Category Archives: Uncategorized

Although I’m starting to turn my attention to a blog series I’m planning on launching shortly about Montreal, it appears – unsurprisingly – there’s a little New Orleans still in my system. 

Just a bit ago, while on Rue St. Laurent / St. Lawrence Street, I started thinking about some walks I’d like to take in Montreal.  The phrase “take that walk” playing in my mind swiftly morphed into Kermit Ruffins’ “When I Die (You Better Second Line),” which I’ve been listening to on a daily basis.  Though I didn’t conduct a systematic survey, I’m pretty sure I was the only person on St. Laurent slipping into a strut and waving an imaginary handkerchief.  It didn’t last long, but the moment had to be respected.

(Quick and hopefully painless tutorial section.  What’s a second line?  Basically, it’s a New Orleans tradition where you’ve got the leaders (the “first line”) in a brass band parade in front, then the band itself, then the “second line” AKA everyone else who wants to step into the streets and join in the strutting and marching and joy.  The second lines with which I’m most familiar are at jazz funerals, where the departed is accompanied to the cemetery with dirges, and after they’re laid to rest, have their journey onward celebrated with exuberance.  Or they’re celebrations by Social Aid and Pleasure Clubs, originally created when African-Americans were unable to obtain insurance and formed their own mutual aid societies, celebrating once a year with parades through the streets in matching suits designed for the main event.)

This past Sunday, following the jazz mass at St. Augustine’s Catholic Church – imagine “cooling off” by stepping out of a non-air conditioned church into a refreshingly humid 34°C – there was a special second line back to Satchmo Summerfest.  

Seeing the pictures I’ve included in this post, a friend of mine responded by saying, “Joy is a serious business in New Orleans.  The only people smiling are the white tourists.”

Well, sort of.  Joy IS a serious business in New Orleans, because joy isn’t always about being smiley.  Not while you’re strutting and dancing and baking in a suit in 34°C, and showing your pride (though these guys were smiles aplenty when it was all done and they found a shady spot with water or beer).  As for the white tourist thing, well kind of but not exactly.  There were plenty of non-white revellers, and a lot of us were either locals or people like me, enough of a regular to be somewhere between local and foreign.  Nor are all the Social Aid and Pleasure Club members black.  For instance, when I joined in for last October’s parade by the Prince of Wales club (video below), one of its heralded members was outgoing president, Joe “White Boy” Stern.

Anyway, that’s all sounding a little too dispassionate for such a non-heady affair.  The point is…

while I live, I better second line

You tell it, Kermit Ruffins (the song’s his, and the visuals are a montage of second line footage from the Treme television series, in which New Orleans itself is the star):

And one bonus video.  The Shotgun Jazz Band performed “Over in the Glory Land” at the festival, and the band at the jazz mass at St. Augustine’s performed it the next day.  A lot of young people get the idea of tradition in New Orleans.

Alright…

Please don’t try this at home.  However, if you’re inclined to change the world, please DO try this in airports (as I did in Philadelphia yesterday) and other public spaces.  Be sure to let me know if it works.

Note: The first two steps are optional.

Step One – Hang out at Satchmofest in New Orleans.

Step Two – Make sure to catch the closing performance by Kermit Ruffins and the Barbecue Swingers, and kick loose, especially when they finish up with Skokiaan.  (If you’re not familiar with Mr. Ruffins, he’s one hell of a performer, often paid the compliment of embodying the spirit of Louis Armstrong himself.)

Step Three – Take your seat in the airport or other public space.

Step Four – Click on this YouTube video *

Step Five – As Kermit gets going, “a smile on every note” (a quote I read yesterday about clarinetist Pete Fountain, but which applies equally here), look at the people around you. Somehow he seems to be accompanying everybody, whether they’re walking energetically or dazedly, texting, drinking from a water bottle, contending with their kids. Because what he’s doing is playing the beauty of life.

Step Six – Check and see. Good chance you’re smiling.

Step Seven – Good chance what you’ve seen and are feeling will make you better equipped to bring out the smile in others.

