2002: October 1 | 2 | 3 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31
Well, we’ve got JS turning his personal tastes into Volt segments again. It could be worse: It could be rallying. (Go, Mitsu!)
On the other hand, and in all fairness, he is bringing a camera along to document his own life, which I rather like. 24 Hours of Adrenalin – now, what’s with the lads doing wheelies and nose picks on picnic tables? Could it be trialsin?
Where have we seen that before on Volt?
By the way, were JS and his caméraman reduced to wandering around camp bellowing “Has anybody speak French ’ere?” in a desperate attempt to round up interview subjects?
Loved the fashion segment with Nadyne, a solid narratrix. Frankie’s got a great pair of shoes, and Félix an excellent sweater.
But I’m sorry. Fred’s kind of adorable. Just in general. It’s the eyes, right?
Now, JS’s Consumer Guide to Buying a Bike: Isn’t the currently-accepted model of bike fit the one that positions your knee nearly but not quite straight with your foot on the pedal at full extension?
I think this yanking-the-bike-into-your-crotch technique has been discredited.
Now. The Voltistes dressed as Amish (Quakers, shurely?!) at the not-to-be-missed Gémeaux made my day. And very game of Mathieu Pichette to show up for the ceremony. Were he Marie Turgeon, he’d send a process server to deliver notices that his likeness could never again be used on the show.
TYPE VICTORY: One notes that onscreen type has been changed to, what, Serifa?
Mature people take good advice irrespective of source, as we see here.
Oh, but please don’t scrunch it, as in “Act 2, Scène 1”?
Now, where were we?
I had a good larf (quietly to myself) at the dour, suppressed failed Jewess Goth chick who runs the teen film festival. Unwitting homage to Gilda Radner, shurely?!
Get this chick a subscription to Heeb. She needs it.
OIZO 51 reads Fred the Adorable’s T-shirt, presumably in Japanese even though I don’t see any kana. (Could be Chinese.) Now: Is this Mr. Oizo?
Actually, it’s got to be Chinese. But boy, is the boy thin.
Which is the most pretentious characteristic of the little fairy from The Lion King?
The later interview with the acting student was, I assume, unintentional self-parody.
He’s so gay.
Loved the viewer bitch-slapping (ambiguous, shurely?!) from deepest Temiskaming. As if he has any standing.
All videos all the time. «Tchi Cum Bah» by Superbus, whoever they are. Whimsy and nonce words work so very poorly in French, but they pull it off.
“If Everybody Looked the Same” by Groove Armada.
Well, we’re reaching deep into the crypt of mediocrity and repetition: “Where’s Your Head At?” by Volt house band and now Pringles spokesmodels Basement Jaxx.
“Sick of Being Lonely” by Field Mob, captioned and partially self-captioning.
“Flat Beat” by Mr. Wasn’t That on Fred the Adorable’s Overly-Tight Shirt?
Oh, by the way: What’s Olivier Dagenais been doing for you lately? Or even for the past year?
What bizarrely androgynous THX 1138 confection is Fred wearing today? (Collarless aquamarine ribbed shirt with a white stripe down the sternum.) ¿Como?
Fred’s really good. Good with the wax-on-vegetables segment. Genuine information densely packed into a highly fluent presentation. Now, what else has he been doing? Well, among other things, he won a roving-journalist contest (eerie reminiscences of Road Movies and, heaven help us, La course: Destination monde) at the same network that fired Mathieu “TWEEKERBOY” Chantelois’ later-to-be-photographed-naked arse.
Fred also wore a blond dye job to put Mathieu Pichette to shame. Well, he was only 22. That makes him at most 25 now. And did you know he was a dancer? That perhaps explains the lissomeness.
And was he also wearing contacts?
Turkey. Yes. The show has apparently learned its lesson. One is not convinced that Fred’s foreign accents are better than Simon’s, which were never that good. Could that be one of Simon’s few performance weaknesses?
You know, I hope he gets published.
En tout cas: Please start using correct apostrophes in the keys from the Ottawa bureau!
Fred will probably eventually be a good father. I’m sure I’m just responding to his lovableness.
But wow, does he ever have a strong accent in English.
You’ve noticed, I trust, just how many segments Volt has aired on garbage treatment? Tito, that nincompoop from Ottawa, now Fred.
Certainly a much better shirt today: Shiny deep green, straight-cut, with 1970s-style collar.
And add Nadyne to the list: Home composting! Oh, but small problem: Apart from failing to use metric units, Nadyne told us twice that one can add something to one’s compost to “accelerate the process.” Add what, then?
