Ornery Planet

As the holidays approach, I'm looking forward to travelling a bit around Europe. I've been here a few times before, but only to Paris and London; in the former case, I was on the way to Morocco and in the latter, my plans to travel more widely were thwarted by an explosion and fire in the Channel tunnel, an economic collapse and (maybe I'm projecting here) a plague of locusts with my name on their bellies.

This time, though. This time I'm gonna do it.

My impending tour of Europe notwithstanding, though, a lot of the blush is off the travel rose, at least when we're talking about the less-developed countries favoured by penniless backpackers like me.

I worked for a few years in a travel-accessory store in Montreal and among the items they stocked was the entire Lonely Planet guidebook series. Over the course of three years' worth of slow periods, I read a good chunk of that library and in doing so, was immersed in the modern Traveller's ethos.

The Traveller's ethos proceeds from the notion that "there are tourists, and then there are travellers," that these are two distinct breeds, and that the latter is superior, entitled to a double ration of smugness by virtue of its willingness to immerse itself in local cultures and really get down with the lively carnival of diversity that is the global Benetton ad in which we live.

Conversely, the tourist is pampered and childish, laden with cameras and camcorders, loudly wondering why he can't get a Coors Lite in Islamabad on a Friday afternoon, dragging his giant suitcase across the rutted streets of Phnomh Penh on his way to the killing fields where he will make a beeline to the gift shop.

The traveller knows how to use chopsticks; the tourist doesn't need them for his Big Mac.

That's the idea, anyway.

In reality, in the less-affluent and more exotic places in the world where I've been, I've been gobsmacked to see how everything has been rearranged to cater to Western backpackers, and in particular to Western backpackers who don't want to be reminded that they are being catered to. The desire to be Sir Richard Burton, first white man to penetrate the deepest jungle/desert/Temple of Doom is a lucrative one for those who know how to cater to the illusion. The locals aren't stupid; in their circumstances they don't have the luxury of being stupid. They know there's a billion affluent Westerners who hunger for the authentic, unvarnished globetrotter's experience, and so they are damn well going to manufacture that authenticity.

So, in Morocco, I was approached every thirty paces by a guide offering to show me some local attraction, with the first words out of his mouth being, "It's not touristic." He didn't know me from Adam but he knew what I was after.

In Cambodia, just a year after that country had been removed from Robert Young Pelton's "five skulls" category of lethality, I was met at the mini-bus depot by a horde of moto drivers who got into a minor riot in order to be the one to take me where I was going.

In Thailand I saw guesthouses that played Hollywood movies all day, including the decidedly postmodern spectacle of young Western backpackers spending all day watching movies like The Beach, a Leonardo DiCaprio movie about a bunch of young Western backpackers who go to Thailand and are disappointed that Thailand is full of young Western backpackers who sit around at guesthouses watching Leonardo DiCaprio movies all day.

Now, I can hear some of you saying, "Well if you don't like travelling, then don't travel. You're very privileged to have that option. Quit your bitching." Okay, it's not that I don't like travelling, and I am acutely aware of how fortunate I am to live in a time and place where "polio" and "aerial bombardment" are just words, let alone having the option to travel all over the globe. So I'm not bitching. I've won the historical, geographical, ethnic and gender lottery.

What I'm saying is, a lot of us have this idea that by travelling around the world, we're gathering some kind of authentic experience and engaging in some transformative ritual that will make us come out the other end a better, wiser, more enlightened person. I've had the sadly humorous experience of watching two seasoned travellers try to one-up each other with their travel stories, like two nth-degree black belts in a kung fu movie, determined to prove once and for all who has the most killer move. Anywhere you've been, I've been somewhere more remote, more beautiful, more untouched, more authentic--a lot like the place you went, before people like me and you started going there by the planeload.

There's a whole publishing industry devoted to the frantic checking off of life experiences. The Ur-example is "1001 Unforgettable Places To Visit Before You Die." What a desperate, frantic, joyless pursuit of notches that implies! Hurry up, half your life is over and you're only at #207! At this rate you'll never finish by the time you're done.

