Memories of Montreal Part 1.

Union St., 1977 (photo: Protogenes the First)

 T his snowstorm has inexplicably brought back memories I have of Montreal back in 1977, and I thought I'd share some of them with you (the ones still remaining among my brain cells, that is).
I moved to Montreal from Senegal, Africa, arriving on July 4, 1976. I believe the Montreal Olympics were happening at the time . . . I'm not sure.

Montreal was very cool to a 19-year old. I thought of it as London, New York and Paris, all in one city. I had lived in Manhattan, gone to school near London, and never been to Paris, but somehow that was the impression I formed.

Back then I think Jean Drapeau was the mayor, though as usual, the brain cells don't cooperate. I could Google these things, but  prefer to rely on my hazy memory.

Since it was summer, and I hadn't seen snow in about five years, I had no idea what winter was going to be like, but I just remember all the "You'll be sorrrry!!!" chuckles that I elicited from any locals when I mentioned I'd never been in a Canadian winter before.

But the summer was amazing -- I'd lived in New York for three years about five years previously and I remembered hating everything about New York's climate: it was so horrifically muggy in the summer, and the winters were always a mishmash, something I was reminded of when I lived in Osaka for five years in 1988-93. By this I mean that they're both cities that live in a zone in which winter never can decide what to do -- it gets cold enough often enough to be really annoying, but then it hardly ever really snows, and if it does it never sticks. It rains a lot at around 4 degrees Celsius and that is, to put it mildly, extremely annoying. The summers were the same. Hot and sticky most of the time.

Montreal was different. Sure, you'd get the occasional 33-degree day, but most of the time, it sailed at around 25 . . . and non-humid to boot.

Me, circa 1977, in London, England,  trying for that Trudeau look

I think 1976 must have been an excellent summer because I remember being really happy about my new home. Everything about Montreal was cool. (I still think so). Even just saying the name of the city was cool, especially to friends left behind in California or Africa. Wow. No one knew anything at all about Montreal, except that it was in Canada, that they spoke a lot of French here, and Pierre Trudeau was REALLY cool, so it had to be cool.

I thought so too, except I was living it. I remember hopping the 65 down Cote-des-Neiges to Sherbrooke and then finding some sidewalk café and drinking coffee on a perfect day, watching the people go by and just being mesmerized at how mellow everything was, how smart everyone seemed to be, how elegant and friendly yet not pushy and brash like Americans. How it was completely normal for them to just babble in English or French or both, or how the switched automatically if they thought you couldn't speak French. Luckily, I spoke excellent French. I'd been learning it with the Belgians, first, in what had recently been the Belgian Congo, and then the French, in Senegal. I just didn't speak Quebecois. I couldn't understand a word they were saying.

But that made it even cooler. St. Laurent was incredible. I'd just been reading The Main, by Trevanian, and it was exactly like he described it (if you live in Montreal and have never read The Main, do so immediately. If you read it before you read any more of my reminiscences, you can skip this post, because The Main describes Montreal in 1977 just about down to the é in Montréal.)

The summer just shot by. I lived in a penthouse in a large apartment tower complex right next to St. Joseph's Oratory. In fact, the Oratory was the only thing you could see through the large glass doors, it was so close.

Vanier Ste. Croix, just as I remember it . . .

I began going to CEGEP. That's junior college, to the uninformed. I think I needed enough credits to be able to get into art college in California, which was my goal at the time. I went to Vanier College, which at the time had two campuses, one on Decarie near where the Snowdon métro is now, and one in Ville St. Laurent at Ste. Croix, where I believe it still is.

So I would hop the 119 down Decarie and go up Graham and Laird and learn German at Ste. Croix and then come home and smoke cigarette after cigarette, play guitar with my brother, and maybe drink scotch when the sun came down.

(Yesterday's snowstorm,  from my window in this room)

The winter that year was quite brutal, I think, as winters go. I loved every moment of it. One evening I was coming home from school after dark and there was a blizzard raging. I was in between buildings in the apartment complex, in their large plaza, and I could barely see my hand in front of my face! The wind was howling and I began to actually worry that I might get lost, wandering between the buildings until I dropped from hypothermia.

That did not happen. (As I type, I look though my widow and see the very same buildings I am writing about; they're just across the street from me).

Concert at a college in a band in Senegal,  Africa, 1975

That winter I did what I always did in a new city: I joined a band. I answered a Montreal Star classified for a bass player for a rock band, and that's when I met George, the crazy-handsome Greek lead singer from Montreal North and Adrian, an equally crazy Scottish transplant who lived in Cartierville and drank much, much more than me -- that was one of the reasons I joined the band.

We were White Lightning, and we played just about everywhere. We played very, very loud, mainly covers of Led Zeppelin or Queen or the Stones or the Beatles, and we played at strip clubs, bars, high schools (John XXIII, Baron Byng, to name a couple) and remote hotel bars in the Laurentians (the Commons, in Morin Heights).

We'd drive up to the Laurentians in blizzards, sipping scotch out of a hip flask, and spend wild weekends playing three-hour sets to packed houses. No one ever told us to turn it down.

Yes, we jammed right here . . .

1977 was a wild year for me. Montreal was an incredible place to be. Ste. Catherine St. was incredible. My mother used to take us downtown to go shopping at Simpson's or Eaton's. I jammed with some people who worked at the Sun Life Building, in the Sun Life Building. We hauled the drum set and all our amps up in the Sun Life Building's elevators after office hours and set up in someone's cavernous office and played Steely Dan and Santana without a single raised eyebrow, anywhere.

(To be continued)

Get Ready for Your Closeup

Taishi's photo of birds in his grandmother's garden

Knatolee inspired me to go out and buy a true macro lens. My son (11) had taken an amazing picture with just a small point and shoot I'd given him three years ago. But he took the picture and uploaded it and fooled around with it on his computer with absolutely no help from anyone else.

I was so blown away that I immediately went out and bought him a DSLR (Canon Digital Rebel). It was expensive but christ, if he can learn to use it, who knows what his future will be.

And I was blown away enough to spend over $450 on a macro lens -- I think that's more than I paid for my entire camera.

But check out the results! Knatolee and my son seem to have great subjects for their photos -- animals -- but my cat is black and most of the furniture is black and she spends most of her time on the furniture so I have to confine myself to inanimate objects.

