Montreal!

what school?

I'm sure they have pedants in Montreal just like everywhere else, but it's a competitive market for sure.

Ha, was this a direct response to me?

slocki: mcgill, i am pretty excited. hey i was wondering, actually, i thought you might be a useful-montreal-person to sound out what the cinemas are like. i know toronto's the big film city, & i know that there's a really good mostly-french cinema in town, but what are the others like? is there anywhere with a particularly interesting/reliable/eclectic programme?

our cinema situation is pretty sad these days but check out cinéma du parc. the amc forum, which is one of the big box theaters, actually has some of the best indie programming in canada (according to some distributors/programmers i know). also check out the cinéma parallèle, which mostly but not exclusively shows french stuff.

Am I wrong in thinking the NFB has some events? I know the headquarters is in Montreal and I was thinking I saw a flier for something or another.

btw as I mentioned on another thread, I'll be in mtl at the end of May, probably going to wander around the city a bit more

dude... its heartbreaking, the nfb downtown center and cinema is being closed thanks to fuckface harper's fucking fucker budget cuts

so thanks for BRINGING IT UP

u might want to also look at the cinémathèque québécoise's schedule, kind of a crapshoot but often great stuff

I didn't know! Fuck, that blows.

I think I took a picture of it previously because lol boards of canada

btw I am not related to the canadian Harper family of note, lest you think I'm bringing this up to spite

NFB is getting closed? fuckin' hell. I only have so much rage left in me after they cut the budget for the Native Friendship Centre in Montreal and the National Aboriginal Health Organization.

And the new immigration bill.

And and and and and.

Sigh.

You still have so many nice cultural institutions, though!

I won't let you in on the secret about booze prices, though. I will continue letting you all think they're reasonable.

the nfb ITSELF isnt getting closed, thank goodness, just the downtown cinema/robotheque.

oh and 10% of everything else.

yeah, sorry. i understood. i just meant - that little cinema room thing was awesome.

ya man i had several flix play there, both at fests and at cast/crew screenings (for the latter it was really the only affordable screening room in town)

It's also fun that the nfb offices are above the 40. and that now they'll have zero downtown presence.

good times these days for national arts institutions/funding bodies... ugh.

I also hate how this govt makes me so sarcastic.

dude... its heartbreaking, the nfb downtown center and cinema is being closed thanks to fuckface harper's fucking fucker budget cuts

― A Little Princess btw (s1ocki), Tuesday, April 10, 2012 2:36 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

what. the. fuck.

god, why hasn't someone fucking slaughtered harper already.

from what I understand, there are plans to move the entire NFB downtown in about 4 years time, and this will probably include a new cinema/robotheque type place. At least this is what a guy who works for the NFB told me.

They have filled his head with pipe dreams.

i also hate stephen harper for making rrrobyn sarcastic :(

because ilx wasn't working on that already!

I go to Montreal tomorrow for a week or so, MTL ILXors please help me out with a couple of questions. Mostly doing work stuff but I might go see Nina Nastasia at Casa del Popolo on Thursday? Anyways:

- Is the Parc du Mont-Royal a good place to go running?
- My French is ok but not amazing (I expect I won't understand the Quebecois accent too well), I assume most tourist-facing Francophones will end up speaking English to me but is it a good idea to "make the effort"?
- Tuesday night I'll be looking for somewhere to go hang out with a bunch of conference people: preferably downtown-ish, open late, laidback/not too hipstery, good beer would be a bonus. Any ideas?

Pro tip: many "tourist-facing francophones" (aren't they all, har har har) are actually bilingual anglophones who will initiate a customer service interaction in French because it's their job to do so. Don't get upset if someone doesn't reply to you in French. They may not, in fact, be French themselves. My advice if you wish to try out a bit of French would be to keep your customer service and tourism French to "bonjour" and "merci" and find a local friend to converse with. Busy customer service people are not paid to humour your fantasies of language proficiency.

Busy customer service people are not paid to humour your fantasies of language proficiency.

Sure, they're not "paid" to do so, but decency-- not to mention a desire to propagate a language-- would suggest that it's a better to encourage new French speakers, not discourage them?

But otherwise OTM.

