From around 1900 until his death in 1937, André was one of the most famous people in Quebec. His personal legend and his fanatical devotion to Saint Joseph, the stepfather of Jesus, inspired the wealthier Catholics of Montreal to finance the massive Oratory’s construction. And his following seems only to have grown since then.

More than two million pilgrims a year visit the Oratory, many in hopes of curing their medical problems. Part of the massive flight of stairs leading to the basilica is roped off for pilgrims who ascend them on their knees, saying a prayer at each step.

André is entombed in a chamber deep beneath the church, his heart on display in a nearby glass case filled with formaldehyde. Adjacent to the tomb is a chapel devoted to Saint Joseph, with stations for each of his different areas of patronage: the worker, the family, those beset by demons, and so on. In between the stations, enormous racks reach up to the ceiling, covered by hundreds and hundreds of crutches. They have been left there by pilgrims who came to the Oratory, and left with no more need for them. The most poignant are the crutches that are just three or four feet tall – the flung-away fetters of an injured or disabled child.

Since the actual ceremony for André was being held in Rome, a screen had been set up at the front of crypt church to live-broadcast the ceremony, but it kept collapsing. Each time it was re-erected, thunderous applause broke out, and some were even moved to tears. A young American nun sat on the lap of her elder sister, craning her neck for a better view; at the back of the room, a Radio-Canada camera crew pressed equipment in people’s faces, aggressively demanding comment.

I spoke to one man who had came from Ottawa to pay homage to André. “The fact that it’s Brother André’s canonization, I think it’s very important that I be here,” he said. “Quebec City was founded 400 years ago or something, and we have [only] one saint now. The church was mostly in Europe, before, and now it’s expanding.” Globally, maybe so, but not in North America. “Quebec has gone very far from being religious. Maybe [the canonization] will bring some back, I don’t know. The church needs to be realigned.”

Another man had travelled all the way from Connecticut. Coincidentially, he was also named André Bessette. “Over the past four or five years, I have been more deliberate, and mindful of my faith, and our heritage,” Bessette told me. He is now an Episcopalian, but comes from a traditional French-Canadian Catholic family (he even said he was a distant relation of his namesake). “What Brother André did, and continues to do through so many people, it’s amazing,” he said. “I was really honoured to be here.”

The path to sainthood

The process leading up to this honour is remarkably bureaucratic. First, a person must be beatified, for which one confirmed miracle in their name is required. They are then referred to as “The Blessed so-and-so,” as Brother André had been since 1982. After a second confirmed miracle, the person becomes a saint, but this can take many years. Brother André was actually one of the youngest of his class – two of this year’s new saints died in the 17th century.

In an interview with The Daily, Richard Bernier, a doctorate student at McGill specializing in the intersection of faith and culture, explained the technicalities of a “miracle.”

“A miracle is understood to be something that manifests the presence of God in the world,” Bernier said. Everyday, personal miracles are part of the Catholic faith, but in the context of canonization, he said, they need to be a little bolder. “In practice it’s always of a medical nature…something that happens in the case of a sick person that’s medically inexplicable.” Whether or not it is inexplicable is determined by a Vatican-appointed team of doctors. If they investigate the case and come up empty-handed, and the medical case is explicitly tied to Catholic devotion – say, if the afflicted had been praying for help to Brother André – a miracle has officially taken place.

Contrary to common conception, the Church doesn’t “make” anyone a saint; the word merely refers to someone who is in heaven. Those recognized as saints here on earth are those known to be in heaven, thanks to the evidence provided by miracles. Saints have no healing power of their own, but, being in heaven, can appeal to God on behalf of people here on Earth.

Most people in the crypt church that night believed André already was a saint, and had just been waiting for the Vatican to acknowledge it. “It’s like when you discover a band,” Bernier told me. Himself a practicing Catholic with a hero of his own – John Henry Newman – on the path to canonization, Bernier continued “If everyone understands how great that music is, maybe it doesn’t change your appreciation of it, but there’s a sense of confirmation, and also you’re sharing something wonderful with other people.”

Staying modest about miracles

The bureaucracy of the canonization system, and individuals’ own veneration of saintly people, can lead to some strange contradictions. It took a century for Brother André to be credited with two confirmed miracles, yet people have been experiencing miracles on the southwest slope of Mount Royal every day for all that time. The tiny chapel where André received the faithful before the crypt church was constructed has been preserved in the shadow of the Oratory. Its walls are covered with donated plaques, thanking Saint Joseph for curing everything from rheumatism to cancer.

When I asked Bernier about the discrepancy between the popular understanding of Brother André and the Vatican’s recognition of only two of his miracles, he emphasized the need for skepticism within the faith. “That’s kind of the hierarchy’s job, they’re like the airbrakes on a truck,” Bernier told me. “They’re meant to slow things down, and that’s frustrating if you’re trying to go faster, or it’s frustrating if you don’t want to encounter that resistance.” Across the globe, average Catholics venerate people and places that the church refuses to recognize. Bernier cited the shrine at Lourdes, France, a widely-revered site that in the past met with severe resistance from church authorities.

