Top off your night at 13th Hour part of FRINGE After Dark.

The 23rd edition of the St-Ambroise Montreal FRINGE Festival is currently in full party mode, so grab a program and Fringe away!

This year’s festival takes over the night (and day) with FRINGE After Dark, including an Indie Montreal FRINGE music series, free events at FRINGE Park including a Pop Montreal curated musical lineup, FRINGE Park Tunes, and take-your-kids-to-FRINGE day, Kids FRINGE .

Happy Fringing!

13th Hour: Glitches and Gags
Elysha del Giusto Enos

They brought back the money wheel. That’s the first thing a die-hard 13th Hour-lover will notice about the latest incarnation of Fringe’s late-night variety show.

The 1 a.m. show is a free sampling of fringe performances, each followed by a spin of the wheel and its random challenge to the audience and performers. The performances are distilled two-minute tidbits and the wheel includes things like “slow motion bar fight” and the infamous 11-second dance party (although, no, the classic 13th Hour theme song, Le Tigre’s “Deceptacon” is not resurfacing as the dance party track).

Holding the night together are hosts from various Fringe shows and the Montreal indie theatre family. The only thing causing a blip is a bit of a tech problem. The first night, the 1 a.m. show only started around 1:30 a.m. because there were so many issues, and on the second night, one performer’s dance number was majorly sidetracked by a skipping soundtrack throughout his performance.

13th hour / Until June 22 / 1:00 a.m. / Cabaret du Mile End (5240 Parc Ave.) / Free

Around Miss Julie is presented by Hopegrown Productions, a company made up of Concordia theatre grads.

Around Miss Julie Gets the Part
Alejandra Melian-Morse

With a mission to bring more dynamic female roles to the stage, Hopegrown Productions showed promise in the pre-fringe hype, even managing to making it onto The Main’s list of Top 10 Fringe Picks .

The play by Harry Standjofski does not disappoint. The team is successful not only in the performance itself, but in achieving their much discussed mission. All four characters carry a complexity that is apparent on many different levels. Though dealing with issues of love and loss, the women of Around Miss Julie go much deeper, bringing out the harsh realities of finding one’s footing in the theatre world.

Even putting the unique female characters aside, the play is of immense quality. Based on August Strindberg’s Miss Julie, the script weaves its way in and out of the classic and mirrors the two plays seamlessly.

Delivered with seemingly effortless humour and energy, Around Miss Julie has its audience doubled over with laughter. With such a strong cast and a brilliant script, the play is definitely one worth seeing at the wonderfully intimate Club Español.

Around Miss Julie / Until June 23 / Club Español (4388 St. Laurent Blvd.) / $10 (students) $12 (general)

Elvis is Water is produced by Scotty’s Boys Productions from Chelsea, Qc.

Elvis is Water: More Than Blue Suede Shoes
Saturn de los Angeles

Grand spanking ‘50s hairdo? Check. Obligatory squeal-invoking hip thrusts? Check. Kick-ass guitars? And the music? Well you just might want to blink your eyes, probably twice.

This musical about young Elvis in his early recording days at Sun Records is also a story of how we’ve all been influenced Elvis in some form. In the words of stage performer John Burns, we’re the fish swimming along in Elvis’ ocean of imagination and his dreams of everyone getting along and having a good time.

The musical is written and directed by Katherine Sandford with the skillful vocal range of Burns who mind-blowingly wears multiple hats—shifting between himself and Elvis, accompanied with his troupe of talented musicians such as Deborah Thomson on piano, Joe Hawkins on electric git-fiddle and Denis Drouin on upright bass.

The interesting part of this show is not just the musical interludes, but also the random fun facts about him. Who knew that “Heartbreak Hotel”—a song about suicide—would be his ticket to perpetual stardom? For the music geek in me growing up listening to Elvis with my dad, it’s heart-warming, nostalgic and cathartic personal experience seeing that onstage energy come alive.

Elvis is Water is not an invitation to an immersive musical experience of yesteryear, nor just a story of a nobody who just loves to sing. This is also a story of a human being who wants to share his love appreciation for the quintessential King of Rock and Roll.

Elvis is Water / Until June 22 / Cabaret du Mile End (5240 Parc Ave.) / $8 (students) $12 (general)

Fire in the Meth Lab: A New Level of Comic Storytelling
Alejandra Melian-Morse

Maybe it was the Australian accent, but I was consumed by Jon Bennett’s Fire in the Meth Lab from the get go. The first thing that caught my attention was the haphazard set, which consisted of an old arm chair, a board game, a coat rack, and other items that hinted at sentimentality and the past.

Slightly out of place in this compilation was an ironing board. The collection of chemicals and tubes that covered the top of the board did not bring to mind images of someone ironing shirts in the morning, but rather a more sinister memory.

In a few words, the show is about the addiction to meth that eventually lands Bennett’s brother in jail, but that synopsis doesn’t even come close to doing the show justice. What Bennett tells is not a story about a meth addiction, it’s an exploration of childhood memories, good and bad, and a search for the reason behind his brother’s troubles.

With such a dark theme, the rare sombre moment maintains the sincerity of the story—yet, impossible as it seems, the show is delivered in the form of a brilliantly interactive, unexpected and fun comedy.

At its core, Fire in the Meth Lab is a story about brothers, and Bennett delivered it with all the resentment, frustration, love and pride that comes with any honest depiction of family.

Fire in the Meth Lab / Until June 22 / Cabaret du Mile End (5240 Parc Ave.) / $10 (students) $12 (general)

Jess Salomon: Obsession is a one-woman comedienne production by Jess For Laughs, based in Montreal.

Jess Salomon: Obsession; What You Can’t Live Without
Alejandra Melian-Morse

I imagine being a UN war crimes lawyer requires a strong sense of humour. For Jess Salomon, though, it became less about staying sane than entering into the completely insane world of comedy. Her need to take things all the way —to the point of obsession, fuelled this particularly drastic career change.

Salomon discusses a few of her different obsessions, ranging from Days of Our Lives actor Jack Deveraux to her iPhone. Although I might be a little young to share her Deveraux crush, the majority of her obsessions are so relatable I felt sheepishly guilty behind my laughs. (What do you care if I just snuck a tweet? And my love affair with tequila is none of your business!)

Through talk of her relationship within the show, Salomon guides the audience through the hilarious discovery of her bisexuality.

Like all good comedians, Salomon discusses serious things, like the influence of social media over our lives, with the shield of humour. Obsession is a show that makes you think after you get past the laughs.

Jess Salomon: Obsession / Until June 23 / Montreal Improv (3713 St. Laurent Blvd. #202) / $9 (students) $12 (general)

Peter N’ Chris Explore Their Bodies: Prepare for trouble. Make it Double!
Elysha del Giusto Enos and Saturn de los Angeles

This hilarious duo takes physical comedy to pitch-perfect levels.

Don’t let the title of the show fool you. There’s nothing racy going on, but there’s there’s a certain brotherly charm that will leave you with a smile when you leave the theatre.

The dynamic Vancouver-based comedy pair of Peter Carlone and Chris Wilson have been performing together since 2009 and are well known in the Canadian comedy circuit having appeared in Vancouver, Winnipeg and Chicago Fringe festivals.

Peter N’ Chris is about them—personified and brought alive in many characters and forms. The pair lives together trying to deal with their own personal midlife crises.

When obnoxious jokester Peter tricks alcoholic and gullible Chris that he’ll die of liver cancer, Peter soon finds himself in deep depression and angst because his dad left him at a young age.

The only way to snap each other out of their misery is to go inside each other’s bodies. And as a side note, inside the human body happens to look a lot like the Lord of the Rings, or imagine a mash-up of Portal in a really wacky role-playing video game manner where both characters have to fight their own personified monsters.

They inject spontaneous doses of self-deprecating humor, energy and lots of random moments. The two perform dance numbers, fight sequences and of course there’s plenty of witty banter. Not to mention the random musical interludes (and by that I mean they pulled off Aerosmith’s “I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing” here), and several nods to pop culture too.

You soon get drawn into the their wacky story from start to end. And you better keep track of that story pretty fast. They pace from one scene to another playing an array of random characters.

It’s no wonder they’ve been the opening act at this year’s Toronto Sketch Comedy Festival and awarded best comedy performance at Just For Laughs last year.

This show is so completely entertaining that it’s good to put on any fringers’ list as a go-to palate-cleanse in case of a few duds in a row.

Peter N’ Chris Explore Their Bodies / Until June 23 / Cabaret du Mile End (5240 Parc Ave.) / $12

Zack Adams: Zack to the Future is a product of Weeping Spoon Productions all the way from Perth, Australia.

Zack Adams: Zack to the Future; Charming but Unstable
Elysha del Giusto Enos, @elyshaenos

Zack, what are you doing?

There’s a guitar and a creepy puppet on stage, and you’re promising to take us into the not-so-distant future to check in on what Future-You is up to. The show twists and turns, and if you weren’t so damn charismatic it would sputter considerably.

But from the moment you got on stage you had the audience eating out of your hand. They loved everything you did no matter how wacky and random it may have seemed.

Zack Adams: Zack to the Future / Until June 23 / Scène Mini (4247 St. Dominique St.) / $10 (students) $12 (general)

N.J.L.Q. (Nouveau Jazz Libre du Quebec) performs Thursday at Sala Rossa with Ensemble Supermusique.

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Also known as the festival of liberation music, Suoni per il Popolo is the festival child of Montreal’s Casa del Popolo team that seeks to turn the spotlight on the city’s most innovative and often ignored musicians—and genuinely nice people.

“A lot of the music that we like, the artists are very approachable,” said artistic director Steve Guimond. “We always want to work with people whose music we enjoy.”

When it comes to booking musicians for the festival, there is no set limit for the genre of music that fits Suoni’s mandate.

“The mandate is really to present creative, interesting, innovative music,” Guimond said.

Music preferences change from year to year, as reflected in the festival’s programming, but you can always count on Suoni per il Popolo to present the best free jazz artists.

“If you look at free jazz musicians and the environment they’re working in, it really mirrors what we’re into, which is creativity, no-holds-barred, not really being fenced in by real rules or parametres, and just going with the artistic freedom.”

Free jazz performances have been part of the festival since its inception, and since that time Suoni per il Popolo has become the main programmer for free jazz artists.

“At one point the big Montreal Jazz Festival used to program a lot of the jazz that we’re doing now, but they just kind of gave up on it,” said Guimond.

Even if you miss the festivities, Suoni books off-season shows all year round. In an effort to build an active and year-round network with artists, off-season concerts broaden the festival’s horizons. It allows artists to present new projects under Suoni per il Popolo between festival seasons, and also helps bring awareness to the festival and Casa del Popolo and La Sala Rossa, the tapas restaurant and concert hall opposite Casa on St. Laurent.

“People automatically associate the festival with those venues,” he said. “It sort of helps to create our own musical environment.”

JGH Jazz, or the Jewish General Hospital Jazz series, is in its 14th year and joins forces with Suoni per il Popolo to promote the idea of healing through music. The series’ founder and JGH music therapist Bryan Highbloom approached the Suoni team to curate the June performances.

“Our idea was to present some local stuff that we really enjoy and some out of town [artists] who are going to be in the city for a couple of days while they’re playing shows here.”

Lean Left and Joe McPhee perform Wednesday at Sala Rossa.

The result is a mini-free-jazz festival of sorts, with the likes of Orkestar Kriminal and Ken Vandermark performing at the hospital’s entrance at lunchtime for free.

