Tag: Toronto

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City Life

Red Dress Project

A red dress hangs from tree in Philosopher's Walk, Taddle Creek, University of Toronto Campus
Red dress hangs from tree in Philosopher’s Walk, Taddle Creek, University of Toronto Campus

Five years ago, in 2017, the University of Toronto’s Women & Gender Studies program invited artist, Jaime Black, to bring her REDress installation to the U. of T. campus. She hung red dresses from trees along the path of Philosopher’s Walk (Taddle Creek) where they were exposed to the early spring weather. The purpose of the installation was to draw attention the staggering loss of life associated with missing and murdered Indigenous woman.

As with everything in the city, the installation had its moment in the sun, and then it was gone. So much clamours for our notice, and we have such short attention spans, and our memories fade as fast as we can turn the channel. Then, of course, there’s Covid. Covid has sucked our attention from everything else until we’re sick of it. All we want is to be left alone.

Like the bodies themselves, the dresses vanish. As do their memories. Historically, Indigenous women have sat at the bottom of every social hierarchy, and that has invited others—mostly notably white men—to treat them as disposable. I can’t say that a shift to a late capitalist consumerist society offers us the finest model to REDress this wrong. When we have grown used to talking about a gig economy where people are no longer reduced even to units of labour, but to subslivers of time/labour, and when the only line advertising blurs is the line between exploitation and indoctrination, and when we smile at quaint notions of distributive justice and say they properly belong in a museum, it may not be so unreasonable to suggest that any progress for MMIW isn’t going to happen without dismantling the existing system.

I get tired of the same conversations that goes nowhere. And I get tired of the same political promises that produce no concrete action. I can’t begin to imagine what it must be like for those who have lost someone they love.

Categories
City Life

The Breitling Bombshell

Blonde bombshell sits on a bomb while a cleaning lady looks on.
Blonde bombshell sits on a bomb while a cleaning lady looks on.

It isn’t always the case that we should mourn the disappearance of things. Some things that disappear were best gone in the first place. Sometimes things best gone have stayed in plain view for so long that we’ve come to view them as part of the landscape, as fixed in place as a mountain. It’s strange, then, when they disappear and we don’t even notice they’re missing.

One of those things is the Breitling Bombshell. To adapt a phrase from T. S. Eliot, I might describe the Breitling Bombshell as an objective correlative, the physical manifestation of a broader—and perhaps mostly unconscious—cultural trend. She has an emotional heft to her that means so much more than just a girl in a skimpy red dress straddling a bomb. For the boys in the service, she was hope and freedom, and she presaged the sexual hope and freedom of the 60’s that arrived courtesy of second wave feminism and the birth control pill.

One evening late in 2015, I stand by the window of Breitling’s store on Bloor Street long after closing. A cleaning lady appears with her duster, a little stooped as she works her way around the perky blonde. Seventy years ago, Breitling provided the fly boys with precision timepieces so they could coordinate their flying missions, and it adopted, as part of its branding, the fly boy practice of painting pinups on the noses and the sides of their machines. Now, most of those fly boys are gone. And so is the world and way of life they thought they were defending. This is a new world now, one in which timepieces no longer serve a practical function when an iPhone tied to an atomic clock is more accurate; instead, their chief function is to declare the wealth of the wearer. Meanwhile, the vendors rely on wage labour that creeps out after dark like the Morlocks in H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine.

After making this photo, I get home and post it along with my usual commentary. Call it cultural criticism if you like. A few months later, they’ve removed the bombshell. A cursory search on YouTube suggests they’ve taken down all their classic nose-art nostalgic commercial spots featuring fly boys with wrist watches. Maybe you remember them; they doubled as breast augmentation ads. I find it highly unlikely that anybody at Breitling saw, much less heeded, my post. But I do think there’s something in the air, something Breitling understood and acted on.

Lately, on social media, a certain subgroup of white men has been going on about how it is being discriminated against by others who want their fair share too. They say the white male gaze is being threatened. I hate to be the bearer of bad news: but when major corporations have, for years now, been treating the white male gaze as over, it’s time to accept it as a certainty.

