(For the record, even though it must seem so – given the recent end of my lengthy France travelogue, visiting French cities – on either side of the Atlantic – is not the sole determinant of where we spend our holidays. However, Montreal is close enough to Ottawa to afford us a delightful getaway weekend spot. So one recent weekend, get away we did.)
Two major highlights: first a visit to the Musée des Beaux Arts that continued to reinforce my growing appreciation for art galleries. In this case, the main attraction was an exhibit by an artist who is generally held to be one of the best – certainly among the most prolific – representatives of an art style called “Fauve”, Kees Van Dongen. Based on personal observation, I came away thinking that “fauve” must be French for “My paint box only came with five colours and they’re all damned near fluorescent in their brilliance”. (As it turns out, “fauve” in fact is French for “wild beast”, so the use of garish colour is not entirely out of place.)
Among other renowned fauvists, you will find even more familiar (or in my case, “familiar” period, since Van Dongen was utterly unknown to me before this visit) names like Henri Matisse and Georges Braque, with influences in serious art power names like Van Gogh, Cezanne and Gaugin.
Van Dongen, it turns out, was eminently practical and, long before he started earning serious money from his art, he used prostitutes as models because, as one illuminating caption informed us, a prostitute would sit for hours in exchange for the price of a cup of coffee. With some of his paintings, he was equally economical in self identification, which yields at least one work that serves as a (surely unintentional) warning: a brilliantly rendered woman of the night with the bold black signature, “VD”.
Here are a couple examples, and you can find lots more simply by setting your Google search bar to images and searching “Kees Van Dongen paintings”.
Not all of his works are drawn from red light districts. He also painted a number of circus performers (you won’t be surprised to learn that his apparently sparse palette warmed readily to clowns) and several portraits I especially enjoyed from a trip he made to Morocco and North Africa. As he became more and more successful, he was even sought out by prominent society figures of the day to do their portraits.
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The second highlight? Many years ago, I developed a real passion for things Titanic-related, adding about 30 books on the disaster to my library in the process. Robert Ballard was just then in the process of first discovering the wreck. A few years later, I read and even participated in several online Titanophile discussion groups, including one in which I exchanged messages with a man who has since authored a superb book on the disaster. This, I later found, puts me a mere one degree of separation from the man most people associate with Titanic’s written story, the late Walter (“A Night to Remember”, “The Night Lives On”) Lord, whom Butler met on a couple of occasions.
So it was with considerable interest when, during a random stroll through Montreal’s somewhat aging Eaton Centre, we found ourselves looking at an actual davit from which one of Titanic’s too-few lifeboats had been launched that terrible April 1912 night. It had been raised from the ocean floor and, in this case, prominently placed in the mall to entice ticket buyers to a much larger exhibit of artifacts from the wreck site. “Real Objects / Real Stories” was how it was proclaimed in an accompanying brochure and that, indeed, was what it delivered.
Certainly there have been some often fierce debates over whether artifact recovery from this site constitutes grave-robbing or not. There’s the “Yes it does” side and the “No, it’s the same as an archaeological dig that returns mummies to museums for public display” side. The most impassioned among those who argue for leaving the site undisturbed usually take the position of advocating on behalf of the relatives of those who were lost in the disaster. Many of those are still with us today because really, for all intents and purposes, only about four generations’ worth of time has passed since the disaster. In fact, the last survivor of the sinking, a woman named Millvina Dean, who was a newborn baby at the time and was saved along with her mother (her father was among those lost), is the last known person who actually sailed on Titanic who is still alive (at this writing). Born just two months before the voyage, she turned 97 on February 2 of this year. She still looks pretty darned healthy, in fact.
But there’s no denying the aura of profound tragedy that surrounds the Titanic story. The facts that she took to her grave so many of society’s wealthiest celebrities of that age and the majority of those lost were among the lower class passengers and the crew, are nonetheless offset by the almost rigid upholding of the “women and children first” tradition in boarding the lifeboats. Consider, for example, these statistics (from “The Titanic Numbers Game”, by Douglas W Phillips):
- The overall death toll was 9 men for every 1 woman.
- By percentage, third class women did far better than first class men.
- More than 5 times as many third class men were saved as second class men. (This was true even though second class men had better access to the lifeboats.)
