SXSW in Austin, Texas, is arguably the most important music festival in the world, annually bringing thousands of people into the so-called Live Music Capital of the World. This year, Hour's Dave Jaffer (pictured) is attending the festival, and keeping everyone up to speed with the doings and happenings. The following is completely and totally true. Tuesday, March 16 I'm not writing this on Tuesday, March 16. I'm writing this on Wednesday morning, after I wrote the first March 17 installment. I really wanted to write this yesterday but, as you'll soon find out, the opportunity to do not there. As such, let's have a secret, you and I. Let's both pretend I wrote this as it was happening yesterday. I promise I'll be honest about everything. After all: It's not too hard to be honest about things that are still burned onto your consciousness as if by branding iron. -- I woke up yesterday morning after about four hours of sleep in the basement of my childhood home...

Camus meets the calamity of war in the Tableau d'Hôte Theatre's production A Line in the Sand is right. Director Mike Payette told me during an interview that the play, about the death of a Palestinian boy, had stirred controversy at the Segal Centre. So when I arrived at the arts center I wasn't surprised to see a group of Hasidic men protesting outside. "Say yes to Judaism, say no to Zionism. Israel is a dangerous place," they chanted. Well it wasn't the kind of protest I was expecting, but it was refreshing none the less. Even more bizarre was the arrival of about 70 Canadian cadets enrolled in an officer training program who had reserved seats for the play. Ah, the theater of the absurd... Hasidic Jews protesting against the state of Israel and a performance space jammed with wanna-be soldiers. Now that's drama!

While Anglophone-oriented arts and culture is technically considered a minority in Quebec, it maintains a high profile in Montreal partly due to the community built around it. Since 1998, the Montreal English Critics Circle Awards (MECCA) – organized by local theatre critics themselves – has been essential in bringing the theatre side of this community together. The yearly awards ceremony aims to not only raise the profile of Anglophone theatre companies and artists in Quebec, but to recognize the high quality of their work, from comedy to tragedy, sometimes even the more experimental. This year, on March 8, the 2008-09 season award winners – performers, designers, directors, text and more – were announced at Theatre Ste-Catherine: Best Actor: Andreas Apergis ( Blessed Are They – Infinitheatre) Best Actress: Nicola Cavendish ( Shirley Valentine – Centaur) Best Director: Greg Kramer ( Cat on a Hot Tin Roof – Segal) Best Text: With Bated Breath (Centaur) Best Ensemble: With Bated Breath ...

Documentary filmmaker and producer Marcel Simard is no longer with us, and it's a very sad story. But Simard's suicide death has also given the doc filmmaking community reason to rage against the worsening conditions facing the sector. In an op-ed in the March 10 issue of Le Devoir, Simard's filmmaker friend Marguise Lepage eloquently eulogizes his contribution to Quebec documentary and social justice, and rails against new government priorities and funding shortages facing doc and auteur filmmakers and producers. Lepage contextualizes the sinister side of this growing cultural poverty, exposing how linchpin independent production companies like Simard's Virage - which champion subjects and issues (gasp) over profitability - are in the process of disappearing. As Lepage points out, doc and auteur films have quite literally made the reputation of our cinema worldwide, and thankfully their makers are refusing to let them (and the injustices and subjects they bring to light...

( By Hour writer Richard Burnett ) "You're sitting in my office!" OSM Maestro Kent Nagano told over 50 journalists and cameramen assembled on the stage at Place des Arts' Salle Wilfred Pelletier after he had conducted his orchestra through an introductory song. "This is where we do our work." The press was then invited to sit in the seats vacated by the musicians as Nagano unveiled the details of the OSM's final season at Salle Wilfred-Pelletier. The 2010-2011 season launches on September 2 with a free open-air concert at Place des Arts - their first-ever - in a concert also featuring the Cirque Eloize. The orchestra will move into their brand spanking new hall next door for their 2011-2012 season. The new 2,100-seat symphony hall is currently under construction at a cost of $266-million. "Usually I want to kill someone when I hear the jackhammers!" Nagano said half-joklingly. Other highlights include their season's first indoor series concert...

