Every Sunday in the summer, the Eastern side of Mont Royal hosts "Tam Tams," where a number of people gather to play hand drums in and around the monument of Sir George-Etienne Cartier.

I remember the day I moved here, driving by it and wondering what the fuck was going on. Its a very large crowd of extreme eccentrics meet middle class families, and you can hear the beat from literally a mile away. Its been going on since the late 1970s, originating as a workshop on African drumming at a jazz bar on Ontario Street. And has evolved into much more than hand drums. People are encouraged to dance, smoke pot, laze around on blankets, check out hippie vendors, and, for the more brave, participate in a continuous mock medieval battle with foam-padded weapons (see photo above and video below, which I nabbed from my friend Jessica's blog).

Though not organized in any way by the city, they do intervene in the event, restricting commercial activity to registered members in designated areas and ensuring safety, first-aid, etc. Although initially controversial in light of the event's communal and countercultural vibe (and permissive attitude towards pot) according to wikipedia as well as my own observations, the police presence has not led to any conflict.

I've been slow on this posting theme, mostly because I actually delayed my Montreal au revoir by a month. But I figured it was time, and I spent the weekend enjoying the official beginning of summer on Boulevard St. Laurent's annual festival, Main Fest. A hybrid sidewalk sale/extended patio/cheap beer/outdoor music (including my friends, On Bodies) event that extends for ten blocks down St. Laurent. The event coincided with both the Fringe Festival and the beginning of the Saint Jean Baptiste holiday (aka "Quebec Day," giving Quebecers two straight long weekends with Canada Day coming up, though the Canada Day celebration is basically non-existent, while St. Jean Baptiste day is a fleur-de-lis extravaganza), giving a lot of options all around the city.

The streets are packed, and the widest variety of people you can imagine are out all hours of the day and night. I only brought my camera once and it died within an hour, so these pictures are nothing special, but do set the mood:

That last one is outside Cinema L'Amour, North America's oldest running XXX theatre, which even got festive by selling boxes of porn outside on the street. This man was checking it out, and its an homage to a day earlier, when me and some friends went to see what was in the boxes, and an old man literally knocked my friend out of the way to get to the box, picking up F'ing Teens 2 (It actually said "F'ing").

I also managed this clip:

I watched this guy for an hour and I still don't know why.

It all kicks off a pretty amazing season here. There are at least one, if not three festivals continuously running from now until September, JazzFest, Just For Laughs, World Film Festival, etc, etc, and fireworks every Wednesday and Sunday where countries compete for whos got the best (I sound like a Montreal tourism ad, I realize). The streets are often closed to pedestrians only, and the entire gay village, essentially a whole mile of St. Catherine street, is permanently shut down, everyday, until September. This was the first time they've ever done this. I have to walk through it to get to one of Montreal's only giant grocery stores and its essentially like walking through gay pride. Wonderfully enough, last week on the day it started, this was the scene on my balcony: a rainbow basically starting and ending where the pedestrian-only zone does the same. If that ain't a sign from God: Make those cars leave the gays alone to drink beer on patios in the widest variety of tank tops on Earth.

Dear Learning Center,

After two years of sitting in you, and getting paid to do so, our time has come to an end.

There are many things about you I won't miss. I won't miss your horrible florescent lighting that by day's end would give me glazed eyes and a headache. I won't miss your environmentally friendly heating system that works off motion, which often left me freezing in the winter months, jumping up and down hoping it would turn on again. I won't miss the fact that it requires 90 minutes of Starbucks cup-grasping early morning transit to get to you, or that the only place to eat near you is Subway. I won't miss your iMac circa 2002 that always froze, often requiring me to rewrite pages of my thesis. I won't miss your printer that always broke down, leading an endless line of undergrads to repeatedly ask me if the printer was working, despite the 5 handmade signs I placed around you informing them that it wasn't. I won't miss some of the people that visited you, especially the girl that always farted at the computer near my desk and never apologized, and the guy that told me I had "flock of seagulls" hair, and more seriously, the 50 year old non-student who used you to download child pornography.

