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J.W. Burleson photo / Boquillas del Carmen, Coah.
Tuesday, September 30, 2014
Montréal & a short story from Travelling Light
Scroll past the photos; the short story's at the end of this post.
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| No 10 Douglas Avenue |
CIVIL WARS
1. Civil
Wars
We used to fight race wars in Montreal. Think
of us in our snowboots, ski jackets, and woolen tuques. The wars began with each side--French and English--building
its snow fort and packing snowballs then venturing out to attack the enemy.
The
violence--fraying, hysteric--escalated with each assault wave. Screams were our
language. We had icicles for spears, when our supply snowballs was exhausted we
hurled chunks of ice. We fought hand-to-mittened-hand, floundering in fresh
snow, spitting and clawing at each other's numb, freezing faces.
From
a certain distance--given the thinness of our northern air, the pellucid
quality of our sunlight, the crisp shadows cast by spruce, maples, elms--our
warfare may not have appeared as vicious as it was. War’s beauty often
deceives. Flesh was sensitive in subzero
January afternoons; every blow ached, wounds bruised yellow. Drops of blood
plummeted through deep, crystalline snow and by the time we disengaged most
were crying, tears glueing our eyelashes.
What
troubled me was the disloyalty of Frances, my older sister, who always fought
alongside the French kids. Her alienation from us was essential, like a code
sculpted on a gene. The sheer strength of her; the way she slashed and thrust
with the icicle in her hands. Both of us screeching, me trying to punch her in
the belly, land a good solid one, fell her.
2. Teeth
Our city
was studded with churches like pieces of costume jewelry, too massive to be
valuable. The power of the Church was weakening, though when a bus drove past a
church most men tipped their hats and many passengers made a Sign of the Cross.
In
sermons wedged between Mass rituals we were told that sin was native and
natural and confession the cleansing, the only, virtue. Year after year we
genuflected on cue then roused ourselves to stroll up the aisle and receive a
Holy Communion wafer. Returning to our pew, kneeling, I sucked the pulpy host
from my teeth, swallowed it, then slipped my teeth around the back of the pew
in front of me and bit hard, compressing the dead cellulose, tasting the salt
and the varnish. It was hard and real, bitterly satisfying.
3. The
Structure
Montreal was as close to home as our father
ever got. There was a middle-class Jewish neighbourhood at one end of Queen
Mary Road and two miles away at the intersection of what had become Boul. Reine-Marie and Cote des Neiges a
French Canadian neighbourhood had mushroomed from a farming village to gather
itself defensively around the Universite
de Montreal, whose space-age campus sprawled up the mountainside. Most
restaurants in the city were owned by Greeks.
Lower Outremont was occupied by Hasidic Jews and once-Yiddish streets east of
Park Avenue were Portuguese. There were tattoo parlours for sailors on St
Lawrence Main and across the Lachine Canal the oldest industrial district where
the Scotch--not the Scots--made 19th
century fortunes importing molasses from the West Indies, refining sugar,
milling wheat, and manufacturing rope and shoes. Irish Griffintown was cut up
with new highways and concrete overpasses but a black stone marked the grave
pit where victims of famine and ship fever were buried.
He took us on long drives through districts no
one else we knew had ever visited. Always east, to the locomotive shops,
Molson's Brewery, the Maisonneuve Ward. Street after street lined with three-story
walkups and steep iron outside
staircases. He steered us down boulevards crowded with people after the
factory whistles blew at noon on Saturday. He brought us to a Sunday Mass in a
Hungarian church, a Portuguese church. He bought salami at a Czech delicatessan
on the Main and black bread from a Russian crone in a bakery in Park Extension
but my sisters and I would not eat it. In the backseat of the Buick we were
restless, bored, unsettled by the exotic feel of whatever it was that attracted
him.
4. Tenants
We lived in an apartment not a house. In the
summers he rented us a beach house in Maine or borrowed a cottage in the
Laurentians from his rich friends. His early life had included unhousement,
internment, deportation. Success in business wasn’t enough to restore what was
taken away in August 1914, on the Isle of Wight, when his German father--
suddenly an ‘enemy alien’--was arrested and removed and imprisoned for four
years. After the Armistice they were immediately deported to Germany. My father
and his Irish mother did not speak the language. He came of age in the Weimar
republic. When Hitler was elected chancellor, my father made plans to go to
Shanghai, but when that city was suddenly occupied by the Japanese army he went
to Canada instead, traveling on his British passport.
