A Workload in Your Face

One does not feel the need to go to work during summer. The Hydro bill is minimal, you can walk / bike anywhere, the sun is shining, and you don't feel like being enslaved in an office all day long while so many mini skirts are walking on the sidewalks downstairs.

Not everybody likes being outside, and that may be a proof that our society is diving deep into a collective psychosis. It sure is fun to work, but when half the city is composed of slackers who just lounge in the sun in the Lafontaine Park, next to the lake, or in the Carré St-Louis, or anywhere there's GREEN, you almost feel like a misfit when you have to go to work.



You're the abnormal one. Why didn't you find a way to avoid this ?

I remember spending a whole summer without working. I had stacked enough money to move out of my Laval basement and I was coming to town. My place on Fullum didn't cost too much and I only found work at the end of August, when I felt like paying the september bills would be kinda hard.

And you know what ? I don't remember much about that summer. I had a blast - watching movies, going out every night with various friends, high speeding through the city on a green Kawasaki with Mr. Moto... I wasn't the big spender I am now and some stacked money was all I needed to survive the summer. Now I am stuck begging for overtime in a boring and understaffed corporate call center.

Living the simple life might be fun, and if it implied not having to work, why the hell not ? But in the meantime, who's going to pay for the bills ? Not you, of course.

I guess I'll settle for less and experience the worst.

*

I went to a condo "visit" on Saturday morning. I had left Théâtre Plaza around 4 and at 8 I was up, showering not to smell too boozish at the meeting. Miss Bijoux wants to buy her own place, and was curious to check out the prices of 801 Sherbrooke Est, this office building they recently stripped off everything but its structure.



The plans look nice, and the views will be amazing. There will be thirteen floors and the prices are escalating along. The units we were interested in checking out were all priced at around 300 000$.

Needless to say, it won't be for now. Paying 300 000$ for what basically will be an appartment downtown, when you can get yourself a big-ass house on any shore for that amount, would be kind of crazy. It's a choice, of course. But not a choice we're ready to make right now, unfortunately. Not with my sorry student ass.

*

I have heard about Nicolas Roeg's DON'T LOOK NOW for years, and I realised yesterday, when I finished viewing it, that I never had really "heard" anything, in fact. Just a silent wave of buzz that didn't say much. Perhaps it was because of Julie Christie, too clothed in Truffaut's LA NUIT AMÉRICAINE, and my man Donald Sutherland, who's always nice to see.

I just happened to come across the Roeg section of the Boîte Noire and it reminded me that I had always wanted to see this one. So I took it. I waited all week, and yesterday we finally got to watch it.



The atmosphere, at first, was mysterious, to say the least. The schizophrenic shots and the epileptic editing didn't help : nothing felt familiar. And once the "action" is taken to Venise, in Italy, it gets even more unfamiliar.

It's not the kind of movie where everything is given away, right away. You kind of have to wait for things to start making sense. You start feeling uneasy after a while. You're not sure which one of these characters you can trust.

The movie has been labeled "erotic" when there is only one sex scene, and it's quite standart according to today's trends. Back in '73, however, it must have been something. Strangely, this scene reminded me of Bertolucci's 1900, where Sutherland plays a vicious nazi officer, and where Gérard Depardieu & Robert de Niro get to share a prostitute. This kind of erotism was troubling, almost upsetting. The scenes with Sutherland were just too brutal & sadistic, and the scenes with De Niro & Depardieu were shocking because of the enormous star status these two guys have achieved today. You wouldn't just expect them to do something like this today.

So when DON'T LOOK NOW ended with a shock, and I found out that Miss Bijoux was sleeping. Too bad she missed the only really scary part of the movie.