Notes From An Attic: The Never-Ending Vacation, Maimondes' Autograph, Promoting The Book, And More

Two months since I've touched this blog? Apparently so. And a very odd two months it's been. To recap: in early October, while on vacation in Spain, I received photos of water seeping outside the door to my house, which water proved to be the result of a toilet valve failing and 48 hours' worth of uncontrolled release of water. The landlord quickly shut it off, but sheetrock, ceiling, and wooden floors all needed replacing. He predicted three weeks or more.

More. If the most optimistic forecasts are correct, I'll have been out of the house for three months by the time I get to move back in. Christmas and New Years will be elsewhere. Fortunately "elsewhere" isn't as onerous as it might be: after a week and a half in a horrible, expensive, poorly-run "extended stay" hotel, a Facebook friend offered me one of his airbnb properties, this not being the high season, and I moved into an attic on his property. It has its down side.

First rule: don't be tall. Photo credit: Special K

Also, I packed for a three-to-four-week stay here, which meant I grabbed a few clothes and some kitchen stuff that was either in excess of what I needed or not enough. There's a stove (oven doesn't work) and a microwave, but cooking has been a problem. When the weather got cold, I had to buy some new shoes (fine: the winter shoes I bought in January sucked, and REI will take them back) and a down jacket thing (already have one, but can't get to it). Fortunately, the place is centrally located, which means I can walk a lot of places, and driving isn't quite the pain it is down south, where you have to drive places to get places. You kind of have to get out of where you are before you can start going where you're going, if you see what I mean. Here, it's a lot more like living in a city.

So I'm still living out of a suitcase, eating out much too much for my comfort (both dietary and financial), but things could be worse: the main focus of the past couple of months has been assuring a smooth launch for The History of Rock & Roll, Vol. 1, which has certainly been interesting. Fortunately, so far most of the reviews have been very positive, and I've mostly done interviews with really intelligent people, like Gil Roth, whom I'd never heard of before, and Michaelangelo Matos, whom I had. There have been some radio interviews, most notably on KQED's Forum, which had the most chaotic, ill-prepared, ignorant host I'd ever dealt with. He'd never so much as opened the book, knew nothing of its subject, and couldn't keep the conversation on track. Unfortunately, I had a severe attack of cedar fever just as the mike went live, so I wasn't at my best initially, either. Fortunately, I recovered. The host...maybe not so much. And there was the Bellowing Celt who called in, completely bonkers. I'm still shaken, but I suspect that's the worst of it.

That cedar fever, too, has slowed me down some: there was a cold snap in Austin and the trees went wild. Me, I went to New York and Montreal, where it was cold enough, caught some kind of flu in all the subways and airplanes and trains and whatnot, so I had to deal with that and the cedar disease when I got back. I haven't been very active, to put it mildly. Oh, and in November there was the Texas Book Fair, where all the music book writers were up against one another, so who do you think got the crowds: Thomas Dolby, me, or the woman who wrote a biography of Guy Clark, beloved late Texas songwriter, who, instead of having a panel in the Capitol building, had the Paramount Theater at her disposal, and had several local high-profile songwriters on board to do some of Guy's songs? I got to the signing tent, there was a huge line...but not for me, of course: her publisher had sensibly augmented Barnes & Nobel's supply. B&N only had 30 books for me to sign, and five were for the store. There were a lot more at Book People, though, for the official release event, and I even had to go down again to sign another raft of them there. (They have 'em on mail-order, too, if you want one).

Still there, newly renovated for your Manhattan office address. Brill himself was in the menswear biz. 

This is all pretty un-chronological, I see, but at the end of November, I went to New York for a week on a project totally unrelated to the book (but got a bit of promo, if you can call five minutes' worth of interview on an AM New York Jesus station "promo": who knew New York had a Jesus station called THE ANSWER? Who knew New York had a Jesus station at all? What can the listenership of an AM station like that be?). Before I left, though, I decided to go to a couple of museums as long as I was in town, and it really felt good.

