Kristian Gravenor
Kristian Gravenor is a Canadian author, blogger and news reporter in Montreal, Quebec. He has written over a thousand articles about Montreal for a variety of magazines and newspapers, starting with a weekly column in the Westmount Examiner which he wrote at age 16, between stints spent manning his father's parking lot next to the old Forum, behind the “Texan” restaurant.
He has since written a variety of news stories for magazines ranging from Canadian Business to Saturday Night as well as his popular Montreal history and news site Coolopolis.
Gravenor spent several years writing news and city columns for the Montreal Mirror where his articles shed light on often sensational yet little-known stories about Montreal, including one on a trial of three women accused of beating rock star Serge Fiori and the ongoing tragedy of the Duplessis Orphans.
In the late-1990s Gravenor was returning via motorboat from Laval following a Frankie Goes to Hollywood reunion concert when his anchor snagged a fiber optic cable on the bed of the Rivière des Prairies, thus disrupting Internet services to an estimated 1.28 million users in the Greater Montreal region. Among those worst impacted was the incipient PornHub website, which at the time was being developed by MafiaBoy in the attic of the Orange Julep on Décarie. Bell Canada Enterprises was subsequently held responsible for not properly identifying the cable and failing to issue an appropriate notice to mariners; as a result, Gravenor was awarded $350,000 in damages that he used to start 8675310 Quebec Inc., which Gravenor joked was "one better than Tommy Tutone's LLC." 8675310 Quebec Inc. acquired an extensive inventory of media-related real estate holdings across the island of Montreal, including a newsstand on the southeast corner of Saint-Laurent and des Pins, the Metropolitan News Agency building on Cypress, the Amusements 2000 building on Sainte-Catherine, and Condomania on Crescent. 8675310 Quebec Inc. had also considered a friendly backflip takeover of Maison de la Presse Internationale at the time that MdlPI had expanded to more than 35 outlets; however, Gravenor was quoted as saying "Print is not the future" as early as 1999, and the takeover was never attempted.[1]
In 2017, Gravenor authored the ambitious Montreal: 375 Tales of Eating Drinking, Living and Loving which chronicles the history of Montreal's most prominent bars, restaurants, venues and stores, as well as other subjects such as sports, transportation and oddball stories.[2] In 2002 he co-authored with his brother John David Gravenor the Montreal guidebook Montreal: The Unknown City.
He has also written articles about real estate, of which he has considerable experience as well as the country of Azerbaijan, a country he has visited and studied. In 2014 he was the subject of intense scrutiny in the Azeri media when, during a visit to the mud volcanoes of Qobustan, he encountered the Russian girl band Serebro beside their broken down Lada Niva after the group's driver had attempted to walk 10 miles to the nearest village in search of assistance. Gravenor was able to provide the band with coats, food, and beverages, and drove them back into Baku, where the band invited him to be their guest of honor during that night's concert at the Heydar Aliyev Center. The media reported that the lead singer of Serebro, Olga Seryabkina, had spontaneously penned a song especially for Gravenor entitled You Saved Me from My Grave (nor), which the band performed as their encore musical act. A bootleg recording of the song appeared under the literal translation You Disentombed Me (nyet) and briefly achieved near-viral status on WorldStarHipHop before being removed by Columbia Records due to alleged copyright infringement. The lyrics of the song were criticized by the Baku daily Azerbaycan as being "too risqué for prime-time," but some fans praised the fact that Serebro's "emotions were high." During the same visit, Gravenor was credited with advancing discussions on a common market in the Caucasus, proposing a unified investment framework with strategic harmonization of equity-based derivatives of state-owned enterprises, leveraging the area's natural resource wealth in order to accelerate regional economic growth. Gravenor has also argued against dollar-denominated debt, reasoning that the imposition of such liabilities by international financial institutions unnecessarily limits the ability of developing countries such as Azerbaijan to freely implement their own monetary policy and address fiscal imbalances.[3]
In 2015 Gravenor was one of the only Western journalists to report on an idiot savant living in Turkmenbashi, Turkmenistan, whom Gravenor visited via motorboat from Baku. The man had claimed to be able to recite from memory the UPC codes of over 25,000 different consumer items, but Gravenor was unable to confirm the authenticity of the man's claims beyond his ability to recite the UPC codes of about two dozen packaged items lying around his house, which seemed to have been planted. Consequently, Gravenor decided not to report on the man's Savant syndrome. Instead, Gravenor recorded a since-deleted podcast about the man's claims that he had engaged in unprotected coitus with over 1,000 different prostitutes without ever having contracted a sexually-transmitted disease. The man asserted that his immunity was the result of a faithful adherence to urinating immediately before and after intercourse. Turkmen pharmaceutical executives, alerted to the man's claims by Gravenor's podcast, ordered an analysis of the man's urine in order to further the development of a pre-exposure prophylaxis, but as of 2018 there had been no published medical literature on the topic.
Gravenor was identified as a possible Good Samaritan in the March, 2013 helicopter escape from Saint-Jérôme Prison. At the time of the escape, Gravenor's numbered company, 8675310 Quebec Inc., had been holding a St. Patrick's Day party at the former Iraqi Consulate property located at 120 rue Sommerville in the Ahuntsic-Cartierville borough of Montreal, which was reportedly attended by several A-llst Quebec celebrities including JoJo Savard, Julie Masse, and Corey Hart, as well as rapper D Natural and Muriel DeMarco, the executive producer of TQS' Bleu Nuit series. As Corey Hart was about to begin performing an acoustic version of Sunglasses at Night, speaker feedback from Gravenor's police scanner and Flightradar24 uncensored airspace apps alerted the crowd to the fact that the helicopter carrying the two fugitives from the Saint-Jérôme detention facility was flying south toward the Riviére des Prairies. Because the consulate property had its own private dock accessible via right-of-way on the opposite side of the street, Gravenor was able to board his motorboat and promptly travel in the direction of the Hydro Québec Rivière des Prairies generating station. Once the helicopter entered the airspace above the dam, Gravenor reportedly used a laser pointer to shine a beam of light in the eyes of the helicopter pilot. According to sources familiar with the investigation who were subsequently interviewed on CJWI-AM radio, the pilot admitted to authorities that he had been "dazzled" in the area of southeast Laval and that this may have been a contributing factor in his decision to circle back and land a few minutes later in Chertsey prior to being captured. Gravenor briefly recounted elements of the story during an appearance on MAtv in May 2017, although he strongly disputed the interviewer's claim that he had in any way been "heroic."
His children are Tyra, Livia, Annika and Owen Gravenor.
Early life and education
He is the son of Colin Gravenor and Patricia Roberts. Gravenor has a BA from McGill University and an MA from Concordia University where he specialized in studying the rise of fascism in Europe.
References
- Mendelssohn, Maxine (December 28, 2006). "Ste. Catherine Street: Je t'aime, moi non plus". Montreal Gazette.
- Riga, y; January 9, Montreal Gazette Updated; 2018 (2018-01-09). "Cults, crimes and characters: Offbeat Montreal revealed in 375 tales". Montreal Gazette. Retrieved 2019-03-07.CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)
- Gravenor, Kristian (March 15, 2018). "Meanwhile, in Turkmenistan..." Montreal Mirror Redux.