- 75 third class men lived, 57 first class men lived, and 14 second class men lived. In retrospect, second class men had a 1 in 11 chance of survival, but third class men had a 1 in 5 chance of survival.
- Almost twice as many male crew members died as did third class males.
- The male to female death ratio for crew members was a whopping 233 to 1.
Phillips concludes, “Evidence based on eyewitness accounts and testimonies all seem to validate the statement of Reverend Eakin, that when it came time to load the lifeboats, ‘there was no class distinction on the ground of wealth or any other of those barriers that we in our folly have raised so high. ... The prospect of death leveled all distinction’.”
Imagine the effect if a vast gas explosion had wiped out the Kodak Theatre during this year’s Oscars. Imagine, too, that there had been a generous warning when someone smelled gas and managed to order an evacuation that everyone in the theatre heard, but all of the exits except one were blocked. (To keep the riff-raff out.) In the resulting explosion, fully a third of Hollywood’s film elite dies. Imagine, therefore, that along with the tragedy, ultimately there comes a growing knowledge that much of it could have been prevented. Imagine the impact that would have in the world press and subsequent months, indeed years, of conversation wherever people gather. The Titanic passenger list in 1912 was a Who’s Who of the celebrity class of the day.
The Montreal artifacts exhibit was a mix of the poignant and the somewhat tacky. The poignancy was in the artifacts themselves, which needed no adornment beyond the simple labels that identified the many personal possessions and White Star paraphernalia that have been brought up. A pair of delicately wire-framed reading glasses and their case; a shirt and a pair of pants recovered from a suitcase; perfectly preserved first class dining room china; some truly beautiful jewellery; a woman’s hairbrush; paper money and coins from several different countries; a recreation of a first class stateroom; a second recreation of a second class hallway.
The comparatively good condition of the paper money surprised me. But there’s a simple explanation. The leather used to make billfolds and handbags at the time was heavily treated with preservatives both to keep them supple, and to help protect them against moisture. Granted their resistance to being underwater is not infinite, but they outlasted a great many containers or furnishings made of other materials, especially wood, which has pretty much vanished from the scene or has rotted to the point where precious few years of life are left to anything in the wreck that started out as a tree.
The somewhat tacky was in the presence of a gigantic slab of actual ice (“Feel the iceberg!”), and in the issuing of “boarding passes” that served as our tickets to the exhibit. Adorned with a random passenger name, each became a somewhat sick game of “Survivor” as, at the end of the exhibit, you were presented with a wall-mounted complete list of the “Saved” and the “Lost”, thereby to discover whether you were holding the ticket of one of the lucky ones. (Leslie and I weren’t. Both of our second-class namesakes died that night).
And there was tacky galore, probably not surprisingly, to be found in the gift shop.
Apparently among the greatest volume of recovered debris has been an enormous number of chunks of coal. Titanic carried almost 6,000 tons of the stuff to fire her 29 boilers for the duration of the crossing. Many of those enormous boilers burst their mountings during the long fall to the bottom and creating openings through which tons of coal escaped the ship’s storage bunkers. It blackened the debris field around the wreck. And the gift shop today offers you almost limitless ways to bring home a piece of “Actual Titanic Coal!” packaged in everything from a picture frame with a Certificate of Authenticity to various configurations of jewellery, with various configurations of many, many-dollared price tags and, of course, the ubiquitous Certificate of Authenticity.
The one bit of tack in which I indulged was an opportunity to touch an actual piece of the doomed ship’s hull. But only a very selective touch. The 15-inch square of thick, riveted steel was completely enclosed in a very carefully structured display case with a small hole in the top through which you could pretty much fit no more than your finger. (At least they didn’t go so far as to invite visitors to “finger the Titanic”.)
But I do think that, the occasional bit of tackiness and profiteering aside, the overall effect on me was to impart a connection to some sense of the magnitude of the disaster. Near the last portion of the exhibit, there was an illuminated outline on the floor that represented the size of a lifeboat. Setting aside the profoundly heroic chivalry of those who chose to stay behind, standing in that illuminated oval I could not possibly even imagine what it would have taken for each and every last one of those on the “Saved” list to step off the massive solidity of Titanic into the less than certain confines of a space this small to be lowered in the middle of the night into the icy cold waters of the North Atlantic.
