mouthnoise

Chakras, chai, and chi… CRAP!

2011-05-08T15:46:00.000-07:00

People occasionally ask me why hippies bother me so much.

Well, fasten your seatbelts, cause here we go...

No comprehension of the importance of boundaries

It was a glorious spring day, and I was looking forward to getting home from work and throwing my front door open to the fresh air and rhythms of the human traffic passing by.

As I headed up my block, a screech rippled out of the place next to mine as a visual assault burst out onto the sidewalk: A prime example of the urban hippie -- skinny guy with an unkempt mop of rank hair; wearing a loud tie-dyed T-shirt paired to clashing disadvantage with too-short baggy indo-patterned pants and grotty bare feet -- all adding up to a major fashion felony with a misdemeanour in dubious personal hygiene.

As he looked wild-eyed and trembling at the doorway, the banshee appeared on the front steps... an equally protein-deprived female specimen in embroidered shift over blaaah pant-like baggery, and poxy dreads like dried, rolled out cow dung swept up in one of those dreary hemp rags that looks like its been pulled from flood wreckage.

The guy snaps his head in my direction and says: "Did you hear that? Did you hear her SCREAMING AT ME?"

I just walked past, smirking: "Forget it... I'm not taking sides in a domestic dispute."

Him: "I just want you to be witness to this!" (like what… in case this ends up going to sweat lodge arbitration?)

She says: "I just want you to witness that I'm dealing with a FREAK!" and stomps off inside.

I ducked into my apartment, thinking:

1) Hey patchouli doll… you're both freaks to me.

2) What could have burst their children-of-the-universe bliss? She's fed up with him leaving his chakra oils all over her yoga mat? He used a beef bouillon cube in the dahl again and now she’s going to have to do a two-week fast, ramped up with a steaming chicory and echinacea root colonic to cleanse her system? She caught him sprawled naked on her Cat Stevens records in a compromising tantric position with her bong? She asked him: 'Does this reusable moss-packed menstrual pad make my ass look fat in these ridiculously shapeless pants?', and he, guilelessly, said 'yes'?

I left my door open, presuming the tiff had blown over. But no… to my horror, up rose the slightly echoing sound of somebody WEEPING in sniveling frustration.

So???? I thought that all you need is love.

I poked my nose out the door, and there's Mr. Tofu, sitting cross-legged (how else?) in the middle of the sidewalk, blubbering away. You’d think he would have chosen to sit in the relative seclusion of his stoop; but no, why not be free and share, and sit over a metal drainage grate that acts as an amplifier so that half the block has to listen to it?

What kind of person doesn’t make any effort to find a private spot to bawl out their personal drama, with no consideration for the fact that they’re creating an offputting and noisy public spectacle? Answer: Two-year-olds… and rejected hippies.

Fashion

Hippies espouse being super individualistic, yet they all basically wear the same frumptastical uniform that’s as restrictive as a corporate dress code. Bottom options are confined to ratty peasant skirts, those abominable harem pants that fit with the elegance of a deflated air balloon, or shapeless trousers featuring some interlocking lizard pattern on something that looks like washed out burlap. Tops range from T-shirts featuring Che Guevara or some garish psychedelic pattern; to shapeless tunics; to wispy flute-sleeved inspirations from the Stevie Nicks BoHo Collection (for more formal occasions, such as moonlit solstice tofu BBQs and beachside commitment ceremonies).

The prevailing aesthetic is that everything looks like it was woven in a shabby village in India or Bolivia from corn husks that have passed through a goat’s digestive tract. Hippies, I ask you: What’s the upside to looking like an impoverished medieval peasant?

Dreadlocks

I saw this tv show in which they did a makeover on a woman who had dreads down to her knees. It looked like a horrible alien spider had attached itself to her head. A smelly cloud of 10-yr-old dirt rose up as the stylist hacked through the dreads with gardening shears.

Dreads are hair matted together with ancient scalp oil and filth.

Ugly and disgusting. No excuse.

Ecoconsciousness?

I was in Tofino on Vancouver Island during the great Clayoquot Sound logging blockade of 92, a hapless tourist suckered into going on a bone-chilling bust of a whale-watching excursion. No majestic tail flukes rising over our boat, no sir; all we saw, from a distance, was a gray blob of a mini whale that was taking a nap… and our guide, being a bleeding heart ecofascist, refused my suggestion that we go over and poke it with a stick until it jumped. Also disappointing was when, in absolute desperation, I had to be let off on a tiny rocky outcrop to take a pee, and as I squatted with my arse exposed to the chill winds, a boatful of smarter tourists who’d opted for a nice big cruiser with full amenities passed by, hooting at my shame.

Seeking refreshments back in town, I stumbled into the unwashed epicentre of tree-hugging hypocrisy.

I’m sitting in this granola café, and its swarming with earnest granolians stocking up on organic millet-and-kelp muffins before heading back out to throw themselves in front of logging trucks and chant and yell and weep about saving the trees… and none of them seems perturbed by the fact that this supposedly ecorighteous hub is built almost entirely from giant murdered trees. Massive beams spanned the ceiling; a big staircase with wide steps made from single planks spiraled up past the cedar-paneled walls… clearly a number of super-old big ass trees died to put this place up.

But hey… as long as that’s fair-trade coffee going out in the styrofoam cups, I guess its ok.

Dudes... I could SERIOUSLY use some organic trail mix right now.

p.s. To experience a full-blown tree-lovin' hippie freak out, you MUST see this:
http://http//www.youtube.com/watch?v=KyEam9NXOnE

Music

a) Reggae. Hippies, contrary to your scriptures, Bob Marley was not a demi-God. I can understand why his Rastafarian politics made him a hero to poor Black Jamaicans; but for North American kids from the suburbs to appropriate him as a revered icon feels a lot like post-Colonial white-guilt bollocks.

Reggae in general drives me nuts, with its relentless wucka-CHUCKa, wucka-CHUCKa, wucka-CHUCKA clanky jangling. Want to write a reggae song? Set your beat machine to ‘reggae’; freestyle with incomprehensible gibberish like ‘Go deh yaka, go deh yaka, go deh in-a rocker’; toss in repeated references to ‘natty dreads’, ‘Jah warrior’, and ‘rub-a-dub stylin’; add a little bit of ‘lyin in dee sun smokin ganga, mon’ and you’re done, you big ol’ buffalo soulja, you.

Bottom line is, I find the rhythmic chugging of a washing machine more pleasant and engaging than the tired tropes of reggae, and Marley’s been done to death, if you’ll pardon the expression. You want to see me go all Incredible Hulk raging mental? Just put on “Jammin” and take cover.

Wow man. Like this HAWK just flew into my head.

That's the power of ONE LOVE, man. Marley lives!!! Wow.

b) Granola Rock. To fans of the Grateful Dead, Phish et al: If I were to synthesize the THC from a bushel of prime BC buds into an injectable form that I then mainlined into my jugular vein, I still don’t think I could get stoned enough to get through one of their guitar-noodling epics without wanting to strangle myself with some love beads. The 60s were half a century ago, guys. Let’s move on.

c) Femi-Folk, Bluegrass, Aboriginal Folk Rock, and Other Horrors. Sorry people… basic musical ability and a surfeit of earnestness doesn’t entitle you be vapidly cliche in public. (see Exhibit A ) Do it if you must, but for pity’s sake, keep it behind closed doors.

d) Music featuring zamfirs, pan pipes, and/or insipid acoustic guitar set against the sounds of the rainforest is the Musak of Hades.

e) Drumming. You are not hunter-gatherers living on the African savanna. Stop it. Your neighbours are fed up.

The cuisine of despair

My first bout with vegetarianism taught me this: if a recipe sounds like its going to taste like a bland amalgam of reconstituted particle board on soggy paper towels, that’s how it’ll play out in your mouth.

Ancient archaeological artifact? Or lunch?

Vegetarians, the bald fact of it is that animals are deelicious. If you want people to stop eating them, you’d better suggest alternatives that aren’t a huge, joyless disappointment when compared to the juicy delights of grilled flesh.

· Meat ‘substitutes’ can be palatable, but stop insisting that they in any way come close to replicating the real thing. There is no alchemy that will make fried coconut, provolone cheese, or soy jerky equal the crispy, fatty wonder of bacon… If you think that real duck is squeamishly fleshy, wait until you experience the unholy texture of mock duck… and online reviews of Tofurky liken it to eating wet wheat bread, and say its only tasty if you inject with cajun sauce -- in which case, its just not really Thanksgivingy in the least, is it?

· Carob DOES NOT mimic the smooth, rich decadence of chocolate. It’s a chalky, bitter, and pointless lie.

· Cookies made without white flour, butter, and/or sugar aren’t worth eating. They tend to be dense, dry slabs with all the joy of compressed sawdust.

· Tofu can be fine, as long as its infused with external flavours and does not have the texture of whale blubber. Adding it to otherwise perfectly good dishes such as veggie chili or lasagna is misguided; trying to pass tofutti off as ice cream is just perverse.

"Our goat just pooped these out. Try one!

They taste, literally, like shit... but they're organic!"

· Vegans are insane; I’m not convinced that a life without cheese, butter, or cream would be worth living. Besides, vegans, with their obsessive disdain towards 99.99% of what is served at your average restaurant or dinner party, are a royal pain in the ass.

I recently sat next to a vegan at a dinner seminar. At first I saluted his shining ethical resolve, and felt a smidge sheepish, if you will, about ordering a succulent slab of beef. But by the time he’d tutted grumpily over the fact that they didn’t have whole grain buns, and had repeatedly pestered the harried waiter (who was a BIT overextended, since he had to run up and down a set of stairs to deliver food to 24 people) to confirm the exact composition of the balsamic dressing on his salad and to determine whether they’d used organic, free-range arugula, he’d proven himself to be a completely neurotic pill who expected the entire restaurant to bend over doubly backwards to accommodate his dietary choices. The only excuse for being THAT paranoid about a few molecules of animal essence getting into your meal is because it’ll send you into anaphylactic shock, not because you can’t bear the thought of a bit of chicken stock smudging your karma.

Plus, his name was Leif, which he made a big deal about insisting is pronounced “Life”. That may indeed be how they say it in Norway, but it was nonetheless just the lactose-free icing on the eggless, gluten-free cake of pointless fussiness.

He was like this perfect storm of self-centered nit-pickery.

Plus, he was wearing leather shoes.

Knock it off with the sprouts already!
They just make everything taste like tin cans

And what the hell are THESE?!?!? Vagina buns??

A fondness for massing in numbers to do a whole lot of not much besides be really icky

Some years ago, I was working late at a small business owned by a guy who’d recently been showing disturbing signs of creeping neo-hippie-ism. Just little things, like wearing a single cowrie shell on a leather string and listening to a lot of Stevie Wonder.

When the phone rang, I answered it with the usual businessly greeting, to be met with:

“Yeah. Uh… Wow. Uh…. Um… yeah. Is, like, David there?”

“No”, I replied, and offered to take a message.

“Ok. Uh. Well. Wow. Ok, so this is Thumper?”

Me (suspecting a prank): “Thumper. Like the cartoon bunny.”

Him: “Huh? Wow, yeah. Ha! No… Wow. So, like, I’m calling about the Rainbow Gathering?”

That’s when I realized , to my horror, that my boss had crossed over to the dark side.

Oh. But I suppose acid is ok?

Unlike what you might logically assume, the Rainbow Gathering is not a massive rave for the LBGT set. Rather, it is a week-long hippie convergence describes in its website as “A free, non-commercial sharing of our hearts in the cathedral of nature […] in a community of tribal anarchy.”

Basically, it’s an annual camping retreat for hippies who call themselves “the Family” (whoa… did anybody else just see a mental image of Charles Manson wearing a beaded macrame headband?). Ostensibly, the goal is to try to achieve peace and love on Earth. But given that the only “organized” activity is the evening councils… which are described as “ad hoc discussion circles, NOT elected legislative bodies that can decide anything for anyone”… it doesn’t seem likely that they’re ever going to accomplish anything aside from seriously inconveniencing a bunch of disgruntled woodland creatures.

Given that the Family can’t even get somebody with rudimentary spelling skills to edit their website, its probably safe to assume that the councils, rather than being a mechanism for achieving quorum on solid peace-and-love initiatives, are just a forum for insipid propagandists to preach to the converted. And since they’re all about inclusion and tolerance and non-confrontation and not hurting anyone’s feeeeelings, presumably any old windbag who gets ahold of the talking stick can drone on all night about their peyote vision quests and nobody can stop them. Kind of like the UN, but with a lot more pot and nudity.

"...and I was staring into this void filled with rings of pulsing colour, kind of like my shirt only in six dimensions, and slowly this face started to emerge...at first it was my old dog Sparky, and his eyes were made of lava, and he barked out "renounce all forms of animal tastiness! Eat veggie dogs!"... then he started to grow ropes out of his head and I realized it was Bob Marley and he said "You've got to lively up yourself, mon," and then my ears turned into donuts and my penis grew into a giant redwood that cracked the sky open so that granola rained from the heavens, and i was weeping, weeping, sobbing like a little girl..."

Anywho, here are a few nuggets gleaned from the Rainbow website:

· Minors showing up without having the presence of mind to attend to details such as packing adequate provisions or telling their parents that they’re about to disappear for a few weeks, is apparently a common enough problem that they’ve posted advise for youth on how to make sure they don’t end up reported as runaways, and emphasizing that a person can’t survive for a week on a pack of organic Skittles and a big bag of Sunchips.

They also advise parents who are worried about their innocent progeny falling in with a bunch of unwashed tripped-out commies somewhere way out of cell phone range, to … well… basically, just chillax, because your kids will be safe with their Rainbow sisters and brothers!

Apparently, it hasn’t occurred to anybody that if a 16-yr-old is so ditzy and naïve that they can’t figure out what to pack for a week in the woods, their parents might have just cause to worry that they’ll be prime targets for whatever sexual predators or other dangerous whackos that they may run into while hitchhiking their way to Nirvana.

I'd say you have a more pressing need for a shirt, but....

· In contrast to the supposed devotion to peace, love and understanding, there is a tone of majorly hostile effrontery to the screen concerning how to get around the “coercive tactics and encroachments of rights” at the police roadblock that tribe members will inevitably face upon arrival.

The general attitude seems to be: “God-damned pigs! So what if you’ve got 500 hits of acid hidden in your dreads, and this is a federal park that has to take at least a few cursory measures to ensure that no deranged maniacs with weapons or explosives have decided to check out the freak show and self-proclaimed anarchist event! Why can’t the friggin’ MAN just BE COOL, MAAAAN!!”

· The list of things to bring include: love and hugs (ick), frisbees (naturally), hair ties (but not hairbrushes), Magic Hat (??), incense holder (duh!), dental floss (but not, notably, deodorant), and the weirdly enigmatic entry: “Homemade campers out-house (grey hair and gimps only)*”.

*So… do the young and non-gimpy just shit where they stand like cattle? Or is that what the Magic Hat is for?

So let’s review: it’s a situation where you’ve got a pile of self-righteous dreamers crammed together, approximately zero privacy, drums going all the time, rampant hacky-sacking, summer heat combined with no proper toilets or bathing facilities, non-stop new-agey/feminist grandstanding, biting bugs, a cloud of b.o. hanging over everything, and the expectation that you must graciously accept the lingering embrace of any nude stranger that comes along, dangly bits all a-dangle against your person.

Add an evening showcase of Celine Dion impersonators, and that’s pretty much my definition of Hell.

My worst-case scenario.

New agey nonsense

To people with a rational grip on reality, believing in karma and healing energy and astrology and all the rest is as preposterous as accepting that there’s a big old bearded guy in the sky pulling strings and hanging out with angels.

SERIOUSLY:

- Tea tree oil does not cure everything from acne to lice to fascism. It just makes you really oily and stink like Vicks Vap-o-rub.

- Acupuncture maybe; but LASER acupuncture? I once knew a woman named Mindy (surprised?) who insisted she could rejuvenate a mildly droopy ficus plant with her magic laser beams. Guess what? Within a week, the tree had dropped all its leaves and died -- probably from embarrassment.
- If someone’s life has been an unrelenting endurance test of completely unfair shit for quite some time, its not only unrealistic, but bordering on insulting to suggest that all they need to do is just close their eyes, burn some incense and “let it go”.

One fall I started getting massages to treat a shoulder injury that had been crumpling me with pain for months. I’d put off dealing with it, because I’d been fighting a steamroller of other crap, including dealing with a highly egregious and possibly mentally unstable co-worker. My masseur was my neighbour, so when he inquired as to why I was a completely stressed out wreck, I felt ok with giving him a small glimpse into the crushing psychological, emotional and financial hell I’d been burdened with for several years, thanks to various factors outside my control.

