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