Daily Archives: November 4, 2010

A modest proposal

Modest Proposal No. 1

Leave a comment
Alley in the Shaughnessy Village

I love this tree. Not this type of tree, this one in particular. Look how it stands. Look how it twists and bends. Look how it manages to provide such a dramatic canopy, so much clean leafy goodness at the end of this ‘figura serpentinata’ trunk. Look at how little ground area it actually takes up.

I’m not a fan of cemeteries – they’ve always seemed useless to me. Not to mention that we here in Montréal could have a Mount-Royal Park at double its current size if we made like 1854 and started exhuming the bodies. So I asked myself – where are the points of intersection here?

Blamo – dedicate trees to people. Replace tombstones with fancy plaques which will eventually become completely absorbed by the trunk of the tree (plus, by the time this happens, everyone you used to know will also be long gone, so no harm, no foul). Either way, we need to get rid of cemeteries, and I really can’t imagine a better way to commemorate someone’s living spirit than by gifting future generations a better environment.

Arts & the City

With many thanks to a van filled with bran and a supafly soul-searcher

Leave a comment

One of my favourite songs, and an excellent video to go with it. Features some interesting perspectives on the city – a very Montréal video. I am not saying it captured the zeitgeist of the era, as that is exactly what you’d expect to read here (if this were a poorer quality blog). So instead I’ll just say that I find this particular video captures a quintessential element of the local culture in the late-90s. It’s dark yet lively, promising despite the gloom, sort of relishing the noire, and reminding us that below the surface, a walk on the wild side awakens spirits numbed by the demands of a trying environment. Yeah, that’ll do nicely…

One more thing, the incomparable Curtis Mayfield is indeed featured on this funkiest of Bran Van tracks, and it would be his last, as the soul-singer-supreme would succumb to illness related to his paralysis. Of note, he recorded the vocals for Astounded while suspended in a special spin-aligning bed. That’s right, Curtis was staring at the floor while his lungs belted out notes that flew towards heaven.