Here in Quebec, though, there may be other reasons for the church to play down André’s mass healing powers. André was a big part of pre-Quiet Revolution Catholicism, when the Church was the most powerful cultural institution in the province, bar none. At that time, people weren’t terribly subtle about their faith in André’s miracles. In one of my favourite documents from the period, a comic book entitled The Wonder Man of Montreal, a bulked-up André doles out healing at every flip of the page. When a man comes to him with a paralyzed right arm, André reminds him to go to confession, then says, “PICK UP YOUR HAT…WITH YOUR RIGHT HAND.” And he does. Later in the book, he even brings a woman back from the dead, Lazarus-style. (She wakes up hungry, prompting him to say, “GET ME AN ORANGE. I WANT HER TO EAT IT.”)

But times have changed. We now live in an era of high-tech hospitals and Catholic child and sex abuse scandals. If the church went around touting “the miracle-man of Montreal,” it might garner some pretty sharp criticism. Consequently, André has gone through something of a public-image revision, from which he has emerged as a faithful naïf, prone less to raising the dead than saying pithy things like “It is with the smallest brushes that the artist paints the most exquisitely beautiful pictures!”

A Globe and Mail article about the canonization spoke sternly about the “creepy” side of André’s legacy, meaning, essentially, miracles, which always have been, and always will be a central part of the Catholic faith. Church officials were quoted in the article emphasizing that the modern-day Oratory only encourages “healthy spirituality.” “The context in which we live today is different,” one priest told the Gazette, “there are a lot more social services and medical services, but there are still a lot of people who need a friend, who need a brother to whom they can talk. Brother André reminds us that we can be this brother, this friend, for people around us.”

For many of the faithful, this tamer church may provide an avenue to reconcile their belief with their modern sensibilities. Besette explained his idea of miracles to me in a manner that perfectly synthesized traditionalism and modern skepticism. Though he “believes” in miracles, less institutionalized, more interpretative miracles appealed to Bessette. “I believe in miracles, I can’t say I see them every day, but I’ve seen them. I’ve got three kids, and they’re all pretty good kids, that’s miraculous.”

Crutches in the basement

Yet things have not changed as much as it could seem to an outsider. Church officials may insist to the sneering anglophone press that they endorse “healthy” kinds of devotion, but the crutches in the basement more than speak for themselves. Little testaments of private faith are scattered throughout the Oratory, suggesting that in the minds of the faithful, André is still the same miraculous, humble man. There are more crutches in the original chapel, and notes slipped under the glass of André’s preserved living quarters beg for his help with all kinds of medical problems.

The Oratory has become a true sanctuary for ill and disabled Catholics. On one of my visits, a young woman who was over-dressed for the weather reached the top of the steps, leaned against a railing, and coughed heavily into a white handkerchief. If critics of the church wish to deride its endorsement of miracles, then they must contend with the other elements of André’s healing legacy. One of these is the Congregation for the Sick and the Suffering, a weekly prayer service for disabled and ill people, held every Wednesday without fail.

Bernier stressed the need to place healing miracles in perspective. “As much as I, or anyone else might say, you know, miracles are a thing of a past – and I’m not saying that is the case – at the same time there are ordinary folks who went to the Oratory one day and experienced something that allowed them to leave their crutches behind. And for them, that might have been life-changing.”

Do we really want to relegate miracles to the past? Miracles are one part of faith that can never be dominated by institutional hierarchy or dogma. Even if they can be co-opted, the actual experience of a miracle remains entirely and intimately personal. Likewise, saints must become folk-heroes before they can merit that institutional stamp of approval. The question of whether or not miracles do, in fact, occur, has almost nothing to do with the fact that people experience them. Try to imagine that the maker of the universe has singled you out and cured your bad leg, and you can begin to understand why the Oratory remains such an attraction. It is this sense of wonder that drew people to the Oratory the night of October 15, including monks, priests, lay-people, and even casually agnostic, Presbyterian-raised student journalists like myself.

On the night of the ceremony, I met a man named Pierre standing on the terrace, smoking a cigarette. His eyes were red with tears. He looked to be in his mid to late thirties and he had long, brown scraggly hair. Despite the awkwardness of the language barrier, he seemed eager to talk to me, and I told him I could record him in French. I asked him why he was there. “Oh,” he said, at a loss, “Brother André is my friend. I don’t know how to explain it…He is someone who has helped me a lot…I wanted to be here to thank him.” I asked what “helped” meant. “I have foot problems,” he explained. I nodded.

As Bernier said, “You’ll meet lots of faithful who are encouraged by the fact that there was a man who walked our streets, who knew Côte-des-Neiges, and took the streetcar ­– all these ordinary parts of urban life. They derive encouragement from the thought that he also seems to have done extraordinary things.”

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The festival could be criticized, however, for how few Canadian films it has managed to scratch up. Is this an oversight, or can we blame the lack of funds for filmmaking in Canada and the marginalization of Canadian black filmmakers for this absence?
Whatever the reason, it’s hard to stomach the fact that more American films are playing this afternoon than Canadian films will play over the entire course of the festival. Though the black culture the IBFF identifies with transcends national borders, one could hope that this festival, at least, would work to counteract the marginalizing forces of a country that so often makes its black people invisible.

