Unfortunately the shortcodes do not have enough flexibility for what I’m trying to accomplish. I wanted to show all of the current users events (as well as all of their “friends” events) in the same calendar. The owner attribute is not enough, and a user’s friends are not part of any group, so the group attribute is useless.
In the end I was able to resolve this the “dirty” way. Around line #379 of the em-object.php file you can edit the where claus (filter) for the query. Have to be careful of course. I overrode the “me” value for the “owner attribute” and altered the filter so that “me” actually means “me and my friends”.