Suddenly, I felt something smooth being placed on the small of my back; then I heard humming punctuated by three gonging strikes. “Uh… what was that?” I asked. He explained that he’d been bonging a brass bowl so the vibrations would release bad energy from my body. My response was: “Thanks, but I think the most effective way to release my bad energy would be to take a baseball bat to a few deserving people’s heads.” He tut-tutted about how negativity would eat me up. I thought: “Listen pal, I’m paying you $75 an hour for a massage, so drop the dopey platitudes, lose the ridiculous props and get rubbing.”

If only wearing a crystal around my neck and just deciding to give out positive energy could have made it all better. But when your circumstances are genuinely miserable, you can’t just fix everything by deciding to put on a happy face.

Just take a Tylenol, fer chrissakes

- If getting what you want through positive visualization actually WORKED as a life plan, right now I’d be lounging around on a pile of money stroking my pet tiger while debating whether I’ll spend some time with Clive Owen for a change, so that James Franco could have a bit of a rest and finish his PhD in astrophysics. Most people figure out by about the age of 5 that fervent wishing isn’t enough to make your dreams come true. Hippies, they just keep believin’ in fairies and pixie dust in spite of the damning evidence. That’s called delusion.

- Eating breakfast in my local diner one day, I couldn’t help but pick up on an incredible spiel of drivel being shoveled by a young women sitting at the next table, talking about how she’d just had the most AWESOME spiritual experience at some holistic-ass retreat:

“Like, so, Jade? She’s like the leader and she was just SOOOO, like… she just, like, radiated this BEAUTIFUL energy? She was A-MAAAAZING!!! So, like the first night she said I could sleep in her bed, and we all ended up just sharing the bed and … like, it was sooooo AWESOME!! And we got up at, like, 3am to go out and pick these, like, leaves of this plant? Because, like, the moon was in the perfect phase for the best energy for this particular plant? Anyway, so as soon as I picked a leaf, it was, like, I felt like this A-MAZING feeling, like I could tell it just had all this, like, AWESOME energy rush!!”

As she went on, I started to wonder if she was the victim of emotionally dysfunctional parenting; it was disturbing that she seemed so grateful to have gained acceptance from a bunch of loopy strangers who think that life oughta be just one big mystical Hogwarts sleepover. Any young adult with that level of gullibility and rank, naked neediness really ought to be getting professional counseling so they can get a grip on their lives, not be wandering around picking moonflowers in la-la land with a bunch of co-sleeping, herb-worshipping zombies for role models. Also, a bit of help from the Toastmasters on how to form a sentence without using “like” and “awesome” as punctuation would also be good.

Like, wow... I just pulled these out of myself... want one?

I suppose that people are entitled to believe whatever ludicrous dogma they want, but its putting on self-righteousness airs about being more pure and evolved than the rest of us that puts me on the offensive.

Because that’s what hippies do. They’ll go on and on about their epiphany in yoga class, or their pilgrimage to Maccu Picchu, or the plight of some political dissident in Nicaragua, or the doula’s rights movement, as if everyone will naturally care with the same misty eyed reverence that they do.

Its just so tedious and self-involved.

Begone, hippies.

Begone.

Animal cruelty

The Hell That Lurks Below

2011-03-05T11:16:00.000-08:00

If you want to get a sense of a city's core character, step deep inside the beast and take a ride on the subway.

In New York, the trains never sleep, screeching their bad-assed way through rat-scuttling tunnels carrying buttoned-down traders, droopy-panted gangbangers, kerchiefed babushkas, slouching hipsters in their dumb glasses, Marge and Harvey from Iowa nervously patting the bulges of their hidden moneybelts, plus your standard-issue crazies and flashers … the seething melting pot of a big, hairy metropolis, constantly on the move. The only thing that stops these pushy bastards is the occasional flood or 9/11-scale cataclysm.

Moscow stations have an old-world veneer of opulent civility:
But in the cars, its an offkilter mix of cabbage-grade mundanity and vodka feuled wonkiness, where feral dogs riding the trains on their daily commutes passes for normal.

Not to vorry, nice laydee readink zee books of vampires... just makink sure Kalashnikov ees clean and verkink like borscht-schloppink proletariat.

The Paris metro is all Catherine Deneuve meets Audrey Tautou – there's sleek sang-froid in how its chic urbanites expertly disdain panhandlers who work the cars with their sob-stories and gypsy music; while the perkily clipped platform warnings about “les peek-po-KET” add a dash of pixie-ish je ne sais quoi.

It's also very sexy.

In Montreal… well, it appears we’re at the mercy of a shabby pot-smokin’ bohemian who’s too wiped out from last night’s open mic poetry slam to give a damn that the rent is overdue, the garbage is overflowing, and that, on any given weekday, there’s about a million people who actually need to get somewhere with a reasonable degree of efficiency.

The “where the fuck is my train?” platform crush guessing game is as old as the metro itself.

The metro system opened 45 years ago, and has pretty much been allowed to crumble into carnal decay ever since. Aside from the embarrassingly dated décor that evokes the worst design impulses of the late 60s (there’s a lot of concrete Brutalism and orange goin’ on), cracks in the walls and ceilings ooze like weeping sores; petty vandals and hooligans run amok; the platforms are shabbily soiled at best; everything is falling to bits, and the Outremont station smells like satan’s outhouse.

The description of Namur station on the Societe Transport de Montreal's website reads: "The decoration is quite plain, except for the astonishing, enormous illuminated molecular structure suspended in mid-air.” In reality, it’s oppressively dreary in spite of being harshly overlit; the depanneur is a shambolic closet of grossness inhabited by a mad old troll with disturbing stains on his paints; the downstairs hosts a mini crapmarket of some of the most hideously tacky accessories in the known universe; the middle landing is the site of an epic land claim battle between two hugely annoying buskers… the old guy in shorts and white knee socks who sculpts a path of pain through your head with his grating piccolo stylings; and the storkish old dame who huffs pathetically into a melodica (in spite of having publicly laboured at it for at least 10 years, still can’t play two consecutive notes even marginally smoothly or cleanly); and getting out the doors entails running a gauntlet of silently accusing Jehovah’s Witnesses and assorted hustlers.

Our trains, by far the oldest on the continent, seem to be held together with little more than rubber bands, chewing gum, and abject faith. When I get on and see the same distinctive jester-on-a-unicycle-shaped splotch that I straddled two days ago, it belies an absence of any sort of focused cleaning regimen; there's stupid teenage-grade graffitti Sharpied onto the walls and seats and scratched into the windows; grip poles are greasy with a thick residue of hand germs; I’m not sure WHAT that brownish scum is on the only available seat, but I’m sure as hell not going to put my ass on it; while underfoot, empty bottles drift back and forth through an undergrowth of discarded papers and whatever quasi-biohazards people care to drop, spit, or spew onto the floor.

Yep. 10:00 am Tuesday and we've got vomit on the platform.

In the summer, the un-airconditioned trains are, at best, dank capsules wafting with dodgy odours. If you unwittingly stumble into a car where the fans aren’t working, once the doors close its like taking a shower in your own trickling sweat while breathing in the fetid body steam of strangers.

Its rare that I’m able to get to and from work without at least one instance of the service being held up repeatedly or flat-out stopped for an indeterminate period. Common causes include doors that won’t close, 2- or 4-legged creatures wandering the tunnels, intermittent electrical failures, and driver caprice.

Don't look up!

And then there are seasonal factors that beget random chaos. The advent of Christmas always gives rise to a cluster of jumpers, heart attacks and stress-induced collapses, which put me in the uncomfortable position of feeling super annoyed at having to blearily figure out what configuration of overstuffed buses to haul my hungry, parched and bladderbursting carcass onto, to arrive mega-late for work AGAIN, because another poor schmuck of lesser fortitude reached their breaking point. And whenever the metro worker’s union contract is overdue for renewal (as it is now) there’s a conspicuous uptick in mysterious slowdowns that magically occur only during rush hours.

A little niche of nastiness at Guy-Concordia station.

In 2006, the city finally acknowledged that it was time to replace its ailing fleet. In keeping with a long history of extended bureaucratic dithering and corporate jousting surrounding multi-billion-dollar contracts, it took 2 years before bidding started and another 2 years of decision-making and legal challenges before a supplier was named. New cars are supposed to be ready by early 2014, but I’m not holding my breath (well, other than when I’m trapped in a car with a homeless person who reeks of poo).

Touted “improvements” include high-definition tvs (so commuters can have more advertising shoved in their faces) and fewer seats. All I dare hope for is that when the trains finally come into service some time around the middle of this century, that the effing doors and ventilation systems work, and that announcements over the PA system sound less like somebody with a mouth shot full of dental anaesthetic mumbling incomprehensibly through a paper bag full of crinkling tinfoil and static.

Perversely, the only surfaces that I see being cleaned routinely are those that nobody touches.

To usher in the rechargeable passcard system, stations were plastered with posters chirply extolling how fun and groovy it was going to be. But since it never occurred to anyone that the promotional budget might have been more usefully spent on signage that actually explained how the new passes and turnstiles worked, stations were jammed with seething scrums of exasperated people unable to figure out why the fares they’d just surrendered into the bowels of the machines didn’t seem to work. After several weeks of fuming chaos, with the ticket-booth staff becoming less helpful and more belligerent the more they got yelled at, the geniuses at head office got around to hiring people to stand at the turnstiles to guide people through. Of course by then, pretty much everyone had it figured out, so all the enablers did was annoy people by being obsequiously useless and constantly in the way.

A deep sea photo from the Marianas trench? Nope: just part of the wall at Snowdon.

Astounding levels of ineffectuality have also been attained in the installation of new escalators. They’ll rip out an old escalator (which at least you could count on working 5% of the time) then let two to three years go by during which the hole sits gapingly idle, leaving old ladies, people on crutches, and moms with strollers to face the monumental challenge of tottering down a bajillion stairs without toppling into the void. And God help them in the fairly likely event that the up escalator also goes on the fritz.

In over 3 years of passing through the Place des Arts station every weekday morning, I have not ONCE seen anybody working on the escalator. Guess they're planning on starting around 4 pm on Feb 27.

Another amusing maintenance in-joke involves randomly disabling station entry doors. Since getting the swivelling doors to budge typically requires a linebacker-strength shoulder check, it isn’t until after you’ve done a running slam into the glass that you notice the highly innocuous wee sticker that vaguely states “Desole” as a post-concussion hint that you need to use the other door.

Can YOU tell which door is locked?

And then, once you’re able find a functioning door and muscle through it, you’re swept off your feet, skirts (if applicable) whipping around your ears, by the incredible suctioning wind caused by the weird pressure differential. Frail grannies are swept away like tumbleweeds; toddlers are wrenched from their mothers’ hands to fly away like leaves in a windstorm. Its super fun.

This is part of a magnificent installation, now running into its 4th month, that takes up a good portion of the southbound Sherbrooke station platform:

Here's a typical workday commute experience:

Approaching the subway entrance, I must apply laser eyes of fury and an edge of hostility to beat a path through the horde of aggressive flyer distributors who come at me like a flock of seagulls moving in on a scattering of french fries.

As I muscle my way through the 500-lb doors, I'm grabbed by a typhoon that sends me hydroplaning across a wet patch for about 4 feet, doing that cartoonish flailing arms thing with my life flashing before my eyes.

Grit my teeth past the busker who's playing off key and screechy easy-listening schmaltz on a violin plugged into a shitty amp that cranks up the awful.

Stand in a jostling mass breathing strangers' coffee breath and getting increasingly desperate to remove a few layers of smothering outerwear, until the train passes old Montreal and a seat frees up.

Enjoyment of newspaper precluded by being rhythmically whacked in the side of the head by somebody's megapurse.

After a few stops, my pissyness shifts to the fact that we’ve been sitting immobile at a station 3 stops from my exit for the past 15 minutes. Finally, there's a garbled announcement saying the whole orange line is stopped because there’s somebody on the tracks. Exasperated sighs and copious eye-rolling all around. More time ticks by, then we’re kicked off the train and told the delay will be “indefinite”.

This grotty little number at Namur is accompanied by the disturbing gurgle of trickling water hiding in the ceiling crack.

People’s faces show a blend of annoyance and anxiety about how they will surely be late for their jobs, their MRI, their thesis defense, their court appearance, their date with destiny. Everyone resents being roused from their morning commuter trance by the dilemma of trying to figure out what hand to play based on zero reliable information… do we stick around to see if the situation is resolved in the next 15 minutes, or join the desperate scramble up to the streets to fight like starving jackals over the scraps of alternate transportation? For once, I make the right call and wait it out. Mere minutes after sending thousands of people away into frustration and chaos, the train starts running again.

Later, during after-work rush hour, people are packed on in a solid, steaming mass ... and it happens again. Really? What is this, Be an Idiot on the Tracks Day?

Caution! Extreme skankiness abounds!

Yet, remarkably, the STM just beat out every other system in North America for an Outstanding Public Transportation System Achievement award. Although we won mostly based on increased ridership, supposedly 86% of users are satisfied with the system’s efficiency and reliability.

You’ve got to wonder who they polled though. Certainly not me, or any of the scores of fed-up commuter schmucks that I rub elbows and other unwitting body parts with every day.

And the buses? Designed by a particularly malicious descendant of the Marquis de Sade, I'll wager.

And they wonder why people want to own cars.

Supposedly great movies that just pissed me right off - Part 1

2011-01-29T11:40:00.000-08:00

Star Wars (George Lucas, 1977)
In the spring of 1977, I was 17, chafing with the usual suburban adolescent boredom that comes from being too old for hide and seek, but too young to get into bars. So when my boyfriend said a bunch of us were going to the drive-in for the opening of this really cool-looking space movie, I was pretty pumped.

I thought I was in for a wildly imaginative escape: something intelligent and inventive like 2001 – A Space Odyssey, but with snappy, eye-popping action and way less brooding obeliskity existentialism (not that there's anything wrong with that).

It was going to be a big night out – instead of sitting around somebody's basement getting high, we were going to sit in a car getting high, and have our minds blown away by a spectacular entertainment.

But the clever bit of eye candy I'd envisioned was a bust. The highly-touted special effects weren’t all that bedazzling, even though I was as stoned as Pete Doherty at a bail hearing. Worse, the story that I thought would be an enthralling and thought-provoking sci-fi narrative quickly revealed itself to be as tritely formulaic as a piece of Disney shlock.

A third of the way in, I could easily project exactly how the story was going to unspool. I was so bored, I might as well have stayed home and listened to Led Zeppelin IV. Again.

Betty Blue (aka 37.2 ° Le Matin) (Jean-Jacques Beineix, 1986)
Critics raved over the passionate intensity of this story of doomed love and the artist/muse dynamic, which, among other accolades, was up for an Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film.

Zorg is a house painter who's working on a novel in his spare time. His nubile girlfriend Betty apparently has no interests or ambitions other than screwing like a mink, flying off into volatile fits of dramatic pique for no apparent reason, and fawning unbecomingly over Zorg's writerly genius.

Much swooning was made over Beatrice Dalle's sensual portrayal of that type of young woman who is supposedly irresistible in spite of being a hugely irritating, unemployed nut case who wastes a great deal of her man's time with pointlessly demanding and self-pitying arguments that inevitably involve her trashing something in an epic fashion while going for a world record in moody pouting.

Me, I couldn't see what made Dalle so supposedly hot. Aside from having a crudely wide, gap-toothed mouth, there was just something off-putting about her. I squirmed through the scene in which, during a pointless quarrel, Betty takes off down the street in her underwear, with the camera following her wobbling bottom for several horrific minutes. I had to irritatedly wonder how this drawn-out gratuitous display of cellulitic pulchritude was contributing anything to plot or character development. And like, come ON now… I don't care how uninhibited she is, no woman’s going to take off down the street practically naked unless there's an ax-murderer on her heels. Being pissed cause your boyfriend forgot to put the toilet seat down again doesn't constitute just cause for streaking.

With her baby-fat voluptuousness, pouty petulance, and appalling immaturity, Betty seemed more like a busty tween than a woman. Maybe that was the problem – it was the blatant ogling of a whiny girl-child who had zero going for her besides her fuckability that just made those droolingly smitten comments by (male) reviewers seem super creepy.

Betty's behaviour gets increasingly volatile and unpredictable. Just when the eternally impatient -- or shall we say doormattish -- Zorg starts to show signs of getting a tad fed up at having to save innocent bystanders from another of his ballistic girlfriend’s monumental meltdowns because somebody over-scorched her crème brulee, Betty suddenly becomes radiant and joyful on discovering that, in spite of being on the pill, she has become pregnant. But after a short interlude of non-crazy bliss, she goes to the doctor, finds out that she isn't knocked up, and becomes so distraught at being a “failure as a woman” that …wait for it… she stabs herself in the eye with a fork.

