Blogstar Man in Babylon

Before I paste in a couple of posts from the original Blogstar Man which had gotten sidetracked due to circumstances beyond my control, I’d like add a couple of, hopefully, brief notes about the time frame:

Now, I notice that one of the pieces mentions the city being invaded by Rolling Stones cover bands, so it must have been back when the Stones went to Toronto...and that was during the great SARS scare, which petered out soon after, much like that Bird Flu number. Then, I had a small piece about working in the films, so that must have been a few years back, since the film industry has pretty much ground to a halt here, what with the Terminator as governor of California and promising to keep film jobs in the state, along with the American dollar tanking, making it not such a big saving to film in Montreal. And a host of other reasons, dealing with certain unions and government bureaucracies, turf battles, general stupidity....
So, without further ado, I will post some of those earlier ramblings:

Blogstar Man in Babylon..coming soon to Blockbusters everywhere..

hello world...I'm sitting on this late july day, between the waves of thunderstorms sweeping through Montreal...at the Cafe Depanneur, listening to Carmen McCrea doing a Julie London favorite..of course, well, Carmen's version is smooth, bit on the "cheesy" side...more Vegas than smoky left Bank boite...but, what with the city now overrun with Rolling Stones cover bands...after hundreds of drunken renderings of Honkey Tonk Woman assaulting our ears from every quarter, "Cry Me a River" sounds like beat poetry..
Now Sylvain, the owner, has put on this synthesized music...kind of New Age elevator music...once, Jahans, this tabla player from Iran tried to convince him that none of the music was made by humans..."look, man, do you see any musicians listed?"
"ah..nope"
"that's because there aren't any. It's a K-2000 synthesizer.."
It's a bit of a touchy subject with the local acoustic musicians...it's called automation...no royalties having to be paid to musicians...oh well...
like Hollywood, since I work in this branch plant of Hollywood, from time to time...A Montreal movie maquiladora, thanks to a low Canadian dollar and cheap electricity...
back in the cafe, the remaining customers have been driven out by Sylvain's music selection, which he is playing at haute volumn...I am soldiering on with a used cocktail napkin stuffed in the ears...now he's gone back to some guy playing an acoustic guitar...and singing this fifties lounge lizard stuff like "how deep is the ocean..."
in fact, after everyone else cleared out, he pointed to me and said, "I'm playing this for you, Dooglas."
of course, I could have stayed home and listened to John Coltrane on this evening jazz show from CBC Francais...tant pis...
yes, I work from time to time in the films...keeps the head just above water...most of the time I'm just treading water, the film extra work, well, it's like taking a breather on a hunk of floating driftwood, to continue the nautical reference...

back again...after one of those days where all the chickens seemed to come home to roost at once...a dark, stormy day, filled with thunder, rain, wind...later, blue sky coming in from the west...a cold, sub-polar Canadian sky..not a July sky...an October sky...it's almost August...I'm broke, and running around in circles, and haven't spent even an afternoon out of the city...I couldn't even camp out in the apartment, since there was this crew installing pre-fab aluminum porches on a duplex across the street...the same pre-fab aluminum balconies that are on this long row of condo leggo construction that has devastated the neighborhood...next to this Windows 2000-designed testament to the victory of profit over any pretense to craft, stand these classic Montreal two stories, with the fleur de lis wrought iron rails, and places with palisade balconies that you might see in Portugal or parts of Mexico...trimmed with this delicately crafted tin ...a vestige of a time when a worker was still a craftsmen...
and today, I got the contemporary version...all power tools...like putting together a kit from IKEA, except for the spine-tingling sound of metal drilling and cutting more metal...
Man as machine...working with machines, for machines...power tools...the favorite item at yard sales here...making summer in the city, for those of us who are too broke to leave, and too broke to be medicated, a living hell...not hell... I exaggerate...a living heck, you could say...
Canada is living heck...I can go for a walk at anytime, anywhere without having to strike a pose, like in the States...I know that nothing much will happen..even if I have a grand mal seizure, like I did last winter, someone will call the ambulance, and it will arrive, and if I survive the ride, that I'll be treated, and wish that I hadn't been...
I also know that nothing magical will happen that day...the chances, you could say, of a chance encounter are slim...
I will walk next door to the Bar St. Laurent, one of the few clubs in the area that play reggae, salsa, afro-Cuban, and know that I'll see skinny African guys dancing with overweight bleached-blondes...
I will not run into an African woman on her own. Montreal is really a very old-fashioned place...it's reputation as sin city is only maintained by being situated in a country which has places like Toronto, Halifax, and Victoria, British Columbia...
Suddenly, I'm listening to Fats Domino, singing "I'm walkin'"...and those yakketty saxes in the background...the music of my youth...funk...acoustic funk...before the electric guitar levelled out with rock...
Rock became to music, what that pre-fab porch across the street became to- architecture, art, craft...

