Mourning Chriss Lee's loss

I feel winded. Here I am across the "pond" in the UK, surfing the Net, checking out the Mirror site since it's not exactly distributed here in print, when I read Chris Yurkiw's article on Chriss Lee's death ["Death cult '97," Jan. 22]. To find out about a friend's death through the Internet is the crappiest feeling I've ever experienced. I met Chriss Lee many years ago at Fouf. He heard about my management of a now-defunct local band called the Minstrels and he wanted me to help him manage his band. I did not want to, but I did long admire his Prince-like aura on stage.

Unfortunately this was a man who did not take "no" for an answer. He called my office four times a day every day for eight months. It became a running joke in the office. The joke, however, got rather boring. But the point is that he was an extremely obsessed person who really wanted to make his band work and badly wanted to express his music and, even more, his stage charisma to the world.

It's fucking unfortunate he never had a chance. He was the epitome of everything right and wrong about Montreal: obsessed, bilingual, straight and queer, gender confused, full of life and with not a care about financial security. He shall be missed.

-Sam Tabar

You don't know Castro

Listen, I expect this of the appalling Gazette but you should know a little better. Fidel Castro's "change of heart" on religion is no such thing ["Angels & Insects," The Front, Jan. 22]. He has invited a pope to visit Cuba three times in the last 30 years and until now the Vatican has said no. Santeria, the Afro-Cuban religion practised to some degree by an estimated 80 per cent of the population, only became legal under Fidel Castro. A little research would help you stop doing American foreign policy work gratis.

-Jill Abson

Inappropriate indeed

How absolutely pathetic Josh Bezonsky's attempt at exteriorizing his tedium-vitae seemed ["City of lights, heart of darkness," Inappropriate Behaviour, Jan. 15]! How his stale genre felt worse than a stale cigarette! How his list of what he did at the end of his Christmas vacation seemed like the listless jottings-down in a diary! How the gossip about L.A. show-biz members seemed like filler! And how insignificant and empty his dichotomizing of the "city of lights" versus "heart of darkness" seemed while so much has happened here! How "inappropriate" it was!

It is time the Mirror made room for other things that other Montrealers have to say; how, for example, the ice storm reminded such a huge number of Montrealers of the war in their native country... how immigrants did not panic because they've been through worse... how refugees felt that they've been doomed to be refugees all their lives. Does the Mirror want to reflect the world of a certain anglophone "elite," a world that has done nothing but turn round on its own axis during the last year? Please consider a substantial and stable space for other voices.

-Nellie Hogikyan

Web site worse than Japanese animation

Would you guys please, please pay attention to the colours you use on your web page [www.montrealmirror.com].

I think that I've permanently damaged my vision trying to make out some words. You might think it's cute or cool, but trust me, there is nothing cutting-edge about using shocking pink and olive in combination.

-Rob van Hell

Ice storm musings

My Uncle Buddy worked corn in Alberta. I visited him once when he threw a family reunion party. I sat quietly on a wood bench, delighted by the fields of corn as a strong wind smoothed each stalk, like hair under a comb. A slow prairie night set in, followed by a prairie storm that grew until it ravaged the corn fields with rain and thunder.

The morning of the Monday that saw the beginning of the ice storm, I waited on a Métro platform until it filled to capacity with silent commuters staring into their own bags. Finally, a Métro train could be heard moving towards our station. As the train entered, it brought with it a strong tunnel wind which smoothed myself and the other passengers over and together, like hair under a comb.

-Leon Lukashevsky