2012/02/16

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  Hiver / Winter
  Scènes de Montréal - Montreal Scenes
  

  ADDENDUM Feb 20

  Québec's Isabelle Boulay in duo with France's Benjamin Biolay (sigh) singing a song I listened to over and over in the late sixties in my college student residence room. Good times. Entering the summer of my life. The sun was shining in my eyes, back then. Ohh-oh-oh summer wine, indeed.

  

  Le 2-22

  I was to explain the story behing that building featured as my previous post's header, but I don't have the time right now. Next post maybe.

  

  Flag? What flag?

  In English Canada, yesterday was Flag Day. They are very proud of their flag, you know, the one that had to be forced down their throat by a Parliament Act on February 15, 1965. Back then, they wanted to keep that old red thing with the British thingie in the corner. The CBC had/has lots of coverage about the flag and Canadian pride on its site and in their news. In a diaporama where people splash this pride, all they could find in Quebec was this man [frame #7] from Kirkland in the west island of Montreal, a small anglo-ghetto town where hearing French is as common as hearing Swahili, and whose pastime was to fly little planes in Hawkesbury in nearby Ontario (you know, where they are civilized ) and whose pride was our taming of winter, something uniquely Canadian he says (yeah, go tell that to the Russians, the Norwegians, the Finnish, etc).

  In Québec, whether at Radio-Canada or anywhere else, it was «Flag What?» No mention whatsoever, nowhere.

  However, this February 15 happened to be the 400th birth anniversary of Paul de Chomedey, Sieur de Maisonneuve, a devout Catholic who at the age of 30 came here in 1642 to found Montreal, along with Jeanne Mance, with in mind the intention to establish cordial and respectful relationships with the then called "Savages", which at the time was not a derogatory term at all. This anniversary, it, was talked about a little, especially on Radio-Canada's radio. De Maisonneuve did not find what he expected, the Iroquois then being at war with the French and other Amerindian nations, encouraged and armed by the Dutch and English who were already settled more in the south (New England and lower). And he had the governor of Quebec City, founded in 1608, not happy at all with a new settlement being set up in Montreal, since he knew it was a geographically more interesting place, especially as fur trade went. But the spirit of De Maisonneuve and Jeanne Mance endured and still remains today. Nowadays, the Iroquois are spread in the north-eastern United States and Ontario for most, and a small percentage live in Kahnawake, facing Montreal across its south shore, and Akwesasne, on the northern side. Most of the Iroquois now only speak English. Only a few still speak Iroquois, and they are for most those who live in Québec (the intolerant one, remember? ). It was also in Montreal that in 1701 was signed the Great Peace of Montreal of which I talked before, and this 59 years after De Maisonneuve first set foot here. He didn't see in his lifetime what he had come to do becoming a reality, but history remembers.

  From the Wikipedia page about the Great Peace (bold is mine):

  Commerce and exploratory expeditions quietly resumed in peace after the signing of the treaty. The French explorer Cadillac left Montreal to explore the Great Lakes region, eventually founding the city of Detroit, which had a promising future. Jesuit priests resumed their spiritual mission-based work in the north. The Great Peace of Montreal is a unique diplomatic event in the history of the Americas. The treaty is still valid and recognized as such by the Native American tribes involved.

  The French, in negotiating followed their traditional policy in the Americas, where the relationship with the natives was characterized by mutual respect and admiration and based on dialogue and negotiation. According to the 19th century historian Francis Parkman:

  "Spanish civilization crushed the Indian; English civilization scorned and neglected him; French civilization embraced and cherished him"
  —Francis Parkman.[2]

  As per their flag, they can shove it. It belongs to those who scorned and neglected [the Amerindians]. I don't need that kind of symbol to create myself an identity as they are lamentably trying to do. I already have one, one whose roots are four centuries old, and of which I certainly am anything but ashamed of. And this goes for both my Acadian and Quebecer identities. Two different peoples, but a common French ancestry, and a common approach towards the first inhabitants of this continent. As per the taming of winter, it's the Amerindians who showed us how to survive here. You should have mentioned that, Mister Proud Canadian from Kirkland, you know, those from which the name Canada itself comes from.

  

  Kissings

  Two Thai men broke the record of the world's longest continuous kiss. Times are achangin' aren't they? Oh, by the way, you can kiss my ass, Santorums and assimilated. And after, why not try to kiss everyone goodbye, while you're at it?

