by RAF KATIGBAK

It was 9:30 at night, almost too late for dinner, but not too late for the dining room packed with young, fashionable hipsters, with their perfectly mussed hair and thick-rimmed glasses, to talk cheerfully over Gin Fizzes and barely audible indie rock. From the worn wood panelling, retro bar furniture and hints of Mediterranean on the menu, everything about the place screamed Montreal’s Mile-End.

Of course, one clue that this certainly wasn’t Mile-End was the fact that the air was clean, and clear: no one was smoking. This was Williamsburg, Brooklyn, after all, 613 km, seven hours and five minutes due south of Mile-End, and public smoking hasn’t been allowed here for some time.

Tucked away in the corner, gleefully laughing over rapid-fire rounds of the house red, were four 20-somethings—a fashion designer, a young activist turned alternative media producer, a writer and a film student—typical young Brooklynites (meaning none of them were actually from Brooklyn), who had much in common.

But there was something tying these kids together beyond the fact that they were young, hip, ambitious and living in Brooklyn. While they were all of these things, more importantly it seemed, they had also recently lived in Montreal, and they all missed it dearly.

I was there too that night, and it was my job to report on what was happening back home. “Well,” I said, “some seven-year-old Filipino kid got in trouble at school for eating Filipino-style, with a fork and spoon...” Guffaws, laughs, outrage. Remarks are made about how a province that complains about preserving their cultural heritage can be so culturally insensitive.

I play the diplomat and explain that francophones have a genuine reason to be protective of their culture, and instead offer my own solution to the Spoongate hullabaloo: that all public institutions implement the use of a single, culturally sensitive utensil: “the Sporkstick”. Part spoon, part fork, part chopstick; everybody’s happy (except those cultures who eat with their hands who, let’s face it, aren’t real cultures anyway...).

The idea of these young people moving to New York to “live freely” is laughable—rent is high and you have to bust your ass to make ends meet. But at one point in the late ’70s, that wasn’t the case; artists flocked to neighbourhoods like the Lower East Side for the cheap rent and an artistic vibrancy. It was a place where you felt like you could do whatever you wanted, and would have enough left over from rent that you could actually afford to do it. Basically for the same reasons many are moving to Montreal right now.

In fact, beyond the whole Hipsters-and-Hassids-living-side-by-side thing, I marvelled at how much—with its increasing number of high-end design shops and geometrically increasing rent—Mile-End is becoming more like Williamsburg every day. But to worry or complain about gentrification is silly. It’s a fact of life that all things must change, and for every Mile-End that inevitably disappears into a forest of Miss Sixty boutiques, le Chateau outlets and Beaver Tail kiosks, there will always be a Griffintown or Verdun stepping up to take its place.

Besides, while artists can flock to Montreal for the same reasons they flooded New York three decades ago, the truth is, Montreal can never be like New York. Partially because there is just not enough money, success, fame and fortune to be made here, but mostly thanks to something my friend likes to call “the great equalizer.”

It’s not the French thing; as every McGill student knows, you can get by in Montreal without speaking a lick of French (why you would want to is a whole other mystery). Rather, as my activist friend pointed out, no matter how many people move to Montreal, the hideous bitch goddess known as Winter will always separate the wheat from the chaff, the men from the boys, and the authentic Louis Vuitton from the inferior Chinatown knock-offs. “You can move to Montreal because you like it,” he proclaimed, “but you have to LOVE Montreal to stay there.”

So that night, in the midst of the sweltering heat that almost peeled the asphalt off the Brooklyn streets, we raised our glasses to the one and only Jack Frost—a major reason why Montrealers are so fiercely proud of having lived there, and the reason why each one of us can truly call ourselves hardcore.

Riff-Raff@sympatico.ca

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