Anyway, that’s my theory till proven otherwise.  Let’s build a body of empirical evidence, shall we?

And what the hell, go ahead and try this at home if you like.  I won’t tell.

* Kermit – should you ever see this, and would rather no one had put the recording on YouTube, let me know, and I’ll find some way to change this blogpost while still securing the improvement of the world.

Not sure I’ve ever been so pleased to discover room for improvement in my photography skills.

My pictures of the Gypsy Kumbia Orchestra at the Montreal Jazz Festival show that I would have been well-served by a faster shutter speed.  Oh well, next time.  The important thing is that those guys were flying and a joyous time was had by all.  And besides, they were making me sway against my will. 

Oh, and courtesy of Funkzie Groove, I now understand that The Beatles’ “Helter Skelter” is a funk song:

Most of my writing time of late has gone into determining if the book I started writing some years ago still has a pulse.  Time for a blog post, I say…

When I was young, I was easily embarrassed by my mother’s habit, when hearing a few words in conversation from a song she knew, of joyfully breaking into the song herself.

“Is the Expos game against the Phillies a day game or night game?” someone might ask.

“Night and daaay, you are the one,” she would sing back. “Only you beneath the moon and under the sun.”  And then, perhaps after a short self-conscious laugh over her impromptu joy, she would dutifully answer the question.

Meanwhile I would look for a place to hide.  I guess I might as well get over it, given that I realized a few years ago, I have the same habit.

For instance…        

While taking shots of this lamppost I’m in love with at the Outremont Metro station, giving the anonymous underground the quality of hominess, anyone within earshot would hear me singing – loudly and possibly on key – Herman’s Hermits’ rendition of “Leaning on the Lamppost at the Corner of the Street.”  How rewarded these commuters must have felt to be serenaded with such words of wisdom as:

She’s wonderful, she’s marvellous, she’s fabulous, she’s beautiful,
And anyone can understand why,
I’m leaning on a lamp-post at the corner of the street
In case a certain little lady comes by.

Then, after capturing a bit more of Outremont station…

 …I walked around the city for the next two days, sharing the song with everyone else.  Couldn’t help it.  Generosity is something else that comes naturally to my mother.

I’ve also been taking pictures of other things than Metro stations.  For example…

If you’d like to see some other images from my time here, this is a link to about 25 of my “greatest hits”:

https://plus.google.com/photos/117565792703398298858/albums/6029705927308071841?banner=pwa

And if you’d like to know what Herman and his hermits had to say:

A couple of days ago, with time to kill in the vicinity of the Decarie Expressway, I found myself wondering what would come of standing above it and watching the traffic for a while.

Immediately, I felt a rush in seeing the cars and trucks below shooting away as if blown from a supersonic cannon.  I marvelled at how exciting the simple, everyday pace of our lives can be.  And desperate, too.  So little time given to us, so much to do.  Everyone with different destinations day to day, in vehicles that mark our individuality with make and colour and price tag.  Everyone with the same ultimate destination.  We ride alongside one another.  We choose or are given space from one another.  And most of the time, we occupy ourselves with the day-to-day, and postpone thoughts about the ultimate.  As it should be, perhaps.

The video clip below runs a minute or so.  Perhaps you too might experience the rush, and find your own reflections in it.

And then, later that day.  I’m riding the 161 bus out of Mile End, the old world meets new world neighbourhood where I’m living.

“Go!  Canadiens!  Go!” says the sign on the bus.  And well it should.  The Habs will be going into game seven that night against Boston (and, ultimately, pull off an upset with grit, goaltending and classic Montreal Canadiens speed). 

But the exclamation points are a marked contrast against the bus ride.

It’s a warm day, the bus is full, not moving very fast, and I feel my nostrils habitually, almost involuntarily, making an aperture adjustment to filter out the odour of a day’s worth of jostling humanity.  And then I stop.  I want to feel this in my nose.  It’s not a pleasant smell, but it’s the smell of shared experience. 

