Just the recent wanderings

About a week and a half ago I went with a couple of friends down to the nude beach on an overcast, drizzly Friday. It was a nice trip. The water was a little cool, but a good opening to the summer season.


Taking the ferry over, first to Ward's Island, and then to Hanlan's point.


This is Blockhouse Bay, where the marina is. It's often full of the most pleasant sailboats.


The boardwalk leading from the grassy area of the park through the screen of trees to the beach...


This is the end of the boardwalk onto the beach. It enters just the clothing side of the fence. Cross the fence and you can really frolic in puris naturalibus al fresco. :)


This is a high dynamic range image compsed of three infrared images of varying exposures (pardon the pun); what I call "HDR IR". This was taken just inside the fence that separated the clothing optional side of the beach (where I'm standing) from the fabric side. The sign warns that you must be dressed on the other side of the fence.


Another HDR IR image. This looks north over the fence towards the Humber Bay.


This is a panorama of the beach, looking south (hi, Rochester!) from about where you enter the nudist side of the divider.


On the way back to the city from the islands. A stereotypical, but I think still lovely, shot of the skyline with a ferryboat in the foreground.


This is where Yonge Street, "the longest street in the world" according to Guinness, actually begins... a couple of yards behind the person standing on the sidewalk are the waters of Lake Ontario.


Looking up Yonge Street from its very beginning. From here, you can drive all the way to the Dakotas, as memory serves. Along this stretch of sidewalk are mileage markers that tell how many kilometres to various Ontarian cities and towns along Yonge Street.

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Last weekend I went down to the Distillery District with a couple of the guys to listen to blues music and drink organic beer. Yeah, it's that kinda town, what can I say. :)


HDR IR image of the Canary Restaurant to be found at Cherry Street (along which we're standing) and Front Street. As I understand it, this corner has been featured in any number of TV shows and movies for its rather authentic 1940s aspect. This restaurant is, amazingly, still a going concern.

An incidental note: I took the photo about five minutes after we were witness to a minor accident at Cherry Street and Eastern Avenue in which an SUV rear-ended a van at the intersection. No real harm done, other than that the van shed about 10 pounds of rust, I nearly shed 5 pounds of brown stuff in my jeans (I was standing less than ten feet from the vehicles at the time), and the guy riding shotgun in the van bailed clutching his neck and yelling "Whiplash!" That at least got a chuckle out of the guy in the SUV. They all seemed to take it pretty well. :)


This is how the downtown looks from Cherry Street, but didn't not that long ago and won't, again, soon. The block was, till lately, an industrial site. It's been torn down to make way for condos. That's the fate of pretty much all the industrial lands downtown over the past 15 years or so. I suppose there are worse fates for a downtown than replacing over-carbonating heavy industry with over-oxygenated Yuppie hothouse flowers...


This is the entrance to the Distillery District on Mill Street (for which a still-resident brewery is named). I'm reliably informed that these gates appeared in the movies Cinderella Man (the looking-for-work scenes) and X-Men (the scene in which Magneto, as a boy in Poland, bends the steel with his mind).


As we entered and made our way down the central drag, we passed the main band shell, where some blues musicians were tuning up. This is an HDR IR image.


This is an HDR IR shot of an alleyway inside the District. It takes three shots to make an image like this; a woman entered the scene in the final shot. She comes out as a ghost in the left foreground. Kinda cool, actually. I still consider it rather ignorant to deliberately enter the field when someone is obviously compositing a photograph, however.


From where we were seated, this was the view of the first live band, who were the self-proclaimed Lester McLean Band. They were just the thing to accompany a warm late spring afternoon and quality brew. :)


Speaking of quality brew, here it is biting the dust.


My friend P-Doug consented to hold still long enough for my infrared camera to collect the requisite three images to compose this HDR IR portrait, which I believe is actually my first.

Mea Gulpa

Well, it had been my intention at the start of the day to go downtown to the Gay Pride Parade and get some shots of the colourful goings-on there. P-Doug said that there was BBQ day going on down at the Distillery District, and we ought to go there first.

Well... we never made it to the parade. Blame it on the beer, the good music, the great weather, the shade.


The star of the show

Where we were sitting, a band was playing really mellow jazz/blues/rock stuff. I don't know for sure what it was, or who they were. We never found out. But they played a fantastic version of Gershwin's Summertime and Cher's Sonny.


The mystery band!

