Wiley Bowstring bridge, Gorewood Road

Last Saturday for something to do I decided to get out and do an update shot of a 1966 photo I have from the city archives. It's of a concrete bow arch bridge over the Humber River just to the northwest of Toronto's borders, in what's now the Claireville Conservation Area in Brampton.

When the original photo was taken in 1966 (and, by the way, folks at the city archives: you're displaying it backwards; it appears corrected below), the bridge was on what was Peel County's Eighth Line East; as far as I know, it was still so-called at the time. Today, south of Steeles, it's renamed for Finch Avenue, which grew west out of Metro Toronto in the early 80s to turn north and take over the route; up to the bridge it's now called Gorewood Road (though it's closed to traffic about a quarter mile north of the 407); north of the bridge it's Claireville Conservation Road (poetic, that, huh?), and then, finally, north of Hwy 7, it's McVean Drive. Not bad for a little country road that's got so little traffic.

Anyway, I'd been to the bridge before. GoogleMaps is a boon to people looking for sad old closed roads and lost bridges. This one, I've discovered recently, was built in 1924, was referred to (for reasons that current elude me) as "Wiley Bowstring Bridge", and served into the 1960s when it was (I suppose) closed as the regional authority turned the place into conservation land. I was at the bridge a few summers ago and wandered a bit of the treed plain beyond. Discovering the 1966 photo was a jaw-dropper; there are nearly no trees immediately near the bridge or beyond it 1966. By the early years of this century, they had really closed in around it, as you'll see.

 

The bridge can be seen from the crest of the hill above it. But the 1966 shot was taken from beside the road (evident from the fact you can see the outside of the bridge), and from above (the top of the bridge is below the horizon line). As I approached the bridge, I began to despair of duplicating the shot. As with many others I've tried, the intervening years have filled the original photographer's perch with trees, brush, or sometimes new construction. In this case, it was trees. To match the shot, I had to leave the road and climb a slippery, grassy slope. I'm usually in sandals in summer and I learned long ago the best way to deal with this is to take them off. Even so, to match the shot, I had to stand on a slope that constantly threatened to send me sliding down into a ditch twenty feet below. I had to pick my way through a lot of underbrush but I finally reached a spot that approximated, but didn't exactly match, that of my predecessor... I was about a foot too low and a yard too far to the right, thanks to a tree that had grown up in the meantime and refused to make way for me even for a few seconds. Still, not a bad match, though I say so myself, especially given that I had no visual cues from the west side of the bridge to work with.

Getting down was about as tricky as getting up. At one point, I stepped onto something rather sharp that penetrated the sole of my right foot just back of the fourth and fifth toes. I made a face and gave a grunt; I've learned to manage this kind of thing (I remember well stepping on a thorn once on the Humber Valley Heritage Trail just as I was lining up a shot of a deer and stifling the yelp... still missed the shot). I put my sandals back on as I reached the gravel road again and I could feel the blood making my foot stick to the sandal as I wandered over the bridge a couple of minutes later. Ah, but it's like jellyfish stings if you live by the sea... it's part of the price of enjoying summer and you get used to it. Didn't bother me more than a minute or two.

Coming back up the hill from the bridge, I took a shot from the lip all the way down the road. Between a quarter and a half a mile away, you can see first the bridge of the 407 over Gorewood Road, and beyond that, the intersection of Finch and Steeles Avenues.

While I was driving up Gorewood, I noticed that all the houses—every single one of them—seemed to be abandoned and boarded up. People were quite comfortably living there the last time I was at the bridge a few years ago. I don't have any idea why they would have sold out as a block. House listings suggest they're being sold as houses... but that doesn't explain why everyone left at the same time. That they seem to be being sold under power of sale suggests to me that maybe they were bought up en masse by someone with a plan for the whole strip (the houses are all on the west side; there are none now on the east, if there ever were), bought them all up, and then the project fell through, so the investors are left with about a dozen homes, priced in the $500K-600K range. Anyway, it occurred to me that they just might be on the way to consignment to history, so I thought I'd walk the length of the street and record what they looked like from the street. This time next year, these lots just might be scrub land again.

Movie review: Inception

This is a review of the movie Inception. It contains plot spoilers. If things like this can ruin your movie experience and you haven't seen the movie yet and intend to, please don't read any further.

I saw the movie Inception on Simcoe Day and my feelings about it are mixed, and, I confess, on the whole, negative. I'll start off by saying it's a tour de force, visually pleasing and even stunning without ever being over the top. It's well-acted and I had no problems with the cast (although I have to wonder why the inestimable Michael Cane appears for all of two minutes in the movie, only to essentially vanish utterly afterward... a cameo? Did Christopher Nolan owe someone a favour?). It's intricate and complicated and requires that you pay attention; despite that, it did not seem overly long, as such movies often do. It features a highly intriguing plot device: new technology that enables people to share a mutual dreamscape. But for me, the movie suffers from a forced premise and a moral vacuousness I found disturbing.

Roger Ebert calls it "a breathtaking juggling act", which I find apt because that's exactly how I was characterizing the plot to myself as I left the theatre. If that kind of thing in and of itself impresses you, this is definitely a movie for you. But I need more: I need for the plot devices and suspension of disbelief to hold together or I tend to bail. And in this "juggling act", I was seeing too many strings. A lot of the juggling was really yo-yo work masquerading as juggling. What I mean is, there was too much special pleading in the movie. I'll come back to this. But I've seen movies like this before that manage their precepts much more adroitly and don't require special pleading to move forward. It's been achieved by Guy Ritchie nigh-flawlessly in Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels, and somewhat more sloppily in Snatch, and with a terrifyingly nightmarish reality by Scott Raimi in A Simple Plan. Inception falls short of those high water marks.

In some senses, it tells something of the same story as The Matrix, inasmuch as it's about making choices about what kind of reality you want to subscribe to and how dreams and waking states can influence each other in complicated ways, and to which it compares favourably because it does so in ways that aim higher than getting 12-year-old boys to croon "coooool!" from the front row; it's a far more mature and believable exploration of the idea. In other ways, it tells something of the same story as Brainstorm, in that it examines the ramifications of technologies that enable humanity to finally open and manipulate the black box of personality and experience. But here Inception compares unfavourably, because Brainstorm follows a narrative that's far more natural, believable, human, and—most distinctively of all—has a moral centre utterly lacking in Inception.

Special pleading

In discussions I've had with theists on the nature of things, I've become aware of a flawed process of logic often used in religious matters called special pleading. Essentially it's aimed at insisting that certain rules or preconditions crucial to other logical arguments can be ignored in cases where someone needs them not to apply. For example:

Theist: Where did everything come from, if God didn't create it? It couldn’t just have created itself.

