It wasn’t just the impropriety of the place that enthralled me. It was the bedlam. For me, Picasso and his peers were grown-ups acting like children. They suggested the nearly unthinkable notion that adults could simply play.
But for my mother, this art signified the possibility of no rules, of making your own rules. “It was only when I stood in front of his canvases that Picasso moved me,” she tells me. “But for years before that, I was intellectually thrilled by him. What he was doing—what he showed me you could do—was deconstructing something instantly recognized, something familiar, and then reassembling the pieces to make something entirely new.”
The Czech Exhibit (1967)
“… instead of tending towards a vast Alexandrian library the world has become a computer, an electronic brain ... And as our senses have gone outside us, Big Brother goes inside.”
- Marshall McLuhan6
In 1967, at the age of fourteen, I finally got to ride the 162 bus unaccompanied by an adult, though the brick house behind the bus stop was no longer my home. But in the hiatus between school and summer camp every year, I would come back to Montreal from Ann Arbor and stay with my Auntie Anne, Uncle Herbie, and my three cousins, whose house was one long block from my old one.
When we moved away, my aunt and uncle had to give up the country house, and Anne’s misery at being stuck in the city was almost palpable. Those summers in the country had been a beloved necessity. Anne was happy there, playful and free. She rarely talked about her childhood, which ended on the last Kindertransporte train out of Vienna when she was fourteen, and never about her parents, who had been killed in the Holocaust. But when out in the woods, she would reminisce about going mushroom hunting with her grandmother. She’d bend close to the ground, hold an imaginary magnifying glass to her eye, and tiptoe through the underbrush. “It was like searching for gold, delicious gold you could eat.” We kids would hold our breaths in those moments, and silently follow her.
But once those summers in the country were yanked away from her, we heard no more reminiscences about visits to her grandmother in Czechoslovakia. “Prague was a fairy tale city,” she’d once half sung, half soothed, with the tone and cadence of a bedtime story, “with a castle like Walt Disney’s.” But by the summer of 1967, on the rare occasions that she spoke of going somewhere, it was to wail at her kids, “You’re driving me to Verdun,” which was the local mental hospital. The summer days were long and slow, and she spent many of them in a darkened bedroom, crippled by migraines.
My cousin Carla and I would dawdle over breakfast (especially since Anne allowed Frosted Flakes and Kix in her house, cereals that were forbidden in mine), then ride bikes to the brand-new neighborhood swimming pool. When we didn’t abandon ourselves to the sheer mindless pleasure of splashing and diving, we’d flirt, watch, bicker, sigh, and judge the other kids our age doing exactly the same thing.
After an enervating day in the sun, we’d pedal home in slow motion, slump exhausted on the interior green carpeted stairs between the main level and bedrooms, until one of us roused ourselves to go put a Beatles record on. Then, in a twilight made magically ours by the cooling of the air, we’d set the table and whisk my aunt’s homemade steak marinade (“The secret’s in the wodka,” she’d say in her piercing Viennese voice. “Yeah, we know, it’s wery important,” we’d answer, never pausing for one instant to marvel, even to think about, how quickly and thoroughly she had learned English.) That far north, the evening sky stayed violet until after nine, and we’d lie in the back yard or sit on the stoop, nursing popsicles, waiting for our lives to start.
Then, in the last two weeks of June, 1967, they did. Montreal’s World’s Fair, Expo 67, had opened on April 28, and it became for Carla and me, the irresistible center of the universe.
Late each morning, Carla and I would walk down Westluke to the corner of Kildare, and stand in front of my old house, awaiting the 161 Bus. We’d ride it to the Plamondon stop on Montreal’s brand-new Metro, which had only opened the previous year. Like Moscow’s, its stations featured enormous, original works of art—stained glass murals and ceramic mosaics —and the brand-new trains, with their rubber wheels, were immaculate and silent. We’d take the red line through downtown Montreal, then transfer at Berri to the yellow line, which carried us a few short stops to the Jean-Drapeau station on Ile St. Helene, one of the three islands in the Saint Lawrence river that served as the site of the fair.
