cpirate

09:20 pm: Exciting Adventures
If you ever feel that your life lacks excitement, that there's nothing interesting to get you out of bed in the morning, I seem to have discovered the cure. The other day I was applying an aerosol protective coat to my winter boots before putting them away for the season, and didn't notice that I was doing it over top of a bit of linoleum that lives directly between my bedroom and the bathroom. The next morning, while stumbling to the bathroom, I discovered that this spray acts very much like a very smooth wax when applied to linoleum, giving my floor a coefficient of friction startlingly close to zero. Of course, I discovered this by nearly going ass over teakettle; it sure did wake me up.

As a bonus, the next day I was sitting at my desk when I noticed a bee (approximately the size of a WW2 fighter plane) bearing down on my head. I made a move for a towel hanging on a chair in the kitchen, but again I had to traverse the Linoleum of Doom. This time I actually went down, along with the chair and the towel, while the bee circled overhead in triumph. The bee then hid himself in the bathroom in order to startle yet another gallon of adrenaline into my bloodstream the next morning. He was then escorted out of the apartment.

In other wildlife news, after licking my (psychological) wounds from the last battle with the pigeons, I've replied with the heavy weapons: I now have a plastic owl sitting out on my balcony, who's doing a superb job of scaring them away. He's my Balcony Bouncer. It's a bit too early to claim complete victory, but I am now generally enjoying a pigeon-free balcony. Current Me vs. Wildlife tally: Pigeons 1, Bees 2, Me 1.

In other non-wildlife news, girlintheclouds has arrived on my futon for the duration of the Montreal Fringe. The festival itself doesn't start until the 7th of June, but the Fringe-For-All preview show is tomorrow night, hence the earlier arrival. The show is at 8pm Monday evening at Cafe Campus (51 Prince Arthur E): be there or... don't know what's going on at the Fringe. It's free! It's fun! How can you lose?

Tags: fringe, pigeons, wildlife

09:45 pm: Overdue Update
I didn't want to talk about it much beforehand, for fear of jinxing things, but I managed to pick up (hopefully) 5 months worth of contract work that started two weeks ago. I'm working for Aquila Technologies, A Division of Caterpillar Of Canada Corporation. I.e. they were independant not so long ago, but got bought by Caterpillar. The office is in the same building as NITI's Montreal Office was, which would be the most extraordinary coincidence ever except for the explanation that I got the job through an encounter with my now-manager in the elevator leaving work one evening last August.

Anyway, the work is pretty interesting, the major pain at the moment being that they're pretty serious about the 9-5 schedule, to which I'm rather unaccustomed, to say the least. The other potential drawback is that they'll be moving the office to the far end of Laval sometime in the next few months, probably before I leave. That could make for a pretty hellish commute. I may yet be crazy enough to buy a beater bike, head to the end of the orange line, and bike in from there. We'll see.

The great news from all this is that instead of taking time off in January and February like I was originally planning on, now I can defer that off to June and July, which sounds much more pleasant. In particular, I should be unemployed for the Fringe - perfect!

Tags: fringe, work

01:48 am: Fringe Survival Guide
So I saw a ludicrous number of shows at this year's Fringe. And yet, I didn't die, nor did I even burn out as much as I did last year. For future years, I should write down my Fringe survival tactics:

1. Get enough sleep. Establish priorities: for me, sleep rated higher than Fringe, and then Fringe rated higher than work. Sorry, work. In fact, Fringe rated higher than just about everything else that wasn't sleep. Sorry, everything else. And sometimes even sleep suffered. Sorry, sleep.

2. Know where to eat quickly. Memorable stops on the Fringe tour include Barros Luco (tasty, cheap, and fast Chilean sandwiches at the corner of Jeanne Mance and Fairmount, alarmingly close to several Fringe venues), Fairmount Bagels (Fairmount and Clarke, bring a knife to spread the cream cheese), Puca Puca (Peruvian food around 5400 St. Laurent, absurdly cheap and fun for a full meal), Schwartz's (sometimes quite fast, and central to the Fringe), and Coco Rico (next to Schwartz's, tasty BBQ chicken sandwiches). Dollar pizza isn't really all that bad. The St. Laurent street festival is a goldmine for the second weekend.

