Sublime angles / Just a trim
Today: Nathan Munn, writer, musician, and author of QUÉBEC; and Brian Hioe, Taipei-based editor, translator, activist, DJ, co-founder of New Bloom, and author of Taipei at Daybreak.
Issue No. 526
Liminal Criminals
Nathan Munn
Snip of Theseus
Brian Hioe
Liminal Criminals
by Nathan Munn
Stretches of empty commercial storefronts and sprawling, forgotten malls. Underground parking structures windowless with silent menace. Dead-quiet industrial parks, soundless under bright blue weekend skies. In East Montreal you can find wondrous constructions dropped from someone’s imagination: hulking, faded Brutalist buildings, retrofuturist half-dreamed playgrounds, architected and conjured and left to seed, revisited decades later by those of us seeking spiritual sensations made real.
In my younger days, I would spend hours wandering the city until I came across such places and landscapes; they gave me a certain feeling I could never get enough of. My spine shivers remembering them. Even today certain places can still set off the feeling that I can only describe as being in the future: tight, twisting stairwells of pure concrete and steel handrail, ceilings severely lined with red extinguisher systems, stairs cubing themselves down storey after storey like a soulless knock-off of a chambered nautilus.
I recently learned that there is a name for these feelings and places: liminal spaces. One dictionary definition: “Intermediate between two states, conditions, or regions; transitional or indeterminate.” Which is not bad, but I prefer this, from Wikipedia: “In anthropology, liminality is the quality of ambiguity or disorientation that occurs in the middle stage of a rite of passage, when participants no longer hold their pre-ritual status but have not yet begun the transition to the status they will hold when the rite is complete.”
That sounds like us, all right.
Keep us breathing fire!
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