Categories
Architecture

Deer Park United Church is now the site of a Condo

Night photograph of a backhoe behind the remnants of a demolished church.
Excavation for new condo on the site of the former Deer Park United Church, St. Clair Avenue West, Toronto

Five years ago, I froze my keister while trying to capture the early stages of ground-breaking for a new condo in Toronto’s Forest Hill neighbourhood. The Blue Diamond Condominium project was going up on the site of the former Deer Park United Church at 129 St. Clair Ave. W. Demolition crews had lopped off the back half of the church building, but the new design would incorporate the front half of the church and the bell tower into a shiny glass structure. We call this practice façadism and it seems to be Toronto’s go-to solution whenever the city wants to claim it cares about heritage buildings without impeding the work of property developers.

While the newly constructed condominium tower sits toward the rear of the lot, the former church, or at least the remaining front half of the church, will become The Imperial, a luxury event space which opens this fall. The Imperial’s web site landing page shows a long dining table laid out for a formal dinner, as if waiting for the guests of the last supper, while in the background is a restored stained glass window. I wonder if anyone gave any thought to the name, The Imperial, and the historical ironies that name imports into this space.

The church is gone and, with it, a particular dream of what it means to be church. Deer Park began its life in 1881 as a Presbyterian congregation and constructed the building at 129 St. Clair Ave. W. in 1913. Twelve years later, most of the congregation voted to join of the United Church of Canada. At that time, the UCC had aspirations of becoming a national church, the religious equivalent of Tim Hortons. While it might seem like a wonderful thing, spreading happiness and unicorns all across the nation, such aspirations come with a cost. All through the post-war boom, with Sunday Schools bursting at the seams, churches had no incentive to think about that cost. But beginning in the 70’s, as membership numbers began a long slow decline, the UCC had to face serious issues like its role in the residential school system and its overwhelming whiteness in the midst of an increasingly diverse culture.

It seems problematic to rename this site The Imperial. At the very least, it ought to come with a plaque that offers an honest account of what went before. Although I was raised within the UCC, I feel no regret for its decline; on the contrary, I feel this is a just outcome. So it bothers me that what we choose to preserve of this “heritage site” is a vestige of its colonial and colonizing past. Wouldn’t it be nice to celebrate the dismantling of our colonial past with symbols that carry us into a more equitable future. Instead, we create a space that celebrates the cannibalistic tendencies of late capitalism. I wonder what kind of meals they serve at The Imperial.

Categories
Wildlife

Toronto Zoo Elephants

Close up photograph of an African elephant.
Elephant, Toronto Zoo

When I was a kid, people used to ask me if Bob was my uncle. In high school, in the middle of intense conversations, friends would turn to me and ask what I thought were the truth or consequences of the situation. My friends thought it was funny that I shared my last name with a game show host. Commiserating with my cousin, who grew up in a different town, I learned that his friends told the same stupid jokes. Low hanging fruit, I guess.

Through most of my life, Bob Barker stuck to California, and I stuck to Toronto, and the two of us were happy. As his TV career faded away, the “Bob’s your uncle” jokes faded away, too. But then, in 2011, he showed up in Toronto as the lynch pin of a campaign to move three elephants from the Toronto Zoo to a wildlife refuge in California. All of a sudden, acquaintances started asking me again if Bob was my uncle. Only now, they included their opinions of the retired game show host turned animal rights activist: why can’t you tell him to mind his own business?

I have ambivalent feelings about the decision to haul the elephants by truck across the continent. Yes, the facilities in Toronto were inadequate. It puzzled me that although the Toronto Zoo is on a huge property, they allocated only two acres to an elephant paddock. On the other hand, a wildlife refuge in California isn’t much of a step up. While it protects three elephants from poaching and gives them a little more room to move, it still keeps them in captivity. There really is no good solution to the problem of managing an endangered species except for humans to stop doing the things that endanger it. It seems disingenuous to offer anything as a solution to a problem we caused in the first place.

The elephants departed in October, 2013. Three months earlier I visited the Toronto Zoo to photograph them in Toronto for the last time. As I view it, the greater concern is that, one day, photographs (and skeletons) may be the only evidence we have that we once shared our planet with elephants. A recent census indicates that there are less than 500,000 elephants left on the planet. While we have had some success against poaching, the chief threat against elephants is habitat loss caused by the encroachment of growing human populations. Moving a handful of elephants by truck isn’t going to do much about that.

Categories
City Life

When a Tree Falls in the Forest

Black and white photograph of two large trees whose roots have been exposed by significant erosion.
Two Trees in Yellow Creek Ravine, Toronto

I feel fortunate to live in a city whose chief geographical feature is a network of ravines courtesy of melt water from the last ice age. The ravines interrupt Toronto’s urban geography with trails and green space. There is a significant canopy that improves air quality and moderates temperature and, most importantly during the pandemic, offers forested areas where people can retreat and decompress.