But Learning Centre, despite all that, I will miss YOU. You paid me very well for doing little-to-no work. I wrote most of my thesis in you, did many an indieWIRE buzz in you (giving me the pleasure of getting paid for two jobs simultaneously), and watched endless hours of YouTube clips in the mildly comfy chair you provided me with. You never got mad at me for being an hour, or even two hours late (but the man who runs you did). You are the second-longest job I've ever held, and though I'll never put you on my resume, or perhaps even tell people I knew you, you'll always have a place in my heart.

I write this letter to you from within you, and will savour my last few hours with you, before lying to students about what you time you close and leaving early for the ever-important activity of watching television in bed.

Be well.

Sincerely,
Peter

My friend/fellow student Brian posted his own take on the entry from a few days back regarding my love/hate relationship with Toronto, which included mention of Richard Florida, a social and economic theorist and author of Who's Your City?. He was the keynote speaker at a conference Brian recently attended, where he discussed how, "place is evidently quite important, despite how common it is for people to travel between cities and work from various remote locations." (They also noted how during his speech, he recommended that a good way to choose a great city is to look at "where the gays go," which is actually really worthy if you think about it: Amsterdam, San Francisco, Montreal, New York, Sydney, Berlin...)

Anyway, this all really interests me right now, for obvious reasons, and I checked out Florida's book's website, which has a great feature that involves a series of questions that help you decide what city may or may not be a good fit for you. Its obviously not the end-all of knowing where you should end up, but I did it with the 5 communities I have either lived in or know well enough to answer the questions: Toronto, Montreal, Halifax, Trenton (Ontario, where I grew up), and New York.

My results were a bit too close to call:

You should definitely consider staying in Montreal, Quebec
final score:80 (amongst the highest scores)

You should definitely consider moving to New York, New York
final score:81 (amongst the highest scores)

You should definitely consider moving to Toronto, Ontario
final score:74 (amongst the highest scores)

You should probably not move to Halifax, Nova Scotia
final score:58 (below the average [62.2] score)

You should definitely not move to Trenton, Ontario
final score:12 (way below the average [62.2] score)

Despite two years here, I never quite made it to the Musee d'art contemporain de Montreal. I went both times I was in Montreal as a visitor, but even though its about a 5 minute walk from my apartment, never as a resident. Anyway, that changed this past weekend thanks in part to my quest to take in all of Montreal's offerings as per this "series" of entries, but mostly due to a group of friends that were in town and going (previously Montrealers for undergrad and my roommates last year, they were born in Vancouver, and they now are in Toronto finding work, which is the great Canadian geographic plan it seems).

Anyway, it was the first week of "Nothing is lost, nothing is created, everything is transformed," a showcase of 135 works from 38 Quebecois artists and collectives, most showing for the first time. Featuring video, sound, painting, sculpture, installation, photography, collage, drawing and performance, it was a wonderfully mixed bag only accentuated by the fact that many of the works came from first timers. My expertise in art criticism or interpretation is non-existent, so I'm not expanding any future. But below are some photos that I snuck past the security guard (who eventually caught me and held on to my camera until I left, pretending not to speak English even though I totally heard him give directions to the bathroom in English earlier), and I strongly advise checking it out if youre in Montreal between now and September.

Sunday afternoon hijinks in Montreal's wee Chinatown.

With Cannes over, I am into the final countdown of many a thing: finishing my thesis and, thus, not being in school for the first time since 1988; the end of my tenth (and favourite) apartment in six year;s and most sadly, the end of my time in Montreal, a city in which I have fallen in love with ten times anything I ever felt toward its predecessor, Toronto, which I spent twice the time in.

Anyway, to coincide with the 66 days I have left before my yearly August 1st put-my-shit-in-a-truck day, I've decided to try and visit, or re-visit, all of Montreal's highlights, and, of course, put them up here for essentially my own amusement and archival use.