His suits
and shoes were made in London. He sent his children to expensive schools and
stayed in the best hotels whenever he traveled but he would/could not imagine
himself as a homeowner. Which word was more alien to his flighty sense of
himself: home or owner? He never possessed any part of the security granted as
birthright to other families we knew. He invested in life insurance policies
and we lived as tenants and people in borrowed houses.
5. The
French Kids
Their names were Daniel and Yvon, they had
moved into a flat across the street, their building had the best driveway for
playing baseball. Their mother was a producer at Radio-Canada and a separatist,
they didn't have a father. We fought them for years, also played hockey,
baseball, and soccer together. In a driveway between two apartment buildings I
watched a baseball fly upward and bounce on the roof of the building across the
street and sometimes this was our language but the relationship was unstable, the
peace always fragile, and we were prepared to resume hostilities at any moment.
They would not speak English and we did not speak French. Nonetheless
one summer, working together, we built a racecar from scavenged lumber, a rain
barrel, and a set of lawnmower wheels. We dragged it to the top of our steep
street and took turns hurtling down the hill past barking dogs in what felt
like a movie about fear, speed, and collapsing time.
6. The
Janitor
He came from the country up north. Tall, with a
dark complexion and strong cheekbones, comme
une Huronne people said. He seemed ferocious, stalking up the street,
pulling a cart with his tools, the knot of keys jangling at his belt. He swept
snow from the walks using a broom of twigs bound to a broken hockey stick. In
the spring he slung storm windows down to the street on a rope and hauled up
copper mesh screens, old and stiff, streaked with green.
The
building stood somnolent in mid-summer, panting in the heat. When we tried to
play handball in the cool, earth-smelling garage, the janitor shooed us
outside, to gum-soft asphalt soaked in hot light. But the afternoons sometimes
broke open with thunderstorms, sudden slabs of rain, trees swaying like hula
dancers, the steep street a black torrent, nervous drivers pulling over to the
curbs, glints of yellow light, and everything shining for a while.
7. Sacred Heart Convent
Frances passionately loves the
nuns and will stay late to help arrange folding chairs in the auditorium or
stuff packets of biscuits into gift boxes to be sent to the mission in Uganda.
On Saturdays she chaperones rich Central American boarders on shopping
expeditions downtown, and is always on call to help decorate the chapel. Even
my parents are jealous of her devotion. When our sister Jean is enrolled as a
day-girl Frances spins a narrative that permeates the school. According to
Frances, Jean has been a terror ever since the day she was adopted. Jean bit a
doctor’s hand deep enough that blue cords of glistening muscle were exposed. Arrested
for shoplifting at age seven, Jean still wets her bed savagely. Denied The Monkees she seizes the television
set and pours it out the window. It explodes hitting the sidewalk and shards of
picture tube zinging through surprised air kill a dog. None of the stories are
true. Maybe Frances is describing her dreams. But she is captain of the
basketball team, and President of Student Council, and Jean, the new girl, is
shunned. At the gymnastics exhibition before Christmas break we sit in folding
chairs and watch Frances launch off a springboard and fly over a
wood-and-leather horse. She soars up, up beyond the supplicant hands of
spotters, her back arched and arms spread in a perfect Flying Angel, face
tranquil and pale like the face of a saint upheld to the light.
8. Saturday
Midwinter
Saturday mornings he wore suede oxfords, a
tattersall shirt from LL Bean, and pair of old grey flannels. He visited the
public library, borrowed history books, diaries of statesmen and soldiers, and
mystery novels. He took us on long, desultory drives through distant parts of
the city, neighbourhoods no one else ever visited. Now I understand he was
trying to attach himself to something.
He took a glass of beer with his lunch and a small piece of bitter
European chocolate. Afterwards he fell asleep on the sofa in the living room
while listening to the Metropolitan Opera broadcast from New York. The steam
radiators scalding to touch, the air brutally dry, dust motes spinning in
shafts of fine winter sunlight. By four-thirty it would be dark outside.
Someone brought him his tea. Living room windows were stinging cold to the
touch. Heaps of snow down in the street below, isolated yelps from the few
children still out playing.