Throughout the pandemic, I have seen posts about the benefits of a walk in the woods to emotional and mental health. For example, during our first pandemic summer, the UK’s Woodland Trust posted a piece titled “Why walking in woods is good for you.” A year later, Medium.com offered an article about the Japanese practice of forest bathing. But before contemporary declarations about the benefits of walking in the woods, we had William Wordsworth, an inveterate walker who was forever rhapsodizing about the joys of communing with nature, as we see in this snippet from “Sweet Was the Walk”:

Musing, the lone spot with my soul agrees,
Quiet and dark; for through the thick wove trees
Scarce peeps the curious star till solemn gleams
The clouded moon, and calls me forth to stray
Thro’ tall, green, silent woods and ruins grey.

For a number of years now, I have been taking regular walks through a nearby ravine where Yellow Creek flows from the northwest and drains into the Don River. The ravine passes under the St. Clair Avenue bridge through what is poetically called the Vale of Avoca which served as the opening scene for Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin: a car careens off the bridge and into the river below.

Over time, I have noticed a shift in my emotional state. This is not merely a place I pass through on my regular walks. It doesn’t serve a merely utilitarian purpose as an alternative to the treadmill in my local gym. Instead, I find myself developing a relationship to the place, with feelings of attachment and fondness. In particular, I have discovered that I have developed feelings of attachment for a number of the trees here.

Walking north where the trail begins a long rise out of the Vale of Avoca, there were two trees which I used to visit each time I passed. I liked to go down to the shallow water and pick my way over the rocks that formed a stepping-stone path. There, I would set up my tripod and photograph the trees or simply stand and pay my respects. They were two mature maples, intertwined roots exposed where erosion had swept away most of the supporting soil. They leaned away from each other, like a pair of dancers, precarious but somehow holding their position.

Inevitably, one of the trees toppled. It happened last April. I came upon the fallen tree during a snow storm. A week later, city crews had come with their chain saws and chopped it up.

I wouldn’t go so far as to say that I mourned the tree, but I was struck by a feeling of sadness for its loss. I had taken from it a sense of constancy, and then it was gone. The destabilizing effect of the pandemic has been a challenge and, as much as possible, I want the external circumstances of my world to remain untouched. The tree betrayed me. How could it fall like that?

The remaining tree stands alone now. I visit it often, but I can tell by the exposed roots that its turn is coming soon.

Winter scene of a snow-covered tree trunk lying across a stream.
Snow on Fallen Tree, Yellow Creek, Toronto
Categories
City Life

Empty Parking Lot in Downtown Toronto

A plastic bag blows across a dusty gravel parking lot while in the background is a graffiti mural on a wall.
Plastic bag blows past mural southeast of the Church/Dundas intersection, Toronto

Maybe you remember the scene from the 1999 film, American Beauty, the scene where the boy next door, Ricky Fitts (Wes Bentley), videos a plastic bag as a breeze buffets it no place in particular. Ricky Fitts is utterly transported by the beauty of the moment and in the background we hear Thomas Newman’s haunting “Any Other Name.”

Ricky intuits that the beauty of the moment is somehow related to the fact that it is fleeting. I have been reading the novellas and short stories of Thomas Mann where he poses questions about the relationship between beauty and decay. In a cruder form, Milan Kundera wonders if, in the absence of shit, beauty is nothing more than kitsch. The film, American Beauty, holds to a similar line; the passing moments we stitch together to make a life would come to nothing without the certainty of death.

A few years ago I found myself standing in an empty parking lot on the southeast corner of Dundas and Church Streets in Toronto staring at a scene chock full of ephemera and wondered if I hadn’t stumbled onto the set of an American Beauty sequel. A breeze kicked up the dirt and, with it, a plastic bag. The bag never got very far before the breeze changed and blew it in the opposite direction.

On the wall behind, a mural, itself a piece of ephemera. Etched on the wall, the outline of a building that had once stood where there was now a parking lot. Even the wall turned out to be a piece of ephemera. Shortly after I made this shot, a demolition company enclosed the lot with temporary fencing and tore everything to the ground. After that, a construction company took over, excavating and putting in footings to support a condominium tower.

Now, everything is gone and I can scarcely remember what stood there before.