At one point I went for a bit of a wander, and stumbled upon Kevin Clark's Jazz Kitchen. Yup, they were back down at the District, doing the Dixieland. I stood and listened for about ten minutes before heading back to rejoin P-Doug. In the course of it they played Stardust, Go to the Mardi Gras, and Blueberry Hill. Gotta get back down there to sit and listen to these guys!


Kevin Clark's Jazz Kitchen about to start cookin'...

While I was wandering around, I encountered the first Segway dealership in Canada, right down there in the Distillery District. This young woman spoke to me about the model she was demonstrating, which cost (as I recall) $5200 Canadian, and would run 20 km. on a charge. Since that's just shy of my round trip to work and back, it did kind of peak my interest. I don't really have that kind of money to put on something like this, but if I did, I'd seriously consider it. It would take me anywhere between 30-60 minutes to get to work, but I don't think I'd mind it, especially if I were zipping past all the traffic. Sure, I'd look like a geek, but I'd be a moving geek. :) And a moving geek trumps a cool dude sitting in traffic with his thumb up his ass any day.


Let's Segway into a different discussion...

This weekend, the District was featuring various artists. One who really caught my eye was Margaret Rankin, who is a printmaker. She had some really appealing pieces depicting the Gardiner Expressway that, were I well-heeled enough, I would have liked to have had. There were others, though. One that really impressed me and was in my price range was the one below, Blue Bamboo.


Blue Bamboo by Margaret Rankin

We also came across some work by a Russian artist named Marina Verpakhovskaia. She calls her company, or at least her website, Catsfriends.com. I have a particular appreciation for this style of work, which comes from Eastern Europe. For a little over a year in the mid-90s, I worked in computer animation with a pair of Bulgarian artists. The work was done according to their style, and while I can't claim to have really mastered it, I did grow to admire it. There's a different aesthetic about it that makes it immediately distinguisable from Western artwork. I can't exactly put my finger on the difference, but I know it when I see it.


Catsfriends art booth

My eye was drawn to a canvas of a happy looking tabby cat. It must have stood out in the artist's eye as well, because she had several prints of it, and it is the featured image on the small business cards she gave us. I bought the original. It is, she related, a portrait of her own cat, Bart, whom she named for Bart Simpson. I have hung this canvas just inside the door to my apartment.


Bart by Marina Verpakhovskaia

Afterwards, P-Doug and I went back to East York to pick up his wife, G. We all went down to the Danforth to eat at the Pappas Grill. The food there is excellent. G and I each had the pork souvlaki, and P-Doug had the chicken souvlaki. They had desserts (G a white chocolate truffle and P-Doug key-lime pie), but I succesfully fought off temptation for once. I need to do rather more of that. Some of the pictures P-Doug took today with me in them are not exactly what I'd call flattering. It's time to shed the weight I've put back on the past year and a half.

The Distillery District Blues Festival (Belch, part two)

As per the plan, I headed out this morning and linked up with P-Doug at his place, and we drove downtown to take in the Blues Festival at the Distillery District. We got there about quarter after eleven, plenty of time to find a good seat. P-Doug demonstrated an unerring knack for finding a great spot that stayed shaded all day, put us in the front rows, and kept us near the suds. The weather co-operated by pouring a gorgeous breeze off the Lake that, combined with the shade, kept us nicely comfortable despite what I understand was 41 degree Celcius weather with the humidex. That's 106 Fahrenheit to you non-Metric types.


Looking back towards the entrance to the District.

A little downrange of this shot is a sandwich place P-Doug and I always eat at when we're down here called the Brick Street Bakery. (N.B.: at time of writing, their site consists of their address and a note "...site coming soon". But they may eventually have something worth looking at, so I include it as a nod to their good intentions.) Since we didn't want to lose our place, we each went separately. I went first; bought the turkey chili with cheddar. This comes with a couple of slices of their organic bread, robust and chewy; perfect for dunking. I also bought a scone. Scones from this place are bigger than your fist, and they're fantastic. It's like eating a little bit of Scottish cake that's butch enough to kick in the door to The Bread-Only Social Club and demand to be served. P-Doug bought a shepherd's pie and a scone. The irony is, it's a sandwich place, like I said. If you ever find yourself there, check 'em out.