3. Eat a big lunch, and then you don't need much dinner.

4. Go with the flow. Try to find a show that starts soon, but not ridiculously soon. Keep doing this for the course of the afternoon/evening.

5. What better way to relax after a day of fringing than an evening at the Thirteenth Hour? Then you can find out what you want to see the next day! And they usually serve both types of beer, blonde and extra-blonde.

Tags: fringe

02:55 am: Fringe wrapup
Fringe is over. Final tally: 42.1 shows, 7 Thirteenth Hours (including one prom), one music set (by rottenfruit) and one awards show. For posterity, some mini-reviews of the rest of the shows I saw. As before, one star means it was worth making an effort to go see; two stars means it was worth making a special trip to go see.

Drama

Drumheller: This almost put me to sleep. I had trouble following, and I'm not sure what they were getting at.
** The Girl Without Hands: Exploration of a very dark Grimm fairy tale. Creepy in a good way.
Gorgeous: Very loud and shrill. Also hard to understand. Among the more unpleasant shows I watched. At least they played good music while we were waiting.

Comedy

* My German Father: A touching story about growing up with a slightly odd immigrant father. I think I heard an except of this on the radio a few weeks ago.
* Les Goubéens: Semi-translated stand-up comedy from France. High quality stuff, though I started to get a bit tired of it by the end.
** Ben Hur: The Epic: Tons of fun. The brick-throwing scene was priceless. The most interactive show I saw at the Fringe.
* Ladies Room: I didn't know what to expect from their bit at the Fringe-For-All, but it turned out to be amusing-yet-superficial sketch comedy. Very amusing all the same.
** Uncalled For 4: For Forever: We went back to see them do their musical. It went quite well, which was a bit of a relief, though it might have been fun if it had been totally horrible.
** Chinese Clown Cabaret: The monologue/clowning while everyone was seating themselves was almost better than the rest of the show. But then the rest of the show was awesome.
** The Black Roses: I went back, since a few people I was with hadn't seen it yet, and there wasn't much else on the go. The particular performance didn't seem quite as good; maybe everyone was just a bit tired, since it was midnight and the crowd seemed a bit dead too. Oh well.
Fresh Off the Boat: Another touching story about growing up with slightly odd immigrant parents. Less engrossing than "My German Father" somehow.

Music/Dance

** Flamenco Con Fusion 2: Holy cow. I don't have any real interest in flamenco, but this show was gripping. Hopefully he'll be back next year.
* From Under The Umbrella: Two short dance pieces. They get bonus marks for making a dance show where I actually understood how the dancing related to their themes (well, for the second part at least). One of these days I'll get myself cultured on these sorts of things.
* Better Parts: Beat poetry with a jazz stand-up bass. Fun and refreshing, but she needs a better title - nobody I was with could ever remember it.
** Terrain de Jeux Pour Marionnettes: A very dark show about the life of a marionette.
* The Chicken Kerfuffle: I finally got to see the Fringe burlesque; we tried a few times to see it last year but failed due to them selling out just about every night. I don't really see what all the fuss is about: it's good, sure, but it wasn't quite spectacular. At least they recovered with a certain amount of grace when their CD skipped a minute into the big finale.
* It's Not You...It's Me: I finally get around to seeing the Solid State breakdancers as my last show of the Fringe. Very good stuff, and undoubtedly my first break-/modern-dance comedy.

[Edit 2007-04-19: Comments disabled due to spammers.]

Tags: fringe

02:41 pm: Fringe Notes To Date
So if anyone's been wondering where I am, or what I'm doing with all my time, the answer is one word: Fringe. Whoa boy, have I ever fallen into a time vortex.

