You know, you’re not a big city if you don’t have your big music festival. The formula is pretty similar across the globe: unique name, full week-end event, outdoors and most importantly tons of bands, with at least one really big bands to headline each day of the festival. Montreal’s own Osheaga follows this recipe to the letter: full week-end event, (Saturday amd Sunday the 1st and 2nd of August), outside venue at the Parc Jean-Drapeau and Coldplay and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs (replacing the Beastie Boys who can’t make it because of MCA’s need to take time off to fight cancer).
Where Osheaga falls short is that it is not exactly like a European-styled rock festival extravaganza, where people stay on the site for the whole duration of the festival, usually in tent-cities, and basically transform the festival into one spontaneous and enormous commune. There is no camping allowed at Osheaga, basically you just go in the morning for the beginning of the shows and leave when the concert ends. That’s kind of sucky, itjust makes Osheaga a big day-long concert, something I wouldn’t really call a festival. But hell, it’s as close as we will get to such an event here.
Regardless, the lineup looks really promising, and Girl Talk will be there on Saturday, guaranteeing a crazy night out at the park.
Our friends at Montreal-Clubs have put together a little list of shows to be seen at the Jazz Fest, which by the way, is starting tonight, with what will be a huge performance by Stevie Wonder. Like every summer, the area around Place des Arts will be transform for about ten days into a giant outdoors concert venue.
Nothing beats Montreal’s Jazz Fest for spending a damp summer night outside, and dancing, all this for free. Obviously, it’s all paid by advertisements, and considering their main sponsor, GM, is bankrupt, that puts a pretty funny spin on the whole event. But anyways, that’s not that important in the grand scheme of things. The goal is to enjoy ourselves, so I recommend checking out the official web page of the festival, and hitting it as often as possible.
Here is a short video from Goran Bregovic’s amazing festival closing show a few years ago. It was just crazy.
St-Helene, the little island South of Montreal’s downtown is definitely no Jamaica. Yes, an obvious statement indeed; especially considering that St-Helene is in the middle of the St-Lawrence river, which is the furthest thing from the Caribbean Sea.
Well, that little detail isn’t preventing the organizers of the Montreal International Reggae Festival to import a little bit of Jamaica on St-Helene for three short days this coming week end.
For this year’s edition of the Reggae festival, the celebration is moving from the Old Port to Island St-Helene, a nice site for having shows and for spending the day outside in the sun in general.
The most interesting part of the festival, in my opinion, will be on the first day (Friday the 26th of June) with the Stur-Gav Sound System party. Apparently these guys have been together for a very long time, making music and performing following the sound system party tradition of Jamaica. Promises to be a good show; here is a little preview from over 20 years ago already:
The Montreal Fringe Fest is back in town with a hefty serving of over 75 plays/shows put up by a swarm of small, independent and semi-professional theater groups. Like every year, they invade le Parc Des Ameriques, on the corner of Rachel and St-Laurent, with a beer tent / ticket booth / postering paradise (see the video bellow). And like every year, the Fringe gives you the chance to see tons of theater plays for a very acceptable price. Consider the sad fact that a date watching a crappy movie at Scotia Cinema (the Cinema Formerly Know as Paramount) will set you back over a quarter of 100 $ bill, and that if you include popcorn and corn-starch filled Coke on top of the movie, you’ll be expected to fork over close to 35$. Now that makes the Fringe fest a much better alternative. And by bringing a date to the Fringe you’ll demonstrate your cultural and adventurous thinking, greatly increasing your chances of hitting the sack.
In retrospect, the serious truth is that, considering the amount of TV and movies people watch, we don’t go to theater nearly enough. I am aware that there are several reasons for this, mostly price, the relatively small number of plays, limited marketing and others. In my mind, the Fringe Fest is a perfect solution to some of these problems, and it’s the perfect way to get your fix of yearly theater.
So hit it.
PS: The Fringe Fest and I go a way back, in fact almost 10 years, when a bunch of friends an I volunteered at the festival with the goal of getting free beer and free shows. Our role was to guard the beer tent at night, a fun activity for teenagers that want to discover the deep secrets of Montreal’s summer nights. And a few years ago I also published a disgruntled article on the Fringe Fest because of a couple of crappy shows. But you know what, crappy can be good too, as long as it touches you in a significant way.
Quick reminder, for the fans of that drink I like to refer to as “la boisson des dieux” (translation “God’s drink”), the Montreal Beer Fest has started, and is in town until Sunday, at the Windsor Station, right next to the Bell Center. The Montreal Beer Fest is the perfect place to discover some small local breweries and quality foreign imports. And if that’s not enough for you, there is also all kinds of sausages, meats and other food products that go hand-in-hand with drinking a cool ale.
So take you mates by the hands, and drag them (if you have to) to the Beer Fest, I swear they won’t regret it.
