Packing tape dispensers, tape, coin rolls, and paint, all for $1.00!

As an industrial designer I am obsessed with material culture- what I do is create objects that help people in ordinary ways in everyday life. I am not really interested in expensive furniture boutiques or art galleries- to me the objects in these stores are formal ware- objects we buy to give good impressions.

What really interests me are the objects that are inexpensive, mass produced, and almost throw-away in their value- these objects are like our pyjamas, what we use when we are just being ourselves. Montreal is therefore an ideal city for me to live in, as it is a city full of dollar stores.

Unlike Walmarts, dollar stores are small, neighbourhood-oriented stores that can be found in all neighbourhoods in the city. Most citizens can walk to their nearby dollar store. Dollar stores are full of objects so banal that you forget them until you need them. Having a dinner party for 16? Get extra plates and wine glasses at the dollar store. Your roommate threw out the hand-me-down plunger? Dollar store. Invited to a costume party? A trip to the dollar store fixes the problem. I (...read more...)

Since the skating rink thawed in the back yard, I have been watching hopefully for the first sign of tulips and hyacinths. The first spring in our house in the Pointe was very modest (see photo above) but it inspired me to plant quite a bit more this year. Unfortunately, I am a novice, and did not consider protecting the bulbs from ravenous squirrels. While I lost all the bulbs in my planters, there are still a large number in the yard itself, and I hope to be pleasantly surprised.

Spring in Montreal is wonderful. It seems everyone gets more cheerful as it gets warmer, and the city is still free of the mobs that arrive for the F1, the Jazzfest, and the dozens of other festivals that fill our summer.

Besides the usual chores around the house, here are some of the things I plan to do over the Easter long weekend:

Check out the flower stalls at the Atwater market. I love the market in the spring but dislike shopping if there are too many people.This year I will go to Serres Brosseau to get flowers- a family-run greenhouse with wholesale prices.
Have a pint and a roast beef (...read more...)

Our trip to the Catskills this weekend was wonderful- it’s great to get out into the country, and away from the everyday hassles of city life. Our friend’s 160 year old farmhouse gave us the pleasure of things we cannot get in Montreal- silence, the sound of birds singing, and absolute darkness. The 2.5 hour commute from NYC is certainly justified for our friends.

I had not been south on the autoroute 15 in several months and was shocked to see a whole new region of suburban sprawl appearing along beside the autoroutes 15 and 30 in Candiac.

What used to be beautiful landscapes that were reminiscent of Peter Hoffer painting are now row after row of Styrofoam chateaus. Each home is a miniature Versailles or Fontainebleau, and takes up every square inch of its site 150 feet off the Autoroute.


Le Groupe Beaumont's Corbusier model home.

Why is this happening? Who do these homes appeal to?

Candiac is calling itself “a harbour of peace” five minutes from the Champlain Bridge. The slogan must be effective, judging by the rate of development along the autoroute. Apparently, people are anxious to escape the rat race of the big city, and live a (...read more...)

Saturday night I found myself at a friend's place for dinner and two of the people there were discussing the public pillow fight they had been to the night before.

Apparently, news of the event was circulated via email and text-messaging in a sort of viral, non-organized fashion. No one knew who started the idea or where it came from. The instructions were simply to arrive at Dorchester Square at 7:00pm and to bring a pillow. And to start a fight. Which clearly happened.

According to my friends at the party, the experience was incredibly liberating. They only knew each other--so the other 30 or so people who showed up were total strangers--it seemed that most of the participants did not know one another either.

Imaging the frisson of walking up to total strangers and just letting go with your favourite feather filled comfort device. The event probably saved thousands in psychotherapy bills alone.

As entertainment, V For Vendetta fires on nearly all cylinders, to whit: several buildings explode; there’s a masked hero; a beautiful, if not necessarily fatal, femme; some shootouts; some knife fights; some witticisms; and, for those who like a teaspoon of high culture with their evening out, the Bard is quoted more than once. In short, to quell the fears of movie-goers (like me) made gunshy by the bloated slabs of nothingness that were parts two and three of the Matrix trilogy, relax. We may never know why the brothers Wachowski screwed up so monumentally after making something so fun and original, but, in partnership with director James McTeigue, they’ve come back with an effective vector for popcorn. I promise that nobody soliloquizes about programming binaries for half an hour in a room made of thousands of televisions; there are no underground crowds with perfectly distributed melanin ratios, dancing to the world-beat; on the other hand (and unfortunately, in my view) Monica Bellucci makes absolutely no appearance in Vendetta.

So, it’s watchable. Now on to the bigger question – is it as good as it wants to be? Because this is a movie with aspirations. Certain filmmakers chafe at being mere (...read more...)

Somewhere, as I write and as you read, somewhere in Montreal somebody is knocking on doors and selling something. It's a mean job, a job for those who need money and can't find a better way to make it. I've done it myself. This is how it goes:

It starts in a back room of a shabby office somewhere central, somewhere downtown, say somewhere on Guy between Maisonneuve and Rene Levesque. It starts in this backroom with instructions, a sales workshop.

Instructor: They’ve let you in their house, you’re following them down the hallway, they’re letting you inside. Their house is their mind. You own the house and everything in it. You kneel before them, but you own them. You unzip the portfolio, you unzip, and you’re stripping, but you own them, it’s a game, you’re stripping them, and painting by painting you show them how to strip themselves. Of their money. You, Kid, show us what you can do.

Kid: Hello I am a bohemian exhibiting the work of my friends door to door offering this unique opportunity to view Art on delivery here for instance is the perennial favorite Mediterranean Fishing Boat executed in warm reds and as I (...read more...)

Strangely, there’s no pizza to be found at St. Catherine and St. Laurent. There’s a storefront with “pizza” in the title, but it was closed last night at 8pm. So we had poutine at La Belle Province. I didn’t expect much from a chain – the interior had no charisma, but the cheese curds were real, the fries thick and greasy, the gravy passable, and the portion generous. We tucked in under baleful fluorescence and were satisfied. But this is not a restaurant review; this is a preamble. We were fortifying ourselves for the next four hours of standing in front of the stage just down the street at Club Soda.

The High Dials, who claim to hail from Montreal, opened. I like their rhythm section. The drummer wears extravagant muttonchop sideburns and attacks his kit with slack-jawed ferocity. The bassist is a small, geek with a mop top and a beard and an infectious, bouncy stage presence (he knocked over a mike stand with his flailing bass, for instance). He also plays the sitar, although I could barely hear it when he did so. I think he and Muttonchops should find a new lead singer and start a different band (...read more...)

From Côte St. Luc to the Plateau, I was told that the best route was Fleet eastbound which would became Van Horne, and still further east, then a right on Parc and there I would be. I puttered along in my sixteen-year old Honda Civic, frost heaves jamming the tires into the wheelbase, and here are a few things that I saw as I bounced and jangled through Outremont: a health food store for pets; the Mountain from the north; white, oval street signs; big, handsome houses; the signature elegant (but surely impractical?) spiral staircases of Montreal.

Barreling down Parc I wanted to turn left on Mont Royal, but it looked dangerous and I’m not sure it’s legal. And then it was too late for any lefts until after the Esplanade and the labyrinthine construction zone below it. My Honda and I gracefully banked onto Avenue des Pins and then left onto St. Laurent and back up in the direction we’d come. I was looking for a place called Lele da Cuca, a Brazilian-Mexican restaurant where I was to join my wife, my wife’s godmother and the godmother’s friend. The latter two I had not met, and naturally I wanted to (...read more...)