The Quest for Mitsou

Mitsou has been one of my favorite Québécois personalities for a while now. Though I didn't understand any of her lyrics when I first heard Bye Bye Mon Cowboy back in the late 80s, she still made an impression on me. Then, as usually happens to francophone artists in English Canada, she seemed to disappear, only to return a few years later with a rather risqué video for her song Dis-Moi, Dis-Moi. From what I've been told, her songs still get air-play during various Toronto "One Hit Wonder" hours on the radio. But despite our ignorance in English Canada, she's continued to have a vibrant career in Quebec. It's with that in mind that I contacted her representatives to try and arrange an interview. Her schedule didn't permit it earlier in the Fall, so I tried again in mid-November. Here's the response I got today:



Bonjour Alan,

Je me souviens de vous. Je suis désolée de vous annoncer qu’il ne sera pas possible pour elle de participer pour les prochains mois.Mitsou sera en congé de maternité jusqu’à approximativement la fin du printemps. Peut-être pour l’automne 2007?

Je vous souhaite un magnifique temps des Fêtes et vous prie d’accepter mes meilleurs vœux pour la nouvelle année à venir!

Meilleures salutations,

Julie
__________________
Julie Harvey
Dazmo Inc.

Not exactly the response I had hoped for, but rest assured, I'll try again. I suppose this is where my stubborn streak comes in handy, eh? I'd just like to take a quick moment to send Mitsou and her family my best wishes during the holiday season and, of course, health and happiness for their soon-to-be new arrival. Til next time...

Words Without Voices

Ol' Al received an unexpected e-mail in his Inbox this afternoon. It seems that Jim Fielding of Atlantis Found Publishing in Maine came across the review I did about the Metal documentary several months back and asked that I mention the Words Without Voices online album art competition. I took a quick look at the press release and figured it, why not? What follows is the press release sent to me by Mr. Fielding. I encourage any of my artisitcally inclined readers to check it out.

***

Rock Meets Academia in National Concept Album Art Competition



Portland, Maine-based Atlantis Found Publishing Inc. announces the launch of “WORDS WITHOUT VOICES” (™) Online Album Art Competition. The contest seeks digital visual artwork submissions to illustrate the song lyrics of Conceptual Artist James Thomas Fielding.

The contest is limited to the U.S. , Canada and the U.K.

The juried art competition, which seeks to establish a new multimedia artform based on rock “Concept Albums,” offers $6,000 in cash prizes to be awarded to three finalists in two categories: Best Songbook Jacket and Best Album Jacket.

The public will select the winners by voting online at the contest website
http://www.wordswithoutvoices.com/ .

The “WORDS WITHOUT VOICES” (™) series combines Art, Music, Language, and Internet Technology, and will be aimed toward the youth market, especially college art instructors and students who study Advertising, Visual Arts, English, Graphic Design, Multimedia, Music, and Web Design.

Says Maine resident Fielding, 51, “This competition places more emphasis on imagination than knowledge, and students in many fields of study will benefit from both result-oriented and experiential learning.”

Fielding says “WORDS WITHOUT VOICES(™)” is not so much an attempt to resurrect the concept album as to preserve and explore its possibilities as a viable artform.

“The release of The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band in 1967 should have signaled the beginning of a new era in album composition,” says Fielding, “instead it was a rare high point in a field more interested in making money than exploring art. In the 40 years since Sgt. Pepper’s release, modern rock has been limited enormously by formula formats and commercialism.”

According to Fielding, Green Day’s American Idiot is a good recent example of the “concept album,” even though it wasn’t marketed as such.

Fielding admits that Atlantis Found’s agenda—to elevate an artform which reached it’s creative zenith by the mid-1970’s, is ambitious. “Staples of yesteryear such as concept albums and rock operas, like The Who’s Tommy, Hair, and Jesus Christ Superstar, are rare today,” Fielding says.

Still, he believes the potential appeal of concept albums ranges from “15-year-old heavy-metal headbangers to college professors with PhD’s in literature.”

Fielding is seeking artwork to illustrate the titles of 25 Songbook Jackets and 125 Album covers, in genres ranging from country, gospel, and progressive rock to death metal.

The initial “WORDS WITHOUT VOICES” (™) contest features no music, just the combination of visual artwork and Songbook, Album and Song titles.

