Food Court
City Centre Mall
Calgary AB, 21st Century
A girl sits in a food court.
Over the intercom plays what she thinks is latin music. She is wrong and in this evidently from Edmonton. She tries again. Reminds herself of her locale. Apologizes to the narrator. Pauses. Slaps herself on the forehead, presses the complementary “that was easy” button next to the napkin holder. Laughs backwards instead of forwards. Obviously! “An hour dedicated to culturally appreciate the musical offerings of Latin America”. She will enjoy the music more now, she might wonder why.
Behind her an old lady — once sitting — is overtaken and begins to salsa, at her bay surmounts an amass of tables. They are occupied by modern day sensuality – compact, foldable, 90 degrees. A Hutterite couple and their newborn walk by, the boy’s first word will be a sentence, and the sentence will be, “We didn’t grow thumbs for nuthin’ Ma!”
The lady does not dance in public, though it would seem so. The girl is a stranger looking in, as does she to the rest of the tenants here at the food court – it’s interior walls are a forgotten salad, and by this we mean a salad without dressing. To her right a sign reads:
“The plants in the Green Wall are real.
Please! Do not pull them out.
Your co-operation and respect is appreciated.”
The girl will later die fetching water with Jack on the hillock past curfew; at the naval base. Occurrences of the ink. The executive director with no name with release a public statement –
The executive director who hides his name behind the curtain of admin will release a public apology-
The executive director will acknowledge what has happened…
upholding the organization’s loving hug with the grip of a tyranny.
No further comments. Thank you.
________________
In front of me, I watch Calgary. I watch because that’s all I can do.
It’s perfectly integrated train system, it is nice. The type you read about on those developer websites who love Jane; or at least use her in their campaigns. The city is impressive, impressive enough that I’ve become an archetype in my submission.
His plants are real and his trains tell us what time they’re coming. And so they read: ON TIME. His street signs wear boater hats, or perhaps they’re deflated Capotain hats, depending on whether you think the English are as so privileged to think the word “absolute” is theirs. Behind me a lady starts to salsa and I wonder if this is really, like really honestly real. My sigh tells me so. But even these real plants, and this really real lady — like the montage of an all-girls sleepover movie– dancing, and girls at the shelter whom to all be falling at the knee’s of the holy spirit, above it all I have a daydream: laying in the undergrowth of the street I come across an empty bottle of gin, hope. The citizen’s dreams incorporated within the landscape of the city.
I wonder if cities are ever great, or if some are just better at playing dress-up better than others. I don’t really know what’s going on here. The cityscape is a crowd that never has recess, which leaves me tugging at my skin. They say New York is crowded but that’s not the case, because the people seem to be people but in Calgary it’s an undying crowd, the people and the art which lends itself to the movement of a flock of birds in V at the end of season.
Who’s the protagonist? The demeanor of his city is one
that exists on a set. It’s people are perfectly strange, perfectly recluse.
And the homeless are perfectly homeless – though I suspect some retire their
day to what would seem to be hotels.
Drunk but not too drunk, high but not too high.
The kids are bratty but not too bratty.
Loud but not too, Happy but not too, Cool but not too.
Even the trash is perfectly placed, not overbearing.
Goldilocks?
His people will never overpower his plot.
As always, attractions by means of organization breed fake culture and photo-ops for postcards that end up at the Re-use Center. Picked up by a sorry house wif- homemakers in demise of pintrest dreams. I call upon my use-to city not to become another pin-up. Your shittiness gives way to allow us all to be modestly egotistical. And this right of self is the true enabler of creative confidence. We are shitty in Edmonton, we fight openly on the street, use the inner workings of the bus as gyms,have no restraint. Is there another city that’s as perfectly — I like to think — Springfield? I don’t think it would be acceptable in Calgary to bust out my sand pail and shovel as a busk. Edmonton is an openly judgmental city, which I think affords the level of acceptance found in its return. It’s a satire of 1984, there’s “Trust No One” stickers plastered-incognito in dual tones. An honest city.
It’s the Dawn of the Space Age. When the war on humans isn’t necessarily of tyrannical rulers, but the landscape in North American cities that tell you how to live and how to stand, regardless of the people who live here. I’m tired of stainless steel and granite and modernist tones, I’m not any of these things. The new age design inadvertently leads way to conformity.
I think if I was the only person in the city or even the world, I’d still be influenced by the design of buildings and alike, to live and dress as they say I should. Bland, concrete, transparent.
The landscape defies human resilience, makes mockery of creativity, confined character in districts. Edmonton’s blindness is its gift.
The greatest question — excitement — I’m having when it comes to “solving” urban isolation is trying to identify what that means. I’d like to separate the term from depression, yet the term in itself lends way to feeling. Is the term a myth? What defines urban? I thought at first urban was the amount of people, yet urban isolation can be found in towns — and not due to low population or an assumed reclusivity of towns — and in a room with two people, or maybe a room with just one. And if urban isolation is not people, people’s interactions, and whether it is that we ever find ourselves isolated against our own will, I wonder. Some define it as the environment that is inhuman and inaccessible. Before your block was your entire city, and now the city is the block. I want to define my urban isolation as resulting not from the design of cities, whether it’s functionality or aesthetics, but of the composition ( though I recognize that all three are hand in hand ) .
The colours of objects is what I’m fascinated with foremost and then the chemical composition of technology (chairs, railings, etc). I imagine urban isolation like pointillism. Where each dot is a little tap on the human vessel, and the taps lead way to feeling, and the feelings of the taps come from the colours and chemical composition which subconsciously is the big and I would like to think invisible gear to the equation.
Pointillism is something.
I don’t think government leads way to the end of a nation, it is the colour and composition that builds the people to govern that way, or live that way, as a result of the landscape, as with any decision and choices made throughout a life.
When the city is already built, it’s hard to dream and imagine a social order that does not reflect the way in which the city was built.
Before we have vision we are blind and it is the colours and textures we feel; that allow sight.
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