Have you – a passionate admirer of all things artistic – ever encountered a wall covered in graffiti and thought, “That would look mighty spectacular in my livingroom”?
If your answer to the above question is no, then you must have something against firefighters from Quebec.
Admit it, you scowled at the sight of a Montreal fire station painted to resemble a Canadiens logo, as was recently reported on the nightly news and on such popular web sites as “Go, Habs, go!” and “Passing on the right is my right.”
The firefighters were only trying to celebrate their beloved hockey team, but the mayor of Montreal would have none of it, ordering them to remove the offending artwork.
The fire chief, in as diplomatic a manner as possible, promptly told the city administration to take a hike up the nearest fire pole.
The artwork was staying, and if they didn’t like it, then they could fight their own fires, or something to that effect.
The missing element in this story was the fact that everything in Montreal is covered in graffiti – apartment buildings, shops, grand old churches and people who doze too long on park benches.
Paris is the City of Light.
Montreal, as I learned during a recent visit, is the City of Illegally Painted Surfaces.
Bus stops vanish under a camouflage of elaborate streaks and symbols, and storefronts disappear behind sheets of squiggly lines of no discernable meaning.
A cube van idling outside a Vietnamese market was awash in what I presumed were French-Canadian cuss words and mean-spirited phrases such as, “Your momma, she wears the lumberjack boots.”
The driver of the van, had he attempted to contact the police, would have discovered graffiti on the handset of the nearest payphone, which, I swear on the sanctity of the Habs, was spray-painted in doodles.
Even the backside of a directional sign suspended over a four-lane highway was slathered in the stuff, leaving me to marvel at the courage (and intellectual challenges) of the person responsible.
When the vandals run short of storefronts, telephones and other pedestrians, they turn on themselves.
A bearded man in ragged coveralls, standing next to an aisle of scented candles in a downtown dollar store, approached us and said something that sounded menacing, but because my command of Canada’s other official language is limited to the food groups, I could only stare and wave my arms in the international sign for “Where can I buy a roast chicken, if you please?”
Then I noticed his footwear.
The bulbous work boots were painted a fluorescent shade of orange, the paint applied in randomly sized patches that suggested a drive-by attack by hoodlums with aerosol cans but was more likely the work of the man wearing them.
I mistakenly assumed that what he was saying had something to do with the apocalypse or possibly funny voices in his head, and began fishing for loose change when he piped up again.
“I said everything is for a dollar,” he added, motioning grandly to the shelves behind him.
I was speaking not with a crazed customer but the owner, who, as I have previously mentioned, had spraypainted his shoes the colour of safety pylons and was willingly wearing them in public.
Someone should have called the mayor.
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