  

  

  The wraths of winter

  The Iles-de-la-Madeleine (Magdalen Islands) is a small archipelago populated majorly by Acadians who fled the Deportation of 1755, and which is located smack in the middle of the Gulf of St-Lawrence. Winters there are usually milder than on the continent. However this year, they got showered with a fierce ice storm that left over 230 electricity poles severed or broken, all this with a -30C outside temperature. There is almost no forest on those islands so dwellings are heated by electricity. A lot of inhabitants had to find some shelter among relatives who still had power, or at emergency shelters where they had generators. Hydro-Québec had to import by boat all the poles and equipment and personel to fix the mess.

  Diaporama of the storm's aftermath here -> DIAPORAMA

  I have been a few times to the Islands. Once in summer, in August, when the temperatures are the most pleasant. It's a long trip, you first have to travel through New Brunswick, then take a ferry to reach Prince Edward Island (then, now there's a bridge), and after crossing the island, take another ferry for a five hour trip to the Magdalen Islands. But I was there also before, in 1982. I was in winter, and back then I was working in Sept-Iles on Québec's north shore, or geographically, on the north end of the Gulf of St-Lawrence. For my work, I had taken the plane for a 24 hour stint, arriving one day and leaving the next, the time to take the inventory of the three or four houses our department had there. Unfortunately for me, and more so for the Islanders, that night coincided with the snow storm of the century.

  From Environment Canada's 1982 archives (translated): «A storm hits the gulf of St-Lawrence, paralyzing the region for a week. In the Magdalen Islands, 80 km/h winds transformed the 60 cm of snow that had fallen into 7 meter high snow banks. Aerial and maritime communications stopped, telephone lines were severed, and power failures deprived many of heating. »

  For almost one whole week, I was stranded in a hotel, and every passing day there was less and less food available. In the end, it was the same menu, mostly from canned food. We had heat because of the hotel's generators, I suspect, but I don't remember how much. There was no way to communicate with the outside world except by listening to the newly inaugurated community radio, where there were reports about the situation and more so where they supplied information on the whereabouts of people in snowmobiles passing from house to house to pick up the sick and pregnant women about to deliver so as to bring them to the hospital in Cap-aux-Meules (where I was). Some of those villages are quite remote from Cap-aux-Meules. It was impossible to go outside, the storm was raging non stop and besides, to go where? There were no roads anymore. It never snows much in the Islands and the only two snow plows broke in the matter of hours. Where there used to be roads, it was now a continuous snow blanket reaching almost as high as the teleophone poles. After five days, the storm finally diminished. A first plane landed at the airport on that or the next day. But the airport was on another island and the roads leading to it were not reopened yet. Snow removal equipment was arriving by boat at the wharf. My hotel (which still exists) was on a hill overlooking Cap-aux-Meules, with in normal times a fantastic view of Cap-aux-Meules and of its port and the ferry. But these were not normal times. From my room all I saw was snow surrounding us. Eventually, they managed to open some kind of roofless tunnel on the road going downhill, where there was the center of Cap-aux-Meules but more so a brasserie (beer pub) which had just reopened. I probably heard about it on the radio. I strolled down, eerily, between those two massive walls of snow on each side of the tunnel, and entered the pub. In there, some musicians (they are all musicians over there) were playing lively traditional music and everyone was looking at each other, smiling with that kind of blissfull look that you can only see in the eyes of survivors. It took a few days before the road and the bridge leading to Hâvre-aux-Maisons (where is the airport) were reopened and that I could board a plane bringing me back to Sept-Iles. A week I will never forget. And assurely the longest 24 hour trip of my life.

  It had all started on a February 17 of 1982, I read in that archive. Thirty years exactly, tomorrow. Talk of a coincidence... I was 31.

  

  The wraths of poverty

  Terrible, terrible what happened in Honduras, with those 350 prisoners dead in a prison fire. Social equality is inversely proportional to the size of a society's penitentiary system. That's what makes this tragedy even more tragic. Many of those prisoners should not have been there in the first place.

  

  Who's next?

