Several months ago I started to catch word of The Alpine Review. The references were coming from people who I hold in the “automatically pursue anything they recommend” place in my heart — people like Martin and Peter and Igor. And so, without being completely sure of what I was getting myself into, I paid the $35 to order the first issue. It arrived in my post box on Monday.

It turns out that not only are the aforementioned recommenders of magazine, they’re deeply steeped in its creation. Peter is an editor. Martin’s an author. Indeed as I scanned the table of contents I realized that I’d had lunch at one time or another with a healthy cross section of the issue’s contributors.

As to the magazine itself: wow.

My elevator pitch would be “A contemporary take on the Whole Earth Review zeitgeist with the production values of Monocle” (and, fortunately, with none of the “you should really wear this $290 scarf and this $2900 watch” aspirrationality of the latter).

The writing is substantial but accessible; the design is magnificent. And, true to its title, the approach is to survey the terrain from a distance (but not from far enough away that you can’t leap down and make connections to everyday life). This is a magazine that I will spend weeks making my way through, for every page holds a new insight. And each new insight leads me down a rabbit hole.

On page 180, for example, is an item titled Red Telephones and Pink Ponies that starts off:

Napoleon famously said that ‘If you start to take Vienna – take Vienna.’

I was inspired to find a reference for this quotation, which led me through vast swaths of the Internet, through the UPEI library ready-reference desk, and into an email dialog with the magazine’s managing director Louis-Jacques Darveau, who told me he’d heard the quote from the late Ben Weider, a Canadian businessman about whom Wikipedia says “well known in two areas: bodybuilding and Napoleonic history.”

Well, okay.

Satisfied, I then continued my tangent, reading parts of the English translation of the 1823 book Memorial de Sainte Helene: Journal of the Private Life and Conversations of the Emperor Napoleon at Saint Helena. Wherein I found the following entry from March 31, 1816:

This day the weather has continued very bad; we suffered from it; besides, we are absolutely infested with rats, fleas, and bugs: our sleep is disturbed by them, so that the troubles by night are in perfect harmony with those by day.

The weather changed entirely to fair on the 31st; we went out in the carriage. The Emperor, in the course of conversation, observed, speaking of Egypt and Syria, that if he had taken Saint Jean-d’Acre, as ought to have been the case, he would have wrought a revolution in the East.  “The most trivial circumstances,” said he, “lead to the greatest events. The weakness of the captain of a frigate, who stood out to sea instead of forcing a passage into the harbour, some trifling impediments with respect to some shallops or light vessels, prevented the face of the world from being changed. Possessed of Saint Jean-d’Acre, the French army would fly to Damascus and Aleppo; in a twinkling it would have been on the Euphrates; the Christians of Syria, the Druses, the Christians of Armenia, would have joined it; nations were on the point of being shaken.” One of us having said that they would have presently been reinforced with 400,000 men. “Say 600,000,” replied the Emperor, “who can calculate what it might have been if I should have reached Constantinople and the Indies; I should have changed the face of the world.”

Not quite the pithiness of “If you start to take Vienna – take Vienna.” But certainly the same sentiment.

As with many good things, The Alpine Review, though international in scope, is published in Montreal. Louis-Jacques calls the city “a silent actor” in the magazine, but I think some of the sensibility of the city — pluralistic, international, complex, chaotic — shows through.

I haven’t been this excited about a magazine in a long, long time — perhaps not since I read Louis Rossetto’s pitch for WIRED on The Well back in the early 1990s. What’s different about The Alpine Review, though, is that it seems to be a creation of my tribe — a sort of house journal for those of us lurking at the nexus of hacker/maker culture, systems, ecology, psychogeography. It’s the closest I’ve ever come to a “hey, Pete, here’s a magazine made about exactly the things that are interesting to you right now.”

I’ll be buried inside The Alpine Review for at least the rest of the month. I shall eagerly await future issues.

Thank you.

I had the privilege of meeting Andy Wells in the fall of 2009. I had become fascinated with the Prince Edward Island of the late 1960s and early 1970s: the “Development Plan” of that era, and the cultural and environmental transformations it begat were, in light of our current concerns about climate change, a beacon of hope that substantive and dramatic change on Prince Edward Island is possible. Wells’ work with Premier Alex Campbell and, later, with the Institute of Man and Resources, seemed almost unbelievably revolutionary in light of our current paralysis.