The one Canadian film playing this week, then, plays an important role. Billy is the story of a black pioneer who, at the age of 94, tells his story to a young white journalist. It’s a story which demonstrates just how neglected black culture is in Canada; the image of the pioneer, so fundamental to Canadian national myths, is generally reserved for white, anglophone Canadians. In actuality, black Canadians have filled the settler role since the 19th century, and at the beginning of the 20th played a large role in the Canadian government’s expansionist policy in the West. A 1910 petition from the Edmonton Board of Trade to Prime Minister Laurier, quoted in the Canadian Encyclopedia, demonstrates both how important these settlers were, and how brutally they were treated by their fellow pioneers. “We, the undersigned residents of the City of Edmonton, respectfully urge upon your attention and that of the Government of which you are the head, the serious menace to the future welfare of a large portion of western Canada, by reason of the alarming influx of Negro settlers,” the petition reads.

The structure of Billy echoes the position of the film within contemporary culture: the black settler finally gets the chance to tell his story to the culture that his labour built, and that has since forgotten him. Billy’s age reminds us that this story is being told far, far too late. Nonetheless, it’s time Canada listened.

Billy is playing at Cinéma du Parc (3575 Parc) at 9 p.m. on Tuesday and at the ONF/NFB Cinema (1564 St. Denis) at 8 p.m. on Saturday. Visit montrealblackfilm.com for more information.

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When Choose Life gained club status and they revealed themselves as everything we were afraid they’d be, some students demanded the revocation of their club status – others even called for a ban against all future pro-life groups. The basic argument has stayed the same: that all pro-life groups, not just Choose Life, endanger the safety of certain students.

Over the past few months, The Daily’s editorial board has said little on the topic, but has quietly opposed this movement in the student body. Sadly, we have done so in a disingenuous and inadequate fashion. We’ve either ignored or set up sham arguments in response to the anti-Choose Lifers’ concerns, and it’s been easy for us, since we hold the more widely accepted opinion. Take, for example, our condemnation of the Anti-Discriminatory Groups general assembly (GA) motion in November.

According to The Daily, “this motion makes the faulty leap of logic that all pro-life groups are the same” (“The Daily’s GA Recommendations,” February 7). It is true that this generalization was made in the resolution. But we ignored the essence of this generalization – that pro-life groups aren’t just all “the same,” but are inherently discriminatory and hateful. As Liam Olson-Mayes, who co-wrote the motion, told me, “The term ‘pro-life’ is seriously rooted in this historical, political context, which has very much occupied itself with legal struggles and efforts to criminalize abortion.” By ignoring this premise and the varying implications of the term “pro-life,” we gave ourselves the freedom to speak in patronizing tones about “leaps in logic,” without engaging with the argument behind these connections. If The Daily doesn’t believe that pro-life groups are inherently dangerous to students, we need to explain why.

More importantly though, this is an argument which ignores and thereby silences the anti-Choose Lifers. By opposing their positions but not engaging with any of their arguments, we eliminate them from the discourse.

All along, anti-Choose Lifers have argued that pro-life groups are unacceptable on campus, not just for their actions, but for the very premise of their existence – that women should “choose life.”

“I think that there shouldn’t be any organization [at McGill] that can advocate for this change in social conditions that would lead to the widespread death of women. I think that that’s totally inappropriate, and is not up for discussion,” Olson-Mayes said. “By having this organization, which is legitimated as it exists as a SSMU club, to me that’s just totally bizarre and totally wrong – that what we’re actually going to represent one side of the debate which is advocating for social conditions under which women are going to die en masse.” No matter your politics, if a group engages in a politics of hate, it’s not okay for our student society to be giving them a home – even if they’re quiet about it.

The Daily has yet to come up with a meaningful response to this argument. We said in our GA endorsements that “a pro-life group could exist on campus that respects students’ safety and provides beneficial medical services.” That’s not the point. According to anti-Choose Lifers, the problem isn’t just what pro-life groups do – it’s what they are. The very premise of their existence is hateful.

Now, three months later, we’re making the same mistakes. This past week, in our referendum endorsements (Editorial, March 8), we again wallowed in the comfort of representing the status quo, instead of engaging with those who say we are wrong. Without qualification, we wrote that “if approved by students, [the motion on body sovereignty] should not be used as a way to categorically ban either pro-life or pro-choice groups.” Such a connection would likely be controversial and unpopular on campus. But why would it be illegitimate? We have to start providing the other side with some answers, not just telling them to shut up.

As an editor with nearly three years of experience with The Daily and having seen the paper go through some nasty political scraps, I have found our handling of this issue especially disappointing. We usually find ourselves strongly on one side of an issue, not, as we are now, standing in a position of political moderation, lecturing the fringes. Dailyites know better than anybody that there is nothing more stifling or frustrating in political discourse than coming up against the blank, indifferent wall of majority opinion. Yet as soon as The Daily has found itself in a moderate position, we’ve engaged in the exact same tactics that we always rail against.

