Das eez kaput! Sometime around 2002 I spaced the entire database table that mapped individual entries to categories. Such is life. What follows is a random sampling of entries that were associated with the category. Over time, the entries will be updated and then it will be even more confusing. Wander around, though, it's still a fun way to find stuff.
of the opinion that marijuana does wonders for art and culture.
Meanwhile, Paul Wells is doing a pretty good job of walking the [please contain your weblogging as journalism debate to this small space] line.
As a rule I try to be sympathetic although it's a feeling that's tempered by memories of my own less than sincere endeavours bumming for change as a teenager. But the whole opening the bank door for me has always seemed wrong on more levels than I am usually comfortable thinking about.
It's Friday night and, already late to meet a friend, I am beating a rough path down the Main when I pass the bank on the corner of Bagg. It's not a branch where it's practical for someone to open the door for you because it's normally locked and swings inwards, automatically, when you swipe your bank card.
Instead, the guy trying to scrape up enough money for food, booze, whatever is sitting directly in front of the card reader with a bank card in his hand and mechanically jamming it in to the slot as soon as anyone approaches the door.
That's at least another layer, or two, of uncomfortable thoughts added on to an already unpleasant situation.
Since I've finally managed to get
jpegrdf
working I've been farting around adding different kinds of
locative
data in the absence of, and notwithstanding, automagic GPS goodness.
The following examples are the results of some experiments that may change but seem to hit pretty close to my personal 80/20 mark (where being able to read and write, not to mention query, this stuff quickly is of premium importance.)
Given the following namespaces :
@prefix : <#> .
@prefix dc: <http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/title> .
@prefix where: <x-urn:aaronstraupcope:knows:where#> .
@prefix rue: <x-urn:aaronstraupcope:knows:where:qc-montreal:rue#> .
@prefix blvd: <x-urn:aaronstraupcope:knows:where:qc-montreal:boulevard#> .
@prefix ruelle: <x-urn:aaronstraupcope:knows:where:qc-montreal:ruelle#> .
This picture gets assigned the following data, which is pretty straghtforward :
<20040424-qc-montreal-terres_urbaines.jpg>
dc:title "Terres Urbaines" ;
dc:coverage where:qc-montreal ;
where:site rue:marquette ;
where:near blvd:du-mont-royal .
This one
is pretty much the same as the last one but the
near
property is replaced by
corner
. Is this sign
really
on the corner? No — not enough to satisfy
our new robot overlords
, anyway. But seriously it's not like
this data is for dropping bombs on people
. If either one of us was trying to give the other directions — stop, stop now, and don't tell me you're going to beam me GPS coordinates unless you want to get slapped; you know who you are — we would fudge them the same way and be no worse for it.
<20040424-qc-montreal-runs_buses.jpg>
dc:title "Runs with Buses" ;
dc:coverage where:qc-montreal ;
where:site blvd:du-mont-royal ;
where:corner rue:berri .
On the other hand, the picture associated with this post depicts something that really is on a corner :
<20040424-qc-montreal-god_juggling_donuts.jpg>
dc:title "The God of Juggling Donuts" ;
dc:coverage where:qc-montreal ;
where:site ruelle:unknown ;
where:corner ruelle:unknown ;
where:near blvd:du-mont-royal ,
rue:drolet .
Now that we've given the pot smokers in the audience a few moments to giggle and nod knowingly to each other I will note that without creating a magic RDF Bag of Holding it's not possible to indicate that the two corners are the same : unknown, except relative to some other street. So, you fudge it again and assign an unknown
site
and an unknown
corner
on the grounds that, given the way the graph gets built, you can still find what you're looking for.
There are
site
s which are nice and vague and have a higher precedence than a
corner
which has hight precedence than something that is
near
. Streets, avenues, and such are all assumed to live in a namespace specific to their locality because anything else starts to smack of a grand unifying theory and who really has the time?
I suppose it would be useful to extend properties like
near
to add some sort of spacial element like, say,
-e
for East. But let me just point out that in Montréal
East
means anything on one side of the Main and
South
means anything towards, and beyond, the old city. Neither of which are
true
statements since both are off by about forty-five degrees. No one in Montréal cares.
There are a few things sweeter still than beating the Boston Bruins in the playoffs, going up to the roof on what is the first real day of spring and listening as
les rumeurs de la ville
travel across the night sky.
But it is pretty fucking great.
Nuts is a padded white room, dotted with puck-sized CH crests, and a video screen that plays an endless loop of a befuddled, incredulous Don Cherry mouthing the words,
Too many men...
