4 BOOTH AVENUE

4 BOOTH AVENUE - $750,000 An exciting property co-listed with Erin Gallagher at Century 21.

A very modern home set at the edge of the trees and overlooking the St. Lawrence River just east of Kingston. An austere black wood exterior is wrapped around a set of light-filled and magazine-worthy spaces. The sense is that you’ve found the best chocolate in the box. The loft bedroom alone is like something you’d check into on a skiing holiday to the Alps, with its own deck and a lounge far below, a herringboned space from which you recount your most recent adventures.

INTERPOL - IF YOU REALLY LOVE NOTHING

Paul Banks is one of the most serious frontmen going, with a mostly fixed stony expression, sort of like Daniel Craig’s harder cousin, and a haircut that rides a line between roman gladiator and ill-advised late-night dare. He’s complicated, in other words, as is the band.

I saw them at The Horseshoe in Toronto more than twenty years ago, when they were touring in support of their first album, which was about to take off. I lost track of them in their middle years, but Marauder, the 2018 album from which this song and video is taken, and The Other Side of Make-Believe from 2022, are a return to exquisite form and relevance that I didn’t see coming. If anything, I like these last two albums even more than I did the first two.

It’s a very good video as well, perhaps because I don’t spend any time in bars these days, and scenes filmed in them are so rarely convincing. Kristen Stewart’s appearance here feels entirely organic, as if she just happened to be there drinking. It doesn’t hurt that she and Banks might as well be siblings, so well do they share that air of invincible, melancholic cool.

DOGS - A VERY FEW LINES FROM THE NOVEL-IN-PROGRESS:

Real estate agents were animals, she had long ago decided. Either they were down-on-their-luck beasts spring-loaded behind kitchen islands like famished strays, or they were predatory - jackals and wolves stuffed into cheap suits and dresses.  The way they looked at you as soon as you entered was enough to give them away. They might as well have worn tags: sloth, hyena, pussy cat, Lothario. She swatted them all away easily enough, but always carried her shoes with her rather than leaving them at the front door, in case one Sunday between two and four she had to leave suddenly through the garden, or even jump from a laughable bathroom window into dank tangles of sumac.

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