Taylor Noakes {.} Com

Saw Sugar Sammy’s Le Show Franglais at l’Olympia on Friday night. Wow. Simply excellent.

I know I’m late to the party, but the tickets were purchased over a month ago by my mom – a birthday gift, and a testament to the enduring popularity of Sammy’s unique show. My understanding is that it was initially supposed to have only a limited run and that there was a lot of speculation it wouldn’t go over terribly well. That was three months ago. My mother was astounded she couldn’t get anything before last Friday, but took it as a good sign that everything else was sold out. I’ll cut right to the chase, you should see this show at any cost. It was immediately apparent the show was running like a well-oiled machine; everything from the choice of venue, to the MC, the opening acts and the flow of the main performance was indicative of someone exhibiting a well-honed craft. Sugar Sammy, and this show in particular, may very well spear-head a revolution in this city of the Juste pour rire. If we can laugh together, there won’t be much left to keep us apart, and a whole new brand of comedy may very well come into existence. Thus, I feel there are many comedians who will rise in his wake; it’s more than just the novelty of bilingual comedy, it’s that the model allows for a relaxed and open discussion of culture. This innovation is fascinating to me, because ‘cultural comedy’ has largely seemed to be of an exclusionary nature, or pejorative. Perhaps until now.

It was smooth, it was relentless. It was unforgiving, unyielding – at the end I saw a vast group of Montréalais gently massaging their Joker-esque perma-grins as they stumbled out into the cold and chaos in the direction of Place Emilie-Gamelin. As I strode out with them, listening to the on-going laughter as those attending reminisced about their favourite moments, it contrasted sharply with the apparent seriousness of the reality beyond the well appointed Vaudeville-styled theatre (and by the way – I can’t believe I hadn’t seen a show there previously – a very nice retro theatre and local landmark). And yet the show was our reality too. I wouldn’t pigeon-hole the show as being ‘cultural comedy’ – it was so much more than that chiefly because it was about all of us, our shared society. The somewhat lackadaisical NDP slogan from the last federal election, ‘travaillons ensemble’ was often repeated throughout. Though it’s insufferably Canadian in its modesty, it fits what I feel is a growing general sentiment in this city, this province and country – put aside your differences and get to work. Besides, you might discover you enjoy ‘les autres’, or maybe even les maudits anglais.

While I feel the implications of a show like this might be significant, I don’t want it to detract from what is first and foremost an excellent comedy show by anyone’s definition. There was a fair bit of improvisation and lots of interaction with the crowd, hallmarks of any good entertainer. What made the show great was the incisive wit, the rhythm, the equilibrium. It was evenly French and English, evenly contrasted moments of electric, unrelenting cheeky rejoinders contrasted with slower, constructed anecdotes. His social commentary is wide-reaching but takes on a particularly funny perspective when understood in the context of this show, with the city and it’s unique cultural identity serving to throw misperceptions and prejudices a curveball. Plus he’s a devout trouble-maker and smart-ass, which plays well with Montrealers regardless of cultural or linguistic backgrounds. I think his story about how he trolled his hardcore separatist history teacher the day after the 1995 Referendum was the joke that brought the house down – a collective ‘oh snap’ of nervous laughter boomed out of more than a thousand people after several bear-baiter jokes concerning the Referendum which had set the mood. It was explosive. It was awesome.

Also – my date for the evening comes from a small town in the Pacific Northwest. She had never been to a comedy show before. She was really impressed. I’m really glad this was her introduction to the world of Montreal comedy.

So what can I say – go do whatever you can to see this show. You won’t be disappointed.

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So I’ve recently started working in an office tower Downtown. Try to guess which one based off these pics, it should be fairly obvious. All correct answers will receive infinite karma, as will incorrect answers. You can’t possibly go wrong!

A few things I’ve noticed about working on the 24th floor of this building. For one, I feel like I’ve become a lot more aware of how urban density is a very subjective, aesthetic affair once you get past the human-scale street-side. We benefit from excellent urban planning, and as such I feel that the towers are less imposing in some cases. The tallest seem less overwhelming when viewed in relation to the large open spaces they’re located next to, whereas the more intermediate towers in the ‘uptown’ area (along Boul. de Maisonneuve in was once referred to as the Place du Centre) are spaced apart more-or-less evenly, so that views are open rather than obscured (consider Toronto, which placed all their tallest buildings in the same small confined area, with few set-backs). When I turned the corner in the office on my first day, and saw the other principle skyscrapers of the urban core rising high above the more cluttered mass below, I felt like I was standing amongst giants. A very inspiring place to be indeed. It was something else to see the other giants at a more-or-less dead-on perspective.

