Founded in 1966 by musician Bob Fuller, The Wheel Club is a bar and dart club with a bluegrass pedigree. I went down Monday for Hillbilly night, which is free to the public. Filled with a mix of wayfaring visitors and salty but hospitable regulars, the club is more family reunion than raucous rodeo. With no cover (regulars pay $25 a year for membership), Monday nights are a pleasant free-for-all, where guests find their place among the checkered tablecloths and plaid-shirted silver-haired country folk toting steel-strings at the open mic.

I found my place in a corner, halfway to the back along the wood-paneled walls, that lead to a long rickety oak bar. Beside me at the folding table was a man, his body slung like an empty sack of potatoes, whose balding profile found solace in the swoon of a harmonica. As a couple of cowboys caroused and played some country tunes out on the low stage, a lone woman in green danced with herself. She would continue dancing alone frantically into the night.

The stage is sprinkled with seventies country kitsch, lanterns, paper Easter bunnies, and Christmas lights, and the guitar players beat out weary tunes, stiff as boards. Wagon wheels lean against the stage and pictures of old timers hang upon the wall like old wallpaper. The songs are old, too; the club regulates that all tunes played must be written before 1965.

A squeaky wheel might get the grease, but quiet or not, no one is alone here.

After the band chugged through a Jimmy Rogers waltz, a man leans over me to look into the other room. Two old men in Western dress from head to toe play pool beside an open guitar case. The announcer asks the audience how an old friend is recuperating, and tells another guest, “Oh that’s a nice country shirt you got!” A guest fiddle player steps up to the stage, laughing and making mistakes. A wrinkly man in a Canadiens jersey from the seventies hobbles over with an overflowing paper plate, grunts, and says, “How bout a nice black licorice?” I oblige. Like a family reunion, this is one big, laid back, social jam session.

Can you crash someone else’s family reunion? My four years in Canada, marked by a series of strikes and never-ending red-tape-ribbon-cutting ceremonies, are a part of me now, irreversible. You learn to like a country like you learn to love a family, learn to love yourself. The little faults are ugly or they’re beauty marks. Call them what you will, they happened and the past is here to stay.

As I work my way back out onto the street, an old man in spurs and a cowboy hat leans against the door, breathing into a cigarette. The strong and silent type.

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Now Montrealers will have a new outlet for their celebrity fixations. This April 19, the company which operates Musée Grévin in the 9th arrondissement in Paris will open a wax museum in the empty Eaton Centre building at Maisonneuve and University. While wax museums offer cheap thrills, the cost of admission can get expensive. At New York’s  famous Madame Tussauds, full price admission for a family of four (children 4 to 12) is $130. Paris’ Grévin costs at least $100 as well. In this age of instant archive access on YouTube, and with everyone’s 15 minutes of fame virtually guaranteed, are wax museums still relevant?

First, a brief history of these peculiar spaces: The Queen of all wax museums (and maybe gimmickry in general) was Madame Marie Tussaud (1761-1850), whose name is attached to museums from London to New York, Niagara Falls, Las Vegas, and beyond. Born in Strasbourg, Tussaud first learned the trade of wax sculpture from Dr. Philippe Curtius, in whose Parisian and Swiss homes she was a housekeeper. Besides playing with wax, Curtius was also a physician. Though he had artistic ambitions, Curtius used wax for more practical purposes – as a medium to depict the anatomy to students.

Wax figuring probably developed from this intersection of medicine and art. Death masks, originally fashioned from gold and other valuable materials for Egyptian pharaohs, would eventually be made from wax in the late-middle ages. In fact, Tussaud’s oldest figure still on display is a 1765 wax portrait of Louis XV’s last mistress, Madame du Barry. In 1776 Madame Tussaud was featured in an exhibition at the Palais Royal in Paris, and she quickly developed inroads with royalty in France and England, as her sculptures were more life-like than paintings.