Here is how Alan MacEachern introduces Wells in his excellent book The Institute of Man and Resources: An Environmental Fable:

Campbell’s interest in environmental matters was, like much of his thought, nurtured by his executive secretary, speechwriter, and right-hand man, Andy Wells — Machiavelli to Campbell’s Prince, in one pundit’s words. Theirs was what Campbell calls “a remarkable relationship.” For one thing, it was a second-generation one: when Alex’s father Thane was premier of PEI in the 1930s, Andy’s father James had been his assistant. After returning to the Island to take over the family farm in 1959, Andy Wells had worked on Alex Campbell’s winning election campaign in 1966, and soon became the premier’s closest advisor. Wells had a philsophical bent that matched Campbell’s pragmatism, a skill at behind-the-scenes politicking which nicely complemented Campbell’s public persona. When defining policy or preparing speeches they were so in tune — Wells knowing what his premier wanted said, Campbell trusting the words handed to him — that it was difficult to know where one’s ideas ended and the other’s began. Campbell states simply, “He was my researcher and I was his voice.” Wells remembers Campbell once referring to himself as a vessel into which Wells poured his ideas. Though he adds that the premier was joking, Wells is clearly pleased with the line.

It was largely through Wells that the Campbell goverment gained an interest in environmental thought. Wells was an inverterate reader, and was drawing influence at the time from anti-technology works like Louis Mumford’s Myth of the Machine and Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful. He even built his own back-to-the-land project, a home in Hazelgrove heated entirely with wood. Wells got Campbell talking about environmental ideas, and, through Campbell, got the government involved.

Andy Wells died this week. With his passing Islanders have lost a man I would hold to be among the most positively influential public servants we’ve ever had.

More than any of the myriad ways in which the Development Plan and the Institute affected life on the Island practically, the notion that Prince Edward Island can determine its own future, that we can innovate and experiment here as or more nimbly as anywhere, and that we can change seemingly unchangeable things is a tremendous and powerful legacy. 

On a sunny day in the autumn of 2009 I travelled to Andy Wells’ home in Hazelgrove — the selfsame “back-to-the-land project” — to chat with him his role in the Island’s transformation of that day.

It was not in the nature of Andy’s position or inclination to shine light on his own accomplishments; it is my great hope that his contributions to Island society not be lost. Rest in peace.

I’d forgotten all about this photo I took in Oliver’s old bedroom 4 years ago today. I always knew that Bob the Builder was up to something: this photo is the evidence; along with DHL and Santa Claus he’s a leading a revolt of the PLAYMOBILians.

Over the summer I casually suggested to Frances Squire, a teacher at Birchwood Intermediate School, that she bring her students along to my letterpress shop sometime for a printing workshop. She jumped on the idea, and, as a result, 14 of her grade 9 students arrived at the shop this morning ready to print.

We quick ran through the basics of setting type — we only had 3 hours, so we had to be quick — and then they split into 4 groups to set passages they’d worked out before coming. 

As proof that “technology literacy” extends to more than just digital technology, they took to the trade like ducks to water, and quickly figured out their way around the jigsaw puzzle that is setting type by hand.

Hand-set letterpress is all about limitations — you can only set the type you have, and you can only arrange it in ways that physical geometry allows — and so plans had to be adapted in mid-stream (one group’s very ambitious plan for a broadside with two typefaces of different sizes had to give way as the shop wasn’t equipped with enough spaces to allow it to be pieced together). But the students adapted quickly, and we managed to get four passages set and printed before their 11:45 a.m. deadline. Here’s what they came up with:

They were a great group of students to work with: curious, flexible, imaginative. Frances is to be lauded for taking the initiative to get them out of the class doing real stuff.

I learned a lot about what to do (and what not to do) in letterpress workshops (don’t talk about “inches” because students today think in centimetres”, do get out of the way and let them figure out the geometry because that’s the only way to learn it). I was right at the limit of the letterpress supplies I have — I really, really need more 30 point spaces and some additional furniture and leading — and with a single press and a single printer at hand there was a bottleneck for the last 45 minutes as typesetting was done and groups had to wait to have their work printed (I did the actually printing, for safety’s sake — I kept everyone 10 feet, err, 3 metres, away and behind a table from the press). But it seemed to all work out in the end.

I may even do this again…

Johnny and I were down in New England last week visiting with our colleagues at The Old Farmer’s Almanac and Yankee Magazine. Autumn was on the tail end of its colour fury in southern New Hampshire, but it was still a beautiful time to be in the region, and we had a productive week of time, work and social, with our web team. 