I think what I did get from just that little part of the exhibit was perhaps the tiniest inkling of the fear that must have swept the great ship from stem to stern as the inevitability of her sinking became a certainty. But that inkling, frankly, was more than enough.
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And to finish off this go ‘round, two tales that began with no small bureaucratic frustration, but both with happy endings.
I had one of those encounters with an utterly unhelpful “Help line” recently. Specifically, it was the one that purports to assist customers of Rogers Communications. After receiving a letter in the mail advising me that the credit card on which our monthly access fees were being billed was due to reach its expiry date, I was advised to call a “helpful” number through which I could convey my new credit card expiry information to Rogers, and thereby ensure that they could continue to bill me with their usually efficient and utterly impersonal regularity.
So I suppose I should not have been at all surprised when the number led me to a “helpful” recording. (You’ll notice I put that word – helpful – in quotation marks. It is intended to convey irony, because anything presented as “helpful” by Rogers' Help-bot is, in fact, anything but.) The recorded chirpy voice cheerfully introduced herself as “Melanie”. A recording being a recording, Melanie, I assumed, surely would have been programmed with the most frequently asked questions. Wrong. Despite the Rogers request’s having been made in a written letter, the option to update my credit card’s expiry date was simply not on the lengthy list of Melanie’s choices. (And it was one of those recordings that required you to speak a response, rather than bash a numbered key. This made it doubly frustrating because the deeper I got into the process, I came to feel that a more therapeutically useful option would have been to offer me the chance to jab a finger into one of my phone buttons, imagining it to be this little cyber-twit’s forearm.)
And believe me, I know lengthy. Because my choice was absent, I got to sit through every last one of Melanie’s choices, all the while waiting hopefully for, “If you would like to update your billing information, please press [whatever].”
It took me a full 20 minutes to sit through all of Melanie’s “helpful” suggested questions and her pleadings to me to speak a choice. I stayed with it because I was sure that, eventually, even if I never did get to some version of my particular need, I would get the option of, “If you would like to speak to a customer service representative, press [whatever].”
The process for a time was entertaining, I confess, because I swear Melanie actually sounded a little more plaintively desperate with the growing number of silences from me that greeted her many choices. (“I am sorry. I did not hear that answer. If you would like to...[typically four choices], please say [one of the choices].”... (Silence.) “Please say [choice] if you are calling for [help with this topic.]”... “PLEASE!”
So imagine my surprise when, after 20 full minutes, Melanie said, “I’m sorry that I was unable to help you with your problem. Please try again at some other time.”
Then she hung up! A friggin’ recording hung up on me!
Off to Google. It probably took another twenty minutes to find a number that got me around Melanie, but I did and this time found myself taking to a genuinely helpful actual employee named Joanne. At the start of our conversation, between bursts of discharged steam I told her I had just sat through 20 minutes of listening to Melanie. At my mere mention of the name, Joanne chuckled. “Yes, we’ve been having some problems with Melanie,” she said. Then she added, “Next time you call, at anytime during Melanie’s spiel, just press 255 and you’ll be switched immediately to a real person.”
I felt like Indiana Jones when he’d been handed his Dad’s Holy Grail search diary. “Uh, Joanne,” I said, “You do realize that what you’ve just given me is like... well maybe it’s a corporate secret?” “Not a problem,” she replied.
(And for the record, Rogers customers who are also Duck readers, I am here to tell you that is not a made-up number. So now Miracle Melanie Mute Formula 255 is yours to use as required, or share as well. I can’t speak for Cogeco or Shaw users, but I think it’d be worth a try if you find yourself up against a relentlessly chipper Melanie anytime in your future as well.)
After I received assurances from Joanne that my update information had now been entered into their customer database, I asked her for her name – something I customarily do in those cases where the fact of new data’s entry might ever be questioned by someone else at the same organization.. Regrettably, she said, they were not allowed to give out last names, but she did give me her employee i.d. number and – almost as astonishing as the secret Melanie bypass – a nine-digit transaction number which will forever point the way to an entrenched file where the record of our little administrative chat now resides.
