Phantom Station

I’ve long heard rumours there is a abandoned TTC station near Museum. Finally, my suspicion is proven. Thanks to Joe Clark’s wonderful exposé of the TTC’s living tile presented at the ATypI 2007 conference for bringing forth some fascinating tid-bits of TTC history. Among a cornucopia of facts, Joe confirms the exisitance of the phantom station. Located under the present day bay station, Bay Lower station has been in disuse for 30 years and is only ever used for training and testing and, more prominently, for film, TV, and commercial shoots. However, lucky TTC riders on the Bloor-Danforth line were able to catch a glimpse of Bay lower for three consecutive weekends in February 2007 while the TTC carried out repairs. Equally exciting the trains used a Y junction to stop at Museum rather than Bay station. Although east-west riders were forced to change trains to continue their journey, the ride must have been worth it to catch a glimpse of the phantom station.

Sell-Off

Yesterday, our unelected Minister of Pork-barreling (otherwise known as Minister of Public Works Michel Fortier), announced that Canada’s “new” government had sold off a package of public properties to private developer Larco Investments for $1.6 Billion. The government was only too willing to unload these properties fearing to have to foot the bill for much needed repairs after years of neglect. As part of the deal Larco will provide $77 million dollars of repairs. So far, so good.

However, several factors point to the long-term insanity of these asset sell-offs:

• The federal government will still have to pay annual maintenance and operating costs on top of base rent.
• The base rent of $79 million dollars/year is more than the amount Larco will spend on the extensive repairs needed.
• As a condition of the sale, the feds signed a guaranteed 25 year lease.

Now that is pretty sweet. Can you imagine getting a 25 year guarantee by your tenant, employer etc. This is what I call revenue security. PSAC has called the Minister to task, noting that on top of giving up control of these properties “the federal government has, in effect, written a $630 million dollar check signed by Canadian taxpayers.” It is even more perverse considering a counter-appraisal by Infometrica evaluated the properties at $2.3 Billion. No risk of large repairs, or increasing utility costs, no risk of default, AND guaranteed rent. Sounds like a license to print money. However, this type of profligacy in favor of private property developers is nothing new, and we should head warning to lessons of the past to learn about the repercussions of these silent deals.

In early 1974, when restrictions were imposed on public works expenditures, the federal Department of Public Works (PW) cleverly adapted to these new conditions. With the assistance of private sector real-estate moguls, senior mandarins at PW initiated an early form of public-private-partnership (P3’s) to ensure the post-war building boom would continue. Under direction of Andy Perry, who before his appointment as ADM of PW had built Robert Campeau’s Place de Ville Complex, the feds abandoned the “crown-construct” model preferred by past and current functionaries at the NCC and launched the “lease-purchase agreement programme” (Deachman and Woolfrey, 1982).

However, as Deachman and Woolfrey (1982) astutely demonstrated in their case study of Terrasse de la Chaudière, the cost-effectiveness of such agreements was often questionable since over the long-term costs for office-retail-hotel developments such as Terrasse de la Chaudière were considerably higher under the “lease-purchase” agreements than the “crown-construct model.” Deachman and Woolfrey estimate the Terasse de la Chaudière development would over the full 35 years would cost $1B, and $900M more than it would have cost to self-build.

Yesterday’s announcement is a continuation of this trajectory.

This is a classic case of what McGill University Prof. Henry Mintzberg has referred to as the perverse adoption of private management models to the public sector, which contrary to the private sectors have completely different goals, and as a result different criteria from which we should judge efficiency. Leasing works for large private sector firms since they must meet short term financial objectives to keep investors happy. These private firms often sell-off valuable property to boost profits, dividends or stock price. Private firms may also sell fixed assets to provide cash for investments in liquid assets with higher returns. Private firms use opportunity costs as a way to make these decisions. Fixed asset sales work very well in the short-term. However, governments operate over the long-term with financial horizons beyond the life span of the average firm. Governments are not in the investment business: they cannot turn around and invest the sale value in another asset that will give better returns (It’s not like Harper is going to invest the 1.6 B in Berkshire-Hathaway and send me a nice dividend check every quarter). Assets such as buildings make sense for the public sector because over the long-term owning is cost-effective. Moreover, no matter what, the feds will need office space. They will never “get-out” of the business of needing office space. The logic just doesn’t work here.

