‘Volt’: The maudit anglophone fan page

January 2000 Volt reviews

You are here:
fawny.org > Situationist Histories > Diaries >
Volt: The maudit anglophone fan page > Show reviews > January 2000

Next →

January 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 31

  • Monday 17:
    • Musical guest: [BITCH!] Irksome half-a-hit-wonder Kelis («un nouveau son à la fois ancien et futuriste»: donne-moi un break), a name which, by the way, does not rhyme with trellis.
    • The whole show, dedicated to snowboard themes, played out as a costume drama mixing the Summer of Love and «le snow,» to use le bon français. [BITCH!] What’s with the orange jumpsuit, the stringy, scarecrow-esque wig, the hippie lingo? Is this Volt, American Style?
    • [BITCH!] Incomprehensible waste-of-time telephone message («on parle de snow, man!»), which I believe the Volt kids call blagues téléphoniques, but hey, what do I know?
    • [BITCH!] Marc Bishop has delivered more content-rich sites Web expositions, let me tell you.
    • Les Nouvelles with Bernard De Longlac’s Devo/David Byrne plastic hairpiece: This time it’s recycling the dead!, with Guy as the stiff. Is this Weekend at Gagnier’s? Is this Volt?
      • Videoclips: "Shock the Monkey" de Coal Chamber; «Si loin de toi» de Pit Bacardi.
  • Tuesday 18:
    • [BITCH!] God help us: Volt is heading to New Brunswick, or, to use the official TFO Orwellianism, Acadie.
    • [BITCH!] Let’s not have Stéphane do that kind of striptease anywhere outside the Black Eagle.
    • [BITCH!] Particularly tasteless and irrelevant Nouvelles segment, but that seems to be the theme of anything involving Guy this week. (The man was spotted storming up rue Yonge on Wednesday, looking tall and angry at the world and smoking a fag.) We do, however, approve of the ancient prop microphone.
    • [BITCH!] Musical guest: Les Vulgaires machins, or, in English, the Irrelevant Machines. CDs of the week with Nathalie.
    • [BITCH!] A Simone skit, which we fast-forward through altogether; that little christer has worn out her welcome.
    • Phone call lambasting criticisms heard on previous phone calls (yay, team) – hardly a blague, that.
    • And we’re looking at a dating Truth or Dare game show for Valentine’s Day. I’ll take Guy for five hundred, Alex.
  • Wednesday 19:
    • [BITCH!] Did I mention the slightly hackneyed youth-making-their-way-in-the-wake-of-decades-of-industrial-devastation show opening? The team looks nonetheless fierce in the end close-up.
    • Today, Mathieu as fag waiter. Offensive not per se (I’m into exploring stereotypes) but because the execution was so poor. Dave Grohl did a better job in "Learn to Fly," but only just.
    • [BITCH!] Overlong, content-weak segment with Dano on tips, filmed – surprise – at Coupe Bizarre. (And Dufflet Pastries, and the church down the street.)
    • Guy caps off a disappointing week for him with an analysis of the sexual personæ of women in Walt Disney cartoons, with particular emphasis on the bustline. And boy, did Mathieu ever not care.
    • Eric Lefebvre, no longer naked, goes mushing with a dog team whose owner wears a fetching raccoon hat. Nice. ([BITCH!] Where’s my spraypaint when I need it?)
    • JS seeks treatment for folie from Dr. Spüntz, situated, as only TFO doctors could be, in the Panorama office. [BITCH!] The last thing we need is a stream-of-delirium dream sequence with a shirtless JS.
      • Videoclips: "Astonishing Panorama of the Endtimes," another case of falsity in advertising de Marilyn Manson; «Tu pourras dire» de Kevin Parent.
  • Thursday 20: A rerun.
    • Herr Müller’s petit trüc of the week: Building a birdhouse.
    • Dano on candy. Gasps were heard in the viewing audience as Dano and her cohort were seen licking lollipops on bed in schoolgirl uniforms. [BITCH!] Retching was heard at Dano’s egregiously sycophantic recapitulation of an M&M marketing slogan. ("TFO’s editorial content brought to you by...")
