London Tahn

Back in good old blighty where the weather is damp and the moss grows thick over the bobbies' helmets. Yes indeed, this place is the vibrant cacophony I left behind those years ago, with the primary school yelping in one swell voice behind my window, and large trucks thundering by on tiny streets, barely missing the Ford Kas which dart about the streets.

I hardly landed here that I was whisked into an interview and landed with a 6 month appointment in the Heathland school in Hounslow, where I will start on December 10th. Boy am I looking forward to being back in school again, after these odd months of patching together sundry teaching jobs on top of odd jobs of all descriptions. I'd be lying if I said I didn't miss it.

Montreal is currently under 30cm of snow, and although everyone there is surely bummed about it, I am horribly jealous. I love the snow, even when it's all slushy and horrible (although having cold, wet shoes all day long is not nice), and I really wish I could hop up the Mount Royal path to beaver lake for a morning of ice skating under the snow. But then again, people who live and work dayjobs don't get to do that stuff there either, as I found out the hard way.

I guess you have to make the most of the place you're in, and be there for people who are important; close friends and family who need you around. And being in London will hopefully allow me to do those things as well as take short (and long!) breaks to places like Montreal when I can afford them. After all, schoolteachers have holidays to travel, and given a little thrift, I should really be able to afford flights here and there.

Everybody around me has been so patient with my vagaries around the globe, especially the friends I've been staying with here in London tahn. What better way to confirm my decision to come back here than to know I can count on you lot to put up with my hectic ways.

Better go open a bank account so I can get paid soon. I'm off!

Montreal departure

The bus station in the centre of Montreal has the most terrifying diner I've ever seen. Luckily it wasn't the only place I'd eaten in town, although their poutine wasn't at all terrible. For those of you who aren't familiar with poutine, it's a large bucket of chips/fries covered in gravy and really fatty cheese. It's sloppy and extremely fattening, which is why it's a favourite dish in a city as cold as Montreal.

The snow was covering the ground, and I had to drag suitcases through slush and ice to get to the station. Somehow my mobile phone had vanished the night before, while I was out having a celebratory drink in a blues bar the previous night. I went back to the bar and luckily they still had the telephone, and hadn't called any antipodean countries on it. So I was all set to go.

So much has happened during this time in Montreal. I haven't even started to blog about the trip to Quebec city with Jo, Niels and Julien, and our fantastic experience of photographing dilapidated buildings and ice skating in the old centre of the city. I didn't even get round to posting pictures of the Montmorency waterfalls we visited on the way, or the surreal Ethiopean restaurant we dined in when we got back.

Nor did I even get to describe my most unusual professional experience to date; working morning shifts in a factory and teaching evenings and afternoons in high schools and universities. Try preparing a lesson on 20th century short stories while sitting on a bag of rice in a warehouse, between two rushed bouts of loading a truck with pallets. Without even starting on the political discussions these guys get into on their way to delivering in Chinatown.

But I suppose that's what happens when you are living life rather than writing about it. Unlike Sartre's protagonist from "La Nausee", I don't really get to sit about contemplating all this very much. All I can do is stick up a few pictures in retrospective (when I get my camera in order), and tell you that Montreal is unforgettable. The graffiti around the city (take a look at the facebook albums), the snow-capped trees, the unmistakable cafes and the bums in the metro are completely unique. Nowhere else does the teenager bagging groceries in the supermarket say 'papier-plastic-paper-plastic?' when you get to the checkout and are trying to remember which language to speak in. No other city has a Chinatown with shop signs which are bad translations of English badly translated into French, and then back again.

Goodbye to all the wacky people I've met in Montreal, and thank you for the music. Now I get down to supply teaching in London. Won't that be an eyebrow-raiser...? Stay tuned for the next chapter, where guitarist and composer extraordinaire Will Rutter plays Irish melodies while scoring Mariah Carey songs for high school Christmas parties, and takes me running round sphinxes in London's strangest park. The Ghost of Crystal Palace...

Elizabeth: the sellout age

This huge film, destined to demonstrate the hugeness of the humongous history of Queen Elizabeth, sequel to another film entitled Elizabeth a few years ago, achieved the quasi-impossible. It proved that it is actually possible to depict the history of this period with even less intrigue, interest and wit than the first one did. An achievement of cinematographic mediocrity like no other. Just how did they do it?

The thing that fuels my ire the most about this film is that you don't even need to have an original writer to create an interesting plot around this queen's life. The history itself is full of intrigue, suspense, sex, murder, plots, wars, exploration, literary and philosophical originality and the thrill of the British renaissance. You don't even need to fictionalise it; it's all outstanding film material. How they even managed to make this reality boring is quite beyond me.

Elizabeth is portrayed as this snivelling, cold-hearted Queen whose humanity and womanhood nonetheless pours through the cracks to reveal her weaknesses, or what Hollywood would disgustingly caricature as her 'femininity'. During an era of unprecedented literary growth, of science developing beyond belief, and of religious strife tearing families and communities to shreds, the Elizabeth of this movie spends her time moping over Sir Walter Raleigh, in a J-lo meets Britney rich bitch scenario barely worthy of Desperate Housewives. The males in the film - who are incidentally unanimously appalling actors - are tapping her on her regal shoulder, reminding her that the Spaniards are, sort of, coming for war with thousands of well-armed ships, and maybe she should be doing something other than teaching Sir Walter Raleigh how to two-step with her lady-in-waiting. But this isn't even intended as humour. This is supposed to be either good fiction or historically accurate? And Walter Raleigh, who was the most fraudulent explorer ever, is depicted as some sort of war hero, who single-handedly sets fire to the Armada ships, jumps overboard and swims to safety as his horse dives headlong at him. What this was meant to mean I really don't know.

Aside from being historically inaccurate, this film is a two hour emotional porn flick, with even less effort given to plot than a Hugh Heffner would bother with. Scenes of decapitated limbs are cut to larger-than-life philharmonic string sections, between even more gratuitous scenes of Elizabeth wringing her hands over her sex life and the decisions she had to make. No effort is made to display the woman's unparalleled wit, her paranoid delusions, her machiavellian war genius, her obsession with virginity coupled with unbridled sexual desire... Even the sex is shoddy. How did they get that wrong?

It is worth seeing Elizabeth: The Golden Age, just to see how creative Hollywood filmmakers can be at ruining a good story. But if this doesn't interest you, stay home and watch the Simpsons, and avoid the flooded bathrooms of cinema multiplexes where staff dismiss you nonchalantly when you mention that Niagara Falls has taken over the gents' loo. Perhaps they had a hand in making this film

Another week past

I spent yesterday walking around the city again, which is my favourite way of getting things moving upstairs, when I need to think. Keeping the old engine oiled, so to speak.

We headed out after a brunch into the freezing cold air of Montreal, to climb Mont Royal and take some great pictures (I'm hoping Jo will contribute a few to this blog), but also to do some English conversation. Jo is an interior designer who's created a life for himself here for over a year, and has just started in a new job as a technician for a fairly prominent design office. His English is far better than most French people who learned through school, but a healthy dose of conversation will be a bit help for his job.

We ended up walking to the Oratoire St Joseph, which recently hit the Montreal headlines, when a guy entered with a gun and threatened to kill himself, in the middle of a mass (this place is a church). The enormous, cathedral-like building looks like a postmodern blend of a Soviet gulag and a giant temple for a religious sect. The organ is straight out of a Star Trek episode, and the 20 foot high wooden statues of the apostles who glare down at unsuspecting churchgoers, were the object of our fascination and mirth (sorry God, but what with being the creator, we thought you'd empathise with our need to laugh at this morose sight). Still, from the outside, this massive place of worship is an impressive promontory over the city, and certainly makes an interesting walk.