When Montreal won the bid to host Expo 67, Ile Ste. Helene was the only island in the St. Lawrence adjacent to downtown. But clever planners realized that they could take the twenty-five million tons of dirt excavated in the effort to build the Metro and use it both to enlarge Ste. Helene and to create the brand-new, artificial Ile Notre Dame. This was recycling at its finest, though that term had yet to be coined. Then they called it Ingenuity, or Modernity.
Across the two islands, a span of roughly sixty-four city blocks held radically styled buildings—inverted pyramids, metallic tent-like structures, round glass-shingled buildings, and a geodesic dome. Unlike the pulp science fiction comics of the 1950s, where domes and towers dominated the landscape, Expo 67 suggested that the future would be made of triangles.
Of course, the question of what to wear to the future loomed large for Carla and me as we rifled through our dressers in her floral pink bedroom.
“Too childish,” she ruled when I held up my favorite beige pedal pushers and red striped shirt for her inspection. She twirled around in the red bowl chair at the foot of her bed. “We’re going to La Ronde tonight, remember?” La Ronde, an enormous amusement park at one end of Ile St. Helene, was, for that summer, the social hub for everyone in the city under the age of eighteen.
Eventually we settled on uniforms of jean skirts, sandals, and the cotton peasant blouses that were just coming into vogue. That was just one of many looks in the eclectic fashion parade at Expo, where the different styles represented the diversity in generations more than in culture. For the older visitors, both the locals and the tourists from around the world, Expo was like taking a trip on an airplane, something for which one dressed up. Alongside the young people in bell bottoms and Peruvian vests were men in Fedoras and suits, women in matching skirts, jackets, and pillbox hats. Hemlines ranged from mid-shin to mid-thigh; some men’s shirts were ironed and white, their necklines sharply angled and held in place by collar stays; others were paisley, wrinkled and limp in the summer heat. But every outfit told us stories.
Fifty million people came to Expo; over ninety countries exhibited there. Standing in line for a train or an exhibit on any given day, we swayed like seaweed in a sea of people from around the planet. Though we couldn’t understand much of what was being said in the multi-lingual conversations around us, we could look at the clothes and find our peers, and with our privileged, heady parent-free status, show instant solidarity in a meaningful glance with some other fourteen-year-old from halfway around the world whose anxious mothers and fathers were trying to educate and uplift them.
Each day, the Montreal papers would list the notables visiting Expo. I remember Anne’s gregarious and overly enthusiastic neighbor, Eleanor, planting herself at the kitchen table while my aggrieved aunt slammed a coffee cup down in front of her, hoping to get the forced schmooze over with as quickly as possible.
“Princess Grace is coming today!” Eleanor exclaimed.
“Who?” Anne asked. She undoubtedly knew the answer.
“Princess Grace! Of Monaco!”
“Monaco. Is that like Nabisco?” As withering as Anne’s resentment could be when turned on Carla, we took unhealthy pleasure in seeing her aim it at someone else.
“Don’t be ridiculous. Monaco is…it’s in Europe someplace. Princess Grace used to be Grace Kelly. Surely you’ve heard of Grace Kelly!”
Anne didn’t bother to answer. “We haven’t,” Carla piped up in a rare act of solidarity with her mother.
The Beatles guru, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, was joining Princess Grace in the odd registry of visitors to Man and His World. Later that summer, so would French President Charles de Gaulle (who won the lasting enmity of the English-speaking Canada for yelling Vivre Quebec Libre! to a crowd of nationalist Francophiles who had lined the streets to greet him) and Ethiopian Emperor Haile Salasse. The cultural performances were equally eclectic, from The Supremes and Tiny Tim to Thelonious Monk and Jefferson Airplane. But no matter—all were celebrities, and like the nerd who finally gets an actual date for the school dance, the nation stood up straighter and got a little strut in its step.
