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Musician (trad to noo wave), accidental sound tech, writer who should write more, occasional educator, former bike courier and rubber-stamp maker, immigrant, Montréalais, has always had an accent from somewhere else, son, father, etc.
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A-1 comment thread!
“ARTISTS ARE THE SHOCK TROOPS OF GENTRIFICATION” - graffiti in a soon-to-demolished micro neighbourhood in downtown Montreal in the ‘80s. I wasn’t sure what it meant then, even as an artist paying dirt-cheap rent in an inner city, but I do now.
Here in Montreal it’s definitely because of good deals, but also because of wanting bourgie types wanting to buy in to some notion of edgy urban cool…which they then proceed to undermine at every chance, calling in noise complaints to music venues etc.
But, War Is Peace, innit?
No shit!!
Oh really? I hadn’t caught that, fair play to M. Dibango.
+ 1! Definitely influenced groove-wise by Manu Dibango’s all-time banger Soul Makossa, & nicely done.
What kind of judge of normality and social connection can this weird mfer be? If ever anyone looked and acted like an alien lizard in a human suit…
I had a weird premonition last night that when he dies, they’ll just break out the hologram version for rallies etc. After watching that, I have no doubt of it.
Isn’t having unmarked regime paramilitaries invade cities to quash dissent a kitchen-table issue?
cultmtl.com/2025/08/obse... Neverbefore has a Canadian politician shared so much disinfo unchecked.As Poilievre tries to weasel his way back into Parliament,Canada’s legacy media still refuses to call out Poilievre’s lies,or question his ties to CanadaProud,who ran disinfo campaigns targeting our PM
Cheers to @mikusmeets.bsky.social who made this lyric video! RIP Joe, and much-missed Swift Years bassist Susanne Ungar.
Joe Strummer would’ve been 73 yesterday, and no doubt would have had plenty to say… youtu.be/lY4SsG6YCP4?...
Here’s me own tribute to Joe, written not long after Joe’s passing. The first 7 lines are factual reportage, then takes off from there…https://youtu.be/lY4SsG6YCP4?si=Dmab11QDcNnOv1qc
Fortunately my frantic flailing stopped it before it got to me eyes!
Nice one Ron! One of my fave Clash songs to sing too, along with Stay Free and Career Opportunities, and shows that punk can be folk and vice versa.
Nice one Ron, punk reggae folk ftw! That’s one of my faves to sing too, ever since an Irish mate & I free-associated into it at a pub session decades ago, it’s one that grabs people even when they’ve never heard it before.
And nobody in the busy workplace noticed me slapping meself around the head, singed bits of hair flying!
It was the ‘80s, when people still smoked everywhere. I was on hold with dispatch on the reception courtesy phone, and lit up a smoke to make the time pass. I must have just filled my petrol lighter, big flame, and still had a fringe straggling over my eyes.
Thanks for sharing! I’ve on occasion been disappointed when no one catches a pratfall…like when I was a bike courrier, and set my hair on fire in a customer’s reception area.
I don’t see them quite as much now, but for a while it seemed like every grocery I went into had an Epoch Times stand in the entrance. That’s Falun Gong, right, along with that ballet show that posters everywhere obnoxiously?
Who threatened her?
Sauvez mon âme, des flammes de l’enfer!!
Yup, from my recollection it would be Basher’s big hit.
I’m glad I became parental in my 20s, can’t imagine running around after yer weans decades older! Although he probably has others to do the running…(also, wtf, BoJo is younger than me?!)
Wasn’t it Sensible Centrists who told us we were overreacting, when we said Drumph was a fascist first time around?
Sensible Centrists are a bit of a plague, aren’t they?
I never heard of it when I was growing up in Lincs in the ‘70s, either.
I wish I’d known about that coming up, I would have loved it: I don’t think my parents knew about it either, they would’ve likely looked into it. As it was, I went through a couple of years of cubs & a couple of sea-scouts, with dwindling enthusiasm.
Home of the Mods!
(I’m in Montreal, Québec, Canada: originally from the UK, I arrived here more or less by accident in my late teens, and am 63 now. I didn’t particularly intend to spend my life here, but have no regrets that I have so far.)
Being able to live without a car, having a huge variety of affordable groceries close by, hearing languages and music from every continent, being part of all of the above.
That was more in-the-family, but a couple of years later in money troubles my mother (whose usual occasional gig was substitute-teaching Latin or Greek) & I answered a call for pea-pickers on a local farm: that was piece-work, and we did not do well.
Whereabouts in Lincs? I grew up in Skeg then near Spilsby in the ‘70, the first paid work I ever did was a few days on a potato harvester on a friend’s uncle’s farm.
Nicely done, real talk, no less fierce for being affable.
I’m not American, but I am just old enough to remember the unholy shame and scandal about Watergate. What really stopped me in my tracks, was that when the whole Iran-Contra mess came out, it was pretty much consequence-free for the perpetrators.
Epic trolling, a taste of his own medicine, I love it!
They sprang a photographic equivalent on me, when I went to pick up her ashes. I refused the photoshop monstrosity, took the ashes, and drove home cursing and crying and apologizing to the ashes on the back seat for the foul language.
I didn’t suffer that indignity when my mother died last year, but the funeral directors did decide to photoshop cheezy clouds & doves all over the photo I gave them: she wouldn’t have been caught dead near something like that, and I refused to take it.
Truth in satire!
