2013/02/16

• 
  2011.03.24
  Scènes de Montréal – Montreal Scenes
  

  Boots, provocation and other dance related things

  For some time now, and increasingly and everywhere, right-wing values and ways of living in society are being adopted by the masses, who apparently see little problem surrendering their privacy on the Net or elsewhere in exchange for short term benefits. Whether they do it knowingly or not is less important than the fact that nature abhors vacuum, and that those who trail behind and pick up the bits and pieces of that privacy left here and there do so for, and only for, their own benefit.

  Recently I sent to one of my younger brothers a link to a letter to the editor I had read in my daily and whose title was [translated] «The Freedom of the Press in Freefall in Canada». He replied that he was also reading articles about the same subject and pertaining to the United States, Greece, etc… adding «The boots make themselves heard more and more loudly.» Boots here is to be understood in its broader sense, that is countries where the State (or big corporations, it’s the same) controls what they want people to think, overtly or covertly, and take the appropriate measures for it to be so, and accessorily where civil liberties are considered a cumbersome nuisance. This reference to boots brought back to my mind a song from three or four years ago composed and performed by Yann Perreau, on lyrics written by Dédé Traké [you must know French to understand the wordplay used for this stagename]. Yann Perreau is well-nown Québec singer and songwriter. He is not at all in the “music industry mainstream”, more in the fringe rather. He also makes makes no secret of his political allegeance, that is Québec independence.

  It wasn’t meant to be this way but this section echoes two other recent blog entries by Biggles and Carlo where these subjects were adressed.
  The lyrics [translated] are below, followed by two videos. The first one is a live (it didn’t steal that description) performance at the Montreal Métropolis, a very well-known mostly standing up venue on Ste-Catherine St, near Place des Arts. Perreau is accompanied on the stage by the popular, for a certain age bracket, hip hop group Loco Locass, who sing in French and are also very independentist. Also accompanying Perreau is Samian, an Algonquin rap performer who sings in French and his native language, Algonquin, which he does in the last part of the video (he is the one with a navy blue t-shirt). I of course have only a clue about what he says, based on what Loco Locass are themselves saying. Not knowing if it’s one of their songs embedded in Perreau’s one, I couldn’t find them on the net for translation. But to make a long story short, they talk about the planet’s destruction and the Peoples exploitation. Samian knows a bit about that, being a Canadian Native (or Amerindian or Aboriginal, depending who you talk to).

  I like this song for its lyrics, but also very much for its haunting music. Listening to it, you can almost visualize the German soldiers goosestepping their way down the Champs-Élysées in Paris.

  
  LE BRUIT DES BOTTES
  Dédé Traké/Yann Perreault

  Can’t you hear them
  Loud as thunder
  Marching in goosesteps
  Crushing down borders
  Smashing doors open
  With their studded soles
  Pleading the defence
  Of rights and freedoms

  Don’t you hear
  The wind that carries
  The sound of boots
  They are there, millions
  Just waiting to resonate
  Only remains to find the feet
  Willing to wear them

  Hate is everywhere
  So they line up
  For a bit of power
  And a pair of their own

  Don’t you hear
  The wind that carries
  The sound of boots

  [Loco Locass]

  Don’t you hear
  The wind that carries
  The sound of boots

  Which they will fray
  In the country of their choice
  Reassured by their leaders
  That they are in their right
  In the name of freedom
  They will go and impose
  To the rest of the planet
  Their own way of walking

  Don’t you hear
  The wind that carries
  The sound of boots

  [Samian singing in Algonquin & Loco Locass]

  They are there, millions
  Only waiting to resonate
  Remains to find the feet
  Willing to wear them

  Live performance at the Metropolis

  This other video is the official video for the song. You will or will not like it. For my part, the first time I saw it I was like Er..? The second time it was Gee! and on the third it became Wow!! It is the work of Montreal dancer/choreographer Dave St-Pierre who in 2006 created the show “Un peu de tendresse, bordel de merde!” (A Little Tenderness for Crying Out Loud!), second of a trilogy and which was well received here and in France (Festival d’Avignon and Paris) and after which St-Pierre was invited all expenses paid in Germany and Austria to complete his trilogy. The show however was not well received at all in London where it was blasted like there’s no tomorrow. They were performing at the Sadler’s Wells. More on this below. ^[1]

  Someone commented this video on Youtube saying that “quebec people are super weird”. Yes, we know. Then again…

  ADD-ON: I just realized that the Youtube version is a doctored one, aka censored by blurring frontal nudity. The original non censored version is available on Vimeo here -> http://vimeo.com/16998014

  Trivia… or is it really?

