A blog archive from former Posterous.com designed using Newspaper Club's layout software featuring my own editorial content covering various topics such as architecture, urban studies, film, social media and music.

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2012 Edition

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02: House of Families, Fantastic Norway / Håkon & Haffner, image courtesy Fantastic Norway / Håkon & Haffner, hakonoghaffner.no
Nuuk Survey:
Arctic Urbanism
in Greenland
local commercial fishing industry in
a centralized setting while as many
as 100 smaller coastal Greenlander
villages were shut down to populate
Nuuk. (Greenlandic Architecture,
rudyfoto.com)
Eric Gould, surface2air.posterous.com, 6
January 2012
The building looms across the skyline like a vast horizontal wall to protect its inhabitants from the brisk
Arctic wind and snow. And while it
is home to many residents, Blok P
and the other alphabetic blocks have
become something of eyesore. These
buildings have collectively branded Nuuk's urban identity for many
years. It's been part of Nuuk's inherited Danish effort for urban planning to develop the town as a strategic sea port and military outpost.
Fortunately for local dwellers that
is about to change as contemporary
Greenlander, Norwegian and international architects in collaboration
with Nuuk's city planners and residents envision a new urban transformation. One larger revitalization
effort for the city center calls for the
removal of Blok P and offering as
the newer alternative a series of residential dwellings inspired by Greenland's landscape and earlier Danish
colonial designs.
From the air a visitor flying over
Nuuk could not miss the long residential structures composed in orderly rows looking much like oversized army barracks. Blok P is the
largest one stretching east-to-west in
a 209-meter span and rising just 5
stories high. Containing 135 apartments and 50 residential dwellings,
this is how residents have lived for 40
years. According to Wikipedia, Blok
P houses 1% of Greenland's total
population.
Blok P's factory-like profile leaves
an impression that the Danish designers and developers who organized Nuuk's urban planning and
housing had nothing little more
than contempt for Greenlanders in
favor of expediency and economic
efficiency. The building and similar smaller building structures were
initially part of a social housing
program designed to provide apartments for residents working in the
An example includes architect firm
Fantastic Norway's Houses for
Families residential design. The architectural concept smartly avoids
any institutional style in favor of a
small village cluster model that is
redolent of Greenland's Danish colonial phase of residential construction. Fantastic Norway updates that
approach with wood finishes and
new sustainable and technological
standards including solar panels and
water heating. The House for Families project is designed for disadvantaged women and children and provides them with both independence
and community.
This project is part of a large-scale
phase of urban development and
renewal for Nuuk's city center and
planned demolition of Blok P and
Blok A - L in Tuujuk. "Their days are
numbered, their time is over," writes
the architects in the comprehensive
master plan proposal Nunarsuup
qeqqani - Nuup qeqqani // In the
middle of the world - in the middle
of Nuuk awarded Best Nordic urban
plan at last year's Norwegian architecture festival – Arkitekturmässan,
in Gothenburg. The project cohesively looks forward towards Nuuk's
future urban planning and sustainable development as the city’s population increases.
Architects Dahl & Uhre who submitted this project proposal in April
2011 focuses on Nuuk's urban center
where Blok P and adjacent residential housing blocks currently stand.
The project envisions new contemporary housing more fitting with a
human-scaled approach to architecture and urban development in
place of the existing model. The project also involves associate architect
teams including the London-based
42 / architects, Fantastic Norway /
Håkon & Haffner, and TNT Nuuk
to model new housing and residential buildings addressing needs for
the community such as social and
park spaces, landscaping, retail and
a sustainable design.
Dahl & Uhre's documentation outlines the structure towards project
development and how restructuring
Nuuk's urban core with the removal
of Blok P and other existing housing stock will not only impact residents who have lived there and have
fostered a strong community but to
imagine what's next. In practice their
plan seeks to elicit comment from
those living in Blok P and the Tuujuk
residential community to determine
the needs to forge a newer Arctic urban model. Its scope raises some interesting questions regarding who is
the city for and what functions does

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a city serve. Nuuk's post-war contemporary development is now at a
new stage to evolve its urban plan
with a strategic, cohesive approach
that also involves its inhabitants. It
also doesn’t hurt to retire a dated
building design – one that burdens
Nuuk’s civic image and social space
– in favor of an aesthetic design tailored towards the values of the people living there.
Their urban plan does not merely
address the problem of Blok P and
Tuujuk’s Blok A-L which contains
156 apartments. These structures
will be demolished over a period of
years. Resettlement is needed for the
residents who live here in existing
housing in suburban areas and parts
of downtown while construction begins for the new building projects as
part of the greater urban plan. In the
process, an emerging surge in economic activity and job creation is
expected from the new construction.
Dahl & Uhre's grand urban vision
for Nuuk's future and, by extension,
its pivotal position in a globalized
Arctic context is buoyed by significant existing and newly planned civic projects. Katuaq, the Nuuk Cutlural Center has emerged as one of
the more enduring recent architectural icons for the city. Inspired by
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the northern lights, icebergs and the
play of light and snow, this gentle
wave-sided building in Nuuk's business and retail core clearly departs
from the warehouse rigidity of the
Blok P's profile with a distinctive
organic contour. Designed by architects Schmidt Hammer & Lassen of
Århus, Denmark, Katuaq opened in
February 1997 as Greenland's central cultural venue. Katuaq's web site
describes the meaning of Katuaq as
"a musical instrument that can begin to play at any moment. During
the day it’s full of dreams – at night
it acts like a magnetic field, drawing
people into the light."
Schmidt Hammer & Lassen Architects have also designed a proposal
for a school in Qinngorput in Nuuk
for the Greenland Home Rule Government. Although the design is less
fluid in profile, the architects draw
inspiration from the location's angular mountain ridge setting overlooking the sea. The school's concept also
contains an open plaza, and in the
evening the building functions as an
arts and community center.
Art and culture is also the primary
focus for a new venue planned for
contemporary art and Greenland's
vibrant art history. The Greenland
National Gallery for Art takes the
shape of a concrete circle straddling
Nuuk's rocky coastline integrating land and sea. It's a bold design
as a spherical white oval appearing beached like an iceberg on the
shore against a backdrop of one of
the older apartment block structures
facing the sea. The award-winning
design, recognized in a competition
last year, is by the Danish firm BIG,
Bjarke Ingels Group, in partnership
with TNT Nuuk, Ramboll Nuuk
and Arkitekti. As part of the social
poltical dialogue about Greenlandic
identity, BIG sees the Greenland National Gallery for Art as "a symbolic
tool in the continuous contribution
for political independency" and to
"become a symbol of the current independent Greenlandic artistic and
architectural expresssion."
With a plan and several projects under way, Nuuk's recent past looks to
be a springboard for brighter things
ahead. Stay tuned.
Image credits: 01: Katuaq, the Nuuk
Cultural Center, Photo: Adam
Mørk, courtesy The Arctic Council,
ac.npolar.no; 02: House of Families,
Fantastic Norway / Håkon & Haffner,
image courtesy Fantastic Norway /
Håkon & Haffner, hakonoghaffner.
no; 03: Mixed Use Development street view sky darker, Apartments,
retail and community spaces as part
of sustainable masterplan, Collaboration with regional Associates. 42 /
Architects, image courtesy 42architects.com; 04: Greenland National
Gallery of Art, image courtesy BIG,
Bjarke Ingels Group, big.dk; 05:
Karen Thastum, Tura Ya Moya, Julia Pars and USK students, Nipi &
Qaamasoq saga, Block 6, as part of
the NIPI & QAAMASOQ Saga/MY
SAGA light installation at Katuaq
Nuuk Cultural Center and Blocks 6
and 7, Photo Kim Christensen, November 2011. Image courtesy sermitsiaq.ag; 06: Architectural concept
for a school in Qinngorput, Schmidt
Hammer & Lassen Architects, image
courtesy shl.dk; 07: Cover art from
Nunarsuup qeqqani - Nuup qeqqani
// In the middle of the world - in the
middle of Nuuk, a comprehensive
Master Plan proposal for parts of
the City Centre of the Capital Nuuk,
Dahl & Uhre Architects, image courtesy Dahl & Uhre Architects, Dialogue Architecture Landscape Urbanism, dahluhre.blogspot.com.