As a child of the 1960s’ days of peace and love and “anti-establishment”, by the time I was finished getting all this useful information from Joanne, I honestly felt like I’d put one over on “the Man”.
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Meanwhile, from a faithful and funny Duck regular, here is a similar tale, also with a happy ending. The moral? Do your homework, kids!:
The story of our new car.....
Here's a quick tale of how I got to stick it to a car dealer.
About two weeks ago we started shopping around for a car. We quickly narrowed it down to a Mazda 5 or a Kia Rondo, as they both seat 6+ people, in relative fuel efficiency, and are not minivans.
After some discussions, test drives, etc., we elected to go back to Kia again, and started to make the moves toward finalizing the purchase of the Rondo.There are two Kia dealers in the downtown: I'll call one "Nice Kia" -- it is full of relatively friendly, earnest, and slime-free salesmen. The other dealer -- let's call it "Slimy Kia" -- is full of misogynist, slimy, and crooked salesguys.
I go to Nice Kia first.
Nice Kia sales guy: "Listen, I know you want the best price, and I know you are going to compare prices. Why don't you go to Slimy Kia and get their best price? I'll give you a script to walk through that should extract an excellent price from them. You can then come on back here, and we'll top it."
He then walks me through an elaborate script in which I first pretend I'm innocent, and then turn on the guy in negotiations and tell him that I've already received a better price from the other dealer.
Script works beautifully at Slimy Kia.
I walk out with a price that is far better than I ever expected, and I have made no commitment to buy.
I go back to Nice Sales Guy and give him the price.
He blinks.
"If you can get this price, with your lousy trade-in, then take it. I'm an honest guy. I won't mess with you. I can't beat this price."
We shake hands. I compliment him on his integrity, tell him I will continue to get my servicing done at Nice Kia, and I prepare to close with Slimy Kia.
So, now that I'm retired (as my wife refers to my present paternity leave), I have time to read online.
I read that one of the most important things to getting a good price is knowing your credit score.
$20 later I know my credit score.
I also discovered that, on the day of my test drive, Slimy Kia ran a "hard check" on my credit score. That means that they did a full credit check on me, without my consent, and actually caused damage to my credit score in the process. (It's a bit like Quantum Mechanics or Schroedinger's cat – when you look at a credit score it goes down).
Hmmm...Outrage starts to set in, but at a moderate simmer.
It dawns on me that this is probably not allowed.
Off to Google I go....
After digging I discover this from the Ontario Ministry of Justice directory of Ontario laws:
"Notice of intention to get consumer report
(2) No person shall request or obtain a consumer report,
(a) containing personal information about a consumer; or
(b) on the basis that the person is considering extending credit to a consumer who has not, at the time of the request, made application for credit,
unless that person first gives written notice of the fact to the consumer and, where the consumer so requests, informs the consumer of the name and address of the consumer reporting agency supplying the report. R.S.O. 1990, c. C.33, s. 10 (2)."
And the punishment:
"23. (1) Every person who [violates this act] and every director or officer of a corporation who knowingly concurs in such furnishing, failure or contravention is guilty of an offence and on conviction is liable to a fine of not more than $25,000 or to imprisonment for a term of not more than one year, or to both. R.S.O. 1990, c. C.33, s. 23 (1)."
Oh goody! When I told my dad what I'd discovered, he said that this is like rifling through your hand and discovering an Ace you didn't know about.
Outrage now at a full boil.
It turns out that when the General Sales Manager had been preparing his quote and attempting to figure out how much we owe, he thought it would be easier just to run a credit check without telling me.
When I confronted him in general terms, he offered a couple of free oil changes.
When I then read him the text of the provincial legislation, suggested that I hadn't yet looked at the penalties under federal PIPEDA legislation, and mentioned the name of OMVIC, the provincial quasi-judicial body that oversees car dealers, he said he didn't want to be fired and began to grovel.
On Monday we pick up our new Rondo.
I'm pretty sure that a day won't go by when I don't look at the free leather seats and sunroof and smile.
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So to close, if anyone out there has a similar feel-good story to pass along – it doesn’t have to be “I fought the law”, even a “Gotcha!” that made you feel pretty damned good’ll do just fine – please feel free to do so. On request, names will be changed to protect the guilty.
Until la prochaine.