The walk across the cemetary, up to this church, and back round the glitzy Outremont neighbourhood with the floor heating under its driveways (I sh+t you not), led to the inevitable conversation about parallel universes, time travel, and how human decisions influence endless splits in the course of the universe, creating the past as well as the future (retroactive causality...). Then we walked home down the Lachine canal, tried some guitars in a guitar shop, and had a slap-up meal while watching a few episodes of Lost.

The episode happened to be about a character who has flash visions of the future and tries to influence the course of the planet through his actions. The acting is about as believable as a South American jungle island having polar bears, and the plot seems about as likely as Hollywood funding a decent director through a well-written movie this century. But of course, it echoed our conversation pretty nicely.

Any of your feedback on these questions would be useful to me.

- If physical energy is never lost but transformed, what happens to mental energy when we die? (for instance, the fact that we dream, and our dreams influence our mythology and narratives... surely that doesn't just disappear when after death)

- If particles from parallel universes manifest themselves in our universe (and I think this is the dominant school of thought in astrophysics at the moment), then is it possible for us to inhabit several universes at once, provided we can invent a tool which allows us to observe these shadow particles?

and most importantly:

- When I flew to Canada, I travelled a few microseconds in time, since I was further away from the earth while on the plane, and therefore time passed differently for me than it did for most of you. Does that mean I'm in a different dimension to you?

Just a few thoughts for Sunday morning, to get your brains going, or to get your blood boiling, if you have any real scientific understanding of these issues and can correct my misapprehensions. Please write comments, however abusive, to help me out!

Pea soup

Now why is it that pea soup tastes so funny? And the smell... All I want is to fill my newly-proclaimed vegetarian belly with something warm, healthy and enjoyable. Why do the makers of pea soup have to do this to me?

The fridge and the flat stink of whatever horrific products they put in pea soup. OK, so at 1 dollar per can, you can't complain much. But I'm complaining anyway. For the love of God/Allah/Jehovah/Mcdonald's/Buddha please add something artificial and unhealthy which gives the illusion of eating an actual organic substance. As the song says

"Fool me, fool me, go on and fool me"

Give me artificial colouring, artificial taste, artificial anything over the pungent odour of pea soup which currently infests the flat from curtain rod to bed leg.

Teacher's Sunday

Today was beautiful. Cold, but beautiful.

I woke up at 7.45, after a late evening of preparing pumpkin-based food for a bunch of French people. A 'Cremaillere' (potlach) which went till late last night, in which I was the 'head cook', so to speak, expected to feed the masses equipped only with an internet connection (for recipes) and a pumpkin.

So waking up to face a 17km run with the Running Room - the group which trains for marathons, here in Westmount, west Montreal - was a tall order. But seeing the beautiful sunlight outside, I mustered up the courage.

The group had dressed up for hallowe'en, and people were running in costume, and had brought their own food for a bake sale, raising funds for people to go to marathons later this year. Their unabashed north American costume-wearing bore its fruits; making an idiot of yourself for a good cause is a well-accepted activity here. And so it damn well should be. Of course, the hardcore runners (who ran 25km around a lake) were equipped as per usual, and didn't slow down a whit for all the Hallowe'en shinanigans. Luckily for my left knee (currently taking its revenge on me for my vagaries this morning), I didn't follow them all the way.

Otherwise, I've spent my Sunday preparing for a job interview in a hotel (yes, I'm looking for anything at the moment, and hotel reception is as good as anything), and getting some food ready for the week. A few meals to grab on the way out the door, so I don't starve during the day or blow a fortune on overpriced crappy sandwiches.

The job interview in a glitzy downtown hotel didn't happen after all, and while I was standing outside the door, after the would-be interview, it started to snow. Only very lightly, and barely a couple of minutes, but it's the first snowfall of the year. I couldn't help but laugh out loud. I love snow!

This evening was spent preparing more applications for schools. I'm hoping to start a position in January, and am going all out, applying for 4 to 5 jobs every 2 or 3 days (which gives me time to redraft, contact people, get extra information they need, etc...), on top of preparing the lessons for this week. Three different sessions, preparing adults for the TOEFL examinations, in two different schools. One is a very well recognised university, and the other is a dodgy little language school in town, whose arm I had to twist to get anything like a decent hourly rate from. But better than a kick in the teeth.

I'm balancing a crazy timetable, and have already mixed up a couple of appointments, which is partly behind today's interview mixup. Yes, my talents with timetabling, so well known amongst my friends and family, are being put to the test, to say the least. It's a learning curve; I hope to come out of this a bit more savvy about how to plan my week around train times, maps to find unknown places, making job interviews and appointments on time, preparing my materials without the help of a photocopier in a school copy room...

But I'll be back to schoolteaching soon, people. Armed and ready, you'll see...

Work

It was 25 degrees celcius today in Montreal, and people were sunbathing on their lunchbreaks in the park. I didn't have a lunchbreak; I'm jobhunting. "Pounding the Pavement", as one of the business English texts says is a common idiom to describe my situation. Pounding indeed. One of the reasons I originally decided to come to Montreal was that I had a fairly comfortable life and job in Stuttgart, and I needed to step back from that, to know what my next step would be. I've sure as hell done that all right.

Being jobless or in a precarious situation at work is one of the rare problems that a well-established, qualified teacher doesn't have to face often. Teachers qualify, get a job, and then move to the next job without having to face the concerns of being fired from one day to the next because of downsizing, because a powerful client doesn't like your face, or because your boss had a bad morning. Although some teachers struggle to find a position, we mostly take our position for granted. Unless you do something horribly wrong, you're probably safe, you just might have to deal with a bolshy parent or a stroppy teenager, but you're not likely to end up jobless.

Unless of course you decide to pick up your stuff and leave for another continent on a whim, without securing a contract on the other end, that is. But only idiots do that sort of thing.

Meanwhile, there are some things you learn about yourself when spending your time interviewing, running around trying to convince people that their company is the best thing since sliced bread, and the only thing you ever asked Santa Claus for since you were three was to have a job in their scrumptrilescent company. I, for one, am learning to make everything count more. Friends, family, possessions, the knowledge that I've got fresh vegetables at home waiting for me for dinner, and that the sun shone really nicely this morning through the trees when I was out running. The insecurity and fear of looking for work makes you focus on the essentials. What's really important, and how can I be grateful for it.

Sounds cheesy, I know, but it's true. I hope anybody who reads this realises that right now more than ever, I value them for who they are. I have a couple of students who read this, Julia and Pragathi, and I have never been so grateful for having been their teacher. My parents might read this, and I know they don't believe it but I love them and appreciate what they've done for me over the years. My sister is endlessly patient with my vagaries, my endless rants over the phone, and my crazy ideas for how I'm going to change the world. My friends in Stuttgart think I'm raving mad, and my friends in London are just checking in to see if I'm going to be in another country by the time their TV series is over.

But having a permanent job isn't the only form of important work. Friendships are work, and so is study and leisure. It's hard work to practice the guitar for hours to be good enough for a gig, or to keep at a friend till they tell you what's really the matter. And some forms of work are really fascinating.