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04: Greenland National Gallery of Art, image courtesy BIG, Bjarke Ingels Group, big.dk
06: Architectural concept for a school in Qinngorput, Schmidt Hammer & Lassen Architects, image courtesy shl.dk;
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03: Mixed Use Development - street view sky darker, Apartments, retail and community spaces as part of sustainable masterplan, Collaboration with regional Associates
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Davos Brief:
Social Media
Engagement at
the World
Economic
Forum Summit
Eric Gould, surface2air.posterous.com, 27
January 2012
A year ago, January 25, 2011 was
for most people an ordinary date
on the calendar. The previous year's
holidays had finally ebbed into a
new year, and the World Economic
Forum in Davos, Switzerland, was
holding its annual conference.
In Cairo, pro-democracy demonstrators convened in the city's central Tahir Square calling for Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak to
step down and an end to his repressive military regime. Their demonstration was organized through a
network of connections that leveraged Facebook and Twitter. Social
media, largely ignored or dismissed
as a superficial past-time, had been
an instrumental communication tool
and platform for students, activists, "citizen journalists," and others
participating and bearing witness to
social change as it was happening in
Egypt. It was a powerful one as the
world watched a collective sharing
of information and people organized
to pursue an unprecedented pro-democracy movement. Egypt's January
25 revolution -- on the heels of Tunisia's Jasmine Revolution in December 2010 -- was broadly branded as
the "Arab Spring" with subsequent
social struggles unfolding in neighboring states across North Africa
and the Gulf in Bahrain, Libya, Morocco, Syria, and Yemen in the weeks
that followed.
Egyptian youth had successfully and
collectively shared social and mobile platforms that had been sometimes derisively called the "Twitter
Revolution" in that country, but that
trivializes what happened behind the
headlines. Clearly, social media and
networks which have been largely
adopted by a younger generation can
mobilize action and quickly demonstrate effective communication.
And social change and unrest did
not go unnoticed; TIME Magazine
acknowledged The Protester as the
Person of the Year. The events culminating in the Arab Spring and
late summer's emergent Occupy
Wall Street movement reveals the
abundance of social engagement
and proving a significant importance
across the world.
This year's World Economic Forum
held each year in Davos in January
recognizes the value of social media and social engagement and has
broadened its reach of openness
and communication through social
media channels and mobile applications. Despite the exclusivity and
elitist nature of the WEF conference -- participating attendees representing a cross-section of political,
economic and business leaders are
there by inivitation-only formality
-- the five-day event can be followed
and accessed via Facebook, Twitter,
YouTube, Foursquare, and several
reports are available on Scribd. Online and via the free World Economic
Forum iPhone app, live streaming
and archived video broadcast feeds
are available through its Livestream
channel at livestream.com/worldeconomicforum. Interviews in the Social Media Corner archive are with
Mashable Founder and CEO Pete
Cashmore, Ariana Huffington, President of the Huffington Post Media
Group, Robert Scoble from Rackspace, and others.
Davos/Klosters, Switzerland, 3 Jan 2012, aerial view of the mountain resort, Copyright by
World Economic Forum, swiss-image.ch / Photo by Andy Mettler.
While this transperancy may be
good and levels accessibility to the
conference exist beyond the alpine slopes hovering near DavosKlosters, one of the main themes at
this year's summit addresses Global
Risk for 2012. At the center of this
issue is economic income disparity in the world, which also happens
to be one of the focal points of the
global Occupy movement. Some
members from its ranks have set up
an Occupy WEF igloo and yurt encampment near conference venues
and hotels in Davos. It goes without
saying that the 99% has a stake in
the ongoing dialogue regarding globalization and economic challenges
facing the world.
In meeting between Reuters Social
Media Editor Anthony De Rosa and
Mashable Founder Pete Cashmore
at the Documented at Davos Studio (Reuters TV, 26 January 2012),
Cashmore explains, "We're here at
Davos where world leaders come to
meet and decide the future of the
world. Well, what happens when everyone is empowered to participate in
that future? That turns things on its
head."
Image credits: Twilight in Davos,
Switzerland, photo: Scott Eells/
Bloomberg; World Economic Forum logo; Reuters Social Media
Editor Anthony De Rosa and Mashable Founder Pete Cashmore at the
Documented at Davos Studio (Reuters TV, Jan 26, 2012); Occupy WEF
protesters prepare a yurt in the town
of Davos, Switzerland, on January
21, photo: Scott Eells/Bloomberg;
Davos/Klosters, Switzerland, 3 Jan
2012, aerial view of the mountain resort, Copyright by World Economic
Forum, swiss-image.ch / Photo by
Andy Mettler.

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Occupy WEF protesters prepare a yurt in the town of Davos, Switzerland, on January 21, photo: Scott Eells/Bloomberg
Twilight in Davos, Switzerland, photo: Scott Eells/Bloomberg
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Centre for
Digital Media
- Vancouver, BC
Eric Gould, surface2air.posterous.com, 15
February 2012
Vancouver’s False Creek Flats, a 20
-acre under-developed industrial
stretch of East Vancouver adjacent to
Chinatown, is an area that city institutions are hoping to kindle into at
least one idea: an urban epicenter for
Vancouver’s digital economy. At the
forefront of this mission is the Great
Northern Way Campus Trust which
is building the Centre for Digital
Media and will complete construction by September 2012 to welcome
students into its innovative Masters’ programs. The Centre offers
the first-ever professional graduate
degree program in digital media in
Canada.
The school's design is like modernist
chalet soaring with an 8-bit pixelated
almost-flattened polygon frame as if
windswept from Vancouver's English
Bay gusts in winter. On the outside,
the building's white skin is not only
branded with the school name but
also features a digital screen for projecting video for audiences on the
adjacent plaza. The 15,000-square
foot interior beckons students and
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faculty for teaching, meeting and
studio space, and for breaks in the
cafe. The Centre’s upper floors offer housing for students in 76 apartments described by GNWC president Matthew Carter as a “digital
dormitory.”
Designed by Vancouver-based Musson Cattell Mackey Partnership Architects Designers Planners (MCM),
the Centre for Digital Media is not
only a specialized academic institution but an essential one for the development of False Creek Flats as a
high tech, creative, innovative urban
district. The Vancouver Economic
Commission sees the city’s high tech
sector as a valuable economic engine. Greater Vancouver accounts for
60-percent of more than 600 digital
media companies in British Columbia that produce $2.3 billion CAD
in revenue. Gaming software businesses are highly visible in Vancouver and include Disney, Electronic
Arts, Nintendo and THQ. Paired
with an advanced film, television and
marketing sector, the Commission
describes Vancouver as strategically
and geographically competitive with
similar economic centers on the West
Coast, notably Los Angeles, Seattle
and Redmond, and overseas AsianPacific markets.
Students looking to pursue a serious academic career in digital media
studies have little time left to enroll
in the Centre for Digital Media
programs on offer and a chance to
be among the first graduates at the
school's new center to open in September this year. On February 16,
there will be an MDM Open House
for students interested in the Masters programs offered. Application
deadline is February 28, 2012.
In a press release published by the
Centre, Richard Smith, Director
of the Masters of Digital Media
(MDM) program said “We are excited about our new home; it will
greet the next generation of highly
skilled leaders needed to maintain
B.C’s edge in the booming new media market."
For admission details and information about the Centre on Digital
Media, check out mdm.gnwc.ca.

