The Garden in mid-July 2020

New Sculpture on Loyola Campus

The science hub, the new building on the Loyola Campus of Concordia University, includes a recently installed sculpture. I don't know the artist's name or what the sculpture is called (it hasn't been announced), but it is quite imposing and you get an idea of what it might mean when you approach it from a distance. It looks like a "rough beast", almost an invisible man not wrapped in gauze but in striations of aluminum. This is a formidable sculpture, as though an amorphous human body, one arm bent and protruding from the body making it look like it is slouching towards something; standing beside the sculpture it doesn't seem to be anything but a formless mass. I don't see any celebration of science in this sculpture assuming there should be considering it is located between two science buildings (literal me), it is more of a dystopian impression of the new soulless human being that has been manifesting for the last hundred years or so. The sculpture is hollow so you can step inside and looking up you see the blue sky, windows of the new building, and the endless and infinite universe over one's head. These shapes above one's head remind me of work done by Hans Arp, if I remember correctly. The sculpture is actually a very perceptive and accurate image of an aspect of our new world order, one that is both disturbing and disconcerting.

Now I remember what the sculpture reminds me of, it is the Golem from Jewish mythology; this seems appropriate considering the age in which we live. 

And now (09 October 2020) I know the artist's name, it is Marc-Antoine Cote. 

Walking to Meadowbrook Golf Course

I've deleted a rant and substituted the following more reasoned and watered down commentary: most of the trees on this stretch of Cote St. Luc Road have been cut down, this is the road that ends at Meadowbrook Golf Course. The town of Cote St. Luc is about as soulless a suburb as you can find so no wonder they've destroyed this last bit of country-like area; developers won't rest until they've built condos on every square inch of land. There were alternatives to cutting down trees in this area, the best would have been to just leave things as they were. I am not convinced by the signs warning people of falling trees, or if the branch of a tree did fall then does that warrant cutting down most of the trees in this area? Well, folks, we'll see if they plant a single tree for every tree they've cut down which is what they said was their plan.

Now compare the road as it was with my photographs of what it looks like now:

Here is Google Street View over a twelve year period, 2007 to 2019: https://www.google.com/maps/@45.4564534,-73.6684001,3a,75y,208.22h,94.22t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1sY1druHKghkiV9eiUA42kKQ!2e0!5s20070901T000000!7i3328!8i1664

Here is the road today:

Crows in our backyard

The personality of crows

In other words, crows are sociable, independent, proud, and very intelligent.