Erdély induló : PART ONE

My parents are ethnic Hungarians from Maros Vasarhely, in Transylvania, modern day Romania. I travelled there this month with my mother and my step-father (my father did not join us). The purpose of the experience was to revisit our homeland, or in my case, see it for the first time, and meet relatives I'd only known through photos and numerous stories.



Transylvania is a peculiar place, mainly because it's a region with a huge question mark over its head. From the late 800s until the 20th century, Transylvania was, more often than not, a coveted piece of land, but a territory protected within vast Hungarian borders, with occasional incursions by Turks, Austrians and Russians. Such is not the case any longer. Apart from a brief period during WWII, Transylvania has been under the control of Romania since the end of WWI, and Hungarians there have had to fight (but thankfully not kill, or die) for the retention and visibility of their culture.




The houses where my father and mother grew up respectively...no longer in family hands.

We once lived in the majority, but our numbers have dwindled to about one-third of the Transylvanian population, and while places like Vasarhely remain 40/40 (the remaining 20% are made up by Gypsies, Germans, Serbs and Croats), it's still dominated by Romanian language and culture. My family represents three generations of Hungarians who lived through the Romanianization of their birth names, schools and workplaces, and life there is not easy for them.



Vasarhely is small, and like Kingston, it's a university town, rife with contradictions. It's architectural makeup is split between Hungarian turn-of-the-century style and Romanian Communist utilitarian structures. It's a vat of varying tastes, with urbanity and renewal as the fine extract, and ruralism and decay in the swill. On the pallet sits an aftertaste of diesel fuel.

There are few riches to acquire, and those who have them hoard them. Beautification and renewal are only concepts there, and even then, they're scarcely considered. There's garbage and dirt everywhere, especially in public parks.



The sky is either pleasantly bright, or terrifyingly dark.





Death is a prevalent theme. Among many graveyards is the Soviet Heroes park, up on the Trebely, a hill surrounding the city. My father used to play there as a child, now it's "buried in the weeds", as one travel writer once wrote.


Segeant Baklanov, Lieutenant Martinchuk, and other Soviet Heroes lie in rest, while the hammer-and-sickle stones are blacked out and replaced with swasztikas.

In WWII, the German/Hungarian/Romanian forces fought against the Soviets on these hills, and then the Romanians switched sides in 1944. Romania was under communist control until 1989, after which all efforts to maintain memorials to Soviet victories ceased. Romanian graves, however, are kept up nicely, while there are absolutely no commemorations to Hungarians who died in the war.


Crosses for before the switch, when they were fascists, and of course, Soviet heroes for afterwards.

More posts from the Transylvania trip to follow over the next few days.

JANVIER, QU'EST-CE QUE CEST?

Salem's Loft #1


Salem's Loft #2


Soldatengeist


Three Ladies In A Parlour

He had a dream last night that he was flying in the passenger seat in an open cockpit plane. A young woman shared the seat with him. He sat at th edge of the seat, leaning back against her chest, while she clutched him and put her face before his, both of them staring forward. All he could see was a dim sky ahead of him, and some errant locks of hair from the girl's head behind him. Just as it was starting to feel really exhilirating, he could hear the alarm going, and so ended his trip back in time.

*******

A history of Transylvania...the book could never be written, not in any semi-objective or official context. It would only be tainted with sentimentalism, bias and, prejudices, depending on who writes the book, where they come from, what their interests might be, but perhaps more importantly, when they wrote it. All that can be measured is how much investment in that book each writer has. But perspectives change over time, so what one person thinks in one era might be totally aligned with thoughts of the future, but terribly out of place in their own time.

Like any region, it had been inhabited by numerous peoples. Each little subsection of Transylvania could, in all possibility, be claimed by at least a few groups, supposing all of these groups still existed, and had a forum to communicate. But such is not the case, and beyond that, what constitutes a "people" remains unclear. What became of the Dacians, who settled there before the Romans? There are also the Huns, who spread their genes into the Magyars (or Hungarians as the English call them), yet one cannot say that Transylvania is an Asiatic place. There are Germans who inhabit whole communities, and then there are the Csángó, who, in popular wisdom, "have German blood, speak Hungarian, and dress like Romanians." The Szekely, who live a traditional life beyond towns and cities, have similarly intertwined roots and customs. There are the Macedonians, and Greeks, who are now referred to in obscure linguistic journals as Aromanians. Finally, we have the Ruthenians, so few in number, who can only be some combination of Romanian and Russian, with perhaps some Serb in there as well? Who knows, really.

