Montreal — Page 42

Next Saturday, Belgium

June 4, 2000 by Michael Boyle

kicks off the first game of Euro 2000 in Brussels. I’m not a huge football (aka soccer) fan but I love the big tournaments. And Montreal is a particularly great place to be a soccer fan – it really comes alive during a big event. My neighbourhood (le Plateau Mont-Royal) is a mix of artists and students – but also of tons of first-generation Canadians, just here from Portugal, South and Central America, and little Italy is just up the way a mile or so. During the last World Cup if you had walked down boul. St-Laurent, you would have noticed that every business had a TV in it – barbershops, hair salons, cafs, bars, restos – and they were all tuned to a game.

My friend Roel splits his time between here and Amsterdam and tells me that Holland is particularly dangerous this year.

Take a look at

May 24, 2000 by Michael Boyle

the flag flying atop the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. Pipilotti Rist has staged a coup!

I lost one other entry

May 15, 2000 by Michael Boyle

on the weekend, which was essentially an ode to Montreal, and my neighbourhood. Last weekend was full of parties, full of art, full of expressive, intelligent, engaged people just busting out with creativity and life. I spoke with 2 newly working filmmakers (doing it locally), a bucketful of artists who are doing a group vernissage next weekend (I’ll try and scan the invite soon – it’s nice), a writer named Yann Martel who’s publishing his second novel Very Soon Now, a guy who does relatively naive watercolors – but then scans them and does minimal, subtle processing in photoshop, which moves the work in an entirely different direction.

Things I like today:

May 8, 2000 by Michael Boyle

The expanding MetaFilter. To paraphrase you-know-who… it’s a platform!
My friend Buffy’s article about Médecins sans frontières in Outpost magazine.
O’Meara’s always engaging (and True) pile of words in Locals at Large: You’ve quit your job, you’ve been on a bender for two weeks and you and everybody you know have been circling each other like hungry dogs in the coliseum of love. In other words, it’s spring in Montreal.
The new Prolific and Swallowing Tacks designs.

It’s simply too nice

May 7, 2000 by Michael Boyle

to be doing much blogging these days – at least on weekends. Yesterday was “walk all over the mountain” day, today was the first of this season’s regular Sunday pickup soccer games in Parc Lafontaine. We’ve been doing this hack soccer game for about 6 years now, and last year we merged two similar games and it’s even more viable than ever. By “hack” I mean that in true Montreal tradition, most people are exorcising some weekend-induced chemical imbalances during the game, so it’s pretty uneven. Some clean-living folks are giving it everything they’ve got, others are just trying to survive and sweat out some of the weekend’s consumption of booze.