Pasta, Salmone and a P.A. Market

DCORBEIL | Plaisir incandescent, 2009

« Fin d’après-midi de juillet. Soleil qui glisse lentement vers le nord-ouest – typiquement montréalais – que je regarde par la large porte qui s’ouvre sur la terrasse.

J’y trouve une amie, française de passage à Montréal, brûlant cigarettes sur cigarettes en étirant de longues conversations oisives à son amoureux sis en mère patrie.

J’étire le cou d’un centimètre supplémentaire : le ciel est mou. Vaste toile orangée qui découpe les clochers du Mile End.

Je retourne à la cuisine.

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Morning Coffee: Café Olimpico

DCORBEIL | Un caffè et un rêve, 2009

« En chemin, la pluie reprend vigueur et me rattrape rue Saint-Viateur. Je plonge, tête première, au Olimpico. La terrasse, partiellement à l’abri de notre climat capricieux, est déjà bondée par une foule bigarrée de fumeurs, accrocs du caffè, de Bobos, de m’as-tu-vus et autres lesbiennes dépravées. Aussi quelques habitués : le fou du village, le boulanger du coin. Une petite fille seule, l’air débile. Et moi, un peu l’écart, un peu inclus dans le groupe.

Caffè macchiato, que je commande dans un italien trop confiant. On me sert, et je demande un verre d’eau, pour authentifier mon origine catanaise. Je donne un pourboire généreux, nonchalamment, tout en jetant un regard rassuré sur la mine heureuse du barrista. Les affaires sont les affaires, et je ne suis pas un cheap. De toute façon, je calcule qu’on me sert ici un café parmi les meilleurs en ville, pour un prix dérisoire. J’investis donc dans le service, même si ce dernier est toujours un peu laborieux. Et pas très volontaire.

M’installant sur une des tables qui longent la large fenestration, je constate que je suis bien seul ici. Même le fou du village se retrouve du centre d’une petite bande d’hurluberlus. Il reçoit un appel, ça semble important. Peut-être brasse-t-il des affaires. Des trucs louches. La drogue ? je m’interroge. Je penche davantage pour la porno, avec son air de pervers, ses culottes noires et délavées. Son veston vieillot, trop petit pour son ventre protubérant. Sa tête échevelée. Son regard perdu. Il est grotesque et se couvre de ridicule. Malgré tout, le barrista l’interpelle comme on le ferait à un ami. Malgré sa mine bête, il fait partie de la place.

Alors que moi je suis seul. Un imposteur, une imposture. Un voyeur même. Un autre type de perversion.

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Bushwick Trailer Park

Having successively appropriated so much Middle American iconography — from trucker hats to Pabst Blue Ribbon beer — some north Brooklyn hipsters may have decided that their living space ought to reach the same heights of irony as their wardrobes. Enter the Nut Factory (video below), an exclusive trailer park for artists currently situated inside a warehouse in Bushwick, east of Williamsburg.

Like homesteaders following the route of the transcontinental railroad, hipsters began gentrifying parts of Bushwick along the L train when — depending on whom you ask — they were priced out of Williamsburg or began to find it too mainstream for their liking. So while the “frontier” of their settlement has technically pushed out as far as Ridgewood, in Queens, it’s concentrated mainly along the narrow corridor easily reached by the L, and vast swathes of industrial Bushwick still invite experiments in cheap housing.

Among them, the urban trailer park may be uniquely qualified to come of age.

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Indie Radio in a Shopping Mall Basement

The basement of a shopping mall is the last place you’d expect to find the stirrings of a revolution, but that’s exactly what is happening in a tiny studio on the bottom floor of Langham Place. For the past year, Radio Dada has been dishing up indie music and irreverent discussion about Hong Kong arts and culture. Not only is this volunteer-run operation Hong Kong’s only independent radio station, its internet-based approach finally breaks free of the shackles that bind Hong Kong’s airwaves.

“Radio Dada is an experiment on how to build a radio station in Hong Kong,” says rapper and graffiti writer MC Yan, who is also the station’s musical director. “People are surprised that we do it without any money. But it’s not about money. It’s about freedom. Hong Kong is full of self-censorship, it’s way worse than in China. People here have no guts and no balls. We’re here to fix that.”

Despite Hong Kong’s reputation as a bastion of free expression, it’s actually illegal to run an independent radio station here. Only three radio stations — two of them commercial, one run by the government — are allowed to broadcast over the air. Nobody else has succeeded in getting a broadcast licence. In 2005, when a band of pro-democracy activists started a pirate station, Citizens’ Radio, that broadcast weekly political commentary, their offices were raided by police.

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Morning Coffee: Bo(ok)hemian

Sometimes good things do come from the pages of Lonely Planet. Normally (in Southeast Asia, at least), visiting one of the bars or restaurants recommended in its pages will lead you to a place filled Lonely Planet readers of the most insufferable sort. Bo(ok)hemian is not one of those places. Despite its goofy name, it’s a nicely ramshackle hangout in the oldest part of Phuket, stocked with used Thai books and local art. The coffee is great, too, and cheap.

