Boing Boing does many things reliably in its cataloging of “wonderful things”. Its five contributors give us a window on pictures of weird shit someone put up on flickr, thrilled fawnings at repetitive science fiction, customer service gripes that bring down whole industries, and attempts to confabulate the programmability of your TiVo with freedom itself. Its well-scrubbed cast of peripatetic Californians have been into the things they’re into for quite a long time, and is made up of the kind of terminal self-actuating monad that cheerfully confuses the repeated gratification of vapid, secondhand obsessions with the more profound human curiosity that in other social conditions would lead to literature, philosophy or political action.

We check it roughly every 45 minutes anyway, jonesing for the next Victorian medical illustration, biographical factoid about some long-dead spacedork, or household gewgaw from somebody’s trove of midcentury populuxe cheese that makes Richard Neutra look like Mies. Reading Boing Boing is watching American online “culture” chew its cud and fart while blankly staring at a fence.

One of these contributors is don’t-ask-us-why nerd sex symbol Xeni Jardin, a presentable go-to commentator beloved of lazy segment producers, who call upon her to jazz up snoozy NPR and PBS offerings with her insider perspective and asymmetrical outfits. During some time off from target practice, Xeni recently found out about that nasty nasty Hugo Chavez and has been helping out those who are afraid of what mass literacy and justice might do to their privilege, passing along messages from university students who are furious at losing their primary source of imported reruns.

The decision in question here is the decision not to renew the broadcast license of RCTV, a private national network. RCTV, you may remember, was one of the most egregious of the private media that lied — not misled or spun, but deliberately set out to mislead the public — about events during anti-Chavez demonstrations that were part of the coup attempt in 2002. Thinking themselves victorious, coup plotters sitting around a coffee tablewent on RCTV the next day and gigglingly described their deception, complete with knowing winks at the camera; RCTV news director Andres Izarra was so disgusted he quit and ended up heading Telesur, a pan-South American satellite channel funded by Venezuela and other pariah states. (The shootings during the coup and Izarra’s description of his role in it can bee seen here, and the goofy post-coup talk show confessions at roughly 5:30 in here, from the stellar documentary The Revolution Will Not Be Televised which you should watch in its entirety. Llaguna Bridge: Anatomy of a Massacre takes a more detailed look at the shootings and is available in Spanish as one long video or in English chopped up into annoying bits here. No caveats of bias need apply as documentaries, as all four of our readers surely know, are entirely true and free of absurd conjecture or deliberate silliness.)

Now after the failed coup nothing much happened; the coup plotters’ case was bounced around the courts. Under a telecommunications law passed in 1987, broadcast licensing came under the authority of CONATEL, a telecommunications regulator controlled by the executive branch. RCTV’s 20-year licence came up for renewal in 2007, and the same source (a resolutely anti-Chavez newspaper, incidentally) asserts that the station’s core argument against closure is that another administrative procedure in 2002 amounted to an extension of the 1987 license to 2022. The Committee to Protect Journalists delegation says that its principal problems with the non-renewal is the absence of a clear set of criteria and evaluative process, and other groups such as Human Rights Watch term their concern similarly. Their final report lists the primary complaints of opposition media, claiming that the government stifles the press by

blocking access to state-sponsored events, government buildings, and public institutions; by refusing to give statements to reporters working for private media; by withholding advertising; by denying access to public information; and by filing criminal defamation complaints

To put this in perspective, then: RCTV engineered an enormous public lie in the course of suborning an armed coup, and upon its non-renewal over four years later its main complaints are the government’s unwillingness to advertise with or return the phone calls of a station that doesn’t play very nice at all, and its principal claim to the airwaves is based on the degree of procedural thoroughness in denying it a license. When sedition laws weren’t on the books, the claim was that RCTV hadn’t broken the law by urging the overthrow of the elected government; now that they are, the claim is that such laws are undemocratic.

Not that anybody from RCTV has been put in jail, for sedition or even for defamation. In fact, the station is still free to transmit on satellite and cable — the license only applies to broadcasting over the airwaves on VHF channel 2. (Cable/satellite penetration rates for Venezuela, or information as to whether RCTV is already carried on alternate services, remain a mystery to us as people apparently stack some serious fucking chips collecting and selling that data. Eight bills per report or three large for site access? Makes TimesSelect look like a bargain.)

So into this situation steps Jardin, who uncritically passes along a reader-submitted piece describing RCTV’s exhibition of weepy theatrics before its shutdown. “Anonimo in Venezuela” knows which buttons to push to get through Boing Boing’s industrial-strength PR filters: “The world needs to know. Only you guys abroad can help us spread the word.” With such breathless exhortations, the commenter works the boingers’ pretentions to “citizen journalism” by implicitly characterizing RCTV as a kind of scrappy populist voice being drowned out by incipient dictatorship in a country the world forgot, instead of the vigorously defended franchise that brought Venezuela such crucial public services as ¿Quién quiere ser millonario?. Doing her correspondent one better, Jardin includes a link to a Reuters wire story including such reassuringly evenhanded assessments as “Since becoming president in 1999, Chavez has centralized power, politicizing the judiciary, military and oil industry.”