As Zorg tries to comfort a weeping, eye-patched Betty in her hospital bed, I failed to be moved by the tender heartbreak of the young lovers' tragedy. Au contraire… I was seriously annoyed that I was meant to swallow such a choking wallop of contrived melodramatic merditude. How can you hate yourself to the point of (self)blinding rage for not getting pregnant while on birth control? That's reeeally stretching it, drama queen. You're sitting around all day with nothing to do, yet you can't manufacture something more credible to pin a self-maiming hissy fit on? Plus, ok, so you're distraught: wander into traffic in your garter belt, try to o.d. on pouty-mouthed shots of absynthe, try to get fatally infected by sleeping with a consumptive mime, whatever... but a FORK IN THE EYE?!?!? (And also, what kind of name, seriously, is Zorg??)

I don't remember how it ends... whether Betty is institutionalized, spending her days throwing imaginary furniture around the looney bin in comely back-slit hospital pyjamas, or whether she goes home and fatally mangles herself with a Cuisinart, or what. I just remember feeling hugely annoyed at being lured out with the expectation of seeing a moving bit of intelligent cinema, only to be served up a daft and leering tribute to the cr-a-a-a-z-y sexpot stereotype that makes women cringe, but that apparently really appeals to a whole pile of idiot men, particularly those in the field of film criticism.

In a bit of life-imitating art, Dalle was prone to a bit of loopy behaviour of her own. Over the years, she was arrested for stealing jewelry in Paris; was fined for assaulting a traffic warden; and got busted for cocaine possession in Miami. In 2005, while shooting a film about prison life, Dalle met a guy who was serving a 12-year sentence for assaulting and raping his ex-girlfriend. She married him and helped get him early parole... and then guess what? She had to dump him a few weeks after his release, because he turned out to be a violent psychopath.

One perceptive reviewer likened Dalle's smile to the front grill of a 1950s Pontiac.

Titanic (James Cameron, 1997)
I was perhaps the only refusnik on the media-aware planet who defiantly stayed away from this film when it came out. I knew that it would have a paint-by-numbers plot that I would just find tiresome, yet it would still manage to manipulate me into getting all sniffly at the end, triggering some well-deserved self-loathing. I was also ardently determined to do whatever I could to avoid having to hear that God-bedamned Celine Dion song one more time.

A few years later, happening across it of a slow tv night, I figured: what the hell, millions of people loved this movie -- its got to be more edifying than watching Wife Swap reruns.

I only got as far as one of the early scenes where Kate Winslet sneaks down to the lower-class deck to cut loose drinking whiskey and kicking up her skirts with some folk dancing. I know its a fictional entertainment, but I can't abide when blockbuster movies completely give the finger to historical reality. In 1912, there's just no way that a young woman from the “proper” classes would act that way. She would have had all traces of free-spirited defiance of her role as corseted chattel bullied out of her long before she reached puberty.

To me, suggesting that young women of that time had any hope of escaping the confines of their societal roles for two seconds, let alone managing to sneak off and party like a serving wench in heat, was a bit of an insult to the long struggle that women went through to get equal rights. And I think its kind of irresponsible, given that the fan base for the movie was young girls who probably wouldn’t know that they were being served up a big stinking pile of historical revisionist fantasy, the end goal of which was to reward the men behind the film with a bajillion box-office-smashing dollars and enduring glory.

Ultimately though, if there's one thing I can't stand, it's maudlin and facile crap, and I could tell that's where this sinking ship was sailing to.

Magnolia (Paul Thomas Anderson, 1999)
After spending two years as a very socially isolated stay-at-home mom, I was desperate to regain some semblance of my old life. Sitting in the dark getting lost in a film being hailed as a masterpiece seemed the perfect way to get a taste of the alone time and intellectual stimulation I was starved of.

About 45 minutes in, I was feeling something I’d never felt at the cinema before – a mightily powerful urge to walk out in disgust. Plot?* HELLS no... just a bunch of pointless and befuddling story lines featuring characters who were unilaterally annoying. Julianne Moore spends her screen time histrionically yowling like a cat in heat locked out in a rainstorm; Tom Cruise plays some freakily obnoxious game show host who struts around giving rambling and repetitive speeches about “penis power”; and a bunch of other characters wander in and out being at once irritatingly quirky and painfully bland. Although some of the characters are linked (or are they?), none of the story lines make any sense or goes anywhere.

The scene that really drove me nuts was when a cop answers a call at this woman's house, and it goes on and on with her babbling this neurotic nonsense with him being super awkward because he wants to ask her out but he’s too shy, and you're struggling to follow the dialog because they're being drowned out by this loud wheedling music that really had no point in being in the scene, other than to be distracting and obnoxious.

At that point, I wondered how many other people were also completely fed up, but didn't want to appear like philistines too crass to understand great art by getting up and leaving. I felt pretty confident I’d start a minor exodus if I stood up and shouted: “This movie SUCKS and I'm going to ask for my money back... anybody with me?” before stomping out. But I figured that after suffering past the halfway mark, I might as well stick it out to see how it ends. Cause its a MASTERPIECE, right, so surely there was going to be some kind of profoundly magnificent ending that was going to pull all this tedious and grating nonsense together.

And WHAT is this genius ending, which finally comes out of nowhere? Why, IT RAINS FROGS!!!! Really big ones, like cane toads have magically been sucked out of the Australian countryside and dropped in the American midwest. And then there are a few more pointless scenes in which nobody comments or acknowledges the fact that it just RAINED FROGS. And that's it.

Yeah, its a masterpiece all right... a masterpiece of CRAP!!

*(if you don't believe how dumb this film is, check out the plot summary, complete with complicated charts and diagrams that fail to impart any kind of sense or clarity @ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnolia_(film)

Kill Bill, Vol. 1 (Quentin Tarantino, 2003)
I thought Reservoir Dogs was a cool and original thriller. Pulp Fiction was ok, although some of its characters and plot lines seemed a little contrived and forced.

The critics were licking Tarantino’s feet, throwing around phrases like “wunderkind auteur”, but I was already wondering if he had the goods to live up to the hype. If by your second film, you’re resorting to rolling out a cavalcade of cussing freaks to catch people’s attention, how long before you end up like David Lynch, who had worn out his oddball welcome, but could still just toss together a mishmash of creepy nonsense, add the ol’ dwarf-in-a-curtained-chamber-talking-backwards trope, and have effete hipsters in black turtlenecks insist it was art, no matter how bad it smelled if you really poked at it with an objectively critical stick.

Indeed, by the time Jackie Brown ran its unremarkable yet critically hailed course, I began to suspect that being crowned a genius right out of the gate had gone to Tarantino’s oddly-shaped head; and that after all that premature gushing about him being the second directorial coming of Christ, nobody dared to stand up and declare that the emperor had no clothes. It seemed implicit that he could just grind out a formulaic script that substituted the shock value of potty-mouthed violence for cleverness and originality, and he’d be sported off to Cannes in a gilded litter borne on the shoulders of sycophantic film-theory students from Portland.

I wrote him off as definitively overrated after seeing his contribution to the compilation film Four Rooms (1995). This study in moronic testosteronal one-upmanship could have been interesting if the characters weren't all one-dimensional rehashes of the personalities in Reservoir Dogs, and if he'd bothered to write dialog with some substance, instead of just trying to camoflage the laziness of the writing by having everyone throw out some variation on “fuck” every few seconds. Where’s the genius in revelling in juvenile machismo? Like come on Quentin... you're a smart guy, so have some self-respect and stop phoning in scripts that seem like they were written by a bratty suburban 15-yr-old who thinks that violent-jerk posturing is way cool. I get enough of that crap taking the metro home with the junior high kids.

So when the boyfriend chose Kill Bill as our video rental, I was resistant (especially since I knew it had a cheesy sounding comic-book ninja revenge theme), but decided to give Tarantino another chance, because once again, the reviews had rhapsodized at how incredible a piece of stylistic directing it was.

I didn't make it too far. In scene three, Uma Thurman, who plays a wronged assassin hell-bent on spandex-swathed revenge, ambushes a former colleague, played by the equally babe-alicious Vivica A. Fox, in her suburban kitchen. The dialog went pretty much like this:

Uma: “I'm back, you motherfuckin poopyhead, and i'm gonna kick your motherfuckin' ass.”

Vivica: “Oh yeah, well YOU'RE a motherfuckin poopyhead, bitch, and I'm gonna kick YOUR motherfuckin' ass!”

Uma: “Oh YEAH, MOTHERFUCKER?!?!”

Vivica: “Yeah, MU-THA-FUCKKA!!!”

And then they start a kung fu catfight.

Then Vivica's little girl walks in, and suddenly they're like two pals happily bonding over motherhood, as if two seconds ago, they weren't trying to kill each other, while Uma rattles off a long bit of stupidly complicated backstory exposition.

Maybe Tarantino was aiming for some kind of ironic campy take on martial arts comics cum soft porn ninja chick fantasy but, excuse me, it was just unconscionably dumb.

Two more hours of this ridiculously ham-fisted twaddle... and then there's the equally long wank of volume 2??

Fuck you, you fuckin' motherfucker. I'm going to bed.

Avatar (James Cameron, 2009)
As with Titanic, I refused to give in to the hype about this movie, because I had a hunch that its lowest-common-denominator narrative would probably bother me. But I really like 3D movies, and somebody whose opinion I respected said it was stunning and I really needed to see it on the big screen. So off I went, already begruding the idea of putting another $15 in James Cameron's ego-lined pockets.

Indeed, in a visual sense, it was utterly gorgeous. But it was hard for me to get lost in the spectacle when I kept getting slapped in the brain by the sheer banality of the script.

It was as if they’d taken something a 5-yr-old boy thought up (“So, like, there’s these giant blue cat people? And they live in a ginormous tree? And they ride dinosaurs and they’re really nice to everything, even plants, but some bad men come to destroy their home and there’s this other guy who wants to help the princess and so there’s this big war and everybody is sad but then they win and the guy marries the princess the END”), then they turned it over to some hack writer, handed him a schmaltz shovel, and him told to load it on as thick as possible.

Come on boys... you’ve got a $250 million dollar budget to create this epic fantasy, but you can’t afford a scriptwriter with a smidge of imaginative originality? Like, the rare mineral they want to rape the planet for is called … “unobtainium”. Is that supposed to be a joke? Although I suppose it could have been worse -- they could have gone with "greedium."

Even if you're aiming for the widest-possible audience, it shouldn’t mean that the script has to be borderline retarded, with a strong overglaze of mawkish wankditude. Just for starters:

You’ve got these Na’vi (and, scuse me, but what’s the apostrophe for? New-agey flair? Did Sting come up with that one?) who plug their TAILS into TREES for some kind of eco-orgasmic kick. Oh puh-leeze... Star Trek's Vulcan mind-meld; that was cool. This tail-plug business had dorkily cloying Oprah-atic spirituality written all over it.
Was that really Sigourney Weaver, or a character robot pulling lines from a cliché database?
Did anybody for one second actually worry that the hero was really going to die at the end? And the way it was edited, didn’t it seem like he went a good 20 minutes without breathing?

What a bunch of hoo'ey.

It was just sooo melodramatically belaboured that I found myself wishing that the forces of evil would triumph and the natives would be flattened into one big, blue patchouli-oil scented splotch. They're just a bunch of tediously smarmy space hippies anyway. Wipe out the tree-hugging fuckers before they invent some sinister otherworldly incarnation of zamphir music and hacky sackery, and shut the door on the threat of a sequel that is bound to be even less original.

A buck 41 of crazy

2010-12-12T08:42:00.001-08:00

Friday, 6pm and the mall is pre-Christmas swarming. Need to pop into Zellers to source a dress suitable as a gift for me mum, whose tastes roughly follow those of the Queen, minus the hats, corgis, and immense wealth.

Matronly frock nabbed, I start inching through the check-out. As usual, the shortest line turns out to be the slowest. First there's an animated coupon-waving debate over the price of a box of detergent; then a pack of tube socks is missing its SKU code; then the elderly woman ahead of me turns out to be living in her own private Idaho, and is battily hell-bent on milking as much flamboyantly deranged chatter with the cashier as possible before initiating the painfully drawn out process of rooting out her pocketbook, befuddledly opening and closing each compartment several times before finding the one that holds her cash, questioning the validity of the price of each object rung up, having to be loudly corrected five times before she hands over a sufficient amount, then needing a great deal of convincing before she'll accept that she has, in fact, been given back a quarter and not a nickel, cause hey... she may be dog-slapping nuts, but she's not fool enough to be hoodwinked out of her pocket change by some devilishly scheming con-artist disguised as a Zeller's cashier, who's busily amassing a purloined fortune 20 sneaky cents at a time.

Mini-rivers of sweat are starting to flow under my coat and down into my pants, keening to find a path homeward to the mighty St-Lawrence; but I manage to remain mostly patient. Best not to be too judgmental... another few years and that could well be me, oblivious to time, space, and the finer points of sanity.

Finally I'm through, and on to my next pressing mission; and this one's crucial. A full two days has passed during which I have been virtually out of cheddar cheese. This makes me feel anxious and vulnerable. What if I have a late-night nacho emergency? I live four blocks from a 24-hour grocery store, but it can't be relied on to stock a decently tasty chunk of everyday cheddar. Oh, sure, they'll have wee wedges of premium 10-yr-old, but it's too fine and expensive to cook with. And they'll have an entire dairy case brimming with 30 brands of mild in white, orange, marbled and skim; but that stuff's too bland to be worth eating... it just tastes like solidified milk.

Oh sure... i can get a cheese sombrero at 4am. That's handy.

At the bad-ass Provigo at the mall, however, I can score a double-sized fix of street-grade tangy old – sometimes even [exquisite shudder] EXTRA old – for under $10. But its always super busy in there... is it really worth spending 20 minutes in line to pay because I'm a slave to an irrational cheese fetish?

But, lo! As I enter, there is, most freakishly, virtually no line up at the express check out. GAME. ON!
I slalom through the usual obstacle course of shopping carts idiotically piloted by shuffling zombies, nab the sweet lacteal goods, and zip into line with just 2 people ahead of me. I can't believe my luck. I'll be out of here in 3 minutes! Its a Christmas miracle!

The cashier finishes a sale, then turns to deal with a woman who has appeared at the service counter. Just an average-looking middle-class woman in her 30s, with a bit of a dilemma – she wants to exchange 2 boxes of instant oatmeal for a box of Special K. As she's brought over to the front of the line so the cashier can scan the price codes, I'm already thinking: What the hell? She just shows up and immediately gets to jump the queue? And who the hell buys CEREAL, then changes their mind, and comes all the way back to exchange it? But whatever. It's nearly my turn. Won't take but a minute.

CASHIER: “That's $1.41.”
WOMAN (solicitously): “Its minus.”

CASHIER: ?????

WOMAN (genially indulgent): “Its minus. You owe me $1.41.”

CASHIER (frazzled): “Oh. Yes. Sorry.”

Apparently, she's a new to the job, and now we've gone off protocol. She gets on the phone and pages her supervisor.

Everyone in line starts to shift restlessly, thinking: “Oh-h-h-h. Crap. Here we go...”

We wait, some glaring off into the middle distance in an annoyed fashion.

The cashier makes a second page for assistance.

The general mood swings quite perceptibly into the “awww, FUCK ME!!” zone.

The seconds drag by like a thrubbing vacuum of slow-dripping despair. The line-up has grown exponentially, with everyone peering down the queue with cranky faces on, and doing that sighing, eye-rolling,“why the fuck is this line NOT MOVING!” pantomime.

The cashier, looking nervous about the ticking time bomb of frayed tempers that she'll be the lightening rod for, shouts out to someone for a key.

Her supervisor comes over; and after a debriefing, turns her key in the price display thingey, squints at the readout, and says to Ms. Cereally-indecisive: “You have a difference of $1.41.”

WOMAN (getting her peeve on now that she's facing an alpha opponent): “Yes! I know! You owe me $1.41.”

SUPERVISOR (warily assuming an authoritative attitude): “I'm sorry... store policy is that we don't give cash refunds.”

Woman gets her hackles up and starts pontificating in a huffy tone about how she has a cousin who works at Canadian Tire and they give refunds, bla bla bla... can't see the problem... bla bla... this is ridiculous!... bla bla bla, crap crap crappidy crap.

Cashier and supervisor are biting their lips and avoiding eye contact. Their guarded expressions say: “Oh boy... Code red! Bitch on fire!”

SUPERVISOR (steely and firm): “I'm sorry. Its store policy.”

WOMAN (worked into a nice, frothy lather of aggrieved indignation now): “I need to speak to your manager.”

I smell a pungent tide of blood pressures rising. A chorus of “tsk!”-ing ripples down the queue. We have the beginnings of an angry mob here.

Enough already. I pull a toonie out of my pocket and brandish it at the blonde Rosa Parks of non-receipt-holding cereal-rebate justice.

ME: “Here. I'll give you 2 bucks to just take your cereal and leave, so the rest of us can get on with our lives.”

WOMAN (shooting me an appalled look, as if I'm being an asshole): “No. There's a PRINCIPLE here.”

ME: “PRINCIPLE? You butt ahead of everyone, and now you want us all to wait while you argue over a BUCK FORTY ONE?!?!?? Come on! This isn't a human rights violation!”

