Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday in Hong Kong

Outdoor screening of Jacques Tati’s 1953 comedy, Les vacances de Monsieur Hulot, in an amphitheatre near Lan Kwai Fong

Lepers, Gods & Immortality: L’India di Manganelli

16h45. L’aiguille marque la minute d’un tac dramatique. Sonorité agaçante et répétitive. Je suis assis à la terrasse du Club Social, Mile End, tantôt le nez plongé dans ce bouquin d’importation, déniché à prix fort dans cette librairie opulente de l’Avenue du Parc. Tantôt le regard scrutateur, balayant la masse vivante qui se tortille autour de moi.

Un poilu gratte sa guitare, la barbe qui lui dessine une tête de chèvre.

C’est le titre du livre qui m’a attiré et sitôt convaincu de lui faire voir le soleil : Le gout du voyage. Quatre mots qui raisonnent et déraisonnent dans ma lourde cavité cervicale. D’ailleurs, dès le moment que j’eusse trouvé une chaise libre, j’y plongea tête première. Une, deux, dix pages. Un chapitre.

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Footbridges

I dislike footbridges on principle, because they represent an abhorrent, machine-like view of the city: cars here, pedestrians there and never the twain shall meet. The city is reduced (like the Internet) to a series of tubes through which different modes of transportation travel as quickly and efficiently as possible. It’s soul-destroying.

But in a city as crowded and densely-populated as Hong Kong, I have to admit, footbridges do have some advantages. Though the motive behind their construction is still reprehensible — let’s get those people out of the way so that cars and trucks can go faster — they inadvertently create another layer of urban space where pedestrians have free reign. As a result, footbridges begin to mimic the atmosphere of a lively street, with protest banners, musicians, touts and (if the police are looking the other way) hawkers.

In Wan Chai, the busy footbridge leading from the MTR station to the office district north of Gloucester Road is popular with Falun Gong protesters. In Central, the footbridges around Exchange Square are filled with Filipina women on Sunday; the footbridge that links the MTR with the ferry piers is where someone named Law Fong writes bilingual treatises on the topics of the day and pastes them to the bridge’s pillars.

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Make Some Noise, Hong Kong!

Outdoor concert on St. Viateur Street in Montreal — something that could never happen in Hong Kong under the current noise regulations

Last month, on a muggy Saturday afternoon, a couple of hundred people gathered in the courtyard of the former Central Married Police Quarters for a taste of something rare in Hong Kong: live outdoor music. Three French-speaking hip hop groups from France, Canada and Belgium took the stage as the crowd in front danced and cheered. But audience members standing further away looked rather less impressed.

Noise complaints had been coming in all afternoon, starting with the sound check, and police had told the concert’s organizers to make sure the volume of music never exceeded 70 decibels. So they muffled the sound, irritating performers and audience members alike. “The ambiance is really hot,” said Canadian DJ Félix-Antoine Leroux as he surveyed the crowd. “It’s just too bad about the sound.”

The hip hop show was the third installment of The Indie Ones, a series of free concerts organized by composer and musician Kung Chi-shing for the Heritage X Art X Design festival. Each show received noise complaints and police orders to turn down the music.

“The police came three or four times during the first one,” said Kung. “Every time they came we turned it down. At the end we weren’t even using a mic for the drum set, but the police still wanted to give us a summons. We had to talk them out of it. The funny thing is that I got government support for the shows. They support outdoor music but don’t help you deal with the noise issues.”

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The City Gets Pixelated

True, Patrick Jean’s 8-bit 80s arcade game-inspired New York invasion video, “PIXELS”, will soon be featured on nearly every blog on the internet. But it struck me as so in keeping to some of the other work featured here — from Jan Vormann’s Lego brick street art to this Berlin housing block game of Tetris (repeated on an art deco skyscraper above) — that it would be a shame not to put it in context with these — not to mention some earlier antecedents (the appearance of a frog hopping across the street — a clear reference to the old game Frogger — brings to mind the meta-heroics of Seinfeld‘s George Costanza, attempting to push an old Frogger machine across a busy New York street in a fashion similar to the game itself).

Combined with tilt-shift videography, which has made actual cities appear toylike, these projects all seem to share the same underlying theme: a certain deconstruction of the barrier between the imaginary world (particularly of play) and the actual — a desegregation of virtual and reality. In the video, this is literally (and dramatically) illustrated by the explosion of pixels from the TV screen in which they’d been confined. Such works seem to presage in art the emerging world of augmented reality, which recently began to filter into the consumer mainstream with the release of Google’s Goggles application, in which a smartphone photo can be translated into a digital data stream, integrating networked data into the public sphere.

