While the orange fascist continues his parade of destructive idiocy through the system of government holding his country together (just), among his bolder – as in batshit crazy, storm into Poland-level, everyone loves me coz I’m hot hot hot, bolder – “ideas” is acquiring a new state. In Canada. As you do.
What’s up there? Beyond beers, bacon, moose and hockey pucks? Ah, glad you asked says Wind Back Wednesday, home of this visit to some of the eastern side of the country, and especially Montreal. There’s a few more things. A lot more things. And not all of them L. Cohen.
This was 2010. A lot has changed – indeed it wasn’t even the same on the next visit – but a lot, like the principles of a country America could only aspire to be, has not.
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“SOME PEOPLE CRY, some people laugh,” says Pascal, a waiter with a philosophical streak as wide as the St Lawrence River which flows around Montreal. “I’m not the seller; I just want you to experience it.”
How very Montreal.
Ok, Pascal in this instance was trying to convince me that La Fabrique’s duck breast, red polenta and bok choy, with a glass of Cotes du Rhone, really needed to be finished off with what was described as French toast with clove caramel. (Lord knows I didn’t need it. Trust me I resisted manfully for some time. But sadly he was right, it was scrumptious. Damn those chefs.)
But the point remains that this is how the Montréalais and Montrealaise, the 3.6 million Canadians in the second-largest French-speaking city in the world, approach interest from outsiders. They know that their island city, while not as picture-book pretty as the provincial capital Quebec City, isn't exactly hard to like, particularly if you have a Francophile leaning. They also have a healthy self-confidence which is not burdened by excessive concern for other Canadian regions. So they figure they won't shove it at you, instead gently pointing out what is sitting there waiting for you.
There is a superficially similar but actually quite different attitude to be found down the road in Toronto where they don’t want to waste much time convincing you there’s reasons to be here. That’s partly because there is something of the insecurity of the less pretty but thrusting younger sister about this city. Here, neither natural beauty nor architectural heritage will do the heavy lifting of attracting visitors – even though the city’s favourite weekend/summer/afternoon getaway, Toronto Island Park, a short ferry trip across Toronto Harbour, is a pretty oasis.
Consequently it's much more about business and efficiency and practicality. (Oh yes, and hockey. It’s Canada, they do hockey seriously here. Check out the Hockey Hall Of Fame. Seriously.) Montréal has the jazz and comedy festivals, where flighty artists shine; Toronto has the North by North East and Canadian Music Week music industry conventions, where managers, agents, programmers and journalists outnumber the performers.
If Montréal is the most French part of Canada, right down to having an excellent Metro service, then this much younger, less history bound city could lay claim to being the most American. But that only goes so far. It’s a city where the collectivist culture still exists, where the most successful indie rock band, Broken Social Scene, is a sprawling outfit which incorporates solo artists, multiple offshoots and self-funded labels and tours. A music scene which author Michael Barclay told the New York Times was an example of "textbook Canadian identity politics: the expression of individual will through community."
But here again, the differences between the eastern Canadian cities are not as clear cut as clichés would have it. Or as different as they are again from the more relaxed west coast city of Vancouver. As Mark Di Pietro, a music industry veteran explains: "In Canada we embrace [national] culture as our own while in the US it's more about the hometown. It is from the heart, there's no pretensions to it.”
So look again and Montréal, for all its purported insularity - as described by non-Quebecois with barely concealed disdain-cum-dislike - is actually a city of blends. You need only look at the music for which it is famous to understand that, even before getting to the Irish, English, French and native Canadian roots of what used to be Ville Marie as displayed in the small but fascinating McCord Museum.
It’s the city where Arcade Fire blend southern American outer suburbia and Canadian isolation with Bruce Springsteen-fired passion and Haitian longing. Where the Jewish Leonard Cohen draws liberally from Christian iconography and where the British roots of the Wainwright/McGarrigle families flowers among French chanson and Italian opera in the youngest members, Martha and Rufus.
You could, at a pinch, even point to the fact that this was the second city where Liverpudlian pop star John Lennon and Japanese artist Yoko Ono conducted one of their hippie-fabulous Bed-Ins. They spent a week in bed in room 1742 at the Queen Elizabeth Hotel during May/June 1969 preaching togetherness and the city still was celebrating the event last year.
As any Sydneysider would know, the real test of cultural blending and cultural maturity is on the plate. Now Toronto isn’t short of good restaurants, several of them in restaurant alley along King St W where they literally lunge at you as you pass, touting wares which range from French (I had a pretty fine calves’ liver one night) to Asian to plain and hearty. And a few high price/high end ones too, with the Japanese influenced look and exquisitely balanced food of Ultra, further north on Queen Street, a highlight. For some more bohemian atmosphere – that is they don’t look like they’re much more awake than you at breakfast but the food is well alive – there’s little holes-in-the-wall places at the eastern end of King St, nearer the old town. Le Petit Dejeneur is one.
But, having discovered it post-gig one night at what could be called “kebab o’clock” in Australia, I can’t deny that the best food I ate in Toronto – for sheer pleasure, consistency and zing - was at Mike’s Hot Dogs. Not a restaurant but one of the many streetside vendors. Real sausages, real bread, condiments seemingly without end and a combination which seems prosaic on paper but hits the spot just as well at 2pm as 2am.
I might hesitate to admit that in Montreal where noshing is a sport unto itself, whether it’s the gimmicky but amusing pitch black experience of O Noir (don’t wear white, do bring a friend), the combination of modern Spain and provincial France of Pintxo (sparkling tapas and earthy cassoulet) or the bagels produced 24 hours a day at La Maison De L-Original Fairmount Bagel (perfect after you’ve ridden up Mont Royal for that morning view of the city). Be warned though, in Montreal they like their bagels sweet.
And they like their churches.
I don’t care if you have a faith or not, you can’t come to Montreal and not go to church. Any church. (No, I don’t mean the Bell Centre, home of the 24-times Stanley Cup winning Canadiens, though some locals may disagree.) It would be like visiting Sydney and avoiding the harbour or dropping into New York and refusing to look up at a skyscraper.
Montreal is a city not short of grand cathedrals, small chapels and old houses of worship which date back two or three centuries - at some you can trace a fossil or two in the stonework. The locals are fond of quoting Mark Twain who once declared after a visit to the city on the St Lawrence, “this is the first time I was ever in a city where you couldn't throw a brick without breaking a church window".
There’s the neo-gothic of St George‘s Anglican Church with its blue ceiling and black walnut, its tableaux and sloping floor rising up from the altar somewhat humbly nestled between tower blocks. Or on the other side of the central railway station, the more subtle architecture of St Patricks, built for the Irish immigrant workers and toned brown and cream. You can mimic the pilgrims who approach the green dome and white stone of Notre Dame Basilica on their knees or take lunch outside the modest but quietly beautiful Christ Church Cathedral.
But best of all if you can get out of bed in time on a Sunday morning, try the Cathedrale Marie Reine du Monde (Cathedral of Mary Queen Of The World) for a morning service with the grand 1893 organ being played, sending its sound high up to the domed ceiling, while the choir above you rings out “Hosanna, Hosanna”.
As Pascal says, some people laugh, some people cry.
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