October 13th 2010 – 7pm

From the press release:

Pillar of the indie-arts community and Local Legend Louis Rastelli will be  reading from his novel A Fine Ending – fiction loosely based on the Montreal scene of the late 1990s. “(Rastelli) has successfully painted a timeless portrait of the spirit of bohemia that not only permeates the vibrant and colourful Montreal neighbourhood in which he lives and loves, but would feel equally at home in Greenwich Village, Soho or along the left bank of Paris. And, like the Plateau itself, A Fine Ending shines with both substance and style.” - Stephen Clare, Halifax Daily News

The Concordia Community Solidarity Co-op Bookstore is located at 2150 Bishop Street in Montreal. The Local Legends Reading Series lays the smack down starting at 7 PM. Admission is a suggested donation of $2, though no one will be turned away, and all of the Co-op’s stock will be available for purchase throughout the evening.

http://www.co-opbookstore.ca
http://www.facebook.com/ConcordiaCoopBookstore

The Story of the First Nuclear Attack, Hiroshima August 6, 1945

Survivor and witness testimony assembled from various sources by Louis Rastelli

The following is a narrative strung together combining sentences and paragraphs from dozens of different witness and survivor accounts. It was first published in Fish Piss Magazine Vol. 3 No. 1, 2004. A list of sources used is at the end; however, since much of the research was done 10 years ago, it’s possible many of the original websites are no longer online.

-Louis Rastelli, August 6, 2010-08-06

The Story of the First Nuclear Attack

The bomb doors of the Enola Gay overhead opened at 8.15 am and about 40 seconds later the bomb exploded 600m above the city. The Americans knew this would cause the most devastation: if the bomb exploded any lower, much energy from the blast would be wasted, merely gouging a crater into the ground.

Most of the initial damage was caused by a shock wave that broke windows nine miles away from the blast. Most of the radiation released was made up of gamma rays, which came directly from the heart of the uranium as it split open during the chain reaction.

FLASH

Somewhere, a voice said, “Hey look, it’s a parachute! A parachute is falling.” I instinctively looked where the person pointed. That’s when it happened. Just where I was looking, the sky exploded with an indescribable light. It was like fire burning my eyes.

I heard an indescribable, deafening roar. My first thought was that the plane had aimed at me.

There was an indescribable loud sound followed by a shock that seemed as if it would tear my body into pieces. It was not a boom like a bomb falling to earth, nor the rain-like sound of a firebomb, but a metallic sound that was somehow difficult to resist. The word “instant” had never fit a moment as well as it did that one.

I remember I thought I was a goner.

It was so bright I had my hands over my eyes closed, and I could see the bones like you were looking at an X-ray.

[From a nearby village] The weather was fine in the village on the morning of 6 August. Suddenly I felt something warm on my left cheek and turned back. It seemed like a strong reflection from a mirror. Then a roaring sound shook the whole village. While I was wondering what had happened, a column of clouds appeared above the mountains in the south. That was not an ordinary cloud but of a superb pink colour. Gradually it assumed the shape of a mushroom and rose to the sky.

I saw the mushroom cloud growing in the sky. It was very bright. It had so much heat inside. It caught the light and it showed every colour of the rainbow. Reflecting on the past, it’s strange, but I could say that it was beautiful.

In the distance houses levitated a little and then crashed down to the ground like domino pieces. It was just like a white wave coming toward me while standing on the beach. The wave steadily approached.

The wind reflected when it hit the mountains surrounding the city. The houses and buildings near the mountains were destroyed by the reflected wind. Actually, I felt a strong wind twice, and the second one was stronger than the first.

I found that all the houses around there had collapsed for as far as I could see!

I saw that the roof, walls and windows had flown off, and I was standing in the twisted skeleton of what had been our house. Standing alone, as if in a field, I saw things I shouldn’t have been able to see. I could see the next-door neighbour’s house.

