MTL spring

SMELL of SPRING in MTL

For locals, spring is associated with a distinctive smell of thawing dog products. Months and months of it too.

POST TENEBRAS LUX

In early spring many things bubble up from the snow piles.

JACQUES CARTIER BRIDGE

Still nippy out there but the most loved sight of Montrealers warms the heart. A recent poll showed that locals were fonder of this bridge than their Olympic stadium.

Turcot Interchange

Modern art machine that smells like cat shit

Imagine a machine of polished steel and high tech electrical wiring where you insert a nice dinner in one end and receive human feces on the other end. Well dream no longer, wake up and smell the crap: it's called "Cloaca #5" and it's in an art gallery near you. Belgian creator Wim Delvoye has produced eight such shit producing machines since the mid-1990s. Cloaca, Greek for sewer, imitates the human digestive system thanks to daily injections of a delicate mix of bile, acids and bacteria. Its diet varies depending on its host country. In France, five-star chefs poured fine cuisine down its stainless steel pallet. In less sophisticated places, the beast only gets leftovers from local cafeterias.

The endless and regular dumps (of both food and waste) is seen by some as a critic for the capitalist system. Others find it a perfect metaphor for contemporary art. The machine has no opinion and no purpose.

Number five has just left the exhibition hall of l'Université du Québec à Montréal (aka UQÀM). On the last afternoon of the show, a Saturday, the place was packed with all sort of people. Lots of young children bouncing around, over excited at the reverence adults were giving to their favorite subject matter. Some of the smallest kids had to be kept from sticking their fingers into the machine's production. A pungent whiff of cat shit mixed with freshly brewed coffee and high flying intellectual interpretations.

Is it like a Tamagotchi? You know, those fashionable electronic pets from Japan that sold millions a decade ago, where you had to keep caring for your toy or it would die. And how about the fact that Canadian tax payers subsidized this piece - of art - to the tune of 30 000 CAN$ (24 000 USD)? And what's the use of art anyway? And does everything need to have a purpose? Is there beauty in uselessness, even if it smells like cat poo?

http://www.cloaca.be/
http://www.wimdelvoye.be/cloacafactory.php#

The length of an email should be like a woman's skirt...

... long enough to cover everything important but short enough to keep your attention. Good old Benjamin Franklin supposedly discovered that one, for letters, a couple of centuries ago. Nowadays it most definitely applies to emails, and blogs. Maybe even more to blogs than to anything else.

Where do people find the time and concentration to plow through what often seems like daily doses of unedited diary vomit? The self-serving psychotherapeutic attribute of writing is quickly apparent; but for the reader(s)?

When does a blog entry turn into a burka?
---
The remixed version of the Ben Franklin quote comes from www.looper.ca who also publishes some beautiful and thought provoking illustrations.

Montréal or Montreal

Is it Montreal or Montréal?

Language and thus spelling are politically sensitive issues in this part of North America. When sending an email, or filing out an application, some people who are bilingual (and perhaps a little neurotic) make many minute calculations about the political-linguistic preferences of the person on the receiving end. Are they Québecois thirsting for independence or irritated federalists?

Sure, if the text is in French, then it's a no brainer. You are in Montréal. However, never, EVER, write a francophone you are in Montreal, unless it can pass as a typo. Just like you should never begin speaking to a stranger in the language of Shakespeare. You might be exposing yourself to a descent amount of unfriendliness. When in doubt in the continent's bilingual capital, always begin a conversation in French. French speakers will be happy you are one of them and Anglophones will feel in a disadvantaged position (especially if they "ne parle pas la français"). But in the event you are writing en anglais, then it can become important how you spell the name of the world's second largest French speaking city, and the neurotic second guessing can begin.

A similar question can be asked about other wonderfully fractured cities. In the more explosive context of Jerusalem, do people visit Israel, the Occupied Territories, the Holy Land, or Palestine? Yikes, at least in the case of the place so dear to many of the world's religions, the spelling is the same and you can always cop out by just writing you are going to the city, regardless of where that is. Not so with Québec's largest metropolis, because of that damn accent aigu.

That same bilingual problem comes up again when writing an address, what does one write after the wacky British postal code (H2K 4H9), just "QC" (Québec), or "QC, Canada"? Where are we? At least in an oral conversation it is easy to sidestep the issue by simply being in Montreal, or is it Montréal?