First on the tour was the Lachine Rapids, which I'd never been to, mostly due to its non-pedestrian friendly location on the south end of the city's shipping yards. I'm partially paraphrasing Wikipedia here, but to quickly educate: they are a series of rapids on the Saint Lawrence River, between the Island of Montreal and the south shore. As for the impressive part. They contain the largest standing waves in the world. This is because the water volume and current do not change with respect to the permanent features in the riverbed, namely its shelf-like drops. Seasonal variation in the water flow does not change the situation of the waves.

Yesterday, with a car thankfully, I found the rather hidden rapids (behind a "highlight" in its own right, the wild Habitat 67, which I'll post later on), as well as a bunch of hunky Quebecois surfers who were riding the world's largest standing waves. Thats pretty much the whole story, but I'll share some video and photo of them:

I'm back in Montreal, lying near comatose on my couch trying to not fall sleep to avoid letting this jetlag get out of hand. My plan to not sleep last night so I would on the plane backfired. My seat was on the aisle in a 3 seat row. The people next to me were an elderly Quebecois couple, the husband of which was obviously suffering from a severely dehabilitating condition. It resulted in being woken up about 10 times so that his wife could help him out of his chair and to the bathroom, and many other times by noises he made that seemed to suggest some sort of physical pain. I asked if I could take the window to avoid disturbing their need to get up, and she told me that he likes the window, which is fair enough, but also put me in that horrible state of no sleep in 20 hours + 2 advil PMs and no possibility of sleeping.

Its obviously not their fault, and I certainly was not annoyed at them specifically, if anything was deeply empathetic. But I was feeling annoyed in general, and was specifically annoyed at the airline for continuing to shit all over their movie selection. They one upped their showing of P.S. I Love You on the way down with The Bucket List, which was the last thing I wanted to see. It probably seemed even worse considering I was sitting next to someone that was actually facing death, and I kept thinking about intense it must be for his wife, and himself, to deal with that. And then I watch Rob Reiner's horribly misrepresentative schmaltzfest that disrespects those actually going through cancer or any other life threatening disease. And thats only from the half hour I watched before deciding that sitting in silence was more entertaining.

Anyway.. unrelated (although it does technically relate to both Montreal - it was shot here last summer, and death - its about a man aging backwards), I found the Spanish trailer for The Curious Case of Benjamin Button in an aimless three hour youtube fest to try and keep me awake. It looks like it has some serious potential. Though the trailer is pretty much dialogue-less, its visually stunning and Brad Pitt looks like he went through the quite the transformation.

This might also be my only entry for a few days while I try to readjust to Eastern Standard Time and a life in which the Mediterranean Sea isn't a 5 minute walk away.

My post from last night might have been a bit uninformed. It turns out the hoots and hollers I heard regarding the Montreal Canadiens FIRST ROUND win was actually a bit more intense than I imagined.
This blog posted incredible photos from 4 kilometres from my apartment, where a literal riot broke out after the win. And this, again, was the first round. There are three to (maybe) go. Meaning maybe I should consider avoiding the city more than I had thought if they make it that far.

After a four day stint in Toronto, my trip back to Montreal was welcomed with a sound you don't often hear in Toronto: Crazed hockey fans celebrating a playoff round won. For the past hour, horns, screams and now, sirens, have blared through my room window at a volume that makes me feel like I'm in a hockey arena. And I do not live in a pub-full area, nor anywhere near the arena where said win took place. And as annoying as the sounds are now getting, the first 20 minutes or so brought me sincere civic pride. True to one of our greatest stereotypes, Canadians and hockey are an intense hand-in-hand. And during playoff season - I time that I admit the Sports page becomes my first go-to of the newspaper - the mood of entire cities is quite extraordinary. Right now I do my part by having streaming games often minimized on my laptop for occasional check-ins. The bar scene is a bit too butch for me to fully embrace, but I do feel a bit jealous when I see herds of fans drunkenly screaming at bar televisions as I walk by pretending not to care. However, if the Montreal Canadiens make it to the finals - a possibility that secretly led me to ensure being in the city during that time - I might even have to full-on participate in the madness.