We were surrounded by beer taps. I stood the first round. A couple of little cups, not quite a pint, I'd have to say, cost me twelve bucks. A little steep, but that's the nature of yuppie venues. That one went pretty fast. While we were sitting there letting the music and the breeze pour over us, we noticed a guy buying a pitcher. It had never occurred to either of us that that was an option. P-Doug hopped up and got one. I'm figuring, well, thirty bucks. No way! Eighteen! And we got about five glasses out of it, which cuts the cost-per from $6 to $3.60. Screw buying it by the cup down there anymore. A word to the wise!


Gary Kendall Band.

We sat through the sets of two bands while we were there. The first was the Gary Kendall Band. These guys were good. Downside for them was, they started just after noon, and there was hardly anyone there yet. Upside was, no one was too hot and tired yet, so the applause they got was enthusiastic.


Grant Lyle.

Round about 2PM, Grant Lyle and his band set up. The crowd was getting pretty full by then, especially under the canopy where P-Doug and I were sitting. Maybe I was just getting logy by then, but I didn't think they had the same spark Gary Kendall's band had. The crowd seemed less enthusiastic too. Again, that might have been a function of the heat, but there were also a lot more people to applaud, so... For myself, I found my listening became far less active and more passive. This is not to say I didn't enjoy their music; I did. Just that Kendall's clicked with me more.


Georgette Fry.

At one point during Gary Kendall's set, P-Doug excused himself to go to the washroom. He was gone about 45 minutes. I was wondering if I should call the Coast Guard; did he flush himself into Lake Ontario? Turns out he'd just gone wandering. Came back with a magazine and a CD. So, later on, towards the end of Grant Lyle's set, I decide to do the same. I won't burden you with my speculations as to just what was making the men's room floor so slippery I nearly landed on my keester; I'll just say that I, too, went for a post-piss stroll. I ended up at the main stage where Georgette Fry and her band were playing...


Blues, hell! So happy, they're dancing!

I noticed a couple of young women were up by the stage, dancing, and I couldn't resist taking a few shots of them enjoying themselves. It was one of those rare moments when the American underpinning of the Canadian character pushes through the easily-embarrassed British veneer and says "What the hell." Good for them!


Hope the boss doesn't recognize the back of his head...

Did I mention that we were sitting literally ten feet from one of the bars? We saw an interesting array of people pass by between us and the stage. When P-Doug pointed out this guy's shirt, I just had to get a shot of it. It's a boozy take-off on Green Eggs and Ham of Dr. Seuss fame. Wish I had this shirt. :)

Anyway, by the time the second set was over, around 3:30 or so, I was ready to head out. We headed back to P-Doug's place, got G, and had supper at Shopsy's Deli up at Woodbine and Steeles. P & G dote on the place, but I have to confess, the tuna wrap notwithstanding, I find the fare surprisingly bland and usually a little disappointing, given the prices. The smoked turkey I had this evening ($8.99) was generous, but epicureanistically not at all inspiring. (Okay, I liked the potato salad). Given the tiresome flack we take from Montrealers (including my mother) about how they're the only people in the universe capable of making a smoked meat sandwich worthy of the name, I'd love to be able to take them someplace in T.O. to prove them wrong. Sadly, I think this would be evidence for the defense. But have the tuna wrap; that, they seem to have a real flair for.

Blues and booze

This is a shot of The Boiler Room from September last year.

This weekend, there's a blues festival going on down at the Distillery District. I'm not really up on the blues, but I didn't think I was up on jazz, either. But last summer my buddy P-Doug took me down to the DD and we sat outside The Boiler House here, drinking beer brewed by the Mill St. Brewery just across from this shot, to the right, sweltering in the heat, and listening to Kevin Clark's Jazz Kitchen. Clark was a tall, blondish, bespectacled guy of about 40... not the stereotype for a jazz man. But he was, believe it or not, from Louisianna (he married a Canuck and moved to Toronto), and he's also a chef. His CD has New Orleans recipes on it... P-Doug's tried some, I think. But the music was great. One of his songs, Tom's Jones, about a fellow jazz musician jonesing for Diet Coke, is one of my favourites to listen to. The band's great, and I'm looking forward to seeing them down there this summer over the suds, God willing.

Anyway, this weekend is blues, not jazz. P-Doug's tastes are pretty eclectic; he favours baroque, but jazz, classical, rock, and apparently blues are also in his repertoire. The weather folks are warning us of 40 degree Celcius weather with the humidex; that, and / or thunderstorms. P-Doug's hedging, but that kind of weather's just my cup of tea. If it's warm, and I don't have to be anywhere sitting around right afterwards, I don't mind getting caught in the rain. I think it could be great, to tell you the truth. We'll see how it goes.