Night & Day: Two Views of Montreal

I started off the evening in clogs and super skinny jeans, a hotter look than you might think, at least according to the catcalling population of Little Burgundy. I was propositioned three times between the Metro and the Canal.

I was on my way to a 5 à 7 at the new loft of an old friend from back in the days when I worked in the corporate world. The party had a class reunion feel, aided and abetted by the retro look of the place. I wouldn’t have thought that an almost empty loft could look so eighties, but this one really did. That’s why my friend bought it. She’s going to renovate. And then she’s going to flip it, or so she says. The second story bedroom has cathedral ceilings and a 280-degree wrap-around deck. I might have a hard time selling such a stellar view.



The 5 à 7 turned into a 6 à 9. The blue sky turned grey, the wind came up and it started raining as I made my way up from the Canal to the Metro again. Clogs are really comfortable but super skinny jeans are only good for standing up in. I spent three hours on my feet talking to people I’d only just met or that I hadn’t seen in years, and occasionally confusing the two. By the time got home I was beat. But home was just a pit stop. I had to come up with a whole new outfit for my friend Sherwin’s birthday and head out again.



The outfit pressure was considerable. Dress up, Sherwin said. Wear something you wouldn’t normally wear. What wouldn’t I wear to a transvestite’s birthday party? I settled on motorcycle boots and a silver tube dress. On the 55 Bus back downtown there were a bunch of huge guys making a lot of noise. When I got up to get off one of them said: I wish this were our stop. It sounds dumb now but at the time I thought it was kind of sweet, a demure send off into the Saint-Laurent at Sainte-Catherine sleaze.



The only thing Sherwin’s birthday party had in common with the loft warming party was the eighties feel. Quite a few people took the dress-up theme down a sequined beaded fluorescent route. Not Sherwin though, he wisely stuck to a svelte little spaghetti-strapped black dress. I love it when the birthday boy has more cleavage than I do.



Oh, and it’s possible that both parties had glass coffee tables in the living room. At Sherwin’s, every now and then you’d hear the loud glass-on-glass smack of a very drunk person misjudging just where the glass might be and putting their beer bottle down way too hard, like a bird flying into a plate glass window.



There was a crazy view out the rear window. I’ve never seen those buildings out anyone’s window before, I said to a woman I’d just met. Oh they look all right from here, she replied. But up close? Whoa. Mexico City.



Waiting for the bathroom I met a girl who’d only been in Montreal for two weeks. She and her friends had just been walking down the street and someone invited them up. That keeps happening, she said. She looked all of 15 years old but somehow fit right into the eighties dance floor scene. I’ve been in Montreal for 17 years now and I sure am glad to have friends in high and low places. I’m not always sure which is which. Both have such great views.
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les huit quartiers du sommeil de Montréal 1990-2006

a new web map writing project by J. R. Carpenter

les huit quartiers du sommeil de Montréal 1990-2006

I moved to Montréal on the night train. I've lived in eight neighbourhoods since and each has had a different quality of sleep. There are eight hours for sleeping in, four quarters in each hour, many more quarters in each city. Some quarters never sleep, or so they say. Others seem to be built for dreaming in. These are les huit quartiers du sommeil de Montréal 1990-2006: Car Crash Sleep, Bamboo Blind Sleep, Waterbed Sleep, Louvered Door Sleep, Purple Parakeet Sleep, Break and Enter Sleep, Gondola Sleep and Greek Sleep.



To navigate these neighbourhoods of sleep, take the night train to Montréal (warning: this method may take 16 years). Or do a Google Maps search for J. R. Carpenter les huit quartiers du sommeil de Montreal 1990-2006 and view the user generated content (warning: this method may return variable results). Or follow a direct link to the Google Map of les huit quartiers du sommeil here: http://luckysoap.com/huitquartiers

A Note on the Type: I wrote the text of les huit quartiers du sommeil during a bout of insomnia at Yaddo, January-February 2007. Thanks everyone at the Yaddo dinner table for listening to the thunks and whirrings of this text coming to life. Thanks CALQ for helping me get to Yaddo. I built the Google Maps and HTML versions of huit quartiers in Montréal May-July 2007. Thanks Sandra Dametto for the brilliant idea, and thanks Michael Boyce and Lisa Vinebaum for the careful readings. The aerial photographs are totally copyright you, Google Earth. Thanks in advance for having a sense of humour. The other images were found using Google Images and then altered using Photoshop filters until they looked like something I would do. Except for the street maps, those I drew by hand as you can probably tell. Merci Daniel Canty, your English is better than mine. Et merci Stéphane Vermette pour tous.

