2013/08/25

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  Rue Ste-Catherine – Village Gai
  Photo © Uncredited – Huffington Post Québec
  Scènes de Montréal – Montreal Scenes
  

  Above

  A rare aerial view of Ste-Catherine St in the stretch that flows through the Gay Village, from St-Hubert to Papineau (here looking westwards) which is also the one covered with those pink balls. The “Village” spans over the whole area seen on this pic, and more, especially on the right where it extends pretty much up to Sherbrooke St. But it is not a ghetto as such. Although there is a much greater concentration of gays in the Village than in other parts of the city, it is also home to many non-gays, including families with children. But that stretch of Ste-Catherine is where most catering-to-gays businesses are located. This area, part of what is called the “Centre-Sud”, used to be quite poor and runned-down, but the arrival of those gays in the eighties changed a lot of this, revitalizing the area.

  

  Life’s little hassles

  For more than a week, my life has been kind of monopolized by stuff related to my health: infection, short stay at the emergency ward, antibiotics, three scheduled appointments with as many doctors/specialists, plus the usual chores like three mornings per week reserved for bandage replacement and two afternoons for physiotherapy, plus daily separate exercises at home for my left arm and hand. Oh, and a haircut with that (that one was for mental health ). Not to complain, just to explain why I may become scarce on the net at times.

  

  Bottleneck

  During the same period, there was enough going on on this planet to post five times a day. So where do I start?

  

  Music updates

  When I attended the OSM concert on the Olympic stadium’s esplanade, as you may recall, I couldn’t see anything of the stage. But it sure wasn’t the case for the area just below the ramp where I was standing. Listening to the music, I indulged into what I like doing, people watching. I mean in almost an anthropological way. The crescent shaped area was covered with lawn and many people had brought folding chairs or some kind of matting with them. There was a gay couple there sitting directly on the grass, twenties with one older than the other, and the older one was regularly gaving sweet loving kisses on his companion’s head.

  To their right, three couples and two babies were installed on three opened sleeping bags which they had joined together to form a round area. There was a mature man who was standing often, taking pics at times, while his female companion was resting on her heels. To her left, a hunky bald guy and his gal were having some good time with their barely able to stand up toddler. Facing these two couples, a young (and quite handsome) guy was lying down on his back with his head resting on his female companion’s lap, who was slowly caressing his hair all the time, as she would have done if he’d been also a toddler. A modern version of La Pietà.

  A little to the upper left of all these people, four young guys in their twenties had installed their folding chairs facing each other so as to form a square. They all had portable phones whose screen was the center of all their attention. I never saw them speaking to each other. Four chairs, four planets. One left before the end and the other three a little after.

  On my and their right (as I saw it), three young guys had aligned their folding chairs contiguously in a single row. Two of them had portable phones and occasionally spoke to each other. The third one had no phone and seemed bored stiff. The three of them stayed until the end. My take is that the two with phones were maybe together (aka lovers), while the other one was boyfriendless, so to speak. I can be wrong about this but not about their being gay. As with the other four, I’ve yet to see hetero young guys in their twenties whose idea of a fun outing together is going to an outdoor classical concert, carrying a folding chair in a shoulder bag.

  Up on the ramp where I was, I had my share of emotions, so to speak. On my left side, there was a couple with a very young girl, about three years old. On my right, an elderly man with an even younger toddler, maybe two. Granddad/grandson I guess. He had put the kid standing on the top of the ramp, which is not that wide (see pic) and about 4 meters above the lawn area below. He was barely holding the kid, who like any kid that age just didn’t stay put. It drove me crazy, always checking with side vision if he wasn’t about to fall. At one point, it came so close that in an automatic and flash gesture I extended my arm to hold him, in case. He didn’t fall. I said nothing, not even looking at the guy. But I think he got the message. Those on the left were not that much better, their little girl sitting instead of standing up, but she was also anything but in a stable position. I know that these days, parents don’t want their kids to be restrained, it’s part of those new ‘raising children’ methods supposedly favoring their blossoming into perfect adults, but seems to me there is a damn limit called ‘responsibility’.

  

  The weekend following the stadium concert, the Montreal Symphony Orchestra organized for a second year a “Virée classique” in four halls of the Place des Arts complex. Thirty 45-minute concerts for everyone, from kids to the elderly. A lot of Mozart, and some others. “Virée” in French (in Québec at least) is often used in the expression “faire la virée des bars” and means hopping from one bar to another during a whole evening, or afternoon if one is so inclined. This is another one of Kent Nagano’s ideas. It’s some kind of Nuit Blanche in the daytime. I read Monday that over 20,000 attended. But not me. On Friday evening I was in a hospital emergency ward, and Saturday I completely forgot about it.