I did not write this article with the intention of advocating a ban of pro-life groups. I’m writing because I feel that regardless of the issues, my paper has engaged in institutional cowardice. The Daily’s moderate position may be tenable – but we have yet to justify it. We all know that abortion is a political minefield, and the easiest thing to do in debates surrounding it is to disengage or play the middle ground. But if students on campus are saying, loudly and clearly, that they feel they are being endangered and that marginalized groups are being discriminated against, we’d better have some pretty serious answers for them if we’re not going to back them up.

Our response to this issue is not only a matter of abortion politics, it’s a matter of rhetorical domination and political suppression. The anti-Choose Lifers are advocating a marginalized and apparently unpopular opinion. By glossing over their concerns and failing to respond to the questions they have raised, The Daily has not only disagreed with them, we’ve silenced them. Although The Daily often advocates for marginalized groups, we occupy a position of considerable power on campus. It’s absolutely crucial that we don’t use this position to rob the less powerful of their dissenting voices by not entering into dialogue with their concerns. Maddie Ritts, who wrote the GA motion with Olson-Mayes, told me that she found The Daily’s impact on the discourse around pro-life groups this year “really scary.”

Having spent close to 40 hours a week with them since the beginning of the year, I can’t overstate my respect for this year’s editorial staff. But I do feel that in this instance, we’ve behaved irresponsibly and ignored the effects of our actions. I hope the anti-Choose Lifers continue to make their voices heard in our paper, and I hope that when they do, we as an editorial board will have the courage to engage with them. I can’t help but feel that doing so would make us change our position. At the very least, though, we have to stop making members of our paper feel like they’re yelling at a wall.

Ian Beattie is a U2 English literature student. He’s also one of The Daily’s Culture editors. Engage with his views in a way that doesn’t marginalize or silence them at ian.beattie@mail.mcgill.ca.

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In an altruistic act of pedagogy, the British journalists had taken it upon to themselves to explain to their readers what, exactly, the winter Olympics are. The concise, comprehensive guidebook they produced managed to blow apart any straggling illusions I had about Canada’s international visibility.

The vast majority of winter sports, it turns out, the ones I’ve played or watched all my life, are stupidly dangerous and best avoided – as, in the majority of cases, the British athletic world has wisely done. Others just didn’t appeal to the quaint sensibilities of British cricket fans, and were left to the lumpen masses – “uber-sized Dutch men and women.” My favourite, though, was the scandalized three sentences derived from the British experience of watching hockey, and I provide them here in full:
“Quite possibly the most pointless sport ever to be televised as it is impossible to follow the puck unless the action is shown in slow motion. Possibly worth watching for the frequent fights but you’ll have to take the score on trust. Not that you will care because Great Britain hasn’t entered a team in either the men’s or women’s competitions.”

And that’s that.

The second article ran in another prestigious publication, the New York Times. It was written by an old staffer who happens to be the leader of the opposition in Canadian Parliament right now – Michael Ignatieff.

Ignatieff’s vision of the Vancouver Olympics made the Games seem like a church bake sale. Nice, but nothing too fancy. “We Canadians are immensely proud of our country,” Ignatieff wrote, “but we try to be soft-spoken about it, so we aren’t looking for the Vancouver Games to be a grandiose exercise in self-promotion.” Apparently, the goal of the Games is to send the bizarre message that “we’re a people the world can count on…. Ask us to do a job, and we get it done right.”

Behind all the obsequious stereotypes of Canadian modesty, however, Ignatieff’s article was haunted by the enormous apathy, exemplified by the Guardian’s coverage, with which most of the world treats the Winter Olympic Games. Only 82 countries are competing this year, compared to the 204 entered in the Beijing Summer Games, and though we blew the budget, a Winter Olympics is only worth $6 billion, $34 billion less than Beijing.

Nobody likes to mention it, but this is a real source of anxiety here. The Winter Olympics hold a particular resonance in Canada, in that they exhibit Canada’s sole uniting cultural characteristic – our nordicity. No matter where you were born or how long you’ve lived here, every Canadian experiences winter. Even if you’re from the rainforest coasts of B.C., you’re surrounded by snow-capped mountains. So it makes sense that we care.

But it makes equal sense that they’re not a big deal in most places. A lot of countries simply don’t have snow and ice. The fact that the Summer Games are viewed as the “real” Olympics by most shouldn’t matter to us. Nordicity remains a fact of our existence, and winter sports will always be popular here.

And yet even during this so very Canadian event, we seem to find ourselves, as always, turning southward, begging for American validation. Our politicians write op-eds no one will read in American papers. We launch the fascistic “Own the Podium” campaign, and it backfires – Canada has half the medal count of the front runners, and the sparse international media attention being paid to the Games is now solely focused on the program’s unfairness and fatal disregard for safety.

And then there are the opening ceremonies, which were, well, weird. Ask Canada to define itself, and we freak out. Satan charges fiddling across the stage in a canoe. k.d. lang weeps as she butchers “Hallelujah” to bits. And a country confronts the fact that after more than a century of trying, all we have for a self-image is a confusing caricature.