Thanks for sharing this, Lorna. I live close to the Montreal side of the Victoria bridge, the other side is Kahnawake Mohawk Territory, and I have vivid memories of the resistance that closed it in 1990. The story of the high-steel workers is well known here.
I was just going to say that. HCR is usually so understated, just laying out the damning facts and giving the reader credit to do the math, but she came right out and said it today.
JFC!!
I first read that as “big hand job” and, well…
The Liberal government knows that recognizing the group "Métis Nation of Ontario" is explosive for moving forward on Indigenous and Métis land rights. PM Carney is no dumb bunny. His decision to host this group on talks over major resource projects on treaty lands will burn bridges of trust.
Seriously…
Truer words were never spoke. True that the Romans did have the indignities of Caligula, Elagabalus etc though: how long before a horse is appointed to the US senate?
I’m sorry, what? There’s a meeting going at Vance’s house to decide on an “Epstein strategy”??
Well, it *is* a picture of a stolen district, but just in the opposite way from what they meant!
A great, and lengthy, interview with a great artist and activist.
Ah, Snufkin, how right you are.
Très pertinent as always, Charlie: I find myself talking back to the radio every morning, as these voices of normalization sound insane to me.
And then be administered in suppository form.
Oh ffs! These arseholes are going to make the word “antisemitism” entirely meaningless, talk about the boy who cried wolf…
Absofuckinglutely, well put!
"Funny thing about evil is that it sneaks up on you. It sidles up slowly, slouching, conditioning you to its presence, so before you know you have crossed a line, the damage has been done. The lesson here is not about the 'final solution' but how it starts." www.cltampa.com/news/at-ever...
My old hometown of Skegness and county of Lincolnshire has been in the news more than once, for attitudes the exact opposite of this: fair play to this enlightened lass, she gives me hope!
Israeli forces killed more Palestinians waiting for food at aid sites over the weekend, as it continues to starve the population of Gaza. Benjamin Netanyahu is a war criminal — and we as a nation are complicit in this bloodbath. We must stop all military assistance to Israel.
Are the construction hols pan-Canadian? I always assumed they were QC-specific. Also, was the pol in question Robert Bourassa?
All I think about when I hear people say that it’s bad taste to dance on Hulk Hogan’s grave is that Emmett Till’s monument had to be replaced with a 500lb steel bulletproof monument because white people simply won’t stop riddling it with bullets. So now it just has tons of dents. From bullets.
How come those arseholes with guns get to have their faces obscured??
Bless your heart, Skeg lass! I lived in and around Skeg from 1970-78, ages 8-16, and sadly I’ve been mortified several times in recent years by unedifying news from there, mainly about people with the opposite attitude from this lovely human.
BBC News: Do you think you were a witness to war crimes? American veteran who worked at Gaza Humanitarian Foundation aid distribution center: Without question I witnessed war crimes.
FFS!!
Mammonite fucksticks! Thank you for that resounding and accurate phrase!
Shame, CBC.
One of the things I love about Montreal is the mix of people from various elsewheres, it makes me feel at home. Even though I’m not a visible minority, I’ve never fully passed for a local anywhere I’ve lived, and I’m fine with that.
Knowing several Pinochet refugees/survivors, that was my reaction too.
Cf Emma Goldman’s famous “if I can’t dance, i want no part of your revolution.” (I’m with her)
RIP, very sorry to hear of Harry Standjofski’s passing, un grand comédien.
Charlie’s right on the bean here, with extra points for the Robbie Burns reference, and goddamn but that nauseating picture really sums it up: Parcel Of Rogues In A Nation indeed!
Three of the slimiest!
Nice juxtaposition! The AI seems to be the only winner…
Danke!
I don’t read German, but am I correct in assuming that “ausgetrickst” means “another trick” or similar?
Yesterday, Maurene Comey, who prosecuted the Epstein case, was summarily fired from SDNY. Her letter to colleagues pulls no punches. "Fear is the tool of a tyrant, wielded to suppress independent thought." h/t @msnbc.com
Interesting angle, might be onto something here…
Even by today’s Caligulan standards, this is evil and depraved.
And it’s also shitty weasel English.
That’s what I do too: not infallible, depends on the garlic, but pretty good success rate.
True I’ve been away from the uk since just before Thatcher got in, but it is unfnbelievable that this kind of proven arrant free-market cultist bollocks is being spouted by a Labour politician.
Entirely believable possibility.
There was always plenty of insanity to go around, and much of it we recognized as such at the time, but it really seems to be in a particularly intense cycle now.
I'm trying to think about how I would have reacted if shown this headline five years ago
At least in NL they don’t go on rampages through Catholic/Republican neighborhoods, like they do in Northern Ireland, nor mount massive dangerous bonfires next to residential areas. (The R word used in the Irish sense here, of course, not the US one.)
He was evil and chilling in the first Trump term, and much more so now that the adults have been got rid of.
Fair enough: I’m not in the US myself, just the concerned upstairs neighbour.
I was just thinking that, nice Freudian slip/mixed metaphor!
Actually, he’s both of those things.
Well, “homeland” has been used in this sense since post 911, when GWB started the Department of Homeland Security….
Innit?
Way too close, and then some.
Excellent piece, thanks.
This right here.
No, and he even made a point of saying “the Biden-appointed judge”
Apart from the fact that he’s a proudly ignorant racist fascist pos, he’s clearly also incapable of speaking a coherent sentence.
“Man afraid of subway put in charge of NASA” was the catchy headline in Rolling Stone.