BLOGSTAR MAN IN THE PROMISED LAND...

the promised land ends up not being how it was advertised...life in America will never be shown on TV...
America in it's Late Tabloid/Early Apocalypse phase...
not a pretty sight...enough of idle chit chat...I must admit that I've just gotten back from the Rez...
We'd made this cheap tobacco run...across the industrial section of Montreal...which is most of Montreal, really...out past smokestacks belching burnt whatever into the air, the smokestacks rising over this flat-roofed late industrial nullity...out across the highway of asphalt and iron girders...with about a thousand sodium vapor lamps shining from every direction...in the western sky above this devastated landscape, was the tale end of one of those delicate chromatic sunsets, receding in the direction of the mountains in the distance...five minutes later, we are driving down this long country road fringed with woods, silvery strings of cloud floating by the treetops.
It's the Mohawk reservation, Khanawake...and we're going down the OCR, the Old Chateauguay Road...cheap smokes...bags of tobacco, enough to roll a cartoon with your little plastic rolling machine and tubes...good for a carton...eight bucks a bag...
Anyhow, I'm back at the machine...Michel, from Baie Coumeau Quebec, just back from three years in Beijing..he'd stopped by with Carol...and as I was just about to interest him in looking at my blog...Trina called...three times...like some desperado on the show Friends, that my fourteen year old is hooked on, along with Gap Jeans...the whole package...multi-billion dollar business...get them hooked on Brands as early as possible...Pacifiers by Microsoft...that sort of thing...
and I have Trina, the thirty-something version on the phone..pure native, but orphaned and raised by this nice Jewish liberal couple...so she's this two hundred pound, six foot towering hulk of Need...and she's on the phone...and I can hear the JAP in her asking Michel to come...Now!...that sort of thing..."come on Michel check out the blog...she'll have you jumping through hoops in a week...don't fetch..."
and he's just back from China...where he'd spent three years..and was saying..."boy, sure is different here...like people they make such a big deal about the most trivial things..".
Michel hasn't seen a soap or sit-com or Oprah or Dr. Phil in three years...out of the loop... as my kid, the fourteen year old with her Friends and Will and Grace habit..when she mentions the soaps..."god,dad, just a bunch of rich people standing around complaining..".
it's like this..."too many immigrants" number, that either Carol or Michel were doing, as we languished in a good ol' French Canadian Friday-night-in-the-summer total traffic jam...idling cars by the thousands sending up the toxic by-products of petroleum combustion...idling cars...with pedestrians getting the Tokyo subway treatment...somebody mentions immigrants...and I point to this montsrous SUV, and say, about two dozen Sri Lankans could fit in the space that one SUV is taking...hmmm...and I read that there are eighty thousand new cars on the island every year...and we're talking huge gas guzzling American tanks...the Bound for Baghdad cult...this rather vicious circle which is causing some serious havoc with earth and humanity, let alone the oceans rivers lakes and fields...
yes, blog buffs, I will try to keep you abreast of developments...speaking of abreast of developments, my younger sister came to visit from New York last week, after stopping in Toronto for a breast enhancement, eighteen thousand dollars worth...more on that to come...

