SOPA, PIPA, ACTA, C11 and all the other letters and numbers they can throw at us be damned! The Net’s Not Gonna Change

To paraphrase Micheal Corleone’s only noteable line in Godfather III: “Just when we thought we were out, they pull us back in!” I had to paraphrase it because I wouldn’t dare embed the YouTube clip these days and am even a little skittish about a direct quote from such a heavily copyrighted film. Yes, we all know that SOPA and PIPA got shelved in the US, thanks in large part to sites like Wikipedia going dark for a day and showing everyone just what a heavily censored and regulated internet might be like. But that doesn’t mean they’re done for good…

2011: The Year in Posts

While it may have taken a bit longer than expected (admittedly, this is really, really late, but we’ve been busy), our list of our top 20 posts of 2011 is here. We asked our writers to tell us their favourite posts or the posts they felt were the most important, both by themselves and other writers that appeared on FTB over the year…

2011 Year-In-Review: News

With revolution in the streets from the Middle East to middle America, a major power shift in Ottawa and a smattering of other events that would have stolen the headlines in any other year, 2011 will be largely remembered as the year that got the ball rolling for the future, good or bad…

From Ottawa With Love: A Radio-Friendly NDP Leadership Debate

Since the Kennedy-Nixon debates of the 60s, politics have been almost all about what the candidates look like, and how they hold themselves on camera. Sure, what they have to say…

Some people never change: Tremblay evicts Occupy Montreal

You know when you dislike someone and then they go and do something really cool and you start thinking that maybe you’ve misjudged them? Inevitably, they go back to their old ways and you realize that nope, you were right about them all along and you kick yourself for doubting your preconceptions. That’s exactly how I feel right now about Montreal Mayor Gerald Tremblay and I doubt I’m the only one. For weeks, Tremblay kept a drastically different tone than the mayors of other major cities with an occupied public space. Following the 1am commando-style raid…

On Devil’s Sunday… There Was Blood, Lots of It

Horror and sex, they go together like burlesque and Montreal. If you don’t believe me, just watch any horror flick and tell me you’re not turned on at one point or another by one of the sexy college students fleeing or fighting the mysterious killer. It’s a classic formula, really. Rarely, if ever, are the killers themselves seen as sexy…

It’s Close to Midnight in Montreal: 2011 Halloween Preview

“It’s close to midnight” Yup, was busy with the first real night of Halloween celebrations last night and preparing for a show I’m participating in on the last night. Took me a while to get this post up, but not a minute too soon, because…”Something evil’s lurking in the dark” Not so much evil as creative, inventive, fun and a little bit weird, just like Montreal at Halloween time. And Halloween is upon us once again…

Join the Club, the Candyass Club, Tonight @ Cafe Cleopatre

Velma, Velma, Velma, what have you got yourself into now?

As if running her own burlesque troupe (the Dead Doll Dancers); helping to save Cafe Cleopatre; theatrically teaching the history of Montreal’s Red Light District alongside Donovan King; and the semi-regular trips to burlesque festivals in New York and Las Vegas wasn’t enough, Velma Candyass is now doing a monthly show.

The aptly named Candyass Club runs tonight at the aforementioned Cafe Cleopatre and features burlesque, drag and all sorts of quirky…

The Arab Spring meets fall in New York, but you won’t find #OccupyWallStreet on TV

BREAKING NEWS: New York City is under occupation and has been for a few days. You’d think that would be breaking news, wouldn’t you? Even if it’s not the whole city, just the financial quarter. And even if it’s not an invading army, but people upset with the way their own country is running things (in this case, the economy). After all, domestic upheaval in Egypt and people occupying a public square in Bahrain was headline news all around the world just a few months ago, wasn’t it? Come to think of it, the lack of media coverage of the Occupy Wall Street protest is just like the Arab Spring. State controlled media completely blocked the protesters’ side of the story…

