Briques du Neige

Fat City no more for the raccoons

2011-11-26T08:07:00.001-05:00

So the city or the park administration finally took the feeding of the raccoons at the belvedere on Mont Royal seriously and put up some permanent signs.

DON'T TOUCH ME
DON'T FEED ME
I CARRY DISEASES

The situation was out of control, with people bringing bags of cat food and dumping them on the ground. According to the local group Les Amis de la Montagne there was something like twice the amount of raccoons on Mont-Royal than the land could actually support. I always wondered what happened to them in the winter. Did people still come by and feed them? Did the fat they had built up all summer help them make it through? Or did a bunch die off every winter? If the signs work and people really do stop feeding them, than I guess we will have a bunch of dead raccoons over the next year. What happens to their bodies?

Maybe the raccoons who are so used to humans doing their bidding will get aggressive now that the food is not forthcoming. It will start off small, with them approaching people, tugging on their pant leg. Then one day one of them will climb up some little girl and yank her ice cream sandwich from her hands. Then they'll start ganging up, pulling down small children and frail older people. Or maybe they get sneaky, chewing brake lines on people's parked cars as they roll a joint or make out at night then following the car down Camillien-Houde until it crashes where they jump in and feast on the bodies before the ambulance arrives.

That fine has some teeth. How will it be enforced, though?

I also like the "Je suis porteur de maladies" line. It's basically untrue, at least to the extent that anybody would ever get sick from feeding a raccoon. Obviously, it could happen, but the rate would be so minimal that there would be no real social cost. It's just that our society has become so obsessed with health and safety (and our own individual well-being of course), that that simple line will probably be incredibly effective. All the ignorant people who are only capable of thinking of their own pleasure will get that message quite quickly, especially the freaked-out parents of today. Really, it's quite clever.

Next time I see somebody from Les Amis de la Montagne, I'll ask them about the story behind the sign. The last time I talked to them, they lamented about how hard a time they were having educating people about not feeding the raccoons and how they had put signs up only to have them all torn down. I'm curious how they got real action to be taken and how effective it actually is.

Indie hip-hop video being filmed downtown

2011-11-16T20:01:00.000-05:00

Behind St-Cats and St-Elizabeth. Some sweet graffiti back there. These guys were rapping over a boombox of their own tracks while two others filmed them with what looked like a smartphone and a digital point-and-shoot camera. That's some indie shit. If anybody recognizes them, let me know their name so I can see if I can find their music anywhere. Their delivery showed promise.

A near-perfect walk

2011-11-16T08:35:00.000-05:00

We've had a beautiful Autumn here this year and I have taken advantage of it. The weekend before last, when the leaves changing was at its apex and the weather was unseasonably warm, I did the "summit" of Mont Royal on both Saturday and Sunday. On Saturday I did it with the sunset and on Sunday, I went up in the late morning/early afternoon. Below are my pictures from the Sunday trip.

Dude

2011-11-15T19:52:00.001-05:00

The mountain

2011-11-06T09:48:00.002-05:00

It's probably going to be crowded, but if you have the opportunity to go up Mont-Royal today, I strongly recommend that you do so. I had a nice long evening walk yesterday and it was absolutely gorgeous.

Bixi Shaolin Style

2011-11-04T08:13:00.000-04:00

Hao! More chi!

Bowzer

2011-11-03T08:11:00.000-04:00

The widest bulldog ever. When he has some energy, he is actually quite playful. His neighbours have a hard time taking him for a walk in public because everybody wants to pet him.

Pink Habs House

2011-11-02T08:07:00.000-04:00

Mile End Photoshoot

2011-11-01T08:00:00.000-04:00

Spotted late summer coming out of the alley. That car has been sitting there for a while. Glad somebody made use of it.

Monday

2011-10-31T08:00:00.002-04:00

Enough said

2011-10-18T09:12:00.002-04:00

Autumn Apples

2011-10-13T22:09:00.001-04:00

Got these at the farmer's market on St-Dominique between St-Joseph and Laurier. That (and the closing down of the street that allowed it to exist) have turned out to be a real boon. I'll miss it when they close for the winter.

But what's the story with the local apple trees. I passed several in the alleys of Mile End and they all have this diseased look. The owners let them fall and rot, so I imagine they aren't edible. Does anybody know what the story is?

The Hank Williams Scandal: Bad Logic and Butthurt

2011-10-08T12:44:00.003-04:00

Are you ready for some butthurt!

The whole Hank Williams "scandal" perfectly encapsulates everything that is wrong with American political culture and the media that amplifies it. In a nutshell, Americans want to be offended, they want to be outraged. They are constantly looking for fuel to feed their baseless resentment. And the media is constantly providing.

After saying he wouldn't support any of the Republican party candidates for president, non-celebrity, non-pundit, non-talented Hank Williams Jr. complained about Obama and Boehner (Safari spellcheck suggests "Boner" here) playing golf together. He then made the simile that them doing was would be like Netanyahu and Hitler playing golf together.

Butthurt
Cue the butthurt. Get ready for the outrage. We're all so offended that he would dare to "compare Obama to Hitler". The announcers kept probing to make absolutely sure that he was aware that he had dared to use the word Hitler. The next few days there is a wave of media reaction. Monday Night Football ends their contract with him (his song "Are you Ready for some Football!" has been the opening theme since 1989).

Who is angry? What is your reasoning for being offended? There is none. These words did not offend the people who are freaking out. They are already offended. Their whole lives are consciously or sub-consciously dedicated to seeking out reasons to get into an uproar. This is our puritan culture, the same one that freaked out about comic books or Dungeons & Dragons or Janet's nipple slip.

The righteousness and the vigilance has always been there. The new element is the personal affront. Now it's not just morally offensive, it's actually a personal attack against you somehow. Everything is about you now. Right or left. It's like a competition between two drama queens about who can be the most personally damaged by somebody else's words. Nobody gives a shit about Hank Williams Jr., particularly on the left (most people on the left had probably never even heard of him) and now all of a sudden his words are so powerful and dangerous that he must be forced to apologize and his music must not be allowed to be heard!

Bad Logic
The thing that is so insane about all this is that he did not even compare Obama to Hitler. He compared the association of Boehner and Obama, two people who are supposed to be enemies, to the leader of the Jewish state and the leader of the state that wanted to kill all the Jews, clearly enemies. Logically, it's the same as saying "Boehner and Obama playing golf together is like a cat and dog going for a walk together." He wasn't comparing Hitler to anyone. But the use of that word is a trigger for the perpetually butthurt. So all logic is thrown out the window. The need for the emotional release trumps rationality and clear thought. This is why America is doomed. We're stupid and emotional.

Now to really trigger the butthurt
This same phenomenon is what made 9/11 so awesome for most Americans (minus the ones who actually lost somebody). It was the butthurt they had all been waiting for for so long. The real shock the followed the attacks was not that somebody had actually dared to attack America. Americans had been behaving as if they were under attack for a decade already. The shock was the incredible scale of it. But the fact of it played right into everyone's desire to be angry and righteous.

And then look at the most famous flawed logic of the 21st century that followed 9/11: the costly, wasteful, politically ineffective invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan which resulted in a stronger, crazier form of Islamic Extremism and an acceleration of America's economic collapse.

The choice that Americans were given was: 1) indulge in your most satisfying, childish emotions of righteous anger or 2) suck it up and make rational decisions about your country's future. They chose the first option and they are still choosing it. The media and the politicians are all banking on that choice and that is probably the road we are going to ride right into oblivion.

So keep an eye out for future media-fueled butthurt incidents. Ask yourself if what was said is truly offensive. Check the logic of the arguments. And even if you do find solid logic and a reason to be offended, look deep inside yourself. Are you really offended? Or was that emotion already there?

RIP Steve Jobs

2011-10-06T20:18:00.001-04:00

Just have to join the cavalcade of reaction to Steve Jobs' death. While I am generally very much against this weird public mourning that our society seems to feel it has to do every time somebody famous dies, I do appreciate the recognition that society is giving to Steve Jobs' impact on our society.

We got our first computer in 1984 and it was a Mac. My dad was a longtime computer hobbyist, but highly critical of the mainstream trends of computing and it was a running joke in our family about how my dad kept putting off buying a computer. The whole family stood around the kitchen table as we opened the box and took out all the smaller boxes. Looking back on it now, I realize that it was one of the earliest times that I would see a product where the packaging was all part of a total product experience. Not sure if that is such a good thing, but it is certainly ubiquitous today (though still nobody is able to do it as well as Apple).

Man, did I ever get into that thing. Happily, the computer was kept in the guest room right across from my bedroom. I used to spend hours with MacPaint, playing Infocom games, just monkeying around. I still find it a bit hard to believe that you used to have to actually load the programs into RAM via the disk drive. I got amazingly fast at swapping 3.5" floppies in and out. The joke (that I only learned about during the best man speech at my wedding) was that when I invited people over to come play with our Mac, it meant inviting people over to come and watch me play with the Mac. Sorry guys! For my sister's birthday, I made a birthday card with MacPaint and signed it "From the family and Macie" and then I had the voice synthesizer say happy birthday to her.

I got way out of computers when I went to college (even though, Ironically, I went to Reed, whose computer lab was one of the first all Mac college labs in the country). I sort of regret that, as I lost some learning. When I did get into the workforce, my first corporate job was in a Mac environment and all of a sudden I was the only guy who knew how to really make them sing. From then on in, in my varied career, my computer skills have always been a fundamental part of whatever job I've been doing. I actually went back to school a few years ago and got a diploma in Computer Science. I just didn't have the focus or the nerdy patience to tinker with UNIX when I was a kid. The interface of the Mac stimulated my imagination and got me into computers. Today, I'm working in a mostly Windows office and have made my peace with that ugly but functional OS. It helps that I don't have to live in fear of never using a decent interface again. Thanks to Apple (and Google and a lot of other factors), competition is fierce in the computer market.

Today, the Apple haters are in the minority and on the run. And even they have to recognize Apple's impact on technology. But it didn't used to be like that. Back in the day, Mac users were a real minority, sneered at and dismissed by more "serious" computer users. I can't tell you how many times I had to listen to people argue with this sort of pedantic, superior tone about how Macs weren't a real business computer, how it was totally correct for game companies to not design games for them, how you couldn't actually control them (yeah, like DOS was somehow really getting at the guts of the system). Where are those sysadmins and businessmen today? Desperately waiting in line for their iPhone 4S, that's where. Suck it bitches! Sorry, I know that's petty during this sad time, but I just can't help myself. You were wrong and I was right.

Oh yes, and a special shout-out to all you losers who used the Macs are too expensive argument. Yes, for a certain percentage of the North American population, a Mac is out of their price range and they can get a fine Windows laptop for a lot cheaper. But the ones who were making that argument were also usually owners of tricked out 6K gaming boxes who would run out to line up and buy the latest videogame at $100 a pop every month.

I have many criticisms with Apple as a company and the direction they are taking their software, but I am so grateful that Apple exists. Can you imagine a world where Microsoft was the only interface? Where Blackberry dominated the cell phone market? We got pretty close, and it was freaking scary. Today, it's a truism that the user experience is the most important factor in selling computers to people. That is thanks to Steve Jobs and all the people behind the Macintosh. We are going to hell in handbasket, destroying our planet and letting the fascists back into power, but at least we have some awesome technology to play with while it all goes down. Oh yeah, and good animated movies as well. Thanks Steve and rest in peace.

On the other hand...

2011-09-17T07:19:00.001-04:00

In counterpoint to my rant the other day,where I added my voice to the collective outburst of the entire province against the corruption in our government and contractors, I have had the exact opposite experience with renovators at the private, entrepreneurial level here in Quebec. At my job, I am currently overseeing a fairly significant renovation project. Thanks to a happy confluence of timing, real estate and budget, we have been available to invest a bit of money into our office space, which I have mentioned before is a 100-year old presbytère. We've got a bunch of people fixing doors and windows, redoing the kitchen, painting, re-doing the floors and doing a general energy efficiency overhaul. It's an old, long-neglected building and while we are only doing a fraction of what should be done to return this piece of Montreal history to its proper state (and to simply protect it).

This project has brought me in contact with a bunch of different people whose career is in renovation: contractors, painters, carpenters, general handymen, window experts, locksmiths, restoration experts, energy efficiency engineers, designers. There are anglophones, francophones and allophones. Some are old and have been doing this for decades. Some are brand new and even still in school for their trade. It's early days still and there is still room for a minor disaster. But so far I have been uniformly impressed with the quality and integrity of the work of every one of them.

They have come in on time, done a thorough analysis and provided me with what so far appears to be fairly accurate estimates. Once the work has started, they have been more than on-time (getting to the job site so early that I am the one who has to be changing my schedule), hard-working, flexible (and with this old building, my vacillation and a not entirely traditional work environment, they've had to be flexible) and just pleasant, interesting people to be around. Their costs are reasonable. None of them is making a huge margin on these jobs and in several cases they have given us a break, recognizing that we are a non-profit and that our landlord (the church) would be otherwise leaving this beautiful building to rot.

And they are skilled. There have been some serious challenges already, such as the sill under the front door being completely rotted away and no real floor joists left to properly support it. After a few minutes of standing around and looking and discussion, the guy went out that day, got some quick-drying concrete, built a mini-form and just filled the gap in with a little foundation that will support the sill. The guys doing the floors discovered that the old substrate plywood under the floor went underneath all the radiators and he couldn't just tear it out without them losing their level and possibly damaging the pipes. So he hand-fashioned little wooden shims and went around under each foot of each radiator and tapped them in.

It's just been a joy to be a part of a process where old, quality work is being restored and brought back to its original quality with a minimum of waste and with long-term durability in mind rather than they typical short-term "get it done so we can sell it" mentality. I have seen so much shit "renovation" work done here in Montreal, where they just go in, tear everything out, put up aluminum studs and gyproc walls and paint everything white. My sister lives in Brooklyn and it seems impossible to find anybody competent with any skill or care for the job. Just that fucking dull-faced, semi-tough guy contractor attitude, where they are utterly inflexible and tell you how the job is supposed to go. Have any of you dealt with that? I have seen so many of those guys in my life and I haven't even met one so far in this project. If I did, he would be out the door, that's for sure. Being able to say that is a result of the surplus of skilled, conscientious craftsmen on the market here and it is something to celebrate.

If only this were the same for the development industry and the government workers here in Quebec.

The change has come...

2011-09-15T09:10:00.001-04:00

My God, I'm starting to become a real Quebecker, a real Canadian. I'm starting to complain all the time! But holy christ, the level of lies and corruption and dissimulation that goes on here, coupled with growing wreck that is our civil infrastructure, it's hard not to complain. The Montreal region is literally falling apart. I'm sure you've heard about report after report of crumbling bridges and overpasses, huge chunks of concrete falling on people, rebar sticking out, endless public construction jobs. On top of it all, we pay the most taxes in North America. I am fine with paying taxes. I believe strongly in paying taxes. Hell, I don't even mind some inefficiency in the distribution of that money throughout the social services. I recognize that when a system gets that large it is going to be far from perfect.

But what is going on in Quebec today and has been going on for decades goes far beyond simple inefficiency. It is straight out crime. Theft. Corruption. Government officials, both in the bureaucracy and in the elected classes collude with organized crime contractors to siphon massive amounts of taxpayer money for public projects that go into their own pockets and into party coffers. This goes on at every level, municipal and provincial and is massive. This is the reason Quebec is the most expensive province in Canada and the worst when it comes to construction efficiency. It is a joke. I mean I used to think that road work in New York City was embarrassing, but wow Quebec makes NYC look like Abu Dhabi.

And we've had empty reports and government investigations going on for years with no results at all. So finally, we get some teeny bit of real information from the rapport de l'unité d'anticollusion, led by ex-cop Jacques Duchesneau, which basically confirms everything I said above. And guess what the minister of transport, Pierre Moreau, says. That basically it's a few bad apples, that we shouldn't have a public inquiry, that it's exaggerated and that we should just let the police get on with their business.

Holy shit. That just shows first how deep the corruption goes and second how little anyone involved in it really believes they will ever get busted for it. At the very least, we could expect a strongly worded, righteous response about how this will be dealt with. But here their arrogance is so vast that they don't even bother giving the people that rhetoric. They basically are telling us that there is nothing we can do about it and if there is, they sure aren't going to be ones to do it. Does anybody remember what happened to the federal Liberals when they took this same attitude when it came to the sponsorship scandal? At this point, I don't even care about other political issues at the provincial level. Let's just turf these fuckers out right now. They are vampires sucking the life of the province away. Fat and bloated, they want power for power's sake and do not give a shit about the people of Quebec. Let's get rid of Tremblay here in Montreal as well. And when the new government comes in, we need a serious purge of the bureaucracy and sub-ministries as well as the big contracting and architecture firms. Line them up in the Olympic Stadium in their underwear for all to see and then send them off to clear the streets of snow by hand for the rest of their lives. Scumbags.

Hey Plateau-ites, you're really not helping yourselves

2011-09-07T00:20:00.002-04:00

So this happened today. Several organizations are moving out of the building where I work. It's on Laurier, facing the awesome new two-way bike path and new one-way only Laurier. The moving truck came to deliver a bunch of empty plastic moving boxes to the tenants to start packing.

I come downstairs around eleven to check on something else and one of my colleagues who was outside having a cigarette points out this doofus on a Bixi. He's berating the moving men for parking their van in the bike path. I didn't get involved, but lurked while the conversation went on for literally almost 20 minutes. It went from the guy spazzing out to him calming down and trying to have a "reasonable" conversation with him where he tried to argue that they were somehow doing something terribly wrong. Even though there is nowhere else for them to park and he could have quite easily just gone around as it was late morning and there was practically no traffic on Laurier. He claimed that he worked for the city, but when pressed about exactly what it was he did, he remained vague. He was wearing a relaxed grey blazer and looked every bit the stereotypical Plateau yuppy. He finally rode off. The moving guys were far from impressed. 10 minutes later a cop showed up. Because the moving dudes were finishing up their job, I went and talked to him. He was reasonable and when I told them they would be done in 10 minutes, he let them finish their work and go. When I asked if he had just driven by or if there was a complaint, he said he had received many complaints.

I mean what the fuck? Look I am pretty fascistically pro-bike. If I had my way, cars would simply be outlawed and anyone owning an SUV sent to intensive work re-education camps. But for fuck's sake, be reasonable! People have to move. Movers have to park to put people's stuff in the truck. What are they supposed to do? Find a parking spot around the block and walk the furniture back and forth to the truck so you don't have to deviate from your straight line Bixi ride to the coffee shop where you are going to rail against people who have jobs on your laptop?

Here's the problem with grey blazer fuckstick. He doesn't understand about work. He has clearly never done a real job in his life. These are the kind of people that everybody hates about the Plateau. Their selfish, spoiled, ignorant behaviour completely undermines any rational argument for bikes and improved, less-polluting systems of transportation. How are those movers going to vote when they see someone stumping for more public transport and better bike lanes now?

The world is getting more crowded. There are more cars in cities than ever before and more bikes. Everybody is going to have to be a little flexible and try extra hard to be mindful of others. So when bikes make a strong political victory, just like anytime you win, you should be gracious and generous about it. You should not be a righteous cockface and get all up in a couple of dudes grills who are simply doing their job, especially when nothing they are doing is bothering anyone at all.

And Ferrandez and company, I don't know how much of it is true, but I am starting to hear more and more complaints and frustration from Plateau citizens about the utter inflexibility of your laws. Maybe this is a perception problem, maybe it's real, but it is growing. If you are going to make a real, lasting impact for the good, you need to get buy-in from all the parties. Making draconian, inflexible laws that don't take into account the reality of day-to-day life and work in our community (such as not allowing delivery men to stop for 10 minutes in a bike path), is going to alienate a lot of potential voters. This is especially the case when the changes you are making are radical ones. And to car addicts, anything that restricts them is radical.

Stormchasing with Briques du Neige: Memories of Irene

2011-08-28T17:39:00.002-04:00

Despite the great pleasure I take in mocking the media overreaction to Tropical Storm (née Hurricane) Irene, especially when it comes to New York City, I have to say that I do quite enjoy following the storm itself. It's really quite impressive! I feel quite privileged being here in Montreal, as I got to get a nice taste of the storm without having to suffer any of its damage.

Though I knew I had to do go for a walk in the storm, I did have an internal debate early this afternoon and got out later than I wanted to. As it turned out, it was probably for the best, as the majority of the branches that were going to fall had fallen. There was quite a bit of damage. I would not have felt comfortable being in the forest in the first couple hours of the storm. As it was, I felt pretty tense for a lot of the trip. You can't really relax when the wind is moving like that, even if you know the odds of something happening to be pretty low. Up on the top, on the south-facing side, the wind was really ferocious. It came in big, long gusts that drove the rain to the horizontal. At one point, when I was just before an exposed gap on the trail, it got so loud that I felt the surging seed of panic in my breast. I suppressed it and calmed myself down, but it was interesting to see how your physiology reacts to environmental stress. It wasn't going so fast that I felt nervous about losing my footing, but I had to take care. Maybe getting close to 40 km/h at the highest? (hmm, the weather site is telling me the gusts can be getting up to 69 km/h! I feel manly!)