Oil, gold, forests and bison are scarce resources on a finite planet. So are authentically untouched places, or even moderately untrampled ones. Telling ourselves otherwise is to pretend that Space Mountain is a real rocketship ride, or that the call girl is doing it 'cause she loves us, and not for the discreet envelope we have left on the mantelpiece.

It's fun to pretend. Sometimes we have to, just to stay sane.

But when it comes to authentic travel, be careful what you wish for. The world is a very different place compared to when Cartier and Cabot, Lewis and Clark, Stanley and Livingstone, even Jones and Ravenwood did their stomping around. The population of this big round theme park has nearly doubled in my lifetime and that cracking sound you hear is the joists of the boardwalk in the first stages of Malthusian collapse. For most of the people in most of the places you're likely to go, the authentic experience is hunger and desperation, blotted out with pirated Britney Spears recordings, seasoned with diesel fumes and oceans of discarded plastic water bottles.

Space Madness

Aalborg is located at just over 57 degrees north latitude. At this latitude, the length of the night in winter (and the day in summer) becomes rather extreme; on the solstice, I am told, the sun will rise at around 10am and set around 3pm, with much of the intervening five hours of daylight being a sort of long twilight.

This, combined with being in school and especially a project-based phase of that schooling (i.e. no classes or structured events this late in the semester) creates an odd sense of timelessness and limbo that is not entirely unpleasant. It will be interesting to see what it's like in summer when the sun is out almost all the time.

But as it is now, I inhabit an odd sort of science-fiction space colony existence. This is underscored by the institutional kollegium where I live, with a tiny shared kitchen (a galley, really) and very small individual quarters. I get up in what the clock assures me is the morning and get to work, spending hours doing brainy science stuff with a computer, with very little in the way of external signals as to what time it is. Outside, it is dark, flecked with pretty lights.

To make it even more science-fictiony--I didn't plan it this way--I'm listening to an online archive of old radio shows that were broadcast in the 1980's and early 1990's. I have basically parked my spaceship twenty light years away from Earth so I can listen to signals sent out decades ago, which are just getting there now.

Of course, in many ways this place is far less lunar than back home. The temperature doesn't go much below zero, and the landscape of North America--shopping malls, parking lots, individual houses separated by unbridgeable distances--is much more like the denatured futurist world of bubble cities and rocketship landing pads that seemed so exciting to Hugo Gernsback but that turns out (in my experience) to produce a chronic quiet desperation beyond Thoreau's wildest imaginings.

Here, I can ride my bike to where I want to go, should I choose to go out at all. That's more than I can say for somewhere like Orleans, Ontario in December, which (this time last year) had the added hassle of a public transit strike which drove home the inherent isolation of suburbia in winter.

The darkness was getting to me for awhile but I think I've adjusted. The new crewmen always need a bit of time to adjust to their surroundings. After awhile the daily routine of demagnetizing the fraculator, sideloading the balonium plant and cleaning tribbles out of the air ducts becomes a pleasantly monastic existence. At least until one of my shipmates comes back from EVA with an alien organism in her chest and inadvertently looses it on the crew.

Coffee and half-chewed Danish.

I've been living here in Denmark for three months now but I haven't done a lot of posting about it because (a) I've been kinda busy, (b) I've been crazy busy, or (c) some combination of (a) and (b).

It's an interesting place, occasionally dull, but dull in that way that extremely civilized countries can be. No bracing road duels with hillbillies in Hummers while riding your bike; no crazy people in the streets, cut loose by a shredded social safety net; and, unlike in North America, nearly everyone is trim, healthy and dressed like adults all with like dignity 'n' stuff.

The biggest challenge so far is that I can't understand a word anyone is saying, at least when they're speaking Danish. Now, that sounds kind of trivially obvious, Danish being a foreign language to me and all. So let me clarify. It's not that I don't know the meaning of the words that people are saying in this foreign language (though that too); it's that I can't understand what the hell they said. I could not take what someone says and transliterate it into a string of letters and then look up that string of letters in a Danish-English dictionary and determine the meaning of the word.

Danish stands out among languages for not being pronounced anything like how it is spelled. Consonants and syllables get smooshed together into this indistinct paste. The other day, one of my housemates asked another for the kitchen roll (i.e. paper towels.) The Danish word for this item is kokkenruller--superficially, four syllables, including a distinct k, n, r and l sound.

