Author: David Barker

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City Life

Good-bye 2021

E & N Railway Trail, Victoria, B.C.

Tonight we show 2021 the door. A year ago, people made jokes about saying good riddance to 2020. By implication, 2021 had to be better because nothing could be worse than 2020. And then 2021 came along …

To be fair. It’s not a competition. Each year has turned out to be shit fucked in its own special way.

This image nicely captures how I feel about 2021. I identify with the skeleton playing the mandolin. I didn’t even bother to interrogate the year or give it a fair trial. Instead, I chopped off its arm and ran a sword through its chest. Then I sat on a log and played a madrigal. They call them madrigals for a reason. If you sang them when you’re happy, they’d call them gladrigals.

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City Life

How do you pronounce Toronto?

Construction Crew, Toronto

One of the things I love about Toronto is that a majority of the people living here weren’t born in Canada. What’s more, a majority of the people living here identify as belonging to a visible minority. That means there are huge opportunities for personal and cultural enrichment. If I let people in, they can shake me from my complacency and show me fresh ways to engage the world around me. This is a gift.

As a middle-aged white male who was born here, I acknowledge that bias inevitably creeps into my impressions of Toronto’s multicultural life. For example, I tend to regard Toronto as a place which, relative to other places, puts far less pressure on newcomers to conform to some hegemonic view of local culture. Then again, as I’ve never been a newcomer, I could be mistaken.

However, there is one matter which demands absolute conformity. If you want to claim you’re from here, you have to pronounce the name of this place without the second “T”. Nobody is from Toronto. We are from Trawna. I don’t know why. That’s just the way it is. You can find a good example of this in the hit song by The Kings, The Beat Goes On/Switchin’ to Glide. There, they rhyme Trawna with wanna and Donna.

Another way to pronounce Toronto is “construction.”

Categories
City Life

A bottle in front of me

Empty vodka bottle on a garbage can on Yonge Street, Toronto

Dorothy Parker once famously said: I’d rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy. A logician would say that, strictly speaking, this is what is known as a false opposition. But our logician would also be missing the point.

Traditionally, the holiday season is the time of year when we tend to put more bottles in front of us. That impulse may be compounded this year by the fact that, thanks to the omicron variant, more of us are alone and/or bored. Alcohol seems like a reasonable antidote, especially after we’ve already had a few.

However, thanks to the fact that, in Ontario, most of our alcohol comes through a single pipeline (the LCBO), we are at its mercy to keep us well stocked. And this year, that’s a problem. There are rumours swirling around, like olives in a martini glass, that the LCBO is having supply chain issues. Their advice is to buy early and try new things. People have been using the Hunger Games to describe the scramble for booster shots. I think it’s a more fitting description of the scramble for jello shots.

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City Life

Party Line

When I was kid, my mom and my grandma spoke on the phone almost every day. My grandma worked at the Eaton’s offices in London and they had a trunk line to Toronto, so the calls were free. It was a different matter when my grandma called from home. She and my grandpa lived on a farm on the 5th concession near Nilestown to the south of London. There, they had a party line with the farm across the road which would have been fine except that it was a family of 8 children who lived there, most in their teens, and they kept the line perpetually busy. My grandparents complained, but secretly they enjoyed the entertainment. They’d pick up the receiver and overhear one of the teen-aged girls spilling her heart to a friend. When my grandma retired, it came as a mixed blessing. On the one hand, there were no more free calls to Toronto. On the other hand, there was more time to listen in on the family across the road.

A few years later, after I was married, my wife and I drove to London to visit my grandma. By this time, change had overtaken her. For one thing, my grandpa had died, leaving her alone on a large rural property. For another thing, the neighbours across the road now had a phone line of their own which forced my grandma to do the same. I think she missed keeping up with all the kids.

