The Old Port, Montreal. June 30, 2008

I originally did this on Facebook but I thought I’d carry it over here. Mare tagged me to see where I’d score with the BBC’s Big Read: The 100 Most Loved Novels of All Time. The list is going for sheer popularity, not necessarily critical acclaim which explains why The Fucking Da Vinci Code is there. Also, The Chronicles of Narnia is included, along with The Lion, the Witch, and The Wardrobe, which is odd.

I scored something like 26 or 27, which is higher than average but lower than a lot of people I know.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (not all, a fair amount)
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown (ok, why is this even on the list?)
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

One of our favourite places on the Island of Montreal is the Ecomuseum in Ste-Anne-de-Bellevue. We usually get a visit in once or twice a year. This year, we went with Aidan. Oh, and his mom and dad, too.

I took a bunch of pictures. This is my favourite one.

Celine Dion and Anastasia - “You Shook Me All Night Long”

Guitar World magazine recently did a poll asking readers to name the worst cover song ever. This song came at the top of the list.

Now, here’s the thing. I don’t actually hate Celine Dion. Some of earlier stuff was kind of pleasant but when she got into her biggest success doing power ballads for American films, that wasn’t really up my alley. But hey, I figured, all power to her.

But she really needs to avoid the rock. It’s sort of like watching your mom dance.

For the record, I don’t agree that this is worst cover song ever. I think this particular hommage to Al Green might be a contender:

Les Trois Accords - “Vraiment Beau”

This song’s been in nonstop rotation in my head since I heard it during the trailer for Cruising Bar 2 so I thought it would be an appropriate choice for the fête nationale.

In anticipation of the release of Cruising Bar 2, we rented the original last night. I had seen the movie in bits and pieces on late night TV over the years, mostly in a dubbed version on CBC so we decided to watch it in the original french.

The original Cruising Bar stars Micheal Côté in four roles: Jean-Jacques the metrosexual Peacock (above), Gerard the philandering Bull, Patrice the mulleted Lion, and Serge the lonely Earthworm. Each man goes out in search of love and sex (but mostly sex) in their respective favourite drinking establishments. This was one of the most popular comedies ever produced in Quebec.

The pacing is a bit uneven and there is an unfortunate sequence in which the rape of the one the characters is implied (and played for laughs) but it’s a fun film as Micheal Côté was able to give each of his characters a good dose of humanity. You like them enough to want to see how they’ve fared 18 years later.

The fun part, however, is seeing 1989 Montreal with its slightly different skyline, giant cars, and even larger shoulder pads. Even the sight of people smoking in bars seems like a throwback already. And apparently, back in the day, people danced to Sass Jordan.

Jean-Jacques is probably my favourite character, with his fashionably lopsided hairstyle, pristine white condo, and self-portrait above his bed. He spends the most time on his image, rarely saying anything and when he finally speaks, he’s incredibly dull.

I think, given a choice between that other hit of the 80’s, The Decline of the American Empire, and Cruising Bar, I’ll take the latter. Watching middle-aged intellectuals cheerfully talk about how awesome it is to cheat on your wife gets a little stale but I could forever watch Serge’s life and death struggles with public transit.

This week, U.S. Senator Barack Obama launched his first official campaign commercial as the Democratic nominee for president of the United States. In the ad, as Obama lists his accomplishments and his plans for the future as a montage of images showing the senator being raised by his mother and grandparents, and meeting with working class people. This projects to the voters an image of a man who has struggled to accomplish what he has but none of it would have been possible had he not be born in the country that he loves.

The ad also begins with him addressing the camera in front of a window where the frame creates a cross over his shoulder (pictured above).

This was done by Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee in an ad last year when he ran for the Republican nomination, although he denied it as being intentional. And really, given that in the ad, he talks openly about being a Christian, subtle hints in imagery aren’t warranted.

I couldn’t help but see the same thing in Obama’s TV spot. The window may simply be located in his house and it could have been chosen for the light but usually images appear in commercials for a well-thought out reason.

There are still persistant rumours that he is secretly a Muslim. They could have taken a cue from the Huckabee campaign to imply to voters, “See? Christian. Not Muslim. Christian.” It’s a bit tragic that candidates not only have to declare their faith to voters, but it has to be the correct faith (and it can never be no faith).