Thanks for tips. I'm less interested in trying out my French than in not pissing anyone off.

in my experience i didn't understand a blinking word of the Quebecoise French and got the impression they felt exactly the same about the French i learned in school, save for merci, i reckon

Sure, they're not "paid" to do so, but decency-- not to mention a desire to propagate a language-- would suggest that it's a better to encourage new French speakers, not discourage them?

At a systemic level, "desire to propagate a language" works out to tax credits and socialized childcare so that white francophone women will have more babies. The only people in Quebec who believe that being able to order a sandwich in French constitutes propagation of the language are McGill students from USA, tourists, and people posting on message boards. The people making your sandwiches, increasingly, don't give a fuck about French anyway and only speak it well enough to take someone's sandwich order.

I know no French and have been running around speaking English w/no probs.

The park would be good for running if you like hills!

@fields I agree with everything you're saying, re: service industry professionals. And your advice is sound. My experience with bilingual Quebeckers-- my family, for example-- has been that many have a profound lack of patience with anybody who is not already fully fluent in the Quebecois dialect. I don't take issue with it but myself try to be more patient with new French speakers

My sister hosted an exchange student as a teen and it was always "bien non speak English" in the guy's face, I was like, really?

So the language thing has turned out to be more complex than I expected - I've spent lots of instances speaking French because English is clearly the dispreferred option.

More important though: where should we go dancing tomorrow/Friday night?

I tried to order Montreal restaurant meals in French a couple of times, but it was apparently obvious I wasn't too fluent because they always responded in English to make it easier for me.

What kind of dancing/music? Did you find a downtown bar for work gathering? What part of downtown? Grand prix is on so I would say avoid crescent st and avoid st-Laurent btwn Sherbrooke and Pins - both are that particular brand of swanky-shitty-painful nightclub scene.

http://www.marketwire.com/press-release/montreal-mirror-to-end-publication-tsx-qbr.a-1672679.htm

June 22, 2012 12:42 ET
Montreal Mirror to End Publication

MONTREAL, QUEBEC--(Marketwire - June 22, 2012) - It is with great regret that Sun Media Corporation is today compelled to announce the closure of the Montreal Mirror. The current edition of the free English-language cultural weekly will be its last.

The growing popularity of digital media and communications has irremediably changed the context in which free cultural weeklies operate, bringing about economic challenges which have unfortunately compromised The Mirror's viability.

The closure will result in the layoff of seven employees and the transfer of two more into other parts of the corporation.

Sun Media Corporation sincerely wishes to thank these employees who contributed to making the Mirror a true Montreal cultural and journalistic institution.

i am gutted by this miserable news! this paper was my first glimpse into the montreal music scene, and despite some noticeable downsizing in recent years was still an invaluable source for local news & cultural events of all kinds. it will be dearly missed not only by its readers, but by future generations who will miss out on it

RIP

freakin sucks.
the weekly i worked for shut down 1.5 years ago, and it was because of profit-above-all-else. but business is business. pretty fucked up that we have no english-language weekly paper now when less than 2 years ago we had two.

plus people losing their jobs and freelance gigs, ugh

i don't even know how i can live in this world anymore

i guess it's time to start a(nother) website

i feel like i have 8 different rants i could go on

i hate quebecor for so many reasons but this is too personal, too close to home

it's a massive fuck-you to anglophones and to anglophone tourists imo

but the paper wasn't making money, that's what counts, not politics, business is business, blahblahblah, rmde, it's not like anyone tried to change the business model at the mirror or at hour

it is massively depressing that such a valuable cultural institution could not make enough money to persist, even in a majority french province the need for such a service feels so great, it felt permanent because it was so necessary

the whole reason these weekly papers started in the first place was to give a voice and some PR to up-and-coming music and culture and the creators of that, the stuff that didn't make it into the dailies and magazines/tv. and then they were bought by companies, who for a while let them do whatever they wanted (lol 90s!) and then slowly but surely started to cut sales team attention/hours and thus cut pages, and here we are...

it's also a big fuck-you to journalists in general

as if facebook and bookmarks for 10 different websites can somehow replace the information provided by these papers

okay i think i've hit 4 rant topics already