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Kraftweek at
MoMA:
Kraftwerk
– Retrospective
12345678
Eric Gould, surface2air.posterous.com, 17
April 2012
Kraftwerk – Retrospective 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
Museum of Modern Art, New York
April
10–17,
2012
he Donald B. and Catherine C. Marron Atrium, second floor
For what is now dubbed as "Kraftweek" in New York, the Museum of
Modern Art has offered live performances by Kraftwerk in the program
Kraftwerk – Retrospective 1 2 3 4 5
6 7 8. Spanning over eight consecutive evenings -- all of which sold out
in advance -- an intimate audience
of 450 are having a rare opportunity
to experience the band perform live
versions of eight studio recordings
beginning with Autobahn (1974)
and concluding with Tour de France
(2003).
Autobahn, when it debuted on
Novemeber 1, 1974 - coincidentally, the same day as another West
German band The Scorpions' heavy
metal release Fly to the Rainbow -it was Kraftwerk's fourth studio recording. In a direction that was hinted at in their previous recording Ralf
und Florian, Kraftwerk moved more
towards electronics, synthesizers and
the use of the vocoder, and a departure from conventional instruments.
Autobahn also expressed more of a
musical focus and discipline, in part,
owed to producer Conny Plank who
had helped shape a maturing style
over their first three full-length recordings and away from the rougher
experimental rock style the band had
pioneered.
Their subsequent musical output
focused on technology and communications and the dynamic offers of
each in the modern world. RadioAktivität (released as Radio-Activity
in the United States), produced after
Autobahn, unveils the band's greater
confidence in building their musical
expression and identity around synthesized music with a concept album
exploring the pun of nuclear exposure ("Radioactivity") with broadcast
media "radio-activity". Ralf Hütter
intones on the song "Radioaktivität"
that "radioactivity is in the air for you
and me" intended for the listener to
reflect upon.
New York's live performances at the
Museum of Modern Art have been
esteemed for its exclusivity among
its fortunate patronage, but it's also
been a sore-point for those who
couldn't get a ticket. The series sold
out instantly in late February in advance of the April series, and scalpers were reportedly selling individual
tickets for $1,000. As for the live series itself, Kraftwerk fans have been
enjoying the rare spectacle on view at
MoMA, but Rolling Stone notes that
the performances are getting shorter
with each passing night and noted
that Sunday evening's Computerwelt
("Computer World") from 1981 was
shaved from the recording's original 35 minutes down to 18 minutes
("Kraftwerk Diary Day Five: 1981's
'Computer World' Invents Electronic Funk" by Mike Rubin, Rolling
Stone, April 16, 2012).
Unlike a nostalgic arrangement of
works by one artist or from a collection, Kraftwerk's honed electronic
focus and music output has a freshness that seems to defy kitsch. Their
music and lyrics anticipated if not expressed the contemporary zeitgeist.
Kraftwerk's 1981 release Computerwelt may have sounded like sciencefiction for its listeners at the time,
for example. Now, in a world where
we have "smart" mobile devices and
iPhones, the lyrical engineer fantasy from that album's song "Pocket
Calculator" ebbs forward into the
future: "I'm the operator with my
pocket calculator / I am adding and
subtracting I'm controlling and composing / By pressing down a special
key, it plays a little melody." Rewind
and press play.

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SIFF
2012 - Mobile
Urbanism
- Expressions of
Social
Transformation
and
Globalization
Eric Gould, surface2air.posterous.com, 1
June 2012
Cities have their own histories and
myths, their inhabitants contribute to define and shape their personalities. Films that carve a bit of
that information in their cinematic
narratives help viewers understand
the signposts about urban ideas, location, culture and economy. The
sums of these as well as other factors help render the distinctiveness
of place and -- for a city’s residents
-- the language of identity. The only
thing constant is the pace of change
and transformation. Cities, like their
populations, are not idle but are always on the move.
The first weekend of the Seattle International Film Festival featured
some films that sketched narratives
in this terrain, entertaining a few
ideas about contemporary urbanism
and social transformation. Filmmaker Brent Chesanek’s debut City
World overlays a fictional narrative
and creation myth in a film filled
with lush suburban impressions
and cinematography in an Orlando
bereft of people and activity. Drawing inspiration from the artificiality
of Orlando as a destination for escapism, Chesanek’s film peers over
backyard fences and past empty
theme park lots to forge an alternative history. The result is a meditative work merging a fictional story
with the culturally-inscribed urban
landscape.
Pema Tseden’s film Old Dog explores how social and cultural shifts
usher in changes as rural Tibet becomes urbanized. The remote Qinghai province’s rugged vistas and
mountains are backgrounded in
Tseden’s focus on a shepherd dog’s
fate – symbolically, the fate of Tibetan culture – in a village that’s gradually losing its heritage character with
the emergence of new construction,
development and population density. This dynamic force of economic
activity coupled with the village’s
cultural shift produces a sustained
tension throughout the film, one
that ultimately tests the shepherd’s
resolve.
Artist Ai Weiwei whose articulate
and critical commentary about living
under China’s one country, two systems regime routinely tests the limits
of expression through social media
and communication. His every moment becomes recorded, packaged
and branded for a domestic Chinese
audience and on the world stage
through social media and from his
museum work as the documentary
Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry reveals. But
what distinguishes his actions is his
level of social engagement using mobile and digital technology. He not
only shares his thoughts and comments, he invites participation as
well. After the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, he produced several projects
and films to commemorate and document the individuals who died. One
project was the result of identifying
and recording the names of more
than 5,000 children buried alive.
Produced as an online radio project,
volunteers read aloud each of the
names of the deceased. His use of
social media is a form of story-telling
in a larger mobile urban context.
Filmmaker Alison Klayman's generous portrait of the contemporary
artist in Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry is
like dipping into a cinematic stream
of Ai Weiwei's Twitter feed. Martijn
de Waal's essay "Towards a MySpace Urbanism?" (The Mobile City,
2008) considers the concept of The
Mobile City regarding individuals
and their use of locative media. "City
space, after all, is by now a hybrid
space" defined no longer exclusively

