Lady Midnight

Nights spent in a foreign country have a sense, sometimes, of counting more than nights spent on familiar turf, don't they? The days and nights of Mary and I in Montreal were purgatorial ones. Being alone in a foreign country, we had no recourse, cut off from our usual routines, but to face exactly who we were, to ourselves, and reciprocally, to each other. We also fulfilled a Manifest Destiny impulse to being ex-pats, albeit brief ex-pats. Montreal being half-French language, half- English language, we kept stumbling into situations that called for us to know more than we did. Saint Catherine Street, where we stayed in Montreal, is a rough equivalent to South Street in Philadelphia, or St. Mark's Place in Manhattan. Lots of action, but action which tends to be of a rough or raunchy variety. So it was no surprise that Mary and I witnessed an actual barroom brawl. I was non-plussed but also not moved, but Mary was very upset. A foreign country will expose delicate nerves. As I bothered to document on Art Recess 2, our purgatorial means out, that particular night, was a kinky one. The emergence, probably not for the first time, of the occult conferring benediction on Saint Catherine Street. Mary just missing the beckoning gesture of Lady Midnight, as Leonard Cohen assays here, who hovered over us in Montreal, with a distinct, mixed, enchantment/damnation vibe. May I say we also bothered to spend a few hours on the McGill campus, took some pictures there, and were rewarded by a sense of liberation past our personal Purgatorio, Dantean Double Dutch. When we arrived back in Philadelphia, we knew ourselves better.