Memorial Day Camp Weekend

Last weekend was "Memorial Day" in the U.S., which in theory is like Canada's Remembrance Day, except instead of solemn remembrance of the horrors of war and the sacrifice of compatriots... they have a three-day weekend and get drunk around the barbecue. I'm not even kidding. Be that as it may, I wore my poppy last November, so last weekend Laura and I headed down to summer camp in Maine, for Newfound/Owatonna's Memorial day cleanup weekend. (Here's the Flickr album.) We rented a car and made a road trip out of it, complete with stops for milkshakes and onion rings at Colebrook, NH's Wilderness Restaurant, and North Waterford, ME's Tut's a.k.a Melby's. I spent a good part of the weekend feeding brush and logs into a wood chipper with former camper Ricky Stein, John Sparkman, and Owatonna's new director Brandon Frank. It was very very woodsy, I assure you. We also played some Scrabble, rode in Pete's pickup, and put the docks in down at the boathouse, which meant going for more than one dunk in the just-swimmable waters of Long Lake. It wasn't that bad, really, you just wouldn't want to hang out in there all afternoon. And how could I spend a weekend at camp, and not go in at least once? (Unless it was this weekend.) I won't work the regular session at camp this year, although I was very tempted to change my mind this weekend, but I'll be down there again in just 2 1/2 short months for family camp, as always. I'm pretty much counting the days already.
Today's song is Outside of a Small Circle of Friends, by Phil Ochs. Tonight's evening activity is my 10-year high school reunion in Saint Lambert. Party on.
Outside a Small Circle of Friends (powered by ODEO)

Opening Day at LaRonde

Right, so last autumn Benjamin, Laura, Denyse, Gabriel and I went to LaRonde, Montreal's amusement park on an island. That visit reminded me of something I had forgotten about 10 years earlier: roller coasters are totally awesome. And so I made a vow that come spring, I would go all out and buy the season's pass. Spring has come, and so last week (May 19th) I went all out and bought the season's pass. So did Laura. We took it easy on opening day, did a new apple-shaped spinny tower in the kid's land, the obligatory Monster run, and the swing carousel "Tour de Ville" pictured above, which is Laura's new favourite ride. then we had to wait in line for an hour to actually get our photos taken for the season's pass cards. I'm so happy with our decision, though. When you think about it, one ticket to Montreal's Cirque du Soleil is about 100$. One ticket. Lame. An entire season at LaRonde is 90. Really, there's no competition. Plus, the Cirque has become the establishment now, with all their Las Vegas shows and stuff. They've lost track of their Baie Saint-Paul roots. The new cool in circuses is the Tohu, all the way.

In closure, today's song is a quiet one, but it has the word "ride" in it, which is the closest it's going to get to being à propos. Morningtown Ride, by the incomparable Malvina Reynolds.

Morningtown Ride (powered by ODEO)
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3 Exciting Things + Ben plays Daniel Johnston

Exciting things happening tonight. Not necessarily good, but exciting. In ascending order:

• André Boisclair resigned as the leader of the Parti Québécois
• They've (probably) found King Herod's tomb in the West Bank
• It's warm enough to wear a T-shirt at night!

I just can't get over that last one. No matter how many times spring happens, it never stops making me feel ebullient. As for King Herod's tomb, that's really cool, although granted, they discovered it in a place called Herodium. So, uh, not exactly the last place you'd think to look. As for Boisclair.. meh, politics. But it's still big news.
I sat out in Parc Lafontaine tonight and played songs on the little skylark guitar that Benjamin left me when he was down in Montreal this weekend. We saw Daniel Johnston together (May 5, Sala Rossa) and Ben got to go backstage and give him his The Fox and the Hound CD, which has two Daniel Johnston covers on it. Thanks go to Brian Seeger for that connection, since he was the opening act and also happens to be a fraquaintance of mine from Indigo (tha bookstore). (I'd call him a friend, but I don't think I've really yet logged the conversation time required to justify that.) So Brian got Ben backstage, and for any of you wondering how it went, you can ask him. For any of you wondering how a Ben Vaughan cover of Daniel Johnston sounds, you can go here and listen to Walking the Cow. For any of you who don't yet know what a me cover of DJ sounds like, check the audio player in the sidebar (but be advised, Ben's versions sound nicer).

The Guns of Brixton

I totally just kicked in a door. I'm not kidding. It was my own, actually. The bolt was caught and so I couldn't open it with my key. I jiggled it around for 15-20 minutes and finally got to door-stomping. The third kick did it, for you stats fanatics out there. Not one of my neighbors peeked out to see what the noise was all about, which is a little worrisome, really.

In other news, I'm cooking Kraft dinner and adding plum sauce and hot pickled vegetables to it.

