February 2000 Volt reviews
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- Tuesday
01:
![[BITCH!]](bitch.gif "[BITCH!]")
Eric on barcodes. For about two
minutes. Why didn’t Thérèse squash this one? Emblazoned
on the post-industrial down jumpsuits worn by Slipknot
(SlipKnot, who knows) in their video, we see... barcodes.
How cosmic.- Yvon Ailleurs and Bernard De Longlac on antisqueegeeism.
- A blague over the phone: «Faites-les pas vos maudits messages.» Take your own medicine, honey.
- CDs with Nathalie. Noir Silence: The Beau Dommage of the ’90s. That bad, huh? I grew up with that stuff. Mathieu finds them fossilized, and rather predictably so, at the adolescent level – not at all like Volt interstitial comedy segments.
- Info-tête-parlante de Simon. (What is the name of this segment?) All we are is a wetware computer, he says in the 1,500 words required to utter any simple technical concept in French.
- While watching a French educational program, I saw a fight break out. A very old segment with Simon and (apparently) Jean-Louis, a fascinating man, where Simon snaps JL’s condom on a bar patio. Certainly a common occurrence in mid-Toronto – do we see this a lot in the washrooms at Berlin? Then Simon as a disturbingly plausible flower child (the wig is killer) using shockingly explicit terminology to push les condoms Volt.
- A writing competition.
- Videoclips: "Spit It Out" de Slipknot; «Yves et Martin» de C’est ben salsa, with faux-español subtitles.
- Wednesday
02:
- Mathieu as tipsy and girlish. A dream come true?
- Learn to articulate statistics,
Dano. You claim that the consumption of alcohol has increased from
25% to 243%. Percent of what? For which group? Over which period?
What is the source?
- Meme of the week: ÒMy face stuck in my frozen puke.Ó
- JS, unshaven, in a beret administering a breathalyzer. A dream
come true?
- Videoclips: «Arrête de boire» de Rock et belles oreilles, hilarious years later even though it’s recycled footage from their defunct comedy program; «Le teint de Linda» de Mara Tremblay.
- Thursday 03: All videos all the time, hosted by Sven, who speaks an inexplicable German argot. (Photographed on the bridge across the tracks at Manor Rd., right?) “Afrika Shox” de Leftfield; «Pour toi» de David Hallyday; “Marder” de Ramasutra; «Y’a pas d’arrangement» de Zebda.
- Friday
04: What could be more
distasteful, extraneous, time-wasting, and unwelcome than a
Volt sexualité phone-in show? (I tried,
kids, really I did, with Simon and Mathieu, but the
giggling discomfort of the callers, the L2 French of the guest, and
of course the epididymus fiasco put me off.)
- Monday
07:
- Mathieu indispo{sed,nible} on the can, so the floor director opens the show.
- Hollywood Gossip® with the beautiful people, Guy-n-Dano. Has Madonna really been successfully reimpregnated? Just why does this segment work?
- Vox Pop with an
orange-clown-haired Mathieu in Ottawa. (Is that where he’s from?
Perhaps that explains the bitterness – from Ottawa to Yonge
and Eg, it’s not a step up.) First he asks if passerby victims
speak du plus meilleur French. Then he
wonders what people will do to get on TV. Dye their hair orange,
apparently. (Was Mathieu in fact the Lady Miss Kier manqué in
“Le Rapper Chic”?)
- Internet “chronicle” with Marc, wearing a turtleneck and leather jacket. He’ll be on a Cycleski on Wednesday, but we’ll get there later. Valentine’s Day sites, conscientiously presented.
- Mathieu has had his hair cut, making his eyes look all the wider.
- Volt does backward masking: Now another report
from Guy in which he sports a little orange tank top.
- Ouch. You’re hurting me.
- Jérôme Minière, musician. But knock off the spinning 3D frame and solarization.
- Repeat of item with Simon and (I guess) Jean-Louis as cops, the latter of whom loses it! when making the collar, to deploy a sipowiczism. Was that a Life® vitamin bottle holding les Franco-Pilules Volt («pour du plus meilleur French»)? And doesn’t the image of JL on the rooftop evoke "Owner of a Lonely Heart"?