Anyway, for posterity, and in case anyone is looking for some recommendations, here's the shows I've seen so far, and some brief notes. Since I don't like star-inflation, how about I go with the Michelin style: one star means it's noteworthy and definitely worth seeing if you have a chance. Two stars means to go out of your way to see it, it's very good. None of the shows I've seen have been bad, so no stars just means that it was decent, but not worth a special mention.

Drama

** Hourglass: Excellent. An extremely good script with extremely good performances. Go see this.
** Wonders of the World: Recite: Charming. Has an octopus dance, and cake. Go see this.
* Word Infirmia: The Criminal Perspectives Project: As joenotcharles said, it's very intense. It could have used a bit more context, or maybe we just missed it since we were a bit late.
* In The Beginning: A Short Piece on Life and Death: Slightly depressing, and quite different from what I expected from the preview. Still very well done.
40 Needles: A bit pointless. And I don't like needles.
In Jim's Image: The actor playing Jim was very stiff in the first half, and even when he warmed up, he didn't seem to fit the part all that well. Pretty decent all the same.
* dis+graced: Very powerful stuff. I wish I knew a bit more of the context surrounding Josephine.
** Real Time: Lots of fun, performed extremely well.
* Desperate Housepets: An animal-rights-based play that wasn't preachy, and was lots of fun. The goldfish were hilarious.
* Chandeleirva: An immensely talented Cirque du Soleil clown in a one-woman show. The character annoyed me a bit, but it was very impressive.

Comedy

* Pentecostal Wisconsin: A very honest account of growing up in a small religious community.
* Evil is the New Good: Good slightly-political standup.
** Jem Rolls: Rapid-fire poetry. With an English accent and excellent diction. Pure awesome.
** The Black Roses: A comedic-folk duo sing very naughty songs. Hilarious.
** The Sum of All Cheers: The Montreal All-Star Cheerleaders vs. Stephen Harper and David Suzuki. Cheesy and silly, but lots of fun. Much better than their show two years ago.
* Never Surrender in: Centaur! Centaur! Centaur!: Felt unpolished, and didn't quite stack up to their Greatest Adventure two years ago, but I still enjoyed myself.
** Uncalled For 4: For Forever: This year, they're doing all long-form improv, and it's excellent. They're doing a musical for their show on Saturday, which may well be incredible, and the show on Friday will have special Fringe guest stars.
Sunny Side Up: Sketch comedy, but the pacing felt kind of off. Some of it was very good, some was a bit less interesting.
* Fresh Meat: More sketch comedy. These guys really kept the pace up, and had some well-done videos too.
* Hanakengo: Insane Japanese performance-art duo. Really very insane. My brain came close to being sucked out of my ears. Very short.
** Teaching As You Like It: Keir Cutler's hapless Shakespeare professor returns, but more pathetic. And the lower he sinks, the funnier he is.

Music/Dance

My Little Rant: Someone sings showtunes to cheer themselves up. What can I say, I don't care much for showtunes. And it seemed a bit pointless.
* Journey the Transformation: Unlike most Fringe shows, this is mostly about the music, with a bit of dance and video. I'm not normally a fan of the style of music, but I still enjoyed it a lot.
I Love New York: A bit of dance, a bit of a play, a bit of video. The videos didn't really work for me, and the play felt a bit disjointed. There was something very good in there trying to get out though.
** This Fairytale Is Not Working Out: Wow. This was amazing. There were celery-stick fights on the sidelines, and bananaphones, and fruit and veggies everywhere, and all kinds of movement all over the place. By far the most fun dance show I've ever seen. Quite possibly the best dance show I've ever seen. Among the best Fringe shows I've ever seen. Go see this.

An honourable mention goes out to The Thirteenth Hour, the nightly Fringe talk show at 1am, with Fringe guests and the Money Wheel and dance parties. It's free, and often insane and awesome.