Categories
Street Photography

Photographs of what was but is no more

Shirtless man covered in chalk sits on bench with a balloon that says: Happy Birthday!
Man sitting outside the Bloor/Yonge subway station, Toronto.

As is my habit, I start each month with a fresh theme. For the month of May, I will feature images that represent things / people / buildings / neighbourhoods / objects / ideas that were but are no more. All photography seeks to freeze time. All photography fails in this because time carries on; we gaze at the frozen photograph and can’t help but note how much things have changed. Far from freezing time, our photographs underscore how quickly it flows.

Nothing alerts me to this flow quite like a visit to the local archives. For me, that means the City of Toronto archives, but most cities have an archival service. What shocks me is the speed at which my own photographs become “archival.” The word “archival” calls to mind old black and white prints of people wearing dated fashions and crossing streets where the only mode of transportation is horse-drawn carriages. But my own photographs are quickly becoming archival because the world they portray is vanishing, and at an accelerated pace.

Part of it may have to do with a cultural shift. Once upon a time, we were outraged to learn that General Motors had adopted a principle of planned obsolescence as a way to guarantee a future market for its products. But we’ve grown complacent, allowing the practice to drive consumer demand for everything from new clothes to new phones to new intimate partners. This cultural shift has even crept into municipal planning so that now we treat large buildings, even entire city blocks, as if they were disposable. As a result, it takes only a few short years for our urban geography to become unrecognizable.

I pass a homeless man I’ve seen at different corners throughout the downtown core. Shirtless. Body covered in a chalky white powder. A helium-filled foil balloon says Happy Birthday and reminds me that another year has passed me by. At the man’s bare feet are a dozen or so shopping bags—the universal symbol of consumerism—stuffed with all his belongings. In the background I see scaffolding at a construction site. Today, this is the site of a 76 story condominium residence. I can’t remember what stood there before the demolition.

Most troubling of all is the fact that, today, 7 years after making this image, I no longer see this man anymore. Even people are disposable. Some more than others.

Categories
Street Photography

Saying goodbye to a month of candid photography

Couple walks south from Bloor on Yonge Street, Toronto. The woman wears a bright red dress, the man wears a baby blue suit. Both are blessed with ample buttocks.
Couple walks south from Bloor on Yonge Street, Toronto

This is the final post in a series of candid photos that ushered us through the month of April. This is by no means the last word on the matter given that the possibilities for candid photography are as varied and as interesting as the people on this planet.

As I see it, there are only two circumstances in which I run out of candid photos. The unlikely circumstance is that the government passes legislation prohibiting this kind of photography. At least in Canada, this is improbable because the ability to photograph in public is intimately tied to constitutionally protected conduct. One day, we might become the creatures of an authoritarian regime that doesn’t feel constrained by constitutional principles. Trump could get re-elected and decide, like his buddy Putin, to invade a neighbouring country. But until such a day arrives, I view the opportunities for candid photography as limitless.

The more likely circumstance that could put an end to my candid shooting is that deep fakes become so widespread they render photography meaningless. I see that a year old video of Bill Gates sporting breast implants has retrended on Twitter. Snopes declares that the video is digitally altered, but debunking it isn’t enough to make it go away. Like the boy who cried wolf, the more unreliable our digital ecosystem becomes in its documentation of the real world, the less likely we are to believe anything is true.

As people assume digital manipulation as their default approach to online images, those like me who make such images will move on to other kinds of image making. Maybe we’ll manufacture backdrops for dystopian sci-fi virtual reality games. Or we’ll produce animal porn. But it’s a losing game. In time, even these specialized areas will be taken over by AI image-making engines.

Eventually, we old-school documentary photographers will grow old and tell tall tales of the amazing and improbable things we’ve seen. No one will believe us, of course. Anything we’ve seen, AI can do better. So we’ll drink ourselves into oblivion instead.

Categories
Street Photography

Health Care Worker on the way to his next shift

Health care worker in hospital greens crosses the street
Health Care Worker heads to Saint Michael's Hospital, Toronto

Throughout the pandemic, my wife has been able to work from home. But every so often she has to go into the office to handle something that can’t be handled virtually. She’s required to carry a laptop with her wherever she goes, but it’s heavy, so I serve as her personal pack mule. I walk down with her early in the morning, carrying her laptop and my camera gear, then I go on from there with a morning photo walk.