les huit quartiers du sommeil de Montréal 1990-2006
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updates are now available

or, the path to the twentieth century via the kicking and screaming route

believe it or not, until last Monday morning we still had a dial-up Internet connection. and me, a web artist and all. we suffered these retrograde conditions for as long as we did in part because until recently we had plenty of neighbours with unauthenticated high-speed wireless routers spewing out connection left right and centre. as I explained to a friend last winter: our neighbours stomp up and down the stairs and walking around with boots on over our heads at all hours – so we clog up their internet connection with as much high-bandwidth data transfer as possible. my friend said: well, that’s showing them. ha. this past July first moving day the last of these unauthenticated hosts moved out and left us signal-less and oh so slow.

another reason it took us so long to make this transition was we were looking for the perfect solution and we were looking to pay less. we wasted months comparison shopping for bundles, packages, deals. now we know. there is no perfection solution and everything costs a lot. the best we could do was to get a lot more bang for our buck. after months of saying we have to do something about this soon, and then weeks of grumbling about how we haven’t done anything about it yet and more weeks of comparing notes about all the things we hadn’t thought of yet and then more hours online (on dial-up), and more hours on the phone (and so, therefore, with no internet access), and without endorsing any brand names or companies (because really, they’re all charlatans), here’s what we came up with:

we now have cable internet. it isn’t high-speed exactly, it’s intermediate speed. maybe eventually we’ll think it’s too slow, but right now we’re pretty darn happy with ten times faster than dial-up at four dollars a month more than dial-up. we also have cable telephone. it costs ten dollars less than what we were paying and instead of being forced to pay for call waiting even though we didn’t want it, we now have call display, which is a miraculous invention and a huge load off our minds. we can now not answer the phone in peace. we can also talk on the phone and use the internet at the same time. we have an encrypted connection, so forget about it neighbours, just back off.

we were on a roll so we decided we’d better consolidate our cell phone spending too. this was rather difficult as we were both already on the cheapest plans possible. we found a couples plan that worked out to a few dollars less per month and offered us more minutes than what we had and free incoming calls and unlimited calls between us, and all those things couples plans figure couples need. we’d have to sign a contract of course, but we were willing to do it – mostly because I needed a new phone. my old phone was so old it was made of metal. the display was black and green. there was no camera, no mp3 player, no internet, nothing. not that I minded so much, having plenty of other devices capable of these fulfilling functions. the real problem was that I’d stepped on the recharger cable thingy one too many times and was having an increasingly difficult time getting it to stay plugged into the phone. eventually the ability to charge the phone supersedes the phone charges, and I had reached that point.

so there we were on the phone the other night with a cell phone company we’ve been clients off for years, armed with an absurd arsenal of couples plan and phone feature trivia. things started off alright but soon became irritating. the couples package comes with two new phones, but all the good phones cost money and staring down the barrel of a two to three year contract, I did not want to get stuck with a piece of crap phone. now, in all our years of giving this company money we’d accumulated a fair amount of “reward dollars”, but we were not aloud to apply these dollars to purchasing the new phones that come with the package because they were already being offered at a reduced rate. fine. and the couples plan price originally quoted to us does not include call display – an absolute must have – for which we will both have to pay and additional six bucks extra. whatever. then they put us both through credit checks, even though we were already paying customers in good standing, and THEN they refused us a special reduced rate on the first three months because we were already clients. by this time it was nine thirty at night and my zucchini flower risotto was languishing on the back burner and we were about to die of starvation. and we were pissed off. I said: you know what, forget it. we’re not saving any money here and we’re not agreeing to a contract while we’re pissed off. so forget about it, we’ll stick with the plans we have. would that it were that easy. we were so far along in the process that we were already on the couples plan. the sales guys was almost as miserable as we were. he kept saying: I’m sorry, there’s nothing I can do. finally he gave me a 1-800 number to call in the morning and we hung up. the zucchini flower risotto was awesome, which was of some consolation, but I didn’t sleep well that night, worried about the 1800 phone call in the morning. it felt like we’d somehow stumbled into a Las Vegas wedding – seedy and schmaltzy but still legal and not so easily annulled.