At the same time, my wife had gotten herself a cell phone. (I was still a bit of a Luddite and resisted the trend.) One afternoon, we took my grandma for a drive to visit family, but because we were late, I suggested my wife use her fancy new cell phone to call ahead and let them know we’d be a few minutes late. From the back seat, my grandma said: “Why don’t you use mine.” And she passed her phone to my wife in the front seat. It was cordless phone. Before we left, she’d pulled it off its cradle and put it in her purse. She didn’t know there was a difference between a cordless phone and cell phone. She thought she could use her cordless phone to call from anywhere.

Categories
Public Art

Larry Sefton Memorial

Larry Sefton Memorial, by Jerome Markson

Typically, I avoid shooting a work of public art if all I’m doing is documenting its existence. That feels parasitic. I should leave the work alone to do whatever it’s supposed to do, whether that means interact with its environment or with the people who encounter it. But there are times when I feel drawn into conversation with a work, as I did when I approached this arrangement of girders by the architect Jerome Markson. There was something about the falling snow and the red wall behind it that lent it a something more. I met it in a fleeting moment that would vanish when the snow melted and the sun came out to cast shadows across the scene. There was a surplus in this moment.

Categories
City Life

We’re all in the same basket

My parents have resumed their usual habit of wintering in Florida with hundreds of thousands of other retired Canadians who’ve had enough of winter living. Recently, my dad told how he went to a meeting of the local camera club and was the only one wearing a mask. They met in an enclosed space. They didn’t enforce any distancing protocols. Meanwhile, the news tells of omicron ripping its way through European countries as a portent of things to come in North America. But people in Florida have had enough of Covid-19 protocols and all the accompanying talk of vaccinations. They want to get on with their lives the way they lived them back at the beginning of 2020. And so my dad sat by himself, masked and triple vaxxed.

My dad’s account offers an interesting reversal of an already interesting reversal in the narratives people tell about mandated protocols. Here, in Toronto, where vaccination rates are some of the highest in the world (86.2 % fully vaccinated among those aged 12 and up) the anti-vaxxers take to the streets, marching through the downtown core every Saturday and telling onlookers to stop being sheeple, to start thinking for themselves. (I call this an interesting reversal because, before the pandemic, the same protesters insisted on wearing masks because they feared government surveillance.)

The situation in Florida illustrates a further reversal. When the anti-vaxxers dominate the public discourse, they lose the advantage of their usual arguments. They can’t accuse people like my dad of being sheeple anymore. And they can’t say that he isn’t thinking for himself because, obviously, he’s asserting his independence of thought when he’s the only one choosing to wear a mask.

Context is everything. In the context of an unmasked majority, we see them clearly for what they are: people who have cast aside all pretense of argument and will do what they want to do for no other reason than that they want to do it. But we can’t very well call this libertarianism, can we? Not when everyone is doing it. I’m more inclined to call it sheepleism.

Categories
Landscape Photography

Christmas Tree

Snow-Covered Tree, Yellow Creek (Vale of Avoca), Toronto

Merry Christmas!

This is a photograph of a Christmas tree.

How, you may ask, is this a Christmas tree? Isn’t a Christmas tree supposed to be an evergreen tree covered in tinsel and lights?

I’m glad you asked. This is a Christmas tree because, taken with its reflection in the river, it forms an X. In Koine Greek, X is the letter Chi which is the first letter of the word, Christ, and is often used as shorthand for it.

If we wait long enough, it may also end up being the name of a coronavirus variant. We’re at omicron right now. We have only seven more letters to go. Yippee!

Categories
City Life

The white stuff

TD Centre, Wellington Street, Toronto

I love it when the white stuff falls during the holiday season. By white stuff, I don’t mean snow; I mean salt. Whenever our weather apps send out even the hint of a whiff of a chance of snow, people afraid of attracting personal liability scatter bag loads of rock salt onto the sidewalks while city plows scatter it everywhere else. Never mind that it corrodes everything from cars to concrete. And never mind that saline runoff damages the local watershed. Still, after it’s done its work melting the snow, it leaves behind fascinating patterns etched into the underlying surfaces.

Categories
Street Photography

How will we look back on the 20’s?