In a way Ignatieff would never have intended, the Vancouver Games have really been the perfect mirror to hold up to Canadian society. Canada’s unique nordicity is present, yes, but so is our usually-hidden desire to be American, to make the world notice us. Our media has been all over our alleged modesty, but the less cute parts of Canada’s culture – our bigotry toward the First Nations, our hatred of the homeless, and our lack of investment in real, progressive urban planning – have also been drawn out and magnified for all to see.

The Olympics have turned into a battle between the way we would like to sell ourselves and the way we are. On February 13, the Times ran an article praising Canada for being a place where everybody goes home at midnight after the opening ceremonies. That morning, a black bloc of more than 200 protesters marched into downtown Vancouver and smashed store windows displaying Olympic clothing before engaging in a violent battle with the police. No one told them anger isn’t Canadian, I guess.

The image of Canada as modest and self-aware seems like a nice idea. But if that national image really matched our identity, maybe we would have invested in solving the problems of the homeless in Vancouver, rather than pushing them out and spending a billion dollars on security. Instead of just using native imagery to brand the Games, we could have taken a good, hard look at the fact that the entire province where all the hubbub is happening lies on Native land that was never ceded. And we could wonder what happened that made a country with such an enormous population of visible minorities send a team to the Games that is almost exclusively white.

As a Canadian, I’m fine with the fact that the Winter Olympics will never truly catch the world’s attention – with years of experience, I’ve developed the marvellous ability to follow a hockey puck, and I enjoy doing it. Northern countries like Canada will always be somewhat alone in our northernness, and perhaps that’s part of the appeal. But at some point, we have to stop worrying how much the world knows about us, and begin to question what we think we know about ourselves.

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What makes hashing unique in the sports world is the general hedonism which accompanies it. Runs are followed by copious amounts of beer. The sport’s drinking element has lead to the mantra, “A drinking club with a running problem.” Like other sports, hashing comes with its own lingo and conventions. Athletic prowess, however, is not necessarily the most prized quality. According to Montreal’s Hash House Harrier’s web site, an “FRB” is a Front Running Bastard, alternatively a Fit Bastard, both terms that come with strong pejorative connotations. On the other hand, falling down and making an ass of yourself earns you a reputation as a “Day Tripper,” and means more beer and general acclaim.

This Sunday, their weekly hash will be returning to Île-Perrot for their post-holidays “Regift” hash. All are welcome. Sunday’s Regift Hash will be meeting at 71 Rue Des Fougères, Île-Perrot at 1 p.m. Bring $7.

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Their work will make use of a variety of media – dance, circus acts, poetry, music, and theatre. This year, for the first time, the festival will also include pre-show acts in and around the theatre, to ensure that you don’t drop off before the show even starts.

The closing act of the festival will be the 24-hour playwriting competition’s final performance on Saturday night, an ARTifact staple that’s pretty much what it sounds like. Three playwrights are given opening and closing lines for their plays, and have one day to write the play and another to rehearse it with the 30 volunteer actors recruited last week. Something tells me they’re probably cheating a little, dreaming up plots and characters as you read this right now, trying to think of throw-away methods of incorporating any sentence in the English language into a play. “And that, Ethel, is how I can prove you killed your husband. Furthermore, that hedgehog is in flames!” But one must forgive them that, as it doesn’t mean their plays won’t be worth watching. McGill artists need McGill audiences, so break out of your winter hermitage and come show them your support.

Tickets are $6 for students and $10 for adults. Email tnctheatre@gmail.com to reserve tickets for every night except Saturday. Tickets for the 24-hour playwriting competition finale on Saturday will be available at the door on a first come, first served basis. If you’re a McGill ARTist too, and you didn’t hear about ARTifact this year, there’s always next year. Calls for artists are usually announced on the drama board in the Arts building in November or December.

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Joyland.ca is here to change all that. It’s like a web 2.0 literary journal. Operating without grants or public funding, Joyland is attempting to reinvigorate the short story genre by making new short fiction available online to all. Based in Toronto, Chicago, Los Angeles, Montreal, New York, and London, this digital lit-Mecca has been receiving emphatic praise from the Canadian and American literary communities alike.

Monday night at Green Room, Joyland will be emerging from the web-world into reality. The night’s events are the first stop on a reading tour that will also touch down in New York and Chicago. Presented in conjunction with Montreal’s Matrix magazine, the night will include readings by authors such as Emily Schultz, Brian Joseph Davis, Jon Paul Fiorentino, Sina Queyras, and Arjun Basu. Drop by to see what short fiction means in the 21st century.

The Joyland Montreal reading takes place tonight at 8 p.m. at Green Room (5386 St. Laurent).

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On November 9, the 30 boats participating in the latest edition of the Vendée Globe around the world sailing race left the French port of Les Sables d’Olonne to begin their journey southward. The race is the only non-stop, solo, round-the-world sailing race currently active, and only the second in history. To make the fastest time, the sailors – referred to as “skippers”– plot their course right through the heart of the Southern Ocean, making it one of the most extreme tests of courage and endurance the sporting world has to offer. More people have orbited the earth and summitted Everest than have completed a solo, non-stop circumnavigation.