Returning to the Island on Friday night we found fall colours here were at their very most vibrant: it’s “peak week” here, and evidence of this is everywhere. Here’s the front yard of Tai Chi Gardens, for example:

On Saturday I took Oliver out to theatre class in Bonshaw, which took us into the heart of fall colour in the Bonshaw hills:

That photo is looking northeast from the village, through the forest, right through the path of “Plan B” (against | for). No matter your feeling on this project, it’s hard not to be deeply affected by the red gash through the Island that you encounter on the right of the highway en route to Bonshaw.

Yesterday we spent the afternoon out in Green Meadows at the potato farm where my cousin Sergii is working. Harvest there is about 2/3 finished, and on potato fields where harvest is finished you get the colour palette of Prince Edward Island at its most intense red and green:

If you’re looking for a drive full of the colours of autumn, drive along the St. Catherines Road through Bonshaw, or along the eastern side of the Hillsborough River from Stratford to Morell, are both in peak form right now.

You may recall that, just over a month ago, Catherine and I switched from Rogers Wireless to Virgin Mobile for our mobile phone service. Today we got our first bill. For $172.03. Which is way, way more than I expected, and about $50 more than our last Rogers Wireless bill.

What happened?

Well, it turns out that Catherine and use our mobiles as telephones much more than I thought we did: 242 minutes for Catherine, 190 minutes for me. A lot of that talk was between ourselves (which is not billed per-minute), but enough of it was to others — 139 minutes for Catherine and 84 minutes for me — that we easily tipped over our 50 “included” minutes each, and so we ended up spending $100.35 extra for all that calling.

My worry going in was data, not voice. Turns out this wasn’t an issue at all: Catherine doesn’t use it, and I used only 151 MB for the month, which was within the $15/month 300 MB “pay per use data” plan that comes standard.

If we’d upped for the $35/month base plan (which included unlimited incoming calls, and free evenings and weekends), rather than the cheapest-possible $20/month plan we started with, our first bill would have been about $90 rather than $172.

So I’ve switched us up (fortunately Virgin makes this really, really easy to do online; the only downside is that the new plan doesn’t take effect until Nov. 6, so we’re stuck with the old one until then).

We’ll still come out ahead of the game compared to Rogers; it’s just taking us some time to find our way there.

My letterpress project in September was a three-panel rendering of the lyrics to The Island Hymn, by Prince Edward Island author L.M. Montgomery. The song is, officially, “the patriotic song of Prince Edward Island.” Montgomery wrote it in 1907, and it was first performed, to the tune of God Save The King, on Arbor Day in 1907. The following year, with lyrics by Lawrence W. Watson, the hymn was first performed as we know it today.

(Purchase the set of 3 from my shop if you’d like your own)

Each panel of my “triptych” of The Island Hymn is printed in black ink on a Golding Jobber No. 8 letterpress on a 5½ by 6½ inch piece of plain white card stock. The larger face is 60 point Akzidenz Grotesk and the smaller is Univers (both faces are type purchased used, this spring, from Atelier Domino).

I presented a set to my friend Catherine Hennessey for her birthday this year, and in return she kindly gave me a copy of the lyrics and sheet music prepared by the 1973 Centennial Commission (1MB PDF).

I took the sheet music from that brochure, scanned it on my Doxie scanner and the scanned image through a demo copy of the SharpEye Music Scanner application for Windows which resulted in a MIDI file of The Island Hymn which I dragged into Garage Band. The result, after some fiddling, was that I could listen to the music as I was reading the lyrics I’d printed.

(There’s a bug in the 3rd bar in the bass line that I struggled and failed to correct — my musical knowledge has been slowing draining away since piano lessons ended 30 years ago — and I welcome a corrected version if you’ve got the MIDI chops to help me.)

There’s something magical about taking a 39 year old piece of sheet music of a 104 year old piece of music and, 20 minutes and some digital processing later, having it come out of your headphones.

If you want to hear a more rousing and real-world rendition of The Island Hymn, check out this YouTube video shot in Florida of vacationing Islanders singing their hearts out. If you look carefully you can see a former Premier of Prince Edward Island in the choir.

You don’t actually need ink to be able to “print” with a letterpress: thick paper, large, bold type and sufficient pressure will do. I’ve wanted to make a new sign for the office door here at the Reinventorium for a while; wanting to print this afternoon, but also wanting to avoid the hassle of cleaning up the press afterwards, I decided to see what I could create without ink.

The paper is Crane Lettra 220 lb. in “ecru white.” The type is an unnamed 36 point all-caps face I purchased this spring from Atelier Domino in Montreal.

