Olivier Robichaud on Huffpost lists twelve projects to watch in 2019.
Updates from December, 2018 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
-
Kate
-
Kate
TVA predicts highway hell for 2019.
-
Kate
There isn’t a lot of live news Monday but there are retrospectives.
CBC has a 2018 news quiz.
Eater has several summaries about dining out in town, notably the closures and the complaints from critics. (The one that irks me here is from
a La Pressean Eater writer: “Why is salmon tartare still a Montreal menu staple in 2018? It was out-of-date years ago, let alone now.” Maybe it’s still on menus because people like it and keep ordering it. Critics should remember they’re assessing restaurants as a service to their readers, not to show off how cutting-edge they are. Anyway.) Eater’s got more retrospectives as well.The Gazette looks at four medical breakthroughs made by Montreal researchers this year and Global does sports stories. Radio-Canada ponders the public figures who died in 2018, both local and worldwide.
Also from the Gazette, a list of all 32 homicides with some details on each.
Le Devoir has quotations of the year.
dhomas
@Kate did you start putting ads on the blog? I saw this today
Not that is bad or anything, was just a little surprised.
dhomas
Oops! My post ate the link. Here it is again
https://i.ibb.co/Yhzq8Ww/Screenshot-20190102-102446.pngKate
dhomas, I’ve just started it as an experiment and haven’t yet tuned it up. I don’t intend to have ads in the middle of posts as you saw today – just one in the sidebar for the moment. Hang in there – it won’t be overwhelming.
I want the blog to at least pay for its own hosting if I can manage that.
Joey
The salmon tartare complaint is from Mallory Frayn, an Eater contributor, not someone at La Presse.
Kate
You’re right, Joey. I was reading it as if the names and affiliations were signatures to the quotes, but they’re on top. Thanks.
-
Kate
As in previous years there will be an open-air New Year’s party with fireworks in Old Montreal Monday evening. Urgences-Santé is standing by.
-
Kate
All sources predict snow for the new year as two weather systems converge here Monday evening into Tuesday.
-
Kate
-
Kate
Jean Dumontier, who designed the Longueuil and Île Ste-Hélène metro stations, died last week at 83. The concrete murals on the platforms at Île Ste-Hélène (now Jean-Drapeau) station are also his work.
-
Kate
The 1400 students at FACE will have to study somewhere else for six years while the building on University gets depth-renovated. The CSDM has an eye on the empty Sourds et Muettes building on St-Denis and Jacques-Viger hospital at René and St-Hubert, but both are also old.
EmilyG
Yikes. Considering that the school has a huge music program, a temporary relocation sounds like it could be tricky. There are certain things needed for a music program (pianos, large rooms,) that not all buildings would have.
denpanosekai
Holy shit. So maybe completed in 20 years. At least they’re not outright tearing it down.
Kate
Also, it’s a two-stage reno, like city hall: they’ll have to spend a year at least making the temporary digs inhabitable before people can vacate the main building so the real renovations can begin.
Ian
I am a FACE parent – there is no budget for this reno, so we have to wait for the next budget to find out if there is an allocation – in which case they can begin to seriously plan to renovate the temporary location. Effectively we are waiting on two separate allocations, neither of which have been confirmed in any way – and even preparing the temporary location will take 2 years renovation minimum according to the CSDM. If this even starts before my kid graduates high school 4 years from now I will be amazed. Even the six years renovation estimate is ambitious, to renovate the library they estimated one year and it took 4.
-
Kate
The Toronto Star tracks down classmates of Kamala Harris from her time at Westmount High and actually, toward the end of the article, finds someone who didn’t like her much. Harris is said to be deciding whether to make a bid to lead the Democratic party in the U.S.
John R
How did Harris get into an English public high school?
Michael Black
Aren’t there exemptions, especially for children of someone here on a contract? They moved here for a specific job, not moved here and then found a job. She certainly didn’t stick around, back to the US on graduation.
Michael
Kevin
She was born in 1964, so would have been in the school system long before any restrictions came into effect.
Blork
I laughed at the one dissenting voice. Basically, it’s someone who felt some shade a million years ago in high school and hasn’t gotten over it.
Mark Côté
Harris graduated in 1981 and bill 101 passed in 1977, so I’m not sure if it would have applied to her or not… I guess it depended on how much school she had attended in Quebec before that. But what Michael said is true: there are many children of temporary workers at EMSB schools. They can make up to 1/3 of some school populations, I’m told.
Randall
She would have enrolled in the english system in the early 1970s before bill101 was enacted.
Michael Black
And now she’s announced her candidacy for President.
The CBC says she was at Wedtmount High from grade 7 through 11, something I looked for before. So she barely got in before the laws changed.
So she barely overlaps with when I was there. But nobody really noticed the grade sevens.
Michael
Philippe
From the time Bill 101 was passed until the early 2000s, any immigrant or Francophone who sent their oldest kid to one year of private elementary school in English could then get the certificate required to switch to public English schools for their whole family. It was a very common loophole. In Kamala’s case though, her mother was most likely on a work permit and therefore classified as a temporary foreign resident and therefore exempt from Bill 101.