  That Saturday afternoon however, I did go for an errand on boul. St-Laurent in Little Italy. I had forgotten that it was Italy week, so the street was closed to traffic. It was also the pit stop of another of those roaming pianos. This one was white. Or had once been.

  

  

  LGBTA and Putin

  Sunday was the Gay Pride parade, closing Gay Pride week. As previously mentioned on this blog, we have two major gay events here, Divers/Cité usually in late July, and Fierté Gaie (Gay Pride itself) held around the middle of August. The first one is now mainly staged at the Old Port and is the one with all the big outdoor shows (drags etc) and dances. Gay Pride is mostly in the Village (Ste-Catherine st), besides also organizing the annual parade, which runs on boul. René-Lévesque. It was the longest ever I heard in the news. I don’t recall why we have two gay events, just as we have two Symphony orchestras in Montreal (the other is Orchestre Métropolitain). I hadn’t been to the parade in years for all sorts of reasons, so this year I decided to go check things out. Long it was indeed, at least 2,4 km (1,5 miles) between Guy and Sanguinet St. And packed, with continuous music. At some point, there were long standstills, maybe it bottlenecked at arrival. There were not that many floats, instead hundreds of participants of all ages (babies to elderly) representing all sorts of organizations working for the betterment of LGBTA people, and an answer to Putin. A protest against his law was the theme of the parade, and its theme color was red. Overly provocative behaviors or clothings (or absence thereof) was not part of this parade. I mean like men parading with their schlong in open air. At some point in the evolution of gay acceptance in a society, this becomes redundant, if not squarely counter-productive.

  There was a record number of politicians heading the parade, among which the heads of the three opposition parties in Ottawa and, for the first time ever, the Premier of Québec herself. She was elected, for remembrance, on the same day I was first operated upon last September. Also there the mayor of Montreal and a bunch of wannabes (elections this fall). There was strictly no one representing Harper’s federal government but we had a message for him, which this time around he couldn’t have his police stop.

  Banner: “Stephen Harper Hates Us”

  

  Oops… photo mix-up and memory failure: this group represents a monoparental association. The group before them were the ones catering to transgender children. . They also had kids but no infants (not in my pics anyways).

  

  During one of the long stalemates, this pooch who kept itself under the shadow of the large flag decided to frankly sit and rest.

  

  The traditional minute of silence, at around 15h00. Everything stopped, music, motors, vehicle ignitions cut off, in a wave starting from the beginning of the parade. Some organisers with walkie-talkies were preceding the wave and advising spectators and marchers 30 seconds in advance. Afterwards, everything came back alive the same way, starting from the beginning. You could hear the giant wave of sound coming our way when people ahead started to jeer, trucks were restarted and the music playing again. Music by the way which was never-ending, no ‘dead’ spots anywhere in the parade. And good music at that.

  

  

  Low level

  Humans this week explored how deep they could go before reaching the bottom of their barrel. First there were those three American youngsters who shot a jogger in the back simply because they were bored. Then there is this woman in Ontario who sent an anonymous letter to a neighbor telling her to either move or have her autistic adolescent kid euthanized. And finally, the unspeakable horror in Syria, hitting mostly children and women. Shock and awe Syrian style. One decade exactly after the Bush one.

  In the same category but on a different register, Lausanne_guy pointed out to me some days ago that someone in Toronto had put up his moronic [my evaluation] version of the already weird American cronut, this time turning it into a bacon cheeseburger sold on the Canadian National Exhibition site in Toronto. Before the beaver tail, this has to be the epitomy of so-called “Canadian cuisine” ^[1]. No personality of its own, just a bunch of borrowed elements ramdomly patched together, and apparently these days, also intoxicating. Resembles the country comes to think of it.

  ^[1] ‘Canadian’ here excludes Quebec where for now Beaver Tails are only sold in heavily touristic areas (aka to tourists from Beaver Tail eating countries). Besides, not many people here knew (or remembered) that there was a Canadian National Exhibition yearly in Toronto. ‘National’? Depends to whom one is talking to I guess.

  

  More to come in the next post…

  • 15:40
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