By the turn of the 19th century, where our story more or less begins, Transylvania had become a strong and independent slice of Austro-Hungary, known for its localized justice system, and the relative prosperity and respectability of its noble classes. The several provinces that made up Transylvania proper weren't exactly typical places, but they were not altogether foreign in the larger context of the Empire. In that period, Braham Stoker would steal an old legend about bats, and with little thought, picked a name from bloodier times, and thus came about the ridiculous Dracula story. Vlad the Impaler had nothing to do with bats. He did have a lot to do with impaling, however. There are tales of him having impaled 30,000 victims in one go, after a battle. No woman, child or breathing soul was spared in the vicinity of victory.

Blood has always flown by violence in Transylvania, but not a lot of it was visible, not in an en masse fashion. Under Communsim, for instance, most murder was committed behind closed doors, usually by the hand of a well trained, hardened officer of the security services. By and large, the region lived in peace and prosperity. But there was no lack of cruelty when blows were stricken. The Turks committed atrocities that killed thousands in days. One cannot forget the Jews, who took the brunt of their fate towards the end of the war, but took it no less harder than any of Hitler's enemies. The number of battles and clashes that took place there are almost too many to count. To tally every incident involving mass slaughter or acts of war would only confirm the obvious.

The enduring conflict, in modern times, concerned until recently only two groups of people. Hungarians and Romanians both held a special regard for "the place beyond the forest", both claiming it homeland, and neither relenting at any point.

It was afternoon and the clothes on the line hung peacefully in the back yard garden. Little Miki, for the first time in his life, saw the sun dry a wet piece of garment. It was then that his brother was brought back home on a carriage by a man from the country.

"Why has he come home like this?" asked his mother as a carriage rolled through the front gate. Little Miki then saw his brother, from a distance, haggard and barely awake, lying on a flat wagon with large wooden wheels. His mother had torn her shawl from her head and tears streamed down her screaming face like Miki had never seen before. One of his older sisters quickly shoed him inside, and he hid under a bed until it was dark.

The first few days were quiet. Miki's returning brother was placed by the woodstove. The sisters all took turns taking care of him at night, while Miki was excused on account of his young age. But during the day, his mother took care of the returning son. He had left because of a spat with his father, who had since set out to find him.

Upon first appearance he had lost a great deal of weight and his body was covered in bruises, as if he had been beaten or mugged. He carried no bag and was dressed without shoes, covered in mud head to toe. After he was bathed and fed, he fell asleep and woke up only intermittently for a week, eventually developing a pattern of sleeping in shifts of several hours, waking to eat, and then sleeping again.

It was some time later, perhaps weeks or months, that Miki's brother had started to cough blood. His mother immediately called a doctor, who tentatively diagnosed TB and told her not to handle any blood without wearing leather gloves and cleaning it with hard soap.

At first, Miki's brother would spit his discharge into a bowl provided by one of the sisters, but his hostility towards the situation was such that he began spitting it onto the wall instead, more than likely out of spite.

His mother did not take kindly to this blood spitting, and immediately began scolding him. Yet everyday, without saying a word, Miki's brother continued to spit his blood onto the wall.

When Miki's father returned, he immediately barred any of the children from entering the central room of the house where Miki's brother slept and spat. He took out his kit but realized that if it were TB, as his wife had told him, he wouldn't be able to take the risk of touching the boy if he didn’t have to. He would have his wife continue to clean the blood, under his supervision, and he would make sure she cleaned it thoroughly.

The children were sent by their father to stay with their aunt a few days later, and were told to say goodbye to their brother through the window into the central room on the day they left. He was asleep, and fresh blood trickled down the wall beside the bed, but the siblings all said their goodbyes to him through the window as told.

Miki's brother died not too long after, and the family burned the house down, contents and all, and built a new one a few acres off.