In fact, the word is pronounced with one and a half syllables: "kughghruh."

The closest analogy I can think of in English is where words like "worcestershire" get pronounced "wooster." Imagine that that rule applies to every word in the language and you start to understand the principle of Danish.

Actually, the "o" in kokkenruller is that Scandinavian o-like thing with a slash through it. Not only do they not pronounce their consonants, apparently they had to make up a bunch of new vowels that look a lot like existing vowels but make different sounds and--just to make things interesting--lie at the end of the alphabet. So o-with-a-slash, a-e dipthong, and a-with-an-orange-on-its-head all come after z, with evident implications for someone trying to look up a word.

I'll keep trying to learn the language. But if I need to wipe up a spill in a hurry, I'm liable to fall back on English.

Marty McFly has a difficult life ahead of him.

It's not wise to over-think movies, especially the kinds of summer junk-food movies that seem to lodge themselves so firmly in our hearts at a young age. These are, after all, transient entertainments, with just the right mix of internal consistency, panache and charm to make a big impression when we first see them. Unfortunately, with the help of VHS and DVD, we end up watching these films over and over again, and around the three hundredth viewing you start to see the strings.

So, for example: The Empire Strikes Back is easily the best entry in the whole Star Wars franchise. But it occurs to me that the time Luke Skywalker spends on Dagobah, learning (we are later told) almost everything he needs to know to become a Jedi, is about the same time as Han and Leia spend fleeing from Hoth to Cloud City. He accumulates generations of ancient wisdom and gnarly paranormal powers during what is basically an extended car chase. That's like going to a Tony Robbins seminar and coming out with a black belt in every martial art ever invented, plus a doctorate in particle physics.

Another thing that's troubled me lately (if by "troubled" we mean "occurred to me as I lie here waiting for my flu to blow over") is Marty McFly's future in Back To The Future. If you'll recall, the most important thing that happens in that trilogy is that he goes back to 1955 and changes the past, so that when he gets back to 1985, his life is way better. His dad's not a coward anymore, his mom's not an alcoholic anymore, his brother's not a loser, they have more money etc.

Which is great. But the thing is, now he's going to spend the rest of his life with a completely different set of memories of his family than they have. (That's how it works in BTTF. Matchbooks and photos get rewritten when the time they came from changes, but your memory of things stays the same. I know--it only occurs to you after the 600th viewing. Or when some jerk with a blog points it out.)

But isn't this going to make him kind of crazy? I mean, his family are now completely different people, and their experiences over the last 17 years will bear little ressemblance to what he remembers. A lot of the things that they've done together (from Marty's perspective) now never happened. No one will remember the trip they took to Six Flags because, in this new/improved timeline, George McFly made enough money to take them to Disneyworld. Every Christmas and Thanksgiving for the rest of his life, he's going to sit there while everyone talks about old times and he won't know what the hell they're talking about. Even his own experiences with the rest of the world will probably have been completely different.

The more I think about it, the more awful it sounds--like your family has been replaced by replicants and your own life lived by a stranger. You'd feel like an impostor, or like everyone else is. If you ever disagreed with anyone about the fact of a past event, you wouldn't have a leg to stand on. Your confidence in your ability to remember anything would be permanently shaken, more and more as time goes on, as memory itself gets fuzzier and timelines confuse themselves without any help from a flux capacitor.

Rails to Moncton.

Pirate shmirate.

There's a new movie coming out called Pirate Radio. It's about, well, a pirate radio station off the coast of Britain in the 1960's.

I will probably end up seeing it, if only because the movie options here in Aalborg are kind of limited. I don't know; maybe it will be great. But from what I can tell from the promotional material, there's something about it that just rubs me the wrong way, in a spot that's been rubbed raw over the years.

It's a movie about youthful rebellion, set during the 1960's. At the time, as with the rest of Europe, the radio spectrum in the UK was much more tightly controlled than in America. As a result, programming was a lot less hip; kids could barely hear rock 'n' roll, outside of a few specialty programs during designated time slots. So this bunch of ragtag rebels and misfits showed up on a ship in 1964 and broadcast from offshore, pissing off the stodgy, square British authorities and awakening the millions of British kids in their cool retro-1960's wardrobes to this awesome, raunchy, liberating sound of blah blah blah...