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The Wandering Rock Band

Like many people in Hong Kong, I first heard about Red Noon through a YouTube video that showed them rocking out on their iPhones in the MTR. At first I thought it was a gimmick, something like the iPhone orchestras that have become popular lately, but later, after I met the band, they explained that it was actually part of their overall schtick. While they spend as much time in the studio and on stage as any other band, Red Noon also like to go in public and play for strangers — not as buskers who stand on a streetcorner waiting for an audience, but as travelling musicians who actively seek listeners.

Last November, I followed Red Noon as they wandered around the pedestrian shopping district of Tsuen Wan, not far from their band room. They approached people with a rather ambiguous greeting — “Would you like us to play you a song?” — and their audience was usually sceptical, if not downright apprehensive, as they started playing. But Red Noon’s songs are catchy and accessible; after 30 seconds of listening the audience would usually give in and start dancing to the beat.

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The Great Awakening

It’s spring, the snow has melted and Montreal is undergoing its annual awakening. “Spring is like an autopsy,” Leonard Cohen wrote in his 1966 novel, Beautiful Losers. “Everyone wants to see the inside of the frozen mammoth. Girls rip off their sleeves and the flesh is sweet and white, like wood under green bark. From the streets a sexual manifesto rises like an inflating tire, ‘The winter has not killed us again!’”

On Spacing Montreal, Alanah Heffez puts it another way: “The seasons in this city are seasons of forgetting and every April we Montrealers make a pact to uphold this joint delusion that winter — what winter? We don’t even believe in snow anymore.” She goes on to rave about the sudden infusion of music into the soft spring air. Everywhere, it seems, there’s someone playing music.

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The View from West Kowloon

The biennale of architecture and urbanism that took place in West Kowloon earlier this year was underfunded and underattended, but it was also an example of what shape Hong Kong’s future “cultural district” could take. The official plans call for museums, concert halls, public squares and other well-defined, well-regulated spaces, but what the biennale showed was that the most successful and imaginative uses of space are often those that are planned the least. By scattering installations along a waterfront promenade and using an overgrown vacant lot for artistic interventions, film screenings, forums and outdoor concerts, the biennale created its own ad-hoc cultural district, one that was far more thought-provoking than any government-imposed cultural centre could ever be.

Alas, big buildings make for better photo-ops than scruffy fields, so West Kowloon will eventually be dug up and turned into something more respectable. This summer, Sir Norman Foster, Rem Koolhaus and local architect Rocco Yim will unveil three new proposals for the district. Originally, the cultural district was conceived as a tourist attraction, but after it was revealed to be little more than a property-development boondoggle — a single property developer would be given the multi-billion-dollar contract to build the whole thing — it was sent back to the drawing board in 2006. Since then, it has ignited a wide-ranging discussion on the state of the arts in Hong Kong; whatever happens now, it seems clear that public pressure is on the government to ensure that the cultural district exists for the benefit of Hong Kong people, not just for property developers and the businesses that profit from tourism.

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Grognons, ronchons & cabotins : les cohues montréalaises

“So..So..So.. Solidarité”

Centre des affaires de Montréal, ce jeudi de brume sèche. Agitation dans la populace : les grognons, les ronchons et autres cabotins s’en donnent à coeur joie, criant et maugréant  à qui veut bien l’entendre que le Québec est à sa fin. Une bande de matamores, ravie d’avoir une cause à défendre : le droit à la richesse, menacé par les hausses de taxes.

Une conviction défendue avec ardeur, peu importe si cette aisance soit prise en dépit de la pauvreté flagrante des trois quarts de l’humanité. C’est désagréable d’y songer, mais mon confort douillet de néo-canadien dépend du sacrifice que les pauvres font de leurs propres vies, dans ces pays aux sonorités amusantes. Combien de Burkinabés, de Guatémaltèques ou d’Azerbaïdjanais devront connaître une mort prématurée pour que je puisse posséder ma tanière, manger du saumon fumé et rouler en VTT climatisé.

C’est que le dernier budget provincial, dont le propos stérile et superficiel ne m’atteint aucunement, fait “mal” à la classe moyenne. Exit la McMansion aux tourelles rigolotes néo-machinchouette. Exit la deuxième bagnole et pas de télévision tridimensionnelle pour 2010. L’horreur, finalement.

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