Subsequently, Jardin appended a second post with material from a dozen commenters that call attention to RCTV’s role in the 2002 coup, with three mentioning The Revolution Will Not Be Televised outright. Nearly all the commenters, however, fail to speak of any event that occurred before Chavez’ 1998 election. In this way, they perhaps unwittingly maintain the key narrative of Venezuela’s middle and upper classes — now rallying to the defense of a system under which they were rapidly dwindling away — that there were no politics before Chavez, that his “politicization” of the country’s political institutions was what set the polarization of the society in motion. Revealingly, the only pre-1998 event described is an awkward reference to Chavez’ role in an abortive 1992 coup, posing him as a kind of coup hobbyist: “So he’s also very into this subject, not just a poor victim.” We don’t like to hear the word “coup”, even when the target government does things like send the military on a rampage through the slums in response to food riots. The Venezuelan opposition is far better at tugging at our heartstrings than Chavez, who makes long speeches and wears funny shirts, and so has wrapped its coup attempts in a fuzzy blanket of “popular mobilization”, with each carefully managed demonstration a grant application to the National Democratic Institute and the Open Society Foundation.

Politics begins, as it were, when people start doing things you don’t like and they result in unhappiness among the wrong sectors of the population. When governments enact polarizing, impoverishing policies against the right people, however, politics is understood to not be present, to gracefully turn its head away from sad but necessary technical operations. We didn’t hear much about Venezuela’s “resource curse” when the right people were getting shot; now that Chavez is directing resource revenues at health and literacy and boosting the spending power of the lower classes, oil is proclaimed from middlebrow rooftops as a terrible trap (though Boing Boing collaborator Bruce Sterling seems to be clued in to the hustle). Before, educated Venezuelans looked down on RCTV and its parade of well-coiffed white people doing silly shit; now they sneer at its replacement’s display of uppity “negritos with tambores“.

On the occasion of yesterday’s Venezuela-related post (in the most recent one, found here, the jokes are getting lame and the tempest is confined to a teapot, so perhaps Jardin will be distracted by a shinier media object) we are treated to contributions from students who are clearly still tingling from the experience of their first riots (conflicts that are no more violent than those that typically accompany English soccer teams abroad — though come to think of it, that isn’t the most flattering comparison). One of these students tells us that “Things are gettin ugly” and asks readers to “Please keep an eye on us, dude.” Well homey, for most of your compatriots things got ugly a long time ago, and they were too dark and expendible to keep an eye on. But don’t worry: now that it’s your ox getting gored, Xeni’s on the case, with received opinions winging into her BlackBerry minute by minute.

The Boing Boing crew huff the vapors of their own self-creation, with Xeni Jardin’s willfully mysterious eponym merely the most glaring example. As a side effect they can barely evince interest in anything that happened before they fashioned their current persona, like university first-years who start calling themselves by their middle names and don’t want to talk about the dorks they were in high school. For the blog crowd, the angel of history roused from her sleep and lumbered into flight sometime when Macintoshes were still beige and the first trickles of venture capital started puddling in the deindustrialized wasteland between Market Street and San Francisco Bay, washing the brick warehouses clean. Anything that occurred before the boom that isn’t directly linked to computing or kitsch is mired in its own tangibility, lost in the dark and bloody warehouse of the past, so the “smart people” are out on the lawn chasing a gossamer future as it flits among the wildflowers. As such, their sympathies naturally lie with the relatively few Venezuelans who have escaped the surly bonds of a quest for food and dignity to write software. Even if it means giving in a bit to their lust for our attention, let’s keep an eye on them.

1.

The New York Times gives us a glimpse into its Rolodex of old school contacts, in an article about efforts to preserve a moderate-income Bronx building in which Kool Herc DJed his first parties and, as he does not tire of reminding us, invented this shit:

“This is where it came from,” said Clive Campbell, pointing to the building’s first-floor community room. “This is it. The culture started here and went around the world. But this is where it came from. Not anyplace else.”

Also deemed worthy of quotation is Grandmaster Caz. As the building at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue comes off of the Mitchell-Lama program it will become a market-rate apartment building, and tenants are trying to force the landlords to maintain the low rents that were offset by the program’s low-interest mortgages. At 1520 Sedgwick, the occupants are trying to get the building on the National Register of Historic Places — potentially preserving it as affordable housing — because Herc threw his early parties there.