Our city has a fair number of falcons prowling the city skies for unsuspecting rodents or pigeons. I’m okay with that – though admittedly they tend to be rather ominous looking, circling as they do, waiting to dive in for the kill. Majestic too, if majesty can be foreboding too.

I’m surprised I have this much empathy for rats and their winged equivalents.

In any event – it’s re-assuring to see our city coming together as it is, with empty lots slated for immediate development. The urban housing boom seems to have finally made its way to Montréal, and in my opinion, I sincerely feel development is proceeding far more cautiously than in other major urban centres. From the window I can watch the new residential towers rising. Hopefully, they will lead to the re-establishment of a veritable sense of community in our urban core.

That’s all for now. More soon.

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This article is a somewhat longer version of the one I published on the Forget the Box news-collective’s website. The original can be found here.

If you find the very concept of an unpaid internship thoroughly degrading an exploitative, you’re my target audience.

In my opinion, access to free education ought to be a fundamental human right. Across Canada, students have almost free public education up to the end of the secondary cycle, with some provinces offer subsidized options for post-secondary studies. Because we are a consumerist nation, because we believe paying for something is innately better than not, our society feels it would be inappropriate not to pay, something, for post-secondary education. After all, we paid nothing to go to the public primary and secondary sector, and that got us nothing. Over the years, our universities have ballooned in population while twenty-somethings enrolled live the high-consumption lifestyles of the modern student. The universities expand and market themselves aggressively so as to stimulate growth, in turn providing self-sustaining economic engines. Ask yourself what four years in university will get you, aside from the debt. The modern corporate university is as much a pyramid scheme as it is an odd kind of casino.

These days, an undergraduate degree isn’t likely to get you very far by itself. And the university has no obligation to provide you with the skills to go out and get precisely what you want career-wise. At the same time, corporations and conglomerates have no obligation to invest any amount of time or money in training you for a career in the establishment, as this is now more or less what a BA signifies in the professional world. It isn’t your specific discipline that matters, not nearly as much as the university degree simply states you have a basic level of professional competency. This is what a high-school diploma used to mean in our society. Thirty years ago universities had significantly smaller student populations, with tuition and book costs (for full time studies) not exceeding $1,000 per year. Associated costs have not kept pace with inflation and the university degree, for a variety of reasons, has largely been de-valued during this time. Compounding the issue is the fact that the current workforce has little choice but to continue working longer, as a result of the major economic crisis, so recent graduates and current student have even fewer options. And with regards to our collective debt, well, we’re told not to worry about, that we’ll eventually get good jobs to pay it off.

So is there reason, justification, for Québec students to strike, demonstrate, protest etc – yes, absolutely, but the movement would be wise to consider all its options before utilizing what I view as last ditch options to force negotiations. Public-education in Canada has been generally neglected, both by successive provincial and federal gov’ts and our society is no longer willing to appropriately fund the primary and secondary sectors. This is true across Canada. As an example: in order to pay down the massive debt and deficit of the Mulroney administration, Chretien & Martin cancelled federal transfer payments intended to be used by provincial education and healthcare ministries. As such, hospitals across Canada became overcrowded and the public sector education system took a major beating in terms of funding. Private schools and school boards have been growing in number ever since 1993, as the public lost faith in the public system. Loss of faith in the public system, which is supposed to set the social standard for education, in turn led to a nation-wide net loss of faith in what a high-school diploma could provide. This is an untenable, financially unsound situation for a nation wishing to maintain its high living standards.

Québec figured out a solution to the problem of how to provide ‘free’ social advancement for all citizens, regardless of class or region of birth, back in the late 1960s & early 1970s. As part of the Quiet Revolution, the Quebec Liberal Party established the University of Québec system – a series of public post-secondary institutions throughout the province providing low-cost, highly accessible university education. In addition, the CEGEP system was created, providing a college diploma in general or professional studies. These two public, province-wide systems were intended to do two things. First, provide a public, low-cost alternative to private or for-profit post-secondary educational institutions. Second, to assist in transforming Quebec society to build a much larger middle class, encourage our culture and ultimately to build a better society. I think the plan worked very well. The corporatization of the campus and commercializiation of the student class, in Québec inasmuch as anywhere in Canada, is a direct threat to the publicly funded means to social advancement our post-secondary system is designed to provide.