We can excuse ministry officials, I guess, since Fortier is hiding in the shadows of his barrels. Remember this is the unelected and uncountable Minister who is unwilling to run in one of three (THREE!) by-elections in Québec. My guess is he is scared of facing public scrutiny. To scare him out of the shadows, I say that whenever Fortier announces something every reporter should ask the same question: Mr. Fortier, why are you not running in the Outremont by-election?

The murky nature of this deal, and flawed rationale of the initial 1974 P3’s continues to capture the minds our MBA-indoctrinated ADM’s and high-level federal property mandarins. Henry Mintzberg should take them to school! Oh, and did I mention this: When is Fortier going to run anyway?

Remembering State Violence in the Everyday

Henri Lefebvre's preface to his Critique of Everyday Life is a wonderful voyage into the veiled alienation of bourgeois urban life. In the first few pages, Lefebvre rails against those who were only willing to see “alienation on the speculative level” and
unwilling to see alienation “soiled by the confrontation with actual human reality, with everyday life.” The eternally humanist HL wants to connect alienation to everyday life and to anchor them in the materiality everyday life: to renew the critique of everyday life as a “base” that matters. Lefebvre successfully drew attention to the alienation of everyday life, and the techno-urban dream of modern of urban life.


In one of the more telling passages, Lefebvre, uploads the following quotation from L’Express of June 8 1956:

“Kitchens are becoming less like kitchens and more like works of art... The latest technique is the electronic oven... The intercom (a system of loudspeakers linking every room) is becoming a standard piece of equipment in the home, while everyone is talking about a personalized little television network which will enable the lady of the house to attend to her chores while keeping an eye on the children playing in another room or in the garden... The remarkable ubiquity of ‘do it itself,’ the latest craze for the American husband... includes all the household gadgets that go with it...”

These new found gadgets were in K. Ross’ (1996: 192) words, “an assemblage of standardized, interconnected components” of newly created “totality of use-values... adapted to capitalist mass production through the development of “design” : a functionalist aesthetic that would render the components uniform, or compatible, the stove-sink-refrigerator flowing together in a seamless, white-chrome unit...”

Lefebvre extended Marx into the every-day by connecting "alienation" with the everyday using the poets of contradictory modern life: Brecht and Chaplin.
Just as HL confronts actual human reality using the power of illusion to uveil his critique of everyday life (a critique in action), I want use these passages and this poetic inspiration to jump into a discussion of everyday life as portrayed in two films set close together, but produced decades apart: Jacques Tati’s Mon Oncle and the recent film Nuit Noire, 17 Octobre 1961.


First, Mon Oncle. In the earlier passage, HL could be describing one of the ridiculous scenes in which the Jacques Tati’s clown-like Mr. Hulot witnesses complete household automation with much surprise in various scenes of his 1958 spectacle of subdued hilarity. In the film, Hulot, played by Tati himself, makes several visits to the suburban home of his relatives, where every aspect of domestic life has been automated: the kitchen, the fountain, the garage door, the cooking, the watering, and even the childhood games. All is clean, modern, sparkling and automated. With his usual flair for the ridiculous, Tati plays hubris with this convenience of modern domestic life. The romantic and residual, Hulot - who continues to ride his bike and smoke his pipe - exposes the all too silly nature of automated domestic life. The juxtaposition of his simple life with that of this ultra-modern relatives provides opens up questions about the utter insanity of post-war consumption and materialist aspirations.

Hulot’s relatives are the model of the new French middle class and “the construction of the new French urban techno-couple” awash in the dream of the American Life. Tati pokes ridicule at the continued division of labour upon which this new habitus rests. Not only is home life industrialized, segregated but, as we find out, the husband/bread winner is engaged in an equally regimented and segmented quotidien. He is the “new man” of the modern bureaucratic capitalist modernization, running an efficient modern plant (in some hilarious scenes Hulot is a series of jobs in the factory but is completely unable to adapt to the assembly line). At home, his wife runs the efficient household. Together this “new couple” is the micro-level of technological society. They are manifestations of the urban revolution, and testaments of modern convenience and technical brilliance, but also of the hidden contradictions of this urban life. As Lefebvre notes in another passage of Critique (1991: 8)

