Montreal New Years Eve 2013 :: the Blog

We used to have the good old habit of linking to the Montreal Mirror’s yearly NYE party guide: a nice long article published every December by the Montreal Mirror, a free cultural weekly newspaper.

Well that will no longer be the case, as the Montreal Mirror is no more. Correct, the over 25 year old newspaper is no longer published. There is no more English language free cultural newspaper in Montreal. If you ask me, that’s a good business opportunity right there, a now untapped market.

Fortunately, a large chunk of the Mirror’s former staff has united and are back with a vengeance online, now publishing a website titled CultMontreal.com.

A cover page that will be missed.

A cover page that will not be missed.

This coming week-end (8th to 10th of July) will be a really busy one in Montreal.

First, we have the Beer Fest going on at the Windsor Station downtown. It’s the place for discovering new beers (like the Green Goblin) and trying out new sausages.

And second, we have the F1 Grand Prix hosted by Montreal. As usual, half of downtown will be closed off to traffic (a bit ironic, don’t you think, to stop traffic downtown because of a car race !) Crescent, Peel and St-Laurent will be closed, and filled with fun street activities.

So enjoy this amazing summer week-end.

Now that the new years celebrations are well behind us, and now that we’re well into the cold Montreal winter months, how is one to keep going strong?

Nothing easier, just read this appropriately titled article 2012 is here. Now what? .

The basic premise is: go out, go to the different parties, festivals and events that are happening in Montreal during the winter.

Ok, it might be too late for the Igloofest, which just concluded last week-end. But there is still the “Nuit Blanche” to come, and in Quebec city, the Winter Carnival is in full swing.

There is also some (little) snow on the ground, so don’t hesitate to strap-on your skis or snowboard, and head to the many hills surrounding Montreal.

Photo credit: iLuv2Bthe4N1

As it is now my long-lasting tradition, I let the “real media” do all the hard work, and just link to it from our blog.

And here we go again, for NYE 2012 celebrations, the Mirror has compiled all the big nightclub events, a listing of bars and clubs where you can drink the year away, and finally a listing of live music and other performances happening on the 31st of December 2011.

All these listings and otherwise useful information was collected by paid professional journalists, so that all I have to do is link to (as done above).

Obviously, as shameless promotion, I want to remind everyone that you can buy tickets for some of the events listed by the Mirror on our very own NYE events listings section, where yo can shop for NYE tickets online at ClubZone.com.

Contrarily to the crazy consumer that you are, I personally haven’t done any Christmas shopping yet.

Still, I need to buy a minimum number of things. Not for me, for other. You see, knowing how knowledgeable I am in all things cool in Montreal, other people mandate me to purchase their gifts, and then go on vacation while I am left slaving-off in Montreal.

The sad reality is, I have no idea where to begin. I did a quick search in all the “real media” out there, and there is nothing. We’ve been left on our own.

Last year, we just published a link to the Montreal Mirror’s Christmas shopping guide. This year we have nothing to link to yet. Come-on “real media”! Get cranking. So we can link and re-link and blog, re-blog and re-tweet it all.

Until then, I came upon this amazingly interesting blog about Montreal’s sewer and underground: UnderMontreal. If Andrew Emond, the author of UnderMontreal, publishes a book about his explorations of Montreal’s underbelly, it would be a crazy amazing Christmas gift.

Another idea, how about a Cesária Évora CD? She was a great voice in a see of bland commercialism (wow, that is deep, but seriously, she was amazing).

A surreal scene from UnderMontreal

It’s because of events like those that you need to read newspapers like the Mirror regularly. I just learned, a few minutes ago, that British musician Bonobo will be DJing live at Le Belmont tonight (on 4483 Saint-Laurent).

Actually, even reading the Mirror might not have been enough, considering that the show is already sold-out. The question that we need to answer then is: how the hell did all these people that bought tickets know about the concert? Is there some-kind of secret Bonobo concert email list that I am not aware of? Or maybe people “follow” Bonobo on facebook? (that sounds lame actually, I don’t even want to follow myself on facebook).

