More on Sainte-Marie: Really Reclassified

Last weekend we wandered in and out of some of the attractions of Portes ouvertes design Montreal. There were lots of highlights: I was very impressed with the augmented reality work of Moment Factory. But recycling was big this year and a number of architecture, design and fashion outfits trumpeted their ecological approach. One such architecture firm, Rayside, had a pile of old plans on offer for visitors to take away, including a rather lengthy redevelopment plan for Saint-Marie.

They list the neighborhood as bordered by the river on the south, Papineau on the west, Sherbrooke on the north and train tracks east of Wurtele and Florian on the east. There are also maps of open and closed schools, empty blocks slated for development, and planned community facilities. There are plans to promote the history and unique local character of the area. Of course, the document is from 2006 so it is already out of date, but revisiting our old neighborhood yesterday as part of our design tour, we did see lots of new construction.

So I guess we should stop telling people we lived in Hochelaga-Maisonneuve for three years, except that it signifies better than Sainte Marie (when it signifies at all–if you want to know how social class and language interact, the small number of Anglos who have heard of Hochelaga-Maisonneuve could tell you a lot).

Ballet of Trucks now available for download

http://lo-boy.net
http://lo-boy.bandcamp.com

Ballet of Trucks was originally released in 2003.

Now it’s available in all your favorite digital formats.

Like Radiohead and Saul Williams, we let you name your price or no price at all. If you download, we will take your email address and notify you when our second album comes out sometime in 2009 or 2010. (All revenues will go toward mastering our second record; or, a Montreal bagel or some smoked meat for Mike when he gets here for the final mixing, whichever seems most appropriate).

The Backstory

In 2003, my band lo-boy released our first CD Ballet of Trucks. As is usually the case with indy bands, we had a small run of discs we never sold out. I was responsible for our small web presence and never bothered with MySpace, since I didn’t like the site or its intellectual property policies (though I have always checked out bands there).

I had planned to get the lo-boy tracks up on our own site but never got around to figuring out a good interface to do it. Then recently I was tipped off on the TapeOp boards to bandcamp.com, which is more or less like WordPress for musicians, complete with creative commons options for licensing. The template is simple, there are lots of format options for users, and you can charge or not charge as you like (we chose “pay what you want”), though you and the buyer both need PayPal accounts. The site is still new and evolving (one could imagine, for instance, full interace customization like any other CMS and full band webhosting possibilities). Uploading the full .aiff files took some time but was worth it. On first try, their streaming mp3 encoder couldn’t handle all the low-end but it seemed to resolve itself a couple days later — they stream at 128k mp3 and are looking into higher bitrates. But they seem to really know what they are doing, customer service is great, and so is search engine optimization. Of course, we could get into the iTunes store for $30 a year too.

Speaking of which, the plan is to finally finish mixing our STILL untitled second CD this summer. Which is good because right about now is the 5th anniversary of the date we finished recording the tracks in Pittsburgh.

New University: Makes Its Own Sauce

If you were to start over, how would you build a university from scratch? Would you keep disciplines, tenure, professors, students, and degrees? What would you keep from the current system?

Taking a break from the End of the Newspaper, yesterday’s New York Times ran an End of the University op-ed from Mark Taylor, a religious studies prof at Columbia (hat tip to Cathy Davidson for the link). To be sure, the current economic downturn/depression and its attendant job crunch have added some spice to the “crisis of the humanities” rhetoric so popular among American professors and newspapers. The piece is a real split for me: half of it is stuff I have been thinking and half of it strikes me as complete lunacy.

He’s absolutely right about universities relying on grad students as revenue sources and sources of cheap labor; but he’s insane to suggest that professors won’t simply suffer the same fate if tenure is eliminated (for a taste, ask UK professors about what the Research Assessment Exercise has done to higher education).