“Manifestations of the brilliant advances in the ‘ideal home’ constitute sociological facts of the first importance, but they must not be allowed to conceal the contradictory character of the real social process beneath and accumulation of technological detail. These advances, along with their consequences, are provoking new structural conflicts within the concrete life of society. The same period which has witnessed a breathtaking development in the application of techniques of everyday life has also witnessed the no-less breathtaking degradation of everyday life for large masses of human beings. All around us, in France, in Paris itself, there are hundreds of thousands of children of youngsters, students, young couples, single people, families, living in conditions of undreamed-of by anyone who does not bring the sociologist’s interest to bear: furnished rooms (increasingly expensive and squalid), slums, overcrowded flats, attic rooms etc.”

What Lefebvre draws attention to here is the contradiction of the ideal suburban home of the upper cadres of French society. A well-run and quality domestic environment has a major influence on the “physique and health of the nation.” As K. Ross (1996) has argued, much of this process of “washing the nation” and cleansing the French nation from its history of colonialism was a central component the domestication of political economy that is part of the consolidation of the new national (French) middle-class to absorb the dangerous classes and to provide a new (domestic) market for capitalist expansion.

While the utopian habits of bourgeois spatial segregation portrayed in Mon Oncle are taking root, becoming the dream-image (model) of French society, an other suburbanization being forged remains silent and forgotten. Workers and labourers from le magreb are being solicited to migrate as the labour-power behind the massive expansion of post-war production and consumption: the very urban fabric which has become the ideal to the “new couple” is unaccommodating to the Algerian, Moroccan and Tunisian workers who can barely afford decent housing and continue to face racialized repression and segregation.


The alter-reality of this inner colonization, and violent repression has recently come to life in the film Nuit Noire: 17 Octobre 1961. The film recalls the events of the night known only a October 17, 1961, and the censored history of the "dead bodies the newspapers didn't mention, that we weren't supposed to know about." (KR, 2002) That night, the FLN organized its first protest to protest a curfew which prohibet Algerians from being on Parisian streets after 8:30pm. Recalling the brutal and forgotten repression of a peaceful pro-FLN march, the film shows in chilling detail how the between peaceful march of between 30-40 thousand men, woman and children was met with fierce violence, and fired upon almost immediately. More than a simple reaction of incompetance, the violence was planed with cold calculation. In the weeks proceeding the march, ex-parachustiste has visited Paris's commissariats and virtually given carte-blanche the police. Papon had told his troops to "Settle your afairs with the Algerians yourselves. Whatever happens, you're covered. For one blow, give ten back... Even if the Algerians are not armed you should think of them always as armed." (KR) The violence was sickening: urnarmed marches in their Sunday bests were shot, matraqué, tossed into the river. How many? To this day, the corpses remain uncounted.

This film has revisited not only the state-perpetrated violent event, but also has shown glimpses into the everyday life of the dangerous classes that are to be absorbed or excluded from the national ideal of mass consumerism. In several scenes, FLN organizers walk through les bidonvilles to attend to organizing meetings and in the process show glimpses of the everyday life in the working districts. It is a stark contrast with the clean, modern totality of the modern home portrayed in Mon Oncle. These fleeting images offer a significant contradiction not only for socio-economic reasons, but also as since they exposes the moment of inner colonization. They are counter-images which expose how - as Kristen Ross has brilliantly noted - France continues to hold “its colonial past to be an “exterior” experience.” A “France” she concludes which has “closed that chapter and moved on to bigger autoroutes, all-electric Kitchens, and the European Economic Community.” When les flics en masse are deployed to stop the march with not so ambiguous instructions the scene is set for a evocation of the urbacidle moment of the urban revolution. Empowered by the brutal French Interior minister, and the right-wing Gaullist government, les flics conduct their brutal repression in subsequent scenes. On that black night remembered on our screen with the relentless violence of our modern state: the willingness of authorities to exert maximum force, the momentum of massive police deployment; the almost inevitable scene of mast arrests and bloodshed; and the impeding quiet aftermath.

The question as always is what do we do with the silence?

Listen... carefully... the silence of state violence is here, today, everywhere, and especially, today, in Montebello... Remember.