So do students in Québec have every right to be upset with any increase to tuition costs, absolutely – it is a threat to a major societal achievement that has helped build our very society. We’re more progressively minded as a direct result of our investment in education, and this benefits our society on the whole. And we should be more sensitive to the needs of students, because they are generally living on the margins of society as is, and aren’t being adequately prepared to enter the workforce. What does this say about our society as a whole?

In the end, it is the public primary and secondary sector that needs to greatest investment. We should ensure that the basic level of education is higher, and thus should endeavour to make the high-school diploma more valuable. We should also seek to increase the value of the CEGEP diploma and increase the number of vocational and professional programs offered at these institutions. Doing so would decrease the number of people flooding into the university system, which in turn would allow for a general decrease in the cost of tuition. Not to mention that we desperately need to ensure the sanctity and high societal value placed on university degrees, and by extension get people out of universities if they have no reason to be there other than the notion that it is a social expectation. We cannot allow the modern university to become a daycare for twenty-somethings.

And the Québec student movement would be wise to utilize strikes, demonstrations and the like as a last-resort measure, because such action is otherwise overly disruptive and secures no additional public support. What I’ve seen over the last ten years is a degeneration of public manifestations of social discontent into an overly aggressive and anti-social free-for-all of street theatre. More discipline ought to be exercised, and the student leadership needs to seek broad public, perhaps even pan-Canadian support. The students of Québec should not try to fight this battle by themselves, but unless the leadership is willing to look for national solidarity they won’t be able to make the case that this is an issue of significant societal importance. Blocking bridges and traffic is something you do when negotiations have proven completely fruitless, and then the movement needs to depend on public support for their aggressive actions (and yes, blocking traffic and bridges is aggressive, it is not passive).

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Though of poor quality, this is still an exceptional photograph of Expo 67, specifically Place des Nations – fully operational as it was intended. You’ll notice there doesn’t seem to be anything going on in the square, and yet people fill the benches and bleachers rising around. All sorts of activity is happening here, at this crucial transit point, as the fair ground expand out in all directions, a festival of truly epic proportions.

Fifty million people came to visit Montreal and see Expo during the Summer of Love. It was an outstanding achievement, as it was the raison-d’etre for a wide variety of city, government and corporate development projects, all coming together in time for opening day. The project, despite delays, was completed on time and on budget. After six months, the fair had paid itself off in admissions and concession sales. What Expo 67 did for international consumer confidence in Montréal, Québec and Canada is incalculable, though it certainly permitted Montréal enough credo to survive armed insurrections, separatism, terrorism and two referendums on national sovereignty in which Montreal was the primary battleground. Expo bought us confidence and an internationally recognized (and enduring) image of modernism, stability and innovation. We haven’t exhausted that confidence yet, though we would be wise to out-do ourselves as quickly as possible. The amount of free publicity for the city the fair generated made subsequent tourism marketing a synch, not to mention the fact that the facilities were operational for several years afterwards as a semi-permanent exhibit, encouraging repeat visitors and locals. Today, though almost all the original pavilions have been torn down and the grounds re-developed into a gorgeous park, we as citizens still retain a massive fair-ground, and we use it every year to our advantage and shared enjoyment.

Expo’s legacy is that it is always preferential for a large city to distinguish itself from other large cities by demonstrating it’s importance in a globally and culturally significant manner. This is precisely what Expo did for our city inasmuch as our province and country. I would argue that it benefitted Montréal perhaps the most given that it resulted in net increases to the common standard of living. We all got to benefit from the Métro, inasmuch as the numerous remaining attractions at Parc Jean-Drapeau. Moreover, ask yourself if we would have had an Olympics without Expo, or whether we would have bothered to protect Old Montréal if not for the reaction it produced in tourists. Thinking big allowed us to secure investment for many years, and it provided new opportunities for growth and development. It kept people employed and made ourselves available to host the world – what power we once had, and all because we dared to dream.

Place des Nations – Overgrown and Underused, 2007

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A postcard featuring a colourized photograph of Dominion Square from the tower of Windsor Station, circa 1907. In this view we see, from left to right: Windsor Station (towards the bottom-left corner), Saint George’s Anglican Cathedral, the Windsor Hotel, the crest of Mount Royal with McGill and the mixed commercial and middle & upper-class residential area near the centre point. The red brick building is the city’s first YMCA, built in the early-mid 1850s, and adjacent to the Knox Presbyterian Cathedral (both buildings would be demolished by 1913 for the development of the Sun Life Building). Finally, occupying most of the right side of the photo, Mary Queen of the World Cathedral.

