April 11th, 2010
Outdoor concert on St. Viateur Street in Montreal — something that could never happen in Hong Kong under the current noise regulations
Last month, on a muggy Saturday afternoon, a couple of hundred people gathered in the courtyard of the former Central Married Police Quarters for a taste of something rare in Hong Kong: live outdoor music. Three French-speaking hip hop groups from France, Canada and Belgium took the stage as the crowd in front danced and cheered. But audience members standing further away looked rather less impressed.
Noise complaints had been coming in all afternoon, starting with the sound check, and police had told the concert’s organizers to make sure the volume of music never exceeded 70 decibels. So they muffled the sound, irritating performers and audience members alike. “The ambiance is really hot,” said Canadian DJ Félix-Antoine Leroux as he surveyed the crowd. “It’s just too bad about the sound.”
The hip hop show was the third installment of The Indie Ones, a series of free concerts organized by composer and musician Kung Chi-shing for the Heritage X Art X Design festival. Each show received noise complaints and police orders to turn down the music.
“The police came three or four times during the first one,” said Kung. “Every time they came we turned it down. At the end we weren’t even using a mic for the drum set, but the police still wanted to give us a summons. We had to talk them out of it. The funny thing is that I got government support for the shows. They support outdoor music but don’t help you deal with the noise issues.”
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March 15th, 2010
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.
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January 18th, 2010
It was an unexpectedly warm day as Syren Johnstone stood, in shirt-sleeves and a bit of sweat on his brow, over a hole dug in the West Kowloon Reclamation site. He held a shovel in his right hand and stared down at a rusted reinforcing bar poking out of the earth.
“This is reclaimed land, but we’re still making archaeological finds here,” said Johnstone, who worked with two other architects, Kingsley Ng and Daniel Patzold, to create Excavation, a mock archaeological dig on the site of the Hong Kong-Shenzhen Bi-City Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism. The biennale, which has attracted an eclectic range of installations and exhibits, is being held until the end of next month on a vacant part of the reclamation grounds, and covers about 73,000 square metres.
As the architects’ work progressed, they found the remains of construction waste that had been mixed with the soil used to reclaim the land — a reminder, Johnstone said, that something can never come from nothing. He turned and looked at the craggy grass and gnarly trees dotting the site, and the half-dozen unused shipping containers housing some of the works. “It’s becoming a bit like Christiania here,” he said, referring to the infamous anarchist enclave in Copenhagen. “People are just coming and doing all sorts of interesting things.”
Since it opened last month, the event has won plaudits for avoiding the academic stuffiness of many architecture showcases, first by situating itself outdoors but also by stressing public participation and the constantly evolving nature of art and architecture – concepts reflected in the theme, “Bring Your Own Biennale”.
But that approach came as much from necessity as it did from curatorial vision. Pressed for time and strapped for cash, the curators had no choice but to stage a more rag-tag production than they would have otherwise. From the beginning, the biennale’s curatorial team, led by the architect Marisa Yiu with partners Eric Schuldenfrei, Alan Lo and Frank Yu, had to work on a tight schedule and budget. They were awarded the curatorship in July, more than a year after the curators on the biennale’s Shenzhen side had been chosen. The disarray behind Hong Kong’s effort, some involved say, reflects the wider organizational problems holding back arts development in the city.
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January 2nd, 2010
On New Year’s Eve, 9pm, Tsim Sha Tsui was packed with revellers. Everyone seemed to be having a good time; even the South Asian touts who are normally aggressive in their pitches for fake watches, tailored suits and Indian restaurants were taking it easy and hanging out in the middle of Nathan Road. Hundreds of thousands of people filled streets normally choked with traffic, including — judging by the amount of Mandarin being spoken — many tourists from mainland China. So what better time for pro-democracy activists to get their message across?
After all, it’s been an eventful season for politics in this part of the world. It started with a plan by politicians from two of Hong Kong’s opposition parties to resign en masse in January, forcing by-elections that would serve as de facto referendums on democracy. What’s at stake are constitutional reforms slated for 2012. That’s supposed to be the year that Hong Kong gains universal sufferage, putting an end to the current corporatist system, whereby half the legislature is elected by the people and the other half is elected by members of “functional constituencies” that represent various professions and industries. But China’s National People’s Congress has decided to indefinitely postpone Hong Kong’s date with full democracy. The mass resignations would be a litmus test to see just how badly Hongkongers want a say in how they are governed.
