Richard Burnett writes a Gazette blog piece on the death of the alt-weekly.
Updates from June, 2012 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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A woman in Rosemont has been declared the city’s 12th homicide of 2012; a suspect has already been arrested.
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Kristian has some thoughts about Montreal prostitution in the 1940s. This follows a piece on how any attempt to legalize or tolerate prostitution has been political suicide for municipal politicians here.
A day ago, the Mirror had the only piece I’ve seen (besides one of my own posts) that raised the question of the danger to the prostitutes from a plan like the one suggested by borough mayor Ménard. But like everything else on the Mirror site, it has now been blown away.
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John
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Kate
These are such weird laws. It’s like saying reading is legal but libraries are not, and you’re not allowed to buy books either.
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Raymond
no weirder than the sexual human psyche! ou est-ce human sexual psyche?
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qatzelok
I used to think that prostitution was worse for the individual than other jobs. But I have since witnessed that most chain-of-command jobs (99% of employment) involve humiliation, physical and psychological damage, and lowered self esteem. Yay, capitalism!
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Kate
qatzelok, it depends whether you think the potential for acquiring sexually transmitted diseases and unwanted pregnancies – plus making its practitioners vulnerable to further exploitation and abuse – puts prostitution into a special category of its own. Many cultures think so, including our own. I don’t deny that most low-grade jobs involve humiliation and damage, but they don’t tend to involve admitting parts of other people’s bodies into one’s own.
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Blork
I agree that prostitution is in a special category of its own. One that, according to what I’ve read, has a very wide range of experience (everything from the destitute street hooker to “empowered” high price escorts who essentially choose their clients.)
That said, when it comes to non-prostitution (or so-called “regular” jobs) it’s not just the low-grade ones that involve humiliation and damage. All that stuff qatzelok mentions happens across the range, from burger flippers to the executive offices. You can always argue that the more well-off people can always get a different job, but things like that are really easy for a third-party to say but not always so easy to do.
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Some nice bits in this piece about Rusty Staub being inducted into the Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame (thanks to reader Doobious for the link).
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Sean Michaels has a good piece in the current Walrus about how Montreal became a circus city.
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Quebecor is shutting the Mirror down after its current edition. OpenFile has a bit of detail.
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anon
Excellentes nouvelles! Moins anglais le mieux.
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Kate
Yes, it’s very good news – from that perspective.
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Marc
Yikes. The free & paid print media is really on borrowed time.
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Robert J
Anybody want to launch an anglo magazine with me?
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Tux
Death of an institution. Goodbye Rant Line, Networthy, Angel and Insect, Sasha… it was great growing up with you.
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Kate
They’ve also taken their entire, extensive archive offline. That’s a serious loss. Every link anyone has ever made to a Mirror story has now broken.
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Tux
Oh shit, the website’s already down? Fuuuuuuuu. They better have a web geek over there who’s forwarding that stuff to Jason Scott.
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cheese
What? This is real? that is the only useful bit of print media in this town (ok perhaps that’s an exaggeration but…). Could they not just translate it into french and keep it going as “le mirroir” or something :). Then I could practice my french *and* read the stuff that interests me.
The fact taht the website is already gone extra sucks. This is the end of an instritution, how will I found out about shows and new music? Now I see why people hate Quebecor…
PS: funny that the above comment by @anon is on an english blog
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david m
the ‘anon’ comment was obviously written by an anglophone. anyway, my take is that this is no big loss – the mirror has sucked for over a decade now, completely irrelevant to the city, aside for the show listings. the really big loss though is the archives, that’s terrible.
anyway, though oriented differently, voir is a much better paper.
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Kate
Maybe. One thing I always found useful was the Student Survival Guide – it was a compilation of a lot of very useful data for living in Montreal on a low income. I’ve only been able to extract the first page out of Google’s cache but it would be a shame to lose that info.
Note to anyone from the Mirror: if you have that data and want it to live anywhere, montreal.com will give it a home.
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Chris
I wonder if the timing, being St Jean, is a coincidence… wrt anon’s comment.)
