by RAF KATIGBAK

About 134 years, four months and 22 days ago, the Toronto Trades Assembly organized the first major workingman’s demonstration. Their immediate intention was the release of 24 leaders of the Toronto Typographical Union, arrested following their illegal strike to secure the nine-hour working day (but possibly also for their gratuitous use of ironic quotation marks). About 10,000 Torontonians showed up to listen to the speeches calling for abolition of a law that called trade unions “criminal conspiracies.” Labour Day was born.

Over one-and-a-quarter centuries later, Montreal has developed its own way of paying tribute to the working class people: we like to get shitfaced.

Well, more precisely, I like to get shitfaced. Or at least I did last Labour Day weekend, and I wasn’t alone. With the influx of fresh-faced frosh-ing academics and the myriad musical miscellany, more than a few of my fellow citizens awoke Monday morning with a head full of cobwebs and a mouth that tasted like ass, praising the powers that be for the governmental holiday decree.

While I often like to be critical of this town’s over-festivalization, the truth is the reason many of us were still smarting Monday is because of the sheer number of must-see events that happened last weekend (and of course their subsequent alcoholic after-party aftermath). With probably 100 acts compacted into three days in several venues across the city, the city came alive as promoters and partygoers tried to wring the last drops of fun from these fleeting summer days.

While I have yet to hear if Dennis Rodman’s appearance at that new Opera Club was worth the hours of wait time, I did hear the first day of the Osheaga Festival was a blast. I myself did not attend, mostly because in the excitement I thought people were saying there was a “Hochelaga” festival, so when I arrived at the East-End district and found nothing but topless breakfast joints and bars advertising Verres Stérilisés, I was confused. Sadly, there were no living legends performing on huge outdoor stages; instead I was treated to four overweight Metallica look-alikes on their balcony drinking Wild Cat and blasting Cryptopsy. Still fun though.

It’s probably just as well that I didn’t go to Osheaga, since I firmly believe that:

a) There’s no way you can process and appreciate that many acts in a single day.

b) Full-body mud treatments should always include an hour-long rub down, sea-salt-and-almond-extract exfoliation and a Mystic Music of the Humpback Whales soundtrack.

And c) My days at open-air music fests ended abruptly after bad-tripping at an outdoor rave, convinced that everyone was a demon but comforted in the fact that nothing really existed anyway and that reality is just a single mote navigating the inner space of my mind’s eyeball.

While I didn’t get to take in the sites, sounds and smells of thousands of sweaty sun-kissed hipsters and indie-emo-embryos, I was able to catch the Metropolis after-festivities Saturday night. While headliner Uffie’s lacklustre performance cemented her place as most overrated, over-hyped act of 2006, Paris’s tag-teaming Ed Banger DJ crew proved that only the French can gleefully prance on that line between hard techno and rave cheese, and also that Rage Against the Machine should belong in more people’s record boxes.

That same night I shuttled between Metropolis and the SAT, where Chromeo—Montreal’s impresarios of ’80s funked-up love jams, and, according to their myspace page, “the only successful Arab/Jew partnership since the dawn of human culture”—proved that their new album will be something to be reckoned with, and that in the three years these guys have been around, their market strategy of targeting the16-year-old-screaming-girls-in-the-front-row demographic has been utterly successful.

What impressed me most about this weekend was that hordes of people actually made almost every event at every venue a success—despite the soul-crushing hangover that felt like being stabbed in the cerebral cortex. And once again many of us participated in that other Montreal Labour Day tradition: calling in sick on Tuesday.

Riff-Raff@sympatico.ca

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