Last week I went to a reading by Colum MacKann, an Irish author whom my mother is officially in love with. His all-too-obvious Dublin accent punctuated a series of readings from his short stories, from Dancer, the biography of Rudolph Nureyev, and his most recent, Zoli, an unusual tale of a roma gypsy girl. His writing sounds like some of the most gruelling work I could imagine. He has travelled and spent time in the most unlikely places, doing 'reasearch' for his novels. He's worked all sorts of mad jobs and sacrificed years of his life for one piece of writing. His friendliness and genuine interest in each reader who came up to get a book signed, testified that this is work to him. Art is work; simple as that.

I just came back this evening from a public lecture on Seamus Heaney in Concordia University, given by Kevin Whelan, an Irish UCD scholar. It was a beautifully conducted lecture, which dealt with some of Heaney's biography without reducing his language to the mundane events of his life. Dr. Whelan obviously has a love for Heaney's work which goes so deep he barely needs to be prompted to deliver a fantastic lecture. As a teacher, it was so satisfying to finally grasp some of what the song-and-dance over Heaney actually is.

I could have sat in front of the TV and watched a series with my flatmate. I could have quietly finished my chapter of 'Les Miserables' (yes Julia, I'm keeping up with the reading, although I don't read as fast as you!), but I have decided to make the most of the academia in this city and go out to an academic lecture after a rough day's jobhunting to attend this lecture.

Who knows what I'll think of this time, when I look back on it years from now. One thing that's for sure; this will be one of the times in my life I most appreciated the value of an honest day's work.

Storytelling and street smelling

This past week has been just as hectic and fantastic as the others. This city seems to be crammed with surprises, and I'm loving every minute of it so far.

So last weekend, I'm on my way home through Parc La Fontaine, and I stumble on a group of storytellers, sitting in a circle around a chair. It's a fairy story about a baker woman who tricks fairies into letting her back into her life, after being kidnapped as a slave, explaining the history of the 'Baker's dozen'. Little kids and big kids are sitting in a circle around this fifty-something year old woman, with a dark shawl and a little squeaky voice, sharing a tale she'd probably heard as a child herself. The sun occasionally lights her face from between the branches of the overhead trees as she tells her familiar story, and she makes the most of it to show the children where fairies live... in trees.

I stayed for three hours, listening to the rambling tales of Quebequois mountains, clever Arab merchants earning donkeys through language trickery, and even attempted a story myself. I've told the tale of how Finn was saved from his fellow giant Cuchulainn by his clever wife, Una, several times to my grade six and seven classes. Storytelling is easy when it's your mother tongue, you've got the attention of a class, and a book to support you if you get lost. But telling Irish folktales in French, in a park, with no book to support me, was another matter.

A matter which allowed me to admire the talents of the Breton storytellers, who are unparalleled in the art, next to the Irish, that is. In this Francophone group, the Breton guy (I've got his name on a card somewhere, I'll dig it up) completely stole the show, turning folk tales and Bible stories into modern commentaries about news stories. He used tales by Marcel Ayme, and tweaked them to suit his own lively style. Outstanding.

And this was a complete fluke, a chance event, like so many in this city brimming with music, art, theatre... That's precisely what I missed in Stuttgart; being able to scour the city as a 'flaneur', soaking up whatever is going on. Like I did as a kid in Paris.



My friend Lisa sees the 'flaneur' as a privilege of a wealthy society, and which is largely reserved for males (women are often pestered if they meander about a city alone), and I'm sure this is absolutely right. Nobody with six children and a mortgage to pay can really hope to be much of a flaneur. But it's something so engrained in me that I can hardly help it.

I grew up in Paris, in a very privileged, wealthy neighbourhood, which was largely geared towards the retired Christians and dinosaurs of Parisian aristocracy. Neuilly-sur-Seine had large boulevards with leafy trees and ecologically friendly solar-powered parking metres, each worth about the price of a new Mercedes. The entire community flocked to the church every Sunday in knickerbockers and prim red reading glasses, squawking out hymns as they left the feelgood ceremony. The priest sang along with the guitar-playing adolescents, who had rehearsed the hymn during their scout weekend in the hills of Dordogne the previous weekend. The birds sang, and Sarkozy - yes, THE Sarkozy of current fame and infamous dizzy presidential heights - was mayor, and had the excruciating dilemma of choosing the colour of the new set of children's slides and swing sets to adorn the local park behind the church. And the slides were changed every six weeks, if my memory serves me right. The unnamed north African teens were safely kept away through Sarkozy's subtle tactics of having military police at every other street corner. A peaceful, Christian, whiter-than-white safe haven, barely a stone's throw from Paris. But no one threw stones. Of course.



I hung out with the 'foreigners', who were scarce in the local public school, populated almost excusively with the offspring of respectable, God-fearing French families, who owned apartments in Paris and the Alps (for skiing in winter), Corsica (for swimming in summer) and a country house not too far from Paris (for fine weekends). So my friendship circle consisted of a Croatian hippy with body odour issues, a Serbian singer whose father had earned a fortune in professional basketball, and a French hanger-on who had lived in Egypt and had gotten into our school through some shady deal with the headmistress, because of his father's connections. We didn't have the money or the privilege of going to the trendy overpriced cafes, bars and nightclubs sported by the glitzy teens who populated our school, and were strangely unimpressed by the priest's efforts to recruit us for the scouts and the upcoming church fair. We smoked, were sarcastic, and played guitar on benches in the cold. We wrote songs and poetry, and admired the indie music scene for its 'alternative' nature. Radiohead CDs littered our bedrooms, and we read Henri Bergson and Nietszche, and knew how fake it all was.

The dichotomy of horrifyingly wealthy christian hypocricy versus teenage pseudo-marxist spleen left little room for anything else at that time, and after many evenings of sitting on the same bench listening to Predrag (the Serbian kid) groan about how, like, unreal it all was, I would decide to get lost. Literally.

I'd go to the Metro station, Les Sablons, and after a 10 minute ride, hop off at Chatelet-les-Halles or Odeon, to meander around the streets of the latin quarter. Sure, it was full of tourists and students, but at least it wasn't packed with money-and-religion-soaked teenage girls with pretty haircuts and expensive scooter bikes, or depressive wannabe artists. I'd browse books in the second hand bookstores, and walk around the labyrinth of streets near the Sorbonne, till the cobbles all looked alike and I wasn't sure which way was north. I'd listen to blues CDs in the stores, and on a good day, spend my Mum's treat of a restaurant ticket (a 30 Franc voucher redeemable only against food in restaurants or takeaways) on a slap-up crepe with cheese and a dessert. There were hairy weirdo travellers and students with dreadlocks selling posters in the metro, and that saxophonist at Concorde metro station, who summed up Paris in a solo.



So being a 'flaneur' means more to me than meandering about aimlessly or window shopping (which, again, it surely is in some places). In Paris (as now in Montreal) it was a way to anonymously soak in the city. It's a sort of altered mind state in which you absorb whatever's going on - and so much of it is - without having to dwell on specialising or knowing everything about a subject to be a part of it. I'd stop to listen to Bulgarian orchestra musicians playing the Four Seasons on accordeons (they couldn't bring the church organ with them into the street), as well as teenagers breakdancing in the underground corridors of Les Halles. I'd talk to bums about where they came from, and chat with American tourists, explaining the conversion rate between Dollars and Francs. I learnt what I later understood from reading and speaking to artists, actors and musicians; that there is no high or low culture except the canon fabricated by political elites. There's culture in the museums, planned by a government-appointed and state funded organisation, but there's the culture growing organically, in all its uncontrolled weirdness. The Bulgarian organists in the Paris metro, sprouting out between the cracks of the French music scene, just like the storytellers of Bretagne appearing in the park in Montreal.