While the contest is open to “anyone who is creative,” state contest restrictions apply. Entry fees are $10 for one entry in one category, $15 to enter both. All submissions will be displayed at WordsWithout Voices. com.

Final deadline for the competition is August 31, 2007.

J.T. Fielding is a conceptual artist, freelance writer, rock critic, lyricist, singer, songwriter and musician. He has produced over 500 musical compositions and 5,000 song titles in a 35-year career.

Contact Information:Jim Fielding
Atlantis Found Publishing Inc.
PO Box 9546 Portland, ME. 04112
jtf@wordswithoutvoices.com
http://www.wordswithoutvoices.com/

The Recap

The dust has finally settled and I’m on my own again. Last weekend saw OJ roll into town, which was cause for a wee bit of celebrating. Thanks to him, I got a chance to take in one of the mandatory Montreal experiences—un match des Canadiens! His train arrived a little before 5pm, which gave us enough time to swing back to my place to drop his stuff off, then go right back downtown via metro to the Bell Centre. We didn’t have tickets, naturally, so we were at the mercy of the friendly street vendors.

En route, we met “Jacques,” who happened to have a couple of nosebleed seats available. I was somewhat surprised that OJ didn’t try to haggle a bit for the price, but whatever. The point is we had seats. Though he protested, at first, OJ convinced “Jacques” to take a picture with us. OJ had tried to play it off as a tourist thing, but “Jacques” was no dumbass. He knew damn well that this was our insurance policy against getting scammed. Fortunately for all parties, the tickets were legit.

This was my second opportunity to see an NHL game in person (the first being in Toronto, years earlier, thanks to some free tickets from a fraternity brother), but this time I got to see a team that I didn’t despise. Our seats were well up in the second highest row, right beside the Molson zone. Y’see, at the Bell Centre, they have a section sponsored by Molson where they do promotions and whatnot. However, we were just outside that section, so ineligible for any prizes. We did have the privilege of gawking at the Molson Promo girls, though!

The game ended in a shootout (totally stupid way to end any sort of hockey game, regular season or otherwise), with Buffalo taking home the victory, leaving us to drown our sorrows at Pub Saint-Ciboire. The boys from Cagibi were playing, so OJ got a chance to hear an example of independent (in many contexts) Quebecois funk/rock music. I also got a chance to introduce him to Blanche de Chambly. Though not nearly as potent as la biere Trois-Pistoles or la Maudite, it’s still quite good. A couple of pints later, we were en route to find late-night smoked meat.

A couple of blocks from my apartment, one will find a 24 hour restaurant called Le Roi de Smoked Meat. It seems to me that if the place is claiming to be “Le Roi” of anything, it should be pretty good. We’d actually discovered this place when the lads came up the year before. I won’t claim this is the best smoked meat place in Montreal, but it isn’t too shabby—especially after a night of drinking. So we grabbed takeout and headed back to my place to stuff ourselves full of smoked meat and crash.

For me, the rest of the weekend was uneventful. It seems that my once indomitable constitution has gone into decline. So while OJ was out doing tourist stuff in Montreal, I was at home, on my couch, watching football. So that’s the scoop. Til next time…

Mes Aïeux

Today I thought I would take a moment or two to talk a bit about my favorite Québécois group, Mes Aïeux. I would be pretty shocked if my readers from English Canada had run across them before and even more shocked if my new American readers (Thanks to a recent link from Stumblingthroughlifewithgrace.com) had even the slightest clue who they are. Since they’ve recently released a new CD/DVD set in Quebec, I thought that now was as good a time as any to talk a bit about them. I don’t know too much about the history of the group (Yes, I know. My bad. But it seems to me that the music is more important than quaint little tales of origin.), but it’s pretty clear that they’ve been deeply influenced by traditional Québécois folk music. The sextet is comprised of Stéphane and Benoit Archambault, Fredéric Giroux, Eric Desranleau, Marie-Hélène Fortin and Marc-André Paquet and has released 4 albums to date.

