the money shot

so, as it happens, the cd store is in the same block as the vietnamese sandwich store. the sandwich was lovely, i ate it while reading this week's terminal city. then i went to the cd store, just to see if there was anything that i could dip into my last bit of money for:
kings of convenience, riot on an empty street
lambchop, aw c'mon/no you c'mon, paired in a nice box!

i did listen to the great destroyer while doing the dishes after all. i listened to juliana hatfield this morning as well.

john ibbitson's column in today's globe makes some of the same points that i've been making for sometime around the growing dichotomy between rural and urban canada. he's smart to not draw a parallel with the united states, but he is not smart enough to not jump to conclusions. in the states, the disparity is, in a large part, political: rural counties went bush, urban counties went kerry. states went bush where the rural votes outnumbered urban votes(ohio, florida, indiana, colorado), and states went kerry where the urban votes outnumbered rural votes(washington, oregon, california, minnesota). that's a simplification, but bear with me. in canada, there is no comparable political dichotomy, but there is an income dichotomy; cities are richer, per capita, across the board. ibbitson recommends that, in order to improve their overall standards of living, relatively impoverished provinces such as saskatchewan and nova scotia should simply embark on massive urbanization programs. i'm happy that this dynamic is getting news, but the flippant solution discounts questions of identity, not to mention urban planning, decay, etc, far too easily to be taken seriously.

my question has been "which west wants in?". in canada, you have an urban west and a rural west, with very different interests. to be precise, you have an urban prarie and a rural prairie; british columbia is more properly termed 'the west beyond the west', as a regional model contiguous from manitoba to british columbia is just lazy. the urban and rural prairies have been rhetorically allied together against the golden horseshoe/the golden triangle/central canada in a core-periphery/heartland-hinterland fight. alberta, though, for example, features the same dynamic, writ small: the calgary-edmonton corridor is heartland to a vast hinterland, with tensions equivalent to the country's. it just so happens that the toronto capitalists are bigger and badder, and everyone loves to root for the hometeam. it's not unlike the waffle: what makes the canadian capitalist automatically more virtuous than the american? nothing! well, then what makes the calgarian capitalist automatically more virtuous than the torontonian?

see, it's not just about records! it is also not just about death; sometimes it is about canada.