Welcoming winter
SATURDAY,
DECEMBER 27, 2003 - CHRISTOPHER DEWOLF
MONTREAL, 15.12.03 : SNOWBOUND
STE-CATHERINE STREET
MONTREAL, 20.12.03 : SNOW CREATURE IN
ANGUISH, ONTARIO ST.
MONTREAL, 15.12.03 : FAIRMOUNT STREET
MONTREAL, 17.12.03 : SAINT-DENIS AND
MONT-ROYAL
MONTREAL, 16.12.03 : MORNING AT PARC
AND ST-VIATEUR
MONTREAL, 16.12.03 : THE SUN AFTER THE
SNOW, JEANNE-MANCE
MONTREAL, 20.12.03 : PRINCE ARTHUR
STREET
MONTREAL, 16.12.03 : PARC AVENUE,
POST-SNOWSTORM
MONTREAL, 21.12.03 : "YOU CALL THAT A
SHOT?" BERRI METRO
MONTREAL, 16.12.03 : VOLVO ON
ST-VIATEUR STREET
MONTREAL, 15.12.03 : CLEARING THE
AWNING ON PARC AVENUE
MONTREAL, 17.12.03 : JEANNE MANCE
PARK, FROM MONT-ROYAL AV.
Christmastime is always a seductive introduction to winter.
The first lights and holiday decorations go up around early
November. Then the first snow comes down and it just seems so
right: big fat Hollywood snowflakes falling onto slick
streets, bathed in the glow of trees festooned with merry red
and white lights. Pretty much every main street in Montreal
becomes a festive parade of shining stars and brilliant trees.
It would be downright magical if it weren’t for the local
penchant for installing loudspeakers on lampposts that bleat
out hollow-sounding Christmas music, which is just downright
creepy. When the snow falls, everything is muffled; it’s the
opposite of rain. Streets become more intimate, traffic
quieter, buildings smaller. Parents exchange strollers for
sleds, dragging their kids along the snow-covered sidewalk.
It’s hot chocolate weather, when you wander home or into a
café to curl up with a good book and a cup of something hot.
Sleepless winter nights are accompanied by the determined
growl of snowploughs down the street. I’m still amazed by the
intricacies of Montreal snow removal, especially after two big
snowfalls last week. I grew up in a city where residential
streets were left unplowed, sidewalk clearance was up to the
property owner and main streets were given a halfhearted
sprinkle of sand. Of course, big storms were relatively rare,
but even then, efforts to get rid of the snow paled in
comparison to the ferocity with which Montreal’s army corps of
snow removers performs.
The snow equipment emerges at night, dancing around the
city-stage like an elaborate nocturnal ballet. There’s a
hierarchy: at the bottom rung of the ladder are
zippy mini-ploughs, which clear the sidewalks at such a
breakneck speed I’ve had to dive out of the way on more than
one occasion. They act like two year olds with attention
deficit disorder, dashing forward and spinning around,
frantically looking for another snowbank to gleefully plunge
into. Up a step are the
standard ploughs, little more than run-of-the-mill
tractors with a big yellow shovel on the front. Up another
notch are the graters, these
spindly-looking things that look like space creatures from
some Alien ripoff. They crawl up and down the street,
pushing the snow into long lines along the sidewalk. As soon
as one creates its little line of snow, another will come and
push that line to the opposite side of the street. It all
seems terribly futile – but that’s where the snow eating
machine comes in. My girlfriend calls it “the mothership,”
which seems appropriate considering how big it seems when
you’re on the second floor of a little house on a tiny, narrow
street. It’s almost the stuff of nightmares. Topped by two
bright spotlights that seem eager to swing around and pin
their sinister gaze on you, the snow eating machines devour
the piles of snow left behind by the graters, sucking them in
through a big gaping hole adorned with what look like teeth.
The snow travels up through a sort of funnel where it is spat
out into an adjacent dumptruck. It’s quite a momentous
occasion when a snow eater and its dumptruck sidekick pay a
visit to your street at two thirty in the morning.
All of this is quite charming until a few days after a
snowstorm. As Kate McDonnell noted on her
Montreal City blog, it isn’t the snow or cold that makes
winter so miserable, it’s the ickiness. All it takes is a
couple more inches of snow and a day or two of rain for the
whole waltz of the snow-eaters to be shot to hell.
Great oceans of slush gather around street corners and
sidewalks become treacherous as the ploughs and graters and
frantic little mini-ploughs fall behind in their snow removal
duties.
