August | 2012 | Brad Spurgeon's Blog

Bad Luck in Paris and Cambrai – or From Pigalle to the Jolly Sailor

August 31, 2012
bradspurgeon

jolly sailor facade

Bad luck comes in threes, but sometimes has its payoffs. There has been a little break on this blog again not because I have been inactive or ceased to exist, but because I had three days of bad luck events, the last two of which cost me blog time. I already wrote on the blog about Tuesday’s bad luck on the dating front, followed by the payoff at the open mic. Well, on Wednesday and Thursday the bad luck continued in other areas, but also had its payoffs each time.

On Wednesday I had a sudden invitation to go and hear a friend perform at a bar in Pigalle, and she invited me to play a few of my songs. Because I had to get up very early on Thursday to travel to Belgium – where I write these words – I thought this a much better thing to do than the Highlander open mic, where I would be tempted to stay until nearly 2 AM.

I also had plenty of trip preparation to do – packing – but decided to go to this gig in Pigalle. I arrived at 10 PM to find that my friend had been playing for an hour and the bar owner had suddenly discovered that the gig was taking place on a day that it was not supposed to happen, and he asked that it stop immediately (this was done through the booking agent). So the moment I arrived with my guitar and eager ears, I was told the show was over.

I would have considered that very bad luck, had it not been for my need to get to bed early to travel the next day. But it was also good luck because it showed me just how nasty bar owners and their booking agents can be sometimes, as the singer was absolutely crushed that her gig had been called off – in the middle of the gig! And there was no suggestion she would be paid. This, I thought, was really crappy luck, but a bit of a good thing for me to see, and a subject, nevertheless, to write about on this blog. AND a warning to be very careful about who you book a gig with.

So I got home, got to bed early and took off for Belgium, where I am spending the weekend reporting on the Formula One race. Driving my Ford Focus along the highway nearly two hours outside Paris and about 15 minutes from the Belgian border, the car suddenly shut itself off. The engine died. I pulled off to the side of the road and could not start the engine. There I was in the middle of nowhere, on the side of the highway, with my Focus – which had just had a 900 euro check up – dead.

It turned out that I was not completely in the middle of nowhere. I was 23 kilometers from the town of Cambrai, which had been a home of many fine music composers in the middle ages. It had also been the scene of the first successful tank battle in World War I, among other things. The car, it turned out, had also broken down at lunchtime, and Cambrai not only has many restaurants, but four of them happen to be right near the Ford garage to which the highway rescue service took my car to have it fixed. There was also a Europcar rental place, from which I was obliged later to rent a car as my car could NOT be fixed immediately.

I was feeling particularly bad about the situation as I was giving a lift to the race to my friend Joe Saward, a fellow Formula One journalist. So we went looking at the restaurants for lunch, and I decided I did not like the one closest to the Ford place. Joe went along with that. But then I did not like the next closest one after that, and we spied one a little way down the road and went to it. It was called the Jolly Sailor, and it seemed the best of the three. Or at least the most appealing.

Now, can you imagine my surprise when I entered the Jolly Sailor and found it had two rooms, two pianos, a 12-string guitar and what looked like an electric guitar in a case, and British flags all over the walls. I sat and ordered my meal and I eventually asked one of the managers – turned out to be the owner – why there were so many instruments around.

His name was David, and he turned out to be British – English, in fact. He told me that he played the piano and sang for the guests, and that the restaurant also invited some of his friends and other diners to play and sing, when they can, and that it was essential an open stage, or open mic. Now how could that possibly have happened to me, I wondered. My blog has as its theme primarily the open mic adventures I live, and here I was breaking down in my car in the middle of nowhere in northern France, and finding myself landing in an open mic run by a Brit.

David later performed, and it was even more interesting to find out in the middle of nowhere, this kind of Noel Coward of the French countryside, and I could not quite believe the situation into which I had fallen. But I thought that whatever might have been my third bit of bad luck in as many days, I definitely had some cool material for my blog! I also felt better that Joe had been entertained too – oh, dear, and Joe has written about it on HIS blog.

Clandestine Nostalgia and Nice Meetings at the Ptit Bonheur la Chance

August 29, 2012
bradspurgeon

I was standing at the bar drinking and talking with a new acquaintance after the open mic a the Ptit Bonheur la Chance had finished last night, and after I had begun the evening by having a date fall through (not quite stood-up, but almost), and telling her – my new acquaintance, not the date – that I just loved going to the Ptit Bonheur la Chance open mic because it seemed that every time I did go, something good happened. Something happens to make me not regret my choice of going there. Be it with the music, or with a meeting at the bar or a jam afterwards – there was always something. She, I said, was “it” last night, that nice thing. I could have added another thing.