Bellow is a small preview of what you can expect from one of the many promotional events that occur during Montreal’s Beer Fest.
This year is the 10th edition of the MUTEK electronic music festival. Montreal has only three short months of summer, but we make the most of it, cramming as many rooftop/street-level/backyard terasses as possible, and almost bi-weekly street festivals, turning downtown into a big street fest. But these festivals all usually follow a tested and true recipe: big, corporate, on the street, heavily subsidized and with lots of free events. MUTEK is different; it doesn’t really follow this traditional Montreal-festival-mold. And in my books, that’s a very good think. Shows are all paying, the festival isn’t backed by (that many) big corporations. Don’t get me wrong, MUTEK has gotten big too, but it still has that aura of novelty and hipness around it. The festival started as a mostly DIY affair, and has managed to grow, but mostly organically, though provifing quality and original line-up year after year, and by not being afraid to go in directions that are more experimental than popular.
So yeah, MUTEK is starting on the 27th and is finishing on the 31 of May, quicker that you’ll have time to realize. So get yourself some tickets and visit the SAT and the other venues MUTEK will be hitting.
I’ve been quite interested in newspaper graphic design lately, and just I realized I had forgotten to post the link to last year’s New Years Eve guide by the Montreal Mirror, so here goes their NYE guide just in case. What’s interesting is their cover page art, see a small version bellow (I couldn’t find a larger image)
And here is the cover page for the NYE guide section:
Now compare that to the cover of 2006 and also to the cover of the actual NYE guide in 2006.The first thing that comes to my mind is that the graphic design for the 2008 issue is fairly similar to the design of the 2006 one: the newspaper’s cover page is a cartoon-style drawing and the cover of the NYE guide is a collage of promotional photos of some of the new years events.
Repeatedly using a graphic design is only a good idea when the design is a proven winner concept, and I am not sure that it is the case here. But I can definitely say that there has been improvement in 2008 vs 2006. The comic-styled cover of 2008 is much better, with an interesting play of colors on a catchy naive-art styled cartoon drawing. As for the inside photo collage, I would say that it is the weak point: collages are easily made boring and hardly made interesting. At least the 2008 edition features some provocatively positioned women, an improvement on the ski-masked faces of 2006.Maybe a crazier/richer photo collage would be best for 2009. Given that I am a nobody and the staff of the Montreal Mirror definitely does not read this blog, my suggestion will probably not be taken into account.
The enormous party Bal en Blanc has nothing to do with New Years Eve, but I want to talk about it because its simply so big and it’s been happening for so many years now, that I simply can’t ignore it anymore. I’ve personally never been to Bal en Blanc, and that’s mostly because I don’t understand where the fun is in going to a massive, commercial-organized rave party.
First, I thought raves were something of the 90ies and early this millennium, who the hell still goes to those?
Second, I thought raves were all about being underground and secret and organized in abandoned factory buildings or military radar sites in the country-side. A rave organized by a corporation in a big public space is like going to see an Eagles concert nowadays: true, it’s for the fans, but we all know it’s lame and it’s driven by the big money machine behind it.
Anyways, I am in a mood to rip into Bal en Blanc, and I guess I am allowed to. It just doesn’t seem like a genuine party to me.
What I liked though, is the advertisements they used for this year’s party. It’s kind of freakish in a way, actually very freakish, but it sure does attract the vieweres attenction. Good job to the big marketing company that the Bal en Blanc machine has employed for creating its propaganda this year.
Not, not as in Indiana Jones, but as in alternative. The collective souls at the Casa Del Popolo and La Sala Rossa will always surprise you with what they offer, and NYE is not an exception to this rule.
2 parties, one of which will be broadcaster live on McGill’s radio station, CKUT 90.3 by the Goods. Not much details about the NYE party at Casa Del Popolo, but just the fact that the DJ is called DJ Slutsky should be plenty enough incentive for everyone. You know, that’s making me ask, where is Peaches spending her NYE? Maybe at some party in TO?
Regardless of the fact that no one will or wants to listen to me, I came up with a great idea for celebrating the New Years Eve differently. Here it goes :
on the ski slopes
I don’t mean in a club or hotel of some big ski resort. I mean, directly on the slopes, and whatever mountain chalet there is.
Here is the idea: keep the ski slopes open all night, put music on the whole maintain. Put a big natural fire outside, maybe a dance floor outside, some jacuzzis, and finally use the mountain main stations/cafeteria (all ski mountains have those) as a big club.
And the perfect candidate for that, one hour away from Montreal, would be Bromont. It’s a nice mountain and they have a big cafeteria and a bar on the bottom of the hills.
I should pitch my idea fro this NYE to the owners of Bromont.
Sometimes, my genius-“ness†even astonishes me.