And yes, if you've been couting, that's 25 shows in 6 days (plus the Thirteenth Hours), i.e. more than I saw in all 10 days last year. Yes, I'm slightly crazy. Yes, that means I'll probably see around 40 shows. Yes, that's even crazier. This is indeed the best Fringe ever.

Tags: fringe

12:53 pm: Fringe review day 0, plans for day 1
Last night was the Fringe "Day 0" opening night party. apenwarr_advo and I met up with kyotto and gorbash_dragon a bit late at The Main for some smoked meat, then went up to The Academy to meet sfllaw and see what was up. The show wasn't too exciting, but we saw a few fringe performers advertising (including the crazy Japanese people on the cover of the Mirror), mostly ignored a few bands, bought our first passes, and planned out Day 1.

So the plan for today, should anyone be interested:

First, at 8pm up at the Bain St. Michel (5300 St. Dominique) we have "Hourglass". Note that it's only $7 instead of $9 if you bring a batch of home-made cookies, in case you don't have a pass, want to come along, and have some home-made cookies to spare.

Next, we get 15 minutes to run down to 4247 St. Dominique for "Evil Is The New Good" (a taxi will probably be involved). After that, we get a break for a few minutes until "The Wonders Of The World: Recite" at 4170 St. Urbain at 11:00. Then, we could see if there's another show about to start, or we could just head up to the Academy to hang out until the 13th Hour.

Boy, it's going to be a good Fringe!

Tags: fringe

12:51 am: Fringe Preview Review
As promised (though slightly belated), my highlights from the Fringe preview show:

( Fringe picks )
Whew. If anyone can figure out WTF I meant for those last two, I'd be much obliged.

Apparently there's some sort of outing planned for opening night on Thursday, details may be forthcoming.

[Edit 2007-04-18: Comments disabled due to spammers]

Tags: fringe

01:58 am: Lots of Stuff
So I'm still working on sorting my pictures from Newfoundland. It was an excellent trip; aside from the already-briefly-described weekend out around the bay, I went out to Bell Island for the afternoon with my mother, as well as a nice bike ride to Fort Amherst and Bowring Park. Pictures are forthcoming once I get them sorted and uploaded.

This past week was a teensy bit crazy, with the Fringe preview, some interviews at work, pillaging pphaneuf's apartment (I have a TV and a garbage can, and all manner of other random junk!), a surprise (to me) visit with ayria, a ridiculous trip to Ikea with sfllaw (I have glassware! And can finish unpacking!), a bit of quality time spent with some quality people at the beer festival, and then the Tour de L'Isle today. Against all odds, I managed to meet up with gorbash_dragon, kyotto, and kfuddy at the start, and then we somehow stumbled across peaceful_dragon while waiting. We had a grand time, didn't get rained on, and even got free apples and caramel at the end, though we did miss out on the free cheese. We celebrated our accomplishment with some quality poutine from La Banquise (which has now expanded, and has a terasse - good to know).

The Fringe starts this Thursday, I can't wait! I wrote up my highlights from the preview show in an email, I should post it here since I gather that I'm some sort of trusted source for Fringe information. Suckers. That'll have to wait until I'm a bit less exhausted. The executive summary is that I'm totally doomed, and will probably end up with 30 or 40 shows I want to see. It should be fun!

Tags: bikes, fringe, kitchen, travel

08:28 pm: Whew, that's a lot of Fringing.
Well, the Fringe is finally over. What an exhausting festival. But so good!

( Oh, the shows I've seen )

So for those keeping track, that's 21 shows in 9 days, plus the free Never Surrender show, plus the Frankie Awards and some trips to the 13th Hour. I think I can safely say that I got about as much as I could out of this year's fringe. I declare my face successfully fringed off. The alarming thing is that I didn't see any truly bad shows, and only a few were so-so; most were great, and I think all of them were better than several shows I saw last year. This means that either the Fringe is getting ridiculously good, I'm getting better at picking Fringe shows, or my standards have dropped through the floor.

