Quote of the week

“I just figured it was another commercial until I looked up. Then he did his little dance with everything hanging out.” —Marana, Arizona resident Cora King, after a 30-second clip of a “graphic sex act” from cable porn channel Club Jenna interrupted the final thrilling minutes of Super Bowl XLIII, featuring the Arizona Cardinals, in the Tucson area.

Greening culture

Since last week’s budget showed that the Harper government isn’t backing down from its war on Canada-Council-sponging, sexually deranged layabouts, artists can now add Kyoto-loving tree-huggery to their list of crimes designed to annoy Conservatives.

To facilitate this, Culture Montreal is hosting a conference called The Arts See Green: For Eco-Responsible Cultural Events today, Thursday, Feb. 5 from 9 a.m. to 12 p.m. at the TOHU (2345 Jarry E.).

“Some of the tips might seem stupid, but someone’s got to think of it,” says Culture Montreal’s Sandra O’Connor. “For example, there’s been a shift to using the Web for promotion, rather than posters and flyers. And there are people who found that using duct tape to secure their wires was creating a huge mess, so they switched to Velcro bands.”

But it’s not just a question of turning off the lights when you leave the room. O’Connor says new organizations have been founded recently that green artists can take advantage of.

“For a long time people were asking what can be done with materials from old sets. There’s an organization called Matériaux pour les arts Montréal [mamontreal.qc.ca] that will find ways to re-use and recycle all these resources,” she says.

See culturemontreal.ca for details.

Fisk a hot item

Few journalists can claim rock star status the way that veteran Middle East correspondent Robert Fisk can. With a Feb. 19 speaking engagement scheduled at Concordia, organizers are anxious to ensure that some of the 600 available seats go to the general public, and not just the usual circle of devoted admirers of the award-winning British author and war correspondent for the U.K. daily The Independent. “We’re taking reservations because we expect it to be quite full,” says Georgina Smith, a member of the Montreal Citizen Forum, which is sponsoring the event. “Each person can reserve two places and no more.”

Organizers are also concerned that Concordia may demand an extra fee for increased security, as they sometimes have in the past for events dealing with the Middle East. Fisk will be addressing Canada’s role in the region. “We’re hoping that they’ll be cooperative and not pull some rabbit out of a hole after all the trouble we’ve gone through to bring him here,” says Smith.

Fisk speaks at 7 p.m., at Concordia’s Hall Building (1455 de Maisonneuve W.), Room H-110. Suggested donation of $20, $10 for students and low income. For reservations e-mail F19Fisk@gmail.com, for more info, visit montrealcitizenforum.org.

by CHRISTOPHER HAZOU

Gathering
good seeds

While the cold, ice, snow and relentless darkness Montrealers endure every winter might have you thinking more about jumping off the Jacques Cartier bridge than what your garden might look like this summer, you know there’s light on the horizon when Action Communiterre, les Amis du Jardin botanique de Montréal and Seeds of Diversity Canada get together to hold their annual Seedy Sunday Seed Fair, now into its ninth year.

Taking place this Sunday, Feb. 8, from 10 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. at the Botanical Gardens (4101 Sherbrooke E.), the always popular event is an opportunity for local producers of organic, heirloom, open-pollinated vegetables, flowers and herb seeds to get together, trade seeds and compare notes.

“We’re trying to make sure industry keeps their hands off of genetic material somehow, and one way to do that is by increasing access to these seeds through local organizing,” says Action Communiterre director Kelly Krauter. “Seedy Sunday is about people involved in urban agriculture and local farmers getting together to share seeds for free—although certainly if you choose to buy seeds there you’ll be supporting local organic agriculture as well, so that’s good too.”

Several related workshops will be taking place on site and admission is 100 per cent free.

by CHRIS BARRY

Chamber music
for the masses

If you’re a classical music lover, there is another way to catch free live performances besides hanging around metro station platforms all day. Since December, Chamber Music Without Borders (CMWB) has been presenting a free weekly lunch-hour concert series, every Thursday at 12:30 p.m., in the beautiful serenity of the Montreal’s St. James United Church sanctuary (463 Ste-Catherine W.).

CMWB, a musical outreach program organized by students from McGill University’s Schulich School of Music, works with different community groups in order to make classical music more accessible to working families, senior citizens, homeless people and other marginalized individuals. The weekly concert series runs until April.

“People who attend these weekly concerts are in for a real treat”, says Robert Bull, coordinator of the St. James Open Door program.

“Every concert offers something completely different, so audiences never really know what to expect from week to week. Sometimes there are ensemble performances and sometimes just soloists. One show might consist of pieces from Beethoven or Bach, while another might be classical interpretations of Stevie Wonder.”

Free admission, donations accepted

by STEVE ZYLBERGOLD

Rear-view mirror

13 YEARS AGO - FEB. 8–15, 1996

On the cover:Evelyn Braxton, 82, in an article about Montreal’s black women, for Black History Month. Despite their importance as “the backbone of Montreal’s black community,” says the article, they are ignored in a new Quebec black history textbook.
•An accompanying poem by Saada Branker laments jheri curls. “i watched/in horror after the metamorphosis/had left us poisoned by assimilation…. CALL IT FREEDOM?/I’LL LABEL IT OPPRESSION,” it reads.
•Raw Material columnist Juliet Waters takes note of the “exhaustive collection of retro-pornography kitsch” shared by CKUT’s Subterranean Jungle host Flipped Out Phil and his wife, underground porn cartoonist Sophie Cossette.
•Some results from the Mirror/Mix 96 sex survey: Fifty-two per cent of het men would rather have sex with someone who has “a gorgeous body but a vacant mind”; 49 per cent of het women would be tempted if offered $100,000 for sex; 93 per cent of gay men and 100 per cent of lesbians would try a virtual reality game that brings them to orgasm.

Angel >> Quebec’s declining suicide rate This is suicide prevention week in Quebec, so it’s worth noting that, for the ninth straight year, the province’s suicide rate has dropped, again. At 14 suicides per 100,000 people, the rate is at its lowest in decades. This is thanks in part to the erection of the suicide barrier on the Jacques Cartier bridge, which has seen three times fewer suicides since the barrier went up in 2004—it’s credited with preventing some 30 suicides since then. (Before the barriers went up, 10 or 11 people a year used it to kill themselves. Now that number is three or four.) The bad news is, the overall suicide rate remains the highest in the countr

Insect >>The Plains of Abraham brouhaha For a country with a remarkably unexciting domestic history, the Battle of the Plains of Abraham, fought 250 years ago, is about as interesting as it gets. So when the federal National Battlefields Commission decided to reenact the battle this summer, historians and Quebec City’s mayor and tourism industry were predictably happy. Predictably just as pissed off were the PQ, BQ, the Société-St-Jean-Baptiste and other sovereignty-minded organizations, saying the event was a humiliation, a disaster, led to 250 years of oppression etc. Granted, the initial plan to make the reenactment celebratory was a little over the top, and has since been toned down—but that hasn’t stopped some fringe groups like the Réseau de résistance du Québecois from promising to disrupt the event.