The Pope In Halifax, 1984

I suppose my recollections are not as profound as others, me not being Catholic, but it was quite the thing when the Pope came to my town in September 1984 at the beginning of my fourth year of undergrad. I don’t have any photos but neither does Google Images so I don’t feel so bad. Here’s the CBC archive of the event – check out Knowlton Nash on the Popemobile.

I don’t really remember being all protestant and cynicalmyself but that is because some of my pals were quite protestant and cynical about the whole thing, the taking over of the Halifax Commons, the weeks of building the massive staging, being somewhat penned with about 200 others in small squares with plenty of Popemobile room in between and all. We kept thinking how much it was all like a concert. At the Friday night youth rally, before the rains of the next day, conveniently located half way between the university zone and the downtown taverns for afters, he kept opening his statements with (in a heavy Polish accent) “Yoou Yooung peeople of Haallyfax…” and we would fill in, loud enough to get scowls from the neighbours, “…reeely knoow how to paaarteee.” One pal, Will, was quite pleased that he could be outside but near St. Mary’s Bascilica watching the Pope perform the Saturday service there on a screen – as he had watched from the tav next door with an excellent view of the church walls, tv coverage above the bar, beer in his hand. Being a fellow traveller he was able to tell him mother truthfully he was in a crowd just outside the service and stayed there right the way through.

At the end of one of his days in town, he Popemobiled at a faster clip down Coburg past our university to the Bishops house where he was staying, thin crowds in the warm evening waving as he headed to bed. We all waved night-night to the Pope.

Update: The Pope passed away mid-afternoon Saturday our time.

Zapshack, 1991

With the events in Rome, I find my self rummaging – amazed when I think of it that I was in eastern Europe so soon after the fall of Communism. I have nothing on Bruce “Hubely”, of course, who was on his second stint in Bratislava, later under the Brandenburg Gates on unification, when I flew into Warsaw to spread democracy, the cult of Walkman as well as jokes about President Jarulzelski looking a lot like Roy Orbison to Baltic resort town teens.

zapshack2

We lived well on chelb, pivo and ser but I dreamed of zapjakanky. We bought them in these zapshacks, above. Lody is ice cream, by the way, which is a hell of a lot easier to say than what Brucey had to order in Bratislave, zrma zlina.

Update: Watching the CBC Life and Times episode on the Pope last night, I was surprised how the Vatican was pouring money into Poland as part of the pressure it brought to undermine the wall and it got me wondering if all we twenty somethings brought into eastern Europe by tiny institutions in an oddly organized fashion was backed by Rome to some degree as well. Karol’s little army of westerners pushed out into little cities and towns who had little experience of westerners other than as tank drivers. My students thought we all used one brand, “Wash n’ Go” shampoo, as it was the first to make the market there. That and “The Final Countdown” by Europe was the height of current pop music as someone had a cassette. To counteract that I passed around the Walkman with Blue Rodeo and “My Definition of a Boombastic (Jazz Style)” by Dream Warriors.

Goodbye Old Email

Today marks the last time you may email my email of many years, good old elal@isn.net, which replaced elal@sympatico.ca and another elal before that. Each became a spammers dream and all have now been entirely replaced by gmail accounts. I deleted three or four years worth of archives and felt so good afterwards.

So send it one last message if you like. Try to invent some new type of spam other than viagara, Rolexes, 3.25% mortgage and Canadian pharmaceuticals. A prize for the best one to use the words “maple”, “Siam”, “carboy” and “cufflink”. And see if you can top the name of one spammer today “hung monaghan”.

Scissor Sisters

Listening to this for the first time, I am struck how my Elton John, Queen and disco pre-teen pre-punk junior high self was as entirely immersed in what gay culture made it to Annapolis Valley, Nova Scotia AM radio. It does make one want to revisit the discography from Captain Fantastic… and back.

Interesting to compare the similar trajectories yet quite distinct 70s nostalgia choices of these folk, The Darkness and Franz Ferdinand.

Arar’s Plane

The New York Times reports that it has found a plane that followed the path Maher Arar has alleged he was flown to Syria for interrogation:

The discovery of the aircraft, in a database compiled from Federal Aviation Agency records, appears to corroborate part of the story Mr. Arar has told many times since his release in 2003. The records show that a Gulfstream III jet, tail number N829MG, followed a flight path matching the route he described. The flight, hopscotching from New Jersey to an airport near Washington to Maine to Rome and beyond, took place on Oct. 8, 2002, the day after Mr. Arar’s deportation order was signed.