Flashdance Flashback: An Exchange on Urban Film

Hey Pittsburg,

For some reason I keep having images if you wearing leggings, dancing in your rusty warehouse space, flying out freely into the fire-escape, exploring abandoned factory spaces to an upbeat 80's soundtrack, and "dancin' like you never did before." Some kind words of advice: don't get too sweaty, avoid shady bars by the waterfront, and watch out for Richard Florida. (Hmm. I may be mixing metaphors here... I am prone to that).

Now that I've exhausted my knowledge of Pittsburgh I wish you best of luck. I was sad to miss your party, and a chance to see you before you leave. I am sure you new adventure will be fruitful. Look forward to seeing you sooner rather than later.

Un Canadien Errant

********

Hey C.E.,

Thanks for the well-researched email. I meant to write you earlier, but things slipped in the midst of my move. However, now I have an appropriate Flashdance story to tell you, which is that I recently brought my bike into the coffee shop that I go to and the theme song was playing on the radio when I entered. I think this is a sign, I mean, Jennifer Beals rides her bike to that song and she lives in Pittsburgh. I'm thinking about auditioning for the ballet or at least finding a wealthy benefactor to support me. I also wouldn't mind getting a mean looking dog.

Hopefully I will see you on one of my trips and please come visit any time. Take care and talk to you soon.

Pittsburg

Silent Streets

“Silence. People who write history devote too much attention to so-called events heard around the world, while neglecting periods of silence... Silence is necessary to tyrants and occupiers, who take pains to have their actions accompanied by quiet.”

Ryszard Kapuscinski
The Soccer War

Closing E.B. Eddy

A Benjaminian Excise of the Tragedy of the E.B. Eddy Plant

On July 31, 2007, the century old dream of an industrial heartland in the Ottawa Valley was dealt a final blow. Domtar Corp. the owner of the historic E.B. Eddy plant announced the closure of the last remaining plant on Chaudière Island. An epoch had finally come to an end. The slow and steady decline had met its terminal point. Forest would no longer be transformed into a cashable commodity by the practiced hands of unionized labour.

For over a century, over a large geographic area stretching far into the Upper Ottawa Valley, lumber had been transported to Chaudière Island to be transfigured from one form to another. Squared logs, timbers, pulp, had all been transformed and metabolized by the labour of the workers and by the energy of the Falls into a commodity to be bought and sold on international markets. Now, we are told by the Captains of Canadian Industry, Chaudière timber is no longer a saleable commodity. The timber fibres are a relic of the past.

The debris of the messy past will soon be cleared out to form a neat natural image and a new wish image. The new utopia will fit neatly into the clean and crisp image of a green capital city. The Chaudière Falls, like LeBreton Flats, will be cleansed of its past, yet like all epochal shifts, the break will not be clean. The traces of past images will be recycled into the new dream embodied in the physical structures of buildings and in the ephemeral celebrations on its grounds. Ye olde plant will become the festival site for consumption where national culture and global tourism will now, in the place of paper, be manufactured. However, this new national storage of memory will be performed as a class-less memory void of the trials of the workers of the Flats. The memory of the Chaudière Falls is to store a national story of regeneration void of tragedy.

****

“To the form of the new means of production which is the beginning is still dominated by the old one (Marx), there correspond in the collective consciousness images in which the new is intermingled with the old. These images are wish images, and in them the collective attempts to transcend as well as to illumine the incompleteness of the social order of production. There also emerges in these wish images a positive striving to set themselves off from the outdated – that means, however, the most recent past. These tendencies turn the image fantasy, that maintains its impulse from the new, back to the ur-past. In the dream in which every epoch sees in images the epoch that follows, the latter appears wedded to the elements of ur-history, that is, of a classless society. Its experiences, which have their storage place in the unconscious of the collective, produce, in their interpretation with the new, the utopia, that has left its trace behind in a thousand configurations of life from permanent buildings to ephemeral fashions.” Walter Benjamin

Caché (Haneke)

Michael Haneke’s latest masterpiece Caché carefully but subtly unveils the tragedy of past(s) forgotten. Haneke’s succeeds in keeping the audience in suspense as to what exactly is hidden. At the same time, Haneke succeeds in reminding the viewer that near the placid surface of contemporary Parisian bourgeois intellectual life bubbles the threat of extreme violence (and that la République continues to suffer from a suppressed colonial moment)