Atheist: Well, then, where did God come from? Did he just create himself? If not, who created him? And who created that creator? And so on...?

Theist: God's different; he's just always existed.

Atheist: Why couldn't the universe just always have existed in some form then, and never required a creator?

Theist: Because everything that exists has a beginning.

Atheist: Well, you say God exists. Therefore, doesn't he have a beginning?

Theist: I told you; God's just always existed.

...at which point, the argument typically circles back and becomes a loop of theistic illogic. This is special pleading: rules don't apply because some aspect of the argument fails if they do. This kind of thing happens in a number of places in Inception.

Nolan spends the first quarter of the movie layering on The Rules of How Dreams and Extraction Work (in spirals I found almost comically similar to Capt. Kirk explaining the rules of "fizbin" to the gangsters in the Star Trek episode A Piece of the Action), and then uses, abuses, or ignores them as required by the plot. You know when they spend the first couple acts of the movie just laying out the ground rules, concept is being sacrificed for the sake of Keen Plot Stuff to Come Later. Instances of special pleading that bothered me were:

• Saito's imaginary wound and that awful imaginary French song are factors all the way down, from dream level to dream level, but the disturbances in gravity due to an imaginary van falling backwards into imaginary water only factor in one other level, where it was clearly set up to allow for a lot of visually cool zero-G fighting. But where the zero-G fighting would have been inconvenient (try shooting that outside a snow fortress), the effect somehow failed to trickle down. Special pleading.

• Projections of Cobb's mind kept showing up in other people's dreams, with no explanation. We're just expected to accept that they're there because he's on screen. Shouldn't they have been the freaked out bugbears of whosever dream they were actually in, instead? Special pleading.

• If getting Fischer to accept a little idea whispered in his ear was such a big deal, why was it no big thing at all to get him to accept as a natural part of his own dream an entire mountainside and a snow fortress  designed by doe-eyed co-ed? (Fischer even blames himself at one point for not dreaming of a beach instead!) Why didn't that set off this carefully-honed dream bullshit detector we've been assured that everyone has, upon which the whole premise hangs? And if it didn't, why wouldn't Cobb have been able to walk up to Fischer in the first dream and just go, "Wooo, I'm the ghost of your conscience, sell your companies off, woooooo!!"? Special pleading.

• Everyone runs around the second half of the movie under threat of madness caused by apparent decades in the "limbo" of Cobb's mind (why his mind, particularly, especially if the dreamer changes at each level?) because the drug required to pull this off conveniently precludes simple waking. And yet, when Saito "dies" and quite obviously does spend the equivalent of decades growing old in the limbo of Cobb's subconscious (which turns out to be a well-appointed house with oaken rooms beside a beach; not quite the hellish purgatory we'd been led to expect), he wakes up none the worse for wear on the plane and reaches for his phone instead of clawing his eyes out and screeching in unimaginable madness as we'd been assured he would, with a brain turned to mush and all. I guess it would have strained his credibility when he called up the State Department or whoever to have Cobb's record expunged and demanded to talk to the Chief High Pink Elephant. So, special pleading.

• The bête noire of the movie, Cobb's (frankly detestable) wife Mal, is not really Mal at all. She's nothing more than a figment of his imagination manifesting on the one hand his yearning for what he's lost, and on the other his guilt for what he did (this seems to be the only morally redeeming thing about the character of Cobb whatsoever, by the way; not that he learns a single thing from it). And yet "she" (and remember, "she" is really "him") is surprised to learn that Cobb implanted the idea in her head that proved fatal. But as a part of his mind, and one generated at least in part by a sense of guilt out to torture him, this projection of Mal would know that. She knows everything else about his motivations and desires, and even minutiae like the layouts of mazes he plans. It makes no sense at all that she would not know something that looms so large in Cobb's mind as the root cause of her suicide, since it's his guilt for causing it that gives rise to "her" in the first place. Special pleading.

• It's given to us that Fischer is highly aware of the process of dream extraction (think freight train). And yet, that the guy on the plane sitting right behind him, and whom he sees in the airport after the dream, is also the one he sees in his dream conspicuously guiding and manipulating him doesn't seem to be an issue, either to him or to Cobb himself. How dumb is Fischer? How much does Cobb trust his luck? Special pleading.

The moral vacuum

Inception is a movie utterly devoid of a moral compass. In a sense, it's a retelling of The Invasion of the Body Snatchers... where we're being asked to cheer for the Body Snatchers. At the heart of this movie is this: people gain the ability to hotwire and fundamentally change an aspect of the personality of another human being against his will, to their colossal benefit and against his own interests, and the movie rewards them for it.

This is a monstrous idea. I wanted to see these people fail, suffer for attempting it, and learn from it. None of that happened. Jan Egelson got away with this kind of thing in A Shock to the System (starring Michael Cane, ironically) by making the protagonist a deeply sympathetic character; it was a rare instance of cheering for the bad guy because he wasn't really a bad guy. But the people in Inception have virtually no sympathy for others and essentially no deeper humanity about them, other than their own self-interests. Any reptile capable of speech could have carried this plot.

• Early in the movie, Cobb, Arthur, and a man named Nash are working on Saito. It goes wrong, and they end up caught. But for some reason, Nash is hauled away to a fate unknown (but assumed to be death) while Cobb and Arthur are essentially free to walk away, supposedly thanks to Saito. (First of all, this strikes me as unlikely. Nash was just the guy who designed the mazes. Taking it out on him but not the masterminds is like bursting armed to the teeth into the offices of a newspaper that slandered you and blowing away the crossword puzzle guy, but tipping your hat the editor and publisher as they stroll out the door for a four-martini lunch.) Neither Cobb nor Arthur so much as raises an eyebrow about it, or even a tsk-tsk-tsk. I don't know about you, but if Saito were asking me for my singular skills, the first condition I would have made was, "Alright, but get on the phone right now and get our buddy off the hook." But no, not a word. They didn't even try. Even if the answer had been no, they were obliged as human beings to make some kind of effort, and they didn't. So right off the bat they started losing me. Why should I waste emotional capital investing it in these remorseless bloodsuckers?

• Relatedly, when Ariande realized that Cobb had these demons that were a dire and direct threat to the team, two moral failings were revealed. First of all, that Cobb was, again, ready to put his friends through hell (remember, at the time, we were assured anyone who "died" in the dream was fated to torture unto madness in "limbo") in the hopes of getting what he wanted. Secondly, that Ariande, instead of being horrified and revealing this to the others so they could make an informed choice, kept it to herself and merely periodically badgered Cobb to tell them, like Ann Landers or some other agony aunt. Why would she do that? Why was respecting his right to privacy (the ultimate irony, given the nature of the movie) more important than the right to sanity of a half a dozen other, deliberately-deceived people?