The only precursor to the Vendée Globe, the infamous Sunday Times Golden Globe of 1969, was a complete disaster. Two entrants committed suicide, one went insane, and only one finished. The resources available to the Golden Globe racers were far from sufficient, and technology at the time left them basically out of contact with the rest of the world.

In the intervening 20 years between the Golden Globe and the first Vendée Globe in 1989, off-shore sailing evolved beyond recognition. The Open 60 class sailed by the skippers (so named because they are all 60 feet in length) dwarf the boats sailed in the Golden Globe by 20 feet, and cost millions of dollars to build. Resembling giant surfboards, they have massive torpedo-shaped counterweights attached to their keels which allow for extreme sail areas and 90 foot masts. They are some of the fastest, lightest single-hulls ever built, and are far better equipped to handle the southern seas than the small pleasure yachts sailed by the skippers of the Golden Globe. Hi-tech communication systems reduce the psychological problems of spending three months alone at sea, while satellite weather charts and emergency signals reduce some of the journey’s risk.

Despite these advances, the Vendée Globe is still a constant trial for the skippers. Rarely do more than half the entrants finish. Sailing a 60-foot racing boat alone is impressive enough – doing so in the Southern Ocean is unreal. During calm stretches, the skippers work themselves into a routine of five hours of sleep a day, taken in one- or two-hour power naps; in the gales of the Southern Ocean, skippers often go for days with no sleep at all. Life onboard the boats is harsh. Sailors famously cut their toothbrushes in half to save weight, and after the first couple weeks only freeze-dried food is eaten. The deck of a conventional boat protrudes over the waterline at the bow, while the bow of an Open 60 is straight up-and-down so as to slice through the water. This means that the bow of the boats shovel waves on board, and skippers must wear wet-suits and mountain-climbing harnesses on deck to withstand the constant assault of tons of water washing over the deck.

The danger for a solo sailor in such conditions is immense, especially since the latitudes that the Vendée Globe skippers sail in are far out of reach of coast guard organizations. Since its inception in 1989, three skippers have died during the race – including Canadian Gerry Roufs in 1996. Skippers who run into trouble must fend for themselves. In the past, sailors have been forced to perform un-anesthetised surgery on themselves, right capsized boats from within the submerged cockpit, and construct makeshift masts when the original has been lost to the seas. Sailors who find themselves in more dire straits have to depend on their fellow racers for rescue. In the 1996 edition, skipper Pete Goss won a Legion d’Honneur for his daring rescue of the Italian racer Raphael Dinelli. When Dinelli capsized, Goss turned his boat around and sailed into hurricane-force headwinds for two days to reach him. Because of the size of an Open 60 and the incredible force of Southern Ocean winds, Goss sailed several hundred miles to Dinelli’s rescue but was only able to make one pass to pick up the stranded sailor, who had been clinging to a tiny life raft for two days. The two sailors popped the bottle of champagne that Dinelli had salvaged from his boat, and Dinelli faxed a marriage proposal to his girlfriend in France. Goss went on to set a British speed record for solo circumnavigation in the same race.

Gerry Roufs was lost in the same storm – a few months after the race ended, his Open 60 was found sailing itself off the coast of South America. This year, for the first time since 1996, another Canadian is participating, although he has already experienced the curse of the Canadians. Derek Hatfield encountered electrical problems during a freak storm right after the start that knocked several other competitors permanently out of the race, and was forced to return to Les Sables d/’Olonne to complete repairs. He has set sail again, thousands of nautical miles behind the leaders. For Hatfield, however, this is not a problem; like many other skippers in the race he never had a real chance of winning. Hatfield’s stated goals for this year’s race are to finish it, and do so leaving a zero-carbon imprint by using wind and water energy to power his electrical systems.

This underdog situation might seem humiliating in other sports; not so in off-shore sailing. Although winning is an incredible achievement, all participants are celebrated simply for sailing. This ideology is the legacy of legendary French sailor Bernard Moitessier, who abandoned the 1969 Golden Globe with victory within his grasp to continue sailing around the world. Moitessier explained this self-disqualification in a note he threw onto the deck of a tanker once he reached the Indian Ocean: “My intention is to continue the voyage, still non-stop, toward the Pacific Islands, where there is plenty of sun and more peace than in Europe. Please do not think I am trying to break a record. ‘Record’ is a very stupid word at sea. I am continuing non-stop because I am happy at sea, and perhaps because I want to save my soul.” The Golden Globe’s winner, Sir Robin Knox-Johnston, has somewhat faded into obscurity, while Moitessier was mentioned over and over again in the months before the race, and many skippers sail with his autobiography on board. To face the challenges of the Vendée Globe, one must be a sailor before a racer.