Consider that back then, the square would have been exceptionally important for all Montrealers. Imagine standing there facing South, looking towards the industry of Griffintown and Goose Village and the rail stations closer to the square. To the West and Northwest, the newest portion of the Square Mile, featuring many large homes on low-density plots, in addition to many protestant churches, since demolished. To the North, the retail district, McGill University and the homes of the urban middle class while to the East the commercial and mercantile centre. All these forces and contributing factors would have found common ground and a necessity to use this crucial urban focal point. Railway stations, churches and social institutions, a luxury hotel and the Bishop’s Palace, all occupying the same space. In time, Dorchester Square would become the new corporate ‘front yard’ of the city.

Note the tram line along Peel going up towards what was then Dorchester Boulevard, and how the southern end of Dominion Square is almost totally bare when compared to the thickets of trees that now define the more ‘rustic’ Place du Canada. Also, consider the layout of walkways, as they lead from all sides and corners towards an elegant centre. There would have been about a dozen churches and cathedrals within eyesight of the square back then, though remarkably few benches for a place so much foot traffic. Some things never change, though by the look of things, the city’s planning a fountain for the southern end – something we’re sorely missing in this city. Judge for yourself:

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For obvious reasons, I did not take this photograph. I found it on Flickr in the “Vanished Montreal” group, something I highly recommend you check out. It was mis-labeled as being from the 1930s, but this is impossible given the presence of the Queen Elizabeth Hotel, among other buildings. It’d put it somewhere between 1958 and 1960. The tallest building in this photograph is the Art Deco Royal Bank Tower, at 22 floors. Building heights in the urban core largely range between 10 and 20 floors, though the Sun Life Building, just out of frame to the right, would have dominated the skyline large to due to its impressive massing. Within two to four years of when this photograph was taken, the immense form of Place Ville-Marie would dominate the centre of this space, rising to more than twice the previous norm. Within ten years about half a dozen buildings of similar height and prominence would come to dominate the skyline. In addition, much of the centre of this photograph was heavily densified in the 1970s and 1980s, with many new office buildings rising to between 15 and 25 floors, particularly in this area.

It looks so quaint.

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Decided to go out and take care of business yesterday, and profited from the pleasant weather we’ve been enjoying. I can imagine Winter’s going to come back and slap us around a little more. What I’d give for an early Spring.

The sidewalks, almost universally, are covered in that awful combination of road salt, sand and gravel that stains the snow brown, and eventually black. Sometimes I wonder why we don’t pay the fire-department to hose down all the roads and sidewalks during a thaw to clean things up a bit. Anyways…

All that to say that the air was perceptively warmer than usual and walking around was thoroughly delightful. The afternoon was a little dimmer than what I had expected; the clouds hung low and thick. I snapped this shot from Phillips Square, looking up towards the new Altitude Condo project and PVM rising behind it. Place Ville-Marie celebrates the fiftieth anniversary of its completion this year.

Here is the elegant Royal George Apartment building, integrated as it currently is into the Concordia Library Building on Bishop Street. Forcing residents out caused a bit of a stir back in the mid-late 1980s, though there was a case to be made that the building, aside from having a beautiful facade, was in poor shape when acquired by Concordia. Though an effort had been made to protect the building as a heritage site, it for some reason never extended past the facade, which in turn was all that was saved.

Of note, a preliminary design of the LB Building featured a library stacked in roughly equally-sized ‘blocks’ rising from the corner of de Maisonneuve and Bishop, wrapping and rising around the Royal George like a massive staircase. This design featured multiple large outdoor terraces on the roofs on each block, the idea being that the expanding urban university should have an appropriately urban solution to limited open-air green space. Moreover, in conjunction with the planned atrium, sunlight would be able to reach the apartment building inasmuch as the interiors of the Library. The final design incorporated some elements of the original design, though the terrace component was never fully implemented. One of the consistent obstacles preventing green-space development on the upper levels of Concordia University buildings is the apparent fact that university students are an insurance liability, and thus rooftop cafés and gardens, though often discussed in development plans, never come to fruition. This is the line I was tol and I have reason to believe it. It doesn’t inspire much faith in insurers though, or the university for that matter. Con-U students could really use the space.