I fitted Taishi's camera with my macro lens and took a few pictures yesterday so I could show him what he'll get (the lens) if he uses his new camera wisely.

Camera equipment can very quickly bankrupt you. There are lenses and accoutrements that make actual cameras seem incredibly cheap. But it's an incredible amount of fun. I put my macro lens onto the camera I'm going to send my son and took some pictures of a geisha doll so I can show him what's possible. I just know he's going to want one.

My little geisha, magnified x 100

Now only if I could get some bees or a mosquito or something -- then I could get into image-stacking!

All I have are these action figures and stuff to sell on eBay. And then there's China Girl . . .

She's actually only six inches tall

I'm just waiting until they've built a scanning electron microscope lens attachment for my Canon T3. I'd probably go nuts taking pictures of snowflakes or something.

Nah, then again I'd probably have to put my cat in there and I don't expect she'd liked to be coated with that weird metallic dust they use.

New Year's Resolutions II

Need support stopping drinking next year? I created a bog expressly for that purpose last January and I must say it's worked for me. I've been mostly alcohol free since last February 1st. I'm sure you can do it too.

Just email me if you want in.

An HDR Christmas

I put lights on the tree and then injected my camera with LSD.

That Time of the Year

I don't know how you feel about Christmas. To some, it's a massive, almost months-long prelude to some all-consuming event. When children are involved, this is sure to be the case. But what about when there are no children around, and maybe it's just you and your partner, or, heavens forbid, just you?

Well, there are two ways to go about it; namely, do as I do and pretty much realise it's Christmas on about December 21st. It's way too late to shop for anyone, even if there were someone to shop for. And even if I did want to shop for someone, I wouldn't have a clue what to get.

I live with Brigitte, but I don't have a single clue what to get her. Perhaps if she had dropped hints for months in advance I might have an idea, but I really, really don't. Besides, if there were anything she wanted, it would be next to useless for me to get it, as I would almost always choose the wrong kind, size, shape or quality. I, of course, always know what I want, but it rarely has anything to do with whether or not I get it for Christmas. I just get it whenever I want it.

But what about the festivities, the "Christmas cheer," the "getting into it?" Well, in Christmases past there'd be no question as to how it would be celebrated: by a double Bloody Mary to start off the morning and then something along that vein all day and night. Well, this will be my first "dry" Christmas, ever since I can remember. That means at least 40 Christmases, folks. Yes, at age 20 I would have probably been zonked out on the couch by 5 p.m. Maybe not, but the point is, for the life of me, I can't remember.

When both my parents were alive, I probably only missed around 5 Christmases with them, and that's because I was in Japan. And let me tell you, being in Japan for Christmas is one of the most miserable  affairs I can imagine. Any Western-style holiday is either completely ignored or given a totally Japanese slant (sorry) or transmogrified into a grotesque approximation of the holiday, like grafting a lemon onto an olive tree; both absurd and useless at the same time.

But this year? It will be the first that I will not be spending with any family members whomsoever. Brigitte has some cousins here, but for her, that's about it. No, Christmas will just be mainly just the two of us. Maybe I'll break a rule and have a couple of Bloody Marys. Since I stopped drinking last February 1st I've discovered, much to my amazement, that I CAN have a couple of drinks now and then -- more "then" than "now" -- and not be afraid that I'm going to sink back into the abyss. In fact, it's always a good reminder of why I don't drink, or rather, shouldn't drink. For you reformed smokers, just imagine after a length of five years or so of abstinence, lighting up a cigarette and smoking the whole thing. Well, you'd be vomiting profusely within ten minutes but just getting that smoke into your chest would remind you why it's such an alien thing for a human being to do.

In my case, same goes for drinking. These days, a hangover is no laughing matter. Even a very minor one fucks me up for days. I so much prefer being "normal."

So good old Mr. Frosty won't have a big place at the dinner, or even, breakfast table.

But starting today I think I'll put my Christmas suit on and really try to make believe that everything is holly-jolly, even though my son is 12,000 miles away and my mother is 4,000.

I promised to make turkey for a couple of friends -- the Usual Suspects -- and I suppose the actual day will come and go and be enjoyable.

But you, you folk? Be of good cheer. Shed not a tear for my maudlin reminiscences. Go out and get hammered, swap presents and have a jolly old good time.

And to start it all off, why don't you take a listen to one of my favorite renditions or one of my most favorite Christmas songs ever: Chrissie Hynde and, well, have yourselves a very merry Christmas.

New Kid in the Misfit Army

 Is this or is this not an astonishing likeness?

His eyes are even bloodshot, ferchrissakes

Only Oliver Stone could have dreamed him up

Now he's a cult figure among real street gangs

Serpico never would have approved . . .

Meet The Fuckers

Yeah, we're the two responsible for this site. Ironman drove all the way from Ottawa yesterday and spent the night. We had a great day. His Christmas present to me was a walking stick with an optional polonium hypodermic slot so I could Litvinenko you if I so desired.

Actually, it has a dual function as a monopod and since I got my macro lens and my Speedlite flash for my Rebel T3 it's gonna come in handy.

Yours Truly

I actually broke my own rule and downed a couple of glasses of excellent Louis Bouillot champagne. You will recall I went on the wagon last February. At first it was hard, even a preoccupation, but nowadays I rarely think about alcohol and I don't miss it at all. It's actually amazing, though, that I am able, from time to time (with months in between) to still have a couple of glasses and then go back to teetotalling. It's the best of all possible worlds. Still, just those two or three glasses last night did make me lethargic and cotton-mouthed this morning -- a condition I do NOT miss at all and am thankful will never become a condition I am used to ever again (as always, I have a standing invitation to anyone who wishes to quit some addiction to join my members-only blog -- just send me an email and I'll invite you along. We have a lot of non-drinking fun over there!)

Ironman: "Whaddayou come ta me for?"

I also celebrated the end of about seven months of selling Apple TVs. I'm delighted to be able to say that I sold 77 of them and made a profit of about $7,000 all told. I've stopped for the meantime mainly because some assholes are threatening that they've developed a jailbreak for the Apple TV 3, which, if true, would instantly put me out of business and render any stock I had left over worth about as much as hockey pucks (which they resemble) instead of the $150 or so I paid for them.

