Surprise Saturdays

When Life gets too serious, you have to take it upon yourself to get it back under your control.

We're Saturday, December 5th. 2009, of course. For a while, my schedule for upcoming live shows was set: December 8th (Tuesday), at Centre St-Ambroise, a solo gig with Torontonian Daniel Greer (on tour for his Victory Songs 2.0, release), the exquisite Philémon Chante and the incomparable Simon Schreiber; January 2nd (Saturday), at Casa Del Popollo with my band, Blooze Konekshun, headlining, with Infinite Moksha and one of two Montréal bands called LeMonade; a show in late January or early February at Barfly again with my band - opening for my current favourite live local band - and pretty damn good on record, too - Dead Messenger; and February 26th, a solo piece at Casa again with my now-Victoria-based UnPop-bro Nate's acousti-punk project, Small Wars, and Jonathan Jude.

But two days ago, my friend Triangles Stuart's show became short one headliner when out-of-towners backed out, and I was offered the gig - and I just couldn't say no, despite the fact that I knew I'd only be half-ready.

So that show is tonight. As usual, I don't know what I'm going to be playing yet, but I'm also going to have to rely on the power of my ad-libbing/storytelling/humour to make this enjoyable to all. Funny thing is, it's when I least expect it that I deliver the most memorable performances; I kind of wish I hadn't forgotten my recording device to immortalize the evening's goings-on.

Murphy's Law, doubled.

I hope those who do make it there know they might be in for a treat. And maybe a cover of Beyoncé's Single Ladies (Put A Ring On It), that I just can't seem to get out of my head.

In preparation, I've been downing Pomegranate Rockstar (with vodka) - breakfast of champions. It feels like Cuba, last year, when I'd have vodka and orange juice for breakfast - no big plans of binging or drunkenness, just a kick to get the body moving.

Homoerotic Wednesdays

It's been a bizarre day, to say the least.

I woke up around 11AM, which isn't so bad since I was only working at noon. But the reason I was working at noon was because I had to finish by 7PM to help Alternate Lady Of The House move some boxes from her current apartment to what will be, in a week, her new home.

I have a glance at the news on Cyberpresse to find out that the Habs traded Kyle Chipchura to the Anaheim Ducks for a 4th-round draft pick - could have been better, could have been worse, but that's another slow player no longer on our team.

Upon opening my email (mainly to see if work has unexpected news for me to attend to before getting there), I get this:


That's right: Traci fucking Lords wants to follow me on Twitter. The real Traci Lords. One of my first boyhood crushes (alongside Samantha Fox, Claire Pimparé, Nathalie Simard, ahead of Demi Moore - who caught up on lost time in my teen years, though! - or Christina Applegate) - and a pioneer in self-advertising (as well as in underage porn, pseudo-techno music and other things).

Then I get ready and leave, and just as I'm locking my front door, I notice the light from my porch broken on the ground. This, after twice having people de-pot flowers and put them in our mailbox at night... and our next-door neighbour not being targeted that way... it kind of got me wondering if we'd done anything wrong lately...

Then I walked to the subway to realize it was warmer out than I had expected - a very welcome surprise - accompanied by the extra surprise of having the subway attendant refusing to let me purchase a ticket, then scooting outside for no apparent reason, leaving me to pass through without paying - which, again, suited me fine because I'm dead broke, as the bank froze my fucking account for no reason whatsoever.

The ride to work was uneventful, as I was reading Slash's autobiography and listening to my mp3 player - both very entertaining.

I get to work and know I'll have three employees at my disposal for tonight's shift, two that are doing well and one who needs coaching, but that I'd have to give everyone at least a few common pointers to look for even though two of them don't really need them... except that Brendan, the one who needs help, isn't there... so we can just have the shift as is and not be bothered to give out a long speech and teach - and that works for me, too, because I just realized that my voice is on the verge of disappearing.

I then made a call to the Alternate Lady Of The House only to find out she may not need my services after all, as her mother's there already, painting and bossing people around.

So it was a mid-karmaic day, with one good thing offset by a bad one, but never to the extreme of any one side... and Greg, my employee and sometime drummer is in a homoerotic mood, mostly joking about balls, cocks and asses in double-entendres.

As Ice Cube once said, and as I've quoted on here before:

All in all, I gotta say, it was a good day

Video of the Week: American Devices

I think I'm liking this new Video of the Week feature... the week's barely starting and I'm already all up in it...

