I love snow, especially when it's thick and sticks around. I like driving in it. I like walking in it. My dog loves playing in it. I like the crispness of the air in which it lives. I like the sound of it crunching under my Sorels. I like the feeling of being snug in my big winter jacket and mitts, the chill and frost kept at bay, but still evident against cheeks and breath. I like covering my dog in snow and watching him shake it off, a white cloud forming around him. I like watching Macbeth catch snowballs. I like lying in the snow, snow angels not requisite. I like how the cold makes your hands ache. Cold is like nature's caffeine, cold and snow like a frothy iced latté. I like sweeping and scraping the snow off everything but the roof and hood of my truck, so that when I'm driving down the road, the wind blows a constant thin film of snow up over my windshield and into my wake, I looking at it in my rearview mirror. If no one is around (and especially in parking lots) I like pulling fishtails and slides and practicing pulling smoothly out of them, which is probably why I'm not a complete spaz with the winter driving, unlike most Vancouverites.
There's pretty much nothing I don't like about snow.
Except Calgary snow, because of the chinooks. It snows, the city sands, it melts. Soon the streets are lined with big black piles of icy ugly. Calgary is what hell would look like if it froze over.
(I thought I'd redo this September 25th Cityscape story. I didn't much like where I was going with the original.)
The economy of erection. Not the most impressive skyline in the world any longer, not the most contemporary (though in its favour, perhaps, the most recognized). All this not due to any loss inherent in nine-eleven. No, with the WTC towers the skyline had a serviceable feel about it, after nine-eleven it's simply returned to antiquated. New York seems lost somewhere along the economic timeline. Stuck thirty, forty, fifty years in the past. New markets open around the world, new points of economic points of interest, and new skylines emerge that are reflections of new thinking, new money. Manhattan has that look of playing catch-up, even though it purports to be the global market leader (and at the moment it still is, if tenuously), a symbol of wealth (and that it is) and the global economy (but it is slowly falling behind, new rules it is slow to adopt). The architecture of New York plays a roll in keeping it from moving further ahead, its foundations run deep, decay beginning to ease the firmament.
USA, RUSSIA, UNITED KINGDOM, FRANCE, CHINA, INDIA and PAKISTAN are all sitting about in great highback leather chairs, smoking Cuban cigars (even USA) and large snifters of brandy in hand. Heady political conversation floats about the room in deep hearty accents. These are all well-fed men, well versed in this sort of luxury.
Behind a large fern in a corner away from most of the nations is ISRAEL, trying not to be seen. Although the other nations know he is there, they dutifully pretend that he is not.
The large oak doors to the smoking room bang open and a short oriental man in large, thick, gold-rimmed glasses enters. He is NORTH KOREA.
NORTH KOREA
(triumphant, and in an oriental accent)
Now you all show respect! Ha ha ha!
USA
(grudgingly)
Howdy.
FRANCE
(grudgingly)
Bonjour monsieur.
UNITED KINGDOM
(grudgingly)
Hello.
RUSSIA
(grudgingly)
Privet.
CHINA
(grudgingly)
Nî hâo.
INDIA
(grudgingly)
Namasté.
PAKISTAN
(grudgingly)
Sa'lam.
NORTH KOREA
(still triumphant, gleeful)
Hey America! Go fetch me brandy and cigar! Now or else! Ha ha ha ha.
The city is pregnant with weather, deep into the third trimester. Autumn a false labour before the eventual birth of winter, and then those remaining months of post partem that stretch out into the new year. But at the minute it is raining. Not a heavy rain, nor a misty drizzle, something rather in between, still wet enough that umbrellas elicit a light curtain of droplets from their perimeters. Along Hastings, the crowds of people, the loiterers outside the mini-marts and run-down hotel pubs, the dealers whispering their wares, shopping carts full of recycables being trollied to refund depots, begging for available change or cigarettes. The weather dampens none of the needs of the city.
The economy of erection. Steel and glass phallouses pierce an atmospheric hymen. Manhattan a swollen sack of commerce. The seeds of the Almighty Dollar stream out along a gridwork of urethras , toward the uteri of the suburbs. The burgeoning rush hour like an oncoming orgasm.
From high up in Rocinho you can see the distribution of Rio's wealth. Shantytown stretching down towards the sea, eventually replaced by surburban dwellings, villas, resorts, office towers, hotels, goverment establishments. It's a living chart describing how wealth concentrates nearest the tideline, how it is nothing more than a trickle high in the hills among the favelas, much like mountain creeks that eventually spill into and create the larger tributary. Each favela a creek, a trickle unto its own, but many such creeks do feed into that larger river of wealth -- Rio. The staccato of gunfire breaks the boy's reverie. The sound comes from further down into Rocinho, where it begins to meet Rio proper. The gunplay could be any number of things, a police assassination squad seeking revenge, a drug dispute between gangs, a wedding, a domestic squabble, or cops doing their just duty actually fighting real crime. Whatever the cause is little concern, blood flows into the creek daily, it's large part of what creates wealth down at oceanside. Humanity up in the hills is nothing more than a commodity, a tool with which to create comfort.
The Great Bell of Westminster sounds deep reports out across the Thames and the city. Further along the river, in that haunt known as The Limehouse, the sound is paradoxically filtered and amplified through a thick Baskervillian fog, a sound that reverberates with a potential malice. The fog distorts the fashionable gentrification along Narrow Street, the present subsumes to a sooty 19th century past, a lurid sensationalistic penny dreadful vision of a time begone. Shapes and sounds lurk just out of reach in the soup, carriages upon cobbles, flower girls calling out their wilted wares, varlets and knaves skulking in shadows. All of which are nothing more than Fords and Hondas upon ashphalt and chatty pubgoers heading to their favourite Rose & Crown-styled watering holes.
The wailing of the muezzins, the weight of prayer, still linger over the city though the last adhan was many hours before. Along the alley in the distance, silhouetted against the hunter's moon, two tall thin minarets straddling a vast onion dome. From a nearby window issues deep languid discourse -- muffled, incomprehensible -- and the curling smoke of a hookah -- the unmistakable scent of a mango-honey maassel blend. Deep pitch shadows splay across the alley, the perception of the noir, like an old British spy thriller. The sense of lurking and prowling is everywhere.
Decay. Stench. Bodies lying peacefully along the street, stretched out on cardboard matting. Entire families, children between parents. The sounds of slumber. The only moment of repose in a life otherwise spent scraping hand and nail for every square centimetre of existence. Piles of trash, steaming, composting. Ectomorphic dogs growl and tug-of-war with a piece of food packaging, only the lingering scent of a meal upon it. A forgotten stratum of the city, and come sunrise Calcutta will once again move on around and by, not daring to look back. Ignorance does not breed guilt.
A milky October morning steams under a tired coffee ground sky. Caffeinated, the city already teems though the day to come still remains a hint just below the horizon. Bicycles, automobiles and pedestrians choke and cough through swirling eddies of pollution - a technological world caught in the grip of a 19th century Industrial Revolution. One too slow to catch the other, the other so fast it threatens disaster. And in a world familiar with revolutions, another cancer of a day begins.
