'Bred Crumbs

11:31 AM Still in Buffalo, awaiting tonight's finals of the DCI championships; I recommend the top five live for your evening's television viewing, in spite of the pledge breaks.

Many are puzzled when I tell them I'm going to the trouble of seeing a drum-corps event. But there are several reasons I enjoy it. There's my frequent love of drumwork and brass instruments in music, and my occasional love of theatricality. Then there's my latent band-geekdom. I was the only one of my siblings not to take band in high school, and now I kind of regret it. I think it might have taught me discipline and social skills well before I picked them up otherwise (truth be told, I still have a ways to go on both counts). I might have come out and/or found my place in the world earlier.

Or maybe I just would have gotten heatstroke.

But here's the main attraction of drum corps: to be sitting outside on a perfect summer evening, with the sound of a lone bugle shifting into a full-on crescendo of drums and horns just as a gentle breeze stirs up and brushes your skin in the fading twilight. It's just a matter of simple contentment, a state of being that doesn't come easily to me.

·  ·  ·

Before leaving Montréal, I also got to see The Tick in French. "Cuillère!"

Send e-mail

06:44 PM So I update my site while I'm on vacation -- from another country, at that -- and yet it sulks. Reports are that timbland.com choked in a big way on or before Tuesday (two days ago), but revived by yesterday. I had no interaction in either occurance. If it's not working for you, please let me know. 'Course, if it's not working, you can't read this ...

Send e-mail

11:21 AM Montréal. I feel like a foreigner, yet I find the city very comfortable.

·  ·  ·

The Musée des Beaux Arts presented a permanent-collection display that was especially pleasing for two reasons: each gallery was a distinct, solid, vibrant color (imagine my glee when a rust-colored room abutted a bright-royal-blue one); and there were many peculiar pre-modern works by unheralded artists. Kees Van Dongen was represented by at least three works. One small, appealing one shows stylized horses rearing mid-air against a blue sky. Another Van Dongen is an ordinary full-length portrait of a woman -- but in the background, in one corner, a rider on yet another rearing horse is stabbing the naked buttocks of a figure running out of frame (though obviously not quickly enough). The piece is titled Actress in the Role of Hamlet; I don't remember anyone getting speared in the ass in Hamlet, but hey, maybe.

And Jan SWART van Groningen's Christ in a Landscape seemed ordinary at first. Then I noticed that Jesus was kind of chubby. And holding a Bible. And just when I was ready to rationalize that maybe it was just the Old Testament, Dewayne pointed out that some of the text was red. The only possible explanation: the artist depicts Jesus learning his lines.

·  ·  ·

Right in front of the altar in the Chapelle du Sacré Coeur, the wedding chapel at the back of the magnificent Basilique Notre-Dame, a middle-aged man adjusted himself.

·  ·  ·

Upon arrival in Montréal, we got our bearings by taking the Metro to the Village, which immediately put Toronto's to shame. Hell, the sheer number of restaurants and bars puts West Hollywood to shame.

We selected a vast place with a vast menu. This place, labeled in so many ways I can't tell you what its name is, is a very-open-air building with three staggered levels, each less wide than the one below it, giving it the look of an unfinished pyramid, as if the builders had said, fuck it, they're all gonna wanna sit outside anyway. (Visiting Toronto and Montréal only in August, when it's fabulously warm day and night, has fixed in my mind the image of eastern Canada as a tropical wonderland, which of course is more than a little delusional.) The décor was the wacky, ornate gaudiness I've seen on French-Canadian homes in Maine; my favorite part was the thin barber-striped poles capped with spinning, colored-light-spewing disco balls.

The people-watching was excellent, topped by a large group of women -- possibly a lesbian baby shower -- that erupted in horseplay, one woman chasing another out of the restaurant; and a solo male diner who, quite to everyone's surprise, was struck on the head by a bottle of ketchup that fell from above. He was OK, I guess, assuming the red stuff on his shirt was only ketchup. Finally we have a justification for green and purple ketchup: to prevent misdiagnoses during al fresco triage.

·  ·  ·

Given how adamant Montréal is about speaking French, it's curious that the songs constantly pouring out of every place in the Village are the hits of the '80s -- in English.

·  ·  ·

I'm an Anglophone who has learned, beyond my native language, only a very little German and Spanish, and I'm in a city where most people speak French. So why, when a waiter brings me something, do I reflexively want to answer with, "Grazi"?

·  ·  ·

Things I enjoyed watching in French before going to sleep: The Simpsons and Further Tales of the City (Chroniques de San Francisco).

·  ·  ·

On four consecutive days, in four venues in two Canadian cities, I have been subjected to "It's Raining Men." There is no excuse for this.

Send e-mail

12:15 PM The nightlife of Toronto, at least on this holiday weekend, has been disappointing. It is small-town high-school nightlife. It is guys cruising Yonge Street, for cryin' out loud, hanging out on the sidewalk or drving slowly with their tops down, yelling at women. It's Canadian Graffiti.

And before we stumbled onto the sprawling, hospitable Woody's, the gay scene in the Village (all gay ghettos in Canada cities are clearly required to be called the Village; Montréal's is, too) wasn't looking much better. Remington's, which we were under the impression was a big dance-oriented bar, was in fact a high-pressure strip club; make the mistake of making eye contact with anyone well-built and shirtless, and you got a back-room-table-dance sales pitch. And then there was Crews, which was just like Bourbon Street's beloved Oz, but with lesbians, and without a dance floor, air conditioning, and apparently a janitorial staff.

·  ·  ·

Lest you think I don't like Toronto, which I do, let me point out that I am blessed again to have a hotel-window view of the wondrous waterfront, to have easy access to the efficient subway, and to have found the cheap scrumptuousness of Joe Badali's, an Italian place I miss already. (Mmm ... rigatoni Bolognese ...)

·  ·  ·

Canadians have reinforced my hatred of coins. It's bad enough they have a one-dollar coin and use it; now they've added a two-dollar one, which encircles a bronze center with a silverish ring. Never model your coinage after a Tootsie Roll Pop. And never make me accidentally almost tip my bartender a quarter.

·  ·  ·

Buffalo, where we landed to start this grand tour of the St. Lawrence Seaway, is not what you'd call a charming town, but we discovered an exception: The Spot, a big coffeehouse downtown with yummy food (chicken foccacia, chicken Thai pasta); fun, colorful furnishings; and the cozy ambience that comes in only something locally owned.

Across the street is a Starbucks. The thought that even one person would ever go there made me want to throw things.

·  ·  ·

At 7:30 a.m. yesterday in the Pittsburgh airport, it hit me, along with a powerful urge to sleep, that I had forgotten to pack my electric razor. Not only was I going to have a Bad Hair Vacation; I was going to have a Bad Face Vacation.

Flag animation by Eclipse Digital via another Web site.

Send e-mail