09th December, 2015 (Montreal)
Stadium Art Movement Calendars will be available this year.
Last year was a private reserve collectors year but this year we have special editions doing the rounds through Infopresse in Montreal.
More news will be forthcoming.
For now, here is a pic of Montreal. Eleven more to come...
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| Molson Stadium in the Milton-Parc/McGill Ghetto of Montreal |
You are looking at one of the most important stadiums in the world. The NFL, the CFL, the PAC10, whatever... none of these letters would mean anything were it not for a game between Harvard and McGill back in the 1800s when they tried to merge a mishmash of styles and codes so that the two teams could compete under the same rules. OK OK OK many of the rules we see today in Canadian and American Football were added many years later after that first game, but as purists we have to stick to the roots, and the roots of the modern North American game are right here in the Island Mountain City.
This view is as if hovering above the Plateau district looking down into the next: an architect's delight of inner city apartment blocks, turn-of-the-century Beaux Arts terraced blocks, International Pseudo-Gothic Universitarian One Design, Modernist and Brutalist and Art Deco melded into the Golden Mile that we now just call the "Ghetto." The people who run the University hate that we use this name, and I have even tried my bit to help in the efforts to kill off this vernacular by telling people that the people who run the University hate that we use this name for the district, but it hasn't really helped. Perhaps the University could try telling everybody how much they love we use this word "Ghetto." It won't change the fact that the entire district is taken over by students living in suspiciously-higher-than-average rental space willing to pay for the convenience. The other people who live in this district who aren't even students? A study in and of themselves. More needs to be done. That's what Sociology does to us. Turns us into the same people we want to then become subject matter. What a waste of time. No wonder buildings last longer than most professors.
I have spent nights asleep in houses full of students, got up with them and joined the morning rhythm of the streets streaming with scholars on their way to class, and led to feel part of this energy, even though I was no more than a guest. It is a fascinating place. Because they are all bunched together, we Montrealers can have fun pointing fingers and rolling our eyeballs at the mention of the student body as if it were one monolith, that drinks and pukes and screams and shouts and screws up against the wall and then goes home at the end of spring to leave a mountain of discarded furniture and other junk to popularize a sub-genre of magazine article called "McGill Ghetto Student Garbage Photos" pretty-much every year in all citywide publications, such is the spectacle.
But I have no shame in saying that I love this place and my only wish is that rents were lower and the tropes more varied and numerous in type. I have great memories of running down the slopes from Mont Royal in the rain, just in time to dry off and catch a flick at the Cinema... and emerge with the stars out and life vibrating around me to the sounds of the night.
The McGill Ghetto is one of the most densely populated urban districts in North America that combines the scholarly atmosphere of Upper West Side Manhattan with a Hyde Park Corner scale of Magnitude one might find in London, but with a gritty iced wind you'd expect from Chicago in winter. In summer, looking down from the mountain onto the circuits of lights above the din and smoke of the streets, could have you thinking of Mulholland Drive and the view across Los Angeles.
