The Drink Tank 221 (2009).pdf

The Drink Tank Issue 221

garcia@computerhistory.org

The cover and the photos with my

article on Montreal are all from The Lovely &

Talented Linda Wenzelburger. Thereʼs some art

in here from Taral too! I love that. The cover is

a photo of a piece from Chihuly...or howrever

you say it. Itʼs an amazingly gorgeous piece of

glass work. The photo on this page is also of

the same piece. Itʼs amazing the way the piece

changes when youʼre standing in a room with it.

Iʼve seen a lot of his pieces, there are several at

the SFMoMA, where Linda and I spent the day

off I took on the Friday before we left for

Montreal. Iʼd never been and while the Rich-

ard Avedon exhibit was what brought me in,

the Chuhily pieces really hit me strong.

Also, they had a Tom of Finland

piece. He and Aarno Sarninen are the two

best known FInnish art-types...unless you

count hockey. Then you have to add Teppo

Numinen.

Iʼm not going to say much about the

Hugos, though a lot of folks might expect

me to comment on Best fanzine. I wonʼt

comment, except for one thing: the Hugo

Voters suck.

Yes, I am among them, and saying

such things may well assure that I never win,

or even get nominated for a Hugo again, but

thereʼs a single award that made the bile rise.

Thatʼs Best Fan Artist. I love Frank Wu. I

really do. I love Frankʼs art, Iʼve been lucky

enough to run many of his pieces over the

years and he was the ﬁrst fan artist to really

let me run his work. I think I ran the most of

his pieces over the last year. Iʼve voted for

him in the past, but this year...

Taral had everything going for him.

He was the Fan Guest of Honor, he had hun-

dreds of pieces showing up all over the place

over the last year, he wrote articles for pretty

much every zine out there and he was amazing.

He ended up placing fourth.

Frank won.

What does it take to win a Hugo? There

was no one who did as much great art last year

as Taral. He did pretty much all the art for An-

ticipation and he didnʼt manage to do any better

than 4th? Thatʼs not at all right. He was the best

fan artist over the last year, I canʼt think of a

year where anyone had such an impact, and yet

he ended up in fourth. Sucks. Hopefully, all the

exposure he got this year will allow him to win

next year, much the same way Brad Foster won

Best Fan Artist a year after he exploded with his

fantastic colored pieces after he took up Photo-

shopping his pieces. I hope so. Nothing both-

ered me more than Taral not winning.

This issue has a Taral article and some

more pieces from him. Heʼs a mensch.

My Trip to Montreal

the airport and caught a taxi into town. Theyʼve

got a standard price for all trips into Montrealʼs

Downtown: just less than 40 bucks. Iʼm glad to

say that the trip into town was fast, though as

my luck would have it, the cab driver spoke no

English. This was odd, but I guess I understood

him just about as well as any cab driver Iʼve

ever had in the US.

We got to the Travelodge about 8pm.

Perfect timing because you should never have

deal with trafﬁc in a new town. We checked in,

every greeting us with French. I let Linda do

all the talking. I know the simple words that

you need to know, but I couldnʼt understand a

word from any of the Quebecois. The accent

also made their English difﬁcult for me to trace.

I have those problems. It was hard for me in

England even to deal with the accents. This is a

problem I will probably always face.

We took our keys and headed up to

room 501. We got off the elevator and it was the

closest room. This was good. I opened the door

and we walked in.

You are in a small room- There is one

obvious exit.

To give you a complete idea, the room

was exactly 13 feet by 10 feet…including the

bathroom. Thatʼs right: 130sqft. As a gentleman

of 5ʼ10 inches and 260 lbs. I can say that it felt

like a dog-legged straightjacket. It was tiny;

easily the smallest hotel room Iʼve ever had. It

wasnʼt that bad for me and Linda, but Jason was

set to come up on Wednesday. It was going to

be interesting. We set our stuff out, and to keep

from feeling too much like a bear in the old

Bronx Zoo, we headed out into the night.

WorldCon 2009 was smart enough to

If you want to hear about the con, youʼll

have to go to Science Fiction San Francisco and

read News and Notes. Here Iʼm going to talk

about the city of Montreal and my trip there,

without talking too much about the con. I usu-

ally just ﬂy in the day of, check-in to the hotel

and then head right off to registration to pick up

my program book and programming schedule

thatʼs never there. Thatʼs how it usually works,

but this time, The Lovely & Talented Linda

and I arrived a couple of days early and took

in the city. We got into Montreal after chang-

ing planes in Toronto, made our way through

put their con on at the same time as the Fran-

cofolies, a French music festival. There were

several stages set-up along Rue de Sainte

Catherine. They seemed to rotate with one stage

running at a time. There was a pretty good

band up on one of the stages and we walked by,

enjoying their sort of funky-thrashy metal. It

was good stuff. We just walked around and saw

the way they laid out the festival. Here I was in

the belly of the beast: the depths of the French-

speaking Montreal where I heard literally not

one word of English spoken save by Linda and

I. It was hard to be surrounded by people who

donʼt talk my talk.

