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Have you ever seen your hometown in a movie or book?

If you're from New York or Toronto or Tokyo I guess you see that all the time, but if you grow up in a small place, a plain place, there's an electric, almost perverse thrill in seeing or reading about the streets you know in a medium that transcends our own small and desperate lives.

Glimpses of St.Catharines, Ontario in the media were rare. When I was in Grade 2, the big book around town come Christmas time was The Welland Canal Monster meets Santa, by Frank Proctor, a local radio host. The Welland Canal is one of St.Catharines' (few) claims to fame, and the fact that it was featured in a book, and that the writer actually came to my school to read about it -- well, words fail me. There was also, of course, that Yuletide classic A Christmas Story, parts of which (including the legendary tongue-stuck-to-the-icy-pole scene) were shot at a school in St.Kitts.

Other than that, I can only think of a couple of others -- an early book by Terry 'Waiting to Exhale' Mcmillan, in which the characters drive through Niagara Falls and St.Catherines (a misspelling, but at least she mentioned us) and Canadian writer Howard Engleman, who has written a series of detective novels featuring Benny Cooperman that take place in the fictional town of Grantham, which is modelled directly after Engleman's hometown of St.Catharines -- right down to the street names and the local diner named Diana Sweets. (I remember slacking off one day when I was about sixteen during a lull in my job at the St.Catharines library, skimming through an Engleman book, only to have a weird sense of something-like-deja-vu-but-not-quite when the main character wandered into the Grantham Library, modelled quite clearly and recognizably after the very place I was reading the book in. He even remembered to mention the weird, metallic statues of Adam and Eve that perpetually loitered in the lobby.

Living just outside of Tokyo, I'd often purposely seek out books that were set in or around the nation's capital, or the multitude of towns nearby I'd visited, just so I could mentally picture precisely what the author was describing. And I remember watching a movie in a theatre in Shibuya (the downtown, teeny-bopper hub of central Tokyo and modern Japan), a movie in which the main characters walked around, well, Shibuya -- and right outside of the very theatre I was watching their adventures in...

Phnom Penh flicks are few and far between. There's a new documentary out on DVD that I have (but haven't watched yet) called S-21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine (a nice, gentle title, eh?) which is about the infamous Tuol Sleng prison that is just down the road a ways from where I'm writing these words. I've been to the actual prison a couple of times; I'm interested in seeing how this flick portrays what went down there.

And then there's City of Ghosts, the Matt Dillon flick that I wrote about in my second blog entry a few months ago. It presents Phnom Penh as a dirty, sleazy place populated by low-life expats. Accurate? There's no argument from this corner...

It's fun and more than a little strange to watch films and read books about a place that was the very definition of foreign; it's fun to make a place your own, and then to compare another version of it to see if it matches your perception, your reality.

The thing is, novels and movies, when they work, can do two things: they can take us out of our everyday lives to some place extraordinary, fresh and pulsating, or they can reveal the hidden secrets and unknown alleyways that form and align the places we think we know so well. When I was younger, a place wasn't real, wasn't validated, unless I could see it on the silver screen, or reimagine it myself within the safe the pages of a novel, guided by the author's (hopefully) sure hand.

I don't know if I need a place to have that kind of imaginative affirmation anymore, but still, it's comforting and stimulating to see a place you know so well transformed by another's artistic intent. Strange and, if you're lucky, magical. You can nod your head with the sights and tone of place that you recognize, and throw popcorn at the screen at the obvious (to you anyways) oversights and omissions of your hometown (or the town you're now in.)

It's a tangible way to connect the gritty ground beneath your feet with that other, higher level of shimmering stability that the best art strives for, and sometimes even achieves.