seventy-six. [THEME: it's a beautiful day in the neighbourhood]

[cabaretlights.livejournal.com]

Tonight the Streets Are Ours
Artist: Richard Hawley
Album: Lady's Bridge
Year: 2007
♥: I love [almost] all of Montreal, to tiny bits and pieces -- but this isn't about Montreal, really, it's about the neighbourhood: the little clusters of streets hidden within boroughs. When I first moved to the city, I lived right downtown, in the midst of expensive rented concrete and white walls, blocks lined with what passes for skyscrapers in Montreal. It was not home: I loved the city, but it in no way felt like a community. And then, Julie and I moved to NDG.

I remember the first 24 bus ride I took there with her (the first time we looked at our Claremont apartment, early March 2008): we crossed out of residential Westmount and began getting increasingly excited as we passed a Dairy Queen, a dozen independent boutiques, and then the bus stopped at a Starbucks. "A Starbucks right up the street!" I remember giddily exclaiming -- and I hadn't even ventured west of Claremont. Little did I know the amazing landmarks and lifelines that would appear on Sherbrooke West -- Cafe 92, Yuki Bakery, Shaika, NDG Park, Encore Books, Rocky Montana's, and, of course, 5961 Cote Ste-Antoine.

Still, despite being very much an NDG girl, I do consider Westmount Adjacent (Landsdowne to Decarie) "my neighbourhood." It may have more Westmount bitches than NDG crazies, but everything about those few blocks just screams "HOME!" to me. I love that though we've moved twice, both times intending to go farther west, we can't seem to make it past Decarie. I thought of this theme while sitting on the new terrasse at Jonah James, eating an overpriced but delicious sundried tomato sandwich and sipping a flawless iced latte, with a perfectly-coiffed dyed-blonde trophy wife on one side of me and two students wearing red squares on the other, and my heart just stretched with love: only in Montreal would you find both in the same place (and really, probably only in Westmount Adjacent, haha). I love wandering the streets and feeling completely at home while seeing every walk of life pass by.

I first heard this song on a particularly beautiful day in May 2010, just after Julie and Justin began dating. Julie had texted me and, all spur-of-the-moment on my part, I cheerfully agreed to go with them to see "Exit Through the Gift Shop" at AMC. It was maybe the second time I'd actually be hanging out with Justin, and instead of metro-ing, we walked. Through Westmount park, through the trees, leisurely along the shopfronted streets, the conversation flowing easily, the sun big and warm in the sky, that inarticulable sense of ease and lightness that comes with good friends and gorgeous weather.

The film was amazing, and this song plays to excellent ironic effect over the end credits. I was positive it was a 60s ditty, something familiar that I just couldn't place, and was shocked when I got home -- after another amazing walk back, this time under a near full moon -- to find that it had been released just three years earlier. I love this song. I love listening to it while strolling or skipping, and it is one of those songs that is so unbelievably CHEERFUL that you can't listen to it and be depressed.

And that's kind of like NDG, kind of like my neighbourhood: life might be terrible further afield, but (especially now that, in our new place, I feel so at home) when I cross its borders, I can't be that depressed. That sense of home is stronger now than it's been all year, and there's no song that reflects my quite-near-blind love of the Deeg quite like this one. & the bonus, of course, is that you live a few blocks from me, and the connotations of this song have taken on new significance in recent months.
Tonight, the streets are ours
And these lights in our hearts, they tell no lies



I still have my "Exit Through the Gift Shop" ticket in my wallet. Every time I dig through and find it, I can't help but smile: remembering that walk, the quality of light and of people, and how wonderfully at ease, blissful, I felt as I wandered my neighbourhood.

seventy-six (it's a beautiful day in the neighbourhood)

[amethysting.livejournal.com]

Little Boxes
Malvina Reynolds
Ear to the Ground
2000 (originally released: 1967)

Firstly, I have to touch on a phenomena that is limited exclusively to 5pm_weds: the precise moment when I think of the song I am going to post in response to a theme.  It's the thrilling sensation of being hit with an invisible wave that starts at my toes and works its way up to my head--leaving a trail of goosebumps in its wake.  If I'm walking, I skip up a step and pick up the pace; it's like turning the rows of a Rubik's cube and finally getting everything to line up in its place.

I love this theme because I love my neighborhood.  I loved NDG before I lived here, as if having a sense that this, at last, was the place where I belonged.  It is a true neighborhood.  I struggled with this theme, I think, because of this deep-rooted NDG-love.  NDG (and its inhabitants) never fail to surprise me.  Quite simply, it (and its inhabitants) are a little...diverse.  Even wacky, perhaps.  I wanted my song to capture that awesome weirdness, and the always-comfortable sense I have of fitting into it somehow.

I've said on a number of occasions how I could never imagine living in one of those condo developments many of my friends live in.  It's not to say that those homes and neighborhoods are not beautiful, but they aren't the neighborhood or sense of community that I want to experience.  In truth, I can't stand the idea of living somewhere where every home is a cookie cutout of the one beside it.  A neighborhood of identical homes stretching as far as the eye can see, each with its own neatly manicured lawn and well-tended garden.  This song perfectly encapsulates that other neighborhood--the one I am most definitely not drawn to.  I like that Malvina Reynolds's voice is strange (an honorary NDG resident if I ever saw one!) and the way both the music and words are kind of looped...like a conveyor belt in a factory churning out the same thing over and over again.  I realized today that I was struggling to find a song that would describe what NDG is--which started to prove a rather impossible feat.  Instead I've selected one that illustrates what it is not.