• It's also related to us that in real life, Cobb's wife Mal committed suicide to "wake up", believing even the real world to be a dream thanks to Cobb's interference with her fundamental character. Aware of how the dreaming world works, the logic of it would lead such a person to say to the other, "Alright, you don't believe it's a dream. That's fine; I'll simply jump off the ledge and wake myself up, and when I do, I'll just roll over and wake you up, too. See you in a minute...", and then jump. Mal would obviously know that. Instead, the movie tells us that, for no logical reason whatsoever, this soul vampire of a woman, thrice-pronounced sane, decides to frame the man she supposedly loves for murder, costing him his family and his freedom if he doesn't bend to her will and jump too. Why would a loving spouse mentally torture the other in the full knowledge that, if she's right, she'll be waking him up herself in ten seconds anyway? Again, the message is that the rights and considerations of others are utterly dispensable and you're right to use whatever means available to force others to do what you want.

Worst of all is what's being done to Fischer. He is changed against his will, and becomes the tool of the will of another. That the movie gives him a cookie in the form of a fake catharsis (that is, after all, itself simply the sugar coating on a form of suicide pill) does not excuse what's being done to him. He goes to sleep on the plane a free man, and wakes up loving Big Brother. And we're meant to applaud this as a skillful accomplishment.

Consider this. The act that ruins Cobb's life, costs him his wife, his children their mother, and his wife her discernment and finally her very existence, is the very same one he chooses to get his freedom back. Forcing his will on a person he loved, to expedite getting what he wanted, destroyed her. And yet, he's ready, willing, and able to do it to someone else, again, as a shortcut to getting what he wants. Despite the death of the woman he loved, other people remain tools to achieve his desires, even unto slavery. Epiphany: none; moral and spiritual growth of protagonist: none. How is it possible not to despise this man, and his all-too-willing cohorts?

What was done to Fischer was very much like deliberately passing someone a computer virus; the movie even points that out, but fails to follow that through to its moral conclusion: it exists simply as a means to explain the process to the audience, and in spite of it costing Mal her life, is never mapped out as territory that should not be trespassed, ever. Fischer's "Rosebud" moment with his father isn't even worthy of a comparison, because it's an illusion; it's nothing more than his own interpretation of a poisonous splinter pressed into his mind to fester; magic worked against his own free will. We have no idea what Fischer's father's opinion of him actually was, and neither does Fischer. Would the audience have been accepting of an outcome in which Fischer's conception of his father had, instead, compelled him to sell his companies off and then blow his brains out? Effectively, the results for the team would have been the same: Saito would have gotten what he wanted, Cobb would have gotten what he wanted, the other members would have gotten what they wanted (money, presumably). Again, Fischer was expendable; they didn't care what happened to him as long as he performed as programmed. The movie gives him a "happy" ending to assuage the consciences of the audience, and the protagonists (assuming they have any, which I doubt). In this, too, I think it lets us down.

How is what was done to Fischer in any way different from locking a man in a room full of laughing gas, getting him to sign away everything he owns to you, and then leaving him there for the rest of his life? Why are we asked to endorse this, and cheer that people get away with it?

I wanted them to fail. I wanted Fischer to smell a rat and have them arrested. I wanted Cobb to spend the rest of his life pining for the children whose mother his tinkering destroyed. I wanted Saito to wake up mad for daring to steal the mind of his legitimate competitor. I would have applauded the movie as a cautionary tale with an eye to the future if it had had the moral strength to do this. But no. The movie turns Fischer into a slave, and rewards his captors handsomely.

To sum up

In the end, overall, I was disappointed because the movie was a great concept hijacked by a James Bond movie. Instead of starting with an idea (a new ability to share a dreamscape) and seeing where it naturally leads, Nolan has taken that idea, married it to a preconceived end, and then hammered, sawed, and welded in into something awkward to suit that purpose. Extraneous characters and rules and exceptions to rules are larded on to fit the needs of an action flick—and not one that grew organically from the original concept, but was shoehorned in.

It's worth seeing, but I don't think it's exceptional. But it could have been.

Pork, peanuts, plunges, and pique, Part II

I got this response regarding my recent post, Pork, peanuts, plunges, and pique, in email from P-Doug mid-week. He's consented to let me post it as a follow-up and the other side of the story. :)

* * * * *

As for my return trip to Otterwa, you got the details right.  You were right to stay with the car.  I was totally ticked off at my own lack of focus in forgetting the keys that accompanying me would have been an exercise in Buddha-level tranquility.  I was almost grinding my teeth in frustration at myself but, since I was the one to screw up, it was only up to me to make the return trek and learn the life lesson involved.  The real problem was that the sun was setting just as we discovered what I had (not) done.  The other problem was that, by the time I got back to the curve in the road, I realized that I had no insect repellent on me (it was also in the fanny pack) so this was going to be a trip without long pauses.  I cinched the straps on my sandals tight and headed off.

Once into the woods, my eyes adjusted to the gloom but it was pretty obvious that this trip was going to have to be done within the next 30 minutes or I was going to be in some trouble.  Slogging up the hill at full bore was no fun (barefoot, you’d never be able to keep up with me) but the decent on the other side was a matter of running downhill like some fat Heidi heading for a mud bath of warm chocolate while missing the patches of thistle.

The situation really hit me when I got down to the ridge of pine trees between the field and the river.  It was so dark that I could see the trees but not the layout of the ground.  It took a moment before I gave up trying to find the route down and just went for the falling-from-tree-to-tree method.  That got me down to the riverbank swamp where I double-checked each foot fall so as to not suddenly sink up to my hips again.  By the time I was slip-sliding my way across the river rocks to the far side, I was swearing in entire paragraphs (Jonny Rotten is right, anger is an energy).  Finally found the fanny pack which was a black thing fallen into black bushes, double-checked I still had my keys and turned around to face the 400 foot climb of the return trip.  I knew at that point, staring at the now-dark woods, that I had to do this in one shot.

The fields were not too bad.  There was plenty of glow in the sky to see the foliage and lay of the land.  It was just that, with the bugs gathering, I didn’t have time to be too fussy in my path.  If I ran into thistle, too bad.  Just deal with it.  The woods were different.  It took a while before your eyes adjusted to the gloom but the delay allowed me to half-catch my breath.  By the time I got to the top of the hill again. I was making wheezing noises like Jackie Gleason in a marathon and looked like I’d just skydived through a canopy of trees.  Needless to say, as I walked up the yellow line of Humber Station Road, I almost had spirals for eyes from the adrenalin.

When I didn’t see you at the car, I was rather puzzled.  I know that you would not have wandered off but your absence made me instantly uneasy.  If you WERE gone, what could be the reason?  I can’t say I was thinking utterly rationally but I was looking around with almost feral intensity.  When you suddenly rose out of the grass, I almost leapt backwards into the road.