MOMA had the first US retrospective of Surrealist painter Francis Picabia, whom I'd mostly known as a major pain in the ass to the entire Paris art scene throughout Cubism, Surrealism, and beyond. It wasn't until after I saw the show that I learned that at the age of 15, Francis, son of a wealthy man, learned to paint so that he could copy his father's collection of old Spanish paintings, replace them with his copies, and sell the originals to dealers so he could buy expensive stamps for his stamp collection. That, however, is consistent with the rest of his life, as is the excerpt from one of his writings that gives the show its title: Our Heads Are Round So Our Thoughts Can Change Direction. His thoughts certainly did: austere drawings of machines that actually do nothing, colorful abstracts, odd cartoon-like stuff, bland but disturbing hyper-realist oils, some of them sourced from soft-porn magazines, during the German occupation of France, and, if your feet are tired, you can sit and watch a film he and René Clair made called entr'acte, which was shown during the intermission (entr'acte) of an Erik Satie ballet. It's exhausting and goofy, and the show made my day. Heads off to Picabia!

The show I knew I wanted to see, however, was up at the Met, and I devoted a day to it: Jerusalem, 1000-1400, Every People Under Heaven.  It was a bit odd: having not quite returned from a trip to Spain to try to get a handle on the three-culture Christian-Jewish-Muslim culture there, from which Crusaders went off to try to "reclaim" the Holy Land, here I was in New York watching the story from the other end of the telescope. It's not a particularly arty show, because two of the religions involved weren't much on representational art, and also because a lot of the prize exhibits are books. Delicate and tending towards fading, they're displayed in darkish rooms, and you really have to want to look at them -- and you need to to get the show's message.  Here's a beautiful illuminated manuscript, obviously French 14th century, groaning with gold leaf, showing a biblical scene. The lettering's in Hebrew, though, and it was used by the Jewish community of Tours. Here is a deluxe fold-out map of Jerusalem, prepared for tourists -- or, rather, for a tourist, since it's hand-lettered and hand-illustrated. Of course, the guy who did it had never been there, but it's still amazingly accurate. Over here, a letter asking that some hostages be freed -- the caption says such letters are quite common from this period -- signed by Maimondes! That gave me an electric shock and once again reminded me that this story I've been chasing -- whatever it is -- spreads over a huge area. I have to say, the show is huge, painstakingly fair to all sides, and not only fills in a lot of blanks on the three-culture story for me, but also shows that the idea of the tourist trap is millenia old: lots of the stuff on display was made for pilgrims to take back to Europe with them. Only open until January 8, so get down there if you can.

Most of the rest of my time has been spent waiting for the house down south to be finished. At some time after the first of the year, I'm confident that my publisher will make an offer for Vol. 2 of the book, and I can get back to doing what I do best: writing. I may attempt a couple of signing tours -- I'm trying to work one up with Amtrak so that I can take the train up the West Coast -- which I'll have to finance myself. But that's in the future: right now I want to move back into my house, sit on my couch, sleep in my bed, and cook in my kitchen again. Three months is too damn long. When you're walking up Madison Avenue (to the Grand Central Oyster Bar: some things never change) and you realize that you're taking a vacation from your vacation and soon will be on a train to Montreal to visit friends as a vacation from the vacation to the vacation, you realize how much you miss having a home.

Of course, I've been feeling that way for about two years now, and the recent election only firmed up my decision to leave again once this next book is finished. I could, and no doubt will, go into that in some detail. But not today. Today is Christmas Eve in the attic. I have to stockpile some food for the weekend. Ho ho ho, y'all.

Midsummer East Coast Tour, Canada And Back

Why the train is relaxing.

There are better times to visit Montreal than the ones I've visited in the past. When I lived in Europe, I'd go as I left the country after SXSW, stopping in New York, then heading north. The trouble was, late March up there is like early February in other places, and I've had to make my way through loads of snow and slush just to get from one place to another. Not to mention the time the train back to New York froze and the rescue vehicle coming to fix it fell over on its way up from Albany. But summer, summer's very different.

In fact, this year, Montreal was suffering higher temperatures than New York, which was odd indeed, and I was beginning to regret having packed the jeans jacket I figured I'd be needing. Not to worry; it rained the day I spent on the train, and by the time I got there, it was considerably milder.