    • The disgusting Old Volt promo. Seriocomic «Les gens de chez nous» on Louise Lanoue, last seen in the Volt Sauce promo, which kills me. She needs very slightly better material; I suspect she can do anything. (Sarah Polley? Who?) Loved the bit about appearing on Camilla Scott discusing her secret maldiète of bacon.
    • Capt. Gravolt does lacrosse – the glory, if not of lacrosse players, then of the pokecheck. In fact, someone should start a Web site: pokecheck.com.
      • Videoclips: «Hysterical Mama» de Dax Rider, rehashing Blade Runner; «Respect» d’Alliance Ethnik.
  • Friday 21: [BITCH!] Tediously oversincere documentary on a Montreal chick who survives cancer.
  • Monday 24: The guy show. (Not, however, the Guy show.) A disembodied Dano head femmes up the episode’s frat-boy segments.
    • Musical guests: Les Messagers du son, LMDS. [BITCH!] And why should we care, apart from watching Guy interview them wearing an orange tank top and choker? Éric of LMDS holds the mike like an MC – all but horizontally, right up to the mouth, Volt mikeflash almost angling out of view.
    • JS: «Un homeboy pour la pêche.» [BITCH!] I ran out of fingers enumerating the vowels uttered in pêche – in France, a single-syllable word. What’s with the fisherman’s télécommande? How clever.
    • Guy looks narcotized, to deploy the term used, with nauseating, narcotizing regularity, to describe the characters in Crash, yet more content than a pig in shit. (Or a weasel in shit.)
    • [BITCH!] Yawning with Eric. How appropriate.
    • [BITCH!] Disgusting Fromage Volt segment. Could y’all please cut out the disgusting parts altogether? Who are they really designed for? Anyone you know? Anyone you’d care to know? Are you talking down to your audience? Thinking in stereotypes ("Kids love the gross stuff")?
    • Guy is skinny, isn’t he? [BITCH!] Must be the smoking.
    • Marc plugs a TVO Web site (a meta-list of educational Web pages), which strikes me as a conflict of interest and [BITCH!] exactly the sort of debased incestuous marketing-infused synergy pseudojournalism we were told to expect from AOL Time Warner Turner EMI. «Un peu jeune pour les adultes»? Un peu sleazy pour les adultes, voulais-tu dire?
    • A blague accused the crew of racism. Since the accuser is female, she is unassailable. (I’ve had women accuse gays of homophobia and get away with it.) The caller wonders why they can’t put someone on who speaks a good French, ignoring the fact that pretty much every qualified Franco-Ontarian already works on Volt, and that the rest of TFO is populated by Quebecers, North Africans, and Europeans. While that may be a case of tribalism, racism it ain’t, because not only are there "non-whites" on the TFO staff, even the whites aren’t homogeneous. Get a grip, fuckface.
      • Videoclips: «La squadra» de LMDS; "I Changed My Mind" de Quannum.
  • Tuesday 25: All Hospital Passion all the time!
    • Bernard De Longlac mispronounces "Kir Smiks" at one point. Zinger, or honest mistake? (Fumes or leachate from the hairpiece?)
    • «Toujours aucun signe de M. Bolduc?» «Non, il semble avoir [définitivement] disparu» will be Volt’s buzzword of the decade, reminiscent of "This is an ex-parrot."
    • «Dick entre dans le dangereux monde du jet-set franco-ontarien,» channelling his inner Bruce McCulloch after hoovering a plateful of rock salt. (Entre: OK, I know that’s the wrong word. Is it sombre or s’ombre?)
    • Capsychie as followup to Mathieu’s hypercorrection of épididyme on a sex call-in show. If I can handle polysyllabics, why can’t you? Huh? Huh? And words in French are longer anyway.
    • Brenda Cross as Céline Dion. It’s a dream come true for Dano.
    • «Après l’Hôpital Montfort, allons-nous perdre l’Hospital Passion?»
    • Vince Chizpaquette, a Jean-Marc Barr manqué:
      • Guy Gagnier with blood on his shirt, then water. Hint of ambisexualism. Better take that off to let it dry. You’ll catch your death.