As for flinging $3 out the window, I fully claim my Scottish heritage. It was a matter of priorities.  I needed to get home and swallow a handful of antihistamines before the adrenalin wore off.  When I sat down, my leaping back out again wasn’t an act.  The welts on me literally felt like I was sitting on barbwire.  I couldn’t tell with the lack of light but I figured I might be heading for a major immune reaction (thankfully, that wasn’t the case). Besides, no offence for your hunger, which was a real thing, but I figured it would be about 10:15pm before I got back to East York.  And, yeah, you’d still be there if you’d got out of the car.  8^)

Back home, after grabbing a shower, I certainly caught G's eye.  My left side didn’t have a nick on it but my right side, especially my leg, was a map of scars.  I don’t remember it but I must have had a butt-kicking session with a patch of thistle because my one side was a patchwork of lacerations.  But not a single mosquito bite.  Nothing, not a single itch.  Strange.

The Dead "Blow-It" Society

This Jeremy thing raised other issues for me on the theme of suicide. The one that's on my mind now is the way the movie The Dead Poet Society ends.

That movie came out in 1989, just after I graduated high school, so I was still pretty fresh to that experience and I related on a very visceral level.  I saw it with friends, other creative guys who like to write, and it struck a lot of chords with us. But I felt then, and feel even more strongly now, that the device of Neil's suicide in the movie turned it into a maudlin shadow of the triumph it might have been; that every expectation earlier in the movie demanded it should have been. The movie would have been greatly improved if the powerful build-up to Neil's suicide had only seemed to be that: if he had sat down and written a long note, leading the audience to fear that was his intention, but instead had run away to pursue his dreams... that would have been a much better way for the movie to end. All the same things could have happened: the pressuring of the other boys by their authorities, the firing of Mr. Keating, the powerful affirmation of (most of) his students at the end... but it could have been capped with a wonderful scene at the very end with Neil, five or ten years later, tromping the boards on Broadway in some middling role, only to meet up with Mr. Keating backstage. We could have had a movie that told teenagers not to bend in the face of adversity to their dreams and ambitions. Instead we got one that said don't strive, don't plan, don't bide your time: if they don't understand you, if you don't get what you want right away, kill yourself. Then they'll be sorry. Then they'll love and appreciate you. Well, every teenager in the world is born with that already hardwired into them. Did we really need this movie's ending to re-enforce that?

I always loved the first two thirds of that movie, despite its low-key pomposity. But for me, the last third puts the lie to everything Keating was saying in the most fundamental way possible. I'm amazed that writers who get paid millions couldn't see that.

Kindle win(dle)

Now that I'm taking the subway to work instead of driving I have a lot more time for reading; basically an hour-and-a-half to two hours a day in transit and down in the food court at lunch time. I've probably read more fiction in the past three months than in the past three years, sorry to say.

A friend of mine where I used to work had a Sony ebook reader. I always thought it was pretty snazzy, and I wanted one, but not in any practical sense. When was I going to use it? But just lately I've been catching the bug again. A couple of times I've finished a book in the middle of the day and been caught short. It would be nice to have the next vine to grab hold of when I'm swinging along. So I thought I'd look into it.

For a variety of reasons, which are largely just personal preferences, I settled on Amazon's Kindle 2. They have a DX version that's jazzier but it's more than I need and it's on the large side. So, techno bargain hunter that I've always been, I started looking around on Craigslist and Kijiji. On the latter, I came across an offer so fresh its eyes hadn't opened yet. A fellow in Unionville had won a Kindle 2 on a business trip and decided he didn't need it, so he'd take the windfall as cash and pass along some savings to someone at the same time. Amazon sells the Kindle 2 for $189 (technically at a slight loss, I think, to get folks buying ebooks), but he was offering his, unused, for $150. I replied PDQ, figuring I was probably already way down the line, but as it turned out, I was first, and I snagged it. No tax, no waiting for shipping.

So, I've registered it with my Amazon account and now the search for free, or cheap, books begins. :) There's also the wonderful resource of the Toronto Public Library, whose ebook catalog grows all the time. I was delighted, almost beyond words, to discover the Kindle is permanently online, for free, on the Whispernet system, so I can look things up on Wikipedia easily, and even check my email (though responding by thumb-typing will be done on an only-when-absolutely-necessary basis). It also plays music, audio books, and can even read books with a computer voice.  All in all, it's pretty impressive.

See, now I know I'm getting old, because they're not just coming up with stuff I've been waiting for, but stuff I didn't even really imagine. What's next, horseless carriages?

Jeremy

I guess I'm not very good with lyrics.

I've always kind of liked the song Jeremy by Pearl Jam, but I never knew the story behind it. I didn't know it was about a boy who killed himself in front of his class until just today, though apparently the incident that prompted the song happened about twenty years ago now. I had always assumed quite the opposite from the character of the lyrics; that this was a song about a kid who was bullied and finally stood up for himself and made everyone back off. I mean, the repeated line "Jeremy spoke in class today" suggested nothing to me so much as this person telling everyone else what's what, and impressing the singer who self-identifies as one of the boy's tormentors. I had always thought of the song as something of a pat on the back to someone who'd finally centred himself; it's troubling to find out it's really about someone destroying himself in public, in front of other young people. The song is deeper and darker now, perhaps even more significant, but all in all, I preferred my own take on it.

"Too stark"

As we wait for the subway to pull away, the bald man with the close-cropped beard is telling us all, through the woman he's technically solely addressing, that "Ansel Adams is this famous American photographer" and that "I really don't like his work. It's too stark." This is, apparently, in response to questions arising from the news on the front page of the free transit daily that 65 glass plate negatives have been authenticated as being from Adams's early career, long since considered lost in a fire, and valued at approximately $200 million dollars. All for 45 bucks ten years ago in a garage sale; about 70¢ a plate for things worth over $4 million each. I should be marvelling at the fickleness of fate, wondering at the artistic glories the world has recovered, thrilling to the acumen of the owner who has done both humanity and himself a great service. And I do. But mostly, above all, I can't help thinking that somewhere in the world there's a guy buying 45 dollars worth of shotgun shells with which to blow his brains out.

Looking east to 401/404-DVP interchange

Looking east to 401/404-DVP interchange
Originally uploaded by Lone Primate

View faces east from Don Mills Road towards 404/DVP interchange with the 401.

401 journey

401 journey
Originally uploaded by Lone Primate

Time lapse from Feb. 10, 2008.

Hwy 401 at rush hour

Hwy 401 at rush hour
Originally uploaded by Lone Primate

The view faces west from the Don Mills Road bridge over the 401 towards first Leslie Street (the ramps at the bottom) and Bayview Avenue beyond (where the pretentious "Manhattan"-style condos can be seen).