I couldn’t see anyone around me but I heard somebody shouting “Help! Help!” from somewhere. The cries were actually from underground as I was walking on.

We were blinded by a great flash. At that moment I felt as if I had been struck by a thousand bolts of lightning. Then there was complete darkness, after which we could see dead bodies covered with blood that were piled on top of my brother and I. We tried to come to our senses and push aside the corpses.

FLAMES

Then the noise stopped. Cautiously, I crawled out of my hiding place and looked around. I saw an enormous, bright red pillar of fire (I was told later that it measured 200 meters in diameter and rose 10,000 meters in the air), which increased in size minute by minute, reaching high in the sky.

From the ground up, the pillar of fire rose toward the sky, with tremendous force. Sometimes it was hollow at the centre. At other times, broiling, leaping flames blew out of the centre. The sight was so horrifying that I can find no words to describe it.

In a little while some window frames began burning, then all the windows were burning. The fire spread inside. A little while later the same process began in the Industrial Promotion Hall. Then the Chamber of Commerce and Industry, too, was burning from the windows inward.

The flames spread and grew. We were hot. The river was gradually shifting from high tide to ebb tide, and we moved closer to it, step by step. The black smoke diagonal to us on the other side whirled in a high vortex. Sometimes whirlwinds of smoke sank low and came straight for our heads. Out of this maelstrom burnt sheets of tin and charred board fragments were dropping all around us. It was dangerous. We had to watch for falling objects and dodge them, which required looking up. Our eyes filled with smoke and tears– it was unbearable. Breathing made us choke.

I went to Miyuki Bridge to get some water. The water was dead people. I had to push the bodies aside to drink the muddy water. We didn’t know anything about radioactivity at that time.

A section of the water in the Motoyasu River seemed to rise, then it began spinning into a round pillar and soared up into the sky. A waterspout! Water spilled from the whirling wind. The fire was furious! Smoke and sparks surged across the river toward us. Oh no!

Since I thought it would be dangerous to stay on this side, I swam over to the other side. It was so frightening. An awful thing happened: I was suddenly spun around by the current. And then large pieces of hail begin to fall and my face started hurting. So to avoid that I again plunged my face into the water time and time again. And then I spun around again and again. It just didn’t stop. The water was swirling around me and later I learned that was a tornado.

(more…)

Then, from April 9 - 16 I will be in France for a celebration of the 25th anniversary of the Fanzinothèque in Poitiers. I will be presenting a bit of all the things I do: the old Fish Piss magazine (still on hiatus), the Distroboto and Expozine projects and a large selection of zines from Québec from the 60s to today, drawn from the archives of Archive Montreal.

In the meantime,  March 31 marks the closing of the nearly 100 year old Montreal Poolroom hot dog restaurant, the oldest operating restaurant in Montreal (and possibly Canada?), shut down by the city for a “revitalization” of the block it sits on that has since fallen apart. I was interviewed on this matter in last Sunday’s Montreal Gazette, the article can be found here. Watch for more updates on the botched “revitalization” of this historic quarter on my blog in the months to come.

You can also find out more about this situation on the website of the Save the Main Coalition. There will also be an evening of ideas and presentations about the future of this district in May, details available here.

This Tuesday (Dec. 1) I will be spinning a number of rare African psychedelic rock records throughout the night, and prepared this mix online for anyone who wants a taste. It’s a 5 hour DJ set, so there will also be lots of rock/ punk/ post-punk/ new wave etc. from the 70s to today, dashes of soul and rnb, hard-rocking funk and blues, proto-punk/ metal and top-notch 60s-70s psychedelia– in short, a lot of music you’ve never ever heard of but will want to hear MORE of afterwards!!

If I don’t see you tonight, I’ll be back at it on Tuesday, January 5, 2010.

Don’t be shy to come up and introduce yourself! See you there.

Here’s a link to the slideshow on Youtube.