This was to be a quick trip, to come down from the New York experience before heading back to Texas to start doing publicity for one of the two books I have coming out this year, so I wasn't in any particular rush to do anything when I got off the train except check into my hotel and get dinner. Fortunately my friends Terry and Patricia had done research on the latter and were at the station to hustle me into a cab. Dinner turned out to be up a side street around the corner from the hotel in a restaurant called Bonaparte. It was first-class: absolutely traditional French cooking -- I had a goose-leg confit with a mushroom ragout, and Terry and Patricia had skate wings and veal -- done perfectly. The big surprise was the wine: it was an extensive list, so I stuck to what I knew, and picked a Pic-St.-Loup I'd never heard of from a winery that seems to be brand-new. A glance at their website doesn't show the wine we had, which had a Japanese name, but I know the area they're located in, and the rest of their stuff looks very interesting.

On the way to the restaurant we noted a video projected on the side of one of the buildings: a black woman was running towards us, fleeing a wall of flames. Terry said there was a 19th century woman who was accused of arson who'd become a symbol of racism and sexism. On the way out, though, she'd been replaced by a young Jackie Robinson, who'd gotten his start in the minor leagues in Montreal. Apparently there are a number of these things around the city, called Montréal en Histoires, with an app that can help people discover where and what they are.

Terry was anxious that I see the Pompeii exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, so Sunday we hustled down there to discover a line out the door and down the block. So much for that, but there was also the Redpath Natural History Museum at McGill University, right nearby. Terry described it as an instructive look at an institution of a previous century struggling to catch up with changing attitudes, particularly in its cultures-of-the-world section. I knew what he meant: the natural history museum in New York features quotes from Theodore Roosevelt about Manliness and Duty set in metal letters right in the marble walls, and as I waited for my ride to Nyack, I gazed at the huge bronze statue of him outside, on his horse, leading the inferior races -- an Indian in a big warbonnet and a mostly-naked Negro -- into a glorious future. They may have to deal with that some day. But for some reason the Redpath was closed on Sunday.

Trying to salvage the day, we headed to the Fur Building, a nearly block-sized structure downtown that had held the warehouses for furs, back when that was one of Montreal's biggest businesses. Today, the fur companies have left, and artists and galleries, happy to have such huge rooms with long windows at their disposal, have moved in, along with a couple of dance studios, martial-arts instructors, and yoga studios. We'd been there before, and the galleries never seem to be open at once, so you pick your way down the hall to see what's open. Of course, it was August, hardly high season in the art world, so there wasn't much to see. A couple of galleries were open, but I doubt they were showing their A-list clients. There was an amusing video shot under some elevated subway tracks, the images heavily treated, and one mysterious and effective installation where objects were placed in square columns of frosted glass. Some of them were moving, some not, and the amount of visibility on each side varied. It was clever, which was more than you could say about most of the rest of the stuff.

Having arted, we made it back to my hotel, rested our feet, and finally set out for an experience we knew would be deeply satisfying: dinner at Cuisine Szechuan, which I consider one of the best Chinese restaurants in North America. Since the last time I was in Montreal, Terry and Patricia have befriended the owner, who happened not to be in this time. Still, the place was superb again, and since they turned the ordering over to me (except for starting with both Szechuan-style -- in a tart sauce with Szechuan pepper and toasted sesame seeds -- and Hunan-style -- in a peanut-based sauce -- dumplings, traditional favorites going back years in this place) we wound up with a bunch of stuff nobody had had before: a meatball soup with glass noodles, crispy chicken with a lot of stir-fried vegetables and a sauce I'd never heard of before, and a casserole of eggplant and fried tofu in a garlicky sauce. (I think there was one other dish, but it's not coming back to me: it was one of the ones whose leftovers they packed up for the next day's breakfast). Two great meals in two nights.