Back in the spring of 2020, when we first started doing this, the downtown streets were all but empty. There was no traffic coming into the downtown core and the only pedestrians were either essential workers or, oddly enough, street photographers like me documenting the emptiness. I caught this health care worker arriving for a morning shift at St. Michael’s Hospital as we were standing at the Queen/Victoria intersection. I note the Blue Jays baseball hat, a reminder of a life outside the job even as the job was beginning to overwhelm our health care workers.

Do you remember how, every evening at 7:30 pm, people leaned out their windows and banged on pots and pans to celebrate the dedication of front line workers? When did that stop? It seems our energy petered out, maybe falling victim to Covid fatigue. Two years on, it strikes me that our front line workers need the celebration and encouragement more than ever. Instead, they have to deal with a government that dickers over trivial wage increases. They have to confront incessant denialism and disinformation from a subculture of ignoramuses. And, because so many end up exposed to Covid-19, they find themselves understaffed and unable to deliver the level of care to which they are committed.

I suspect the best way we can support health care workers is to do our best to ensure that we don’t need their services. That way, they are free to offer their services to those who truly need them. That’s my subtle way of saying: wear a damned mask when you’re indoors, self-isolate when you’re sick, and take all other prophylactic measures you possibly can.

Categories
Street Photography

Is that a bullhorn? Or are you just happy to see me?

A man with a bullhorn walks down the sidewalk with a man carrying a flag.
Man with Bullhorn, Bloor Street West, Toronto

Early in the pandemic, before I had figured out that anti-vaxx anti-mask anti-government anti-everything protesters were meeting every Saturday to stage their little marches, I would see people scurrying along the sidewalk who seemed out of place. For one thing, they were walking with purpose. Nobody walks with purpose on a Saturday in downtown Toronto except if it involves shopping. But these were no shoppers. I didn’t understand then that they were rushing to their rallying point where they would get themselves whipped into a frenzy before they took their message to the streets. For another thing, they came in their dozens with flags and signs and bullhorns. What good is a message if you can’t shout it loud to a shopping public?

Ah, freedom of expression, freedom of assembly, the basic freedoms that buttress a healthy democracy. Even though I vehemently disagree with these people, and even though I think their notions of civic engagement have all the subtlety of a collision with a planet-sized asteroid, I celebrate these moments. They remind me that I share these basic freedoms and, if I so choose, I can stand on a street corner and speak my mind without reprisal. They also remind me that, as part of the social contract, it is my responsibility to ensure that these people feel free enough to continue without reprisal as well.

My daughter went through a stage where she would ask me what things I grew up with that we don’t have anymore. Typically, I would answer with things like rotary phones and vinyl. If I had thought more closely on it, I might have flipped her question on its head and told her about things that didn’t exist then that exist now. Social media would top the list and, with it, certain ideas about civic engagement that have changed since we all became so attached to our iPhones. In particular, I am mindful of cancel culture, an idea that didn’t exist when I was my daughter’s age.

Forget for a minute that cancel culture is something people on the left do to people on the right or vice versa. Instead, abstract yourself from specific political leanings and view cancel culture as a structural problem. When people complain that they have been cancelled, they are telling us that they have been deplatformed. They still enjoy their freedoms; they just have no way to enjoy them. A classic example from 2021 was Twitter’s decision to cancel Donald Trump’s account. We’ve encountered similar events on a smaller scale closer to home. When anti-vaxx protesters tried to enter Toronto’s CF Eaton Centre, private security personnel enforced a mask requirement and prevented them from entering. It seems almost an incidental fact that Toronto police arrested two protesters for assaulting the personnel.

Both incidents illustrate that the constitutionally entrenched rights and freedoms that safeguard a democracy apply only to the relationship between citizens and the state. They aren’t binding upon private enterprise. Twitter owes nothing to Donald Trump. Cadillac Fairview owes nothing to the shoppers (or protesters) who enter its premises.

The problem with a world where civic engagement happens increasingly in privatized spaces (especially privatized virtual spaces) is that it is increasingly vulnerable to cancellation. Democracies, and the political thought that underpins them, hasn’t been able to keep up with this strange shift.

But I assure you, me and my camera will be there, tracking the moat that protects our ever-dwindling freedoms.

Categories
Street Photography

What’s more important? Staying fit? Or performing fitness?