Remember 9/11 but don’t forget the rest

Ten years ago I was working the night shift in a call centre. I had been up kind of late the night before and a phone call before 9am was not what I wanted, but it’s what I got. My initial reaction to news of a plane hitting the World Trade Center was blunt: “Yeah right, Jerry, I’m trying to sleep.” But he insisted that he wasn’t joking and that I turn on the TV…But he insisted that he wasn’t joking and that I turn on the TV. After a bit of groaning, I left my bed that I had only reached a few hours prior, went into the living room…

I want my TV for free, just like it used to be

We all know those people. The kind that proudly don’t own a TV, don’t need one and don’t want one. I know people like that and I sympathize. I agree that TV can be an intrusive presence and a real conversation stopper, not to mention it’s a medium dominated by corporate advertising which I despise.

Still, I never counted myself among those ranks because there is something mind-numbingly pleasing about watching a good show, even a cop show. Yes, this anti-authoritarian, anti-corporate activist likes him some CSI.

We also all know people who feel that owning a TV is…

Closing the window on Irene

As the remnants of Tropical Storm Irene pounded Montreal this past Sunday, I hunkered down in my apartment. Listening to the winds blow and the rain fall, I thought to myself: “I should really close the living room window, my roommate’s XBox is getting wet.” If you were expecting my rainy day thoughts to be something more profound or at the very least profound-ish sounding and dealing with the nature of nature and its relationship to our very unnatural culture, well, that’s not the case here. And why should it be? Yeah, I had been outside earlier in the day. I had felt slightly stronger-than-usual winds press up against me as I ran some errands. I witnessed the closest thing my neighbourhood got to destruction…

Murder Most Raunchy: Glam Gam’s If Looks Could Kill, They Will @ Cafe Cleopatre

There’s a killer loose and you can help catch him or her, or at very least benefit from the murderous rampage with some good laughs and cheap shots, I mean bar shots that drop to $2 when the killer strikes again. Last night I caught (pun somewhat intended) Glam Gam Productions’ latest offering, the self-described burlesque murder mystery If Looks Could Kill, They Will, which runs again tonight and tomorrow.

If a typical Glam Gam show is…

If Looks Could Kill, They Most Certainly Will This Weekend

Have you ever thought to yourself: “I really love playing Clue but I wish there was more nudity”? If so, this weekend head to Cafe Cleopatre and catch If Looks Could Kill…They Will.

It’s the new show from Glam Gam Productions, the same group that brought us the sexy Halloween fright-fest Nightmare on Main Street, the raunchy holiday treat Tits the Season and even the Montreal incarnation of SlutWalk. If Looks Could Kill is billed as a burlesque murder mystery…

Four Days of Madness…The Good Kind: A Report from the 2011 Buffalo Infringement Festival

As the bus takes me back to Montreal away from a weekend away from the ordinary at the 2011 Buffalo Infringement Festival, one thought seems to dominate my mind: next year, I’m going to go for longer. I’ve been for longer, in fact last year I spent a little over a week at the BIF, but this year circumstances limited my time there to four days. Four wonderful days jam-packed with underground art and chillin in the park, sometimes both at the same time. A mere ten minutes after arriving in town, I was in The Bend watching Infringement cab driver (yes, the fest has its own cabbie), visual artist and now spoken-word comedy artist Scott “Skitchy” Steele…

Like we’ve done one thousand times before: FTB’s 1000th post

I’d like to interrupt our regularly scheduled flow of news, arts and culture coverage and commentary to bring you an important announcement. Well, maybe not so important for you, to be honest, but for us here at FTB it’s kind of a mini-milestone. You see, the post which you are reading is the thousandth to appear on this site. Think about that for a second. We’re a small group. No one’s being paid, from administrators and editors to writers and photographers, we’re doing this because we love it. We’ve all got other things going on in our lives and have other ways to pay the bills. Despite this, in roughly two years’ time, we’ve managed to produce 1000 pieces of content…