Kudos to Ford

I read this morning that Ford is about to start selling the hybrid version of one of its cars at the same price as the gasoline version. Mind you, it's $35K luxury car, a particular model of the Lincoln, but still. This could be a trend-setter. If Ford starts doing this with more modestly-priced cars, the eco-crowd is going to flock to their banner, and that can only influence the other car manufacturers. So kudos to you, Ford, for being the first (as well as for keeping your hand out of the stimulus jar).

Nite thot jots

I keep a little notepad inside the drawer of my night table to record ideas I come up with in dreams, or while falling asleep or while waking up. It's to record ideas that strike me as profound (rare), potentially useful in writing (occasional), or simply so asinine they're funny (frequent). Time to air out the "night thoughts" from approximately the last two years... :)
-----------

• When a man reaches my age, he leaves behind everything but reason and contempt.

• the plaintiff wail of the anal harmonica

• "Lumps of Beer" (pub)

• For some reason I can't explain
  I'm up in orbit abusing Tang

• I don't know the speed of my own skate key
  Skate Keys for Barefoot Animals

• Book review by John Lennon: "Don't quote me on that; I'm dead."

• We believe what we know.

• "Who in their right mind would fuck a band called 'Get Chuck'?"

• Fixer Menbinder Jones

• Throw your farts!

• I turned, by necessity, from murderer to snake princess.

• Pull-chain to the stars

• Buntman, armed with a vast array of appliances and useful kitchen utensil! Garnishing his efforts like a sprig of parsley is Borin', whose crime-fighting powers consist entirely of stating the obvious.

• Roger Omlette, ace mess pilot and devil-may-care frying fool, who, when he takes a crouton energy pill, giving him the elan of 20 Frenchmen for a period of 20 seconds, defeats his foes by compelling them to puke.

• Informational Madness

• Beyond the Machine

• With pockets full of Cream of Wheat, I would surely never know hunger... and yet, I was naked.

• A calm without much natural parallel. It must have been profound.

• I SMOKE WOOD

• NIGHTMARE EMERGENCY SHAVER KIT: If you wake up and your mustache is gone, you'll know it was real

• About six billion people took a dump today... where did it all go?

• Living means never having to say you're dead.

• Death means never having to say

• Bogart Backwash

• All the Groovy Ideas

• Bob Dylan's "Why Don't the Beatles Just Fuck Off?"

• The Real Ballbusters

• The Wunderbar World of Hitler

• Knock knock
  Who's there?
  Eddie Murphy.
  Eddie Murphy who?
  How soon they forget.

• Bunnicula! Have YOU a carrot for him to suck??

• It's as though someone constructed a box from all angles, and THEN looked inside...

• Planet Mars Minus One

• I swear he's been waiting years for science to come up with a skull-extraction procedure so that he'll never be at risk of smiling again

• [to: Raindrops Keep Fallin' On My Head]
  Assholes keep jumpin' outta planes
  And next thing you know Iraq is goin' up in flames
  Who's to fuckin' blame?
  Lame!

• Lead drops keep shootin' from my gun
  And splashin' a guy who weighs a half a metric ton
  Said my wife was "fun"
  Scum!

• There aren't enough hours in the day for me to hate you.

• I want a life bereft of assholes except my own.

• Do all you right-wingers start the day with a heapin' helpin' of Batshit Crisp? What a waste of good milk and a bowl it is when you spend all day just puking it into each other's ears anyway. "More Batshit Crisp, honey?" "No, pass the Moron Flakes, or FOXNews might stop making sense to me." (The original name was FUCKSnooze, because aside from pounding down Big Macs, those are about the only activities its viewership can manage. They just changed the name because they didn't want to be caught telling even one truth by the FCC.)

Pork, peanuts, plunges, and pique

I'd thought about going up to Kettleby and photographing the place on the weekend and sent an email to P-Doug on Thursday to that effect, but P-Doug fired a suggestion off to me at exactly the same moment... it was creepy-weird; his email was waiting for me when I hit the Send button. His suggestion entailed going out to the annual ribfest in Victoria Park in Kitchener, stopping at Piccard's Peanuts, and maybe visiting Otterwa if there was time on the way back. The ribfest is a once-a-year event, and presumably Kettleby will be there for a while, so it was pretty clear to me his suggestion trumped.

He picked me up around 10 and we headed west on the 401. The traffic was moving, but it was busy all the way. I guess there's hardly ever a time now when the 401 isn't busy.

We stopped in Cambridge and looked around a retail outlet that used to be some kind of factory; it was nicely refurbished sometime in the 90s, I guess, and now houses the kind of stores that yuppies are drawn to. In our particular case it was a clothing store that sells brand name items at reduced prices. While I was there, I heard a song on the radio I really wanted to find, but promptly forgot everything about (melody, lyrics, any hint of the name of the band) and was left only with an itch I can't scratch now, unless I happen to stumble across that song again. That's extremely frustrating. It's like one of those zits that's nowhere near the surface and you can't do a thing about it... I seem to get more and more of those as I get older.

Anyway, we got to Kitchener about 12:30 or so. P-Doug had brought folding chairs so we wouldn't have to sit in awkward ways under the trees this year. We also brought several cameras and decided to casually record the event for posterity. Nothing major or important, just one of those "how life was in the 2010s" kind of things. By and large, these consisted of candid shots of People Who Look Faintly Ridiculous. That's said in the full knowledge that we may end up in such a collection ourselves for all the same reasons.

From Dr. Seuss's unreleased manuscript, Pimp a Wimp.

A number of Ontario's microbreweries had set up shop there and for $20 I got a small souvenir glass for the beer samples and eight tokens, which I split with P-Doug. In the course of the afternoon we tried a few things, but about half our tokens went to Nickel Brook's Green Apple Pilsner (in my estimation, probably second only to Innis and Gunn, imported from Scotland as the best beer I've ever had). It's one of the most delightful beers I know of. Naturally, the LCBO has discontinued it, which means driving to Burlington if we ever want to pick any up from now on.

P-Doug picked up a 1/3 rack of ribs from the Boss Hog's exhibition. These guys were up from somewhere waaay down south. They were wearing shirts with "01" on the back (which those of us over 35 will recognize as a reference to the General Lee from The Dukes of Hazzard), and would occasionally draw attention by sounding a fanfare horn that played the first dozen notes of "Dixie". We had three ribs each and yeah, their sauce was pretty good.

But me, I came for the pulled pork sandwich. When I was my turn, I went to a crew from New York called Fire Island. Now, with a name like that, I would have expected their sauce to have a real kick to it (either that or be gay). It was actually a honey garlic sauce. I also got us their baked beans and mashed potatoes; the former were possibly the best I've ever had, and the latter had chunks of potato skin in it, a real first for me. The sandwiches were satisfying but, unfortunately, not really spicy. Ah, well.

