Quick Thoughts After A Week In Montreal

Montreal's a great city.  No doubt.  I haven't spent any significant time here since about 1987, so it's fun and interesting to try to get to know the city a bit again.  Frankly, this time I'm an urbanite, whereas last time I lived on the west island in the same suburban lifestyle that I've had most of my life.

So this time is a bit different.  I'm living in Westmount, and commuting in the subwway (Metro) to work.  No car, which is a different way for me to see the city.  Better to experience the real city, probably, though I found it harder to get my bearings than I do in a car.  Particularly because we travel underground a lot.  But at least it's warm down there.  The city has been pretty cold for my first week here.  The natives are restless, with a much colder than typical winter now having overstayed its welcome.

I've found lots of good food here.  That wasn't a surprise, but a welcome confirmation of my impression of Montreal.  Coming from Vancouver, where food is cheap, diverse and excellent, I could easily have been disappointed, but I'm not.  I do think restaurant food is more expensive here than in Vancouver, but it's based on a pretty small sampling to this point.  The food has been interesting enough that i'm thinking I might start a side-blog with quickie restaurant reviews.  But maybe I'll be too lazy for that.

I really like riding the Metro.  It gets you across town efficiently and and without freezing.  But it's noisy.  Far louder than my normal living environment in Vancouver, and I'm finding that a bit disturbing.  Noise blocking headphones/earbuds help some, but I don't wear them when traveling with my colleages.

I'm really looking forward to discovering the music scene here.  So far I've seen/heard nothing.  I don't even know anyone interesting in Montreal to follow on Twitter, so suggestions would be welcome.  Oh, I guess I have Nikki Yanofsky, but that's about it.  Tomorrow, I hope to get a visit to Steve's Music.  I haven't been to the Montreal store since a trip my high school rock band made in a Volkswagen bus back in the late '70s.  Should be fun to visit.  I'm missing my regular visits to Long & McQuade around the Vancouver area.

Until today I've been pretty positive about the experience, but I found myself kind of down in the dumps at work this morning.  Rather than join the lineup in the cafeteria at lunch, I decided to dash out and ride the Metro north to the end of the line at Cote Vertu.  I didn't know what was there, but figured it was as good a place to explore as any other nearby.  Somehow, fate must have been guiding me, as I walked a block south down Decarie from the station and immediately found Decarie Hot Dog.

This is a place I remember eating lunch with office-mates when I worked in Montreal in 1986/87.  I had only a vague recollection of where it was, and previous searches on Google Maps hadn't turned up the location.  Stumbling on it on a very short lunch break was completely unexpected, and very welcome.  I sat down to the "traditional": 2 hot dogs, all dressed (with lettuce!), fries and a Coke.  There were only a few people in the place when I was in, which surprised me a bit... I recall the place being elbow to elbow, and having to reach over people at the counter to get my food.  It was the same friendly environment, though.  No... they don't want your money up front... please enjoy your food and pay on the way out.  This little diner has been in business since I was an infant, and I can see why... it's highly recommended for a little taste of tradition.

As I walked briskly back to the Metro, I found my mood had lightened considerably, and I proceeded to quite enjoy my afternoon.  Rock on!

Moving on...

Wow, I can't believe I let this narrative stagnate for a whole year.  Life is busy.  And then it's not... or at least you think it might not be.

I was recently canned from my employer of 9 years because they're restructuring where the work is done.  Old story, even for me.  However, before my last day there, I and a number of teammates got a renewed lease on life, working for the company in a different product area.  It's a good opportunity for us in a number of ways, so I'm still "there", but it's all new.

As part of moving to this new role, I'm also temporarily working in a different city, far from my family, friends, and bandmates.  An opportunity to explore places, technologies and musical inspiration, and hopefully to spend a bit more time with family who live closer to my new temporary home than to my permanent one.

The new location is Montreal, which is somewhere I worked for more than a year a long long time ago, before I moved to Vancouver. As a fitting first dinner last evening, I had Montreal smoked meat, which was excellent. Montreal is an interesting, ethnicly diverse city, and I'm looking forward to lots of great meals.

I also hope I can find my way around the local music scene, as I also think of Montreal as vibrant in that area. And meanwhile, back in my "bachelor pad", I have a minimal setup for making music, and hope I can make it work well for me.

I've written previously about how I find business travel both frustrating and inspiring.  I expect this experience will be no different, but am looking forward to the inspiring part... there's a LOT of possibilty there. For the rest... hopefully FaceTime will help keep family close.