Here are some of the photos (click image for full-size view):

 http://www.montrealmirror.com/2009/052809/news2.html

If it weren’t for all the empty lots surrounding the block, and if they weren’t violating the zoning (and neighboring scale) to put up an office building, it might be worth considering the idea. Much of the block could use a makeover — but the trend these days is to level everything first (see the Griffintown project, the hole in the ground where Le Spectrum or where Ben’s was etc.)

At least there will be public consultations and time for people to send in written opinions (info, forms on doing so and all documentation about this project are available here)

I guess if it weren’t for Club Soda having set up shop across the street a decade ago they would have demolished that too.

Here’s the NEW corner of St. Laurent and Ste. Catherine St.:

Here’s the street level on Ste. Catherine St. (keep in mind that you can’t see the top 8 floors or so of the office tower, and that most of those old facades are just stuck to the base of the tower):

It’s interesting to note that since this illustration was presented to the public on May 26, they airbrushed the Q out of most of the documents you can find on the weblink posted above, except for this image:

Here’s the Clark St. side:

And here’s the floor plan, with portions of the current interior volumes of the spaces that are there now preserved (and highlighted in red). Note that less than half of the current interior space of, say, Montreal Poolroom are preserved. These will be VERY tiny retail spaces (at the presentation they were described as the minimum needed for a small commerce to be viable). They want Clark St. to come alive with teeny tiny stores too. (My guess is they’ll end up going with an interior food court, for all the same reasons such office buildings usually go with them).

In any case, they mentioned they will not rent to bars or concert halls so aside perhaps from a couple of tiny restaurants, there will only be daytime business anyway (so why not a food court?) This raises probably the most important heritage issue, one that isn’t mentioned whatsoever in the heritage studies made by the city or the promoter — that for 200 years or more, that block was very much a NIGHTTIME block, with lots of activity at night. This goes back to when Montreal was a walled city through the 1700s and early 1800s and Saint-Laurent Boulevard was the street that led to the main gate of the walled city (hence its shortened nickname “The Main”). Being just outside the main city made it a perfect place for such sinful businesses as bars, strip clubs, brothels and opium dens. Much later, during the glory days of the city’s jazz and burlesque scene when Montreal was Canada’s “Sin City”, the block was still central to the action, with Lily St-Cyr and other burlesque legends performing on or around that block. Putting an office complex that is completely closed at night would put an end to 200 years of night life.

I’m not saying they should build a brothel and opium den there instead — all that stuff is pretty much gone from that block already. Aside from Café Cléopatra which is considered one of the safest and least dingy strip clubs downtown, pretty much all the drugs and prostitution that were on that block have moved further east on Ste. Catherine St. Basically, the argument that the Hydro-Québec tower will finally “clean up the area” is completely false. In fact, because they would be vacating the Place Dupuis office tower near Berri Métro to move employees to this block, this project will have a very negative effect on that area which is far more populated with homeless people and drugs than the corner of St. Laurent. Some might say that just moving the “undesirables” a bit further east, out of the way of Jazz Festival tourists, is part of the plan– either way, it doesn’t jibe with the notion that this project will be a net positive for the area.

If you want to know more about the history of the area, I wrote a long piece about that specific block some years back. Here’s an excerpt (click to go to the full piece):

For Montrealers, the intersection of St. Lawrence Boulevard and Ste. Catherine St. downtown has always been a special place. St. Lawrence (or St. Laurent) is of course the main street of the city, usually called simply The Main (or “La Main.” This habit goes back to when the street passed through “the main gate” of the city walls when Montreal was a walled city—roughly between 1650 and 1800. One assumes that the habit of saying “The main gate” was shortened to just “The main,” and the habit persists to this day.) For its part, Ste. Catherine St. has been a major shopping artery since the 1840s. Ever since then, for some reason, the intersection of these two streets has been the colourful heart of Montreal’s “red light” district.
The term “red light” arose around 1865, when public officials tried to restrict prostitution to specific houses where doctors could certify that the women had no VD. A red lantern in the window of a house was supposed to tell customers they could have a relatively safe good time.
The area by the end of the 1800’s was also home to many opium dens (run by the fledgling Chinese community), gambling houses, booze cans and more. There have literally been dozens of initiatives proposed to clean up the area “for good” in the past 150 years, but to this day you can still go there and buy hard drugs or cheap hookers; you can still eat the same greasy food that was served there 100 years back; you can still gaze at the same run-down buildings and run-down people who hang out there. The area is home to sex shops, live peep shows, arcades, drag cabarets, male and female strip bars, and hotels with hourly rates only. Unlike the so-called “Old Montreal” district, where old facades cover up buildings long gutted of their interiors and their character, this intersection preserves not just buildings but the people, businesses and general atmosphere of a past era.