Welcome aboard, blog buffs...after a blustery day, as pooh bear would say...his mouthpiece that is..got the full treatment from the bi-polar miss-appropriating my apartment..if you're wondering about the puns, well I'd just smoked some local pot and it was ground grown, as all pot back in the sixties and seventies...and I'm flashing back to those days when getting stoned and punning was the rage...
well, I'm in Canada where you just don't play with words..well, English Quebec anyhow...even when I work in English Canadian films...you see..WORK in films...I'm PLAYING in films, right?...
I had been hired to do this dance sequence...a foxtrot...the old two step...learned it at age seven...the world's simplest dance...the two step, right? One step less and you're standing still...normally, in the French productions I'm allowed to improvise...but, not the CBC English production...we had to suffer the stern and unsmiling gaze of this young woman, dressed and made up to look like a contemporary neo-spinster from some Merchant/Ivory production...horn-rimmed glasses, the rest, classic Lord and Taylor from an old Audrey Hepburn movie...
of course, the movie was the Audrey Hepburn Story, now starring this teen slasher film queen with one of those hyphenated names from the era of the corporate merger... Jennifer Love-Hewitt or Hewe-Lovitt..there go those puns again..
not Ashley Judd, that was Eye of the Beholder...and Ashley was acting out the title's less subtle implications...the mink coat with Victoria's secret underwear...(more on that later)
much more pleasant to behold than the stern gaze of the foxtrot instructress...and, when this particular casting agency hires me, they always put me with the "gray eminences"...the geezers, as the Anglos say with a slight hint of studied self-effacement...the English Canadians are masters of self-effacement...like Steven, who always plays Chuck the Homeless Guy...this Canuck homeless guy, you know Cratchett fallen on hard times in the Christmas Carol type of self-effacement...he wouldn't last an hour on the streets in the U.S...
but, it's this survival strategy here in Canada..do your job, don't complain... the classic Delta Male in an industry dominated by Alpha Women...that sort of deal...it's a dog's life...the only problem, is that throughout history, war and famine would leave the people with no alternative than to roast the mutts...that was always the basic flaw with the beg and fetch survival strategy...
anyhow, unlike the French films, I'm usually paired with a woman my senior...in the Audrey Hepburn story, well I swore it was Eva Braun's older sister...Helga..she was German...but, she didn't join the Party, she said...she couldn't..seemed that to become a full fledged member of the Nazi Party, you had to prove that all your grandparents were German...anyhow, she did a decent foxtrot....a little stiff with the leg kicks, as one would expect, but nonetheless...
not like franco film “Le Pollak”, where I danced with this nineteen year old young lovely who was in a Polish dance troupe...and we got into this modified Mazurka, with little polka flourishes....and she liked it, and I have this yin and yang that comes out....maybe because I'd grown up in the days when kids, black and white used to boogie...and the trick is to lead without leading, follow without following...something that seems to come naturally with Polish girls...it's vestige of the petty gentry mentality..

now I'm interrupted by the crying of a yuppie baby just back from a week of eco touring in the Laurentians...it's the latest yuppie fad here, meaning that it must have peaked ten years ago in Boston....it’s replaced jogging...bikes neatly racked on the top...I personally never approached that level of urban middle class-ness...I peaked at drive, park, walk...now, I have an old ten speed given to me by my guardian angle, jean marc when I was going through a particular grim period of material deprivation...and it sits outside with a new chain and a flat tire...
the subways, metros, whatever you call them, are so suffocating that even a Sarin Gas attack would be a breath of fresh air...

Introducing the Best of Blogstar Man

Hello-I'm still trying to get the basic mechanics of blogging down. I admit that I'm from another era. For much of my life, there was no internet. In fact, for much of my life, I'd written on an old mechanical typewriter. I'd just written this long introduction that somehow disappeared when I pushed the wrong button. I could be connected with this pot that I'd picked up yesterday from the neighborhood dealer, R.,who has a little ganja shop set up in on the ground floor of his duplex. It's a family business. I lucked out yesterday, since R.s wife was at the scales, and she is not quite as vigilant when it comes to measuring out a gram, and always errs on the side of the customer… particularly when the customer is trying to lay on the charm, and keep up with the local gossip and chit chat...Since, I'd sworn off the stuff while I was stuck in a cast for six weeks, knowing that the pot habit was a contributing factor to my sorry physical state to begin with...and, that I needed a lot of concentration while hopping around on one foot....so, as anyone whose stopped drinking or smoking for a while knows...well, particularly smoking, since I find the brain speeding up, but that part of the brain, the automatic pilot part, (that has learned to push buttons, and type, and press a gas pedal when the light turns green and a hundred other automaton movements concerned with machines)..anyhow, this post-industrial Pavlovian part of the mind malfunctions. I'd gotten out of practice,(vis a vis functioning stoned) So, I push the wrong button. I delete instead of save. Goodbye thoughts.
I would like to confess that when I called it the Best of Blogstar Man was being facetious...I have tendencies toward hyperbole. I blame it on the week I spent in an ad agency back when I was twenty. I was being offered a chance to be paid handsomely for facetiousness anchored to the bedrock of hyperbole, while adrift in the fog of obfuscation. Unfortunately, or fortunately I can't tell in hindsight, I couldn't really handle being in a windowless office in a Back Bay Boston highrise...having grown up in a small village on the coast, and having never really been beyond the second floor, and then only to sleep and brush my teeth, bathe, and caca. I spent most of my days outdoors, when I wasn't locked into the local school.

