“Les peaux de lièvres” is quintessential Tricot Machine. Deliberately innocent but twinged with melancholy, it revels in the simple pleasures of life, like wandering through a snowy, nighttime Montreal. I have to be honest when I say that I probably wouldn’t have remembered it if it weren’t for this music video, which is probably the first stop-motion animation I have seen that uses knitwear as its medium. It also features a nice visual narrative that takes us past Mount Royal and the downtown skyline and up the side of the Olympic Stadium, weaving between the intimacy of personal life and the greater experience of the city.
Some cities ravaged by war slump into decline and desperation. Others rebound with as much vigour as before. Kabul seems to be the latter, which is not surprising considering its 3,000-year history as a crossroads of culture, commerce and empire. In this clip from documentary film Kabul Transit, the camera floats through the streets of the Afghan capital, past hawkers selling tea, lunch, fabric, chickens. Men dash across the street pushing wheelbarrows or pulling wagons piled high with boxes. People are everywhere. Like turn-of-the-century New York or present-day Shenzhen, it strikes me as being a kind of hustler’s city, where everyone is trying to aggressively make up for time lost to poverty and violence.
Hong Kong is a noisy city. Part of it comes from the usual bustle of a large metropolis—roaring buses, roadwork, shops blasting music to attract customers—but part of it comes from a higher tolerance for noise than you would encounter in most of Europe or North America.
For instance, every crosswalk in Hong Kong makes a beeping sound to let blind pedestrians know whether it is safe to cross or not. With streetlights on nearly every corner, this means that the beeping is constant and ubiquitous. (Audible crosswalks in other cities don’t seem to be nearly as loud.) Video screens are another example: while they are common throughout the world, they are usually muted, but not in Asia, which means that newscasts, commercials and music videos are always being blasted at full volume on busy commercial streets.
I recorded these videos as part of a somewhat haphazard attempt to capture a bit of this soundscape. The first one was taken at a crosswalk next to Statue Square in Central; the second is a block-long walk down Sai Yeung Choi Street in Mongkok on a relatively quiet Monday night.
Unlike people in most Canadian cities, Montrealers don’t take being able to cross the street for granted. For our own sake, we always assume that an oncoming car will not stop, so we calculate our trajectory accordingly when we attempt the seemingly simple task of getting from one side of the road to the other. This applies to jaywalking, of course, but also to crosswalks: the only cars that ever stop at zebra crossings have Ontario licence plates.
That gives us something in common with Bangkok, where pedestrians hold no illusions about being very high in the transportation pecking order. With roads clogged by a mind-boggling number of cars, trucks, buses, taxis, tuk-tuks and motorcycles (there are 50,000 death-defying motorcycle taxis alone), all of them moving very fast, pedestrians have a lot of adversaries to deal with when crossing the street.
Since there are so few breaks in traffic, the procedure is usually to step off the sidewalk as soon as the nearest lane is clear, then wait on the lane divider for the next lane to clear, and so on. Meanwhile, as you wait in the middle of the road, traffic will engulf you, so you’d better watch your step if you enjoy having intact bones in your feet. The scooters and motorcycles are what make this endeavour so complicated: they seem to come out of nowhere and always at top speed.
As long as you’re alert and you have good nerves, it’s easy to get used to it, and whenever you leave Bangkok you’ll be amazed at how calm the traffic is in other cities. But, as the opening scene in the great Thai thriller 13 Beloved so effectively indicates, when you cross the street in Bangkok, there’s very little standing between you and certain death…
While the Fa Yuen Street market in the north end of Mongkok is more of a destination for cheap clothes, shoes and accessories than it is for food, it still has a good number of stalls selling fruits and vegetables. (It’s also a good place to buy a sweet young coconut to drink.) By ten in the evening, most of the market hawkers have left, and the last shops are beginning to close, but the fruit and vegetable vendors press on, trying to get rid of the last of their produce.
There’s something remarkably honest about the United Steel Workers of Montreal. Far from being a contrivance, their country and bluegrass music feels earnest and appropriate, and nowhere is that more obvious than in the new video for their song “Émile Bertrand.”