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by physical size and dimension. Artist Ai Weiwei recognizes this and
embraces the tools of locative media using his Blackberry, Twitter and
Weibo accounts and leveraging other
platforms like blogs and Google+
for social engagement in a personal
struggle towards democratic freedom behind the Great Firewall of
China.
Klayman accompanies Ai on his
travels in and around China, from
Beijing to Chengdu and Shanghai,
and overseas to London and Munich, offering an intimate perspective
about the artist, the son of Ai Qing
a famous poet critical of the Communist regime in the 1950s. Sharing
his father’s distrust towards China’s
authoritarian politics energizes how
he works, moves about, and informs
his work. Once described as “China’s Andy Warhol,” Klayman’s film
offers a much more complex personality nuanced by his representation of China in art and culture.
His coming-of-age as a young artist
in New York City during the 1980s
reveals his struggle as a Chinese national living abroad that reached a
pivotal point during 1989’s Tiananmen Square protests. This tumultuous period had greatly influenced his
work.
By 1993, he returned to Beijing after
his father became ill and established
a new niche as one of several emerging contemporary Chinese artists. As
one of the most recognizable names
in art, he strides a delicate balance
between how he has come to marquee and represent China as a contemporary artist in the world while
testing the boundaries of political
expression. Certainly, Ai Weiwei is
aware of his own brand, a “brand of
liberal thinking” he explains to Klayman when she questions him about
his celebrity. Whether he is seen photographed gesturing with a middle
finger towards Tiananmen Square
or painting a historic urn with a
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Coca-Cola logo, Ai Weiwei playfully
courts controversy. When answering
Klayman’s question as to what kind
of artist he is, he describes himself as
a kind of kind of chess player waiting
for his opponent's move.
Brent Chesanek's film City World
(SIFF 2012 World Premiere) reveals
an experimental narrative shot on
location in suburban Orlando, Florida, as told from the point of view of
an unnamed and unidentified boy
whose only depiction is from his
pointed delivery and voice-over. The
Orlando in City World is identified
briefly from signage on a pedestrian
bridge gleaming in silver from midmorning sunlight but it is not a city
bustling with activity, cars or people.
In fact, it's quite the opposite. Chesanek photographed suburban backyards, screen-canopied swimming
pools, and the gentle turning lanes
and highways that traverse the flat
open spaces near central Florida's
lush, tropical forests. The images of a
depopulated Orlando bring to mind
Matt Logue's photography series
Empty LA featuring Los Angeles eerily absent of traffic, cars and people
on its freeways and streets.
The boy’s narrative in City World offers a creation myth about the settlement of the city at the site of a tall
tree in the forest and its location as a
battle site between Native Americans
and soldiers. The tree is what the boy
is drawn towards in seeking to free
him from the suburban malaise he
associates with his father's lost interest in the world. This duality between the impotent domestic setting
and an impulsiveness to escape from
it towards his vision of a better future
propels the boy's to leave.
Chesanek is not setting out to produce a documentary about Orlando's
origins, but to consider Orlando's
identity as an inverted Shangri-La
and re-imagined as the boy's personal connection to a location, a place
inside time, its history and future.
Chesanek acknowledges that people do not come to Orlando to visit
the city, but rather, to escape from it
at nearby theme-parks. Walt Disney
World Resort, Epcot Center, Universal Studios are some of the destinations for which Orlando springboards access to as portals towards a
utopian fantasy. It's the artificial that
Orlando's visitors find comfort in
outside of the unorganized, unpredictable natural world. Underscoring this, City World flirts with this
kind of imagery including a palm
tree made from plastic, metal and
aluminum turning in the breeze.
Urbanization in the setting of rural
Tibet evokes a canary in the coal
mine for Tibetan culture in Old Dog.
As one of the most significant trends
towards a globalized world author
Doug Saunders from his book “Arrival City” describes it as “the final
shift of human populations from agricultural life to cities.” Tibetan filmmaker Pema Tseden's third feature
Old Dog captures this concept succinctly in a narrative about the fate
of a shepherd’s esteemed mastiff, an
aging dog and one of the most prized
canine breeds in the world that the
shepherd’s son is trying to sell to a
Chinese trader in town.
Set against the mountainous region
of the Tibetan province of Qinghai,
Old Dog is punctuated in the soundtrack’s background with the thunderous pounding of construction noise.
This rural town with its shoddy
construction looks to have surfaced
overnight on the high mountain terrain, and -- like larger cities that
have been jumpstarted with new development and construction projects
-- the building continues. A muddy
unpaved road cuts through a main
drag of urban façades and modest
Chinese storefronts bringing with
it an import of Chinese inhabitants
and culture in a post-colonial migration of urbanization. Tseden’s film
bears witness to modernization in
the margins of the story’s narrative
focus about a rural Tibetan family
cleaved apart from change. At home
they pass time watching Chinese
shopping networks on television and
smoke cigarettes. In the village, the
shepherd presses his son for medical
answers about his son’s impotency
and why he and his wife have not
consummated their relationship with
a child.
Meanwhile, the old shepherd’s mastiff has, perhaps, seen better days like
his master in his youth before the
advent of an urbanized Tibet which
draws the film towards a close. A
moral and existential crisis precipitating in the mastiff’s fate suggests
that there is no monetary value for
the erosion of cultural identity. In
the final scenes of the film following its brutal ending, the shepherd
strides forcefully but slowly through
a golden hillside of dried grasses
looking much like the opposite of
"Bliss" -- Microsoft's Windows XP
screen desktop image of blue sky and
green hills.

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Evan Hecox:
Dark Island
Eric Gould, surface2air.posterous.com, 10
June 2012
Evan
Hecox:
Dark
Island
Joshua Liner Gallery, New York, NY
May 24 - June 23, 2012
Evan Hecox whose artwork and illustrations have become distinctive
with impressionable line-form of
urban street settings and bold color
continue to mature with time. Joshua Liner Gallery in New York is currently exhibiting Evan Hecox: Dark
Island - a new series of work focusing street views of New York City
rendered in acrylic and gouache on
vintage newspaper.
The Colorado native who has done
commercial work for Chocolate
Skateboards and incase is also best
known for his vibrant urban street
scenes from locations around the
world. His style captures the energy
of a moment like bustling traffic in
Ho Chi Minh City or the hidden quiet corners of London. His illustrative
style remains fresh and almost cinematic, awash in punctuating color
and overlaid against a monochromic
grain. What makes his work most estimable and exciting is his clarity for
composition and content, and finding creative nuance in the spaces of
cities and urban street settings.
Recent work of New York street locations sees Hecox exploring a merging between his representational
content with abstract geometry
evocative of minimalism and early
modern poster designs thrust with
bold color. Hecox also crosses over
into font specimen design with his
illustration Five Boroughs, offered
as an edition, featuring an Art Decostyle lettertype for the names of New
York's distinctive communities. His
show Dark Island, closing this week
at Joshua Liner Gallery on June 23,
captures some New York vignettes
that offer both a contemporary and
nostalgic perspective set against a
vintage newsprint canvas.
For additional details, visit Joshua
Liner Gallery: joshualinergallery.
com.
Images: Evan Hecox, Wilderness,
mixed media on panel, 2012, 48 x 36
in.; Evan Hecox, Carroll Gardens,
mixed media on panel, 2012, 48 x
36 in.; Evan Hecox, Five Boroughs,
acrylic and gouache on treated vintage newspaper, 2012, 30 x 44 in.;
Evan Hecox, The Stranger's Grave,
acrylic, gouache and ink, on treated
vintage newspaper, 2012, 20 x 25
in.; Evan Hecox, Sun Dat Trading,
acrylic, gouache and ink, on treated
vintage newspaper, 2012, 20 x 25 in.
Images courtesy Joshua Liner Gallery, joshualinergallery.com.