This week, there's a hint of spring in the air, no? I've started to notice the quality of the light change, as it sneaks in my bedroom window - earlier - and with its rusty-orange glow. It's downright teasy. Next, we'll be seeing little sprigs of grass poping up here and there, and getting randy. So. If green is also on your mind, and you happen to have ideas about how to make the Plateau more eco, you should attend a community forum taking place tonight (Wedn. March 3) at 7 p.m. at the House of Friendship (120 Duluth St. E.). Organized by Projet Montreal, the forum welcomes locals to share their thoughts on what a greener Plateau might look like, what projects they'd like to see happen, and what tools they need to make their piece of the Plateau sprout. The forum will unite various groups, including Santropol Roulant , the Urban Ecology Centre , The Mile End Citizen's Committee and the local Eco-Quartier , as well as Greening Duluth (the new neighbourhood group...

For the first time in a long time, today I felt the warmth of the sun. And while brief, it reminded me that maybe I should save my beer and poutine money for a "sun-destination" trip next winter. But, well, beer and poutine... Speaking of which: Friday! And lots of awesome stuff to do: - I for one am definitely going up to Il Motore (179 Jean-Talon W.) for the second night of the Blue Skies Turn Black 10th anniversary shows : with Hour's cover stars Black Feelings and Grand Trine, Ultrathin, Tonstartssbandht, Special Noise, Homosexual Cops and DJs Fred and Guillaume (read more about BSTB's more-underground music connection with Pirates of the Lachine Canal here ). Starts at around 8:15 p.m. - Divan Orange (4234 St-Laurent Blvd.) hosts a MEG Showcase featuring the pop-rock stylin's of Organ Mood , Vicious/Delicious and Shortpants Romance , 8 p.m. - The Immigrant Worker Centre of Montreal teams up with Cinema Politica in solidarity with the laid-off textile manufacturing...

It's last call for Hollerado, who play the final night of their month-long, Saturday night stand at Divan Orange (4234 St-Laurent Blvd.) this coming Saturday, Feb. 27. It's becoming something of an annual thing for the band (last February the whoresome foursome farmed themselves out for 28-days straight, playing nightly residencies in seven different cities, seven nights a week for a whole month) who've been selling out their concerts at Le Divan. The last show this weekend will see the band sharing the stage with Zeroes and Huron. Hollerado released their album debut, Record In a Bag , at the beginning of this month, a ragingly homosexual review of which can be found here . The Cesarean birth of the Bag capped an uncommonly crazy year for these semi-local boys (Manotick, Ontario enjoys joint custody of the band), a year that saw them rock the People's Republic of China not once but twice, win $250,000 dollars (yes, that's the correct number of zeroes) from an Ottawa...

Ah, the snow-melt-slush-snow-melt-slush cycle decends upon us. Forge through the sleet tonight in the name of many different causes, or just to have fun, either way, works for me. - Painting a New World for Haiti shows work by emerging African artists, with honoured guest Minister of Immigration Yolande James, at Olympic Stadium, 5 p.m. - Painter John Ancheta 's Aquacades swims to great depths at Battat Contemporary (#100-7245 Alexandra), 6 p.m. - Best Canadian Poetry and Best Canadian Essays 2009 and the Banff literary journalism program's Cabin Fever launch many a good word at Drawn and Quarterly (211 Bernard), 7 p.m. - Funny, highly entertaining and admirably odd, Sidemart Theatrical Grocery's experimental and music-inspired Trying for the Kingdom is worth a visit to the Segal Centre Studio (5170 Côte-Ste-Catherine), 8 p.m. tonight and Feb. 27. - NYC-dweller Gina Gibney visits town with View Partially Obstructed uncovers beauty and tackles domestic violence, at Agora (840...