Marie, Reine du Monde

My guitars (the big one and the little bitty one) are going through some hard times. Fortunately my brother Benjamin might be coming in to Montreal from Ottawa this weekend, so I'll try to get him to give me his expert advice on how to make them sound nicer. For the time being though, they can still play, so I recorded a new song tonight. It's by Townes Van Zandt, a country singer of some considerable street cred, I understand. Douglas in Chengdu got me into him. The song is Pancho and Lefty, and it's a cinematic western about a bandit who "wore his guns outside his pants, for all the honest world to feel". Woah.

Pancho and Lefty (powered by ODEO)
Last weekend Laura's (twin) sister Sabrina came to town from Brooklyn, we ate at Juliette et Chocolat, my favourite place in Montreal for melted chocolate in a mug. Also last week I was exploring a lot, and took a lot of pictures of Carré Saint Louis and the Basilique Cathédrale Marie Reine du Monde, among other places. Mary being queen of the world isn't something I knew about Catholic theology until I went to Mexico and learned about that sort of thing. It's interesting. Spring is coming to Montreal and it looks like so is Katie, a friend of my brother's I've never met, but who might be tapping on my window sometime this weekend. Must clear the floor and get out the air mattress. Love to you peoples,
Matthew

Snow, Circus, Company

Last week 3 important things happened.
Laura's parents came up from D.C. to visit her
It snowed. A LOT.
I went to the circus.

On Thursday evening I met Laura and her parents at Shambala, a Tibetan restaurant on Saint Denis. I had been up all night the night before, and so I had just woken up from a nap when I got there, which made it hard to be witty and urbane, but I tried to pull it together. Then Friday they took Laura out for fancy-pants ($) food, so I went to the circus with Francie, from Indigo, which was, all in all, incredible. This coincided with a few feet of snow being dumped on the city, so I was already jumping and rolling all over the place in powdery white, and the ants in my pants only multiplied after the circus, which was a Belgian acrobat troupe. Highly inspirational. I want to be a Belgian acrobat. Riding the metro home, Francie and I got out at Mont Royal, and were amazed to find a mountain of plowed snow in the middle of the plaza, and next to it, a huge, fallen, plastic election poster, which we then used for a toboggan and went sledding on the snow pile. Sledding on top of a Liberal Party election poster on a snowy Friday night, after going to the circus. Honestly, it doesn't get much more inspirational than that. We topped it off with noodles at Parfums d'asie on Saint Laurent (3475 St-Laurent), and called it a night. A snowy, fun night.
powered by ODEO
Music today is from Bob Dylan, played by me, as always. It's "You're gonna make me lonesome when you go".

New Music. Beaver Lake. Giddyup.

Winter has been good so far. Quick weather recap: January - ominously warm, February - freakin cold. Today I went out to Beaver Lake with Laura, which is just on the north side of Mount Royal in Montreal. Skiers were skiing, skaters skating, and sledders sledding. We didn't have sleds and didn't want to shell out 8$ for a tube, so we're going to pick up some crazy carpets at the dollar store tomorrow and go tobogganing on a Monday afternoon when no one's around.



In music news, two new songs today! Your own Worst Enemy is a favourite by They Might be Giants, and Casper the Friendly Ghost is a kicker by Daniel Johnston. I'm out of my blogging funk because I've ditched the frozen site Caspost.com and switched to Odeo.com, where I've put up all the songs that ever were on dumb ol' Castpost, plus 3 new ones, plus (and pay attention to this part) they're all downloadable! So head on over there and check it out, because the player on my sidebar is really cute, but it only shows the last 20 songs, and there are already 30 available on Odeo. More to come, I'll let you know. (Yabba-dabba do.)

Fire on Duluth

Manifestation Montréal 2007

On New Year's eve I got together out in Saint Hubert with Julie, a friend who's been living in Belgium for going on 2 years now. She was back for the holidays and so I taxied over to her place at the last minute. The taxi driver didn't know the south shore of Montreal very well, though, so he and I had to stop on the side of the highway at 10 minutes to midnight and get out the road map to try to find our way. Finally, I got there at 12 exactly, just in time to pour myself some punch and clink glasses all around. The party wound down around 3am, and I was put up on the floor for the night, along with a few others who were stranded without the metro. The next morning, we were treated to a feast of waffles and fruit, and played some Cranium (Quebec edition) before heading home. As I left, Julie and her friend Laurence invited me to join them the next day for some shenanigans downtown. The idea was to stage a protest with no real specific raison d'être. It was more hilarious than that sounds, I promise. January second found the three of us on rue Sainte-Catherine with picket signs of various ambiguous sentiments, such as
-Pas contents! (Unhappy!)
-Ça pas de bon sens! (It's crazy/unreasonable!)
-On est contre! (We're against it!)
-C'est faux! (Lies!)
and, just for fun -Vive l'ambiguïté!!?
We spent a few hours walkind the streets yelling and picketing, nobody understood what was going on, we made some friends on the street, it was a pretty silly and fun activity to start off the new year. And on that note, here's the video and a happy new year to all y'all. PHOTOS