Morning rush hour in Utrecht, the fourth largest city in the Netherlands, and there’s no traffic jams — just bikes. Lots of bikes.
Like most Dutch cities, bicycles enjoy pride of place in Utrecht, where they are used for roughly one-third of all trips made each day. What impresses me most about this video is not the sheer number of bicycles you see in this video, it’s what you don’t see: collisions, cyclist-pedestrian conflicts, helmets.
In North America, where cities like Montreal and New York are aggressively promoting bike use, there are constant complaints from drivers about unruly cyclists. What those drivers don’t seem to understand is the extent to which the rules of the road are stacked against cyclists. If someone on a bike is riding the wrong way down a one-way street, it’s because the street runs in a single direction for the benefit of drivers and no one else. If they fail to come to a complete stop at a stop sign, again, it’s because those stop signs exist to control the movement of cars — bicycles would do far better with a yield.
Utrecht suggests that having streets that are designed with cyclists in mind, as well as cars, buses and pedestrians, leads to a far better environment for everyone involved.
Part of the brilliance of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1954 film Rear Window was the way it acknowledged voyeurism as part of urban life. In the city, we’re always being watched and we’re always watching others, be it on the street, from across a café or on the web, through street photography.
I’d be lying if I said that the thrill of spying on others wasn’t part of the reason why I like rooftops. The exchange of glances on the street is replaced by a position that gives you a privileged view of everything around. I’ve never seen anything particularly exciting from a roof — it’s not like I bring a pair of binoculars — but I do enjoy catching the occasional glimpse into the normally sheltered world of somebody’s private life. Not too long ago, while hanging out on a friend’s rooftop, I was able to catch part of a World Cup game being watched on a large high-definition TV in the building next door.
Obviously I’m not alone. Peepers, a new film by Montreal’s Automatic Vaudeville Studios, takes the idea of rooftop voyeurism and builds a movie around it. I haven’t seen it yet, but I’m happy to see some of the rooftops I know and love featured in the trailer. At least one of the scenes looks like was filmed on the rooftop where writer/actor Mark Slutsky lives — a rooftop my friends and I have snuck up to many times.
This just in from the Department of Eye Candy: a beautiful time-lapse video of a tropical storm rolling into Hong Kong last summer. One of the benefits of Hong Kong’s abundance of hills and skyscrapers is that it allows for some astounding weather-related sights. It’s nice enough to look out my window at the mountains just north of Kowloon, but when those mountains are framed by dark, fast-moving clouds, that’s an even more impressive sight. So is watching a storm rush towards you over the harbour. You get to see both in this video, which runs a bit long but is worth watching because it’s just so fun to look at.
A row of numbered tin shacks in Blikkiesdorp. Photo from the Western Cape Anti-Eviction Campaign
Nestled in a sun-kissed valley amid coastal mountains, pastel-hued, historic Cape Town is arguably one of the world’s most beautiful cities. So it’s long been a rude awakening for first time visitors expecting to arrive amid its sweeping vistas and colonial architecture that the N2, the highway stretching between the Cape Town’s airport and the city center, is lined by the handmade shacks that constitute the Joe Slovo informal settlement.
Nestled between the highway and the formal black townships established by the apartheid government on the Cape Flats, Joe Slovo was the result of the rapid population influx into South Africa’s cities since the end of racial discrimination in 1994 — and of the government’s inability to keep up with demand for housing, guaranteed as a right in South Africa’s progressive constitution.
In 2005, a fire that rapidly ate through Joe Slovo’s makeshift shacks left hundreds homeless. At the same time, the government began planning a permanent solution to the housing crisis that had produced the settlement, which was ironically named for Nelson Mandela’s first housing minister. Joe Slovo’s shacks were to be replaced by the N2 Gateway, a proper housing development. But first, Cape Town needed a place to put the refugees of the fire — and those whom it would eventually relocate to the N2 Gateway.
Enter Blikkiesdorp, officially the Symphony Way Temporary Relocation Area, and unofficially what translates from Afrikaans as, literally, “block village” — more often known as “Tin Can City” in English. Established in 2007, it was initially built to house another set of shack dwellers who had set up camp nearby — and it’s increasingly housing refugees from shack settlement and apartment evictions all across Cape Town. Enclosed by a thick concrete fence, constantly patrolled by vigilant police, its rows of numbered tin shacks have elicited comparisons to a concentration camp.
These days, the sweet ballads of Cantopop might seem like they are smothering whatever creative spark Hong Kong’s music scene might have, but that wasn’t always the case. In the 1970s, Cantonese pop was populist, exciting and avant-garde. Until then, most of the popular music recorded in Hong Kong was in Mandarin. It was the rise of the local TV and film industry to make Cantonese music for the masses, often in the form of theme songs that ran during the opening credits (a tradition that still exists on television today).
Ask anyone who defined the sound and ethos of 1970s Cantopop and Sam Hui‘s name will invariably crop up. Raised in So Uk, a public housing estate, Hui sang humourously about everyday Hong Kong life in a vernacular language that people could easily identify with. (His song about the 1960s water shortage is a classic.) He was also an actor, appearing two dozen movies between 1973 and 2000.
The opening sequence of the 1976 comedy The Private Eyes is a great montage of Hong Kong street scenes, accompanied by a song by Hui with the usual topical references to Hong Kong life and culture. There’s a funny English version, but it’s meaningless — all of the local commentary has been removed.
