2012/07/08

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  Adam Cohen (fils de / son of Leonard)
  (and accessorily uncle to Rufus Wainwright's daughter)
  Spectacle de la Fête Nationale du Québec - Parc Maisonneuve - 24 juin 2012
  «Je suis Québécois« / «I am Quebecer»
  Scènes de Montréal - Montreal Scenes
  

  Liza

  Nothing but best words in our media for Liza Minnelli following her concert on Thursday. Unfortunately most of those words are in French so not very user-friendly for those not speaking it. However, I did find this one from The Gazette, Montreal's only English-language daily, and it follows the same tune as all the others.

  The Huffington Post - Québec has a set of pics, and the TVA site has a one minute video from the concert. I guess others will pop up on Youtube. [laterz: I found this one, quality so and so but Liza top notch as usual, even when she goes in for some French]. She received at the end of the concert the Montreal Jazz Festival Ella Fitzgerald Prize.

  

  Casseroles are not red squares

  I mentioned earlier that I thought a break from daily casseroling for the summer seemed to me to be a good idea. I forgot to add that the red square was not included, in my mind. I still continue to wear it but I changed the modus operandi. I used to wear it either on my shirt or attached to the zipper of my day bag (backpack?). It involved a lot of messing around with safety pins so I elected to wear it instead on the cargo shorts I usually wear in summer. I don't change those as often as shirts and I just attach them to one of the pocket flaps.

  

  Roaming the planet

  This week, the 'Quebec spring' is frontpage (plus a dossier inside) to the Courrier International. The Courrier International is a great anglophone press discrepancy. It is a magazine whose entire content is made only of articles published in newspapers or magazines all around the world, which are translated in French if needed. Some of the contents is about very current events or relating to current events of the past week, but there are also many dating from a few weeks or months. Not being newsfeeds but in-depth articles, they're just as relevant now as they were when originally published. Since they end up with a humongous bank of articles which they most likely index by subject, they have no problem mounting also a weekly dossier on a specific one, like in this case about our crisis. It's a crying shame, for them, that the English-speaking world does not have an equivalent. Reading an original article in extenso or with large excerpts is not the same at all as being told about a situation by a reporter who sees it with his own culturally tainted eyes. I do measure how privileged we Francos are. I've been quite unfaithful to the Courrier International lately, mostly because I don't have the time to read it. And the reason I don't have the time is that I pass way too much time on the internet. By doing so, I necessarily put myself in the same situation as the one I mention above about anglophones. I of course access sites whose language I understand, mostly French, a few in English. I don't read on the net stuff written in Japanese on Japanese sites, or in Hungarian in Hungarian sites, or in Serbian in a Zagreb paper. I may even miss going on the Mother Jones site, or on the Los Angeles Times site, or even if I can (a little) read Spanish, not go every day on the Reforma site in Mexico City, or read something about buddhism in the Zhongguo XinWen Zhoukan from the province of Xinglong in China, or about the social problems and inequalities in Oriental-Timor (a former Portuguese colony for 400 years) in the Lisbon Público, or read in Cairo's Al-Shourouk how some young Egyptians manage to liberate themselves from the Muslim Brothers (and what it costs them), or something about a gay marriage celebrated in Israel reported in Tel-Aviv's Ha'Aretz. These are just a few of the articles in this week's edition, and to the risk of repeating myself, the most important about them being that they are written by local people, and not from the viewpoint of outsiders. As per what they choose to publish, I have never seen any slant whatsoever in that magazine which is sold for reminders on all five continents. French, along with English, is one of the only two languages spoken on all the five continents. If they'd start pitting a country against another , they wouldn't stay in business for very long.

  French ranks third on the Web with 5% of the pages, after English (45%) and German (7%). This means that 43% of the webpages are in a language other than these three. And that number is expanding, not diminishing. Those who forecasted the eventual hegemony of English on the web seem to have bet on the wrong camel. By the way, the immense majority of French speakers live in Africa. They for now are barely present on the Net for obvious poverty reasons. If their economic status betters, and they stick to French as their language, watch out...

  This week's cover - «Montreal, Rebel City»

  

  A partial list of their sources for this week's edition. For each, they give additional information about the media in question. (click twice on pic for readable display)

  

  

  More of the same

  Another street sale on the Plaza (a 1 Km commercial stretch on St-Hubert St. where the sidewalks are covered with awnings). From Wednesday to Sunday. There are two each summer. Another one is slated some time in August. It causes traffic slowdowns in adjacent streets not geared for heavy traffic diverted there, of which mine, which brings its lot of honking impatient drivers.