  I am not at all a fan of pop music and am generally ignorant of that milieu, that is both the songs and who sings them. I of course had heard the names of Amy Winehouse or Whitney Houston, but if you had put me in a room and played one of their songs and asked me who it was who was singing, I wouldn't have had a clue. This said, when one of them makes the news, I will read about all I missed. Among those, this excerpt from a column by Marc Cassivi in La Presse (Feb 14): http://www.cyberpresse.ca/chroniqueurs/marc-cassivi/201202/14/01-4495698-lange-dechu.php?utm_categorieinterne=trafficdrivers&utm_contenuinterne=cyberpresse_B13b_marc-cassivi_3259_section_POS1

  «From the summit of the rainbow to the depths of the ditches, from the image (created from scratch?) of a balanced young woman to that of a human wreck eaten by her demons, the life of Whitney Houston will have corresponded to the worst cliches of American showbizz. Archtypal Musicography, «from the firmament of stars to the inmost depths of drugs», without redemption at the last chapter.

  The story of the long and painful fall, in view of all, of a queen of pop, in an era of ready-to-discard.

  Listening to the homage, touching, sober and felt, by Jennifer Hudson to Whitney Houston, Sunday, at the Grammies, I have asked myself how many among the current pop singers - - Rihanna, Nicki Minaj, Katy Perry -, would end up with the same fate as «The Voice». How many of them are condemned to be out of date before hitting 35? To not know how to manage the after-effects of their celebrity? To extinguish themselves like Amy Winehouse?

  She is handsome, Adele. She has a rich, textured, exceptional voice. Her ballad Someone Like You, inspired by a broken love relationship, is on its way to become, also, a standard for Star Académie style singing contests (Star Académie is a local tv show). The British woman has known celebrity at the age of 22. Whitney Houston had the same age when she appeared, as a light, on the international pop scene. No one suspected the darkness that was in store for her.»

  Monday Celine Dion, in a phone interview for (I think) the television show Good Morning America, said that she was scared shitless (she used other words of course), for herself that is, of that "milieu" laden with booze and drugs (those words, she did say) and that it was the main reason why she did not participate at all in the showbusiness social life, preferring to stay home.

  Monday also, it was learned that Houston's record companies didn't wait for her body to get cold before heavily and indecently boosting the price of her albums. And when her golden hearse arrived form the airport in Jersey, lots of people were there already sporting t-shirts with her face on it, with dates of birth/death. Profiterring from human misery. You can find a bastard at almost every street corner on this planet. In some places more than others.

  Every day, in Mexico, they find bodies, or parts thereof, scattered here and there, savagely slain by the narcos. When one of those American celebrities dies after having indulged heavily in drugs for years, sometimes I wonder if they asked themselves, if only just once in their lifetime, if they could be the direct cause of this carnage. There's no offer when there's no demand. And everyone knows where the demand comes from.

  ADDENDUM (Feb. 18)

  Pierre Foglia had this in his column Thurday morning (my translation):

  « Speaking of silence...

  Is Whitney Houston still going to die for long, you think? As long as Michael Jackson? Mrs Houston died on Saturday, yet, as I write these lines, five days later, she continues to die two or three hours a day on NBC, Fox, ABC, CBS... this is a question addressed to no one in particular: couldn't she just be left alone? Couldn't we stop killing her and rekilling her with a bunch of cliches, of repetitions, of "I will always love you"? Five days later, the tribute acts as a sledge-hammer that flattens the body a little more each time.

  Speaking of silence, it is very often mistaken, unfortunately, for oblivion. »

  As I write this, it's still Whitney Houston wall-to-wall on CNN. Seven days now... Just how much money can they still extract from her corpse?

  

  Food section

  There's a Chilean butcher shop and grocery store on Beaubien St where the sell delicious chicken or beef empanadas, Chili style. Besides the meat and onions, they also put in each one a half hard-boiled egg. ¡Muy sabroso! This one is an "empanada de res", res being beef. The sauce in the salad is mine and has chipotle in it. A recipe I found on some American site.

  

  The other day, I bought at Milano a pack of cheese-stuffed tortellini imported from Italy. They are described as "shelf stable" which means I gather that they don't need to be refrigerated prior to the pack being opened. They are egg pastas, and the cheese is pecorino romano, ricotta, and two hard cheeses. Surprisingly there is a rather short list of conservatives and the likes, considering that they can stay on the shelf. They were pretty good, and the 250g pack made for two meals. They were quite large. Maybe they should be called tortellis. I don't know where they come from exactly in Italy, because they are being imported here by a Canadian company founded by some Dutch people in the 50s, for the initial purpose to import Dutch fish. Eventually the company grew and they created their home brand Emma for some of the products they import from Italy. They don't give more info on the package other than it's made in Italy. The sauce is mine. I call it my "sauce rosée pour pâtes". It's not obvious by the looks, but it contains garlic, onion, red peppers, sugar, red wine, cream, parsley, tomato sauce, olive oil, and some hot peppers (jalapeño or serrano). Not to brag, but it's not bad at all.