The collaboration with the Jewish General falls within the festival’s mandate to participate in community outreach programs. Casa del Popolo works with McGill’s Improv for Social Change to bring a weekly MusikAddict workshop series held out of NDG’s Head and Hands community centre for at-risk youth.

Even if you’ve never heard the sounds of Suoni per il Popolo, you’ve probably noticed the colourful and intricate “promotional” posters on Montreal’s streets.

The festival is accompanied by a collection of posters designed and printed in-house (and by hand). Kiva Stimac, one of Casa del Popolo’s founders, runs the Popolo Press studios within Casa’s home on the Main.

“Part of the idea was to create a general aesthetic for the festival, both musically and then also visually,” Guimond said.

Now in its 13th year, Guimond, who joined Casa in 2005 after a career in independent radio, has seen their efforts grow from a modest project to a full-blown music and arts program comprising of free Tools of the Trade workshops, DJ nights, film screenings and a series of media arts performances.

Suoni per il Popolo runs until June 22, explore the festival’s last week of events .

This mural appears to be a grandma holding a spray can. She may also be picking her nose with her finger. We’ll find out if my guess was right when it’s done by the end of the weekend. Photo Saturn de los Angeles

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What happens when you transform Montreal’s historic Main into a blank canvas?

That’s what the inaugural MURAL Festival is cooking up this weekend. Up to 20 murals along St. Laurent Blvd. will come alive by some of the city’s most prolific wall artists. Artists from Europe, the U.S. and Australia will be there too.

Director and founder of LNDMRK, the organization behind the festival, André Bathalon says this event is a first for the city.

“In past years, [our mural artists] contributed to other events [similar to MURAL] overseas,” he said. “At some point, we realized why always go elsewhere when we can be that canvas and be the center of attention?”

That center of attention is along the Main, from the corners of Sherbrooke up to Mont Royal Ave. The street is closed for pedestrians to watch mural artists colour abandoned brick walls with spray paint.

There are also tons of food stands for visitors to grab snacks while watching the artists work their creative magic. Many merchants have also set up shop along the way for people to buy products at discounted prices.

One of Montreal’s well known artist-run collective, A’SHOP, was there when I walked around on the festival’s first night on Thursday. They’re behind the ubiquitous Our Lady of Grace mural in NDG.

So far the mural depicts a grandma holding a spray can. She may also be picking her nose with her finger. We’ll find out if my guess was right when it’s done by the end of the weekend.

“The canvas [that is St. Laurent Blvd.] is a character by itself,” Bathalon adds as he explains why the Main was chosen as the venue for the festival’s first edition. “It’s important not only to draw from it, but also put the art into context to play with. There are so many walls that need attention, love and caring.

“[The Main] is almost a city by itself. There are so many people with different cultures and it divides Montreal into the East and the West.”

Saturday afternoon is the best day to walk up the Main. MURAL fest has partnered with Osheaga for a block party that will happen near Cinema Excentris, while DJs spin tracks near several murals.

Bathalon deeply appreciates the creative fabric of the city. It’s something that served as a driving force to launch MURAL Festival.

“Montreal has nothing to be ashamed of,” he said. “We have plenty of extremely talented artists, so why not invite our artist friends from elsewhere to paint with us here.”

MURAL Festival runs through Sunday night. It is free and open to the public.

Visit our photo blog for more.

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Council meetings running until the early morning is nothing new at the CSU.

Last year’s meetings routinely went well past midnight and were often criticized for their lack of structure and efficiency.

In keeping with tradition, Wednesday’s council meeting lasted over 10 hours—running until almost 5:00 a.m.—but unlike similarly lengthy yet unproductive meetings of last year’s team, the new CSU managed to get through over 30 agenda points, only tabling two to be discussed at a future date.

A new Chair was elected, various positions on multiple committees were filled, Senate appointments were made and the budget for the 2013-14 year was approved.

After interviewing candidates in closed session, Shannon Keymaram was selected as CSU Chair. Jessica Galvina, Melissa Lemieux, Cameron Tishaw, and Terry Wilkings will sit on Senate, joined by council reps Yasmeen Zahar and Wendy Krauss-Heitmann.

CSU President Melissa Kate Wheeler will be the student representative on Concordia’s Board of Governors, with Melanie Hotchkiss as alternate.

One notable policy regarding councillor attendance was changed: a motion to include rules on absences in the CSU’s standing regulations made by councillor Chuck Wilson.

With this motion, an absence will be recorded if a councillor or executive misses 60 minutes of a meeting. In order for an excused absence to be approved, it must be accompanied by supporting documents such as proof of final or midterm exam.

Absences will not be excused due to vacations, non-examination academic events or other personal commitments. Under the current CSU bylaws, a councilor who misses three regular meetings is deemed to have resigned. Members of the executive are currently docked $100 from their salary per absence.

These changes will be in effect by next council meeting.

Cyclists commute on the ever-busy Berri St. bike path. Photo Erin Sparks

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Montreal cyclists may have noticed something new during their daily commute.

The last few weeks have seen a massive increase in police presence along routes frequented by cyclists, and tickets are being handed out in staggering numbers. The intensification of ticketing is a problem in itself, but it is also indicative of a larger problem facing cyclists: outdated laws.

Tickets are being handed out for many reasons, and while some of these reasons make sense (like running a yellow light when it’s clearly unsafe), the majority appear to be misguided attempts to criminalize cycling in a city oriented towards car travel. Other reported reasons for the tickets have included lacking the proper reflectors (despite the presence of numerous lights), or failing to come to a complete stop at a stop sign, even if the intersection is clear. Considering the increase in cyclists in the city, as well as how easy it is becoming to travel by bike around the city, the law should be adjusted to reflect these changing realities.

In a recent interview on CBC Daybreak, cyclist Philippe Raymond mentioned that, in his 30 years of pedalling around the city, he has never seen such a heavy police presence focused on ticketing cyclists, nor has he seen fines being handed out for the obscure offences that are now being targeted. In response to the swelling police presence, Montrealer Dominik Richard has created a Google Map allowing people to add locations where police have been spotted giving out tickets. It’s an ingenious idea, and it helps foster a community of individuals who see these tickets as having a hugely negative impact on the Montreal cycling community, as well as those hoping to get into cycling themselves.

Like Raymond and Richard, I also believe that the intensified fining of cyclists is misguided—why are cyclists being ticketed for trivial things like a missing pedal reflector, when motorists routinely run through stop signs and behave in a way that puts cyclists (and pedestrians) at risk of injury or death? When was the last time the police aggressively targeted motorists as they are now with those on bikes? And why does it come only weeks after Urban Bike Week, an event that saw Montreal cyclists get together to promote the thing they love, and to find ways to make cycling more mainstream and less dangerous?

With the documented increase in public transportation, as well as the recent addition of more BIXI stands and bike lanes, laws for cyclists should be adapting to reflect the increasing interest in alternate modes of getting around. By refusing to recognize the ever growing presence of a Montreal bike community, a disservice is being done to all. Current laws, such as those which require reflectors on both pedals, do not reflect advances in bicycle technology; clip-in pedals do not allow the rider to have reflectors on their pedals. Certain sections of Quebec’s Highway Safety Code are also vague; riders are told to stay to the extreme right, but on Montreal’s narrow streets that means riding dangerously close to parked cars, and running the risk of being hit by an opening car door, which in some cases has killed people.

Enforcing outdated or ambiguous laws solves nothing, it only entrenches the attitude towards bikers as reckless, and dissuades those who wish to start cycling. Ticketing also isn’t the only way to enforce the law, and police should not rely so heavily on it. In Portland, Oregon and Amherst, Massachusetts, police who stopped cyclists for lacking the proper lights or reflectors gave those they stopped the required equipment; their goal was to create awareness, rather than to penalize cyclists. This happened in Montreal, to a smaller extent, along de Maisonneuve Blvd. a couple years ago. Bringing that back will more effectively persuade cyclists than the threat of a ticket.

The city has announced it is putting together a new advisory committee that will help better plan cycling infrastructure—which indicates that things are moving in the right direction. However, if the laws cyclists are told to obey remain unchanged, all this new infrastructure won’t do much to increase the number of people on bikes.

Reckless cyclists exist, just as reckless drivers do, and breaking the law should not go unpunished, but laws that are no longer relevant should not be maintained either. Placing such a massive police presence on the streets sends a clear message to cyclists. Despite the laundry list of issues the city currently faces, for some reason they are the ones being targeted.

In a previous version of this article, it was reported that Philippe Raymond created the map, but in reality it was Dominik Richard. The Link regrets the error.

The Little Beau Peep Show mixes storybook characters with cabaret and smuttiness. Photo Sylvain Granier

Blending the right dose of nudity and fun, the Little Beau Peep Show irresistibly mocks body issues.

Presented as part of 2013 Montreal Fringe Festival by local burlesque troupe Glam Gam Productions, the show crushes the innocence of fairy tales by mixing dance, theater and singing with indecent performances.

All body types are invited onstage—curvy, tall, short, hairy, hairless, skinny—breaking the genre’s common definition of “sexy.”

Julie Paquet, the show’s co-producer with Michael McCarthy, feels representing diversity is how to reach an equally diverse audience. She hopes the crowd will adopt a new perception of body image and self-consciousness by recognizing their own shape on stage.

“We want to show people it’s OK to be naked—that bodies are fun, bodies are beautiful,” she said.

Storybooks are Glam Gam’s main inspiration. In the Beau Peep Show, the Little Mermaid sells her “purity” to become a cabaret dancer, and just guess what grows when Pinocchio tells a lie (hint: it’s not his nose).

“Fairy tales often have a very dark, perverted origin,” Paquet said. “We like to make them more adult, more sexual.”

Glam Gam Productions was founded in 2009, the morning after a night of debauchery between Montrealer Julie Paquet and lifelong friends and Newfoundlanders Sarah Murphy and Michael McCarthy. Over the years, other performers joined—mostly amateurs.

“I never did theatre before,” said Paquet, laughing. “Just tap dancing when I was young.”

Although male performers have been stripping in Glam Gam productions since the group’s beginnings, no woman in the troupe would until Paquet took the lead.

“It was a Halloween show,” she said. “We did Thriller by Michael Jackson and I went out butt naked.

“I thought: this is fun! Honestly, it was the better thing I’ve ever done for my self-esteem.”

Passion, fun and group cohesion seem to be Glam Gam’s ingredients for success.

“When people see us having fun, they have fun,” said Paquet. “It’s a lot of work, but a labour of love. We are all friends and we definitely enjoy performing together.”

Café Cleopatra will host the Little Beau Peep Show until June 15. The strip club is not only famous for its second floor cabaret, but also for resisting expropriation by the municipal government in 2011.

Glam Gam has other raunchy events up their sleeves. On Saturday, they will host a pants-off Little Beau Peep Show after-party, No Pants No Problem at Theatre Ste. Catherine.

And if you feel like stripping down yourself, you can join Julie Paquet and Michael McCarthy every last Thursday of the month for a Lipster Strip Karaoke at the Second Floor Bar on Parc Avenue.

The Little Beau Peep Show has four more shows until June 15 / Café Cleopatra (1230 St. Laurent Blvd.) / $12

Concordia has adopted governance reforms which change how administrators are hired, fired and evaluated. Photo Riley Sparks

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Concordia is looking to clean up their act when it comes to governance and severance packages.

The Board of Governors approved sweeping policy reforms including how senior administrators are hired, and how much they are paid, at their last meeting of the year on June 7.

“A lot of safeguards have been introduced for good governance,” said Concordia President Alan Shepard in an interview with The Link. Shepard has been working on the policy changes with the Board’s human resources committee since last fall.

