Montreal to Paris: Fog, Strikes, and Salmon

Le voyage commence à l’embarquement dans ce bus déjà trop plein – suite 747 – qui nous débarquera à l’aéroport P.E.T.

Et si ce même voyage commencait déjà, par ce chemin, au travers du centre des affaires montréalais – vaste esplanade commerciale – et qui nous dépose au pied de Marie-Reine du Monde. Notre cathédrale. Celle qui nous fait déjà rêver de Roma, de San Pietro au crépuscule. La vie, la bousculade. Le mouvement. Un espresso sur fond de paysage enflammé.

Aussi on embarque dans ce bus – franchement trop plein – et on défile au travers de Montréal, en glissant la pente vers les faubourgs du Sud-Ouest. On croise rapidement le marché Atwater, qui nous transporte jusqu’à la Méditérannée, et puis on suit la longue et paresseuse coulée du canal de Lachine. Des murs aux briques rouges, avec en arrière-plan, le Mont-Royal : arqué et coloré, en cette saison où l’automne ronge rapidement les arbres, les préparant pour ces trois longs mois d’hivers. On a un peu froid : cette carte postale nous donne le vertige, avec un certain de degré de romantisme. L’appel à l’infinie.

Ce voyage promet d’être décisif.

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Morning Coffee: Cappuccino with Salami

Le matin se lève doucement à Jena, dans une brume lourde, qui flotte au travers de la petite cité universitaire. Dans les rues, le bruit de mes pas donne le rythme, alors que le calme respire aux alentours.

J’habite, l’instant d’une nuité, dans le Quartier des Dames – Damenviertel – où les hautes demeures de la fin du 19e siècle sont, malgré leurs étages, dominées par les collines environnantes, aussi colorées que celles de l’Amérique du Nord. Ces maisons aux couleurs contrastantes – du bleu à l’orangé, jusqu’au jaune, en passant par le vert – sont aglutinées dans un petit quadrilatère, entre le centre-ville et la campagne. De grands appartements, par moment partagés entre cinq ou six locataires étudiants – souvent propriété d’un riche enseignant de la prestigieuse université centenaire de Jena.

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Passing Trams

Morning Coffee: It’s the Rats

The only way to properly explore a city is to walk, walk, walk — and take frequent breaks, especially in a place as hot and humid as Kuala Lumpur. By the time the sun was setting on our meander through Pudu, an old Chinese neighbourhood, we needed a sit down and a nice cup of tea. Emerging from the brilliantly unrenovated, 1970s-style Pudu Plaza shopping mall, we deposited ourselves on the plastic stools of a tea and coffee stall across the street.

Ordering coffee or tea in Malaysia involves venturing far away from the familiar Italian espresso territory of ristrettos and caffè lattes. Do you want kopi (with sugar and milk)? Or kopi o (with sugar only)? Kopi teh? We opted for teh tarik, a mix of black tea and condensed milk not dissimilar to Hong Kong’s milk tea. Instead of being thick and creamy, though, this teh tarik was light and frothy, with earthy undertones from the tea.

A number of other people were sitting around us, sipping a late afternoon tea or coffee: an old man reading a Chinese newspaper, two other older men eyeing passersby as they chatted in Cantonese, a young pair of Tamil guys immersed in conversation. As we sipped our delicious teh tarik, we noticed a commotion nearby as a group of young guys leapt up from their table at the sight of a rat that was scurrying underneath.

“So that’s why the tea here is so good,” said my girlfriend. “It’s the rats!”

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China’s Heritage Policy: Missing a Step

The 18 steps (十八梯) in Chongqing form a wonderfully atmospheric alleyway. It’s one of many older streets sunk down amongst the thrusting skyscrapers of this rapidly growing city which feel saturated with history, in contrast to the modern development all around.

Clambering up the steps, I feel like I’ve found the traditional China I’ve been searching for. Old grey bricked buildings dating back to the Ming dynasty tumble crookedly down the hill on each side, their open doorways offering glimpses of interiors cluttered with objects worthy of a museum. A few trees spread out branches into the streets, their roots crawling around the brick walls of these buildings.

I pass an old man sitting on a shady step with a cup of tea by his side and a newspaper spread out. Further on, a lady squats in that typical Chinese way and hacks with a cleaver at dark red meat laid on a board on the steps. Climbing higher, there’s a small massage place that has men sat outside with their bare torsos covered in wooden cups.

