December 3rd, they're having an exposition at the Vancouver Art Gallery where local businesses and artisans will be selling their wares. Perhaps a good opportunity to find something for someone on your Christmas list?

And, if that's not enough hot direct-from-the-craftsperson shopping action for you, may I please remind you of the Mayor's 3rd Annual Christmas Sale! It's got the best goddam image advertisement going, and it inspired me to post the word 'pussy' for the first time on this blog. It's a whole day of hoo-hah local shopping. Get on it.

Note: This post was not made in China or any other cheap labour country. It was made almost entirely with gumption and a sprinkle of pixels.