First up this month, another visit to a bar on a weekend afternoon, then an oddball poet, and finally some sad news.
Blues
The Rex is a budget hotel on Queen Street West, with a beer hall on the ground floor. Toronto’s working class has been drinking beers at the corner of Queen and St Patrick for more than a century for sure, but no-one knows exactly how long. The construction records were destroyed by a fire at the city offices in the 1920s. In the 1970s Queen Street became the centre of Toronto’s hip music and arts scene as low rents attracted the city’s creative types. Those days are mostly gone; the street has been gentrified, but the Rex Hotel is still there and still offers a lot (!) of live jazz, blues and other musical styles. It is one of the many iconic Toronto pubs to which, for some reason, I have never been.
Last month, I joined my friends GW and MW to see an afternoon performance by “Dr. Nick and the Rollercoasters”. I didn’t know Dr. Nick or the Rollercoasters from Adam, but they were endorsed by GW and I trust him.
Dr. Nick is Nick Ouroumov, and he plays harmonica and sings. He’s been doing it for years, and I wish I could tell you he is a great harmonica player. He might or might not be, I just don’t know enough about harmonica technique to tell a virtuoso from a hack.
On the day we went, the Dr. Nick’s chosen Rollercoasters were:
Darren Gallen – Guitar
Julian Fauth – Piano
James Thomson – Standup Bass
Bob Vespaziani – Drums
The good doctor plays the blues. Nothin’ but the blues. There were two 45 minute sets crammed with blues from start to finish and The Rex is the perfect setting. It is just a big room with little adornment; a long curved wooden bar and furniture that might have been there forever. Curiously, there are large windows along two walls where the daylight streams in incongruously with the music which feels like it should be heard in a dark smoky basement club. But it doesn’t matter, it’s all good.
There is no cover charge, but a tip jar is passed around a couple of times during the show. It seemed to fill up quite well, so I guess the nearly full house had a good time. I sure did.
The Question
Erm, well – I begin, shifting nervously in my chair –
if it’s true there is no heaven and no hell,
no eternity or long hereafter,
no divine plan or offstage direction from an invisible hand,
then how do we make sense of it all,how do we make our way through this life,
this glorious, ridiculous, ramshackle world of ours,
with its wars and brutality, conflicts and petty arguments,
the ten thousand tiny acts of kindness
which happen unnoticed before breakfast,
and all that love and pain, happiness and loneliness
that comes to us unannounced, by turns,
as if we ourselves were pitched daily
onto the waves of one of its vast, mysterious oceans,
not knowing whether today is the day we drown
or we find ourselves washed up
on some strange but friendly shore?
Mmm – you say, after a lengthy silence –
what I meant was … do you have any questions
about the job?
This is a poem by Brian Biliston, who writes poetry and other stuff1. You can subscribe to receive new offbeat poems on a fairly frequent basis, like this haiku that he sent recently:
Limeraiku
There once was a young
limerick from Kew who turned
into a haiku.
Guys My Age
Robert Mcmillan and David Perlmutter were both the same age as me, were two of the nicest guys, and both died last month.
Robert worked on the front desk of the building where HVW and I live. The staff in our building has a reputation for being the friendliest and most helpful in Toronto, and Robert was the friendliest and most helpful of them all. A tall, trim 67-year old with longish hair tied back in a pony tail, just by looking at him, you knew that his life story was non-traditional. You couldn’t walk past the desk without Robert at least wishing you a “great day”2, but more often he would make a comment or ask a question as a way to initiate a conversation. It wasn’t always easy to bring them to conclusion; Robert had thoughts on most things. I wish I had asked him to tell me more about his life. He died unexpectedly on a Caribbean cruise with his wife. (Obituary)
When we lived in Hoboken, David and his wife, Monique, were neighbours in our building. David had a colourful past: he traveled the world working on cruise ships. Although he had gotten on top of it, he previously had issues with drug use, both steroids for body building and others. He had multiple health issues, requiring back and neck surgery while we were neighbours, but ultimately succumbed to glioblastoma (brain cancer). None of this affected his wonderfully positive attitude. Originally from Boston, he never lost his accent nor his undying support for their sports teams. Although he, effectively, lived in NY he hated the Yankees with a passion: Every year he gleefully celebrated “Yankees Elimination Day” when their run for the World Series ended. Now David’s run has ended too.
PS: the header image this month is a horizontal slice from a tilt-shifted shot inside the Toronto Reference Library. A gorgeous building. The full photo is on my Obscure Obsession, page.
- That’s an official quote from the “About” section on his webstite: brianbiliston.com. ↩︎
- The more traditional wish to have a “good day” wasn’t sufficient for Robert. ↩︎