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Brick Lane Street Art

It’s right next to the City of London, but the Brick Lane area is everything the financial district is not. It has long been one of the poorest districts of London, notorious for its crime and council housing. It also has an artistic atmosphere and abundant street art that contrasts with the sterile corporate landscape next door.

Impromptu art and graffiti and are everywhere here. There’s pictures filling recessed doorways, stretching across gates, tucked into corners high up on rooftops. They bring new vibrancy to derelict buildings and to the grimy, rundown walls. Lurking amongst all this art, anonymous and legendary at the same time, are works by some of the world’s best know graffiti artists. Banksy, D*Face and Ben Eine all have pieces scattered around the walls here.

This slideshow is an attempt to show what it is like to wander around the area, continually being surprised by new pieces of art that you haven’t noticed before. The soundtrack’s by that ever nostalgic UK beat boy DJ Format.

Life Under the Landing Gear

The approach to Hong Kong’s old Kai Tak Airport was notorious: planes that swooped down toward its runways passed so close to the rooftops of Kowloon City that they practically risked tangling their landing gear in laundry lines. Nearly thirty years ago, life on Neptune Road, hard by Logan Airport in East Boston, wasn’t quite so dramatic. But the noise pollution resulting from planes descending near its closely-packed triple-deckers was bad enough for the Environmental Protection Agency to become involved in monitoring the neighborhood’s habitability.

The EPA’s agents didn’t arrive in the area alone. As part of the agency’s Documerica project, dedicated to chronicling the environmental problems of the 1970s, photographer Michael Philip Manheim joined them, capturing the lives of residents living on and around Neptune Road. Recently, his 1973 collection of photos from the neighborhood became available, along with the rest of the Documerica photographers’ work, on the U.S. National Archives’ Flickr account.

There’s no longer a noise problem in Kowloon City, which has been free of din since Kai Tak Airport shut down in 1998. Neptune Road, too, has grown relatively quiet — but not because of any changes made at Logan. Beginning shortly before Manheim shot its streets and accelerating through the 1970s, the neighborhood was systematically acquired by Massport, the agency that runs the airport, and almost entirely demolished. Manheim’s photos are now among the few records of one of Boston’s long-forgotten corners.

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The Industrial City Deconstructed

Détroit: Ville Sauvage (Detroit Wild City), film de Florent Tillon (2010), présente de façon particulièrement poétique et imagée la réversibilité du processus d’urbanisation. Dans le cas très précis de Détroit, il s’agît d’un phénomène directement lié à la baisse de production dans l’industrie automobile américaine et des pertes d’emplois qui sont une conséquence directe des déboires dans cette industrie.

Les quartiers anciens de la ville – ainsi que certaines banlieues – sont laissés à l’abandon, vidés de leurs habitants. Plusieurs tours anciennes du centre-ville sont en attente d’un preneur et d’une nouvelle occupation. D’autres sont simplement détruites… Une attention particulière à été porté aux sonorités ambiantes, ce qui plonge le spectateur dans un environnement sonore particulièrement persistant, qui marque.

Quel est le destin des mégapoles en perte de vitesse? Quel est l’avenir du mode d’urbanisation nord-américain? Peut-on sauver ces témoins de notre passé industriel, lorsque les ressources financières se font rares? Quelle est la valeur – et le sens – de notre banlieue, si la ville centrale disparait?

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Dolce musica ebraica con una mela

Grace and Gracelessness

I often groan while looking at then-and-now photos, since the “now” is usually so bland and graceless compared to the “then.” This new compilation by Guillaume St-Jean, which depicts the corner of Sherbrooke Street and St-Laurent in Montreal, leaves me rather more dumbfounded. How on earth did that end up looking like this?

Hong Kong’s Disappearing Shophouses

Johnston Road, Wan Chai. Photo compilation by Lee Chi-man

When Philip Kenny wanders around Hong Kong, taking photos for his blog on local heritage, one type of building always catches his interest: Chinese shophouses. “They are a reminder of what Hong Kong used to be like — a bit old and rickety, perhaps, but vastly more colourful,” he says.

Kenny knows, however, that many of the shophouses he stumbles across could soon disappear. “I mourn the fact that pre-war buildings that have survived many years of Hong Kong’s harsh climate, as well as street fighting and bombing raids during the war, end up being torn down on the whim of a developer,” he says.