- An actually-serious blague, on alcoholism, from a recovering
toxicomane. Hey! Mathieu actually wasn’t
drunk that day!
- Videoclips: «Gros t’as (d’marde)» de GrimSkunk; "Alive" des Garçons-Beastie.
- Tuesday
08:
- Choclair intros. It’s TFO, not V, Choc.
- Rant about left-lane hoggers. Um... «La switch est à bitch» veut dire quoi?
- Bernard De Longlac. The opening music is ominous, reminiscent of Stronger Than the Sun. Is TFO really censoring swearwords on-air? (There are any? Indirect backstabbing in-joke character assassinations, yes, but swearing?) Yvon Ailleurs on les testicules des pirates de l’air. Nice jacket, Guy.
- Get lost, Simone.
- One does however note the real-world hominess of many of Volt’s locations, located as they are in the real world, homey.
- Nathalie once again. Mathieu! It’s Celebrity Deathmatch, not “Celebrating”! He is otherwise very good. Indeed, I quite like the way Mathieu includes himself in review discussions; he’s more than a host, which is itself a very interactive-technology approach. Now all he needs to do is shave his head, paint his face and cranium luminous green, and deliver monologues in monotone.
- Dano on Choclair. Chutzpah, girl! Don’t let him off the hook. (This actually is one of the few rationales for attending J-school: They teach you how to ask difficult questions. I was derided by my J-school diplômé friend after asking Michael Johnson if he threw the race against Donovan Bailey. But I digress.)
- Another blague from a detox d00d. Also sincere.
- Videoclips: "1999" de Cassius – way typographic, and fantabulous. "Let’s Ride" de Choclair.
- Wednesday
09: By my calculations, it took the
Voltistes fully 23 days to think this one up.
- Spot the error with JS’s toupée. The schtick today, rather like Volt 2000 of yore, is technologie intéractive, plugged with recurring pythonesque malapropism throughout the show.
- JS likes to mountain-bike, but sez he can’t in winter. Honey! Come to papa! Doesn’t he read the Icebike mailing list on winter cycling, which I founded and run? Heck, I coined the word icebike. Looked at icebike.org recently? En tout cas, JS and Marc made an effort on the Cycleski. I wonder if they’ve finally gotten such a product right. It’s been much-discussed in icebike circles. There do tend to be two categories of icebiker – recreational and commuter – and I think it’s really the wealthier rec icebikers, and of course the dilettantes, who would cotton to such a product. More power to ’em, though.
- I am Name-Checked on Volt, Episode 1.
- No, Miss Kier, I’m not going to me saloper on the concept. I actually think the fake user-interface widgets onscreen through the show were quite clever, and well-set-up with du plus meilleur French.
- And this isn’t "interactive," unless you call a snatchmail from Guy with the misconstructible subject line "weasel" interactive, too.
- JS on jeux vidéos.
- Does Dano really wear false eyelashes to bed? Lord knows I do. Kirk de Hospital Passion is not unstudly. Give Guy some of his body hair; donor grafts begin at the wrists. If losing Dano is what you get for missing Volt, do I get Kirk for watching it?
- Dano trying her best with a Valentine’s Day report. Really. Labouring through tremendous interference, and agendas. (I’ve been reading too much Martin Amis.)
- Fake tearoom ad about les Culottes Volt. They’re doing this to torture me. And everyone knows the coefficient of expansion is the deciding variable in such encounters.
- A blague requesting various irrelevant
bands, and getting one of them.
- Videoclips: «Jalousie» de X-clusives, reproducing what most will dismiss as the Busta Rhymes trope of figures body-painted, like a certain talking head, in glowing black-light fluorescents. But doesn’t anyone remember "Devotion" by Nomad? «Jugement dernier» de Sans Pression.
We see here the undercurrent of meanness in Mathieu, whereas I still love the show.
- Thursday
10: A rerun.
- Simon, as Tito Boisvert, the hard-hatted, Safe-T-vested roadworker, dines and sips wine with a sommelier. Simon is at considerable, and even modestly embarrassing, pains to use pluperfect French with this European woman, who must have made her peace with joual to have moved here. (Compare this to Tito’s performance in the what-is-kosher? segment.) I thought Volt viewers weren’t old enough to drink?