Terry and I got into the Pompeii show on Monday, and it was very much worth it. A lot of what one goes to see at Pompeii isn't exactly moveable, nor were all the first-class artifacts taken on the road for this, but the show (which I can't seem to find moving elsewhere, although it showed in Toronto last year) brilliantly exposes daily life in Pompeii (and the other two towns that got hit by the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius, Herculanaeum and Stabiae, the latter a tiny resort town that never gets mentioned) through intelligent labels and well-lit displays. Sports, sex, business, daily life, all get their rooms, and then one walks into a room with a dramatically-lit cast of a dog that died in agony and the four walls projecting the progress of the disaster, the chronology of which we know because the Plinys, father and son, were living nearby and went to rescue friends of theirs from the eruption. Pliny the Elder's lungs got filled with volcanic dust and he died during the rescue, while his son, when it was over, wrote a detailed letter to the historian Tacitus about what had happened. It's a dramatic use of space: after we've seen all the artifacts, the decorations, the silverware, the shrines to the household gods, the statues of unknown people, we're in the destruction. The next room has casts. Everything was covered by ash so quickly that people were suffocated, and when the ash hardened, their bodies disappeared. When these hollow areas are discovered, casting material is poured into them and the cast is excavated. There are men, women, a child, all at the moment of death. In the next room, a film shot by U.S. Army personnel stationed in the area documents a 1944 eruption, the latest major one.

After this bravura display, the rest of the museum could have been a letdown, but it wasn't. A fine Toulouse-Lautrec show had many of his familiar images, but put them into the social context of his circle and Bohemian Paris in general, and was just large enough. The permanent collection, like those in many regional art museums, is largely filled with the best work of second-tier artists, enjoyable in its way. At least that was true for the older stuff: downstairs there is some first-rate stuff by "name" modern and contemporary artists and some surprises by folks I'd never heard of, not all of whom were Canadian. There was a separate gallery for Canadian stuff, a design gallery, and lots more, but I began to get art burn after a while, so we left and headed to the Redpath, which was quite a let-down after what we'd both seen and, yes, trying its best to put things into the current cultural context.

I was pooped, so we headed back to the hotel to meet Patricia, who'd been studying at Terry's office at Concordia University. She was going to take a French proficiency test, passing which will mean she can work in Quebec. Make no mistake: French is the first language in Montreal, even if it isn't for a lot of its population. It's a shred of cultural identity for Quebec to hold on to, and they do so like pit bulls. We took a bus to Point St. Charles, the tough Irish working-class neighborhood that's very slowly gentrifying, so I could see the current progress on their house. (Others who are interested should check out Terry's blog on the subject). We had no idea where to go for dinner, so we decided not to go far. Across the street, as a matter of fact. Chez Dallaire is a hipster bar in a non-hipster zone, but it seems to attract enough people to keep going and has added a small but interesting menu. Across the street is a place I have yet to try, Boom-J's, run by an affable and savvy Jamaican. So while it's a bit premature to suggest the Point as a destination for dining, I bet in five years it'll have some great stuff to offer. As for now, we had pork rillettes in a little glass jar for appetizers and "grilled cheese" sandwiches for the main course: toasted high-quality bread enveloped a wad of smoked meat -- Montreal pastrami -- and had a tangy cheddar-like cheese melted over it. Along with the craft beers they pour, a satisfying meal. These guys look like they'll make it.

Happy diners, Chez Dallaire

Having had a "sandwich vietnamien" that was made from canned tuna in the museum, I was anxious for the real deal, and Montreal's Chinatown was just down the street from my hotel. With Terry and Patricia sidelined by work for much of the day, I'd have time to find the place Terry had told me about when I was expressing my disappointment with the museum sandwich: real Vietnamese banh mi. I had Terry's instructions with me, but no such place was in evidence. I walked the streets of Chinatown, untempted by the Chinese places (I'd just been in the best of them), and finally settling for a place with a specialty of "soupe tonkinoise," which, because Quebecers don't like foreign languages, means pho. This place had a line in front of it when I first passed, but by the time I'd scoured the rest of the neighborhood, it had calmed down, and despite its weird name (Pho Bang New York, possibly connected to a New York restaurant also called Pho Bang) I went in and had a pho that had the best tasting broth I've had in a long time. It's at 1001 Boulevard St-Laurent if you're in the neighborhood. And another cool thing was stepping into a tiny shop to see if they had gong fu shoes, which make wonderful house slippers, and not only finding them, but finding big enough ones to fit my feet, a sign that Chinese people are indeed getting biger. Ten bucks Canadian, too. Can't beat that.

