No Montréal for Old Hipsters

The dream of a city where you can live as a crustpunk in luxury is dead.

The dream of Montreal is dead.

I was thinking recently about this old article (which seems to now only exist in this forum post) poking fun at the idealization of Montreal, and re-reading it was a trip, like, it might as well be describing a Lost Civilization considering how deeply alien its depiction seems to me now. This was inevitable, obviously, because Montreal had always been très trendy. I don’t mean très in the annoying ironic Douglas Coupland sense, I mean it in the sincerely French sense because Montreal is French. Anyway.

You’ve all probably already seen the abomination that is Nike’s Montreal Bagel Shoe, something which shocked even myself in how tastelessly OVO-brained it was, the kind of stupid fucking bullshit you would absolutely expect in a place like Toronto, but Montreal? Really, there was no reason at all for shock. At least New York traded its identity for the sick af “What the NY” Air Force 1s, whereas Montreal is treated to some stupid twee shoe with sesame seeds on it. I remember reading once that the guy who started St-Viateur Bagel did so because all he dreamt about while he was in Buchenwald was “a piece of bread.” Now that piece of bread is on a shoe! Rejoice!

Véhicule Press put out this compilation recently of some column from Maisonneuve that I’ve never read, some like culture reporting pieces that look to be about millennial hipster life in the early 21st century. Obviously city-based compilations roll out all the time all over this place, but this still rang to me of when a band puts out a “greatest hits” album even though they’re still around — it’s a final admission that their best days are definitively behind them.

I then made a major misstep. I checked out the book’s socials. For a long and healthy life, Dr. Eris recommends never reading the GoodReads reviews for any book under any circumstances, and this following example demonstrates quite potently as to why that is. Just take a look at this dipshit:

People who come here and say stuff about wanting to "preserve the magic of the city" are 100% of the process of what is draining the "magic" of this city. It's usually people who came here to work at some startup or work remotely (sometimes both) and then overpay their landlord like 150% on their rent. If you're going to move here, fine, but please don't subject us to this kind of talk while you're actively gentrifying the city we live in. It's pretty insulting. This woman in particular — you know damn well I did a cursory LinkedIn check — is doing both, and I wrote this bit before even knowing that. It’s that fucking predictable!

As for the book itself, it’s very much part of the problem and should be studied as a prequel to the present crisis. I talked before about the whole Richard Florida “high bohemians” thing, and this book sounds like a poignant chart of its emergence in Montreal, of the rise of the city’s Yuccies: Young Urban Creatives (yeah, I’m bringing it back). One author featured in the book, who shall remain nameless (it’s Sean Michaels), organized with me once in Mile End. He’s the kind of music writer I hate, the kind who just completely misses the forest for the trees? Maybe even vice versa? The kind who really exemplifies Frank Zappa’s old adage that “writing about music is like dancing about architecture”? Like the sort of critic who uses absolutely nebulous musical descriptors, like referring to synths as “glittering”? He recently described some guitar song as “the kind of music that feels as if you've always known it, like the lines on your hand.” Brother, I don’t know the lines on my hand at all, I evidently don’t spend as much time looking at myself as you do.

The guy’s one of your more insipid libs, though I’m sure he’d never identify as such. Fought tooth and nail alongside his fellow yuccies and their class interest in making sure our org’s focus was as far away from helping the poor as it possibly could be.

Here’s an excerpt from a letter our ol’ pal Sean penned for us:

We, the undersigned, as united residents, workers, businesspeople, artists, property owners, punks and flâneurs of Montreal's Mile End, present this letter as a howl of protest against the landlords whose greed is strangling our neighbourhood. 

1) Some of us long for the complete dismantling of capitalism; others of us strongly believe in the virtues of the free market. Despite these disagreements, we are unanimous in our condemnation of what is being practiced in Mile End: a pursuit of profit that ignores all context, history and community.

[emphasis mine]

There would be no faster way to get me to put a gun in my mouth than make me stand with an org that issues statements like this, so of course I peaced right the fuck out. The “landlord” shit mentioned in the above is a farce, by the way, the only “landlords” they were really ever concerned about were the ones that were threatening the existence of Welch’s bookstore. While their Discord made plans to help out regular renters in some event or another after their big “save the bookstore” event, nothing even materialized out of it, because of course it didn’t, because helping regular renters was never their genuine MO in the first place.

They tried to run people who were antagonistic to small business owners out of the group, as several of the group’s members turned out to own local businesses (as confessed to above). It sort of felt like that scene in The Wind that Shakes the Barley, only imagine that instead of the rift amongst the Irish Republicans over whether to accept the support of some shithead landlord its over the support of some place with a name like “Ophelia’s Erotic Cakes and Bicycle Repair.”

Heather O’Neill was there, another dickhead, and she’s thankfully dumb enough to go totally mask-off and not even realize it; she fully said straight up — and I have several witnesses — that Mile End used to be a dump, that we had to preserve what it had become, and that it was of central importance to keep the “vibe” of Montreal quirky ahead of helping the homeless (the homeless thing wasn’t implied, by the way, she explicitly said the homeless weren’t a priority to her, eventually saying to someone “I can’t believe you’re insinuating that homeless people are more important than artists”). What is with these fucking Giller recipients? Is the Giller Prize some kind of MKULTRA-esque plot? Like do you walk into Scotiabank upon receiving it and they just drug you and beam this shit directly into your brain?

After my friends and I backed out we watched from afar as they planned the cringiest forms of direct action you’ve ever seen. Like they wanted to have a circus troupe or something iirc. Reminds me of the time I was at the Greta Thunberg™ climate march and there was a funeral procession for the Earth. These people are using human suffering as an opportunity to flex their “quirky” creativity, the suffering is just a convenient thematic backdrop. They’re Nero fiddling while Rome burns. Compare this to the activist discussions that used to happen in this neighbourhood and are memorialized in Gail Scott’s Heroine. Can you believe that nobody in this organization for one second even considered the possibility of blowing something up? Ils ont oublié. Not that they ever remembered.

These are the sorts of people who used to write those articles in the aforementioned collection, and these are their class interests. The culture fomented by the kinds of articles they wrote, the cultural capital conferred on this city, is what draws in this new wave of shitheads. They’ll all wind up going to the same parties anyway, only the new guys will be running AirBnb scams while the old guys will have the hipster noblesse oblige to know to be modest about their own AirBnb scams. Oh my GOD I’m realizing it’s a cultural West Egg/East Egg situation only they’ve all read Milan Kundera.

Let me take a final moment to address the newly-arrived Montreal West Eggers: moving to Montreal will not make up for your lack of a personality, it will not make you cool, and there isn’t going to be another Arcade Fire for you to discover at a Mile End battle of the bands.

You will come here and you will follow meme pages that make jokes about Segal’s grocery store, a place you appreciate the charm of but would never enter yourself because it’s too dirty. You’ll be sad when it closes down, even though it probably closed down because bougie dipshits like you moved into the neighborhood and willed it into a Whole Foods.

You are a blight upon this city. But you’re in good company.

[image at the top stolen from this guy]