- Charles Duchesne, alias DJ Focâle, alias Kirk Smith ("Kir Smits"), applies lipstick and wears a wig that just isn’t right for him. But we like the calves. We’re liking the calves, all right. He attacks a businessman, stopping him cold at first by showing a little leg (I did say "we"), and steals his wallet, only to refuse a kiss. Got problems? Call Investigations Volt. Sure, I will – just lose the Charlie Chan facial hair. ("Racial" hair?)
- Dano down on Queen St. absolutely wasting everybody’s time scratching the upper patina of the top molecules of the surface of what makes the street hip. And imagine! filling up an entire bag of clothing at Noise for five bucks! (I’m not marking this one with my BITCH! logotype. Any reasonable person, let alone any qualified producer, would have spiked this one on sight.)
- Surrealist segment, seen now a thousand times without really wearing out its welcome, set in a mid-Toronto apartment, with a Thomas Trio and the Red Albino–reminiscent man in a fridge. Le café Ultra-Brun de Volt. Hilare. And we love the tall chick, while still missing Marie Turgeon, la déesse.
- Guy discusses kitsch, more or less credibly, thanks to his
guests. (Dano? Hello?) The sight of Guy Gagnier brandishing an
Ericofon made my week, full stop. And then we saw Søren of
Aqua for five seconds. Jeez. I’m blowing up here.
- As alluded to by Mr. Metro Retro (who offered a pink Ericofon for sale last week!), kitsch works when the item was invented with sincerity. Someone loved it. What distinguishes kitsch from ephemera, from something disposable, is love. The Backstreet Boys are trash; Aqua aren’t, and the Pet Shop Boys certainly are not.
- What also helps is some understanding of the history and role of design, pompous as that sounds; you see it in Aqua’s lovingly art-directed music videos, where the surfaces have depth. The Backstreet Boys’ are gratingly Hollywood all the way. If you were stuck at an airport waiting out a storm, which would you rather watch?
- Videoclips (two major winners today!): «Johnny Go» de Jean Leloup, a startlingly effective layering of English refrain, hiphop, the French Renaissance as processed through Les Dangerous Valmont Liaisons, Bride of Frankenstein, Rocky Horror, metacinema, a sexy butch white-guy rapper dude, Christ’s passion, La femme Nikita/Wilkes Booth, the Borg, and folk jammin’; «Vous les menteurs» de Natali Lorio, with jetblack skies and a crashing third-world jetliner. The singing into the PA mike bests Yvon Ailleurs’ prop by a hair (what is it with Guy and decorative microphones?). Disco-glitter panel gown. Waiting to find those runway guidance flares on EC. (In fact, I suggest a cross-promotion between Volt and Electric Circus. Let’s get the entire on-air and production staff on EC and producin’, baby!)
- Friday 11: Documentary on deaf fellow in Mozambique, which was actually rather good, avoiding the standard pitfall of speaking for him. Generally smart to subtitle signed dialogue rather than dub it, though there was some of that, too. But just what sign language do he and his friends speak? Where’d it come from? How did he avoid missing out on language-learning ability altogether if he went to an oral school as a kid, and only for a limited time? Nonetheless, we’re liking this Feu sacré series more and more.
- Monday
14: Happy Valentine’s Day to six high-school
students who happen to speak French and live in Toronto.
- Truth or Dare is the game, calqued as Trou Tort D’air.
- Mathieu, squeezed into what have now grown wearily used to as a
typical getup, was scattered and not really in command of his set.
At least get people’s names
straight.
- The dares weren’t as juvenile as expected, though the truths could have been punchier, if not by much.
- If you’re gonna have a wheel,
let it fall where it may – see Quiz Show for the
consequences of rigging.
- Rather impressive command of the French language from the contestants, particularly the Jennifer Jason Leigh manquée, Crystel. I sure didn’t have things that together when I was 16. Did you?
By the way, next year, if any out queer francophone students can be found, put them on the show.
- Tuesday
15: JS produces tonight.
