April 2000 Volt reviews

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April 4 | 5 | 6 | ? | 7 | 10 | 11

• Tuesday 04:
  • Les Nouvelles on the Microsoft ruling, such as it is. "Bonsoir!" absolutely hollered.
  • JS and Guy shoe- and sockless on the floor (a key element of the set’s appeal, by the way), tossing a beach ball back and forth while Dano exercises her faculties by reviewing... sandals. Nadyne does her Flashdance, Mathieu says with characteristic meanness. He has the acid tongue of a fag hard-done-by, and it’s entirely misplaced, and indeed here he acts as bored as an heterosexualist male would be when forced to talk about ladies’ sandals for more than half a second. He doesn’t hear the $50 price for the flats the first time and whelps on the second.
  • Dano flubs the time left in the segment. «C’est pour ça qu’elle n’est pas animatrice,» Mathieu tells us redundantly.
  • Simone down on Yonge St. Street kids at Evergreen barely pay her heed, having seen it all before – probably 20 minutes before, in fact. Audio quality is poor. Why always do something? she asks. Why not just be? (Because my mind races. I have to keep up.) Sugar Ray plays in the background. She passes Remington’s and fails to notice.
  • Weird faux-historical film with Jean-Louis and Simon, consisting of flirting, Fudd-style skirt-chasing, and vulgar symbolism. Again.
    • Videoclips: "Wait & Bleed" de SlipKnot, with crystal-clear, entrancing, lushly melodic, Toolesque vocals when not switched over to rap-gae mode; Katerine, «Je vous emmerde.»
• Wednesday 05:
  • Dano on grrrl hockey in Bathurst. (Hey, that’s old news.) Introed with Yvon Ailleurs’ mike, dammit. Dano on skates. Stick to sandals, dearie.
  • Women are more sensitive, states a player. More team-oriented. Patience, says the French-speaking coach with the English name, is the grrrls’ greatest virtue. Uh-huh. It’s actually true, but also a bit of a stereotype.
  • More focus on breast protection, sliced and diced forever in Amazons, which This Ain’t the Rosedale Library still has on sale. (Crucial and essential reading in order to be considered civilised. And I name-check it in my article.)
  • Rodrigue Jean, director of Full Blast, set in Bathurst, of which my only memories are the orange-painted cinder-block walls of the hotel, as if indeed anticipating some kind of blast. He’s quite defensive about the film’s fictiveness. And it’s not heavy, he protests unconvincingly: When they’re not fucking, they’re fighting. Was I ever glad when this segment ended. And Mathieu should have known Rodrigue was from Caraquet before starting the interview – a beginner-level mistake.
  • On location in Caraquet, at the Legion manqué. The pool hall.
  • Guy on summer jobs (via Internet), which never pay enough to be of use. Not quite an iron ring on Guy’s right pinky. Repetitive, content-weak segment, this. Guy is ill-suited to the net.beat.
  • Gogosse à JS: «Pas besoin de cheap crap.» It ain’t gonna come from me, but eventually someone powerful is going to make a conspicuous complaint about JS’s French, and about Volt in general.
    • Videoclips: «À Moncton» de Marie-Jo Thério (Guy sings a karaoke version to Dano); «Oh chérie» de Caféïne.
• Thursday 06: A rerun. Of course.
  • Tito Boisvert meets a recycling man. (Somebody’s fantasy, shurely?!) What is with the Frenj accent? And Tito has a wife? At the recycling station (of which I have excellent photographs), Tito turns "all the crap you pick up in the morning" into a pork chop. Word to your mother.
  • Dano on body image and weight. Heavy on biological determinism, which does have some error bars surrounding it in reality. A lot of L2 anglo grrrls interviewed down at the Beach.
  • Herr Müller on shining shoes: «Nettoyer le queer.» The shoes didn’t end up looking any better.
    • Videoclips: «Je dis aime» de M; «L’impertinent» de Fabe.
• Unknown date:
  • JS and Mathieu as school inspectors in New Brunswick Acadie. Grrrl and her nylons barricaded in a locker. Donuts. Very deadpan in the face of embarrassingly giggle-triggerhappy principal. (The deadpanness comes from the meanness.) Typing tests for office ladies. (I max out at 89 wpm. Top that, honey.) A gang d’amis called the Funky Bunch. In rural New Brunswick, you gotta believe.