this story may be long and tedious and all too familiar to some, but it does have a happy ending. it turns out that that sales guy did do one great thing for us. the 1-800 number he gave us was magic. it led to a whole other plane of existence. I called in the morning to file for a divorce from the couples plan. I quickly realized that I was speaking to someone with real power. suddenly call display was free for both of us for the duration of our contract, which finally made it cheaper for us to be on the couples plan than to have two separate plans. when I told the Wizard of the 1-800 number that last night we hadn’t even got to the part where we order new phones, she asked if we had any reward dollars. yes, I said, but we were told we couldn’t use them for the phones that come with a package. she said, they couldn’t do that for you in that office, but here we can. my god! it was like getting out of high school and into university and suddenly you get to pick what courses you take and you’re legal drinking age too! I quickly called up the web page detailing all the phone options so as to pick out way better phones than what we were going to settle for when we though we were paying cash (good thing we’d taken care of that pesky not being about to talk on the phone and browse the internet at the same time problem a few days before) because now that we were paying in magical “reward dollar” money we were in a whole new playing field, phone-wise.

Stéphane didn’t even need a new phone. he was going to take whatever phone they’d give him for free and give it to a friend of his who’s old phone was even older than my old phone. the magic 1-800 allowed him to use his points to get her a way nicer new phone – with a camera and an mp3 player and everything. on the card we wrote: you have no idea what we went through to get you this phone!!

my new phone is slimmer and more sophisticated than I am but we get along great. I still dress up a bit when we go out together. I’m sure I’ll get over it eventually. it helps that new-phone has a metal casing just like its prehistoric predecessor did – one does need some thread of continuity amidst all this change.

we put it off for as long as possible and once we decided to do it, it took quite a bit of doing, but I do believe we have now irrevocably entered the twenty-first century.
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the world’s most impractical cake plates

One vacation leads to another. It took a lot of doing to get us to Toronto in June. But then, on the train back to Montréal, we read an article about 1001 Pots in the Via Rail magazine and since we were feeling pretty brazen after pulling off a week away together that we thought – How hard could a day trip up to Val-David be? So we decided we’d find a way to go check it out and finally we did.



1001 Pots is a huge outdoor ceramics festival/exhibition/sale – the largest in North America according to the brochure. It’s in its 19th year now. It costs all of two bucks to get in and it lasts a whole month. And Val David is only a little over an hour out of the city. So really, the odds of getting up to check it out are pretty good.

By the time we got to 1001 Pots we’d already visited two fromageries and had a picnic beside a river. It was hot and sunny and we were a little out of it. 1001 Pots is all outdoors, which is lovely in the shade. The first thing we figured out was that there were many more that 1001 pots. We wandered around in a daze trying not to break anything. The second thing we figured out was that everything was extremely expensive and the third, that a lot of it looked the same. No harm done, we thought. It got us out of the city, we thought.



And then we came upon this one table that totally blew our minds. Thankfully I took pictures; otherwise I’d be hard pressed to describe these amazing oddball over-the-top eccentric bright chunky wonky wonderful totally unique pieces. We soon discovered that they were the creations of special-needs kids from Maison Emmanuel, a community centre in Val-Morin. We went to sit in the shade and have a little think.

What we decided was, we were in need of cake plates and who better to buy them from than the kids of Maison Emmanuel. We ventured out into the sun again to make some tough decisions. Each plate was a work of art. How to choose? None of them matched. Not that any of our dishes match. None of them were the least bit practical. But all of them would look awesome on our yellow Formica table. Finally a lady came over to where we were clutching teetering stacks of highly irregular plates and asked if we needed any help. Do you have any more of these hidden away somewhere? We wanted to know. The woman beamed: Do you know who made these plates? Yes, the kids from Maison Emmanuel – we pointed to the prominently displayed sign over the table. And do you know that I’m their ceramic teacher? Well! We all got really excited. She went off to find us more plates while we contemplate possible uses for the ones we had already fallen in love with and in the end we wound up with quite a discount on two of the world’s most impractical cake plates and a cheese plate that doesn’t wobble at all if you put a folded tea towel under it.



All three are works of art. We can’t stop looking at them. This picture doesn’t do them justice at all. They do indeed look awesome on our yellow kitchen table. None are likely to see the inside of a cupboard anytime soon.

