| Ultimate
by KRISTIAN GRAVENOR Last few years I’ve developed the attention span of a two year old in a shopping mall. Forget reading, I can’t even watch a movie-maybe I’m still traumatized by K-Pax and Vanilla Sky-but even that commitment is far too great. An entire TV show is totally out of the question and, needless to say, any book that could hold my interest would sure have to have a lot of pictures of pop-ups. But somehow I can muddle through a great book about Montreal, which I sometimes almost do. Then I look the author’s name up in the phone book and call ’em to ask them to explain the book to me. No kidding. Here are some of my best Montreal books. The Montreal chapter in the boringly-titled Reform Planning and City Politics by Harold Kaplan (1982) blasts the less romantic side of the city Leonard Cohen described as the new Jerusalem, as a tribute to the dynamic tension between groups laying claim to the burg. Kaplan exposes how for almost its entire history, our city administration was an ethnic grabfest run by groups paranoid of losing their advantage. The cynical obsession to gain an edge encouraged reformers-even those taking measures against the tuberculosis epidemic-to leave politics. Movie theatres has always been one of my so-what issues that I found almost as boring as the future of Mount Royal. That changed when I saw Montreal Movie Palaces, written in 1993 by Dane Lanken. This eye-orgy of photos and text by the husband of one of those McGarrigle singing chicks will make you say a prayer for all the love and care for the once-great movie theatres we’ve mostly lost by now. Saturday Night at the Bagel Factory, Don Bell’s collected features published in the early 1970s in Canadian Magazine, is worth picking up at a lawn sale, mainly for the chapter on Kid Oblay and Jockey Fleming, insane rival bookies who ran the opposite corners of Peel and Ste-Catherine. Bell, who now gamely packs a respirator while zipping around the Townships, later worked on a never-released book suggesting that Harry Houdini was intentionally murdered in Montreal in a plot concocted by religious authorities. Michael McLoughlin’s Last Stop Paris, a conspiracy-theory romp through the FLQ terrorist days, was widely denounced for suggesting that RCMP agents were actually to blame for much of the terrorist mayhem. I love it. He’s working on a sequel along the same lines. Montreal at the Crossroads, from a series of Gazette articles written by a bunch of writers, including that annoying reverse mortgage guy Gordon Pape, exposes the demolitionism that ruined much of this city’s heritage. Brian McKenna and then-wife Susan Purcell’s Drapeau bio brilliantly dissects the shaper of modern Montreal. The Concordia Library has a juicier version in its archives. Another author I used to phone and yell at-he was hard of hearing-was the late, lamented Edgar Andrew Collard, whose many bound collections of the history of Montreal columns read a lot better in books than in paper. I’m also slightly obsessed with longtime city columnist Al Palmer, whose bawdy novel Sugar-Puss on Dorchester Street reflects the ’50s era when 15-year-old farmgirls would come to town and sell their sexy bodies at places like the Drummond Café for $5 a toss. Here are a few of the others from a list too long to detail: Lorimer’s The Developers, anything by Boyce Richardson, William Weintraub’s stuff, as well as Gerry Fortin’s Life of the Party. Herbert Ames’s The City Below the Hill (1897) analyzes poverty in the old-time city while Alan Hustak’s excellent walking tour stuff also deserves a pickup. Rather than publishing straight-to-the-99-cent-bin bios of David “anglo separatist” Levine, local publishers should coax autobiographies from cranky old newspaper writer Tim Burke, or architect Michael Fish. We also need the definitive Camilien Houde bio as well as a tell-all about biker gangs, Cirque du Soleil or the MCM. : Comments? kgravy@openface.ca |