As I write this, Derek Hatfield is a few hundred miles off the Moroccan coast, making good speed and trying to close the gap with the rest of the racers, although he is again having problems with electrical systems. The leaders are entering the doldrums, a weather system in the middle of the Atlantic that is famous for its lack of wind, and must be crossed to reach the south. By mid-December, however, all the racers will be in the Southern Ocean. For the millions following the race, and presumably even more so for the skippers themselves, the doldrums are like the pause at the tip of a roller coaster. Humans have yet to perfect the art of Southern Ocean sailing, and any skipper who makes it out with his boat in one piece will owe a great deal to luck.

Despite the danger, the Vendée Globe continues to grow in popularity, both in terms of audience and participants. This year’s edition has half again as many skippers as ever before. A testament to the maniacal devotion to sailing that is the mark of any Vendée Globe sailor, Dinelli is competing this year, currently holding 22nd place. Since his 1996 rescue, he has not missed a single race.

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The best summer of my life. Quite a challenge. In truth, I felt a stir of apprehension as I bade farewell to Upper Rez and headed down the mountain towards the parts of the city where Real Life was waiting. Deciding not to go home hadn’t been easy, and I felt pressure to prove to myself that the decision had been a good one. I needed to enjoy myself, experience wondrous new things, meet scores of new and exciting people, and hopefully learn to speak French on the way. It’s going to be okay, I told myself, because this is it: the famed summer in Montreal.

The only thing that troubled me was that I didn’t have a clear picture of what that meant. I knew it had something to do with street fairs on St. Laurent, drink specials and open terraces at every bar, and gorgeous, nameless women cavorting around in the sunshine. Topping it all off would be the world-renowned Montreal Jazz Festival, putting to shame every other party one could ever go to, and involving little to no music actually recognizable as jazz. Would all that really be so great? Everyone seemed to think so. But romantically, and somewhat obviously, I hoped my summer in Montreal would also carry a hint of an early Leonard Cohen song, or the eerie city glimpsed in Ryan Larkin’s film Walking.

All such hopes crumbled, of course, on the day that my summer really started: my first training day of work, when I faced the grim realization that summer in Montreal for an 18-year-old was going to be the same as summer anywhere for an 18-year-old, because an 18-year-old has to have a job. It was a chilly, gray, drizzling day in late spring. It also happened to be the same day that a very dear friend left Montreal forever. I had no interest in being carted across the city to Place St. Henri at eight a.m., no interest in whether latex paint can go on oil paint or if it’s the other way around (I’m still not sure), and I just wanted to run back home, change out of my paint-covered clothes, and be on the next train home to Toronto.

Everyone I knew told me to avoid student painting like the plague, but like a fool I still did it, and for four bleak months I paid the price. Painting is something one should know how to do before getting paid to do it, or else one ends up watching helplessly as paint bubbles on walls, poorly secured ladders come crashing down, and cement facades collapse on heads. But it was those mornings on the way to my painting sites, which were all in Outremont, when I began to have some idea of what summer in Montreal meant.

I was struck by the ubiquitous presence of the colour green. Green in any shade is a hard colour to come by in the winter months of Montreal, but during the summer it was suddenly all over the place. It dominated the tree-lined streets of Outremont, but nowhere was so completely conquered by green as the Outremont parks. Being, as they are, playgrounds of the rich and famous and their dogs, parks in the borough are touched with a splendour not seen in the parks of the rest of Montreal.

Parc Outremont boasts a bronze statue of a cherub spouting water, and Parc Beaubien’s fountain is so high, powerful, and impractical that it soaks anyone downwind for metres. However, Parc John Pratt, where within a half an hour I – in my paint-covered state – was questioned by two different Outremont businessmen about my reasons for being there, takes the cake for opulence. Situated on a gentle, pine-tree quilted slope, it boasts not only an artificial brook, but three separate ponds at different elevations.

In addition to being green, Montreal in summer is full of people milling about at any time of day or night. Coming home from work, I would pass Hassidic families congregating along Hutchison, and clouds of shoppers and café-goers made walking along Mont Royal’s too-narrow sidewalks impossible. Bars and venues seemed to never empty. I went to the dingy backroom of Miami Bar at two in the morning on a Wednesday and was unable to get a seat.

If street festivals were the reason for so many people being around, that is all that I would thank them for. Far from being the high points of the Montreal summer, they seemed to crash-land on St. Laurent and for a few days scare away what I snobbishly considered the true spirit of the city, replacing the Plateau’s tranquility with drunken tourists and foul smells emanating from every gutter.

The Jazz Festival did eventually arrive, in all of its sordid glory, and the big story this summer was that Leonard Cohen, the secular patron saint of Montreal, would be returning for a concert for the first time in, well, a really long time. Tickets were two hundred dollars, and far, far more if you had to buy them second-hand. The concert, according to all the rich people who went, was mind blowing, but penniless student painters like myself had to take pleasure this summer in the singer’s more constant presence in the city, the one that drifted down from apartment windows no matter where one went, it seemed.