The other thing was a return to the past and a look at the future as I saw a familiar face in the audience in the latter part of the evening when I returned with a refill of beer after performing my set. Could this really be Ben Ellis? I had not seen Ben at an open mic for years, and never at the Ptit Bonheur. But yes, it was Ben. This took me back almost exactly four years – still two months from the anniversary – when I dared to try an open mic in Paris for the first time, and only my second open mic in decades, at Earle Holme’s Lizard Lounge open mic, in November 2008.

Earle introduced me to Ben, and I was immediately mesmerized by his music and singing, and that of a whole host of other young rockers who had grown up around Earle and his open mic. In fact, Ben’s band, Brooklyn, was breaking out in a big way, and soon seen on French television, and traveling around the world. I had particularly liked Brooklyn’s song “Clandestine,” which was about … Earle’s open mics.

So last night I saw Ben again – whom I had, nevertheless, seen a few times in the last couple of years, although he had moved to New York City for a while. And more importantly, I heard one of Ben’s latest songs, as he is working on a new album, finally! Brooklyn no longer exists, but by the sound of this new song, I get a feeling something just as big, or bigger, will come of it.

He was about to stop after only one song and I begged him to play “Clandestine.” He had not done it for a long, long time, he said to me afterwards, but he did it and did it happily, introducing the Ptit Bonheur la Chance to this song that should be legendary in the Paris open mic world.

The evening had a few other interesting moments, like the strange apparition of the man with the harmonica, which seemed to float through the ether from all corners of the room without warning. I invited him up to join me when I heard him playing during my song, “Except Her Heart,” but unfortunately, somehow I lost the mic to the harmonica well before the song was finished, and never did get to the end. I then invited him to join me on “Crazy Love,” and we got through it okay.

Thanks to a suggestion by Wayne Standley, we finished the evening with Yaco the MC and I doing Bob Dylan’s “You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere” as a duet. That was fun! It was also, maybe, an interesting response to Ben Ellis’s line in Clandestine, where he sings, “We don’t know where we are goin’…” But then again, no, I get the idea now that Ben knows….

September on the Horizon as Paris August Winds Down

August 28, 2012
bradspurgeon

I have no huge story I have to get off my chest or mind today about last night’s open mic crawl. Let’s just say that there was a feeling of Paris coming back to life towards the end of the miserable month of August when the city goes to sleep. I found both the Tennessee bar and the Coolin pub open mics to be quite well attended and lively. And I was delighted to meet up with my friend Joe Cady, who accompanied me on my two songs at Coolin on his violin.

I also met some older friends and made some new ones, and found myself so busy singing along to music or talking to people or doing my own number, that I completely failed to make any videos of Joe playing either with me or anyone else – as he later accompanied some other musicians at Coolin. I did get a video of Joe being accompanied, though, as he played guitar and sang….

So what more to say? I think I will save on screen space – the virtual equivalent of saving paper – and cut off today’s blog item right here, rather than stretch it out any longer and risk losing readers as well…. I can simply sum things up with a feeling of optimism about the departure into the past of the month of August in Paris. (Of course, there are worse places to be!)

Art Café Saves the Day

August 25, 2012
bradspurgeon

Just when I thought that the month of August in Paris had hit its lowest ebb, I was perhaps proven correct! A message came in over Facebook from the organizer of the Friday night open mic at L’Art Cafe, Amelia Bolt, saying that the open mic had returned after its August break. So I tripped off to the Parmentier Metro with guitar over back and middling expectations.

When I entered this tiny bar with the colorful walls, photos, and barely a place to sit, I said to myself, “Okay, not that many people here. But I remember well how it turned out last time upon entering and finding it with a minimum audience.” That is, it ended up being a monumental night of jamming and open mic music.

So I went in with confidence last night, with delight that here I was on a Friday in August in Paris and there was actually a place to play and an audience – and WHAT an audience! A mix of musicians and listeners, the open mic proved to be almost exactly what it had been the first time I went. I have only been once before because it is a new open mic, and I went just before the summer break.

