Captain Quétaine

by RAF KATIGBAK

You know that feeling when you’re young and you discover something life-changing for the first time? Often it’s a matter of circumstance: you discovered it while you were in the right mood and it was the right time—any other day of the week, perhaps, you would never have even given it a second thought. In astrology-speak, the stars were aligned, or some shit.

For a lot of people, this often happens with music. There’s a particular song or album you come across at what seems the perfect time in your life—usually when something is going to the shithouse.

Like in high school, when you were super-bummed that your girlfriend just made out with your best friend at the dance and your good buddy Sean passes you a tape of the Smiths and says, “You should check these guys out.”

Or maybe you just had a fight with your parents because they wouldn’t let you stay over at your best friend’s house to watch movies and you were in a rage because you were really planning on staying over at your girlfriend’s place because you planned on going to third base with her and now you can’t, so you end up cruising in your best friend’s beat-up yellow ’70s Volvo station wagon and he puts on a new album he just got from a band called Nirvana and you start driving fast through the back alleys—it all just comes together and makes sense.

It’s like a mix of excitement and fulfillment. You get lost in the moment. You wonder how someone can make something so complete, so perfect. It’s like an emotional boner that no amount of cold showers or picturing your parents naked could ever diminish.

It’s been a while since I’ve had such an epiphany, but it happened just yesterday, when a friend was trying to recount some crazy story about some Québécois woman who was killed while participating in a drunken round of apple-on-the-head-circus-knife-throwing and one of the witnesses “was some crazy school bus driver character who was later discovered to have made all these insane home videos that involved science fiction, theft prevention and being a Tom-Selleck-lookalike.”

No, I know it doesn’t really make sense, but that’s what I heard, and, while I was drunk on most of the two-litre bottle of Sidecar I had mixed at home and brought to the party, even if I were sober, this story was just plain crazy.

He described the witness, a Mr. Roger Normandin, as a modern day Québécois Ed Wood: videos with cheap effects, poorly scripted, badly acted. Apparently Normandin was so desperate to have his films seen that he would sneak them onto the shelves of his local video stores. It sounded horrible. But it was the kind of surreal horribleness that made me wonder, was Shawinigan going to be home to another outsider artist discovery on the scale of Henry Darger?

Then I saw it: Roger Normandin et la 4ième Dimension.

It was beyond my wildest dreams of bad. I’ll let the video description speak for itself:

The film tells the story of Roger, who, after tripping over his vacuum cleaner, obtains the capacities to travel in the 4th dimension. And “IT’S MARVELLOUS!” The powers of the 4th dimension consist of reading minds, passing through walls, lighting cigarettes with a gun, etc... Roger, having acquired these powers, decides to be a vigilante in the 4th dimension. He prevents shoplifting, bank robbery, purse snatching, and other crimes, all accompanied by interminable morals which I like to call “Normandesque!” I believe to have summarized the essence of the film. And as Roger would say, “The 4th dimension: IT’S MARVELLOUS!”

What is it about Queb culture that’s just so... crappy? Okay, that’s not fair. Let me rephrase that. Why is it that my favourite part of Queb culture is so crappy? I love the dive bars, the coupe Longueuils, the heavy joual accent; it’s music to my ears. And I’m not alone. Personalities like MC Gilles (www.mcgilles.com) and Simon Lacroix (who hosts the regular Total Crap festival which will be taking place again next Friday, Sept. 28 at Club Soda) have helped build a scene that revels in the awfulness of local culture.

Perhaps—like those shitty Queb country acts that used to rock out at Bar Sherbrooke—it’s an honesty and unpretentiousness that is refreshing in the entertainment world. Is it the innocence? The idea of doing something purely for the love, and not for the money? Or is it funny because they’re acting like complete retards? Who knows. There’s a word in French for it though: quétaine, and it’s one of my favourite words of any language.

Riff-Raff@sympatico.ca