The changes were largely due to recommendations made by PricewaterhouseCoopers LLC to separate the university’s governance and management practices after the Shaprio Report outlined a “culture of contempt” surrounding Concordia’s administration.

These recommendations came after a string of questionable settlement packages with senior administrators between 2009 and 2010, that in part resulted in a $2 million dollar fine from the Quebec government last year.

The human resources committee must now establish an administrator’s severance, and must be approved by the Board if it differs from their contract. It’s also now made clear that administrative leave—a period of up to one year when an administrator is paid after leaving their post—cannot overlap with paid teaching work.

In addition, the president now oversees administrators’ search and evaluation committees, which before was directed by the Board. Holding public presentations for senior administrator candidates has also been removed as a university policy.

“A lot of safeguards have been introduced for good governance.”
—Concordia President Alan Shepard

“The interests of the community are already represented by these search committees. They’re not all appointed by the president, there’s a mix of appointments and elections,” said Shepard, who added he believes the way to get the best candidates is to not publish their names for the world to see.

“You get an environment where if you’re a candidate for one of these jobs and you’re not successful, it’s not like they take down the posters on campus and you go on your way. It’s on the Internet for the rest of your career […] You’re trying to attract somebody who’s already successful.”

Changes also include salary adjustments for new hires, which were last updated in 2006. Academic Deans, of which the university librarian is now noted in the policy, now have a salary range of $175,000 – $275,000 which raises the minimum amount by $50,000.

The salary range of vice-presidents was adjusted from $150,000 – $275,000 to $200,000 – $300,000, while the new salary range for Concordia’s president is $300,000 – $400,000, up from $200,000 – $350,000.

This new policy reflects Shepard’s contract, who in his first year earned a $357,000 salary.

While the old policy allowed for Concordia to foot the bill for two club memberships for the president and vice-presidents, now only the president can get one membership paid for. Maximum yearly bonuses have also been scaled back, from 20 per cent of their salary to 10 per cent.

With these changes, Concordia now has a remuneration policy for all employees that aren’t engaged in collective agreements with the university.

Around Miss Julie premieres June 15 at Club Español during the Montreal Fringe Fest.

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If having playwright and director Harry Standjofski as a professor has taught his students one thing, it’s that—in the theatre world especially—you have to create your own opportunities.

As a group of recently graduated Concordia fine arts students, Miriam Cummings, Lindsey Huebner and Samantha Megarry have realized that now is the time to create those opportunities.

“Why wait around for someone to give you a job when you can make one for yourself—at least for now,” said Megarry, now the co-founder of theatre company Hopegrown Productions with Hubener and Cummings.

Like most actors entering today’s theatre world, the group’s members know that stage success will not come easily.

“There are so many people who have the same dream,” said Cummings. “It’s a vicious cycle because it’s difficult to get work if you’re not part of a union, but it’s also difficult to be part of the union without professional credits. I think that it’s an inspiring thing to do, to create opportunities for yourself.”

Through Hopegrown, the graduates found not only the performance opportunities they were looking for, but also the chance to work with like-minded performers.

“Throughout the years we’ve wanted to work together, but due to the nature of the [theatre] program and how productions are run here, you don’t exactly get to choose who you work with,” said Huebner.

“This was a cool opportunity for us to make our own dream team.”

Embracing this new sense of freedom, Hopegrown needed to decide what kind of opportunities they actually wanted to make for themselves. One thing they had all noticed throughout their years in the theatre program was the lack of female roles, both in plays throughout history and in contemporary theatre.

“It’s not just Concordia’s problem. It’s everywhere,” said Hopegrown director Norah Paton. “There aren’t plays that have a cast of three or more fleshed out female characters, other than The Vagina Monologues —and we all did that!”

“Just in terms of employment numbers, think about any other industry. If you were to say there are this many positions available for men and this many for women in the medical field, that would be ridiculous. There would be a huge up in arms,” added Megarry.

“It just so happens that with theatre and with film, you’re playing a character that has a sex assigned to it and so right now there are just less jobs available for women.”

Coupled with the larger number of aspiring female actors, the theatre world is less than kind to actresses. For Hopegrown, focusing on creating female roles was the best way they could make a change in the theatre world, while also creating opportunities for themselves.

The group’s goal is to develop interesting, well rounded female characters—and ideally having more than one in any given show. As female-oriented as the goal is, however, Hopegrown is not set on portraying women as perfect, or ignoring men in productions.

“What we want to get across is that it’s a full-bodied character with fallibilities and flaws. We want to depict reality in the way that a male-centric show can about a man,” said Huebner. “That same kind of critical dialogue with the audience about the character, we want that to take place here too.”

“ Around Miss Julie certainly is not a feminist attempt at social change. It’s a story about people, and a bunch of those people happen to be women, and that’s unique,” added Megarry.

The play is accessible to all audiences however, including those that might not be as passionate about the need for change in the gender dynamics of theatre.

Lindsey Hubener and Graham Berlin rehearsing at Concordia.

“It’s four people, trying to find their way in the theatre industry and regardless of their sex, everyone is a little crazy and has their quirks and their problems,” said Graham Berlin, the only male member of the play.

“I think that’s what’s important to represent, whether you’re a man or a woman.”

Around Miss Julie was written by theatre professor Standjofski, who took on the task of writing a play that countered the women’s secondary role in theatre. After approaching Standjofski with their project, Hopegrown members ended up with a show to make their own.

“With a script like this that’s never been performed before, it’s really exciting that it’s my interpretation first,” Cummings said of acting in an original production.

Founded last fall, Hopegrown’s project has grown from a group of Concordia theatre students to professional actors, as they premiere their first production at The Montreal Fringe Festival, before touring the world.

“There’s this huge sense of community, so much other stuff that ends up going on,” said Paton of the Fringe festival. “There are people from all over the world—it’s a smorgasbord of theatre and theatre people.”

Besides a great opportunity to be surrounded by diverse and interesting theatre, festivals like Fringe are also financially beneficial to the actors.

“One of the fantastic things about Fringe festivals across the globe is that the profits go back to the artists,” said Megarry. “As young actors starting out, it’s a very complicated business to try to make any type of a living in, this is a really great way to launch into the industry and be able to feed ourselves.”

She was also clear on the fact that organizing a project like this was not easy. Hopegrown launched a crowdfunding effort and successfully raised $5,000 to tour the show in Ontario as well. They’ll also be bringing the show to Edinburgh later this summer.

“Our project kept growing!” Megarry said. “We would have a great idea for a fundraising event, and then a city would get added onto the tour, something would happen that would increase the total budget of the project.

“A big part of our goal for this is that we don’t want it to be a volunteer thing for the people we’ve involved. This is a job, it’s a business endeavour.”

“On top of that, we were all in our final semester of university,” added Huebner. “There was a whole plethora of commitments to school and productions and planning for our futures that was happening concurrently with trying to get all this off the ground. It was a lot of things coming at us at once.”

All that being said, it’s their dedication to the project that will make it possible for the curtains to go up on June 15.

“It’s a personal investment, which I think has a different quality to it than a school show,” said Paton. Not that you’re any less committed [to a school show], but I would take it harder as a person if this show were to fail.”

“Graduating is a scary, scary time,” said Megarry. “Becoming an actor is a scary, scary time, always. It was having faith in ourselves, in our team members, and in the project that kept us growing.”

For showtimes and more info, visit hopegrown.ca.

Between 170,000 and 200,000 students were on strike in Quebec from March to June 2012 in protest of the Charest government’s planned tuition hikes Photo Rodrigo Lozada

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One year after the largest student movement in Canada’s history, studies are looking into who was actually protesting, and what they wanted out of the Maple Spring.

A research group led by McGill professor Dietlind Stolle has been analyzing data from a survey completed by university students in Montreal. Questions included what the surveyed student’s stance was on the tuition hikes proposed by Jean Charest’s Liberals and how they demonstrated it, as well as collecting data on whether the student worked, paid rent, was in debt or paid for their own education.

The survey was sent out through the official email services at McGill, Université du Québec à Montréal and Université de Montréal soon after September’s provincial elections, with 15,491 students completing it.

Respondents who marked that they came from a family with above the Quebec average income were likely to support the tuition increase, however the survey also indicated those who gave that same response would also attend protests more frequently.

“These two results go in opposite directions, but in a sense it also means these students were not necessarily protesting out of their self-interest,” said Eva Falk Pedersen, a Masters political science student at McGill who is part of the research team.

This finding puts a different spin on the argument often heard last year by those supporting the hikes: that students were hypocritical in complaining about the increase of $325 per year while buying smartphones and cigarettes.

“These two results go in opposite directions, but in a sense it also means these students were not necessarily protesting out of their self-interest.”
—Eva Falk Pedersen, McGill Masters political science student

“Using the relative deprivation model, we also saw that students with debt, living in apartments and working while going to school were more likely to attend a protest,” said Falk Pedersen.

However, the study also yielded results showing the more a student paid for their own education costs, the less likely they were to protest.

“That could be a question of not having the time, because you’re probably working,” said Falk Pedersen. “But there can also be that underlying idea that they’re self-sufficient, so others should be too.”

In total, 48 per cent of respondents “participated in some sort of protest activity,” made up of 55 per cent of UQAM students, 48 per cent of UdeM students, and 23 per cent of McGill students.

In addition, 55 per cent of protester respondents felt threatened by police, while three to four per cent were detained or arrested. In total, 382 protesters were arrested under the Criminal Code, and 1,711 detained for municipal infractions during the Maple Spring, as reported by La Presse.

The research group, which also includes UQAM’s Allison Harell and UdeM’s Pascale Dufour, presented their findings at the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences in Victoria last week, titled “Maple Spring Up Close.” The group will continue to develop their conclusions throughout the summer.

The bike protest against the Grand Prix on June 7 was the first organized by the CLAC this year without arrests. Photo Erin Sparks.

Approximately 60 protesters took to the street on bicycles in a mobile demonstration against Montreal’s annual Formula One Grand Prix race this weekend.

Organized by the Anti-capitalist Convergence, the bike-mounted protest was aimed at disrupting Grand Prix weekend.

Two groups began their ride at 5:30 p.m. in Laurier Park and Hochelaga Park, the group made their way through the Plateau and downtown where numerous streets are blocked off to accommodate the weekend-long car race.

Unlike many recent protests in the city, it was not declared illegal and there were few altercations between demonstrators and police.

The protest followed traffic rules and the police presence was mostly used to ensure the safety of both cyclists and motorists.

“[We are taking to] the streets to remind capitalist promoters and race car enthusiasts that the city belongs to those who live in it,” said Nicolas Lanoue-Larue, spokesperson for the CLAC.

In an interview with The Link, Lanoue-Larue explained that he sees a lot dissent surrounding the Grand Prix.

“Politicians and the business community would like everybody to think there is consensus on the Grand Prix because of the money it brings into the community, but there are a lot of people who do not agree with having the Grand Prix here every year with the public money that goes into it,” he said.

After being removed for a year from the Formula One circuit in 2008, an agreement between government officials and the F1 guaranteed $10 million in contributions over five years from the three levels of government in exchange for a 30 per cent share of the race’s ticket sales.

Tourism Montreal, a privately-owned conglomerate of city businesses and other groups in the tourism industry, also contributes $5 million annually.

Economic returns for city businesses during the racing weekend in 2007 were estimated at $74 million, according to reports by ING bank.

Demonstrations last year at the Grand Prix, largely in conjunction with the student strike, were marred by arrests and violence, with storefronts and police cruiser windows being destroyed by a small number of protesters. Then-Premier Jean Charest openly condemned the CLAC protests.