The Art Cafe in Paris is the proof that what makes an open mic great is the people who attend. Last night it was not as full as the previous time, as it is indeed still a new open mic. But it was just as fun and well organized. All musicians started by doing three songs, and then after that we jammed for an hour or so.

There were some wonderful acts, including, of course, Amelie herself, with her rock ‘n Roll Silvertone guitar and guitar case amplifier, with Theko – who is holding her own concert in the same place tonight – and with the big voice and emotion of little Audrey, whom I had never heard or met before. We jammed together quite a bit afterwards, and I have rarely had so much fun in a jam as I did with Audrey and her voice!

I will return again as this open mic is sure to grow – even if it has little space to do so!

Early to Arrive, Earlier to Play at the Highlander – and a Neat Instrument

August 23, 2012
bradspurgeon

For the first time in a year or two or more I arrived at the Highlander in time to be one of the very first people on the list. How did I pull off this miraculous thing? Well, I had a meeting with someone else, a friend, and we decided to make a night out of the Highlander and a local Asian food emporium. And it all worked. The downside? There is not really a downside, except for right here on the blog where I discovered to my own amazement today as I sat down to write this that I had taken only TWO videos of the music last night.

The Highlander was just as bubbling full, with its usual list of maybe 17 musicians, and I actually managed to play at the real height of the evening and right after Jolly Roger the mad lead guitar player who does not sing. So it was prime real estate to get everyone else singing once I got up there, and I did What’s Up! and Father and Son to do just that, along with my own Borderline – which maybe a few people did the “ooooooooooo” falsetto part, but not much else.

It was shoulder to shoulder…except when I arrived and I heard some musician say: “What? Brad is here while the sun is still up?” Yes, early on the list. And it was a pleasure. As was the Asian food emporium. A night to remember at the Highlander, which unfortunately I only managed to give you witness to on two videos, both, to my shock today, of the same person – but the little finger harp was very cool. Oh, and it was also neat that the first bit turned into a jam….

Bad Luck at the Good Luck Bar – or I WOS There, They Weren’t

August 22, 2012
bradspurgeon

However great, omniscient, informative and even invasive Facebook may be, it is NOT the place for an acquaintance to make an announcement on behalf of an event the person usually has nothing to do with in organizing it. So it was that I had told a couple of inquirers that the open mic at the Ptit Bonheur la Chance bar was indeed happening last night after a single session break last Tuesday. And so it was I rushed down my dinner, rushed on some clean clothes that I ironed, rushed out the door and hurried up to the bar to find that it was closed.

Fortunately, I knew that although my night of giving entertainment had a fall-back in receiving entertainment just up the road at the WOS bar, where the host of the Highlander open mic, Thomas Brun, was giving one of his weekly concerts. There I met a friend who attends a few of the same open mics I attend, but she as a spectator only, and it was from her that I learned one of our mutual Facebook friends had announced the sudden and unexpected closing of the Ptit Bonheur la Chance.

It was not, I discovered, the person most likely to make that announcement – the MC – but this musician who plays there most weeks, and who IS a friend on Facebook. But unfortunately, Facebook just is not reliable enough to make that sort of announcement, so I and I guess a few of the other people who thought it was open – including those whom I told – will have showed up and found they wasted an evening. (I hope it was not something really serious that kept it closed.) The month of August in Paris continues its reputation as a dead month. Forget April, T.S., August is the cruelest month!

Well, no, it was not a wasted evening, in the end, as I did go and listen to Thomas Brun. And there I heard the one-man band playing practically nothing but songs that I never hear him play as the Highlander MC. I am continually amazed at this man’s repertoire. When I commented on it afterwards, Thomas told me that he had a whole lot of songs he did not usually sing to open the open mic at the Highlander because he did not want to get the crowd too excited, foot stompingly mad right at the beginning of the evening, with much thought of whoever might take to the mic right after him. IE, who might be a lot, lot more down tempo and romping. As I then said to Thomas, following him is a difficult task for any musician no matter what he may decide to play.

August Break Blues in Paris and Three Open Mics

August 21, 2012
bradspurgeon

I was starting to feel ill about four days without a post on this blog! I cannot remember the last time I went four days without a post. And really, it’s NOT my fault. It’s the fault of the Paris-in-the-month-of-August-syndrome. Well, all right, that combined with the fact that I am here in Paris during that month of August.