And yes, I have returned from Hot Docs (more on that later), which was a fantastic time filled with perhaps an exhausting dose of documentaries and Stella, and have exactly 36 hours to run two weeks worth of errands before heading to Tribeca, where its possible the New York Rangers could be playing Montreal in the second round... Maybe wearing a Montreal hockey jersey around New York is in order if that happens.

Perhaps exemplifying this more than we'd like to admit, many of my peers in the 2nd year of Concordia's Media Studies program have one after another taken on The Wire as their thesis-writing-distraction-of-choice. Because we're all at different parts of the series (we all use the same DVD copies, and rotate them), we've made a joke out of the exchanging of the discs, using it as an opportunity to use Wire-catchphrases and simulate drug deals. Anyway.. one of the culprits, Dallas, took a few photos of the act and posted it on her blog so I figured I'd make mention and link.

As I continue to increasingly turn this site into a weather blog, I'm ending my series of "yes, its still winter" posts with a "it's finally spring" one. Despite the above photo of Parc LaFontaine this afternoon (soon to be Lac LaFontaine), it was 15 degrees in Montreal today. And its remarkable the energy it put in the air. I swear every person I saw was smiling or laughing, many overdoing the mild temperatures by wearing tank tops or shorts. Terraces were packed, and a whole city seemed to unite to celebrate their survival of five whole months of white terror.

It was nice to see the city in such spirits again, as my days here are numbered and I'd like to enjoy them for all they're worth. Tomorrow begins this site's transformation into a "travel blog," with essentially consecutive film festival journeys to Atlanta, Hot Docs, Tribeca and Cannes. After that, I have a month or two to finish up all things thesis (which will remain, somehow, a substantial hell in my life even as I travel), and then my time as a lingual minority in the land de Quebecois will come to an end.

Last night, for the second time in two years, my apartment was burglarized while I was in the actual apartment. This time was thankfully a little less traumatizing. I got woken up to my roommate knocking at my door: "Peter? Uh, I think we were robbed." And he was right. Somehow, a crackhead or three made their way up four stories to our terrance and came in to take, among other things: laptops, cameras and cellphones. Luckily, I've always been one to sleep near my electronics, and nothing of mine went missing that I was too upset about. It just amazes me that 3 people slept through it, and disturbs in that my apartment now feels like tainted goods.

The first time, which was in what would generally be considered a much safer neighbourhood (The Annex in Toronto.. I live in "Cracktown, Montreal" now), was a lot worse. My roommates were both gone: one in Germany visiting his boyfriend, the other down the street visiting her girlfriend. I had stayed up really late for one reason or another, and was reading in bed when I heard the footsteps of what sounded like a very large person coming up the stairs. It was an above-a-store apartment, with a staircase leading up to it from right off the street. My room was this sort of make-shift bedroom at the very top of the stairs. It had a black curtain over the glass door, and I quickly turned off my bedside lamp when I heard whoever the hell it was coming up the stairs. It wasn't the boy roommate, as he was overseas. And the girl would not have sounded like that given her petiteness, and rarely left her lesbian love den six blocks east.

For a good 30 seconds (and what felt like an hour), the man stood outside my door, breathing heavily and not really doing much. I didn't want to make a sound, especially that of dialing 911, so I just waited. When he finally headed to the left, and into the kitchen about 30 feet away (and out of sight of the staircase to outside), I grabbed the only weapon I could find (a can of Pledge), and booted it down the stairs, wearing pajama pants and nothing else. Which would have been okay if it wasn't February, snowing, and 4:00am.