I guess it was about quarter after four when we left. P-Doug wanted to get to Piccard's Peanuts to pick up some stuff for his missus before it closed, guessing that would be about five-ish. On the way back to the car, I paused to get a shot of a pioneer's house, fretting out loud about whether we could spare the time. The shot took, of course, slightly over two seconds to set up and take, after which we laughed all the way to the car about how disgusted James Salmon would be with how all the art and nuance had been drained from photography by modern technology; two seconds on a whim to do something that probably would have required most of a minute for him to set up and frame, and serious deliberation as to whether the shot was worth the film.

We got to Piccard's Peanuts in plenty of time and for once in my life I didn't spend a cent there. On our way in, some family was gathered on the porch and consoling some little girl while one them, in a surprisingly adult voice, was taunting (a la Eddie Murphy) "you don't have no ice cream..." I whispered to P-Doug on the way in "The Asshole Family's road trip vacation". By the time we left, the girl had been mollified... probably by ice cream.

We took the backroads across to Bolton where Otterwa is. The last two times we were there we were sharing the place with anglers. The first time was at the end of the summer in 2008; we completely ignored the place in 2009 as we explored other places. A few weeks ago we decided to go back. We made our way through the brush, down the hills, through the mucky swamp at the bottom, crossed the river to the sandy landing, only to spot a fresh cigarette on the shore.  And literally within one minute of our arrival, two guys with fishing rods came out of the field. We milled around for a bit and realized the day was theirs, so we headed back and just hung out on the hilltop over the road for a while before heading off for the consolation prize of beer and burgers.

This time we were arriving very late in the day. I had some misgivings about the hour and our ability to find our way back out as the sunlight faded (Otterwa is not an easy place to get to... unless you have a fishing rod, apparently), and I wondered if Glasgow might not be a more likely choice, given its proximity to the road, but I kept them to myself. Really, Glasgow's a poor excuse for the pocket Eden of Otterwa.

It was about seven or so when we parked the car. Since May last year, I've started occasionally challenging myself on these hikes by leaving my sandals behind in the car and leaving myself no recourse to them at all, and for the first time at Otterwa I decided to do that and go barefoot the whole way in and out. Asphalt and gravel aren't the obstacles they once were; I'm kind of proud of that. We headed down the road and into the trees, and made our way for the umpteenth time to Otterwa. At the swampy base of the hill, P-Doug sank his right leg in almost to the hip. The only way to extricate himself without ruining his clothes was with my help. Immediately afterward, I stepped over a fallen log by the river and sunk in past my knee myself.

I stepped into the river and it was like tea that had been left out to cool for half an hour. There was still a lingering warmth to it; it was very comfortable. Far warmer than Lake Ontario when we were down at Cherry Beach a few weeks ago. We crossed over to the landing and found, yet again, evidence of a recent visitor; deep boot prints in the sand that had to have been made that day. But, it was pretty clear by then that the guy wasn't around, and even if he was, I wasn't overly bothered. We stripped off and got in the water and channeled good old Walt Whitman. :)

Last year P-Doug happened across a couple of watertight camera bags and he picked them up for me. I put one to the test with the G9, and for the first time, I videoed underwater there in the river. It worked spectacularly. The bare, rusty-coloured rocks on the Humber bed reminded me of nothing so much as photos of Mars. I could see minnows darting around, avoiding our feet; the silt bloom out when I stepped or brushed it from the fallen tree trunks. I've been dying since last year to do that. I want to try it again in other places.

My first ever underwater video.

I was also worried the mosquitoes would be a problem but I didn't hear the whine of the first one till we were approaching the swampy lip of the river, and even then it wasn't so bad. And at first, while we were in the water, they left us alone. I was sitting near the bank and they began to pester me so I moved out to the centre. But as the sun sank lower, they got bolder, until at last most of our time in the water was taken up with keeping our shoulders submerged and warning each other off about impending landings. That, and a few other factors (concern with the failing light, hunger after six hours) prodded me to suggest we consider it a short, successful, Apollo 11-style landing and make our way to either Wendy's or The Toby Jug.

With the mosquitoes being what they were, the possibility of lingering on the bank to dry really wasn't one. We carried our clothes out, up the hills, across the little clearings, over the pine needles, keeping ahead of the mosquitoes till we were within sight of the road, when we dressed. We've hiked out naked from Otterwa before – the first time in a rainstorm – this time due to a different set of necessities.

There was nearly no traffic coming or going; the pavement under my feet was still pleasantly warm even after the sun had set. We got to within ten yards of the car when P-Doug cried out like the damned: his keys were in his belt pack, and his belt pack was back on the landing by the river.

I can't, I honestly can't, remember an instant where I felt so hopelessly resigned to a disheartening inevitability. P-Doug asked me if I wanted to sit it out by the car. I had to mull it over for two or three seconds. The only reason for accompanying him was, well, to accompany him. Solidarity. That was it, really. But there were myriad reasons not to go. First of all, he was instantly (and understandably) in, shall we say, not the most social of moods, and anyone travelling with him would have been wise to do so in unprovocative silence. Well, sitting by the car, I wasn't likely to say anything to irritate him. Secondly, offering my blood to the mosquitoes again wasn't going to accomplish anything except feeding the mosquitoes. Finally, my sandals were locked in the car. One of the challenges I like about barefoot hiking is choosing my footfalls, but that's enough of a challenge in daylight. I really didn't want to test my skill (luck) in increasing darkness; besides, I would have slowed him down. I estimated a 40-minute round trip. So, feeling cowardly and slightly guilty, I politely begged off.

I settled in the grass beside the car and tried to pass the time reviewing the underwater video I'd shot. Naturally, the battery gave up the ghost after about ten minutes. I settled back, trying to keep out of sight of the passing cars so as not to have to explain my situation to anyone seeking to offer aid (no one did... hmmm...), and watched the telephone pole fade to a silhouette against a darkening pink and azure backdrop. The mosquitoes found me, but I'd liberally coated myself with repellant and it seemed to work. They'd come close, hover around uncertainly, and drift off. But if I didn't provide an appetizing entrée for the mosquitoes, what I did provide was bait for the dragonflies. They were soon on the scene; a dozen or more. The big mammal locked outside the car was a godsend for them. I drew the mosquitoes in; the dragonflies took them out. I felt like an aircraft carrier in the Battle of the Coral Sea or something. Zeroes swarming around me, Mustangs zooming in to pick them off before they could inflict their damage on me. At one point, I watched a mosquito easing its way in toward me, about a foot from my left temple. I reached up slowly, ready to shoot my arm out and try to grab it, when I was suddenly outgunned and outclassed by a dragonfly who flashed through like a Spitfire and did the mosquito in. Not a word of a lie; I actually heard the "gluck" sound of the dragonfly taking the mosquito. I don't care how many thousands or millions of times bigger I was than either of them; it sent a primordial shiver up my spine.