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montrealfilmguy
The anon just above Kate who’s happy to have less anglish stuff can’t even
correctly write in french…facepalm time. -
poplar
i was always surprised by the freedom of speech exercised on this paper
i am pretty sure that the reasons of it’s closure are more political than financial, hence the sudden closing down
if it was financial there could have been attempts to make ends meet, either by reducing the content or by asking for the readers’ contribution
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TC
@kate: since libraries generally keep newspapers in their physical form as part of their collection, perhaps the Mirror could donate their online archives to the Grande Bibliotheque.
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Kate
@TC: that would be a great solution – but do you think they’d even consider it?
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Marc
Fagstein tweeted this: http://www.montrealmirror.com/potatoes/archive.html
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Kate
Thanks, Marc! I missed that.
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walkerp
Wow, huge bummer. I’ve really enjoyed the Mirror. It’s a lively voice for young anglo culture in Montreal.
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david m
thanks for that archive link, going to see about full-stop copying it, but i hope that you montreal.com folks can pull it off. that’s a true local archive. as for the mirror contemp, has anyone leafed through it lately? it’s mostly screeds and boxy opinions, just embarrassing, nothing like journalism. honestly, some of these columns read like ravings of people on psychedelics. aside from the shows listings, i’d say not a big loss.
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Kate
david m, we can’t possibly take or host the whole Mirror archive and I doubt we’d get away with it. But there’s nothing wrong with me basing a Montreal survival guide on the old Mirror survival guide, updating it and expanding it: I always thought it should be regarded as a general low-income file anyway, not only for students. So I will work on that this summer.
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Michel
Even more insidious is that the good-bye message wasn’t even written by the Mirror staff. It’s a Quebecor PR letter, even though they claim to be the Mirror editors. That’s just kinda low.
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qatzelok
What a great way to figure out what movie you should pay to see, or what CD you ought to buy. Goodbye to a very effective circulaire!
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Josh
It would be so nice, qatzelok, if you showed even just a little respect for different opinions, different ways of living and thinking than your own.
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Kate
Josh, please don’t attack other commenters. What qatzelok says here is critical, but from things I’ve heard since yesterday, there are others who share his opinion that the Mirror had declined to become a commercial shill.
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Matt
You know, I still picked it up on occasion to read Rant-line, the restaurant reviews or just to stave off boredom. Maybe I’m a day late, but it’s definitely going to leave a void. I always found it useful in terms of an aggregator of events in the city. Example, what to do on New Year’s Eve. Any suggestions on what will take its place? Is there a website that does the same?
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Kate
Matt, I know. As a source of hard news it’s been skimpy over the last few years but it did aggregate useful information from time to time – even if these were updates of files it had worked on since time immemorial. Nightlife might pick up on the New Year’s Eve stuff.
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bensoo
From what i remember it’s pretty much the usual thing that newspapers are shut down this way by their corporate owners. The nameless, expensively dressed minions of the powers that be still fear the might of the press and to turf out without warning the editors and workers of the newspaper is the only way to not leave at their disposal some tool as powerful as a working newspaper with up-to-date printing contracts and working distribution systems.
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Kate
bensoo, yes, the only paper I’ve seen fold gracefully was Rue Frontenac, which put up all its content on exruefrontenac.com. But it was an atypical production as a strikers’ paper in the first place.
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bensoo
It’s prolly terribly uncouth for the entity who hosts a news blog for someone, to inject his own opinion into it as i do here– kinda like if some distaff Peladeau offspring were to start airing oped pieces on the CFTM nightly news or some such: it’s just that the Mirror shutting down is one of those things that hits me deeper than i’d like.
i’m certain a large portion of Kate’s readership have had work related dealings with the Mirror over its life, and that’s the case with me. i was one of those who were there when the thing began. Was at the early meetings where its original core group formed, and worked at it for a couple years when it ran on some government grant from, if i remember, the dept. of fisheries and games or something equally implausible, before it was taken into a private, for-profit status.
i miss those days. There was an energy and vitality there you don’t often see, a belief that you were doing something really worthwhile, and a time and place when it was really worth doing. i remember the huge, daily effort people threw into it, lived thru the 2, 3-day layup sessions at Communications Gratte-Ciel, all fueled by what felt like nicotine, starvation and love for the fringe music and art scene.