And here it is. Old N829MG has been a lot of places. It is not registered with the FAA. In April 2003 and June 2002, it was spotted by nerds at an Airport near Amsterdam under the ownership of MJG Aviation even though in the report it is stated to be owned by Presidential Aviation as this record shows. Here are its specs. The interior was fairly new:

New Feb 2002, 14 pax interior Beige leather seats with Gold and Black accents, DVD, CD, VHS and Airshow. Fwd galley. Fwd and aft lavs. Fireblocked. Immaculate.

In October 2002, the month after Arar’s flight, it appears on this listing which I do not understand – likely more plane spotting nerds. Interesting to read this October 2001 USA Today article quoting the head of Presidential Aviation:

…convenience is the very reason the rich are opting for private planes, says Nigel England, director of operations at Presidential Aviation in Fort Lauderdale. “You have absolute control over who gets on that aircraft,” he says. “We don’t subject you or your bags to humiliating checks.” While chartering less lavish aircraft for short distances can rival commercial prices, the price of airborne exclusivity can be high: about $20,000 for a coast-to-coast flight aboard Presidential’s eight-seat Lear 55; double that for a 14-seat Gulfstream III. “You can’t justify the cost on a numbers basis,” he says. “It’s about convenience and security.”

It would be interesting to check the air radio logs for the plane from that time as they would have had to report to air traffic control along the way. I wonder of the flight records or the radio reports will indicate who want on board or how many or who booked it. Why did it backtrack to Washington?

8.7

Yesterday’s disasterous quake has been stated to have been 8.7. I have been in a 5.2 in Quebec in early November 1997 and that was frightening enough. If I understand the exponential aspect to the scale used, this one was something like 5000% more powerful though, thankfully ten times weaker than Dec. 26th and relatively – but only relatively – less deadly.

Recordings

Wandering around even a smaller Borders shop in the southern land is a revelation and when the credit card has been paid down, or a near enough facsimilie thereof, it is a candy store. I walked around and gathered an armful, looked at it and realized I had proposed to myself the procurement of a stack of CDs from my twenties, replacements of their vinyl clones. I put most of them back, except for the Pretenders Learning to Crawl and Brian Eno’s Ambient 1: Music For Airports both of which are among the most important works in my experience of growing up into the present state. An elder Swick had the Eno in my grade 11 and Learning to Crawlwas the soundtrack of the second half of my undergrad. Buy either now if you do not know them. Leave your workplace mid-shift if necessary.

But I did not stop there. I recall a reference or two toThe Decemberists and picked up their 2003 CD Her Majesty. This led me to a review of their very recently released follow up at cokemachineglow.com and also to the question of whether that site preceeded the CD and book of poetry by the frontman of the Tragically Hip, Gordie Down…or Gord Downie, or the other way around. I used “Coke machine glow” in a conversation the other day to describe the experience of being in the exercise room without the light on, reading a magazine as I cycled to nowhere as someone who was there first did some yoga like thing. Anyway, the CD is good, an interesting voice, something of the Ben Folds Five with piano but also some art rock self-indulgences.

I also bought The Beginning Stage of…The Polyphonic Spree, the Jesus Freaks meets Supertramp and small college revival of the musical Godspell as it might have been presented by and only to the members of some lesser 1970s Christian cult, one that never got to the purple Kool-aid. Freaky webs site. They were on Austin City Limits three weeks back. It had the kids complaining on the drive home. They all sounded the same they shouted from the back seat but it reminded me of being their age when yet another troupe of Jesus freaks in a old school bus passed through the Maritimes filling United Church Halls like Dad’s more than thirty years ago during my pre-teen summers, them sleeping on sleeping bags on the floor, surviving on sandwiches and squares made the elderly widows of WWI vets who in turn were somewhat stunned and amused by all the hair on the boys. Plus it has French horn among all the other horns and once upon a time I took French horn and, after grade eight, I even went to band camp to become excellent at French horn only to be returned to my parents with a note about my fatal overbite. I suspect they had wished that the overbite test occurred prior to the application and cheque being forwarded. The next summer I went to basketball camp and, moving before the new school year, I dropped that, too, in favour of typical anxieties and the gang including the one with a Hagstrom Swede electric guitar. I seem to have picked up my present habits of ale, ska and soccer only in grade eleven when I started to become mostly the me I am now.

Best of all perhaps is my acquisition of “Conquering Dub” by Yabby You Meets King Tubby off ofThe Rough Guide to Dub, recorded around 1974 somewhere between the Jesus freaks and band camp. Is it just me or was this what The Clash was listening to on the bus?