CLAC has also been at the forefront of several other demonstrations in the past few months, primarily to denounce municipal bylaw P-6, which the organization says is illegally restricting rights to free expression and assembly.

In amendments last year, the bylaw was expanded to grant police powers to declare protests illegal if no route is provided to police within 24 hours of any demonstration on public land.

At least 700 people have been arrested in violation of the bylaw since March.

Another demonstration by the anti-capitalist organization is planned for Monday, according to Lanoue-Larue, in protest of the International Economic Forum of the Americas, which holds its annual conference in Montreal next week.

Wooden carvings of Jewish figurines remains a tradition in Poland.

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Can an ethnic group be a toy?

A Concordia research project is engaging such discussion on the tradition of carving wooden figurines of Jews, travelling to Krakow, Poland to exhibit their work at the end of the month.

Organized by professor Erica Lehrer, Souvenir, Talisman, Toy: Jews for hearth and home, will be presented as part of Krakow’s Festival of Jewish Culture from June 25 to July 14.

Lehrer, an associate professor in the history and sociology and anthropology departments, is the director of the Centre for Ethnographic Research and Exhibition in the Aftermath of Violence. She also holds the Canada Research Chair in Post-Conflict Memory, Ethnography and Museology.

Lehrer is presently in Krakow and will be joined by public history honours student Lauren Ramsay and English and creative writing honours student Lizy Mostowski.

Ramsay became involved with the CEREV after taking Lehrer’s Museums and Heritage in the Globalized World class. Ramsay has been working on the exhibit since September and is in charge of sound design for one of the gallery spaces as well as writing a joint article with Lehrer.

Mostowski became involved after contacting the director of the Krakow Jewish Community Centre, Jonathan Ornstein, who informed her about the exhibit organized by a Concordia professor.

Tasked with media relations and communication, she plans on tweeting photos of the exhibit and the festival in Krakow.

She wants to put some of the questions they designed to prompt conversation on the Twitterverse.

“It would be cool to continue the dialogue and I want to carve [the Twitter account] as an archive,” said Mostowski, whose parents are from Krakow and Warsaw.

Poland had the largest Jewish community in the world before the Holocaust. Since the end of World War II, Jewish culture disappeared and few Jews remained in Poland. Recently hit by a Jewish revival, Poles are reconnecting with the Jewish culture and reviving its Jewish landscape of synagogues and cemeteries.

Historical Figures

Lehrer’s exhibit will display figurines by Polish carvers depicting Jews. The majority of these figurines are from personal collections in Poland, and some are from abroad. Oftentimes craftsmen carve these figurines simply for the art of it, although most sell their work.

Today, most carvers have never met any Jews—the exhibit’s featured carver Józef Reguła, for example, learned about Jewish history out of his own curiosity.

After an army friend taught him to carve wood in his twenties, he started carving Jewish figurines in the ‘90s at the request of his brother-in-law, a director of a regional museum. He was asked to make figurines in a time where carvings, especially of Jews were popular in museums.

The goal of the exhibit is to create a dialogue between the Jewish tourists and the Polish community. The exhibit presents a history of figurines to encourage visitors to discuss their importance in Jewish and Polish identities.

“People connect to each other through talking about the objects,” said Ramsay.

Volunteers will be present throughout the weeklong festival and engage in conversation with visitors as well by asking them specific questions, such as: “What makes [figurines] different from nostalgic artworks made by Jews?”

“It’s about confronting a difficult past and confronting a complicated contemporary relationship between where non-Jewish Poles create items of Jewish culture,” said Ramsay about the importance of the exhibit and of the figurines.

“[These items] are then consumed by a diaspora that perhaps comes to Poland to engage and relate with Jewish history.”

Located in the J. W. McConnell Building, the CEREV has a gallery on the sixth floor and an work-room on the 10th floor. The gallery is a research and experimental curating space and the work-room is reserved for members to meet and prepare digital exhibit elements.

This latest exhibit is one of many projects by the CEREV. Previous work includes Inuit and Residential Schools, which portrayed the illustrated memories of eight Inuit survivors of the traumatic federal program, and a collection of interviews entitled Palestinian Canadian Life Stories. The centre hosts lectures and events and offers workshops and trainings in different subjects related to the aftermath of large-scale violence and conflict, providing opportunities for students to participate in interdisciplinary work.

For more information, visit the project’s website.

Protesters hold up a banner in front of a vacant lot on Notre-Dame St in Montreal’s St-Henri neighbourhood on June 5. Belonging to a group that calls itself À qui la ville, approximately 30 protesters have been camping out in the empty lot at the corner of Notre-Dame and St-Philippe Sts since June 1, demanding more social housing in the area. Businessman Peter Sergakis, who owns the empty lot as well as some of the surrounding dwellings, met with police Wednesday morning to ask that the protesters be evicted. Photo Leslie Schachter

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Peter Sergakis has had a change of heart.

On Monday, the big-time and often controversial bar owner was quoted in the Montreal Gazette seeming uncharacteristically cool about a group of 20 to 30 protestors that had set up camp on a vacant lot he owns in St. Henri.

“They have a message for the government, that they want more social housing,” Sergakis said. “Let them deliver the message. It’s a democracy. It’s their job to defend the poor. As long as they don’t hurt anyone or do any damage, I don’t mind. They can stay there.”

Four days into the occupation however, Sergakis says the protesters have had their chance and need to leave, apparently meeting with police early on June 5 to have the group evicted.

On the morning of June 6, Sergakis read an eviction notice to the occupiers with police present. All had peacefully vacated the lot by 9:15 a.m., as reported by The Gazette.

The group calls themselves À qui la ville? and is fighting to raise awareness over rapid condo development in the neighbourhood, and the lack of affordable housing.

“The City of Montreal must set up a reserve of land and buildings to curb speculation and allow the development of social housing,” stated the POPIR-Comité Logement. They are also calling for more occupations, to “reclaim the right to the city for all.”

Word of the looming eviction spread quickly on Wednesday, and call-out’s were made over social media for supporters to join in the occupation.

Montreal police confirmed that they had met with Sergakis, and that some neighbours had filed complaints, but remained relatively tight-lipped about whether or not the group would be forcibly removed from the lot.

Occupiers on Wednesday afternoon were making attempts at barring mainstream media from filming the occupation, raising banners to block the view.

—with files from Leslie Schachter

Tigercats performed songs from their debut album Isle of Dogs last Saturday at Tavern L’Inspecteur Épingle.

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There’s something irresistibly charming about a band with a barefooted lead singer.

It makes a performance that much more comfortable and inviting, and when East London’s Tigercats played at Taverne L’Inspecteur Épingle this past Saturday (yes, with one barefooted member) they were both those things. The band gave an attention-grabbing first impression as they performed songs from their debut album Isle of Dogs —with the keyboardist even donning a bicycle necklace, a good sign that they’d fit right in here in Montreal.

The impression didn’t change once the music started. The songs had an immediate energy that, put simply, made you smile. Most importantly, the band seemed excited to be there and pretty soon everyone else was too. Bassist Giles Barrett brought a considerable amount of energy to the stage which, given the unspoken rule of sulking bassists in the background, was quite refreshing.

During the performance, Tigercats created a relationship not only with the audience but with each other. They showed a cohesiveness even more impressive so by the fact that the guitarist was not their own. Stefan Schafer was expected to join later in the tour, but guitarist Ola Innset from the norwegian band Making Marks took the stage tonight. The performance appeared seamless from the crowd’s perspective, but the change threw the band members for a bit of a loop.

“Everyone has different types of flares, and there were little things that I was waiting for to come in that Stefan would usually play” said keyboardist Laura Kovic after the show.

Duncan Barrett, lead singer and Giles’s brother, agreed that the change was noticeable.

“It’s no better or worse, it’s just a bit more unexpected,” he said. “Some of the songs we’ve played so many times that playing with someone new is suddenly really fresh. It’ll be really great to have Stefan back, but in the interim it’s really good having Ola, he’s a great guitarist.”

Part of what made the performance special was the strong keyboard presence. There is a frustrating tendency for the keyboard to sink into the background, but Kovic was not only audible but added a crucial layer to each song.

Her vocals were also a beautiful counterpart to Duncan’s. Their voices blended together as if they were always meant to, harmonies coming in both unexpectedly and fittingly.

This was the band’s opening show on their first North American tour, and they had barely enough time to fit in a visit to Schwartz’s before performing. They’ll be moving all over the east coast before finally ending up in New York City for Popfest 2013, where they’re sure to make even more waves.

As various reviewers have noted, indie pop you can dance to is rare, and yet Tigercats has managed to do it. It’s difficult to put a finger on what keeps the body moving, but the subtle alterations in the melody and well-placed tempo changes do a good job of keeping things interesting. Whatever it is, it’s impossible to keep still listening to these guys.

If you do manage to sit still long enough to listen to the lyrics, though, you’ll notice that they haven’t been abandoned in favour of the beat, and actually offer quite a bit of wit. However, don’t read too much into the song “Jonny.” Tempting as it is to wonder, they swear it has nothing to do with their drummer Jonny Evans.

“We were sitting in a pub in London,” explained Evans, “and Duncan for some reason says ‘Guys, I’ve got something to tell you. I’ve written a love song called Jonny.’ At first I laughed and we were all pissing ourselves, but then as it turns out, he had written a love song, called Jonny.”

Jonny —Tigercats

The humour behind the song’s story fits well with the whole album’s upbeat feel. However, their identity as a primarily fast paced band might be changing as they make moves toward their next album.

“We feel like we can take our time more,” said bassist Giles. “In our first album we were rushing everything out, and we were playing shows at 100 miles per hour. Now sometimes we want to be able to breathe a bit on stage.”

They can make any changes they want, as long as their unique sound goes untouched. It’s a sound that has been well received all over Europe, but it’s inspired by their homebase in London.

“We could go to another city with a completely different scene, and they wouldn’t necessarily know where we’re coming from,” said Duncan. “Which isn’t to say they wouldn’t enjoy it, but in our own city we’ve got our own place and the music fits in with all the different bands that we play with. So more than the place itself [the biggest influence] is the bands that we play with.”

As much as a second Isle of Dogs would be welcome, Duncan made it clear that growth can be expected as the band moves away from their first album.

“You’ve got to put a distance between yourself and the stuff you’ve done before. Otherwise you won’t ever do anything better than that.”

Concordia’s Engineering and Visual Arts Building. A recent survey shows that Quebec’s future engineers are worried about allegations of collusion in the construction industry. Graphic Clement Liu

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The allegations of collusion and corruption in the construction industry that have rocked Quebec politics since the Charbonneau Commission began are also affecting the outlooks of the province’s engineering students.

A recent survey conducted by the Québec confederation for engineering student outreach shows that 75 per cent of Quebec engineering students are concerned about collusion, and 96 per cent believe that collusion has hurt the reputation of their future profession.

“[The survey] gave some interesting results,” said Mathieu Boutin-Delisle, QCESO’s VP academic, in an interview with The Link.

“People often say that students aren’t aware of what’s happening [but] we saw that students feel concerned by the allegations [of collusion]—it’s a good sign that students are interested in this issue.”

Insufficient Ethics

According to the survey, 59 per cent of students think that their engineering ethics courses are not well-adapted to the situation in Quebec, and 45 per cent say their program doesn’t equip them to deal with ethical conflicts once they graduate.

At Concordia, engineering students’ ethical instruction consists of one 1.5-credit class, “Professional Practice and Responsibility” (ENGR 201). According to its course description, 201 deals with professional ethics, the quebec engineers’ Professional Code and the Engineer’s Act.