At the front of the bus is an Orthodox Jewish man with a black kippah, and closer to me, a younger one with a beatnik’s beard and a designer variation on tie-dye.  There’s a black man in front of me in a jean suit (kind enough to defer to me when a seat becomes available) and another, not far behind him, in a glistening, silver suit, while towards the front, a young black girl in pigtails conjures associations with Norman Rockwell’s civil rights paintings.  A woman with a beautiful profile; a man across the aisle distractedly keeping time to an imagined drum beat with a water bottle, slapping it again the place where neck and shoulder meet.  A young woman who I think is Russian can’t help from laughing at the antics of a couple of pre-adolescent schoolmates.  I want to tell the girl with the blue hair, out-of-season woolen socks and a knapsack with an “Are you dead yet?” decal that she is beautiful, because I suspect she has no idea. 

And we are without our masks.  We are not acting for colleagues or friends or family.  We are just ourselves, pensive, contemplative, not wearing exclamation marks.  We don’t seem to be especially happy or sad, but we are reflecting at the end of a long day, which may be falling upon the end of a long week, a long year, a hard life.

I don’t only want to see what I’m seeing, though.  I want to do something with it.  So I tell myself that, when in the future, the conduct of people is other than I would like and I am tempted to act with impatience or indifference, that I will try instead to remember this shared journey.

I’m living in Montreal for the next while; an opportunity to spend more time with my family here, and to better know the city in which I grew up but left in my early twenties.

It also seems to be an opportunity to interact with my intuition a little more.  For instance, yesterday when I awoke, I spent a while starting at the parallelograms of early morning light on the wall.

And for some reason, the song “Take Me to the River” came to mind.  So I decided – or it was simply decided – I would make the five-mile walk along Clark Street down to the St. Lawrence River.

Doing my best to pay attention to the details, I noticed sunshine on my chest and birdsong in the air, the pleasure brought by a gradual downhill slope and the subtle discontentment that accompanied the uphills, my irritation with some people and my willingness to exchange it for curiosity about their behaviour.

And more people than were probably interested, were exposed to my spontaneous vocalizations of “Take Me to the River,” along with finger pumps accompanying the trumpets inside me head.

Also, oh yeah did I see stuff.

If interested, you can check out the entire web album (30 images in total):

https://plus.google.com/photos/105048799489063157726/albums/6013001022224491937?cfem=1

And finally, for good measure, here’s a version of Take Me to the River I’ve always liked, from The Commitments movie:

Rambling through the day – to, through, and out of High Park – I noticed a father guiding his daughter across an intersection with his foot while chatting on his cell, and a man walking in the park and texting, and two women in the park with buds in their ears, missing out on the birdsong – and I was inclined to judge them.  What happened to being in the world when in the world?  Then, remembering I have my own kind of expertise with non-presence, I pulled back on judgement and felt a little sadness for us all; the pressure we feel to always plug on, the diminished ability to ever plug out.  But watching a swan protect its nest by chasing a goose through Grenadier Pond, I was reminded that it’s not necessarily supposed to be easy.

Also, I saw some stuff:

Normally I ascribe a theme to what I post here.  The best I can come up with for this one is…

Hey!  Look at all these pictures without snow in them!

Mile End, Montreal

Balmutto and Charles, Toronto

Yonge Street

I know, I know…I should get with the program and give up my preference

of old and dilapidated over new and behemoth.  Just doesn’t seem to be in me.

Black and white aren’t colours? 

In watching the transition from winter to spring, I’ve been taking turns enjoying it and negotiating with it to happen faster.

(So far, I don’t seem to be calling the shots.)

Along the way, I’ve gotten to see fire and ice and whimsy…

What these images don’t quite capture was the adventure my afternoon companion and I enjoyed today in “progressing” along the ice in High Park.  But Paul Simon’s “Slip Sliding Away” does.  Plus it has this beautiful and heartbreaking verse:

And I know a father who had a son

He longed to tell him all the reasons for the things he’d done

He came a long way just to explain

He kissed his boy while he lay sleeping

And he turned around

And he headed home again

Darned if it didn’t happen again.