That does not mean that I have been doing nothing creative, no writing, no music, or any such nothings. I have been hugely active working on my book manuscripts, sending them out, editing my film, planning future projects, buying a new dish washer, shoes, clothes, a life….

But most of the open mics in Paris closed down for the August lull, so I had so much more time to tend to these other projects. Last night, finally, the four-day drought ended and I was able to go to…three open mics. I was late doing it, though, so I did not have time to stay longer than 30 seconds at the Tennessee Bar before I decided to go to the Coolin open mic, and I then followed that one – after my performance, and several other people’s – with the Galway pub open mic.

Despite the August lull – a time lots of people profess to like, but I now hate more than ever – there were lots of musicians at all the open mics. There were even spectators. So I played two songs at Coolin and four at the Galway, even trying out new songs I have learned – a Dylan and a Stones.

It was a nice evening that made me forget I was in August in Paris. Today was a “cold shower” of a wake up, though, when I ended up running into one August-related crappy situation after another as I sought to pick up those shoes at the cobbler’s and found them not ready; went to five stores in my neighborhood to find ink for my printer and the stores were either closed or did not want to serve me because it was August, and none had the ink; received my new dish washer only to find that all the cleaning of the floors I had done was now reduced to a muddy swamp with the exit of the old one leaking its dirty water and then finding that the delivery men had left their tools at the previous client’s place and had to leave and return to install the dish washer; going to Casino and finding there was only a half a box of dish washer salt and I need a full one; oh, I think there were other aggravations, but I’d better keep them to myself lest I have readers regretting that I have returned after a four-day lull!!!!

A Steve Forbert Connection in Mid-Summer in the Highlander Open Mic in Paris

August 16, 2012
bradspurgeon

Way way back when, in a period I shy to talk about on this blog it was just so far and long away, I met a young performer named Steve Forbert, while we were both playing at Gerde’s Folk City open mic in New York City, in the Village. I could barely keep a beat, was little able to express emotion in the singing, and had not memorized my songs. But this guy Forbert was blowing everyone in the room away and filling it with his presence, just knocking us all out. I just couldn’t figure it out. Like, who is he? Why is he here? How does he do that?

I arrived one day in the long sign-up line up outside the door on East Third Street and stood right behind him. It was fall, and his coat was full of holes with the cotton insides hanging out. This was not a cultivated look, it was poverty. Anyway, I asked him how long he had been playing the open mics, etc., and he said a couple of years – he was 21 – and he said he was also busking in Grand Central Station….

I made no sense of him until a couple of years later when I was in a taxi in London, England I heard on the radio his distinctive voice again, and then heard the announcer say his name. He was the next Bob Dylan, it seemed, and he had this album out that was making everyone go crazy. Anyway, today Forbert is comparatively forgotten, but really alive and kicking and playing small venues all over the States and occasionally England.

Well last night at the Highlander, when a performer named Jake Weinsoff broke a string on the house guitar, I offered Thomas Brun, the MC, for Jake – and others – to use my guitar while Thomas put a new string on his guitar. Thomas accepted, Jake took my guitar, and then he announced he was going to play a song by Steve Forbert! First time I have heard anyone – aside from me – do a Forbert song at an open mic! And it was with my guitar. I spoke to Jake afterwards, and he told me that he too had met Forbert…. Cool!

More generally, what to report? It was smack in the middle of the month of August last night, and the only joint offering an open mic in Paris as far as I could see – on the public holiday of the 15 August – was the brave Highlander. On the other hand, you almost had to have been brave to go there. It was so packed with spectators and musicians! I arrived one hour earlier than last week, and like last week I signed up as the 17th musician on the list. And as the Highlander offers three songs per night come rain, shine or sickness, that means going one well past midnight.

Still, unlike the week before, I did manage to do my three songs by 1 AM this time. That, too, gave me the great possibility of watching all the other acts of the evening. And there were a lot, and some original – even off-the-wall – performances. Well, all right maybe just one off-the-wall performance. But lots of great stuff beside that.

Still, as I continue this long, long stretch in the Paris open mics while I have my holiday and take a break from my world travels, I maybe don’t have a hell of a lot of different stuff to say about this – for me – local hangout.

From Drinks With Marianne to a Musical Digestif at Coolin, Palliating the Coming Dearth of Open Mics in Paris

August 14, 2012
bradspurgeon

marianne bp

In terms of open mics in Paris, we are situated in the red hot moment of total desperation, angst and depression in the middle of the month of August where all of Paris has to take off and go somewhere else, leaving its tourists and musicians to play with themselves.