We'll hang out until the scare is over -- say February or so -- and then find a nice new supplier and start again.

I'm addicted to selling these things; I meet so many interesting people and make so much darn money that it's hard to let it go. But my supplier has run out for the moment so I'll take the opportunity to rest and plan my next moves.

This Christmas is going to be an extremely lonely one; no Taishi (my son) and no other relatives either on my side or Brigitte's. Still, we bought a tree and will duly light it up and exchange whatever last-minute things we can come up with.

This will be technically my first alcohol-free Christmas in 35 years, though I'll probably have a Bloody Mary or two -- or maybe not.

Have fun, you loyal pack of 94 followers, no matter who the hell you are . . . you've stuck around faithfully over these many years so I must be doing SOMETHING RIGHT.

Why You Are Nothing

A  couple of weeks ago (or was it a couple of months? The ravages of dementia! Play for me) I reminded Brigitte, who doesn't have a drop of American blood in her yet watched every femtosecond of election coverage, that Halfwit Romney would be a punchline in less than three months. She just wouldn't believe me.

But face it, he is, isn't he? If you asked 100 Americans who Mitt Romney was, at least 93 of them would shrug and say "No clue, sorry."

Do you remember Senator Gary Hart? No? How about James Brady? Nancy Kerrigan? John Bobbitt?

No, no and no? Well, let me tell you, at some point (at least in my lifetime) they were the subjects of relentless news coverage -- some would say ROUND-THE-CLOCK news coverage.

Hard to believe, isn't it? Most of you probably have never EVER heard of these people, yet they're all still alive!

My point here, is that in 100 years, let alone the two or three decades that have gone by with some of the people I mentioned, NO one alive will remember them at all! Yep, not even your grandson will profess to have ever heard a single word about any one of them!

Today, Mitt Romney, although there was an excruciating time there for about four months in which you couldn't even go to the bathroom without hallucinating his name in the toilet flush, might as well have moved to Clipperton Island for all I know . . . and in one year from now his name will be so utterly forgotten that his own children will come home from school one day and say "Who are you and what are you doing in my house? Get out before I call the cops!"

And on a much, much more personal scale, YOU will be completely, utterly forgotten. In 100 years, ANYONE alive today will either be very, very old, or very very dead. Thus, NOT ONE LIVING SOUL will remember you, what you did for your miserably short life, unless you are, perhaps, Ringo Starr, and even if you are, you'll just be another footnote in history.

But if you are you, the earth is not going to recognize your passing or even the fact that you were ever here. Have you ever wandered around in a cemetery? Know any of the names on those headstones? Thought not.

No, to the universe in general, you won't have registered as even a neutrino in terms of your effect on the progress of it. I mean do you even know how many countless AMERICANS (sorry, being ethno-centric here) lost their lives during WWII  and it is not known HOW, let alone WHERE or WHY? Not even their own wives, children, brothers or sisters, let alone the branch of the service they were in have a CLUE whatever happened to them. They might as well have NEVER EXISTED.

Even the school shooter from two days ago -- anyone know his name? Anyone know the name of the school he shot up? In twenty years, is anyone but a tiny handful of people even going to remember, let alone care?

And in 2,000 years, is there going to be anyone around to remember WWII or 9/11?

In 10,000 years, is anyone going to be around, period?

So go to your graves and take solace knowing that ten thousand millenniums from now most, if not ALL the atoms that are buzzing around in your body, the ones that make up YOU right at this moment (though you are shedding billions of them even as you read these words), are very likely still going to be buzzing around somewhere, maybe as part of a leaf or an iceberg or even a cloud.

That's kind of a cool thought, isn't it?

Roid Rage

This is the pleasant picture (actually, a series of pictures) of a three-mile-long asteroid that flew by Earth last week at a distance of seven lunar lengths (seven times further away than the moon).

If this thing had hit anywhere on the surface of the Earth, it would have made a crater the size of Ireland and 99.9% of living species on Earth would have been eradicated. That would have left quite a few species, but we wouldn't have been among them. Oh sure, maybe a few hundred of us would have survived to build up a colony and rise again, but Earth's atmosphere would have been SERIOUSLY fucked up for about 100,000 years, probably in the form of a massive ice age.

Luck for us, this is one they spotted. Not that it matters. They say, these asteroid-spotting hermits, that when the truly big one comes (well, anything that succeeds in getting through the atmosphere that's bigger than Alcatraz island) no one, not even THEY will see it coming, it will happen so fast. Most of these space boulders are travelling around 77,000 mph and would hit with the force of 100 times every explosive ever detonated on Earth PLUS the potential explosive force of every nuclear warhead stockpiled at present, to the power of ten.

And it would happen in the blink of a gnat's eye, which is pretty darn fast.

This series of photos was taken by an orbiting Chinese satellite.

I, Robot

Wow

That's just about all I can say. We all get tired of these Internet experiments and the lunatics posting them -- you know, "Man ages 12 years in 2 minutes" -- but this experiment is truly awe-inspiring.

To not only have pulled it off but to have made it staggeringly beautiful . . . well, a tip of the hat goes out to this guy.

First, he composes a chorale for a choir. Then he videos himself conducting it, along with the sheet music for the various parts.

Then, more than 4,000 people -- after watching this video I'd have to call them singers -- record their parts in front of their webcam, then send in the results. The composer then assembles all those parts into one work and posts the result online. And the result is beyond eerie. It's absolutely mind-blowing.

It brings to mind that old saw "If everyone in China jumped up and down at the same time . . ."

My God, can you imagine the possibilities of posting online Beethoven's Fifth with an amazing conductor conducting, plus the sheet music, then inviting the world's musicians (pros, I mean -- you'd have amateurs but they could literally be weeded out) to record their performances and then posting 5,000 musicians playing it?

Who the hell thinks stuff like this up? But wait, who the hell thinks this stuff up, and then SEES IT THROUGH?

It's tempting to call this guy a grandstander and the result bordering on cheesy, but I beg to differ. I'm humbly, officially, blown away.

What a Legacy

When my son becomes 21, in ten years, what will the world be like? I will be 65 years old. Compare my world at the age of 21 to HIS age of 21.