      • Ouch! with the mike clipped to the nipple, à la the Chili Peppers on Much.
      You know, they’re doing this to torture me.
  • Wednesday 26: Another guy show. ([BITCH!] This is getting ridiculous. It’s like Sports Illustrated for Women: Explicitly marking an episode or magazine for one sex implies that the other episodes or magazines are really intended for the opposite sex. Is that what Volt really means? Most on-air personalities and guests are male already.)
    • «C’est quoi être un gars aujourd’hui?» The issue is becoming a bit stale now, after Little Big Men and the signal New York Times Magazine article "The Bully in the Mirror" (Stephen S. Hall, 1999.08.22).
    • [BITCH!] Gee, an in-studio interview with JS and Guy. Spare no expense.
      • The not-very-good Christian youth chat show FreeTV started out with a winsomely personal concept: Three friends devise and host a talk show, then discuss what they’ve learned at each episode’s end. In an age of attempted universality, setting up an entire series as a quest for personal understanding has legs. But of course they abandoned that principle, and the program degenerated into a catechism of just how boring Christian youth really are.
      • In this episode of Volt, we clearly sought that degree of personal grounding, but it came off sounding like "We couldn’t afford to do outside interviews."
      • Also, if a deep personal link between Jean-Sébastien and Guy were present, it was unnoticeable. [BITCH!] Their link seemed to be "we’re boys and we work for the show."
    • «J’ai une indifférence envers ma personne,» JS told us. Yeah, probably. Guys are like that a lot of the time. JS certainly is. Only Dano coerced him into getting his hair cut (where, again?). He works out «parce que je travaille» – he would have finished with "long hours" had Mathieu not interrupted him. Looking good isn’t the goal for JS; maintenance is. «Pis ton look, ça ne t’importe pas là-dedans?» asks Mathieu. You had to ask? He’s sitting next to the program’s resident fashion plate/cutie.
    • Throughout the show, Guy Gagnier was making a lot of sense, with one wee exception, as we’ll see shortly.
    • Wow. How cosmic that Courtney Love should come out with "Be a Man" just as Volt planned a show on the topic. Having stood amid naked NFL types myself, and having been stared down by Troy Aikman and his mid-50s bodyguard, both of whom were wise to me (Troy sent out a telepathic burst: "Don’t embarrass me"), I see an irony in "Be a Man." She can stand there in the muddy field, nude or in a rag of a dress, and the guys aren’t gonna touch her. Even the football types with an urge toward sexual assault wouldn’t be so stupid as to do so out in public. Thus Courtney, an actual girl, has the upper hand over two dozen football types. Put me out there and they’d beat the shit out of me faster than Insane Clown Posse. Read Camille Paglia.
    • Also, is it really a fantasy for straight guys to find themselves brought back to life, Lazarus-style, by the kiss of Courtney Love? Could her kiss hoover you back upright after lying inert in the mud and rain? A game of raising the negro from the mud through the power of lip suction pushes buttons promiscuously. Maybe we expect little else from the omnivorous Courtney, but is it a bit too Alanis-as-God? (As if Courtney would do anything to Alanis but beat the shit out of her.)
    • Men defined by their roles: Read Stiffed. Though widely reviled by dissident feminists, Stiffed is a recent treatment of the concept of men-as-doers.
    • «Quand tu penses à un homme qui symbolise la masculinité, tu penses à qui?» Molina finds the answer to this dilemma in Kiss of the Spider Woman. My answer? You wouldn’t know him. Scot Hollonbeck would do in a pinch, but for God’s sake don’t tell Jeff Adams. I can’t stand to see a redhead cry.
    • Successful men – men succeeding in the role of being a man – project the image of confident heroism, avers Guy. An ideal man is «beau, grand, riche et intélligent.» We say "tall, dark and handsome" in English, though that hardly explains Matt Damon.