9. The
Café
On Wednesday nights they always ate dinner at
Café Martin on Mountain Street. He had been a regular since his bachelor days.
Mountain Street was named after Bishop Mountain, first Anglican prelate of
Montreal, but by the Seventies its name had been changed to rue de
la Montagne. We admired their lives, the scent of her perfume, her sheath
dresses, the burnish on his beautiful shoes glowing from somewhere inside the
leather, and tried hard not be angry when they left us behind with a sitter but
anger like electric current can deliver lethal shocks, or illuminate cities,
and it never just disappears.
10. The
School.
The Headmaster chain-smoked and was a pioneer
in the field of sex education. The School was trying to soldier its way through
the Sixties. We endured warning lectures from psychologists and policemen, drug
raids in the locker room, bomb threats from separatists. When the fire alarm
sounded we streamed out to Royal Avenue and formed ranks patrolled by prefects.
We were caned for infractions and learned to live in the shadow of fear, mostly
fear of humiliation. In the hallways ancient chalk dust mingled with the scent
of watery soup from the dining hall. Hallways, museums of doomed youth, were
lined with sepia-tinted team photographs of a generation of Old Boys
slaughtered in the trenches. They wore their hair parted in the middle,
ferociously slicked down. The rolled necks of their woolen hockey jerseys
caused them to lift their chins, which gave them a tautness, a wariness as they
gazed at the camera, as though they were aware of the history awaiting them.
11.
Europe
On birthdays our grandmother sent five-pound
notes and English children's books in brown paper parcels tied with brown
string, the knots lumped with scarlet clots of sealing wax. Before the First
World War she had been an Irish governess in Saxony where she met our German grandfather
whom she called “Bobs” and who was dead. When she came to Montreal she
attempted to school us in the manners and style of the Edwardians, or perhaps
the gentry of pre-war Saxony. She spoke German badly and no French. Her
boyfriend, the Count, had been in a cavalry charge and lived in the same
seaside boarding house at Bournemouth. She could describe her parents being
pelted with garbage on their wedding day, at Sligo. She had walked out of Frankfurt’s
rubble in 1945 to barter silver picture frames for potatoes in black fields.
Montreal was less real for her than Europe and at the dinner table on Sunday
evening she liked to draw our father, her son, into arguments about politics
and history, Germany and England and Ireland, and my sisters and I escaped as
soon as we could and headed for the TV room where Fred MacMurray was starring
in My Three Sons.
12. Operating
Instructions
You understand everything we tell you about
ourselves and everything we say about the others is partly a lie partly a dream
and not to be trusted.
13. Autoroute
My parents did not trust the French to run
things fairly and were always annoyed with the government. They did not speak
French themselves. In Montreal you could get by without it but in the country
it was more difficult. One Friday afternoon we were headed north on the Laurentian Autoroute when
our car was pulled over by a Surete de
Quebec cruiser. My father said Bonjour
but the cop did not reply, only held out his hand for license and
registration, then returned to his grey-and-yellow police car with the
documents while my father muttered about stormtroopers.
When the cop came back and wordlessly handed over the ticket I felt compressed
between my father’s irritation and the cop's silence. People sharing a country
but not a language come together clumsily and dangerously, like jealous armies.
14. The
Fall of New France
Through our mother we were descendants of an
Irish officer who sailed up the St Lawrence with General Wolfe's army and
camped all the summer on Ile d'Orleans
while the artillery pounded Quebec. On a September night the British crossed
from the island on boats, and the soldiers filed up a narrow trail at Anse au Foulon. They had nearly gained
the heights when one alert sentry challenged "Qui vive? " Our ancestor, educated at the Catholic
universities of Louvain and Paris, replied "Vive le Roi!" his
delightful accent causing the sentry a few seconds hesitation during which his
throat was cut. The remaining pickets were overcome and the British regiments
formed in line of battle on a wheat field just outside the town walls. In the
foggy morning General Montcalm attended Mass at the Ursulines Convent then
sortied his troops through St.Louis Gate to give battle on the field. He was
shot in the breast, his army broke and ran and Quebec fell to the British, all
on account of our ancestor. Wolfe died too.