There was no call of my name or sound of footsteps; just a key in the lock of the hatchback. I climbed up; it had been half an hour. P-Doug had shaved about ten minutes off my self-estimated ETA, and I was quietly delighted for him (and in truth, there's little doubt in my mind that my accompanying him perforce barefooted would have tacked at least that extra ten minutes on, if not more, as darkness fell).

Stopping to eat was off the itinerary; he simply wanted to get home. I honestly couldn't blame him; what he'd just gone through was no fun. As he started the car, I noticed a stack of coins by the gear shift. Fearing that the sudden start, fired by frustration, that we were likely about to experience would scatter them under the seats, I gathered them up and handed them to him. He gazed at them like a handful of shirt buttons and promptly hurled them out onto the road... along with them, any legitimate claim to pride in a Scottish heritage, which will always ringing slightly hollow now. I've been mad, I've been frustrated, but I'm hard-pressed to think of a time I've been willing to throw three bucks in change out into the street. It's just not in me to do that.  :) Man, I'm not joking: it fleetingly crossed my mind to get out and claim the salvage rights! Of course, I'd still be standing there, hitching a ride, if I'd done that. :)

His pique didn't last long; he wasn't sore at me, just the situation. By the time we were on Hwy 50 and leaving Bolton behind he was already waxing eloquent on the merits of over-the-counter histamines. Hey, were else am I going to hear these things?

But it all ended in comedy anyway. Typically on our hikes we tend to leave our wallets in the glove compartment. Nothing to buy in the woods and no need for a driver's license; why risk losing them? So as I stepped out of the car at my building, having gathered my things, I gave myself a quick once-over to make sure I'd gotten everything. Felt the hollow place on my thigh where my wallet should be and shouted out just as he began to pull away. He stopped, I pointed to the glove compartment, and he hauled out my wallet with a grin. At least we got a laugh out of it.

Sunday I pretty much just sat around, picking out the photos I wanted for the collection and preparing and tagging them. That and buying $50 in groceries and some of the last sixes of Nickel Brook Green Apple Pilsner  the Liquor Control Board of Ontario is ever going to offer the people of this province for sale. Yup, their radar for figuring out what I like and then getting rid of it is stellar stealth-proof...

Story of my life :)

So I think of Christmas in the middle of July...

It's funny what comes back to you. I'm sitting here this morning and for some reason I'm reminded of a morning long ago... almost 30 years ago now (God! I remember when I couldn't say that about anything).

I was in grade 8 and one of our assignments that year was a to write a children's Christmas story. My story, dimly remembered now, was about a werewolf named Dennis who either kidnapped Santa or stole his toys or both... in any case, he had it in for Christmas and then had a change of heart and pitched in to make Christmas a big success. Okay, it might be argued I was subconsciously cribbing from How the Grinch Stole Christmas, but I think The Nightmare Before Christmas stole a march on me, too.

Somehow, through some sort of inter-school, inter-teacher secret handshake, it was decided that a handful of the best stories from the two grade 8 classes in my school would be read, by their authors, to some still-believing-in-Santa age kids at an elementary school about fifteen minutes away from ours. Mine was one of those chosen; so was that of my friend Nick. I don't remember now the nature of how we arrived at the school, but I remember being in a class with Nick with all these kids listening to us reading our stories, and then answering their questions, and the rounds of applause, and feeling for maybe the first time in our lives like doted-upon big shots. We were, like, on assignment, loaned out to another school and representing the best of our own, off on this lark while most of our classmates sat in their usual desks, scribbling away in their usual notebooks, listening to the usual teacher up at the usual blackboard. And it was all during that soothing, peaceful season on the lead-up to two weeks off – I mean, the glorious holiday season.

But what I principally remember was the trip back to our own school. Just me and Nick, wandering the slushy streets of the west end of Hamilton Mountain. Left to our own devices, unfettered, unescorted. Free, but trusted with that freedom. For once, we weren't being herded along like geese or sheep in a gaggle of other kids. And we made our way back to the school, kicking through the muck on Sanatorium, glorying in our mutual triumph; two boys in their first teenage year, still children unburdened by real responsibilities, but on the cusps of adulthood. It was a shining moment, a perfect little crystal that somehow still resonates with me. I don't even know why I'm thinking about it or what brought it up, but I'd give a lot to be back there for just a few hours.

Raid and boxes, rails and beer

So in keeping with what I said the other day about tallying events...

Well, so, Friday night I took the 407 over to Bolt's place in Oakville. He moved back from the States after about ten years of his employers jerking him around about getting him permanent residency, keeping him on the leash of the lowest-order work visa, till he called their bluff and came back to Canada. Larry and I have been hanging around with him a little bit because he sure needs to let off steam. He hasn't even gotten serious about finding a job again in his career field because right now he's looking after two invalid parents (diabetes on the one hand and advanced Alzheimer's on the other), and his soccer-mom sister sounds like no help at all, unless she's paid. Disgusting. So day-to-day, it's mostly down to Bolt. We show up and he can vent. Hey, what are friends for?

Level crossing heading south on Fourth Line in Oakville.

Bolt asked me to help him move some of his stuff on Saturday. He needed to get it out of storage and into the garage. So, yeah, I signed on for that. Unfortunately Larry works Saturdays so it was down to me and Bolt, for the most part.

There's a hot tub in the backyard there so, as usual, as the sky faded to pink and orange the three of us headed out back. There's something about being casually naked in the backyard, drinking beer, and listening to twenty-year-old Bill Hicks routines on an iMac that's just the epitome of the upper-middle class WASP experience. This was qualified somewhat: I'd expressed concerns about mosquitoes, which had prompted Bolt to issue two liberal blasts of Raid into the air around the hot tub at the start of the evening. Some of it settled on the cans, and as a result, the Molson's Honey Lager tasted faintly but persistently of insecticide all evening. Two and a half cans in, that was enough for me. One way to cut down on your drinking, I guess.

Come 6 a.m. the sun was rising, Larry had already headed out to work, and Bolt and I got our ducks in a row and headed out a bit after 7, I think. Since we were likely to be heading in opposite directions when the chore was over, he suggested I follow him in my car. We headed along the QE, 403, and 401 to Rexdale. There was a U-Haul there where his stuff had been stored since his return last winter, and a rental truck waiting for him. I guess it took us somewhere between and hour and an hour-and-a-half to get his stuff loaded. At first, the idea was to use two carts to get his stuff, push it up the ramp, and dump it. This proved to be impractical. We never succeeded in getting any of it up the ramp. Instead, he retrieved the stuff from storage and carted it out, handed it up to me, and I arranged it in the back of truck. Most of what he brought first was heavy, well-packed boxes, and three or four loads in I thought I wasn't going to make it through the day. Luckily, that trailed off to smaller loads of lighter, more voluminous items, and my back adjusted pretty quickly.