Last night was the end of the opulence, as there were actually and ridiculously, FOUR open mics concentrated in the same area – more or less – of the Latin Quarter. Tonight, Tuesday, there are ZERO open mics, as they all take a summer break. On the other hand, not even a brimming full Paris of open mics and the crawl it would have allowed me to take would stop me from preferring to go out for a drink with my friend Marianne BP.

I met Marianne at an open jam session one Monday night a year or so ago, and our musical paths have crossed several times, and as she was about to go off herself for a vacation, we met up for a drink last night and discussed our various projects. Marianne has recently completed the second of her music videos, as well as completing her first novel. So as I complete my various writing and video projects, we had much to discuss and share.

I mention this mainly in order to post her two music videos on the blog and by way of explanation as to why there will be so little on the blog about my open mic experience in Paris last night… that did not effectively begin until midnight, at the Coolin, having taken a pass at the other three places, the Batofar, the Tennessee Bar and the Galway. I heard from musicians who DID do a bit of an open mic crawl that things were kicking at both the Galway – where there was a list of 12 performers, and apparently Thomas Brun of the Highlander was serving as MC – and at the Tennessee. I had no spies at the Batofar, though, so I cannot say anything about that one.

I can only complain that it makes no sense for four venues to do an open mic in the same city on the same night when there are other nights this summer where there is NOTHING: Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday, for example!

Anyway, the Coolin seemed to become even more alive as we approached 12:30 AM, but it seemed they were looking to close down a little early too, and so I managed to do my two-song set, and see a few other performers, and then call it an early night – at around 1:30….

A Genuine Canadian Article, Eh

August 12, 2012
bradspurgeon

I am not proud to be a Canadian. I never was, in fact. Always hated the concept. I am just a Canadian. I was born in Toronto, and grew up there and in Ottawa. I have two passports, two citizenships, a British one and a Canadian one. I have spent most of my adult life living in France. But I will never tell anyone I am British. I am Canadian, that’s where I’m from, how I was raised, where my whole early essence of life comes from. Now, my life is all about the entire world, as readers of this blog will know, as I travel the world for my work and seek out music everywhere – the common language. All of this long introduction is just to say how “un-proud” I felt this morning as I picked up my copy of the May 2012 LRC, or Literary Review of Canada, and my eye was suddenly caught by a stamp, a logo of approval on the bottom right corner of the cover that read: Genuine Canadian Magazine.

bob and doug mckenzie

What?!? Suddenly now images of Bob & Doug McKenzie, the yokels from SCTV in the 1980s designed to fulfill Canadian-content rules come to mind. This morning what came to mind was the incredible Canadian inferiority complex, the extraordinary need for Canada to assert its cultural identity by announcing that it has one, by promoting culture for the very fact of its Canadian-ness rather than its quality. But coming on the cover of a literary review, I was struck almost like as if in the balls as I said to myself, “Man, if I saw Genuine Canadian Leather stamped on my Roots shoes or some Canadian souvenir, I would not blink. Just like I might expect to see the same thing on a Malaysian, Brazilian or any other product around the world.”

But having not read the Canadian Literary Review ever before in my life – it is more than 20 years old, but I have been in France longer than that – I suddenly felt as if a), my intelligence had been affronted in a place where I had gone to make use of it, and b), as if the quality of the magazine itself was most certainly going to be about as thick and impenetrable as Genuine Canadian Leather, or even worse, it would read like as if Bob & Doug McKenzie – sorry for the ancient reference from pop culture – had written it. How could any self-respecting literary review stamp itself as a “Genuine Canadian Magazine”? And why, above all, with a title such as “Literary Review of Canada,” would I in my wildest dreams have any doubts as to its origins or cultural background?

literary review of canada

The review, of course, looks and feels like a Canadian version of the London Review of Books, the LRB. It is about the same size, same paper, same layout – more or less. I have read such reviews for years, the LRB, The New York Review of Books, or NYRB, the Magazine Litteraire and Lire, in France, etc. Here I was now eager to break into the pages of the Canadian literary review and immediately being reminded of all I hated about my native country on the cultural level. I used to be well-liked at the University of Toronto in the early 1980s if ever I brought up any such topic of criticism of Canada’s effort to ghettoize its own literature by calling it “CanLit.” Give me the Lit, you keep the Can, I would say.