On that score, however, I assume Obama does actually believe the scientific fact of evolution, whereas Huckabee believes in the biblical Creation myth. Obama’s actual opponent, John McCain, says the Hand of God had a part in the creation of the universe which, I think, is political code for “I haven’t been to church in twenty years but I’ll say this shit if it’ll shut you up.”

Obama is actually church shopping these days, after severing ties with his controversial pastor. I think, if he must choose, he should take a cue from America’s second president, and half my Massachusetts cousins, and hitch his wagon to the inoffensive Unitarian Universalists.

In the meantime, here are some more rumours about Obama.

This aired in the U.S. last year and I heard a lot of good things about it but only now that it’s airing on CTV have I had a chance to see it. It’s worth the wait.

In case you haven’t heard of it, Mad Men is a drama set in a New York advertising agency in 1960. Along with rampant workplace smoking, viewers are treated to casual sexual harassment and racism. It’s a real window into an often romaticised time.

From the two episodes I’ve seen, the show centers around two people: Don Draper, the man in charge of creating such memorable slogans as “Lucky Strikes: They’re Toasted”, and Peggy Olsen, his newly hired secretary. Don is having an affair with a beatnik greeting card writer, Peggy has just moved into the city and prompty went on the Pill. Don also has a murky past that will likely be uncovered as the show goes on.

The show sometimes goes out of its way to show us how much attitudes have changed: Women smoke while pregnant, everyone is half-cut on cocktails before climbing into their pre-Ralph Nader cars where nobody wears seatbelts, and Don’s daughter is seen playing “Spaceman” with a plastic drycleaning bag over her head (I assume she survives the series). It also hits us over the head with clumsy lines like “Well, unless there’s some machine that magically makes copies of documents, I’d say you took this report from my office.”

In any case, it’s a particularly well-crafted series and it’s worth catching (CTV also helpfully streams full episodes online if you want catch the first two).

A few years ago, in a small fit of rage, I threw my Saturday Globe and Mail against the wall after reading one too many self-important columnists waste valuable paper space on utter horseshit. I vowed never to read it again.

This was, in itself, horseshit because I still read it online and once in a blue moon, will pay for a copy, just for a change. I still hate the damn thing.

I can never tell what demographic they’re going for with that paper because, if their weekend section is to be believed, the Globe reader makes >200K per year, lives in Rosedale (but with a condo near Queen West), has a massive cottage in the Muskokas, and like the couple in the old CIBC commercials, is torn between a retirement in Provence or Tuscany. In other words, whatever it is, it ain’t you. So I quit reading it. For a while.

Turns out, their most important columnist Leah McLaren is reaching out to me. She has decided for me that it’s ok to be me. It’s ok to buy the inexpensive things I buy because, hey, she buys them too.

So to you, Leah, I say thank you. Thank you for letting me enjoy what you call “crap“.

I have gone my entire life purchasing cheap fast food, buying housewares from discount stores, eating frozen food not, as you might conclude, in an elaborate attempt to be ironic but because it was what I can afford. Turns out a rarefied person such as yourself also enjoyed these things in her less sophisticated youth and now you have the choice to enjoy them again.

Of course, it’s not because you have to for financial reasons. Oh no, let’s make that clear, as you do in your column. You got money and you do move in fabulous circles. You could continue to enjoy quality goods (that I’ve never heard of) if you want. You just choose not to, for now.

You’ll grow tired of it, of course. Eating at McDonald’s and shopping at Wal-Mart will save you money but it does mean you’ll have to rub shoulders with the acne-faced, the working classes, the suburbanites, the recent immigrants, and, yes, the fat. By the time the fall Vogue comes out (assuming it’s still read in your circles), you’ll have moved on to the latest movement you and your friends have noticed.

But until then, I’ll remain content in the knowledge that you and I could be eating a Big Mac at the very same time. I’d like to think that connects you and I on some level, if only for an ever fleeting moment.

Sam Roberts - “Them Kids”

Hey, it’s Sims: Sub-Prime Mortgage Edition!