Hell, let's go even further back. My father's world at 21. My father's world at age 21 was 1943. 1943 was probably overall, and I can say with confidence in regards to the future, the worst year that Humanity has ever seen or ever will see. The litany of horrors that sprinkle the year 1943 is so unspeakable that it is completely inconceivable to those of us living today under the age of 60. 1943 was the height, the sickening apogee of World War II; living in that world, during that year, for every single human being on Earth must have been a nightmare of such indescribable proportions that I can not envision any kind of scenario in which anything even close could ever happen to humanity as a species again.

A natural disaster? Perhaps. An asteroid strike or Yellowstone erupting . . . these would be horrific events. But a man-made disaster equal to World War II? It will, can, never happen again.

But that's the world my father looked upon at age 21; indeed, he was already a part of the disaster, right in the middle of it, at the very epicenter of the worldwide conflagration. Hell, he was one of the ones that contributed a HUGE part to the conflagration: flying in B-24 bombers over Germany and France and bombing the shit out of the Germans. Can you imagine the sheer horror of it to a 21-year-old mind?

As I wrote in a recent email to my sister, the penalties to my father, had he ever been unfortunate enough to be captured behind German lines, would have been horrendous. Everyone thinks that Allied airmen were just shuffled into prison camps with people like Steve McQueen digging tunnels and such tripe. It was far more likely to be beaten to death by an enraged populace (this was actively encouraged by the Nazis) or be put in an extermination camp.

This was the reality my father would have looked upon every time he volunteered to climb into a B-24 (the aircrews were all-volunteer), which ended up being 25 times.

At 21 I was in art school, a very different reality. There was no worldwide conflict. Sure, there was the Cold War, but that brought more yawns than fear to most of the world.

Still, there were no computers. I didn't even have a VCR. There were about twelve channels on the TV. Cable television was just getting started, but I couldn't afford it. There was no Internet, no one had cell phones. If you wanted to look up some arcane piece of information you either didn't bother or you had to go to a public library. Music came on vinyl albums and would continue to do so until I was about 26 years old. Getting drunk at home or a bar was my most popular form of recreation. There was simply nothing else to do. There were no ATM machines. You had to get money while the bank was open, at your branch. I had no camera and there were very, very few moving pictures of me under the age of 21.

What will my son's reality be in ten years? He will never have lived in a pre-digital world. He will have used a computer from the age of three. His childhood will have been immortalized on several DVDs. He will carry some kind of mobile device. Frankly, I have no clue what the world is going to look like in ten years. Just ten years ago the world was a completely different place. There was no YouTube, no Wikipedia, hardly anyone had a cell phone and one used them to make phone calls, not take photographs or listen to music. Oh, yeah, mp3s had just come into being and pirating music was becoming popular.

Today if I want to listen to a pice of music -- almost any music ever produced electronically -- all I have to do is go to YouTube. Any obscure fact you can think of is probably exhaustively covered on Wikipedia. You can find out many things about someone you met yesterday by plugging their name into a search engine.

It still takes 11 hours to fly from California to Japan but in ten years, will that still be the case?

Will certain diseases be eradicated by gene therapy, will Islamists rule the Middle East with iron fists, or will democracy have invaded every corner of the earth? Will China be the dominant super power, will Iran still be waving its nuclear matchsticks around in envy-wracked tantrums?

Almost certainly I will still be alive.

I think all in all, I'd rather this present state of affairs just froze in its tracks for the rest of my life. Being alive today is like walking around in old slippers.

When Is Learning a Language Not Enough?

I teach Japanese to foreign people. I am, of course, a foreign person. I used to teach English to Japanese.

My father spoke three languages: English, French and German. I also speak three languages, English, Japanese and French, probably in that order of comfortability.

But when does learning another language become counterproductive, even useless? I gauge it at when the speaker of that foreign language needs additional subtitles in the foreign language he's speaking in order to be understood.

In other words, kind of like the Japanese professor-type in this video. To him I say: well done, old fellow, well done. You have learned a substantial amount of English. No doubt you understand it very well; even technical conversations are fairly easy to understand. But to him I also say: but don't bother speaking it to any speakers of English. Because it borders on the incomprehensible. His accent in English is so appallingly bad that it may as well not be English at all.

Which brings things back to my father. He could SPEAK French and German; this much is true. But his accent was so appalling that he may have well just not have bothered, although his grammar and vocabulary levels were impressive. Unfortunately, while he was speaking those languages, it wasn't very practical to have subtitles floating above his head that actually explained what he was trying to say in the foreign language.

I think you're most often just a victim of your childhood. If you grow to age 18 or so never having learned another language as a child, it is unlikely that the pathways in your brain will be malleable enough to truly be able to learn how to speak a foreign language. Indeed, any language but your own.

As an experiment, find someone you know who speaks English as a second language. Assess (in your own mind!) how well they actually speak -- in other words, how close their accent is to true English. Do they speak almost flawlessly, with a better than 75% rate of immediate understandability, or with less than 50% of understandability, in which case you spend a lot of time wondering what it is that they are trying to say?

I'm willing to bet that those whose accents are very good learned a second language to some degree or another before the age of ten. Those whose accents are appalling, like the Japanese gentleman's in the video, probably never started learning a second language natively, that is, among the target speakers of the language, before they were 18.

I, luckily, as a child, was from infanthood raised in a milieu of a constantly-spoken foreign language. In my case, it was Hindustani, with a lot of Bengali and perhaps also a sprinkling of Tamil and Urdu thrown in.

Apparently, although I've completely forgotten it all now, by age five I was speaking Hindustani as well as I spoke English. I even have faint memories of being able to understand the local people around me in Calcutta, were I was born, and being able to talk to them without using English.

After that, at age 13 or so, I was thrust into learning French with Belgians in what is now the Congo, which continued with French with the French in Senegal a couple of years later. So by the time I was 18, I had already been almost 100% fluent in TWO completely different foreign languages.

Which made it fifty times easier to learn German in my 20s and Japanese when I was in my early 30s. My German teacher in community college was "shocked" at how good my accent in German was, although I'd never learned the language before. She told me that when I parroted certain phrases that she uttered, she could tell that I was speaking in her accent of Stuttgart, even though I had no idea what that was. My parroting was that good.