The article also troublingly equates withdrawal from the Mitchell-Lama program with “gentrification” — blame “the yuppies” or blame “greed” but don’t blame the structure of the deal itself, which seems to have been set up to achieve exactly this outcome. Mitchell-Lama involved handing city-owned land over to the landlords, which is what capital does when smacked around by beefy Rockefeller Republicans: agree to a secure but limited return for a defined period of time in exchange for eventual complete control over the property. Kool Herc seems to be more concerned with continually reconfirming his primacy (his OG status is not in dispute, but his sweeping claims to cultural ownership are) than with helping the tenants out with an interesting strategy to keep their homes, but we don’t hire DJs to referee land use, we hire them to rock the party and shout out their own names.

Questions for class discussion:

-Given that historic preservation projects often pick the most relevant stage of a building’s long history to which they restore the structure, does that mean that we will be forced to lovingly replicate decaying infrastructure and “benign neglect” in restoring the Bronx River Houses to their appearance in the late Ford Administration?

-Are their other cultures whose “classical” period is redefined by a few dozen middle-aged men who have leveraged their position as “cultural radicals” into bullying elder status vis-a-vis a growing coterie of worshipful journalists/academics, playing off of the ossified hierarchies that would have had their teenage selves obsessed with well-scrubbed respectability a la Booker T?

2.

KRS-One, by way of contrast, is entirely running on fumes by this point and can think of nothing more to rap about than his own imagined centrality to rap — oh, sorry about that, hip-hop culture. His dire new track, a collabo with former meaningless-80s-beef rival Marley Marl, “I Was There“, recites several of the mass public events at which KRS was a spectator, and on which his authority (and presumably that of the tens of thousands of other attendees) is based: an address by Nelson Mandela at Yankee Stadium, Stokley Carmichael’s funeral, the debut of Yo! MTV Raps. Some private events at which KRS was “there” are also listed: the births of his children (we would have thought that hip-hop transcended being a decent father and partner, but what do we know as we weren’t there), the various labels at which KRS has had successively smaller packaging-design budgets (we would submit that maybe a Koch affiliation isn’t quite the badge of honor it seems).

Indeed Mr. Parker takes special care to let us know he “was there” at the 1995 Source Awards, where Suge Knight and Puffy bleated threats at one another. Let the record show that 12 years turned this televised snit between intermittently solvent pop-rap moguls, both thoroughly hated by the herds of KRSoid backpackers who roamed the landscape in that era (leaving naught but shitty tags, mumbled pieties about the “four elements” and blunt innards in their wake), into the kind of historical event at which one’s presence is a badge of authenticity.

KRS poses these assertions as his claim to superiority over “hip hop historians” who are doing culturally retrograde things like writing books about events in the past. These might include the opinions of people who are not KRS-One, who may have different recollections of what occurred when they too were “there”, or who may even have been in other places and will claim that where they were was “there” and that where KRS was at the time was someplace inferior or potentially less important to the world than it was to the erstwhile Blastmaster himself.

This petulant and self-centered posturing — from the man whose worldview and incisive intelligence were so expansive as to work shit like a cogent and catchy exegesis of the origins of the notion of “race” into fucking rap videos and suchlike — is apparently an attempt to not back down from the juvenile rhetorical sucker-punching of a fellow participant at a Stanford University roundtable last year. He turned the panel’s talk into a denunication of “enemies to the culture”, who had been “slandering” him in other fora, and when other panelists tried to school KRS in how not to act like an irrelevant psycho, threatened to “beat your fuckin ass”. Audio and links to further discussion can be found here, but our own opinion may not really count in the end for we (thankfully) were not there.

Ah leaders. We are supposed to love leaders in Quebec, because although we have a civic life and associational tendency that is virtually unparalleled on this continent, we are still governed and shaped by a merry little band of rich people who like one-stop shopping when wielding influence and seeking public congratulations for their accomplishments. Lucky for us that they’re a rickety and second-rate ruling class, and always have been; the failed scions of Scotland gave way to the self-congratulatory “self-made” types from the sticks and the successive generations of preening overambitious sons of Outremont that Stanislas and Brébeuf cough up like clockwork.

Today, La Presse is unhappy with the mayor but it can’t figure out why. So it builds a shockingly incoherent article, critical of his lack of take-charge leadership, around last year’s sneering public smackdown offered by Tremblay’s former friend Charles Lapointe the professional tout, who is bitter that his economic sideshow is not universally regarded as the three-ring circus of servility he believes that it should be. Tout aux touristes.

