Indoors/Outdoors

Hey People,

Remember, way way back, when it was first starting to snow? I decided that rather than going all the way down to the bright, shining fluorescent lights of the McLennan stacks, I would do my homework in a café. As the snow came down, the ground got covered in white, the outdoors began to change; and I began to become very aware that this café didn’t have Wi-Fi.

So it’s snowed/is snowing, and as any person with feet can tell you, it’s difficult to walk around right now. It’s made me rethink my relationship to the indoors and the outdoors in a drastic way. In other words, I don’t want to go outside (because it’s cold, and snowy), and want to stay inside (because it’s warm and sweatery).

So the Internet is inexplicably tied to the indoors. Obviously, you spend most (all?) of your time on the Internet also indoors.

So I am curious, is cyberspace just an indoor space? And not only that, but if I am spending all of my time on the Internet, indoors, is there anyway to engage with this city – a city that seems to be turning against me more and more as every degree of warmth slips away -

Am I digging deeper and deeper into a big hill of self-possession?

You do become aware of the outdoors in a whole new way during the winter. It was possible once to just walk along – now you have to watch every step on the snow and the ice. Winter has insinuated itself, we can’t just forget about the outdoors. The cold air reminds your skin you’re out in the city, even if I want to put on my headphones and forget.

It’s weird how a new snow screws with the narrative – even after everyone gets good and bored with snow falling, every new snow blurs the lines between road and sidewalk. Cars go from one to the other, drive slow enough to seem like pedestrians. Cars and people are so separate during most of the year, but during wintersuddenly people have to get in the streets and shovel around these cars, push them out of snow banks.

Coming back second semester there was that urge to get re-acquainted, see new places, make old/good places a force of habit. So this sort of counter-acted that natural need to stay indoors.

But how could the Internet, something that had helped me stay indoors, help me get outdoors?

Everywhere I go, people check the weather on the Internet. This is one way to remind yourself there is something else out there, something you might have to drive or walk through in the near future.

The McGill Daily’s beginning of the year, “Disorientation Guide,” directed me to the Stille Post Montreal – a great place to find reasons to leave the indoors. Although it is also in paper form, the Mirror’s beginning of the year list of “Noisemakers” was a wonderful overview of the things going on in the city – a place on the Internet or indoors reminding you where you lived and what was happening where you lived.

It’s been floating there, in the back, but now I’ll just say it: the Internet has a real de-spacing effect. Sitting in my room, it’s easy to forget I am in Montreal.

This blog is always trying to find ways this isn’t true; always trying to find connections between the Montreal – the place where we use the internet – and the spaces of the internet itself. But sometimes there can be a real and distracting disconnect.

Then again, sometimes I go out looking for this disconnect. Example – keeping up with the GLOBAL FINANCIAL CRISIS, I am drawn to this terrific podcast (Planet Money), made in the US (for National Public Radio), often engaging with US issues, US crises.

Problems in Iceland and Cambodia seem to be the same distance away online, but there are things that are happening around the corner and down the street, in other words, in Montreal. There is a blog that this blog will probably be coming back to again and again. It’s called Spacing Montreal, and it deals with issues that are happening in this city – to this city – along with pictures of the city, a kind of virtual walk down the street.

A new semester also means new friends, new people, huddled like those pigeons on that big grate at Parc and Prince-Arthur, to walk down the street with. We all get to where we are going, and for the next five minutes, we all start taking things off – coat, scarf, gloves, hat, boots, maybe a sweater or other. It seems easier to see the city when you work your way from warm spot to warm spot with a group of friends.

I usually don’t have anybody on my way to school in the morning. Sometimes I listen to music during the walk. It is a way to create some artificial warmth - especially this.

So I will try and get outdoors, wander around in the snow - and keep blogging.

-Sam Neylon

Posted at 06:37AM on Feb 13, 2009

Etés-vous un pendant magnifique?

This blog is going to be an exploration of two places I either spend too much or not enough time in: the Internet and the City. This is how things are going to work around here; writing this blog will give me an excuse to surf the web, and a reason to see Montreal - and a lot of these little “adventures” or whatever are going to begin with a deadline shoving me out the door.

I went to see this Documentary, “Beautiful Losers.” It was part of Film Pop/Pop Montreal, and also part of the Festival de Nouveau Cinema. There were a lot of signs outside.