Winter. February. Who needs it?

Let’s go shopping instead.

But on the other hand, isn’t the way of getting the most out of winter to step into it instead?

Apparently so, at least this afternoon.

Okay, so it’s been trying to hide, but seen in downtown Toronto the last couple of days…colour! 

Question: are we required to offer gratitude to the browns, beiges and grays for helping us enjoy the reds and the blues?

Wanted out badly this afternoon.  Tempted to go to a movie, and use a big bag of popcorn as a hand warmer.  Reminded myself that there’s a decidedly finite amount of sunlight to be had this time of year.  Went instead, almost against my will, to the meeting place of the Humber River and Lake Ontario, and got to see this:

So often we think of winter as an occasion of loss – there goes the green grass, there fall the leaves, and the birds have left for their timeshares down south.  But lately, when I remember to lift my shoulders from their seasonal hunching, I’m noticing what the “loss” reveals:

And this morning, this has me thinking, “One Man’s Ceiling is Another Man’s Floor” 

So this is what happens during an ice storm…

Good thing the first bus that came along was full.  Gave me a chance to look up:

Show up at Grossman’s Tavern at the right hour of a sunny Sunday, and watch the light do its thing….and, oh yeah, catch some really fine trad jazz while you’re there:

Nuance to this autumn day….

…some green that’s in no hurry to go…

….and some auburn that didn’t get the memo about the approaching “dullness”

Since taking this shot while walking Toronto’s Beltline Trail a couple of days ago

I’ve found myself thinking of a line from Simon & Garfunkel’s Bleecker Street

“…I watched a shadow touch a shadow’s hand…”

Here’s the song:

Of course, it helps that Montreal has a knack for wearing “inclement” with panache:

So if I understand all this mindfulness propaganda I’m practicing (and valuing), I’m to embrace the arriving greyness, even if I am not required to love it

Fortunately, that doesn’t seem to require being inattentive to the non-grey

[Prelude: Life is good, real good.  Figured out how to embed the video that I hadn’t been able to add to the previous version of this blog post.]

Well if you’re going to get seduced by something, it might as well be the restoration of your soul.  Didn’t know I needed it, but a light breeze is coming in through the front door of the double-shotgun where I stay when in New Orleans (https://www.airbnb.com/rooms/71624), giving me a view of a weathered fence beside a more weathered house, and behind it a more freshly painted purple and burgundy job, and I am enjoying just the right kind of hangover.  The kind where I got drunk on one beer and a six-pack of New Orleans vibe.

Started with Amanda Shaw and the “Cute Guys” electrifying the crowd at the Louisiana Seafood Festival at City Park (not such great quality video, but Ms. Shaw and company’s sound makes up for it)

Continued at the Spotted Cat on Frenchmen

where a fusion trad jazz-funk band got a bunch of us on our feet and kept us there.  Before I knew it, a young hottie was flirting with me while the band played “I’ll Fly Away.”  She ditched me, though, for someone twenty years my senior.  Can’t blame her; he was a better dancer.

And then, it was John Boutte across the street at dba doing:

City of New Orleans

and Halleluyah

Somewhere, it dawns on me that I’m having a religious experience.  In the way that happens here at its best, it’s not just about performing, it’s about connecting.  So Boutte gets a “young cat” onstage for a duet on “At the Foot of Canal Street,” and tells us whatever stories are on his mind about his day and his life.  Next thing I know, a young couple have pushed their way in front.  I’m annoyed at first, but admit to myself that it’s sweet the way he really wants her to be close to the stage.  Then I notice their wardrobe.  He’s in a tux, she’s in a wedding gown. And Boutte tries to get the back of the house to hush (“that’ll never happen,” someone shouts out….dba is long and narrow and if you’re far away from the stage, you can’t see the performers) so he can sing a love song for them.  And then he ends the show with his Treme theme song, the newly married couple leading in the joy of it all:

When all’s said and done, he signs a couple of CDs for me, tells me about the time he saved Massey Hall in Toronto from going down in flames when a fellow performer tossed a cigarette in a trash can, and I talk about the connection I saw on stage and with the audience, and how it had the quality of a religious experience.  This weirds him out, I think, but I also think he can take it.