  Dave St-Pierre received a double lung transplant in 2009. Since then, he’s on fire. I wonder if it was done by the same surgeon I had. If it was done in Montreal, it’s quite possible. I wouldn’t mind being ablaze too, but don’t count on me to run around flashing you know what.

  Real Trivia

  Friend lived until recently at a stone’s throw from Usine C, an experimental theater located in an old reconverted factory, and where the show was staged. He saw the show… and survived.

  ^[1]
  From a 2011 article by Mali Isle Paquin in La Presse. She’s a La Presse freelance columnist living in London. I removed the paragraphs formatting.

  The blazing universe of Dave St-Pierre came onto a head-on collision with the English’s puritanism last Thursday. The Quebec dancers of “A little tenderness for crying out loud!”, playing for three nights in London, were greeted by “Fuck you” as soon as they appeared on stage. The public of Sadler’s Wells, den of dance lovers, had however been warned: there would be nudity. Obviously, it was not prepared to see it so close. For a dozen naked males, arrayed in blonde wigs, take to the floor in the first act of the play, created in 2006. The kamikaze pose their hairy asses on the knees of stunned spectators and wriggle their genital appendages like kids. One put saliva on a man’s glasses last Thursday. It was the critic of The Guardian. “This is the most unpleasant experience I’ve had in theater,” writes Luke Jennings. His cronies were hardly more tender. “Manure,” said Mark Monahan of the conservative daily Daily Telegraph. This finger salute to theatrical conventions (the play) had yet blown the director of Sadler’s Wells, Alistair Spalding, at the Avignon Festival in 2009. “I had never seen anything so bold,” he told La Presse.

  Fortunately, Dave St-Pierre’s performers don’t lack tenderness elsewhere in Europe, where they toured intermittently since November 2010. They were the darlings of the Parisian public in late May (2011), during five euphoric performances at the Théâtre de la Cité. “People were ecstatic, said Claire Verlet, theater director in a telephone interview. I had never seen anything so genial. Ovations were never-ending. They didn’t want to let them go! ” The Quebec choreographer was invited to Düsseldorf (Germany) and Salzburg (Austria) at the end of the summer to work on the follow-up to A Little Tenderness… all expenses paid. It will complete his trilogy on love relationships, initiated in 2004 with Pornography souls. The Franco-German craze has obviously not yet crossed the Channel. [..] In London, a good fifty people left the 1500 seater hall 1500 during the performance. The others looked pensive and smiling after the show. “I had not laughed like that for a long time,” says Ulrike Tombling, 37 years. “I found it painful, said Simon Sterne, 38. They wanted to provoke us, but for what purpose? ” In the dressing rooms, the dancers had received the mixed reception as a cold shower. “Some had almost violent reactions … We invaded their sacrosanct space,” says Alexis Lefebvre.

  

  Health update

  I walked to Marché Jean-Talon yesterday (Feb 14), with stop-overs at the latino grocery store and Motta’s for a piece of pizza. About 1,8 km in all. Things are getting much better in that respect. I did stop a few times for short rests, though. Today the nurse who came for the daily bandage replacement over the hole I have in my back told me they won’t come this week-end and starting next week it’ll be only on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Apparently the wound is healing well. I saw my surgeon last week for a three-month follow-up (the last operation where they removed the drain and made that hole to replace it was on Nov 7). He is waiting for the liver thing in early March to be over with and has plans to then close the hole in a way he didn’t give much details about, but which would be faster than waiting for it to close itself by tissue growth, which it could take a very long time, if ever. That’s when he came back with that thing about my being a very courageous person, adding «When you were in intensive care, absolutely no one there thought you had any chance of ever surviving» . I don’t like very much being reminded of that. First because I don’t see very well what courage had to do with it, my being in the coma. But more so, being reminded about this near-death brings tears to my eyes, what the psychiatrist I saw at that hospital called so beautifully “avoir de l’eau sur le coeur”, having water on the heart. Oh yeah, the left arm. I have nothing nice to say about the left arm.