This summer, I was pleasantly surprised to discover that Leonard Cohen’s music really does haunt Montreal. The same night as the concert, I even heard a rough-edged but extremely thorough rendition of “Suzanne” performed by a homeless man in Parc Mont-Royal who claimed to have been the city’s first bike messenger. I found Ryan Larkin’s ghost, too, in the form of a pair I met in front of Copacabana who said they had seen him there almost nightly until his death, brooding in a corner alone over his failure to create one last beautiful film.

As the summer closed out, I had come to think of Montreal as a leafy, sunny paradise for the young. Street festivals came and went, and I took advantage of the cheap eats and sunglasses, but preferred to retreat northward to the colourful circus of Jean Talon Market, eastward to swim in the outdoor pool at Parc Laurier, or, once, down to the Champlain bridge to watch the fireworks festival.

It would be wrong, however, not to mention that midway through August, an uglier side of the city reared its head as North Montreal broke into racially-charged riots following a police shooting of an unarmed 18-year-old. Violence, it seemed, was part of the Montreal summer too. I thought I had observed and felt something unique, which I had identified as the personality of Montreal. Was my own experience – idyllic, serene – in any way representative of what summer in this city is really about?

Having lived it, I can recount anecdote upon anecdote about the Montreal summer, but truly evoking its personality it is too daunting a task. I can say, however, that it is more than the often-heard descriptions of Montreal as a synthesis of Europe and North America, a slice of Paris with a tinge of Brooklyn. During the summer months, Montreal reveals itself as a summation of infinite parts, a city that is entirely new and different from any other. If one is an 18-year-old looking to have the best summer of one’s life, I would say that Montreal is a good place to try.

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Dreamless focuses on the troubles and triumphs of mother-daughter pair Florencia and Eugenia, who live in a squalid apartment in the slums of an unnamed Argentina city. Florencia gave birth to her daughter while in high school, provoking permanent bitterness between herself and her mother, a wealthy psychiatrist who is unable to deal with her daughter’s flaws. Florencia’s mother reluctantly pays for her daughter’s living expenses so she will not have to work, but often cuts payments when Florencia messes up. Florencia rebels against her mother’s controlling parenting by constantly testing her patience. She uses cocaine and has unprotected sex with innumerable shady characters, confident that her scandalized mother will pay for her abortions.

Florencia’s rebellion against her mother’s bourgeois values – which her self-imposed exile to the slums authenticates – could be seen as admirable, if somewhat over the top. Yet Eugenia, who is nine years old at the start of the film, inadvertently draws attention to the cracks in her mother’s moral framework. Florencia is totally inadequate as Eugenia’s mother. Engrossed in her own angst, she seems to forget that by martyring herself she has also condemned her innocent daughter to a deprived life. Often, it is Eugenia who must mother Florencia, shaking her out of a mid-afternoon hangover for a parent-teacher interview, or convincing her to get a job so that they can pay their gas bills. Eugenia’s circumstance is rendered truly tragic by her ignorance of her own condition. For Eugenia, life is a constant party, despite the slaps she receives for the cocaine in the kitchen sugar bowl. “We are what we are, and we’re happy,” she tells her shocked grandmother at one point. Towards the end of the film, Eugenia gets her first period. The symbolic step towards adolescence, made all the more significant by the fact that her mother has apparently never told her about menstruation, reminds the viewer that while Eugenia might be having fun now, the deficiencies of her childhood threaten to make growing up a disaster.

But the critique implicit in directors’ Martin Desalvo and Vera Fogwill film lacks a sense of cohesive direction. At times, Dreamless veers towards social commentary, when themes of poverty and social justice flare up and Florencia and Eugenia momentarily appear to be victims of circumstance. At others, it’s a cynical portrait of Argentine youth, particularly during one scene where Florencia psychoanalyses herself while lounging in a lawn chair, sporting Ray Bans and smoking a cigarette. She’s so cool she’s bored with being cool. During these times, Eugenia is kind of tucked away in a corner, an inconvenient reminder of how extraordinarily selfish Dreamless’s main character really is.

Dreamless is not only unable to fully develop either of these themes; it is also a poorly crafted narrative. It’s unclear that Florencia comes from a wealthy family until well into the film. And even though Dreamless explores motherhood, her relationship with Eugenia is never resolved, though the birth of her second child seems to instantly place her on higher moral ground. In a conversation with her mother, she haughtily explains her cocaine-addled theory of non-parenting as some form of idealized anarchist motherhood. Wait, what? Our little tragic heroine is still sailing happily and blindly into impending disaster when she waves us goodbye, preceding the film’s climactic final scene that ends on a note of disillusionment.

With Dreamless, Desalvo and Fogwill have created a colourful, creative film; the lush cinematography keeps us from ever getting bored. To their credit, every character in the film is wonderfully crafted, made believable by their flaws, yet the film is a tangle of loose ends. Every time it seems to be going somewhere, Dreamless loses its way and stumbles off the path again. After watching it, one is left frustrated and confused, yet, at the same time, somewhat charmed. A head scratcher, but a pretty one.

Kept and Dreamless plays as part of Festivalissimo at 9 p.m. on March 23 at Cinema du Parc (3575 Parc). Visit cinemaduparc.com for information.

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