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.