Le Moulin à images (The Image Mill)

Just got back from Quebec City, where we hung out for a couple of days, eating out, walking around the old town, shopping, reading in cafes. I took along for reading Jhumpa Lahiri's The Namesake (highly recommended -- a brilliant book), and my bilingual edition of Baudelaire's The Flowers of Evil -- magnificent not only for Baudelaire's poetry, but for the superb translations by the likes of Richard Wilbur, Robert Lowell, Roy Campbell and others. For me, for almost entirely personal reasons, Baudelaire and this town are intimately connected: in its antique elegance and inanity, it could well be the closest approximation I can get in this corner of the world to my idea of his mid-19th C. Paris; also, during last year's stay I wrote a palimpsest of one of his prose poems. (For more pictures of Quebec City, click on the label below.)

This year is the 400th anniversary of the founding of this town: there were lots of events and hoopla. That was really not why we went, but we did take in Le Moulin à images. I had heard some rave reviews (or at least rave mentions) by acquaintances and the media, so it seemed like a must-see.

Le Moulin à images (The Image Mill) is a forty-minute (well, according to my watch, 50 minute) audiovisual production projected against the grain silos in the Port of Québec, created by the renowned animation group Ex Machina under the direction of no less a mover and shaker than Robert Lepage. The idea, according to the website, was to create an "impressionistic portrait of the city over time" -- a kind of visual symphony in four movements corresponding to the city's four centuries of history. The production is huge-- the largest outdoor architectural projection ever created, some 600 meters long by 30 meters high, with 27 synchronized video projectors, 230 spotlights and more than 300 loudspeakers. Some of the tableaus are quite stunning, as you can see:





The production, as could be expected, was done with plenty of panache. The cylindrical shape of the silos was frequently put to cunning use; one of my favourite series of tableaus represents the visual arts, including a celebration Sico Paints, a major paint company founded in Quebec City -- assembly lines of paint cans dissolving into the spectrum of brilliant colour seen above. (Was Sico one of the sponsors? En tout cas...) One of the most powerful moments was when decline of Catholicism was represented by the shattering of stained glass images all over the screen.

The focus was primarily socio-economic-technological; conspicuously absent was any treatment of politics, particularly during the last 40 years. For some reason, Lepage et al decided to zero in on the Queen's visit in the '50s, with a video panning a small crowd placard-carrying protesters -- hardly the most significant political event in the capitol of Canada's (near)breakaway province. What of the PQ, Rene Levesque, School/Language reform, etc? Was the nationalist legacy considered too hot to handle? Yet it seems to me that reality could have been dealt with briefly and intelligently within this enormous visual collage without necessarily pouring gasoline on separatist flames. Anyway, from Robert Lepage I expected something far more daring. For all the size and technical mastery of the production, after thirty minutes I found myself looking at my watch to estimate how much time was left; and I was not alone. As a couple beside me said when the lights dimmed on the fake fireworks finale: “C’etait beau, quand même.”

Casements

A prose poem of mine is up at Montreal Serai. (Ed. Note, August 2009: The poem doesn't seem to be up anymore -- and has since undergone changes. The final version, which appeared in Passanger Flight, is below.) This one is a palimpsest of Charles Baudelaire's "Windows" in "Paris Spleen" as translated by Louise Varèse (this transcription has a number of typos, but is the only one I could find). I wrote the first draft of it in Quebec City only last May. Above is a view from the hotel window by which I wrote the piece (click on the photo to see it much larger). Through that window directly across, one can actually see kitchen cupboards. I saw the penumbra of human shadows, a hand reaching up -- but not the whiskey bottles! Actually the night-time sparkles of the city are more spectacular from the left side of that window, looking through towards the right, where I sat with my laptop and drafted the poem -- but I didn't have the presence of mind to photograph that view. (For more photos from my camera of that trip, click here.)

CASEMENTS
(after Charles Baudelaire)

Through this doubled pane, the city spreads. Strings of lights delineate throughways. Pinpoints shunt the length of them. Constellations of fixed lights – an electronic Milky Way – wink in a haze of automobile fumes, steam rising from the river, dust filtering out through industrial chimneys.
Looking around my neighbourhood in these so-called wee hours, I see rectangles of variously shaded yellow or blue light suspended among the shadows. Across the street, framed in a silhouette of century-old moulding, I see under a single incandescent bulb a row of kitchen cabinets. Occasionally a hand reaches up, opens a cupboard, takes down a bottle of whiskey from several others on the shelf. The hand is gnarled, age-spotted – man or woman I cannot tell for sure. Several other rectangles glow with a bluish, spectral hue: I imagine other solitudes crouching over computer screens, sending digital self-portraits around the world.
Across the ocean of roofs, I see a middle-aged woman, her face already lined, who rarely if ever goes out. Often, as now, she slouches motionless in front of a television. I can only imagine her frown: out of that imaginary frown, out of practically nothing at all I have made up this woman’s story, or rather legend, and sometimes I tell it to myself and my eyes water; but I do not weep. Perhaps my compassion – could this be called compassion? – is anesthetized by her own ceaseless foray into distraction. Perhaps in one of these casements, someone is observing my square – dimly illuminated by this screen on which I write – and thinking: there is an oblivious one, a little life, unaware of all others! Yet imagining these lives, even the one observing mine – hasn’t it helped me to see my own, to feel that I am what I am – but one open eye among the many eyes of the city?

Quebec City

Some pics of a two-day trip late last week to la belle ville. Click on them and they'll fill your computer screen.
Restaurants in the old city...
The oldest stone church in Canada (dates from the early 1620's).
... rue Petit Champlain, one of Canada's oldest streets (now given over almost entirely to glitzy tourist shops... no one in the picture, by the way, that I know..."just people", as we so errantly say. I hope none of them minds the possibility of being spotted by a boss or partner!)
A picture of YT at one of the outdoor cafes in the Old City. Got some great pictures of my parter on this trip, but she doesn't like pictures of herself flying all over the world. So you have to settle for this rather drowsy-looking version of myself.
Rue St-Jean, a commercial street I prefer to stroll along to the picturesque but dolled-up streets within the walls of the old town. In a used bookstore here, I picked up a copy of Baudelaire's Petits Poëmes en prose (Le Spleen de Paris), which I had read already a few times in English translation... that night, in our hotel room, gained a valuable insight into B.'s creative process by looking over his lists of "poemes a faire" -- subjects to write on -- and "symboles et moralites", which were included in this fine edition. An obvious architectural shaping idea that it had never occured to me to do. Started my own list of "poemes a faire" for my own prose poems. And wrote a draft of one about looking through a window at night...
... in particular this window, in our B&B hotel room in the old town.
My favourite bronze statue in a town with a fair number of them. This outside a church on rue St-Jean which has been turned into public library.