According to civil engineering student Amir Essaati, ethics has a “minimal” role in Concordia’s engineering curriculum. Essaati also told The Link that ENGR 201 wasn’t often a top priority for students.

“I don’t know how much time students really invest in the class,” he said. “Your technical classes are much more mentally demanding, time demanding.”

Although Essaati has yet to do an internship, he says that ENGR 201’s theoretical approach didn’t prepare him and his classmates to deal with collusion in the workplace.

“I can definitely see how students don’t feel equipped to deal with these complex ethical issues,” he said.

“Though you may have in your mind a framework by which to make an ethical decision, once you contrast that to what your supervisor’s telling you to do, it’s not always clear.”

Mathieu Poirier, also a Concordia civil engineering student, says that although ENGR 201 “pretty much covers all the bases” in terms of laws and regulations, it should be given in a student’s last semester, instead of in first year, so that the material is fresh in students’ minds as they enter the workforce.

“Most of the students tend to forget,” he said. “[Collusion] might happen, and a student who just became a new engineer might not even know he’s doing something wrong”

The QCESO has recommended that Quebec’s engineering deans revamp their curriculums to make ethics more prominent throughout the duration of an engineer’s studies. It also wants students to receive more in-depth instruction about the Professional Code, the Engineer’s Act and Ordre d’ingénieurs du Québec’s regulations, before they begin their internships.

“What we want to do is give students have the tools to respond to situations where they’re experiencing collusion,” said Boutin-Delisle.

“I can definitely see how students don’t feel equipped to deal with these complex ethical issues. Though you may have in your mind a framework by which to make an ethical decision, once you contrast that to what your supervisor’s telling you to do, it’s not always clear.”

—Civil engineering student Amir Essaati

Collusion Not Hidden from Interns

According to the survey, 5 per cent of engineering students have witnessed collusion during an internship—a number that surprised the QCESO.

“We realized that collusion isn’t very hidden,” Boutin-Delisle said.

The role of engineers in collusion was brought to the public’s attention when Montreal municipal engineer Gilles Surprenant testified before the Charbonneau commission, revealing that he had received over $700, 000 in kickbacks from construction firms. Since then, further testimonies have exposed bid-fixing among engineering firms in Laval.

Although none of the students interviewed for this article had seen collusion firsthand during an internship, Arseneau said that he’d heard stories from classmates and colleagues about contractors sharing insider information about bids for contracts, calling the practice “common.”

Engineering’s Reputation

Concordia University Building Engineering Society president Kyle Arseneau said that although collusion does come up in conversation among the students he represents, very few would consider pursuing a career elsewhere because of the issue.

“Out of a hundred people, maybe not even one would come to the radical decision of saying, ‘I don’t want to work in Montreal, I want to go work in Toronto because of the collusion,” he said. “It might come into their choice, but it wouldn’t be the main factor.”

“There’s a lot of work to be done to reassert the prestige of the profession,” said Boutin-Delisle on the issue. “But I don’t think that [collusion] will discourage students from going into engineering.”

The confederation hopes that collusion prevention measures will help improve engineering’s reputation.

The QCESO represents over over 16,000 students and received 1,136 responses to its survey, which was conducted over March and April of this year.

Although the survey was offered to all Quebec engineering students, Concordia, along with McGill, had a response rate of only one per cent. Overall, students with Quebec residency status made up the bulk of the respondents.

The full survey results can be found here.

Cam Novak founded Cycle-Bird, a bicycle-powered courier company that closed its doors last year. Photo Michelle Pucci

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As Urban Cycling Week comes to an end, Montrealers can still catch a glimpse of the consciousness-raising project in the form of a mural on St. Marc St. and Ste. Catherine St. W.

A Mural for Montreal Cyclists uses art to stir up an awareness of the politics behind transportation.

“Bikes don’t really have a place in the visual dialogue,” street artist Cam Novak said of the lack of bike culture in media.

Novak is partnering up with another artist, Roadsworth, to complete the mural.

Both Novak and Roadsworth are avid street artists and bike advocates.

“You look around and you see car advertisements and SUVS,” said Novak. “I mean you look everywhere and there are cars parked on every street—it’s the most visible thing you see.

“So why not give cyclists a space, in the public eye?”

The project is meant to confront the city’s lack of bike ads, and remind cyclists that they do have a place on city streets.

Roadsworth described it as a “glorification or beautification of bike culture,” without actually trying to sell you a pedal-powered machine.

The mural itself depicts a cyclist in motion, symbolized with a bird above the cyclist, also in motion, and leaving behind Novak’s brightly coloured and floral spray-painted arrangement.

“It’s as though you’re leaving a trail of crazy beautiful energy behind you,” Novak said of the mural.

“It’s fun but it’s also playing a role so that people feel welcome when they’re on their bike.”

Even with the introduction of Bixi, bikes and cyclists are a part of a city transportation taboo, and are at the receiving end of a lot of animosity, according to Novak.

“[Cyclists] are allowed [in the city],” Novak said. “But I don’t think it’s as encouraged as people think it is.”

Before getting more involved in his art, Novak founded Cycle-Bird a bicycle-powered courier company, which closed its doors last year.

Roadsworth a.k.a. Peter Gibson is infamous for his unsigned street art, having painted the streets and sidewalks of Montreal with counter-car-culture “illegally” a decade ago.

His street art and the arrest that followed led to a whirlwind of publicity, including the 2008 documentary Roadsworth: Crossing the Line, which was co-produced by the National Film Board.

Organized by the Montreal Bike Coalition, the Urban Cycling Week saw bike tours and conferences, including a Tour du Silence in memory of cyclists who have died on the road, all leading up to the Urban Bike Summit on Saturday.

Endless Fantasy is in stores May 14.

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Anamanaguchi, the bumpin’ indie-rock-meets-chiptune quartet from New York, are finally ready to present their second full-length album to the world.

If you’re not familiar with their brand of electronic fury, you might think you’ve accidentally clicked on a retro online game. The genre of 8-bit, or “chiptune,” refers to harnessing old school gaming systems’ soundcards to produce fast, upbeat electronic melodies: think Super Mario on acid.

Embracing their roots of mixing videogames and music, Anamanaguchi provided the soundtrack for the game adaptation of the 2010 cult film Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, starring Canada’s beloved Michael Cera, a “total chiller” according to the band.

Their first full-length, 2009’s Dawn Metropolis, showcased their unique style of blending 8-bit bleeps and chirps with pop-rock style, including guitars and bass to jam along with the Gameboys and NES’s.

Endless Fantasy, out on May 14, boasts an impressive 22-song tracklist, with several songs already released, including a glitchy Japanese-themed music video for the single “Meow.”

“Meow” —Anamanaguchi

The album has been over 4 years in the making, which drummer Luke Silas called “a truly arduous but totally rewarding process.

“_Endless Fantasy_ has been nothing short of a labor of love,” Silas said. “The whole project was pushed back plenty due to false starts and offers that ended up not panning out, but we wanted to take our time and make sure we could do things properly.

“Some of the songs on the record were started years ago, as early as 2008. As a stronger theme and cohesive sound for Endless Fantasy came into place, songs were reworked and expanded in a way that made sense,” he added.

8-bit to 16-bit: A New Sound Rises

This album is a slight departure from the raw, unrefined 8-bit tunes of Dawn Metropolis, and tracks have a more organic flow, most notably one of the album’s singles, “Planet,” a standout dreamwave-y track that took most fans by surprise.

“I was playing through The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask and the ‘Astral Observatory’ blew my mind,” songwriter Pete Berkman said, concerning his inspiration for “Planet.”

“The song is about Earth’s place in the universe, it’s a tiny zone floating through in an infinite abyss, and somehow there’s life on it,” Berkman said. “I wanted to create a sense of that melancholy wonder of being alone and knowing we aren’t.”

“Planet” —Anamanaguchi

The shift in sound was “definitely a natural progression,” according to Silas. The polished electronica sound is the result of members endlessly tweaking the tracks to have them sounding as full as possible, and also due to branching into different sampling techniques.

“We expanded to using more sample-based 16-bit software, and spent a long time with our producer fine-tuning everything,” Silas said.

“Make no mistake, those abrasive [8-bit] bleeps are still the majority of the sounds on the record, but we wanted to expand everything.”

And Endless Fantasy marks another milestone in Anamanaguchi’s growth and progression as musicians with the introduction of vocals in their songs.

Their previous record and EPs remained firmly within the instrumental realm, but their latest effort features singing, looped soundbites, and even spoken word on a number of songs, including “Japan Air,” “Viridian Genesis,” and the trippy album closer, “(T-T)b.”

“We’ve wanted to work with vocalists for a while,” Silas said. “We had very specific vocal styles in mind for the tracks with singers, and we actually just looked to some amazing friends of ours on those tracks.”

The band will be playing their second Montreal show later this month—their first time being in the “coldest temperature I’ve ever been exposed to,” Silas admitted.

“The city was rad and we’re super excited to get back. We love Montreal and can’t wait to play a sweet, bright and loud show for you,” Silas said.

“And we’ll gladly wolf down some poutine.”

Endless Fantasy will be released May 14, by the label Dream.Hax.

Anamanaguchi // Il Motore (179 Jean Talon St. W.) // May 21 // 8:00 p.m. // $11 – $13

Buck 65 and Shad are playing a $5 show at the Corona Theatre May 17.

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If you think Buck 65 has been taking it easy for the last couple years, you just haven’t been looking close enough. In fact, he’s never been busier.

The genre-bending hip-hop cipher has several pots on the fire and a new LP in the can. And he’s in the midst of writing a novel—mashing his love of music, baseball and the history of his hometown of Mount Uniacke, Nova Scotia.

While it’s been a couple years since his last major release, he’s been working away at his home in Toronto, adding to his already huge catalogue.

“It’s the one feather in my cap,” says Buck 65, real name Richard Terfry. “I never sold tons of records, I never became super famous, I can’t claim all the usual measures of success that a successful musicians would have.

“The one thing I do have is a fairly large body of work coupled with longevity.”

Over the last 20 years Buck 65 has rapped over tracks ranging from scratch-heavy hip-hop to banjo-driven country, to dark ambience and simmering drum & bass. And while he maintains a sound that’s distinctively Buck 65, what that means exactly depends on which record you’re listening to.

“It drives some people crazy, but it’s the only way I can work. It’s almost ironic that comes across as schizophrenic. I just can’t make every song I make be a disco jam, or any other kind of jam,” he says.

It’s a testament to his restless work ethic, that he lives and breathes his music. Writing about any and every feeling and experience that inspires him, he doesn’t want his palette to be limited—and staying loyal to one sound is dangerous to his work.

“I try to express myself as fully and as richly as I can, as a human being going through their day. And that’s complicated, as it is for everybody alive,” he says. “Nobody is a one-dimensional thing, I would even dare say gangster rappers, even though we get only one side of them on most cases, have their moments of tenderness.

“When their sister has a baby and they smell its forehead. Nobody is immune to that.”

Survival Tactics

Buck 65 has had a major label deal for over 10 years, releasing a number of LPs under Warner Music, as well as re-releasing earlier work such as 2001’s dark, experimental Man Overboard.

But far from keeping to the simple model of a new full-length release every couple years, he’s been building up his catalogue with unofficial records and side projects. His last Warner release, 20 Odd Years, first came out as a series of EPs, and since 2008 he’s released three free hour-long mixtapes titled Dirtbike —holding some of his best work to date.

“I, along with everybody else, am trying to make sense of how this business is moving,” he says. “I’m always thinking about how my approach to this career needs to evolve.”