The latter half of the afternoon was meeting up with Terry and taking a whirlwind tour of the magnificent Atwater Market to pick up groceries he needed and admire the just-in Quebec strawberry crop, which I wished I could teleport back to my place in Texas. The tomatoes also looked great. After depositing this at the house, we decided to visit another gentrifying neighborhood, this one with a lot of history. For a long time, much longer than was healthy, Terry was married to a woman he'd met in college (we both went to Antioch). I performed the ceremony, in fact, with my Universal Life Church credentials. Eventually, the marriage fell apart, divorce papers were filed, and much ugliness ensued, with the bright spot being Terry's deepening affair with one of his students, Patricia, whom he followed to Japan, where she was teaching. During Terry's previous marriage, they'd lived in a suburb called Verdun, where I visited many, many times. It was gritty, working-class, and not that easy to get to on the Metro, either. But it did have potential, and now some of it is being realized. Terry remembered that Wellington, a main street a quick bus ride away, had a number of good restaurants on it, so we headed down there. Alas, it may have had, but like many pioneers, they'd gone out of business or been forced to change menus. True, there were two Indian places, which I certainly would have appreciated way back when, but we stumbled on a fish joint that doubled as a market: Queue de Poisson. They do excellent fish and chips, the grilled monkfish I had was perfect, and there's a good selection of Canadian craft beers. (A note on these: Quebec microbrewers seem to be chasing French beer as an ideal. Folks, French beer just sucks. Try to embrace a teeny part of your English -- or even American -- heritage for at least a couple of your beers. Thanks.) Once again we ate outside, once again the young folks who ran the restaurant did a great job. First Point St. Charles, then Verdun. There's hope for Montreal yet.

Sunset, Hudson, NY railroad station

I said good-bye to Terry and Patricia when they got off the bus and then rode it the rest of the way to my hotel. The next morning, Amtrak took its sweet time getting me to New York, but I managed dinner and a good night's sleep, then spent the next day shopping for salt-cured anchovies (at Eataly, of all places, and a good sight cheaper than in Oakland) and got to JFK with lots of time to spare.

I was headed home, and happy about that. Less happy, though, that that home was in Texas. Not that I'd gotten any inspiration where to go next (which won't be for a while). Jersey City has pockets that are real nice, and much larger areas that just exude despair. I hadn't seen enough of Nyack, Hoboken was out of the question, and forget Canada. Still looking. I've got time.

Eating Québec (And Elsewhere)

The vacation I ended last week was intended to clear my mind in preparation for the hard work of writing my book, which I have just a year to do. I couldn't think of any better way to do it than to fly to New York, meet a friend in Jersey City, eat Indian food there, then take the train up to Montreal for a week. I figured it'd be coming on to peak foliage season, and I was right. So right, in fact, that the Monday I went up was the first day Amtrak added the Dome Car to the run: a car with a glass dome on it for maximum sightseeing.

It's not easy to take pictures from a speeding train, but this gives you an idea. The glass is thick, so it mutes some of the colors, and I decided to check out the special equipment to see what advantages it would bring.

The view was nice, but the car was crowded. The head in the picture belongs to a fat woman who sat down at a table meant for six and spread her crafting supplies all over it and played with them while ignoring the scenery. So this was as close as I got. I spent most of the time listening to green-shirted folks with "National Parks Service Volunteer" on arm-patches talk about the landscape and the history ("Ethan Allen, who ran the Green Mountain Boys? He was a thug. They were all thugs. Fortunately, they were our thugs." Pretty accurate assessment, actually) and passed on the occasional bit of misinformation: water hyacinth is not an alga, sorry. But Lake Champlain, like most places with water in them, is pretty choked by them now.