15. The
Game
The French
had been calling themselves Canadiens when
we were still British, by the time we were Canadian they had become Quebecois, our histories chasing each
other, jealous, intolerant, never quite letting up. Le club de hockey Canadien were also known as "the Habs",
les habitants, pioneers of New
France. They were slight, tough, wiry; deft stick-handlers. Their best skaters
could stop on a dime and leave you nine cents change, people said.
When
the referee who ejected Rocket Richard from a playoff game in Boston dared
appear on Forum ice with his chrome whistle attached to his finger like a wedding
band people threw smoke bombs then ransacked St. Catherine Street, the biggest
riot since the Legislative Assembly was burnt down in the eighteen-forties.
The
night in 1965 when the Canadiens
played the Chicago Black Hawks for the Cup and you were in the stands because
your parents were in Europe and the housekeeper's daughter, Bridget, had won a
pair of tickets in an office pool and by some miracle of grace flowering from
her lonely young spinsterhood had invited you, age ten, to accompany her. You
traveled down Côte des Neiges on the 65 bus then walked west along St Catherine
Street in the thickness of an anxious, well-dressed crowd and squeezed into the
Forum to find your seats high in the blues. Charlie Hodge and Glenn Hall were
goalkeepers and Claude Provost shadowed Bobby Hull--the Golden Jet--so closely
he hardly got a shot on goal. And when Beliveau captain of the Canadiens skated his victory lap, Cup
hoisted high, sweat soaking his red jersey black, how you cried and cried.
16. He
Died
He died in a hospital room at Montreal
believing he was in Frankfurt and it was 1939. He had returned that summer
hoping to persuade his Catholic but hopelessly cosmopolitan parents to quit
Germany for England or Canada. He was unsuccessful. He managed to squeeze
aboard the last train for Rotterdam with his British passport hours before
England declared war. He was stranded at Rotterdam for three weeks before he
got a passage to New York. From there he caught the train up to Montreal where
half a century later he sits up in his hospital bed commanding me to fetch his
suitcase from the closet, we have to get to the bahnhof, catch the last train, the Dutch frontier will be closing
and he’ll be trapped in a country gone insane. Quickly. Hurry. Hurry!
17. Intersection
Frances has a partner at last and pays the
fertilization clinic and they have a baby girl and Frances loves their baby but
the partner will sometimes remark, almost casually, that the baby is her baby, not their baby. The partner threatens to take the baby and move back to
Russia or to Toronto and we see how difficult this is for Frances to hear, how
vulnerable she is how hard she works to support her little family and we resent
her partner for being cold, ungrateful, and more than a little crazy. A few days before the baby’s first birthday
Frances is on a business trip to Chicago. It’s raining. The car she’s a
passenger in runs a red light and gets t-boned by a truck. Frances is
killed. What does her life feel like to
her, approaching that intersection in the rain? Does it have a texture and a
shape? Is it something she can nearly hold in her arms, like a baby? But
Frances lives within herself--then she doesn’t--and what she knows she never
tells.
18. French
Kids (ii)
My father was dead and I finally persuaded mother
to leave the flat which had become too large and empty after years of being too
small and crowded. Five or six different landlords had owned the building
during the last few years. The heating machinery was breaking down. The janitor
had died and there was no one to shovel the snow from the steps. I found her an
apartment in a modern building with a doorman just down the street from the
church where she was married. On the last day of the move I was putting a last
carton of odds and ends into the trunk of my rented car when I saw Daniel, one
of the French kids, across the street. I had not spoken to him in twenty-five
years except once when I had helped him and his brother push a car out of a
snowbank. Now Daniel was also loading cardboard cartons into the trunk of a
car, a Toyota, the same model my mother owned, except blue, not grey. I crossed
the street and we shook hands. For years I had been taking French lessons in
California; at last we spoke the same language. He said his mother was leaving
the neighbourhood as well, going back to Victoriaville where she had grown up.
He was a mathematician, his brother Yvon a sound engineer. It was like an
encounter with a friendly stranger, also with someone you are afraid knows you
too well. I don't know why children who share a street a neighbourhood prefer
to ignore history until it shrivels and carries no weight and finally melts
away like snow does eventually even in Montreal but that was what we had done
and it was too late to do anything about all that now.
fin.