Later, French people would tell me they could tell that I'd learned French from the Belgians. Now, when I speak Japanese, Japanese people can instantly tell that I learned Japanese in Osaka. Not Nagasaki or Fukuoka or Sapporo -- Osaka.

So even though my Japanese is not great from a vocabulary standpoint, the words I do know are spoken without an English accent and in the exact intonation in which I learned them.

I feel sorry for this Japanese fellow in the video. Even though he has put in many, many hours of learning English, he would be among the first to qualify for a new technology of projecting subtitles out of one's mouth. Then at least what he was saying wouldn't get in the way of how it was being said.

Pirating Music

Uhh, sorry . . . I thought for a second I was in 2002.

Did I pirate music? Hell yeah! I pirated everything that ever reached my iPod. When I had an iPod. Well, maybe not everything. I ripped as many CDs from my collection as I could stand before I became so nauseated at having to put Elton John's Greatest Hits (published in 1981) back in my music collection yet again. I mean, I love Elton John, but just how many times can you listen to Rocket Man until it just becomes a persistent earworm?

Hey, let me tell you something you might not be able to grasp: You can get bored of a music library of 50,000 songs. Yes, 50,000 songs can quickly become boring. Think about a library of 50,000 movies. Then think about every time you went to what used to be video rental stores (for the younger among you, these were places where you would actually go and RENT a physical representation of a movie, either on something called VHS or something called a DVD). You'd be confronted with rows upon rows upon racks upon racks upon shelves upon shelves of MOVIES YOU DIDN'T WANT TO WATCH.

Why anyone actually went to these places is still a mystery, but now, in the age of the 500 channels You Never Watch Because They're All Playing Dog The Bounty Housewives Of Long Island Whispering Hoarder Interventions CSI, I can kind of see where they might have come in useful: to steal money from you that you otherwise would have spent buying things called CDs.

So fuck, yeah, I was an ENTHUSIASTIC pirater of music back in 2002 or so. The funny thing was, though, all the Metallicas and Madonnas who got mad at us pirates . . . well, I NEVER EVER pirated their music. I only actually pirated music worth listening to. And I don't think Beethoven's Estate is going to get its knickers in a twist over the 400 millionth pirated downloading of the Jupiter Symphony.

My point today, though, is please, RIAA or Sony, PLEASE GO AHEAD and put up ALL YOUR CREATIONS FOR FREE on some website somewhere so that I can pirate it legally.

Because you know what? I don't want to any more. I don't want to pirate your new movies and I don't want to pirate your new music. In fact, if you dressed it in a pink ribbon and had it all, the WHOLE FUCKING CATALOG, delivered to me this afternoon in 14 floor-to-ceiling 18-wheelers filled with CDs, DVDs, Ray-Bans (sorry, BluRays), 3d, Director's Cut, Special Feature Extended Edition with Commentary from Our Lord Jesus Christ Saviour, well, I'd just have to tell you to TURN RIGHT ROUND AND HAUL IT ALL AWAY.

All of it, every single plastic atom of it, directly to the nearest landfill. Because out of the 786,098-odd movies and the 43,976,766, 812 music albums that you have produced since roughly November, 1993 are all completely unwatchable and unlistenable except to perhaps, dogs, who can hear beautiful tonalities we humans could never hope to hear, and bees who can see in wavelengths that reveal actual plots, dramas and gripping entertainment that to human eyes are completely absent from any movie you have made since then.

See, I don't WANT to pirate your garbage, I don't even want it for a paltry $1.99 from iTunes, you couldn't PAY ME ANY SUM IMAGINABLE to listen to the endless fountain of dreck that you produce, faithfully, day in, day out, or watch the mindless, puerile, inane drivel that emanates from your industrial backsides like Lucifer's flatus after having been scraped from the bottom of the Abyssal Plain at which depth not a single photon of light ever reaches.

You see, YOU HAVE RID THE WORLD of pirates such as me; through no actions of your own except doing what you do worst, we are a dying, lost species who will NEVER RISE AGAIN.

You have made the Pirate, that upstanding lover of all things that were good and listenable and watchable, EXTINCT. Now, may I rest in peace?

Hello Again, 1935 -- I thought You Never Left.

Y'know, before I met Brigitte I kind of didn't care one way or the other about the Israelis and their Arab tormentors; of course it was extremely easy to despise the Arabs because they were such vicious, senseless clods that reminded me of Nazis -- a LOT. My friend Charles and I  (he's the official voice of Mario of video-game fame and in his milieu, he's like a rock star) used to make disparaging jokes about the Arabs -- no, he isn't Jewish -- during that horrific period in the mid 80s when it seemed some atrocity against Jews was being perpetrated, whether it being suicide bombers in airport terminals or the day-in, day-out hijacking of public transport, be they planes, ships Hell, I was expecting the Space Shuttle to be hijacked, it was so bad.

Iran was just coming to the forefront of the Baddest of the Bad, and this wasn't just a ragtag bunch of Jew-haters, this was an entire nation swept up in hate; hate for the West, hate for Israel, hate for EVERYONE except themselves.

Does that not remind you of Germany, circa 1937? Anyway, Charlie and I would sing Christmas songs and put our own lyrics into them -- one of our party favorites was "The Ayatollah's Coming to Town."

But it was easy to hate the Arabs -- hell, it's STILL easy to hate the Arabs. And yeah, the usual disclaimer, not as INDIVIDUALS but as an ideology.

Still to me at the time, the Jews were annoying in that, in my primitive thoughts, they were ALWAYS fighting with the Arabs. Call it Middle East fatigue. I didn't pay too much attention, even to that wave of bus bombings and the the various intifadas, because it was so mind-numbing. The same old shit, day in, day out. You become incredibly desensitized to it -- it's like,"New rebel attacks in the Democratic of the Congo." It's like, WHO CARES any more? Who the fuck gives a shit about a bunch of crazy assed stoner tribesmen recruiting children and cutting each other's hands off? Tell me something NEW.

But after meeting Brigitte and seeing the day-to day contempt that is heaped on Jews and Israel by EVERYBODY, not just Arabs, it reminds me ever so much of 1935 and another era and I recall, through all my recent (well, five years now, at least) studies of Nazi Germany and the cult of Jew-hating, that yes, there are STILL PEOPLE TODAY who consider Jews "vermin" and that they should all be "Gassed" . . . it's a sick cliché until you realise what actually happened during World War II.