A young couple go for a morning run and their image is reflected in a store window as they round the corner.
Out for a Morning Run on Balmuto Street at Bloor, Toronto

I hate exercise. I’m not particularly fit, but I live in a building with a gym and so, in order to get my money’s worth from my common expense fees, I visit it at least 3 times a week. The sound of my bones creaking confirms to me that I’m still alive.

I’m glad my building has a gym. A regular gym wouldn’t let someone like me be a member. I think it was Nietzsche who first articulated the gym paradox. He adapted it from Schopenhauer’s haute couture paradox: they won’t let you into a fancy clothing store unless you are wearing fancy clothes, but how can you be wearing fancy clothes in the first instance if they won’t let you in to buy them? In Nietzsche’s version, they only let you into the gym if you look fit enough to belong to a gym, but how can you look fit enough in the first instance if they won’t let you join to become fit? Is it any wonder most of us sit on the couch in sweat pants and hoover potato chips?

When it comes to exercise, I think I have mixed motives. Like everyone else, I claim that I exercise for the sake of my personal health. But in rare moments of self-reflection, I discover that it’s more complicated than that. The real reason I exercise is to “earn” the right to eat a bag of chips or drink a bottle of wine by burning an equivalent number of calories. Or, since exercise comes after the fact, it’s more like doing penance. In fact, there are deeply religious overtones to my exercise: “Forgive me, rowing machine, for I have sinned. It’s been a full week since my last session.”

I’m self-conscious and grateful every time I visit the gym and find I’m the only one there. Sometimes I choose odd hours on purpose so I can avoid what I imagine are the judgmental stares of all the buff and beautiful people. But I’m convinced that an extraverted subset of the exercising public is motivated by a need to perform exercise. It’s not good enough just to be fit; it’s important to be seen to be fit. That means working out in high-visibility settings. That means wearing the “correct” clothing with expensive brands that declare a financial commitment to the enterprise. Most important of all, that means wearing headbands.

Categories
Street Photography

Casually Strolling Down the Street in a Gorilla Suit

Man in gorilla suit walks down Kensington Avenue, Toronto

Sometimes when I’m out and about (yes, I’m Canadian and I don’t say oot and aboot), I play a game of photography scavenger hunt. I keep a mental list of things I’d like to photograph should the opportunity arise. Examples include: 1) middle-aged men wearing argyle socks and sandals; 2) looters smashing a store window; 3) a woman landing a slap; 4) a dog pooping on a religious tract; 5) a car at the moment of impact as it careens into a utility pole.

But if I included: 6) a random guy walking down the street in a gorilla suit, I guarantee you I would never in a million years get that shot. The only way I could get the gorilla suit shot would be to hire someone. But I never included the gorilla suit shot on my photography scavenger hunt list, so the gorilla appeared quite naturally and I seized the moment.

Lists are fine, I guess, but they don’t do me any good if they distract me from the strangeness of the world I encounter with every step. With a tip of the hat to Yogi Berra, I see a lot just by looking. And if a guy in a gorilla suit happens to appear, strolling casually down the road, then who am I to deny my camera the opportunity to make the shot?

Categories
Street Photography

What’s The Point?

City News at Bloor Street east of Yonge in Toronto

If I’m out on a photo walk and I see reporters, my first instinct is to suppose that something interesting is happening; I should keep my eyes open for opportunities. But when the news reporter is wearing pastels, I know he’s never going to report anything of substance. The most I can expect is school children showcasing new dance moves. Or the release of a new line of cosmetics. Or tips on how to avoid pigeon shit. That’s not to say there’s nothing of visual interest for me to shoot; only that I’ll have to look somewhere else to find it.

In this case, the visual interest lies in the news people themselves. They look as if they’ve just teleported to this corner and are trying to get their bearings. The cameraman is pointing to the west as if to say: Look! That’s west. The reporter (or the personality, or whatever he is) says: Well if that’s west, then which way’s east?

To be honest, I feel sorry for media personalities. They face horrible discrimination, especially the white blonde ones on Fox News. Much of that discrimination has arisen thanks to comedic Fascists like Will Farrell whose Ron Burgundy suggests that news personalities are vapid ciphers. If I had more money, I’d create a charitable foundation that provides support for the victims of such discrimination. Everybody deserves to be treated with dignity no matter where they score on the Human Vapidity Index (HVI), which is a real measure, at least in my own mind.

Whatever’s happening in this photograph, we can see clearly that it’s happening somewhere else. That’s the point of the pointing. There’s something to the west. What is it? Godzilla? Lady Boadecia riding naked on a horse? People wearing last year’s fashions? We’ll never know, but at least we have the consolation of our overactive imaginations.