See, I get tired just commenting on it. We all know the story, the Promethean Dead Poets Footloose Society Riding On The Storm and challenging authority with the power of music/poetry/dance/fire.

The idea that youthful energy and rebellion and sexuality is subversive and threatening to established power is fun to believe, especially if you're young and horny. There's even some truth to it, in that every generation has to shake things up a bit, and just acting like a young person tends to rattle your folks because they're not young anymore and they've kind of forgotten.

But this kind of thing stopped being credibly subversive a long time ago, if indeed it ever was. Youthful rebellion is the safest, most blue-chip marketing strategy there is. Teenagers and young adults are insecure, inexperienced and churning with hormones. Give them credit cards and no understanding of compound interest and it's like shooting fish in a barrel.

So the marketing industry (including the scary Pod People corporate monster that taken over what at one point was a music industry capable of producing new and exciting music) has spent the past forty years flogging this idea that rebelling against your parent's tastes and values is an inherently useful and revolutionary activity. It's gotten kind of threadbare.

I wasn't there for the sixties so I don't know--maybe it really was a hidebound time that desperately needed to be shaken up. I find it hard to believe; it was the 1950's that produced rock 'n' roll, and in Britain the Beatles and the Rolling Stones came out of the early sixties, long before all the groovy social revolution we've all been bludgeoned with. Maybe Britain in particular was stodgy and not real exciting. Of course, it's worth keeping in mind that they had spent the past fifteen years rebuilding what the Luftwaffe destroyed, and under those conditions being hip is a bit of a luxury.

But the overarching conceit of this kind of movie is that what's really oppressing us is some rigid, Apollonian power structure that doesn't want us to have fun. To the extent that that was ever true, I don't think it's been particularly so, let alone relevant, for decades now. There's a power structure all right, and it's oppressive in other ways. But to rebut the Beastie Boys, no, you don't really have to fight for your right to party. Indeed, most of our consumer culture wants us to party, all the time, as long as we're using their party favours--big TV's, big cars, big tubs of carbonated sugar water, big stadiums with thousands of people watching millionaires jump around with guitars. Dionysus has a very comfy seat at the table, thanks very much.

In fact, if anything, the obsession with commercialized hedonism is the problem. We're so busy being cool, being hip, living for the now and having it all, that we've forgotten that we're supposed to be responsible adults with a collective civic job to do. Namely, to ensure that the world we hand off to the next generation is in basic working order, with functional infrastructure and viable farmland and education and an ecosystem that isn't on the verge of full-blown collapse.

Every day for the past six years I put on a suit and went in to my planning job in municipal government and spent the day doing what I could to improve the world. I'm not blowing my own horn; I consider this to be the most basic responsibility of citizenship. But some people thought I was some kind of hero for doing what, two generations ago, would have been the bare minimum required to call yourself an adult. And this says more about how far everyone else's standards have fallen than it does about how awesome I am. The fact that to doing this felt deeply subversive--that is, completely at odds with the predominant ethos of me first, show me the money, and I want to rock and roll all night/party every day--is a sign of real trouble ahead.

All of which is to say, I don't really need another story about how cool it was to be a rebel in the sixties. We know what you were rebelling against. I'm knee-deep in the debris of it all.

Mandatory parking requirements, or, How to kill your Downtown real fast without even trying, Part 1.

One of the neat things about Moncton is that, unlike a lot of cities, they don’t require parking if you want to build something Downtown. This is something that shocks people when they call to ask about development rules because it seems that a lot of cities still make you put in X amount of parking, even if it’s right in your central business district. Moncton doesn’t do that. The minimum parking ratio for a development in Moncton’s Downtown is zero.

And as a result, Moncton has seen a lot of good urban development in its downtown core over the past five or six years. For instance, this office building extension was built on the existing building's parking lot.


By making parking optional, it allows developments to happen that couldn’t happen in a city that requires X number of parking stalls for every square foot of floor area.

But every now and then, someone comes along and says, “I had trouble finding a free parking space in the middle of the business day! Don’t builders have to put in parking? Why the hell not?” And they’re outraged and they make a lot of noise.