Now, I think the other Nadine has something going with this Sœur Soda diesel-nun action. I adored her showing up the little fascists of World Youth Overrunning My City. You know, the kids who would “disagree” with the “life-style” of three-quarters of Volt’s staff. I adore this shit. In all fairness, there is so much catechism that it is unrealistic to have all of it available at random access in one’s mind. (Serial access, sure: Get them started on the first Commandment and the other nine follow right away. But try asking for Commandments in reverse numerical order. How’s that gonna work?)
I happened to be doing the dishes on Tuesday night. I did not bother twisting the tube around to watch Volt, preferring to listen. (Prime use for audio description, shurely?!) It was thus only now that I realized Sœur Soda hit up Guy Gagnier for a few Commandments! I underwent a minor religious experience.
Well, you know, I do totally approve of him. He’s so natural and open. Love the chest hair.
Certainly it is reassuring to see that Frank has gotten his hair under control. He was bordering on Jewfro territory. (Frogfro, shurely?!)
Friendly Rich courageously blazes the trail pioneered by Déjà Voodoo 20 years ago. I think not.
«La Bande 100 pareil ROCK» is working out quite well so far. Much screaming and continuous chuckling were heard. More! More! More!
How is Charles Duchesne these days?
Our video show. “Poem” by Taproot; “Attitude” by Alien Ant Farm; “In the End” by Linkin Park, yet again without captions (previous two had them); «Nous mourrons tous pauvres» by les Ordures ioniques; “Smells Like Teen Spirit” by Nirvana.
Loved the interstitial in which Mathieu Pichette beats the shit out of an HP LaserJet II. Everyone’s fantasy, shurely?!
Now, I think I have quite roundly flubbed this week’s tapings. One’s days may be off here.
One came in on the tail end of another nutrition segment, this time from the so-far-undreadful redhead chick in Ottawa.
Guest reporters? What’s up with that? Next you’ll be giving us videographers.
I seem not to have this one. I hate it when that happens.
It’s Nutrition Day on Volt!
So let’s recap what the shill from McDonald’s is saying: They’re changing to an “enhanced” vegetable oil. Beats beef tallow, doesn’t it? But enhanced how? Not with beef tallow, by any chance? And will palm kernel oil be part of the enhancement? And will French fries actually be vegetarian now?
Doesn’t the “enhancement” imply hydrogenation?
I think Fred was giving the shill enough rope to hang herself today. It was a fine line: I was pretty sure he was lobbing softballs. I think the “money quote” was the shill’s admission that Adbusters, the most unfunny publication this side of Marie Claire, has “a wonderful sense of humour.”
There is of course the issue that currently-popularized thinking in nutrition holds that high-fat foods are less harmful than previously thought. It’s starches that cause obesity, the claim holds.
Generally comprehensible description of fat and oil. One nonetheless appreciates the effort to give usable information.
The new Volt site had frigging well better be fully compliant.
You do realize that ultra-leftist wanker offering his malapropist diatribe on libel chill used the term libidinous (“lustful”) for litigious?
I object to Frankie and JS’s namby-pamby oversimplification – grating and juvenile even by the standards of the French language, which is notably selective about the topics it can articulate at once concisely and in detail – of “libel” to mean “saying things that are not nice.” Have you bothered to read The Law of Libel and Slander in Canada?
Well, guess who has?
And yes, this is another issue on which I have expertise. The list never seems to end, does it?
(In all fairness, I’ve forgotten a great many details. But I can tell you that “not-nice” speech is manifestly protected, and the standard of proof is quite high in defaming a corporation.)
Videos. “Satellite” by POD. «Panique celtique» by Manau (yes!), with really muddy audio. “Dope Nose” by Weezer, absolutely none of whose songs make any sense whatsoever. «Marie-Lou» by Dumas – quite a profound and accomplished noir.
Krystle, c’est hard pour moi de te dire ceci, but I am having a hard time imagining effeminate François Grisé licking plum sauce off big bruiser Nadyne Kasta’s abdomen.
I think I have unfucked my VCRs. I am taping the midnight shows now.
Fred the dancer covers breakdancing. (“Days Go By,” anyone?) Jeff Goring the instructor d00d is built like, as they say, a brick shithouse, and seems like a very up people person.
What’s with his Rs, though? I could live with that, of course. Think of the neck one gets to hang offa. What is not to like, really?
But we did not really see Fred doing his shit. And can we open up the tracking on the unreadable French subtitles, please?
Someone is going to regret the suggestion that we call him B-Boy Fred.
Someone’s gonna really regret that. Oh, yes, me son.
Well, I suppose it was all valuable to hear Renée complain that clothing manufacturers do not make clothes in outlier sizes like hers. Isn’t this why God gave us E-commerce?