He sometimes feels that he's on the verge of witnessing large, seizmic things, yet every passing day grows stiller and quieter than the last. The more alienated he imagines himself from the ways of others, the more confidence he finds in his own ideas. He's not clear about his values and often thinks he has none, but he knows that deep down, something will change in him, something that will allow him the benefit of hindsight, which he has yet to accrue.

*******



Under the lantern, he could see the dark water drip slowly into the bucket. It had been seven weeks since he'd run away, and three days now without proper food or water. His lips had cracked hours ago and his stomach had more or less shrank to the size of a small pouch.

But there it was, this beautiful bucket under the light, in a back alley in Segesvár, or Sighisoara as the Rumanians called it, where Vlad the Impaler, Dracula, had been born and raised. It's difficult to say whether or not he noticed the discordant colours of the water in the bucket, or the material floating in it, but in his unyielding thirst, he might have simply ignored the hazards. He drank of the bucket, sticking his face straight into the cesspool as if searching for apples at a county fair contest.

He slumped to the ground and lay for what might have been hours before he heard a sound, which turned out to be a carriage stopping in the near distance.

SPRING UND DRANG

HARDCORE MAN by
Perennial Machete (Dan Hildebrand /Steve Birek /Matt Thompson)
Never to be Released

He's a hardcore, hardcore man

Lives his life by a hardcore plan
(He's a hardcore, hardcore man)
Drives around in a hardcore van
(He's a hardcore, hardcore man)
Has a brother named Hardcore Dan
(He's a hardcore, hardcore man)
Eats his lunch from a hardcore can
(He's a hardcore, hardcore man)



He's a hardcore, hardcore man

Lives his life by a hardcore plan
(He's a hardcore, hardcore man)
Cools his room with a hardcore fan
(He's a hardcore, hardcore man)



He's a hardcore, hardcore man

I used to know this guy when I went to university, and he was pretty fucked up. He was thoroughly alcoholic, yes, but what that article doesn;t tell you is that he had some issues with ritalin. I remember him shoving a few into my mouth one night (I'm not kidding exactly) and thinking later "Jesus, this shit is awful, how can he do this stuff? I feel like crap!" But he did, and throughout that period of drinking and pill-popping it was quite difficult to call him a friend. I didn't dislike him. In fact, I found him at first to be rather expressive and intelligent, albeit a little crazy.

I didn't know him as well as a few of my friends did, and I can't say I ever grew close to him, but he was a person I hung out with from time to time in group situations, usually partying. Ater the first few times I hung out with him, he degraded rather quickly to a state of rampancy, growing more eccentric as the weekends rolled along. Eventually, he just became the kind of guy who would walk from place to place saying non-sensical, almost schizophrenice things to everyone and no one in particular.

I remember once he approached me at the bar and said "Steve, there's some obvious tension between us. We're not communicating", explaining that a girl I had dated briefly was "coming between us". I didn't really know there was an "us" to come between. At my band's last show, he came up to me after every song and asked that I announce my roommate's birthday, even though I'd mentioned it three times already. In his mind, he totally tuned out the facts because he was drunk and high and couldn't bother to apply facts to reality. He had these imagined concepts of what the world was like around him, so I suppose his inner world must have been intensely subjective and suspended from the real chain of events that comprised his social life.

A lot of people avoided him. He was simply too much, and it was quite often a sad thing to watch. We often felt for him, but we really couldn't do anything. We accepted him not solely as a casualty but a powerful warning as well. We saw this shadow of a person

But once I ran into him during exams and he had decided to take them seriously that semester. He had spent all day in the library and was going to do more. He was rationally discussing the topics of his studeies in a scholarly fashion, coherently and with conviction. It was ike I had seen a completely different person that day, as if I had met him that night at that party and instead of him putting pills on my tongue, we sat down and had a conversation about something of interest. It was as if all that time in between our initial meeting and that moment had been rewritten. I could almost see flashes of Kyle as a someone capable of motivation and thirst for knowledge.

Having read that article just now, I realize that he had it in him to change the whole time, and he's had the sense to do so before the situation got any more desperate. I'm very happy to see Kyle's story portrayed in the context of a relatable issue at Queen's, particularly after the wholeHomecoming mess. While Kyle is definitely a unique guy, there were most certainly others like him who were maybe less outward about their vices than Kyle but just as mired into to bog as he had been.