I have an irrational dislike of the other teams in the Original Six and Boston is pretty low on the list — about the only time I can bring myself to root for the Bruins is when they are playing the Leafs (sic.) But, you've got to love a town where the sports writers will just toss in (let alone remember) stuff like this:
Adding even more zeal to an overzealous home crowd, Habs goaltender Jose Theodore was credited with the second assist on both Kovalev strikes. It was reminiscent of Quebec City's NHL days when a Stastny -- be it Peter, Anton, or Marian -- by writ of Provincial law had to be credited with an assist on every Nordiques goal. Some nights it didn't seem to matter if they were even dressed, never mind on the ice.
Expo 67 is, apparently, the only thing that a certain segment of Americans know about Montréal.
Bucky Balls were all the rage in architecture circles until 1974, if you believe the guy I used to work for, when
everyone gave up the dream and decided to make money instead.
The painter Barnett Newman was commissioned to create the eighteen foot tall
Voice of Fire
for the pavillion. Twenty years later the National Gallery of Canada acquired the painting to hang in Ottawa. To the shock of the lay-folk they paid two million dollars for the purchase prompting a farmer in rural Canada to reproduce the work on the side of his barn for a grand total of twenty bucks.
A few years after the Fair, a local kite maker was in the Bucky Ball finalizing arrangements to create an permanent installation when the building's exterior shell caught fire. It burned for two days and was never replaced.
Expo 67 was held on St. Helen's Island which is also where the International Fireworks Festival takes place. One year, in high school, after watching the event under Dangerous and Other Circumstances my friends and I were wandering around the Island. We heard the sound of beer bottles being tossed from a lookout in the distance so we scampered up the side of the hill and stuck our heads over the top of the stone wall. When the gaggle of head-bangers saw us they yelled
Ahhh! Extraterrestrials!!
and ran away leaving standing near the two-four of empty beer bottles. At which point, we ran away.
Later that same evening as I was climbing over a metal fence I impaled my palm on the twisted wires at the top. My first reaction was to pull away which only caused the puncture to be torn laterally and I spent the rest of the evening walking around looking as though I was offering people my stigmata. As was often the case in those days I drew the short end of the stick and was forced to sleep sitting upright in a chair with my up-turned hand resting uncomfortably on its arm.
The Bucky Ball lay empty until 1995 when it was re-christened as Environment Canada's Biosphere,
the only museum of water in America dedicated to the St. Lawrence River and the Great Lakes
.
Maybe I would be happier if I just numbed the pain by painting my teeth with Liquid Paper, at night, like everyone else.
The scenography will be conceived in collaboration with a Montreal architect so as to maximize the functionality of the various places to be set up in the incinerator, all the while promoting an aesthetic approach that corresponds to the scale of the building.
The presentation of the works themselves and the design of novel presentation structures will focus on the increasingly narrowly defined relation between the work, the concrete context of its diffusion and the audience's perception within the interior spaces of the incinerator.
For the uninitiated this probably gives you same uneasy feeling I had the first day I was introduced to the Unix command line.
Note to self: consider proposal to write a Masters of Fine Arts thesis in shell script. You laugh. This is why I am a better Artist than you. No, really.
Anyway.
The first paragraph simply says : We're gonna hang stuff in a way that makes sure people appreciate how big the place is. Leaving aside, of course, our built-in ability to recognize really big things as being, well, big.
The second paragraph says : We know that only a small and rarified group of overly linear thinkers will be able to grok, let alone appreciate, any of the work on display. So for the pea-brains out there we'll just emphasize how small they are in such a big room.
The rest of the piece goes on to recycle (sorry) all the truisms of the industrial complex in an urban landscape, of renewing the space as some kind of sickly-sweet after-school special teen center (read: condos in five years) and as the site for, god help us, a little more self-exploration. All of it, I am loathe to admit, true enough in its own way.
But it's a bit discouraging that in all the high-minded blather no one thought to mention that right next to l'usine, the city has set up
one of eight
éco-centre
s
where people can bring all manner of crap for recycling or at least proper disposal.
The centers were created for residential use; people building highrises still need to rent their own damn garbage containers. I'm sure that there are some contractors who play fast and easy with the rules but by and large the centers are frequented by plain vanilla folks who want to do the right thing with their paint thinner or that wall they've just torn down in the living room.
The Éco-centre de la Petite-Patrie is not on the site of the incinerator, proper, but you would be forgiven if you thought it was. It is pretty much the only thing you notice when you're not paying attention enough to keep yourself from falling in to a giant garbage bin.
Frankly, I always thought it was just a matter of time before the center expanded in to the incinerator. Regardless, it is difficult to overstate just how important these places have become to the city-folk.
[A] concrete and anthropological definition of the urban desert
, indeed.
via Michael , who I'm relying on
Not only did the University rescue a beautiful property from the scourge of condominiums overwhelming Montréal but they're handing it over to the Fine Arts department. To borrow Ben's phrase :