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15. surface2air
15
Coast Modern in
Vancouver, July
6 - 12, 2012
Eric Gould, surface2air.posterous.com, 10
July 2012
Modernist architecture's West Coast
school is the subject of the eagerly-awaited new documentary film
Coast Modern directed by Mike
Bernard and Gavin Froome. Focusing on three generations of architects whose emphasis on residential
design and architecture is explored
in the film which is currently having
a limited engagement in Vancouver,
BC, at the Vancity Theatre centrallylocated in the city's Yaletown-Granville corridor. Viewers will have their
last chance to see the film this week
before it closes Thursday night on
July 12.
Filmmakers Bernard and Froome
trace the early origins of Modernist architecture in the 1920s and
how it took root in Vancouver and
other West Coast cities in the United
States. The film reveals how Modernism has evolved from its development in the past sixty years along the
Pacific Coast. Inspired by the coastal
landscape setting and the use of new
materials, light and form, these architectural pioneers helped forge an
identity in residential design. Architect Henrik Bull says that the "West
Coast - including Vancouver, Seattle, Portland, San Francisco - there
always has been a greater respect for
nature."
Speaking about Modernism's enduring quality and appeal in residential design, Architect Eric Cobb
says that "it's here to stay, and not
as an aesthetic. It's here to stay because it's about the most important
parts about dwelling in a structure:
light and space." Coast Modern also
features interviews with several architects, photographers and cultural
critics including James Steele, Barbara Lamprecht, Dion Neutra, Vancouver author Douglas Coupland,
photographer Julius Shulman, and
others.
Coast Modern, which had its world
premiere at the DOXA Documentary Film Festival in Vancouver, BC,
in May, returns to Vancouver for
this limited engagement. Check out
Vancity Theatre for info, visit the official web site for Coast Modern, and
view the Coast Modern film trailer
at Vimeo.

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Hong Kong and
Zürich: Most
Liveable Cities
in 2012
Eric Gould, surface2air.posterous.com, 12
July 2012
What makes a city ultimately a "most
liveable" one? Depending on who
you talk to, the criteria can vary and
it has with this year's Economist Intelligence Unit 2012 Most Liveable
City survey published earlier in July.
The EIU, which has been publishing
their Most Liveable City index for
10 years, considers up to 150 cities
world-wide based on how each city
surveyed scores on stability, healthcare, culture and entertainment,
education and infrastructure. Those
cities at the top of the list are esteemed for their higher scores across
the board in their ranking compared
to those at the bottom.
Last year Melbourne topped the list
beating out Vancouver in the coveted
Number One spot for nearly a decade. Vancouver, for example, makes
for excellent liveability; the city is located on the shores of English Bay
and in the shadow of Grouse Mountain. The city's natural landscape
setting coupled with an energetic
downtown is also noted for its education and business sectors, particularly regarding high-tech, television
and film, trade, and its healthcare.
In the EIU's 2011 Most Liveable
City survey, Melbourne leaped over
Canada's young West Coast port
edging ahead with just a 0.2 percentage point factoring in Vancouver's
increased traffic congestion. This detail is really an oversight because the
EIU survey cited the Malahat highway congestion which is not near
Vancouver, but near Victoria, British Columbia, on Vancouver Island.
As the capital seat of the Canadian
province, Victoria is not even geographically close to Vancouver. It's
only accessible by air from Vancouver and Seattle, and from a two-hour
ferry crossing in Vancouver's Lower
Mainland and south of the border
by ferry services from Washington
State.
This year's survey omits both Vancouver and Melbourne entirely. Together, including Vienna, these cities
were the top three cities in the EIU
liveability ranking. Subject to newer
criteria that is collectively identified
as the Spatially Adjusted Liveablity
Index, Architect and Urban Planner
Filippo Lovato provided seven new
indicators for the EIU's survey in a
collaboration with BuzzData, a datasharing company. In an EIU competition for generating a new ranking
model, Lovato's spatial adjustment
assessment was selected as the winning choice. The Spatially Adjusted
Liveability Index criteria are physical and geographical assessors that
include green space, sprawl, natural
assets, cultural assets, connectivity,
isolation and pollution. Combined,
the Spatially Adjusted Liveability
Index was assigned a score of 25%
or one-quarter of the total assessed
score that includes the EIU standard ranking for stability, healthcare,
culture and environment, education,
and infrastructure.
Hong Kong in this year's survey tops
the list with the Spatially Adjusted
Liveabilty Index applied. How did
Hong Kong's ranking compare in
Lovato's survey of 70 cities? The
Economist reports that Hong Kong
earned particularly good scores for
green space, less sprawl, natural assets and a lack of isolation. The idea
regarding a city's isolation is geographical as well as cultural. Stockholm, according to The Economist
("Hong Kong's Best", July 3, 2012),
for example, ranked poorly on this
score compared with Shanghai based
on Lovato's assertion that isolation
"negatively affects leisure opportunities and the possibilities of discovering different ways of life."
Hong Kong, as described in the
EIU's Best cities and ranking report,
is a winner. "It is a very compact city
that has managed to maintain its
natural heritage, create a dense network of green spaces and enjoy extensive links to the rest of the world,"
according to the study.
Comparatively, Monocle magazine
publishes a shorter list of the Top 25
Liveable Cities in their Quality of
Life survey. Available in print from
their current July/August 2012 issue,
Monocle's editors weigh in on similar factors found in the EIU survey,
explaining that "the process of finding a favorite has been a global undertaking." Topping Monocle's list
of the Top 25 is Zürich.
Zürich's ranking in the Top 25 is esteemed for nearly identical criteria
applied to Hong Kong in the EIU
city survey. Reporting for Monocle,
Journalist Gabriel Leigh describes
that Zürich is "a city with abundant
and interconnected green space cut
by rivers leading to its lake." In an
interview with David Marquardt,
Founder of MACH Architektur in
Leigh's video report, Marquardt
appreciates the scale of Zurich's size
as accessible by bike and notes that
"it's too big to be a small village,
but too small to be a big city." Anna
Schindler, Director of Urban Planning for the City of Zürich, agrees,
commenting on the city's metropolitan virtues, scalability, infrastructure as well as its accessibility to the
world. Leigh identifies another estimable factor regarding socio-economic changes in Zürich's population demographic. He explains that
the city is "becoming less conservative" owing in part to "an influx of
people from abroad" leading towards
a more diverse community.
Although Hong Kong did not figure in the top ten, Monocle's Top 25
Liveable Cities report reveals that
the city appears in the Number 13
spot. In a summary about the Pearl
of Asia, Monocle writes that "after years of pushing the commerce
agenda, Hong Kong is now stepping up its culture game and scoring
points for making life here just a bit
more interesting in the process."
Image credits: Ap Lei Chau Wind
Tower Park, Hong Kong, Photo:
Chow Zhe; Hanami, Glattzentrum
in Wallisellen, Zürich, Switzerland,
Photo: (c) Roland Fischer. All photos
licensed under Creative Commons.