There were dozens of restaurants on the

street, but the ones within the festival area were

swamped. It was getting close to 9, so a lot of

places were closing. We went to a place called

Amirʼs, a chain as I understand it. They were a

gyros place and I looked over their menu and

saw the thing Iʼd most been wanting: poutine!

I had one with chicken on it. It was great. The

fries were good, but the gravy was fantas-

tic. The cheese curds were awesome, and the

chicken added a great and very ﬂavorful note.

It was the worst poutine I had on the entire trip,

but it was still very, very tasty. Linda had the

shwarma. It smelled good.

We walked back to the room and I got

the wiﬁ code so I could search for what we

were going to do. There are a lot of great muse-

ums in Montreal, so we had to make a plan. We

chose the Decorative Arts Museum of Montreal.

Itʼs a lovely pair of building right across the

street from each other. We started with the older

of the two building. It was a bit of a trek from

our hotel, but it wasnʼt that bad. We got in and

it was a big museum, free to go into the perma-

nent collection and costs for special exhibitions.

The collection we ﬁrst went into was very good,

a section of furniture starting with a lovely

sleigh from the 1780s. It was in good shape

and that made it even more impressive. There

were a ton of pieces that I really enjoyed. An-

tique chairs, more modern things, pieces from

Tiffaniʼs. Frank Gehryʼs corrugated cardboard

chair, an Apple Mac and televisions and radios.

The designs were modern and beautiful and it

made me very happy to see them all.

Upstairs, they had a lovely series of

rooms for paintings. There were some very

modern pieces, including I think one Pollack

and a few Pop Art pieces that were exceptional,

but there was also a lot of Canadian pieces

from artists Iʼd never heard of who were doing

Abstract Expressionist and post-Impression-

ist kinds of things. There was a group of artists

called the Group of Six who did some amazing

modern stuff that related to Canadian land-

scapes. I loved their stuff. I usually like things

that are much more in the 20th Century, but

these pieces, which felt rooted in the late 19th,

were all fantastic.

There was a great room dedicated to

First Nations art, especially those tradition-

ally around Hudson Bay and northern Quebec.

There was a bear, a Polar Bear kind of statue,

that seemed to be dancing. I asked Linda to take

a bunch of photos of it. It was the kind of thing

that just buzzed with a sort of joy. It looked like

it was skankinʼ! Honestly, I am always looking

for things that seem to represent joy. This was

certainly one of them.

We enjoyed the museum and walked

in the exhibit. There were probably thousands

of political cartoons done in both France and

the UK during Napoleanʼs reign and it would

have been nice to have some of those, but as it

is, it was still a very strong exhibit.

We walked down to the bottom level

which was nice. There was a lot of modern art,

which is my wheelhouse. There was a weird

video thing that I thought was pretty cool. There

were ﬁve screens, all shaped like stretched bear-

skins. On them were projected the images of

four dancing First Nations warrior types and a

ﬁfth that looked to be a woman in a red beaded

thing. They all danced to a techno-y tune. It was

really interesting, I found myself watching it

more closely than I usually watch video instal-

lations. There was a lot to it. The central image

did resemble Cher a bit, which was odd. I liked

it. Kent Monkman was the artist, and Iʼm going

ot be looking for more from him.

The funniest thing was leaving the

building. We walked around and there was

this big remodeling project going on under the

ground. They had a walk-way through it which

had some lovely images of well-known paint-

ings with hard hats and such. They were really

fun. When we got to the end of it, there was a

sign to the Sortie (which either means exit or

a ﬂeet of bomber pilots) and when we left, we

were back at the ﬁrst building! It was weird. I

was seriously tripped out by the entire situation!

These things only seem to happen to me.

We walked on towards St. Catherine.

Itʼs a wonderful shopping and eating street.

It reminded me of Boston and Newbury or

Boylston. Iʼd been there before, I love that part

of town, and we walked around until we found

lunch. Reubenʼs. This was a place Iʼd been ages

before, one one of my trips with Emerson I

think, and itʼs a wonderful deli-like restaurant.

Itʼd almost count as a coffee shop and yʼall

know how I feel about Coffee Shops. We got a

seat and Linda and I ordered. She had a sam-

mich, I had the Smoked Meat Poutine.

Now, Montreal is known for its smoked

meat. Iʼd say itʼs the half-way point between

corned beef and pastrami. Itʼs delicious, it really

is, and there are several places that are famous

for it. I understand that Reubenʼs gets theirs

from Schwartzʼs, which is the Gold Standard.

We ordered and when it came, it was giant. That

photo only gives part of the story. The smell,

she was amazing. You got the meat and you got

out in the air of the city. It had been drizzling

and raining a bit, but when we got out, it was

clean and clear and everything was perfect. We

walked across the street and there was the other

building that formed the museum. This one had

an exhibit dedicated to Napolean. There was

one of his hats, a bunch of paintings and arti-

facts that were from his household or at least

the kind that he would have used, and there

was an awesome couple of chairs. This whole

exhibit showed 1) that Napolean was an incred-

ibly important part of the history of France and

2) the French canʼt seem to leave him alone. It

was a nice exhibit, the kind youʼd ﬁnd at a his-

tory museum, which I didnʼt expect from an art

museum. Sadly, I only saw one political cartoon

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