Dans son discours, il a rappelé la réflexion de Simon Anholt, un expert de l’image, lorsqu’il est arrivé à Montréal et qu’il a vu l’état lamentable des routes entre l’aéroport et le centre-ville : « Je pensais que j’avais atterri au Kazakhstan. »

No sum is too great to make sure that someone has a nice cab ride from the airport to downtown. Regardless of what role the 20 and Cote-de-Liesse have in the economy — as places where we build airplane engines and turbines that are sold around the world, for instance — they must be showpieces at any price. An “image expert” (a consultant who is paid to make cities worried about their image, and then hire him to buff that image and reassure them that yes, an important foreigner in a nice blazer gazes out of his taxi window and feels at peace) came here and apparently immediately shitted on his hosts — hi, tourism chief, your city looks like where Borat is from — and we are supposed to worry. Instead of calling him rude and asking him to rephrase his comment constructively and watch his bitchy little mouth when he’s a guest somewhere. Remember, this is part of Lapointe’s (and others’) strategy: make you feel nervous about yourself in the eyes of your betters.

So what’s Tremblay been doing, when not busily getting fucked by his political allies?

La Ville rafistole les tuyaux, bouche des trous, retape le boulevard Saint-Laurent. Une administration en rase-mottes. Il y a peu de grandes réalisations, mais beaucoup d’intendance. Et de mots.

Doesn’t maintenance suck? When people let things fall apart and then new people come in and fix those things? Isn’t that, well, disruptive? And when an administration focuses on the little details about which angry shopkeepers get so worked up, instead of swingingly wildly for the fences with another batch of white elephants, isn’t that such a lack of vision? You’re filling potholes, but where’s your vision?

Depuis mars 2006, la Ville a pondu quatre politiques (sur l’approvisionnement, l’égalité entre les hommes et les femmes…) et six plans (plan d’action corporatif pour préserver le climat, plan d’action 2007 d’accessibilité universelle…). Zzz…

Isn’t it boring when municipal governments start droning on about their vision? I mean, what is this shit: gender equality, climate change, accessibility for the disabled — what a yawn. And who needs a procurement policy? Just go out and, you know buy stuff.

Le maire était sagement assis avec le public, sur le premier banc en avant. Comme un petit garçon. Il n’a pas soufflé mot et il n’est pas monté sur l’estrade. À se demander qui est maire de la ville.

Swagger, where’s the swagger? Building consensus, not being a ridiculous asshole in public, letting members of your team make major announcements in your second term, being perhaps justifiably afraid of having your fellow-hacks stab you in the back at public events — all of that’s for pussies and little boys. La Presse wants a real man at the helm. Maybe even a man in a helmet. And this time around he doesn’t even have to make the trains run on time, he just has to be concerned that they’re nice looking trains and that the view from the window synchronizes seamlessly with other people’s expectations.

(Not without this side pulling that move where you accidentally click “post” and the page doesn’t load, so you think you’re safe, but then you spend too much time continuing to polish your little words and by the time you post your interlocutor has already responded. Which makes you feel super swift and totally classy. Like Rochelle Lash.)

You see, print media pay people to research and write stories, and pay other people to edit them and remove their intemperate or inaccurate statements, because they exist in a context of responsibility and accountability. It is from this that the print media derive the sodden, flimsy vestiges of their fast-disintegrating authority. Whereas most online “media” don’t pay anyone to do fuck all, much less retain the authority they never had in the first place.

In Montreal, one of North America’s great transit and port cities, the English daily doesn’t pay anyone to regularly cover transportation. (Does it? See, that’s one of those intemperate and potentially-inaccurate statements that nobody’s getting paid to check!) Instead, it relies on freelancers to provide what coverage it can occasionally be stirred to provide. Because freelancers don’t require benefits, or require the paper to maintain a newsroom where human beings might want to work for more than a year or two, or require publishers and editors that know the business and that are more concerned with treating their people right than with pleasing some fuck in a Bentley. Even competent and engaged freelancers, like DeWolf is on this very topic, are no substitute for an actual commitment of resources and people to the day in, day out grind of beat reporting.

Now we here at Assertions are as dedicated to freelancers getting money as we are to the third person. That, in fact, is our next tattoo: a back piece with FREELANCERS GET MONEY in blackletter script. And what better freelancers to hire than aficionados with love for that which they cover? But when those sorts of serious discussions of the infrastructure that makes your life work are increasingly rare, don’t wonder why: it’s because it’s as hard to cover the STM on the cheap out of CanWest’s Winnipeg headquarters as it is easy to score cheap points hiring your right-wing pals to snipe at Quebec from a closer and more comfortable perch.

Monday’s Media Morsels (via Midnight Poutine)

Right around the corner, the city is having vaguely similar problems with the old central library building facing Parc Lafontaine — the collection and the entire idea of a central library got folded into the Grande bibliotheque project, without a clear vision for the future of the original structure. La Presse tells us that renovation of the library to house a clutch of municipal arts and culture agencies has proceeded slowly. Apparently the city went to the trouble to estimate the overall cost of the work, before defining exactly what work needed to be done. Maybe the best thing to do with news like this is to take it as a koan: meditate on the seeming paradox until you reach a higher understanding, then be sure to share it in the comments.