And in recent days as I have not been attending open mics all over the world or even in my adopted home of Paris – thanks to it being August and most of the open mics being closed – I have been doing a lot more reading, particularly of this absolutely superb biography of one of my favourite authors, who also happens to be Canadian, Mordecai Richler. Interestingly, as someone who hates the concept of CanLit, two of my favourite authors are Richler and his fellow Canadian, Robertson Davies. But in reading the Richler biography, written by Charles Foran – whom I also learned in the LRC, is the president of PEN Canada – I have learned that Richler also hated the whole concept of trying to prop up and boast about and support Canadian culture. His point of view was that it should survive on merit, not government support. Even more interesting, Richler was left-wing.

Well, back to the LRC, that Genuine Canadian Magazine. FYI, my dad was founder and editor of another genuine Canadian magazine in the 1960s and 1970s, that I know would not have survived without government support – it was called Science Forum – and so I could not, either, be against government support. The point is not “don’t help it survive with money,” the point is, “allow it to be trashed, criticized, discarded, publicly ostracized and allow it to die…if it is no good. Allow it to be praised, promoted and loved if it IS good – in fact, if it is so good, it WILL be loved and promoted.” Here, yes, we arrive back at the LRC.

mordecai richler

My first impressions were completely destroyed by this stamp of authenticity. I had been really pleased to pick up a literary review from my country – I am Canadian, remember – and thought that I would feel a little closer to it in my bones and roots than the ones I was used to reading… only to then be treated like a bumpkin or tourist picking up a pair of Genuine Canadian Moccasins in Niagara Falls. Okay, so then I read it. Cover to cover in one sitting. It is superb. It is Canadian, but not exclusively so. It had stories about books on the failed, disastrous Franklin expedition to the Arctic in 1845 and how it has become a political tool to define Canada and its territorial rights; another on a book about Michael Ignatieff and the death of the Liberal party, written by Peter C. Newman; about a biography of the great theater director, John Hirsch, who had emigrated as a war orphan from Hungary to Canada after WWII; about the Mauthausen trials after WWII; it even had a couple of novel reviews!

The point of this was that in reading the LRC, I felt a closeness to the English Canadian intellectual, creative and cultural world in a way that my life as an expat and my annual return trips only for my work as a Formula One journalist – which is how I bought the LRC in June – does not usually permit me to feel. Above all, the review seemed to me to be very much the equal to any of other such reviews I read or have read from any other country in the world.

There was absolutely no doubt in my mind that I was reading a Genuine Canadian Magazine! And that made that little idiot’s insignia on the front all the bigger an insult. By the time I got to the last page of the review I found a full-page advertisement telling me the source of the Genuine Canadian Magazine seal of approval: “Canadian magazine are unique,” read the ad, which had the face all fuzzy in the background – in a collage of magazine covers – of the ubiquitous and now iconic Margaret Atwood. “And so are you,” the ad continued. “That’s why we publish hundreds of titles, so you know there’s one just for you. All you have to do is head to the newsstands, look for the Genuine Canadian Magazine icon marking truly Canadian publications and start reading. It’s that easy.”

I was then told to visit magazinescanada.ca/ns to find my favourite magazine. I did so, and to my great shock, I found there just about every magazine that I ever knew existed in Canada. And I thought, holy crap, there’s no way I could even protest the culture police if I wanted to – without dropping all association with all Canadian magazines, including what appeared to be the major small literary reviews. At least it is not just the LRC that should be taken to task for this – although they would do well to be intelligent enough to at least drop the logo from the front page…if they are allowed to.

So the point of today’s rant? (Yesterday’s rant was about unicycling and cops and traffic laws in France.) The point is that Canada should really drop its efforts to show and impose its culture as being the equal to any on earth – especially that of its great neighbour to the south – because its best culture IS up to the level of that of anyone else’s…except when the culture police pop up their heads and insult our intelligence by insisting that we hear that. Again, and again, and again. Inferiority complexes are not attractive.

PS, in going to the LRC web site just now, I see there is currently a feature called, “How Others See Us.” Hmm… it’s catchy….

PPS, to add a point about not being proud to be Canadian, that phrase I used to open this rant. I speak in the same terms as one of the daughters of King Lear, when he asked his daughters how much each of them loved him. One of those daughters said she loved him – no more, no less. He failed to understand.

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Monthly Archives: August 2012