My French literature teacher used to sardonically quip that 'Shakespeare is worth a pair of boots' to ridicule the notion that the literary canon is political. Well, by revisiting the flaneur in me, while meandering about this city, I'm finding out that Shakespeare is certainly in a pair of boots, when you can afford to wear them down that far...

Contes

Je suis tombe hier sur un cercle de conteurs, qui pratiquaient leur art dans un parc près de la ou je travaille. Le parc La Fontaine (quelle belle coïncidence) donne lieu à toutes sortes d'évènements culturels ce week-end, à l'occasion des Journées de la Culture.

L'expérience était d'autant plus fascinante pour moi, que je m'étais promis de me mettre à l'art du conteur, ou du moins, de voir si j'ai le moindre talent. Je suis fasciné par l'expérience d'un groupe d'adultes et d'enfants qui écoutent avidement raconter des fables, des mythes ou même des histoires surréalistes, qui reflètent si intimement l'expérience de chacun.

Le conteur cherche souvent à établir un lien direct entre l'audience et l'histoire qu'il raconte. On se sert du nuage qui passe au moment du récit pour amorcer l'incertitude du personnage, ou alors les arbres du parc pour faire visualiser la taille d'un géant. On reflète les sourires, les soupirs, les ennuis ou les déceptions de l'audience pour piquer la narration.

Autant de gens talentueux qui m'ont fascine pendant plus de trois heures hier, et que je vais retrouver aujourd'hui. Un breton a lunettes qui parle de la religion des autos à Detroit dans les années '80. Un irlandais francophone (oui, il y en a d'autres!) qui parle des trous dans les routes irlandaises qui se vendaient a travers la campagne, par les escrocs des campagnes.

Au plaisir du conte, je vous retrouve ce soir pour finir l'histoire!

Risible discombobulation

Since I have arrived, the media is absolutely choc-a-block full of the vagaries of the Bouchard-Taylor commission; a political fanfare which is touring Quebec discussing the problems of integrating immigrants' culture in Quebec. The idea is for the commission to sound out what Quebequois residents can consider as reasonable accommodations for immigrants, particularly religious groups, to provide exceptions for laws or customs which might conflict with immigrants' customs.

The media is, predictably, having an absolute field day over these hearings. A Jewish community somewhere frosts its windows to allow prayer in the dark, while a baseball game is going on next door, and there is "mayhem", "clash of religions", you name it... Someone says it's an unreasonable accommodation, and boom, there's your news story. Interview Michel Leblanc who is sick of everything changing in his town, and berates the foreigners, and then interview the Chinese corner shop owners, who barely speak French, and their statement translates (badly) to being sick of Christmas trees littering pavements in January. As Eric Cartman from South Park says: Race war!

The commission is spearheaded by the guru of cultural relativism himself, Charles Taylor, whose openmindedness shines forth through the murky darkness of our ignorance and modernistic, backwater mentalities. His razor sharp mind cuts through the provincial idiocy to remind us that

Other societies present us with different and often disconcerting ways of being human. Our task is to acknowledge the humanity of these "other" ways while still living our own. That this may be difficult to achieve, that it will demand a change in our self-understanding and hence in our way of life, is the challenge our societies must reckon with in the years ahead.

The Other and Ourselves: Is Multi-culturalism Inherently Relativist?
by Charles Taylor, July 2002

"Tut tut", he says, wagging his creamy white messianic finger "you've been skipping your multicultural pills again, haven't you?". The commission pushes onwards, at warp speed, boldly going where no culturally relativistic commission, destined to spin policies government has already predetermined, has gone before.

These public hearings have become a freak show, allowing the loudest vessels to voice whatever opinions they choose to on immigration issues. This obviously gives rise to the most hilarious and depressing interventions, and I never know whether to laugh or cry when reading them.

The world's most popular sport is a way to bring people together even if they have different religious beliefs, said Joseph Morelli, a physical education teacher in Joliette, Quebec.

"We all have the same objective — just to put the ball in the net, and everybody who participates in the sport can go get something out of it. There's no colour or language barrier through all of that," Morelli said at public hearings Wednesday."


Soccer can sow sectarian serenity, commission hearsWednesday, September 26, 2007
CBC News

Hooray. Let's all play soccer, eat oranges at half-time, and sing 'Heal the World' by Michael Jackson while holding hands, around a giant footbll painted with the 5 continents. Then we can watch reruns of the World Cup last year and watch the final, when Zidane headbutted Materazzi for insulting his sister... no, wait.

I can hardly believe the sort of media reports which are darkening between 5 and 10 pages of every newspaper, not to mention 5 minutes of each radio report on CBC. The amount of attention given to this is unbelievable. And Quebequois residents have no problems with immigrants! Compared to being in Europe this place is multi-culti heaven. And I'm not just talking about Montreal, where half the residents are so happy from passive pot smoking they wouldn't flinch seeing a naked, four-headed, turban-wearing sikh with black bangles, singing 'Kum-ba-ya' to Hare Krishna music. The rest of Quebec is unbelievably accommodating to foreigners.

Is it a coincidence that yesterday in one of my classes, I find out that Michel, a 50 something-year-old postal worker with the best pension imaginable, who rides his bicycle for 70km per weekend just for kicks, has a 2 month wait before he can see his family doctor? The words 'red' and 'herring' seem to scream their way out of the paper with each new charade of this commission. And still blogs like this one find space to discuss it. What suckers we are.

Concert

Wow.

I've wanted to blog about the Bjork concert at Jacques Cartier pier since it finished on Friday, and have only just made time for it. Being caught up in a random bicycle demonstration, meeting my former students from Italy who are now in university, and meeting my 3rd cousin David and playing with his baby girl, are only three of the wacky things which happened this weekend, and which I'm trying to process. What a weekend!

So the concert. It was the best gig I've ever seen, and I've been to a few. In a nutshell, it was a masterpiece of amplified live music, orchestrated by a team of musicians who use the combination of live harmony and prerecorded electronica better than any others I know of.

The stage was decorated using the theme of flags, which depicted creatures from Nordic mythology (as far as I can tell) which became part of the music only in the final encore piece. It was a colourful, lively set, without being too pretentious, like the visuals in big concerts often are. For instance, I was in the Red Hot Chili Peppers concert (not that they're at all the same register), and the set was so visually interesting that it distracted from the concert. It was an LED display of a dragon which twisted and turned in synch with the music. So mesmerizing that the musicians could have been playing 'Mary Had a Little Lamb' backwards with yukeleles, as the solo for "Under the Bridge" and I wouldn't have known.

But I noticed Bjork's music; the visuals didn't distract at all, except for an oddly-timed, Spidermanesque moment where she cast a web of threads out of each hand, which hung in mid-air for a few seconds. Oh yeah, and the obligatory towers of flame which flared 15 metres high on either side of the stage for the opening tune: "Earth Intruders". But anyway, I was talking about the focus of this concert, the music.

Step one. A choir of Icelandic girls who doubled as a brass band, to drive the harmonies previously played by the philharmonic orchestras Bjork toured with on her second album. They echoed her whispering in 'Pagan Poetry', and built up the harmonic swell on 'Joga'; another ballad a la Bjork which culminates in a sort of childish passionate scream.