  • Mathieu is left-handed. Sinister.
  • The Queen’s French: winner; game de hockey.
  • Eric on BlackholeTV.com, featured presumably because they live in Ottawa. Make-work project for Eric, I guess. What’s their revenue model?
  • Francophone hockey tourney, with a lot of English accents. (Face it, some immersion students, like their own teachers, never achieve native competency.) Excellent use of car rear-view mirror by spaz JS.
  • Guy channelling Simon as Fernand «He Shoots! He Scores!» Castonguay. Too-consistent prosody, like the net-TV segment. Didn’t we just enjoy a hockey segment? Grrrls, that time? The coach is a redhead.
  • Chickenhawk NAMBLA-bait dressing-room photos, though I swear one of the players was wearing a pink dress.
  • Detect-o-mo Volt segment again. I have to force myself to sit there quietly just to catch all the dialogue. I’m usually gripping my head and squealing in astonished delight. But this one’s so good we’ve got to keep it from getting out, lest we put up with embarrassing, misrepresentative questions in the Leg.
  • A blague claims the gang (the Funky Bunch?) never set foot in Shippagan. The Voltists purport to prove it via videotape, conveniently forgetting the lessons of Capricorn One.
    • Videoclips: "Flat Beat" de Mr. Oizo, a Wallpaper porn fantasy from that old fag Jim Henson’s deathbed delirium (smoke the wiener!); «La cabine à Félix» de Marc Déry, not showing enough skin or bod.
• Friday 07: A video show. Simon visits a collector of flatulence. Like, kids.
  • JS and Simon doing a Pythonesque communication-via-nonverbal-utterances thang. The shades look good on JS. Very mod, those. Shock: It’s an ad. Le service de clairvoyance Volt.
    • Videoclips: "Break Stuff" de Limp Bizkit; «Libérez» de la Brigade; «Pas d’expérience» de Kid Fléo; «Les camions» de WD40 (trademark violation, anyone? but Cf. Prozzäk); «C’est bien salsa» d’Yves et Martin, wearing out its welcome; "Paninaro ’95" des Pet Shop Boys, easily their worst video, exceeding even "West End Girls." What, you couldn’t have played "Rent" or "So Hard"?
• Monday 10:
  • Dano, our "kiddo reporter," meets SlipKnot. She’s shocked at their ordinariness and douceur. Odd how she wears an S&M zipped hooded mask. It’s worse than Kiss with the fans slavishly emulating the bandmembers’ masks. One thinks of the Residents. What happens if someone makes off with a mask one day? And the Knots claim their fans don’t want to see ’em any other way. Didn’t Laura Ashley MacIsaac claim that fans can have him high or have him sober, and what the fans are paying for is having him high?
  • Nathalie on music. Discussing Mr. Oizo, she consistently misuses "analogue" to mean "monaural." Will the puppet in the oft-seen video really get his own show? (They muttered that idea, a tad more cruelly, to the little girl in Blind Melon’s "No Rain," too.)
  • Today, Mathieu is virtually asleep, and looks disheveled.
  • Another school inspection, this one in Caraquet. Overexposed: Ever heard of white balance, kids? Running joke on cafeteria matrons’ uniforms. A spaghetti-eating contest that makes its contestants resemble the patient in Metallica’s "One." A certain contestant, though jailbait, is a redhead and would look even more stunning were he not so overexposed.
  • Volt: C’est ben meilleur à minuit. Then run all five of the week’s episodes starting at midnight Sunday.
    • Videoclips: «Détruire» des Marmottes aplaties; "Spit It Out" de SlipKnot, again.
• Tuesday 11: Missed the first eight minutes.
  • Guy covering the net.beat again. Very bushy hair today. Topic: Summer vacation.
  • Eric on ballon-ballet, or ball hockey, or whatever it’s called. I don’t get it.
  • Danger Zone aime Spécial V!
  • The name of the info-tête-parlante is finally clear: Willian Portal. (William Orbit + Orbital + portal?) Complains that kids have $6,000 computers but claim to be too poor to buy a compact disc. William advances a strong antipiracy stance, which I support. If he were a corporeal entity I’d want to go out on a date with him.
    • Videoclips: «Jeune et con» de Saez; "Alive" des Garçons-Beastie.

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