In a postscript: We realized when we got home and consulted the catalogue that the only other stuff we admired at 1001 Pots was made by the kids’ ceramic instructor, Maggie Roddan. Thanks Maggie Roddan, thanks 1001 Pots, thanks Maison Emmanuel.



More information: Maison Emmanuel

More information: 1001 Pots
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Quebec Cheese

We’ve walked up to the Jean Talon Market just about every weekend this summer. We’ve been buying whatever’s in season and planning our meals for the week around that. We’ve also been trying a new Québec cheese every week. I don’t know when this started but all of a sudden we have some amazing artisanal lait cru fromageries in Québec and the Fromagerie Hamel at the Jean Talon Market is a museum of them.

Back in June a number of regional cheese producers schlepped into town to offer tastings in front of Hamel. We’d already bought a semi-firm from Iberville, but we proceeded from table to table tasting cheeses for next time. At the last table we came to we met two goats, skittish ambassadors of some great chèvres, and we were blown away by a vache called le Rassembleu. The woman at the Rassembleu table invited us to visit their farm. We decided on the spot that we would.

Last week we rented a car for a day and headed up to Sainte-Sophie to visit Les Fromagiers de la Table Ronde. We had no idea what to expect. We’ve never set off in search of a food item in quite this way before. We’re not galloping gourmands booking truffle-hunting excursions and then smuggling home crates of wine from France or anything. Generally we eat what we can buy within walking distance of our apartment. Whatever expectations we had of Les Fromagiers de la Table Ronde they were well exceeded. We called ahead and had been advised to arrive before 11AM at which time a tour bus would descend. We didn’t want to be there when that happened! We arrived well in advance of the bus and had the place to ourselves. M. Alary, head of this family run operation, greeted us. Through a huge plate glass window we watched a woman dressed in white was mixing this mornings milk – already forming into curds – in a giant stainless steel tub. We offered out rapt attention to M. Alary who quietly explained everything we ever thought we wanted to know but didn’t know whom to ask about how they make cheese. I don’t’ want to spoil the tour for you, but here are some facts that really everyone should know: All the different cheeses come from the same cows. They make a different kind each day. It takes ten litres of milk to make one of cheese. You have to poke holes in blue cheese to get the blue into it. Les Fromagiers de la Table Ronde has been producing organic raw cows milk cheeses for over four years now, but the farm has been in the family for generations. Artisanal cheeses cost less on site than in stores in Montréal. After our window tour we had a tasting and made our selections. We bought le Rassembleu, of course; le Fleurdelysé, a much younger softer bleu half of which we promptly devoured an hour later picnicking beside le Petit Rivier du Nord; le Fou du Roy, a young semi-firm with a pale orange rind; and le Pavé, which we later put on the most incredible pizza – le Pavé is like the Fou du Roy only the rind is washed off every day so they can age it longer so it’s firmer and more intense. M. Alary seemed impressed that we’d come prepared with ice packs and coolers. At any rate, he gathered that we were serious about cheese and gave us directions to a chèvre fromagerie a little further down the road. Our selection of cheeses, safely stowed in the cooler, the tour bus looming on the horizon, we walked across the field to say hi to the Alary cows and soon were on our way. Thanks cows.



Les Fromagiers de la Table Ronde
317, route 158, Sainte-Sophie (Québec)
http://www.fromagiersdelatableronde.qc.ca


Fromagerie La Suisse Normande makes vache and chèvre cheeses; we were already stocked up on vache so we concentrated on the chèvre. We bought a semi-firm called le Capra, half of which disappeared during the afore mentioned picnic; two small dried Crottin, one of which we crumbled onto a zucchini flour fresh pasta last week that was so good we could have cried; a pyramid of le Sabot Blanchette; and two fresh Caprice that we put in a jar with herbs and oil to save for some dark gloomy winter day. It turns out that the goats we met at the market were from La Suisse Normande. When we asked the charming proprietor if we could meet them she said yes of course but she couldn’t promise that we’d find the same two that were at the market. We walked across the road and into the barn. The goats seemed excited to have company – they came running ove to check us out. They’re kind of like dogs – dog size and dog friendly – but instead of trying to sniff your crotch they try to eat your watch. Thanks goats.



Fromagerie La Suisse Normande
985, Rivière Nord, St-Roch de l’Achigan (Québec)
http://fromageduquebec.qc.ca/suissenormande
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