Call & Response is a series of Q&As with bands, artists and random people we dig that live in Montreal, visit here, or have some dubious connection to the city.

I wasn't sure what to say about Pat Jordache, so I turned to the internet: "Patrick was a mechanic; Patrick was a carpenter; Patrick was a virtuoso engineer. He spent the month of May turning furniture into radios. He hid tuning dials in freezer cabinets, slid antennas under seat cushions, smoothed speaker grilles to the underside of coffee-tables. Armchairs were tuned to CBC Radio 2, chaises-longues to BBC Radio 3, La-Z-Boys to local top 40." You can check out his MySpace or find him this Saturday June 19th @ Parc des Ameriques for the Fringe Festival. Also check out his latest release FUTURE SONGS here.

I recently had a chance to sit down with pat JORDACHE via the interweb and ask him some very in-depth questions about life and music:

This is Claude Dauphin, the president of council. He didn't do anything wrong, though.

Over the past three days, Montreal's city council held their final session before the summer recess. Transparency was a big theme, after the recent scandals around how the city awards big contracts.

Here's a recap of the situation, Midnight-Poutine-style - time for some delicious, high-fat political commentary.

'Tis the season of drug and tobacco raids. Police in Montreal and Longueuil conducted two separate raids today of 52 locales storing/selling illegal cigarillos and 15 storing marijuana plants, cash, and hydraulic equipment. The two raids follow on the heals of a June 3 blitz on five of Montreal's compassion clubs (and the subequenet arrest of 35 or so people, according to the CBC).

This is the first of hopefully many end-of-the-day news posts, and this story be a little gruesome, but raises questions about Montreal's cultures, and I'm sure someone will use the phrase "clash of cultures" before this story is through. So I thought it might fit with Midnight Poutine's M.O.

An Afghanistan-born mother stabbed her 19 year old daughter with a kitchen knife this weekend in Dorval, possibly for staying out too late.

In case you haven't heard yet, there's been a lot of commotion in Villeray this past week over plans to turn the abandoned Chinese hospital on 7500 St-Denis into an Inuit health facility. The centre would be used for patients coming to Montreal to get medical care unavailable in northern Quebec.

A citizen's petition (online version: "danger-imminent.com") whipped up a panic about crime going up in the neighbourhood with Inuit passing through, and drew lots of negative press for its racist overtones.

Photo de Jackduvr

Le palmarès de la revue Maclean's place Montréal comme l'avant-dernière grande ville du Canada pour sa culture... FOUTAISES.

Les sondages et les statistiques devraient toujours être pris avec un grain de sel. Il est si facile de faire dire n'importe quoi à une série bien arrangée de chiffres que bien souvent ceux-ci ne révèlent qu'une vérité partielle de la réalité. Le palmarès de Maclean's en ce qui concerne la consommation de la culture dans les grandes villes canadiennes en est bien la preuve.