what a city

i still remember coming downtown in the early 90's from sherwood park, i was around 14 or 15...i remember there was a line of buildings where the epcor building is now...one of them was deserted and it always seemed to smell like urine back there...we tested our luck and snuck in one day to find the second floor was completely graffittied and people had even made a little fire pit...i'm surprised it didnt burn down before they tore it down...anyway, its just funny how the city changes in such a short time...
the bar buddys used to be called area 51, a metal bar in which my band played many many times...and as for flashback, i do believe the space it was in was turned into a bar again a few years ago and there were shows there....i might be wrong as i am not completely sure where it was...
and if i am correct, the first movie house in edmonton was on jasper ave and until only recently was used by ink machine tattoo, and i also practiced with one of my bands there...it was an old building and you could feel the history

cashman vs. hagen

Though i found cashman's book to be interesting, i did not feel it gave a view of edmonton that was accurate. By this i mean that the notion of the underworld was not looked at. Cashman's book basically gives us funny, short, almost anecdotal scenes of a city that not only saw hardship, but was founded in a part of the world where the weak would not survive. i hate to compare it, but the growth of a city like edmonton kinda reminds me of Knut Hamsun's "Growth of the Soil". out of nothing sprang everything, and the underbelly is what made it all happen. Hagen, on the other hand, jumps right into the underside of our city and exposes the debauchery for all it was. even though some of the details may be embellished to make the story better, i still feel that in writing the history of anything, the writer must do away with the pretenses of the normal.

what is normal is what is accepted, normalcy in many ways can never be achieved