She wasn't quite ready to give in, but seemed to realize that forces were rallying against her, and momentarily dropped her offense. The staff looked relieved at the shift in dynamic. The people next to me thanked me for trying. Somebody a bit further back applauded. There were muffled “whuf, whuf, whuf”-ish sounds of disgruntled solidarity.

At that, the woman stomped off, presumably to make a royal pain in the arse of herself up the chain of Provigo command.

The cashier tried to suppress a delighted smirk as she rang me through.
And the mega-cheese was mine.

The prize

Oui, je parle Franglais !

2010-12-05T16:51:00.001-08:00

When I moved to Quebec, I was determined to get over my fear of looking like a ham-tongued linguistic yokel and take a serious crack at speaking the language of the land.

I’d forced myself to take French all through high school, even though it was about as enjoyable as sitting in a sauna with a parka on, rhythmically whacking myself in the head with a 20-lb hard-covered unabridged Roget's English-French dictionary while listening to a Beau Dommage album on replay... particularly since one of the major qualifications for teaching the language at the secondary level appeared to be a high proficiency in being a colossally unamused harpy whose motivational techniques were limited to frequent and random outbursts of exasperated shrieking and whacking desks with a ruler.

Dictée or Die!

When my daughter was three, she asked me one day why she had to learn French in daycare, because she hated it. When I asked her what the problem was, she said: “I don't know... but when its time for us to do French, that's when the hating starts”.

That pretty much summed up how I'd felt about it in high school, but I'd knuckled down and scored good marks – so I naively thought I’d slip into functional bilingualism fairly quickly.

But as it turned out, the French I learned in school is like a quaint and obscure dialect compared to how Quebecers actually speak. I might have stood a chance in the court of Louis XIV, where daintily articulated stock phrases like “Comment-allez vous?” were actually still in use.

In the real world, I was up against a streamroller onslaught of nonsensical, mushed-together aural slurry speckled with the incomprehensible mush of joual and dotted with bizarre idioms. It sounded like somebody firing off a verbal machine gun of nonsense underwater.

I DID try at first. When someone was speaking to me, I’d train my eyes on their lips and focus on the verbal barrage pinging my brain like a coked-up woodpecker, desperately trying to figure out where one word ended and another began, then trying to parse the meaning of enough of those words that I had half a clue of what they were saying. But after about the tenth syllable, all I could focus on was how I was suddenly awash in an acrid body sweat of confusion and intellectual panic, while crumbling under a sinking sense of inadequacy.

So trying to get my brain to rev at franco-speed was exhausting work with negligible gains. Once I got a job where the lingua franca was English, I happily gave up on my noble aspirations to fluid bilingualism. Primarily because I already had a massive brain-taxing hill to climb in order to teach myself a new profession; and partly because semi-ignorance of the language makes it easy, when in public spaces, to block out dumbass background chatter.

My keener attitude also changed after the Great Sovereignty Referendum Drama of 1995. The separatist camp was allowed to run its mouth off largely unchallenged, with all its unfounded accusations about Quebec languishing under the oppression of the English boot… and how, as an independent nation bouyed by an economy that would magically become stronger without billions of dollars in transfer payments from the feds, the master race would firmly put the non-“pure-laine” into their rightful place as second-class citizens.

Not sure which is more offensive… the guy’s belligerent anti-Anglo hostility, or his 70s porn star ‘stache.

Although the vote to separate from Canada was narrowly defeated, it was enough to prompt a noticeable exodus of Anglos to places where you could fly a flag on Canada day without getting a rock through your window. But me? I thought: For the most part, we all get along fine here. And most francophones aren’t idiots: they realize that linguistic isolationism will only limit them in an increasingly globalized world. I am not going to do what a bunch of bullies with delusions of grandeur want me to do, which is to get scared and leave. Hells no! I’ll stay … and from now on, I will not be ashamed to stand out as an Anglo.

Its not that I don't support the nurturing of Quebecois culture. I may not get their fascination with unicycles, juggling, and all other things circussy....

Dude, seriously. Just get some normal pants and a bicycle.

….the way that they seem to be endlessly amused by goofy faces...

As the founder of Cirque du Soleil, billionaire Guy Laliberte is like unto a demi-god in Quebec. Cleverly combining face-making and circustry, this is the look our hero chose to go with on the momentous occasion of becoming the first Canadian space tourist. Way to represent your province to the global media, Guy! What’s next? Unicycling at the UN in a day-glo unitard?

... nor their fondness for 70s-style rock.

I smell cheese!

And leather pants.

I may tease, but I fully realize that Montreal’s unique charm comes from its people -- I love their big-hearted openness; their child-like ability to just let go and have fun; their comfort with casual physical contact and demonstrations of affection. Its so refreshingly opposite to the reserved Protestant tight-assedness that I was raised in.

Just another balmy Sunday in free-and-easy Montreal. “Sans pantalons, toulmonde !”, shout the happy children.

It only marginally bothers me that the most deranged and heinous toad-aliens in the Parti Quebecois show no shame or regret any time they drop a completely racist crack against the English, Muslims, Jews, or anybody else not born with a fleur-de-lis up their arse. So we have megalomanical idiots in government. No different from most places.

I don’t really give a damn that the St-Jean Baptiste day celebrations are, if you scratch slightly below the surface, a display of exclusionary nationalism. Let the haters have their party. I can just stay away.

The St-Jean Baptiste Society is the skulking ground of some former members of the FLQ terrorist group. How bitter and crazy are these people? Well… in 2009, when Prince Charles was about to visit Canada, the society formally requested that he apologize on behalf of the British Crown for harm caused to French culture in North America, specifically for: Deportation of the Acadians (1755), Deportation/execution of leaders of the 1837 Rebellion; Uniting Upper and Lower Canada in 1840; Executing Louis Riel (1885); Repatriation of the Constitution without Quebec’s permission (1981). ??? I mean, talk about holding a grudge! And, ok, if we’re going to be like THAT, how about Quebec formally apologize to the entire PLANET for the ongoing cultural damage wreaked by Celine Dion?

What makes me as irritated as a mime-school graduate trapped in a shrinking box full of angry bees, is the fact that in a place where overpasses are falling apart, and driving the streets is like shooting a rapids of sinkholes and potholes deep enough to swallow a toddler; and where seriously atrophied schools can’t even cover their photocopy budgets let alone keep the toilets working, Quebec wastes a shitload of money playing sovereigntist games.

In 2006, five people were crushed to wet smithereens when a huge piece of a highway overpass in the suburb of Laval gave way on a Saturday afternoon. An hour before the mayhem, a city inspector was dispatched to the site to pick up pieces of concrete that had fallen off -- apparently, he didn’t take that as a hint that maybe the highway oughta be closed and inspected.

Mind you, its kind of understandable that he wouldn’t think anything was out of the ordinary, since Montreal has a history of crumbling mega-structures and Mob- and/or graft-influenced flouting of construction standards. In 1996, a chunk of the Olympic stadium tower fell onto the playing field during an Expos game, with another exterior slab coming off that fall. In July of 2009, a woman at a café terrace was killed when a concrete slab fell off the Marriott hotel on Peel St, one of the city’s busiest bar/club strips. Especially tragic was the fact she had switched tables, unwittingly moving herself from safety into the target zone.

This fall, the ADQ party reported that the province is spending $57 a year to maintain diplomatic offices in 37 cities in the U.S. , Europe, and Asia where Canada already is represented by the Department of Foreign Affairs. And roughly $20-million a year in tax revenue goes to the exhalted generatrix of intra-linguistic tension, the Big Brotherish Office de la Langue Francaise.

Backed by the muscle of Bill 101 (which lays out the rights and restraints accorded to Anglos in Quebec), the OLF’s mandate is "To align on international French, promote good Canadianisms and fight Anglicisms [...] and carry out a global language policy that would consider notably the importance of socio-economic motivations in making French the priority language in Québec."
Once you get around the (typically) convoluted phrasing, it sounds quite grand and noble, doesn’t it?

In practice, what the OLF mostly seems to do is waste a whole lot of time and money on pointless bullying and intimidation; for example:

- Call centers are one of the few workplaces that offer jobs to unilingual English speakers… primarily out-of province kids trying to pay their way through university. Recently, a caller to The Mirror’s Rant Line reported that Language Police storm troopers had shown up at their call center to tear down all the cheesy motivational slogan posters because they were not in French.

- In January 2008, a reporter from the Journal de Montreal pretended to be a unilingual anglophone while applying for temporary jobs at downtown stores during the pre-Christmas rush. The fact that 15% were willing to hire her without French skills set off hysteria in the English-Go-Home camp over the continuing legacy of grievious indignity suffered by Francophones because they can’t get service in their own language. (Which, of course, is overflowing buckets of crap.) In response, the OLF launched the $1.5 million “Bonjour!” campaign which urged people to speak French to each other.

Inexplicably, it appears the genius "Bonjour !" brain-washing blitz was not enough, because this past march, the “Merci de me servir en français” campaign was pointlessly released on the downtown core.

- If you run a business, even if it’s a one-person on-line operation run out of your home, you can be threatened with legal action if somebody squeals on you for answering the phones in English (or even if you answer in English first, then in French); or for not having a French version of your website; or for not making the French text on your menus bigger than the English text.

In terms of “fighting anglicisms”, here’s an example of the dazzling alchemy employed by the OLF’s linguistic wizards.

When challenged to determine which term to use for “branding”, the sage ones examined the entrails of a spilled dish of poutine and, after rigorous and empassioned debate while wearing their magic hats that funnel the pure essence of la Francophonie into their heads, arrived at the yawningly pedantic “choix de la marque”. That is just sooo French all over: instead of using one snappy, efficient word, replace it with a sluggish multi-word phrase will all the modernity and verve of an old-folks' whist club.

As part of its ruling, the OLF explained why “marketing” is acceptable, but “branding” is not. Apparently, the former can be pronounced with a frenchified twist, but the latter can't. So... “le mar-ke-TING” sounds suitably French; but “le bran-DING”??!??! Nope. Too English.

When faced with that kind of non-logic, you might reasonably wonder what good is served by these tireless crusaders for the Supreme Glorification of the Mighty and Infallible French Language. Perhaps I am too biased with bastardly English arrogance, but it kinda looks like, indeed, we’re wasting money we can’t afford on an organization with Inquisition-like powers that does the bidding of a minority of deranged zealots who get off on anonymously setting up their neighbours for pointless harrassment.

Her Most Lizardly Franco-Highness, Pauline Marois, leader of the Parti Quebecois. For breakfast, she enjoys an energy shake of pureed Anglo babies.

If the OLF want to do something that will actually help French catch on in popularity, I suggest they take a crack at modernizing and simplifying the language so that learning it becomes less like trying to decode the Rosetta stone with a mouth full of marbles.

For instance, the fact that nouns are either masculine or feminine really messes people up, because the gender of a word determines whether it is “le” or “la” ….and, in some cases, whether the noun and its adjectives get an extra “e”, and whether modifiers are pronounced differently and/or take on additional semi-random letters at the end. That is a LOT to figure out on the fly when you’re hopping from foot to foot trying to figure out how to ask where the women’s washroom is. In English, we don’t care if a shoe is a girl and foot is a boy. Both use “the”. So elegantly simple!

There isn’t even any intuitive logic to how noun-genders are assigned: For example, masculinité, virilité and moustache are feminine; whereas the nouns for “breast” and “vagina” are male.

[a pause while your mind reels].

While the inventors of French may have had their pantaloons in a twist about objects needing to be male or female, they didn’t seem to think it might be a good idea to devise unique words for different objects. For example:

Ver = worm;
Verre = glass
Vers = near
Vert = green

…and they are pronounced the same (unless, remember, you’re describing a green female object, in which case, vert becomes verte… and you are required to execute a subtle but complicated facial tic to get the exact nuance of the object’s womanly hue across correctly).

I picture some prehistoric Frenchman sitting in a cave up in Lascaux, pondering the inscrutable gender of his foot, and his potter buddy Jean-Louis Hippylotte-Lachance (mes amis also have a penchant for excessively long multi-hyphenated names) comes over with this amazing earthenware drinking vessel he's invented. He tilts his woolly mammoth beret off his beady simian eyes, sparks a flint so he can light up a Gauloises, and says “Zut alors, Philippe-Honore Donat-des-Iles-de-la-Madeleine, what do you think I should call it, hein*?”

*A charmingly French expression which, in this context, it is roughly equivalent to “eh?”. But it can also mean “WHAT?!?!?”, in which case, its typically pronounced like this:

And between the two of them, the best they can come up with is to take the word for “worm”, add a few silent letters, and call it a day? REALLY? Even if you’re a Neanderthal, how hard is it to throw around a few different sound combinations until you come up with a new word? Evidently the Pict savages across the channel were able to do it.

“UNH!! Feels masculine.... uh. Noooo... feminine?? Ah, fuck it... i'm gonna go live in the monkey camp. If they try to invent language, i'll throw my feces at them until they stop.”

Another example? In French, the following words are all pronounced “pat”:

Pâte (which can mean pastry, dough, batter, or paste)

Pâtes (pasta)

Patte (which can mean paw, foot [but only on an animal!], hand [as in a hand of cards], tab, lug, flap on a bonnet (?), the tongue of a shoe, or … and here comes the crazy… a sideburn).

None of these is to be confused with pâté, which we have all spread on crackers.

And then, from WAY out in left field, comes Shepherd’s Pie, which in another turn of wacky French logic, is called “pâté Chinois”, even though I don’t believe there has ever been a time when ground beef, corn, and mashed potatoes were a staple of Oriental cuisine.

ONE sound can mean a dozen different things? Good system! Hell, while we're at it, why not just use “pat” plus a few silent letters for every new English word that gets invented? So...

Pattage = marketing
Pât = stem cell research
Paaats = sexting
Paaatttt = Adorkable
Paât = Webinar
Mobbe de paât = Flash mob
Pique de pât = Road rage
Gâteaux de pât = Oversharing

...etc

On fait de la pat !

And then there are words dotted with pointless silent letters (why have TWO LLs in brouillard, if you don’t pronounce either of them?); the dilemma of how to pronounce words like aieux that are effectively all vowels; or total tongue-fuck combinations like bouteille d’eau, which I actually get tense about saying, because I know my mouth is just NOT going to cooperate, am I'm going to mangle it horribly.

Fortunately, however, I can capably execute the phrase: “Une pinte de Boréale blanc, s'il t'plaît.”

And don't even get me started on the arcane and convoluted structures of the formal written language. Reading a notice from Hydro-Quebec is like parsing Shakespeare.

While the French can somehow magically discern whether you mean you merely like something or completely adore it when you say “j'aime ça”, paradoxically, they can't make a small mental leap to figure out what you mean if you make a wee mispronunciation. Once, while asking where I could buy a drink, I said “boizzon” instead of the only-very-subtlely different “boisson”. She was at a complete loss until I mimed out an interpretation of crawling through a parched desert while mewling “j’ai soif!”.

Come to think of it, maybe that’s how the French get back at people who can’t be bothered to master their language… they pretend incomprehension so we’ll dance pathetic charades for them, like the Anglo idiots we are.

Vive le quebec !!

The Derelicts

2010-11-11T16:32:00.000-08:00

They sit slumped along busy urban streets, ragged and wanting. People stream by, looking away from their sad decay; they have only pigeons for company.

While the neighbourhoods around them have flourished through a dozen years of revitalisation and yuppie-fueled gentrification, why these poor old souls have been left to slowly fall to bits has long mystified me.

This gracious old gal, hugging the corner of St. Laurent and des Pins at the epicentre of Main bustle, has been largely abandoned since well before I moved here 14 years ago. The falafel joint that used to inhabit the first floor vacated a few years ago. About a month ago, the police had to block off the corner while a crew shored up the outside wall that had shucked a tumble of bricks. She's running out of time, poor thing.

Just IMAGINE the post-dive-bar punked-up trespassing mischief that the spooky top floor must have seen. A veritable rat hotel...
Some of the more humble joints... like the abandoned corner store down the block that apparently hadn't changed since grandpa was a wee mite (wood stove hugging the back wall, painted in that weird old hospital-green colour that you always find about 20 layers down if you strip the window frames of any 100-plus-year-old building; 2 shelves of stock consisting of a few boxes of corn flakes, some batteries, several jars of what may have been bootstrap molasses, maybe even some mustache wax and bottles of tonic for the vapours) are probably owned by an elderly someone who has lost their faculties and are withering away in a home somewhere. Like their owners, these dusty old troopers sit in limbo, wilting echoes of the past, until the grim reaper sets the estate free so it can be stripped of its unique retro-ness and turned into another typically unique organic tea house or some similar fey concern.

In the case of the more elegant shambolics, its probably another case of malicious greed at play. The city has rules to protect heritage properties, which means that renovating these guys to meet city codes can be hugely expensive. So what less-scrupulous property owners are probably doing is letting once-lovely old buildings crumble over time until they can get them condemned, so they can then tear them down and put up a nicely profitable ultra-bland condo building.