I called 911, and then sought cover. The Blockbuster downstairs (which had people in it for some reason), would not let me in, ignoring my banging as I assume they figured a disheveled topless man in February was bad news. Finally, two half-drunk college girls saw me and asked me what was wrong. They let me stand in the vestibule of their apartment building and gave me an extremely feminine coat to wear (all i can remember was light blue feathers against my neck, and feeling like a poor man's drag queen). Which was lovely, but unfortunately put my apartment door out of viewing. I assume the dude heard me run out and left, because by the time the cops got there, he was gone, as was my mp3 player and a bottle of vodka.

Obviously, that could have been a lot worse too. At least no one was hurt and the actual burglary limited. But it was a hell of lot more terrifying than today's experience (though I wouldnt be saying that today if I were my roommates, one of whom is now laptopless during end-of-school-year madness). I hadn't thought about that night in a long time until this morning, when that same unique sense of violation found its way into my mind and stayed there all day. So I figured I'd share.

Anyway.... Lock your doors. Even if they are four stories off the ground. And always keep dangerous cleaning products near your bed. Moral of story.

Why do you have to play me this way? Yesterday, you give me the first day of 2008 where I could wear something other than a parka outside. Today, you give me this:

(Care of Dallas)

36 hours of snowfall later...

Tonight I'll be "springing ahead" my alarm clock in the midst of yet another blizzard in what seems like an endless barrage of them here in Montreal. 40-50 more centimetres (thats 2-2.5 feet) are dropping today, which has actually been good for my productivity levels (and for HBO DVD sales, I've bought and watched four seasons of The Wire in pretty much a few weeks since the snow makes even the four block walk to Starbucks seem daunting).

The Globe and Mail reports Montreal is well on its way to breaking the 383 centimetre snowfall record set in 1970-71, while Toronto will break its record (set in the 1920s) sometime in the next 24 hours. For two cities known as some of the snowiest in the world, this is no small feat. Its a really strange thing to experience, because never in my life have I seen so many people discuss the weather (and never have I been so willing and excited to discuss the weather). The man at the store across the street has repeatedly (I'm talking five or six times, unknowingly i think) told me about how he hasn't seen this kind of winter since he was a child, and anti-Al Gore-ers think this warrants "global warming is a conspiracy" chatter (though lots of precipitation does not necessarily mean a colder climate, so they are a tad misguided, and if i understand it all correctly i thought wacky weather systems, snow included, could actually be a sign of global warming's effects?). Either way, I realize blogging about the weather is a new low, but its because of the weather I haven't been able to get out and have anything else to blog about, so this is as good as it gets.

The first Saturday night (and Sunday morning) of March marks Montreal's 5th annual Nuit Blanche, an all-night festival of pretty much anything and everything. The festival has variations around the world, including Toronto, Chicago and Paris, where it started 6 years ago. This was my second Nuit, and I have to say its probably my favourite community event I've ever taken part in. A free shuttle bus takes you around a full city of events, everything from a giant ice slide running through the old city (see above video), tons of art exhibitions and installations, a mini film festival (Festivalissimo, La Noche de los cortos features short films from all over the Spanish-speaking world), a disco party in the chambers of old city hall, extreme amounts of booze (people just walk around with it), karaoke at the opera house, a Mars-centered show at the planetarium, a giant old church playing themes from classic horror films on its organ, etc, etc, etc.

Its a extremely bizarre evening that ends up feeling like seven different nights (for the price of half of one, almost everything is free). Just think of drinking a king can of Heineken inside a church while the organ plays the theme from Jaws. Anyway.. I made it until about 3:30 when the planetarium show (in french so I had no idea what was going on), almost induced some group vomiting and I couldn't bare to make it to our final proposed destination: Free breakfast at 4:30 AM in one of the city's downtown shopping centers. But after the jump is a bunch of photos, which probably make no sense out of context but suggest the eclectic spirit of the night.

Montreal got an intense amount of snow for what seems like the hundredth time this winter, so, despite having nothing actually scheduled, I decided to have a faux snow day and forget impending deadlines, roaming the city having gay photo shoots.