Here's another one I upped on my Facebook page quite a few times already: The American Devices' 'You Wouldn't Understand'...

For those of you who need a description of what they're about to see, it's about a guy, sitting on a chair, in what seems to be an empty apartment, and a dominatrix walking around him, sometimes whipping him gently.

Now that that's clear, here's a bit of info on the band itself: founded 30 years ago, this all-Montréal band is 'fronted' (although I'm 150% sure he despises this term) by Rick Trembles, cartoonist extraordinaire whose work has graced the pages of such prestigious zines as Fish Piss and such renown newspapers as the Montreal Mirror; he has also just released a second volume of his Motion Picture Purgatory series, in which he critiques and analyzes a film in one page - and in comic form. Also in the band are Rob Labelle and André Asselin, other legends of our local scene, as well as another comic-book genius, Howard Chackowicz on drums.

Former member Chris Burns (who has played bass, guitar and drums in the band and whom you could also know from bands like Crackpot and Nutsak, the latter with Asselin and Chackowicz) came up with a list of former members for me to tack onto this:

Jackie Gallant (drums), Cups Von Helm (drums), Suzy Joseph (farfisa organ), Mary-Jane Lamond (keys and vocals), Louise Burns (keys and vocals), Sylvie Payne (bass), and Dave Hill (bass).

to which Trembles added:

You missed Larry Vitus & Eric (hard rock goners) Sandmark who were both on bass for a bit (in the) late eighties.

There you have it, a complete list of current and former members of the longest-lasting freak unit (and apparent revolving door, especially on bass) in town.


You can call them punk, or new wave, or rock - but you would be dead-wrong. Sure, they rock and groove harder than Devo and The Ramones, but they can also slay their instruments with more love than Ravi Shankar at Woodstock.


But, hey - maybe you get it, or maybe You Wouldn't Understand.

Oh Yes: December Sucks

You know what? Maybe it's the Montréal bipolarity taking hold, but after a day of dirty fucking snow and sub-zero weather before December even got here, I have to say: scratch the previous post, this coming month will suck.

I always forget just how much I hate winter until it actually arrives.

I'm not your typical Montrealer who complains that it's too cold in winter and does a complete 180 and says it's too hot in the summer; I bask (and bake) in the 40-degree (115 for our American friends) humidity my island provides me with from June to August because I know how much I hate minus-40 degrees in February... but I forget the extent.

You know how sometimes something pisses you off so much you could hurt someone, or even yourself? Winter turns me into Stalin - that rage, times a million.

It's so cold you could kill AIDS, it's so slippery even hiking boots won't stop you from falling, it gets so messy that your wool socks get a brownish hue; add that to the metal of cars breaking, the asphalt in the streets decomposing by the chunks, snow so heavy it makes rooftops collapse and bridges break, and a hockey team that hasn't won a championship since 1993.

I'm 12 hours away from Day One and I'm already angry and depressed.

Fuck winter.

The Year's Coming To A Close

November's ending, and the year's coming into its last throes - and what do I have to say for myself? What have I done this year that merits attention, that makes it worth havin spent 365 days in it?

I've remained in country (unless you consider Toronto to be another country - I don't yet, but I did feel rather alien in it, as always), I've played 15 local shows and hosted UnPop yet again, but without an actual Finale to speak of yet, few outside shows.

My book is still not out (although it's pretty damn close at this point), I'm expecting news in a matter of days and already have approved the texts, fonts and bar code.

I'll soon be living alone with my two kitties in an apartment that was made for two humans and maybe an extra tiny one...

I'll get to redecorate, though, that should be fun, sports and music memorabilia everywhere.

My grandparents celebrated their 55th wedding anniversary; I like that people who have trouble getting out of couches get more accomplishments done in a year than I do.

I wanted to exercise and walk, that didn't happen. I think I need to buy myself some skates and start playing outdoors hockey again - except for the fact that I hate the fucking cold. And I likely can't afford new skates, especially since I've been using goalie skates all my life and those would be the ones I'd need - and they're fucking expensive.

Oh well, we'll see what the new year brings. Either way, I still have a shot at ending 2009 with a bang.

Video of the Week: Dead Messenger

I started a new weekly feature just last week, Video Of the Week, and I nearly didn't post one this week... so much for continuity, eh?

Well, in the hopes of maybe getting myself to follow through on something for once in my life, here's a video from Dead Messenger that they did last summer (so it's still relatively recent). The song is 'Fat Black Heart', one of the best from their recent CD 'Love Is The Only Weapon', and usually the song they end their live sets with - not bad, considering they're one of the best live bands in this stinking town.