There are two of these grand old apartment buildings slowly going to hell next to each other on the swank and highly-desirable stretch of L'Esplanade that looks out across Jeanne-Mance park at the east side of the mountain. A one-bedroom apartment on a less chi-chi block just north is going for $400,000; so condos on these lots would surely reap many millions.

At least one venerable old timer is finally poised for a mega-project make-over, which, for those of us who love a nice bit of rusty brutalism, may or may not be a good thing. Silo No. 5, an incredible hulk on the canal across from the west end of Old Montreal, has come under the ownership of a crown corporation that intends to develop it into some kind of mixed use facility.

Although the agency acknowledges that the building is an iconic symbol of Montreal's industrial heritage (in the days when Canada was known as the “breadbasket of the world”, the silo was used to store grain from the Prairies that was to be shipped out via the St. Lawrence), something tells me that all its rough charm -- the essence of its coolness -- is going to be smoothed over.

Why I can almost smell the rooftop Starbucks now...
But at least it will still be there... hopefully, forever.

My First Date

2010-10-16T14:59:00.000-07:00

Granted, I've historically had a knack for making disastrous relationship choices. But even if I hadn’t been fatally drawn to brooding misanthropes and borderline wing nuts, I think I'm just happier on my own. As a little girl, I was appalled at the idea of tying myself to some man, and through my teens and into adulthood, I was never keen on getting married – even on my wedding day.

This is about what it would take to get me to the altar again.

For sure, the best periods of my life have all coincided with being single. I love being able to do what I want, free from the constant need to consult, negotiate and compromise; with nobody commandeering the tv remote, or randomly whacking me in the face at night while stealing the blankets and crowding me off the bed; nobody draining my energy with the incessant neediness of their ego and libido; no danger of falling into that sinkhole of working so hard to please somebody else that I forget what it's like to please myself.

Still, the default human position is to crave meaningful companionship beyond what a few cats can provide. And even I, the champion of contented solitude, am not immune to the mythical allure of romantic love… even though I know that the fairy tale too often ends with a once-dashing prince gone to indifferent, love-handled seed; and a once-radiant princess transformed by broken dreams and drudgery into a resentful witch.

Before....

...and after

When my last relationship ended, it was the hearty kick up the emotional arse that culminated several exhausting and traumatic years: I’d moved twice within 8 months; I'd fought hard to retrain myself in a highly demanding profession while beating against heaving tides of incredibly malicious co-worker retardation; I'd endured 5 years of vindictive psychological torture from the ex-husband while bleeding out a small fortune in a farcically doomed attempt to get him to at least marginally comply with our custody agreement; and I'd just spent the summer in swooning misery, because the quack at my local clinic kept insisting that my wheezing and feverish delirium were due to exhaustion and an allergic reaction to the filth kicked up by the brickworkers who had banged and shouted outside all my windows for two months.

It wasn't until I'd nearly passed out on the metro after a gang of nuns fluttered on board and settled around me like a flock of grey, benevolent birds coming to roost at the edges of my own personal apocalypse, and I couldn’t quite tell whether I was hallucinating or not, that I crawled to a clinic with for-real doctors and was diagnosed with walking pneumonia. After two courses of antibiotics, I then spent a few weeks violently pissing out my throbbing ass and living in fear that I was going to soil my pants with boiling liquid stink whenever i wasn't within 10 seconds of a bathroom, because none of the geniuses who’d tossed me all those pills had thought to mention that too many antibiotics can turn your bowels into a rollicking shit slide of terror, and I’d need to eat some yogurt to get my gut biotics back in order.

It was just one god-damned thing after another. My misfortune seemed epically cruel and interminable, like a community theatre production of the Vagina Monologues.

Just as I was finally starting to get a grip on my physical health, the boyfriend that I was still smitten with… even though he'd long since devolved from being an adoring tonic into a dragging weight who was sucking the life out of me with his pointless negativity and crippling neuroses (think Eeyore, but without the cute friends)… gave me the finger for Christmas, by cutting off all contact under the pretense of the old “I need time to think” canard. I didn’t matter that I knew I’d be better off without him – I was still shocked and devastated. To be rejected by somebody who was so off the rails that he’d had a panic attack when he tried to go shopping for pants, well… I couldn’t see how I could get any lower.

So there I was, an absolute washed-out wreck. Because I'd devoted all my spare time coddling the socially phobic Sir Mopesalot, I'd lost touch with the few friends still standing after the acrid debris of my imploded marriage cleared. I didn’t dare try to reconnect with them now… I was so filled with hurt and bitterness that I literally could not say anything nice about anything. I felt that if the tight lid of my anguish was uncorked by the kindness of a friend, it was likely I’d drown them in a blasting spew of emotional gore so livid it would make Dario Argento blanch, and scare them off forever. I needed time to let the evil dissipate.

I spent the winter staring dolefully out cafe windows, too depleted to scratch out self-indulgent blank verse in a wee moleskin notebook. Maudlin narratives about brave and loyal pets or random acts of human kindness made me weep like an open sore. Dumb country music hurtin’ songs were suddenly profound and meaningful. When I saw happy couples canoodling in public, I had to fight back the urge to attack them with my misery stick. Potato chips became a primary food group.

Classic, full-blown emotional meltdown? You betcha!

By the time the dirty end of winter rolled around, it seemed imperative that I reintegrate with the living or I’d fall off the edge of less than functionally sane

And of course, when you've been left feeling like you're dragging your bloodied heart around behind you on a ragged little string, the impulse is to fill that aching hole with somebody new.

Sitting in my local café, I’d scope out the male landscape, dreamily mooning over the shaggy haired intellectual types that have always been my weakness. Oh yes… there’s a lovely specimen, all furrow-browed over his dog-eared copy of Infinite Jest; his lean frame poured into some standard-issue beplaided hipster rumplement; looking so soulfully in need of a good woman to feed him, nurture his sensitive artistic soul through the dark valleys of existential torment, and subsidize his student loans… no, wait … GET A GRIP! You’re a middle-aged woman, so stop looking at delicious dead-end boys. You know they're poison anyway.

And I could probably forget about that chiseled-jawed late-30-something. Even if he wasn't also too young for me, he’s likely already got somebody at home slow-cooking something organic in the tagine while mulling between “Sadie” or “Talullah” as names for their first-born.

Realistically, my prospects were more like…oh Lord… that paunchy guy with the scraggly greying hair willowing off in all directions from his receding hairline; sallow, drooping skin and eye bags; ear hair; and a stretch of brown sock revealed by his too-short pants, squinting through crooked reading glasses at a David Suzuki biography.

Had it REALLY come to this?

The ideal...

...the reality

NO!!!!! Please, please, merciful baby Jesus, there had to be some eligible males in my age bracket with more charisma and style than a crumpled swatch of flannel. I needed to broaden the search…adopt a new methodology for the hunt…because wandering around scowling and looking bereft didn’t appear to be working.

With the advent of the spring mating season, ads for LavaLife blossomed all over the metro. I’d always considered on-line dating as something that only the pathetic and desperate would do. I mean, what kind of loser has a life so devoid of friends and social options that they have to use the Internet to get a life? … oh. Right. That would be me.

I still felt too bruised to fall in love or to jump into in some kind of more casual coupling; and I highly doubted that I’d find anybody I’d click with on a site that was pitched at loopy girly singletons who liked to giggle on the phone with studly jocks.
But I’d never actually gone on a date, and was just plain curious about the whole concept. Plus, it seemed a reasonable way to pry open some new social doors; or at the very least, get me out of the house of an otherwise bleak Saturday night and give me some good stories to tell. Given that I’d be dealing with innocent strangers, I’d be forced to leave the pathetic, broken me at home and at least ACT interesting and engaging.

I worried about putting myself up for scrutiny on the Internet … the nature of the medium is that you are primarily judged on how you look, and I’ve got my insecurities like anybody else. But then I figured: every new interaction in real life involves a mutual flurry of snap superficial judgements. So what the hell. Its not like I had much dignity left anyway.

I put together what I hoped was a deft summary of my wit, intelligence and non-conventional charms, added a few pictures that honestly alluded to, yet minimized the ravages of time, and made my cyberdating debut.

The initial flurry of messages in my inbox might have been heartening, had they not all fallen into one of these templates:

1) “Hello beutiful lady. I am hard body, and reddy to give you to hot love.”

[Late 30s/early 40s. Picture shows swarthy guido in a muscle shirt leaning on a black car. Two-sentence profile riddled with typos, random capitals, and animated emoticons of dancing pickles holding beer bottles; interests include working out and beef].

2) “Hello. I am an easy going and down to earth guy. I am looking for a warm-hearted lady to fill my life with happiness and cuddles. We seem to have a lot in common. Please check out my profile and contact me if you agree.”

[Anywhere from early 40s to late 60s. Picture shows pudgy, frumpy white man in pleated tan pants, in the bleakest of suburban rooms, caught in the blank-faced action of doing absolutely nothing of even marginal interest. Profile says that they are easy going and down to earth; are looking for a warm-hearted lady to fill their lives with happiness and cuddles; like classic rock and light jazz, and oatmeal].

3) “Hi. U R hot!!!! U like yung men? Txt me @ cougareater[Skinny, shirtless 20-yr-old boy affecting an expression of smouldering intensity in spite of the fact that he’s probably nervous about his mom, who’d be my age, walking in and catching him posing like a porn star in front of his webcam.

[Profile reads: “WOOO!!! Let’s party! Srsly! LOL”]

Ok so…it was my worst fears realized. And then some.

Browsing through random profiles of guys in my age bracket didn’t do much to bolster my optimism. If they weren’t overtly anti-attractive or creepy, they were either super outdoorsy jock-A-types (pictures of them kayaking, rock-climbing, hiking up Maccu Picchu, wallowing in a pile of gortex and generally looking insufferably hearty and keen); too drippingly new agey (soft-focus close-up of them staring soulfully into the distance by candlelight; doing a yoga pose on a lakeshore at sunset), or just too… err… normal (In theory, there’s nothing wrong with guys who work in sales, drive SUVs, live in the suburbs, own cycling outfits, and think it would be cool to see Daughtry play warm-up on the Eagles reunion tour. But given that my lifestyle is the antithesis of that, getting through a half-hour coffee date with somebody like that would be an awkward and pointless slog for both of us).

Say, what's that smell? Steamy spandex and a hint of overachieverism?

After several months of nothing but lewd and misspelled propositions from baboons, I finally received a message from a guy who had actually bothered to write me a fairly lengthy and articulate introduction. I checked out his profile. My age (no need to fret over my “bitch lines” and other facial creases); college teacher (educated! employed!); in good shape (not a schlumpy potato!); 2 grown kids (Capable of stability and responsibility!); could pass for ok looking (if I took my glasses off); pictured in a canoe (Owns car/can be leveraged for dearly missed escapes to the country?!?!?).

Bright red alarm flags did start snapping in the wind when I saw that he called himself “BladeDancer” (*cough*) because he enjoyed getting out on his in-line skates and moving to music on his ipod (oh...boy....). But in keeping with my resolve to loosen up and be more open to sampling outside my usual disastrous hip-altster demographic, I thought: Hey… maybe its not as painfully dinkish as it sounds. And if I’m going to be a completely resistent tight-ass with impossible standards, I might as well give up.

We began a correspondance. He seemed intelligent, thoughtful, mature, decent and kind. He could spell and punctuate. He was patient and sympathetic. Seemed I could… and had… done much worse.
Finally, he proposed that we meet. I wasn’t sure that we had much in common; he persuaded me by saying that eventually, I’d have to start taking a chance or two. Going against all my instincts, I told him to call me at work the next afternoon with a time and place. Then immediately regretted it.

I barely slept. All the next day, I fretted about whether I should back out. My workmates said: “No, no! You should go! What have you got to lose?” They convinced me that my increasing sense of dread was just schoolgirlish nerves.

He sounded human when he called. Told me to meet him at café that had nice food and “a good vibe” (T-W-I-N-G! Mini flag!). Said he’d be coming from a tennis game and would be wearing shorts, sandals, and a CBC baseball cap.

Oh mama. There it is, right there. CBC hat?? So the sandals would be Birkenstocks, right? God help me, I was indeed headed into a shit-storm of dinkditude. But it was too late to back out now.

I arrived a bit early. The venue held bad portends: It had a hippie-folkish name and ambiance and was populated with anglo university students with that annoyingly chipper self-importance about them while they plucked away at laptops. Sufjian Stevens snivelled in the background. The walls were hung with aggressively lame art that looked like it had been painted by one of those insipid trust fund chicks who won’t accept that she has zero talent and who pretentiously adores gits like Sufjian Stevens; but who will one day abandon her faux-boho pretentions, marry a lawyer, and spend her time on school committees and charity drives. (T-W-I-N-G! Flag!).

Aside from having a confusingly uninterpretable first name, Mr. Stevens plays the banjo and likes to wear wings.

I rest my case.

It was a smouldering hot day, and I had a pounding sleep-deprivation headache, so I ordered a nice cool beer to help smooth the edges.

Just when I figured the legendary Mr. Blade Dancer had stood me up and I could run away, he shows up, 25 minutes late. He says “Oh. You’re drinking a BEER,” with more than a hint of disapproval. (Flag!)

I cop a look down and indeed, he’s wearing the dreaded Birkenstocks…. (Flaaag!)

….With socks. (Wildly flapping red flag, and screeching alarm sirens!!)

That’s a dealbreaker within a dealbreaker, wrapped in hopelessness.

Is it a chilly hobbit? No, its MY DATE!!

It didn’t get better. We were able to fill the time with talk, but it felt more like an intense interview than a conversation. After a bit, I figured out why I felt so rattled: here I was, the nervous quipster, dealing with one of these freaky people who have no discernable sense of humour. He did not smile once, and seemed perplexed and vaguely annoyed when I said something intended to be amusing. I’ve felt more warmth and geniality from snakes.

When his food arrived, he poked around examining everything, like he didn’t trust it. Then he opened his ham sandwich and shook an obscene amount of salt into it, muttering that he “probably” ate too much salt on everything. PROBABLY?? How can ham not be salty enough? You want a salt lick with a soy sauce chaser on the side with that?

(A whole flagpole of waving flags on fire!)

I felt like I’d gotten off the bus in a grim and joyless freakytown. I had not felt such twitching and appalled discomfort since the time I saw my ex in-laws running around in their underwear; maman with her massively quivering blue-marbled cottage cheese thighs, and dear ol’ daddyo with his undershirt tucked smartly into his Y-fronts, which were pulled up to near self-wedgie heights.

I couldn’t believe I’d wasted two seconds worrying about what to wear, or what kind of impression I’d make, when I was now pinned under the withering Gorgonlike gaze of a guy who seemed to have all kinds of hang ups about nothing, and who couldn’t be bothered to put on a decent pair of shoes for a first date. Or show up on time. It might have helped if I could just keep drinking, but didn’t dare order another beer, in case it prompted Mr. Buzzkill to loudly denounce me as a depraved harlot while throwing salt in my eyes.

All my gut feelings about the vaguely disturbing odours underlying everything he’d written in his profile and emails had been spot on. “Into the bliss of dancing on skates” my ass – this guy was skating the fine edge of whacko.

Finally, to our mutual relief, it was over.

I actually shuddered as I turned to head off to the metro.

In spite of everything, I felt that the civil thing to do would be to send this guy, who had put so much effort into convincing a stranger to take a small step outside their anti-social shell, a little follow-up note that just said: “Thanks. Nice to meet you." Just because we'd mutually appalled each other, there was no reason to not be polite.

And you know what? Son of a bitch didn’t respond. Shunned me like I was a turd that he’d accidentally picked up.

So even though the date was a complete dud, from this and other experiences, I have developed a few rules to enable me to more adeptly play the dating game:

1) For the most part, the axiom “if a guy past 35 is still single, there’s a good reason why” holds true.

2) If it doesn’t smell right up front, walk away. Fast.

3 ) More so than in real life, virtual suitors will turn on the charm as long as there’s a slim chance that it’ll set them on the path to Shagtown. Once they realize its not going to happen, they drop the act and let the jerk back out. Shameless liars abound. Believe nothing until you see it. And even then, BEWARE!!! 4) I can embrace the uncommon liberty that on-line anonymity offers with no guilt. Although its not worth responding to pigs, its still kind of fun to know that I can be as blunt and brutally honest as any given situation warrants.

5) You seriously CAN’T …and shouldn’t… trust anybody who wears Birkenstocks.

Also out: 48-yr-olds who wear leather pants.

---P.S.

This was perhaps the most depressing suggested match sent to me by any dating site. According to their super-advanced matchmatching algorithm of love, we were a near-perfect match, at 98% compatible.

So apparently, this is my soul mate.

Insomnia

2010-09-22T14:15:00.000-07:00

10:15 pm

What the hell? All day long, my eyes feel like they’re filled with sand I’m so tired, and now that I’m finally in bed, what happens? I feel w-i-d-e awake.