Oh, plus I discovered a delightful lyric in another song by someone I now know was named Little Milton:

If I don’t love you baby

Grits ain’t groceries

Eggs ain’t poultry

And Mona Lisa was a man

Coming soon to a blog post near this one…my tale of stepping out at the Prince of Wales second line…

Important discovery the past couple of days.

Turns out fall is a beautiful time of year.

Spread the word.

Next to actually getting to see this, the best part was that when I asked if I could take this picture, no one demanded I sign a waiver first.  Thank you, young woman who served me at the Hot Oven Bakery this morning:

And next to actually getting to see this, the best part is that the moment lasted a while:

Well, sure, the beauty of the leaves is ephemeral.  But at least the sky is eternal.

Oh…except that it’s not always that blue.

Or filled with interestingly shaped clouds. 

So what was my point again?  Oh, yeah!  No matter what, there’s surely going to be something interesting going on.  Even when the leaves call it a season…

So you know that thing about how the only constant is change?

Here’s what I’m wondering.  Assuming the theory of evolution is correct, I’m wondering if natural selection allowed our particular brand of hominoid to survive because we have a capacity for seeing some changes with joy as well as dread:

And here’s what I’m also wondering.  If natural selection has any say in the matter, what will happen to those of us who can manage the changing leaves, but are made to shudder by the pace of broader societal and technological transformation?

For now, though, I’ll try to satisfy myself with, “Hey!  Look how pretty the leaves are.”

That, and the pleasure of walking under a building I normally regard from a distance, to take time for a closer look:

And so, what I’m wondering is, who stuck all that 19^th century behind my 20^th (and early 21^st) century?

Just asking….

(with apologies to those who know enough about architecture to correct my time stamping….I like to think the “point” holds in any case)

We seem to have reached that time of year when the light is always bouncing off of things.* 

Since taking this shot a few days ago

and seeing metal pipes meld with bike melding with an imagined cyclist with the key to the lock, I’ve found myself thinking of these lyrics from Paul Simon’s “Love is Eternal Sacred Light”

How’d it all begin?  Started with a bang

Couple of light years later, stars and planets sang

Fire warmed the cold, waves of colours flew

Moonlight into gold, earth to green and blue…

Earth becomes a farm

Farmer takes a wife

Wife becomes a river and giver of life

Man becomes machine

Oil runs down his face

Machine becomes a man

With a bomb in the marketplace

As Mr. Simon seems to do so often, he finds room for the ominous, spiritual and playful almost in the same breath.  Later in the song, there’s a lyric: “I’m driving along in my automobile.  It’s a brand new pre-owned ’96 Ford.”

It’s Simcha Torah today, when Jewish tradition has celebrants reading the end of the Torah, with Moses’ death, then starting over with the creation of the universe.  Death gives way to rebirth, as hopefully (and effortfully) bombs in marketplaces will one day give way to rivers of life.

Here’s how the song goes.  Be sure to tell Paul I sent you:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WdrrEpYhATM

 * (or is it that we’ve reached that time of year when we’re more likely to be outdoors when the sun is low to the horizon….I think it IS this time of year, but anyone who knows otherwise is welcome to leave a comment)

Time to risk stretching a metaphor….

I think of this flotilla of clouds (last seen a year ago on Lac St. Louis in Quebec) as a reminder of the moments of our lives.  Each unique, each likely to command our attention as though they represent something eternal, but nonetheless moving along to be replaced by other apparent eternities.

Brought to you by Rosh Hashanah (the Jewish New Year) and my ongoing mission to walk the walk, talk the talk, and sit the sit…

You just never know when the world will sprout behind your back…

….or in front of your face

So is finding these hues of red amidst the concrete of the city an act of mindful attention or just camera gimmickry?  Of course, I know what I’d like the answer to be…

Note to self…sometimes the light is there to be found…