Overall, it was an amazing walk. Super intense. The pictures don't capture what it was like to be in it and this is really pretty mild compared to what the people down south got (south of New York, I mean) and along the coasts got, but it still felt amazingly powerful and vast. I really got a sense that I was hanging out on the fringes of a major weather system that had travelled up the continent to get to me.

Here's a pretty big tree that came down up near the Grandeur Nature field

This guy was up on the battlefield plateau, just next to the field itself and—I kid you not—he was wearing a wizard cape and appeared to be performing magical ceremonies. After I took this picture, he sprang up and the ground where he'd been leaning was smoking. Later, I heard a loud bang coming from the direction of the battlefield.

These are the rock stairs behind the sloping field looking down across the main path towards the medieval battlefield. This picture isn't great, but you can see the water streaming down either side. Later, as you will see below, the stairs themselves became a waterfall.

The summit!

The wrath of the gods

and here it is live!

Looks like the Tower of Orthanc.

Some other hearty souls.

Didn't stand a chance.

Here are the same stairs, but seen from above. I went around.

Charlie oblivious to the carnage in her obsessive hunt for squirrels.

Looking for like-minded Google Plus'ers

2011-08-10T08:42:00.002-04:00

Hey, I'm over at Google+ and I'm looking for people who are interested in discussing the kinds of movies we see at Fantasia as well as the topics of Canada and Montreal that get bandied about here. I'm sure they are out there and it would be fun to have the kind of short-term discussions and sharing of neat stuff that goes on on G+ with them. So if you are on google+, find me at Olman Feelyus and add me to your book circles or whatever. If you want to be on, let me know in the comments and I'll try and send you an invite.

It's weird, because I already have lots of people I already know as well as tons of people from the tabletop RPG community in my circles. But I can't figure out a way to search people by interest and thus find discussions about other subjects (mainly books and movies) that I am interested in.

(I've posted this same thing over at Olman's Fifty, but about books.)

Rant: l'affaire Turmel

2011-08-02T18:26:00.003-04:00

Canadians are fucking stupid and the fucking media is largely responsible for this. How the fuck is it a news story that the interim leader of the NDP once was a member of the Bloc. This is like the Red Scare. How did it end up that our media just entirely bought into the Conservative propaganda line which effectively undermines any serious opposition to their power?

What's even more maddening than the retarded reporters and their scumbag editors who are pushing this story to the top of the headlines, are the retarded anglophone Canadians who are on the left who actually consider this an issue. Check this quote from user "retardo" on the CBC website:

This is really sad for the Federal NDP. They made such gains in the last election, and actually could have formed a govt in 4 years (Providing that Canadians are upset with the Conservatives and the Liberals are still picking bad leaders) This Woman has just destroyed the NDP. They now stand no chance of making any gains outside of Quebec in the next election. They had an opportunity to become a national contender in the next federal election, now they will simply become the regional party of Quebec.
What was the NDP caucus thinking? If Jack does not miraculously heal in the next week they will lose every seat outside of Quebec in the next election.

You really believe this shit? Seriously? How fucking stupid and ignorant are my fellow anglophone Canadians?

Here, I am going to spell it out for you.

Quebec separating is not "destroying Canada"
If this worst-case scenario were to actually happen (which it won't), so what? The only people who will suffer are the federalists in Quebec and they are already so put upon, I can't see how much worse it could be for them. Otherwise, Canada is still Canada, just minus a big province. If you cut off my arm, it will hurt like hell, but I'll live and still be me (and I'll still kick your ass). This "having anything to do with the Bloc" = "wanting to destroy Canada" is simply a logical fallacy and must be eliminated from our national discourse. It exists because as long as the Bloc is demonized, the left can never unite against Harper and his neo-cons. They know this and that is why they are very happy right now. I'm not speaking to fans of Harper and his cronies here. I'm speaking to you fuckstick anglophones on the left who do not know shit about Quebec but are somehow weirdly fearful and angry that there is a political movement here that wants independence. YOU ARE WRONG.

Quebec won't separate
It's just not a practical reality. That's why the NDP did so well in Quebec. So even if you disagree with my logic above, it doesn't matter. It's simply never going to happen. Francophone Quebeckers already get the social and cultural benefits they demanded for in la Revolution Tranquille and tons of economic benefits. The only people who are still complaining are those for whom it is an emotional issue and they are dying off and selling out (cough Jaques Parizeau cough) or remain a small minority too distracted with Turcotte to care. So stop worrying about it. It's not going to happen.

Political reality on the ground in Quebec has almost nothing to do with sovereignty
Sovereignty is pretty low down on practical political issues that drive people to vote here (and drive politicians to choose parties). The economy, the environment and myriad local issues. The Bloc and Quebec Solidaire never talk about separation these days. It's just sort of a baseline that you have to say to be a legit party here in Quebec.

I have to cut this short, because I have to get to a Fantasia screening (enfin!), but I think you get my point. Dear anglo leftie who thinks that it is an issue that Turmel was a member of the Bloc: you are an idiot. Fuck, it was 20 years ago! Dear CBC: @#@Q#%#$^@#$^ (sorry, I can't even express myself).

So Fantasia

2011-07-11T17:26:00.002-04:00

As some of you have already seen in the comments, I am unfortunately going to be going on vacation for the first two and a half weeks of Fantasia this year. While I am very excited about my vacation (to the Maritimes), I am bummed about not being able to dive into the awesome madness that is the world's best film festival. It's even more of a disappointment because I built up a lot of momentum last year blogging about the movies (and possibly even got a few regular readers). On the other hand, this will be a test of my maturity. I am going to get the program and read it on my vacation and there will be lots of wailing and gnashing of the teeth (already missing both The Robot and the latest Ip Man installment), but when we come back, I will be psyched to dive in and take in what awesome movies are left.

Part of the reason I started blogging last year was because I found a big drop-off in the quantity of coverage from the english blogosphere last year. So in my absence, I hope that people who lost some of their energy, find it again and give us the awesome in-depth reports as well as reviews. I won't be online too much, but I hope to come back to an internet about to burst with Fantasia news, reviews, stories and opinions.

Go explode your cinematic awesomeness all over Montreal and the world, Fantasia. I feel that this year is going to rock even harder. I can already here the CJLO DJs crushing it.

Seriously. I'm not playing.

Also, PLEASE DO NOT TEXT DURING THE MOVIES. NOT EVEN DURING THE TRAILERS! If basic civil decency and thoughtfulness is not enough to convince you to turn your phone off as soon as the lights dim, I will warn you now that you have a two-week window to be an asshole. Because when I get back, I am going after with extreme prejudice anybody who texts in my vicinity during the movie. You will receive a stern warning. You will receive a second warning. Third time I am going after your phone. I WILL go there.

Finally, are any of you movie nerds on Google+? I never did the Facebook, but am on the Plus and would like to get a movie circle going. If you are, you can find me at Olman Feelyus.

Bon festival! Keep the seat warm for me.

Portuguese Scaffolding

2011-07-11T06:53:00.002-04:00

This is the kind of project that makes me happy to live where I live:

Man working

2011-07-11T06:51:00.005-04:00

Seen on aqueduct replacement site on Laurier, east of St-Denis.

A message is sent

2011-07-10T18:25:00.011-04:00

When you don't live in a neighbourhood and you see a sign like this, it is of passing interest and perhaps a gentle reminder to not litter. But when you live here, you realize that there is a rich and ongoing story behind such a sign, a history of neighbours, conflicting use of space and cultural and demographic assumptions. Though I usually fall on the fascistically clean side in these kinds of arguments, I am sort of on the fence here. On one side, we have a residential building that is used as a commercial garage. I'm pretty sure it is them who tend to leave fairly large piles of junk (though strangely, it's rarely automotive stuff) in this section of the alley, which then becomes a magnet for other junk leavers (including me on occasion). I am pretty sure what you are supposed to do is leave the big junk in the front of the street where it will get picked up. I don't like all the garbage in the alleys, but on the other hand, sometimes you do have a ton of clippings that need to get put out. And when the alley is full of stuff, it blocks people from driving through, and I'm always in favour of blocking cars. My larger concern about too much fussiness around the alleys is it starts to get close to restricting people's ability to do projects in their yards. Too much officiousness back here and we could end up like Vancouver where you aren't allowed to have a clothesline. It's a balance.

ruelle Saint-Louis du Ha ha

2011-07-10T08:16:00.004-04:00

Here is a sweet alley. I forget exactly where it is, one of those T-alley intersections south of Laurier, east of St-Hubert. Anyways, I applaud it.

Clark & Villeneuve, Friday evening, summer

2011-07-09T10:10:00.005-04:00

Interestingly, I learned from a neighbour who lives across the street from this building and has been there since the 60s that this grey apartment building sits on the site of what was a Jewish school. It was affiliated with the synagogue across the street (directly behind where I, as photographer, am standing) which is now a Jehovah's Witness church. I would love to find some pictures of that building when it was a synagogue as well as the old school that was here. I guess it was a vacant lot for quite a while before these condos were put up.

Some secret Patrick Swayze fan club here in Montreal?

2011-07-05T21:35:00.002-04:00

For perverse reasons that I don't want to share on the internet, I have twice now gone to Boîte Noire, the extremely well-stocked arty video store here in Montréal, to rent Next of Kin. Both times, it has been rented! I was floored the first time that it was rented (and that was after searching through the "Gros Bras" action movie section in the basement for twenty minutes). But when I went back today, two weeks later and the guy told me it was out again, I was almost sure there was some mistake in their system. He confirmed that it had been rented recently, but couldn't say if it was the same person who rented it the last time. What the hell? Who the fuck is renting Next of Kin? I either really want to meet this person or I really don't.

Blue Sunshine @ Blue Sunshine

2011-06-26T10:52:00.004-04:00

So I finally got myself to Blue Sunshine last night. It's a pretty cool concept that I've been kicking myself for not checking out earlier, basically a mini-movie theatre/cinema hang-out scene. It resides on the top floor of one of the commercial/residential buildings on the lower Main in a pretty sweet apartment that has been converted into a screening room with the kitchen at back as a little bar/refreshment stand. They play a wide range of movies, going about as obscure as any movie house I've ever known. They also hold classes, workshops and lecture/slideshows. It acts as the classroom for the Miskatonic Institute, a film school that deals with horror filming techniques and history, which I think may even be properly accredited. They also have a lot of links with Fantasia. All in all, a super cool thing and I'm psyched that they have managed to hang on for year.

Last night was the 1-year anniversary and they screened Blue Sunshine, the cult film (can't say classic, though it probably is, just because so few people even among cult movie fans have heard of it, though that is changing obviously) that they got their name from. I was a bit hesitant to go, but Ariel, a young but already high-level movie geek and moviemaker to be, whose excellent and active tumblr blog I follow, encouraged me. He does a good job selling, an excellent trait for the movie business!

The scene is super mellow. There are something like 30 chairs in a large front room. They've got a built in booth with a 16mm projector, DVD, betacam (borrowed, I think, for the occassion). Around the back is the kitchen, where you can get a beer or soda and some snacks (with some various cool movie books and mags for sale). There were free cupcakes last night as well, but that may have been for the anniversary. They were quite good! All in all, it's a very mellow almost family-like feel. I could see how this could become a regular hang-out for movie geeks. My dance card is full these days, but were I in an earlier phase of my life, I would probably have been a regular here. There is the undercurrent of that nerdy intensity, though, that these days makes me feel tired (I overheard several "here's this cool movie thing!" "oh yeah, and here's this one!" type of conversations, I even almost got caught up in one myself!) But really, that goes with the territory. If you are a movie geek, you need to get your ass to Blue Sunshine basically.

The movie itself is a small-budget thriller from the mid-70s about a group of people who had all taken a specific strain of LSD 10 years earlier that had changed their DNA and was causing them all to turn into hairless homicidal maniacs. Jeff Lieberman, the director, was present. He is an amiable, engaging New Yorker who told a hilarious story about the ramifications of the one time he took acid as a very young man. After years of anti-LSD fear propaganda, he was convinced that he may have damaged himself in some serious way. When his first child was crowning, he having no experience of childbirth (and having skipped the Lemas classes his wife wanted him to take), saw the folded head of his child and thought that his wife was birthing a mutant sparrow-child because of the acid he took! Quite a funny story. At the beginning of it, he asked who had taken acid in the audience. Nobody in the first two rows raised their hands! What the hell, didn't you people go to middle school?! Man, what is this world coming to?

Jeff Lieberman, director of Blue Sunshine (the movie) at the Q & A

Blue Sunshine the movie was actually quite entertaining and well done. It was surprisingly not that weird and culty. At times, I felt like I was watching a particularly energetic and edgy movie of the week from the 70s. The main actor, Zalman King, had a pretty good Sean Penn thing going on. I guess he later went on to become a fairly successful producer of big budget soft-core movies. I also noticed Brion James (of Blade Runner fame) playing a weirdo at a party who starts flapping his arms around the living room. The Q & A at the end was quite interesting as well. The finale plays out in a disco, but at the time, disco hadn't made it to the west coast. Lieberman basically recreated the scene that he knew from New York in a honky-tonk club (I wonder if it was the same one where Road House was filmed). Was he responsible for bringing disco to the west coast?

After the movie and Q & A were over, the place basically turned into a house party. I had a nice conversation with Ariel and his friend, saw a couple of local film luminaries (Rick Trembles, sans dark glasses) and checked out a small bookshelf with some sweet old paperbacks including what looks like a series of British youth novels (starting with Skinhead) that were quite intriguing. Because I'm an old man and am watching the neighbour's dog, I snuck out early, but I suspect the party went on. All in all a good time and I will be making it back there.

Memories of winter

2011-06-24T15:14:00.002-04:00

Is it too early for these still? Always amazes me how different our perception of the world is in different seasons and how we totally forget what it felt like to be in that other season.

Wherein the naive optimism of the young citizen is rudely crushed by a painful revelation

2011-06-21T19:03:00.004-04:00

So the results are in. Imagine my joy when I heard the streetsweeper coming up the street this morning and looked out the window to see this to my left:

and this to my right:

Not a car in sight and finally, after all these years, a properly swept street! Is that not a beautiful sight? I went to work with a real skip in my step.

So I come home for lunch and there is Orlando, my next door neighbour and retired Portuguese handyman repairing one of the stairs on the front of his house. Full of bravado, I point out the new sign and how I was responsible for it. He then says to me, in his quiet way "the people who work for the city are stupid. They are the stupidest people in the world." I was expecting some baseless cynical bitter old-man argument from him. Instead, he pointed to the sign and to the tree that is right across the sidewalk from it, explaining that the distance between them was now too narrow for the sidewalk plow and that it would now damage the young tree. I stood there dumbfounded. Not only that, but he was there when the guy was installing the new sign and told him not to do it. The guy said he had to because that is what his boss told him to do. I mean talk about retarded. There are so many other places where the sign could have been put and they chose one exactly opposite a young, but flourishing tree that is now at risk of being damaged. I noticed that there is a cylinder of metal in the ground where an old sign was right next to the new one. I wonder if that explains both the location and speed with which the work was done: they used to have a sign there that deteriorated (which Orlando confirmed was the case) and so could easily replace it. Now maybe they are going to take it out December 1st, when the street sweeping ends and in that case, all is fine. But if not, I am going to have to start my campaign all over again. Astounding.

Results! The city comes through!

2011-06-20T19:04:00.003-04:00

So those of you who have been following this blog know that I have been bitching and complaining about the lack of street cleaning on my side of the block because of people who don't move their cars during the 9-10 am street cleaning time on Tuesdays. I've gone back and forth with the parking department and the borough, complaining every week. Some weeks they come by and give tickets, other weeks they don't showing up right after the cleaner has already passed by and just driving up the street. I guess because it is now after 10, they can't give tickets. I called furious after that one and the lady told me they were débordé (overflowing with work) which seems weird to me, since it is a revenue-generating activity.

I've put signs on the cars and almost dumped the garbage from the street on them. But my more mature side prevailed and I realized that the fault might be that many people who don't live in the neighbourhood don't even realize that you aren't supposed to park there during that hour. The two signs that state this are far away at each end of the street and there are a myriad of confusing parking signs in between.

So I started to take that tack with the people at 311 that the problem was a lack of proper signage. After the second try at this, directly with somebody from the Borough of the Plateau Mont-Royal, I was given a dossier number (11-119537) and told that they would open an investigation, sending some planners to do an investigation into the block. I basically assumed that I was going to have to keep on following up with this, with further calls, perhaps a physical visit to the office (which is on my way to work). This call was on May 31st.

Well blow me down, when I walked out of my apartment last Friday I stumbled upon this:

They must have installed it while I was at work and I didn't even notice until the next day. That is some pretty fast work! Under two weeks. Tomorrow is the day when the street sweeper comes, so we will see if the people notice the sign. I'll certainly be on the case of the parking bureau as well. But I have to say that I am quite satisfied and impressed with this level of service from the municipality. So to whomever oversaw dossier #11-119537, made sure it got to the right people, to whomever came and did a survey of my block and to whomever actually loaded up the sign, brought it here, dug a hole and put it up, I send you a great big Briques du Neige THANK YOU!

My experience with the new street fair closing time

2011-06-19T14:59:00.002-04:00

So I was out on both Thursday and Friday nights of the Frénésie de la Main until the new closing time. On Thursday, I was at Laika with a couple of old high school friends. On Friday, I was at Frappé with a larger and constantly evolving groups. In both cases, the group I was with and everyone around us was sitting around, drinking beer, people watching and socializing. In both cases, the cops coming seemed utterly abrupt and unnecessary. It just made no sense. Everybody complied and the merchants were well on board, getting us prepared mentally for the early closing ahead of time.

I didn't hear anything about Saturday night, but based on the other two, I bet the cops were quite happy with the way it worked. I'm glad for them as individuals with jobs that their jobs were easier and that they didn't have to put up with too much trouble (though I don't know what happened farther down the Main). What was quite amazing was that as we were walking up the street to home, it started to drizzle. When we finally did get in the house, at around 1:30, the heavens opened up and it rained about as hard as I've seen it rain here. It's almost like God is also in agreement with this new council decision! I'm sure the cops were particularly happy about that. Too bad they didn't have a similar downpour in Vancouver.

The sense that I get is that a majority of responsible Montrealers is paying for the bad behaviour for a few, which is often one of the symptoms of overzealous authoritarianism. The group I was with on Friday was made up of many people who grew up in Montreal and are now in their 30s and 40s, responsible, employed citizens. Many of them were not aware of the new law and they were quite shocked and upset. I directed them to Alex Norris' facebook page.

My personal theory about this new law is that the counsellors did it to make a deal with the police. Either the police just have a great deal of sway with the borough council or they offered something the council wanted. My (completely unsubstantiated theory) is that the police new the new road closures were going to demand some serious police oversight and involvement and they told the counsellors that if they wanted to get solid help with that (which they have gotten), they wanted support on the early closure. Total conjecture, but it does paint Projet Montreal in a more positive light.

Because the negative light is that they are promoting a yuppie agenda, one that encourages increased property values and a culturally safe lifestyle for upper middle class property owners. One of the bartenders at Laika told me that they also made all the terrasses take away the ashtrays and that now smoking will no longer be allowed on the terrasses, because of the mess they made. I find this worrying. The Plateau is attractive because of its diversity and rich cultural life. Noise and mess and late nights come with that. If you move here and start complaining about the noise, you are an asshole. You want your cake and eat it too. Go get your quiet out in the suburbs, please. Message to Projet Montreal, yes I want a clean Plateau, but not at the expense of the social culture that makes this place what it is.

Squirrels and skunks and raccoons oh my!

2011-06-10T09:24:00.004-04:00

So it's been an animal-tastic week here at Briques du Neige.

Squirrels
Sadly, the first encounter was the dog I walked finally actually caught a squirrel. She chases them all the time and the few times she has actually outpaced them, she doesn't do anything. This time, I think the squirrel was either really old, sick or already injured, because he was super slow. Charlie got at him before I could get to them and a little fight went on, where she kept biting the squirrel and the squirrel was going after her throat, but clearly couldn't get through her thick mane of hair. I finally got over to the dog. It took two pretty solid kicks to her ribs to get her to let go and then I dragged her away. Looking back, I saw the squirrel leaning against the tree it was trying to get up looking not good at all. There were no holes or anything, but at the very least it looked stunned. I hope that Charlie was only lightly biting at it (dogs can do that), but she may well have broken bones, which probably spells death for the poor little guy. Had we been in the forest and it was obvious the squirrel was badly injured, I probably would have found some way to put it out of its misery. But we were right by the children's swings (whenever Charlie does something bad, it's always in front of the worst possible witnesses: she loves to take a big dump in front of a blanket full of picnicking McGill girls for instance). I'm so soft when it comes to animals and seeing its look of fear and survival left an impression on my mind that did not feel good. I hope it survived to live on for a while.

Raccoons
This is a funny one. After years of walking Mont-Royal and the alleys of Mile End, I have still yet to ever see a raccoon or a skunk. I hear that there are plenty here, but I guess my timing is off. It's nothing like Vancouver where walking home from a bar, you have to actively avoid the bold beasts (both raccoons and skunks) and Cali where I used to have to beat them out of our kitchen with a broom when they came through the cat door (not skunks, fortunately). So one evening last week, coming back down the trails on the mountain above the Grandeur Nature battlefield, I saw an adolescent raccoon up in a tree. He was eyeing us warily, looked to be in good health. I was quite excited and went and told all my neighbours.