The main protagonist in this unsettling tale is television host Georges Laurent played by Daniel Auteil. Laurent leads a seemingly idyllic life alongside his equally successful and cultured wife Anne (Juliette Binoche) and their son Pierre. In the opening sequence, the eerily placid shot of Parisian street is disrupted when we discover that the opening sequence was in fact a surveillance video of the couple’s chic-modern home at the heart of the old métropole. The quiet historic building where the family conducts its private affairs and their bourgeois comfort is quickly ruptured. Violence, or rather, the threat of violence, becomes the moment déclancheur which will keep the audience suspended, and sets the pace, and intellectual tour-de-force of the film. As the deeper layers of this thriller unfold, several encounters point to the frayed edges of the liberal mores of le nouveau régime de la République.

A sequence of video’s of their home, post-cards to George’s work and Pierre’s school indicate the voyeur is familiar with the Laurent family’s vie quotidiene.

In one such trangression the couple entertains their cosmopolitan guests in their book-adorned dining room, a third video arrives. This time the banal disruption of the smooth interior spaces strikes at the heart of la nation: its liberal intellectuals; its food; its salons; the very identity-foundations of La République. Puzzled, none seems able to explain this series threats to his interior safe-spaces: home, work, school.

Without full disclosure to his closest ally in the social contract, Anne, Laurent runs around trying to locate the author of this threat to modern life. It seems that George’s deep set memory has been tipped off by a bloody dream – giving him a hunch to search for a old childhood acquaintance in an HLM. At this moment we get a glimmer more than a the mere threat of violence to the private lives of a cast of the French intellectual bourgeoisie, but that what needs to uncovered it Laurent’s relationship to the “other” forgotten underclass. This becomes clearer in a key tête-a-tête with his ailing and distant mother.

Dialogue

When his mother speaks it is if time is suspended through the marvel of cinema. Time and space collapse and we are brought immediately to that colonial moment. A moment of clarity emerges from the fog. The deep-seated nature of his discomfort emerges: it is in the words of Kristin Ross about the inner colonization of everyday-life. For a fleeting moment the extreme violence associated with maintaining the security of home and la patrie is exposed.

This is again recalled when George makes another visit to the HLM exploding into the apartment with violent resolve. He wields his white-power privilège and threatens his "other" with his own unequivocal threats of violence. Yet, the massive racist, selfish rejection has o never seen by the self. Laurent, just like his class of upper cadres, failed in this instance as in every other, to understand why he is targeted. It seems completely illogical to them. Yet, it was a familar aller-retour of the violent colonization their class had perpetrated in Algeria and during their return to France as post-war planners. In this context, Georges rejection was part of inner colonization of everyday life that was dispersed and built into the urban fabric.

As Kristin Ross explained in her brilliant book Fast Cars, Clean Bodies, the technocratic new French state’s incipient colonization of everyday life is in itself directly linked to the process of de-colonization. As Ross noted (1996: 77) "To evoke the colonial situation here is not gratuitous; I want to suggest that in the roughly ten-year period of the mid-1950’s to the mid-1960’s – the decade that saw both the end of the empire and the surge in French consumption and modernization – the colonies are in some sense “replaced” and the effort that once went into maintaining and disciplining a colonial people and situation becomes instead concentrated on a particular “level” of metropolitian existence: every-day life (1996: 77)." The transfer of colonial political economy to the household what she calls “controlling domesticity,” is part of the dual process of modernization and decolonization. A well-run and quality domestic environment has a major influence on the “physique and health of the nation.” Much of this process of “washing the nation” and cleansing the French nation from its history of colonialism applies to the domestication of political economy that is part of the consolidation of the new national (French) middle-class to absorb the dangerous classes. The impenetrable membrane of domestic (home) and national (nation) modernization also denies colonialism and attempted to separate colonialism as extraneous force thus providing the basis for the “neo-racist conscensus of today.” As Ross argues this, “logic of exclusion has its basis in the ideology of capitalist modernization,” and the exteriorization of Algeria, the interiorization of life and the “cleansing” of French modernization.

Ross reminds us that the colonial moment exists at every moment; that our privilège and modern domestic comfort is built on an inner colonization that is completely ubiquitous to western liberal-capitalism.