Thursday, March 29, 2007
à la Montréal
I've been asking myself if deep down I just want to recreate montreal in jersey city. Or, have jersey city recreate montreal for me. This is an internal, existential debate, surely, so let me not deal with it here. But there are a few features of the cities which line up well.
For one thing, as one gets closer to the waterfront in Jersey City the building size increases just as in Montreal. Nestled within these tall buildings is the mall, built-in, half-underground, where you need to be. Personally I'd pass through the Eaton Centre almost every day in one direction or another on my way from one transit to another. Similarly the walk from the Hamilton Park region to the P-N Path will have to pass through the mall.
This is no trivial feature: to me, the worst part of suburbia is the inconvenience of shopping. One has to *go out* to do it (props to Tris McCall on that style). This is already a huge pain for things like groceries, drugs, and alcohol, but for clothes, it's a whole nother matter. Here the shopping must be completely natural, completely involuntary, completely subconscious. Otherwise it turns into a therapy session at best or a nervous breakdown in some cases. (Cf. "That's not my style, but what is my style? Must everything match? Must they not match so I'm truly postmodern? But the non-matching shit doesn't look good because I have no aesthetic sense, so I should formalize the wear and thus abandon my philosophy...") Yeah, we don't want that.
One more subtle similarity is the topography of the two cities. One literally descends from the heights to the water in Jersey City. Beautifully, this walk points directly towards lower Manhattan, which will one day include a gigantic needle reenforcing the orientation. In Montreal there was always a gradient to my travels: downward to start the day and back up at the end. The opposite of Sisyphus. While it may be subtle, it's this kind of orientation that will build the city's character within me.
For one thing, as one gets closer to the waterfront in Jersey City the building size increases just as in Montreal. Nestled within these tall buildings is the mall, built-in, half-underground, where you need to be. Personally I'd pass through the Eaton Centre almost every day in one direction or another on my way from one transit to another. Similarly the walk from the Hamilton Park region to the P-N Path will have to pass through the mall.
This is no trivial feature: to me, the worst part of suburbia is the inconvenience of shopping. One has to *go out* to do it (props to Tris McCall on that style). This is already a huge pain for things like groceries, drugs, and alcohol, but for clothes, it's a whole nother matter. Here the shopping must be completely natural, completely involuntary, completely subconscious. Otherwise it turns into a therapy session at best or a nervous breakdown in some cases. (Cf. "That's not my style, but what is my style? Must everything match? Must they not match so I'm truly postmodern? But the non-matching shit doesn't look good because I have no aesthetic sense, so I should formalize the wear and thus abandon my philosophy...") Yeah, we don't want that.
One more subtle similarity is the topography of the two cities. One literally descends from the heights to the water in Jersey City. Beautifully, this walk points directly towards lower Manhattan, which will one day include a gigantic needle reenforcing the orientation. In Montreal there was always a gradient to my travels: downward to start the day and back up at the end. The opposite of Sisyphus. While it may be subtle, it's this kind of orientation that will build the city's character within me.
Owen Martin 10:09 AM
1 Comments:
owen,
i like your shopping philosophy. when i was younger, i was traumatized by shopping because it was always such a big outing and i wasn't a natural to begin with. the only way that it wouldn't end in a nervous breakdown would be if i got to go to a bookstore or maybe ice cream. my mother literally had to bribe me to go get the things i needed, like shoes. i never even imagined shopping could be any other way, it was just a natural headache.
i like your shopping philosophy. when i was younger, i was traumatized by shopping because it was always such a big outing and i wasn't a natural to begin with. the only way that it wouldn't end in a nervous breakdown would be if i got to go to a bookstore or maybe ice cream. my mother literally had to bribe me to go get the things i needed, like shoes. i never even imagined shopping could be any other way, it was just a natural headache.