This elegy for the lost working-class life of Montreal’s southwest is named in honour of the Émile Bertrand restaurant, a snack bar at Notre-Dame and Mountain that was famous for its home-brewed spruce beer. It closed in 2006 when its owner, Barbara Strudensky, died of cancer, so the USWM filmed their video in Point St. Charles’ Paul Patates, which has inherited Émile Bertrand’s legacy — and spruce beer. “Dreamin’ just comes easy when work is just too hard to bear,” croon the USWM’s vocalists, Felicity Hamer and Sean Beauchamp, as the video cuts between present-day scenes of the Lachine Canal, St. Henri and Point St. Charles and historical photos of Griffintown.
There’s something about this landscape that invites nostalgia. Maybe it’s the unexpected tranquility of the canal and the brooding ghosts of industry along it. Five years ago, when I lived in St. Henri, I lay awake at night listening to the mysterious clanging of trains in the nearby railyards. Those solitary moments, more than anything, are what I remember about living in the city’s southwest.
I’m too young to have ever watched the CBC television series King of Kensington, which aired from 1975 to 1980, but if I had been alive at that time I think I would have enjoyed it. Set in Toronto’s Kensington Market, it revolved around the life of the charismastic Larry King, played by Al Waxman, and his multicultural group of friends. The show’s opening sequence shows a kind of happy urbanism that reminds me a lot of the music video for the Shuffle Demons’ “Spadina Bus.”
Twenty years later, another CBC comedy, Twitch City, was set in Kensington Market. With a housebound television addict as its main character (played by Don McKellar, no less), this show portrayed the neighbourhood in a much stranger, darker and more ironic fashion. In the first episode, one of the main character’s friends ends up killing a homeless man in the street — not just any homeless man, though, but a homeless man played by Al Waxman, the King of Kensington himself.
I don’t think I’ve ever been more awed—or creeped out—by public art as I was when I first passed through Monk metro, beneath the giant metal sculptures meant to represent the construction workers who built the metro. In the vast concrete belly of the station, there is something eerie, otherworldly and epic about them; their frozen state seems impermanent, as if they will resume their work as soon as I turn away.
That’s the idea behind Terminus, a short film posted earlier this week by Andrew Chau on urban-ism. Set in 1970s Montreal, and mostly in the metro, it follows a man’s descent into lunacy as he is followed by a large concrete sculpture, which stands over him incessantly, its gaze expectant. Soon, the man starts seeing public installations following other people. A woman walks down a metro corridor as one of Villa-Maria station’s round mural sculptures rolls behind her; a man is hounded by Beaudry’s moving sidewalk; a child is followed by Pierryves Anger’s Le Malheureux Magnifique.
The film also does great work in bringing out the creepiness inherent in so much 70s-era art, architecture and design in Montreal. It’ll be something to think about next time you’re descending into the concrete abyss of Lucien L’Allier or Place-Saint-Henri.
I’ve already written about transit ads in Montreal, Paris and Milwaukee. Now it’s time for Hong Kong.
With several competing bus companies and a metro system that is constantly being expanded, Hong Kong is in many ways a public transit user’s paradise. That can be seen in the regularity with which the company that runs its metro system, the MTR, advertises its services. Unlike many North American transit agencies, the MTR doesn’t take its riders for granted: every year sees new advertising campaigns geared at reminding Hong Kongers that taking transit is the right way to go.
Those ads are, in many ways, a reflection of Hong Kong. Take the one above for example. Set on an apartment building roof, it portrays the classic child’s game of “traffic lights,” which involves a cast of people who try to sneak up on a man who isn’t looking. When he turns around, they must freeze or else they’re out of the game. Before yelling “stop,” the man gives them a warning sound — “Doot doot doot! Doot doot doot!” — which is, of course, the sound the MTR’s doors make before closing. The message of the advertisement? Stand clear of the train’s doors when they close.
It’s an odd mix of passive promotion (the MTR doesn’t even sell us on its services, it just reminds us that they exist), local culture (all of the people in the ad are Hong Kong stereotypes, from the old man holding bird cages to the see lai housewife) and public service announcement (a love of which Hong Kong seems to have inherited from the British). I don’t think you would ever see an ad like this anywhere else.
It’s December 25th, that bizarre day when much of the population seems to have vanished into their living rooms in a sugar-and-turkey-fuelled daze. But what about everyone else? If you don’t celebrate Christmas, there’s no better day to catch a movie or grab Chinese food, as this classic animation by Saturday Night Live’s Robert Smigel so aptly demonstrates.
Tokyo is trippy enough, but Chris Jongkind’s videos of its vast rail network takes its surreality to another level entirely. The right adjective here would be “serpentine” as we watch trains slide effortlessly through the urban underbrush of the world’s largest city.
