Disobedient Villeray, marched past my house tonight, making a b-line for
St. Laurent Grand Prix street festival. The street festival is an
annual event here in Little Italy. The streets are shut down and a
whole lot of girls wearing so much perfume that you can smell them ten
blocks away, and a whole lot of guys with a half-bucket of gel in their
hair, gather in cafes and restaurants and also spend
time leaning into the hoods of the expensive looking cars that are
parked all along the closed streets beneath various tents plastered with
corporate logos.
As Laura likes to describe it, all we see here are the extremes of the performance of masculinity and femininity. If you are a male then you are an uber-male and you swagger about and discuss how amazing it is that this car or that car is painted orange and has seven gas tanks that all shoot fire at the same time. If you are an uber-woman then you must spend the whole night ignoring this talk and clacking at your cell-phone with your elongated bright nails while trying to balance on your towering heels. You must imagine yourself to be better than everything.
I would not have missed this non-meeting of the minds for the world. The manifestation de casserole meets the Grand Prix. As Villeray passed down St. Zotique, I jumped into my flip-flops and followed the procession.
This is not the downtown anarchist procession, mind you. There was no silly violence. There were children here, riding on the shoulders of their parents. There were grandmothers. There was even a man in a motorized wheelchair. The police followed, but it was clear they were not planning to act or react. They had smiles on their faces. They moved ahead and blocked the road for the march. Symbiosis. Anyhow, they should be happy; they are all going to get fat new TVs and tropical vacations with all the overtime pay they've gathered.
As the protesters moved up through the Grand Prix crowd, pushing them back to the margins with the street-wide banners they carried, the main reaction I was able to read from the crowd was surprise and disdain. A few kids in the crowd watched with dropped jaws. I hope they ask a lot of questions when they go home and I hope their parents can't answer any of them.
A few people cheered--a lot more gave the march a thumbs down as the clanging pots drowned out the loud techno music that was blasting out of this restaurant and that one. Security guards and nervous car owners stood protectively in front of the hot-rod cars, and the swag vendors scowled.
"You're all a bunch of fucking losers! Losers!!" One man, in a red Ferrari jumpsuit yelled, following along beside us. He put his hand up to his forehead to make the "L" sign (backwards, unfortunately). The girls in the restaurants, meanwhile, looked up from their texting with disaffected disgust and then looked back down. It was honestly a lot of fun.
As Laura likes to describe it, all we see here are the extremes of the performance of masculinity and femininity. If you are a male then you are an uber-male and you swagger about and discuss how amazing it is that this car or that car is painted orange and has seven gas tanks that all shoot fire at the same time. If you are an uber-woman then you must spend the whole night ignoring this talk and clacking at your cell-phone with your elongated bright nails while trying to balance on your towering heels. You must imagine yourself to be better than everything.
I would not have missed this non-meeting of the minds for the world. The manifestation de casserole meets the Grand Prix. As Villeray passed down St. Zotique, I jumped into my flip-flops and followed the procession.
This is not the downtown anarchist procession, mind you. There was no silly violence. There were children here, riding on the shoulders of their parents. There were grandmothers. There was even a man in a motorized wheelchair. The police followed, but it was clear they were not planning to act or react. They had smiles on their faces. They moved ahead and blocked the road for the march. Symbiosis. Anyhow, they should be happy; they are all going to get fat new TVs and tropical vacations with all the overtime pay they've gathered.
As the protesters moved up through the Grand Prix crowd, pushing them back to the margins with the street-wide banners they carried, the main reaction I was able to read from the crowd was surprise and disdain. A few kids in the crowd watched with dropped jaws. I hope they ask a lot of questions when they go home and I hope their parents can't answer any of them.
A few people cheered--a lot more gave the march a thumbs down as the clanging pots drowned out the loud techno music that was blasting out of this restaurant and that one. Security guards and nervous car owners stood protectively in front of the hot-rod cars, and the swag vendors scowled.
"You're all a bunch of fucking losers! Losers!!" One man, in a red Ferrari jumpsuit yelled, following along beside us. He put his hand up to his forehead to make the "L" sign (backwards, unfortunately). The girls in the restaurants, meanwhile, looked up from their texting with disaffected disgust and then looked back down. It was honestly a lot of fun.
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