It's Getting HOT in Here

Despite the weather. Despite the black tortured souls howling at night because they haven't seen the sunshine since... I don't know when. Despite all the hard times we've been facing in the last 10 shitty days that have graced Montreal, the Piknic still happening yesterday with about only 50 attendees - among which I was not - and the overall crap mood everybody's in, it's getting hot in here.

Simply because... the A/C broke down.



I don't know if you've ever been in an office where it's humid and tropical, and the celsius meter hits 40, but it really ain't my cup of tea, baby. So when I got to work earlier today - I even VOLUNTEERED, for fuck's sake - I was hit by a barrier of hot air upon entering the 8th floor. They still allowed us to come to work because they thought it would be bearable, considering the ass freezing weather outside. But, well, they were kinda wrong. There is such a discrepancy between inside & outside that it's almost frightening.

So with all these weather worries we've been experiencing lately, and Météomédia still predicting rain in the upcoming week, all I can say is that I'm pretty fuckin' fed up, thank you.

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I tried to go to Balroom yesterday, to see Stephan Bodzin's DJ set. The guy is good, he's the humble ghost producer behind projects like Marc Romboy's "Gemini" album, the Rekorder series, and Schumacher's project Elektrochemie - and he DJ's like a madman. I would have been a fool to miss this, right ?



I am suffering from a cold, and am pretty depressed by the weather & sleep deprivation. So when I got up after my disco nap, around 9:30 yesterday, I didn't feel much like partyin. I still took a shower, dressed up & left. When we got to Balroom around 12:30, it was still raining, and we saw the line-up was expanding to the door. People were smoking inside, which is always pretty disgusting in a small confined space like that, and a friend of mine told us he had been standing in the staircase for 15 minutes without anybody moving.

It almost broke my heart to decide to go, because I had "negociated" a double guest list with my editor in chief at Noctambules. But the line-up and cigarette smoke I could have done without. So I decided to leave and go the fuck home to read my New Yorker in my bed while drinking tea. Before doing so, Miss Bijoux & me watched a Seinfeld episode in which somebody's father had a whole box full of love letters from John Cheever. This whole thing constituted more fun material than any smoky evening spend in any club.

Can't wait for the fuckin' new law to pass. May 31st, please hurry your fat ass up.

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My Spike Lee fixation continued over the week-end with the viewing of SHE HATE ME. Shot in 2004, after THE 25TH HOUR and just before THE INSIDE MAN, this funny piece of celluloid depicts the tribulations of John Henry Armstrong (played here by Anthony Mackie), an exec in a pharmaceutical company that loses his job after being too honest in a corruption story.



Not only does he lose his job, but his ex employers are also doing all they can to erase him from the surface of the earth. His bank account is frozen, and he can't find a job anywhere. Thanks to his ice cold boss, played by Woody Harrelson. So his ex fiancée shows up with her girlfriend, one day, and proposes to give him 5 000$ to make her pregnant. Ditto for her girl. After a bit of convincing he gives up - he needs the money and doesn't mind getting laid, of course - and the following day the ex shows up to his door with five other lesbians looking to get knocked up.

The cast is impressive, with characters played by John Turturro, Ellen Barkin, Jim "Slaughter" Brown, Monica Bellucci, Ossie Davis and Jamel Debbouze, and even though it lasts 2h20, it doesn't appear to drag. However, Spike Lee's worst comes out : the "feel good" music with burning saxophone solos and keys really hit rock bottom here. And the ending is, shall we say, incredibly cheesy. Maybe it's Mackie who's not up to the task of portraying such a "sex symbol", or maybe it's just too damn to ask from us to believe this fairytale, but the ultimate heterosexual "dream" of living with two gorgeous lesbians just doesn't appeal to everybody.

It's not always refreshing to detect remains of repressive machismo in the oeuvre of a director we like.