His most recent endeavour to alternate releases is SASS, an acronym for Short Attention Spans. It’s a 14-song record that clocks in at under five minutes —each song no longer than 30 seconds.

“If I’m listening to music in my travels, I’ll often listen to it on shuffle. I’ve noticed even if I really love a song that comes on, no song is as good as the excitement of hitting that button to the next thing, knowing you have something new coming next,” he says.

“I’m skipping through songs at this unbelievable rate of speed, and I thought how can you make an album that is going to withstand that test?”

It’s that idea, that we expect everything to be digestible in smaller and smaller bites, that inspired SASS. He’s been kicking around the concept for a while, and has already posted a second track on Soundcloud produced by longtime collaborator Jorun Bombay.

“If you mention a song to somebody, like ‘Hungry like the Wolf’ by Duran Duran, you would sing the one part you remember,” he says. “When a song gets in your head, it’s never the three-and-a-half minutes of the song, it’s one part that will cycle through your head over and over again.

“So I thought, why not make a song just that? Is everything else just filler anyway?”

The Major Label Game

Despite regularly posting music online, it’s all been fairly low-profile since his most recent Warner record 20 Odd Years came out in 2011. But the next Warner LP has been done for months. The finished product, complete with name and album artwork, was sent to the label in November.

“It’s the one feather in my cap. I never sold tons of records, I never became super famous, I can’t claim all the usual measures of success that a successful musicians would have. The one thing I do have is a fairly large body of work coupled with longevity.”
—Buck 65

Despite it being done since last year, it may not see the light of day until early 2014.

“I don’t know and I’ll admit that’s utterly agonizing,” he says of the album’s mystery release date. “I was dying for people to hear that stuff the day those songs were mixed in November. They’re waiting until the best time, strategically, to put it out.”

His records are released internationally, meaning the pushers and movers at labels in 18 different countries need to sign off on the release date. And if the stars don’t align—if domestic releases clash with his prospective release date—then it sits at Warner.

One of the tracks, the hot, hook-heavy contemporary hip-hop of “Fairy Tales,” has been hosted on Buck 65’s Soundcloud. But in the meantime, the rest of the record, and its title, wait for the label’s official announcement.

“Labels like to announce it themselves, it seems that’s a thing now,” he says.

In the meantime he continues to work. He’s halfway through the next Bike for Three! album, his collaboration with Belgian producer Joëlle Phuong Minh Lê. The fourth Dirtbike is in the works, too.

The upcoming Bike For Three! record has been negotiated with Warner to be released outside the label, but some of Buck 65’s other work, like SASS and the Dirtbike series, is in a legal grey area.

“Technically it would be seen as a violation of my contract. It’s basically illegal what I’m doing, and if my label was a little more iron-fisted they could probably kick my ass for this sort of thing,” he says.

He works in parallel universes simultaneously—signed to a major label while putting out free music on the side. It’s a pretty rare scenario in the business these days, but Buck 65 isn’t like most major label artists.

“I had a way of doing things that was pretty grassroots, or underground or whatever you want to call it,” he says. His deal with Warner was struck after being independent for 10 years.

“The label doesn’t meddle in the recording process at all.”

And as such there’s something of a paradox in Buck 65’s catalogue. His success has allowed him to have his records distributed around the world—but on Warner’s time. So he balances that waiting game with what he puts on Soundcloud, what his fans can hear five minutes after he finishes the track.

He went outside the label for a recent vinyl reissue of Vertex, a “lo-fi left field artifact” from 1997, home to one of his earliest hits, “The Centaur.”

But word inevitably gets out, and demand came from all over—even though it was a Canada-only release.

“I’m selling it in Canada for $15, and then trying to get it in Japan would cost $50 without distribution—and I don’t want to charge $50 for anything,” he says.

“When the worldwide release does come out, a kid in Japan can go to their local record store and pay $15.”

Buck 65 (with Shad) / May 17 / Corona Theatre (2490 Notre Dame St. W.) / $5 advance

Nicolas Maigret’s projected hard-drive disk-scratching installation “System Introspection.” Photos provided by Eastern Bloc

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Organized by the Eastern Bloc, Montreal’s multimedia exhibition centre, the Sight + Sound festival will exhibit installations and host performances by international digital media artists from around the world, beginning today.

The festival spans three weeks and showcases works that incorporate black market themes.

Artistic director and curator at the Eastern Bloc Eliane Ellbogen describes the black market as made up of structures and systems that function under the radar.

“They function in parallel or in alternative to more apparent socio-political and economic structures,” she said, explaining that the festival is curating works that explore the way these systems function, and the networks they create.

“The idea is to create an overview, or links between these systems and how they relate to contemporary digital culture and telecommunications systems,” she said.

Jean-Baptiste Bayle’s “Terminator Studies” installation is a satirical cartography that demonstrates the connections between the Terminator film series and contemporary political structures.

“There’s some fiction there but there is also a lot reality,” Ellbogen said. “There are obvious links between Arnold being the governor of California and also being the star of the film trilogy.”

Online, the most well-known black market network is the deep web, made up of web content accessible through standard search engines like Google.

According to Ellbogen, over the years, the number of performances and installations directly interacting with the Internet has increased.

One such performance in this year’s programme is Raphael Lyon’s “The Limits of Perception and the Rectangular Frame 2.” Lyon creates a 45-minute narrative through Google’s search bar and, through this interactivity with the Internet, pieces together a story.

French artist Nicolas Maigret presents two pieces at this year’s festival: the projected analysis of peer-to-peer exchanges “The Pirate Cinema” installation and a performance of hard-drive disk-scratching entitled “System Introspection.”

System Introspection —Nicolas Maigret

“The Pirate Cinema,” produced in collaboration with media artists and engineer Brendan Howell, intercepts and presents the underground and obscure file exchanging activity online in a control room setting, with multiple screens displaying parts of files, movies, TV shows, porn, etc. as they are traversing the torrent system.

File sharing is the subject of controversy, specifically with regards to copyright laws. Maigret wanted “to give a form and make it possible to be sensed and felt by people.”

“System Introspection” also explores how data can be translated into raw sound and visuals. The performance is a modern play on vinyl record scratching: Maigret scratches a computer hard-drive and tricks the computer into reading data stored as binary codes, such as Word documents or an iTunes playlist, into sound and pixels.

The project is intended to present computer language, which isn’t meant to be read by humans, in a visually and sonically tangible way—offering audiences the chance to have a critical experience of data.

“Today we are surrounded by data, and a lot of abstract data, we are producing it all the time,” Maigret said, explaining his inspiration.

“Your mobile phone in your pocket is producing data right now, your computer as well—soon your microwave will be producing data.”

“Untitled (Piece for Sound and Light #2),” a performance by Montreal-based artist and musician Steve Bates, explores the links between audio and visuals. Bates will convert live sounds in the Eastern Bloc into a video signal that displays a visual translation of these sounds.

Bates, who holds an MFA from Concordia, created a sensory feedback system that tricks a projector into emitting coloured, black or white light depending on the sound’s frequency or volume.

This interest in manipulating sensory products stems from his work as a musician.

“I also love guitar feedback and noise and use that in other performances as a sound source as well,” Bates said. “If you lean an electric guitar up against a amplifier with the sound at 11 running through effects pedals, I can listen to that happily for a really long time.”

The performance is similar to his previous installation “Feedback for a Black Box,” which was exhibited last year in the FOFA gallery.

The festival is in its fifth year and was extended in order to place more emphasis on conferences, workshops and the installations that contribute to a consistent theme, as well as giving more space to the projects so that festival-goers can fully appreciate them.

“The idea is to present a clear curatorial line that is well-articulated with fewer projects rather than just having a cacophony of projects that aren’t necessarily that clearly related to the theme,” said Ellbogen.

Maigret believes the Eastern Bloc’s dedication to supporting new, intelligent, experimental and boundary-crossing projects is exceptional in the art world.

“Not very often are festivals dedicated to pure, cutting edge or experimental or risky projects,” he said.

For Maigret, many new media projects are often less about artistry and more concerned with “promoting the innovation,” showing the potential of new technology without interpreting or critiquing these new systems.

“It’s a way to put more gasoline into the existing system,” he said.

“The idea is to work with artists whose practice is critical and also engaged with new technologies so that there isn’t just, say, a straightforward spectacular presentation of what digital art can be, what it’s proposing to be,” Ellbogen said.

The Eastern Bloc curates pieces that are critical and interactive so that audiences, as mass media consumers, can be more aware of how these technologies are used.

Sight + Sound / May 8 to May 29 / Eastern Bloc (7240 Clark St.)

For more info, visit the festival website.

New and former president of the FEUQ, Antoine Genest-Grégoire and Martine Desjardins, say research and employment support are top priorities for the lobby group. Photo Louis Gabriel Kéroack

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After two years at the head of the Fédération Étudiante Universitaire du Québec, Martine Desjardins is stepping down.

She was replaced on May 1 by Antoine Genest-Grégoire—a masters student in economics and former president of the Université du Québec à Montréal’s Association étudiante – École des sciences de la gestion.

The FEUQ represents over 125,000 students from 14 student associations across Quebec, including the Concordia Student Union.

In an interview with The Link on Monday, Desjardins and Génest-Grégoire reflected on the FEUQ’s role over the past two years and discussed some of the upcoming challenges for the Quebec student movement.

Desjardins, who will be remembered for her role as FEUQ president in the 2012 student strike, said that she witnessed “enormous” change during her time at the federation.

“We changed our internal policies,” she said. “And we improved the links we have with our members.”

Desjardins also noted the FEUQ’s transformation from an organization that was not known for its ability to mobilize into a driving force of a large protest movement.

“We showed that we were able to do both political lobbying and mobilization in the street,” she said.

Since announcing her decision to step down, the former FEUQ president has been vocal in criticizing certain aspects of the Coalition large de L’Association pour une solidarité syndicale étudiante’s actions during the strike, including the coalition’s failure to immediately denounce violence at protests.

But Desjardins dismissed the idea that ideological divisions between the two groups could hurt the student movement.

“We shouldn’t be afraid to debate in public,” she said, adding that it is “normal” for the two organisations to be at odds. “When you don’t have the same principles, it’s difficult to show a united front.”

Genest-Grégoire’s presidency is likely to be a more peaceful one than Desjardins’, but will present a different set of hurdles.

“We’re no longer focused on one central campaign,” he said. “We now have a larger number of challenges, and we’re working on many different issues at the same time.”

Chantiers de travail

One area of focus is the FEUQ’s participation in the Ministre de l’Enseignement supérieur, de la Recherche, de la Science et de la Technologie’s chantiers de travail, the policy-planning committees created in the wake of February’s education summit to deal with various unresolved issues in higher education.

The work of the chantier on student financial aid is almost complete, and the FEUQ is awaiting the release of its final report to see which of its recommendations will be included.

The federation wants to increase how much students can earn with summer jobs without affecting their financial aid, and to raise the amount of money that students are given for living expenses.

“We’ve been waiting for this to change for a long time,” Genest-Grégoire said. “The government allots $7 a day for students to feed themselves. This amount is very, very out of date, so we’re going to try and raise it.”

The FEUQ is also trying to influence change in the chantiers concerning the drafting of a legal framework for universities and the formation of a council on universities, on which the FEUQ wants to see as much student representation as possible.

“We’re trying to protect everything in the category of accessibility and public financing,” said Desjardins. “We want to reform university management, and we can’t forget that students should be key players in that management.”