Having a ten-foot raise in your view doesn't really help, especially when you can't get to it, so I listened to the Parks Service folks for a while and went back to my seat. The upper reaches of the hills were bursting out in color, particularly the red maples and sumac trees, which do a darker shade of red. It was a great show.

Then the sun went down and the rather boring ride between Plattsburg and the border station at Rouses Point and then into Canada ends in a rather dramatic view of Montreal all lit up, which I, of course, forgot to snap.

No matter; I was among friends, ensconced in an ultra-deluxe hotel I'd scored rooms in via a discounter, on the edge of Old Montreal, which is picturesque, at least, although it tends to be clogged with tourists. My usual guides, Terry and Patricia, were on hand to help me through a city I learn just as I leave -- every time! -- and we decided on a well-reviewed fish-and-chips place not far away. It was pretty good, especially for someone like me who hasn't had fish and chips in an age, but only pretty good, and it had all kinds of breadings, which I didn't understand, and a lot of other kind of nouveau trappings. I lost the address, so if you feel inclined to challenge my opinion or check it out yourself, it's on the edge of Old Montreal. Somewhere.

The next night, though, was filled with anticipation. Ages ago, Terry and Patricia took me to Cuisine Szechuan on Avenue Guy. Its huge menu was filled with stuff I never thought I'd see in a restaurant outside of China, and it's always been superb. Terry reported a downward slide in the two years since I'd been, but he'd heard it was back in action. There was no way we'd miss this, so off we went.

Left to right: fried lotus root sticks, twice-fried fish, Chinese spinach with pickled Szechuan chiles.  Grease stains in bowls and on plate due to Szechuan dumplings in chile sauce and Szechuan dumplings with peanut sauce.

The bad news was there were only three of us, so the amount of stuff we could order was limited. Not shown was a dish a guy cooks in a wok on your table, which was very good. The lotus root was like French fries, they're that starchy, but with a completely different texture and, of course, green onions and two kinds of chiles lending their flavors to the oil the lotus root's fried in. The fish was also wonderful, although I didn't get as much of it as I'd liked, and the spinach wasn't overwhelmed by the pickled chiles, although they were certainly powerful, and I intend to find some next time I'm shopping at the Vietnamese-Chinese supermarket. The appetizers were, unsurprisingly, also great: those cloud-like dumplings with a little ball of pork hidden in them somewhere, one batch swimming in a delicious deep red sauce, the other napped with a peanut butter and soy sauce with other ingredients. You don't want to know how inexpensive this place is, but you definitely do need to know how to find it next time you're in Montreal:

Don't forget to tip: the place attracts lots of Chinese students from China, and the staff complains loudly of their parsimony.

The next evening we somehow managed to pull off a coup. Patricia had been wanting to go to Joe Beef, which seems to have replaced Au Pied de Cochon as the in restaurant in Montreal. Like Pied de Cochon, it's been visited by, and raved about by, Anthony Bourdain. Unlike Pied de Cochon, it doesn't post its menu on its website, but I pulled it up and the first thing I saw was a photo of Ai Wei Wei with a kitten, so I figured it'd be okay. Then followed a comedy of sorts in which Patricia attempted to use the website to make a reservation and discovered they were booked up until Christmas or something, then called and was told there'd be a table tonight -- or was it tomorrow? At any rate, we headed down there secure that we'd made a reservation and stood in line in the freezing evening temperature and the young woman with the iPad came and told us she couldn't find our reservation. So we stood around a bit more and finally got escorted to a tight table with windows onto the street, and discovered there's no menu.

Or, rather, there's a menu, but it's written on a chalkboard above the bar, surrounded by tiny Christmas lights, and impossible to read. That's all the menu you get. So you twist in your seat, squint at the words (all of them in French, but that usually doesn't faze me), try to make stuff out, and try to construct a meal out of that. Eventually, crafty Terry and Patricia chose two things I don't like, with him getting "veal liver" (which I remember being called calf's liver) in a red wine reduction, and her getting trout prepared some way that she deemed excellent, neither of which I was going to try. I got pasta with lobster, since I hadn't had lobster in over a decade. Oh, and now it's time for the wine: this menu is written in even smaller letters on its chalkboard and is in all kinds of languages. Naturally, a party of three can't crowd around it with the waiter to discuss it, so I volunteered myself and wound up with a very, very good Ardèche Syrah. Luck of the draw, I assure you.

