Kurt Swinghammer: Jacobsonean Keeper of Toronto's Cultural Flame

When I noted that Sam The Record Man is about to close shop, I mentioned several artists who benefited directly from Sam's existence and mode of being including Kurt Swinghammer. After receiving a couple of "who he?" e-mails, I thought it behooved me to forward one and all to his website.

I am perhaps inordinately fond of Kurt. I used to follow him back when he and Ron Sexsmith were running an even keel, showbiz-wise. They'd put on shows at C'est What? and joke that the plus to performing together was being able to call themselves SexHammer.

Kurt seems to have slowed down a bit in the aural arts department, while picking up the pace as a visual artist. He is a delightful wielder of the air- and paint-brush, but for those of us who have seen him playing guitar and singing on stage, it's a bitter pill to watch him step back, however temporarily, from the scene. Anyone who had a campfire facility with the guitar knew this guy was freaky magic, but for some reason that never seemed to translate in the studio (the way it does for, say, Richard Thompson).

Ah, well. He is very much a creative force to be reckoned with. Here is his website, and this is the T-shirt (and bag) design he did for Sam The Record Man:

Feral Pigs Meat The Press

Using the Tricky Pix for Klutzes book, "you can learn how to create your own Page-1 worthy beast!"

Link from ALD.

Gratuitous Hockey Post

Well, Anaheim is clearly a defenceman's team. Last night's event skated perilously close to the sort of game I don't enjoy watching, where the play is almost entirely dictated by a suffocating defense. Every time Alfredsson, Heatley and Spezza attempted to assemble their rush, they found three Ducks waiting for them across the blue-line. The Senators spent three periods beating their heads against the wall, then scratching their heads trying to figure out how two Ducks could outplay the two Senators on defense.

If Sens goalie Ray Emery weren't on fire, the Senators would have been taken to the cleaners. Neidermeyer was spectacular to watch, and there were moments in the second and third period where you could see the Senators trying to tease apart the Anaheim defense. Too little, too late. I'll be curious to see what sort of strategic changes coach Bryan Murray makes. For the regular season he and the Senators have been capable of readjusting their play with breathtaking results. My hunch, and here I must resort to the precise language of acute analysis, is something will "click" for the Sens and they'll win three straight games. But will it be the next three?

Sam The Record Man

"I said it, I did it!" And now Sam is closing shop. When I worked downtown I made it a weekly habit to visit Sam's to see what was new in music. Sam's was one of those very old, labrynthine buildings that you could spend days exploring. I don't think they ever sent anything back to the distributors, because I picked up some mighty obscure discs that had been out of print for years.

These days I download via eMusic and (very rarely) that would-be monopolizer of all things digital. In some ways the download is a boon for music lovers: I'm listening to all sorts of stuff I would never have bothered with if it had meant buying something wrapped in plastic. Recent download treats include wax.on wax.off, Camera Obscura and Mavis Staples. Just to drive the point home, I've even given Arcade Fire my attention, a band whose music is not at all to my taste. It's good exposure for the artists, and a worthwhile experience for me.

But do I ever miss the package! Heck, I miss the LP! Back in the day I used to pore over every little detail on an album cover, sometimes with a magnifying glass, hoping to further decode the cypher of significance within. Those were the glorious days of rumoured backmasking and other mischief. Every album was like a ticking bomb that you unpacked and explored at your own peril. The world — your world, our world — could change!

Well, the world has changed and now it's just the music and nothing else, which I suppose should be more than enough. But some days it seems like little more than a bunch of ones and zeros. And I miss the event of stepping into a creaky old building that required a person to walk up a set of stairs, then down a few steps, then take a left and another left before you came into a small room that stocked that über Cool Jazz masterpiece, Poitier Meets Plato.

It's another era, and I'm not going to stand in its way. But you'd better believe we're already missing the fun and discovery of the era that's rapidly fading.

Sekine: The Best Bikes In The World

When it came to scoring bicycles, my brother did exceedingly well at police auctions. In the mid-70s, he and my parents came home from a city auction with a white Sekine (rhymes with "Zucchinni") ten-speed. I tried to hide my envy — prior to receiving my CCM five-speed, the cute, dark-haired girl next door had informed me that Sekines were "the best bikes in the world. And they cost a hundred dollars!" (Guess what she got for her birthday?) $100 was an unconscionable amount of money for a Mennonite to spend on a bicycle in 1977, but my parents forked out fifty at the police auction. I affected indifference to my younger brother's good fortune, while the lucky tyke tooled around town on his flashy wheels.