Later that week, I ran into one of my neighbours who was going for a walk himself and he told me that in the evening, up at the belvedere (I guess that is french for the look-out, which is a great vocab word to know and have), the raccoons come out and get fed by the tourists and eat from the garbage. So this week I went up there myself and holy crap its a raccoon party. They are everywhere, following screaming children, standing up on their hind legs and begging, pulling the lids off the garbage cans. It's kind of disgusting, though they are pretty cute. I had a hell of a time holding Charlie on the leash as she was slavering at the bit to get at those little raccoons. Kind of makes my one sighting down below in the forest a little less special!

Skunks
I read that there are quite a few skunks in Montreal and that they can also be seen in the Mile End alleys. I've certainly smelled them from time to time (though given the quality of weed these days and the clouds of smoke billowing off the tam-tam on Sundays, sometimes it's hard to be sure). Supposedly, they eat a certain grub and when it rains a lot, there are many more of those grubs. So last night when I was coming home from watching the game (NBA Finals, thank you, game 5 great victory by Dallas over the evil Heats), I saw a couple ogling something in front of my apartment. It was a nice-looking skunk, sort of noodling around directly underneath the curvy stairs that lead up to my front door. He (or she, I didn't check) really did not seem bothered at all by my presence. I prudently took the stairs on the far side. My cat really wanted to go out front when I got back, but that certainly wasn't going to happen.

So yeah, not anything really exotic, but exciting for me, nonetheless. Go Canucks!

Go dig for wells in Westmount!

2011-06-02T07:33:00.002-04:00

A very clever protest sign seen at the manif against the big oil companies last summer downtown.

The Rapture on the wall

2011-06-01T19:26:00.002-04:00

This graffiti mural is so awesome. There is so much cool shit going on here. On the left hand side, it's a multitude of apocalyptica: nuclear explosions, erupting volcanoes, war (see the tiny bombers over the future-city), asteroids, UFOs and the very prescient flooding. Then on the right, the Hands of Wisdom part the curtains of reality to reveal a refuge of untouched nature (at the foot of the Rockies, perhaps?). Is this simply a hippy interpretation of The Rapture? A call for ecology? A cry for help from a transplanted west coaster?

(click for the larger picture)

Dead Soldier

2011-06-01T07:24:00.000-04:00

Place des Festivals en hiver

2011-05-31T19:21:00.001-04:00

Winter shot that I never put up. I was catching a bus, so I didn't have time to play in that bubbly wonderland. Looks cool though!

Stump Destruction!

2011-05-31T07:11:00.005-04:00

You may have noticed discrete dark orange lumps of woodchips on certain sidewalks or alleys or yards in Montreal this spring:

You may have also noticed that these piles of woodchips were once stumps. We had a pretty big stump outside our office where they took down an érable à giguère that had rotted in its core. I had watched that whole chopping up process from out my office window. A few days later, on the way back from lunch, I noticed this machinery in action:

It's some crazy stump destroyer. A big part of the operation is preventing chips and dust from flying all over the place. That's what those rubber flaps are for, as the direction of the grinding blade pushes the shrapnel behind and under it.

In concept, it is just like a giant grinder that goes back and forth across the top of the stump at an angle, digging deeper and deeper, coring the whole thing out and leaving ground up, presumably easily decomposable material.

I didn't get to watch them finish the job, so I don't know if it leaves a nice mound like that automatically or if there is a lot of shovelling and sweeping. I also don't know if they come back and get the chips or just let them sit there and slowly become part of the earth. Actually, if the pile remains there, I should take some to put on top of our work compost.

Fungi!

2011-05-30T07:06:00.003-04:00

I came across this stump in one of the alleys at the far northern end of Mile End, right before Van Horne. I find it weirdly fascinating to look at. I wonder if it was deliberately cultivated to be surrounded by these fungi or if it just happened naturally. It looks like there is an ashtray or something built into the top, which makes me think it was deliberate. Or maybe that thing was just sitting there and got fungied in place, which is why the whole thing is out in the alley now. I should go back and get it and put it in my backyard to see what happens to it.

Earlier this spring, I also took a picture of a fallen tree in Parc Mont-Royal that had a similar affliction, except not as complete.

Alley Sightings

2011-05-29T20:00:00.002-04:00

You can hear these birds before you see them and to see them, there is only a space between the high fence where they are visible. I wonder if this is the house of the Greek barber on Avenue du Parc, whose shop is full of singing birds?

This supposed to be a picture of the washing machine and the clever graffiti art behind it, but Charlie has a weird knack for getting herself into the frame.

A very nicely designed little cat ladder. I hope to see a cat using it one day.

One of the prettier alley segments (and one of the few alley intersections in Mile End)

Heavenly indeed!

2011-05-28T18:05:00.002-04:00

Dieu de Ciel has a terrasse!

I wonder if its existence is due to the new changes over on Laurier? I can't quite see how, as it starts one block east of here, but the timing suggests that there may be a connection. In any case, hell yes!

Now if only it would stop raining. It's pretty funny because I took the dog out at around 3:30 or so and it was grey and spitty. We walked to Van Horne via the alleys seeing very few people. Then the atmosphere started getting lighter and the sun even came out. As we came out of the alley on to St-Viateur, we saw that the street was suddenly full of people. There were lineups at both hipster Italian coffee shops and groups walking up and down the street as if they had been out all day. It's amazing how quickly this city reacts to good weather.

I feel a bit guilty talking about how much rain we've had, just because for us in the city life is pretty cushy compared to the people getting flooded out right now to the south. I came up on the train through upstate New York on Monday and you could see flooded houses, business and roads for a good ways along Lake Champlain. Rough.

Laurier avenue improvements - the painting is down

2011-05-28T11:34:00.004-04:00

I've been really busy with work and life as well as having a hard time believing that Spring is really here with this constant end-of-times rain we've been having. But seeing actual activity on the work being done on avenue Laurier spurred me to take a picture and do some blog posting.

Quite soon after Projet Montreal got elected to the borough of the Plateau, they announced a bunch of fairly radical traffic-calming measurements, the biggest one being the transition of Laurier from Saint-Laurent to Mentana from a two-way street to a one-way street with a dedicated bike lane and widened sidewalks. The project was supposed to start last fall but got pushed back to this Spring. I remember having a meeting with our landlord at work, which is the Fabrique of the church and one of the older Marguillier (literally Churchwarden, one of the people responsible for the management of a parish) saying with some smug bitterness that it was never going to happen. You may recall that much of the opposition against the closing of roads came from older members of the church for reasons I still don't fully understand. He seemed to be fully in that camp and as we were negotiating other stuff, I did not press him on this. I wonder how he feels today, seeing that early last week the cops blocked off the westbound lane, getting drivers prepared for its absence. Since then, they have painted the lines, funnelling traffic into a single lane heading east and creating two nice wide lanes for bikes.

Looking west

Looking east

It's pretty nice, but this much space for the bikes will only last until they start widening the sidewalk. Though I could be wrong about that. I think one side will be bikes going in two directions and the other will be the wider sidewalk, though it could be that bikes will have dedicated lanes in each direction, which would be pretty sweet.

Also, will there be no parking at all on Laurier?

When I see how bottled up the cars get with only a single lane, it makes me think that for sure smart commuters are going to start avoiding Laurier, which is a good thing. But it also makes me think that this transformation only affects the symptoms and not the disease, to some degree. There still are a lot of lazy, greedy car owners who live in and around the Plateau who could be using other modes of transportation, but the majority of drivers are coming from places where they don't have good alternatives other than cars for getting to their jobs. So these changes just make their commuting life less pleasant. Honestly, as people who know my position on cars can guess, I'm not too sympathetic with them. Nevertheless, our larger governments, the municipal and provincial need to start putting in longer-term and longer range mass transport alternatives for these people. This is certainly not the responsibility of the borough governments. I applaud Projet Montreal for making this change, as it is a fairly powerful move towards a more responsible and social form of urban transport.

I'll be keeping you posted as the work continues.

Scaredy Cat

2011-04-25T15:18:00.002-04:00

I've seen this little guy around many times in the alley just west of Clark, north of Saint-Joseph. I've seen him farther afield as well, in the alleys to the west. Here, the dog has freaked him out. He arches but doesn't turn tail and run. I imagine conserving energy is a priority for him as he is a thin, scraggly fellow, probably eating food scraps from the restaurants that face onto Laurier and whatever kind residents put out food for him.

"Hey, Johnny Prosciutto!"

2011-04-24T15:10:00.001-04:00

Fermez le Berger Blanc!

2011-04-23T15:40:00.007-04:00

I went to the protest in front of City Hall to demonstrate against the city rewarding the Berger Blanc with a renewal of their contract to be the official city pound. The Berger Blanc is a private operation that is the sole owner of the contract from the city to deal with stray dogs and cats. The place is a fucking nightmare and finally proper attention, at least by the media and the citizens, is being paid to it. The Mirror did a cover story on it a few weeks ago and Radio-Canada did a visit with a hidden camera that revealed how badly the animals are abused. Momentum is starting to build and somebody, maybe Society for the Protection of Animals Canada, organized a protest.

Turnout was quite good and lively for a rainy, grey saturday. There were maybe 300-500 people there, chanting and waving signs. Lots of dogs, of course. The majority of the people were on the City Hall side of the street, up on the steps with lots of signs, but there was a good crowd on the other side of the street as well. The police were there, handling the situation in a very professional and friendly manner. Every time a car would drive by with dogs in the back, everybody would cheer. Good media turnout too, with cameras from Rad-Can, Global and CTV. It was just a good scene all around. There is going to be another protest, same place (275 rue Notre-Dame est) on May 13. Be there! There is going to be on in Quebec City as well on that date. This campaign has real potential to make change.

The thing is, while the heart of this issue is an emotional one—the natural human reaction to cruelty to our animal companions—the relatonship between the Berger-Blanc and the city is a very clear example of fallout from the corruption that is endemic to the current administration. I'm not saying that there is any explicit corruption in the contract that the Berger-Blanc gets (though I wouldn't be surprised if there are some kickbacks going on there), but that the way the issue of stray animals and pets is handled (or rather not handled) is an indirect result of leaders whose priority is lining their pockets and maintaining their power. This isn't just about treating animals humanely. It's about how you manage city services, specifically animal control. We should have an infrastructure in place that actively works to limit stray animals through licensing, neutering and education. Rescue shelters should be the last stage in this overall plan, not the first and only, as is basically the case in the city right now.

The city deals with the animal issue by giving one company the sole contract to deal with stray animals. There is no oversight, just the money. And that organization basically runs those animals though like a slaughterhouse. They don't even check the animals for RFID tags. No effort is made to return them to their owners. There are several stories of people calling the Berger-Blanc looking for their dog and employees saying it wasn't there, only to find out later that their dog was there and was killed! You can read in more detail here the negligence and abuse that takes place at the Berger Blanc. It gets worse.

This issue is very similar to the shoddy municipal construction, the terrible road conditions, the shitty bus service, the bootleg domestic airport and all the other embarrassments that make Montreal seem second class when, in fact, she has the heart and soul of the greatest city in Canada. The difference here is that living creatures are suffering terribly and that can motivate people to take action. I've also heard that several organizations and veternarians are working on getting the funding to build a competing shelter to try and get the contract. I hope to hear more concrete information on such a project and would certainly support it.

In the meantime, let's keep fighting. Here is a very helpful web page from the Humane Society with links to all the people you can contact here in Montreal to put pressure on about this issue

Friends

2011-04-11T15:40:00.000-04:00

Projet Montreal, what the hell is going on?

2011-04-10T11:12:00.002-04:00

A very disturbing announcement in LePlateau from Friday, concerning the borough's new resolution to close the terrasses at 1:00 am instead of 3:00 am (via the always helpful Montreal City Weblog)

Is Projet Montreal starting to reveal its true colours as a party that is more concerned about promoting gentrification than the environment? I voted for them in the Plateau and have been generally quite pleased with the work Luc Ferrandez and his team have done since they took office. Just their transparency and communication alone has been a huge improvement over Helen "help developers build condos" Fotopolous. They have put forth some aggressive (though not yet realized) traffic-calming projects and made a big effort to improve the cleanliness. But little by little, they have also started to get into disturbing law and order and public behaviour legislation that is reminding me of the co-opting of Vancouver's Green Party by NIMBY yuppies who equated the environment with property values.

The thing that is setting off my alarm bells big time is the resolution to close the terrasses 2 hours early on the Main during the summer street festivals. Currently, the terrasses close at 3 am. This summer, they will now close at 1. The ostensible reason is that the police have an excessive amount of work and trouble with the late night crowds during these festivals.

There are so many things wrong with this legislation, I don't even know where to start. In general, it attacks the very heart of everything that makes this neighbourhood so awesome. This is a place of culture, of society, of people hanging out. Montreal has proven for decades that people can stay up late, drink and have fun and it makes the city a better place. Closing the terrasses at 1 gets us one step closer to the hell that is Vancouver nightlife (though hell is the wrong word, because hell is at least exciting.)

I do believe the police when they say they have more trouble during these street festivals late at night. However, all the trouble is localized along the strip between Prince Arthur and Sherbrooke, at the trendy clubs that all the out-of-towners and suburbanites go to. During the festival that's where all the packs of prowling men and gangs of cops are to be found. Above des Pins, it's always mellow. And there are many great terrasses there (Frappé, Cabana, Le Divan Orange, Laika to name a few). So now they all have to suffer because a bunch of losers from Longeuil can't get into a club on the other end of the street?

Also, the cops have had a giant hard-on for those clubs for years. They are always harrassing them, closing them down, citing them for code violations. I don't know the politics behind it all, I suspect the club owners are probably associated with organized crime, but this look suspicously like another attempt to harrass these clubs. That's great, I really couldn't give a shit about those over-priced, mediocre establishments that are designed purely for people to see themselves being seen. But don't kill the whole vibe of the street festival to attack a small group of establishments.

The other thing that really worries me as well is the "diminishing the quality of life of the residents". I am a resident here. I am a property owner. I am a taxpayer. Rowdiness on St-Laurent improves my quality of life. I am not kidding. If I wanted to live in a neighbourhood where having fun is suppressed, I would move back to the west coast. My neighbours feel this way. We live one block away from St-Laurent and Mont-Royal and in the summer we get a lot of fallout from the clubs up here. Cars going up and down the street, drunken groups of guidos, garbage in the mornings. Yeah, it can be annoying, but one the flip side, we can go out and walk to a cool restaurant or bar ourselves. We can come home drunk at 4 in the morning. We can go over to the park with a foam sword or a bongo drum. These things all go hand in hand. You start cracking down on the bars and soon you start getting aggressive by-laws about unleashed dogs or dangerous foam swords. There is a lobby out there just waiting in the shadows to jump in and stop you from having fun. They will latch on to anything they can and start screaming about safety and the children the moment they see an opening. These are the same losers who bought condos on St-Dominique and then complained about noise from the Fringe festival.

And these words are not coming from some wildman with a pick-up truck on blocks in his front yard. Au contraire, I am very uptight about cleanliness and the appearance of the neighbourhood, as anyone who has followed this blog will know. I take civic responsibility very seriously and I believe that suppressing other people's fun generally is not good for a community.

What is going on here, Monsieur Ferrandez? Monsieur Alex Norris? Where is the motivation for this law really coming from? Unless you can provide me with some other information that I may be missing, then I strongly encourage you to re-think this resolution and find a compromise that will make the job of the police a little easier on Friday and Saturday nights without killing the fun for everyone who does enjoy simply sitting out on a terrasse and people watching and jasing until 3 in the morning.

Bye bye Winter!

2011-04-08T10:27:00.004-04:00

It's been a pleasure. See you next year!

Here's the last picture of the alley ice rink in all its glory, just before the end

And here it is last week, just some sad broken bottles where the kids turned to alchohol now that they no longer have hockey.

Bring on the springtime! Yeah, I got a flat tire literally three days after bringing my bike out, but I'm still psyched.

Some evidence and a new outrage

2011-04-07T12:12:00.006-04:00

Following up on yesterday's frustration with my street not getting properly cleaned, I was able to get a picture that demonstrates the results. You can see the line of dirt next to the cars and where it gets cut off at the point where the sweeper was able to turn in (because there weren't any cars parked there). I really don't understand why it is always my section that is missed, but there it is.

On the more positive front, reasonable reader Mare reminded me in the comments that the cleaning is weekly, not monthly. I confirmed that this is indeed correct, so thanks for talking me off the ledge! ;)

However, on my way to work, I noticed another injustice. This year, we all received small cards announcing the spring clean-up. The point of the cards, though, was to explain that they would be using orange signs to indicate where and when clean-ups were going to take place. These are just like the ones they use for the snow removal, but I guess they decided to get more focused about it or something.

Well I certainly haven't seen any of these on our block yet, but imagine my dismay, when exactly a block and a half north, on our very street I see this:

and a whole line of them going all the way up Clark street into the haughty upper Mile End regions. What because I don't spend my entire day with my stroller at Open Da Nite sipping cappucino and pretnding to work on a latop, I'm not entitled to get the orange signs! Why are we being ghettoized! Lower Clark represent!

I've become the nosy neighbour rat fink

2011-04-06T15:01:00.003-04:00

I feel a bit like Irene Cara in Fame, caught up in a situation out of my control where I just wanted to do the right thing.

We live on a dirty block. Aside from east coast people being generally dirty and littery, we also have a lot of students on our block who seem to be moving out on a quarterly basis and throwing everything out on to the sidewalk. There is also a strong wind that blows up from Mont-Royal and most of the garbage makes it about halfway up the block.

I try to keep my sidewalk and gutter clean and that of the sixplexes on either side of me. But in the spring, the street is pretty filthy and a lot of it is the snow-melting gravel and bits of glass that really need the street sweeper to clean up. It comes on the first Tuesday of every month, starting in April.

The problem is that people don't move their cars. And what's even weirder, for some reason, on our southern half of the block, they rarely get tickets. I come home from work and the northern half of the block is swept entirely, while our half is only swept in sections where the machine could find enough empty spaces to turn into. Many times, the space outside our place is one where someone has parked.

I was very excited for the first passing of the sweeper this spring and quite disappointed to come home and find that they had completely missed our section once again. And no tickets to be seen. So I called 3-1-1 the city hotline and she passed me on to the parking bureau, where I ratted out my neighbours. I feel like a heel. The parking authorities used to be one of my biggest enemies back in the Bay Area. I'd much rather be able to just communicate with the people and warn them ahead of time. Instead, they are going to leave their car there next month and get a ticket.

The thing is, this is probably for the best. What with the litter, the parked cars and the people not picking up after their dog, I am turning into a dense ball of civic fury and at some point I am going to explode and beat someone to death with a shovel and then stick their head, smeared in their own dog's feces, on to the antenna of some Nautilus Gym dork's car as a message to others. While perfectly justified in my own mind, I fear that society and the law would frown on such behaviour and I would ultimately come out the loser. So for now, I skulk and inform.

Liberals, NDP, Bloc and Greens form new Canadian Coalition

2011-04-01T08:01:00.006-04:00

Ottawa - April 1, 2011

All four major parties contesting Stephen Harper's minority government in a surprise press conference this morning announced they are forming a coalition, named The Canadian Coalitiion, to ensure a majority in the upcoming election.

"We finally realised," the joint statement said "that, despite our many differences, we are all much closer together on the political spectrum than our previous bickering would have led Canadians to believe. Furthermore, we see that the majority of Canadians also share these same values and that it is only a small, but powerful, minority who want to undermine our democracy and society to increase their own wealth and power."

"We would like to apologize to the Canadian people for our own arrogance and egotism that forced them to split up their votes allowing the Conservatives to make a run right up the middle. From here on in, we can promise you that if you vote with your heart and beliefs, we will bury our differences and find the compromise to form a government that will shepherd in a new era of fiscal responsibility married with social support for those who need it."

"Education, the environment, investment in technological R&D and green forms of energy will be the pillars of our shared platform, all wrapped in a tent of prudent spending with a priority on eliminating the deficit. By eliminating the excessive corporate tax cuts of the Conservatives, we should be able to get in the black by the end of 2012."

After the reading of the statement, each of the leaders spoke individually to reporters.

Jack Layton: "I finally realized that my dream of taking over the centrist position of the Liberals was simply unrealistic and based on a lot of suppressed resentment towards Iggy and his educational pedigree. Yeah, he is kind of an intellectual snob, but he's actually a pretty smart guy. Turns out we've got a lot to talk about."

Gilles Duceppe: "It was not easy for me to swallow, but I finally realized that by hanging on to my strict separatist platform, I only scare off the rest of Canada and allow the Conservatives to play the "destruction of Canada" card. I can't keep catering to a bunch of resentful losers stuck in the Sixties. We've won the revolution and Quebec is doing great. Now is the time to take our platform of social justice and support to the rest of the country."

Michael Ignatieff: "I'll tell you what did it for us, it was that CBC Vote Compass. When you see your political position laid out graphically like that, it just becomes so clear. I e-mailed Jack and it turned out he was e-mailing me at the same time. Crazy!"