Bolt told me in the course of this that another of his buddies was going to help us out with unpacking; a guy he used to know from around college days. This fellow, Jay, didn't drive, so we were going to have to pick him up at Islington station. What's more, he was bringing his 6- or 7-year-old autistic son with him. I was trying to imagine how this was going to amount to "help", but hey, we're here to learn, right? And in all, it wasn't so bad, aside from the kid reminding his dad he wanted to get back to the "train" (subway) every five minutes for most of the drive... it's like, dude, lift the needle out of the groove, okay? Please? Well, eventually he did. :) Jay was sharp, interesting, and easy to talk to, so it was fairly enjoyable, in truth.

We grabbed a quick bite at Wendy's and then headed back to Oakville. Unpacking the truck went much faster, mostly because there were no long pauses carting stuff back and forth; we were simply backed up to the garage. I handed stuff down to Bolt and Jay (and, when we got to stuff light enough, Jay's boy). Not much more than half an hour, I'd say. After that, we lingered in the refreshing coolness of the family room in the basement for another half an hour before heading back to Rexdale, where I parted company from them. That was about two in the afternoon, or so, and to my surprise my back was fine, so I decided to go ahead with my hoped-for plan for the afternoon and shoot some of the level crossings on the Stouffville GO line before they're eventually bridged, which I think has to happen sooner or later.

I started at Steeles and worked my way south. Incredibly, there are seven level crossings on this line in Toronto alone, without even getting up into York Region (which I should). Steeles is an otherwise six-lane thoroughfare, humbled to four for a level crossing... yeah, in 2010 (the same is true for Finch and Sheppard as well). It boggles the mind. Pretty much everywhere else in what used to be Metro, this was dealt with in the 1960s.

Level crossing on Steeles, looking east. (Technically speaking, Toronto is on the right here, south of Steeles, and the Town of Markham in York Region is on the left, on the north side.)

Level crossing on Passmore Avenue, looking east.

Level crossing on McNicoll Avenue, looking east.

Level crossing on Finch Avenue, looking west.

Level crossing on Huntingwood Drive, looking east.

Level crossing on Havendale Road, looking east. Isn't this one particularly gorgeous? I would have haunted this place when I was a kid if I'd lived here.

Some of the crossings are on smaller streets that are either industrial, like the much-diminished Passmore Avenue, or residential. Still, there exist level crossings with this line on three of Toronto's top-tier thoroughfares: Steeles, Finch, and Sheppard Avenues. Sheppard was the furthest south, so I got there last. By that time, even the back-up batteries on both the cameras I'd brought with me (the Fuji 3D W1 and the Sony HX5V) were ready to expire, so I had to shoot fast and sparingly. But I was surprised, stunned, and delighted to see that on the north side of the Sheppard crossing, there was already a well-established and recently-paved diversion road. Signs around it confirmed my guess: the Sheppard crossing is about to be bridged! It wasn't for the reason I expected, though, which would be simple easing of the traffic flow, as everywhere else. No, this is in conjunction with the building of a new LRT line on Sheppard Avenue. I guess it's fine for cars to be impeded by railroad tracks, but not other trains. Well, whatever. It should make for some interesting shots over time as the work proceeds.

Level crossing on Sheppard Avenue, looking west.

 Closer view of the crossing.

 Diversion road being prepared on the north side of Sheppard, seen from across the tracks. This view looks east.

Diversion road on the west side of the tracks, looking west.

Sign announcing the LRT project.

Sunday I went down to P-Doug's place and we walked along the Danforth. He manned the 3D camera and the PhotoTrackr and I used the HX5V. We got some pretty good work done that ought to be of some interest to people 40 or 50 years from now. I made a joke at one point that I should start shooting from the waist like James Salmon (he was using a Roloflex that was held about belt-level and gazed down into), and then it occurred to me that might be a good way to get some candid shots of people just walking and being natural without being intrusive. So I simply held the camera at the end of my arm as I waited for P-Doug to line up shots, and angled the lens to face passers-by. Not all the shots came out, but the majority of them did, and some of them are really pleasingly. Taken from a yard off the ground, everyone looks tall, impressive, and their strides are such that they seem to be wearing invisible seven-league boots. The styles, fashions, and character of the people of the east end will make an impression on the future, I think. :)

After that, it was beer o'clock. I don't remember the name of the pub now (I'll see if I can look it up [later: P-Doug says it was The Court Jester]), but... gosh, I don't even remember what I ordered! P-Doug had the chicken stir-fry; I remember that because it was an unusually light choice for him. Oh, yes, I had a tandoori pork burger and mashed potatoes. It wasn't bad, but I think once was enough,  you know? So, we drank beer and talked while two dozen largely Dutch-derived people watched a spectacularly uninspiring World Cup final (I think we were interrupted only three or four times by actual gasps of excitement; the thing was unscored and well into overtime when we finally left). Probably the most interesting thing about World Cup 2010 was the first half-decent mascot to ever come out of the World Cup, Zakumi (don't believe me? Just look at his predecessors... this is the best the world has to offer, huh?).

And there; that was the weekend that was. :)

I'm letting down the side

I've been working with the set of photos I'm intending to contribute to either the Toronto Public Archives or the Toronto Public Library, following in the footsteps of Ted Chirnside and James V. Salmon, and I've realized just how valuable this blog has been to identifying dates for some of the photos that, back when I took them, I wasn't so careful to even make sure the camera knew what day it was. I have shots taken in the mid-2000s that the camera dates to the year 2000, simply because I let the battery run out. This blog's been instrumental in pinning down the day for several hundred photos so far.

I used to post on City In the Trees pretty much weekly—almost daily, for a while. I've really gotten away from that. It's not so much that I really believe there are people reading this thing... maybe a half-dozen friends who swing by from time to time. But no, it's more a sort of diary... something that's fireproof and won't (or shouldn't) get lost. A way for me to look back and keep accounts of my life; time ever more fleeting as it goes. Sometimes I look back at this and I'm really surprised; I don't remember things the way I recorded them here. But what am I going to say; I was wrong then when it happened, but I'm right now?

Ultimately what I mean is I should get more serious about recording my little comings and goings here. Again, not so much because I believe they're fascinating to mankind, no... just that they might be of passing interest to others, and they're of vital importance to me in remembering where I've been and what I've seen, and when.