Step two, Bjork's voice. Although it's something of a trademark, and her lyrics can be irritating efforts at poetry, on the odd occasions when they fall short of being actually poetic (but hey, who's perfect), nobody does it like her. She builds up a fragile hum only to culminate in an out-of-control scream, declaring love, frustration or humour, or questioning why a partner is cowardly and "can't handle love"... Again, the lyrics can be juvenile at times, but a phrase or a sentence in which she mocks herself for being too scandinavian, too naive or a recluse ("I sit here with a beard and a pipe...") bring home that these lyrics are the immature feelings of a mature woman and artist.

Lastly, the three DJs who do the samples and electronic sounds for the non-acoustic songs. Basically, these three guys (whose names I couldn't find on the internet) are incredible. It's impossible to understand exactly what they do until you go to the concert and stand in an audience with thousands of other people, and amplifiers the size of a small apartment. Although that doesn't sound like much artistry - needing so much technology to perform music - it's actually extraordinarily creative. They create sounds which they adapt to the acoustics of the space they are playing in, as they play. During the concert, there were screens showing the programs they were using to create and control sounds. For instance, one of them had a disc-shaped table on which he put cup-like objects which he moved and twisted around the table. Depending on their relative position to each other, the frequency, balance or pitch of the bass could be altered. Doesn't sound like much until you combine this with a 15 piece brass band, a live drummer and Bjork's screaming vocals, and use it to really drive the spirit of the song.

Picture this music being performed live, literally shaking your organs through your rib cage (that's one of the frequencies they use; it shakes your entire nervous system), playing over the pink, darkening skies of Montreal's quays, with a ferry taking off in the background, and a light breeze which cools off as the music drops...

I guess this means I'm siding with the tattoo-sporting, dreadlock-wearing intelligentsia of Montreal's fashionably unfashionable art student population, croaking to one another about how Bjork is like, so Bach-meets-Kaftwerk, y'know? But through the haze of their pot smoke, emanates some decent taste in music. While other musicians (such as Montreal's philharmonic orchestra) still use amplification to imperfectly reproduce live sounds to a large audience, often losing in quality, directness or timbre, Bjork's band uses electronics to immediately convey exactly the sound they want the audience to experience, and can raise a frenzy of celebratory adrenaline or hush up to a soul-crushing tragic finish, silencing teeny-boppers and fogies alike in mid-stride...

The finale was 'Declare independence', a song from her new album, for which all the choir tore up flags from the stage and danced to Bjork's screams of 'Protect your language' and 'Don't let them do that to you'. Needless to add, the overwhelming majority of Quebequois separatists went wild. Her rare moments of speaking to the audience being in French, there was obviously a message geared towards this audience, about cultures having to fight against nations, which I for one recognize in Nietszche's 'Zarathustra'. But that's another discussion. The point is, the final message was unexpectedly political.

Given that this morning I spent about 20 minutes listening to a sextagenarian Anglophone Montrealer ranting about how Quebequois politics has actively discriminated against English speakers, and was a 'fascist measure', the concert resonates strangely for me. Does it make sense that a shape-shifting musician should be a spokesperson for Quebequois nationalism?

I get around

(picture of the 'canal de Lachine'. Take a look at how much like a seafront this canal promenade is)

Comme promis, je continue mon effort de changer de langue une fois sur deux, pour bien intégrer la loi 101 dans mon blog. Apres tout, au Quebec, il faut bien manger de la poutine en criant devant le match de hockey sur glace pour faire l'expérience de la culture. Pourquoi pas bloguer en Français (ça se dit, 'bloguer' on dirait un Quebequois au café qui veut amuser le patron.)

J'ai fait environ 30 bornes a vélo aujourd'hui. Je voulais m'acheter un super vélo d'occasion, une Peugeot de course qui serait retapée dans un magazine, dont seulement le cadre serait vieux, et tout le reste mis a neuf, pour a peine 200 dollars. Ça valait le coup d'avoir un très bon vélo a ce prix, mais voila, je n'ai pas encore encaisse de salaire, et vu les mois d'hiver ici, je ne sais même pas combien de temps je vais encore pouvoir faire du vélo Je vais tenter jusqu'a fin Novembre, mais c'est ambitieux, aller au boulot sous la neige en velo.

Bonne nouvelle entre-temps, j'ai contacte un gars sur craigslist (un site de vente d'affaires usagées) qui m'a vendu sa Peugeot un peu vieillotte, mais encore bonne, pour mois de la moitie du prix de l'autre. Seuls 6 des 12 vitesses marchent, mais ce n’est pas si grave, je peux remplacer la pièce manquante si j'en ai besoin. Le siège est comme du bois, par contre. J'ai de ces bleus au fessart, au bout des 30 bornes que j'me suis tape en rentrant de Beaconsfield, ou j'ai du chercher le vélo Mais c'etait une superbe balade, le long de la riviere.

Sinon, j'ai découvert le quartier Mile End, que je trouve vraiment superbe. Un petit café a peine la taille d'un appartement 1 et demi (comme ils le disent ici), gère par un Chilien, sur la rue Bernard, plein de bilboquets, un vieux piano avec un 'Real Book' de jazz, et un chien résident; un échiquier en verre et des tables en bois. Janis Jopin en vinyle, dont le blues sarcastique accompagne les bruits des tasses et la machine a café Quelle perle, ce cafe que j'ai vu en rentrant d'un autre rendez-vous inutile pour voir un velo d'occasion.

Dans la même volée, en route vers chez moi depuis le met Beaubien, j'suis tombe sur un bar excellent dont je ne me souviens pas le nom, mais j'ai pris le flyer, et j'y retournerai de sitôt. Encore une trouvaille de la rue Bernard, ils font des concerts gratuits 3 soirs par semaine, dont une jam le Dimanche. J'pense que, vu les musiciens que j'ai rencontre ici, ça doit être un boeuf à voir.

En tout cas, j'guette le quartier de près. Les magasins sont 15 a 20% moins cher qu'au prestigieux Westmount, et l'ambiance y est distinctement moins distinguée (une bonne chose, a mes yeux d'irlandais de souche paysanne).

J'ai failli oublier de vous raconter la rencontre philosophique de Vendredi dernier. J'y retournerai en anglais dans mon prochain épisode.

Same bat-time, same bat-place. So there!

So there!

I'm going to see Bjork on Friday! Found out she's playing in an obscure venue in Montreal next Friday evening. I'm teaching the next day, but what the hell.

I just thought I would post this to make you all very very jealous of what a great city this is. Where else could you see Bjork perform at a week's notice, for 55 dollars!?

The World's Language

I've just finished my first week as a language teacher (as opposed to a schoolteacher) today, and I have to say it's a pretty good experience. At least, it's been refreshing and fun so far. I get the fun of teaching, presenting, guiding activities, meeting people who want to educate themselves and exchange ideas, without the pains of an institution. Bells ringing every hour, disillusioned inmates, desperately glaring at the clock in the hope of a time warp, angry parents with enormous, fluorescent pink-tinted glasses, and endless meetings about achievement, assessment, curriculum, bla bla bla.