  

  Yesterday's merguez with risotto alla Milanese. Not shown on the pic, a dollop of Dijon mustard which I added later near the sausages. Nothing complicated but always quite tasteful.

  

  This evening (well, not very long from now), it's gonna be lobster and potato salad. Lobster (live, I never buy cooked lobster) was on special at Loblaw's so I walked there the day before yesterday and bought two, because they were advertised at 1 to 1¼ pounds. I ended up with 1,3 Kg for both which is near three pounds. I'm not that hungry so I have a cinch one will be enough. We'll see. With lobster we never know. A certain times of the year they change carapace and when this happens they are almost empty inside. And as per meat to carapace ratio goes, the smaller the lobster, the smaller the ratio, aka less meat per overall weight. I cooked them the day I bought them and they were in the fridge since. Loblaw's is a large supermarket chain and the closest to my pad is a 3,6 Km round trip. It's a nice walk, although short of the 5 Km I should be doing daily and just about never do. On the other hand, in my book, 3,6 is better than 0. As they say in business circles, there's no small profit.

  

  And in there somewhere (the evening of the 12th in fact), another batch of my world famous clover and brandy flavored Seville oranges marmalade. It's supposed to be cognac but I don't have any cognac while I do have VSOP brandy and that's because VSOP brandy is three times cheaper than VSOP cognac so brandy it is and that's that. Anyone have complaints just has to send me a cheque for the price differencial and cognac it will be. I don't know how it happened, but I ended up with the equivalent of nine 125ml jars while usually it's more like six and something. I did add a teensy bit more sugar but that's because I included not only the lemon juice this time around, but also some of its peel. But more so, it's probably because I used a different technique to remove the white stuff from the peels (before chopping them into fine pieces) and I maybe left more of it on the peel. I did have to skim a few times, more than usual. This added with the extra lemon peel probably made the difference. (as if anyone cared )

  

  Honky Tonk

  Now let's bring a little Cajun sunshine in here.

  La Porte d'en arrière - D.L. Menard (English lyrics below) both picked up on the Net.

  Moi et la belle on avait été-z-au bal
  on a passé dans tous les honkytonks
  s'en a rev'nu le lendemain matin
  le jour était apres se casser
  j'ai passé dedans la porte en arriere

  l'apres-midi moi j'étais au village
  et je m'ai saoulé que je pouvais plus marcher
  ils m'ont ramené back a la maison
  il y avait de la compagnie, c'était du monde étranger
  J'ai passé dedans le porte en arriere

  mon vieux pere un soir quand j'arrivais
  il a essayé de changer mon idée
  j'ai pas écouté, moi j'avais trop la tete dure
  "un jour a venir, mon neg', tu vas avoir du regret
  t'as passé dedans la porte en arriere"

  j'ai eu un tas des amis tant que j'avais de l'argent
  asteur j'ai plus d'argent mais ils voulont plus me voir
  j'ai été dans le village et moi je m'ai mis dans le tracas
  la loi m'a ramassé, moi je suis parti dans la prison
  on va passer dedans la porte en arriere
  =====================================

  Me and my girl had gone to the dance
  we went to all the honky-tonks
  we came back the next morning
  the day was breaking
  I passed in by the back door

  that afternoon I was at the village
  I got so drunk I couldn't walk
  they brought me back to the house
  there was company there, some strangers
  I passed in by the back door

  my old father, one evening when I arrived
  he tried to change my way of looking at things
  I didn't listen to him, I had too hard a head
  "a day will come, my friend, you'll be sorry,
  you passed in by the back door"

  I had a lot of friends when I had money
  now that I don't have any money they won't see me anymore
  I was in town, I got myself in trouble
  the law picked me up, and I was put in jail,
  I'm gonna' pass in through the back door

  They translated mon nèg' by my friend. Political correctness I guess. Another site was more true to the lyrics although they obviously feared net censorships since they wrote "my n/i/g/g/e/r". The expression "mon nèg'" in this song, on first glance, is not as derogatory as "my nig'" would be in English. The Cajuns were closer to the Blacks than the other "Whites", which does not mean that some of them in the richer spheres were not slave owners themselves back then. Of what I know, they would be much more to the right than the left, politically.

  

  • 18:43
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