One of the things that makes Hong Kong’s incessant concrete and frequently bland architecture so bearable is that public spaces attract a kind of cultural detritus the way a bookshelf attracts dust. It only takes a few years for newly-built spaces to feel well-used and lived-in.
Bus stations are a good example. Often built beneath shopping malls or housing estates, they are deeply unpleasant places that trap noise, exhaust and heat. But bus drivers and supervisors must make their living there and, as a result, you’ll find desks, sofas, random discarded furniture and, most important of all, Chinese altars.
In this video by Thomas Lee, a feng shui master is called to a bus station that has suffered a string of traffic accents. He will perform a hoi dei tsu ceremony to invite a god to watch over and protect the station. It’s a good look at how even an inhospitable space like a bus station can be humanized.
Though it’s not actually a film about Christmas, I’ve always associated Sheldon Cohen’s “The Sweater” with the holiday season, maybe because it evokes all of the bittersweet feelings that come with receiving an eagerly-awaited gift, only to discover that it isn’t quite what you wanted. It’s also probably the most quintessentially hivernal of all the NFB shorts. And you can’t beat Roch Carrier’s narration, both in the English version above and in the French version.
The tensions had to bubble to the surface at some point. That’s the consensus that has emerged since underground cylcing activists literally took their fight to the streets, reclaiming a fourteen block stretch of bike lane that had been removed in Brooklyn earlier this year — at the possible behest of the area’s ultra-Orthodox Hasidic Jewish community.
The removal occurred on a stretch of Bedford Avenue, the main artery of Williamsburg. For the uninitiated, the neighborhood is roughly split between a gentrifying playground for youngish hipsters to the north and a tradition-bound, family-oriented Hasidic district to the south. The contrast between the two Williamsburgs can be stark, especially on Saturdays: whereas the northside is often packed with revelers, the storefronts of the southside are shut, and, save for families walking to and from synogogues, its sidewalks deserted.
Neither part of Williamsburg could remain contained within its own sphere for very long, and a culture clash was probably inevitable. The city cited safety concerns — including a prevalence of double parking and an increasing number of pedestrians being hit by bikes — as its reason for removing the lanes, but cycling advocates blamed Hasidic complaints that bikers’ skimpy attire was an affront to their moral sensibilities.
Last week, I posted a video by Thomas Lee in which he asked passers-by on Sai Yeung Choi Street where they would go if they could open a door to anywhere. Now he’s back with another great video, this time a (well-subtitled) Cantonese-language rap by MC Yan, whom you might remember as the founder of Radio Dada and one of the first Chinese rappers.
I helped produce this video (though I can’t claim much credit — after introducing him to MC Yan and participating in a brainstorming session, nearly all of the work was done by Thomas). What struck me from the beginning was how passionate MC Yan is about Hong Kong, despite the cynicism that defines his lyrics. He’s genuinely fascinated by this place, rooted to it not only by birth but by a desire to improve it, and the way he expresses that is through unrelenting criticism of Hong Kong’s government and leaders.
In the video, he takes us on a tour of three important parts of Hong Kong — Causeway Bay, Central and West Kowloon — drawing inspiration from the social, political and cultural geography of each.
Thanks to Montréal Multiple, an excellent blog about multiethnic Montreal written by two La Presse journalists, I came across this video video for L’oubli, the new single off of Dramatik’s new album La Boîte Noire. Dramatik, who suffered a childhood as a rest-avec — a modern-day house slave — in Haiti, raps about Montreal North, the borough that was wracked by riots last year after police shot and killed a young teenager, Fredy Villaneuva. The song’s refrain says it all: “Did you forget that we lived here?”
Every evening, Sai Yeung Choi Street becomes a parade of shoppers, street performers and promoters that lasts until after midnight. There are few other places in the world where you come into such close proximity with so many people, but contact is fleeting: a bumped elbow, a wayward glance, a shared moment while watching a busker.
Videographer Thomas Lee exploited Sai Yeung Choi Street’s ephemeral nature in his video “A Door to Anywhere,” pulling aside people to ask them a simple question: “If you had a door that opened to anywhere at all, where would you go?” It’s a cute conceit taken from Doraemon, the Japanese anime, where the “dokodemo door” allows its characters to be instantly transported anywhere.
The answers that Lee gets are funny, surprising and poignant. For a few seconds, we get a glimpse of who these strangers are, before they wave goodbye and disappear back into the crowd.
Curious about what the building his great-great-grandfather lived in was like, ex-Brooklynite Zach van Schouwen was soon researching the history of his entire street. The result is “The Block,” a series pen-and-ink drawings of how the stretch of Eldridge Street, between Stanton and Rivington on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, looked in every year since 1795.