Incidentally, the childrens’ library (currently in the lower levels of the old central library building) is moving to de la Visitation, where it will be folded into a project to enlarge the Association sportive et communautaire de Centre-Sud. While it’s all well and good that the children of Centre-Sud get a new place to sit in beanbag chairs and look at pictures of dinosaurs, an administration supposedly panicking about the flow of families off-island would do well to consider locating kid-oriented facilities somewhere like Rosemont, instead of in a neighborhood where the new development is characterized by high-end one-bedroom condos. And you never see toddlers at Parking these days.

With big-money downtown cultural announcements being made, and Benoit Labonte’s name liberally applied to most of them, it’s almost as if he’s getting ready to run for something.

Finally the cavalcade of dance facility capital funding continues. Compagnie Marie Chouinard is moving into the Aegidius-Fauteux building, which was built as the Jewish Public Library in 1949 and that most recently housed the periodicals department of the Bibliotheque nationale.

One would think that the outcome of the megacity flap, the victory of the West Island’s arbitrary crazy quilt of lilliputian municipal anglostans over modern solutions for better regional management, was enough to restore the often-tempestuous love affair between the Quebec Liberal Party and a key component of its base. In those heady days, West Island suburbanites suddenly discovered that their anomic shitscape inhabited by a few hundred thousand bored and anxious mallrats was a community, and one that those sovereigntist bastards were going to take from us.

Now Bourque Newswatch (no, you don’t get a link, because he’s a dick) — Canada’s favorite allegedly pay-to-play “news” aggregator — alerts us to a new twist in their knickers. The Globe and Mail reports that West Island mayors, frustrated with Charest’s disinterest in fully undoing one of his predecessor’s most sensible decisions, are going to add their voice to Mario Dumont’s coalition of right-wingers, soft nationalists who still think it’s 1993, and lumpen idiots from Quebec City.

Municipal governments on this continent were concieved and set up largely as ways to manage the development of infrastructure and the subsequent increase in land values. In Montreal, the process was often led by builders and providers of building supplies, who also served as members of the parish council and thereby controlled most community services (particularly the caisses populaires, kept on a short leash by the Church so that people wouldn’t get any funny ideas about the power of cooperative institutions). A gross oversimplification of the standard practice would go like this: get the archdiocese to build a church, get elected to the parish council, incorporate a city, get elected to the city council, and then get both the parish and the city to buy building materials from you until the city went bankrupt, at which point the City of Montreal would step in, annex you, and assume the debt.

Fast-forward to the 1950′s, when developers started seeing the upside to remaining an independent municipality, such as keeping out undesirables and further micromanaging the development process so as to ensure a monoculture of single-family houses and take maximum advantage of subsidized infrastructure that radically increases the accessibility and value of your land (i.e., Highway 40). Yet beyond these advantages, forming new municipalities was about getting away from the terrifying fecundity of Catholics and spending your money like “normal” North Americans, by sinking it into a shitty house with a garage instead of paying low rent on a decently-maintained triplex apartment and taking the bus. Most of the suburban municipalities of the West Island were created within living memory as an economic response to class and cultural anxieties, not because a bunch of farmers wanted to build a picturesque mill in the distant past.

The resulting constellation of (often amusingly mutually hostile) suburban cities was a fertile ground for Anglo alarmism, incoherent suspicion of the Galganov/Schnurmacher type, and occasional threats to secede from Quebec and form an extraterritorial enclave of Ontario (after all, we need only to survey the international examples of which Mr. Dion is so fond to see how well those kinds of things turn out). Naturally, when the PQ’s megacity proposal threatened suburbanites with having to pay to fix their spectacularly overbuilt infrastructure and take some measure of responsibility for their externalities, the shit hit the fan. Charest’s Liberals got to play the brave saviors as Westmounters and soccer moms took to the streets, and once elected fulfilled their promise to wreck a reasonably well-conceived system of policy development and operational responsibilities for the boroughs, the island, and the larger region.

Remember, repeat to yourself that it isn’t about language or partition, over and over again. Because “reopening the divisive language/sovereignty debate” is something that big bad sovereigntists do — the senescent windbags of the Gazette editorial page are merely performing their civic duty in reacting to their own cultural irrelevance in the shrillest possible terms. Now they’re teaming up with ptit Mario and his ever-shifting constellation of disposable hangers-on, ready to reap protest votes from the English wing of the minivan set. Be afraid.

His arrival at new funny video provider Super Deluxe is the harbinger of deep incursions into your bandwidth and your productivity. Fear him.

Now comes news that Alcan is expanding their mini-campus, by building a 15-story tower on top of (behind? beside? nobody knows) the same church, purchased from the Salvation Army. A $58 million project altogether, relatively small potatoes, and yet the announcment was attended by the mayor, the premier, the economic development minister, and a crowd of media (the recent announcement of a new $135 million skyscraper on de Maisonneuve entailed neither a pile-on of politicians nor banner headlines). All this when they admit they weren’t even considering moving their headquarters out of town. Maybe it’s the half-billion dollars of subsidies and “loans” (don’t worry, they’ll just get written off — after all, it’s not like there’s banks or a stock market that could provide capital to firms like this) that Quebec has thrown at Alcan in the past few months.