Rue de la Montagne, looking south from Boul. de Maisonneuve. Moving up from Boul. René-Lévesque Ouest, the street features the Centre du Commerce Electronique, Le Crystal de la Montagne, a house John Wilkes Booth may have stayed at some point in 1864 (today an Italian restaurant, if I’m not mistaken), the Novotel and many other restaurants and boutiques. It is largely defined today by its many prominent hotels. Academie Bourget and O’Sullivan College are locate below Ste-Catherine’s, as is Ogilvy’s Department Store, the Loews Vogue Hotel and the Hotel de la Montagne. Upwards towards Sherbrooke, condos, boutiques, office space and then the Ritz-Carlton.

Drummond Street, with the Bell Centre in the background, and the Drummond Medical Building at centre. Conceptualized and built in the late-1920s and early-1930s, this building symbolizes an interesting solution to the problems of urban multi-levelled parking. Back in the 20s and 30s, the city enacted laws designed to prevent the construction of above-ground parking garages (because they wanted to limit the number of cars in the city and thought parking garages were ugly, go figure). Thus, a multi-level parking garage was built behind an eleven-floor medical office building. The idea of a purpose-built medical office building was an architectural and design innovation typical of the era. Elements of the design, including floor layout, elevator placement, waste-disposal systems and building services were all incorporated so as to benefit a building specializing in private medical care. The parking garage would serve to provide the building with a constant source of income to defray building maintenance and renovation costs.

It’s funny, I’m reading Richler’s Son of a Smaller Hero and just read a passage where the young adulterous couple, Myriam and Noah, walk up and down the streets of the city one night, and the visible stretch of Ste-Catherine’s you see in this photograph features prominently. There’s as much neon today as there was back then, it’s just far subtler now (back in the 40s and 50s, a lot of signage was designed to protrude outwards and perpendicular to the building). But Ste-Catherine’s has indeed lost its former character as the city-spanning entertainment and night-life thoroughfare. Today’s its character is principally retail oriented. Gone are the once numerous theatres, night-clubs, diners and cocktail bars which left such an indelible impression of the city’s character. I wouldn’t mind seeing the street evolve in such a fashion that an equilibrium is struck between what it was once famous for and what it is today. There’s no denying how important and interesting this street actually is.

The CIBC Tower, also celebrating its 50th anniversary this year. The 45-floor tower was built on the former site of the original Windsor Hotel, the Southern wing having burned down in 1957. It is particularly slender for a modernist office tower, but benefits immensely from a far more ornate facade, which includes the use of Green Slate as well as other stones in the spandrels between glass curtain-walls. It’s position on the plot in relation to the intersection and Dorchester Square makes it extremely prominent without being imposing.

It’s too bad – the building once had an observation deck on the top floor, which was closed in the 1970s. If I’m not mistaken, it features prominently in a scene in Jésus de Montréal.

What can I say, I’m glad Global and the Gazette are in the same building – if only they collaborated and focused on developing local original content together. Could you imagine what that might do for the local entertainment and news-media industries, and in turn what this beautiful building would come to symbolize?

Somewhere I have a USB-key filled with images I scanned at the CCA, pertaining to the ground-breaking 60s: Montreal Thinks Big exhibit back in 2004. Among others I found a massive number of projects and proposals that never got off the ground, including a plan by Mies van der Rohe to demolish the Dominion Square building, replacing it with a street-spanning overhead plaza and two tall office towers. I like his work, but I’m glad it never panned out.

The Dominion Square building was one of the first in the city to feature an indoor shopping arcade – it’s original design, much like the Mount Royal Hotel, featured numerous retail spaces with interior and exterior access points. The ‘mirrored-E’ design of the upper floors allows for many interesting layout possibilities, numerous corner offices and an exceptional amount of sunlight for a building of its era.

The Kondiaronk Belvedere atop Mount Royal, viewed from Rue de la Montagne. With the candelabra communications tower rising, always menacingly, behind. The belvedere and Mount Royal Chalet were constructed during the Depression as a city-sponsored ‘make work project’ to replace the previous look-out, which by that time had become dilapidated. One key feature of the old look-out was that it was a) accessible via a funicular railway, b) covered and c) it projected out from the mountain’s side, offering a wider panoramic view. The new belvedere, by contrast, is far larger, and the openness of the space is appropriate given the majesty of view beyond.