You’re exhausted… put the sleep mask on and just relax.

No big deal.

10:35 pm

Ok. Feck. I’m as jumpy as a landed fish.

Might as well read a bit. Try to calm down.

11:15 pm

Well, a good measure of vodka with some soda oughta knock me out.

11:25 pm

Lightsh out, sleep mashk on, ear plugsh in.

Let’sh go.

11:48 pm

Fuck. This is ridiculous. I feel like I’ve just had a double espresso. I NEED TO SLEEP!

Stupid school schedule, with this get-up-at 6am crap. Why the hell does ANYTHING have to start at 8:15, let alone junior high. 9 am? ok. That’s just standard. Anything earlier is just malicious sadism. Why the hell do morning people get to set the rules for the rest of us? Why don’t THEY just get used to starting later, so that the rest of us don’t have to stumble around all sleep-deprived all the time? Its tyranny!

Seriously. Maybe I should bring this up in the next PTA meeting. Maybe I’m not the only parent who has a problem with this. Cause there’s kids coming all the way from the south shore no less… what time do THEY have to get up to get to school on time? 4am??? I could cite those studies that show that teenaged brains are naturally programmed for a later sleep cycle, and lack of sleep will ruin their brains. Go for the parental paranoia angle. Turn this bus around.

Ok, no, like what? I’m going to be that crazy person who starts some fanatical campaign to convince everybody else that there's a far more glaringly sane way to do things? Yep… that strategy panned out SOOOOO well at work. I think I’ve still got a few knives stuck in my back. If there's one thing i should know by now, its that people would rather stick with something that’s super stupid than contemplate change.

Yep, just what I need… start on another pointless crusade that’ll just piss people off and stress me out.

Just go to sleep.

Jesus.

11:52 pm

Was that the cat?

Ok. No. its fine.

11:56 pm

I think I have to pee. No, I’m just being jumpy. Relax.

11:58 pm

Ok, that’s it. Just get it over with and go pee, and then go to sleep.

12:05 am

I wonder if I could ever adopt a kid? Like, I’m not even comfortable having somebody I don’t know really really well over for a few hours, so how could you just take in this strange little person that you don’t even know … I mean, what if it turns out you don’t really LIKE each other? You can't really send the kid back...

Christ. This is SOOO pointless. Like I’m going to adopt a kid.

I won’t even get a DOG. And I LOVE dogs!

12:13 am

Got. To. Shut. Down. My. Mind.

Try the breathing thing. Even though that never works.

Like those yoga types who tell me I should meditate so I can relax? Yeah, well, the PROBLEM is, if it was even remotely possible for me to shut off my mind long enough to approach a meditative state, I would ALREADY be relaxed enough that i wouldn't need to meditate.

Classic Catch-22 situation.

Idiots. They just have no idea what I’m dealing with.

(breathe in)…. (breathe out)….

(breathe in)…. (breathe out)….

I need to remember to get those god-damned forms in to taxation.

Shit.

(breathe in)…. (breathe out)….

(breathe in)…. (breathe out)….

So I wonder what’s up with Francis. I haven’t heard from him in AGES…

12:14 am

Alright. More booze.
3:25 am

Oh SHUT THE FUCK UP out there!

Christ. I’m sooo thirsty, thanks to the vodka. Ignore it. Water’s right there, but too tired to move…

3:27 am

(Glug glug glug)

Well, great, now I’m awake.

I’m going to be a godamned wreck tomorrow. Maybe I should take half a sleeping pill…

No, cause.... a) either it won’t work, and I’ll feel chemically whacked out on top of being exhausted; b) it’ll work, but it’ll make getting up even harder and I’ll be chemically whacked out on top of being exhausted.

3:45 am

“Baby you’ll be famous, chase me down until you LOVE me, PAPPA-PAPPARAZZI!”

FUCK. What IS it with earworms? Its bad enough to have some line from a pop song on unstoppable repeat in your head… but why does it always have to be Celine Dion or that Gnarls Barlekey Crazy song, or something equally heinous that drives me nuts to start with? And ok, great that you neurologists or whatever have identified the phenomenon… but could you maybe toss around a few suggestions about how to MAKE IT STOP?

“Baby you’ll be famous, chase me down until you LOVE me, PAPPA-PAPPARAZZI!”

Just block it out.

“Baby you’ll be famous….”

BLOCK IT OUT!!!

Jesus. I’m going to be sooo tired tomorrow. Again. Fuck.

“Baby you’ll be famous, chase me down until you LOVE me, PAPPA-PAPPARAZZI!”

AAAAAAGGHGHGHGHH!

4:10 am

CAT, GET OFF!

I was just falling asleep!

GODAMN IT!!

4:45 am

“Baby you’ll be famous, chase me down until you LOVE me, PAPPA-PAPPARAZZI!”

“Baby you’ll be famous, chase me down until you LOVE me, PAPPA-PAPPARAZZI!”

“Baby you’ll be famous, chase me down until you LOVE me, PAPPA-PAPPARAZZI!”

“Baby you’ll be famous, chase me down until you LOVE me, PAPPA-PAPPARAZZI!”

5:15 am

“Baby you’ll be famous, chase me down until you LOVE me, PAPPA-PAPPARAZZI!”

5:21 am

...squirrels...

5:36 am

...dentist?...

5:47 am

Think i'm finally sinking ...

6:00 am

(BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP!!)

Wha???

Was I asleep? I don’t think so. I think I was just skimming over the top of sleep, maybe just almost dipping in, but not.

FUCK.

“Baby you’ll be famous, chase me down until you LOVE me, PAPPA-PAPPARAZZI!”

This day is going to hurt.

….

10:00 pm

What the hell? I turn out the lights, and suddenly I feel wide awake!

Fuck.

Goodbye sleaze...hello snooze

2010-09-18T16:17:00.000-07:00

The lower Main, centered around the intersection of St. Laurent and Ste Catherine streets, has a gloriously hedonistic history as the heart of Canada’s Sin City.

Its sleazy roots slither back to the 1700s-early 1800s, when there was a wall around the city, which comprised what is now Old Montreal. St Laurent Boulevard led to the main city gate (which is how the street got its nickname of "The Main"), and the strip heading north from the port became the natural breeding ground for bars, brothels and opium dens.

Montreal’s continuing reputation as a playground for Americans looking for a booze-drenched, sexy good time was cemented during Prohibition in the 1920s-mid 30s. Sailors would stroll up from the port to the lower Main to… well, drink and swear like sailors… and treat themselves to the hookers who, at $2 a go, were twice as pricey as the harbour girls… and presumably worth it.

Ye Olde Partytown!

Through the 30s and 40s, Montreal was one of the continent’s fastest growing cities. With its easy access by ship, its European flavour, and its reputation as being bountiful with forbidden fruit, it attracted naughty epicures from around the world and across Canada.

During the day, the lower Main was the domain of textile workers. But when the factories closed and the sun set, it would transform into a neon-lit realm of longshoremen, bookies, sex tourists, pickpockets, drag queens and the artsy demimonde. There were all-night vaudeville cabarets and seedy repertory theatres where the dark and isolated balconies, rather than the movies, were the main attraction. There were strippers and live sex shows that featured women going at each other with dildos. There were brawls and knifings and drunks passing out in the streets.

The 40s and 50s were the glory days of the jazz and burlesque scene, with clubs featuring big name acts like Eartha Kitt and Louis Armstrong. Legendary striptease artist Lily St Cyr, whose shows ran the creative gamut from frolicking in bubble baths to pretending to make love to parrots, loved performing here. Her fame and popularity provoked an outcry from the morality squad, led by the Catholic clergy, which declared that when she performed “the theater is made to stink with the foul odor of sexual frenzy” (oh… so, like a dance club at 3am?) and led to her arrest for indecency (she was acquitted).

Lily St. Cyr rose to international fame as the star of Montreal's Gaiety burlesque club. She is reputed to be the role model for Marilyn Monroe's breathy sex goddess persona.

Cab Calloway steaming up the Chez Maurice.

The city would occasionally attempt to rein in the ‘hood’s licentiousness to appease the city’s moralizing prudes, but there was a covert understanding that the libertine playground added something special and valuable to the city’s character. In 1944, the mayor shut down dozens of brothels in reaction to an epidemic of STIs in nearby military bases. Tourism plummeted, proving the economic value of vice. The party resumed.

The strip in the 50s

The 1960s begat the Quiet Revolution and the birth of the Separatist movement. The echos of the post-war boom peaked with Expo ’67; by the early 1970s, Canada was in an economic slump partially triggered by an oil crisis. With shipping trade dropping off, and with the violence of the October Crisis prompting the exodus of Anglos and big business out of the province, Montreal lost its place as one of Canada’s most successful cities, and began to slide into disrepair.

As the years clicked by, the lower Main lost what glamour it had enjoyed as the epicentre of the city’s nightlife and diversity, becoming dominated by barflys, pimps and hookers, drug dealers and addicts, biker gangs and thugs. The bohemians moved north up the hill above Sherbrooke; the university drinkers moved west to Crescent Street; and the non-straight crowd moved east to establish the Gay Village.

As the 2000s rolled in, the area fell into the sights of those riding the uptick in urban redevelopment that had wiped out the legendary “3 bedrooms on the Plateau for $150/month, heated, with a free dime bag of pot from the neighbours downstairs as a signing bonus” apartment bargoons, and saw cookie-cutter 1-bedroom condos for 200-grand popping up like some kind of obscene human-hamster alien mushroom livingpods.

As the revamp of the Quartiers des Spectacles around the Place des Arts kicked in, the impulse to extend the blandifying makeover to the lower Main intensified.

In January 2008, the city announced that Angus, a non-profit development corporation, would start demolition on a mega-million revitalisation project that would include a 12-storey office building for architects, video production and design companies; fair-trade shops with organic, local produce; and independent cafes, bars and bookstores.

While the idea of an “eco-friendly showcase of art and socially response retail” sounds hippietastic, there are those who aren’t buying the suspiciously utopian vision. Dinu Bumbaru, Policy Director of Heritage Montreal, summed it up with: "St. Laurent is one of the most significant heritage streets in the city. It's a sinful place, but it's a soulful place too. We run a risk of sanitizing it."

Former home of the Montreal Pool Room, which opened in 1912. By the 80s, the pool tables were gone, but the place was still renowned for its for its cheap steamies, fries, and draught. This spring, as the building began to seriously fall apart, the business moved across the street. Without the cachet of its historically shambolic atmosphere, which featured stone floors worn down by a 100 years of tipsy traffic, the new place has the same bland atmosphere as the Lafleur's fast-food chain a half block away.

Johnny Zouboulakis, owner of the Cleopatra strip club, is a stubborn holdout, refusing to sell, and fighting expropriation. With a 2nd-storey cabaret featuring transvestite and fetish shows, and as the only venue that hires dancers of any age, shape and size, his club is the last vestige of the spirit of inclusiveness and diversity that made the area special. "What I love about the Main is there was always room for everybody, any political affiliation, any religious affiliation. It didn't matter, as long as they had good intentions," he has said. "But now there is no room for Cleopatra."

Oui! Nous avons des strip teaseuses!

Although the city is busily ripping up the intersection of St. Laurent and Ste. Catherine, the redevelopment scheme as been temporarily shelved, probably due to the latest economic downturn, and because of lobbying by those who resist the idea of gentrifying the strip's character into oblivion.

As the shuttered buildings wait in limbo, the artistic underground has stepped up to celebrate a legacy of boisterous anarchy by turning it into a gallery of street art.

Established venues like Club Soda, the Metropolis, and Foufounes Electriques guarantee that the area will remain a night life hub, but its pretty much a given that all traces of the strip's rough and edgy past will be smoothed over and homogenized.

That's progress... I guess.

Since its birth as an indoor skating rink in 1884, the building that houses the Metropolis was a theatre, a porn cinema, and a discotheque, before being converted into a live music venue in 1997. With a capacity of 2,300, its big enough to have showcased on-their-way-up-to-stadium-status acts Beck, the White Stripes, and even (gulp) Coldplay… and small enough to provide fairly intimate access to popular less-than-mainstream bands like Arctic Monkeys, and Nick Cave + the Bad Seeds.

Founded by a trio of artists in 1983, The Foufounes Electriques – or “electric buttocks” – got its name from its owners’ fondness for exhibiting their painted arses in old tv sets.

Starting out more as an artist’s hangout than an official bar, this sprawling multi-level club established itself as a centre for underground music and arts with its infamous for its “peinture en direct” events (where local and international artists would create paintings on canvas, on people, or on the walls), DIY fashion shows, barbecues and sideshows. Musical acts have ranged from punk, to reggae, to industrial, to hip-hop, with past shows including Nirvana, Mudhoney, William S. Burroughs and Marianne Faithfull.

The Fouf hosts the Under Pressure Graffiti Convention every August; the evidence can be seen in the streets and alleys around the club.

Would I like some extra pain with that baby? no thanks

2010-09-06T14:05:00.000-07:00

“It's one of the most charged decisions a woman faces in childbirth: Whether to have a pain-relieving epidural or to try to hold off and have a drug-free birth. Many proponents of natural childbirth paint the epidural option as a choice with many negative consequences, including slowing down labour and separating a woman from the experience.

But a new study out of Australia has found that an epidural may play a positive role in women's health long after the baby is delivered by reducing damage to the pelvic floor muscles [which can cause] future health problems including collapse of the pelvic organs and incontinence.”

– From “Epidural May Aid a Woman's Long-term Health”, Globe and Mail, September 2, 2010

A few weeks before my daughter was due, my obstetrician told me, that since I was facing a potentially problematic breached birth, I needed to choose whether to try deliver the natural way, or go for a planned C-section.

It took me about a nanosecond to decide. I was HUGELY relieved that I'd been dealt a free pass to completely avoid the terrifying and sordid prospects of labour and giving birth.

It wasn't really the pain that worried me. Like somebody caught in the path of a tornado, what I dreaded was being at the mercy of violent and unknown forces of nature. Pregnancy was bad enough – aside from the grinding non-stop nausea and myriad other torments, it was highly disturbing to feel my body gradually turn into an increasingly alien and mutant thing. And feeling some largely abstract and intangible being wiggling and kicking inside me didn't send me off into soft-focus dreaminess about the wonder of being a vessel for life – it was just plain weird and a bit creepy and made me think of pelicans swallowing life,wriggling fish whole. In terms of what I'd been used to from the shell of flesh I'd inhabited for 37 years, it all seemed the opposite of normal and good.

So you can imagine how little enthusiasm I had for the prospect of my body suddenly deciding to go completely berserk and turn itself inside out to expel a large object out my nether regions, rending apart whatever stood in its way. I mean, if childbirth didn't exist... if it was something you saw in a David Cronenberg film... you'd be (appropriately) horrified, wouldn't you?

While I respect the guts and determination of women who opt for natural childbirth, it seems peculiar to WANT to take on excruciating pain when you really don't need to.

After surgically extracting my baby, my obstetrician told me that from the looks of my plumbing, it wouldn't have had the muscle power to push a baby out; after several hours of futile labour, she'd have had to perform a C-section anyway. It struck me that if I wasn't living in the time and place that I do, there's a good chance that I would have died in agonized childbirth, taking my baby with me. It made me feel acutely privileged to have access to the best that modern science and technology has to offer, because you know what? Its a very good thing.

So I don't get why some women so adamantly reject medical aid to help them through a grueling, physically traumatic ordeal because its “unnatural”. So what? Before the advent of modern medicine, it was natural for people to die of fairly mundane things before they hit late-middle age. Any of you ladies think we oughta get back to that state of affairs? [Dead at 42 from the ague, anyone? Three children lost to consumption before their 10th birthdays? Bubonic plague, anyone? No??? A nice round of all-natural leeches to help get rid of that fever? No? You'd rather take a few Tylenol? WHAT???] I mean, just imagine if you went to the dentist and insisted: “No anesthetic for me! I don't want to be separated from the experience of having a root canal”. People would justifiably think you were nuts.

"Err... honey? You SURE you don't want me to call 9-1-1?"

"Just keep taking pictures dammit... I can't wait to splash these intimate memories all over the Internet."

And if the goal is being all-natural, how did giving birth in a bath make it onto the earth-mother-approved list? For a land-based mammal, that's about as unnatural as it gets...Your cat is having kittens, she doesn't stand mewling by the sink waiting for you to run her a warm bath and put on some zamphir music so she can get on with her business. And I tell you, that's gonna be one helluva nasty bathtub ring that I, for one, would not want to have to scrub out.

It seems to me that carrying a baby inside you for the better part of a year, then devoting the rest of your life to loving and nurturing that child, is heroic in itself. A woman shouldn't be pressured to earn extra credentials by foregoing a little help to make birth easier. Bringing a baby into the world is a profound rite of passage that affects everyone involved, even when it happens on an operating table.