In fact, what happened is so truly horrific that I don't think most people's brains have the capacity to understand the mindless bestiality that extinguished so many lives so brutally . . . and that a lot of them WEREN'T EVEN JEWS. "Never again?" Don't you dare make me laugh.

But one needs to be reminded from time to time the cold horror that lurks within some people's minds even today -- and how easy it would be for some cultish orator to somehow bring a modern, civilised country under its thrall, and command it to go out and kill, kill, kill . . . the Jews.

Jacques "Petain" Fabi

If you are under the mistaken impression that it can't ever happen again in our "modern" society, then I urge you to listen to this. It's all in that patois that I still can't stand to listen to --"Country-fried" Quebec French -- but it doesn't take a translator to tell you what's being said. By a revered Quebec talk-show personality, no less, live on air. I always like to say, "If this exact conversation were about the blacks, there would be an uproar the size of which you can not imagine across the entire continent of North America.

Yet this little slice of obscenity will go unnoticed everywhere except in Quebec. It didn't even make the inside pages of this weekend's Gazette. But the words spoken and given tacit approval by a man who is  using public airwaves as his personal soapbox -- well, people, think about "Never again" again. It's happening RIGHT NOW, never mind "again."

For the benefit of non-French speakers, I paste the story from the National Post:

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MONTREAL – A veteran Quebec radio host nicknamed “the king of the night” is facing disciplinary action after he encouraged an anti-Semitic caller who declared the Holocaust to be “the most beautiful thing to happen in history.”

During his midnight to 5:30 a.m. broadcast on Cogeco’s 98.5 FM Thursday, Jacques Fabi, took a call from a woman identifying herself as Maria. She said she was of Arab origin and was distraught that her “brothers and sisters” were dying in Gaza.

She then invited Mr. Fabi to participate in a quiz, trying to guess what animal she was thinking of. When he guessed dog, she replied, “Exactly, it’s an Israeli” and laughed.

Related

• Dan Delmar: Quebec wallows in its cult of victimhood

She then asked him whether he knew about Hitler and the Holocaust. “For me, it was the most beautiful thing to happen in history,” she said.

Instead of cutting the line or confronting her, Mr. Fabi affirmed that she had the right to say what she had said but she should be careful.

“You know that here, in this democratic country, one can never say anything offensive against the Israelis, because it can be costly, you know,” he said. She said she did not care, and he said he finds it “annoying” that some topics are off limits. “You know, Madame, in this beautiful country we have freedom of expression, but one can never make negative comments, whatever their nature, against the Jewish people,” he said. “Otherwise there will be consequences.”

LISTEN TO THE AUDIO IN FRENCH. CALL STARTS AT ABOUT 2:30.(Source: Marto Napoli, 4h11 Radio Show on Radiopirate.com)

He said she was fortunate to benefit from anonymity as a caller to an open-line show. “I find it a real pain not be able to comment sometimes,” he said, noting that Montreal has a “pretty sizeable Jewish population” and that he sometimes finds their behavior “annoying.” He concluded by thanking her for her call.

The Quebec branch of the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs sent a letter Thursday demanding that disciplinary action be taken against Mr. Fabi, who began his radio career in 1972 in Sherbrooke. The letter said Mr. Fabi was an accomplice to the caller in spreading comments that promoted hatred and violence against Jews.

David Crête, a spokesman for 98.5 FM called the comments unacceptable. “Sanctions will be taken against Jacques Fabi,” he said, but as of Friday morning the exact nature of the punishment had not been determined.

Mr. Fabi’s show, Fabi la nuit, draws about 40,000 listeners and is heard on Cogeco stations across the province.

And I Thought it was a Remarkable Breakthrough

Potsy the Self-Printing Printer

Okay, I'm not feeling too well this morning, but on the BBC News website I was sure it said "Printer Creates Replacement Cartridge."

Now wouldn't that have been truly amazing? Almost like a printer "giving birth" to a baby printer. And why not? A machine actually propagating. Who would have thought of a printer that prints printer cartridges? THAT would have made headlines across the globe, now, don't you think?

I suppose if you have a printer printing diagrams upon how to build itself that would be close . . . but what about about a printer actually printing other printers that could print printers?

Then you'd truly have a machine race. Each individual's only function would be to print a copy of itself. And I guess if it printed two copies you'd be forced to call them twins.

I want one.

A View to a Kill

Watch as I masterfully destroy the computer in under two minutes.

Remember the Internet Café?

I'll bet you didn't even notice that they'd disappeared. But they have. Think about it. Does your local Starbucks or WiredCoffeeland have a little section in the back with those four greasy PCs all set up for you to leave your PayPal password on? Not any more.

But you don't even notice they'd disappeared! Ten short, short years ago, I frequented my local Second Cup at least three times a week. Ten years ago. That's a twinkling of an eye for someone my age. But back then, I NEVER saw a laptop. There was no reason to bring a laptop. I hardly ever, ever saw people talking on cellphones.

Now, if you walk into that same Second Cup, without fail, every single person or at least one person in every single group will be using a laptop or fiddling with an iPhone. Yes, an Apple laptop, or an Apple iPhone. I counted, the other day. 75% of the people in there had MacBooks or MacBook Airs. 90% of cellphone users were using iPhones.

Just think, if you're actually old enough, about that same Second Cup merely ten years ago. People were shuffling papers. Maybe thumbing through text books. Maybe just talking.

But now, every coffee shop bristles, just bristles with laptops and cell phones. Hardly anyone is talking, or if they are, it's over the screens of their laptops.

Does no one find this utterly surreal?

I'll extend this little scene to your typical airport. Look at that mighty pillar holding up the ceiling at regular intevals. It's the only thing around that has power outlets in it. And no, they weren't put there for you to recharge your electronic device. They were put there for the cleaner to plug in his non-portable electronic device, his vacuum cleaner.

Yet nowadays you'll see clusters of adults sitting on the floor around these things, typing away on their laptops.