-
Kate
The SPVM has put up details of four cold cases on its website, while the Toronto police service has nearly 600. John Allore is speaking up about the lack of attention given to unsolved murder cases partly because his own sister was killed decades ago and the case was never solved (by the SQ, as it happens, not the Montreal force).
-
Kate
Robert Lepage has broken the long silence he kept after the collapse of the show SLĀV last summer with a statement on Facebook. I’m not overly impressed with his lede that the show “at least prompted some long-needed reflection in the province of Quebec” – the squabble that broke out didn’t have much quality of a reflection, more of a bar brawl – but he has a legitimate point about wanting to speak directly with his critics rather than via the broken telephone of the media. Which he has proceeded to do.
This statement follows the recent story about Lepage’s show Kanata in Paris, which reportedly disappointed indigenous critics who went to see it.
Le Devoir blesses Lepage, calling his statement a mea culpa (which I don’t think it is, or not completely) and saying he’s made up for his mistakes. I think it’s for the communities that have felt slighted by Lepage’s artistic treatment to say whether he’s made it up, though. Not for the media, and not for Lepage himself.
Lepage plans to bring SLĀV back in 2019, revue et corrigée as they say.
Hamza
I still don’t see an apology. Tho the thing about including persons of African descent in future projects sounds promising, if Lepage had really learned something, he wouldn’t put this show on again. Even the title is horrible. Finally, the quip about ‘radical Anglos from Concordia University’ made me laugh.
Jack
I was impressed by Lepage. Let’s be perfectly honest this man is a genius in his domain. He makes theatre that others can not even imagine. He screwed up as many of us do and in my view owned it, and yeah I get it, but radical anglos don’t go to McGill.
Kate
Lepage has done some brilliant stuff, but I think he has to learn from these experiences that it’s a dead end trying to sell his impressions of other cultures. He may be good, but giving us a sort of “Tintin Among the Savages” view of things doesn’t work any more.
qatzelok
“Tintin Among the Savages” would work as an epitaph for Paul Simon’s “Graceland” album, as well as most of Hollywood’s and mainstream television’s treatment of non-moneyed sub-groups. It’s in our DNA?
Uatu
Eh, at least Simon worked with Ladysmith black mambazo, but I get your point…
Jack
I couldn’t agree more with you, the idea that Lepage could be so blind to this reality is what he is apologizing for. The fact that he went back and got schooled says a lot for him. The fact that he recognized that the people defending his artistic “licence” were just using him to spin J de M racist rhetoric.
When you write that you demonstrated « maladresse et de manque de jugement » I think that shows contrition.Bill Binns
Nobody owns a copyright on any “culture” and anybody should be able to write or perform whatever the hell they want if they can get people to buy tickets.
Funny that “Hamilton” somehow dodged the accusations of “Cultural Appropriation” while mis-casting the founding fathers of the US.
EmilyG
But art and culture aren’t just about selling tickets and making money.
Kate
Bill Binns, Robert Lepage has been one of Quebec’s big stars over the course of his career, creating a sort of performance spectacle we hadn’t seen here before and being hired outside of Quebec to stage major operas and things. He’s expected to break certain expectations, which is why we’re shocked when we see him giving us stale received ideas instead of branching out and doing something that brings insights, even uncomfortable ones, into existing cultural stresses.
At some point many creative people will rest on their laurels and stick to a safe formula, but at this cultural moment it’s not smart for white people in Quebec to think giving the public their view of e.g. black or native culture is enough in itself. If Lepage can build bridges and alliances with people who can help him create pieces that make his own culture query itself, he’ll have a chance of going on to make more good art. Or, he can just withdraw behind a wall of “freedom of expression” and make more 20th-century-sensibility shows like Kanata and SLAV for the Journal de Montréal to applaud.
Chris
Exactly, he can do either of those things. It’s his choice. And some may like one over the over, and that’s fine. And some may criticize his work by pen or by protest, and that’s fine. But those that advocate banning him, shutting him down, deplatforming him, and the like, I think go too far. It’s fine to be offended by something (it happens to everyone occasionally), but it does not follow that you have to get your knickers in a knot, you could instead just change channel. There is no right to be never offended.
-
Kate
Arson stories made the news this year, but Daniel Renaud says numbers were down in 2018. With some other stats concerning fatal fires and arsons, including the pizzeria that’s been hit multiple times in the year.
-
Kate
CBC puts up its photos of 2018. Le Devoir has Jacques Nadeau’s photos of the year – only four pictures, but good ones. The.Gazette also has its photos of the year.
-
Kate
A woman was stabbed, not fatally, in Park Extension overnight, presumably by someone she knows, although there have been no arrests. News is so slow this holiday season that all media are reporting this non-fatal incident.
-
Kate
La Presse talks to the father of Ariel Kouakou, the ten-year-old missing since last March in the north end. Police continue to surmise the boy drowned in the Rivière des Prairies, while his parents persist in hoping he was kidnapped and is alive somewhere.
Steve Q 12:33 on 2019-01-02 Permalink
Interesting recap of the big projects underway and on the table.