  

  City tobogganing

  If having one of the weirdest winters in years wasn’t enough, some contractor doing street repair on Sherbrooke St on January 28 managed to break a major water line, flooding a whole block and more.

  

  Swiss Connection

  No I’m not talking about banks loaded with laundered money. Nor about colliding Higgs bosons in the Large Hadron Collider. I’m rather talking about waves. Sound waves that is. To be more precise, waves coming from the Radio Suisse Romande (the French-language Swiss radio network). And to break it down to an even smaller particle, although still light-years larger than your average boson, I’m talking about Option Musique, its fourth component, and which I’ve listened to quite often lately. When I do, it’s usually in late afternoon or evening. Over there it’s late evening or the middle of the night, which is fine with me. The music played is eclectic although rather smooth. They play a lot of French songs (including some Quebec ones), but others too. Most are also oldies (kind of) which we don’t hear often on our local radios. In the last hour for example, they played Christophe Maé, Daniel Balavoine, The Beatles, Stephan Eicher, Serge Gainsbourg, Célien Schneider, Renaud, Calogero, Lou Reed, Aliose, Michel Sardou, Thelma Houston. And no blabberings if only a few words of presentation at times, and no advertisement. Only music.

  http://www.rts.ch/option-musique/

  

  Habemus nullus papa

  The Pope unpoped himself. He is leaving his red slippers stuck in the mud of financial and sexual scandals. They won’t be left empty for long. There’s a line-up of others who mildly protest that they don’t want the job while they ‘ve been working for the same for years. Among those, Cardinal Marc Ouellet, a Quebecer who is currently holding a top job at the Vatican (the choosing of bishops among others) where he is in regular contact with Mr Ratzinger, at least once a week, and with whom he shares his conservative views. If I were a Catholic and interested in having the Church modernize a little, if only to recognize equality between men and women, I’d be worried about this guy ever generating white smoke. He’s in the top contenders list, we’re told. It would be nice to have someone from Latin America or Africa for a change, but apparently and unfortunately, they would be just as conservative, if not more.

  Of what I understand, Mr Ratzinger was a bright kid with not that much of a personality and who prefered to be alone with his books and thoughts more than attending cocktails. Some kind of nerd, finally.

  Ouellet is not a nerd. He’s a freak. He worked for a long time in Latin America (that alone is scary) where the Church still acts like it did in our western countries back in the fifties. When Ouellet came back, the Vatican gave him the archdiocese of Québec (the city) where he never missed to show to all how disconnected he was with our modern society. When he opposed abortion even in cases of rape and whatever the age of the victim, that was it. He was whisked to Rome, not as a promotion as some thought, but as a measure of damage control before he shunned away what was left of practicing Catholics in Québec (the province).

  
  Photo © Riccardo de Luca – AFP

  

  The Swiss Disconnection

  Here, the Swiss factor is accidental. It’s just that the IOC (International Olympic Commitee) is based in Lausanne. These people are considering removing the three-millenium-old sport of wrestling all the while adding golf. This decision and the reasons they gave for it show if need may be that the Olympic Games have ceased to be what they were initially, to become a humongous financial and mediatic enterprise, where « Citius, Altius, Fortius » refers to the cash they generate and where the truce-style “fraternity” between contestants of different countries is a sick joke. The next Winter games in Sotchi will cost Russians over 52 billion. This is mad.

  For one, I can’t watch these games on television all the while pinching my nose not to smell all what’s behind them.

  

  • 21:24
  • 11 Comments