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December 23rd, 2009
Last Sunday, Clara Lee and her nine-year-old daughter Hoi-ching were wandering through the craggy grass and gnarly trees that make up the West Kowloon site of the Hong Kong-Shenzhen Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism and Architecture.
“It’s big here!” exclaimed Hoi-ching. “I don’t often go to the countryside.”
“Actually,” said her mother, “this is not the countryside. We’re in the city.”
Hoi-ching looked up, perplexed. “But it feels like the country.”
She could be excused for being mistaken. After it was created from landfill fifteen years ago, parts of West Kowloon were developed with malls and highrises, while a narrow strip of waterfront was recently converted into a public park and promenade. But most of it was simply fenced off and left fallow; land reclaimed from the sea was gradually reclaimed by nature. With the totems of Hong Kong finance soaring at either end of the site, it’s an odd experience to wander along a dirt road past wild grass, untamed shrubs and the sound of crickets buzzing in the sun.
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December 13th, 2009
When the curators of the 2009 Hong Kong-Shenzhen Biennale began assembling exhibits for the urbanism and architecture showcase, they decided to focus on the theme of sustainability. It turns out that most of the artists, architects and designers who answered their call for submissions had the same idea.
“It’s almost a zeitgeist,” says Eric Schuldenfrei, one of the biennale’s four curators. “When you ask people for new work, the dialogue with nature is very strong. It might be subtle, but if you look for it, there is that element in almost every project in the biennale. It’s curated to an extent, but it’s also what everyone was already working on.”
Sustainability might be a buzzword, but the philosophy behind it goes far beyond a bit of greenery here and there. A scan of the biennale’s lengthy roster of exhibitions, installations, lectures and events shows a preoccupation with the question of how to reduce Hong Kong’s impact on the environment and bring city-dwellers back into contact with nature.
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December 3rd, 2009
This might be an odd thing to say about Hong Kong, but the place lacks spontaneity. For all of its hustle and intensity, it’s awfully beholden to routine: every day, the same street markets, the same packed MTR trains, the same carnival of consumerism. Even the political protests, though frequent, are quite orderly, almost choreographed.
So thank goodness for things like Detour, a new art and design festival that is headquartered at the old Married Police Quarters, a wonderful 1950s-era housing block (home to Hong Kong’s chief executive in his early years) that was once home to police families and is now empty and abandoned. Just a few years ago, it was meant to be sold and redeveloped, but it has now been preserved and earmarked for creative uses like Detour.
Detour is run by the Ambassadors of Design, a well-funded group whose stated mission is to make Hong Kong into a more creative city; among the events it organizes are Pecha Kucha Night, Cut and Paste and the Business of Design Week.
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November 12th, 2009
Howard Elias, founder of the Hong Kong Jewish Film Festival
There aren’t a lot of Jews in Hong Kong, but that hasn’t stopped the city from becoming the centre of Jewish life in Asia, with one of the continent’s oldest synagogues, an active community centre and the only Jewish film festival on this side of the world.
Hong Kong’s first Jews arrived with the British in 1842 — many had been trading in nearby Canton, now known as Guangzhou — and by the turn of the twentieth century, some of the territory’s most prominent families were Jewish, including the Kadoories and Sassoons, whose names have been enshrined in streets, hills and institutions across the city. (Andy Lau, arguably Hong Kong’s biggest pop star, lives in a mansion on Kadoorie Avenue.) One of Hong Kong’s early governors, Sir Matthew Nathan, was Jewish, and though he wasn’t local — Hong Kong was just one of his many stops in the imperial service — he did provide the community with a certain amount of official attention.
Despite a small influx of Jews from Shanghai, Harbin and Tianjin after the Japanese invasion of China, Hong Kong’s Jewish community remained tiny until quite recently; it numbered 200 in 1968 and 2,500 in 1998. Recently, though, more and more Jewish expatriates have been moving to Hong Kong, and the community numbers somewhere between 6,000 to 10,000 — about the same size as the Jewish communities in Calgary, Frankfurt and pre-Katrina New Orleans.
Earlier this week, I interviewed Howard Elias, the Toronto-born founder of the Hong Kong Jewish Film Festival, for CNNGo, where you can find a partial transcript of our conversation.
October 11th, 2009
Los Angeles’s spin on the Art Walk serves more than just the obvious purposes of promoting foot traffic and celebrating art in the flatland of mini malls and gas guzzlers. The monthly spectacle constitutes a larger urban project: the gentrification and “revitalization” of Downtown LA.
