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Notes on July
Jul. 15th, 2014 10:16 amI.
Saturday was a super moon, which I didn't know -- but on Friday night I went biking along the riverside path, eventually ending up in the Lachine Rapids migratory bird sanctuary a half-hour's ride away. The moon was very large and very bright; in iPhone photos it looks like a spotlight on the water.
The last time I went biking, the Saturday evening after Canada Day, I ran into an outdoors salsa social, a Greek neighbourhood dance party/food fair, and a waterside bonfire, over the course of a 7km ride. And there was a view of the Old Port fireworks on the way back. Southwest Montreal is off the anglo radar -- the Plateau hipsters of my generation follow their French counterparts north to Anjou when they get hitched and want a bigger place; the squares move back to NDG/Cote Saint-Luc, good grief -- but Wellington Street is what Monkland Village was 25 years ago, with better metro access. (Except Verdun/LaSalle/Charlevoix were traditionally French-Irish Catholic working class. Now with sizeable mainland Chinese population: university kids, restaurant workers, and new immigrants, not the big-house suburbanite types across the river in Brossard. I can do my weekend grocery run entirely in Mandarin if I wanted. Then there's the err assorted characters.)
Come on: two minutes' walk to the metro station (7 minutes metro to downtown), 5 minutes' walk to the supermarket and the Canadian Tire, 5 minutes walk the other way to the gym (3 gourmet coffee shops along the way), 5 minutes' bike to the public pool, and from there access to 30 km worth of bike paths along riverside parks, bird sanctuaries, et al. Every yard backing onto the alley behind my house contains a dog, and this is why. There is also a pigeon coop, and an extraordinarily friendly peaches-and-cream outdoors cat. She followed me up the fire escape last night, was not at all shy about coming inside to have a look around, in fact was rather indignant about being put out again. I'm quite allergic to her, alas.
II.
Have been watching the World Cup (generally agreed to be the best WC since [insert] year: my first and measuring-stick WC was '98, so '98 for me), old Winding Refn movies, and listening to vaporwave. Uploaded a couple of mixes to 8tracks. Last night was Queen and Adam Lambert at the Bell Centre; probably the loudest stadium show I've ever been at (I don't do a lot of classic rock). The amps seemed ready to fritz, and I could barely hear myself talk afterward.
There is probably an alternate universe in which Brian May is the narrator of Cosmos and Neil Degrasse Tyson is a guitar god.
Much of the social-use space Queen occupied in their heyday has been taken over by other genres, I think. And even rock bands that make the charts tend to feel homogeneous, rather than very recognizable personalities meshing as a team (this is also what I want out of pop vocal groups and, for that matter, World Cup national sides) -- I mean the Mumfords are nice folks but etc etc. The thing I diffusely miss in non-rock genres is that certain types don't end up with as much of a place in the stage act, or the public face of the art, or what have you. Never mind Brian May or Roger Taylor; who's the John Deacon of rap, you know? It closes off avenues. But being the John Deacon of Queen is also meaningless outside of the context of there being a Freddie Mercury, Brian May, and Roger Taylor of Queen.
ANYWAY HERE'S "LOVE KILLS"
Saturday was a super moon, which I didn't know -- but on Friday night I went biking along the riverside path, eventually ending up in the Lachine Rapids migratory bird sanctuary a half-hour's ride away. The moon was very large and very bright; in iPhone photos it looks like a spotlight on the water.
The last time I went biking, the Saturday evening after Canada Day, I ran into an outdoors salsa social, a Greek neighbourhood dance party/food fair, and a waterside bonfire, over the course of a 7km ride. And there was a view of the Old Port fireworks on the way back. Southwest Montreal is off the anglo radar -- the Plateau hipsters of my generation follow their French counterparts north to Anjou when they get hitched and want a bigger place; the squares move back to NDG/Cote Saint-Luc, good grief -- but Wellington Street is what Monkland Village was 25 years ago, with better metro access. (Except Verdun/LaSalle/Charlevoix were traditionally French-Irish Catholic working class. Now with sizeable mainland Chinese population: university kids, restaurant workers, and new immigrants, not the big-house suburbanite types across the river in Brossard. I can do my weekend grocery run entirely in Mandarin if I wanted. Then there's the err assorted characters.)
Come on: two minutes' walk to the metro station (7 minutes metro to downtown), 5 minutes' walk to the supermarket and the Canadian Tire, 5 minutes walk the other way to the gym (3 gourmet coffee shops along the way), 5 minutes' bike to the public pool, and from there access to 30 km worth of bike paths along riverside parks, bird sanctuaries, et al. Every yard backing onto the alley behind my house contains a dog, and this is why. There is also a pigeon coop, and an extraordinarily friendly peaches-and-cream outdoors cat. She followed me up the fire escape last night, was not at all shy about coming inside to have a look around, in fact was rather indignant about being put out again. I'm quite allergic to her, alas.
II.
Have been watching the World Cup (generally agreed to be the best WC since [insert] year: my first and measuring-stick WC was '98, so '98 for me), old Winding Refn movies, and listening to vaporwave. Uploaded a couple of mixes to 8tracks. Last night was Queen and Adam Lambert at the Bell Centre; probably the loudest stadium show I've ever been at (I don't do a lot of classic rock). The amps seemed ready to fritz, and I could barely hear myself talk afterward.
There is probably an alternate universe in which Brian May is the narrator of Cosmos and Neil Degrasse Tyson is a guitar god.
Much of the social-use space Queen occupied in their heyday has been taken over by other genres, I think. And even rock bands that make the charts tend to feel homogeneous, rather than very recognizable personalities meshing as a team (this is also what I want out of pop vocal groups and, for that matter, World Cup national sides) -- I mean the Mumfords are nice folks but etc etc. The thing I diffusely miss in non-rock genres is that certain types don't end up with as much of a place in the stage act, or the public face of the art, or what have you. Never mind Brian May or Roger Taylor; who's the John Deacon of rap, you know? It closes off avenues. But being the John Deacon of Queen is also meaningless outside of the context of there being a Freddie Mercury, Brian May, and Roger Taylor of Queen.
ANYWAY HERE'S "LOVE KILLS"
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