- Bernard De Longlac: Six centimetres of snow lands on Toronto, paralyzing it. It’s funny because it’s true. Yvon Ailleurs reports on the cyanide contamination in Europe, which will be more far-reaching than Chernobyl but will receive no coverage whatsoever at any time in the future. Mark my words. And don’t eat the fish.
- Guy is really quite effective at exposition in these segments, you know, due to canny vocal intonations on keywords, which make it self-evident that these are new terms you should be learning through the immediately-ensuing definition. If he can also do this in English – not a sure thing; Simon, for example, sounds remarkably soft-spoken, even apologetic, in English – Guy has a future ahead of him in explaining technical concepts to nontechnical people. While that may sound like I’m condemning him to the Crawlspace for the rest of his life, there is in fact a healthy market for that kind of skill. He could easily host a CNN technology show.
- Simone, that christer. This segment deploys intertextuality, linking the apocalypsism of the opening credits to her murderous impulses. Like Kellerman on Homicide admitting he feels like pulling his gun out whenever he’s so much as cut off in traffic. He and Simone are honest. We give them that. The whole subject of menstrual advertising is actually not unsmart. Perhaps I am warming to her. Mary, mother of God.
- Tall chick and shaven-headed shirtless fellow make out. He fingers her Volt T-shirt, which she removes. But he wants it back on her. Or he wants it. Les T-shirts Volt: Le grand fétish des Franco-Ontariens. Testify, sister!
- Music with Charles Duchesne, alias DJ Focâle, alias Kirk Smith ("Kir Smits"). He’s really quite good, you know, with an excellent active vocabulary and evidently deep musical knowledge. Only one tiny hiccup that most viewers wouldn’t notice. I say replace Nathalie.
- Eric goes ice-fishing. Like I’m going to watch
that.
- Videoclips: «Téléthargique» de Groovy Aardvark; «Gros Mené.»
- Wednesday
16: The thunder episode.
- Modrôbes. What are they, again?
- The Trou Tort D’air couple, Crystel and Denis (Arsenault and Villeneuve), have resolved to just be friends. Oh, for fork sakes. You’re 16 and French. What are you waiting for? («Ça cliquait!»)
- Mathieu lies to Crystel on the phone about Daniel’s saying he’d show her off to his parents. Give us more of this.
- Dano on acne (never mentioning the word "sebum"), with Guy in a
chair as guinea pig.
- Mathieu washes Guy’s face roughly with a cloth, sending shivers down the spines of the Toolbox crowd.
- Vinegar blotting with the cotton ball. («Ça brûle! Ça pue!»)
- Flub the breaking of egg for – surprise! – an egg mask.
- Adhere the cotton to the cheek, Hallowe’en-style. Why not?
- Honey/oat mask, delicious for breakfast.
- To avoid pimples, Dano finally manages to advise (she gets the giggles worse than JS in a gogosse), also avoid iodine, salt, and coffee. What, I can’t have any pleasure in life?
- Guy interviews Catherine Durand, wearing sleeveless T-shirt and choker. Finally some variety in the wardrobe. Guy is the type of skinny guy with the noticeable hamstrings and leg hair, but no quads or calves. And you know, I think he fancies her.
- Les gogosses à JS: Popping
film-canister lids with expelled carbon dioxide.
- Videoclips: "Jump & Shout" de Basement Jaxx; «La lune est au ciel» de Catherine Durand.
- Thursday
17:
- Les petits trücs de Herr Müller: Baking a pie crust. I mean, honey, I do that better than him, and I do it vegan.
- Upper Canada Brewery tour, where our host really knows his stuff and has commendable stage presence. Too bad Dano doesn’t really like beer.
- Ti-vieux := M. Bolduc («Version française de Fleeing Mr. Bolduc»).
- Tito learns the secrets of
kashrut. Best thing about Bathurst and Eglinton: Kosher, hence
vegan, marshmallows. I need to make regular pilgrimages. So
equipped, I can even carry out a Dair on next year’s Valentine’s
show.
- Videoclips: «Au départ» de Yelo Molo; «Embrasse-moi» des Nubians.
- Friday 18: Feu sacré with an Australian aboriginal firebrand. More power to him, I say. (In which Australian state does he reside?)