Both Desjardins and Genest-Grégoire said that they had faith in the Parti Québécois government’s good intentions for the chantiers, despite their disappointment the recent decision to index tuition fees to the cost of living, leading to a 2.6 per cent increase for the 2013-2014 academic year.

“At the moment, we’re getting good feedback; it’s an honest process,” said Genest-Grégoire of the chantiers. “Of course, the chantiers end up as reports, and the reports are supposed to end up influencing policy […]. When the policy comes out, that’s when we’ll know whether they were listening.”

Supporting Student Researchers

Also on the horizon is Quebec’s new research policy—the Politique nationale de recherche et d’innovation—which will be released in June. The FEUQ has been lobbying the government to make sure that student researchers get a fair shake in the new policy.

“A lot of research and innovation is propelled by graduate students,” said Genest-Grégoire. “It’s great to have grants for research but we should also have them for student researchers.”

Genest-Grégoire said that the Fonds de recherche du Québec, the province’s main funding body, turns away too many qualified students.

“There simply isn’t enough money,” he said. “The province needs to catch up to make sure that students can continue to graduate studies, to do research that moves Quebec forward.”

The FEUQ is also keeping an eye on the government’s possible plans to promote more research partnerships between universities and private industry in the new policy.

“We’re not against partnerships,” Desjardins said. “But we have to make sure that they’re fair to students, that they respect intellectual property and that the profits from the research don’t just go to the businesses.”

International Students

Though he admits that international tuition fees are often considered a “peripheral issue” in the funding debate, the FEUQ’s new president sees a need for change.

“What we’re seeing is essentially a deregulation of certain programs,” said Genest-Grégoire.

Although international rates are regulated, many programs are allowed to charge an unregulated supplementary fee that has put students, in Genest-Grégoire’s words, “at the mercy of administrators.”

Genest-Grégoire said the FEUQ would study the issue within the framework of the chantier on university funding.

Internal issues

Genest-Grégoire is taking the presidency at a moment when the FEUQ is under scrutiny for its centralized leadership style, both in the press and from a former member of its executive.

Genest-Grégoire said that the FEUQ wouldn’t respond to individual comments, but that it was taking its member associations’ concerns seriously.

“We had a mandate from our members to revise a portion of our internal processes,” he said. “That has already started in this past year, and it will continue in the year to come.”

“What matters to us is that students are satisfied with their organization, that it gives them results, that it provides them with something concrete, and at the same time, that they have a way to control it—that they can know where it’s going.”

Genest-Grégoire explained that he became familiar with the FEUQ’s policies and procedures over two years of participating in the federation’s congresses, but that in the past year, he “wanted to do even more, to go as far as I could with the organization.”

“It was a personal challenge, and also a way to put everything I’ve learned in theory into practice,” he said. “Economics is very abstract […]. Applying these principles to real public policy is a wonderful experience for me.”

Graphic provided by Club Roll Music.

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One day last year, former president of Montreal’s Last Gang Records Lenny Levine met with Pop Montreal founder Dan Seligman at a café to ask him to start a record label.

He didn’t have to ask twice.

“He didn’t hesitate,” Levine said. “He was just like, ‘yeah, I’m in.’”

Not even a year old and Club Roll, the label founded by Levine and Seligman, already has a distribution deal with Universal Music Canada and a publishing deal with Nettwerk One.

The two had worked together before, Levine having collaborated with the independent music and arts festival Pop Montreal on behalf of Last Gang Records. Seligman is already infused in the Montreal music scene, but had never ventured into the label side.

“I’ve been around record labels but I’ve never been directly involved, so I thought this would be an interesting opportunity to pursue and potentially diversify,” Seligman said.

Montreal’s pool of talent is no secret to the rest of the world—the last decade seeing the ensemble-rock of Arcade Fire, electro-funk of Chromeo, alt-pop melodrama of Stars and otherworldly electronica of Grimes earning international success—to name a few.

Levine hopes to tap the mainline of Montreal’s musical prowess with an indie label armed with major-label-sized connections.

So far the label has signed the “David Byrne meets Zappa” mad scientist Karneef, “dark-folk with a melotron vibe” AroarA, flamboyant and captivating Jef Barbara, and newcomers Filthy Haanz.

AroarA’s In The Pines EP was released last month; the full-length is expected in June. More releases are slated for the end of the summer.

“The next few months are going to be telling,” he said. “We’re going to be carpet-bombing people with music.”

Buzz surrounding the newly born label is building. The Globe and Mail ran a few articles about AroarA early this year after Feist joined them onstage in Toronto for a surprise performance.

“The inside joke between Dan and I is that Feist is our publicist,” said Levine.

After recently ending their worldwide tour supporting Martha Wainwright, AroarA finally “inked” their contract with Club Roll. The duo, made up of former Broken Social Scene member Andrew Whiteman and Montreal-based orchestra Land of Kush singer Ariel Engle, has worked with Seligman and Pop Montreal for many years before forming the AroarA project.

“We’ve all been involved in music for quite a long time,” said Whiteman. “It’s kind of fun in that way because you get to start again, but you get to start again after already having made a shit-load of mistakes.”

According to Seligman, Levine has expertise in the industry and is known for getting things done. On the other hand, the Pop Montreal director is comfortable doing A&R, the task of finding new artists, because he spends so much time working with bands on the ground.

“He’s got his finger on the pulse of what’s going on artistically and culturally,” said Levine.

Seligman runs the management company Danagement. The company manages Montreal-based Besnard Lakes, Suuns, Socalled and Yamantaka//Sonic Titan, and provides other services for artists, like grant writing and tour production.

Levine owns 50 per cent of Club Roll and Seligman owns the other half with fellow Pop Montreal administrators Hilary Leftick and Shaun Bronstein, each contributing to the label with their respective financing and grant-writing expertise.

New Beginnings

Levine worked at former record store Phantasmagoria on Parc Avenue when he was a 19-year-old student at Vanier College, before going on to work as the manager of a Phantasmagoria franchise at the corner of Sherbrooke and Claremont.

“That’s where I got my education in music,” he said

After graduating from Concordia with a BA Philosophy, he started working at EMI in the ‘90s in the sales and customer service division. He later moved to Aquarius Records, which was part of the Donald K. Donald empire, before working at Last Gang Records for eight years.

Levine was president of Last Gang’s Montreal branch before it closed and all operations were moved to Toronto two years ago.

After being unceremoniously let go, Levine considered other opportunities. He was offered a position at Universal Music Canada and weighed his options before deciding to start his own record label.

“A lot of times it’s very hard in any facet of the entertainment business to come back,” he said.

One of Club Roll’s slogans, ‘Sorry, We’re Open’ speaks to Levine’s resilience to stay in the business.

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Concordia filmmakers are screening their short film productions during the 40th annual Concordia Film Festival, which kicks off today.

The festival is the longest-running university film fest in Canada and presents works by Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema students in film production and film animation.

According to festival director Simran Dewan, the 40th edition aims to pay homage to students and ex-students alike.

This year the festival honours André Turpin, Concordia alumni and acclaimed cinematographer of the Oscar-nominated film Incendies.

Cinema students present their fictional, documentary and experimental films with their peers as part of 90-minute-long screening segments, and a jury of professionals chooses 15 films to screen at the Best of the Fest, where awards are given. The Best of the Fest screens Saturday May 4 at 8:00 p.m.

This year marks the end of analog productions in film classes at Concordia. Now that Montreal film labs and companies are closing down, students will be working exclusively with digital next year.

“The big attraction for Concordia was the fact that even ‘till today we were shooting everything in film—so 16/35mm,” Dewan said.

This year’s festival is meant to mark the shift to digital production, the third-year cinema student added.

An Open Bar segment is new this year. Filmmakers from around Quebec were invited to present their work alongside Concordia students. The festival received submissions from CEGEP students as well as out-of-school filmmakers.

“It was sort of like a test run to see the reception of what would happen if we opened up a screening to many different universities,” Dewan said.

“We were curious to see what would happen if you put a Concordia film against a [Université de Montréal] film.”

First-year Filmmaking I students aren’t excluded from the festival, and last year a few of their films were even selected as part of Best of the Fest.

Teachers set up a first year screening, and organizers of the Concordia Film Festival send their own jury to select 15 films to be screened alongside works by students in more advanced film classes.

“In the end it’s not about the medium or what year you’re in,” he said. “It’s really just about how good your film is.”

The first-year filmmakers traditionally shoot their short movies with a Bolex camera, although next year they will make the move to digital cameras.

“The jury we select comes in like a professional jury,” Dewan said. “They don’t really care whether it was shot 35mm or Bolex.”

Concordia Film Festival / May 2 to 4 / Maxwell-Cummings Auditorium (Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 1379A Sherbrooke St. W.) / $7.75 per film

For more info, visit the Concordia Film Festival website

International Workers Day in Montreal, also known as May Day, saw mass arrests at the demonstration organized by the Anti-Capitalist Convergence. Photo Erin Sparks

Montreal’s May Day protest was nearly over before it began, with roughly 300 people detained and ticketed in the the city’s Old Port Wednesday afternoon.

Organized by the Anti-Capitalist Convergence, the protest gathered at Place Jacques-Cartier, right outside Montreal City Hall to protest capitalism, corruption and labour issues.

Wednesday’s demonstration was intended to centre around the Le 357c—a private club that has recently come up in the Charbonneau Commission and, according to the CLAC, is where “the capitalists draw up the plans of our oppression and our exploitation.”

The protest never made it to the club.

As someone over a megaphone called for the march to begin, Montreal police in riot gear moved in and split the group, causing small clashes between police and groups of protesters still trying to remain in the streets.

Paint and water balloons were thrown at a line of riot police and a small scuffle ensued. The police soon announced that the protest had been declared illegal under municipal bylaw P-6 as well as due to criminal acts being committed.

A tweet from the Montreal police later claimed that sticks were used to hit officers and that billiard balls had been thrown at them.

After a short march west down several blocks of de la Commune St., the police forcibly corralled and kettled approximately 300 people. Others were targeted and arrested before and after the kettling.

Pepper spray and sound grenades were used by the police during the protest.

Other demonstrations were organized throughout the city to mark May Day. The day is also known as the international worker’s day and is celebrated annually to commemorate or demonstrate for labour issues and workers rights.

Two protests converged on Montreal’s Old Port mid-afternoon on Wednesday, according to Montreal police. Demonstrators included workers from the umbrella union group Confédération des Syndicats Nationaux, which is asking for unionization among employees of the Couche-Tard convenience store franchise.

A representative from the CSN also sat down with Quebec premier Pauline Marois, along with representatives from the Quebec Labour Federation and the Central Union of Quebec—the two other major provincial labour unions—to discuss the unions’ concerns with Bill C-14, a proposed language law amendment to further protect the French language in the province.

A Non-Migrating Struggle

While proponents argue worker’s rights for collective bargaining and fair wages are being threatened worldwide, immigrant labour organizations say the rights of migrant workers are being disproportionately ignored.

According to a press release by the Immigrant Workers Centre in Montreal, migrant and temporary agency workers are upset with changes to the federal Low Skilled Temporary Foreign Workers Program, announced this week in response to RBC’s hiring of foreign workers to replace 45 Canadian-held positions at the bank.

They say the changes will discourage migrant worker employment in Canada.

“We are not asking for anything but a minimum of respect for our rights as temporary migrant workers,” said Mohammad, a temporary worker in New Brunswick whose last name was omitted in a statement released by the IWC.

They are also demanding minimum wage be increased to the “liveable” sum of $12 per hour.

According to Emma Smith, spokesperson for the Montreal chapter of CLAC, the struggle of migrant workers is closely tied to the anti-capitalist cause.