In BC, Alcan is threatening to cancel a smelter project unless the (publicly owned) BC Hydro buys surplus hydro from them at $71 a megawatt-hour. This is power that Alcan generates using (publicly owned) water for $5 per megawatt-hour. In South Africa, Alcan is gearing up to incur 4.7 million tons of carbon emissions per year at its new smelter, using electricity from coal-fired plants. This is after it negotiated hard for a good deal from South Africa’s (publicly owned but partially privatized) national electric utility, Eskom, which specifically entails eliminating Eskom’s ability to redirect the resulting profits to reduce power bills for the impoverished black citizens — an undesirable “cross-subsidy” — to whom it denied service under apartheid.

Alcan giveth, sure. But boy does it taketh the fuck away.

Big map (slicker this time, don’t you know?) and then the rundown.

1. UQAM

The new science complex (the “Coeur des sciences”) is already finished, but it’s included in this list because of the impact its financial failure will have on nearby development. $40 million of cost overruns in this project — which includes some highly speculative office and laboratory space to be occupied by private firms — not only cost UQAM rector Roch Denis his job, but cast a pall over the ambitious and underfinanced expansion dreams that ran rampant over the university in the past several years. Now the speculative office component of the Voyageur project is being reevaluated, and UQAM’s interest in the former Jewish Museum site (#17 on the list) is presumably diminished.

The new complex, specificially the part behind the meaningless bright-yellow glass wall on Sherbrooke, also houses the TELUQ, the distance-learning arm of the Université du Québec. This opened up space in the giant flashcube at Villeneuve and Henri-Julien, which will become home to the music and drama conservatories originally destined for the Balmoral block (see #7).

2. place Eugène-Lapierre

Along with #6 and #9, this site has been put forth as a way to shoehorn new green space into a very dense corner of the city, reinforcing proposed and ongoing condominium development with aesthetic flourishes. The idea was to replace the parking lot with some kind of high-design park designed by McGill and UdeM urban design students. After a flurry of excited announcements between 2002 and 2004, the project seems to have fallen off of the map entirely.

3. 400 Sherbrooke West

Montrealers have become used to ephemeral “coming soon! under construction!” signs on this site, where developers’ desires to make extend the wall of high-rises along the south side of Sherbrooke seemingly crested and fell. Now there’s shovels in the ground for a 37-storey residential high-rise that will rise from the bottom of Hutchison.

4. Le Concorde

Sure, a lot of people say they’re going to develop a residential high-rise around Place des Arts, but as it nears completion Le Concorde is the only one that’s actually gone through.

5. de Maisonneuve/Bleury/Mayor
Rising from a 14-storey podium that aligns well with the nearby fur district buildings along de Maisonnueve, the full 28-storey tower will be a ponderable slab, much higher than its neighbors. 287 residential units (condo or apartment?) are planned, but the idea doesn’t please everybody. Various festival-related interests have been speaking out against such a concentration of complaint-happy local residents so close to the summer festivals.

6. Gardens around St. James Church

Though the plaza on Sainte-Catherine has been completed — it can seem a little stark, and would be greatly enhanced by throngs of teenagers socializing and smoking hash on the steps on warm summer evenings, à l’italien – vauger and more uncertain plans to dig up the unceremonious horseshoe-shaped parking lot that wraps around the variegated sandstone of the church, in order to give the fur district its own proper park, have gone unfulfilled.

7. Balmoral block

Ah, the Balmoral block, where different administrations can project their dreams. Confronted with a soft market for commercial office space, Bernard Landry naturally pursued multiple projects to water things down further. One of them was for an enormous blob of provincial-government office space on the north end of the Balmoral block, closer to project #6 above. The site naturally needed a cultural component, so the existing buildings — home to at least one dance school, studios and cultural businesses, the original home of the SAT, and a fair number of dotcoms, and hence needed to be removed for cultural purposes — were expropriated (except for the bank on the corner, which was a nice touch) to make way for a culturedrome housing the OSM along with the conservatories of music and drama. Jean Charest apparently has another set of development-industry interests to prop up, so he quickly cancelled the project. Neither administration saw anything wrong with leaving perfectly useful publicly-owned buildings empty and unmaintained, and rumor has it that the ensuing years have made them pretty much uninhabitable and ready for demolition.

Pictured is a rendering from the Quartier des spectacles vision plan, which is still (given the current state of the preexisting structures depicted in it) possible but unlikely. In Feburary, we’ll learn what kind of “cultural facility” will be going there next. Neither the OSM nor the conservatories will be on the site, but most involved keep dropping hints that some kind of place des festivals will be incorporated.

