MOZART MEETS THE METRO: Opera singer Chad Louwerse made the daily commute a bit more classy as he belts out some choice bits of Mozart at Place des Arts metro on Monday afternoon, as part of the third edition of the Music in the Metro (metrOpera) series. Photo by Rachel Granofsky

Quote of the week

“The amount of land in protected status within the Canadian Boreal, now at under 10 per cent, is inadequate and must be markedly increased.” —From an open letter from 1,500 scientists urging the Canadian government to protect the largest carbon sink in the world.

Pride parade nixed

Montreal’s 14-year-old, world-famous les/bi/gay/trans pride parade and the accompanying Le Grand Rendez-vous community days have been dropped by Fierté Montreal, the group formed to organize the events this year. Parade founders Divers/Cité earlier this year decided to focus on the increasingly popular live music street parties and offloaded responsibility for the parade and community days to Fierté Montreal. But Fierté Montreal’s Jacques Tricot says organizing the parade was an uphill battle from the start, from finding a date to accommodating the demands of community groups that were frustrated when the parade became a night affair two years ago.

Divers/Cité stipulated that this year’s parade could not happen during its queer arts celebration at the beginning of August because they wanted to distinguish the events. This left no weekends available during Montreal’s festival-packed summer.

But, insists Divers/Cité’s Suzanne Girard, “No one said the parade is cancelled,” even though her group and Fierté Montreal have officially bowed out. That leaves no one to organize the parade, but she hopes the community will see this as an opportunity to question what it wants Pride to be. A last-minute, community-driven effort is the only hope for a Pride parade this summer.

Divers/Cité runs from August 1–August 5.

by Jane Shulman

Anarchy reads

People in Montreal once again have the opportunity to challenge the state by picking up a book as St-Henri plays host to the eighth annual Anarchist Bookfair this weekend. Featuring 15 workshops over Saturday and Sunday, film screenings, a program for children and around 100 book distributors, organizers say the Bookfair is the largest Anarchist event in North America. The distributors “range from large publishers like AK Press to zinesters,” according to organizer Helen Hudson.

Attracting participants from across North America, Hudson says the Bookfair is intended to be a forum for people to network, share ideas and organize around common values “We put into practice the principles of anarchism. We base the Bookfair around the principles of autonomy and solidarity as well as focusing on accessibility,” she says.

Hudson stresses the idea of solidarity as a central focus of the event, pointing to a workshop being presented by a French anarchist group about last year’s uprisings against racism and police brutality that started in the Paris suburbs.

Events kick off with an Anarchist Cabaret on Friday, May 18 at the Main Hall (5390 St-Laurent), 8 p.m., $5–$7 suggested donation, followed by the Bookfair and workshops on Saturday and Sunday.

For more details, visit www.anarchistbookfair.ca.

Saving Antarctica

It seems like news from the climate change front just keeps growing progressively more dire. Even the oil companies have started toning down their “global-warming-is-a-myth-created-by-left-wing-radicals-like-Al-Gore” rhetoric in recent months, a sure sign that keeping your head in the sand trying to pretend we’re not all doomed is a strategy that’s just so, well… 20th century. According to Steven Guilbeault, director of Greenpeace Quebec, “Two-thirds of the species remaining on Earth will have disappeared by 2100 if no measures are taken to counter this phenomenon.” Good times, man.

But apparently all is not yet lost, and on Tuesday, May 22, at 7:30 p.m. at the Palais des congrès (1001 Place Jean-Paul-Riopelle, corner Bleury), internationally acclaimed biologist Jean Lemire will be presenting his allegedly stunning audio-visual documentation of a rapidly melting Antarctica, and, along with Greenpeace’s Guilbeault, Equiterre co-founder Sidney Ribaux and Dr. Ahmed Djoghlaf of the United Nations Environment Program, will be offering ways to address the current crisis as part of an Equiterre-sponsored conference called “Mission Antarctique: La Terre vue de la mer.”

Admission is $40 for adults, $30 for students. For more information, go to www.equiterre.org.

Dress vs. homophobia

Are you looking for a special way to commemorate this year’s International Day Against Homophobia, but conjuring up the spirit of Freddie Mercury in a séance at the Coloniale bathhouse seems too creepy? Fret not, because on Thursday, May 17, from 6–8 p.m. at 6 Weredale Park, the people from Project 10 will present “Gay Proms Through the Ages,” a fashion show extravaganza ($10 entrance, $7 for students). If you’re one of those nostalgic types who remembers their own gay prom like it was yesterday, this event should bring back many fond memories.

Proceeds from the show will support Project 10, a community organization providing help and information to young people who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, transsexual, two-spirit, intersexed, queer or questioning. Models will sport clothing from Mad-âme boutique and designs created by the youth from Project 10.

“What’s special about this show is that it was conceived by our young members as a fundraising event to help us expand our reach through the community,” says Elizabeth Meyer, co-chair of Project 10 board of directors.

For info and tickets, call (514) 989-4585 or visit www.p10.qc.ca. For more on the International Day Against Homophobia, see www.homophobiaday.org.

Rear-view mirror

18 years ago-may 19–june 1, 1989

On the cover: A pair of tango dancers, as two “post-modern interpretations of the world’s oldest dance” are performed at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and Club Soda. “If you do [tango] very authentically, it sounds a little too exotic,” says Ramon Pelinski, leader of Tango X3. “I’m not interested in doing exotic or ethnic music. Then you’re a purist, and I don’t get any fun out of that.”

• Plans are afoot to open a needle exchange near St-Laurent and Ste-Catherine. “We have documented here the highest [HIV-infection] rates in Canada among injection drug users,” says Dr. Catherine Hankins at the Department on Community Health’s Centre for AIDS Studies.

• Jenny Ross’s Notes From Underground: “Ludwig Von 88 do drum-machine punk français like Béru, but with more variations, like Caribbean rhythms; fun, silly music to read Tintin by.”

• Earth Girls Are Easy is “unbelievably dumb, predictable and corny” as well as “dazzling, brainless summer matinee material. Awesome.”

• Bifteck hosts a Slum Dog comix launch

Angel >> Jerry Falwell On Tuesday, the Almighty, in His wisdom, decided to call back his favourite son. Jerry Falwell, moral majoritarian and defender of traditional American family values against the onslaught of homosexual abortionist pornographers, shrugged off this mortal coil to join his personal saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ, thanks to a bum ticker. Falwell’s railings against atheism, secularism and humanism, as well as civil rights (civil “wrongs,” according to him), pagans, the American Civil Liberties Union and Teletubbies were legendary. And his staunch support for segregation, the apartheid regime and Israel—in order to usher in the Second Coming, with the Anti-Christ being of necessity Jewish—laid the foundations for the current run of success enjoyed by the religious right as embodied in the Republican Party.

Insect >> Politicizing the RCMP Following last week’s arrest of Jeff Monaghan, the Environment Canada employee who was arrested (but not charged) by the Mounties following his leak of the feds’ generally weak green plan, many an eyebrow has been raised about political interference in the course of their duties. The Harper government has displayed an almost pathological paranoia in communications control, a fact not lost on opposition parties last week when they noted that leaks that have helped the Conservatives weren’t followed up by early-morning arrests. Recent allegations of incompetence around the Air India affair, a culture of cover-ups and even of senior brass abusing the force’s pension haven’t helped them improve a badly tarnished image.