Going posters

Small venues and musicians are feeling
the pinch thanks to Montreal’s bylaws

ATTENTION ALL MUSIC LOVERS:
Blues Skies Turn Black’s Meyer Billurcu

by MALCOLM FRASER

Anyone who’s walked the streets of our fine city has seen the plethora of event posters competing for our visual attention. Showcasing the skills of our internationally acclaimed graphic artists is only an added bonus to posters’ practical use. “It’s still the most direct way of promoting,” says Meyer Billurcu of indie promotional team Blue Skies Turn Black. “The Internet’s great, but people get bombarded, so stuff falls through the cracks. If you have a nice poster, it can really grab attention.”

But street postering is illegal in Montreal—our bylaws explicitly link postering with graffiti in the context of urban pollution—and in recent years, the city has clamped down hard, handing out fines to the city’s smallest venues and promoters, and their postering representatives, in the tens of thousands of dollars. John Milchem, frontman for local rockers Starvin’ Hungry, moonlighted as a postering man for the past seven years before being discouraged by the latest round of fines. “Ironically, and typically, the people who are being persecuted in Mile End over this issue are the same people who turned it into a gold mine for property owners, developers, new businesses and the city itself in the last 10 years,” he grumbles.

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Last month, APLAS (L’Association des petits lieux d’arts et de spectacles), a city-funded group representing small music and arts venues, released a 28-page report detailing the situation and proposing some alternatives to the current system. The report details how other cities, from Vancouver and Ottawa to Trois-Rivières and Sherbrooke, have set up public columns designated specifically for posters. In fact, Montreal tried this as a pilot project downtown in 2005–’06, but has yet to follow up on the experiment. (Toronto, meanwhile, has no anti-postering law, though as Milchem points out, that approach has its drawbacks: “You tend to see a lot of the same crappy commercially printed and designed posters blanketed everywhere there. It’s not very inspiring”).

Sébastien Croteau, director general of APLAS (and singer for local death-metal band Exhult), notes that the city has appointed a representative to look into the issue. “That’s a very, very positive development, and I’m optimistic that we can find a collective solution,” he says. When contacted by the Mirror, the city commissary in question, Robert Ladouceur, said he wasn’t authorized to speak to the media. At the mayor’s office, Helen Fotopulos, responsible for the cultural portfolio on the executive committee, passed on a statement through her spokesperson Bernard Larin: “She has read the report and has shared it with several of the borough mayors. She’s also brought it to the city services, and asked them to read it and give her their recommendations. She’d like to reserve comment until she’s had these recommendations.”

Pop Montreal’s Hilary Leftick has also initiated an informal grassroots coalition to brainstorm solutions to the postering problem. “We’re working with the city and we want them to be involved,” she says. But this outreach faces some bureaucratic complications: “Main thoroughways that cross through boroughs are run by the city, and other streets are run by the boroughs,” Leftick explains. “If [the solution] is going to be long-lasting, we have to have everybody on board, and that takes time.”

Hope from Peterborough

Though this goes unmentioned in the APLAS report, Canada’s Supreme Court ruled in 1993 against the city of Peterborough, Ontario in favour of the right to poster on public property. “If this continues unabated, the only solution will be to take it to court,” declares Milchem. “Hopefully something can be worked out before that happens.”

“The [postering] modules are the obvious solution,” says Croteau. “We need to convince elected officials that it’s an issue that deserves to be invested in, it needs to be done right, and then the city needs to find the money.”

But the hurdles are clear to everyone involved. “The poster kiosks they tried a few years ago are apparently prohibitively costly, and there wasn’t much etiquette applied to their use,” recalls Milchem. “We need something affordable and practical, and we need guidelines to ensure these spaces aren’t abused by inconsiderate parties at everyone else’s expense.”

In the meantime, the law continues its economic impact, and not just with the postering fines. “We pay someone to design a poster, and we pay someone to put up a poster,” points out Billurcu. “Now I can’t do that, so I’m putting people out of work. We do 150–200 shows a year, so it adds up. I hope something works out, but I’m not holding my breath.”