Elizabeth May: "Kiss my ass, Consortium of Canadian Broadcasters! Good luck with your subsidies next year!"

Stephen Harper, in Churchill Falls, simply said "ah, fuck."

(with a tip of the hat to Angeli.ca.)

modern architecture

2011-02-18T07:02:00.000-05:00

This apartment is advertised on the street, but it is actually hidden behind a fairly unattractive white brick communist bloc style apartment building. These neat spiral staircases look out onto the interior courtyard.

Working dog

2011-02-17T06:59:00.000-05:00

I'm pretty sure I passed this dog a week earlier, jogging with his master. What was remarkable was that he was towing about 6' of heavy chain and a 3' long 4x4 beam. I saw him again helping the family bring the groceries home. Can I get my cats to do this?

Toronto Cardinal

2011-02-16T07:00:00.000-05:00

Spent Super Bowl weekend in TO (who have pretty decent alleys of their own) and caught this winter cardinal hanging out in the trees.

Alley Rink

2011-02-15T19:46:00.004-05:00

In one of the alleys in upper Mile End, an enterprising father has built a sweet ice rink. I've stumbled across it a few times but only this weekend did I actually see the man responsible. I stopped and had a chat with him. He said that they used to go to the park to play hockey, but that his kids have so much homework this year he thought he would try to build a rink nearby to cut out the travel time. It turned out to be a big hit. "You come here at night and it's black with kids!".

He also said it was actually not that easy to build or maintain. He bought these special rectangular plastic bags from Canadian Tire that you fill with water and then lay on the ground. Once they have frozen, you tear the plastic off the top and sides. This builds a consistent base that you then fill in and on with slow additions of water. The thing always seems really well maintained when I've been by it.

We are supposed to get up to 8 degrees on Thursday and then back to normal temperatures. I hope that doesn't ruin the rink
too much!

Plus, some bonus winter alley walk images:

ViaRail : terrible pricing policy saved by excellent customer service

2011-02-03T14:53:00.000-05:00

I know that Canada's passenger train system is a sad shadow of what it once was, but I have never had particularly negative feelings towards ViaRail. They seem to do a decent job. However, they do have a pretty bad reputation here in Canada.

I am happy to say, I just had a positive customer service experience with them that definitely has improved their reputation in my mind.

My wife and I are going to Toronto and we bought our tickets separately. I mistakenly thought we were leaving on Friday, when it was actually Thursday. We didn't discover this mistake until 4 days after we bought the tickets.

Of course, I bought the cheapest tickets possible and was under the assumption that I would have to pay a penalty. No such luck! If you buy a non-exchangeable ticket, it means you can't do anything with it. You are just screwed.

How utterly retarded is that? So I just swallow it and buy the Thursday ticket and they now have an empty seat on their Friday train, which they could have sold and got me for a penalty.

Well I had a long discussion about this with the woman on the phone, who was quite pleasant and articulate (though she could not explain the reasoning behind the no exchange rule beyond the circular logic that "it can't be exchanged"). She did suggest that I call customer service, after having bought the Thursday ticket, to make sure I had a seat on the train. You do have a 24-hour grace period where you can change your tickets, but I had bought the tickets 4 days ago.

I called customer service and they quite promptly just refunded my newly purchased ticket and changed my originally purchased Thursday to Friday.

When I went to pick up the tickets, I saw the woman at the counter do some fiddling with the computer. When I remarked on how complicated it seems, she said she had to do that to ensure I didn't pay a penalty.

I find it such a breath of fresh air that ViaRail gives their front line workers the leeway to change things in the system. So often these days, the customer service representative is simply a voice telling you what the system already tells you: you're screwed. There are so many things wrong with this system, I don't have time right now to go into it. Suffice to say that it is fucked. So I really appreciate ViaRail having some flexibility built into their system and having a policy that lets customer service reps actually serve the customers.

Well done, ViaRail and thank you.

A reminder

2011-01-20T07:00:00.000-05:00

From early fall 2010. Just wanted to add some colour to your winter day!

en ce lieu fit halte Obwondiag

2011-01-19T07:54:00.002-05:00

"In this place, in 1757 Chief Obwondiag, known as Pontiac, Chief Odawa, conqueror of the English, made a stop."

I sure hope he didn't have to suffer that horrible pink brick exterior and cheap white railing.

Our squirrel neighbours

2011-01-18T07:47:00.002-05:00

In the warmer seasons, these guys use the small window sills outside our back stairs as one of their many resting stops. It's funny because you can go right up to the window and look at them, even with the light on behind you and they don't seem disturbed. But as soon as you go out the back door, which is almost two stories below them, they totally freak out and scramble out of their nest to escape to the roof via the ivy. In the spring and once or twice in the later summer, they grab leaves and re-pad their nest. That process is enjoyable to watch.

(note these photos were taken last summer.)

Sometimes there are three of them all crammed together. It looks quite cozy.

However, I have to admit that up close they aren't really that cute. Look at those orange teeth!

The new road!

2011-01-17T07:29:00.001-05:00

I do apologize to all of you for making you wait for months for the satisfying climax of this epic construction journey. I simply had to enjoy the smoothness on my own for a few months. Now that it is covered in snow and grime, I am ready to share with you the images of the beautiful new road on Clark street.

I don't know very much about this process, but grading is clearly crucial. This image is one of multiple passes that several different machines made up the street as each new layer was put down. There is also a guy on foot who is constantly measuring.

What you don't realize is that a road isn't flat, it actually has a very gentle slope, rising up to the middle. This is so water can run off into the gutters. I really have no idea how they get that slope, but it sure was consistent. Most impressive.

Look at that beautiful smooth road, it's dark-grey matte surface welcoming the late summer sun.

See how tightly it fits up against the new sidewalk. Really satisfying to look at for some reason.

Let me tell you, this thing is really nice to ride your bike on. It's practically a velodome. Same for cars I imagine because sadly, they are back. And what's worse this new road really encourages speed so they come whipping up the street faster than ever. I really should have tried to get a speed bump in place when I had the chance. Oh well, I guess it's back to caltrops. And yelling.

The pour!

2011-01-16T08:10:00.001-05:00

Pouring concrete is the best. I have a friend who is a serious pro and when he starts talking about it, you realize what an art and a science it is. I've had the opportunity to lay a couple of house foundations as well as several smaller jobs and I can tell you there is something quite satisfying about watching it settle and seeing the cream rise to the top. The coolest thing about concrete is that no work is needed to make it level. You do need to flatten it and get a nice texture, but it is simply physics and gravity that gets it all level. There is something truly cool about that. You can also do all kinds of stuff with colours, textures and creative shapes with forms. Another friend of mine designed a really beautiful series of kitchen counters entirely in concrete.

Unfortunately, it is perhaps too efficient at large scales and has basically taken over the residential construction industry, filling cities (like ours) with soulless, cold concrete boxes for living spaces (and the design industry follows suit trying to sell us on minimalism; another gang of scumbags that will be sent to work camps when I take over the world). Finally, the production of concrete is really bad for the environment.

But I digess, back to the local:

How sweet is that! They sprayed the surface with some kind of whitening agent that is supposed to slow down the drying process (concrete sets best at a certain temperature, if it sets too hot or too cold, it weakens the final product). The problem later is that we had our little drawbridge and since the sun didn't shine under it, it left a dark rectangle on our sidewalk! We'll see how it turns out after a winter and some wear and tear.

And no, in the end, we decided against making our mark in the fresh concrete. It just looked so pristine. One of the neighbour kids did his though, which he seemed quite psyched about.

Forms in place

2011-01-15T19:00:00.001-05:00

They've clearly got the set-up of the forms into a pretty efficient rhythm as this got done in under a day. With this amount of concrete, you really don't need that support, but on bigger jobs, man you better make those forms sturdy! You hear tales of one-inch thick sheets of plywood just splitting apart down the middle like a zipper with concrete pouring out of it as not enough whaler bars were put in place.

Hmm, some of those forms don't look perfectly vertical to me. Tight sphincter, people! I'm still too young, but in about twenty years when I'm truly an annoying old codger, if I'm ever in a similar situation, I'm going to hang around while the guys are working, constantly checking their work and making sure they do a proper job. That's what the old portuguese guys did and I bet they got better quality sidewalks than we did!

See the vapour barrier/insulation to prevent water from getting down there freezing and causing cracking

Bring on the cream!

The sidewalks came!

2011-01-15T13:41:00.004-05:00

I can't even remember what happened, but I dropped the ball on my continuing report of the new road and sidewalk being put in on our street. Happily, I did take pictures and I will be putting up 3 sets over this weekend to complete the historical record. The last construction post was my excitement about signs that they were soon going to put in the new sidewalks. Well they did and here is the story in pictures:

First they came by and topped up the holes between sidewalk squares (which had been dug out to access our drains, I remind you) with fresh gravel.

And each house whose entrance was blocked by the hole got their own personal plywood drawbridge.

I don't know why, but I love seeing what's underneath the sidewalk. It's just so cool to think that the original concrete at the base of the stairs was poured directly onto some dirt and gravel that has since shifted, leaving little pockets that have not seen the light of day since their birth. Now, thanks to the construction, it is exposed to us. It's like history or something, man!

Then a truck came up the street, with workers dropping off the materials necessary to set up the forms. That is in fact the only work these guys did and I noticed that they were all Mexican or Central American. I guess maybe that's how you start your way up the ladder in the construction industry, though I would not be surprised at all if these guys were fully capable of setting up the forms and pouring the concrete themselves.

All ready for some form building!

Nabbed at the illegal pedestrian railway crossing on Van Horne

2011-01-10T07:40:00.003-05:00

For those of you who aren't aware, there has been a longstanding issue between the CPR, the municipality and the citizens of the Plateau around the railroad track that separates the Plateau borough from the Petite-Patrie and Rosemont. This railroad track blocks all pedestrian traffic from the west to the east. Until about a year ago, it was no problem, because there were many holes in the fence at convenient crossing points and no enforcement of any kind. Really, the way it should be. I even remarked on how surprisingly mellow it was in a past blog post.

Well that has all changed. The CPR all of a sudden started cracking down. First they started repairing the holes in the fence and then reinforcing the repairs with heavier-duty metal. This became a bit of an arms race where a fence would be repaired and reinforced and soon after another hole cut a bit further down. The next escalation was the CPR installing their security guards at the crossing points and handing out infractions.

Well I got nabbed yesterday afternoon. I had to pick up some keys on St. Zotique, a street on the far side of the tracks from me. At my wife's sensible suggestion (and she is starting to learn how to motivate me), I took the neighbour's dog for a long walk as well. I just assumed the holes in the fence are blocked off, so I took the underpass along St. Laurent on the way up.

Let me tell you, this thing is a motherfucker for pedestrians. It's hairy enough on a bike, but at least you have the flowing road to follow if you dare. On foot, it is nerve-wracking. You have to cross at least two points if you are coming from the west where there is nothing to aid the pedestrian. There are no painted lines, no stop signs, let alone and actual crossing light. Hell, there isn't even a sidewalk on a big part of it. This thing was designed for cars with no thought to pedestrians at all. Bikers are encouraged to walk their bikes, but even then it is so narrow that it makes for very awkward passing. I would seriously think twice before making this trip with a child in a stroller.

On the way back, I figured I'd see if any of the points were open. If they weren't, I could just walk along the pathway for a while with the dog. I approached from behind the Home Depot, to come out where Van Horne meets St-Urbain (and there is a cool statue garden):

View Larger Map

And it was here that just as I reached the opening on the south side, that I saw the CPR truck parked in the driveway next to the park. I could have probably just turned around and walked back, but something compelled me forward: the force of the law, my Canadian side, fear, curiousity, momentum, who can say.

I'll keep the interaction short, because I actually hung out next to the agent's truck for a good 15 minutes and there was a lot of back and forth. In the end, he turned out to be an interesting guy and relatively cool, given his position. They are well-equipped, these CPR security agents. He had a sweet 4WD compact, all kitted out, a nice new uniform. I was wary and defensive at first, but when he made it clear that he had the option to not actually give the infraction and that he was willing to talk and listen, I relaxed. I was forced to give him my ID, which does not make me comfortable at all, but I do believe that legally he was telling me the truth that when observed in an infraction by an officer of the law, a citizen has to share his or her ID. It's clear the guy has heard all the arguments, because he had well thought out explanations for all of my positions, though ultimately we agreed that the situation overall was messed up. So here's the deal according to him:

There is a new boss at the CPR who has installed the mandate of protecting the CPR's territory. Trespassing is to be cut to zero and all resources now go towards that. The security teams used to patrol the yards, but now they don't do that anymore, but rather are on constant patrols of places where the public can access the railroads.

The CPR does not have the jurisdiction to put pedestrian overpasses because their entrances fall on municipal land.

So we are stuck at this impasse. The one answer I really didn't get was what is in it for the CPR to protect their property against trespassing. The guard's answer to that was "New boss; those are the rules". It isn't a money grab, as all the infractions actually go to Quebec. The CPR can give out infractions to enforce the law, but it's the government who gets that money, not the CPR. My guess is that it is because of insurance, that they did some new big insurance deal. But it could also be some kind of political fight between the CPR and the city.

Either way, it's fucked. The CPR needs to back off this policy of enforcement or explain why they have suddenly decided to implement it after years of doing nothing. If there is a valid reason, then the CPR and the city must get together and build pedestrian overpasses at all the sections where people would naturally cross.

Because the reality is that people are not breaking the law to be vandals or cause difficulty. They are doing it because it is the most obvious route to take and the few existing alternatives are inconvenient and downright dangerous.

Some bullet points on Takers

2011-01-04T11:54:00.002-05:00

I just had a very exhausting holiday season. I showed up at work more tired than I was before I left! Tons of familial obligations sandwiched by generally pretty uncomfortable and inefficient travel options are to blame, though my self-pity is assuaged by hearing the same complaint from a majority of my co-workers and a quote from the guy next to me on the last leg of my journey who said "sometimes change is as good as a rest" which I think is a valid point.

So instead of ranting about Air Canada's terrible customer service, I am going to focus on the positive, their top-notch audio-visual system. Every seat on Air Canada's fleet has a little TV in it with a choice of movies, tv shows and other goodies. The thing that makes it so great is that the TV shows are quite up to date (and it often has a good and interesting selection, from hits like The Big Bang and Modern Family to more obscure fare and good British stuff, like the In-Betweeners) and the movies even more so. A nice selection of first-run movies that you kind of thought might be worth renting are available. Between my wife and me, we watched The Town, The Social Network, Going the Distance, Never Let Me Go and Takers (more on this later). There is also an excellent CanCon channel and I re-watched the delirious beginning of Fubar II as well as several quite good Canadian shorts.

Once, when flying from San Francisco to Montreal (a direct flight that is inexplicably unavailable over the holiday season; anger beginning to rise again, must. calm. down.) a young American who had just got a job for Ubisoft in Quebec leaned over to me and asked if the movies were free. He was scared to press the Watch button for fear that some charge would be accrued to his credit card. For once in the last decade, I was quite proud of Canada. It was almost like the Chretien or Trudeau years again, when we were the cool, generous country. A fleeting moment, but I savour it.

But let's get on to Takers. What, you haven't seen Takers? Only the best movie of 2010. Well let's say the best old-style guy-focused action movie of 2010. It's basically the story of a mixed-race gang of high-rolling heisters with Matt Dillon in high pursuit. It's not great, but it doesn't annoy or enrage and other than a lame misstep with Dillon's daughter, treats its audience with respect. Instead of a review, I will simply share some bullet points with you.

Paul Walker began his career as an almost laughably generic movie star, but in the absence of any other cool white guys in action movies, I have to admit that he has grown on me. He makes an effort and even threw in a bit of black humour this time around. I'm going to treat his career with tentative respect going forward.

These kinds of movies can be seen as career gauges. For actors like Idris Elba and rappers like T.I. or Chris Brown (who seems to know Parcour?!) a movie like this is a fine paycheque. But Hayden Christensen has got to be a little concerned to be consigned to playing the goofy tech guy of the team (though he does have a pretty good fight scene and is quite a gamer despite his small frame). Even more remarkable is the plummet of Zoe Saldana. She was the star of two of the biggest hits of 2009 and here she is playing in an utterly thankless role as the only woman where she doesn't get to do anything but look loving or worried or dead. What happened? She has always been thin, but now seems to be slipping over to the eating disorder or drug abuse side of thin. Worrying.

You gotta love Matt Dillon. I don't know if he does these movies for the money, or just to be working or because he just enjoys partying it up on the set with a bunch of dudes. But he delivers. I loved him in Armored playing the driven, possibly psychotic heister and he is just as great here as the tired, driven cop. Just him walking down the hospital hallway after learning that his partner died (who was recently revealed to be corrupt, but got himself shot in the line of duty so he'll receive full honours and his wife and kids full benefits), turning back to his chief and saying wearily "yes, sir" after the chief says "Hey Welles, take care of yourself" is one of those moments that remind you of what it means to be a man.

I love the racial harmony movies like this posit. This isn't the full multi-cultural band, just black and white, but they get along so well! I almost wish I could be part of a club-owning, high-rolling multi-racial team of heisters. But then I learn that most of them end up getting tragically shot and I change my mind back to wanting to be a Hong Kong cop or defensive lineman in the NFL.

Takers, the Armored of 2010.

Hope you all have a good work week!

Hipsters then and now

2010-12-19T15:51:00.004-05:00

[This is a speciall cross-promotion post with my other blog Olman's Fifty (where I track and review the books I read), since it was the reading of A Fine Ending by Louis Rastelli that spurred me to write about Mile End hipsters. You can read my full review of the book over there.]

I just finished reading Louis Rastelli's A Fine Ending. It's a great chronicle of Montreal back when rents really were cheap and hipsters were actual poor artists who were mostly making art for the art and being a freak was cool. I apologize for dropping a negative post during this season of cheer, but reading about the 90s really helped crystallize why today's hipsters are so fucking annoying.

Every young, white, educated, first-world cultural movement is annoying in some way (and often many ways), from the hippies onward. Fundamentally what is annoying is that these scenes have a lot of righteousness and political rhetoric, but they are ultimately in existence because of society's wealth and the fortune of the particpants of being born to a certain class. You can't have these movements without leisure time and you can't have leisure time without material success. You can't afford to be poor if there is real poverty in a society. So these poor artists, squatting in their lofts and dumpster-diving can only afford to do so because of the wealth of society around them.

Despite that cynical foundation, there is still a difference between scenes. This difference often gets defined by authenticity, which then devolves into useless arguments of taste and experience (and the "when I was a kid" old guy argument). I'm probably edging dangerously close to that argument here, but since I was also just as critical and contemptuous of my own hipster age (in slacktastic Portland with its lame "grunge" scene and Oakland with annoying post-punks and scruffy white rappers and finally for the worst hipster hell of all which should be just fucking nuked, Williamsburg), I figure I'll have some credibility.

Reading Rastelli's account of the 90s and now having lived in that same neighbourhood the last 6 years, the main difference I see between his scene and today's are three things: the wealth, the conformity and the self-awareness.

The wealth is obvious. The kids in the hipster scene here in Mile End clearly have a lot of disposable income. The two big factors are most likely because they are working in the software industry (Ubisoft is the main engine driving Mile End's gentrification) and because they come from wealthy families. Back in Rastelli's day, there must have been a few trust fund kids, but the world (and urban north america in particular) is a much wealthier place today, thanks to the Clinton boom years. The kids back then seemed to often be drop-outs, whereas today they are post-McGill kids who stick around or other post-university graduates who are drawn to the coolness of Montreal. Logically, given the end of the cheap rents and the greater cost of living, they just have to be wealthier to live here.

With that wealth, which is based on a consumer culture, comes conformity. Today, youth cultures define themselves by what products they buy, what clothes they wear. Back in Louis' day, clothes and goods were less relevant. I passed two guys talking to each other on Laurier who were literally wearing exactly the same outfit. It was clear that they had just ran into each other. They had brown faux old-time logger leather boots, narrow jeans with wide cuffs above the boots, zipped hoodies under plaid jackets, big rounded bushy bears and black elf-toques on the back of their head. I really wanted to take a picture. Oh yeah, they each had store-branded shopping bags of newly purchased stuff (okay, possibly xmas shopping, so I could maybe give them a pass on that, but it just all fit in so perfectly). It looked like a parody of hipsterness.

[One other element of this conformity that is interesting is that it is also a manifestation of the growing feminization of males. Young men are encouraged to enslave themselves to fashion, where it is acceptable even for creative types to dress like everyone else as long as it is in the latest style, which then encourages a higher rate of consumption in order to keep up.]

Well who cares if they all dress the same, you may well ask. The problem with their conformity is that they define themselves as creative types. But they are all operating out of the same pre-defined rule books. Companies hire "cool-hunters" who then codify styles, brand them and sell them to these hipsters. And this is where the self-awareness comes in. These people are actively aware of being part of a scene. They all learn you have to have a track bike and wear a rollerderby shirt because that's what they are doing in New York. They actively create their own little marketing and publicity campaigns and make those things happen here. The existence of the internet is probably the one main reason for this change. When you go to a music show today, it's not to actually experience, but to be able to record it with your digital camera or cellphone (both of which are owned by most hipsters, if not also a videocamera; remember when Sting said "Too many cameras, not enough food) and then put it up on your Facebook page. That is the perfect example of consumerism (the camera) + the internet = what hipsters today consider cultural production.

