MONTREAL FULL OF BRIGHT IDEAS TO CELEBRATE 375TH ANNIVERSARY

Our ‘glowing’ revolution is lighting up buildings, monuments and streets

My nightly view of Mount Royal has spooked me lately, since the mountain’s slopes have been shimmering and flashing with weird hallucinogenic lights.

At first I thought it was a UFO, or the Ghost of Christmas Past or Trump Future. Now I know it’s a giant outdoor light show called Aurores Montréal, to mark the city’s 375th birthday.

The woods are alive with 40 huge projectors that reflect a video off the snow, rocks and trees. It’s literally movie time on Mount Royal, using the mountain as a huge natural screen you can see for miles.

It’s just the latest experiment in our city’s “glowing” revolution. Montreal is lighting up its buildings, monuments and streets, with a new winter motto: Let There Be Light!

We live in a town where nature’s own lighting practically shuts down from November through February — a period I call La Grande Noirceur (the Great Darkness), when the light dies at 4 p.m. and your spirits die, too.

I used to see this as inevitable until I visited Scandinavia several winters ago and came away illuminated. Many cities there routinely light up public buildings, bridges, and streets to make the dark months seem brighter.

They call it Northern lighting — and now at last, it’s spreading here too. Montreal is seeing the light at: MOUNT ROYAL: It turns out the mountain is the biggest piece of potential screen space in town. At 233 metres high and four blocks wide, it could be the world’s largest outdoor IMAX theatre.

The one-hour film they’re projecting now is an artistic “love poem” to the mountain including photos, images and poems by Leonard Cohen. If this monthlong run is successful maybe our mountain can host other movies on special occasions: Miracle on 34th Street at Christmas, horror films on Halloween, Canadiens games on Saturday night.

But I’m not sure how the squirrels and other wildlife would take to living inside Mount Royal Drive-in, unless we just show Bambi. THE QUARTIER DES SPECTACLES: It’s another light show that gets brighter each winter. This year’s spectacle includes rows of huge illuminated hockey pucks, along Jeanne Mance St.

You can sit in them and fiddle with levers to create your own light-and-sound show.

Many buildings in the Quartier have light shows projected right onto them — from a movie history of the Montreal Canadiens to photos of Montreal in its Sin City days — all eerily flickering on highrise walls.

For the coming 375th other city landmarks will be lit up, too, including the Big Owe, the Biosphere and Habitat — so visiting aliens may soon be able to see Montreal from space.

Now that we’re becoming experts at northern lighting, where else could we light up the night? How about:

With the lighting of Montreal’s bridge planned in spring, for once we may be in the forefront of outdoor urban art, not 30 years behind.

CONSTRUCTION LIGHTING: With half our roads ripped up, I sometimes find myself driving down some dark, one-lane detour and don’t realize it’s switched to twoway traffic until I see headlights coming right at me.

That’s because construction warning signs are often lost in the dark. Let’s light up our work zones like a Hollywood set, instead of a graveyard.

Maybe we can electrify our orange cones so they glow in the dark? Or light up our potholes so we see them before landing in them? For a festive touch, let’s illuminate our stop signs too. Instead of right turns on reds, how about bright turns on reds? TRANSPORT: The Eastern Townships Autoroute is darker than a cow pasture on a moonless night, once you pass Brossard. Highway lines are often hidden by snow, so the only light is your headlights.

Metropolitan Blvd. is another cone of darkness that needs brighter overhead lighting like you see routinely on every American highway.

Let’s light up our gloomy métro stations, and bus shelters, too — even our buses, like they do in Latin America where they’re festooned in multicoloured lights.

We could even illuminate our fire hydrants, mailboxes and parking meters. Forget about seizing the day, let’s seize the night!

Finally, there’s the biggest light show of all — the upcoming illumination of the Jacques Cartier Bridge that’s upset many Montrealers. It’s over-priced at $39.5 million, mostly federal funds, but the idea is in keeping with the times. Light is the new black, from Asia through Scandinavia and elsewhere in Europe.

Last week, London green-lit a spectacular $35 million lighting project to bathe its 17 bridges in a river of light along the Thames. It’s called “Illuminated River” and other cities talk of “glowing with the flow” as a hot new trend in city design.

With the lighting of Montreal’s bridge planned in spring, for once we may be in the forefront of outdoor urban art, not 30 years behind.

For now, movie time on the mountain is 5-11 p.m. tonight, with viewing areas on Parc Ave. near Pins, or Mount Royal.

Bring your own popcorn. But watch out for the squirrels.