For what it’s worth, Jongkind’s photos are even better.
Mark Slutsky sent me a link to this video today, showing a market lining a railway in Thailand. Within seconds of a train passing through, the market springs back to life.
Naturally, the video raises some pretty obvious questions, like why on earth would a market be located on a set of train tracks? Andrew Leonard, on Salon’s How the World Works, points the way to some explanations. Apparently, the train tracks in question are actually part of the the Mae Klong Railway, an interurban line that runs diesel trams from from Bangkok in the east to Samut Songkhram in the west. Along the way, it passes down some local roads, including a neighbourhood market. The trains are infrequent enough that they don’t pose much of a danger or inconvenience to shoppers or vendors.
According to Justin Bur, who wrote in to Salon, this is not so different from streets markets in Belgium or France through which trams pass. In Hong Kong, trams pass right through the middle of a street market in North Point.
I’ve written about music here before, and I’ve even posted a couple of music videos that have absolutely nothing to do with cities aside from the fact that they were shot in them. It feels kind of silly, but still, it’s a nice distraction from the dreary November weather.
So here’s another video, this one by the New York-by-way-of-New Zealand comedy duo Flight of the Conchords. Last year, they landed their own show on HBO. It’s about a pair of New Zealand comedy singers who are trying to make it big on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. As with any type of comedy, it doesn’t appeal to everyone, and I have no doubt that some of you will find this song utterly annoying — but I love it.
“Inner City Pressure” is not only a parody of Pet Shop Boys, it pokes fun at the great hipster/artist/creatively-under-employed social substratum that has engulfed large swaths of urban North America. There might even be a bit of a satirical take on Wong Kar Wai in the slow-motion shots of nighttime streets under the elevated rail, which are nothing if not reminiscent of the scenes in the first part of Chungking Express.
In Quebec, the question of how to “reasonably accommodate” religious minorities has morphed, over the past year, into an all-consuming debate over immigration. It has tangled together every conceivable strand of Quebec’s identity issues: language, religion, ethnicity, sovereignty and geography.
Many people, myself included, have become frustrated with the xenophobic tenor of the discussion and the lack of strong voices in support of immigrants and ethnic minorities. While politicians like Pauline Marois cynically exploit (and obfuscate) the issue with appeals to linguistic nationalism, and old-stock Quebeckers in homogeneous villages fret about the threat posed to their culture by immigrants who reside hundreds of kilometres away in Montreal, the real problems faced by immigrants — barriers to employment and discrimination, notably — have gone largely ignored.
Still, as painful as this whole process as been, it has remained abstract. Some might say that this is because the people most fearful about immigration are those who live in the most homogeneous settings. I certainly haven’t experienced any tension on the streets of Montreal or in the day-to-day interactions of its culturally diverse citizens.
That isn’t quite the case in Prince William County, Virginia. Over the past several months, this exurban area on the fringes of metropolitan Washington, DC, where one-fifth of the population is foreign-born and nearly half is non-white, has been the setting for a sometimes vicious quarrel over immigration and, more specifically, Latino immigration. More specifically, the debate has revolved around a resolution that would force police officers to verify the immigration status of anyone suspected of being in the United States illegally.
In response, two filmmakers have taken it upon themselves to document the conflict. Annabel Park and Eric Byler, Asian-Americans who grew up in Prince William County, have launched 9500Liberty, an interactive documentary that straightforwardly explores all facets of the debate. Park and Byler are editing their footage as they shoot it and uploading it to YouTube as quickly as possible, giving viewers the chance to shape its direction and engage with it in a way that would not be possible with a traditional film.
So far, the filmmakers have documented county meetings, interviewed key players in the debate and shot confrontations between supporters of the crackdown on illegal immigration and its opponents. The most-viewed video, which you can watch above, deals with the so-called Liberty Wall, a large banner that urges Prince William County residents to “stop your racism to Hispanics!” After it was erected, several attempts were made to destroy it.
Byler and Park’s project has been widely viewed and discussed. Like any documentary, it creates an opportunity for reflection. That’s something we could use here in Quebec. Unlike the proposed resolution in Prince William County, or even the larger debate over illegal immigration, the question of reasonable accommodation is astoundingly vague. That, in large part, is the reason why it has veered so drastically off course. What we need, most of all, to explore, as honestly as possible, the ground-level reality of immigration and multiculturalism in Montreal and Quebec.
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