    • «Un gars faible, c’est pas l’fun.» And Roberto Benigni as a nice guy who made it. Jeez. These fellas really don’t have any æsthetic sense «envers les gars.» Benigni is a buffoon, a comedian. A "handsome, big, rich, smart" comedian is too threatening. And there’s a reason why homely guys get into comedy: They’re homely. (And depressive.) It’s a compensation. I heard a stand-up comedian admitting to that just last year.
    • Abbis Mahmoud, some kind of C-tier editor/publisher chasing the Maxim/Loaded demographic, mentions grrrlz’ typical mental duality: They say they want a caring, intelligent boyfriend, but in reality they’re attracted to the tougher, more butch specimens. (No mention of the word "lad." The sense may be a bit too British, even for Yonge and Eglinton.) Well, of course. It’s evolution. "But I think their genes have been passed on since the cave days where they’ve been protected for and stuff like that." That was like profound, Abbis. And true. Dano herself, later called in as token female punditrix, reiterates this duality.
    • Guy claims that «libération des gais» influenced æsthetics. [BITCH!] Thanks a lot, fella. If it weren’t for our putting our necks out, usually enveloped in a mauve-coloured ascot, you wouldn’t be able to interview joke metal bands wearing a tighty tank top and choker. The PR agents for "gay liberation" want us to believe that we changed the definition of what makes a man, but in reality we were busy lining up a row of Ken dolls to emulate. Check any fagbar. Who there displays natural and unaffected manhood, or, if you prefer, masculinity? As in our preferences for and in dessert, we always need a bit too much sugar on top. We miss details. The real butches are straight, as the goddess Camille tells us. We study these Ken dolls and never quite rid ourselves of Barbie. Of course, there is the JS counterargument.
  • Thursday 27: A rerun.
    • Captain Gravolt.
    • Simon as beret-topped director with an omnivorous, even courtneyesque casting couch. You want something soft, lighting, Roman Polanski Tess, nice ambience? the director is asked. Sure, like the women on Star Trek, the original series. Just how does the director resemble Polanski? (Read Martin Amis’s profile of the latter.)
    • «Incroyables, ces Polonnais. Incroyables.»
    • [BITCH!] Puppet show with fingers was embarrassingly juvenile. It’s a youth show, not a kids’ show.
    • Dano on PMS, who intros the piece while walking along the TVO ground-floor window – more than enough to trigger cramping in any gender. And isn’t PMS in French actually SPM?
    • Herr Müller on hair removal, with coy Rubik’s cubes superimposed on Nair and Barbasol logos.
      • Videoclip: «Ingurgitus» de Groovy Aardvark.
  • Friday 28: All videos all the time: "Guerrilla Radio" de Rage Against the Machine; «La tribu de Dana» de Manau [Cf. Ma folie de Manau]; "All the Small Things" de Blink 182, like their intellects, endowments, and longevity; «Bagnole» des Marmottes aplaties; «Mémoire» de Dubmatique; «Calvaire» de la Chicane. Why can’t Volt create an all-new typography to credit music videos? We don’t need to learn the name of the label until the show’s end credits, you know. Even whitebread East2West innovates here. The MTV/MuchMusic paradigm is outdated.
  • Monday 31:
    • Clearing up the distinction between libertine and libéral. French is a fiendishly difficult language, except when it isn’t. Memories of the épidydime embarrassment.
    • «Choses morones 3» with JS. Turning a toaster into a Pop-Tart flamethrower. Lighting a fluorescent tube in a microwave. (No metal parts inside?) [BITCH!] Lengthy sequence, as of Scrabble tiles, of vowels as JS pronounces what is for Parisians and television newsreaders a single-syllable word, gaz. Blowing up a grape, again in the microwave.
    • Guest Jean Bélanger offers his tedious slideshow on climbing Mt. McKinley. I guess he was the only Francophone mountain climber in town. [BITCH!] In the future, everyone who speaks French in Toronto will have their own Volt segment.
    • Uninteresting musical guests: Royal Hill.
    • Blague begging the show to continue with Le Hospital Passion.
    • What is with the fake historical documentary with its lewd symbolism?
      • Videoclips: «Je vous emmerde» de Katerine; «Pas d’expérience» de Kid Fléo.

Next →