It's not limited to gender or race either. Queen's was probably the only scene I've ever experienced where I could count on two hands or more the number of actual drunks I knew at any one time. None of them were suffering as physically as Kyle was, but their emotions and health took less than desirable turns when they upped the sauce intake to daily occurances.

Queen's culture is ambivalent towards alcoholism, there is no question about that. To students, it's a humourous addition to someone's character. To Kingstonians, it's a nusance that nobody really wants to do anything about. To the administration, they only care about it when the headlines start blasting on the ticker.

I've been to other universities. U of T students are afraid of hangovers and McGill kids like their wine with dinner and a joint. When I visited Reed College in Portland, Oregon (which I always felt was Queen's if it cut 90% of its population down and kept only the smart, cool people who actually gave a shit about anything) I was amazed to see a nearly dry frosh party with a fucking salsa band headlining the show. People were dancing exotically! What I would have given to see that at Queen's, but instead I got people's chants of "ohhh-laaayyyy oh-lay -oh-lay oh-lay" outside of my window until 5 am because Queen's students have centered their lives around drinking. I watched akid rip the seat off my toilet because the drama students initiating him into his forst play made him drink whiskey and shots of cooking oil. I saw a drunken mob maraude a cafeteria on a Friday afternoon, turn the place upside down and then get arrested for smashing stolen glasses on the ground and blocking fire trucks. One of my friends stole a car from some driver who had left his keys in and the motor running for a minute, all because my friend was loaded and didn't have the sense to ask himself basic, logical questions like "should I be driving drunk in a stolen car right now?"

Don't get me wrong, I loved a ol' good belt once in a while, and still do, but for CRYIN OUT LOUD! I don't need to deprive my brain of oxygen that many times a week, and if I ever choose to do so, I'll make sure I don't wake up my neighbourhood while I'm at it. I won't flip any cars and I won't go fuckin bananas when someone tells me I shouldn't flip cars and I certainly won't tell old Chinese people that "it's time to leave the neighbourhood".

And neither should you! Think about what you've done like our friend Kyle and start making things right again.

ZANY ADVENTURES WITH THE KULESHOV EFFECT AND TRANSLATION MACHINES

СВЯТЕЙШИЙ SHIT!!! Моим сердцем кровотечения будет звонок
wake-up для смерти на земле. Представьте если мы все имеемые
БЛОНДИНКЫ NIFTY LEGGY для того чтобы всосать наши краны.
Такие были бы настолько ШПУНТОВЫ. Я был раз лягушкой на
McDonalds. Hoiw много времен делает BILLY JOEL
делает шутки flatulence?

ВОПРОС О SWEEEEEET!

STILL AND SOUND

The following are a production still and a sample audio track from the upcoming, ongoing gallery project Before the Fall by video artist Ben Roberts and sound engineer Steve Birek.

COUSTEAU AT THE COTTAGE

"TURN AROUND BRIGHT EYES" OR "PAPERBACK WRITER"?

Oh, hi, nice to meet you, I'm the nurse in this play...I just ate the front row.

Dear Diary,

I'm back in the drama...theatre, that is! Not silly girl troubles. Aw, lordie! What a hoot it is to be back at the ol' thespian games. I've gone from a lead actor all the way to sound technician in only 6 years. What a feat!

And my, the parties those dramatists throw! Oh, the karaoke, the lights, the junior high-ness of it all!

I'll never forget those grand old times in University, when my old actor roommate threw all his cast parties, right in our house! Boy, do those kids sure like to make out and fall hopelessly in love with each other. Like, remember the time I listened to a grown, 26 year old theatre director cry outside my bedroom door for two hours at four in the morning over the unrequited love of an 18 year old girl who'd only had her first kiss an hour before? Oh, sweet Jeezies, I'll sure miss those wacky days of youth.