It was a quiet evening when I visited late last month. Most of the nearby shops had already closed for the day. Two Thai twentysomethings sat at a table on the sidewalk, eyes fixed on a white Macbook, while a Chinese couple looked through the books. Gig posters and indie CDs were on display near the cafe’s entrance. I couldn’t help but think that Bo(ok)hemian represented another face of globalization, the kind described in Andrew Potter’s book The Rebel Sell: a localized version of the same indie culture that can be found in Mile End, the Lower East Side and Kensington Market.

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Living on the Edge

Rooftop houses in Kwun Tong

By the end of this year, Hong Kong’s Buildings Department plans to finish clearing illegal rooftop structures from single-staircase buildings, marking the end of a clearance programme that began in 2001. But illegal rooftop communities continue to thrive, fed by a shortage of centrally located public housing and perennially high rents in the private sector.

Nine floors above Li Tak Street, in Tai Kok Tsui, more than 100 people live in haphazard shacks on the roof of a large block of flats.

Sam Fong, 23, who studies English at Polytechnic University and is an amateur photographer, moved to the rooftop two years ago, when he left Guangzhou to join his father, mother and sister in Hong Kong. They share a sheet-metal shack with small kitchen, living room and bedroom.

“Hong Kong is just like a jungle. You have to fight for your survival here,” said Fong, who recently started working part-time in a nearby supermarket. His father is a building concierge, his mother is a waitress and his sister works in a clothing store.

Because Fong, his mother and sister have not lived in Hong Kong for seven years, the family cannot apply for public housing, a common problem faced by poor immigrants.

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Texture Everywhere

In Douglas Young’s new book, My HK, the designer/entrepreneur — responsible for the Hong Kong Design Museum I wrote about earlier this year — gives special praise to the kitschy patterned tiles that became popular in postwar Hong Kong. They’re cheap, easy to clean, well-suited to Hong Kong’s humid climate and they liven up what could otherwise be drab and monotone. I also like them for the way they liven up the straight lines and plain surfaces of Hong Kong’s early modern architecture.

The Old Steel Foundry

My first experience of urban exploration came thanks to an abandoned steel foundry on St. Ambroise St. in St. Henri, on which there was still a piece of 1995 referendum-era graffiti urging us to vote “Oui.” My girlfriend and I walked around the building, exploring some of the more easily accessible areas on the ground floor.

Just as we were about to leave, two kids from the neighbourhood came up to us. “Do you want to see something cool?” they asked. We followed them to a steel garage door that had been pried open, squeezing ourselves underneath and into a dark building.

The boys ran up a staircase to the left. Upstairs was a large room, brightly lit by the setting sun, filled with huge piles of debris, toilets and empty bottles. “GOGGLE AREA,” read a sign hanging crookedly from the ceiling. “Wear your safety goggles. Portez vos lunettes de sûreté.” As I looked around, flipping through the pages of 1980s fashion magazines that were sitting in a pile on the floor, the two boys started picking up bottles and smashing them on the ground.

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Handmade Community

Craft market in Tai Hang. Photo by Mary Cheung

On a muggy afternoon, a few dozen people have come to check out a small craft sale at the Jockey Club Creative Arts Centre in Shek Kip Mei. Milling about, they chat and nibble on snacks while browsing the wares. There are necklaces, drawings, dolls, bags and other handmade items.

The atmosphere is more party than market, and that’s exactly what Shan Luk had in mind when she decided to host an informal fair outside her sixth-floor studio in the centre. Dubbing it the Artisans Show, Luk has asked her artist friends to include their work in the sale to promote handmade design.

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Through the Gate

Ever since my first visit last year, the Jamia Mosque, located near the top of the Central-Mid Levels escalator, has had a special pull on me. Hidden behind its stone walls is a verdant respite from the noise and stress of Central. A stately wrought iron gate acts as a portal between a frenzied city and a quiet place of contemplation and spiritual release.

The mosque is a welcome diversion whenever I find myself riding up the escalator. I enjoy the well-worn appearance of its grounds, the songs of the birds in its trees and the particular coziness created by the wall of skyscrapers that surround it. It’s also a place I like to show visitors to Hong Kong, and on a pleasant evening last winter, I found myself sitting on a stone ledge next to the mosque with a couple of my friends from Montreal. As the sounds of the evening prayer drifted through the air, an old man with a beard and more than a few missing teeth came up to us and started talking about everything he could think of: politics, the weather, Islam, his childhood. He mentioned that he had grown up at the mosque and had witnessed the complete transformation of the neighbourhood around it from an airy collection of walk-up tenements to a dense, dizzying cluster of highrises. He said that there were many families that lived around the mosque, in haphazardly-built houses and an elegant, now-decrepit building once used to house travelling Muslims and Islamic scholars.

Unfortuantely, the old man dashed away before I could ask him for his name. The next time I saw him, he brushed me off, muttering under his breath. “Don’t bother him, he’s crazy,” said someone standing nearby. But my interest was piqued. I decided to make a documentary, with three of my classmates at the University of Hong Kong, about the mosque and the diverse community of people that worship and live there. People started moving in during the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong during World War II. They never left, and now 20 families call the mosque home.