It makes me think of the ways Montreal adapts – and doesn’t
adapt – to its winters. Downtown’s long string of underground
passages and malls is probably the most obvious example of
coping with mountains of snow and bitter cold. At first
glance, Montreal’s flat roofs might seem odd for a city that
gets so much snow, but a friend tells me it actually insulates
the building. Beyond that, though, this city seems to deal
with winter somewhat incompetently. Parts of Helsinki have
heated sidewalks, which melt snow upon impact, but there’s
nothing of the sort in Montreal. Commercial streets in
Australian cities are lined with awnings that shelter
pedestrians from the brutal summer sun and winter rains, but
there are a very few of them here, beyond the glass-covered
sidewalks of St-Hubert Street. Here’s another example: back in
the 1960s, when Montreal was set to build its metro system,
then-mayor Jean Drapeau insisted that the trains be
rubber-tired, like on some of the metro lines in Paris.
Rubber-tired trains are quieter and smoother, but there’s a
problem: the tires can’t cope with extreme weather. Fine for
Paris, where temperatures don’t get that hot and barely dip
below freezing, but Montreal is all about extremes. The
result? The metro system must be kept completely underground,
a rather expensive endeavour.
In the 18th century, Montrealers rejoiced when
winter was severe. After all, lots of snow made for smooth
sledding on the streets. Today, it’s all about getting the
snow out of sight, pretending it never fell. In 1999, the
anthropologist Bernard Arcand wrote a little book called
Abolissons l’hiver! – “Let’s abolish winter!” – in
which he suggested that Quebec ought to accept its icy nature
and stop spending millions of dollars trying to fight winter.
Why not work in the summer and relax in the winter, and by
doing so, save energy and money? I wouldn’t go as far as
Arcand, but maybe he has a point: let’s put the shovels down,
lock the salt away and build a few more glass awnings.
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Winnipeg and the Weakerthans
THURSDAY,
DECEMBER 18, 2003 - CHRISTOPHER DEWOLF
MONTREAL, 16.12.03 : ICICLES ON PARC
AVENUE
MONTREAL, 15.12.03 : THE ESSENCE OF
WINTER, PARC AVENUE
MONTREAL, 15.12.03 : WAITING FOR THE
BUS ON PARC
MONTREAL, 07.12.03 : SEASON'S FIRST
SNOWFALL, BERRI STREET
MONTREAL, 06.12.03 : ST-VIATEUR AND
CLARK, MILE END
MONTREAL, 06.12.03 : A PLASTIC JESUS
IS BORN ON JEANNE-MANCE
MONTREAL, 07.12.03 : SNOWPLOW ON BERRI
STREET
MONTREAL, 07.12.03 : SELLING CHRISTMAS
TREES ON THE PLATEAU
MONTREAL, 07.12.03 : CHRISTMAS TREE
VENDOR
MONTREAL, 07.12.03 : JOYEUSES FÊTES ON
PARC AVENUE
I want to go to Winnipeg. When I mention that to Colin Kent –
whose fantastic
Winnipeg photoessay is our December feature – he cocks an
eyebrow. “Why?” the native Winnipegger asks dubiously. Why?
For
the Weakerthans, of course.
Winnipeg is a little city in a big, bald prairie,
mosquito-infested in the summer and unimaginably cold in the
winter. It looks terribly lonely on the map, three hundred
kilometres from nowhere and another hundred from oblivion. For
most Canadians, that’s the sum of Winnipeg’s parts – but,
naturally, there’s much more to it than that. Third-largest
city in Canada for the first part of the 20th
century, Winnipeg was a boomtown that attracted trainloads
upon trainloads of Eastern Europeans and English Canadians in
addition to its long-established métis and French Canadian
communities. In its first few generations as a city, Winnipeg
witnessed a rebellion against the federal government, a
raucous general strike and the ambition of a nation pushing
west. Things are different today. Downtown’s buildings, those
bulky, austere monuments to turn-of-the-century capitalism,
sit empty and shivering beneath an endless sky, soaked in the
bright winter light.
In step the Weakerthans. Founded in 1997, the Weakerthans are
a four-piece rock band with hints of punk, folk and
alt-country influence. Their guitar-driven music is solid and
well-crafted, but what make them one of Canada’s best
contemporary bands are leader John K. Samson’s lyrics. Poetic
and vivid, the Weakerthans’ songs are both accessible and
enchantingly intelligent. In the fall issue of Maisonneuve,
the poet
Jon Paul Fiorentino wrote that Samson’s lyrics “rival the
work of many of Canada’s most celebrated poets. Within a
four-minute rock song, Samson delivers lyrical prowess that
just might wake up the slumbering poets of this nation –
lyric, formalist and avant-garde.” High praise indeed, and
he’s right. The Weakerthans’ songs are rife with literary
allusions and imbued with the spirit of Prairie progressive
politics, but, despite all of this, they never come across as
cloying or heavy-handed. This is honest and heartfelt stuff,
buoyed by witty lyrics and a rugged sense of optimism.