  I strolled the street on Friday. Not to buy anything from the outside stands, but for other stuff I needed. Among which a plastic version of Michelin World map number 902. I had a paper version bought years ago and installed on a wall. It was used as a background for weird Christmas trees and the likes, and it was full of pushpin holes, not to mention that being the folded pocket paper version, it was full of said folds, even after decades. Considering the recent repainting of the walls, old map was elected for a trip in folded-for-a-long-time territory, and a brand new plasticized map was to be bought, which is now done. Remains only to put it on the wall where the other one was. [update: done tonight, Sunday, with the help of Friend].

  

  

  Swiss glitz

  The annual fireworks competition started last Saturday. I missed it first because I wasn't aware of it. This Saturday, I promised myself to correct the situation. Of course, as usual, I did everything too late including my supper (which in fact was too early by my standards but too late in the fireworks one), so I ended up finally leaving home at 21h15, barely giving me time to get there before they started, at 22h00. It was way too late for using a BIXI (first finding one, second finding a parking slot for it once there) so I either had to use my own bike which I haven't used in months, or scrap the idea of going all together. The country was Switzerland and for some obscure reason I thought it might not be worth it.

  That would have been a huge mistake. When you have been attending a fireworks competition for 25 years and they still manage to surprise you, I mean hey! Their half-hour was themed on motorized aviation. From one of the firm's co-owners: «We revisit the history of aviation, from propeller twin-engines to space rockets, passing by the Second World War and the jet planes from the film Top Gun. [..]. So as to help the public follow the historical evolution of the show, it will be accompanied by music from the soundtracks of many popular films, of which Top Gun and Apollo 13. [note: the founder of this relatively new firm (2004) has a formation in jewelry] Surprisingly, jewelry is not that far away from pyrotechnics. The big difference lies with jewels lasting a long time, while fireworks are ephemeral. I like the idea that people only remember the 'tableaux' they have liked. They become jewels in the mind»

  What he last said is so right, I couldn't have said it better myself. The fireworks are lit on the north side of Lac des Dauphins, a small lake on St-Hélène island, with paying public and La Ronde amusement park on the other side of the lake, with the island itself set in the middle of the St-Laurent river. With the Jacques-Bridge just above, closed and all lined up with spectators, and the thousands of others on both shores, it's a dream setting. At one point in the show, they seemed to be in between numbers or something, nothing was apparently happening, at least for all those who were not there on the site, but we were hearing music. Slowly some started to see a very small green light that seemed to hover back and forth and up and down over the lake like a flying saucer (I first thought it was a laser), and some spectators who had seen it were pointing at it and others started to see it too and soon everyone was watching that little unidentified flying object, literally. Slowly, it became a teensy bit brighter and started to alternate between emitting a green and a red light. After more than a minute, it started to have a small tail of sparks like on a comet and it continued its hovering for another minute or two, and eventually it started to blast, one at a time, single balls of multicolored light before eventually, all hell broke loose. I don't know how long it lasted, three or four minutes I'd say, but what I do know is that I had never seen anything like this before. I mean, when you know the scale of this urban setting, having maybe 100,000 people glued on watching that little thingie waltzing around for minutes was really something else. In another set, we started the hear the astronauts of Apollo 13 talking to Ground Control just prior to take-off, and then bright yellow (flame colored, really) fireworks started to spurt from the ground, then narrowing while at the same time becoming much higher and of an incredible fiery brightness, ending up in simulating the famous column of fire we have all seen gushing out of a Saturn rocket after take-off. In another tableau, it was that famous scene from Close Encounters of the Third Kind when they try to communicate with Aliens through the use of musical tones and matching boxes of light. The boxes were ground-level puffs of fireworks of different colors, each one's height corresponding to the tone (low to high), all puffing in perfect synchonicity with the tones in the music. And the grand finale, although it had as much fireworks launched at the same time as the other contestants who, for some of them which that I won't name, just seem to pile up their unused yearly supply of anything and just throw a match in it, had all the finesse and intricacy of a fine Swiss watch. Truly a great show. Frequent applauses by spectators also don't lie.

  As the guy said, little jewels that stay in the mind. Only downside, if it's really one, and this explaining that, could be the lack of emotion. Like most of the movies it referred to, this type of show is more about awe than soul. It's fantastic to watch, but what remains is not some general state of feeling good, but rather little moments of awe, which he calls jewels. I'm all for jewels, but I also appreciate more seeing them nested in their velvet lined cases.