So I'm teaching The World's Language, as the great Bill Bryson (yeah, great, sure) calls it. I'm a sellout, taking money from a private institution to correct the inadequacies of public systems. After 12 to 15 years of schooling in English, my students turn up without a word and need to study English pretty much from scratch. And actually, it's really satisfying. They want to do something with their lives, and need English to achieve it. The odd scrounger is just there because the company has forced him, but even he will pull his socks up when it's important. So for the time being - even though business environments are completely not me and I still struggle to remember to shave every day and wear an ironed shirt rather than a patched cardigan and corduroys - I've opted out of the institutional cynicism of schools. It's quite a refreshing change.

I know of a secondary school teacher who invented a game called 'Bulls**t Bingo'. Several teachers had cards with terms like 'assessment', 'child-centred learning', 'community', 'objectives' and 'moving forward' written in sequence on a battleship grid, grouped like submarines. When the headmaster/director gave a speech or held a meeting for teachers, you could tick off words, and if a 'submarine' of words was hit, you could cough out "Bulls**t!" discretely enough to not be noticed by the speaker, but loud enough to be heard by other players, in order to gain points. Of course in my school, we were educated, well-meaning professionals, fully involved in the director's agenda, so we never finished a game. (coughs uncomfortably)

This sort of game isn't really needed in a language school. In fact, if your boss is really breathing down your neck or the place is a god-awful mess, you can simply look for work elsewhere, or even set yourself up independently, given the contacts. For the most part, they're pretty small and well-run, although there is some unnecessary cafuffle, like in every school. I like the idea of getting to work, doing my job, and leaving it behind at the end of the day, though. A major perk, in comparison with being a schoolteacher, day and night, whether you like it or not. Whatever anyone says, schoolteachers are in it for good. It changes the way you pee and the taste of your child-centred, objectives-driven tofu meal; knowing that at any time, you can be called upon or recognized as The Teacher. The guide-by-the-side everyone loves to hate, mock and criticise, and noone wants to be.

But I want to go back to it, before long. The masochists among you, reading this blog, know what I'm talking about. I appreciate a change, I'm working in a language school and getting a lot out of it, but the teacher's itch is at me; a part of my educational mong wants to be standing in front of bored and disillusioned teenagers and moaning in the faculty lounge, waiting for the bell. I miss bad spelling, fart-smelling classes of edgy kids, eager for attention, irritable, and repeated questions about colours of pens.

To compensate, I'm thinking of doing some work in schools, but via outside organisations. I'm looking to work for a charity which raises money for leukemia patients, by sponsoring runs and the like. I might go into schools and pester parents, kids and teachers to raise money for this charity, asking them to sponsor me to train up for a marathon. I might do some storytelling in local libraries or primary schools, using hats to distinguish characters in French and English. Or I might just go back to a plain old classroom. Who knows.

Laundry, Radio and Teaching

I've been staying in for most of the weekend, which is completely against my nature. I might reward myself later by going back to the tam-tams. Maybe.

Yesterday, after using up every stitch of clean clothing I had, I picked up my courage and did an evening's washing. Why am I telling you this? Because it illustrates the little differences in everyday tasks, between living in Europe and here. I had to call up the janitor of the building, who lives here, and buy tokens from him for 2 dollars a pop. He's Philippino (I think), and his friendly but frighteningly efficient wife provided me with the troublesome tokens I had been trying to get hold of all week. The previous weekend, I had been taken to a 'coop' which sells environmentally friendly products, to buy my detergent. Something I've wanted to do for a long time and never quite knew where to buy the stuff in Germany. So I did my laundry, and fought a losing battle with the clothes horse, the architecture of which reminded me of those boats people make out of thousands of matches. Or one of those mind puzzles, where an apparently simple pair of metal circles make a fool out of people like me, when asked to join them.

Freshly adorned with my favourite clothing (and no longer having to wear my undersized gear I avoid wearing unless nothing else is clean, during the hottest days of Montreal's summer), I've been preparing meals, sorting files, working out finances... all the boring, annoying stuff. I always put these things off when I was earning a steady income as an international school teacher, somehow able to put them off. I'd get a ready-made meal or eat out on weekends, leave a desk strewn with bills and letters, put bills into a bowl and hide from them till I'd get an angry reminder. I guess this change is forcing me to be a bit more conscientious about this stuff. Tant mieux.

I've had to be around the flat as I am now, listening to CBC's programmes, which range from the ultra-prententious interviews about plurals for double-barreled nouns, to a guy playing guitar as he presents blues tracks. I love the radio here; I find it investigative, interesting, varied, and somehow real. Something missing in a lot of countries, where the news is cursory and uninteresting, the talk is all about stars or pretentious political debates leading nowhere, and the music rarely goes beyond Bon Jovi.

How do I connect this to teaching. Well, it seems to me that these small shifts in habits are an important part of my reevaluation of what teaching is about, to me. I was talking with a former student yesterday, and was trying to explain why I chose to move from a comfortable job in Europe to an insecure, chaotic, badly paid job here in Montreal. And my explanation was that this is partly why I am doing it. I've been a part of an institution since I left university, in the UK school system and in both international schools I've worked for. A state school system encourages teachers to behave institutionally. To expect cares and comforts which aren't offered in other professions, in exchange for commitment to government policies and programmes. In a different vein, international schools institutionalise their teachers as well. They are closed communities, often independent from the country, language and even legal system which surrounds them. The community is encouraged to rely on the school for social events, for assistance with everyday life, from finding an apartment (as a teacher) to the bells which structure the day's timetable. Inevitably, everyone thinks hierarchically, dislikes but yet depends on the institution to support and punish them.

So my struggles with where to buy cheaper milk and how to get hold of the bloody coupons for the washing machine, are useful to me. I'm working outside an institution, for the first time in my life in fact. School, university and then schoolteaching have cocooned my life, so those who still wonder why I've put myself to all this trouble, the answer is, basically, because it puts me to all this trouble.

La Musique

Je n’ai pas fait grand chose d'utile aujourd'hui. Pourtant ça a été une journée super utile, puisque j'ai pris contact avec beaucoup de gens sur Montréal. Ce qui me manque le plus ici, c'est de pouvoir jouer ma musique.

J'ai bien sur perdu mon lecteur MP3 avant de partir d'Allemagne, et actuellement mon ordinateur ne marche plus. Je suis donc en manque totale de ma musique, et je suis oblige de chercher ce qui me plait sur Youtube. Pas plus mal, vous me direz, puisque ça m'oblige a chercher un peu dans ce qui se fait sur le net.

John Butler est déjà dans mes favoris en haut de la page. Je pense qu'il est tout ce que Ben Harper est censé être, mais n'a jamais été. Il a un style vraiment unique à la guitare, et mélange les styles avec beaucoup de succès. Il est très fort.

C'est justement ça qui me fait kiffer en ce moment, dans la musique. Les artistes qui savent vraiment mélanger les styles sans que ça fasse salade de chocolat et de camembert. Les groupes et les zicos qui maîtrisent suffisamment plusieurs genres souvent différents et difficiles a mélanger, pour oublier les conventions stylistiques et créer une musique vraiment originale.

Hocus Pocus fait partie de cette catégorie de musiciens. C'est un groupe hip hop qui est maintenant très connu en France, et pour cause. Les samples sont originaux et recherches. Ils ne se contentent pas d'un rythme pompant sur un thème rébarbatif. Ils vont chercher dans le classique, le hip hop old school, la bossa nova... partout ou ils peuvent assembler des musiques qui portent leurs paroles. Celles-ci sont intéressantes et ne prennent pas l'audience pour des cons. Respect bien rare dans le hip hop, a mon avis.