The
best article ever written about the Weakerthans showed up
two summers ago in the Canadian magazine Geist. In
“City Still Breathing,” Paul Tough delivers a beautiful,
intensely personal account of his relationship with Winnipeg
and the Weakerthans. “I wasn’t certain, sitting at my table
watching the band warm up, whether I was in Winnipeg because
of the Weakerthans, or whether I cared about the Weakerthans
because I care about Winnipeg,” he writes. “But I knew I was
trying to figure something out about home: what it means to
love or hate where you live, how to write about a place, how
to claim a home with words.” Winnipeg is present in all three
of the Weakerthans’ albums, but it’s in Left and Leaving,
their second, that its relationship with the band is most
obvious. It begins with the slightly elegiac “Everything Must
Go,” which lists the detritus of an awkward life: “A
cracked-up compass and a pocket watch,” “the cutlery and
coffee cups I stole from all-night restaurants, a sense of
wonder (only slightly used),” “the outline to a complicated
dream of dignity, and a laugh (too loud and too long).” In
a way, Left and Leaving goes on to examine that life in
more detail. In “Aside,” Samson sings:
Armed with
every previous failure, and amateur cartography,
I breathe in deep before I spread these maps out on my
bedroom floor.
Leaving. Wave goodbye.
But there is no great escape. You get the sense that Winnipeg
is the kind of city you ache to leave but can’t. The streets,
as Samson sings in the title song, “never take me anywhere but
here.”
Why stay? Interestingly, the word Winnipeg appears only once
in any of the Weakerthans’ songs. In “One Great City!” a take
on the chest-thumpingly cheery civic slogan you see when
you’re driving into town from the frostbitten prairie, the
chorus is “I hate Winnipeg.” It’s echoed in the weary winter
sighs of the song’s dollar store clerks and bus drivers,
finally ending with this:
Up above us all,
leaning into sky,
our Golden Business Boy
will watch the North End die,
and sing "I love this town,"
then let his arcing wrecking ball proclaim,
"I hate Winnipeg.”
In another song, Samson sings, “I love this place; the
enormous sky, and the faces, hands that I’m haunted by,” and
then asks: “So why can’t I forgive these buildings, these
frameworks labeled ‘Home’?” Tough writes that “an unmistakable
feeling of deep-seated civic regret” flowed through his
conversations with both his Winnipeg sister and Samson, “a
sense that when you live in Winnipeg, the city’s entire
twentieth-century history is present in every moment, from its
golden age of promise and prosperity as the railway-and-wheat
hub of a growing nation, to its current status as a misplaced
and impoverished city.” He concludes that the deepest
relationship one can have with a place is to hate it and stay
– to be able to live without forgiving its buildings, to bear
the weight of their history, their failed promise. Cheap civic
boosterism – the “Golden Business Boy” and his hollow, cheery
slogans – is intent only on
knocking down those buildings.
The stubbornness and tenacity of Winnipeggers seems to be
leading to something interesting, though. In Tough’s essay,
Samson suggest that “There is a lot of potential in places
that are removed from the centre of power. I have this feeling
that that’s where a lot of interesting things are going to
emerge—things that have the potential not to be sullied or
defeated as soon as they’re created.” People in marginalized
cities, places down on their luck and far removed from the
mainstream’s spotlight, have a tendency to do their own thing
when it comes to art and culture. Winnipeg is emerging as a
bit of an indie arts hub, with a handful of good independent
record labels, some small presses – Samson co-founded one –
and some rising stars in the visual arts world. Owing to its
small size, Winnipeg’s cultural scene boasts what the Globe
and Mail calls a type of
“artistic cross-pollination” that is almost impossible to
achieve in busier and more alienating larger cities.
Maybe, just maybe, those harsh winters, the economic
depression and the mosquitoes have conspired to give people
like me good reasons to visit Winnipeg after all.
―――
This coming February, The McGill
Institute for the Study of Canada will be hosting a conference
on
Challenging Cities in Canada. Discussions and lectures
will focus on how cities matter in our lives, different
visions of what cities should be, how we can sustain our
cities and who is responsible for cities. Speakers include
Vancouver architect Bing Thom (responsible for the intriguing
"glass tower" proposal), Governor General Adrienne
Clarkson and a whack of academics. The conference will also
coincide with the opening of a
McCord Museum of Canadian History exhibit on Canada's
cities. It looks like fun stuff and I know I'll be there. The
conference takes place from February 11 to 14, 2004, and early
registration is only $40 for students ($150 for non-students).
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