  

  Bring your vitamins

  Yesterday afternoon was the yearly Carifiesta (Caribbean Fiesta) parade on boulevard René-Lévesque. Yesterday was day 3 of the 11 day Montréal Complètement Cirque international circus festival, with free outside shows spead over the city, the main one being at Place Emilie-Gamelin near the Berri-UQAM metro and the Gay Village. Speaking of the Village, I saw last night that the Montréal En Arts festival gave way to two Memorama high wooden booths installed smack in the street, for those who want to touch their balls, maybe. I'm talking of those pink ones hanging over the street. What were you thinking, you perverts! While the Swiss were launching their fireworks, another type of fireworks was lit up by the third major outside event and closing show of the Montreal Jazz Festival (total attendance: 2 million) and the group was Montreal's Chromeo, an electropunk group duo formed in 2004 by two French-speaking guys who sing in English, one Arab (Lebanese-born Patrick Gemayel) and the other a Jew (David Macklovitch who also happens to hold or is about to hold a Doctor's degree in French literature from Columbia University, if Wiki is right). These guys are pretty much Montreal all right. In this video (of theirs) they say 'en français' that everywhere else they say they are from Montreal so in Montreal they can say they are from here. I of course didn't know them. I'm 62 and listened to Georges Brassens and Serge Reggiani when I was their age so I have an excuse. There's also the month-long Zoofest Festival of which I don't know much except it's some kind of eclectic humor festival presented in sixteen different venues, more far out (kinky?) of what I can see than the Juste pour rire/Just for Laughs festival slated for later this month. With all this and the street sales and the other festivals I didn't mention and all those coming up, one has to be built strong to live in this city. Or liking to stay home.

  Yesterday in the news, there was this clip of an elated New York middle aged couple being interviewed in the afternoon on the Jazz Festival premises and they were saying that "you could never walk around with a beer in a New York festival". I was surprised. Sometimes it takes a stranger to make you realize that what you take for granted is not necessarily the case everywhere. Makes you appreciate it even more.

  

  Hot and hotter

  We're been in a heat wave for some time now. It was worse a few days ago. But ours is nothing compared to what they are having in the American midwest and most of the eastern part of that country.

  

  International tidbits

  Some things I garnered here and there in the Courrier International with their accompanying caption (retranslated by me to English when applicable) :

  [Mixed up] Csanád Szegedi is an extreme-right Hungarian Euro-MP known for his anti-semitism. He just learned that he himself has Jewish origins. «I don't say that I wasn't surprised» adding that it will take him «a certain time to digest the news» (picked up from Barikád in Budapest). Personally I wouldn't tear my shirt in shock if it would take him a very long time to digest and that in between he would have frequent urges to rush to the toilet.

  [Affirmative] Anderson Cooper: «The fact is that I am gay, that I have always been and will always be, and that I am all there is to be happy about, comfortable with myself, and proud» (picked up from The Daily Beast, New York). Anderson Cooper gay? Whodda thought!

  [Envious]Jordan Golson, sales clerk in a Salem (New Hamshire) Apple store: «When you see the company's profits and you see your paycheck at the end of the month , it hurts a little» (picked up from the New York Times). I've already mentioned what I think of Apple Inc.

  [Boosted] Mikhaïl Khvostov, permanent representative of Bielorussia at the Office of the United Nations in Geneva: «Bielorussia is a democratic country. The state of democracy is, under many aspects, much better in our country than in the other European countries» (picked up from Charter97, Minsk). Yeah, that's what we heard.

  

  Da food section

  Thursday: Yeah, I had some extra salmon cubes I had planned to find a way to make brochettes with. Done deed. I found this ridiculously easy recipe on the Net which is so simple to make that finding out how it can be that simple is harder than finding a bosonic god particle in a high speed collider. I'll put you in the secret: marinate fish and vegetables in lemon juice, salt, fresh herbs and paprika. Baste with olive oil at cooking time. That's it. I had put ¼ teaspoon (1,25 ml) of paprika in the marinade (just enough for the quantity of fish I had), plus sprinkled some more before basting the brochettes with oil. Next time, more paprika in the marinade. I added soy sauce to a part of the rice. It was good, but just as good without. Just a variation on a same theme. By the way (this is for Biggles) although it's dark outside usually when I eat, it is not that dark on the table nor on the balcony which is lighted with a ceiling lamp on the bottom of upstairs balcony. I think that my camera detects that rail lamp and darkens the rest of the picture with its automatic thingies.