Seriously folks, avoid actors, acting, stages, theatres and anyone who walks near them. It's impossible to tell whether people in drama are real or not. They're always acting and twisting the truth. They're creepy at best, supernaturally possessed at worst. Like, I mean, are they actually alive, or just really from the legions of the undead, roaming the earth on screens and stages, fooling us with their Stanislavskies and Dietrichs so that we may be caught off guard in a moment of emotive enternatinment so that they may eat our brains?

I'm not sure, I'm having trouble figuring that one out.

THE GUY STEVOS GUIDE TO THE GREATEST CANADIANS OF ALL TIME IN NO PARTICULAR ORDER

On this day, Canada's 138th birthday, I bring you The Guide Stevos Guide to the Greatest Canadians of All Time In No Particular Order...



THRUSH HERMIT - Have you ever seen that video for "The Day We Hit The Coast"? Where they put on all that fur trading clothes and walk through the woods in late winter on a sunny day? And at the end they reach a stage by a stream and rock the fuck out? Yes, it was very Canadian. Chalk Clayton Park up as one of the best albums of all time, let alone Canadian albums.



MARC GARNEAU - Ladies and gentlemen, the first Canadian in space! Need I say more?
*FUN FACT! Canada was the third country to make it to space. Researchers like The Mars Society of Canada are calling for a Canadian led mission to Mars, which apparently is not all that impossible.



STOMPIN TOM CONNORS - In his book On the Cold Road, Dave Bidini of the Rheostatics recalls his trip to Ireland as a youngster: "[Stompin Tom's] My Stompin Grounds became my way of communicating what Canada was like without having to stumble through my own hazy ideas about home (Tom, after all, had a song naming the provinces and their capitals, a handy geography lesson in under three minutes)...Tom's voice drew me back across the ocean, and the songs about bobcats and Wilf Carter that I'd once been embarrassed to listen to anchored my identity in a culture where nationhood was everything." Sure, Tom's a real mainstream name, which in Canada generally means misplaced in CBC specials and overcelebrated by too many journalists, and he's not the first thing a street-cred obsessed indie kid would toss into the jukebox. But in all seriousness, this man is a hard-nosed rebel who doesn't take shit. He was a moderately well-known artist in the country, folk and traditional circuits through the 60s and 70s, but he shunned fame and the music industry in Canada at large, sending back all his Junos and hanging his boots to rest until the early 90's, when Dave Bidini helped resurrect his career and put him on the path to iconhood (but to me he's very much an iconoclast).



THE PEOPLE OF WINNIPEG, 1919 - Most people forget that this quiet Canadian city was the only place in North America that came anywhere close to a modern revolution? For six weeks, the people of Winnipeg took part in a prolonged general strike that put the city at the centre of global news for a whole summer. For the duration of the strike, which was supported from the get-go by the police force and fire department, the Strike Committee and those overwhelming number of people who cooperated with them maintained a syndicalist municipal government that only a few cities around the world succeeded in even attempting. The Strike did not die under its own weight. On the contrary, it was killed by a robust RCMP, the vigilantes of The Citizen's Committee of 1000, and their The Strike serves as a lesson of history that any movement of the people - and that's what it was, it did not belong solely to the unions or the activists, it found its way into the middle class and the public sector and crossed racial and ethnic lines - any movement that attempts to rid the system of unfairness and injustice will face extreme hostility from an elite group that do not wish to understand the concerns of those they commit to serving.



LOUIS RIEL AND THE RED RIVER REBELLION - The world's first touring western Canadian protest band. They sold enough copies of sheet music to go platinum back in 1885. Their tightness as group, sense of dynamics and ability to just jam on some sick shit was at least twenty years ahead of its time. They actually invented ragtime, which was stolen by Le Caravan Cajun de Jacques Brossard and brought to Louisiana, where it was immediately appropriated and popularized in their image. Their gutsy, feisty uncompromising sound had never been heard before, and due to the fact that records were still by and large uninvented back then, they will never be heard again. Louis Riel, their revered band leader and community champion, was hanged for treason after he extended the musical ethos of the Rebellion to the political sphere.



THE ORIGINAL GREENPEACE GANG - These guys and girls were the Cousteaus of envronmentalism, taking to the seas to protect us from oil spills and nuclear war. Their purpose has developed since those early days and now Greenpeace is a global pool of activists working for our future. They took on Davidian tasks but never once flinched in fear or compromised their principles. For that, they belong on the list over anyone else.