The song starts off as a convenience store in-line camera, then just slowly evolves into random acts of randomness that happen every day in town: people dancing in the streets, people walking down the streets with TVs on their heads, people hanging out in the middle of cinder blocks - and shots of Dead Messenger rocking out.

I like this song so much I've already linked the video four times on my Facebook page, and have used their chorus as an intro to a song of mine at a few live shows of late - and I like the band so much I've booked them for a fifth UnPop show in 5 years this Fall. I also plan on booking and opening for them for a future show at Barfly early in 2010.

Instant Karma

It sure feels like Scandinavia at this time of year: you can smell the snow begging to drop from the sky, it's dark in mid-afternoon, all sports talk is about winter sports and all arts talk is about dark, depressing art, be it music (heavy stuff like black metal), scary paintings, or black and white pictures.

For a night owl, though, it's an early Christmas.

Kind of makes you wish life were like an all-inclusive resort in the Caribbean, where you could drink all day, relax all the time, work if you feel like it, and not feel an ounce of remorse in the process.

My life will be undergoing some massive changes in the near future, mostly filled with people disappearing from it - it won't be a first, but this time I may not have close friends to fall back on like I did all the other times. Not that I don't have friends I love and that I think love me back, just that for the past few years, our ways of life have gone in totally different directions and I wouldn't want to impose my presence more than the twice-a-year habit the last half-decade brought us to.

I used to have three big bunches of friends I'd jump from every season or so, so it never got boring and was always new and fresh - plus I could alternate between English- and French-speaking gangs and not lose one in the process. But now...

With the Lady Of The House moving out, and Alternate Lady Of the House having purchased a faraway house with her long-time boyfriend, my immediate circle of friends went from 3 to 0. Add a best friend in Mexico, one with a one-year old - and a serious day job taking care of invalids and night school to better his financial situation - plus one who is perennially busy and has hundreds of other friends to see, and a music scene of hipsters I disagree with more and more on a daily basis - I'm starting to see my future path open up before me: to see other humans, I'll have no choice but to become a regular barfly at the corner Bar Fullum, like the old guys that seem to have their chairs molded after their asses for having been there too often and for too long.

Or maybe I need a car. Or maybe I need to move. And if I need to move... NYC, or the ocean side? A city filled with strong nightlife, or a quiet beach-side place where I can relax and die? Every time I keep pulling out, they keep pulling me in...

Physical Work Vs Mental Work

I was debating the values of physical, menial work versus more cerebral work, the other day, with the soon-to-be Former Lady Of The House who, as is customary when people have known each other for roughly a decade, seems to think her work has more value than mine.

Some folks refuse to admit they are both demanding - and at just about the same level, at that. Working physically, using your muscles to move and lift things, to run, stand, takes up energy; at the end of the day, tiredness occurs. Concentrating, thinking, creating also requires energy: the brain works and assimilates information, data, then organizes it; at the end of the day, you can still be ectenuated, exhausted, mentally fatigued.

In the first case, your muscles refuse to follow what your brain asks of them and you slouch or sleep; in the second, your brain refuses to work anymore, thus even if your muscles wanted to move, they couldn't, because the brain can't tell them where or how to move.

The end result is the same fucking thing: fatigue.

One isn't necessarily worth more than the other, by the way, they are different ways to accomplish things, and often, one person who cannot do one or the other just won't ''get'' the effort it requires.

That's all there is to it, really... I've been up for 20 hours, writing, thinking... it's almost 8AM and I should be getting at least some sleep. Guess I'm fatigued...

D'oh Habs D'oh!

So, I waited for the first quarter of the season before I got to talking about the Canadiens, to give them a chance to gel, to give the new coach a chance to get his system in, for a leader to emerge, for the goalies to take their rightful place.