I'm telling you, if I get on a plane next year and they don't have a power plug in the seat in front of me for my laptop, -- no sorry, iPad, because the seat pitch won't allow a real laptop any more -- I'll fucking raise Cain. I'll fucking DEMAND MY RIGHT to have a power outlet for my portable device, or it will be back to the gate for me.

And while I'm at it, FUCK those stupid little "entertainment systems" built into the backs of the seat in front of you. They do fuck all except get interrupted every time the captain wants to point out the Rockies "on your left side!" at midnight on the Redeye.

I'm perfectly happy with my very own portable entertainment center, thank you, with my 64 hard-drive-stored movies and twelve thousand albums. ALBUMS, not songs.

But just try to imagine what the coffee shop or airport lounge is going to look like 10 years from now. If it looks as different then as it looked ten years ago, I'll probably be thinking this blog post into my wedding ring while watching a movie on my thumbnail.

These People Have the Right Idea

When I die, I don't want people moping over me. I want them celebrating my life. If they mope, I'll most definitely come back to haunt them, in their dreams.

I'd love to have these as nightlights.

Wouldn't you?

Japan

Japan . . . that enigma wrapped in a riddle wrapped in a Big Mac pocket.

For those of you who've never been there, I can only say that in your wildest dreams, Japan is not going to appear. Nowhere have I been more correct than when I once wrote, in an account about my five years there, that stepping off that plane that first night was like stepping onto the surface of Mars.

And I've lived in a LOT of places. India, Africa, New York, England . . . but no one can predict Japan. Not even the Japanese can explain Japan.

*Sigh* and I am now inexorably tied to Japan for the rest of my days . . . I will never be able to muse about "my time in Japan . . ." as if it were a diminishing past. It is permanently in my future. The rest of my family all live in California. But technically, there's nothing that says I'll HAVE to return there one day. But I will have to return to Japan. And that's not such a nice thing, to be obliged to have to go somewhere you don't particularly like.

What's not to like about Japan, you say. What's to like about it, I say. These days, about an hour after I've stepped off the plane in Osaka, I'm ready to get right back on. Trouble is, it's so FUCKING FAR AWAY. I never really appreciated just how far it was when I actually enjoyed being there, when plane travel was still fun, when the thought of just being there didn't fill me with dread.

But it's really, really far. It's geographically far, but it's mentally far, too.

What's In a Name Part II

Umm . . . do you really trust an adult who calls himself Tommy? "Bobby" is reeeally pushing it for me.  People have . . . uh . . . occasionally referred to me as Nicky, perhaps in some deluded state thinking I might appreciate it, but, uh . . . I guess I . . . don't.

Then again, the reverse holds true. Um, calling yourself, or allowing yourself to be called, uh . . . Robert, is, I'm afraid, Pushing It, in my limited world of experiences.

Ya gotta EARN the Robert, dude. That's maybe why Robert de Niro actually goes by the name Bobby. Or maybe he just prefers it.

Lol. I thought I'd throw out that in there, appear to have something in common with the Internet hordes, or is that spelled with a "wh?" Whordes. Good one. That's where u got me, where ur really cool.

Imagine Winston Churchill, for soem reason being awakened from hypersleep and being asked to comment on the language of youth today.

What's In a Name

I've often wondered: what is it that seems to strike the terror of the Lord into all of us when we hear some Islamofascist's name? Why does the name "Abu Muammar Saad" strike us as so . . . sabre-wielding, so turbaned and alien? So absolutely terrifying? When all he is is a two-bit warlord wannabe who spits in the street and grunts when spoken to?

What if he were more familiar to us . . . what if his name were something we recognized as being familiar, one that we could quickly categorize and dismiss, like the petty thug he really is, instead of some romantic, "Allahu akhbar" shrieking dervish on camelback, come to roust us from our tents, rape our women and pillage our village, so to speak?

Abu Mazen Al Jihadi, AKA Vinny "Bags" Manolo

What if his name was Eddie "No-nose" Gallucci? Or Nicolo "Nicky the Pin" Canutti? See what that does? The very familiarity of the thuggish nature of those names doesn't strike fear in our hearts, it sparks a sneer of recognition. ""Omar Qadr Ibn Al Hajj" might sound scary and terroristic, but what if it was Mike "Southside Philly Donuts" Mignoli? Would you be terrified by a name like that? Hey, basically, they're both thugs. Admittedly, Southside Philly doesn't walk into bars with bombs strapped to his chest and blow up women and children, but he loan sharks on West 18th and Shepperton and has a stable of hookers and has, like, "Unfriended" a couple guys here 'n' there, you knows?

WHAT is the fucking difference?

Next time you hear the ominous-sounding "Mullah Omar" just translate it into "Joey 'Two-chins' Copoli" and you'll get your perspectives a little straighter.

The Bar: Pt. 1.

A cowboy walks into a bar and orders a whiskey.

The bartender delivers the drink, and the cowboy asks, "Where is everybody?"

"They gone to the hangin'," says the bartender.

 "Hangin'? Who they hangin'?"

"Brown Paper Pete," the bartender replies.

 "What kind of a name's that?" the cowboy asks.

"Well," says the bartender, "he wears a brown paper hat, brown paper shirt, brown paper trousers and brown paper shoes."

"Seems like there ain't no harm in that," says the cowboy. "What they hangin' him for?"

The bartender leans over the bar and says "Rustlin'."

The One The Awl Rejected

I wrote a piece I hoped The Awl would publish but they didn't. Maybe I should have aimed for a somewhat more sober site. So it appears here instead.

====================================================================
The Stolen Children

“In total I have lived in Japan for 11 years now. I have recently married another lady (2012 feb) and we found out she is pregnant. We were  both very excited about it and I supported her throughout the pregnancy and birth. 

“After the baby was born, my wife started acting very different. She acted distant and not interested in our relationship anymore. When I say ‘After’ I mean the day she came out of hospital. 

“She would only ever talk about the baby or her family or money for this and that. She started getting very angry if I even tried to interact with her. 

“Then one night I was feeling ill and went to bed early. I woke up to find she had gone with the baby and left no note or any form of message. I panicked, I didn't know Japanese law regarding children but I know the UK law and the UK says it's illegal so I went straight to the police station (koban) at 3am. 

“They told me to go and see the central police in the main office at 8 a.m. They said they would look out for her but can't do anything right now.

