Big Day Downtown--2013 Edition

Back in 2011, I was asked to participate in the Downtown Halifax Business Commission’s Big Day Downtown event, wherein several local bloggers and social-media types were given $100 to spend in downtown Halifax--specifically, the area between Brunswick Street and the waterfront--and asked to write about how they spent the money. At the time, I was contributing to my friend Rachelle Goguen’s comic blog Living Between Wednesdays, so that’s where I posted about my outing. Due to a change in email address, I missed out on being involved in the 2012 event--I found my invitation in the inbox of a dormant email account several months later--but was lucky enough to be invited to participate in the 2013 incarnation.

As anyone who lives in Halifax knows, the area with which the DHBC concerns itself is something of a ghost town these days. Barrington Street used to be a bustling, thriving hub of commerce (one that, in the 1980s, was able to support not one but TWO giant record stores operating across the street from each other, Sam The Record Man and A & A’s). These days, it’s home to empty storefronts and a few businesses struggling to lure the commuters who only visit the street to take advantage of its many bus stops. There are still some great businesses along Barrington--Freak Lunchbox, Little Mysteries, and United Bookstore immediately come to mind--but they’re often surrounded by “FOR LEASE” signs. It breaks my heart to see the downtown area gutted like that, which makes this initiative by the DHBC more important than ever. My involvement this year posed a few challenges. For one thing, I hadn’t really been blogging for a while, but being asked to participate did give me the incentive to fold all my other blogs into this one all-purpose pop culture repository. For another, one of the requirements of this year’s Big Day Downtown involved the choosing of three cards, each with a random word that was meant to help shape our spending choices. For mine, I received “DRAMATIC”, “CREATIVE”, and “INSPIRATIONAL”.

Now obviously, as a sometime comic book creator, DeSerres Art Store at 1546 Barrington Street seemed an obvious choice for a place to spend money “CREATIVEly”. But I’m pretty well stocked on creative materials at the present time, so this forced me to be a bit more “CREATIVE” in my choices. As it happens, the encroaching deadline for my blog entry coincided with the birthday of my girlfriend, Hillary Titley, so I decided to get “CREATIVE” with my spending choices and blow the entirety of my budget (expanded from $100 to $150 this year!) celebrating the birthday of the lady who “INSPIRES” me on a daily basis. See what I did there? Now, Hillary is a pop-culture junkie like myself, which makes shopping for her a fun experience. She is a true partner in pop obsession, and one of the cultural events that we both are currently consumed with is the AMC crime drama Breaking Bad, now in its final season. Hillary collects bobble heads (sometimes called head knockers) of characters from several of her favourite TV shows and films, and her “Rogues’ Gallery” includes Kenny Powers from Eastbound & Down, Bane from The Dark Knight Rises, and the entire cast of It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia. I had hoped to include the new bobble head of BB star Walter White, but it’s not actually out yet--Strange Adventures, now ensconced in its new home at 5110 Prince Street (at the corner of Prince and Lower Water), will have them in stock soon, so I set aside a bit of my budget and gave Hillary the following IOU instead.

Breaking Bad was created by Vince Gilligan, who was part of the braintrust of another one of Hillary’s all-time favourite TV shows--The X-Files. Strange Adventures carries the new “Season 10” comic book from IDW Publishing, which picks up where the TV series left off, as well as the first of a new line of hardcover compilations of the 1990s comic books published by Topps Comics. Even though Hillary has all of the single issues of this series, I figured she’d enjoy a new deluxe edition for her bookshelf. I figured right.

Also from Strange Adventures, I bought her a new mini-comic called The Kate Effect by local creator Susan MacLeod. It deals with the phenomenon of Royal-watchers and Kate Middleton obsessives in a funny, self-deprecating, and self-contained read. Hillary took the morning off work to watch Kate get hitched to Prince William, so it’s safe to say she’s in the key demographic for this charming minicomic.

Strange Adventures isn’t the only downtown fixture to move to a new location recently (one that thankfully still falls within the guidelines of the Big Day Downtown event). Taz Records, previously located on Market Street, has a new home 1521 Grafton Street, right around the corner from Maritime Hobbies & Crafts. I hit them up hoping to find Hillary a Don Rickles or Henny Youngman compilation, but there were none to be found. Instead, I grabbed her a Weird Al Yankovic 12-inch single for his contribution to the Johnny Dangerously soundtrack, “This Is The Life” (the flipside features Al’s reggae spoof “Buy Me A Condo”). I also scored her a copy of Prince’s 1985 album Around The World In A Day, featuring the hit “Raspberry Beret”. We were lucky enough to catch Prince’s show at the Metro Centre in 2011, and we hope to see Weird Al perform live one day as well. Dare to dream...

Now, onto the “DRAMATIC” portion of our Big Day Downtown: the Atlantic Fringe Festival is in full swing right now, and we used our BDD cash to buy tickets to Love In The Time Of Time Machines, a comedic play starring Ned Petrie, Brian MacQuarrie, and Hillary’s friend Gillian English. We caught a Saturday night performance of this hour-long brain-twister, featuring a guy who uses a time machine to try and salvage (and occasionally sabotage) his troubled relationship. It plays like a Douglas Adams revision of Back To The Future, and if you’ve got a taste for zany SF and relationship angst, you should make time for it (we caught it at Danspace at 1531 Grafton, only seconds away from the new Taz location).

Once the play was wrapped up, we made tracks for Obladee Wine Bar, a classy spot located on the corner of Barrington and Sackville (right across from the Discovery Centre). We split a bottle of Nova 7, a delicious, locally-produced red wine. I’m not the kind of wine connoisseur who can properly wax on oaky aftertastes and fruity, aromatic flavouring, but I can tell you that we made short work of it (not to mention the chocolate board we ordered to go along with it). If you’re looking for a respite from the city’s dearth of pubs and you want to at least give the impression of class, Obladee is just the spot.

With just a few bucks left on our DHBC Visa gift card, we strolled a few blocks over to Tempo, a new-ish restaurant located across from Scotia Square at the corner of Duke and Barrington. A quick word of explanation--every January, Hillary and I make a point of watching the entire Rocky series from beginning to end, and we always chuckle at Rocky’s multiple appearances on the cover of a fictional magazine called Tempo (presumably the equivalent of Time in the Balboaverse). When Tempo opened last year, we began to joke about dropping by there to eat sometime. But when Hillary took a look at their dessert menu, she stopped laughing--she indulged in some chocolate pudding and I had some kind of cheesecake construction that was so ornate and well-designed, I felt kind of bad about eating it. That didn’t stop me, though.

So that was our Big Day Downtown. As I said previously, I wish there were even more businesses in the area to compete over my not-exactly-hard-earned money, but I think we did okay regardless. I hope that if I’m invited to participate in a similar event in 2014, I’m torn between too many choices. Those are the kind of problems you wanna have. PS--Happy Birthday Hillary!