Bjork est un autre exemple du musicien qui brasse les styles de manière intelligente. Bien sur, bon nombre de ses clips vidéo poussent un peu les limites du ridicule. Elle aime pousser son image de fillette dans un corps de femme, qui chiale comme une gamine ou gémit en orgasme en fonction de la chanson. Un peu lourd parfois, mais elle reste une génie musicale. On peut acheter un album sans même se poser la question si ça va être de la qualité.

Le dernier dont je veux parler ici, c'est Thomas Fersen. C'est un génie du jeu de mot et de l'auto-derision, au point qu'il n'en est presque même plus français. Il sait se moquer de lui-même, de sa musique, avec une créativité digne des Monty Python, tout en créant des morceaux originaux, et en mélangeant les styles, encore une fois.

Il y a seulement deux semaines, j'étais encore en Irlande, comptant les jours et les heures avant de venir ici, a Montréal. J'ai travaille dans une école de langue, ne sachant pas combien de temps il allait me falloir là-bas. Sachant que j'ai passe sept années de mon enfance là-bas, que c'est mon pays d'origine et le pays de ma famille des deux cotes, c'est dommage que je m'y sente tellement étranger. Seulement lorsque j'ai vu ce groupe sur scène, j'ai eu le sentiment d'appartenir réellement a mon pays. C'est difficile à expliquer, mais il y a quelque chose dans le brassage musical qui me donne le sentiment d'avoir un chez moi, un foyer ou je peux me reconnaître, en dépit du fait que j'ai tellement bouge ces dernières années. C'est peut-être pour ça que les gitans sont tellement musicaux...

Getting a sense of the city

Spent today doing jobhunting, like most days I've spent here so far. It looks like I've lucked out and will be starting work next week on Tuesday. There's quite a lot of jobs opening up with the students starting classes again.

I dropped into the main French university, UQAM, for a coffee. It seems like a pretty nice place, in that sort of hectic, underfunded public university sort of way. It's got the scattiness of the Sorbonne without being covered with graffiti and smelling of urine (sorry, but it's true!). I'd be interested to find out what the courses are like.

Meanwhile, I signed up to the main public library. Amazing. The place has five stories of books, CDs, DVDs... you name it. I was looking for some pretty specific writing on Oscar Wilde and found some pretty extraordinary tomes there. Given it's not a university library, the collection is outstanding. It's free, open till past 10pm on weeknights, and most of the weekend. The staff are pleasant, and actually know what they're talking about. This library is a good enough reason to want to move here in itself!

I sat outside to eat lunch, since the job searching office of my exchange programme was shut for a meeting, and read my books in the sunshine. It's not always warm here, but it's really bright. I'm constantly told the weather is terrible here, but I've yet to see it, despite being here in winter. Even then it was snowing in December, and I remember wanting to sit out in the sunshine.

I walked home from downtown, after the job interview. It took several hours, but it was worth it. Getting to know the city is a good enough reason in itself to walk it, even if the weather wasn't so good. But there's more to it than geography. Walking helps me think straighter, focus what I'm doing, question my own thinking, and really have time to mull things over. Right now, when I've got all the questions popping into mind which naturally ensue from such a huge move (What is the meaning of life? Where can a guy get some decent chips round here? How come Canadian squirrels are so gangster-like?), it's a huge help to have some thinking space. And by Jingo I'm getting good use of those shoes I bought before I left. If I wore off 1 euro per kilometer I've used those shoes, they'd be a shred by now.

Concert

Ce soir je suis tombe sur un concert assez unique, en plein centre de Montréal. J'étais a UQAM (l'Université du Québec a Montréal) pour prendre un café, et en sortant, je vois des camions de 3 chaînes radio très connues ici, de l'autre cote de la rue. En traversant, je me rends compte qu'il y a une scène énorme, pour un orchestre. J'apprends que l'orchestre symphonique de Montréal va jouer ce soir, dirigée par John Nagano.


D'évidence, mon ignorance de l'identité de ce surhomme était irréparable. Je crois qu'il est américain, en tout cas il le parait, mais d'origine japonaise.

J'ai donc traîne un peu dans des magasins de musique à regarder les MP3, et les boutiques de souvenirs, à imaginer des cadeaux moches pour mes copains, en attendant le début, à 19h30. Je reviens, et ça en valait véritablement la peine.

C'était en fait une espèce de double jeu orchestral, ou Nagano dirigeait l'orchestre symphonique dans la salle même, et un autre orchestre, compose de deux universités Montréalaises, à l'extérieur. D'autant plus de bouchées doubles du fait que les immeubles autour de la Place des Arts faisaient office d'écrans géants pour projeter le concert même, dans la salle. On a donc eu droit a une pièce de Gershwin (je n'avais pas de programme, mais je crois avoir reconnu 'Porgy and Bess', pardonnez l'incertitude) en 'live' avec Nagano sur notre scène en plein air, suivi d'un Nagano de 30 mètres de haut, projeté sur une cheminée, dont la gestuelle évoquait un homme qui se noie en pleine crise d'épilepsie. C'était 'Ainsi parla Zarathustra' de Wagner. Comme l'avait dit Woody Allen, on a du mal à écouter ce morceau sans vouloir envahir la Pologne...

C'était bizarroïde et magique à la fois. Des mamans qui chuchotaient a leurs bambins, des étudiants grignotant leurs fast-food, et des professeurs sortis tout droit de l'université, qui comme moi, n'avaient pas du tout calcule le concert, et sont tombes dans la foule par hasard.

Bon nombre de villes ont ce genre d'événement maintenant en été. Des concerts gratuits, projetés dans des places publiques, des festivals a tout bout de champ. Mais à Montréal, il y a quelque chose de particulièrement rafraîchissant quand des milliers de personnes se tassent dans un square pour écouter de la musique. Peut-être un bon but pour ce blog serait de refaire la même chose dans un an, et voir si je peux l'expliquer. Entretemps, je me régale ici. Si seulement je pouvais vous montrer mes photos!

Values

Here's something I read this morning while browsing the net (as you do, while you're meant to be job searching)

For why has the advent of nihilism become necessary? Because the values we have had hitherto thus draw their final consequence; because nihilism represents the ultimate logical conclusion of our great values and ideals--because we must experience nihilism before we can find out what value these "values" really had.--We require, sometime, new values.

Friedrich Nietszche
The Will to Power

Something hits home to me here; the idea that an extreme idealist like Nietszche felt forced into nihilism in order to re-evaluate his own values.

Nihilism. To me, the idea evokes Jeff Bridges in the bath fighting a ferret, surrounded by German gangsters in tight black leather (The Big Lebowski) But somehow it also stands to reason that ideals are clearer when the background is cleared.

Nietszche seemed to be trying to rid himself of his European idealism in order to start an entirely new philosophy. Ironically, his anti-religious and anti-establishment thinking became the very thing it hated. He was an idealist whether he liked it or not, and invariably European in his views. Perhaps I won't ever shake my Europeanness either, nor the very European ideas of education I picked up during 5 years of working in schools in Europe. But I can try...

Promenades

Back to English. I like the idea of switching languages for each post; I hope I can stick to it. As I mentioned before, it's a pretty good illustration of my chaotic mind...

Just came back from a 15km run with the yuppies from the local running store. Yes, there's a shop entirely dedicated to running, just around the corner. I wouldn't have guessed you could make a living out of products to do with running. I mean, how much can you actually need to buy to go for a run, however long? Shoes, shorts, and a t-shirt. Maybe a belt to carry a water bottle, if you're stuck... I suppose people will find all sorts of ways to spend their money when they have enough of it. Sweatbands worth 30 dollars. Come on.