“It got to 5 a.m. and my wife's father called me. He said my wife is on the way to Hiroshima with the baby. 

“I went back to the police again to let them know and they said there is nothing they can do at all. 

“That leaves me at today. Her family are telling her to divorce me and keep the baby. I am not allowed contact with my child according to them. 

“I feel completely helpless. It seems Japanese women can just up and leave any time they want and take everything with them. Nothing according to law can stop them doing that.”

Have a cigar, kid, and go have a few drinks with the boys. Then go home and stumble into bed and sleep the sleep of the damned. Then wake up, take two aspirin, and try to forget about that bizarre dream that somehow seemed so real. Shake it off, and then proceed with your day.

Actually, if that had been the real response I wrote to the writer of that sad tale, I would have changed the line “proceed with your day” to “proceed with your life.”

No, this isn’t a joke column and that isn’t a joke letter. Word for word, it’s exactly what I found myself reading this morning after popping half a Mirtazapine with my coffee. Mirtazapine is supposed to be a serious weapon in the fight against depression but in case you’re planning on suggesting to your doctor that he prescribe it to you, let me just assure you that it doesn’t work very well.

Nothing works very well against the kind of depression I have. I had to give up the love of my life, drinking, around 10 months ago, because it was either that or a future liver transplant, which would probably not only be messy and dangerous but something someone with my finances would have to transact with a Chinese lifer. But pills are the only weapon I have against the depression that I suffer, day in, day out, knowing that today is another day that will go by in which I will have no contact with my 11-year-old son.

And our dear old new dad up there is going to have to make very good friends with a doc who hands out prescriptions like candy, if his life goes the way I predict it will. 

It’s just too bad I wasn’t in on the thing when he kissed the bride and danced an ersatz Western-style dance in an ersatz Japanese Western-style wedding; too bad I wasn’t there when he excitedly confided to the world that he “was pregnant!”

He may have been pregnant, but he was pregnant with what was to turn out to be a “ghost child.” At this point, not being privy to 100% of the facts, I can only predict with 99% certainty that he will never see his child except from a distance and even that will be highly unlikely. When the child turns 18 there is the off-chance that he/she will come a-knocking but even that is a pipe dream if what I know about these things is even half true.

Our friend — let’s call him Alex, for want of a name better than “Suckaaaahhhh” — is now the proud parent of a bag of flesh that shares 50% of his DNA and will suck him mentally, if not financially dry in the coming 18 years or so.

He is the parent of a half-Japanese child. His “wife” — probably more accurately termed his “sperm-processing machine” — has just kidnapped their child in Japan, has fled to the haven of her parents, and the chances are very good indeed that Alex will never see his child again in his lifetime. And there is nothing that he, his country of origin, his local embassy or F. Lee Bailey and a Dream Team of lawyers can do about it.

Japan is one of those nations that has chosen not to be a party to the Hague Abduction Convention, which “provides an expeditious method to return a child internationally abducted by a parent from one member nation to another.”

One would think that Japan, a “stable, highly developed parliamentary democracy with a modern economy” according to the description provided by the U.S. State Department website, would be party to most if not all international conventions with regards to the rights of children and their parents. But one would be very, very wrong. Egregiously, badly, sadly wrong. One thinks of countries like Saudi Arabia and Sudan as being the primitive backwaters and safekeepers of medieval laws that shouldn’t apply to the world of the 21st Century, but one would never suspect that one would have a better chance of getting one’s child back from Burkina Faso, Africa, than one would from Japan.

So if you are the father of a half-Japanese child, and the child holds a Japanese passport, if the child’s mother decides one day in a crowded shopping mall in downtown Harajuku, Tokyo to have a shouting match with you and then take your child into the subway, move out of your house with the child and refuse to let you ever see or contact the child again, she is not only perfectly within her rights to do so, but you would probably be arrested and possibly deported if you attempted to go against her wishes.

You can hire a small army of lawyers, either in your home country or Japan, you can get custody judgments giving you 50% custody of your child with the according visitation rights form your local family judge, you can get a signed, framed decree from the Prime Minister of Canada demanding the return of your child to you, but the only thing you can depend on is that if your child’s mother wishes it, on any grounds whatsoever, you may very well never see your child again or have contact with him/her until he/she attains the age of 18 and decides to track you down.

According to the U.S. State Department, “Abductions to Japan represent one of the largest portfolios in the State Department, Bureau of Consular Affairs, Office of Children’s Issues and are among the most difficult to resolve. Japanese law and custom favor one parent having sole custody, making it extremely difficult for foreign left-behind parents to obtain the return of or access to abducted children.”

Furthermore, “Foreigners have been arrested for attempting to flee Japan with their children.”

So what does this have to do with you? Probably nothing. But it has a lot to do with me. I consider myself lucky; I married my Japanese wife in 1990 and she moved with me to Canada. We had a son in 2001. In 2004, she decided she no longer wanted to live in Canada, and moved back to Japan after having met a Japanese man on the Internet. In Japan, she married the man and had two children with him; after that, he met another woman on a business trip and the two were divorced. Apparently her second husband, although Japanese, never contacts her or attempts to see his children.

My son, who is now 11, lives with his mother and her two children from her second marriage She earns money from a part time job. She recently refused to allow my son to leave Japan, citing “school obligations,” but does not disallow contact. Thus, I am able to travel, at ruinous expense, to Japan during his summer “holidays” and interact with him, have him stay with me at my hotel, and so on. He no longer holds a valid passport, although he is a legal citizen of three countries: The United States (I’m American), Canada (he was born in Montreal) and obviously, Japan.

Unlike our friend Alex, I’m fairly certain that when my son, who is well aware of his predicament, attains the age of 18, he will choose to move permanently to Canada. However, his English reading and writing skills will be severely lacking and only a supreme effort of study will bring him to a level in which he could function in a job here. It remains to be seen how that will play out. And every single day that goes by is a day in which I don’t see my only son play, learn, evolve.

However, to our plaintive Alex, the only solution I was able to offer him was to do exactly what I described at the beginning of this piece: Go out with your buddies, get horrendously smashed, wake up the next day and pretend that that “whole Japan thing” never happened. Because that’s pretty much the only thing that is going to get him through the next eighteen years.