Long Hair and Mid-Air

I haven't written many blog entries in the past year, and I'm finding it odd that the reason is that I haven't been doing much business travel.

Well maybe this year will bring more. I'm once again writing from 37,000 feet in the air, over central Greenland.

This is my first flight to Europe since late 2011. And I have been growing my hair since the last time I was there. I've gone from a short-haired computer geek to a rock star wanna-be in that short time.

After watching two movies it seems time to settle down during the dark of the winter night. Sadly, I started the trip with a discharged laptop battery and the Lufthansa A340 I'm in has no seat power (at least not in economy). So although I had hoped to put in a few hours of office work, I'm out of luck. And I'm thus writing another blog entry on my iPhone.

The soundtrack to this blog is Peter Frampton's incredible Grammy-winning Fingerprints album. It's now been a top pick for me for a few years. Not yet at the level of Miles' Kinda Blue, but getting there.

In the past few weeks I had arrived at the point of feeling like I needed new music, and have been a bit disappointed in the process.

First off, I had been waiting quite awhile for the North American release of an album I'd seen buzz about on Twitter. Sweet Billy Pilgrim (@sweetbillyp) is an indie band from the UK, and I found myself oddly compelled by their latest album Crown and Treaty. In the end, they did not release it on iTunes in Canada, and I waited while their website finally got able to sell direct.

Now, I can understand the view that you'll make more money per sale when selling direct. But honestly, my opinion is that this is creating a barrier to entry that will not maximize total sales. The same reason that iPods took over the digital music player industry holds for music sales as well. On a whim, anywhere I happen to be, I can buy a track in the iTunes store for a good price and have it immediately available to listen to. I have a few examples from past business trips where I bought music on the plane before we left the gate.

In the case of the Crown and Treaty album, when I finally got access to their store, there wasn't even a simple way to buy the whole album. You had to select each track separately, at a total well above a typical album purchase for me. So in the end, instead of buying the album, I bought only the one song from it that had been haunting me: Archaeology. If the album had been available on iTunes, they would have made $7 or so from me. Instead they got probably $2. And frankly I'm sorry, but that's business. The album's tracks can be streamed from sweetbillypilgrim.com. Check it out.

So, the other "new" music I bought was intended to re-inspire me, but has been less than totally awesome.

Beth Hart released a new album recently called Bang Bang Boom Boom. It's very good, but a bit further from my favorite tastes than the previous one with Joe Bonamassa. I think the new one feels a bit more "country", but my wife disagrees. And she is quite keen on this new one. Beth's voice is fantastic.

I truly loved the last Dream Theater album A Dramatic Turn of Events. That was my first Dream Theater, so knowing they're again recording a new album, I thought I'd buy something from the back catalog. In the end, I bought the previous one, Octavarium. It's quite good, but I found it "less" interesting than the Dramatic Turn one. It didn't floor me on initial listen, and although it's grown on me, I'm still not enjoying it as much.

I got in the mood for some ragtime and bought The Very Best of Scott Joplin, which was very cheap on iTunes and includes dozens of tunes. Very solid, though a bit much to listen to all the way through in one sitting.

Then Joe Bonamassa has teamed up with a different sort of outfit and released a Funk album with a group called Rock Candy Funk Party. The album is We Want Groove, and it's actually pretty good. I'm a bit of a funk fan, and feel so vindicated that Joe has validated this love. Maybe I'm not the only one who thinks of his influences as Blues-Rock/Jazz/Funk. I still find it disturbing that Funk isn't a category on iTunes, actually. I'd probably find lots on speculation if I could search for it by category. Anyway this album reminds me of early 70s funk in many places. Feels like low-ceiling rooms, dark lighting and cigarette smoke. There are a few real grooving tracks, though. Overall, probably the best find of the lot here.

Then I bought the brand new Steve Lukather Transition album. I really liked his last one All's Well That Ends Well. This one is decent, but feels a bit less inspired. I think I'll queue it up for another listen next, hoping that it keeps improving for me. The singing, in particular, seems weaker than his last album, which is too bad. There are really some very excellent guitar parts, which isn't a surprise from this guitar legend, much-demanded session guitarist, and member of Toto.

Well, from the north coast of Iceland, I'll call it a night. Rock on...

Traveling or Voyaging?