Eldridge turns out to be fairly typical of the neighborhood, which evolved from “Delancey’s Farm” to a series of tall, narrow tenements that start replacing the street’s small rowhouses in the 1850s. Fire escapes begin to appear, in accordance with law, in the 1920s and 30s. The block takes a downward turn just after World War II, when a number of tenements are gradually boarded up, torn down, and replaced with garages and storage facilities. In 1985, the entire block becomes occupied by a single housing project.
Ordos 100 project architects wander the emptiness of Inner Mongolia. Photo by Flickr user mi schoner
In August, I came across an intriguing photo in Tokyo’s Mori Museum — a group of what appeared to be a group of urban sophisticates wandering, seemingly lost, in a desert landscape. The image was part of an exhibit on the work of Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, but it wasn’t the photo itself that was on display: Ai was the “curator”, working along with hip Swiss architects Herzog & deMeuron, of a project called “Ordos 100,” and the wanderers were among one hundred architects, each selected to develop a villa in a development near a booming city called Ordos in China’s resource-rich Inner Mongolia, which is apparently gaining a reputation as “the Chinese Texas”.
Since the onset of the global recession, Ordos has come to resemble its Texas counterparts in more ways than one: a vast, hypermodern extension of the city sits almost completely empty. Ordos cannot fill the hundreds of rank-and-file apartments that were conceived and constructed while Ordos 100’s vanity villas have remained in the design stage.
I liked this song when I first heard it on CBC Radio 3, but when I saw its music video, I liked it even more. “Sweet Sixteen” by Think About Life is light, ironic dance-pop, and the video is similarly fun, especially in the stylized way it reflects the (hipster) Montreal landscape.
First there’s the giant “Ouvert 24 Hrs” sign in the background of the opening scene’s diner, then a poster-clad hydro pole set against a background video of a distinctly Montreal park (look at the benches!), a passing Hassid (who later makes an appearance at the final dance party) and, later, a cameo by Tong, a waiter at La Maison VIP, one of Chinatown’s best late-night eateries. I especially appreciate the detailed rendition of a Montreal bus, right down to the yellow stop-request wire and blue seats.
When I saw this fun Berlin-commie-block-as-Tetris video, I immediately thought of Habitat 67, Moshe Safdie’s experimental modular apartment building. When it was built, by assembling prefab housing cubes into a jumbled whole, it looked more or less like what you see in this video. Unfortunately, Safdie’s vision of customizable, prefabricated apartment construction wasn’t as feasible as he had hoped, so instead of the deconstructionist cubes of Habitat 67, we have a world filled with lookalike boxes.
Below is an excerpt from Stuart Cooper’s 1977 movie The Disappearance, starring Donald Sutherland as a hitman who lives in Habitat 67. There’s plenty of great shots set to a very appropriate soundtrack.
This new ad for the recent extension of the Hong Kong MTR’s West Rail Line, which now runs from Tsim Sha Tsui all the way out to Tuen Mun, via the farm fields, housing estates and wife cakes of Yuen Long, straddles a line between parallel traditions of public transit advertising: the earnest and the bizarre.
While it does a pretty straightforward job of depicting all of the places linked by the West Rail Line, the ad uses multi-coloured rings as a visual and narrative device to link everything together. I’m not really sure what the rings are meant to represent (stations? transfer points?) but it’s a cute concept.
In the interests of flagrant self-promotion, I’m sharing with you my first foray into the world of francophone music pseudo-journalism. Earlier this summer, Bande à part, the excellent web-based indie music radio station, asked me to do a segment on the Hong Kong music scene for their weekly video podcast, L’actualité musicale. I decided to talk about hip hop. My dispatch took the form of an interview and my photos were remixed by DJ Ma; you can find it 10 minutes in.
Cantonese is a particularly good language for rap, thanks to its many tones, nuances and potential for wordplay, and a number of MCs and groups have taken advantage of this, making what people tell me is some very clever music that reflects Hong Kong culture and is often quite critical of the social and political status quo.
I like this short documentary about a Filipino carnival, even if it is essentially an advertisement for a new DSLR that shall remain unnamed (it should be obvious enough once you finish watching it). There are some remarkable shots here but the pace is a bit too brisk for its own good. I wish it would linger on some of its subjects, just for a little bit longer.
It’s got nothing on Il fait beau dans l’métro, but this 1985 TV spot certainly ranks up there in the pantheon of kitschy transit ads. What kind of bugs me about it is that the metro is taking this very fashionable couple from their living room to a restaurant and a swimming pool, yet they choose to get off and hop on a bus driven by some creepy moustachioed uncle with a twangy accent. What gives?
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