He’s right about the need to encourage a general curiosity among students and faculty; but the demand for “relevance” is tired and pathetic. Usually, this is coupled with an appear to “real world” pragmatism, but intellectuals in the professions know the importance of so-called basic research. Ask doctors what industry imperatives do to medicine; ask communication engineers what happened with AT&T shut down Bell Labs.

The place where he is spot on, however, is curriculum. Few departments are true intellectual communities (ours more than many, and ours is an interdisciplinary department). Most liberal arts majors have as much applicability as the next, and even in many of the sciences and professions, the model of curriculum has little to do with how or what students actually learn. The theory is that it is all cumulative and stepped, but the reality is that even in highly regimented curricula, students retain little from one class to the next. The “cumulative” effect is not the learning objectives covered in assignments and test but the cumulative effect of being immersed in a subject over a long time. At the undergraduate level, this would be relatively easy to do. At the graduate level, it would be much more difficult unless everyone abolished departments at the same time–people with interdisciplinary degrees are only rarely hired into traditional disciplines, which are mostly interested in gatekeeping.

Either way, it seems to me that programs and departments are generally carried on by a small core of passionate people who keep them alive and injected with energy. When those people leave or take on new interests, the curriculum remains and in some places, become a numb and foolish imperative (“we have to hire a person to teach X course” as opposed to hiring the best possible person in an area the current faculty find interesting and important).

Taylor’s piece is full of radical self-posturing (let’s see him be the first in line to give up tenure at Columbia–he doesn’t have to keep it) which occludes the simplicity of his curricular suggestion. Variations have already been tried at many schools, from Chicago’s committee system to the sprawling interdisciplinary programs on many Canadian campuses. Some work better than others, to be sure, and there are lots of problems to solve at both undergraduate (enrollment management and planning? class size, pedagogy? mentoring?) and graduate levels (funding? supervision? academic community? placement? prerequisite skills like language and math?) but the idea is a venerable postwar proposition. It’s at least as old as the move from “ology” to “studies” in the naming of fields, and is worth looking into for inspiration as we seek to build our schools, even in a moment (or an age) of diminished expectations.

Reclassified?

For our first three years in Montreal, we lived in a Francophone working class neighborhood, on Frontenac, just south of Sherbrooke St.

The ad for the place didn’t mention a neighborhood, and we knew we were east and south of the Plateau. We deduced that we resided in the Hochelaga part of Hochelaga-Maisonneuve. Our landlord once told us that it was the Plateau because he got some tax document to that effect. Perhaps so, but I have yet to meet another Montrealer who would call that location the Plateau. Perhaps in the spirit of Westmount anglos, it could be “Plateau-adjacent.”

Well, it turns out that perhaps the neighborhood may have another name: Sainte-Marie. I’m intrigued but it messes with my self-conception. Shockingly few Anglos know where Hochelaga-Maisonneuve is; Sainte-Marie signifies even less. The borders of the neighborhood are not totally clear, but according to a blogger who recently moved there, we were in it.

This isn’t quite a Herculine Barbin-level reclassification but it certainly messes with my self-conception. Hochelaga-Maisonneuve means something. As the blog to which I linked demonstrated, Sainte-Marie is a much more ambiguous signifier.

Villeray in the News

Several blocks around my home have been discussed on Spacing Montreal recently. Three gas stations within a few blocks have been razed and replaced with–wait for it–condos (more here and here). The condo-ization is a relatively straightforward process. Gas stations sit on corners and take up a lot of space yet run relatively low margins by absentee owners, which means that they occupy prime real estate and can easily be purchased by developers. While the author is quite critical of the developments, and I miss one of the gas stations (they repaired our car a couple times), I can’t be too critical. Our building also occupies the entire lot. Of course, it’s been here for close to 100 years, probably predating many of the homes on our block, so it’s not exactly new construction (though the conversion to residential condos was only in 2005 or 2006). The one certain thing is that all the new construction (or in our case, renovation and reclassification) is bringing lots of new people into the neighborhood, us included. Is it truly gentrification? A lot depends on how posh those condos are and who’s buying them.