Through the Gate is my first documentary. It offers a glimpse of life at the Jamia Mosque through the experiences of three people. Andy Putranto is an Indonesian grad student who sees the mosque as a home away from home. Leila Karchoud is a Tunisian woman who was drawn back to Islam when she moved to Hong Kong. Mustafa Mohammed was born and raised at the mosque. I’ve tried to use their stories to convey the atmosphere of the mosque and its significance as a place both sacred and secular.

Late Lunch

2:30pm in a restaurant on the outskirts of Saigon’s District 1

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A Perch on the Edge of the World

There are two types of architectural birdcages in Macau: casinos and balconies. One of this southern Chinese city’s most famous casinos, the gloriously kitschy Lisboa, could coop up a giant parrot, and across town, a massive aviary greets visitors at the city’s newest gambling complex, in the Four Seasons Hotel. This is the only place in China where gambling is legal—in 2006, revenues surpassed those of Las Vegas—but unlike in nearby Hong Kong, traditional aesthetics are not yet lost. It doesn’t take long to wander away from the casinos into crowded streets that double as living rooms; amid the Portuguese street signs and droopy banyan trees, you’ll see dozens of balconies and windowsills, each enclosed by iron grates. The bars are a precaution against burglary, but the effect is a jumble of human-sized birdcages above the street, with potted plants and laundry instead of seed trays and perches.

Those balconies are a large reason why, despite the flashing casino lights on the horizon, Macau continues to feel lived-in and down-to-earth. They’re a bridge between the private and the public, inviting domestic activity into the street and social life into the home. If the city is a stage, the balcony is just that—the balcony, a spot for observing drama and, as with the two old men in The Muppets, occasionally participating in it.

And balconies are unique in every city. In Vancouver’s West End, where apartment buildings nestle into lush greenery, they are for quiet post-dinner conversation and solitary reading. Neighbours are glimpsed, voyeuristically, but interaction is rare. In the coastal Indian city of Chennai, by contrast, teenagers flirt “across floors and across blocks,” reports The Hindu, prompting mothers to warn their daughters against spending too much time on the balcony. Of course, there are few cities so passionate about its balconies as Montreal, where, as memories of the long winter melt with the snow, summer brings the whole city outside. Almost every evening from May until October, the murmur of conversation and clinking of beer bottles drifts down from overhead.

Things are different in Hong Kong, where I now live. Here, across the Pearl River Delta from Macau, summers are muggy, and for decades balconies had the all-important task of providing ventilation to sweltering apartments. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, both British colonial tenements and tong lau—literally “Chinese building”—were graced with spacious balconies and large, recessed verandas.

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A City and its Balconies

Back in 2002, I was hired to write the cover story for Maisonneuve’s breakout third issue. It was my first real writing assignment and a big part of the reason why I ended up on the career path down which I’m now stumbling. Looking back, I cringe at the cloying introduction, but aside from that, I think it’s a pretty decent treatment of one of the defining aspects of Montreal and the first thing that struck me when I moved there: balconies.

My first two apartments were balcony-less; for two years, I was haunted by the feeling of missing out on some essential part of the Montreal experience. Finally, after finding an apartment on Park Avenue that was properly-balconied (one in the front, one in the back), I began to immerse myself in summer’s balcony life. Sitting in the afternoon sun, I chatted with my next-door neighbour, who was on her balcony whenever she wasn’t working at a café down the street. I watched the old Greek man next door tend the tomatoes he grew on the roof of the shed in his backyard. I spied on people cycling or strolling down the back lane.

Walking through any Montreal neighbourhood is an experience defined by the balconies you pass by. Near the corner of Park and Fairmount, an old man spends most of the summer sitting on his first-floor balcony listening to Greek radio at full volume. In north-end Villeray, tenants along busy St. Denis advertise their nationalism with plastic Quebec flags affixed to their balcony’s railings. The darkness of warm summer nights is always softened by the murmur of conversation and clinking of beer bottles coming from the balconies above.

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À la bibliothèque

Expounding upon the virtues of public libraries is a bit like talking about how good it is to breathe clean air: it’s kind of obvious. But just as we insist on polluting our air until it is nearly toxic, libraries are often shamefully neglected. That was the case for most of Montreal’s history, but luckily, things have changed. If you ask me, the opening of the Grande Bibliothèque in 2005 was a turning point. Suddenly, Montreal’s underfunded, overlooked public library network had an anchor. People not only flocked to the new central library, their interest in the rest of the system was revived, and City Hall responded with more investment.

An example of that is Biblioclip, an annual video contest launched last year. Filmmakers were invited to make a one-and-a-half-minute spot about the public library network. The grand prize: television broadcast and $4,000. The deadline for this year’s edition is April 30th, and if last year’s submissions were any indication, the standard will be high. On his new blog about Montreal urban life and culture, Andy Riga pointed to a few of last year’s best contenders. I’m a particularly big fan of these two, which both convey the public imagination and knowledge that libraries help foster.