Today I'm on a business trip to California.  I actually haven't traveled nearly as much this year as I have for the past few, which is nice.  Anyway, business trips for me are rarely too much fun on their own.  I've written about these issues in a past post.  I always try to find a little time for myself, though, and do something I enjoy.  Interestingly, I find that simpler when I'm not traveling with others, as they generally tend to do the standard dinner and drinks and off to bed routine.

It was a beautiful day in Silicon Valley [as is nearly every day of the year], and this was the view out my hotel window at 7pm, looking south across the whole valley:

Anyway, today I found myself in informal travel mode, and coincidentally wearing a traveler shirt:

Perhaps this was a subliminal message to me, as when I found myself alone at dinnertime I felt the urge to travel further, rather than go visit a guitar store or similar, which is my tendency when I'm here.  This urge to travel, particularly to the ocean, is a common theme when I travel.

So tonight, from San Jose, I drove west to visit one of my favourite spots: Santa Cruz.  It's actually only about 40 miles away, but with the crossing of a mountain range and moving from semi-desert to coastal weather, it seems like another world.  Unfortunately, I didn't factor in that there are fewer hours of sunlight here in Northern California than 1000km to the north in Vancouver.  I left San Jose at 7:30pm, and the sun had already set when I arrived on the coast.

I had visited Santa Cruz a few times in the past.  My first visit in 1995 involved arriving on a sailboat after sailing 7 days nonstop from the mouth of Juan de Fuca Strait at the north tip of Washington state.  Needlesstosay the warm, dry port of Santa Cruz left an indelible positive impression on me.  On that visit, I had a chance to walk around various parts of town, as the harbour is pretty central.

And I have stolen a few quick evening visits over there when in San Jose on business, including at least one very enjoyable evening with a variety of business associates.  I had never visited the Lighthouse Field State Park area, southwest of the town pier.  So that was my initial objective for this evening, and it didn't disappoint.  Although the sun was down, the twilight colours were pretty, and the silhouettes of windblown pine trees gave the entire scene a poetry I wasn't expecting.

I thoroughly enjoyed walking around the area, observing the slow swell and occasional surf breaking on the sandy shore, the undulating kelp beds, and my favourite brown pelicans gliding effortlessly above the waves.

I even put off dinner in order enjoy as much of this lovely environment as I could take in.  I found myself cursing the fact that I had not brought a good camera with me.  I took quite a few pictures on my iPhone 4, but they tend to be pretty poor, paricularly in lower light.  I think they've captured the moment, though.

As I left the area, I drove a bit further up the coast, and then decided I've always wanted to see Halfmoon Bay, so why not carry on the adventure a bit further.  Of course the evening was getting pretty dark by this point, and Halfmoon Bay was well over 40 miles north of Santa Cruz.  But once beside the great ocean, I found myself reluctant to pull away so quickly.  So off I set, into the relative unknown.  I had actually driven this section of road once before on a Saturday off during a business trip.  Cruising up the dim strip of pavement was just familiar enough to be enjoyable.  This section of Highway 1 isn't overly twisty, so it was quite good driving despite the hour.  And of course I had lucked into a clear day on the coast... it's often foggy along this strip.

As I drove up the highway, I found myself musing about the difference between traveling and voyaging.  To me, a voyage involves discovery and new experiences.  As a business traveler, I have long abandoned that sort of feeling when it comes to basic business travel.  I equate travel with sitting in airports, sitting on planes, sitting in meeting rooms... lots of sitting.  But I do often find tastes of voyaging wherever I go, if I can just manage a few hours to explore.  Sometimes, like tonight, it's a solo jaunt up some unfamiliar coast in a rental car.  I've done it from Boston up past Salem, and from Tampa, Florida out to see Cape Canaveral.  Or a crazy drive across Europe last September when I had a few days free between meetings and tore from Genoa, Italy up to Stockholm, Sweden... and then back at the end of the week.

But equally fascinating have been the more urban voyages.  The narrow alleyways of old Genoa.  The cobblestone streets of Copenhagen.  Discovering pubs with good mates in Soho... both London and Manhattan.

Interestingly, my voyage tonight included arriving at Half Moon Bay to find that I was unable to locate the harbour I saw earlier from the air, when looking in the dark on the ground.  Perhaps a failure to achieve one of today's objectives, but also an opportunity to bring myself there again, perhaps in another context.  And in daylight.

If you find yourself traveling... have a little look to see if you can locate the voyage in your travels.  It makes for a more fulfilling trip.

Cheers

Dave