  

  I am a blue freak. Blue cheese that is. For no particular reason other than it appealed to me and that I didn't know it and wanted to try it, I bought a point of La Roche Noire blue cheese at Capitol's at Marché Jean-Talon. I still had a little place to fill after the brochettes (or maybe I'm just a slut), so I had some of it as a meal ender. What a fantastic cheese! Exactly as they say on their site: «A firm cheese that will melt in your mouth and delight you with its creamy texture. With delicate blue veins of Penicillium roqueforti, it offers a unique and savoury flavour. This scrumptiously strong blue will win the heart of anyone who enjoys cheeses with character.» And it's a raw milk cheese, which explains a lot the above. We have around 300 different cheeses here in Québec and a lot of them are to die for. Taking a day off each week, it would take a year to taste them all, a new one each day.

  Friday: some leftovers (the cactus salad, the radishes, the Lebanese cucumber) accompanying that same (well not exactly the same one, one similar) prosciutto and vegetable quiche like the one I had last week. That Spanish wine, Agarena, is surprisingly good for a rather inexpensive wine at 9$ (by Québec's prices). I first bought a tempranillo wine when travelling in Spain, near Saragosa. Fruity but sturdy. I was hooked. This one is mixed with cabernet-sauvignon grapes, a nice marriage.

  

  Saturday: quick meal for someone rushing to not miss the fireworks. Once again, leftovers. Leftover of ham, leftover of a pack of maltagliati egg pasta and leftover of Agarena wine. The garlic, the parsley, the bread, the butter and the olive oil were not leftovers. Those pasta are quite thin, about 1mm. You can almost see through them. And they cook in a jiffy, 2 to 3 minutes which in the circumstances was really appreciated. There are two cloves of chopped garlic in there. If going on a date, try something else, unless both have eaten the same. Garlic is antiseptic. It shuns away germs. Even two-legged ones at times. For remembrance, 'maltagliati' which translates by 'mal taillés' in French, means 'not well cut'. They are lasagna-like pasta but cut in small irregular shapes.

  

  Today, mid-day: This is totally disgusting. I mean, everyone knows that the espresso coffee cup should be on the right side of the placemat, not on the left side. Talk of bad table manners! I did change it after the pic was taken, to my discharge.

  It is a makeshift strawberry shortcake made with fresh Québec strawberries and home-whipped heavy cream (35%). They have those yellowish cakes which they sell by the square at the latino grocery store and which contain either peaches or apricots, I'm not sure, but are perfect to use when one can't make himself the real homemade shortcake cake needed to make strawberry shortcakes. I understand myself. Besides I'd have to ask my mother how to make that cake because right off the bat, I wouldn't know the exact recipe. Anyways, that shortcake is also disgusting..... ly good!

  

  Finally, this evening: Mussels with white wine, tomatoes, a bouquet garni and half a ton of garlic. And fries cooked in duck fat. Friend came for supper which explains the wine glass on the left side. He is left-handed. He also puts butter on his bread, something I never do since my first trip to Europe many, many years ago, and where (in France at least) I never saw any butter on the table in restaurants anywhere. The wine used for both the recipe and served at the table is a Léon Beyer Alsace Riesling. Good stuff.

  

  I mentioned to Friend my little adventure with the shrimps turned salmon. When I told him how expensive the shrimps were, he had the kind attention to make me realize I had made a total fool of myself. I erroneously estimated that at 26$ a kilo, the shrimps were selling at the equivalent of 50 some dollars a pound. Looks like my internal conversion gizmo badly needs replacement since in fact it was more like less than half of 26$ for a pound, or roughly 12$. There's 2,2 pounds in a kilo, not 2,2 kilos in a pound. Silly (dyslexic?) me. And maybe not. This just heightens my belief that this imperial measurement system is the dumbest system on earth. Since we moved to the International System of Measurement (called by some the 'metric system') in the late sixties, I try the best I can to only think with this new system and I curse the day I was born in that other idiotic one and left lingering in it for some twenty years before finally accessing a logical system. However, the damage was done, and among the population, there is still a lot of resistance and this is generated a lot by being neighbors to the only country in the world which still measures distances by referring to the length of the foot of someone who died centuries ago and maybe even may never have existed. Being the mightiest country on earth does not preclude being the most retarded on some aspects. What I find the most stupid, on a societal point of view, is that kids are only thought the metric system at school (I'm talking of Québec, elsewhere in Canada I presume it's the same) and have to learn the idiotic system on top of that afterwards because some of their dumbfuck parents lost their key giving access to evolution.

