I'm back...

Hello, Ithaca. You're looking rather gloomy this afternoon.

But then again, don't you always?

So if I had one word for Montreal, what would it be?

Shoes

New pair of shoes from Transit. It was a tight choice between black/gray/green Converses, and black leather dress boots, but in the end I went for the dress boots. They seem to work remarkably well with boot-cut dark washes. Oh, and on a not-so-good note, my favorite D&G sunglasses cracked at the hinge. No worries, I can get them repaired free.

Dinner was at Segafredo again. Tonight we were in time to watch some live jazz: a salon jazz piano trio headed up by a beautiful Egyptian singer, singing in French of course. We watched for a few hours over cheesecake and drinks, while a couple of thet the Montreal jazz scene, and oh yes, the female's scene.

I know. It's not fair I make this stereotype. But it was there, at the table, that I noticed that all Canadian drummers, regardless of genre, look more or less alike. There's a commonality not only in their nervous, edgy-but-composed sticking style, but also in their aesthetic quality: a handsome, slightly rough, stubbly, thin face partly hidden by messy and medium black hair. They all wear a black suit over a white button-down, dark-wash jeans, and oh yes, don't forget the sweat.

But then again, it's a French Canada thing. I mean. Look at Etienne.

Montreal has a charme incendiere.

French Jazz...<3

I don't know why I brought this subject up. My guess was it's a combination of a couple things, from riding on the Montreal subway, to the quality of girls here, to excess spare time.

I figured that sex in a subway tunnel would be pretty erotic. But it'd have to be in a certain place. It couldn't just be anywhere. It'd have to be close to the trains, and it couldn't be too rough. The sweeter the better. Why? It's like public sex, except at the same time, the spectators are moving by too fast to know what's really going on.

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Ah, mon dieu. French jazz is so cool.

There's a unique sound here that you can't really find elsewhere in lyrics and in music itself. It's this quirky, smoky, more organic flavor of jazzmusique, too refined to be bebop and too avantgarde to be west coast. Exotique. The chanteuses are much prettier here too, in this more adorable, classier way.

It's the language too. Jazz was meant to be in French. You know, it's inexplicably cute, the way everything sounds better in French. French can turn the worst lyrics into an art. Ah, this music is so beautiful it makes me cry.

I think I'm falling in love...

Boxing Day

I love the style here in Montreal. People are so well-dressed here.

Surprisingly, financial damages were kept at a minimum. In the end, I dropped 25$ on dark-wash boot cuts, 20$ on a kickass white collar shirt, another 20$ on a tight black sweater, and 3.50$ on a black and gray scarf. My guess is that I would have gotten more had we not been lost for most of the time.

*Note the prices are in CAD, not USD. And then I get my tax money back at the border.

I love Boxing Day.

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I remember my first time in a Segafredo. It was in Tokyo, when we dropped in for a coffee after hanging out on the Promenade. I must say the atmosphere didn't allow breathing; too much cigar smoke. The pastries were thick and crusty, and the coffee was rancid. I didn't enter another Segafredo for another year.

I gradually built up my taste for the Portuguese cafe chain in Lisbon, actually.It was one of the places we frequented for lunch in the Baixa-Chiado before we resorted to an ugly, coach-class Chinese restaurant a block from our hotel that played the same MIDI-driven keyboardist playing cheap riffs over a 20$ drum machine. Every day.

And today, in Montreal, my dad and I went out to pick up a late dinner at the Underground City, but apparently they close early these days. So we went out to St. Catherin Street, a SoHo-like district that cuts Montreal in half between Mont-Royal and the Old City. Most of the pizza parlours were closed, but I spotted...a Segafredo.

And when we walked in, I changed my mind. French house music. Hardwood floors, glasstop bars, walls of spirits, and the white leather chairs. The consumers match the decor; a man on my right wearing a Versace suit and a crisp red embroidered chemise sits down with his friend and pulls out a sixteen hundred dollar Vertu Ascension, one of the world's most expensive cellphones.