A perspective that won’t last much longer – the Tour de la Bourse viewed from the grounds of a former orphanage adjacent to Saint Patrick’s Basilica, through the space soon to be occupied by the Altoria Condominiums. The building currently being demolished used to be an important local print shop, and if not mistaken, this building had an infamous history in the local gay community, given that a raid on a party located here resulted in Montréal’s equivalent of the Stonewall Riots, the Sex Garage Raid. As party-goers exited onto Rue de la Gauchetiere, they were met by the SPVM, ID tags removed, batons in hand. The subsequent beat-down and two days of protests and additional mass ass-whippings put too many in the hospital with too few SPVM officers indicted for assault. What did change was public sentiment towards the local gay and lesbian community, as video footage of the SPVM using excessive force against unarmed civilians interspersed with images of Mohawk blockades and stories of bloody beatings by SQ thugs in Oka. It was a perfect storm for local media that drew the public’s attention in a heretofore unseen fashion, focusing on numerous local civil rights abuses at the same time. I would argue video footage played a significant role in turning public opinion away from the established authority and pushed support for the minorities and oppressed in our society.

I stood here a couple days ago and watched this machine rip pieces of wood, brick and plaster from the building as a small crowd gathered below to watch it happen. This has been happening a lot – crowds gathered to watch demolition or construction work.

Makes me wonder why we don’t use explosives to quickly demolish buildings as opposed to systematically ripping them apart. I suppose the latter option poses fewer problems to surrounding buildings, yet we regularly use dynamite when clearing the foundation – I heard some go off near the Le Chateau Apartments just a week ago. I’d really like to find out what the rules are with regards to this.

It’s too bad this place is pretty much exclusively used as a cathedral – something tells me it could be an excellent performance venue. Maybe not, I don’t know what the acoustics are like inside, but if I had to guess I’d say they’re probably quite good.

That and I can imagine opera and theatre could make excellent use of the interior for some very interesting experimentation.

I like knowing that I have this image, and I’m trying to get a little collection going of short-term perspectives on the city. Soon, a thirty floor glass curtain-wall condo tower will make this view impossible, yet also bring new life to the old Paper Hill sector. I can only hope that the resulting building is worthy of its location on Square Victoria, and that the ground-level floors in some way reflect the earth-tones of late-19th and early-20th century buildings in the area.

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Local satirist and vlogger Abdul Butt went down to cover the Movement Québec français demonstration last Saturday night in front of the Bell Centre. As one might expect, he uncovers that the group is composed of old people fighting a linguistic battle from over forty years ago. Plus there was some chanting that seemed to indicate the crowd was interested in the NHL conducting more of its affairs in French, and further that it would be nice if the Habs hired more Québecois players, something made rather difficult by the way players are selected, salary caps, individual free agency, the NHL draft etc. I took this as another sign those demonstrating were out of touch with reality. It’s almost as if they have no knowledge professional ice hockey has become an internationally lucrative entertainment industry spanning a good chunk of the Northern Hemisphere and that Québec is not the sole provider of hockey talent.

I’ve seen a common sentiment repeated often in various comment forums online; could you imagine if a bunch of English-speaking Canadians in Calgary showed up in front of the Saddledome to protest the number of Russians or Francophones in the NHL, and that individual teams would perform better if they were unilingual, perhaps even monocultural?

I typically hate these kinds of comparisons, because they are all too often used inappropriately or out of context to such a degree that the comparison is absurd to begin with. The French language must be preserved and promoted, inasmuch as French, Aboriginal and Commonwealth culture should be preserved and promoted as elements of our shared cultural experience. This has absolutely nothing to do with the Habs or the NHL.

And if you find the analogy above distasteful, perhaps racist, then you’re probably right. And therefore, Québecois have to put their collective foot down, and tell these old fools they’re no longer welcome in our integrationist, cosmopolitan city. We don’t need to tolerate intolerance.

I’d probably have been upset if I had been there, so big time kudos to Mr. Butt for seeing this for what it ultimately was and poking a lot of fun at it. For what it’s worth, it seems as though some of these old fogeys got a kick just by getting out of the house. At least one seems to have caught on that their complaint maybe isn’t as serious as they were initially hoping.

Final point – true to form, several people interviewed didn’t seem offended in the least with Mr. Butt’s slightly exaggerated Anglophone accent, and were keen enough to speak in English too. We’ve come a long way from the drive-by arguments and insults of the 1980s and 1990s.

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