It’s been thunder-storming quite a bit lately; these small pockets of the day where the sky turns grey, sounds a thunder, then starts pouring. On one of these occasions, last-last weekend, I was walking hastily to the National Film Board (NFB) building at Place Des Arts. As part of the Jazz Festival activities, there was a free screening of a Leonard Cohen documentary, entitled Ladies and Gentlemen, Mr. Leonard Cohen. The theater was full and I sat the second-to-last row; the seats, nicely comfortable and raised with good incline. In the documentary, Cohen was thirty years old, spending the majority of his time on Hydra island in Greece, living with Marianne. But the short fourty-four-minute documentary was filmed during a stay in Montréal, which he visited ‘once or twice a year to renew his neurotic affiliations’ and where he stayed in three-dollar-a-night hotel rooms.
The film followed episodes in his life and work; reciting poetry at reading events, meeting with friends late at night. Cohen’s manner of speaking was calm and self-assured, giving the impression of someone who has little anxiety in his system and take things by the day; as the narration goes, ‘1964 was a very good year, with prizes and other fringe benefits, he earned $17,000. Before that, he earned next to nothing. And a return to poverty will have no noticeable effect on his way of life’. Funny, he is too (‘It’s true that since I stopped eating meat, I feel better among animals. I feel I can be much more honest when I pat a dog’).
Notably, at the time of the documentary’s release in 1965, Cohen had yet to make music; his debut studio album, Songs of Leonard Cohen, came out in 1967. I listened to So Long, Marianne, the sixth-track on the record, for the first time recently; if I’ve heard it before, I cannot recall. It opens with a guitar strum, then Cohen’s gentle, crooning voice enters. A happy tune, a sad tune. (Ladies and Gentlemen, Mr. Leonard Cohen is available for free to watch on the NFB’s website.)
I was caught up in another storm last Thursday, this time around, with a hint of cruelty. Walking home from the cinema, a quick change in the weather brought about sudden heavy rain; as if one turned on their shower-head. So there I was, my sauntering turned into sprinting and at 7:50 p.m., I took cover under the stoop of a corner café that was closed; already there were five, six people. I was drenched; my poor mocs. The downpour married with strong gusts brought about an interesting phenomenon: diagonal rain coming in rhythmic waves. Rainwater ricochets off the pavement in continuous rows of skipping stones; rainwater gathers in excess and runoff down the street.
There are brighter days where the sun’s razor sharp and all feels warm and well. As of recent during these hot days, I like to take a walk down to the river, and sit on a bench under the shade, and look out onto the open landscape. The river is the St. Lawrence; the same one Cohen sang about in Suzanne. The water isn’t quite bright blue; it’s more of a muddy teal.
To the left, I see Saint Helen’s island, the former grounds to Expo ‘67 (a world fair held back in 1967); remnants of the fair can still be seen: the Biosphere (as its name suggests, a spherical structure that looks made of chicken wire; ‘a museum entirely devoted to the links between society and the environment’); nearby, a huge steel sculpture by Alexander Calder, Trois disques (or Man), resembling the figure of a spider, its pointy edges standing on six legs. I’ve been interested in Calder’s work lately. Trois disques is an example of what Calder labeled stabiles, large monumental sculptures that usually find itself located in public spaces. Another set of sculptures, he called mobiles; smaller, usually hanging, and are moving; they flow with the wind and cast fun shadows as the folds shift to create new forms.
To the right, there is a thin stretch of land called Cité du Havre, shaped like a mini-peninsula, that connects to Saint Helen’s with a bridge. There, I see a gazebo and I see Habitat 67, a length-sprawling complex in the Brutalist style; blocks of cubes stacked on top of each other in a zig-zag pattern, as a child might do with toy building-blocks. Habitat too was built for the Expo, by Moshe Safdie, who came up with the design for his master’s thesis at McGill.
Safdie also had a hand in decorating the Singapore skyline, namely Marina Bay Sands (MBS; a hotel and resort, consisting of three towers joined together by a boat-shaped structure on top) and Jewel Changi Airport (donut-shaped retail-dining-accommodation extension of Changi Airport, with the tallest indoor waterfall as the centerpiece). MBS and Jewel are both impressive and beautiful; I have many fond memories when I visited many years ago; squeaky clean interiors, spaces that keep on expanding. There was a long elevator in MBS that one would take to get to and fro from Gardens by the Bay, and I was terrified. I also remember splurging on art supplies for the first time at a Tokyu Hands store at Jewel: Tombows, Copics, Poscas. I didn’t know though, that Safdie was the common thread connecting the architecture there and here.
So I see it all. The wind blowing and the leaves dancing on the pavement, on my hands and on my pants, casting flickering yellow circles that moves in a rhythm. I hear the skrrrt! of a zipline, and the buzz of a passing jet-ski or cruise or boat, that breaks the ambient barrier and produces ripples in the blue. I sit for a while, then I take my leave.
Thank you for reading, I appreciate your time. Have a great week ahead.