LINA'S ITALIAN MARKET
The smell of baking bread and simmering tomato sauce washes over you like a warm bath when you step through the door. To your right, skinny shelves stacked with fine kitchenware: miniature espresso cup-and-saucer sets emblazoned with the Illy coffee logo, knives, colanders, pestle and mortars. To your left, a bustling cafeteria cordoned off with a demi-wall. More on that later. Many come to Lina’s Italian Market just to eat and run, but the time-gifted should allow themselves a little bit of foreplay—a slow perusal of the dried pastas and pickles; the produce table with baskets of hazelnuts and rows of quince and nespole; the cookie shelves displaying mouthfuls like “Quadratini” and “Napolitanke,” perfectly shaped for dipping into those teeny espresso cups.
All aisles lead to a white-tiled horizon and the whine of deli-slicers cutting salamis into paper-thin rounds to be layed out and wrapped in butcher paper. Beside that, blocks of cheeses with names like “Sardo,” “Pecorino Rustico,” and “Crotonese.” Around the bend are the olives—all manner of shapes, sizes and colours, pitted and non-pitted, spiced and non-spiced. And beyond that, the chocolate-dipped desserts dusted with powdered sugar.
Just try to bypass the cafeteria: the pizzas, the pasta of the day, the panini sandwiches served in oblong rolls sawed off at each end. Your default order is the panini calabrese—a trio of hot salami, creamy provolone and briny eggplant tucked into crusty white bread. You pay on the other side of the retro-styled Elektra espresso machine and shimmy through the lunch-rush crowd of golf-shirted business guys, retirees, yuppie couples with baby bumps and moms out for some “me time,” looking for a spot at one of the tightly arranged tables.
For the next few minutes, it’s just you and that sandwich. Eventually, you dot your lip with a paper napkin and turn your gaze to the picture windows, certain that on the other side lies a lush cobblestone courtyard packed with beautiful couples wearing Ferragamo shoes. What you see instead is the utilitarian causeway of Centre Street. Beyond that, graceless stripmalls feature pawnshops, insurance brokers and the Vanishing Rabbit Magic Shop. You’re not in Italy. You’re in Calgary. But that’s okay, because it tastes like calabrese heaven.
SWERVE SHOPS
Suzie Q Beads has moved around the corner from its old space into a larger
storefront just off Inglewood’s main drag. In addition to the plethora of beads and beading classes it offers, Suzie Q has a great selection of jewelry, like these bangles
($85 and $95) and cufflinks ($85) by Kolas Designs featuring beetles suspended
in Lucite. 917 12th St. S.E., 266-1202.
WORKING THE RANCH
A Photo Essay by George Webber.
Its official name is the Chinook Ranch, but if you call the 6,000-acre spread the Hughes place, people around Longview will know what you mean.
The land, which is about four miles south of Longview (if you say six kilometres, folks around here might not know what you mean), has been in the Hughes family since 1945. That’s when Jim Hughes Sr. bought it (he added to his holdings in the ’50s when the neighboring Bar U broke up). Jim Sr. was born in 1903 on a Hereford farm in Herefordshire, England and grew up to raise Herefords (sense a pattern here?). He came to Canada in 1928 (family lore says he left England with $2 in his pocket), docked in Halifax and got on a westbound train. Once settled, he and his wife Mary had six children, including Jim Jr., now 65, who is in the process of handing the management reins to his son Stephen, 40.
It was Stephen’s younger sister Janet Pliszka who first invited photographer George Webber out to the family spread. She took a darkroom course from Webber in 2000 and when she got married at the ranch three years later, Webber took the pictures.
The wedding took place August 16, three months after the United States banned beef imports from Canada as a result of mad-cow disease. That made for some tough times at the ranch, “I’m attracted to edgy things,” Webber says. “BSE and the border being closed was the hook for me to go back.” Without this turn of events, Webber would have considered the subject of working cowboys to be “if not a cliché, then certainly which intrigued the photographer. well-done.” Instead, as he discovered when he first went to branding day in June of 2004, he was drawn to document a way of life in southern Alberta that is in peril.
The threat has not really lessened with the 2005 reopening of the U.S. border to cattle 30-months-old and younger. Now the challenge is tied to the falling U.S. greenback and the rising Canadian dollar. “It’s hard to make a profit right now,” says Janet. “It’s worse now than in BSE times.”
It’s just another thing the family has to deal with. One of their responses has been to shift their focus and start selling directly to customers—Janet says the move to eat locally produced food has helped in this regard. To promote its products, the ranch is about to unveil that standard feature of modern marketing, a website (www.chinookranch.com), designed by Janet’s husband, Harold Pliszka.
It’s the least he could do. In an admission that still makes Janet shriek with laughter, she says that Harold is a vegan who, to her knowledge, has never been on a horse. That news went over better than you might think when she brought him home to meet the folks. “My parents are not judgmental,” Janet says.
That same quality worked in Webber’s favour when he started photographing life on the ranch. “I need to achieve that practical thing of getting people bored with me so they just get on with their work,” he says. As his photographs show, there is always plenty of work to be done around the Chinook Ranch. That is never truer than on branding day, one of the longest days of the year and the clearest expression of what life on the ranch is all about. By Bruce Weir.