The one positive outcome of this new rich, conformist and self-aware hipster scene is that they have gotten into actually creating real things, with a push for a more locally-based economy. This is an outgrowth of the more spontaneous musical and cultural events back in the '90s (and the Expozine is a great example of people doing a lot of cool stuff; you'll see a pretty interesting mix of hipster generations there). There is also a nice environmental element to that as well, with local cultural groups pushing for doing good things with green space, setting up composting service and so on.

Other than that, though, it's a pretty depressingly empty scene. Today's hipsters are basically wealthy consumers with a lot of leisure time. Their non-labour energies are almost entirely dedicated to increasing cultural consumption. There is very little political will or social consciousness, besides reflexive lip service. Even the punks are apolitical today and the squeegee kids are more conformist than anyone. I know the hippies were super-annoying and basically a giant sausage-fest, but at least they were yelling for some fucking change. Punk Rock back in the day was about smashing shit up. Today it is about getting a record deal or properly managing your twitter account. Today's hipsters is fundamentally conservative (note the new emphasis on traditional women's domestic labour still being done by women, with hipster chicks baking, knitting and sewing, but now it is "crafting" and sold at a higher price point than the mass-produced equivalents).

They are nice kids on the individual level, these hipsters, I'm sure. But you can't help but want to punch them in the face when you see them. Here's why: it's that they think they are actually doing something positive and different. They believe the lies that go along with the products they sell to each other, as we all do. But their lies make them think they are actually part of a cultural movement, as opposed to being just another marketing demographic. When you see a dufus in an SUV with a trunk full of Ikea products, you can lament his wasteful lifestyle and be resentful of his wealth, but he's not trying to be somehow culturally superior. Same with the gelled guidos waiting in line at the club.

This is all inevitable. I find it hard to believe that Mile End could ever be a truly swanky neighbourhood, but it happened in SOHO (though that took decades) and happened almost right before my eyes in Williamsburg. The U.S. is much, much richer than Canada, so I don't know if we've already got the super-expensive chocolate boutiques on Fairmount, the high-end baby stores, condos going up everywhere and the rising property values and rents. Today's hipsters may well integrate themselves successfully into this evolution and become a new wealthy cultural elite. The big wild card is the language thing, which limits the amount of hipsters who can move here (and thank fucking god and the PQ for that despite some of the annoying side effects). That is one thing that keeps Montreal different. There is also the decline of America as a world empire, but I suspect we'll still see several generations of economic growth before it finally really comes down. And we still have decades of natural resources to plunder before the planet as a whole truly starts to suffer. In the meantime, we can watch Mile End become more and more fancy and the hipsters become more and more insufferable until it finally becomes, gasp, Park Slope.

Booby-trapped House

2010-12-17T07:25:00.003-05:00

This is my kind of homeowner.

La bonne bouffe Coréenne

2010-12-16T15:12:00.002-05:00

I'm a big fan of all foods coming from Asia, but in recent years I've gotten particularly into the Korean. I think part of it is that there is no good Japanese food here in Montreal and we have only now started to get a nice little wave of interesting Chinese food in the Concordia ghetto (and most welcome that development is!). But there has always been one or two quality Korean restaurants here and we've been favouring them.

But I think another reason that I am favouring Korean food is because of the cold. I'm pulling this theory right out of my ass, but Korea has a real winter climate and many of their dishes are designed to have the best taste and be most comforting in the cold weather. I realized that today while having a hot ramyon soup (basically fancy ramen) at Miga. Korean food is served piping hot, with a special flat sipping spoon. It is also spicy, but not in an overwhelming way. Also, as soon as I walked in, they brought me a hot tea, not too strong. Sitting there, sipping away on my soup, listening to Radio-Classique, looking at the snowy day outside, I felt very warm and comforted.

The ramyon is an easy choice for new palates, but there are several other really delicious hot soups. I also like the little fried tofu balls to start out with at Miga.

Give them a try!

Miga is on Rachel and Rivard, just one block east of St.Denis. It's right across the street from Frite-Alors.

Two winter scenes: inside and out

2010-12-14T18:45:00.002-05:00

This irresponsible bike owner helps us to see the total snow fall we've had so far this winter. The long term predictions for lots of snow and cold are looking good at this point!

The organization downstairs from us got creative and seasonal with their coffee station!

La chenillette me fait chier!

2010-12-13T12:52:00.008-05:00

La famille Chenillette

The french of Québec can be quite elusive. Sometimes it seems that it's better to find out a bunch of words and then ask if they are the correct ones rather than just ask people what the word for something is. The relevant case in point is snow plow. Each winter, I ask people how you say snowplow and I never really get a solid answer. The most solid I've heard is "déneigeuse", but it seemed too literal. People also speak of the "chasse-neiges", but that refers to the entire range of snow-removing vehicles (and possibly non-vehicles as well).

Even more elusive is the word for the little guy that does the sidewalks. These, as my longtime readers will well know, are a favourite of mine. Little diesel smokers that tear up and down the sidewalks, mangling bikes, scaring pedestrians and (as we will see) smashing fences. Well I just learned about the word "Chenillette".

Un chenille is a caterpillar. It's also used to describe any tracked vehicle (like a tank or a snow plow). So you can say "une véhicule à chenille" or even use it as an adjective, "chenillé". So a chenillette is a little tracked vehicle and was used for those small, tracked gun cars in WWII as well as snow plows on mountains in France. I polled the office and only a few of the Québécois referred to the sidewalk plow as a chenillette, but definitely one or two of them did. Also, chenille is not pronounced shuh-nee, it's pronounced schneeyuh. And you can use it to refer to a tractor just like we do in english (though I'm not sure if that is because of the brand name; which may in turn come from their mode of transportation).

In this conversation, I also finally learned the word "la charrue" which means snowplow! Why was this a big secret? How come when I asked how you say snowplow in french, nobody just said charrue? It's so weird. In any case, une charrue is also a big old ugly woman and quite offensive. There is also the very good phrase "placer la charrue devant les boeufs" which is the french equivalent of placing the cart before the horse. Good to know!

La famille Charrue [does this go too far?]

The building I live in has a teeny front yard, which is the right and responsibility of the owner of the Rez-de-chaussée (ground floor). It has a small wooden fence in front of it and every year, because of the closeness of the sidewalk tree, it gets damaged by the chenillette, who has to maneuver closely by it. Last winter, our neighbour moved the fence's rail on the backside of the post to create another 4 inches of maneuvering room. She also put up some orange flags. So this summer, we went for the same. I did the work and also re-attached the missing vertical slats. The downstairs neighbour's daughter's boyfriend re-did her front gate entirely (and did quite a nice job; he was surprisingly handy).

I don't know if there was something exceptionally difficult or if we have a new chenillette driver, but after the very first snowfall, the dude just went absolutely hogwild, took out half the slats and an entire gate. And then last night, he took out half the slats on the other side. And despite that, he still can't seem to properly clear the sidewalk in front of our place. There remains a mound a good 10 inches above the rest of the sidewalk. I respect these guys and their work, but come on! How come we only lost a few slats in the last few winters and now all of a sudden the whole thing is taken out in the first snowfall? I did notice that the chenillette is red and I think the one last year was yellow, so it could be that this model is bigger in some way and harder to maneuver.

I really don't feel like fixing the fence every year. I had suggested just getting rid of it, but the downstairs neighbour said without a fence, you get way more dogs taking a shit and other stuff. Now I'm scheming of perhaps a removable fence, which we can just lift up and store in the backyard for the winter. Might be a cool project.

So to my francophone readers, what do you call the little sidewalk snowplows?

And for your visual pleasure and edification, here are some images of the damage:

Look at our stubbornly proud little reflecting flags, trying to so hard to be helpful and yet looking pretty guilty for their failure at this point. It's not your fault, guys! You did your best.

You can see how the snow rises here. Our fence was destroyed but they still didn't manage to clear the snow.

Well the gate itself is intact, but the entire post holding it in the ground has been sheared off.

It's the fencacolypse!

I tried to capture the mound here, where the plow didn't get down to the sidewalk. You can't really see the different levels, but you can see where the sidewalk is exposed on either side of it. This, combined with the excessive amount of leaves and garbage we accumulate relative to the rest of the block is starting to make me feel kind of paranoid.

Au printemps, mes amis!

2010-12-10T13:15:00.000-05:00

I stepped out of my office in the very beginning of the way-too-early evening and heard the haunting cry far above me of a flock of geese heading south for the winter. It always amazes me when I think of those birds just flying together like that for days at a time, traveling such long distances, somehow knowing how to stay in formation.

Have a safe journey!

Get 'er done!

2010-12-09T22:14:00.002-05:00

Good work fellas!

Also, saw these dudes through my office window, shoveling around on the roof, trying to find something buried under the snow, maybe another trapdoor or a leak. The snow makes more work for humans!

4-5 cm of snow

2010-12-07T19:44:00.003-05:00

The word according to the meteorologists was that we were expecting 4-5 cm of snow overnight and partly throughout Monday. Instead it snowed and snowed all day Monday and all night and we got a pretty serious dump of over 30 cm. The city (and its citizens) was caught a bit off guard. They are saying the snow should be cleared off in at best 5 days (a tip of the hat to the always reliable Montreal City Weblog for that link). Only problem, we're supposed to be getting another 10+ cm next weekend! Bring it on! Man, the commute must have been a beast this morning!

This is what you see when your toque has blocked your hearing until it's too late while stumbling along the narrow rut of an uncleared sidewalk snow path. It's a stoned and drunk sidewalk snowplow operator barrelling up from behind you and he is stopping for nothing! Quickly find some balcony stairs or dive into the snowpile on the street side!

Phew, you just made it. And you happened to arrive at the foot of my stairs. What a pleasant suprise, a frail, shivering university lad! Why don't you come on in and warm yourself up some, sonny boy? That ferocious snowplow must have given you quite a scare. Here, have some hot chocolate. Go on, drink it up. Yes, that's right. Drink it all down. There's a lad. You're safe now...

I think I saw a dude stealing a bike yesterday

2010-12-07T12:23:00.003-05:00

I was riding home for lunch and right on the corner of my block a dude was bent over a bike attached to the pole. When I stopped and looked to see what he was doing, I saw that he had a short piece of rebar and was using it to leverage out the U-lock. He was about 6' tall, with polarized glasses, a beard and a big hooded blue puffy coat. The bike was a newish, standard-quality silver mountain bike and there was a red helmet attached to it. It looked sort of feminine and he definitely did not. So I asked him why he was doing that (in french) and he said "I lost my keys" (in accented english). I stood and watched him and he definitely was watching me. I was maybe 20' away. He succeeded in breaking the lock. He picked up the rear fender he had knocked off and the helmet and quickly rode away. I followed him, but he lost me heading the wrong way on St. Laurent. He rode on to the sidewalk and since I am trying to abide by the law on my bike, I hesitated and got blocked by oncoming traffic.

This whole episode has left me with bad feelings. I really feel like I should have stopped him. The problem and most reasonable people agree with me, is that I had no way of knowing for sure that he was stealing the bike. It could have been his girlfriend's who lost her keys and he was pissed about having to go get it. But now looking back, I'm pretty sure the guy was a thief and I should have just jumped in and beat him with my own u-lock. It doubly bugs me because this was right on my block and it would have been a very good opportunity to send a message about where junkies and thieves should and should not feel comfortable getting up to their shenanigans. And finally, I'm bummed that the guy got away from me. There was a time when I could have stuck with him all the way to hell and back, but I'm getting older and careful and I was aware that I only had 45 minutes left on my lunch hour. If I had followed him to an address and it turned out the bike was stolen, then I could have left a sign on the pole and the police could have tracked the dude down.

So what should I do next time? Get more aggressive and ask more questions? Pretend I know whose bike it is? Just prevent anyone trying to unlock a bike with a piece of rebar as a general rule?

Petition to improve animal welfare services in Montreal

2010-12-06T15:10:00.003-05:00

Actually, more specifically, it is a petition to force la Berger-Blanc to improve its services. Le Berger Blanc is a private, for-profit animal shelter and euthanasia center (i.e. "the pound") that has the municipal contract for all stray animals that are found in greater Montreal. For those of you who have never looked for a lost animal, or found one and tried to deal with the system of handling lost pets or their corpses, I tell you now that it is a terrible mess.

My first experience was when I found a dead cat in the gutter right around the corner from my house. I knocked on some doors, but nobody seemed to know whose it was and it didn't have a collar. I spent hours (really, literally hours) on the phone going from service to service, trying to find what you are supposed to do. My hope was that we could find out the owner but at the very least, it had to be taken away as it was the summer. It ended up being a failure, but later that day somebody did recognize it and it was taken care of. I spoke to my vet about it and she said that usually the garbage men just pick up dead animals and they are thrown into the dump. Sentimental issues aside about respectfully treating the body, they should at least have a system to see if there is a collar or an RFID tag (which all animals taken from the SPCA get) and let the owners know the fate of their animal.

My quest did lead me to le Berger-Blanc and I learned that they are basically the pound for all of Montreal. The allegations in the petition are pretty damning and I have heard similar concerns from a past vet. But I do wish the people behind the petition would be more transparent. In any case, it looks fairly thoroughly done, correctly written in both french and english. Some of the items are totally basic and it is insane to me that they don't provide those services. For instance, the petition claims the Berger-Blanc doesn't even have an RFID scanner. It sounds like they have had this contract from the city for a long time with no real strings attached beyond "be a place we can send the animals we don't know what to do with". The result is that it the euthanasia rate is super high and lots of people don't get their pets back.

Ultimately, the problem here is with the city administration. We should be spending money on a better system of licensing and sterilization. We should also have smaller, regional shelters within public transport reach of everyone. In the meantime, putting pressure on le Berger-blanc to start to provide decent services to the public is a good start.

You can find the petition here.

(scroll down to the english details of the petition.)

First snow of the 2010-11 winter season

2010-11-28T18:19:00.006-05:00

Took a great long walk up on Mont Royal today. Most invigorating!

This is the bath that Charlie jumps into when the weather is warmer.

This did not seem to deter anybody. I guess it's just their way of absolving responsibility if you wipe out, which seems like a fair deal to me.

Charlie grooving out to some stalwart out of season drummers.

Parking Anxiety

2010-11-23T11:49:00.006-05:00

So the latest freak-out in the saga of Luc Ferrandez' eco-fascist municipal administration is his attempt to take control the parcomètres in the Plateau. Earlier, Montreal mayor Gerald Tremblay announced that the administration and revenue from street parking would be turned over to the Boroughs. I am actually ill-informed of the reasoning behind this insane decision (from the mayor's perspective at least) and I can well imagine the boroughs pounced upon it.

Luc Ferrandez, our borough mayor and member of the ecologically-minded and forward thinking Projet Montréal party (with the radical platform of hey guess what urban cores are not giant shopping malls or waypoints for suburbanites to drive to and through), seized on the opportunity and announced an extension of parking meter hours, locations and a price hike. Merchants freaked out about this and put up a bunch of retarded posters. Today, the mayor balked and announced that he wasn't giving up control yet. I suspect the business lobby has a lot more power over Tremblay at the city level than they do over Ferrandez at the borough level. I can only imagine the many levels of pressure the business lobbyists applied to Tremblay and his people.

Emotionally, I can sympathize with drivers to some degree. The few times that I've driven around town and had to pay for parking, I'm shocked at how expensive it has become. You might as well use a credit card, because coins won't do the trick anymore unless you have a pirate-sized bag of loonies and toonies. On the other hand, compared to other North American cities I've parked in (Vancouver, San Francisco-Bay Area and New York; though this last has its own special craziness that isn't all bad), the availability of parking is really good here.

That being said, financially, if you can afford to drive a car, having to pay a bit more for parking should be well within your budget. I'm sure there are a percentage of people who drive for a living or need a car to get to work (though I am very hesitant to say "need" there given the ease with which people who have public transit, bike and foot options use it to justify their owning a car) who have very tight margins and a parking increase will cause them to sacrifice. I suspect that percentage is very low and most people can afford the hike.

I'm a resident here in the Plateau and cars for the most part are not welcome in my world. They are polluting and dangerous (no children play in the street on my residential road) and take up space. More importantly, I pay a lot of municipal taxes to live here. A big chunk of that money goes to road repair and road cleaning and I don't even drive. So if you are driving your car into my borough, then you need to be paying for the costs that creates. My block is full all day with people who work nearby. They pay nothing for that space. I'm glad they have jobs in my neighbourhood or come and do shopping. But they need to throw a little in the piggy bank to pay for the repairs to the road and the snow clearing, just like I do.

It's the reaction of the businesses that I don't quite get. For the shitty, faux-fancy restaurants on St. Laurent south of des Pins, I can see how they are worried about losing their weekend suburban meal tickets, but don't those people usually park in some pay parking lot anyway or take a cab? It was really surprising to see Sakaris have the anti-Ferrandez poster in their store. Most of their clients come on foot for sure and the ones who come in car are usually the older Portugues ladies whose husbands drive around the block while they buy the entire store. I wonder if a lot of these proprietors just got browbeaten by a few vocal leaders of this business group.

It's amazing how profoundly attached people are to their vehicles. It's an ignorance and short-sightedness that goes far beyond any other consumer item (about which we all have our blinders and loyalties to one degree or another). Car owners can seriously equate a parking rate hike to an attack on their freedoms, likening the Plateau administration to "maoist guerrillas". I kid you not, this was a comment over at the Montreal City Weblog. It used to be the left that tended to make those kinds of hyperbolic historic comparisons, but more and more it is the people who fear change who are starting to talk like this. Maybe they should spend a month with some real Maoist guerrillas (if there are any left, maybe in Tibet?) and then make the comparison.

Mile End Weed

2010-11-09T19:21:00.003-05:00

For those of you who lack confidence about speaking french here

2010-11-05T11:08:00.003-04:00

I realized last night during a work discussion around beers that after 5 years on my job, a part of which entails me dealing with a wide range of the public, on the phone or in person, I have only had one person give me shit about not being a true francophone or not speaking french correctly and he was already in a rage about our organization and our phone system (and rightly so on the latter). Quebec is, very broadly speaking, still an insular society and often reverts to a self-defeating defensive stance, but the people are fundamentally generous and accepting. My french can be rough at times and I have to talk about a crazy range of things with some of the calls I respond to (geothermal, cats stuck in trees, taxes, government databases, real estate to name just a few from the last couple weeks). People are always very patient when I am lacking a vocabulary word. Sometimes I can even hear them trying to make me feel like there is nothing wrong with my french, when I know that I have just said something completely incomprehensible. The worst that has ever happened is that sometimes people switch to english, but strangely, this is very rare over the phone. Maybe there are some visual cues that help people determine what your native tongue is?

In any case, if you feel insecure or worried that people are going to laugh at you or be offended when you try and speak french here in Quebec, push those worries aside, go forth and speak your mind. When you slip, the francophones will be ready to grab you and make sure you don't fall.

FUBAR II - a rare non-Fantasia review

2010-10-16T16:18:00.004-04:00

First of all, if you haven't seen FUBAR, then you can just go ahead and turn in your Canada card right now. Go teabag other loser traitors like David Frum. If you aren't Canadian and want to understand this great nation better, go rent FUBAR right now.

It's funny, because when I was a kid I feared and hated headbangers. I lived in a very small world back then and the music you listened to and the clothes you wore seemed much more important than they actually were. As a minority punker freak, I got a lot of shit from the headbangers. But I see now that only a few of those people were real headbangers. The rest were just trendoids listening to what they were told to listen to and thus we got to hear "Cum on Feel the Noize" every fucking day on the bus ride home from junior high. Or fucking Def Leppard. Despite these differences, I realize today that I learned how to giv'er on Vancouver Island, a skill that has served me well in life.

FUBAR is my #2 all-time favourite movie (The Road Warrior being at the top spot). It came out when I was living in New York and spending my summers in the Rockies. I was feeling more and more the call to come back to Canada. Many a late night I would come home and just watch the first half-hour or so of FUBAR before falling asleep on the couch. The rhythm of that first act (culminating in the anti-Tron party night) is near-cinematic perfection, an exquisite blend of character, humour and music. The rest of the movie just builds on that. For my 35th birthday, I rented out this little movie hall on 12th street and screened it. So you can imagine that I was pretty psyched when I heard they were working on a sequel.

I would have gone to the premier, but I was out of town due to work, so I had to wait until the second weekend. We didn't expect too much of a crowd (Canadians not being too good at supporting our own cinema), so I was quite anxious when we got to the Cineplex Scotiabank with 15 minutes until showtime and there was a massive crowd in the lobby. Not too worry, as there were sadly only 4 other people in the audience with us when we finally got through. I guess the youngsters were all lining up to see that latest Ryan Reynolds movie Buried ("Phonebooth underground" as one kid in line behind me said) or maybe The Social Network.