8. Spectrum block

A few years ago, Équipe Spectra was flying high. They were awarded the license for Montreal’s only shitty-jazz station, were part of the consortium formed to wrest film-festival funding away from Serge Losique, and announced that they were going to turn their storied performance venue into the hub of a cultural complex on the south side of Sainte-Catherine. Nearly every cultural business in the city was considered for the site, including the first version of the place des festivals on the Jeanne-Mance side, along with (at various times) a branch of the French electronics and music retailer Fnac, an Archambault (the fourth in a two-kilometre stretch!), an exCentris (or at least Famous Players) movie theater, and so on.

Faced with a whole raft of people to buy out and cajole into partnering with them, the unwieldy project never got off the ground. Now they can’t muster the cash to exercise their right of first refusal on their own hall, and the Spectrum will be demolished, along with the rest of the storefronts on Sainte-Catherine, to make way for a “15-to-17-storey” office tower including a Best Buy. With Best Buy and Future Shop within a block of each other, these two retail titans will make it easier than ever to find a buying experience that will make you want to stab dullard salespeople in the face. And a stubby, superfluous office “tower” should have no problem finding tenants in a market with a 10% vacancy rate. Cultural metropolis, here we come!

9. Jardins du Gésu

Announced as a done deal in 2004, it’s still a parking lot today. What gives?

10. Le Square Dorchester

What would appear to be 24 stories of residential units on René-Lévesque, with a six-storey component farther south on the block.

11. Notman hotel

The gas station next door does, admittedly, take away from the cute factor. The former house of photographer and businessman William Notman, at Clark and Sherbrooke, is one of the few mid-19th-century Italianate mansions to survive, and is in a charming ensemble with a wooded garden, a brick hospital building from later in the 19th century, and undistinguished garages along Milton. Given a well-preserved structure, renovated within living memory to serve as the Just for Laughs offices, and located next to other similarly renovated mansions that house consular and airline offices, any property owner willing to take good care of a unique asset would work hard to find an appropriate and appreciative tenant. Which appears to not be the case, as it’s remained vacant for ten years. Happily, a succession of outsize hotel schemes has failed to gain heritage approval from various municipal and provincial bodies.

12. SLEB

This one isn’t going away anytime soon. After years of slow work on the phase 1 building, an imposing industrial loft structure that formerly housed a warren of studios, workshops, and craftspeople’s ateliers (in short, critical infrastructure for cultural production, which is always the first thing to disappear when new development comes into a city’s key cultural zone), the developers seemed ready to push forward with the new-build phase 2 of the project and even start dropping hints about phase 3 — all before work on the first building was anywhere near finished. The only visible sign of renewed progress was the demolition of the row of older buildings to the south two years ago, after which the developer announced that the project was bankrupt and announced that most work on phase 1 had been so bad it would have to be jackhammered out. The SLEB site will now remain a charming waterlogged pit, complete with a snake’s nest of rusting rebar and crumbling rubble, until everyone (developers, banks, contractors, purchasers) involved has had their fill of litigation. Ah, the efficiency and transparency of the private sector.

13. Diverting Maisonneuve/consolidating the parks

While it’s important not to take these kinds of exercises too literally, Nomade Architecture’s “vision plan” for the Quartier des spectacles contained several good ideas that risk getting lost in the shuffle. Among them was a reconfiguration of de Maisonneuve as it runs through Fred-Barry and Albert-Duquesne parks; instead of cutting through and leaving two rarely-used half-parks, they proposed continuing de Maisonneuve in parallel with Ontario along the north side of the park and then turning it south, along Clark, on the park’s east side.

14. OSM hall

While other observers might take the regular spectacle of the province, the city and (often) some set of developers scrambling around as they fail to build a concert hall for the Montreal Symphony as a sign of civic failure, we here at Assertions take it as grand civic entertainment. The institutionalization and reenactment of European high culture is a way in which elites assert their refinement, and the grave seriousness of building a venue in which this mysterious ceremony can take place has been used to lend a dignified air to shopping malls, “revitalized downtowns” and other plans to demolish the homes of the poor in nearly every North American city over the past fifty years. Now Charest is lining up private partners to build and maintain a concert hall (lots of private companies making a killing in that large and lucrative sector, one imagines), holding yet another “essential” project to an unproven and risky method of financing while our public debt is used to flood Cree land. Somehow this is going to be shoehorned into the northwestern part of the complex, where a lonely asphalt plaza currently roofs a parking garage. Are there at least going to be cheap seats?

15. Police headquarters parking lot

This would seem to be a tempting site for some kind of new development, if only the expansion of the police headquarters next door. The union building and the Screamin’ Eagle parking lot next door are similar interesting sites. For now, they just end up penciled into speculative plans and visions, but that may well change.