The piece is illustrated by Jean-Pierre Chansigaud (who also illustrated my novel). I am extremely happy I paid him whatever it was to go do some sketches of that block and that old man bar, now that the bar was closed (on purpose to add to the decrepitude that justifies razing the block).  Here’s a couple of the illustrations:

Despite what some readers thought, I think of my first novel, A Fine Ending, as a work of fiction. It certainly has a “non-fiction” aspect to it, in that a real time and place serves as the background to the story, and real people inspire many of the characters. However, the story and the major themes came first, and the events and characters served them. If I’d meant to write a non-fiction chronicle of that time and place, or some sort of autobiography, I would have done the opposite.

I’ve written a lot more non-fiction than fiction and always aim to be as thorough and comprehensive with my research as I can. I didn’t think the subject matter of my book would have been well served by a scholarly treatment, however. Approaching it as a work of fiction allowed me to focus more on the mood and gist of the era than just the facts, and helped make the story arc and cast of characters more universal. (Not to mention, this approach afforded me and a number of people who have characters based on them a certain degree of privacy!) I very much wanted the book to not only be “about the Montreal scene in the 1990s” but also about the end of the 20th century and the lives of 20-somethings in general.

In any case, I assume most novelists draw from personal experience for their writing: jotting down memorable lines and anecdotes for possible future use, remembering remarkable acquaintances to base characters on, etc. Myself, I spent a month before writing the book going through my journals as well as letters and emails to and from friends from the 90s. I compiled a lot of stuff that could be useful, mainly funny lines and dialogue and some longer episodes that could be worked into the book.

Before even agreeing to write the book (which, incidentally, only came about because I was offered a contract to write it), I had drawn up an outline for it, and I kept adding possible scenes to this outline as I scanned through my old writing.

Early on, I decided to use some short stories I’d published in the 90s as chapters, thinking that would make my job a bit easier. (I also only had about six months to write the entire thing!) But the longer stories I decided to insert (“Mush” from Fish Piss Vol. 1 no. 3 and my chapbook “Fly vs. Kitten”, to be precise, plus parts of “Beatrice” and “Clinic” from my “Five Stories (Montreal) chapbook) had their own self-contained world of characters and events, all of which had to be broken apart, re-inserted into the appropriate places in the novel, re-written using the novel’s characters and edited down to remove redundancies. Most importantly, nearly every line had to be modified to reflect the tense, tone and pacing of the rest of the novel. In hindsight, it took a lot longer than if I’d just written those chapters fresh to begin with, but this roundabout approach did help me solidify the right narrative voice. It was very important to me that the novel sound like it was written by a 20-something DURING the 1990s, with the story (and the decade) gradually unfolding through the narrator’s eyes. After working those short stories into the early chapters of the book, I felt had properly “gotten into character” and managed to stick with that voice through the rest of the first draft.

Writing the novel was fun – it basically felt like me pretending to be 25 again — but by the time I finished that first draft, I was anxious to start editing it. I’d written all the stuff I meant to and then some, but just as film footage only becomes a film in the editing room, I knew that it would be the editing that would really pull the novel together.