FUBAR II's opening scene, a party to celebrate Dean being cancer free for five years, was sheer chaotic genius, beyond my expectations. I was delirious with laughter and party pleasure. The follow-up was excellent as well, with our heroes heading up to Fort MacMurray ("The Mac") to get jobs promised to them by the new bearded, single and rapping Tron. What makes this part of the movie stand out for me isn't just Dean and Terry up to their regular hijinks (although Terry demonstrates a surprising character development: a work ethic!), but the portrayal of life in this boom town. We hear constantly about the Tar Sands from an environmental and economic perspective. But we really don't get to see what life is really like up there and it is fascinating. I don't know if it was deliberately emphasized, but it seems like the giant refinery stacks are always there in the background, looming like evil castles. The highs and lows of the boom economy underpin the storyline: the easy credit, quick money and high-end but crass consumerism (decked out trucks, jewelry stores, hunting equipment) on the high side and this crazy camp of itinerant workers on the low side.

Seeing this stuff was super engaging, but it's also where the movie starts to lose its way. There are several storylines and they take too long to develop and aren't always resolved satisfactorily. The main storyline is basically a familial soap opera. It's not terrible, but it's not really all that interesting either. What made the first movie so great was that the human drama was snuck in, hiding under the surface for most of the movie so that you don't realize how much you care about the characters until you are totally caught up in their world. I also suspect that this movie really doesn't work well for people who don't know and love Dean and Terry already. Finally, it never really explodes. All that being said, the acting is almost uniformly outstanding and there is some pretty good madness. I left feeling strangely compelled by The Mac. A part of me felt like heading out there, trying to cash in and just party.

So I enjoyed myself and the first five minutes was worth the price of admission alone, but not a great success as a movie. Nevertheless, I'd rather see FUBAR II than any of the other movies that were in the line-up and it saddens me that so few of those young people crowding the lobby even considered it as an option.

Fubar II and real craziness

2010-10-10T01:00:00.002-04:00

On the way back from Fubar II, we passed a guy kneeling next to a wheelchair, wearing an alien mask. I noticed him but thought nothing more beyond just another panhandler with a gimmick. He picked up a small plastic gas container and poured it over himself. I guess I am so jaded by city living that my reaction was to keep on moving until the people I was with said that it was gasoline and we should call 911. He then walked over to a phone booth, grabbed a sledge hammer and walked across the street (Sherbrooke) to the Loto-Quebec building. I got my phone turned on (ironically, I was the only person of a party of 5 with a working cell phone) and called 911 and told them what I saw. The guy on the other end of the line seriously asked me to describe him. I said "dude, he's covered in gasoline and wearing an alien mask, what more do I need to tell you!" This was after I had given the specific address and there was a crowd of people gathering. During the call, the guy had smashed the glass doors of the Loto-Quebec building and was waiting with the sledge hammer cocked above his head outside the door. The cops came in about 3 or 4 minutes, but it still seemed a bit too long considering we were right downtown. That's the second time I've had attitude from people manning the 911 booth here.

More and more cops came (as one of the people I was with remarked, the cops are quite good at swarming into situations) and eventually they took the guy down, first with the taser and then throwing him down. They demasked him and brought him to one of the cop cars, where they wiped the gasoline off him and treated a cut on his shoulder (I guess from the broken glass he fell into). We stuck around until they put him in the ambulance. A thin guy with a close-cropped head and beard, maybe in his early 30s. On the way home, I got a call back from "station 20" and they asked me exactly what I saw. When I asked them what his deal was they said they didn't know "he's not speaking at all".

I have to say, I've seen a lot of crazy behaviour in my time, but that may well be on the top of my list. It seemed all so well planned, with the wheelchair, the gasoline, the sledgehammer set up in the phone booth, the waiting by the Loto-Quebec building door, but all so useless at the same time. What was his goal? I've seen true madness and there usually is some kind of internal logic that drives the thinking. But there is also usually some kind of external extreme behaviour, often of a performative nature, that helps you identify it as craziness. This guy was so cold and methodical that I didn't even register that he had just poured gasoline on himself.

Oh yeah, a nice coda to the scene was the guy who came up after it was all pretty much over and taped off who started screaming about Montreal corruption, how it was all going down and the damn frogs. Like insanity flies to the crazy light. That's more what I'm used to.

Updates on street, cat and scammer

2010-08-19T10:55:00.003-04:00

Work has been very busy and I'm enjoying these beautiful August evenings too much to be blogging, so please excuse the lack of recent posts. I give you a quick update.

First of all, our street is done. They finished all the sidewalks and did a very nice job. They repaved the entire street in two days, all with asphalt. It radiated heat for a day and half. What are the pros and cons of asphalt over concrete? So the work is all done. Sadly, now all the cars are backed, parked up in every possible space when stationary and racing up the street when not. It's really a pleasure riding the bike on the new asphalt, but the cars are having too much fun as well and I worry for the cats and children. I really need to work on getting the municipality to put a speed bump in place here. Personally, I'd rather use caltrops or launch flywheels into the windshield Mad Max style, but the majority of society would frown upon that.

Second, I have some interesting developments on the orange cat. The porch lady, as she has come to be known, told me that there was another guy who lived on the street who was feeding the orange cat and letting him in the house. I finally met this guy as he was standing almost in front of my house where I was locking my bike and he had the cat in his arms. His name is Louis. Turns out that he was going out to catch a bus and the cat was following him. It had done it before, followed him all the way to Mont-Royal and he was worried he would get hit by a car or lost.

We ended up talking and it turns out that the cat does have a home, sort of. The apartment next door to him is inhabited by a lot of Colombian hippy types who are living there for free while they renovate the upper floors. I guess the landlord is a bit of a hippy himself. They somehow got the cat. So we went over there and talked to them. They seemed like nice guys and did say the cat was theirs. The story goes that two cats were dropped off with one of the guys living there (who was sleeping at the time, which was 6:00 in the evening; whatever) and that one had disappeared and the orange guy was the other one. I offered to get him fixed and they were cool with that and the general notion that it had to be done, but wanted to see what the story was with the sleeping guy. So we said we'd come back tomorrow to figure it out.

In the meantime, another woman, who lives in the apartment above the Jehovah's Witness Kingdom Hall, came by. She also has two cats that she only lets out when she is gardening so she can watch them. She said there was a young man from her church who was looking for a cat. That came by and he did indeed seem like a nice guy, but he was going to keep the cat in an apartment. Louis and I were both not feeling that idea. I told the younger guy that he can always get a really nice already indoor cat at the SPCA and he seemed happy with that idea. Actually kind of seemed like he hadn't even thought of it before.

In any case, the cat is not ours to give and if we get a good answer from the Colombians, I think we'll be happy to know he has a place to go inside in the winter. I'll get him snipped for sure as well. He's called Ali by the way, as in ali gato. I'll keep you posted. Not totally resolved yet, but definitely some good news.

After that whole incident, I got to talking to Louis and it turns out he is a Mile End VIP. He runs the art vending machines you see in Casa Del Popolo and Le Divan Orange. He is also the organizer of ExpoZine. Finally, he wrote the book A Fine Ending, which is all about the salad days of anglo hipsters in Mile End in the 90s, back when rents were cheap. My wife had read it a couple of months ago and remarked how cats had played such a thematic role (you can read her review here). So a minor celebrity and one more responsible, mellow-minded cat lover on our block!

Finally, yesterday I went across the street as I saw a woman on the balcony of the apartment where the guy had supposedly been locked out of. I spoke with her and it turns out she lives there alone. So the dude was a scammer. Nice to know.

Sidewalk repair porn pictures coming. Have a good weekend everyone!

Plateau Nights

2010-08-10T05:02:00.005-04:00

My heart is heavy at 4:00 in the morning on a Monday night.

There has been this very beautiful orange striped young male [edit: cat, I'm talking about a stray cat here!] hanging around the front of the street in the last couple of weeks. He is quite friendly and very vocal. No tags and a magnificent set of furry testicles [NSFW]. I've been trying to avoid him because i'm pretty sure that he is a stray, possibly lost but more likely abandoned after moving day. I spoke with the old woman who lives up the street and she confirmed that he is a stray and that he killed a pigeon and a squirrel in the last couple days. I guess the brazilian student/hippy house has been leaving their door open and possibly feeding him as well. In any case, everybody on this block who might take a stray already has two cats of their own.

So this morning, I was woken up by a furious yowling from the back yard. I went out on the balcony and sure enough there was the orange cat, in the neighbour's backyard in full male cat territorial fighting mode. Wow does this guy have some pipes! Who was his opponent? None other than Tiger White, the reigning stray tom of the back alley. Sadly, this last winter (and it's at least 2 now that he has survived) has weakened TW somewhat and he just isn't as tough as he used to be. We've been feeding him on our back balcony and I do feel a certain attachment to him now.

I'm really torn. I guess the responsible thing would be to get the orange cat and just take him to the SPCA. He really is a nice-looking cat, appears very healthy and is social and friendly. I think he would make a great pet. But he is just past the age of being a kitten and thus has a less likely chance of finding a home. Plus, this is full season at the SPCA thanks to the numerous fucks who get cats without having the responsibility necessary to properly care for them. And the lack of a mandatory neutering program by the city. But I digress.

I just hate to take a living creature and put it in a cage. It might have to be done here, for the best for all involved.

So on the off chance that anybody wants a nice cat, please get in touch with me through the comments or via twitter (olmanfeelyus) and I'll hook you up. I'll pay for the neutering and basic shots as well. If I get a chance to take a picture, I'll put it up here later.

Now that's a fucking nice looking kitty right there!

But what makes this postworthy is that once I chased the cats off, I was quite wide awake. So I went to the front room to work on the computer. It's right next to the front window and as I am watching this awesome classic Kraftwerk video a friend had just referred me to, I see a dude in the light of the streetlamp looking through the doorway of the neighbour's across the street. He does not look anything like the people who live there.

He turns and sees me. I realize that in the dark of night, with my computer monitor on, I am quite visible from the street. He keeps looking and I try to go back to watching the computer. Then he starts waving and comes across the street. So I go out on the front porch.

Here's his story: He got home with Nez Rouge and realized he'd left his keys and wallet and phone in his car. He lives at 4605 (the triplex next to the door I saw him looking in). Nobody is home in any of the apartments (he also said that his parents own the building), but he knows the neighbours next door and was hoping they were home. He asked if there was a garage nearby. He said he worked at Tele-Quebec at Delorimier and Rene-levesque and is working 14-hour shifts ("which is probably why I forgot all my stuff") and that he had got out at 2:00 in the morning.

As I was talking to him, everything seemed on the up and up. He needed a ride, he would pay for gas, he'd gone and talked to the cops at Tim Horton's. The thing was, I am in my underwear, I don't have a car and I had no cash on me. So it would have meant getting dressed and walking to the bank machine with a stranger in the middle of the night. Also, I'd never seen him before and I keep a pretty voyeuristic eye on my street and the neighbours. I don't know any of the people in what he claimed was his place, but I've seen them coming and going many times and I've never seen him.

But the final straw for me was one of competence. If you are not a drug addict or petty scam artist, then how the hell are you going to the bar after work without your keys? He was clearly not drunk in any visible way and said that he had gotten off work at 2:00. It was about 3:45 when I was talking to him. So he is in the bar for an hour and has to take Nez Rouge home? I was also mildly annoyed because he switched into english way early on in the conversation. My french is good enough to have had that same conversation in french and though his english was good, it just rubs me the wrong way when certain francophones switch into english and the way this guy did it was one of those ways.

I finally said "I hate to be cold but I think you are just going to have to walk back to your car and get your keys there." which really is what any real drinker would have done in the first place. It's a beautiful night!

Once I got inside and started to ponder, I am almost certain that he was bullshitting. He may have even seen my light on before he started doing the looking in the window thing. I'll confirm for sure tomorrow, but growing up in the East Bay and catching the tail end of New York's seedy period has kind of set my radar for this kind of thing. It was all too friendly and normal feeling. Made for an interesting night, though. Just various creatures on the mean streets and alleys of the Plateau, trying to survive, doing their thing.

Won't you take me home? I'll be neutered and vaccinated.

Pork, Hungarian Style

2010-08-03T18:30:00.002-04:00

The Charcuterie Fairmont on St. Laurent is my favourite butcher. I know it's not good to eat pork, but their pork is just so darn fresh and good! For whatever reason, I had a hankering for a rich pork stew. (It's probably the soups I've been getting over at Bulgogi House.) I went in, waited a bit while they helped another customer and then simply said that I wanted to make a pork stew, enough for 2 and leftovers. The friendly butcher, who has been there for 40 years, trimmed most of the fat ("you like a bit of fat, eh?") off of a piece of pork shoulder for me, chopping it into rough one-inch chunks, perfect for stew. I then subtly asked what was the right way to cook it. I got the recipe I was hoping for.

Heat up some butter or lard (I used olive oil) in a stew pot.

Sauté about a big fistful of chopped onion until it is starting to get transparent (maybe a little longer).

Throw in the pork cubes. Stir them around so they get good and covered by the oil and onion mixture. Grind some pepper over them. Stir and cook at medium heat (you want bubbling, no higher). When the outside of the pork is cooked on all sides, squeeze in a half a tube of Pörkölt and mix it in well.

I wasn't making those umlauts up! You'll see this stuff and other variants for a buck or two on the shelf to the left or on the counterop.

Let the whole thing cook, covered or semi-covered (keep enough sauce to keep it bubbling, covering most of the pork) for as long as it takes. Put some paprika in to add flavour or spice. It will be ready to eat in a half-hour at least, but the longer and slower you cook it, the tenderer it gets.

We quite enjoyed it, but next time I'd make it a day ahead of time or at least that morning, as it gets much more tender and flavourful with time. I also found it lacked a bit of bite and I'd either add a lot more paprika or perhaps some other straight hot spice, like stir in some jalapeno with the onions or just some red pepper flakes.

[Update: I went back to the butcher and he recommended the spicy version pictured below, a tablespoon of which I added to the leftovers when I reheated them. It definitely gave me the kick I was looking for.]

Yes, now that has some kick!

Next time you want some pork chops, faux fillet, pork shoulder (I get half shoulders here for pulled pork) or any kind of meat, come check the Charcuterie Fairmount out. They also have nice dried sausage and fried chunks of fatty bacon in a tray on the counter that you can just snack on.

Out with the old sidewalk

2010-08-03T13:14:00.000-04:00

Woke up to some serious noise this morning and saw that the machines had already started on the sidewalk. I have to say, that thing pounding into the concrete so close to the house is kind of freaky. It makes the whole house move and knowing the shaky state of some of these foundations and the ground underneath them, I was very thankful the front part of our foundation was re-done several years ago. You really feel it.

Feeling a bit like Lester Dent right about now

Here is how they left it Monday morning. Very post-apocalyptic. I'd almost like to keep it this way. Makes things that much more challenging for intruders and would cut down on unworthy passers-by.

There was a little circle cut into the sidewalk that I always had to take some time to clean out. I can only guess that it was cut to let an old valve through that is no longer there. It looks like they filled it up with asphalt.

Further up the street, they were already turning the broken pieces over and getting ready to load them into the cart. When I took the picture below, the foreman looked kind of nervous and asked if I was the inspector. I didn't say it, but I was tempted to respond "Dude, do I look like the inspector!" I was wearing flip-flops and camo shorts. Probably due to my job, where I sometimes have to be an officious ass, I have a slightly official air no matter what I'm wearing. Good to know.

They were supposed to be putting the forms in today, but hadn't started when I left for work, perhaps due to the rain.

Hochelaga Diptych

2010-08-02T23:00:00.002-04:00

The Sidewalks are Coming! The Sidewalks are Coming!

2010-08-01T08:00:00.001-04:00

I came home from work on Friday to see these blue lines spraypainted along the sidewalk square dividers on our side of the block. I was very pleasantly surprised as this looks to be the vanguard marks of the company actually coming to redo the sidewalks and since the construction holiday ends on the 31st of July, I didn't expect to see anything at least until August. Some super keen worker getting a head start?

What is really cool is that, judging by the lines, where the direction of the arrows indicate which squares will be redone, it looks like not only are they going to be filling in the squares that they tore up for the aqueduct work but that they will also be replacing cracked and damaged squares.

I get a holiday on Monday and while I have to help a friend with his computer, I'm hoping they'll actually start the work then and I can hang around annoying the workers, asking questions and taking pictures.

The real question though is to autograph the fresh cement, thus marking our territory or leave it pristine?

Street Line Painter

2010-07-31T21:21:00.003-04:00

They are repainting the lines of the bike paths this week. What a crazy-looking contraption! I wonder what kind of turning range this thing has? Do you think you could get it to write in cursive? Imagine commandeering it in the middle of the night and going hog wild writing all over the streets of Montreal. Definitely get you on the cover of Le Journal.

I do not imagine this is an easy job, however I have to say that I am not too impressed with the quality of the work being done here.

Dude, come on!

Need to move? Go by bike!

2010-07-31T12:02:00.003-04:00

These guys crossed my path as I was riding to work. I have to say I was quite impressed to see the loads they were pulling (in very low gear, evidently).

I gave them a "felicitations!" and they seemed psyched. I thought they were just some crazy individuals, but then I saw the words "Déménagement Myette" painted on the side of the trailer. A quick web search turned up their website. It's a full-on bike moving company, started by an idealistic, environmentally-minded entrepreneur. They will also come and pick up heavy and bulky refuse and take it to the ecocentre. A great idea and I wish I had known about them back when I did my hand-truck move (I would have still done all the hand-truck sized stuff myself, but would have hired them instead of the truck we got for the all the big furniture I couldn't do on my own).

Has anybody had any experience with them? If you do choose to hire them, let me know how it works out!

Fantasia 2010 wrap-up and report card

2010-07-30T06:41:00.006-04:00

Dead soldiers and the one that got away

(the free pass in exchange for the missed Blades of Blood that I never exchanged)

Overview

I had a great time at Fantasia this year. Things looked a little down after the second week and I was disappointed with the Hong Kong offerings this year, but the last week came home strong with a wide range of excellent North American horror and thriller films. While I didn't take advantage of any of them this year, it is exciting to see the festival evolve and provide some events that aren't just movies. It sounds like they were quite successful. Socially, though my one friend with whom I usually see a lot of movies wasn't around as much (having just moved, a new job and a new child), my wife did a good showing and I got to meet some cool people involved with the festival itself as well as some of the hardcore old-schoolers. I'm really satisfied with the blogging I did. For me, the internet has become a big part of the fun of the festival and this year I actually contributed rather than just consuming the work of others. It also helped me to get to meet some people.

The Movies
Movie-wise, it was an interesting year. My slightly gloomy prognosis at the beginning of the festival turned out to be not totally off-base. There really was no movie that completely surprised me, took me somewhere I haven't been before or just blew the back of my mind out with its intensity. However, there was such a rich collection of well-crafted, intelligent and thoughtful movies, that the lack of novelty, innovation and extreme weirdness was mitigated to the point that I didn't even notice it. I was too busy thinking about religious fundamentalism, post-trauma healing and puzzling out how a filmmaker is even supposed to construct a third-act in today's post torture-porn extreme-gore environment.

Thematically, religion was a big theme this year. The Devils, Black Death and the Last Exorcism were the films that addressed this directly, but it seemed to be hanging around in general. Psychological healing was another big theme, especially with the two documentaries I saw, Marwencol and Feast of the Assumption: BTK and the Otero Murders. In general, there seemed to be a strange hesitation this year, an avoidance of the traditional satisfying, crowd-pleasing decision. Even the relatively big budget Centurion didn't really have a true antagonist. On the one hand, it's a sign of smarter movies, but on the other there may be a little too much self-awareness going on. Sometimes you just really want the badguy to get smashed in the face.

I noticed this particularly in what I'll call the third act problem. There was some criticism in the way many of the movies ended this year, in particular Black Death and the Last Exorcism. They built up such a beautiful approach and then never really exploded. As I was watching the movies, I shared a similar sense of dissatisfaction as I was watching the movies, but I also really enjoyed the endings. I almost think the dissatisfaction is because we've been so trained to receive the orgasmic money-shot conclusion, that is either some explosively dramatic resolution of the narrative or extreme violence or gore that has surpassed what has gone on before. The problem is that, at least for the violence and gore, we've all already gotten it all. So far, in terms of pure martial arts awesomeness, where do we go after Ong Bak? And extreme gore is now a genre in and of itself. I think torture porn is very much the result of a cinema reaching out for greater and greater shocks because we've shown every other possible form of violence on the screen. So you can't finish a film with some ones head blowing up or a beautifully choreographed fight scene where the good guy just manages to beat the bad guy. What's a director to do?

What I saw that they were doing this year was taking a step back from the spectacle and taking the time to play out the theme of the movie, to address the issues that had been brought up. Black Death, with the shifting of audience sympathy and the dark coda, is the obvious example of this. But I think Revenants did this as well, pushing the story to its logical conclusion in an ending that many felt was unnecessary and drawn out (too many screenwriting classes, methinks). The Last Exorcism entirely avoided an expected special effects showdown for a quick conclusion that completely turned everything on its head and perhaps even made a statement in favour of religious fundamentalism. I appreciate a bit more intellectualism of this kind (which could also be a manifestation of the greater trend of genre films and arthouse films overlapping), but I also like a good, simplistic and satisfying ending. Too much thinking in movies can lead to boringness and moral relativism (a looming danger as evinced by the embarrassing praise of critics towards A Serbian Film). We are walking a narrow path in very interesting times for the range of once-marginalized cinema sub-genres that Fantasia does such a fantastic job of collecting. How can you be subversive and transgressive when you can leap from reading this to goat clown porn with the click of a mouse? [Wait, don't go yet, I'm almost done!]