“One cannot exist without the other; they are intimately tied and linked there is no difference between one struggle and the other,” Smith told The Link.

“I think it’s important for people not to ever allow their basic civil freedoms to be taken away so easily, particularly when the political elites are the corrupt in all this, not the people,” she added.

CLAC has organized multiple demonstrations in Montreal over the past few months, primarily to denounce the municipal bylaw P-6, which the organization says is illegally restricting rights to free expression and assembly.

In amendments last year, the bylaw was expanded to grant police powers to declare protests illegal if no route is provided to police within 24 hours of any demonstration on public land.

Protesters are also prohibited from concealing their faces, whether it be with bandanas or panda heads.

Tamey Lau’s Mile End flower shop Dragon Flowers was destroyed in a fire on April 23. Since then, the community has donated gifts and money to help restore the shop. Photo Katie McGroarty

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After Tamey Lau lost her Mile End flower shop in a devastating fire the night of April 23, thousands of people from the neighbourhood, and others as far away as Vancouver, came to her support. Every day since the fire, customers and friends have dropped by the boarded-up store to offer their sympathy and donate money to help rebuild Dragon Flowers, a Mile End fixture of 27 years.

The day after the fire, a family friend of Lau’s started a “fire recovery fund” on a crowd-funding website with a goal of $10,000. So far the campaign has raised almost $14,000 in donations from across the country.

“It’s just very surprising,” Lau said describing the outpour of support she has received. “This kind of love is Mile End. In Mile End, the energy is amazing,” she added before stepping out of the burned-out store to greet a customer.

“Come back and tell me how your exams went!” Lau tells the young lady as she hands her a bouquet of fresh flowers.

Lau says she still doesn’t know what caused the blaze that gutted her store. She was preparing dinner at her daughter’s apartment a few blocks away when her son called to alert her that a fire had broken out.

“There were firemen everywhere, everything was burning,” Lau recalled. “I thought, ‘This is game over.’ I’ve worked here for more than 20 years […] It made me so sad. It was so painful.”

Lau’s son, Tino, was one of the first at the scene of the fire. He was about to go to bed in the apartment above the shop, where he lives with his mother, when his sister smelled smoke. Tino went downstairs and found the store in flames.

“I can’t really describe how it felt,” he said. “It’s my mom’s whole life here. She put all her heart into it, to raise us. And now that it’s all gone, it’s really sad. You work your entire life for something, and in a few hours you lose everything.”

“There are so many people with different stories about how my mom helped them. She saved couples, she saw people grow up, and they always remember my mom.”
—Tino Lau

Since then, Tino and Lau’s other children have spent most of their time helping their mother clean up the mess. As of yet, they do not know when the store will reopen, but they hope to be ready for Mother’s Day.

Yesterday, Tino was carrying pots and statues away in preparation for a garage sale his family is hosting outside the organic food store, Bio Terre, on April 28.

Like his mom, Tino said he feels moved by the community’s response to the fire.

“I was really, really surprised. In one day, a thousand people came together. It was really touching. There are so many people with different stories about how my mom helped them. She saved couples, she saw people grow up—and they always remember my mom.

“I saw on Facebook that someone made a donation from Vancouver, and she said she used to live in Mile End nine years ago and still remembers my mom,” he said.

So many people in the neighbourhood have reached out to Lau that she has trouble remembering all their names.

“There was one group of musicians—they’re called Fire… something?,” she said, drawing a blank. “Fire Alligator? I don’t know their name because my English is no good. Fire Me Away?”

“Arcade Fire!” Tino interjected as he carried a box out the backdoor. “Right! They support me a lot,” Lau said.

Last Wednesday, Arcade Fire tweeted “Tamey has filled our homes with flowers for years and is well loved in our neighbourhood. Let’s help her out!” followed by a link to Dragon Flowers’ fire recovery crowd-funding page.

Most of all, Lau says she is grateful for the kindness and generosity of “Mile End’s kids.”

“In Mile End, the kids are amazing. From two years-old, to 15, 20 – they’re all my kids. They drew me a lot of pictures and sent me a lot of love.”

“They drew me this picture,” said Lau, pointing to a coloured-pencil drawing of her name.

“They drew me this picture,” she said pointing to a coloured-pencil drawing of her name, ornamented with flowers and hearts, hanging on the wall.

Thirteen-year-old Tomas Kovac stopped by Dragon Flowers with his mother on Friday afternoon to say hello. The day after the fire, Kovac went to the shop to comfort Lau and make a donation.
“I donated $50 because she was always kind to me, and she would sometimes give me little treats, but mostly she just makes my day,” Kovac said.

Holding a chocolate and vanilla sundae with rainbow sprinkles, Kovac says he often goes to the shop to chat with Lau and buy flowers. Asked who the flowers were for, he said they are for his mother.

“I don’t have a girlfriend yet,” he said, “Soon.”

Kovac’s mother, Mary-Ann, says that Dragon Flowers is “much more than just a business.”

“They have a relationship, her and Tomas,” she said. “She has a connection to everyone. It’s not a regular flower shop.”

Projet Montréal has nominated two candidates in N.D.G. for the upcoming municipal election. From left to right: Christian Arseneault, Loyola district; Richard Bergeron, party leader; Peter McQueen, NDG district. Photo Michael Wrobel

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Montreal’s municipal election may still be months away, but Projet Montréal has already nominated two candidates in the Côte-des-Neiges–Notre-Dame-de-Grâce borough.

Christian Arseneault will run under the Projet Montréal banner in the Loyola electoral district, while Peter McQueen, who won a seat on city council for Projet Montréal in 2009, will seek re-election in the NDG district.

Arseneault, 24, told The Link that despite his young age, he has a lot of political experience and knows the Loyola district—home to Concordia’s Loyola campus—very well.

“I do bring [to the table] the optimism and idealism that characterizes our youth, and I think that people will realize that’s a good thing, and not a disadvantage,” Arseneault said on April 21 at the NDG Sports Complex, where party members gathered to vote on who would represent Projet Montréal in the elections slated for Nov. 3.

“People write off the idealism and optimism of young people as naïveté and unreasonableness, and I think that they’re wrong in [doing] that,” he said.

“While some people might have qualms about my age, I can guarantee that five minutes with them will have them convinced otherwise.”

Both Arseneault and McQueen told The Link that public transit would be a major issue during the election campaign.

Arseneault said the 105 bus—well-traveled by Concordia students along Sherbrooke St. W.—presents a particular challenge.

“While we have very frequent service, the fact is we have so many people using it,” he said, noting that even small changes could improve on the travel time and comfort of passengers.

McQueen said the Société de transport de Montréal, the city’s public transit authority, has a plan to create a bus lane on Sherbrooke St., but it won’t help students.

The buses will use the reserved lane to travel eastward, toward downtown, in the morning and westward, toward N.D.G., in the afternoon—in other words, against the flow of students.

“I want better service on the 105 bus,” said McQueen. “I would say, bring the [articulated] accordion buses as soon as possible, increase the frequency.”

Arseneault also noted that Projet Montréal has previously called for the price of monthly transit passes to be reduced for students and low-income earners to make their commutes more affordable.

Transparency and openness in government could be another major campaign issue, if Arseneault has his way.

“I hope to show people, through the way that I run my campaign and the ideas that I propose, that in six months from now, we’ll be in a position to encourage greater citizen participation through openness and, as a result, that we’ll be able to improve the delivery of services to citizens all over the borough and all over the city,” he said.

Arseneault has a bachelor’s degree in political science and philosophy from McGill and previously worked in the N.D.G. constituency office of Liberal MNA Kathleen Weil.

McQueen, a Concordia graduate and entrepreneur, ran unsuccessfully as a candidate for the Green Party in the 2007 and 2008 provincial elections before getting involved in municipal politics.

While McQueen’s nomination was unopposed, two people sought the party’s nomination in the Loyola district. Arseneault was chosen in a vote of 141 to 104 over Sharon Sweeney, a former tour planner who is now involved as a volunteer and fundraiser in several community organizations in the borough.

Mayoral Race Heating Up

Projet Montréal leader Richard Bergeron will be running to become Montreal’s mayor in the November election, as will Vision Montréal leader Louise Harel.

Seemingly ending months of speculation that he would throw his hat into the mayoral race, Liberal MP Denis Coderre registered a political party in his name—Équipe Denis Coderre pour Montréal—on Friday.

According to The Gazette, Union Montréal interim leader Richard Deschamps has not confirmed whether or not he will run for mayor. Former Union Montréal leader Gérald Tremblay resigned as mayor on Nov. 5, 2012, following allegations of corruption in the awarding of municipal construction contracts.

Many city councillors elected under the Union Montréal banner in 2009 have since left the party to sit as independents, including Susan Clarke, the current city councillor for the Loyola district.

Benoit-Antoine Bacon will begin a five-year term as Concordia’s new provost starting July 1. Photo Concordia University

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In keeping with recent tradition, there will be another new face on campus next year.

Concordia’s Board of Governors unanimously appointed Benoit-Antoine Bacon to be the university’s newest Provost and Vice President Academic Affairs, set to take office July 1 for a five-year term.

“This is a big moment,” said board Chair Norman Hebert Jr. in an interview with The Link following the meeting. “[Concordia President Alan Shepard] can’t do everything, and he needs a strong provost. This is his right hand.”

Before making his move to Concordia, Bacon will have to finish his current job as Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Science and associate Vice Principal Research at Bishop’s University.

Bacon holds a M.Sc. in Psychology and a PhD in Neuropsychology from the Université de Montréal. He is also a Concordia alumnus, having graduated in 1995 with an Honours Psychology.

Though he was keen to point out Bacon’s Concordia connection, and he’s excited about the changes that he can bring to the university, Shepard added that Bacon would be wise to take his time to become reacquainted with his alma mater.

“What I’ve told him is ‘don’t come and make any sudden decisions. Come get to know the place again,’” said Shepard. “He was here as a student but it was a while ago, and he was a visiting professor at the beginning of his teaching career.

“We’ve talked about him coming to get a lay of the land before starting to pull levers.”

Last year saw Concordia usher in its first official Academic Plan, which Shepard is eager to move forward on. But, he added, some revisions will be necessary as the new provost is brought on.

“We’re ushering in the next era of academic leadership,” said Shepard. “I think we’ll be doing a mix of traditional stuff that universities do, and some innovative stuff that not so many of them do.”

Part of this movement will be to continue towards Shepard’s vision for online and alternative learning at Concordia.

“We’re ushering in the next era of academic leadership. I think we’ll be doing a mix of traditional stuff that universities do, and some innovative stuff that not so many of them do.”
—Alan Shepard, Concordia President

While Bacon’s portfolio as provost will include e-learning in certain capacities, Shepard explained his intention in creating a new position to focus specifically on online education.

“I don’t know what we’ll call it yet, but I’m thinking of some sort of vice-provost role inside the provost office that would work on e-learning,” said Shepard. “We need somebody that wakes up everyday thinking of online learning and the sort of next-generation pedagogy as their baby.”

He added that this would not be restricted to eConcordia, the online learning platform run through the university’s for-profit e-learning corporation, KnowledgeOne.

“We have to position ourselves to stay current,” said Shepard.

According to Bishop’s University, Bacon’s primary research interests are in the field of visual neuroscience. He is also a member of Centre de Recherche en Neuropsychologie et Cognition out of the Université de Montréal and the Group for Interdisciplinary Research in Psychology Applied to Social Systems. Bacon also co-founded the Psychological Health and Well-Being Research Cluster at Bishop’s.