I picked up their 2004 album, En famille, when I was in Quebec City during my first French immersion course and from the first song, I was hooked. The song? Dégénérations- very recently the #1 francophone song in Quebec. The song was first released 2 years ago, but it got no airplay from radio here. Apparently the Powers-That-Be in music programming didn’t think it was right for their audience. Constant pressure from the fans of the group finally got them to change their minds and the next thing you know, it’s the most popular song in Quebec.

For the most part, the song’s sung a capella with only a tribal drumbeat to keep time (though I suppose the presence of ANY instrument disqualifies it from truly being a capella). It traces the history of a family through its days of clearing farmland to present day apartment living, comparing one generation to the next. In a touch of irony, the song’s present generation yearns for the very things their forebears gradually gave up: a plot of land to work and a large family.

I’ve found the same sort of subtext (a desire to return to simpler times) in songs by other sovereignists, though I can’t for the life of me give examples at the moment. The difference between this song and those by other sovereignists is the acknowledgement that the past was pretty miserable. They seem to advocate a balance between the old ways and modern living. Now how anyone attains such a balance is anyone’s guess.

Their songs do have political undercurrents (no big surprise in Quebec), but they also have a sense of humour (again, no big surprise). Heck, they wrote a whole song about leaving the bar after last call and going for late-night poutine! Overall, I’d recommend them to anyone who’s a fan of the pop-folk genre, even if you can’t understand what they’re saying. So fire up your file transfer program of choice and track down a few songs. Til next time…

Calm Before the Storm

Today’s edition of Al B Here will be a brainstorming session. In a mere 2 more days, Hurricane OJ will be blowing into town, leaving chaos in his wake. So the question becomes: what does Montreal have to offer this weekend? There’s been talk of wandering up to some friendly street vendors, in an effort to procure tickets to Saturday night’s hockey game, but even if we do that, the game will be over by 10pm at the latest. And who wants to go home at that point?

While surfing around, I also noticed that my old friends from Cagibi are playing a gig at Saint-Ciboire that night around 9pm, so we may be able to catch a part of that show, depending on how long it goes. From there, I imagine there’s no shortage of trouble we could get ourselves into (though how much manages to make its way onto this site is anyone’s guess). Le Petit Medley is out, though, due to a private party. Damn shame, too, given its proximity to my apartment. I’ve also had a hankering to hold an informal Quebecois beer tasting session. Neither he nor I are connoisseurs so I wouldn’t expect any grand analysis of bouquet or subtlety of aftertaste, but it could be good for a laugh or two.

If anyone amongst my Montreal readership has any recommendations, I will happily accept them for consideration. Don’t be shy! Til next time…

Thoughts on Dion

Although I’m not really one to banter on too much about politics, the recent Liberal leadership convention caught my attention. I didn’t have too many thoughts about it beforehand, aside from being anti-Rae, but I was still pretty surprised at the outcome. Watching Stephane Dion’s come from behind victory reminded me a bit of the coup that resulted in the IOC granting Sydney the Summer Olympics. For those of you who haven’t followed the convention, Dion barely squeaked into 3rd place on the leadership ballot, then leapfrogged the 2 leading candidates and then sealed the deal on the 4th ballot.

The Sydney delegation pulled a similar stunt back in the day. They approached voting members of the IOC and essentially pitched the idea that, “Okay, we know we’re not your first choice. But do you think we’d be an acceptable second choice if your favorite gets knocked out?” They managed to gain enough support by focusing on the endgame rather than the first couple of rounds of voting. Slick move. And from an outsider’s perspective, we seem to see this again with Dion’s victory in the Liberal leadership race.

Far be it for me to try and tell the Liberals what to do with their party, but I’m hard-pressed to believe that Dion can lead them to victory, even in a minority sense. I’ve no doubt that he’s a bright guy, but I can’t help but wonder how his grasp of English will play in the rest of Canada. Chretien had the benefit of a splintered Conservative opposition and a nostalgic connection to Trudeau. Dion seems to be less fluent than Chretien and doesn’t have the luxury of opponents in disarray.

From what I’ve read, Dion was brought in shortly after the 1995 Referendum and worked on the Clarity Act, which has seen more than its share of bad press in his home province. So the Liberals may have just chosen a leader who can’t win in the West and who may have an uphill battle to carry Quebec. Mind you, plenty can happen over the course of the next several months, but I think that Dion is a stopgap leader, at best. Til next time…