The sum of this team's parts should be a playoff-contending team: a possible 40-goal scorer with tremendous speed who never backs down (Michael Cammalleri); the most consistent player of the past 3 seasons who happens to be perfect defensively and always be near the team's scoring lead (Tomas Plekanec); a 5th-overall pick in nets who is deemed by most to be a franchise player (Carey Price); a goalie who has always brought the team back into contention when no one else could (Jaroslav Halak); a Stanley Cup winner who played in the last 2 Finals (Hal Gill); a perennial All Star and one of the 5 most complete defensemen in the game (Andrei Markov); another Cup winner who was at one point seen as the best two-way player in the game and whom the Rangers deemed worthy of $7.33M per year (Scott Gomez); yet another Cup winner and former 48-goal scorer when paired with Gomez (Brian Gionta); a player who should now be hitting the 30-goal mark every season (Andrei Kostitsyn); a gifted playmaker with tons of grit (Sergei Kostitsyn); two potential 20-to-30 goal scoring powerforwards (Guillaume Latendresse and Max Pacioretty); last year's most improved player, quick as lightning and very good defensive forward, the team's best faceofff man (Maxim Lapierre); hard-nosed, hard-working veterans (Glen Metropolit and Cup winner Travis Moen); returning steady veteran defenseman Roman Hamrlik and his younger yet more reliable partner Josh Gorges, a young and potentially bruising defenser and great team player (Ryan O'Byrne); the best - and smartest heavyweight fighter in the game (Georges Laraque); a good offensive happy-go-lucky journeyman defenseman (Paul Mara); a couple of last-chance draft picks from years past (Matt D'Agostini, Ben Maxwell and Kyle Chipchura) and a host of talented up-and-coming prospects (P.K. Subban, Mathieu Carle, Yannick Weber, David Desharnais, Cedric Desjardins)...

Gone are the oft-injured heroes of the past decade (Saku Koivu, Chris Higgins, Mathieu Dandenault, Francis Bouillon, Alex Tanguay, Steve Bégin, Cristobal Huet, Mike Komisarek) and those whose heart and guts were sometimes doubtful (Alex Kovalev, Michael Ryder), all replaced with smaller yet youngerand healthier models of themselves.

With a new coach that's viewed as an experienced, winning (though never in the playoffs) teacher with a boring, defensive style - 3 things we needed, 2 things we could have lived without.

But that's probably precisely where General Manager Bob Gainey's overhaul went wrong, to wit:

- If you keep the players and change the coach (with a real coach, not a GM-stepping-in-as-coach), generally, the dynamics change and the shock treatment is enough to get things going again.
- If you change most of the players, especially the ones who were carrying the bulk of the offense, half the team in this case, that's 8-to-11 new players, who have to get accustomed to playing in a new building, in front of new fans, living in a new city and new media environment, learning a new system.

What you don't need is 11 players learning how to live in a new city (the one who is most passionate about the sport you're playing, at that) and a coach who is dealing with the same issues - and have 23 players needing to learn a new system that may not suit them in the end because it wasn't instilled with the players in place in mind.

And the coach arrived here telling the media and the players that his team looked out of shape, and he got them to work harder than they were used to. Immediate results were seen: injuries to Markov, O'Byrne, Gill, Gionta, Laraque and D'Agostini were quick to materialize, putting more pressure on the goalies and on the kids who may not have been ready to graduate from the farm team.

So we have a team that's among the bottom-feeders, skating like chickens with their heads cut off, defensemen unable to make any passes, forwards who can't score (more shooters than passers in the line-up anyway, so it isn't balanced enough), goalies who are left out to dry and can't afford even the slightest mistake, no captain (my guess is they were going to name Markov but he got injured before they could do so) - and no redemption in sight.

Journalists are calling for Gainey's head, the crowds are booing the home team, and the only asset worth anything in a trade is the only guy everyone wants to keep here (I'll provide my thoughts on that in a post soon enough).

At least it can't get any worse, right?

Stalker Express

Facebook: the CIA isn't the only agency out to get you. Cops have busted criminals through their profile picture alone, the IRS is now using it as a tool... and people are using it to find shit out about their exes. Or people they had crushes on in high school. Or that person who works at the corner store that you think looks cute.

Thing is, it's not just the original user who's doing the stalking. With Firefox, Chrome and Explorer always vying to Facilitate Your Life, everyone who uses a computer after you can now stalk the exact same people you were stalking - in addition to the ones they were about to check up on!

I found an old friend from my early teenage years on there today; I wrote them to apologize for ending a pen pal relationship we had going when we were 11 or 12. I just never wrote back, even though I wanted to, it was just never the right time.

I'm in that kind of mood these days - apologetic, not stalker-y. It feels like I'm on a 12-step program or I'm dying of cancer or something, except I'm not. I guess I'm just trying to set things right, be a decent human being, give back. I'm not sure I'd go as far as the protagonists in My Name is Earl (one of my favourite TV shows of the past decade), where they actually make up for things they did wrong in the past by doing favours for the people they wronged - but I'll see where it leads.