But beyond confidence, Expo 67 exemplified enlightenment. When my brother returned from his visit to the 1964 World’s Fair in New York City—a joint bar mitzvah present from my mother’s three New York City cousins who paid for his train ticket, put him up, “schlepped him around,” and made me almost sick with jealousy—his stories were about the moving armchairs at the General Motors exhibit, the “World’s Largest Cheese” in the Wisconsin pavilion, and the enormous Belgian waffles sold for the extravagant price of three dollars apiece. While generating near-ecstasy in a thirteen-year-old boy, the New York City fair was largely and accurately characterized as a commercial extravaganza that coupled few examples of the visionary with many of the tawdry.
In contrast, Expo 67 was a cultural exhibition, not primarily a commercial one. Of course all of the national, provincial, and cultural exhibits were rich in business and trade industry sponsorships, but that nuance was lost on me then. No, Expo 67 was fundamentally about social progress. Its logo was based on a primitive representation of “man”—a vertical line with arms diagonally outstretched to create a Y-shaped figure. But in the graphic designed for the fair and adorning every flag and municipal sign in Montreal, the figures were linked in pairs to represent friendship, and eight pairs formed a circle to suggest friendship around the world.
The Quebec City newspaper, Le Soleil, which, like much of the French language press, generally tilted in favor of the separatist aspirations of some in the province, embraced the inherent internationalism of the event, though in a Quebec-centric fashion. “Isn’t this the best possible way for Canadians to get to know one another—what other event could attract to Québec so many of our compatriots from the nine other provinces?—to make ourselves known to the rest of the world and at the same time to realize how much progress ties all nations together?”7
Expo 67 was clean and humane, worldly and welcoming, so unlike my experience of the United States. I’d moved to Michigan at an age when my curly hair, budding breasts, and shyness would have made daily life excruciating anywhere. But those routine agonies of early adolescence were compounded by the fact that I’d skipped a grade upon moving, had a funny Canadian accent, and was clueless about what an “ice cream social” was, why paper bags were called “sacks,” and why Michiganders had such an aversion to pronouncing words containing double o’s as they were meant to be articulated, choosing instead to refer to “roofs” as “ruhfs” and “roots” as “ruhts.” Not only did I have trouble understanding my new schoolmates, who throughout sixth grade and junior high school seemed almost uniformly stupid and cruel, but even worse, I felt completely misunderstood by them.
With the Cold War still rumbling and the Vietnam war festering and about to explode, America’s emerging status as the self-satisfied but aggressive cop to the world was entirely consistent with my own experience. For me, already a reluctant expatriate and already politically aware, Expo’s celebration of diversity and culture, of friendship and internationalism, rather ironically aroused a national sense of Canadian pride—more than pride, superiority—which I would come to find obnoxious, but that struck me then as purely deserved. It confirmed that those conformist American kids whose cliques I could not penetrate really were jerks. Even Ca-na-da, the song that became the unofficial anthem of the Canadian centennial and of this event—a relentlessly upbeat number composed by a jingle writer named Bobby Gimby and sung by a chorus of Toronto schoolchildren—made me feel that my native home had all the healthy goodness that my adopted one, with its ignorant bullying boys and maudlin Midwestern homilies about God and country, did not.
The Metro was new, the islands were new, and in this, its centennial year, Canada as a whole was in the mood for self-reinvention. After a nationwide design contest, the red maple leaf, whose very color I found shocking the first time it appeared in the heretofore exclusively black-inked Montreal newspapers, had displaced the British ensign on the new Canadian flag. Though technically still belonging to the British Commonwealth Realm, my homeland was no longer an English colony, and it was certainly not American. To be a supremely self-centered fourteen-year-old Canadian at Expo 67, in the year of the Canadian centennial, was to feel that my environment was simply, naturally mirroring my internal state—festive, independent, and fresh.
The minutes, and sometimes hours, dragged as we stood in the vast but orderly queue outside the Canadian Telephone pavilion. But the anticipation was sublime. Upon passing through the turnstile, we were greeted by two women standing in front of a small stage, dressed like stewardesses, in tailored short skirts, matching jackets, and pillbox hats. One speaking English, the other French, they took turns demonstrating the phone of the future. The Anglophone dialed, the Francophone answered, and we spectators saw their faces displayed in a split screen on two giant monitors as they carried on an animated conversation.