So by the time the starter arrived (salads for T&P, croquetas made with Montreal smoked meat for me) I was pissed off. Not allowing diners full access to the menu and wine list is just plain arrogant. Diners at a place as upmarket as this need time to weigh choices when spending this much money. (Well, actually, it's not that expensive, but it's expensive enough that you want to choose well). They definitely need extended access to the wine list to make a good choice. Hell, during the meal, Patricia spotted the word cheval on the blackboard. I probably wouldn't have ordered horsemeat, but the waiter hadn't even mentioned it while running down the list. Who knows what I missed during my hurried confab at the wine board? We left feeling a bit mistreated -- or I did, at least. I felt like I had a shot at a wonderful meal but hadn't had the opportunity to make a fully informed choice. I liked what appeared to be, from our small sample, Joe Beef's approach to food, but I definitely did not feel like going back. I should also note that the "croquetas," a common Spanish tapa that, in its simplest form, is sort of like a Tater Tot made from mashed potatoes and then gets more complicated as you put other things in with the potatoes, didn't have potatoes in it. There was a sour taste, and I never tasted any of that famous smoked meat (aka pastrami in the USA). I was enjoying the wine too much to pay attention, but boy, when I got back to the hotel and ran into the bathroom, I realized what had happened: they'd substituted goat cheese, to which I'm violently allergic, for the potatoes. That's what the sour taste I didn't like was. Not their fault, but a printed menu might have mentioned that. And there wasn't one.

It's worth noting that across the street from Joe Beef is a pizzeria called Geppetto, and later that week, after I'd come back from Québec City, Terry got three pizzas to go from there. They could have been the best designer pizzas I'd ever had: all three had a tomato sauce base, but in each case, the sauce was different, aimed at complementing the toppings. Just subtle differences, true, but it's the mark of a serious place, and I'll happily go for a sitdown meal there any time.

I interrupted my Montreal stay for a quick trip to Québec City, the provincial capital and scene of a lot of Canadian and American history. I wasn't sure what was there, actually, just wanted to see another piece of the province I've been visiting off and on since the '70s. Unfortunately, when I checked in at my hotel (a charming place where my room was just a tad too small), I was told there would be five cruise ships in the harbor the next day, and 25,000 tourists in the street. Fortunately, the lady in the hotel said, they'd stay in the "lower city" and wouldn't be rampaging up where I was. I had no idea what she was talking about, having just arrived on the train, but I'd find out the next day.

Dinner that evening was at one of the older houses in town (not as old as the town by any means because the Brits bombed the hell out of it in 1760, and caught the mostly-wooden city on fire), a semi-hokey-looking place called Aux Anciens Canadiens, featuring Quebecois food. It was an impressive menu, although I knew that the real deal was fairly simple, and, in fact, that's what I went for: the mixed plate with two kinds of meat pie (tourtière), pig's knuckle, meatball stew, and "salt pork rillettes," which sure looked like cracklins to me. The leg of Inuit-caught wild caribou with Labrador tea spice, cooked sous-vide with a green alder sauce was extremely tempting, but not the price, not even at 85¢ to the Canadian dollar.

The next day I was hoping for a kind of historical museum of the province, but the nearest thing was to walk a bit up the hill and into the Citadel, built by the British to protect their investment in this city at the narrows of the St. Lawrence River once they'd bombarded it and chased the French away. Security was high due to the visit of the Governor-General, who has a residence there, and our excellent teenage guide ordered us to stick close to her and not go off and investigate stuff on our own because there was a good chance people disregarding this would be frog-marched off the property and/or arrested. (Not that this stopped a couple of Japanese tourists from running towards a landing military helicopter at one point in the tour. I was kind of hoping it'd either shoot them or land on them, to be honest.) It was a bracing walk on a chilly morning, but I rather enjoyed it.