I sat down at a window seat and turned on my mp3 player. I made a point of recording the music.

There's a Segafredo that has dignity.

The food came. And the rest of it, as they say, was history.

____________

Amazing electro-house band:
telepopmusik

Take a look at the song Into Everything, Remix. Takes a while to get into, but it's good stuff.

Good evening from Montreal.

living life detached
she knew of three elements
steel, concrete, and glass

___________

Bonne soiree from Montreal.

It's snowing outside; first day of snow this year for Montreal, and we were euh, lucky enough to catch it in full swing. It's dying down now, but there's reportedly 20 centimeters of snow on the ground, and visibility is limited to a couple hundred meters.

But in a way, it's beautiful too.

It seems like this is the way Montreal should look: concrete skyscrapers and traffic jams and surrounding hills, blanketed in a gray haze and caked in white. There's a special appeal to the aura to the city which is..ah, difficult to explain.

It's also about the people. They seems like snowy people. Not to mention quite friendly, and pretty.

[21:32] inqualcanto: like. it's french girls in general, where they're often not hot, but they're really pretty
[21:32] yuvali611acs: yea
[21:32] yuvali611acs: not ugly
[21:32] yuvali611acs: but just like
[21:33] inqualcanto: it's an "adorable" thing more than it is a "wanna bang her uhhh like a drum" thing
[21:33] yuvali611acs: if they have one "off" feature
[21:33] yuvali611acs: like their nose

I was just out for dinner, and we were fortunate enough to snag a hotel in a very chic district. Zegna's in our basement. Their Champs Elysses is just two blocks away. I'm in Elysium. Then again, I didn't spend anything today. Instead, I'd like to think of it as...preliminary surveillance. A recon. An...information gathering operation.

Oh shit. I forgot to bring my sketchbook.

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Elysium: Scrap or Not?

It's been the most laid back Christmas I've ever had. Needless to say I'm not religious, so it's never been too stressful.

Just got off about twenty minutes on my trainer, trying to shake the stagnant feeling you get when you sit on your ass for most of the day. It felt good. Heartrate peaked at around 180; not bad, but not great. And yeah, twenty minutes is a short session, but I made it intense. Besides, I haven't finished packing.

(Tomorrow morning I'm out for Montreal for the rest of the week. I'll have sporadic internet access, but I'll probably be busy doing other things more worth my time.)

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I hate to leave my other story unfinished, but I feel compelled to begin fresh; I can't stand the way I wrote this one. I don't know if that means rewriting my story from scratch or maybe just editing whole sections that sound...eh, chunky. Outdated. Messy. Vicky, you've read it...what do you think? Is it worth my time rewriting?

Then again, in the Information Age, documents are never permanently scrapped. It stays on my hard disk until I decide I truly don't want it anymore. Then it goes to the recycling bin. And if I really don't want it, it gets erased permanently.

But oh, it still pains me to drop it. It's been over a year now since I first turned these ideas into bytes. It's taken my time, my energy, and most of all it's taken so many of my dreams and imagination. It seems like if I scrap it now, I'm turning my back on an era in my life. I'm not just letting go of a story, but I'm letting go of a frame of mind, a dream state I've been in for the last fifteen months. I'll never be able to come back to it again with the same conviction I had before.

At the same time, I feel like I've been only postponing the inevitable. The past month or so, I've opened up my story every day for an hour or so, only to edit a few lines of text, maybe add a paragraph or two, and then close it. It's as if...well, I'm pretending that it lives on in my head. But I have to face it: I'm already losing my energy to continue writing. I don't have the creative stamina to write for long periods of time like this.

I don't like the side I'm leaning towards.

_______

I feel like talking to someone. I don't really care who. I just feel like having a conversation, spilling my thoughts. But it's also 12:18 in the morning, and these are very specific thoughts I have that can um, only be spilled and understood by a few people.