IMMIGRANTS - If it wasn't for the millions of people who populated this country over the past two centuries, we'd be a colonial vestige, a lost piece of land. The perspectives of emigrating communities from around the world have allowed us to live in a global society. Their come-uppance in this country is a testament to how hard they worked to shed the burdens of the often hostile resentment towards their presence.We can send Canadians around the world without real fear, as our concept of "far and wide" has grown beyond our borders.



PEACEKEEPERS - In a way, they're the true Canadian diplomats. From Cyprus to Bosnia to Rwanda, these men and women have been at it since 1964, not to fire bullets but to stop others from doing so. They have been underfunded, neglected and treated poorly by their own government and military heads, but wherever they were, they made progress, sometimes minute, but always significant. I a, of the opinion that every young Canadian should someday serve as a Peacekeeper or be assigned to support them at some point in their young lives.



DR. NORMAN BETHUNE - As important as Florence Knightingale and far more relevant than the characters of M*A*S*H*, this doctor made his way to China, Spain and other civil war zones to provide medical assistance and social leadership to the dispossessed. One of the world's first advocates for universal health care and illness prevention, Bethune's trademark mobile ambulance unit was a world-leading, life giving machine of people power.



THE MACKENIE PAPINEAU BATTALION - The first Canadian volounteer force to fight fascism's ugly face. 1,500 anarchists, syndicalists, unionists and communistst travelled to Spain to take on Franco's reactionary army and Hitler's vicious Luftwaffe, defending the Spanish Republic in a bitter fight that could have, but sadly didn't, stick it to the fascists and weaken their sick quest for global domination. The Mac-Paps were blacklisted when they left for Spain, given a brief clemency during the Second World War, and once again targeted with arrrests, trials and further blacklists during Cold War paranoia in the 50s. Only recently have they been given veteran status in Canada.



DRAFT DODGERS - By far our best cultural acquisition from the States. They burned their draft cards, crossed the border, and we gave them a country to believe in again. They did this under the risk of the death penalty or long jail sentences, and were condemned to losing contact with their families for a whole decade before they were given clemency...and you know what? The majority of them stayed here and gave us our favourite "cool dads", university professors and collectors of soul records.

The party condo has been built!

I spent a bit of time in condoland today and again this evening. In the afternoon, I strolled down a street in the west of the annex and found a new project. It's aim is to make some condos and townhouses out of the Loretto Abbey schools that sit side by side. I applaud the plan for the junior high school, which will not destroy the building and be replaced with a mammoth structure of opulence. A two or three story extension will be built atop the existing building, and some design changes will be made to the window areas, but fundamentally, this seems like a sensible thing to in comparison to what's planned for the older, more Catholic looking Elementary school. Instead of taking the same idea for the junior high and brilliantly making us of the existing building, they're going to tear it down and build a series of modestly luxurious town homes. This angers me slightly, as it is the purpose of the Annex as a historical district to keep its old buildings preserved at least on the exterior. The school could easily be turned into discrete, spacious and highly liveable town homes, but instead they're going with the decision to level this beautiful and practical space.

Later on, I took the plunge into a different reality altogether, just a few blocks away in the twilight zone that is Yorkville. There I met Trevor, who somehow inherited this loft like condo on CUmberland just west of Bay. It was the first time I had ever been inside an apartment with more than one floor. I honestly thought such things are situated only in penthouses high above the city, but not on a middle floor of a relatively low-rise condo building. Equipped with two balconies, this place is a must for at least one good dinner and wine party for those of us who will never get the chance to do such a thing in Yorkville otherwise.

We took a stroll the strange recreations of forests and deserts at Cumberland Square, both agreeing that these locations resembled sound stages than they did public space. We crossed through these monuments that housed beams of green light in hollow, grated futurist columns. I felt that while it looked mighty fantastic, it's actually a regressive design because it forgoes any concern for the excessive use of electricity required to run such projects. While it should be noted that the lights used are far more efficient than the ones we screw into our lamps at home, one should consider the nature of necessity and scarcity. Why, in an era that warns of the excesses of hyper-electrification should we use our dwindling resources for show? Why not make an object shine on its own rather than manufacture the radiance with electrical power? The future, in my opinion, depends on how much we can curtail the use of electricity and make the wonders of the pre-modern world work for us again.

