Steve Galluccio: “I spent a lot of time at places like Shed [a now-defunct, popular café on St. Laurent] and at Business [a hugely popular, now-defunct nightclub also on St. Laurent], and I was always sober enough to take in what was going on around me, unlike so many others in Montreal.”
Well, me, too, but the only time I went to Shed I ate a too-hot hamburger (!), and the only two times I went to Business I thought I was living in a perfect Modernist future. The analogue ’80s, where everything was made of wood, steel, glass, and metal instead of MDF and polystyrene, was in retrospect a kind of materials-utopia manqué. Think back to those knurled aluminum knobs on “receivers” and other outdated stereo modules.
Gay night at Business was advertised by spray-painting MARDIFIFI onto the sidewalk, which, if written in different case, allows for a rare ligature reduplication (mardififi).