A week later, my father took the bike to a local shop for a quick tune-up and was informed that he'd miraculously scored Sekine's top-of-the-line racer: the gearing was more competitive than the store-bought models, and the frame was much, much lighter. When I finally knew what was what, I had to grudgingly admit my brother's bike was quite the prize: chrome moly double-butted tubing, alloy cotter-less cranks ... the evidence of its superiority to everyone else's bicycle piled higher and higher.

Unfortunately for my brother and his snazzy bike, his generation of lads were the genesis of the BMX scene. They didn't want fancy gear-shifting bikes; they wanted a tiny, single-speed bike they could ride off the roof of their father's garage without breaking anything more serious than a collar-bone. Once again my parents took him to the police auction. This time they came back with a monster: a bike that must have weighed 100 pounds, but had a freaky-looking spring that acted as a shock between the rear wheel and the seat post. It was a one-of-a-kind piece of work, and its total cost (including a can of silver Tremclad paint) was $25.

Every kid on the block wanted to ride that thing. (Say, bro — surely you've got pictures?!)

By then I had reached that stage of late puberty when all manner of crazy schemes are worth pursuing. A friend wanted to cycle to the West Coast, so I bought the Sekine off my brother. I cleaned it up, put a new seat on it, rebuilt one of the wheels, then promptly lost interest.

Yesterday, while scrounging around for a garden spade amid all the piles of trash in our garage, I stumbled over this:



I must have strapped it to the car the summer my new wife and I took a road trip to meet the family. For the last 13 years I've shlepped it from apartment, to house, to house ... just because I couldn't bring myself to throw it away. Yesterday I inflated the tires (at least 20 years old) and cautiously took it for a spin. It's in surprisingly good shape.

After a quick Google, it appears this is probably Sekine's penultimate model, the SHT (the derailleurs are Shimano 600s). I'm missing the chain guard for the rear wheel; my cycling friend persuaded me to throw it away because "it just adds weight." D'oh! But I've still got the coveted "ornate head badge":



Mid-life craziness comes in many forms. Here I am with these two grand, old bicycles, and I'm reading stuff like this, and I'm starting to think I'm not so keen on getting something new as I am on restoring something old ... even if I am all thumbs when it comes to this stuff.

Gratuitous Hockey Post

It's a curious experience to have my loyalties as a hockey fan so evenly divided. For most of last night's game I did not want Ottawa to win. But then Anaheim got into the habit of taking stupid penalties, and I thought the Senators would trounce them. That's not how it finally played out, of course. The Sens are still getting a sense of their opponents, and if last night's game is indicative, we'll be enjoying a very exciting series for the cup.

Bicycles Meet the Aspirational New Urbanist

A couple of weeks back a friend gave me a copy of Monocle, the latest Tyler Brûlé concept to hit the magazine stands. It's a quirky-cool bit of business, and reads a little like National Geographic has been taken over by the über-hip staffers at Wallpaper*. I rather like it, particularly the May issue (still on stands in most North American book stores) which takes a quick look at "global bicycle culture and commerce."

Apropos to the magazine's intention of being beautiful, topical and timely, Monocle has already branded a bicycle, as built by Sweden's Skeppshult Bicycles. It looks like this:



For reasons that elude me, the Monocle writers seem especially smitten by single-gear bicycles. A quickie article surveys four bicycle manufacturers from Norway, Japan, Denmark and Finland, all of whom build models my late grandfather could relate to. Well ... except for Norway's Alta, which looks like this:



I suppose there is utilitarian appeal to a single-gear bicycle (near-zero maintenance). Personally, ever since I received a 5-speed bicycle for my 12th birthday I've seen no reason for looking back. These single-gear bicycles are a novelty that bring to mind a summer moment from the mid-80s. I was sitting in the car with my mother, waiting for my father to finish some banking. There was a bicycle shop next to the bank, and a woman pedaled up to it on a brown bicycle with a milk-basket on the front. Her outfit — cable-knit sweater, long corduroy skirt with woolen knee-high socks — was brown as well. She was smiling primly, and when she lowered the bicycle's kick-stand and entered the store, my mother quietly remarked, "She thinks she looks European."

Yes, well: if I thought I looked European, I wouldn't waste money on any of these continental fiddlers. Instead, I'd go straight to the authority — Batuvus — and purchase their no-nonsense Personal Bike Delivery. And I wouldn't mount it unless I was smoking hand-rolled Drum tobacco.



Now that's a bicycle!

In the interests of reportorial fairness, I should mention the Monocle bicycle is a 5-speed. Still, it adheres to the antique fetish aesthetic of the other bikes. In other words, it thinks it looks European.