Inexplicable and hermetic Crystal et Monique segment. I am partly satisfied I figured out the first half. I think it’s a pretty abstract joke even by my standards – turning the cliché of drowning a girl’s sorrows in junk food («troublevés!») into an outright shilling. I partways got that. But is it funny or merely structurally funny? Is it shaped like something funny or is it the real thing?
I also don’t get Frankie Grisé’s pointless sermonizing about guns. Yesterday it was Esso. What’s next? Mumia Abu-Jamal?
Look, Frankie’s just not getting any better. He’s too tentative and he commits the avrilbenoîtism of verbal hesitancy – he even hesitates while enunciating a single word, just like her. He stumbles over himself, corrects himself twice, both of which recapitulate the stumble, then draws further attention to his dysfluency. He needs to slow down and relax. Have less riding on each word. Know what you want to say in advance, but don’t script it out, because then you get all tense when you go “off message” by so much as a single word.
These are difficult skills to learn if you don’t already have them in your real life. Frank’s a passive, effeminate wallflower. He’s gonna have to grow a spine real fast if he wants to become worthy of hosting four shows a week. None of the other regular on-air talent has these disadvantages. They’re all fluent and confident. They are, in effect, themselves. Who is François Grisé? Does he even know himself?
Further, Frankie uses far too much English.
You mean Isabel OKed airfare to Sudbury for two hosts and a crew?
Reasonably strong interview with a seemingly quite solid and credible artistic director of la Nuit, Martin Harvey. What has he not done? You get these polymaths sometimes for whom everything is comfortable and unfussy, but who are massively competent in their work, understand the theory down to the molecular level, and make turning out a good show look easy.
And loved his admission that Quebeckers cannot understand how he could possible be a Franco-Ontarian. No doubt the bilingual name doesn’t help.
He is deemed acceptable.
Great ten-second extro smash-cutting Nadyne dancing her arse off and a standard Volt techno bumper.
Videos: “I Might Be Wrong” by Radiohead. I’ve seen a dozen videos like this over the last ten years. Their shelf life is short. I can’t muster the attention span to watch it all the way through.
And then the tape ran out. Am I ever going to get this right? What is going on?
So. Sick and injured animals. I found a raccoon and newborn raccoonlets on my porch once. She got all freaked out and buggered off, which was hardly necessary, since I am the last person ever to harm a creature.
I know that stilted delivery is part of the charm of «La Bande 100 pareil ROCK,» but a tad more rehearsal could have helped. The overedited interstitials are, however, as bewildering as intended.
It is further postulated that Voltistes think we will not notice the postmodern tricks they’re playing during studio interview segments. Today’s schtick: Fred exchanges identities with Frankie. (I suppose that’s one way to butch him up. A bit drastic, but we’ve run out of options.) It’s all undone later when Frankie dolls himself up in Black and Blue mode (wearing naught but a duct-taped microphone).
Fred looks strangely appropriate in an Hawaiian shirt. Tout est sous contrôle.
Fred’s wearing his kanji T-shirt again. Those who fail to learn the lessons of Félix Tanguay are doomed to repeat them.
We’re getting tired of Renée already. Why? Her false European French and its mannered, dramatized delivery; her intensified, centre-of-attention-seeking facial expressions and body language; her absurd contention that “fuck friends” actually exist for straight people (typically for them, they can’t even get the name right, though Cf. Jason Lee in Vanilla Sky); her use of the term “fuck friends” on a show intended for teenagers. Next Volt will be showing nude photographs of its “journalists.”
She’s supposed to invoke strong, independent, sexually-free womanhood. This I dispute.
I was shocked to witness Silverchair pulling an Insane Clown Posse on Steve “THE DIGGER” Diguer. What else is gonna go wrong for Steve? First some loser consistently misspells his name, now this gets dragged out of the crypt.
In a feat of karmic justice, the first rerun show of the “season” starts with an NFG tape. Control has to take it from the top after a three-minute delay.
Here’s an idea for yez. Instead of running four shows a week, except for one every six weeks that’s a retread, why not run three shows a week and, once a month, five full shows?
Why are repeats better than originals? They’re not.
Oh, right. Another repeat. The “Spécial Hallowe’en.” Now, why can’t I find a mention of it in the archives?
Music videos too, though. «Lost» (or indeed “Lost”) by Noir Désir. They’re trying something ambitious and non-narrative here. I don’t quite get it, and I’m not sure it works, but I like it.
“Tourniquet” by (inevitably) Marilyn Manson. “Boiler” by the most hated man in the music industry.