Back again, after two or three weeks of semi-frantic damage control, mostly relating to all my bad habits catching up...the broken leg is getting better, according to Ms. Cacciatore, the physiotherapist at the local hospital. However I had another medical emergency, after I'd gone shopping at Bala’s, the greengrocer, over on Park Avenue. I'd been ravenously hungry while shopping, after losing track of the time. It had been one of those balmy days that Montrealers have to enjoy to the max, what with the prospect of seven months of winter a mere icy blast from Hudson's Bay away. I'd sat down at this place nearby, Navarhino's, a local Greek pastry and coffee joint. You can get an espresso for a buck fifty, and there are decent chairs on the sidewalk, and what with the bum leg, I thought I'd take a breather.
I'd bought these sesame crackers out of one of the bins at Bala's store. I'd known Bala since the days when he used to work for Harji, after landing in Montreal from Sri Lanka. He'd had bought the place when Harji decided to retire. Now, it seemed that those sesame crackers had been there when Harji owned the place. And he retired about five years ago, and was last heard to be bicycling around Africa with his wife.
Anyhow, I was sitting there at on the terrasse, as it's called here, and had pulled out this old dog-eared copy of “The Idiot” by Dostoyevsky, from my backpack. I'd started reading it when I was chair-bound with a hard cast back in July. And it's quite a melodrama. High melodrama. If I'd thought that some of my more histrionic marginal friends would have fit easily into “the Possessed”...well, those Russians are something else. Moreover, I happen to be an epileptic, like Prince Myshkin. And of course, there is this play on the word "idiot", since up until recently epilepsy was considered a form of idiocy. In fact, back in the twenties, in times much like ours today, what with the plutocrats running the show, Eugenics was quite the rage among the progressive elements. About ten years before the Third Reich was to give Social Darwinism a black eye, so to speak, sterilization laws were passed in both the U.S. and Canada. And, at the head of the list were, “idiots, epileptics, and morons.”
Dostoyevsky can be quite intense. And, for me, well, I know that one thing that helps bring on seizures are all these intense, emotionally draining scenes...and I'd almost break into a sweat wondering when the poor Prince was going to go fall into a grand mal and start frothing at the mouth and mashing his teeth. Ironically, I was sitting exactly across the street from the place where I had my first seizure, about five years ago. Up until then, I was just a petit mal sort of guy. I'd have these brief blackouts from time to time, dizzy spells on occasion, mostly occasioned by having spent the first few years of my life in a cottage by a bay, which was at the end of a long, tree-lined dirt road. I'd see maybe one or two cars a week.
Now Park Avenue is one of those four-lane inner city expressways built over a trolley line that had been ripped out in the fifties when GM started buying and junking urban trolleys to make room for their buses. As I was saying, I'm sitting at the cafe on Park Avenue and am absorbed in this scene with Rozoghin and the Prince which is going to culminate in the former, after exchanging crosses and becoming a "blood brother" with the Prince, trying to stab the poor bloke with a dagger in a darkened hallway of a building. Of course, I'm grossly simplifying thirty odd pages of description-detail, the weather, buildings and people, and this almost gothic sense of impending doom...fevered thoughts, the allegory of the children in the Swiss village where he'd stayed, long discourses on the interpretation of the Apocalypse, Soloviev's History...(we're not talking the Sopranos here)...And there are all these other elements involved-possession-desire, hate mixed with love-everything to an extreme(jusqu'au bout, as they'd say in Quebec)late nineteenth century soap opera characters, since they never have to work much, and are waiting for rich uncles to die, or trying to marry a general's daughter for a good dowry-this constant tension between greed and honor-nihilsts, aristocrats, old believers...the theme of the "idiot" being pure of heart...and being loved, hated, derided and praised because of it...and that is one of the reasons Rozoghin wants to kill him. And Dostoyevsky, being a bit of a ham himself, sets up Prince Myshkin to be saved by his epileptic fit. Meanwhile, I realize suddenly, that I've been chewing on these rock hard sesame crackers that had been sitting in the bin at Bala's grocery store since Harji sold him that place and took off for a round Africa bike trip. I checked out the harder objects in my mouth and to my chagrin discovered that some crowns that had fallen out. Three to be precise. Bottom row, front right.
So, I've been involved with the considerable hassle of trying to get this gaping hole in my mouth filled in. But that saga will have to wait for later, since this little introduction threatens to become longer than the few little vignettes that I had posted in the original Blogstar Man...which happened to have been around the time that I'd had my first seizure across the street from where I’ve just lost three crowns while reading “The Idiot.”