Regardless of the question of why I only learned today about the concert happening tonight, Bonobo is a great artists, if you like chill electronic music that is. If you have the chance to score tickets somehow, and you want to spend the night grooving, then Bonobo will deliver just that.

For those who don’t know Bonobo, here is the classical track that made me discover him. Now that’s some dope sounds:

Some more from Bonobo:

And finally another great classic form Bonobo:

This week-end, Montreal will be invaded by ghouls, zombies, pimps and whores, and every other character, monster, freak or anything in between.

I love Halloween because it’s a week-end for grown-ups to behave like kids again: you’re allowed to dress-up, act like a fool, pretend to be a firefighter, or policeman or construction guy, just as you did when you were a kid. no one will judge you, if anything the more extreme you go with your “pretending” the more impressed your friends will be at your costume. The stars of the Halloween week-end are the weirdoes, and I love that.

So enjoy these 2 cold days of the end of October, eat pumpkin pie like crazy and don’t be shy to go all-out with your costume.

Today is the day the Occupy Montreal event got started. Montreal ain’t New York: there is much less people here, much less of Wall Street and mostly the weather is shittier. So all this begs the question of how long the occupiers will last in cold nights and rainy days.

Regardless of how long it will last, the impressive thing is that the event managed to get started. We were there today, and saw people distributing free food, people singing and dancing, and people meeting and taking. Even more impressive for a protest, there was an area for kids, like a little protest kindergarten.

The other really big question is if Montreal’s authority and the police will let the protesters stay overnight, which the police has already threatened not to do. Tonight, at midnight, when the curfew for all of Montreal’s parks kicks in (why the hell do we even have a curfew for the parks, what is this?) we’ll see if Montreal’s authorities will behave like normal human beings and let the protesters stay. The reality is that they aren’t bothering anyone. If we don’t let the protesters stay overnight, this will mean that Montreal is a much less progressive place than New York, which has tolerated the occupy movement for quite some time now.

Talking about New York, this is the kind of policewoman that look over the protesters there:

This year, POP Montreal is turning 10 years old. That means that in 2 short years the festival will be a teenager, and we all know how dangerous the teenage years are.

But lets not get too ahead of ourselves now, and appreciate this ten years celebration. And appreciate we will, with a massive free concert tomorrow (Thursday) at the now famous Place des Festivals (aka the streets around Place the Arts that were refurbished for the Jazz Fest’s personal use, and which other smaller festivals are allowed to occupy from time to time, as long as the occupation isn’t too long, otherwise it might get all the way up to the UN).

Ok, we’re getting awfully off track here. The important thing is the free concert tomorrow, starting at 19:00 (7PM) with Kid Koala and ending latter the same night with Arcade Fire.

For those who don’t know it, POP Montreal is a festival about independent music, which features shows (obviously), exhibits (can we say we love hat?) and talks and presentation on the music business (well artists need to eat too, not too much though, to keep the sexy figure). Together with MUTEK, POP Montreal are the smaller and independant festivals that help put Montreal artists on the radar (thanks for nothing Jazz Fest).

So enjoy the genius of Kid Koala and Arcade Fire tomorrow and keep the scene groovy.

No, we haven’t disappeared here at the MontrealNewYearsEve.ca blog.

It’s just that we’ve been too busy enjoying every second of warm weather that Montreal’s summer has to offer us, and so we haven’t has the chance to dispense our traditional wisdom to the world on these pages.

Yes, our busy schedules, in between fresh pints on beautiful Montreal terasses, have left us with no time whatsoever to create fresh content.

What to do in such case? Easy, fall back on our best-friends, the professionally paid and professionally ran The Montreal Mirror newspaper, they at least have been busy creating content to make sure that you get to enjoy your summer in Montreal.

And here it is, the Montreal Mirror’s Hot Summer guide for 2011.

Enjoy the summer and maybe see you at a terasses somewhere (like our favorite St-Elisabeth for example).