The short answer is, If your goal is to destroy your Downtown, then by all means impose a minimum parking requirement.

Here’s Main Street in Moncton.


It’s very small—really just five or six blocks. It is, by all accounts, a pretty successful place. It’s mostly bars and restaurants at street level, supported by a lot of office space. There’s not much in the way of retail. But it is a very pleasant urban space. It’s not Paris but for a small-town North American Main Street at the end of almost a century of automobile-dominated urban planning, it is doing very well indeed.

Now, Moncton’s Downtown is actually much, much larger than just this stretch of Main Street. It actually occupies almost the the entire area that was built up by about 1920. And once you get off Main Street, Downtown is a mixed bag. There’s a lot of area that’s been bulldozed for parking.


There are some residential areas and some secondary commercial areas. Some of them are really nice.



Some have seen better days, but have "good bones" and a lot of potential:


And some... well, the less said the better:


But in Main Street we have the seed of a proper Downtown—something around which to crystallize. There was a big design charrette for Moncton’s Downtown in 2006, and there were a lot of opinions and lots of discussion but one thing everybody agreed on is, “We want more of this:”




We want more of the kind of thing we already have on Main Street.

Now, you can build more Main Street, as long as you’re willing to accept some tradeoffs. There are obstacles and complications but you can work around them. But one thing you can’t work around is this: the instant you impose a parking requirement, it’s completely doomed. You may get development in your Downtown but it will be Downtown in name only.

In the next post I'll explain why.

Abandoned box store

I was back in my hometown of Orleans, Ontario last Christmas. It had been years since I lived there, and so I was flabbergasted by two things.

One, the old edge of suburbia--which I remembered as farmland--had been completely gobbled up by suburban development, going (I am told) as far as Navan in one direction and Stittsville in the other. I knew sprawl had continued apace, but I was shocked to see how far it had gone.

Two, some of this suburban development had already been abandoned in favour of slightly-more-favourable (to the chain store owner) locations two or three intersections away.

Such is the case with this hardware store, built in 1992 or 1993 and now abandoned.


The box store below is in Moncton and it isn't abandoned (at least, not as of this post.) But I like the desolation of it. I had a narrow window of opportunity between the time the place closed (so the parking lot would be empty) and the time the sun moved out of the optimal angle.


(Okay, I did Gimp some distracting crap out of the image, but that's okay. This wasn't intended as a pure art photo, but rather as raw material:)

Suburban versus urban land use

This is a pair of land-use maps I did in planning school back in 2003, based on GIS data from McGill University. They illustrate the land-use pattern on an old, pre-WWII urban neighbourhood (the Plateau Mont-Royal, left) and the pattern in post-war suburban development (the West Island, and more specifically the area around the Fairview Mall, where Pointe-Claire and Dollard Des Ormeaux meet.)

Both maps are at the same scale. They really illustrate the finer grain of land uses in old urban neighbourhoods. (It's worth noting that the actual residential density of the residential parts of the Plateau--i.e. the yellow bits on the map on the left) is much higher than in the 'burbs.

One of the results of this is that the Plateau is much more walkable, and much less dependent on cars.

I'm not going to get into theories of urban design and form here; there's a lot of good stuff out there on the topic. I'm just posting this 'cause you might find it illustrative. (Even though I've stated a copyright on the above image, feel free to use it for non-profit purposes e.g. education, advocacy, or otherwise persuading the powers-that-be to quit building suburban sprawl. All I ask is that you credit me and let me know you'vre used the image. I do have an ego that needs stroking from time to time...)

Because Hummers are for weenies!

Monkeytown Comix Jam Poster

I did the illustration for this poster way back in July, then promptly forgot about it until Eric Dyck sent me the finished layout yesterday. Unlike me, Eric is a full-on professional illustrator and his stuff blows my mind.

The Monkeytown Comix Jam is a monthly event where people get together and draw comix and, I must say, it has produced some spectacular stuff over the past year and a half.

I can never remember.

Adventures in inking...

I hate inking. It's really hit and miss with me--sometimes it turns out well, but a lot of the time I just end up ruining a perfectly good pencil drawing. This is one of the few times I've been happy with how it turned out.