Monday, September 29, 2014
1972 Ford Country Squire (for sale)
1966 Austin-Healey 3000 MkIII
Hey. Maybe you ought to subscribe to Autoliterate. It's easy to do---there's a tab to the right where you put in your email address to receive every day's post. Your email address won't go anywhere else, and we won't be trying to sell you any stuff. We're not that kind of operation.
Sunday, September 28, 2014
1947 International Harvester in Richard Ford's Canada
From Alex Emond, in southern Saskatchewan. Where Dell goes, in Richard Ford's wonderful novel Canada. "This truck was parked outside a tire shop in Assiniboia, Saskatchewan . The body , paint and interior is absolutely flawless . It is quite astounding really ... don't know if it has a newer , big motor . The wheels indicate that it has better brakes than it was born with . Quite a gorgeous truck ... if you like 'awesome'. This red Advanced Design Chevy ain't too ugly either . It was just posing in a yard in Central Butte , begging me to take its picture . There is something in the water , that makes these prairie folks pamper their old iron."-AE
1958 Morris Minor Van: Straight Outta Devonshire
I met this Morris meat wagon in Maine. Imported from Devonshire. Original everything.
Saturday, September 27, 2014
Thursday, September 25, 2014
DDR Photographers: Helga Paris "Winstrasse"
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| Helga Paris "Winstrasse" |
"...part of the story with DDR photography is that it wasnt considered an “Art” by the government so photographers had a more room to maneuver. So there is some really interesting stuff that works as visual double and triple entendre. And there is something compelling about scenes of East Berlin in the 50s, just knowing the way back and the way forward from that time.
"Early on during our Berlin stay I got set up at this high-end gallery to look at photos. I was initially interested in Weimar photographers, but said also show me DDR work. when they started showing it to me I was stunned and uninterested in anything else. But then I left and they sent me the prices, which were much higher than I expected or wanted to pay. I stewed about it for a while and was planning to bite the bullet and just buy one to at least establish a relationship - maybe in the future they would cut be a better deal. but a few weeks went by and I never pulled the trigger because I just felt there had to be another way. Then it dawned on me that the guy from whom we rented our Berlin apartment was a photographer. I said what the hell, maybe he knows someone who knows someone. It turns out he did. And on one of our last days in Berlin he and I met with Helga Paris, one of the major DDR photographers, in her apartment in Prenzlauerberg. Lots of talking about photos, about photographing in DDR, about her process. She even understood my German. And I came away with 2 photos, straight from her darkroom. both make my knees shake. The price was vastly lower than at the gallery, but much more importantly getting the photos straight from the source, even if not *vintage* or low edition number makes a huge difference to me.
"So, feeling pretty good with myself, I parted ways with the landlord. I decided I would devote the rest of the day to following up on photo leads. I headed off to an auction house which I noticed in my web crawling occasionally offers up some stuff by DDR photographers. I figured maybe I could get something cheap because it hadn’t sold. There was one photo that I had my eye on, but I was less taken with it in person, so I passed. But one off hand comment in the middle of discussions there was that, if I was really interested in DDR photographers, I should consider stopping by this small gallery in Mitte. The guy there evidently likes showing some of the less well known stuff. It was on my way home, I had some time, so I jumped off the S Bahn and found the place. He’s got some work by a Danish photographer up, not that special. The proprietor was much more interested in some other guy who was there so I just quietly looked around. As I’m passing by a back room with his office, I see that Arno Fischer photo on the wall. It was one of the ones I liked best. We eventually get to talking about a different photographer, then I casually mention that I know the Fischer picture is widely known but I like it - how much is he selling it for? He said 2400 euros. It was 6000 (!) at the high end gallery. We talked more about other stuff then I said, what about cash, and what about now (I had it on me because of wanting to be prepared at Helga Paris’s place). Anyway, he says oh, how about 2000? Done.
Tuesday, September 23, 2014
1949 Chevrolet Deluxe for sale in Maine.
Sunday, September 21, 2014
Kim Jon il's Funeral and the 1976 Lincoln
"Back in 2011, the Dear Leader went out in style, strapped to the roof of a stretched 1976 Lincoln Continental. Sort of like Aunt Edna in National Lampoon's Family Vacation, only classier."
The Sleeper: 1966 Chevrolet Bel Air. Not Your High School Principal's Car.
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