Québec means "narrows," and, at 700 meters, this is as narrow as the St. Lawrence gets. Enemy in sight at far left. 

At noon, we got to watch the firing of the salute.

Ka...

BOOM.

The museum in the Citadel proved to be boring, concentrating on the regiment's time in World War I rather than the history of the Citadel, so a quick turn and I was gone.

Next was the Plains of Abraham, the battlefield where, in 20 minutes, the French lost Canada to the British and both sides lost their generals. The French one, Montcalm, was from Montpellier, where I used to live and where his family's seat is now a tourist restaurant.

Ground Zero for the Cajuns? Uh, no.

This battle, of course, meant the final expulsion of the French farmers from Acadia, the parts of New Brunswick and Nova Scotia where they'd been living happily for about a hundred years until forces larger than they decided the land could be better used.  A couple of shiploads became homeless people who drifted down the Atlantic coast of America, finally arriving in Haiti, where they hated it and eventually escaped to Louisiana, whose governor gave them a ton of land. Mostly swamp, of course, but at least the peasants didn't settle in New Orleans. I wanted to pay a visit to it as the place where the whole Cajun story started, but as it turned out, the French had been moving them on for some time by the time the battle happened. Oh, well.

I then decided to head to the Museum of Civilization, a kind of undefined museum in the lower Old Town where Terry told me he thought a historical exhibition on Québec had been moved. I knew they were having an exhibition of classical Greek stuff that was being heavily hyped. And after a bit of getting lost, I found my way down the steep hill, not looking forward to going back up, and gazing over the edge at one point to see a street deep in tourist gridlock. Pickpockets would faint for the choices down there, I thought, but fortunately where I was going was elsewhere. Turned out that the Greeks were from the Greco-Roman museum in Berlin, where I'd seen them years ago, and, idly wondering whether the pornographic pottery was in the show (I'd come upon it when a high-school art class was sitting there, impassively sketching and I noticed that the pots showed a bunch of very graphic hetero- and homosexual goings-on; this being Germany it's likely nobody cared one way or the other), went down to the Québec stuff. I was pretty bushed by now, so I didn't really give the exhibit as much attention as I should have (and I have to say it was mounted and lit oddly, so it wasn't as easy to decipher as it should have been). It did manage to clear up the whole British-French thing, as well as the anti-British thing that had Canada declare its independence (albeit within the British Commonwealth), as well as reminding me of the incredibly destructive iron grip of the Catholic Church on French Canada, which lasted well into the 20th century. Another bit of history was in a park at the top of the hill: this statue of a man Terry's descended from, the first settler in Québec City.

Limping by now, I went back to the hotel to put my feet up for a while, and later went down to a place I'd seen earlier, the Clarendon Hotel, whose menu looked as good as any (attempting to get my network to come up with suggestions was unproductive; the only concrete suggestions were Schwartz's and Au Pied du Cochon, both of which are in Montreal), and turned out to be quite good, although the hotel itself seems locked in the past. The food was excellent for the '80s, and I was given a couple of rolls with this little device, which I figure must've been in the basement for decades:

Not a world-beating photo. Sorry.

If you look carefully at that thing in the distance, it's a pewter cylinder with a grid in it, on which sit little spheres of butter, each with nubs on them. The most antique serving-device I've seen. The rolled-up smoked whitefish and salmon was very good, and the roast wild boar tremendous. Not as au fait as Joe Beef, nor was the wine as good, but perfectly okay.

It rained the next day as I headed back to Montreal, but it was finished once I got there, and that night was the night of Geppetto's. Fall had fallen on the province of Quebec, and I was headed back to New York for a meeting with my publisher and a visit to my agent. And a quick shopping trip to Chinatown in search of an odd ingredient, which I found.

I'm back now, the book has been started (albeit not to my total satisfaction, since I'm still finding my feet, having not attempted a narrative this large in a while), and it'll be a while before I hit the road again. But this sure was fun.

* * *

Intrepid readers who were as excited about the Indian cuisine in Jersey City as I was will want to read this report of a place I wanted to try but didn't. I'd gladly attempt a story for some magazine about this neighborhood if they'd fly me back!