Those early editions weren’t pretty, but man they were alive, and often right close to the heart of things.
Before i left i watched it fracture into strange and wonderful bits, saw the good people’s eyes glaze over before they left the thing one by one, saw that craft and love for the subject doesn’t trump power play or the desire for private gain.
i observed power politics in very pure forms, practiced with varying expertise by different factions, against a riotous backdrop of cultural and musical strife where each day could bring up some wonderful and ever so precious bauble, or equally likely some bit better left in the communal compost.
i dunno. Perhaps what it was is a better reflection of what Montreal is, than what it might’ve been. i don’t think so tho.
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Josh
I didn’t think I was being disrespectful there, Kate. I don’t think I showed more disrespect for qatzelok’s opinions than qatzelok shows for so many other people’s opinions on a regular basis.
But if that’s how it is, then sorry.
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Josh
And what constitutes an “attack”, btw? Merely asking for more respect for different opinions is an “attack” these days?
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Kate
Yes. Please stop acting like a mod here. I’m not too interested in how you think other people should behave or respond; if you have a blog, that would be the correct forum in which to attempt to guide other people’s behaviour.
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Josh
I just want to know the ground rules here. If there are firm rules, I’m happy to follow them.
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An Expo 67 sculpture has been rehabilitated and refurbished and returned to the Floralies garden on Île Notre-Dame; the Facebook Expo 67 group says it was found in the park’s scrapyard not long ago and that they agitated to save it from being completely junked.
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Possibly useful open and closed list for the Fête nationale; open and closed municipal things specifically.
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François Cardinal writes about a spiky sculpture by Robert Roussil neglected on the end of the Silo #5 pier. He says it’s not visible from elsewhere but I know I’ve spotted it there before.
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Doobious
It’s called Windmill Point, the downstream end of the wharf where Silo #5 is located.
Thank God the Floralies are gone. I always resented the way they made the only quiet and green corner of the Old Port off limits.
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Kate
Was that the Floralies or the thing with the sculpted gardens – Mosaiculture? I thought the Floralies was over on the Expo islands in the 1980s – there’s still a thing called the Jardins des Floralies over there.
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Doobious
Ah, dammit, the beers are interfering with my rememberability. I think the Floralies preceded Mosaicultures as the occupants of the site. The gc.ca does have a pretty nice web site about the site though: http://www.pointedumoulin.ca/home
The Roussil sculpture reminds of another similar outdoor piece adorning the Port of Montreal headquarters building out on Cite du Havre. Similarly decayed metal, but I think it’s by a different artist. I’ll do a search once I’ve slept the beers off.
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Kate
Cardinal wrote a newer entry saying the sculpture used to be at the corner of Beaver Hall Hill and Saint-Antoine and appeared on a Voivod record cover back in 1989.
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Your question in the earlier post about whether sex workers do it in the car, or take clients back to a rented room highlights the questions that the Ontario Court of Appeal struggled with in a recently decided case that has now gone to the Supreme Court.
Prostitution is legal in Canada.
Public communication for the purposes of prostitution, the keeping of a bawdy house, and living off its avails are illegal.
Those who argued to strike down the law argued that it was the things that could make it safer for a sex worker that were illegal.
Using her or his own apartment, or sharing one with others, would make it a common bawdy house (i.e. a place kept, occupied or resorted to for the purpose of prostitution or the practice of acts of indecency). If a street worker picks up a client and goes back to the same room it can be considered a bawdy house.
If she or he has a driver to drop them off (and check on them), then the driver is living off the avails.
While I doubt Réal Ménard will be successful, his suggestion of the police lightening up on the application of the law is not without precedent.
Any strip bar where dancers perform what is better known as the $10, or table dance can be considered a common bawdy house – and that would include the strip bars in the gay village. In that case, the police seem to be ignoring what they know is going on while they wait for the Supreme Court to provide a clearer definition of prostitution based on the Ontario case.