Though wax figures are meant to preserve memory of a faded past, we tend to lump wax museums with cabinets of curiosities. I cannot recall anyone ever asking if wax sculptures are art. Though these figures served a purpose of recording the past in a way words or paintings could not (Tussaud also made death masks of guillotine victims, for instance), today this is mostly unnecessary.

Which begs the question: why do tourists still shell out stupid amounts of money to mingle with fake replicas of the public figures they already consume inordinate amounts of online and on TV?

For some insight, consider the Hollywood Wax Museum. It was founded by one Spoony Singh in 1964, because even in SoCal’s playground for the rich and famous, celebrities were “obligingly sparse.” Though ticket prices are over $15 a person nowadays, the museum still brings in over 300,000 people a year in a city not starved for attraction or distraction. Part of the appeal of Singh’s museum is its figures’ less-than-real appearance – it’s described by the New York Times as “beyond the realm of campy” and “old-time Hollywood decadence that is soulful and deeply satisfying.”

Unlike Hollywood Wax or even original London Tussaud models, the new Tussaud sculptures (and likely the Grévin figures as well) show little evidence of the human artistic touch. Is the artistry perhaps in the arrangement of figures?

The original Grévin in Paris features 450 figures arranged with artifacts to uniquely illustrate France’s past in a way that a stodgy museum exhibition could never bring to life. Similarly, the Montreal museum will include famous figures from Canadian history, including hockey player Guy LaFleur and of course (lest my Heart not Go On), Céline Dion.

Before I was old enough to avoid family vacations, my parents used to drag me and my sister to all the historic landmarks along the Eastern seaboard of the U.S. Though places like Gettysburg, Colonial Virgina, or Boston offered no shortage of sites with real, visual evidence of the past, inevitably we ended up at a restoration and reenactment village in Massachusetts, Colonial Williamsburg, or the President’s Wax Museum. Though even then these places seemed like cheap approximations or plays on the past, they offered something that all the art museums (and we went to many) were lacking: interactivity.

At Madame Tussauds you could pose with and visually disgrace these alarmingly life-like statues of figures you loathed or loved. It was like a living museum in that the ‘art’ and the spectator were stomping around in the same awkward tango. Though I will not go to another wax museum, I think other art institutions, many of which are struggling financially, could learn from this interactive model. We can already see all the pieces online, so how can you move beyond viewing to participation?

Whether it derserves to be ranked among Los Angeles’ more distinguished institutions or not, the Hollywood Wax Museum’s reputation in the public consciousness  never stood much of a chance. As owner Singh said, “On Hollywood Boulevard, dignity kind of gets lost in the shuffle.”  If Montreal wants its own wax museum to cultivate a similar aura, Ste. Catherine’s, that infamous stretch where office worker and sex worker, designer store and dive bar mingle, could not be more appropriate location.

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Due to various construction projects, my beloved 107 bus that floats me down past the delightful excesses of Peel near Sherbrooke to Griffintown, where I work part time, was rerouted. Rather than dropping me off at the bottom of Peel across from what once was a massive brewery, the bus spit me out further south, near a bunch of construction projects, none of which seemed near completion. I was reminded of something a tour guide once told me about the national bird of China being the crane – the construction crane, that is.

Though the revitalization of Griffintown is well documented here and elsewhere, my experience that early afternoon was particularly striking. With an underlying sense of determination in my step, I traipsed hurriedly across empty streets past empty buildings with “For Rent” signs with a swiftness that belied any prevailing sense of calm, until I came to what I’ll call a green pasture.

At the edge of the green was an unassuming sign with a black and white photograph: “Here stood St. Ann’s Church, once the center of Montreal’s Irish-Catholic community.” Beyond the sign several stones stood in line like a ghost of lost past – a past that is quickly being superseded by a new group of people and buildings.