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World Cities
Summit - July
2012, Singapore
Eric Gould, surface2air.posterous.com, 21
July 2012
Urbanization and the design of cities
around the world present new challenges as population density increases. The role of city leaders, urban
planners, architects, and engineers
face regarding urban infrastructure
and communications requires the
need to be both innovative and collaborative to help shape the future
of cities. It's a fast-moving trend demanding critical focus.
On a global scale, Doug Saunders,
author of the book Arrival City: How
the Largest Migration in History is
Reshaping Our World, explains: "Between 2007 and 2050, the world's
cities will absorb an additional 3.1
billion people. . . . Each month there
are five million new city-dwellers
created through migration or birth
in Africa, Asia and the Middle East.
Between 2000 and 2030, the urban
population of Asia and Africa will
double, adding as many city-dwellers
in one generation as these continents
have accumulated during their entire
histories. By the end of 2025, 60 percent of the world will live in cities; by
2050, more than 70 percent; and by
century's end, the entire world, even
the poor nations of sub-Saharan Africa, will be at least three-quarters
urban."
Population density and urbanization dominated discussions around
how to make cities sustainable at the
World Cities Summit 2012 held in
Singapore, July 1-4. Urban sustainability played a critical issue at the
keynote and throughout the four-day
conference plenary sessions. Under
the banner Liveable and Sustainable
Cities - Integrated Solutions, the
World Cities Summit emphasis was
on the challenges of urbanization
and ways to address these challenges
to foster sustainability in cities.
Singapore's Prime Minister Lee
Hsien Loong's opening speech on
July 1 at the Marina Bay Sands Expo
& Convention Center coincided with
three related events in Singapore
held earlier in July. The integrated focus on sustainability and urban planning was shared across the third edition of the World Cities Summit, the
5th Singapore International Water
Week, and the inaugural CleanEnviro Summit Singapore. At the opening ceremony for the World Cities
Summit, the Prime Minister stressed
that urban planning, efficient administration and public support are
needed to make cities work. He also
acknowledged that the world is embarking on urbanization at an unprecedented scale. Among the larger challenges that cities have are to
ensure a high quality of life for city
dwellers to live, work and play.
Singapore has been the host city for
the biennial World Cities Summit
since 2008, and this year's summit
marks the third edition attracting
15,000 delegates, world leaders, academics, business leaders and others
to communicate and exchange ideas about what makes cities liveable
and how to develop sustainable cities. The World Cities Summit is coorganized by the Centre for Liveable
Cities and the Urban Redevelopment Authority.
Why Singapore? As the host city
for the World Cities Summit, Singapore's emergence as a leader for
urban planning innovation offers its
influence as a model sustainable city.
It hasn't always been the case, as it
has been a long road getting there.

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Singapore's modern development in
the past 50 years demanded a sustainable approach for urban development. The Prime Minister explained
that transformation was not easy. The
city-state had to overcome the reversals from the 1980s when privatized
development without community
comment or consultation lead to the
disappearance of historical sites and
landscape conservation was threatened. Further, the Singapore River
fell into decline with pollution in
the 1960s and it took a decade to
clean it up and to restore beginning
in 1978. This effort coincided with a
move to transition Marina Bay as the
new city center with reclaimed land
and green space. Eventually, Marina
Bay's redevelopment contributed to
an esteemed civic identity for Singapore as the Garden City.
The city continues to find ways for innovating its sustainable edge regarding green space, water management,
housing and public transportation.
The physical limits of Singapore as
a city-state without a large land area
demands innovating sustainable solutions from both the public and
private sector. The platform of the
World Cities Summit not only serves
to highlight Singapore's track record
and to identify its achievements as a
model of urban sustainability, but to
further engage businesses and individuals to contribute towards its future development.
One of the participating projects and
exhibitions featured at the World Cities Summit was this year's UP Singapore initiative focusing on urban
prototyping. Crowd-sourced data
and citizen mapping was identified
as a model for urban prototyping. Assembled in a presentation produced
by Re:imagine Group, Gray Area
Foundation for the Arts and Newton Circus, the focus behind crowdsourcing data and citizen mapping
leverages mobile communications
through applications and locative
media. "Data and the ability to act
on it is what makes a city more intelligent: the more we know the more
we can manage," as the presentation
for The Citizen, The Cloud & The
Smart City explains. The role technology can offer through the presence of mobile networks can "enable
government and the private sector
to deploy systems that make our urban environments smarter, more efficient, and more responsive. They
also create entirely new and dynamic
roles for citizens."
Examples of crowd-sourcing data
are applications cited include San
Francisco's Bike Accident Tracker
for cyclists to self-report road safety
19
problems and to improve bike safety
policy. Voice of Kibera, a locationbased information and mapping
service allowing Kiberans to share
community news, report crime and
to produce a free and open digital
map for their impoverished district
in Nairobi, Kenya. Similarly, other
examples cited focus on emergency
response and natural disasters. Haiti's Open Street Map which is used
to compile data from satellite imagery and crowd-sourced information from mobile phones to recreate
street maps and even locate displaced people in Port-au-Prince and
Carrefour. Open Street Map was
developed following the 2010 earthquake in Haiti as way for individuals
to help communicate information
for emergency response and relief
efforts. And in 2011, Japan's Fukushima nuclear disaster prompted
citizens to crowd-source information
on radiation levels and reporting this
data and geotagged information to
online platforms to get a bigger picture about the spread of radiation
across Japan.
At a UP Singapore event in late June
in the run-up to the World Cities
Summit, over 200 engineers, designers and developers worked as collaborative teams to produce applications for urban prototyping to be
eligible for the Most Innovative Idea
Award competition. Six teams were
formed to prepare their ideas and
participated in a 48-hour hackathon
to develop their application. Only
one would be selected to earn the
cash prize of S$250,000 for further
development. The different application project ideas included a platform that addresses the needs of Singapore's aging population, a mobile
app designed to help users find and
reserve car garage parking spaces, a
geolocation app designed to offer urban settings and locations based on
users' moods, another geolocation
app for sending postcards representing data visualizations of Singapore's
mobile network data and other datasets, and a mobile app for tapping
into a community complaint platform. The winning project is a mobile application designed to crowdsource climate control conditions in
air-conditioned office towers. ClimateRight features a social component
as well as serving as a way to gauge
energy resource use in offices.
The competition represents just
one example about how to be innovative with mobile technologies
to address sustainability in the urban environment. On a much larger
scale city leaders have long-ranging
needs to address infrastructure pursuant towards what can and cannot
be sustainable. The Future Cities
Laboratory in Singapore offered a
forum for discussion on 5 Propositions for Sustainable Future Cities at
the conference. Their series of panels
explored design intelligence, terrain
thinking which considers the topographical context of a city, dynamic
grassroots communities, abundant
energy, and integrated mobility. As
cities continue to rapidly develop
and change, critical planning for sustainable solutions is imperative.
In recognition of cities that have endeavored to achieve urban sustainability, this year's Lee Kuan Yew World
City Prize was awarded to New York
Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and
New York City's Departments of
Transportation, City Planning, and
Parks and Recreation. Collectively under Mayor Bloomberg, these
agencies have been recognized by the
award's jury for contributing to New
York City's renewal to improve the
quality of life for its residents in the
last decade since 2001. One of the
significant examples of New York's
transformational enhancements towards urban sustainability is that
the city has become greener with the
addition of 700 acres of parks and
green space that includes the new
sustainable park development on the
waterfront and the Brooklyn Bridge
Park. Additionally, many more biking lanes have been added to surface
streets.
"New York is an inspiring story of
urban rejuvenation," said Kishore
Mahbubani, Chairman of the Nominating Committee for the Lee Kuan
Yew City Prize. "With a big vision,
strong leadership, and excellent
partnership between government
and citizens, there is a new sense of
direction in the city," he said. Six additional cities recognized under the
Lee Kuan Yew City Prize received
Special Mentions: Ahmedabad,
Brisbane, Copenhagen and Malmo,
Vancouver and Melbourne. Together, along with Laureates and Special
Mentions from 2010, are explored
further in a new publication on the
Lee Kuan Yew City Prize called Cities in Transformation published by
the Urban Redevelopment Authority.
The Lee Kuan Yew World City Prize
is named for Singapore's First Prime
Minister and is awarded biennially at
the World Cities Summit. New York
is only the second to receive the prize
since Bilbao was awarded for it in
2009. Prime Minister Lee is credited
for his leadership regarding adopting
policies to create Singapore as a liveable city through strategic land use
including green space, improving
transportation and housing, and elevating the city's economy.
Supertrees are lit against the sunset in Singapore. These Supertrees
range from 25-50 meters in height
and serve as vertical gardens at the
Gardens by the Bay just next to Singapore's busy financial district in Singapore (AP Photo / Wong Maye-E)