With all the doubts and anxieties you feel as a first-time mom, you really don't need the condemnation of self-righteous zealots who imply that you are in some way selfish or less worthy as a mother if you choose safe and efficient technology over the grunting, unpredictable whims of biology; or if you switch to formula so you can regain some semblance of your own life without being virtually chained to your baby and/or having to submit to the searing agony of producing milk through cracked and bleeding nipples every few hours; or if you're bold enough to declare that being on 24-hr duty under the command of a mercilessly demanding vomit/poop/crying machine who does its best to ensure that you can't get 5 minutes of peace to have a crap when you need to, is about the most tedious and unfulfilling work ever; or if you decide to have one small glass of wine with Christmas dinner because you're heading into your 9th month and if you weren't so incapacitated by your own heaving, bloated mass, you might well give in to your desires and go entirely apeshit on whatever and whoever is handy because you're so incredibly uncomfortable all the time, and goddamn it, if anyone deserves just a wee morsel of fleeting pleasure and relief at this juncture, its you.

So I say a hearty to hell with this romanticized nonsense of how a woman isn't really complete if she hasn't experienced the miracle of natural childbirth. If you look at the process from a detached perspective, it comes across about as appealing as experiencing the miracle of repeatedly throwing up so violently that it shoots out your eyes with red-hot pain.

I don't feel that I missed a thing, besides hours and hours of extreme and stressful discomfort. Having my child liberated with a scalpel instead of being slowly squeezed out to a muffled soundtrack of me screaming with the anguish of my effort, in no way diminished the magic and joy of seeing her face for the first time.

Any you know, if I want to marvel at the birth process, I'll go to a farm at calving time. Seeing a minutes-old calf standing up, able to nourish itself without spewing most of it back up, and pretty much ready to function as a viable life form without a year's worth of slobbering down its face and crapping into a diaper...now THAT's a miracle.

Spooky funky Griffintown

2010-07-24T13:41:00.000-07:00

Griffintown is like the broken down old poet of Montreal neighbourhoods. He squats in stubborn, shabby defiance between the old-world elegance of Old Montreal and the yuppie sleekness of the mega-condo developments clustered along the Lachine canal around the Atwater market, vaguely wondering what happened to his life: once so full of purpose and vitality, it now lies in tatters, its future dissolute.

Settled in the mid-1820s by Irish Catholic labourers who built the Lachine Canal, the area quickly grew into a densely populated neighbourhood of working class immigrants crammed into cheaply made housing... Ok... Let's just call it a slum, because it was.

Griffintown's past is loaded with drama. Through last half of the 1800s, it hosted one of the first labour strikes in Canada; a major breakout of typhoid; two major fires (the latter of which destroyed half the housing); one massive flooding; widespread rioting after the election of Thomas D'Arcy McGee as the area's MP; and the infamous beheading of prosititute Mary Gallagher by a drunken rival (Mary's ghost is rumoured to reappear every seven years to look for her head -- but why every seven years? Do ghosts even have a concept of time?). And that was when the area was at the height of its glory.

The big flood of 1886

In the 1950s when the St. Lawrence Seaway opened, business started draining away from the canal area, and people started moving out en masse on the tide of the post-war economic boom. By the early 60s, the region was so depopulated that the city rezoned the area as light industrial, which prompted landlords to demolish housing to put up squat, non-descript buildings now given over to auto-body joints, long-term storage, and other grimy commercial usage.

In the 1970s, most of the remaining housing was bulldozed under to make room for the construction of the Bonaventure elevated expressway, which further degraded the neighbourhood by slicing it in half.

Griffintown is roughly defined as running west to east from Guy to McGill; and from Notre-Dame to the Lachine Canal.

Its a weird neighbourhood, in that it is almost devoid of the normal trappings of everyday life. There are no cafes, or depanneurs, and very few places to actually live. And the fading traces of its bustling industrial past give it a ghostly feeling, even on a bright, sunny afternoon.

These train tracks from nowhere terminate inside warehouse yards; so they probably once we used to haul materials to and from the Lachine canal.

But amongst the scruffiness, you can find pockets of odd and distinct beauty. This is where you'll find vacant lots that look like country meadows.

Cruising along Basin near St. Martin, its not too surprising to see somebody walking a big, black horse down the street, because this is where the caleche horses are stabled.

The stables are tragically shabby, but the horses have the alert eyes and shiny coats of happy, healthy animals.

Although gentrification is encroaching, Griffintown is refuge to a few good old rundown industrial loft spaces...

...which of course, are the preferred habitat for artists; their spoor is everywhere.

The nexus of artsiness is the Darling Foundry on Ottawa St, just east of the Bonaventure expressway. Originally Montreal's second-biggest producer of metal parts for industrial equipment, the foundry eventually became a victim of Griffintown's industrial decline. After finally closing its doors in 1991, the massive complex sat empty for ten years until it was turned into an arts center, with exhibition spaces, studios for international artists in residency, and other groovy artly events.

The interior retains the taste of the foundry's gritty roots; one of the old ovens used to melt metal lurks in an alcove off the main gallery.

The artwork continues outside into the courtyard at the foundry's entrance. In this installation, the car just sits there, the do-up-your-seatbelt beep going off forlornly.

The foundry's influence bleeds a bit westward along Ottawa, with visual pieces tucked into unexpected places, and a sound installation at the corner of Dalhouse.

One of a series of prints installed in the underpass leading to the Darling Foundry.

Just GUESS what was on the other side of the sign... that's right! Nothing!

Of course, given that Griffintown is so close to downtown, and Old Montreal, and the moderating influnces of the increasingly bourgeois neighborhood of Little Burgundy, its just a matter of time before it gives way to the inexorable march of condofication.

In the meantime, though, it remains a bizarre little netherworld where the normal rules don't seem to apply, populated by the outlaw class... the old, the odd, and the rebellious.

"The trouble with neighbours ...

2010-07-20T16:20:00.000-07:00

...is that they live next door."

My apartment may be slowly crumbling into the ground and is as cozy as a meat locker in the winter, but it has two major redeeming qualities -- its crazy cheap; and in nice weather, I can open my back door onto the courtyard for a refreshing breeze, or slip around the back to lounge in my wee scraggilty garden and enjoy refuge from the urban clamour outside my front door.

Well… in theory, anyway.

I’ve rarely been able to do either of those things since the Noiseys moved in across the courtyard three summers ago…or has this hell been nigh onto eternal? Its hard to tell through the veil of simmering pique that clouds my mind.

When I moved in, I had the best neighbours ever: two young arabic guys who were as quiet, shy and elusive as wild foxes. I only saw them twice; I don’t think they ever opened their back door, let alone ventured outside into our common space. This was around that time of heightened paranoia about what such conspicuously inconspicuous young middle-eastern men might be doing in the shifty, dark hours of the night, but they could have been running a meth lab and smuggling guns and adolescent slave boys to the mountain dens of Bin Laden for all I cared, as long as they stayed mercifully out of my face.

When they left, the building was bought by a flipper who gutted and renovated the place inside and out, which meant an entire summer of scaffolding, copious dust everywhere, wildly sweating, pot-bellied workmen shouting in broad joual outside all my windows, and a cacophony of banging and pounding through the walls, from 7am until just before I lost my mind, 6 days a week. It was heinous, but since I knew that it WOULD end, I was able to just barely hang on to the wobbling, frayed edges of my sanity.

Once the dust had cleared, Didier from France took possesion of the ground floor. He was all that you’d imagine from the phrase “Didier from France”… a smug and snooty, rapidly pudge-ifying yuppie rounding the cusp of 40, who was joined on alternating weekends by his two small sons, Matisse and Remy. Yes… Matisse and Remy, if you please.

They were nothing more than normal, energetic little boys who I might have found cute… if, say, they lived across the street. But having to routinely put up with them running amok in the 20-square metres of din-amplifying courtyard outside the bulk of my living space was not terribly endearing.
There is a safe little park about 30 feet down the block where there are always responsible adults keeping an eye out, but Didier was too tight-arsed to let his kids go blow off their manic little-boy energy down there on their own, and too lazy to take them there.

My guess is that he feared that the golden fruit of his noble loins might come into contact with one of the beastly local stock of provincial children, whose unworthiness is evident in their woeful lack of ridiculously pretentious names, and who run around with ghastly feve-au-lard-stained Caillou t-shirts and tacky dollar store sandbox implements of inferior design.

Instead, in order to give himself a bit of peace while he prepared dinner, or surfed for Plushophilia porn, or perhaps simply took some time to meditate on his own self-importance, he would shoo them out into the courtyard to rampage around the concrete on their plastic-wheeled vehicles that rumbled like jet engines, randomly bang on things (like the iron staircase, or my barbecue) with my gardening tools, engage in the incessant shouting that goes on between boys at play, and occasionally poke their heads through my windows to peek around intrusively and/or do some more shouting in their twee little continental French accents.

But it wasn’t the boys’ fault that their father was an insufferable dink. Speaking of which, Didier did leave me with one irreplaceable memory that I’m sure will remain clear and sharp in my mind forever. Unable to sleep late one night, I padded into my darkened kitchen to get a drink. Catching a glimpse of a ghostly white shape moving across the way in my peripheral vision, I turned just in time to see my neighbour’s naked, meaty backside rising into plain view like a hairy clefted moon as he bent to get something from his own fridge, his junk eerily backlit in dangling horror.

And then there was the time that he invited about 30 people, including a horde of small, shrieking children, to an outside birthday party, complete with blaring, insipid French pop music, that he deigned to commence at 9 A-freakin-M on a Sunday. When I went out later to clean up the party debris that they’d left all over my space, I discovered that they’d let the kids stomp all over the flats of flowers that I’d intended to plant that day; and someone had thoughtfully placed a large crushing rock on the one bush that had miraculously survived the apocalypse of the previous summer’s outdoor renos.

Or the time I woke up around 3 am, panicking because I smelled wood smoke which, on the Plateau, can only mean that your building is on fire and if you’re lucky you may have time to grab your cats before dashing into the street to watch your life go up in flames, only to discover that he’d apparently been entertaining a few friends, perhaps with an Edith Piaf singalong fuelled by discreet smears of fois gras on baguette, around an outdoor fireplace in the wee hours.

But as I expected, Didier only lasted a few months before moving on, probably to some neighbourhood less scruffy and more befitting of his elite stature.
It was a hot spring day and I was enjoying a quiet afternoon chez moi, working my patch of land out back with a team of mules, when two women in their 20s emerged from next door, to scout out the yard. Presuming that they might become the new tenants, I said hi and introduced myself. The olive-skinned one with the rogue eye that insisted on keeping lookout to the right while the other one focussed on me, responded by asking me how the space was shared.

“Well,” I said, my brain busily clicking over as I tried to size her up in spite of the distraction of trying to figure out which eye to follow, my misanthropic spidey senses already tingling in vague alarm at what I thought was a mildy daft question, since the answer seemed hugely self-evident to anyone even remotely familiar with the concept of land ownership, “The property line runs up the middle; so this side is mine, and the other side would be yours.”

I also thought it was a bad omen that when I introduced myself she didn’t respond in kind, because that’s a good-manners basic. But I shrugged it off, thinking, well, they’re just looking anyway…

Next thing I know, googly-eyed Moonya and her boyfriend Antoine moved in, and it was PATIO PARTY HELL TIME!
Apparently on a quest to consume his own considerable weight in nothing but grilled meat within each cycle of the full moon, little round Antoine fired up the BBQ pretty much every evening. They typically had at least two of their equally self-absorbed cohort on hand to eat huge slabs of cow and fill the night air with their painfully naïve and unoriginal 20-something f-bomb-laced banter, delightfully punctuated by the occasional refrain of “You’re SUCH a fag!! … No, YOU’RE a fag, FAG!!!” until well into the night.

On Friday and Saturday nights it would be worse… I’d come home from the movies or whatever, and when I opened my front door, I’d be taken aback thinking that there was a party in my living room, because there’d be as many as a dozen of them out there, happily parked literally right outside my windows in my chairs, slowly getting drunker and louder and flicking beer caps into my garden.

I avoided using my kitchen, because when I did, I felt as exposed and on-view as an animal in a zoo; I could only use the living room if I shut all my windows and curtains and turned the tv or stereo up so loud it was unpleasant; and let’s just say its difficult to feel at ease taking care of business in the bathroom when you’re surrounded by disembodied laughing.

Of course, having been raised to be meek and pathologically non-confrontational, I dealt with this monstrous intrusion by closing my windows and sulking angrily in my bedroom, screwing in ear plugs while wishing that one of my other neighbours would step up and tell them off; or at least drop an unsubtle hint, like dumping a bucket of urine or fire ants down on them from above. Why should it have to fall on little ol' me to confront them? Those on the second and third floors at least had the benefit of semi-anonymity and a bit of distance; and, as couples, at least had one buddy for backup against the ravening mob.

What finally broke me was their habit of playing this insanely irritating game … I think it must have been a drinking game that involved bouncing a die off a table into a beer glass or something... that would sound like this:

TAP TAP TAP!!

[Bounce]

“WWWAAAAAYYYYYY!!!”

TAP TAP TAP!!!

[Bounce]

“WWWAAAHAAAAAAYYYYYY!!!”

(repeat about a 100 times over the course of 1-2 hours).

After about the third tappedy tap session in a week, I was ready to storm out and throttle them all with my bare and trembling hands… but remaining aware that I did have to continue seeing them a.l.l t.h.e t.i.m.e, I decided it would probably be better to take a more diplomatic approach on the morrow when I’d be able to keep my now violently boiling temper in check.

Plus, I really didn’t want to be that curmudgeonly old person who bursts out into the middle of their happy fun night time beer fest, all raving and foaming at the mouth, so that they could then write me off as a miserable hag who oughta take her boring old concepts of reasonable privacy and quiet (like being able to get to sleep before 3am on a Tuesday night) to the suburbs where I belong… and/or take vindictive relish in making my life somehow even more miserable, by, say, having impromptu drumming/dijeridoo jams like my former upstairs neighbour used to do (but that’s a whole other story).

Instead, in the spirit of wussy passive-aggressiveness, I wrote them a calm letter in which I pointed out how they were unfairly disturbing all their neighbours by effectively using the shared outdoor space as their personal al fresco party room; and that it would help me feel less intruded upon if they could at least move around behind the back of the building, and be mindful of the fact that my daughter might find it a tetch difficult to sleep if there are half a dozen yahoos yelling obscenities next to her bed all night long.

And things DID get marginally better.

The next spring, I worked on building up a barricade of planters to try to visually underscore the concept of respecting others’ personal space. But still they didn’t get it… if the whole gang came over, they’d just move the planters out of their way, leaving everything askew for me to fix the next morning. It still apparently remained inconceivable that they should have to walk an extra 6 feet from their door and around a corner to use their more private little back patio, which instead had been designated a dumping ground for their discarded crap student furniture, so that on the rare occasions when the view out my windows wasn’t a bunch of drunken kids lolling around butting out smokes in my flowerpots, instead I’d see a mini junk yard.

Around mid-June, I noticed that something had changed. Moonya and Antoine had disappeared, and instead of the clatter peaking during the weekends with late-night BBQs, this friend of theirs, who looked like a young, pierced, and punked up version of Mr. Burns from the Simpsons, was holding court outside every night with one or two pals until 2 or 3am. If that sounds way less annoying on the scale of intrusion, it wasn’t, because he’s one of these people whose speaking voice volume is always turned to “Shout”; and about every 30 seconds he breaks out in a jarring, barking laugh, which then typically sets off an equally loud hacking chain-smoker’s cough. So it wasn’t like a low-grade conversation that you could just tune out, because there were these constant little aural jolts of sharp loudoskity… it was like having your brain poked with a sharp stick through your ears every few seconds.

And, like icing on the relentlessly annoying cake, he was simultaneous going through a heated breakup and embarking on a new love affair, so at least once a week I was woken up at dawn by him having a screaming fight out back on the phone, or in person out front next to my bedroom window; or had the fleeting quiet of a weekend morning destroyed by the highly disturbing strains of cauterwauling love-making.

After about a month, I finally worked up the nerve to ambush him one morning when he was hunched over outside having his first lung-hacking smoke of the day. Once again, I patiently introduced the grown-up notion that it wasn’t appropriate to use what is effectively a shared public space as one’s own outdoor living room, because the rest of us just might want to be able to leave our windows open and not be overrun with noise and smoke all night. He was actually nice about it, saying that since nobody had complained he figured it was a problem; and best of all, that he’d been housesitting while Moonya and Antoine were on honeymoon in her native Morocco and they’d be back in a week.

But Moonya ran into immigration problems and never reappeared, leaving the boys free to continue their louche bachelor lifestyle ways.

Over this past winter, I’d spoken to each of my other neighbours and confirmed that they, too, felt mightily put upon by these selfish patio-hoggers. I encouraged them to speak up, because apparently, as long as it was just me squawking at them, the boys didn’t feel any real pressure to change. But somehow, I knew nobody else would step up. People seem more willing to suffer in silence forever, rather than risk having someone get angry at them for standing up for their rights. At this point though, my feeling was: why should I care if my boorish neighbours think I’m a bitch? THEY’RE the ones in the wrong here.