  I realized all the stupidity of the Imperial system when I started to measure the areas I wanted to paint in my apartment, trying to add all the bits of walls and ceilings to find out how many square feet they represented, and thus how much paint I needed. Tell me, quick, how much square feet there are in four areas measuring respectively 10 feet 4 inches by 18 feet 3 inches, 3 feet 2 inches by 17 inches, 18 feet 3 inches by 8 feet, six inches by 6 feet. Now try the same with measures in centimeters or meters converted to centimeters (that's a hard one - like how many cents in a dollar? Yup, 100. Same for meters. There's 100 centimeters in a meter). So if your wall is 6,4 meters long or 6 meters 40 centimeters, it's also by magic 640 centimeters. If you learned how to count up to ten and you know the 0 was invented by the Arabs, you're in business. If you measure everything in centimeters, using the same basic formulas (length by width) for each, add them up and then divide by 10,000, what do you get? Gee, square meters. Time of calculation: seconds. Margin of error: none. Frankly it just boggles the mind that some still insist on using the Imperial system. It's either lazyness or stupidity. I go for the first. Lazyness comes easy to the powerful sitting on their power. Same for the weather. I don't remember at all what 84F feels like, and I don't want to be reminded how it felt. I know that if I reach 100C inside I'm going to vaporize and that's good enough for me. Just as I do know that at +1 water is liquid and at -1 it's frozen. I don't remember how cold 0˚F is and what it means (in fact sweet fuckall besides being 32 less than 32) so that one also can stay forever in the dump of my life's garbage.

  [Add-on:] I wrote the above late last night and was very tired. I realize I forgot to mention that I don't really care personally what system people use elsewhere, why should I? (I don't understand, but that's something else). After all, it's THEIR business. What angries me is when it messes with MY own life. Examples abound, a dime a dozen. Each a little hassle, but added together they become highly irritant. Like Canadian Tire, a large automotive/general store chain where I bought home-brand spare oil for my car in one litre plastic containers. One day, no more one litre. They suddenly had become 946 ml. What the heck is 946 ml? Well it's an American quart, which is not even the old Canadian quart because a US gallon and an Imperial gallon are not the same, though each contain four quarts. Why all this? Because Canadian Tire was formerly owned by Canadians and now it is owned by American interests (wholly or partially, I don't know and don't care) and they import from the States alreadly packaged oil in of course American sized containers. All they do is stamp another label on it and voilà. On the other hand another company, Castrol, sells in Canada oil packaged in the U.S. and in 1 litre formats. Why they can and the others not? Search me. My take goes for 'profit margin'. Castrol is more expensive but I'm the kind of person to not mind paying more rather than being laughed at by foreigners. Besides, Castrol is better oil to start with so maybe the price differential is not even worth mentioning. This is just one example that can be repeated again and again. Then there's the mental block in English Canada. The "weather" part of the system was implemented the first, in the late sixties. In Québec, it became Celsius and that's that. In English Canada, it took them thirty frickin' years to finally stop always giving both C and F degrees. It's pretty much the same with the other components of the system. But even in Québec, some forces of darkness (in my book) are working hard to stay in the dark. There's a reason for this. In the mid-eighties, a Conservative government was elected in Ottawa and under pressure from English Canada, they started to be laxed about using both the old and the new system, you know, not to bully people and other bullshit reasons like that. It is now to a point that some weeks ago, I went to a fish store at marché Jean-Talon where I bought a fillet not asking how it weighed. When I got at the cash, I realized the label was in pounds only. This is totally illegal in Canada but just try to make a complaint, with the current dinosaur Conservative government... In supermarkets, you have to wear glasses to see the price in kilos (the only official measure I remind) while the price in pounds can be ten times larger. It was not like that before. It slowly came about because the goverment lets do. So I have to fight and argue to be served in the official measure of my own country, and it irritates me one hell of a lot. When you change such a system, you cannot let the old and the new cohabitate. Ask the French when they started using the new Franc. It took decades and decades before people stopped talking in "ancien francs". It's obvious like a zit in the face that changes in mentality only comes when forced to. If the old system is still used, there's no incentive to do so. The first to blame is the Canadian government (the Conservatives essentially) who still today present the metric system as some kind of commie plot forced down their throats by Quebec, purposely ignoring that the metric system is the official system worldwide except in a neighboring place which they asslick like there's no tomorrow. And what pisses me off grand is that I, as a citizen, did the required efforts, and it was not easy and still isn't, while those who sat on their asses got and, more and more, get away with it. And if it still isn't easy, it's that I am confronted in my daily life with constant reminders of the old system, which I used for twenty years, and worse, my twenty first ones, which makes it even harder. I have and always had a huge problem with the cromagnon type of people. And what does all this tell young people? That what they are taught in school is bullshit. And then they wonder why they hit the streets with red squares on their tits.

  

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