16. LADMMI

Enclosed in a chain-link fence and home to a smooth field of fine gravel — a touch of zen on your way to get blurry tatoos and cheap dildos in the neighboring stores, perhaps — this city-owned site has always looked like it was groomed for a better fate. Just add $6 million, and it transforms into a dance school. Cool.

17. Saint-Laurent metro

This city-owned site was touted as the location for a museum celebrating Jewish Montreal, until Jewish Montreal lost interest in the project. Before the abrupt setbacks to their building program, UQAM was expressing interest in the site as well, and a plan to put their urban planning department in a shared facility with the Ville-Marie borough offices has been mooted. Very, ah, very cultural plan there guys. Planners and boroughcrats.

18. Redlight

The feather in the Quartier des spectacles’ cap, so far, would be the construction of this eight-storey building for community groups, cultural organizations, and a centralized ticket window (consciously modeled, in concept if not in physical form, on the famous Times square TKTS booth in New York). The rendering at left was apparently intended to depict both the proposed building, at St-Laurent and Ste-Catherine, and the darkening of the skies that will accompany the return of Cthulu. Conveniently located at the intersection of boulevard des Pimps and avenue des Hoes, because nothing says a night on the town quite like “hey Strawberry, where’s my money?”

19. Hydro-Québec parking lot

The Hydro parking lot, running from the mechanical systems of the office tower north to Dan Hanganu’s goofy Théatre du Nouveau Monde renovation (Dan man, we love you dog, but you swung for the fences and the ball went foul on this one yo), would seem to be prime territory for the kind of uninspiring office development that is apparently more attractive on the Spectrum block, which is an actually vital (if shabby) urban landscape. The site is plunged into shadow and faces other challenges as well: mechanical systems for the existing Hydro building, the bulky Complexe Desjardins podium to the west, a sketchy segment of Clark is to the east, and the theatre obstructing a real presence on Sainte-Catherine to the north. Let’s get this sucker in play and see if we have any real rugged architects in the spot.

20. SAT expansion

One cannot accuse SAT’s Monqiue Savoie of the slightest reluctance to remain in the middle of the action, or of showing any signs of curatorial reticence. After being kicked out of its original digs (see #7) the SAT relocated to the block that remains the sole remnant of a once-thriving (and, not accidentally, far livelier and less sad in its prime) red-light district. Plans to gussy up the SATplex have been drawn up, again with Nomade, but it’s hard to tell where the meat of the plan is given renderings that focus on gestural exuberance.

21. Aquilini phase 3

It’s an unlikely neighborhood in which to build a whack of condos, and an even more unlikely one in which to bulid a fuckload of condos. But a fuckload is indeed what we have recieved, with phases 1 and 2 bringing hundreds of units to the blocks east of Saint-Dominique and south of rue Charlotte.

22. Habitations Jeanne-Mance

HJM, where the contentment and pride of the hundreds of working-class families that live there come forth every several years to smack the fuck out of any architect or urban planner who tries to convince the residents of the necessity of mucking about with their well-loved homes. The only 1950′s British-style housing project ever built on this continent (the world’s most dubious distinction), it shows that ugly public housing can succeed if you don’t let it fall apart. Contrast this with Toronto’s Regent Park, where jacobsite “urban space” fuckwads are engaging in yet another bout of orgiastic self-congratulation over plans to sharply cut the number of public housing units in a “new” scheme featuring lots of market-rate apartments.

The latest idea, which was floating around a few years ago, involved minimal demolition and the straightening of rue de Boisbriand — currently that weird alley-like street with all the graffiti just north of Ste-Catherine, where you go to smoke a joint when you’re spending warm summer nights drinking Hoegaarten out on the terrasse of bar Sainte-Elizabeth — to open up more space to development and provide a more rational street frontage. Being cautious, well-thought-out, and surprisingly affordable, the idea fell flat and hasn’t been heard from since.

As these things will happen, a sign appeared suddenly annoucing that all of that was going to change. Allied Properties Real Estate Investment Trust, which already owns two heavily-renovated commercial buildings nearby, the Balfour at Prince-Arthur and the catichily-monikered 4436-4450 St-Laurent (home to the aforementioned restaurant space), is looking to develop six stories of commercial and retail there, to be managed by Groupe Immobilier de Montréal (which manages 4416, 4428, and 4436 St-Laurent).

The rendering below doesn’t promise a creative solution to the constraints of the site, and the kind of reliable high-end tenants that big-money building managers and REITs love are exactly the kind of snoozers that are killing that stretch of the Main: giant empty stores full of giant leather couches for some asshole’s giant empty loft. At the very least we already have a sufficient density of Subway and Pharmaprix locations around the intersection that we will likely be spared additional sources of nail polish or oddly-textured cold cuts.

No love, motherfuckers. If you want to make money on the Main you had better step your game up.