French publishing house: great catalogues that look east and south, not just west.
Darwin Grenwich sails the oceans of the world on Blue Monday, a CS36 traditional sloop, while maintaining his IT support business by email and on VOIP (403-283-1340). He is especially good on Macs. This is not an ad, just something you might want to know about.
Leigh Sherkin. Farm:Shop aquaponic systemUrban Ruralism: the culture of food production in urban areas. Urban areas are expanding while labour migrates out of the countryside. Farms are becoming suburbs and a handful of companies control the supply chain. If we produce food in the city, can our relationship with food change?
Leigh Sherkin is the director of the urban planning company, specialising in community planning and regeneration. theurbanplanningcompany.com
current issue
on site 27: rural urbanism
On Site: another way to talk about architecture.
Almost guaranteed to contain things you will never find anywhere else.
So Bill Bourne, grade 8 in 1967, living on a farm near Red Deer, saw Oscar Brand's Let's Sing Out on tv and thought, I can do this.
He is a relentless traveller, staple of the summer festival circuit, a rough, jagged blade of a voice. This video is from a gig in Vulcan, a real back of beyond town an hour and a half south of Calgary, where the town built a spaceship in honour of Star Trek, instead of the god of fire, Vulcan, for whom the town was named by the CPR in 1915: rails of forged steel and sparks and all, including all eight avenues and nine streets named after Roman gods and goddesses until they were renamed as numbers.
Anyway, whatever, Bill Bourne played there at the Vulcan Lodge Hall in 2010. Gordon Lightfoot, still on tour at 71 and interviewed on Q yesterday, was about to play the Casinorama in Orillia, the town he grew up in. Really? This is Gordon Lightfoot we are talking about. At 12 he sang at Massey Hall in the Kiwanis Music Festival. His mother said, you know Gordie, Bing makes a living at this.
All this continues a discussion inOn Site 27: rural urbanism, the powerful relationship between the rural and the urban, and the kind of cultural production that comes out of rural areas, migrates to urban centres, but contains an insistent rural sense of completely open possibilities.
Went to a discussion on Calgary and Identity last night: the panel was a fellow from Heritage Calgary – an oxymoron surely, a sustainable cities Newfoundlander who walks everywhere and hasn't got a car, and the local leader of Jane's Walks. Not typical Calgary, but typical of a particular sector of the city. The discussion never really got much beyond 'Calgary does lots of things right, early LRT, great inner city neighbourhoods, an active association of 140 communities, downtown a bit forbidding, Jan Gehl's Copenhagen not going to happen here'.
Well fine. It is one thing to know the history, another to actually rub up against it in this city, a rare thing. It is one thing to live and work downtown, but it is a soulless downtown. It is one thing to live in one of the chic inner city neighbourhoods, another to have lived there for thirty years and suffered through the bikers, the prostitution and the drug deals. But to mention that is to be unacceptably negative – a glass half empty sort of attitude.
Okay, let's think about New York instead. How does a city get to the size where its identity is complex, powerful, unassailable and seemingly independent of branding slogans, earnest discussions of reinvigorating the downtown core, getting more people on public transit? How does a city get to the point of an Empire State of Mind – for that is what identity is, a state of mind.
Of course everyone has an individual identity and lives in a fragment of their city: one does carve out a life that suits, but at some point one must feel that one's individual identity contributes to the civic identity in some way. When the gap between the personal and the civic is unbridgeable, then I think we have a problem. There are several articles in On Site 25: identity about landing in a new city and starting to make one's way. Migrants bring with them a set of urban values that must be cobbled to fit the new circumstances, however, the cities that legitimate and even valourise that process are the ones in which newcomers have the greatest stake.
Look at the appropriation of New York in Empire State of Mind: Jay-Z and Alicia Keys own this city, not just because they are rich and famous, but because they are New Yorkers. And New York is large enough, and generous enough, to encompass them, Donald Trump and The New School.
My family has been in Calgary since 1906; I grew up on Vancouver Island thinking Calgary was a terrifically romantic place based on family stories that went up to 1947, then in 1977 I moved here and found that the pre-oil boom city which had been small and jewel-like was being bulldozed away in the second oil boom. Now, thirty-five years on in the extended third oil boom we have a city that inspires a kind of frantic boosterism within it and vies with Toronto as the city Canada loves to hate.
Calgary's brand: The New West is a phrase that obliterates the old west of ranching and farming with the new one of oil and gas. Oil and gas is an industry, not a culture. Both of them, the old west still encapsulated in the Stampede and the new west of the shiny, thrusting downtown core, exclude so many things, so many people. Without being totally anodyne, how does a city indicate that it is generous and allows a wide diversity of people, ways of thinking, histories – something beyond the statistical indications that we have a sizeable immigrant population. Perhaps the city should stop the branding thing for a while and develop some sort of critical consciousness rather than being threatened by every comment that might be construed as negative. Perhaps it, and everyone in it, could become a bit more generous, not in terms of money, but in terms of welcoming alternative urban dicussions. It is one thing to know that other cities have developed all sorts of strategies for alternative land use and spontaneous urban demonstrations, it is another to actually legitimise them on your own turf.
Right, it is the beginning of a dreary month, a storm is raging outside, the ferries can't run, the east is blanketed in snow, the international news is truly ghastly and Gillian Findlay's documentary last night on police actions during the G8/G20 in Toronto last summer was altogether too shocking.
Here is a little diversion:
A rather more adult version of Dorothy and Toto.
Amazing to think this sort of thing was standard children's viewing in the 1950s. From 4-5 each afternoon was old cartoons, serialised David Niven movies and Gene Autry.
Didier Faustino. Flatland. Fundaçào Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisbon. In Flatland, a spectator becomes an actor by projecting himself into the backside of a movie screen using a swing. The other spectators seated in the theater can see the surface of the screen frontside distorted by the swing of the body, as an empirical three-dimensional effect. Flatland questions what is reality and what is fiction, offering the possibility to a spectator to become the main character of his imaginary.Didier Faustino, such an architect despite the title of his exhibition: lots of brilliant talk while other little bods run around making the piece. Click on the image above to take you to a short video of the setting up of this project.
From the press release: '"Don't Trust Architects" by Didier Faustino at the Calouste Gulbekian Foundation. Didier Faustino is presenting a series of new pieces at the Calouste Gulbekian Foundation (Lisbon) from 14th January to 3rd April 2011. Five new installations produced for the exhibition will immerse visitors in the permanent confrontation of the body with architecture and architecture with movement, via visual and sound tools implemented by Faustino.'
oh for trams, trolleys, street cars. oh for a slow city.
click on the image above and it will take you to Europa Film Treasuresand a short film taken from the front of a tram when the streets were full of children, dogs, people going somewhere.
Andrew Phillips and Marcus O'Dair of Grasscut do a lot of sampling of archival recordings and picking up sound on cell phones. The name of their most recent cd, 1 inch / 1/2 mile, is a map scale. They walked across southern England at one point. On this disc 'The Tin Man' mixes a metal-on-metal creaking of a sculpture at the Pompidou Centre and a 1927 recording of John McCormack recorded off a wind-up gramophone. The results are haunting, as if one was listening to the past through light years of space and time, which of course, we are.
This piece is 'In Her Pride' – Hilaire Belloc in 1932 sings his poem 'The Winged Horse' where he flies over England, and Ezra Pound reads from 'EP: An Ode' of 1926 on the acceleration of interwar life. Their voices are very robust. This is the only video I could find: I wish the image was as lapidary as the music.
Friday, April 20, 2012 at 6:30AM 