FANTASIA 2010 REPORT CARD

Programming: B
First of all, it's really easy to give out a grade to a group of people who worked their asses off and clearly put their heart and soul in to seeking out the best movies every year. I recognize that a big part of this slightly disappointing grade is a function of the state of genre cinema itself. I'm not so in the scene that I actually know this, but I highly doubt there was anything better out there. As I said before, a really strong slate of interesting, well-crafted films, but nothing that blew my mind. And there are two areas that could be improved. I felt the midnight movies have been not great in the last two years. A big part of it again is my personal taste, but I feel like there is too much reliance on Japanese extreme gore. Re-Animator was a great choice and I probably should have gone and seen Birdemic, but over all there just was nothing really out there. My major criticism, though, is the lack of classic kung fu movies. I'll get into that more at the end. So still a rock solid year, but with room for improvement. (Also, note that I am comparing this year against past Fantasia's, not against other film festivals. Fantasia simply blows the curve out of the water and would get an A++++ every time, so it's useless to put it up against mediocre mainstream media wankfests like TIFF or Cannes).

Operations: A
Everything about the festival this year has improved significantly. The website is always solid, but the downloadable calendar additions is a huge improvement. The online and phone ticket service doesn't have the personality of the 8-hour wait in the Hall building, but that's a sacrifice I'll take. The second ticket booth over at [REDACTED-INFO NOT TO BE SHARED] is a huge win. Every single movie I went to started on time this year, except where the situation was out of Fantasia staff's control (the double evacs in da Sève and VivaFilm and Universal's marketing paranoia clusterfuck). The staff and volunteers were uniformly efficient, helpful and friendly. Projection, lighting and sound quality were all rock solid. CJLO rocked as usual with finally some hip-hop (keep Mister Vee in the line-up for next year!). The website was rock solid and very active. Really the only reason this category doesn't get an A+ is because I want to push the staff to get a bit tougher with big-name guests like VivaFilm for them to get their shit together. Really, though, ongratulations due all around.

Internet Participation: B-
This category is kind of fluid and tough to grade because there are so many disparate parties. It encompasses all the stuff I like to do on the internet during Fantasia when I'm not actually at the movies. A big part of the fun for me is reading other people's reviews and experiences, arguing about movies, and so on. I have to say that while there were some bright spots, I was a bit disappointed this year. First of all, if I am actually posting more quantity (not to say any of it is any good) than major sights (who send multiple correspondents and get press passes), then something is wrong. Twitch Films, The Gazette, zTele just really didn't offer much beyond brief capsule reviews. And what happened to Dread Central? They used to have the best social coverage, with great wrap-ups of each day, pictures from the afterparties as well as very thorough reviews. There were some bright spots though. Jay's Movie Blog did a man's job. Sinistreblog as well, in french, kept it coming (and were great about responding to comments). Sound on Sight is a real discovery, with a great range of articles on Fantasia (not just reviews) and a thorough and entertaining podcast. Finally, and this is nobody's fault, I really long for a centralized discussion site where Fantasia fans can just really interact and talk about the movies.

Movies I wish I'd bought tickets for

Rubber, The Loved Ones, [Rec] 2, Castaway on the Moon, Merentau, Little Soldier

Best Audience Moment

Tie between Daniel proposing and the drunk angry nerd hugging it out with the director of the original I Spit on your Grave

Best Starfucking Moment

Alan Tudyk showing me pictures on his iPhone of the wall in his Hollywood home made of antique yardsticks. Eat your heart out, Browncoats!

My recommendations for 2011

1) BRING BACK CLASSIC KUNG FU FLICKS! Is this not obvious? Why have these great Shaw Brothers movies been taken off the slate? The fans love them, they play great on the weekend days, bringing in families and older people from the Chinese community as well as the kung fu geeks. I spoke with King Wei-Hu who is the martial arts programmer and he said this decision is entirely in the hands of Pierre Corbeil, the festival director. Pierre, if you are listening, kung fu is the heart and soul and the foundation of Fantasia. They are also great movies, exciting, beautiful to look at, full of movement and colour. You don't notice how much everyone loves the trailers for them? Please bring these back.

2) DO SOMETHING ABOUT TEXTING DURING THE MOVIE!! This is not Fantasia's fault, but it is starting to become a real problem. I would ask that maybe the organizers think about making an announcement or perhaps throwing in a fun short film/PSA about them at the beginning of the movies. It's not simply a question of people being rude. Some people actually think it's okay and get angry when you ask them to stop. Warning to those of you who will open your cellphone around me, I will escalate.

My Heartfelt Thanks!

All in all, another fantastic year. I had a total blast. A huge thanks to everyone involved with Fantasia, from top to bottom. Whatever brief rest you get, you have earned it. You did a top-notch job once again. One more fully-connecting roundhouse kick to all the other pretender film festivals out there, reminding them that Fantasia is boss! You are one of the major highlights of my life (which is already pretty awesome) here in Montreal, so I really do appreciate all the work that you do.

My Final Movie Rankings

(The list I keep on the right during the festival is going to be taken off, so I'll post it down here for future reference.)

The Last Exorcism

The Housemaid

Tucker and Dale vs. Evil

The Disappearance of Alice Creed

The Shrine

Gallants

The Revenant

Marwencol

Vampires

The Devils

Woochi

Black Death

Mesrine: L’ennemi public n°1

The Perfect Host

Centurion

Ip Man 2

Secret Reunion

I Spit on Your Grave

The Feast of the Assumption

Re-Animator

We Are What We Are

Mesrine: L'instinct de mort

Raging Phoenix

High School

At World's End

Lemmy

Accident

La Meute

Bodyguards & Assassins

The Clash

If a Tree Falls

Thanks for reading, Fantasia fans. Stick around if you want, as I resume my normal meanderings on life in Montreal, being an anglo in Quebec, Canadian politics and the occasional rant against the cellphone companies.

Fantasia Day 21 - Mesrine

2010-07-29T08:03:00.006-04:00

And so it ends. It is with mixed feelings that I type my final review of the 2010 Fantasia Festival. (I will be doing a wrap-up post as well.) I'm pretty weary and ready to get back to my real-life (kung fu is going to be very painful tonight), but I will miss having the opportunity to see one great film after another, night after night.

Last night's screening of the two-part epic gangster bio-pic Mesrine was an interesting event. It felt totally different than the rest of the festival. It was much more connected to the Quebec community at large and much less geek-focused. It barely felt like I was at Fantasia. First of all, the media was all over the place, which surprised me, as I thought last night was the big night. I didn't realize that this film and Roy Dupuis' presence as going to be such a big deal (it also explained why the closing night was last night; that was actually a reschedule as Mesrine was originally scheduled for Tuesday, but Roy Dupuis wasn't available so they swapped them).

Like flies to shit.

As he ages and his head widens, Roy Dupuis looks more and more like Bruce Campbell. I was not alone in this assessment, as my friend had independently remarked upon seeing Bruce Campbell recently in Burn Notice how much he looks like Roy Dupuis!

The other difference was that big blocks of seats were pre-reserved and there were well-dressed young women directing people to their seats. A lot of them were for media and people associated with Alliance Vivafilms, but there was also a big chunk of contest winners for Le Journal. It made for an interesting mix, with the classic, younger, geeky/hipster Fantasia crowd in the back and an older, more pure laine Québécois group in the front.

Resentment fades when I realize that these seats are reserved for the people!

The thing that really caught me off guard, though, was that the line-up started moving early. I was totally not expecting it. I turned around and suddenly the people in front of me had disappeared. It felt kind of like someone had suddenly taken away the wall I had been leaning against. Unfortunately, the efficiency of the Fantasia crew (and once again I applaud how well run the festival has been this year from a logistics standpoint) was undermined by the people managing the Alliance Vivafilm participation. The seats were full by 6:30, when the film was scheduled to start, but nothing was happening. Nothing happened until 6:50 when the crowd broke into spontaneous clapping. Finally, someone from Fantasia came up on stage and we were psyched. But oh no, once again, we had to have an interminable string of thank yous and empty platitudes from the distribution company.

It was clear that they were stalling and the crowd was getting truly annoyed. What was funny was that it was actually the older crowd who were the most cantankerous. The Fantasia regulars just seemed psyched to have any opportunity to yell out, while the middle-aged woman next to my wife was really griping ("On s'en fout!", "Voyons, commençons!") and the old guy in front of me went outside and complained furiously. I like Quebecers in a group like this. They aren't scared of making their feelings known.

[I'd like to make a brief aside about the guy sitting in front of me. He was a petit older guy, nicely but modestly dressed and I noticed he was reading a booklet with a black and white image on it. When I looked closer, I saw it was a picture from The Housemaid. I apologized for reading over his shoulder and asked what he was reading. It turns out it was the booklet for the DVD release of the re-mastered The Housemaid. We had a nice conversation about the movie and he said that the remake was really good as well. "Oh, yes, I heard it was quite good. Where did you see it?" I asked. "At Cannes," he replied. I was impressed.]

The delay is not a good thing, but the way it was handled was worse. The woman from VivaFilm didn't seem to know who was and was not present, but seemed to be trying to get them to come up anyways. Then she basically blamed the talent for the delay, saying that there were a lot of media interviews, which is good. Well it's good for you, but not for us! No real apology from her, no real thanks for our patience and then, with mic in hand, she takes out her blackberry and starts checking her text messages! Finally, Roy Dupuis saunters in, gets a big applause, looks around as if he is staring into the cosmos and then heads to the stage. He and several other actors stand there for a few seconds and then leave. It was awkward, but at least the movie was starting finally!

This is what I came for and it took a while for me to get it!

The two films are L'instinct de mort and L’ennemi public n°1. In the Fantasia schedule, they both had Mesrine: in front of the title, but in the movies themselves they didn't. I will refer to the two together as Mesrine. Though the two movies differ in style and pacing somewhat, they are definitely of a piece and were meant to be seen together (though whether you need to is another matter).

I have mixed feelings. During the movie, especially the first half of the first one, I was feeling really disappointed. It is very much standard bio-pic stuff. It was full of all the obligatory scenes: the arbitrary, excessive violence against a rude patron in the bar, the screaming match with the once naive now weary with children first wife, the taking the bullet out of the wound (and why do the bloody slugs always have to be dropped into a glass of water?!). What's worse, the intensity and fast pacing that were promised were nowhere to be found. The story moves forward briskly but the scenes themselves were quite slow. It is beautifully produced and shot and Vincent Cassel was great, thoroughly absorbed and absorbing. But there was nothing new here for me.

Look he shoots a guy in the leg in a bar fight and that shows us how he is willing to go jusqu'au bout which will help him rise to the top in his career as a gangster.

Things get much better when he goes to prison in Quebec. The movie takes a nastier turn and adds a much needed political edge. The escape is also quite exciting. Fortunately, the second movie, for the most part, keeps with this trend, focusing almost clinically on his two famous escapes. The pacing and style really pick up as well, with a lively camera. The character also comes alive and Cassel is fantastic at projecting his ego and charisma and just sheer force of personality. When he's ranting at the judges in a trial, you kind of hate him because you know he is mostly full of shit and using politics and cheap rhetoric for his own ends but you can't help loving him at the same time. [The petit guy in front of me, who had been lukewarm about the first movie was absolutely loving the second part, laughing and shaking in his chair.]

The closing act, the end of which opens both films, involves Mesrine and his girlfriend trying to sneak to a new hideout. They are staked the entire way by the cops who finally block them on the street with a truck and gun them down. This act really encompasses my ambivalence to the scene. It is very long and detailed, with multiple camera angles of things we'd already seen in the beginning (except that time, inexplicably, it was done with multiple frames, a stylistic device I like if you don't just decide to throw it out the window for the rest of the movie, thus rendering it weirdly out of place). I was feeling quite weary by this point and you already know what is going to happen, so there is no real suspense. Yet the scene keeps trying to amp up the tension, by having nervous cops in their hiding places freaking out as he gets closer to them. I found myself sort of frustrated and wanted them to get on with it. Then I realized, oh wait, this is like a totally slickly shot, cool-looking and very detailed observation of a tightly-organized police surveillance operation taking place in the 1970s, I love this shit, why aren't I into it?

After the movie, I went and did some research on Mesrine and he really had a crazy criminal career. Both films start with a little quote saying that basically saying the movie should not necessarily be taken as the total truth. But there is really nothing exaggerated in the movie. On the contrary, it seems like it was actually quite faithful to the facts of his life. The two prison breaks are extremely tight reproductions of what actually went down. (Check out this newspaper diagram of his escape from the high security Prison de la Santé; if you saw the movie you will see how detailed and accurate a re-enactment it was.)

I share this info with you because it is at the root of my ambivalence about the film. As I was watching it and immediately after, I felt that it lacked both a compelling narrative and any kind of thematic depth. But now after having done some research on the actual guy (who seems to be a big part of french popular culture, judging at least by the amount of websites about him), I see how much effort was done to try and capture what actually happened. Furthermore, I really appreciated the lack of sentimentality. The question I was torn about in the final scene (why am I watching this?) applies to the whole movie. Had I known about Mesrine's life and career beforehand or had I been fully prepared for a history lesson, I suspect I would have had a much more enjoyable time. Because I think the mission of the movie was simply to tell the story of his life without too much commentary either way. The slow pace and clichéd choice of scenes in the first part is less forgivable, though, and I think tried my patience and endurance too much.

This is a long movie with a lot of stuff in it that I haven't mentioned. I think if you are a fan of the history of the period or of Mesrine, you should see the whole thing. If you are a fan of the crime, heist and escape genres than I would suggest only seeing the second one (the Quartier Haute Sécurité prison escape is truly top-notch). Personally, I really wish that Roy Dupuis had been available on Tuesday, because Tucker and Dale would have been the perfect movie to truly close the festival and would have made Mesrine much more appreciated in reflection.

[There is a term I've learned here called Vox-Pop, which I think may exist only in french or in Québec, even though it was also called vox-pop on the english sides of the releases. It's when viewers share their opinion about the movie and are filmed, I guess the footage is used for publicity, maybe for various entertainment shows that are hyping the film. Some of these people actually sounded like they had some interesting stuff to say on the movie and I would have loved to eavesdrop, but they seemed nervous enough in front of the camera without me leaning in. I wonder if anyone was critical?]

Monsieur...

...et madame tout le monde are not shy about sharing their feelings about the movie. And that is the way it should be.

An aside on reviewing movies - Spoilers

2010-07-28T20:30:00.003-04:00

I'm starting to see how reviewing movies is a complex business. They are easy to do and I'd argue not all that hard to do well (not that I'm doing them all that well, but relative to other forms of writing, they are on the easy side, I would say). But when you start doing a lot of them, you do begin to come up against some slippery, tricky issues that take real intelligence and experience to figure out, I suspect.

The first one that I keep bumping into is spoilers. For my own experience, I am super uptight about spoilers. If I know that I want to see a movie, then I try my best to limit my knowledge as much as possible. Even for movies that are straightforward, the less I know the better. Some of my best movie-going experiences have been when I had no idea what I was getting into and got totally blindsided. The more you know about a movie, the more you start to set expectations and the experience becomes more and more one of comparing your expectations against what is actually happening on the screen as opposed to a pure viewing experience where your brain has to deal with what it is getting without having any handholds or guidelines.

I don't think I need to go into Hollywood's terrible practice of telling the entire story in the trailer (though sometimes it is a good thing as often you don't even have to bother seeing the movie, as in Brothers, which you would never actually want to see but if they had kept some of it hidden, you might have been at least tempted to find out what happens). At Fantasia, this concern seems paramount, as most of the movies are being shown for the first time. Furthermore, many of them have plot twists and surprises, these elements being staples of the genres Fantasia celebrates. If it's good, I want you to see it. But I don't want to ruin anything for you.

On the other hand, many of these movies are really interesting and like most good movies, demand discussion afterward among those who have seen it. I can do that with my friends and the other Fantasia geeks one gets to know over time in the line-up. The internet has added a new wrinkle. Now I can share my thoughts and read the thoughts of other people who have seen the movies and in a lot of cases I really want to respond. There were many cases of the reviews that I wrote where I had a lot more to say, but cut it out because I would have had to expose a chunk of the story to explain my position. I was thinking it would be cool to have two datastreams: the current one for people who haven't seen the movies and another one for those who have (you have to type in a serial number on your ticket stub to get access).

I think there is a real skill in reviewing a movie without revealing too much. For popular consumption, such as newspaper reviews that come out on the day of the release, you have to give away a bit of the movie, or you just won't have enough to write about, I suspect. But for the internet, where you can write as little or as much as you feel is appropriate, you can be fairly discrete. It is a real writing challenge to sell a movie without giving any of the good stuff away. In some movies, even knowing there is a twist can alter your perception of your viewing of the film. If you think about it, though, isn't writing a review using all the good stuff from the movie actually cheating? You are using the material created by the artist to entertain to fuel your own entertainment. But then what's wrong with borrowing art? A tricky business, as I say.

I've obviously erred on not giving away any spoilers and sometimes I find my writing to be embarrassingly vague. There are several adjectives—interestingly often in the present participle form as opposed to a true adjective—that have gotten badly overworked here in the last few weeks (poor "entertaining" and aching "engaging"). It's been good training, though and I hope that if you do see any of the films I've lauded this year that you'll appreciate my discipline on this matter (or more likely you'll be thinking why did that over-enthusiastic geek make me watch this piece of crap again?)

(this comic from Saint Gasoline; click on the link to find more nerdy comics.)

Fantasia 2010 - Prix du Public

2010-07-28T14:18:00.008-04:00

So the Audience Choice awards just got announced. I read the first half and thought, holy fuck the audience is stupid. Then I read the second half and calmed down somewhat. I'll list them for you with my comments (i.e. incoherent ranting) below each category. I didn't see any animation films or enough short films to comment on those categories, so I left them out.

Meilleur film asiatique/Best Asian Film
Gold – Ip Man 2 (Hong Kong)
Silver – Sell Out! (Malaisie)
Bronze – Castaway on the Moon (Corée du Sud/South Korea), Dream Home (Hong Kong)

I didn't see either Sell out! or Castaway on the Moon, but from what I heard they are both worthy, but Ip Man 2 is a total shank, a case of big-name popularity over actual quality. The Hong Kong showings were pretty weak this year, sadly, but Gallants crushed Ip Man 2 in originality, style and spirit. Ip Man 2 isn't a bad movie at all, but the second half is basically Fearless drained of all the joy.

Meilleur film européen, nord-américain ou sud-américain/ Best European, North or South American
Gold – A Serbian Film (Serbie)
Silver – At World’s End (Danemark)
Bronze – Rec 2 (Espagne)(Spain)

Now this is some serious horseshit. I'm starting to think the Serbs pulled a great, big scam on us this year. It seems like everybody who is involved in the industry or in reviewing are tripping all over themselves to say how once you view this film as a metaphor it overcomes its exploitative content. It's bullshit and you know it. This is straight up shock torture porn with no moral core and nothing interesting to say beyond "life is shitty when you rape and kill your neighbours and are then rightfully blamed for it." I'm not going to bother to name all the European, North or South American films that played this year that are far superior to A Serbian Film. Simply look to the list on your right. I'm very disappointed with the people for this choice.

Meilleur long métrage canadien ou québécois/Best Canadian or Quebec Feature
Gold – The Shrine
Silver – Suck
Bronze – Frankenstein Unlimited (Québec), Neverlost

Great choice by the people! I didn't see any of the other Canadian films, though (besides If a Tree Falls), so I could be wrong here. But The Shrine was great so I'm very happy they won.

Prix Guru du film le plus énergétique du festival/Guru Prize for Most Energetic Film of the Festival
Gold – Ip Man 2 (Hong Kong)
Silver – Rec 2 (Espagne)(Spain)
Bronze – Symbol (Japon)

Gallants was so much more energetic than Ip Man 2. I don't know what people are thinking here. I won't go on and on though, because overall, the films didn't have that much energy this year. They were good but they didn't ramp it up like in year's past in terms of energy, so this was a very tough category for me to vote in.

Film le plus innovateur/Most Innovative Film
Gold – Symbol (Japon), A Serbian Film (Serbie)
Silver – Sell Out! (Malaisie)
Bronze – Rubber (France)

Take A Serbian Film out of here and you have some solid results. Otherwise, what the fuck, raping a baby is now "innovative". Oh look I'm going to make a movie about a porn star who is forced to do more and more snuffier films. I'm so edgy and innovative. Fuck off. How could the people be so gullible?

Meilleur documentaire/Best Documentary
Marwencol (É-U)(USA)

YES!!! The people are geniuses! ;-)

Edit: a tweeter, (whom I noticed because he was complaining about Ip Man 2 being over-rated) made a very good point about the people's awards: "Audience Awards are unfortunately driven by the amount of people seeing the films, and the generated hype to fill the place. Thus, hyping IP MAN and Serbian Film like crazy to fill Theater Hall twice on prime time does skew those Awards." I still can't understand how so many people could have actually considered it the best film of the fest, but that does help explain how the numbers might be relatively inflated. It's a bit much, but maybe each film should be weighted by its overall attendance and then the votes for those films scaled accordingly, so a film that had a higher percentage of vote relative to attendance would do better than one that maybe had more overall votes.