It's always a great way to get to know a city, running, long walks, generally getting lost on the way home. I have the equivalent sense of direction of a mute bat with a hangover, stuck in a sonar lab experiment. But somehow by meandering my way around Mont-Royal over to Westmount yesterday, and then today's run, I'm getting a good sense of where I am. That's what it takes, in my case. 3 holes in my shoes and a half-dozen callouses later, I pretty much know where I am.

So Montreal is getting to know me, slowly. I'm having to curb my instincts of hanging around in cafes or going for cheap eats around the town, as I used to do on a full salary in Stuttgart. But it's all the more incentive to get outdoors and do sports.

I wish I could upload pictures (I will do this soon), to show you Mont-Royal on a Saturday afternoon. Kids playing frisbee, Colombians playing music, potheads playing god-knows-what... The giant hill, plonked just west of downtown Montreal, is a-buzz with every wacko and his ferret, enjoying the sun and getting up to something outdoorsy and usually fun to watch. And people keep fit here. Droves of joggers and bikers tearing their way all around the place, dodging toddlers, pets, barbeques...

I'm off to do some Sunday washing and cleaning, and then hopefully get to Mont-Royal for the Sunday hippy gathering, the famous 'Tam-tams du Dimanche'. Talk about a stereotype of left-wing tree-huggers in their drum circles. But what the hell. I've only just arrived, I can afford to be a stereotype for a while. A stereotype without a drum, though.


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Video of tam-tams

Montreal's wacky

Pour que ce blog représente véritablement le chaos qui survient dans ma tête ces jours-ci, il faut que j'affiche des pages en français, de temps en temps. J'ai tellement a vous raconter, et je trouve que l'anglais ne me suffit pas.

Il fait beau et chaud ici, ce qui fait véritablement plaisir après les éternels vents et crachats pluvieux de Dublin. Je me suis balade hier soir dans le centre de Montréal, histoire d'habituer mon corps au temps local. Je m'étais permis trop de sommeil jusqu'ici.

Je me promène donc sur la rue Ste Catherine, et je tombe sur le festival du cinéma mondial; le film principal de chaque soirée est projeté sur un écran géant en plein centre ville.

Donc, d'apres le programme, le film etait:

LA NUIT AMÉRICAINE / DAY FOR
NIGHT
France 1973 / 116 min / Fr. STA
Réal.: François Truffaut. Int.: Jacqueline
Bisset, Jean-Pierre Léaud, Alexandra Stewart.
Splendeurs et misères d’une équipe de tournage aux studios
de la Victorine à Nice, le temps de la conception
d’un film.
Funny, touching tale of a motion picture director
(Truffaut) and his problems in trying to film a silly love
story. A loving look into the intricacies of filmmaking.

En plein essor du cinema dans les années '60, ce film satirise la vie du cinéma, les petits drames des acteurs, l'incontrôlable machine du film qui avance en dépit des vies de tous ceux qui y participent... On était des milliers de spectateurs assis sur la Place Desjardins, à regarder ce film, et seulement la moitie devait être francophone, à en juger par les réactions. Ça faisait vraiment bizarre de regarder autour de soi, et de voir les sourires confus des Indiens qui cherchaient à comprendre la blague, avec 6 secondes de retard sur le public francophone.

Donc le Québec se veut une société bilingue, mais je ne vois pas ça partout. Le 'Montréal Gazette' de Mardi affichait cet article:

http://>www.canada.com/montrealgazette/news/editorial/story.html?id=492f2936-7eaf-45fa-8b35-776a1c92134d&p=2

qui déplore les discriminations qui ont découle de cette loi, interdisant presque l'anglais sur les affiches publiques, les pancartes, les enseignes... Plusieurs familles se pressentent actuellement en justice pour combattre l'interdiction de faire éduquer leurs enfants dans les écoles anglophones, après qu'ils sont passe par un établissement prive. On ne peut que se poser la question; a quel prix s'est fait, et se fait encore, le Québec francophone.

En tous cas, j'y suis heureux. Je peux commander un fish-and-chips dans un restaurant du Plateau Mont-Royal, et on m'amène un 'Feeshondechips' bien français. Pourquoi pas. Mon identité bordellique, mélangeant l'anglophone, le francophone et un voyageur incorrigible est complètement à l'aise dans cette ville bouillonnant de couleurs et d'accents. De langues entremêlées, presque créoles, qui amènent le sourire. Je ne peux pas m'empêcher d'adorer les jeux de mots des magasins, qui cherchent à intégrer des mots français dans un titre ou une phrase anglaise... Je ne vais pas me plaindre!

Vous voulez un breuvage avec ca?

This is my second day in Montreal, and man the jet lag is making this seem even more surreal than it is. A couple of months ago, I'm Mr. Kelly in a well-to-do private international school in Germany, and now I find myself squinting at the price lists in takeaways, trying to figure out what a "Chien chaud" is (hence the blog address), and trying to sift my way through the rows of enormous cereal boxes to find some plain old muesli, goddamn it.

I flew into Montreal Trudeau airport at about 5pm local time on Tuesday, after more than 12 hours of flights. Air Canada obviously see time as being a luxury their privileged customers can afford, and didn't tell me that the initial 15 mintues delay on my flight meant a 2 hour delay in the connecting flight. But I got there in the end, starved out of my mind because I hadn't told my travel agent that I have a 'special' diet - meaning I don't eat dead rubber chicken - so I had had precious little food the whole day.

I arrived at the counter in the airport coffee shop, and the depressed students trying to work the tills call me over to place my order. I ask for the bagel-and-soup option, and the girl replies "Vous voulez un breuvage avec ca?" (which translates loosely as "would you like a medieval broth with that?"). I know I'm the foreigner here, and I really don't want to emulate the snobby Parisians who turn up here and mock the Quebequois for their 'weird' language. But with my head spinning from starvation and jet lag, and the excitement of FINALLY being in Montreal after all this time, it's hilarious beyond belief. I mask my splutter of laughter as a cough.

So I'm here. After six months of wrangling my work permit off the Irish and Canadian authorities, relying on the immense patience of my friends in Germany, my sister and my aunt who housed me, fed me, put up with my daily frenzy of forgetfulness and chaotic plans, and creased their brows in concentration while trying to understand what the hell I'm doing and why. I'm here. I got through customs scatheless.

Unlike the guy in the queue next to me, who was being interrogated via a Spanish translator, as to why he had a US felony registered on his passport, and informed that he would be held in jail till the report came from the FBI. The man looked bemused, and this all could have been a mix-up. Despite wanting to mind my own business and concentrate on the questions coming from my own immigrations officer, I couldn't help but think that my Spanish-speaking neighbour might suddenly flip and do something desperate to avoid being thrown into Guantanamo or shipped off to a non-existant Syrian prison.

Looks like the chaos in my life isn't so bad after all. I've got a flat, this computer to write on, a job interview lined up for this afternoon, and am meeting a friend for coffee in the evening, hoping yesterday's storm doesn't hit again. I went for a jog this morning, and had my first experience of being mesmerised by a supermarket here, leaving with twice the stuff I wanted, crammed into a paper bag, and no idea which way was home.

Sure beats the hell out of being stuck in a prison cell waiting for the FBI to determine whether I get let out of prison, for having the wrong name.