Letter from Winnipeg

Filmmaker Guy Maddin. (Carlo Allegri/Getty Images)

It’s sunny on the sidewalks of Winnipeg. For the first time this year, Joey Myles, longtime habitué of everyplace after dark, has appeared in public in his leather vest, signifying, as it has for decades innumerable, something far better than any Groundhog Day: the start of the summer café season! And in Winnipeg there is really only one café in summer — Bar Italia. It’s the closest thing to Jazz Age-vintage Les Deux Magots that this lively community can create from its gallery of demimondaine, flaneurs, artists and professionals.

But unlike that historically preserved haunt of intellectuals and pugilists in the Saint-Germain-des-Prés of Paris, Winnipeg’s Bar-I has been redecorated countless times and for no apparent reason, either. The customers, completely oblivious to decors, throng the place no matter what it looks like. Nowadays, with its tall tables and pulsing plexi-panels of lava light, it resembles an expansive singles bar, but the demographic remains all-ages, as it has through all architectural incarnations.

Here, one can always find teenage electro-clash love dolls passing the sugar to someone behind a newspaper — it’s eminence gris Bud Sherman, a former cabinet minister for Premier Duff Roblin back in the 1960s. One of the many Hells Angels regulars might hold the front door open for Governor General Award-winning author Miriam Toews and Melissa Steele, winner of the Margaret Laurence Award for Fiction. Folk musician Dan Donahue, son or brother (their exact relationship has long been contested) of famed designer Thirsty Jim Donahue — the architect of our Monarch Life Building and creator of the Donahue Chair, a sleek 1960s treasure — might sit at table with a few pals, not even noticing nearby patrons composer Richard Moody and skater-muralist Mike Johnson.

I love the range of faces, dispositions and movements in this place — never entirely welcoming, but at least comfortingly indifferent to your presence! (That’s important to us aging almost-hipsters.) I have a few regular friends. Photographer Nihad Ademi is one of them. His gorgeous black and white photography has lined the walls of this place for years. Now a Canadian citizen, this former prisoner of a concentration camp in Bosnia is prepping for the May 25 release of his new arts and culture magazine, G.Love — pronounced “g-spot love.”

Nihad calls Bar-I “the office” and it is here, right at his favourite table, that he has laboured with designers, writers and other collaborators. It’s going to be a gloriously smart and glossy thing! All the prettiest women in Winnipeg kiss and hug Nihad and this drives me crazy! In a strange case of gender inversion he is the queen bee of this hive, a generous and warm male magnet drawing to himself a great spilling tumult of female drones.

On this, the First Day of Joey’s Vest, I am getting primed with Nihad for tonight’s chanteuse. Vest Day is a Wednesday this year, which means tonight the R&B belter and femme fatale Lisa Bell gets to sing in the season. I’ve had my problems with Lisa before — this city’s Kiki de Montparnasse. She looks like Naomi Campbell crossed with Josephine Baker, only prettier than such a hybrid could be, or so it seems through the tequila goggles I wear these nights.

She’s really cooked up some intense heartache for this old jasper. In spite of my advanced years, I’m still strangely reluctant to play the humiliation artist. I don’t want to be the Emil Jannings to her Lola, and yet this is what I end up doing every time I raise a simple shot glass to my lips. Clouds of electricity foregather upon the glowering horizon visible in the window behind Lisa’s amps. Time lurches with a great hiccough and already she’s well into her first set.

Maybe it’s just the wintry-white triceps curving down from each of Joey’s leather-girt armpits that has me uneasy tonight, maybe it’s the restlessness of the young Zig Zag gang members that blow through the place like lazy tumbleweeds, perhaps it’s the hectoring insistence of street-octogenarian Millie that I give her the tab off a nearby aluminum beer can for her collection — but I can tell tonight is going to be bad, really bad on our Left Bank.

As if to confirm this premonition, further auguries materialize. Local outsider-artist Christian Worthington, who, looking like Christ, beatific and sensual, suddenly and screechingly burns away from the café in his orange muscle car. Royal Art Lodge acolyte Kenneth Lavallee turns his head as if in a dream. I bump foreheads with Leala Hewak, who paints wonderfully the same flower over and over again, a 1950s pattern she found on a cushion abandoned in her apartment block foyer. The evening’s choreography is gently trying to warn me — of what?

Off-duty film crews suddenly fill the few empty spaces remaining. I see camera assistant Casey Ashton brooding about, still moaning with ostentatious self-pity about accidentally double exposing an entire roll of film during the Winnipeg shoot of Dennis Quaid’s The Horsemen. Other crew members seem to be laying cable, or are they looking for change on the floor? I fear they’re reading the entrails of birds. Can they see the spectacular abasement Lisa intends to deal me after I’ve consumed her songs and 50 drinks?

The crowd parts and towards me steps ridiculously handsome Bar-I doorman and actor Nick Villerin, his always-comfy hand extended in gracious greeting. Behind him I swear I see Victor, the puggish beautician and purveyor of the downiest Brazilians in the hood. No, it’s not Victor. It’s Lisa, swimming — darkly swimming swimmingly in front of me as the room spins. She spins the whole room on the tip of her finger. Megalomaniac! Artists! Basta!

I flee to the streets. I have Joey Myles’s vest in my hand, clawing it as a raptor might shred a rabbit. From above, the vault of stars drops aphids onto my lurid face. I must dash home to write furious summer-night e-mails to Lisa!

Guy Maddin is a Winnipeg-based filmmaker and instructor in film history at the University of Manitoba. His next feature, Love Me — Love My Winnipeg, was commissioned by the Documentary Channel and should be ready for this fall’s film festival season.

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