- Monday
21:
- Mathieu and Pierre Granger share the Panorama desk and intro the show. Mathieu’s a bit confused. Hold that thought!
- An orange-haired Mathieu types on the loudest keyboard imaginable in a cubicle farm as a chick clumps by repeatedly. Ah! She’s a skier! And thus is a theme of today’s episode presaged. We learn about acrobatic skiing (Mathieu in a tutu – «C’est pas du ballet?»), and, later, with Eric, acrobatic kiting, apparently unrelated to cheque-kiting.
- Musique avec Nathalie. (Bring back DJ Focâle!) Impassioned plea for the righteousness of Rage contre la machine. Mathieu keeps trying to get a word in edgewise. Later he mentions that 10% of the population will like the style of music of Katerine, a man with a woman’s name. Whatever could it mean?
- A rather vulgar but not ineffective commercial for Laplatt beer. The ’50s kids looked a tad too contemporary.
- Mathieu’s bingo song, with rather lousy titles (loved the côutent). Bingo. OK. I don’t get this. I can see how Dano’s wide-eyed treks south of Eglinton might be educational, but le bingo? Comment?
- And what does bingo pas rapport mean? I
don’t understand every dang word of this frickin’ language.
- Videoclips: «Tu vois le genre» de 2 Faces, dead ringers for Manau [Cf. Ma folie de Manau]; «Pis si ô moins» des Colocs, with a distastefully skinny hirsute dreadlocked d00d.
- Tuesday
22:
- Pierre Granger intros the show in the Volt studio. I’m glad you held that thought!
- Les Nouvelles: A war between daycares. Where’s Yvon Ailleurs when you need him? Coup in Côte d’Ivoire. Is the reporter an ethnic stereotype? (At least he kept his shirt on.)
- Forum 2000 plug. It’s a travelling conference/love-in for 14- to 30-year-old franco chix.
- Simone: Seagull lust!
- Recycling dead Guy again.
Gag.
- Catherine Durand and Guy doing tomato recipes. Who would have thought that tomato canning was so fascinating?
- The bingo song, again, with the Forum 2000 chix
playing gamely along.
- Videoclips: «Juste toi et moi» d’Indochine; Freeman again.
- Wednesday
23: A clip show, AKA Greatest Hits. When The
Simpsons does this, they apologize, kinda. Well. At least
Mathieu explained that everyone was just too busy working
on the bingo. «Lâchez-nous vos
demandes!» and we’ll run your fave vignettes from each
correspondent.
- JS’s: Thérèse demands he get his hair cut. He’s in Oasis mode. Stretching her out along the boardroom table is rather daring. (Assuming this is Thérèse. I could imagine some union issues popping up. And I am sometimes credulous.) My notes say ÒThe Face.Ó Why?
- A Simone video.
- Dano with Tommy Lee, again.
- Guy with the Insane Clown Posse, again. They are even more contemptible than I’d remembered. One feels dirty being in the same room as a television interview with these two.
- Mathieu: Stressed out. Somehow I can imagine that.
- Videoclip: «Furia» de Mass Hysteria.
- Thursday 24: Stoner hosting the morning show. Pretty droll, this entire episode. It’s a video episode. «Aux armes» de Big Red; «Un jour en France» de Noir Désir, in anime (they’re big in Japan; it’s vaguely cultish; something about a suicide by Bernard of the band; lots of over-the-shoulder clips from faux-Japanese newscasts); «Tabou» des Nubians avec Black Thought; ÒAnother Love SongÓ by Insane Clown Posse (don’t blow your English content on ICP, kids!); «Dit-elle» de Jorane.
- Friday
25: Et Bingo était son
nom-Ô. Surprised myself at my enjoyment of the show.
Apart from spotty ad-libbing, which comes only with practice, I was
rather impressed. Adding the DJs was perfect – just
the right way to update grandma’s pastime. (I liked the accent on
one of ’em, too.)
- Mathieu in a tux shirt, inexplicably, and brandishing Yvon Ailleurs’ mike. Give it back! He and Simon, alias Rodrigue Dumoutier, do a grandiose Starmania-like intro offa cue cards.
- What a fetching Ste-Catherine-est-style jacket with sparkles Rodrigue is wearing. He would be welcomed with open arms into a certain invert bar off Guy St. I used to frequent.