You know when you're in a subway station and you see a musician busking for change? On March 2, 2010, in Montreal, you might very well know the musician in the subway station busking for change. And chances are they've played for much larger audiences than you and the pre/post-work crowd. War Child announced today that their successful Busking for Change initiative will take place in Montreal on March 2, 2010, between 8 a.m. and 7 p.m. Apparently, a full list of stations where (well-known, and famous) musicians will be playing will be available, soon, but the stations they're specifically shouting out at present are Berri-UQAM, Place-des-Arts, and the McGill metro/Eaton Centre conflation. This, of course, is kind of blarg: I mean, people at Snowdon and Plamondon and Angrignon need love too, right? Still, it's a good start. A list of artists is no doubt forthcoming as well, but I've heard a rumour that my old buddy Patrick Krief (ex- Dears , Black Diamond Bay ) might...

From start to finish I don't think the smile left my face. It surprised me, because I had my doubts. Before the curtain was drawn on Mainline Theatre's The Mid-Life Crisis of Dionysus, I have to admit, a musical about the god of the debauched didn't inspire me. Although it did sound sexy... I just figured the evening would be lacking in substance and vigor. Well, I couldn't have been more wrong. Everything from the music to the cast to the original songs inspired bachanalian pleasure. The production was as heady as wine and as deliciously indulgent. The Mid-Life Crisis of Dionysus has legs (very beautiful legs) and real staying power. At Mainline Theatre (3997 St-Laurent Blvd.), to March 6

Public Cervix Announcement! World-famous post-porn performer and sex-ed icon Dr. Annie Sprinkle talks to the delightful Tamara Kramer, host and producer of Shtetl on the Shortwave on CKUT90.3FM, tomorrow (Friday, Feb. 19) at 11 am! I wonder if Annie thinks Montreal is still the sexy thing it once was? I worry about our reputation these days, I do. But, to go a little deeper (yep), all too commonly in this still-nascent internet age, the most pervasive images of sex are wrapped up in social control, misogyny and the superficial - that's "mainstream" porn for ya in general, I guess. And while it may be just the thing for some, it barely skims the surface for others. Sprinkle's take on sex and sexuality is like a breath of pure freedom (which is kind of like oxygen but with more long-term euphoria). She's made porn, she's starred in porn, she's written books about her sex/love life and books about how to figure out our own sex/love lives. She even has a PhD in...

So what happens when political correctness goes too far? Someone makes a feature-length documentary about it, that's what. And in this case that doc is the much-talked about 2007 film Indoctrinate U , written and directed by Evan Coyne Maloney, who also stars in it Michael Moore-style (albeit with one critical difference said a reviewer at The Weekly Standard: "[Maloney's] got the on-screen dexterity of a Michael Moore, only with integrity"). Indoctrinate U closely examines repressive and widespread ideological conformism on American university and college campuses, a slowly moving storm of censorship that has created "a campus culture in which speech codes rule the day; in which free inquiry has been replaced with prescribed, politically correct values; and in which students are taught not how to think, but what to think." Sounds just like studying fine arts in Montreal in the early-'90s - good times! Anyway, the documentary takes Maloney - whose previous...

Remember that Facebook phenomenon where people decided it was OK to share 25 things about themselves with a everyone in their innerweb? Well, someone recently pointed me in the direction of this blog... anyone can submit 25 things about their sexuality. Anonymously. The results are suprising moving profound funny disturbing. Warning: You will lose all sense of time. 25 Things About My Sexuality "It's complicated." One of my favourite entries to date is Friday, Feb. 13, 2009 .

Beloved (and historic) trannie showbar Café Cleopatra will be expropriated to clear the way for a new staid office building along the infamous stretch. According to a report by Alanah Heffez at Spacing Montreal , the Société de Développement Angus acquired two more properties on Saint-Laurent and Ste-Catherine: Main Importing Grocery and the building that housed Club Opera. The redevelopment of this stretch has been slotted for years now, but the fact that 4 live show venues will be replaced by office and retail space (all owned by one developer in what is supposed to be the new Quartier des Spectacles) remains the truly sketchy part of the story. Cleopatra's owner John Zoumboulakis has vowed to fight the expropriation in court, but it's unlikely he'll be able to halt the re-development project. For better or worse, it seems that the lower Main is about to get "cleaned up" and that process known as "revitilization" has begun. So, what does getting "cleaned...