Editor’s Note : This is Max’s 600 th Maxed Out column. He thinks it’s a big deal, law of round numbers or big numbers or something like that. Hell, I don’t understand him half the time either. But he whined enough about finding some suitable way of celebrating it that I decided to give him the week off. Sort of. I’ve dispatched his low-rent friend, J.J. Geddyup, to interview him. JJ agreed but pressed the point that if he was going to write the column, he was going to get paid for it. Fair enough.
JJ: So, dude, 600 columns.
Max: I’m not doing this, JJ. Where does Barnett get off sending you to interview me? Then paying you instead of me? I shoulda kept my mouth shut.
JJ: I thought it was your idea. That’s what he said. Besides, I need the dough.
Max: Whaddya mean you need the dough? I thought you were suckin’ the VANOC teat.
JJ: They fired me.
Max: What happened? Bring something in on budget and make the others look bad?
JJ: If you must know, I tried the old contractor’s trick with ’em. Told ’em I couldn’t finish the job they hired me to do without more money.
Max: Sounds reasonable. Whadya ask for?
JJ: Two million.
Max: Two million!? How gullible did you think they are?
JJ: Is that a serious question? Anyway, they offered an extra mil… but I have principles.
Max: None I’ve noticed.
JJ: Okay, I was getting tired of being their bagman. Hey, I’m supposed to be interviewing you here.
Max: So. Edit.
JJ: What’s that mean? Never mind. First question: Have you stopped beating your wife?
Max: What!!!?
JJ: Just kidding. Always wanted to ask a have-you-stopped-beating-your-wife-yet question. Okay, how’d you get started doing this?
Max: This is lame. Why don’t you just ask me my favourite colour or something?
JJ: Just answer the question.
Max: About a year after the Pique started up, Bob Barnett lost his mind, having some months earlier pretty much lost his shirt. Figuring he had nothing more to lose, and based solely on a couple of letters to the editor and one or two features I’d written, he asked me if I wanted to write a column. Having just been more or less fired from Blackcomb, I accepted, in the mistaken belief it might be a paying job.
JJ: You didn’t get paid?
Max: Nobody got paid. But we got sued.
JJ: Something you wrote, I assume.
Max: I’d rather not go into that.
JJ: So what are the biggest changes at the Pique in the last 600 weeks?
Max: I get paid. Everybody else gets paid. No one in production screams and throws things around the office. Reporters stay longer than a couple of months. We have insurance against libel. And depending on the week and the makeup of municipal administration, we’re considered public enemy #1 for what we write. How sweet is that?
JJ: What’s the worst change that’s happened?
Max: Getting my picture stuck on the back page every week. I miss the anonymity.
JJ: What about Whistler? What do you miss?
Max: Ted Nebbeling. He was always doing something outrageous I could write about. Hugh too… but for the opposite reason; he was never doing anything. Kenny’s tough. Beating on Kenny is like kicking a puppy. He means well. It’s not his fault he’s caught up in all this Olympic nonsense.
JJ: Olympics aside, what’s the most disturbing development in Whistler since you began commenting on life around here?
Max: You can’t put the Olympics aside. It pretty much defines life around here. The Olympics are Whistler’s own George Bush.
JJ: This I’ve got to hear.
Max: Fewer people wanted Bush than the other guy. We’ll never know about the Olympics because no one in charge had the rocks to ask us, or anyone else in the province, whether we wanted the Olympics. The money men and politicos made the decision for us; now we’re living with it, making the best of it we can. Bush used the attack on 9/11 to set a stifling, aggressive, moralistic agenda that brooks no dissent. Half the population just kind of shut down, licked their wounds and tried to tough it out. Everything since Vancouver was awarded the Olympics, we’ve danced to another fiddler’s tune around here. Dissent is pointless and our version of toughing it out is trying to keep this juggernaut from driving us into an economic hole we’ll never escape from. But culturally, the Olympics have amplified our worst traits.
JJ: Such as?
Max: Such as the overhyped Whistler Standard. Such as the sustainability initiative.
JJ: What’s wrong with being sustainable?
Max: Nothing. If that’s what we were doing it would be laudable. But so far, most of what we’ve sustained is a PR campaign about sustainability. Worse, we’re believing our own PR. We’re like the Zen novice seeking enlightenment who gets so excited with his progress on the road to Nirvana he stops and pats himself on the back for being so centred. We’re taking bows for our plan to be sustainable while the real measures of sustainability — assuming the word has any meaning left — are mostly moving in the wrong direction. If we’re going to sustain ourselves at whatever level we get to post Olympics, one might honestly wonder whether the ship of sustainability sailed, hit an iceberg and sank out from under us.
JJ: What’s that got to do with the Whistler Standard?
Max: Everything. They’re both exercises in form over substance. The Whistler Standard, whatever it is, is unsustainable. It’s PR. It’s hype. And, ironically, it runs counter to what people seem to be looking for in their holiday adventures — authenticity. We’re rushing headlong to commodify — albeit at a posh level — a place that has so much potential to be unique, to deliver the kinds of experiences people remember when other vacations have blended into a Condé Nast soup of cliché condos and close encounters with fine dining. To quote something the mayor once said, “Bigger — and I think we can include fancier here — is not better.”
JJ: If you don’t like it, why don’t you bail?
Max: People, place, things. There are some amazing people in this town. There’s a community that transcends small-town community but retains its essential goodness. There is fresh air, clean water, big trees, bears and most of all, there are two unbelievable ski hills and some remarkable day touring just beyond the ropes. They’ll have to drag me outta this place feet first.
JJ: How much longer you going to write this column?
Max: I think this column is just about finished. I think Maxed Out continues until I run out of things to say, Bob and Kathy run out of patience with me, or enough people tell me I ought to quit embarrassing myself every week.
JJ: Any final words.
Max: I thought Barnett said he was sending a bottle of champagne with you. You holdin’ out on me?
