Monday, November 05, 2001
I figure I had better document this while I still remember the details...
Woke to an overcast though relatively mild Saturday morning, and went with Bryce to a local “main street” a short car-ride away, and collected some bagels from a branch of a St. Viateur bagelry that was in that area. I bought a dozen to take back home, though I hungrily wolfed one down on the way back to the “McBride Cube” for the rest of breakfast. Spent a leisurely morning chatting with Aggie and Bryce about the ins and outs of International teaching, and what their plans are over the next few years.
Afterwards, Bryce and I set out to see the Moche exhibit at Montreal’s Museum of Archeology. My interest in “museum-ing” fit in nicely with Bryce’s plans for seeing this exhibition, as I was his excuse to suss out the show and report back to Aggie about it. We watched a 20-minute multimedia show about the origins and development of Montreal over the centuries. It was well done, though as I remarked coming out of the show to Bryce “isn’t it amazing how people spoke in exposition centuries ago?” ;-) The show was filled with improbably conversations between people talking about city statistics and overtly descriptive passages. We then descended to the basement area, where you could see Montreal’s first cemetery, the old sewer system and the foundation of various buildings upon which the current museum is situated on top of. It was initially interesting, though after a while looking at the foundations of buildings is about as exciting as it sounds. The Moche exhibition did not disappoint though – it was a well-laid out show, and I was struck by the detail and verisimilitude of the human faces adorning the ceramic wares on display. It seemed impossible that these faces were staring back at us over the space of roughly and half-dozen centuries and more. The tag-line for the exhibition was “The Moche are Watching”, which was apt, though Bryce and I had some fun using the phrase at out-of-context scenarios throughout the day. Was disappointed that the museum didn't see fit to publish a catalog of the Moche exhibition, which I would have bought if they had had one.
Afterwards we wandered through part of the old town, though nothing in the highly touristy shops were interesting enough to lure us in. We then hiked over to the Chinatown area, where Bryce picked up some spicy sauce that Aggie wanted. Chinatown was crowded, and I opted for waiting outside while Bryce went through the assembly-line of people buying things at the store.
Then we began what was to be a long tour by car of the highlights of the city. Have a much better idea of where everything is now, though had I known the tour would have lasted much of the afternoon, I would have said something to Bryce about the plan beforehand. ;-) He wanted to go to a place called Cheap Thrills just down from the McGill campus. It was a combo CD and bookshop, which I remember having visited many, many years ago on a trip to visit Bryce when he was taking his education degree at McGill. I even remember what I had bought there: a CD of Jon Hassell’s that I’d never seen before (or since). However, there wasn’t really anything I was looking for, and I ended up wandering aimlessly through the stacks of CDs, for the most part a scene I am now completely out of touch with. I didn’t come away with anything, though it was nice to see that the store was still there after all these years, though am not particularly anxious for a repeat visit anytime soon.
We ended up going to see “the Russians”, a store that Bryce likes where they can seemingly repair anything electronic, especially older items. Though when Bryce picked up his North Vietnamese-created electric guitar, the lady at the front counter told him in no uncertain terms that it was “unrepairable”. ;-) I asked if they had a tape adapter for the VHS-C tapes I have, but no luck their either. An old Tandy colour computer was on display, though I wasn't interested enough in it to lug it back to Toronto. We then went to a local pizza place and had a quick slice, since we were both starving by this point. A small SAQ was across the street, I ended up buying a small case of a beer who’s name caught our eye: “Delirium Tremens”. A Belgian made beer featuring psychedelic swirls and pink elephants that contained 9% alcohol. Perfect libation for our recording session scheduled for that evening!
By this point in the afternoon it was about time to go and pick up Pierre at the train station, which we did. Brought him back to the McBride house, and soon after Aggie fed us one of her famous meals: spicy shrimp, curried beef and curried chicken on a bed of Asian-style rice. Yum factor 12! ;-)
Then Pierre, Bryce and I settled in for creating bad, silly music over the course of the night. We watched a bit of a “documentary” excerpts that I had done a decade ago, with interviews with most of the members of the “S”: Bill W., Pierre V., Peter V., Ian and myself. We then settled down to writing bad lyrics and creating awful music in the basement. I didn’t contribute much lyrically this time, and concentrated instead on coming up with horrible sounding base electronic tracks using Acid on the notebook computer. Over the course of the next several hours, we record about 5 tunes, including “Bionic Pompadour” and “Mass Haus”, the latter of which featured Pierre doing a mock-rap number on top of the electronic track I had concocted, slowed down to a relatively glacial 80 bpm, and with sound effects that made the whole thing sound suitably “weighty”, ponderous, funny and somehow oddly catchy. We all conked out at sometime after midnight, helped along into slumberland by drinking the strong (but tasty) Belgian beer.
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