Last night I attended Time Out magazine’s showcase of Hong Kong indie bands and my ears are still ringing. There weren’t many surprises — A Roller Control was excellent as usual, as was Chochukmo — with one exception: Choi Sai Ho, a one-man audio-visual electronic act whose frenetic music and jittery on-stage personality embody Hong Kong more than any other act I’ve seen.
Choi, dressed in a white button-down shirt, jumped wildly around on stage like a Hong Kong office worker unleashed from the burdens of his day job — awkward but endearing. Several songs were complemented by videos in which the features of Hong Kong’s cityscape — its trams, anonymous apartment towers and highways — jerk around in tune to the music. One representative piece is “Violin Cityscape” for which Choi plays ordinary, acoustic violin against looped electronic sounds. In another video, “The Educators,” Choi reduces Hong Kong to a maddening abstraction. “Weird Mind,” meanwhile, takes a (relatively) more conventional approach to the same themes.
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.
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.
Franco-Algonquin hip hop is the last thing I expected to encounter in Hong Kong, but that’s exactly what I heard this past weekend at the former Central Married Police Quarters, which has suddenly become the most interesting cultural space in town. Over the past month, the Heritage X Art X Design festival and the Indie Ones series of concerts have used the space to great effect, transforming its concrete courtyard into a fake lawn (in contrast to the beach created by November’s Detour festival) set in front of a bamboo stage illuminated by red market lamps.
Samian is the son of a French-Canadian father and an Algonquin mother; he grew up on a native reserve in Abitibi-Témiscamingue, about 800 kilometres northwest of Montreal. He started rapping when he was a teenager, first in French, and later — after he met the influential hip hop crew Loco Locass — in Algonquin.
Samian took the stage on Saturday in a performance that was energetic but marred by poor sound, which was mainly because the organizers had to muffle the vocals after the police got a slew of noise complaints from nearby luxury apartment towers. (“At least in Quebec we have until 10pm before we have to keep quiet,” Samian’s DJ said to me after the show.) The crowd responded enthusiastically even though most of the people there didn’t speak French.
To earn their hackney license, London’s taxi drivers must all famously master “The Knowledge,” a vast compilation of raw data about the best routes through the city’s streets. The memorization process takes an average of 34 months to study — and 12 attempts to pass. That means it’s a safe bet few licensed London cabbies are ever lost, and — since they’re also immune from central London’s congestion charge or from restrictions on private vehicles in places like busy Oxford Street — the patterns driven by the city’s trademark black cabs probably reflect the overall distribution of street traffic in the British capital better than any other proxy.
Part of the BBC’s visually absorbing Britain from Above series, which also includes this mesmerizing time-lapse of Britain’s busiest rail station, the video above examines the patterns tread by London’s taxis over the course of a day by combining GPS data about their location with satellite imagery of the city, telling the story of Londoners’ movements by tracing their routes in light.
With the Olympics industry a-churning and global media attention now devoted to Vancouver, at least for the next two weeks, this tilt-shift time-lapse video might make a good introduction to the city for those who know nothing about it. Unfortunately, it lacks the wit and narrative drive of Keith Loutit’s similar videos of Sydney, and it’s little more than a tourist postcard, but it’s still fun to watch.
When the afternoon traffic snarls and the SkyTrain is packed full of expats, tourists and shoppers, the best way to get across Bangkok is to jump into a noisy wooden boat as it storms through the waters of the fetid Saen Saep canal.
Riverine transport was once the main way of getting around in the Thai capital, but most of its khlongs, or canals, have been abandoned in favour of roads and rail. (In many cases, the city’s notoriously clogged thoroughfares were built atop canals.) The Khlong Saen Saep is the last canal with a functioning water taxi line, but it’s in no danger of disappearing — 40,000 people still ride the boats every day, because they’re fast and cheap. It costs the same to ride the entire line as it does to go just a few stations on the city’s clean but overpriced metro.
Of course, there’s a risk that you’ll get some nasty canal water sprayed in your face, but you’ll also get a glimpse of a more rustic side of Bangkok, one of wooden houses and waterside markets, though the Saen Saep is generally less picturesque than some of the other, quieter khlongs.
I’m a great fan of Jean Leloup not only because we share a name (though his is made up and mine is real) or because he lived near me and I used to see him on the street every other day. I like him because he’s probably the strangest, most brilliant musician to have ever performed in Quebec.
The video for one of his earliest songs, “Isabelle (J’te déteste)” pokes fun at Jean-Luc Godard’s seminal New Wave film, À bout de souffle, with some great scenes of Montreal and New York in 1991. It also opens with a fantastic cameo by Julien Poulin, the actor who became famous by playing Elvis Gratton.
Last Saturday, I stumbled into Cinema du Parc after fighting a losing battle with some serious wind-chill. I found myself watching Lixin Fan’s documentary, Last Train Home, a jarring film that expertly chronicles the world’s largest human migration.
Every year, 130 million Chinese migrant workers attempt to make it back to their homes in rural China in time to celebrate the Chinese New Year. The last decade has seen China catapulted into a new economic reality as its GDP and infrastructure experience sustained and unprecedented growth. This has resulted in the dismantling of families in China’s poverty stricken countryside as younger members leave their homes for the city.
The film follows the lives of one family, the Zhangs, as they take part in this annual migration. The mother and father have gone to pursue jobs in Guangzhou and they have left behind their children and aging grandmother. Through the story of this family, Fan addresses the much bigger story of globalization and a country’s struggle between old values and new realities.
urban blog of the day: favelissues, discussing favelas (and other types of informal settlements) worldwide http://t.co/5dQ9I6Xyabout 11 hours agofrom web