Categories
Street Photography

Split Perspective

Front & Bay, Toronto

During the pandemic I have noticed a rise in conversations about the benefits of mindfulness meditation practice. I’m skeptical of those people who claim they use it to be more focused, more awake, more aware, more attentive, more directed. As the proud owner of a monkey mind, I know first-hand how difficult it can be to focus attention. My monkey mind isn’t unique; I think everyone has a monkey mind and anyone who claims otherwise is lying.

People talk about staring at a candle flame and achieving a state of perfect concentration. They then take that state with them from their meditation to think great thoughts, imagine cutting edge technology, implement never before heard of investment strategies, write Man Booker winning novels, and calculate in their heads the trajectory of the next mission to Mars.

I try. Honestly, I do. But my monkey mind keeps hopping around. There are bills to pay. Stupid conversations to replay in my mind. Infuriating comments on social media that won’t go away. Ear worms from the latest music. An itch on the back between my shoulder blades.

I’m inclined to think the mindfulness meditation narrative, or at least the one that’s pitched to us by the oversimplifying media, is grossly unfair. It presents us with an impossible ideal: a perfect focus that is supposed to unlock astonishing creative potential. Although I’m no expert when it comes to human cognition (if you discount the fact that I engage it every second of my life), I suspect that we can’t help but entertain a split perspective. Part of us lives in the moment while, simultaneously, another part of us detaches from our present self and looks down on us, observing and commenting on that part of us that lives in the moment. This is our monkey mind and we can’t help but give it free play.

I’m an advocate of a far less utilitarian mindfulness, one that puts no stock in achieving a perfect focus, and concerns itself instead with loving kindness, starting with the self. It forgives us for failing to meet impossible standards. We are a monkey mind people. Consciousness is a necessarily fragmented state. We are present both within and without it. We do, and at the same time we narrate our doing.

Categories
Street Photography

Itching for a Pint

PJ O'Brien Irish Pub & Restaurant, Leader Lane, Toronto

Nearly 25 years ago, I woke with a start in the middle of the night with an excruciating itchiness on my back and shoulders, calves, forearms, even my earlobes. In particular, my palms drove me out of my gourd and I starting doing this thing where the fingers of each hand scratched the opposing palm. This worked fine until I started to draw blood. I stood in the shower to ease the itching. I slathered myself in different lotions. I lay on my back and shimmied around the bedroom floor. Nothing worked to ease the itchiness.

A couple days later I found myself sitting in the waiting room of a dermatologist. It was a high-rent location and all the other “patients” in the waiting room looked as if they were there for their latest botox injection. When the dermatologist saw my back, he made his colleagues drop everything and come in for a look. Then he asked me if I’d be willing to put myself on display for grand rounds at Women’s College Hospital. This was the most exciting thing he’d seen all week. My back was a grade A teaching opportunity.

A biopsy confirmed that I had DH or dermatitis herpetiformis. Celiac disease typically manifests as a gastro-intestinal problem but for a subset of celiacs it produces skin lesions. For some, it’s both. Essentially, it’s an autoimmune disorder and, despite the fact that itchiness doesn’t sound like much of a problem, prolonged itchiness is bloody excruciating. It’s the sort of thing you’d expect the CIA to use in Guantanamo. The solution is to avoid foods containing gluten. This isn’t some kind of lifestyle new-age fad diet; this is necessary to keep people from going absolutely bonkers.

And so I changed my diet. I shifted from a wheat-based Western diet to a rice-based Asian diet, not so difficult since my wife is Tamiko. However, it also meant I had to stop drinking beer. Guinness was out of the question.

That explains a moment of wistfulness as I was walking down Leader Lane past the PJ O’Brien Pub and watched a woman retouching the pint of Guinness on the side of their building. Recently, I went to Ireland with friends and, while everyone else drank Guinness, I ordered pints of Bulmers (Magners) cider. I remember the smell of the drinks to either side of me. The frothy heads. The thick opacity. If drinking beer were a carnivorous act, drinking Guinness would be the equivalent of eating a buffalo steak charred black on a grill.

Then I remembered the itching and the moment of wistfulness vanished.

A woman retouches a painting of a pint of Guinness on the wall of the P.J. O'Brian Pub in Toronto.
PJ O’Brien Irish Pub & Restaurant, Leader Lane, Toronto