Before this, I’d mostly edited non-fiction, which is all about clearly explaining things to the reader; with fiction, I discovered, it’s as much about what ISN’T being told to the reader. I would sometimes choose vagueness or mystery over clarity, or try to convey intangibles and moods, instead of facts and background. I much enjoyed this intuitive aspect, using my gut instinct to help turn the assortment of events and characters I’d written into something bigger. There’s something almost magical about fine-tuning a text so it gradually changes tone, or subtly arranging minor scenes so that they amount to a parallel story readers may or may not notice (but can enjoy regardless.) Fiction can be multi-dimensional in a way that most non-fiction can never be. I could have tried to explain the various “messages” of the novel in an essay, but they wouldn’t have had the depth they gained by being gradually revealed over the course of the book. Some “messages” might best be communicated in other ways, and I guess that’s why we have art in all its forms.

Reaching the last pages of the book in the editing phase was even more satisfying than finishing the first draft. Only about half of the first draft survived, and much of what was left was moved around within the story. Many minor characters and scenes were either eliminated or combined together so as to help move the story along more quickly. (God knows how I could have done that if it was supposed to be non-fiction!) A surprising number of pages were cut just by scrupulously removing extraneous words in each line and extraneous lines in each paragraph. My editor and I went through the entire text at least twice before it was christened “the final draft.” It then went through three close edits with the copy editor.

The time spent not thinking about the book in between these phases helped make the remaining necessary changes seem more obvious to me. Some new writing was actually added in the very final stages to flesh out a few scenes and characters that were scarred from all the previous cuts. This being my first novel and all, I worried I’d want to keep changing it until the publisher yanked it from my scribbling hands, but by the time we were proofreading it, only typos and minor grammatical corrections jumped out at me. When it was all done, I was surprised at how closely the novel ended up following the loose outline I’d sketched for it at the very beginning, and thought, “I guess that’s how you do that.”

My editor (Anne Stone) and I were satisfied with the length, the pacing, the ending (which felt extremely important to get right, given the title and all the themes I wanted to wrap up), but we were still too close to the text to guess whether an average reader would enjoy it. The first encouraging sign was when the copy editor, who’d never set foot in Montreal, read it and said that he felt he could now comfortably walk around the city. That made me feel like I’d accomplished one of the many balancing acts, namely making the story be very deeply set in Montreal without making it necessary to know (or care) about which city the story takes place in.

Another balancing act involved making sure that the people who had characters closely based on them would be happy with how they and the episodes in the book were portrayed. It turned out that keeping the characters somewhat vaguely defined (I used very few physical descriptions of them, for example) helped provide some privacy while also making the characters feel more universal. (Your average reader seems to be pretty good at filling out the details with their own imaginations, and I’m not much of a fan of overly florid or descriptive fiction myself.)

Shortly after the launch, I was very happy to hear some readers in their early 20s say things like “that’s exactly like me and my friends!” The fact that some people said they were compelled to stay up all night finishing the book was also encouraging – one worry I had was that the book was too much of a collection of episodes, but I guess they were tied tightly enough together to make people want to know what was going to happen next. (Many of the friends who were around during the era covered by the book told me they wished I had included this or that crazy party or character or episode, but I think that keeping the book short and tight was crucial to avoid excess repetitiveness.)

The most satisfying feedback I received from readers was in the form of comments or emails saying they got what I was getting at with the main themes about personal and social responsibility (or lack thereof) and the “gradually darkening” feeling (as one reviewer put it) that marked the fin-de-siècle.

In the end, there is not much I would have done differently: my take on the 90s in Montreal and the end of the century from a personal perspective is done. I’m looking forward to using this experience to write some very different fiction in the future.

I’ve also begun posting a bit more material to this site — see new posts on the video-photos and blog sections. I’ll also be posting a couple more times to the Broken Pencil blog (see links in the previous news post) until I pass the reins of resident blogger to someone else in mid-July.

Lastly, another review of my novel A Fine Ending appeared in the May 7 issue of the Suburban newspaper in Montreal, although the review is not available online.