Since Antonio Villaraigosa’s first term in office, the LA mayor has worked with the City Council in redeveloping the desolate city center with a billion-dollar makeover. In recent decades Downtown has devolved from a bustling business hub to a destitute ghost town, where by day careerists flood the skyscraper landscape and by night rush to their suburban pockets leaving a nocturnal community of itinerants. The homeless population in Downtown LA alone exceeded 30,000 in 2004.
Today, the district lies in continual renovation and the lines blur between skid row and Gallery Row. Million-dollar lofts overlook boulevards dotted by sleeping bags and cardboard boxes. There is literally no street in the 5-square-mile area without an old warehouse or hotel from the Roaring Twenties converted into contemporary, luxury residence.
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December 25th, 2007
I was at dinner last night when one of my friends told me about a strange Christmas Eve tradition in her hometown of Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan. “Every year, people go to the main pedestrian street and start hitting each other with inflatable toys,” she explained.
I was perplexed, though far from surprised. Christmas is an increasingly popular holiday in China, mostly because it offers a fun excuse to shop and socialize. Since China has no homegrown Christmas traditions of its own, though, many Chinese are inventing new ones. I asked my friend to send me some more information when she got the chance. So late last night, after she returned home from dinner, she emailed me a link to this Chinese discussion board post, which described the event and provided a lot of nice photos.
Imagine a flash mob, like one of those public pillow fights, that involves not just a few dozen people but tens of thousands of them. Armed with inflatable bats (many inexplicably decorated with the stars and stripes), they descend on Chendu’s main shopping district and start whacking each other over the head. There are families with young children, groups of teenagers, young couples and middle-aged people; all of them seem to be thoroughly enjoying themselves.
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September 10th, 2007
Most Montrealers know about the tam tams. Hell, the weekly drum circle, market and gathering around the Sir George Étienne Cartier Monument on Mount Royal is even used by Tourism Montreal to promote the city. But what about the fighting that goes on in the woods behind the tam tams?
Every Sunday, just a few minutes’ walk from the traffic of Park Avenue, past the trinket vendors, dancers, drum players, drug dealers and picnickers that sprawl across the park lawn, is a weekly mock battle between dozens of people dressed as medieval warriors. They fight with elaborately weapons — swords, daggers, lances, shields, battleaxes and more — crafted entirely from foam and duct tape. Most of the warriors are young men, but every week, as the battle draws more attention, it seems to attract a more diverse crowd that includes some women.
I have no idea how this battle got started. When I wrote an article on the tam tams for the Gazette, in 2003, I can’t recall that it existed. It must be fairly recent, then. In any case, it’s hugely entertaining and it takes place with the same spontaneous organized chaos as the tam tams. In fact, it feeds on the bizarre energy that the tam tams bring to Mount Royal and Jeanne Mance Park every Sunday, a kind of energy that turns normally exclusive activities into large, welcoming and communal ones.
Yesterday, I went down to Mount Royal to check out the fight with some friends. It turns out that anyone can join the fight; there’s even a guy who will loan you weapons. Armed with a couple of makeshift swords from the dollar store, one of my friends charged in only to stand in the dust, bewildered. He was, of course, killed. As he walked back, a man with a shaved head, clad in leather armour, turned to him and said, “I will avenge your death.”
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July 16th, 2007
Jean-Michel Labrosse looks like the kind of guy you’d expect to meet at the tam-tams. As he crosses Park Ave. with a big drum in one hand and a saxophone case in the other, you can’t miss his long, grey beard, with two braids dangling from its tip. Maybe that’s why virtually every journalist who writes about the weekly tam-tams is drawn to him. “I’ve had reporters from the United States, from China,” he said, smiling.
The tam-tam draws him because of the freedom it represents; it’s the one place in the city you can just show up with an instrument and play along.
Labrosse has come for twelve years. He plays the sax and totes around a big plastic drum he made six years ago out of a chemical bin his neighbour sold him for five bucks. All in all, he’s been playing sax for thirty years.
“It’s a Sunday community, like a big family,” he said. “When I was young, we’d go to mass — I was raised a Catholic — and now, this is my mass. It’s a way to meet people and celebrate.”
It has been twenty-five years since the first modern drum beats echoed out over the city from the Sir George-Etienne Cartier monument at the foot of the east side of Mount Royal. In 1978, a group of percussionists chose the site for their Sunday drumming workshops. Inadvertently, they founded a Montreal institution.
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