I actually created a little too much of an impression: if you look carefully you can see some “rupturing” around certain of the letters. Perhaps I should have used a little less packing, or moistened the stock a little before taking the impression. Nonetheless, I’m happy with the result, and it’s on the door to the office now.

The new Terre Rouge “bistro marché” opened in the old Carter’s building on Queen Street today. It’s a combination restaurant and high-end grocery store, connected, both physically and spiritually, to the olive oil shop next door. Oliver and I popped in for a look after lunch this afternoon; the place was packed.

I can’t imagine a place more different than the Clover Farm grocery store that preceded it in the space: the Clover Farm was targetted firmly at the “cheapest tin of peas” and “reduced meat” demographic; the new place is all chorizo, fancy cheese, crème fraîche, gelato and wines-by-the-glass. It’s like the place crossed over to the other side of the tracks without moving an inch.

Certainly the owners of the new place are to be lauded for their moxie, and for investing in what, ultimately, is a risky venture: I’ve always said there’s a huge gap between the aspiration for daily neighbourhood baguettes and the economic and practical reality of daily neighbourhood baguettes, and it’s in the filling in of that chasm that Terre Rouge will suceed or fail.

That all said, it would have been nice to end up with a more “workaday” grocery store in downtown Charlottetown. I’m not wishing for a return of the downmarket Clover Farm by any means, but surely somewhere between “past-expiry-date yoghurt” and “handcrafted pickled plums” lies the kind of grocery store that can actually serve our daily needs for a resonable price.

My jury is out on Terre Rouge for now: I wish them well, and perhaps they’ll do better than their predecessors at listening to their customers and adapting their product mix to cater to our actual day-to-day needs.

Twenty years ago last month, in the fall of 1992, my friends Richard and Victoria moved from Peterborough, Ontario to Halifax, Nova Scotia. I both owned a pickup truck and was unemployed at the time and so, always being game for an adventure, I offered to load up their life into the truck and, along with my friend Stephen Southall, make the trip east with them.

We had lovely weather for the journey. And Stephen is a great travel companion (to every hitchhiker we picked up, Stephen gave a different life story; “oh, I’m an accountant.” I think we may have inadvertently prevented a young lad from becoming and air traffic controller in the process).

We drove south into New York and across through Vermont and Maine, and crossed back into Canada at St. Stephen. At the border we presented quite a scene: a couple of beardy ruffians with a yappy dog, hauling a pickup truck filled with who-knows-what. The border guard asked Stephen, who was driving, to “please hold your dog,” which Stephen took to mean “please hold your dog up to me so I can pet it because it is so adorable.” This is not what the border guard meant.

Miraculously, though, we were let through with nary a question while Richard and Victoria, the clean-cut couple behind us driving a late model sedan, were held up for over an hour with questioning and searching.

In New Brunswick we took the dip down into Fundy National Park, during which time the brakes on my 1978 Ford F100 pickup started to die. They got as far as Halifax, fortunately, where Canadian Tire was able to bring them back to life.

Leaving Victoria and Richard to start their new life in Halifax, we headed west. When we got to the fork in the road just across the New Brunswick border — one direction Moncton, the other direction PEI — we flipped a coin. Prince Edward Island won. And we headed for the ferry. It was to be my first visit to the Island.

Coming off the ferry on the other end we pulled up to the Visitor Information Centre to get a map and our bearings. It was the off-season, however, so the Visitor Information Centre had been repurposed into a daycare (the liquor store next door was still open, though). So, with no bearings to be had, and no knowledge whatsoever of the Island, we turned west at the Albany Y and, before we knew what had happened, we hit West Point (after driving from Ontario to the east, the distance from Borden to West Point seems like popping round the corner).

We set up camp in Cedar Dunes Provincial Park for the night. I remember thinking “my, this place is really beautiful.”

The next morning, having driven as far west as we could imagine, we retraced our steps and headed toward Charlottetown. We set up camp at Strathgarney Provincial Park, and then, on a dark and stormy night, drove into town, or at least the edge of town, to catch a movie — it might have been Sneakers or perhaps School Ties; I can’t recall. We never actually made it into Charlottetown proper.

In the morning we packed up camp, headed for the ferry back to the mainland, and, as recounted earlier in these pages, drove back to Peterborough by way of Rhode Island.

Five months later I was back on Prince Edward Island for a job interview, and, a month after that, in the same pickup truck, this time loaded with my things and Catherine’s, I was a resident (Catherine came two months later). We’ve been here ever since.