Step back in time to the 1950s and shophouses, with their stone façades and distinctive balconies and verandahs, would have been found on nearly every major street in town, from Yuen Long in the north all the way down to Aberdeen in the south. Today, all but a handful have disappeared, scattered like ashes from a fire. Recognizing the threat to Hong Kong’s heritage, nearly 100 shophouses are now being restored by the government and the Urban Renewal Authority (URA), but many more have been left untouched, their chances of survival growing increasingly slim.

“They are extremely vulnerable,” says Lee Ho-yin, the director of the University of Hong Kong’s architectural conservation program. For every shophouse that is saved, like the famous Blue House in Wan Chai, dozens more are razed for development. “There was a beautiful row of shophouses [in Tai Hang] that was torn down two years ago without anyone noticing, and they were a lot more architecturally significant than the Blue House,” he says.

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The Reluctant Urban Artist: Anish Kapoor

The contemporary art world can be a fickle place. Less than a decade ago, Damien Hirst somehow managed to earn an overnight fortune by preserving a dead shark in a fish tank. That was before a host of personal troubles — and the ongoing recession’s damper on the market for ostentatious art. These days, Hirst’s star is falling — fast. But at least one international art sensation of the last decade, sober sculptor Anish Kapoor, is still rapidly on the rise.

Born into Bombay’s community of former Baghdad Jews and educated in Israel and Britain, Kapoor has always been a consummate cosmopolitan, but he’ll have a truly unique place on the world stage all to himself in 2012, when his wild design (co-conceived with Cecil Balmond) for a centerpiece to the London Olympics — a 115 meter high tower, complete with a sort of pretzeloid roller coaster frame that looks even more mad than the games’ controversial logo — is likely to be lingered over by the cameras of broadcasters around the globe.

If Kapoor’s Olympic piece is a coup — it’s already touted as a future landmark on par with the Eiffel Tower — it may cement his everlasting fame. But as a practitioner of urban art, the work he’s left behind to date — more intimate, intricate, and people-friendly — may yet prove more valuable. Warmly embraced wherever it’s been exhibited, Kapoor’s outdoor oeuvre has represented a rare popular success for conceptual sculpture — reflecting, and unavoidably engaging with — the surrounding city, even if that isn’t quite what the artist originally intended.

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Lost in Hong Kong

Imagine if all of your most mundane moments were set to a melodramatic Hans Zimmer soundtrack and filmed like a Hollywood suspense flick. That’s a bit what Edwin Lee‘s new video is like. It’s a straightforward piece of work: a guy in a “I Am Lost in Hong Kong” t-shirt stumbles around the city looking vaguely bewildered. But Lee has filmed him with an anamorphic lens, which has the ability to make anything seem more purposeful and dramatic than it actually is. The effect is cheeky but gorgeous, especially since Lee has gone a very good job of choosing locations, including the Mong Kok Road footbridge and the Western District Public Cargo Working Area.

A Window into Kuala Lumpur

Two weeks ago, my girlfriend and I were celebrating Malaysia’s national holiday at a street party in Bangsar, an upscale neighbourhood of Kuala Lumpur. We had just walked there along broken sidewalks, the sun beating down on us — Kuala Lumpur is not the most pedestrian-friendly place — and we were in desperate need of a drink, so we popped into a bar and ordered a couple of beers. We found ourselves in the midst of a panel discussion about what it means to be Malaysian. “Are we a nation or a collection of peoples?” asked the moderator, an earnest young journalist of Indian descent.

One of the speakers, a young half-Chinese, half-Indian man dressed in a traditional Malay outfit (with the addition of red heart-shaped sunglasses) gave a witty and entertaining presentation about the ambiguities of national identity. His delivery was upbeat, but his message was serious and thoughtful: Malaysia could hardly be described as a true nation, he said — otherwise the government would not have to invest so much in convincing everyone that there is such a thing as “1Malaysia” — but it is also more than the sum of its Malay, Chinese and Indian parts. Like Canada, which is also prone to existential crises and frequent periods of self-doubt, Malaysia is a country that exists in a perpetual state of in-betweenness.

This lingered in my mind for the six days we spent wandering the streets of Kuala Lumpur, a city that few travellers spend much time in and even many Malaysians seem to dislike. For all its importance as an economic and administrative hub, KL doesn’t present itself on a platter like Penang, the darling of Malaysia’s tourism industry. It’s a sprawling, disjointed place that makes casual exploration difficult, but I enjoyed its unpretentiousness and the way it opened a window into Malaysia’s cultural complexities.

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