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21
West Coast
Electric Highway
Eric Gould, surface2air.posterous.com, 1
August 2012
"The road that's followed goes on
forever; in half a minute crossed and
left behind" - Gary Snyder, Mountains and Rivers Without End
Whether or not you're heading
down a ribbon of highway, as Woody
Guthrie sings in This Land is Your
Land, Interstate 5 is a paved conduit
for work and commerce, travel and
leisure. The Five offers motorists
intersections to high density cities
like Los Angeles and San Francisco
and connecting arterials to getaway
destinations in California's redwood
forests, Oregon's rocky beaches, and
the Cascade Mountains of the Pacific Northwest. Stretching 1,300 miles
across the West Coast from California through Oregon and Washington to British Columbia, I-5 is more
than just the backbone of California.
It links an economic network of cities, ports, and options for travel and
tourism across the Pacific Coast
states.
As a vacation and travel corridor
I-5 stitches together many destination options for summer. And now
that the summer season is here and
in full swing, many travelers are hitting the road. It's the time to load
up the car with maps, guide books,
phone chargers and drive. Camp
expeditions, family visits, and a
few laps around national parks and
landmarks make for some memories from the season, far away from
the cul-de-sacs and strip-malls back
home. Sharing the road this summer, at least on the West Coast, will
be electric vehicles. Gas prices have
continued to climb and may deter
some long-distance travel for conventional automobile drivers, but for
EV motorists there's some relief -particularly when it comes to "range
anxiety," or the fear of running low
on battery life and being located too
far away from the next charge.
Earlier this year, the initial rollout of
Aeroenvironment charging stations
in Washington and Oregon marked
the first phase of a West Coast network for accommodating the electric vehicle motorist. The West Coast
Electric Highway stretching along
the I-5 corridor offers a network
of fast-charge charging stations for
electrical vehicles, and are staggered
at least every 25 miles. Aeroenvironment's visibly distinctive green and
silver charging stations are sited near
freeway entrances in highly visible
locations like at restaurants, hotels
and visitors centers, and are currently offered as a free service to EV
drivers.
The West Coast Electric Highway
project is made possible with funding from the American Recovery
and Reinvestment Act and key partnerships with the Oregon Department of Energy and the Washington
State Department of Transportation. Washington state has already
installed 12 Aeroenvironment fastchargers along I-5 between Bellingham and Castle Rock, US Highway
2, and Interstate 90. Ten Aeroenvironment fast-chargers are also installed along the Oregon stretch of
I-5 from Portland to Ashland.
By the end of 2012, extended EV
routes branching from I-5 are tailored towards green tourism which
will allow EV motorists some travel
options and reachable destinations
off the interstate. Washington's US
Highway 2 Stevens Pass Scenic Byway in the North Cascades is one
recreational route for EV motorists
already in place. Inaugurated earlier
this summer in June, the route crossing over the Cascades along Highway
2 marks the world's first EV-friendly
Tourism Corridor. The route leafs
out north of Seattle on I-5 and welcomes EV motorists traveling east
to Stevens Pass, Leavenworth and
Wenatchee.
Aeroenvironment has installed four
480-volt DC fast-charging stations
along Highway 2 that can charge a
Nissan Leaf or a Mitsubishi i-MiEV
in 30 minutes and provide up to a
70-mile driving range. Four 240volt Level 2 charging stations have
also been installed at the same locations. Skiers, backpackers, and other
visitors passing through this scenic
route and East Cascades region will
find these EV charging stations in
Sultan, Skykomish, Leavenworth
and Wenatchee.
In Oregon, two EV tourist routes are
getting rolled out and fitted with fastcharger charging stations. One is the
Oregon Coast route branching west
from Portland and serving Astoria,
Seaside, Cannon Beach and farther
south towards Florence mid-way
down the Oregon Coast. The second
is the Hood River route heading due
east from Portland along the Columbia River. The Oregon Department
of Transportation is currently working with Aeroenvironment to install 22 of the fast-charging stations
throughout these areas to establish
Oregon's EV tourism corridors. The
U.S. Department of Transportation
TIGER II (Transportation Investment Generating Economic Recovery) grant is funding $2 million for
the project in Oregon, writes the
Coast River Business Journal (Construction begins on coastal electrical
vehicle chargers, August 9, 2012).
EV tourism and travel industry
stands to benefit with an expanding
electric highway corridor and travel
network. In the white paper Electric Vehicles and the Oregon Tourism Industry published by the Oregon Transportation Research and
Education Consortium, the authors
note, "By tapping an emerging 'green
traveler' market, the tourist industry
stands to benefit from participating
in the impending EV rollout." The
assertion is an observant one. "The
tourism industry can be a driver of
EV adoption, building a brand that
eco-conscious travelers can identify," according to the paper. The authors also suggest that by "building a
strong support network for EVs will
also send a strong message to visitors
that driving an EV can be an easy,
attractive and green way to travel."
Portland at dusk, above Interstate 5.
Photo: Cacophony, image courtesy
Wikimedia Commons.