BIL HETHERINGTON
The charismatic frontman of Calgary’s The Neckers, Bil Hetherington has love and will travel with the group’s long-running recipe of poppy garage rock. However, more recently, the easygoing singer/songwriter has been plugging away at the long-delayed release of his solo debut, 10 soft and tender tracks that traverse the themes of romance, politics and an achy (but not quite breaky) heart. “I had a bunch of songs that didn’t really work with The Neckers,” Hetherington explains, over a pint at his former place of work, the Hop and Brew. “These songs probably date back to 2000 or 2001, so this album is actually my greatest hits.”
Produced by Lorrie Matheson, and featuring the talents of Broken Social Scenester Lisa Lobsinger, bassist Steve Elaschuk and drummer Kyle Koenig (among others), Through The Sunspots is an easy-on-the-ears collection of tunes from one of the local music scene’s friendliest fellas. The Asian Tigers now include drummer Ian Russell and guitarist Jon Hopkins alongside Elaschuck, which should help fill out Hetherington’s sound in the live arena.
WHAT TO WEAR TO THE WEDDING
written by Cynthia Cushing
Neither of my daughters is getting married soon, although one of them knows exactly what her wedding will be like when the day comes. She’s considered venues, time of day, dresses, shoes, registries, the cake and her attendants. She’s even given a certain amount of thought to the qualities that would be admirable in a groom. So I said to her one night at dinner, “What do you want me to wear to your wedding?”
“You? You can wear whatever you want. I don’t care,” she answered.
I asked my husband. “What do you think a mother of the bride should wear?”
“Is someone getting married? Who cares what you wear?” he said.
“That,” I said as I popped the cork back in the wine bottle and whisked it away just as he was about to pour a second glass, “is my point exactly. Who cares? Nobody but me.”
Well, me and every other woman with daughters of marrying age. We’ve been to our share of weddings and we’ve seen the horror that awaits she who does not care what she wears or, worse, she who thinks she shouldn’t care what she wears. This is the mother of the bride in the pale seafoam dress with the little chiffon capelet, the pearls, the rosebud corsage, the timid hat and the bone-coloured pumps with one-and-a-half-inch heels. We’ve seen her yet not seen her; she is the invisible woman. We never gave her a thought until our daughters’ friends started getting married. Now, we’re thinking that the mother- of-the-bride dress is one of the toughest looks to pull off. It’s tougher than the first day of Grade 8, tougher than prom night and much, much tougher than your own wedding. But is it impossible? Not at all. I’ve critiqued mothers’ clothes at weddings I’ve attended recently and asked every woman over 50 whom I know what she would wear. I have searched for role models in all areas of public life. I’ve come up with two mother-of-the-bride looks that almost anyone can wear and make her own, no matter how time-pressed or fashion-backward she might be.
First, you need to realize what you are up against. There are reasons for the ubiquity of the seafoam dress, the main one being fear of overhearing a guest at the wedding say, “Did you get a load of what the mother of the bride is wearing? Is she trying to look like she’s 20?”
Rule One for the mother of the bride? Never outshine the bride. That’s a rule to which most of us can adhere without trying. Rule Two? Never look as if you are trying to outshine the bride. Anything too clingy, too colourful, too ruffled or too revealing and the mother of the bride might as well have cards printed that say Desperately Trying to Hold On to My Youth Despite All Evidence to the Contrary and then hand them out in the receiving line. At least that’s what we imagine and it makes being invisible infinitely preferable.
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JARVIS HALL FINE FRAMES
As a self-taught gilder living in Calgary, Jarvis Hall has combed the Internet and historical texts for insights into the centuries-old art of applying gold and silver leaf. “It’s like being in a dark room, especially in Canada and especially in this part of Canada—there’s nobody else who does it.”
That’s why his recent meeting with Giovanni Bucchi was so welcome. Hall’s hookup with the master gilder occurred, like all good meetings, at a conference in Las Vegas. At the end of the month Hall will travel to New York to study with Bucchi, whose clients include the Louvre and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, but who is perhaps best known as an appraiser on The Antiques Roadshow. “My work should take a big leap,” Hall says. “He’s ridiculously good.”
The thought of Hall’s craftsmanship improving is a little scary. He’s already adept at the arts of hand-carving and gilding frames, a process that involves applying 10 coats of gesso (hide glue mixed with marble dust) and sanding it “porcelain smooth” before putting on five coats of burnishing clay. Then the gold leaf is applied, burnished and toned using shellac mixed with pigment.
All his skills are on display in the ornate piece he is currently making for an art collector who purchased a Corot at auction in New York. The frame, which is based on those produced during the reign of Louis XVI, will take about 70 hours to produce and cost $5,000.
That’s a good chunk of time but it represents a big change in the august art of gilding. “I was joking with my father that if I was doing this for the king, I’d have two years,” Hall says. “It’d be a meagre living, but the king would give me a few animals—enough to keep my family fed— and a cold room.”
Hall has done better than that since leaving Paul Kuhn Gallery to start his eponymous shop three years ago. But that’s not to say he doesn’t sometimes envy those earlier craftsmen. Instead of the king’s patronage, Hall is “dealing with modern prices, Calgary rent and compressing two years into six weeks.”