Fantasia Day 20 (and Closing Night!) - Tucker and Dale vs. Evil

2010-07-28T10:12:00.014-04:00

I must have made it down to Concordia in record time last night. I knew that Tucker and Dale was sold out and if it was anything like Inglorious Basterds or Bon Cop, Bad Cop, the place was going to be packed. My wife decided at the last minute that she wanted to see the second Mesrine movie as well as the first, so I had to pick her up a ticket for that as well. I pictured a huge lineup at the ticket counter and as I'd taken a nap, I was a couple minutes behind my scheduled ETD. Normally, I don't like to ride too aggressively on the Maisonneuve bike path, but I had to pull a Juan Manuel Fangio on two poor unsuspecting Bixi-riding girls, slipping between them and an oncoming biker. How could they know that the Moth and I are capable of acheiving a near two-dimensional state at certain speeds and angles? "I'm sorry!" I yelled back to them. "I'm late for Fantasia!"

Of course, there was absoutely nobody at the ticket counter and I got a decent spot just before the stairs at 8:30 (for a 9:45 show). I settled in for a long wait with the newly-discovered and very enjoyable Sound on Sight Sordid Cinema Podcast (their podcast is great and so is the website; if you are a movie fan, bookmark it). Then we were informed by one of the very polite and helpful (and fully bilingual) Fantasia volunteers that the film would be starting a half-hour late due to a last-minute decision by the producers of the previous film (Scott Pilgrim vs. The World) to search everybody for recording devices. No wonder people had been tweeting from inside about wishing the movie would start! I already ranted about the retardness of this behaviour by the studios, but this time it sounds like even more of a clusterfuck as they decided to do it at the last minute (you can just see the studio exec at his desk, his face buried in a pyrex bowl of cocaine, suddenly lifting up to text with his iPhone 4 oh yeah make sure no recording devices of any kind at screening don't forget pirates are taking food from our baby's mouthes his face then plopping back into the bowl) , thus giving Fantasia staff no chance to prepare or communicate to the attendees.

The irony of this behaviour is lost on nobody. These companies want to generate buzz and goodwill among the hardcore fans in the movie community by showing it at festivals like Fantasia. Then they piss everybody off by forcing them to go through an offensive and delaying search. It's like so many of these other failed security efforts. The real criminals will manage to bypass the security while the real fans all have to suffer. Hey studio execs, listen to your social marketing people when they tell you how many "Marketing FAIL" tweets and generally critical blogs there were.

Fantasia offered refunds and of course nobody took them up on it. This is Fantasia, what's another half-hour? The only people who were bummed were the dudes who had just finished sparking up. Now the timing of their high was all fucked up! Fortunately for me, a friend of mine, who had friends on the inside to save him a seat came and joined me with his wife and another friend and we killed the time having a pleasant conversation about all the movies we'd seen.

The Tucker and Dale screening had none of that nonsense and we got into the theatre at a swift pace. Relative to my position in the line, the theatre was the most crowded I'd seen it. Since I was a lone wolf, I got a good seat in the upper section 5 rows back, a decent view but still among the people. And I was glad to be among them, because wow was there a long, boring presentation of the various jury prizes before the movie. I'm sure the Fantasia organizers are aware that this section really needs to be improved. But in case they aren't and anybody is listening, clearly the jury prizes and the participation of the judges is very important for the festival and the films involved, but you need to do something to jazz up the actual presentation. The woman next to me suggested a separate press junket. I'm not sure that's the best solution as you lose your captive audience, but at that point, I would have welcomed it. At the very least, maybe coach the various jurors in how to handle a mic and speak to an audience. You could barely hear most of them and when you could there was no energy or cadence in their voices, so the announcement of the winning movies had no punch. The people were getting very restless. The funniest part was when Steven Severin, one of the judges, was explaining how he was holed up in his hotel room for 12 hours watching the movies he had to judge. The guy behind me cried out "and masturbating furiously!" You could feel the seats shaking everybody was laughing so hard and trying to hold it in.

It's fascinating to see the disconnect between the people participating in this presentation and the rest of Fantasia. For the films they chose, they each wrote a brief essay on the film, talking about its "clarity of vision and honesty" and other old school film school talk that I forget even existed anymore. Particularly striking was the guy from Telefilm, who delivered the most generic paean to Fantasia which made it seem like not only had he not seen a single film, but that he only had the vaguest notion of genre films in general, like they were just "what the kids are watching today." He ended up sitting in front of me and kept turning his head in an annoyed way when people were getting rowdy. Now I could be completely misjudging this guy and I am highly biased against Telefilm, but that was the impression I got.

Finally, the director and the two stars of Tucker and Dale vs. Evil were called up and they got it right away, sending us right to the movie (though you could tell the director was loving being up on the stage and probably could have standed hanging out there for a little longer; I don't blame him).

Be aware that my critical faculties are highly suspect when talking about this film. I vibe so much on the general scene of Fantasia that when the crowd is rocking I'm just having such a great time, that it is difficult for me to separate my general enjoyment from my perception of the movie itself. I suspect I am going to have a hell of a time ranking Tucker and Dale. I can safely say that it is a great premise, very funny and driven by its two excellent leads. Furthermore, it is ultimately a really sweet, heart-warming movie, due again to the eponymous heroes but also to a direction whose heart is in the right place. It's nice to see a movie where you feel like the director isn't trying to be cynical or badass or edgy.

Just looking at this picture makes me laugh again.

Tucker and Dale are two good-hearted good ol' boys who have succeeded in realizing their dream, to buy a "vacation home" in the West Virginia woods. On the way up there, they run into a group of vacationing and partying college students at a gas station. The students are totally freaked out by the hillbillies right from the start and Dale only makes it worse when he tries to make conversation with a scythe in his hand, giggling weirdly out of pure nervousness. Of course their dream home, a delapidated cabin with bones hanging from the ceiling (and a great opportunity for humour and character development as Tucker and Dale ooh and ahh over how fancy it is) happens to be right next to the students camping spot. Miscommunication escalates until the two parties are in full-fledged war with each side thinking the other is totally insane. It's a difficult writing task to keep these kind of mistakes piling up without making them too preposterous. The writers totally succeed here to absolutely hilarious effect. They also add an overly intense leader-type character among the college students who eventually becomes the antagonist as the layers of his character are peeled away.

It's good the stars were so strong in this movie, because the dog could have stole the show.

Again, I was having a total blast with the rest of the audience. I got freaked out when Dale's awesome dog was threatened and teary-eyed when Dale starts to develop a connection with the good college girl. I was also working on my flask of Elmer T. Lee. So take my words in that context, but as far as I can tell Tucker and Dale vs Evil is a great movie, a sure-fire crowd-pleaser that definitely merits general distribution. It also has major star power. I don't really understand why it hasn't been picked up already. A great choice for the closing movie and another totally fun evening at Fantasia.

Where are the Browncoats?

Hilariously, I totally didn't realize that Alan Tudyck, the guy who plays Tucker, is Wash from Firefly until the Q & A. Man, somebody come and confiscate my geek badge! Talk about nerd fail, though I do think it is a testimony to his skills as an actor, because I kept thinking he reminded me of somebody but he just seemed so different from Wash, that I never keyed in to it.

[Also super-exciting is that Angelica (who was rocking the wheels of steel before the show tonight and rocking it hard) told me that Mitch had been reading my blog. She introduced me to him and he said that next year he would give me a link on the front page. I basically feel like I am already in Mitch's debt for all the ridiculously kickass programming he and his crew have done for the last six years at Fantasia and it's been a pure pleasure for me to really dig in this year and write about it. So I wasn't really expecting anything, but I have to admit that I am pretty psyched. A big thanks to Angelica for the connect!]

Tonight is the real last night of Fantasia and I have very high hopes for the double-bill of Mesrine, the real-life French gangster. I love me some 70s gangster action and this time my wife and a friend will be coming to both shows, so I won't have to creep out the strangers next to me with my excessive enthusiasm.

Welder Soudage

2010-07-27T11:42:00.002-04:00

Some practical street advertising, but does it violate Bill 101? In any case, I post this for your pleasure but also for my own future reference as I may have need of this gentleman's services in the future and I like his style.

Update: a new friend through gaming and blogging and a follower here actually hired this guy. Here's what he had to say:

Plusieurs marche de l'escalier arriere avaient des morceaux brisees, et une avait totalement defonce - pas tres pratique pour aller dans la cours avec notre fille de 2 ans. Tout est repare et tres solide, et il etait vraiment pas cher (notre proprietaire nous avait dit d'essayer de trouver quelqu'un qui pourrait faire le travail pour 500$ max, ca en a coute 120$.)

Which translates to

Several steps on the back stairs had broken pieces and one had totally fallen apart - not very practical for going out in the back yard with our two-year old daughter. Everything is repaired and very solid and he was really not expensive (our landlord had said to try and find someone who could do the job for $500 max and it ended up costing $120.)

Sounds like a pretty good recommendation! He scanned me his card which you can see below, as well as a picture of his excellent advertising technique used at Martin's place as well. Take note small businesses! Briques du Neige gets you business!

Fantasia Day 19 - The Perfect Host

2010-07-27T00:46:00.005-04:00

A mellow Monday night with only a single 7:30 viewing, allowing me plenty of time to pick up some kimchi and ramen at the Korean grocery on St. Catherine and then have a delicious soft tofu soup at the Bulgogi House just up the street. After a weekend of double and triple bills, a single screening is almost too easy, especially when you are by yourself. I find myself planning and scheming about what snacks I should bring, what line-waiting entertainment material, where I should park my bike and so on when none of it is really necessary.

Though there actually was a pretty good turn-out at da Sève for The Perfect Host. I got there almost an hour early and the line, though spread out, had already turned the corner. I found a good seat, behind the lecturer's booth, with some leg room and no big head in front of me. Unfortunately, I also happened to also sit next to another poor example of the entitled generation. She seemed perfectly pleasant, if a bit weird (obsessively cupping her hand over her mouth when she talked on the cell phone, which did nothing to mask her banal conversation), before the movie started. However, once the short started, she decided that was a good time to start texting. I find the bright light of the cell phone extremely distracting. I really wish I could be zen about it, but it really does bother me. I waited a bit, but she kept doing it so I leaned over and said, in what I thought was a fairly polite manner, "that is very distracting." She kept on texting and I repeated it. She started shushing me! And kept on texting.

What am I supposed to do here? It's astounding to me that anyone would even text at all in a Fantasia showing (I've given up hope on the courtesy of the general movie-going public), but what truly blows my mind is how they get mad if you ask them to stop. As if I'm the asshole for politely asking them to stop doing what they aren't supposed to be doing anyhow! So you are either stuck, sucking up a bright light in your face, or escalating the situation and thus risking further bothering the other patrons. I chose to escalate. I asked her repeatedly to please stop texting. I swear to god, she said "I have important work to do." I told her that if she texted during the main feature, I would take her phone away. This flustered her only slightly. I think we have a population that has never had actual consequences for their behaviour and are so used to being protected by a cushy society and their coddling family, that they can't conceive that something real might actually happen to them.

I was really wrestling in my head what to do (and not enjoying the movie at all, which as I looked up had the guy attempting to sexually assault a woman, which made me feel really weird) and finally decided to go out and get the usher. I had to bump into all these people, but he came really quickly. When we got to her, of course she had stopped texting. Then she spent some time explaining into his ear why she was continuing to text. After she left, she turned to me and said "I continued to do it because of you." Way to go! What is she doing, acting out against daddy? Rebelling against her mean math teacher? Incomprehensible behaviour. My apologies to anyone around us that I disturbed by escalating. Maybe it will pay off in that she'll think twice next time, but I don't have high hopes.

Fortunately, The Perfect Host started out intriguingly. A young man stops a hold-up in a corner store (after his wallet is taken by the thief) where he was trying to buy some medicine and bandages for his badly bleeding foot. Unfortunately, the store owner chases him off too and he leaves empty-handed. It is clear that he is on the run and after trying to bluff his way into one house, finds another in a nice part of LA where he is able to read enough of a postcard in the mailbox to pretend that he knows some acquaintance of the homeowner.

The homeowner, played by David Hyde Pierce (who played Niles on Frasier), is really the focus of the movie. He's a little hesitant to let the guy in, but quickly reveals that he is a warm and welcoming guy, despite a dinner party he is planning his successful and sophisticated friends. There is a lot of great interplay going on in the first 10 minutes or so between Warwick (the host) and John (the intruder) whom we have since learned is a criminal on the run for a recent bank robber. The movie keeps you on your toes as you aren't sure exactly what's going on. The dialogue and the acting here are tight and nuanced and it's quite gripping. I don't think it's too much of a spoiler to say that the expected order of things gets upset and the situation becomes very weird and interesting. I'll leave it at that.

For a while, the movie heads off in a direction that didn't interest me so much. Fortunately, it didn't stay there for too long and the story takes off again. This is a neat movie, kind of a bastard son of the neo-noir with the more au courant psychological horror thriller. It has an early 90s feel to it (when those neo-noirs were all the rage) and I'm sort of surprised that it did with such a big name attached to it. Whether on purpose or due to a lack of budget, the lack of gloss and high-production slickness gives this movie an approachable feel that allows you to pay attention to the best part, the performance by Pierce (or is it Hyde Pierce? or should he just always be referred to as David Hyde Pierce?) and the story around his character. He really is quite entertaining and I think it's safe to say, carries the picture. [edit: in looking for pics for this post, I realized that David Hyde Pierce must have a not insignificant fan club. I think they will be extremely pleased by this movie.]

I had resolved by the end of the movie to apologize to the girl for being overly aggressive, but also to ask her what she thought would have been a better approach. I know tacking on that last question is a bit passive-aggressive, but I felt that some dialogue was called for. However, she got up and left hurriedly the instant the credits started rolling. She clearly was in a rush to get her important work done.

Despite my enjoyment of the movie, I may have made a tactical error in my scheduling. Word on the street is that both The Little Soldier and The Loved Ones are really good and that was the double bill over at the Hall. I'm not sure why I chose The Perfect Host over Little Soldier at the time. I know that The Loved Ones didn't really grab me, as the trailer made it look kind of hipster and twee (which I would have thought would have appealed to the kids, but it had fairly poor attendance, suprisingly). Again, just another example of the embarrassment of filmic riches that is Fantasia.

Here is a bonus picture of the inside of the projection booth at da Sève.

Man, could I poke around in there for several hours asking annoying questions!

Rape Van

2010-07-26T23:59:00.000-04:00

This suspicious looking bus was parked on our block last weekend. Probably a bunch of good-hearted and naive 21st century bourgeois hippies, but you never know.

It reminded me of a van I saw parked on Commercial Drive in Vancouver way back in the early '90s. It was a classic Ford Econoline rape van, painted dark blue at its base, but covered everywhere in graffitti and stickers including, in really big bold letters right along the sliding side door "TAKE THE FUCKING CANDY BAR AND GET IN THE VAN LITTLE GIRL!". Even at the time I found that to be quite risky. Today they would probably be pulled over immediately and never seen from again.

Fantasia Day 18 - The Shrine

2010-07-26T16:42:00.004-04:00

This is exactly why I go to Fantasia. We saw the preview for The Shrine before the Last Exorcism (I think) and I said to my wife "oh that looks kind of cool." She replied, "you bought a ticket for it!" I had completely forgotten and I can't even remember what prompted me to choose it. So I was basically going in almost totally blind. For instance, I didn't even know it was a Canadian movie, something I usually try to be aware of, until some guy behind me in the line-up mentioned it.

This came up because these two girls in front of me had identical t-shirts that read "Cindy Sampson Cadet" with a picture of a woman. It turned out that Cindy Sampson is the star of the movie and that the two girls are close friends of hers who had come to support her (she was in Vancouver and couldn't make it, working I guess).

The Shrine is the story of a very ambitious reporter who takes her boyfriend and an intern to Poland for an unauthorized investigation of a missing American young man. I'm just going to leave it at that as far as the plot goes.

At first, the movie has a slight USA movie of the week feel, but it moves forward efficiently and you are pretty caught up in the situation. Once they get to Poland, the film really takes off and reveals itself to be very well done on all counts, but especially well-written. It's a very cool little story, with some good action and thrills (in particular an excellent foot chase in the forest that was for once well shot with a narrative to it; at the Q & A the actor said it took them 8 hours to shoot a 3-minute running scene and he was running the whole time; well it was well worth it).

I was a bit disappointed by the turn-out. The room was only a bit over half-full, so there were a lot of people who missed out. The producer said that they had literally finished colour-correcting the print two weeks ago and that he flew hear with it to get it shown here. This movie definitely should be picked up. It's a tight, scary (so far the only Fantasia movie to make me jump) and entertaining thriller. It's also entirely Canadian, produced with independent Canadian money and shot in Ontario. It is great to see that more and more Canadian movies are actually funny and entertaining. The Shrine is a great example of this (what I hope is a) trend and it is going to get the #4 spot in my rankings this year so far, which is no joke.

Fantasia Day 18 - Vampires

2010-07-26T13:06:00.003-04:00

Vampires is a Belgian documovie about a family of vampires living in modern-day Brussels, dealing with modern-day problems. It's very clever and very well done, the funniest movie at Fantasia this year for me for sure. What's neat about it is that it successfully creates a reality where vampires could be existing among us and a bit part of the movie is letting the audience explore that reality. And then nestled on top of that is a humorous look at a bourgeois family that would be funny even if they weren't vampires. All of the family members are interesting, but the patriarch really drives this film. He has the elegant bearing of nobility that a good vampire patriarch should have, with a slightly menacing humour. He has to deal with his daughter who wants to be human, his out of control son and the resentful "neighbours" who live in the basment (by vampire law, if you don't have children, you can't have a house of your own; this sets up a lot of hilarious tension).

About three-quarters of the way through the movie, they get into trouble and are exiled to Quebec. This is funny in and of itself, but they take it even farther with the way the vampire community is set up here and then because this was Fantasia, everybody was just loving it for being local.

A great start to an excellent Sunday double bill at Fantasia.

Fantasia Day 17 - If a Tree Falls

2010-07-26T12:43:00.004-04:00

This was my Saturday night midnight showing at da Sève and I've been putting it off. I am an overly critical asshole usually, until I know people involved and am aware of a good faith effort, than I become way too nervous about hurting people's feelings. I met the guys behind If a Tree Falls (and Neverlost) in the hallway of da Sève and they seemed like really cool, nice guys, trying to promote their film. I was psyched for If a Tree Falls because I was hoping for some crazy midnight madness.

I am not a big aficionado of the genre that has manifested itself as "grindhouse". I arrived in New York just as that great era in Times Square was coming to a close. Disney had not yet taken it over, the sketchiness was still there, but there were only one or two theatres left and they were showing mainly second run mainstream movies. Growing up in Nanaimo, video stores did have a pretty good selection of weird and nasty stuff on VHS, but we were too young to know what we were looking for beyond the chop-sockey films and only got a small taste. Since then, most of my education has come from magazines, websites and books by fans who wrote lovingly and richly of the period. The best and most entertaining resource for me is Robin Bougie's Cinema Sewer. It doesn't only deal with grindhouse films, but it has a ton of info on the movies themselves and their history. I strongly recommend it (it's a monthly magazine, but you can get the collected back issues in two volumes, which I found at Fantasia a couple years ago), as well as his fun website.

I understand that If a Tree Falls was meant as an hommage to grindhouse films and I was looking forward to seeing that through a Canadian lens. The story is about two guys and two girls on a road trip to the Maritimes. They get attacked by a group of baddies wearing stocking masks and are then harrassed and tortured silently for the bulk of the movie.

Here is what was good: the look and sound, particularly in the beginning and end really capture the low budget style of the films it is mimicking, the masks are really creepy and well done, there is a bit of okay gore at the end.

That's really it. The major problem is that it is boring. The bulk of the movie is the victims being badly tied up and the stockingheads slapping them in the face lightly over and over again. There is also a lot of one woman whimpering and crying (which is pretty in genre). It just goes on and on and nothing really happens. You have no idea why they are doing it and you just don't care. Another problem is that it is filmed in Ontario and there is nothing really threatening in Ontario. Now if these were some Smithers logger rednecks or psycho Kootenays dope farmers, there might have been some real menace. Instead, it looked like the protagonists had been kidnapped by a bunch of ironic Roller Derby fans with their weird little black dancer shoes and long cut-offs. I know there was a lot of weird pacing and lack of plot in the old grindhouse movies, but there was also a lot of chaos. Crazy characters, random bursts of action, nudity were the things that audiences wanted and they got them, usually at a relatively rapid fire pace. Check out the winning fake trailer of the Grindhouse movie contest: Hobo with a Shotgun (which I've heard is being made into a feature). Perhaps there is some revisionism going on here, but I'll take it if it means a more entertaining film.

So I applaud the effort and I hope that these guys can get some money together to keep working, but they are going to need to tighten up and start inserting some chi into their movies before I'll go check out another one.