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VIFF
2012 - Mapping
Memories of
Past Ghosts
Eric Gould, surface2air.posterous.com, 30
September 2012
What is cinema if not a visual expression of memory, nostalgia and
fragments of the past? Beneath the
clouds over idle container ships near
the South China Sea, Portuguese
filmmakers João Pedro Rodrigues
and João Rui Guerra da Mata explore these connections channeling
Guerra da Mata's memories growing
up in Macau. Their film A Última Vez
Que Vi Macau (The Last Time I Saw
Macau) is a dreamy candy-jar color
tribute to the city embellished with
a labyrinthine mix of past reflections
and old ghosts from a neon-tinged
post-colonial urban demimonde and
a sensual exoticism.
A Última Vez Que Vi Macau unfolds
with its noir-imbued narrative as
Guerra da Mata intones like a hardboiled detective. He tells of how his
old friend Candy -- starring transgendered Cindy Scrash in the role -- is
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in Macau and has recently fallen in
trouble with the "wrong men" after a
friend was murdered. Macau, Candy
explains, is where "strange and scary
things" were happening. Her situation prompts Guerra da Mata to
leave Portugal to find her there and
his search also doubles as a personal
return to the Vegas of the East after
30 years. Guerra da Mata and Rodrigues describe their mysterious story tinged with off-camera intrigue as
an augmented counter-point to the
real-life Macau pulsing to its own
rhythm near the city's harbor.
Their genre-defying film also acknowledges Josef von Sternberg's
1952 movie Macau shot at RKO
Studios in Hollywood starring Robert Mitchum and Jane Russell. In the
opening scenes of A Última Vez Que
Vi Macau Candy lip-syncs behind
shadows to Jane Russell's flirtatious
jazz number "You Kill Me" wearing
a low-cut Chinese dress in front of
tigers fenced-off behind her. Establishing an angle with von Sternberg's
film Macau - which itself is an embellishment of the port city's location
and a form of exoticized cinematic
Chinoiserie -- Guerra da Mata and
Rodrigues unveil a dramatic narrative combining fictionalized memoir, romanticized artifice and a deconstructed urban profile. "This is
Macao," Rodrigues reports in voiceover, ". . . the fascinating Las Vegas
of the East is the friendliest and cruelest of cities where nothing is what
it seems."
Rodrigues is representing both A
Última Vez Que Vi Macau and the
short film Morning of Saint Anthony's Day at this year's 31st Vancouver International Film Festival.
He is also a juror on the panel with
filmmaker Shinozaki Makoto and
film writer Chuck Stephens for the
$5,000 Dragons & Tigers Award for
Young Cinema, an annual prize at
VIFF, to be awarded during the fest.
The festival's Dragons & Tigers:
The Cinemas of East Asia series has
been one of VIFF's estimable marqueed programs drawing a variety
of new cinema and young talent to
Vancouver. It's also crowned with
its own awards gala. The Dragons
& Tigers series is the largest annual
exhibition of East Asian films outside of Asia, featuring established
and emerging filmmaking talents
from South Korea, Japan, Taiwan,
China, Hong Kong, Indonesia, the
Philippines and Thailand ("VIFF
brings a world of film to Vancouver
screens," The Canadian Press, Vancouver Sun, September 27, 2012).
VIFF Programmer and film scholar
Tony Rayns has been curating the
Dragons & Tigers series since its inception in 1994 and organizes the
Dragons & Tigers Award for Young
Cinema. He has selected films from
Japan, South Korea, The Philippines, Indonesia, and Thailand for
this year's fest. Co-curator Shelly
Kraicer who has been programming
VIFF's Dragons & Tigers for four
years has selected a combined total
of 16 Chinese language films from
Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Malaysia
in addition to documentaries and
features from China.
As one of Canada's largest film festivals, VIFF has often been compared with TIFF in Toronto which
happens earlier in September just
weeks before Vancouver's fest opens.
Although both have much in common and scope as international film
festivals, VIFF's distinguished Dragons & Tigers program acknowledges
the creative range of Asian-Pacific
cinema in Vancouver. Festival Director Alan Franey explains to Marsha
Lederman of The Globe and Mail
about what sets VIFF apart from
other festivals, "I really think it's
distinctively (because) of this city,
which is so multicultural and so oriented towards the Pacific and Asia.
And a mark of pride is that for a city
that is on the periphery of a lot of

23. surface2air
things we punch beyond our weight
class in terms of how large a festival
and how vibrant the audience is."
(VIFF's director reflects on must-see
films and the mistakes that eat him
up, The Globe and Mail, September
23, 2012).
Many other films opening this
weekend at the fest also draw connections that resonate between the
past and present, often leading filmmakers and their viewers on a journey stitched together and mapping
memories with past ghosts. Photography and archived collections serve
as spring boards for the films Gotthard Schuh: A Sensual Vision of the
World and The Great Northwest
that share common threads.
Villi Hermann's documentary Gotthard Schuh: A Sensual Vision of the
World follows Hermann retracing
the steps of Swiss Photographer Gotthard Schuh (1897 - 1969) whose
legacy influenced many post-World
War II photographers. With photos
in hand, Hermann visits the Ticino
region of Malcantone and to Bali
noting contrasts with Schuh's early
work and the passage of time.
Similarly, Filmmaker Matt McCormick from Portland, Oregon, retraces
the steps of four young friends from
Seattle whose thrift store scrapbook
discovery formed inspiration for his
photography project and experimental road film The Great Northwest.
The four women whose road-trip
travels around Washington, Oregon,
Idaho and Montana in 1958 are
documented in their scrapbook with
faded photos, postcards, brochures
and other ephemera on yellowed
pages. As a kind of treasure map
from a previous era, McCormick
recreates their travels and offers a
contemporary perspective comparing notes with their time-capsule archive in The Great Northwest.
The intimate space between relationships and the environment haunt
characters in both Mekong Hotel and
Valley of Saints -- two films that generously allow their setting to fill the
screen. Cannes award-winning filmmaker Apichatpong Weeresethakul's
latest film Mekong Hotel is set in
the Thai-Laotian border region
near the Mekong River in northeast
Thailand. Originally inspired by an
initial script for Weeresethakul's Ecstasy Garden, Mekong Hotel offers
a meditative reflection on last year's
flooding in the Mekong River region
and in Bangkok. Here at this remote
hotel a mother reveals herself to her
daughter as a Pob ghost, an "infected" person who has a vampiric appetite for eating raw flesh as described
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in Thai-Lao culture. The afternoon's
soft light and gentle current of the
Mekong River is inverted from her
disruptive spirit.
Political unrest and a military curfew in Kashmir disrupts the mountainous valley region of Dal Lake
in Musa Syeed's striking film Valley
of Saints. Two young friends whose
plans to leave find themselves back
in town during the military crackdown, but are ultimately drawn to
recognize the environmental beauty of Dal Lake through the eyes of
a researcher studying it. Dal Lake
has been a locally-esteemed setting,
however, from years of development,
Syeed's film underscores the lake's
threatened fragility. Elevating exposure to their locations -- the Mekong
River in Mekong Hotel and Dal
Lake in Valley of Saints -- both films
reveal their risks for ongoing degradation from engineering projects
and development.
Past memories of youthful desire
linger for Peter whose coming-ofage as a gay man is the focus of Paul
Agusta's third film Parts of the Heart
- Love Shapes Who We Are. As a
young gay man from Jakarta, Peter's
life unfolds with adolescent awakening and desire. Chronicled in eightpart vignettes, Parts of the Heart reveals Peter at different points in time
falling in and out of relationships
beginning with a first kiss to render
a rich portrait of one man's quest for
love.
The Vancouver International Film
Festival runs for another two weeks,
from September 27 to October 12,
in the Yaletown-Granville corridor
at several venues in downtown Vancouver. This year's Dragons & Tigers
Awards Gala on October 4 coincides
with the North American Premiere
of Lou Ye's 2012 film Mystery marking his return to filmmaking following an official five-year ban. Lou
Ye's Suzhou River from 2000 was
a critically-acclaimed international
debut but his focus on sexual and
poltical themes in his later work had
breached China's censors. For further film festival information, ticketing and venue details, visit VIFF's
web site at viff.org or download the
free mobile iPhone app from iTunes.

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