We moved on to the massive rock "formation" in the middle of the square, just beyond the colum fountains. We could feel the rumblings of the subway line underneath and I felt as if we were awakening a dinosaur. There, three girls who had been partying intermittently between the rock and Sassafraz (a place I laid eyes on for the first time that night and realized that it's probably too expensive for me to even set foot in) mistook our smoke for a joint and asked us to pass it over. I, at this point, did not need any more, as I'd been smoking prolifically all day, so I offered them my last joint to smoke later when they were on their way. "You deserve hugs and kisses!" said one of the girls, and boy, do I wish that were true.

"It's our rock," said the casually dressed brunette.

"I like that it's yours," I say.

"Yeah, we've been hangin here for a while now. We've been coming in and out of Sassafraz since 9 or 10 to get loaded and come sit on the rock. Monday is our night."

"How long has this tradition been going on for?" asked Trevor.

"Since tonight," she says and shrugs.

The more formally dressed blonde was lying in a pile of what looked to be paper ripped into hundreds of pieces.

"What's she lying in?" asked Trevor.

"Her shattered life," the brunette replied jokingly.

The third one, a lovely and polite but drunk girl dressed in black complained that she wasn't going to make it down the rock face on two feet. They announced that it was time to go, but not without telling us to come back next Monday at around 9 or 10.

Upon closer inspection, Trevor revealed that the pieces of paper were actually various photos and negatives of perhaps a significant other. I wonder if there will still be pieces there next Monday.

If all the stereotypes are true, then...

Chinese men are unemotive. Chinese women are annoying.
Jamaican men are assholes. Jamaican women are bitches.
White North American men are fags. White North American women are dykes.
Easter European women are boring. Eastern European men are manipulative.
French men are pricks. French women are depressing.
Italian women are sluts. Italian men are childish.
Hungarian Jewish men are gullible. Hungarian Jewish women are beautiful.

************

Walked around Queen and Roncesvales today for the first time since I was too young to remember it. It seems that when the party's happening (it's Pride weekend in Toronto) I'm as far away to the fringes as I can get. Nonetheless, it's a strange looking corner on the extremity of the city, almost unbefitting to Toronto, since it's not every street corner that opens up to a massive lake. It's probably as close to "seaside town" as Toronto can get. Ended up eating various grilled pannini sandwiches at a place called Daddio's or something to that effect. The place was more or less a tribute to the movies and mid-century life, run by aging but nice artrock hippie geeks. They had names for all their sandwiches there, and we ate "The Godfather", "The Haight-Ashbury" and another Godfather. I guess it was the Godfather II. Anyway, we were talking about Jason movies for some reason and the counter clerk (who looked like a strange Pride weekend love-child of Ryan Larkin and Crispin Glover) piped in to confirm to us that yes, indeed, they had made a Friday the 13th in space. There was nothing totally special about the place, but the food was excellent lunch fare. The place is a bit of consumer art project, it seems, one of those throwback retro restos "gentrified for your convenience", as my friend Pete M. might say, in the middle of a run down edge of downtown.



I noticed that most parts of the city are relatively quiet (with the exception of some of the more Pride oriented sectors). The heat is rather terrible today, one of those barely tolerable spells that borders on intrusively uncomfortable. I suppose the festival will be braved by many despite the elements, as it is one of the largest parties in the city, and if not the largest, then certainly the most youth-driven of the bunch. As a bonus, it's very accessible to those who do not identify as Queer. You do not have to alter your personality to fit in, so long as you are tolerant and open to sexualities that might be different from your own. Caribana, on the other hand, is so hardcore Caribbean that you feel like a bombarasclat just being there. Being a Heeb with a predilection for pre-1970s reggae and a taste for veggie-patty wrapped in coco bread does not make you tight with dancehall yardies. It don't work for Matisyahu and it don't work for me.

Heat, smog...This is not the Toronto I remember from childhood. I guess a place can really change over the course of fifteen or twenty years. But hey, at least the Caribbeans and the Queers stayed!