So this might be slightly exploitative and not even very interesting, but with Sundance over, the Oscar race unheated and personal blogging fatigue, I'm scrambing..

Since I got back to Montreal I've had a peculiar edition to my existence: a new roommate, a Parisian 22 year old who has never been to North America, and came here to find work (I'm taking a risk that he somehow encounters this blog, but I think so far all he knows is that my name is Peter and I subscribe to Entertainment Weekly). Anyway.. in addition to unpostable details, Monsieur Cadillac welcomes my mornings with various shower renditions, and when yesterday I got a wild flashback to a song I hadn't heard in at least a decade, I violated roommate confidentiality:

Montreal, 10:00am. My walk to Starbucks was very Into The Wild.

Braving -22 windchills and snow storms, my teenage sister made the trip up to Montreal for the weekend, and I channeled my inner-teen and did some fun photoshooting.. We covered most of the city, going in and out of any indoor space available to avoid freezing to death.

This is a continuation of a previous post, recapping the conference held as part of Montreal's Image+Nation Film Festival 20th Anniversary. After the jump, I'll highlight B. Ruby Rich's fantastic keynote speech.

So this past weekend 30 or so queer academics and filmmakers gathered in Montreal for the International Workshop on Queer Festivals, part of the celebrations of Image+Nation, Canada's oldest and largest queer film festival. I was lucky enough to sit in on some of the panels and, after the jump, will do my best to make sense of some various dialogues that went on...

“Point de fuite.” Photo by MTL Guy on Flickr.

So this morning was a bit strange. I'm deaf in one ear - and this creates a problematic tendency for me to sleep through alarms. So its about 7:55 when I finally realize I've slept through over an hour of loud, French radio. I needed to leave by 7:30 to make it to work on time. Astoundingly, I was out the door by 8:10 (but you should see what I look like), and raced to the Metro to catch a train to the West End of the city. When I got on, I realized I had finally encountered the art-project subway car that I had been hearing about for months. Totally out of it and in a very packed car, the experience was sorta surreal, even if I was aware that it was an art project and not some hallucination.

The ads were entirely removed from the car, and the walls were made this deep blue panelling that resembled some bizarre version of '70s indoor "psuedo-wood". There were city scape designs on all the windows. And the speaker, which was playing only in that car, varied between jungle beats to church bells to something that sounded like the soundtrack from Heathers. In between, they would play internal monologues that resembled what I'd imagine is going on in many subway riders mind: "Do I know that person? She looks familar. No, her hair isn't quite right." Some of the people on the car had obviously seen it before, but others looked very confused. It created this really interesting vibe in the car, as people kept looking at each other for some recognition that they weren't going crazy and that this was actually happening.

On Thursdays I work at a computer lab/dubbing centre for undergrads at my university. Today, of course, is Thursday, and I had to make my usual hour long transit trek across the city (at 7am no less). Waking up to a sub-zero bedroom, the two hours or so I have been up so far today have been frightful. It is -2 C (28 or so F) and snowing. Its horribly depressing. As most know, Montreal - a generally wonderful city in most regards - is not the greatest place to be in Winter. And today, sadly, is nothing compared to whats to come. I've never hated an article of clothing as much as I did the parka I was forced to put on this morning.

Speaking of Control, I finally got a chance to see it this past weekend during the final days of Montreal's Festival du Nouveau Cinema. And my warm feelings for the film were rooted in reasoning much like my thoughts on the festival as a whole: It was very stylish and soulful; it was extremely well cast (or programmed, as it were); and it uniquely set itself apart from its counterparts (whether music biopics or other festivals).

So despite finding myself joining in the festival offerings halfway through the ten day event, Control was just a highlight among highlights during my favourite of Montreal's seemingly never-ending lineup of film festivals.

Old Port Montreal Costume Shop, Sunday afternoon.

My gifted friend Dallas used me as a subject as part of her ongoing photo project, and posted them on her blog. My own vanity aside, check out her deep archive of work, its pretty impressive.