Anyway, if you ever get a chance to see basically any of those shows, or any of the ones I listed from last week, it'd be well worth your time.

Tags: fringe

08:44 pm: To follow up on my previous post, here's my rough plan for the next few day's worth of the Fringe Festival:

• Tonight, A Girl's Guide to Screwing Herself, 11:15pm, 5390 St. Laurent.
  
• Tomorrow, Hip-Hop 4 Dummeez, 10:15pm, 3680 Jeanne-Mance
  
• Wednesday, Never Surrender Saves a Baby, 10:15pm, 3997 St. Laurent. You'll want to get tickets in advance for this one if possible, otherwise try to show up an hour early to get a ticket at the door. You don't have to hang around in line for the full hour, but the show is going to sell out for sure.

I may go to see other stuff as things develop, but the last two are on the must-see list so I'll definitely be there. Let me know if you want to go to any.

Update: The new plan is to see Never Surrender Thursday evening at 11:30. There'll be a pretty fair-sized raft of us from the office. I don't know what we'll be doing Wednesday now.

Tags: fringe

07:17 pm: Fringing my face off
Saturday I realized that I had missed the first day of the Montreal Fringe Festival. Shock! Horror! Anyway, the situation was soon rectified. Avery informed me of Never Surrender's free show being moved to Saturday afternoon, so I met him at the stage at St. Laurent and Rachel. The show was excellent; we'll have to see their regular show sometime this week. Then, armed with our 10-show passes, we started the serious fringing. Shows seen this weekend:

• S.M.I.L.E. While You D.I.E. - a one-woman show about dreams, and working in a call center.
  
• The Fairies are Thirsty - an english translation of a well-known french feminist play from the 1970s.
  
• Uncalled For - long-form improv; excellently done. They simultaneously did 4 15-minute improv scenes that all tied into each other. Apparently that's not their normal style, so it's tempting to go back and see it again.
  
• Jem Rolls - Some sort of cross between spoken word performance and poetry, delivered at extremely high speed. The very British style of humour was just icing on the cake. Especially impressive considering it's a one-man show.
  
• Sunday Night Live - Standard sketch comedy, in the mold of Saturday Night Live. Pretty well done, and they really do rewrite their show every week when they're in their Toronto home base, which sounds like it would be interesting, but for a Fringe show they'd probably have done better to try to collate and refine their best material. I still enjoyed myself a lot, and the real SNL could learn something - try to keep your damned skits short! The live jazz and licensed venue made it all the better.
  
• How To Pick Up Chicks - We only went because our other option for a show was really far away, and we'd have had to go all the way back up into Mile End for the next show. Completely unexpected, and not at all what you might gather from the writeup. Plenty of audience interaction. Astoundingly good, all things considered.
  
• Unplucked - More sketch comedy. Pretty good overall, and some sketches were very good, but I think that on the whole I preferred Sunday Night Live. Perhaps it was just getting too late in the evening.
  

We then wrapped up the weekend with a stop at the 13th Hour, the Fringe's daily talk-show-esque affair put on in a bar. A few fringe show performers as guests, hosted by a couple of the Uncalled For people, and featuring an appearance by a couple performers from the Sugarpuss Burlesque doing a combination of improv and burlesque, with the (male) hosts doing their best to figure out how to do the whole burlesque thing. For a free show in a bar, it's hard to beat.

And to think, I was wondering if I'd be able to use up that 10-show pass; it looks like I'll be through it by Wednesday or thereabouts. There's still plenty of things on the must-see list (such as Never Surrender). We missed "Man 1, Bank 0", but apparently sfllaw has the DVD so we can catch up later; just as well, since our schedule is already pretty full. If you like cheap theater, you'd do pretty well to see just about anything in the above list, or you can join me in some of my outings for the rest of the week/weekend.

Tags: fringe