- Who’s the guy in the swimsuit knitting all night? Why doesn’t he rock in his chair? Back to him later.
- Dano as ditz Rita.
- Did Moses caller les boules sur la montagne?
- Iffy with the ad-libbing. Very iffy. Bernard De Longlac forgets his own name.
- Stoner hosts for a while. «Salut, Bern, man!» he exclaims to Bernard, who mutters to Control for advice on what to do next.
- An Enza Supermodel–like transvestite emerges to vacuum
the set.
- Hey, the noise! She couldn’a used a Swiffer?
- Good heavens. It’s Guy. I should have recognized the hamstrings.
- The floor directrix, who has no acting ability and really bosses people around as though the actors and not the characters were incompetent, wears a tutu. We’ve seen that before, just not on a girl.
- What’s with the ethnic stereotypes à go-go? First Stéphane, now Pedro {et,y} Pedro.
- Guy re-emerges, incongruously but thankfully, interrupting a pointlessly stereotypical dance number (what, no maracas?), to bust shit up. (Les Gogosses à Guy?) Ack! Puck in the eye of the caméraman!
- Simon as a Gino Empry–esque high roller, Gilles Groove. Mathieu and Stéphane arrive to arrest him. Mathieu looks startlingly plausible in the uniform. Next step: The red serge.
- The red-jumpsuited DJ firmly tells Stéphane to get lost. Love the accent.
- «Tout est sur contrôle» came up no fewer than four times in different guises. Isn’t that the slogan of Volt itself?
- The Tricot-Volt is rather eerily reminiscent of a very old National Lampoon comic strip, which I cannot describe in a family Web page.
- Mathieu and Simon in tux shirts, yet again inexplicably, brandishing red and green gels. Whatever best-laid plans were held to convert the program into faux-3D went off about as well as a Tory cabinet minister’s grocery-shopping tips.
- Guy storms in and busts up a computer, in a shockingly realistic depiction. There’s some manliness that isn’t elsewhere expressed, isn’t there? (Isn’t Guy the jock of the équipe?) Perhaps Guy could have beaten the shit out of ICP after all.
- A pure-DJ set. Mathieu and Simon dance together, French heritage and showmanship trumping heterosexualism.
- Is the swimmer d00d, who’s probably named Robert Howard,
actually knitting a Tricot-Volt?
- Videoclip: "King of Snake" d’Underworld.
- Monday
28:
- Dano wasn’t in on the joke with Bernard the caméraman
getting a puck in the eye. If you
actually had explained it to her up front, would it have
made a difference?
- Eric on the NSA, where Furbies, those cuddly repeater stations, have been banned. What kind of unprofessional, immature loser brings a Furby to work anyway?
- More of this damn acrobatic shite! This time skiing. At least the guy can speak French. If Volt can run three full segments on acrobatic skiing and kite-flying, then I want to appear on the show again. I’ll even do a skit.
- Guy interviewing Marc Déry, who pings with charisma and sexiness, what with the dense, taut, high-muscled chest and good skin. Guy’s looking pretty good in his veston de cuir, by the way.
- The tickling skit, where Mathieu regresses effectively. (Does he bring a Furby to work?) Les Entreprises de chatouillage Volt. Haven’t grown tired of this number yet.
- A skit depicts a ragtag troupe of motley street signs
terrorizing innocent civilians like Dano, who bitch-slaps JS not once, twice, or even three
times, but six full times. (Somebody’s fantasy, shurely?!)
A Cops manqué, this. Mathieu with a mullet. Jean-Louis (I think)
doing his losing it! schtick, this time with
donuts as a prop. (His pants are a tad too short.) Loved the
Peckinpahlike jet of pink donut cream down Mathieu’s gullet.
(Mullet?) «Version française de
Satan’s pancartes of
signalisation.»
- Nice evolution of Mathieu’s hair, nu? (Mullet?)
- Videoclips: «Tomber la chemise» de Zebda: ska; «Le monde est rendu peace» de Marc Déry, who is definitely tapping into something.
- Dano wasn’t in on the joke with Bernard the caméraman
getting a puck in the eye.