—

The song goes: “They paved paradise and put up a parking lot.” These days in Montreal, the paradigm seems reversed, as developers construct vast condo complexes on former parking lots, and market once-static areas as up-and-coming. In the next three years, five buildings with heights over 100 metres (328 feet) will be completed. Beyond that, a total of nine such additional buildings are in the planning stages and at least half sold.

This marks the first major development period in Montreal in at least twenty years, when the two tallest skyscrapers, 1000 de la Gauchetière and 1200 René Lévesque were completed. While Toronto crept out of second place in the 1970s to become Canada’s largest city, another stage of development gave us much of what we see on the horizon when we enter Montreal. During the mid-1960s, a number of landmark International Style buildings – those bastions of sleek corporate excess, including I.M. Pei’s cruciform Place Ville Marie, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s Westmount Square, and Luigi Moretti’s Tour de la Bourse – sprouted from the vertiginous bedrock of centre-ville. In addition, the Place des Arts complex, the Montreal metro, the underground city, and Expo 67 were some of the lasting legacies of this brief but prolific period.

Though the skyscrapers of Toronto, like the overall population, have well eclipsed Montreal in number and height, strict zoning laws in Montreal have kept the city well centred and bustling at its core. In order to maintain the visual integrity and psycho-spatial centrality of Montreal’s best green space, building heights have been restricted to the height of Mont Royal (233 metres above sea level).

The city comes together at the street level, where divergent paths coalesce, collide, and ignore one another. The mountain has always been the focal point around which the city was built.

Unlike many other North American metropolises, high rises in Montreal have historically been more affordable and less high-class. A good example is the preponderance of crumbling ten- to twenty-storey-plus apartment buildings in the Milton-Parc area and the western half of downtown. The great extravagant quarters of Westmount and Montreal’s Golden Square Mile have historically been one-to-three level affairs; in these traditionally wealthy areas, ostentation rather than height conveys power.

According to preeminent architectural critic and former McGill professor Witold Rybczynski, Montreal springs from a Latin culture where people like to see and be seen, hence bewildering lines of skimpily clad pedestrians cavorting in winter outside the clubs on St. Laurent on weekend nights. Compared to L.A. or Toronto, Montreal apartments tend to be on the smaller side, so even during the coldest of winters, people are itching to get out.

Though the skyline is effectively the fingerprint of any North American city, great cities are great because of what happens at the street level – that otherworldly feeling of chaos that supersedes any grid.

What’s striking about the majority of the new skyscraper projects is that they’re mostly luxury condos, a market that economists have warned is becoming saturated in Montreal. One such example is a complex called “Tour des Canadiens” being built above the Bell Centre, part of a larger development program in the area by the Toronto-based development company, Cadillac Fairview.

In a press release, the development company stated, “The 48-storey building […] will become Montreal’s tallest residential building and an unmistakable visual landmark.”

Given that most of these new development projects respect or integrate historically significant structures, this development should, in general, be an exciting time. Nevertheless, one must wonder how much these structures will reflect the period in which they were constructed. I bring you two cases in point.

First, let’s consider the legacy of Jean Drapeau’s sixties-era mega-projects. While Expo 67 and the Olympic stadium brought international fanfare to Montreal, they also plunged the city into massive debt. To this day, the Olympic stadium remains a symbol for reckless government spending.

Second, while the 1960s were a time of unprecedented urban development, part of the legacy of that time is hurried construction and shoddy craftsmanship. While new buildings are being built and planned, daily stories of crumbling and endangered highway overpasses and high-rise apartments riddle the news. Even more disconcerting, the Montreal municipality has recently been stung with revelations of highly pervasive mafia manipulation of public construction contracts that have stalled municipal projects, forced the mayor to resign, and cost taxpayers millions of dollars.

Here my initial foray into Griffintown becomes more relevant. In a time of great inequality between the very rich and the middle class, the majority of the omnipresent construction is centred on the affluent few and their pre-fabricated gleaming towers of luxury. The very absence of that church in Griffintown is emblematic of other projects of historical erasure in that part of the city. We commodify re-vamped ruins as areas of renewal, but in fact few will ever recall the 6,000 Irish immigrants who died of typhus in 1847, only to be re-discovered by more working-class Irish in 1860, when they built the Victoria Bridge.