“It is so annoying when you miss a phone call, either because you are already on the line or because you are not home,” one said with rehearsed frustration.
“Yes, but in the future, you will never have to miss a call!” the other answered with soothing optimism. “In the future, you will be able to switch from the call you are on to an incoming call. And when you leave the house, you’ll key in the number of the place you’re going to, and the phone will ring for you there!”
This vision of perpetual connectivity was at best, puzzling. Telephones were for our mothers. Who wanted to be on the phone when you could be out in the world?
As we were funneled through a second set of the turnstiles and herded into a large, round theatre, our excitement grew. As fifteen hundred of us stood enclosed by waist-high metal rails, the lights dimmed, and a green but dusty parade ground appeared on screen all around us. Then, amid the sound of thundering hooves, dozens of Mounties, lances pointed, charged toward us from all sides, their scarlet uniforms lurid against the horses’ gleaming flanks and brilliant blue sky.
This was the start of Canada 67, a short film executed in the revolutionary new, panoramic Circle-Vision 360! Nine projectors, concealed in the narrow gaps between nine enormous screens, projected a completely circular image, while twelve synchronized sound channels enveloped us in sound. Of course I didn’t know these technical details then. I just knew that as the film took us on a whirlwind trip from east to west, each archetypical Canadian scene made my heart race and my skin, cooling in the air-conditioned dark, tingle. We hurtled down an ice slide at the Quebec Winter Carnival, then stood tense and ready in the goal at one end of the Toronto Maple Leafs’ rink, sandwiched between the crowd noise behind us and the slashing whistle of blades on ice as three Detroit Red Wings bore down on us. We flew over Niagara Falls, and as the plane banked, we gasped and grabbed onto each other or the rails to keep our balance. And when we found ourselves on a bucking bronco in the Calgary Stampede, our hamstrings tensed, we drove our feet into the floor, and experienced all of the heaving with none of the risk.
As exciting as it was, Circle-Vision was just an appetizer. The Czech exhibit was the main course, where all of the magic that I’d already associated with Prague was on display.
Illusion—both the technology and the politics of it—lay at the heart of every exhibit in the
pavilion. And the high point of the Czech pavilion was Kinoautomat—which as best as I can determine, is Czech for “interactive cinema.”
The movie (dubbed into English from the original Czech) called One Man and his House, begins with a flaming house—one in a block full of tenement row houses—then flashes back to what had given rise to this situation. Mr. Novak is alone in his apartment, his wife having gone out on an errand. The doorbell rings, and he opens the door to discover a young woman, a neighbor, clad only in a towel. She has locked herself out of her own apartment and asks Mr. Novak to let her into his home. Mr. Novak wants to be a good neighbor, of course, but she is rather young and scantily clad, and his wife is due home any second. What a quandary!
As I remember that moment (and not quite as it actually occurred), Mr. Novak steps out of the screen and onto the stage. (In fact, the actor playing Mr. Novak simply walked on stage from the wing as the movie frame appeared to freeze.) “What should I do?” he asks the audience in what I would later learn was memorized phonetic English, of which he knew not a word. “Should I let her in?”
Each of us picked up the small remote control tethered to the arm of our seat and pressed either a red button for No or a green button for Yes. A border of 127 lights surrounding the screen lit up in red or green, the audience’s verdict was displayed, and then the movie continued down the path we had chosen for it.
We had nine such decision points in the movie, some involving Mr. Novak, some involving other characters. The votes were usually close (except for one occasion that I recently read about, in which a large contingent of nuns occupied all 127 seats and all commanded No at every opportunity). I don’t know what was more thrilling—the illusion of live people stepping in and out of the film, or the almost plausible hope that we, the audience members, were actually determining the course of events on screen.
This All-at-Onceness Page 5