HOORAY FOR BOLLYWOOD! Performers round off the Accès Asie festival at last Saturday’s Bollywood party, held at the Just for Laughs museum. The event, featuring choreography as well as audience dancing to outtakes from popular Bollywood musicals, raised money for the “Jeunes musiciens du monde,” which funds a music school for Indian youth.

Quote of the week

“Judging from recent negotiations, it could be a long strike rather than a short one.” —Montreal Transit Corporation chairperson Claude Trudel, on the transit strike

Budget meets FRAPRU

Social housing advocate group FRAPRU will be calling all activists this Saturday, May 26, for a post-budget march from genteel Westmount to hardscrabble St-Henri. Their beef, says FRAPRU spokesperson Marie-Josée Corriveau, is the province’s reluctance to spread some dough around, despite recently pocketing a significant chunk of change from Ottawa.

With Quebec Finance Minister Monique Jérôme-Forget presenting the Charest minority government’s first budget today, Thursday, May 24, housing advocates hope that some portion of the $750-million Ottawa promised Quebec will go to housing, even though the Premier himself indicated it would go towards tax breaks.

“The spirit of the march is going to either be celebratory, or to ask the government once more why it still refuses to invest in new social housing,” says Corriveau.

Corriveau says she’s expecting representatives from housing groups from Laval, the South Shore, Sherbrooke, Trois-Rivières and the Gatineau region to take part in the march. She claims that 445,000 tenants in the province are paying more than they can afford in rent.

The march will assemble at Westmount park (corner de Maisonneuve and Melville) at 1:30 p.m. and make its way down to Notre-Dame and Atwater.

by Patrick Lejtenyi

Homeless owe big

The next time a panhandler bugs you for money, it might just be to pay off a municipal fine.

Homeless people in Montreal owe the city more than $2-million in unpaid tickets, and the city continues to burden the justice system and jails by locking up homeless people, says Pierre Gaudreau, director of RAPSIM, a coalition that works on homeless people’s rights.

The money, he says, could be better used to work with homeless people and build shelters than to harass them.

To that end, RAPSIM has started a campaign to persuade the municipality and police that “ticketing is not a solution,” says Gaudreau, and to invest in shelters. The group held a demonstration before the offices of Transport Montreal last week after a Université de Montréal study found that the city doled out more than double the number of tickets to homeless people in metros than it issued the year before.

The number of tickets issued in other public spaces went down by 11 per cent, says Gaudreau.

“It’s not enough, but there is a decrease,” he says.

He adds that police are beginning to realize that ticketing homeless people is not very helpful, but the habit dies hard.

by Samer Elatrash

Anarchy celluloid

Local lefties wrap up the virtual orgy of dissent that is the month-long Montreal Festival of Anarchy this week starting with a free outdoor film fest on St-Laurent this Thursday, May 24.

“Outdoor film screenings have this amazing atmosphere to them,” says festival co-organizer Aaron Lakoff. “It’s a great way to bring anarchy out into the streets.”

The evening will feature a dozen, mostly locally produced short films, ranging from four to 25 minutes in length. The lineup includes L’Empire de la palme, which details the trials of indigenous farmers in Colombia, Raise the Rates, about the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty and Silent Movie, by artist Freda Guttman.

“I’m really hoping to draw in people who are just passing by who stop for a few minutes and watch a film and maybe learn something,” Lakoff says. “[And] it’s good because the films are short, so even people with short attention spans can pick up a lot of information.”

“The Montreal Anarchist Film Festival...Under the Moon!” takes place May 24 at 9 p.m., at 2035 St-Laurent. Bring your own blanket. In case of rain, it will be rescheduled to May 31. For info, see www.myspace.com/filmsanarchistesmtl.

by Christopher Hazou

Solidarity for Lebanon

Many of us would probably like to support the political causes we believe in, but that thing called “life” often gets in the way. When a little bit of spare time does come our way, presenting an opportunity to indulge in some well-needed, much-deserved social interaction, we must weigh our options carefully.

Well, if your cause of choice is Lebanese social justice, you need not wrestle with the guilt of choosing fun over getting involved, because on Sunday, May 27, at la Sala Rossa (4848 St-Laurent, 8 p.m., $5–$15), Tadamon!, the Montreal-based collective working to improve the social conditions for Lebanese people both in Lebanon and around the world, bring you “Sounds of Solidarity” (“Tadamon” happens to mean “solidarity” in Arabic). The annual fundraising concert, featuring a fusion of Middle-Eastern and Western music, is sure to draw some public support in light of the fierce renewed fighting between the Lebanese army and Sunni Islamist militants in Lebanon, where dozens have been killed and scores wounded, with many of the casualties civilians.

“Montreal is one of the largest and most influential Lebanese diaspora communities,” says Tadamon! spokesperson Sawsan Kalache. “We can really make a difference and fight the injustices faced by Lebanese people everywhere.”?

by Steve Zylbergold

Rear-view mirror

19 years ago, May 27–june 9, 1988

On the cover: Craig Russell, “Canada’s best known drag queen,” appearing in Too Outrageous, the sequel to 1977’s Outrageous. On meeting his idol Mae West, Russell says, “She was the first woman I met who could make me feel like a man. She knew you were gay but, in her words, ‘So what—better than depressed!’”

• The Mirror notes that the city of Montreal is offering welfare recipients free entrance to La Ronde—but not free use of public transit, which could actually help them find jobs.

• Reviewing Crocodile Dundee II, Stan Shatenstein writes, “Paul Hogan returns, and he’s also written the sequel’s screenplay, aided by his son, Brett. The two men were knocking back a few Forsters when they scribbled the outline of this story on a napkin, and they must have run out of ideas before they ran out of beer.”

• On Michelle Shocked’s The Texas Campfire Tapes, recorded on a Walkman, “You get crickets, passing trucks and spontaneous patter thrown in for free,” writes Mary Lamey.

Angel >>The P3G genome mapping project Announced Tuesday at the 12th annual Human Genome Meeting, being held in Montreal, the Public Population Project in Genomics (P3G) will gather DNA data from 20,000 volunteer donors for a genetic survey, making it the most ambitious project to date in the field. The P3G project, to be based at the Université de Montréal, is different from other biobanks in that it will act as a central conduit for other genetic research projects and will harmonize international information-gathering and research methods. Researchers say this will be a huge help to the study of disease, genetics and environment. All genetic data donated, the project’s director says, will be kept strictly confidential and will only be shared to other approved research projects.

Insect >> The Vancouver PD On Saturday, May 19, a Vancouver police officer impersonated a journalist from the city’s 24 Hours free daily to lure anti-Olympics protester David Cunningham to a public place, where he was promptly arrested. The Canadian Association of Journalists called the force’s actions “callous” and “foolish, play-acting escapades;” the editor of 24 Hours said the action was “unacceptable.” The CAJ also said the stunt further undermined journalists’ credibility and could possibly create a chilling effect on people who would otherwise talk to reporters, but may back out now fearing they’re talking to cops. Meanwhile, three underage members of Cunningham’s group trashed the BC Premier Gordon Campbell’s office on Tuesday to protest forced evictions in the run-up to 2010.