It was a few weeks ago, warm, and I rode by bike there alone on a Sunday evening.

They were showing the movie at UQAM’s Agora Hydro-Quebec – this large warehouse room with a bar at one end, screens covering every noticeable surface, basked in pseudo-futuristic blue light. I saw the light from the screens as I walked up to the building. Before the film began, they were showing an assortment of YouTube clips: clip after clip of people who had recorded themselves dancing to pop songs.

The clips were a really interesting way to get at the theme of the documentary and of the night: DIY – Do It Yourself culture. The documentary was about a group of DIY artists who met and created in New York. During the Youtube clips, pop music that might have seemed boring or homogenized was suddenly re-presented as a bunch of people excitedly dancing in their living rooms, capturing their dances on bad digital cameras and putting them on YouTube. I’m guessing they had little idea who would watch the videos, or that they would be put into a montage and played on giant screens in Montreal.

I wasn’t able to find anybody to come to this thing with me on short notice. For me, the hardest part about being alone is finding somewhere to stand. You can’t stand/sit out in the middle of nowhere, but you don’t want to crowd groups of people you don’t know. This neurotic attention to the people around me disappeared as soon as the movie started.

The presentation began with a documentary from the National Film Board vaults – Rouli Roulant (part 1, part 2), a Claude Jutra film about Montreal skateboarders in the 60’s. It featured tongue-in-cheek narration over footage of skateboarders covering city streets before being chased away by police. The short ends with a wonderful segment where three skater guys and a girl roll around gracefully to a French pop song written for the film. When I found the video online, I also found some helmeted youths who recreated one of the scenes from that doc in Westmount.

The feature of the night “Beautiful Losers,” is all about a group of DIY artists that came from all over to gather in New York. These artists were all engaged in the loosely connected world of skateboarding, surf, punk, hip hop and graffiti, and their art reflected the rough, do it yourself nature of their youth. The artists themselves seem surprised at their success – they just set up a space in a storefront, put up some art they were doing, and invited friends.

“We were pretty stupid, and great. You know, awesomely dumb,” says artist Mike Mills.

The interviewees are real interesting, they are able to hold forth on their art, tell vivid stories, communicate directly.

In a story that says a lot about the cities these artists grew up in, and how this environment has changed, filmmaker Harmony Korine walks around a park, filled with sculptures made of broken pottery, and talks about how it is where the skaters, weirdoes, and heroine addicts would hang out. Children are playing in the park now. In a sickeningly funny moment, Korine simply tells a boy that his friend Sam’s head had been found under a nearby bench – “Cool!,” the kid says.

Of course, things got bigger and more complicated, the art caught on, pop culture started leaning their way, and their roles changed. The documentary actually does a good job of looking at this problematic relationship, how these artists whose entire world-view was formed in a subcultural context are now to a large extent famous, moneyed, and mainstream.

I am sometimes excited about a documentary subject, but not the doc. This movie, on the other hand, had style and vision that deepened the portrayal of the artists, but wasn’t so stylistic it got in the way.

After the movie I was meeting some people on St. Laurent, but I had to kill a few minutes. I was still sort of in that weird post-movie trance, wandering over by the intersection of Roy and St. Dominique. There is a lot of graffiti back there, and the brick walls began to look like the screens. The film had really given me a sense of the vibrancy this little group of artists had, and that art that seemed like part of the street culture; it was exciting, even though it had happened a while ago.

That seems to be a problem with the documentary form: by the time some movement has solidified enough to warrant the logistics of a documentary, its moment has passed. Or the alternative: some documentary tries to capture the “next big thing” and comes off as silly only a few months later.

So with that in mind - this blog is going to be an archive of sorts, so what I choose to write about, and how I write about it, is going to determine how it’s remembered to some degree. The quick and temporary nature of a blog will allow me to describe things differently than a documentarian might. So I will try to keep this light on its feet, and explore things tangentially – assets of a blog where I don’t have to abide by some strict critical viewpoint. The politics and manner of description seem especially important when only vivid descriptions can stand out amongst all the noise; and only vivid descriptions will be remembered. So perhaps in this way I can explore and capture for a moment these alternatively changing and static webs that structure this city – both on the streets, and on the screens of the Internet.

- Sam Neylon

Posted at 09:09AM on Nov 21, 2008