By May, it had resumed. My days began hearing punkboy hacking through his wake-up smokes, with outdoor bark-laugh-inflected lounging filling the evenings, and all-day computer game and late-night beer-swilling festivals on the weekends. When the first heat wave hit and I was unable to open my windows because they were practically living outside, I went on the attack. First, I ran out and yelled at them when Mr. Burns’ girlfriend started playing a crashingly loud computer game on a Sunday afternoon. And any time they were out there one minute past 11 pm, I called in a noise complaint.

And lo… the magic of those three little digits… 9-1-1!

Its like a new era of reasonable peace and communal contentment has blossomed. Now, entire evenings go by with nobody out there. They actually close their back door sometimes; and on one magical weekend, their outside light, which had been glaring at me all night, every night for the past 3 years like the perpetually burning eye of an all-seeing evil, was either dead or turned off. I have had a few opportunities to sit and read in my garden. I can often leave my windows open, and when I do, I hear that my other neighbours are finally able to do the same, and make use of their balconies again.

It’s like…it’s like… NORMAL.

So what’s the lesson in all this?

Don’t tolerate intolerable behaviour in others. There’s nothing good or noble in keeping your mouth shut for fear of offending somebody whose being offensive. If decent people don’t speak up, the jerks win.

And we can’t have that.

The season of shredded feets

2010-07-06T16:05:00.000-07:00

Guys, here’s the answer to that eternal question: “Why do women buy so many shoes?”

Oh sure, part of it is that we too easily fall prey to the winking, leering seductiveness of a swankly designed pair of trotters, just as men seemed hard-wired to succumb to craven lust by tv screens as oversized as a porn star’s bosom.

But the root of the issue is this: Its nearly impossible to find a pair of shoes that are not only stylish, but that you can walk more than two blocks in before they slowly start to saw off various parts of your feet. So its not that we really want or need 30 pairs of summer shoes… we’re just caught a constant quest to find at least ONE pair that we can get through a cocktail party or workday in without sustaining multiple oozing, throbbing pain points.

For most of my life, I simply refused to go the girly route, avoiding heels and any other style of shoe that could not be worn with socks. It was so simple and comfortable: All I needed was one pair of leather shoes for work/going out, and a pair of converse for off-hours.

But that left me looking either like a ridiculously old and archaic bobby sockser and/or somebody with orthopaedic issues whenever I wore a dress or skirt, because the only flat soled shoes available looked like something an aging nun with bunions would wear.

Say Chip! Let's head out to the Chinese sock hop!

Who needs swank footwear when you're married to Jesus?

As I rounded the corner into middle-age, I wanted to step up my professional game and dress more appropriately for my age. So I started to buy modest heels (which make it feel like you're walking on knives shoved up your feet); followed by wafer-soled flats (which make it feel like you're being pounded with a sledgehammer on the sole of your feet) … and I have been painfully hobbling my way through summers ever since.

I take little comfort in realizing that I was right to eschew practicality for fashion all those years, because this experience has confirmed what I had suspected all along:

Not only is going sockless slimily nasty, but you’re a goner without a layer of fabric to prevent the burning, chafing friction of human skin against leather.

Those little protective nylon sockets that are supposed to fit invisibly inside your shoes? Useless. Take 3 steps and they’ve slipped off your heel and are irritatingly bunched up under the arch of your foot.

Seriously?

3) A shoe that feels like a perfect, supple, comfortable fit in the store will invariably turn out to be an agent of torture about 15 minutes into Day 1 in the real world.

4) Shoe salespeople are eternal liars. Some of their standard, bald-faced untruths include:

“Don’t worry… the leather will soften and stretch to the shape of your foot”; which means “Waste money on some cancer-agent-rich stretching spray that doesn’t really do anything, and resign yourself to wearing a complex array of protective bandaids (which will be scraped off and need to be replaced several times a day) and just gritting through the pain until, maybe, after several years of intense suffering, the shoes will finally be broken in and comfortable. At which point they will be falling apart and will have to be replaced.”

“Too big/too loose in the heel? Just buy a pair of these insoles and they’ll be fine”; which means “That’ll be $12 for insoles that just half fall out when you take a step and the shoe still flops off your foot, so you are constantly in danger of tripping on all this dangling footwear apparatus and will have to devise a highly unnatural and uncomfortable way of walking to try to get around that.”

“Just buy some of these adhesive rubber pads that you can stick to the problem areas in your shoes… they’re AMAZING!”; which means “… they’ll stay in place for about 30 seconds, then migrate up your foot so you’re limping around looking like you’ve got some kind of alien slug feeding off your ankle, but thanks for another $7, sucker.”

All useless

And my personal favourites: “These winter boots are completely waterproof” and “No.. its easy to clean salt stains off suede…. Using this $15 can of highly toxic cleaner spray.”

Approximate retail value: $700
Number of units that don't cause pain: 0
Cumulative utility percentile: .00000001

Bijoux trouvees

2010-06-24T12:08:00.000-07:00

One of the things I love about living on the Plateau are the little oases of charm and greenery that you can find tucked away in back alleys just a few steps from the stink and bustle of even the busiest streets.

Here's a bunch of my favourites....

1) To access this lush pocket that runs west-east just north of Milton, look for a small gateway on St. Urbain or Clark.

The footpath, which is flanked by sweetly scented backyard gardens, opens onto what once must have been a dead-end paved alley, but that is now greened over.
2) Not sure why v-shaped intersections rock, but they do. This one, just west of St. Denis at Gilford and Drolet, sports some quirky architecture... like this building, which houses the offices of the Theatre du Rideau Vert...

...And this weird little row of houses that makes me think of the Wild West, French style.

Ok. It doesn't look like much in this shot (esp. with the lovely garbage can... DAMN MY EYES!!), but I love this ruelle that runs off that V intersection. On a summer night, its somehow just super neat to go, within seconds, from the boisterous clamour of major traffic and steamy, bursting cafes, to a cool and quiet corridor that smells like earth and ends in a kids park where you can trigger a sprinkler for an al fresco shower.

3) The City of Montreal encourages people to beautify their little patches of urban space by giving out awards for "ruelles vertes" with special cachet. Here's a real cutie on Demers, which runs between Hotel de Ville and Coloniale just north of Villeneuve .

4) If you follow de Bullion north from Mont Royal, when you get to Laurier, you'll see this little gem tucked in the back lane between two gracious old French Colonial style houses.

5) Another groovy little lane runs south off Duluth between Henri-Julien and Drolet (Drolet! again!).

Oh these folks, they love their little ruelle, you can tell. Its all tidy and flowery and filled with personal touches. Like the dog refreshment station in memoriam of some wrinkly dog named Mozart...

...or the great little bits of artwork tucked here and there down the lane....

... and on a really hot day, Sam and I can never resist taking a peep into the backyard that boasts a wee little in ground pool, so we can have a little wallow in envy.

6) I went scouting through my old neighbourhood, in the area bordered by Sherbrooke, Ste Catherine, Panet and Berri to find some of my favourite old haunts... and stumbled upon a few new ones. This community garden off St. Christophe at Ontario, needs a bit of work, but the painting, with its spine vine, is cool; and I thought the half-buried bike was a nice touch:

7) Lartigue is this funny street, just west of Panet, that appears to have been chopped up into disjointed segments. The block that runs north of de Maisonneuve has some really charming little numbers, including this odd little place that features a line of red pig heads jutting from the sidewall, and what i think may be a Portuguese version of the little tin solider:

8) A bit north up Panet, at Duhamel, I discovered a tropical themed wonderland haven, complete with a cage of parakeets and cockatiels. There's lots of seating for picnicing or reading or just taking in some calm while you listen to the birds and the rustling breeze. Stunning.

9) Finally, i did the strip of Lartigue that runs of Lariviere behind my old apartment on Panet to revisit a few more oddball residences.

This is a house was built by an architect who taught at McGill. What's neat about it is that the walls were built from straw bales, with a stucco finish. Plus it manages to look modern, yet old-fashioned at the same time. A clever lady, that one.

This old shed or garage was converted into a tiny but cute apartment, with little green frogs painted up the sides. It was difficult to refrain from trying to get a peak inside.

And that concludes our tour for today. More biketastic adventures to come.

Fringetastic

2010-06-22T16:49:00.000-07:00

I've found that trying to see a good show at the Fringe Festival is pretty hit and miss. Maybe i'm just old enough that i've pretty much seen it all and am tough to impress.

To be sure, I've seen some shows that were wildly inventive and hilarious, but i've seen way more that were “meh” at best, and irritating duds at worst. I don't think I can drink enough over my lifetime to ever fully blot out the memory of this one show that was deceptively billed as a comedy about... ok, I don't remember exactly what lies they wrote up to trick people into buying tickets... all I remember is that I had absolutely no inkling that I was sitting my sweaty arse down to squirm through some lame, opposite-of-funny feminist screed that was overly peppered with shouted slams against the “cockocracy!” The only grudging chuckle they were able to tease out of the crowd was when, in the midst of some trite monologue about the wonder of breasts, one of the actresses – excuse me – Brave Goddess Foes of the COCKOCRACY!!! pulled a hidden string that made the vegetable steamer thingeys attached to the bosom of her dress suddenly unfurl like odd metal flowers. If there was ever a compelling argument against politically-correct driven public funding of the arts, I tell ya, that interminable waste of time was IT.

But one regular event I will not miss is the drag races. Not only is it free and outdoors, it is always a ridiculous blast of ribald fun. First of all, much like someone stepping on a rake, taking a pie to the face, or farting loudly in church, there appears to be something primally and inherently funny about men acting goofy in women's clothing. And when the performers are all clever hams with no shame who know how to work a crowd; and when that crowd tends to be predominantly tipsy and rowdy and possibly in the heady preliminary stages of heat stroke, well, mayhem ensues.

Here's the deal: a team of fringe actors is pitted against a team of professional drag queens. Going head-to-head in pairs, they have to pull someone from the audience and give them a 1-minute “makeover”; then ride a tricycle through (or, typically, over) a set of cones;

prepare a cocktail of their own demented invention;

carry the cocktail on their crazy-high heels or platform shoes through the car tires to the tasting judge;

who either deems it ok, or undrinkable (in which case, in theory, they have to make a new drink...but even the cocktail made with pineapple juice, chocolate sauce, and mouthwash got the royal assent);

then take the stage for a lip-synching duel before receiving their scores from a panel of judges.

Through it all, Mado Lamotte, the grande dame of Montreal's drag cabaret scene, keeps up a steady stream of witty commentary and runs herd as things get progressively more loopy, with frisky contestants trying to raid the booze table or frontally assault cute guys in the audience, and with the judges veering off into nonsensical scores like the symbol for pi, or a drawing of a chicken on fire.
Aside from the fact that its just silly fun, what I especially love about the whole thing is that you've got parents with their kids, and old ladies, and your usual hipsters, and just whoever wanders in off the St. Laurent street sale, but everyone is completely accepting of the fact that there are some seriously hard-core cross-dressing fags up there, and when things get a little crude/risque, everybody just laughs and cheers as if its all just perfectly normal and fine and good, harmless fun. As it should be.

enough procrastinating... time to get this party started

2010-06-21T14:07:00.000-07:00

So maybe i only had 4 hours sleep, but at least the rage that kept me awake is burning strong enough to fuel me now [But more on that in a LATER post....].

I could say that the summer festival season kicking in has kept me too spent from giddy merrymaking to have the energy to write. But for the most part, as usual, i've managed to deftly avoid getting involved in all the outdoor mayhem that's already got drivers who naively set out for a quick errand run to downtown or the plateau snorting red-hot frustration from both nostrils (and possibly other orifices) because most of the streets they need to get to are closed.

Two weekends ago, it was the Tour de L'ile open-to-all bike marathon that had streets blocked off around the city as tons of not even semi-competent bikers made their way through the city, occasionally, and for no particular reason, gayly falling over or crashing into each other with a sickening crunch of mangled bike frame.

Last weekend saw the return of the Formula 1 parade of understated but alpha males wandering around looking for some possibly amusing way to throw some money at their general mid-life ennui, who are easily recognizeable by their distinctive trappings, which overall, shouts "Middle aged ex-high-school quarterback turned some kinda consultant/weekend golfer":

Besides the properly crimped baseball hat sporting an elite racing related company's logo, which is de rigueur, casual observation over the years has led me to understand that the only other must-have accessories are an unnaturally thin spray-tanned blonde with bangs and a suspiciously robust bosom, and some nature of gleaming convertible sports car to put the blonde in.

So I'm not sure what this guy was thinking:

What he's got goin on is more of a Jazz Festival vibe... with the Tilley hat and the expedition pocketed vest, both of which are standard basics for a jazz-spree-on-the-town outing, because, you know... jazz is all edgy and dangerous, so you never know when you might have to dig into one of those pockets and pull out a Bowie knife... or emergency juice box... or side of smoked meat and a loaf of rye... or a haemmerhoid cushion... or something.

Meanwhile, up at the Fringe Festival kickoff on St. Laurent, the Electronic Picnic (which basically means a DJ playing dance music that's all the same beat, so it sounds like one reeaaally reeeally long and rather dull throbbing piece of tedium that is also kind of soothing because you can move to it without much thought or creative effort), drew out the kind of people who like go for a little more, shall we say, "insousiance" in their look:

As well as those who cleave to the standard, artfully nondescript hipster profile: yes, they who love an opportunity to engage in the sacred and unholy trinity of drinking, dancing AND smoking at the same time.

And while the homogeneously fervent individualists shuffle their way through rounds of warm and soapy draft, the League of the Steaming Unmentionables stands by, awaiting their golden offerings:

By this weekend, what with the ongoing freshets of horn honking soccer fan convoys cruising the streets, the novelty of over the top street action was already becoming kind of stale. I kept forgetting that the St. Laurent street sale was full-on ... I was a bit surprised every time i cheerfully and innocently headed out for breakfast, or to pick up some broccoli and breath mints, or thinking i'll read the paper over a nice iced coffee, only to hit a seething wall of shuffling, sweating humanity busily pawing at mega-packs of tube socks, cast off DVDs from the porn cinema, and all that other cheap and nasty dreck that the merchants seem to pull out of some God-forsaken Pandora's box of cheesy consumerism whenever its time to move booths out onto the sidewalk and crank more incessant and insane-making dance beats at insufferable volume into the street.

On my way to the bus at Jeanne Mance park, I passed through a meager bunch of dorky separatists with that unmistakable gleam of barely suppressed nutjobbery in their piggish little eyes... the older ones podgy and oddly intimidating yet vulnerable in their vigorously hiked white tube socks, all clustering around Gilles Duceppe like panting school girls feeling not quite worthy to touch the hem of his smartly tailored suit-pants (its twice that i've encountered him working his riding, and i must say that he DOES look striking in person, with those oddly piercing lizard-dead eyes of his); the younger ones with the haunting look of realizing that they'd make a horrific mistake in thinking that they were going to the party where all the cool kids were, cause screw politics... its a gorgeous sunny sunday and all the cool kids are off smoking pot on the mountain, as they should.

For indeed, it was a pretty small and sad crowd, and if that's the best that the forces of Quebec nationalism can muster to mark the anniversary of the death of Meech Lake in Canada's largest French city, i'm not too worried about any tactitly sanctioned goon squads of anti-anglo avengers kicking my doors in and demanding that i conjugate the verb etre in passe composee or otherwise be forced to choke down a heaping side order of creton followed by a slice of sugar pie any time soon.

There were so few people i thought the march must be winding down... but no... turns out they were gathering to march to Parc Lafontaine (where, to further celebrate their unique and cherisable culture, the march would likely devolve into an impromptu frenzy of juggling and unicycling) and given that the Gazette was unable to provide a shot of more than one person, i think it must have been more than a bit of a bust. I felt a bit sorry for Duceppe, who probably was longingly wishing he could have stayed home, lingering over a bowl of cafe au lait while idly sticking pins into his Stephen Harper voodoo doll, rather than sweating into his finely tailored suit, wasting his time pressing the flesh with these mangeurs d'hot dog.

So... on the way back on the bus, we passed a pie eating contest on the terrace at Dusty's... given the guys' leaning back postures, slow chewing, and expressions of pained determination, it looked like they were entering the "and will have a vomiter?" phase of the competition.

At this point i was thinking: "ok people... can you all go home so i can have my neighbourhood back now, please?" But no. there's more....

today's the day

2010-06-07T15:40:00.000-07:00

mouthnoise n (ca. 1989): 1: trivial blather; irritating and pointless chatter 2: seemingly ceaseless bullshit of almost unbearable vacuity and/or untruthiness 3: unsolicited opinions or commentary

Origin: [Recording studio, Algonquin Radio & TV Broadcasting school.] "I'm getting too much MOUTHNOISE!"