The question remains, how will these expensive condo projects come to embody our time? Are we blindly pursuing a developmental path that ignores the city’s cultural, social, and economic reality? Or is Montreal simply catching up to more successful cities that are defined by the height and contemporary aesthetic of their skyline?

As Mayor Drapeau declared as this city’s relative importance waned: “Let Toronto become Milan. Montreal will always be Rome.”

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I imagine that if one is truly in New Orleans then they will inevitably be seen sipping sultry cocktails (like mint juleps) at a long oak-paneled bar in a gaudy oak-paneled room replete with oversized chandeliers but dim lighting, with some Dixie pumping out the bells of a ten-piece ragtag band. Maybe I’m wearing a plaid sports coat and conjuring up the next great Southern Gothic novel, a la William Faulkner.

As fate would have it, I found myself in one such (unfortunate) place a fortnight ago (I figure invoking the old South requires a bit of linguistic archaism, no?).

Sent by The Daily to review a local Montreal jazz artist, I hesitantly entered the heavy doors at the base of one of the faceless corporate towers on Union. This actually took considerable effort, as the doors seem to manifest an underlying desire of the place to keep the outside world out.

Fittingly enough, the place, La Maison du Jazz, is caught like a fly in amber between visions of a society house and a gawdy bordello. Here I am, a little old-fashioned music journalist just tryin’ to get by.

Beyond the low rumble of the leftovers from the cinq-à-sept crowd, I hear a piano player begin to trinkle out the melody of Coltrane’s “Minor Blues” from an old baby grand on the sunken stage. There are pictures of Montreal jazz greats airbrushed into the wooden bar I’m leaning against.

Above the trio trying to form a warm-up groove from nothing, the sounds of 1950s Oscar Peterson and his trio boppin’ away filter through the speakers, which are conspicuously smaller than aforementioned chandeliers.

And yet of all the jazz joints I had to stumble into, why’d there have to be such an uncomfortably overreaching jazz singer in this one? Like anything campy, it’s just too much. As a service to the artist’s humble intentions, I’ll refrain from giving her bad press by referring to her by name.

She starts off, “Here’s a soul tune,” as if that meant she would actually sing soul.  What followed was her version of “It ain’t necessarily so,” but all that you need to know is that it “wasn’t necessarily soul.” It also wasn’t in tune, the rhythm section’s timing was halfway between Greenwich Mean and Pacific, and all the arm flailing and facial contortions in the world wouldn’t convince me that this music was compelling, let alone real soul, or real jazz.

Like the tourist trap that it is, The House of Jazz offers a stylized version of something great and unique and inadvertently turns it into a mockery of itself. Indeed, Montreal has a thriving, cutting-edge jazz and underground scene, but it remains just that: underground. There are several reasons for this.

First off, the most publicized events and venues aim to be something other than what they are. Besides La Maison du Jazz (which few Montreal or visiting jazz artists take seriously), there is Upstairs, a small and cozy jazz bar near the debauchery that is Crescent Street. At Upstairs one can find some truly sensational acts, established and up-and-coming. In fact, Upstairs is doing many things right, including opening up the stage weekly to McGill and Concordia jazz combos, who must prove they’ve got chops before a rotating panel of “combo cops.” Though the venue succeeds on many levels, sometimes I wish Upstairs would stop playing itself off as an overpriced New York-style venue (like the incriminating pizza equivalent, “New York-style”) rather than playing up its status as one of the best profitable jazz venues in town.

This is the problem with kitsch: you take a thing worthy of reverence and shape it into a cheap souvenir of itself.

House of Jazz is at 2060 Aylmer; Upstairs is at 1254 Mackay. Both have shows every night. 

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