Two masked women pass windows on Bloor Street, Toronto

I imagine a time a few decades from now, say the 2060’s, when in all likelihood I’m dead and buried or planted or repurposed or whatever they do to corpses in the future. Someone, maybe an archivist or social historian, stumbles on one of my old photos and immediately recognizes it as a photo from the early 20’s. Maybe it’s the masks or the look of anxiety in the eyes, or the uneasy way the subjects carry themselves. There’s just something about it that screams pandemic.

A hundred years ago, the 20’s were the Roaring Twenties, or the Jazz Age, the age of F. Scott Fitzgerald and flappers, libertine excesses and bottomless champagne glasses. Those were the 1920’s. How will we remember the 2020’s? What will we call them? And what feelings will those epithets evoke?

Categories
Still Life

Life is but a dream

Temperance Street steam vent at Bay Street, Toronto

When I was a small child, my mother used to sing the well-known nursery rhyme to me:

Row, row, row your boat
Gently down the stream.
Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily,
Life is but a dream.

According to the Wikipedia entry on this song, it made its first appearance in 1852.

Close on its coattails is the Lewis Carroll rhyme, an acrostic poem which spells Alice’s full name (Alice Pleasance Liddell) and ends with this stanza:

Ever drifting down the stream —
Lingering in the golden gleam —
Life, what is it but a dream?

The idea that life is indistinguishable from a dream is at least 2,500 years old, dating back to Plato’s Theaetetus, when early philosophers were first laying the groundwork for epistemology, the discipline that asks how it is possible to know anything for a certainty. (See the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s entry on the Philosophy of Dreaming for more.)

Most recently, we have witnessed a blurring of the lines between philosophy and neurobiology to further elucidate (or obfuscate) the problem. See Anil Seth’s latest book, Being You: A New Science of Consciousness. While he doesn’t specifically address this philosophical problem, his basic claim—that our perception of reality is a shared hallucination—clearly shows us which way neurobiology points. To the extent that both waking and dreaming are perceptual states we all participate in, they share in the basic features of all human perceptual states. Waking or dreaming, it’s all the same. Collective hallucination all the way down. Life is indeed but a dream.

Categories
Street Photography

When narrative leaks from an image

Streetcar on King Street, Toronto

Photography and writing go together like hand and glove. Some people decry the use of text in or around images; the image should speak for itself, they say. I’m not such a purist. That should be obvious from the fact that I offer text alongside every image I share on this web site.

I look at this tableau, three people riding a streetcar in downtown Toronto as darkness falls across the city, and I can’t help but see narratives leaking from the image. The image sets my imagination adrift. It’s no coincidence that the word “imagination” has “image” as its root. The same process can happen in reverse, too. Sometimes I read a story or a novel and it stimulates my visual imagination. I can’t help but turn the words into a tableau.

Here, all three riders wear masks and all three have their heads bowed into their cell phones as if engaged in a liturgical rite, a confession, say, or the reading of a holy text. The two men wear toques while the woman is bare-headed. Maybe, in the enclosed fish-bowl world of the streetcar, head-coverings have some significance.

Are they going home after a long day at work? What sort of lives wait for them when they get off the streetcar at their respective stops? A dinner alone, poured from a tin can into a pot and heated on the stove? A night streaming shows on Netflix while thumbing through social media feeds? A spouse? A partner? Someone to save them from the pandemic’s forced isolation?

Categories
City Life

Pandemic Skating in Nathan Phillips Square

Skating in Toronto's Nathan Phillips Square

It’s interesting to compare public skating pre- and post-vaccine. Last year, people were skating before we had secured any vaccines. That meant that protocols were overly cautious. The city allowed only 25 people on the ice at a time while others waited in line behind a fence. When those 25 people had finished their skate, marshals directed them to a separate area where they could take off their skates. Only after the ice had been cleared did the marshals allow the next batch of 25 onto the ice. After the people in the changing area had left that space, the marshals went over and disinfected the benches. It was a slow process, and even though the city got to say that skating was open to the public, in practical terms, almost nobody got to skate.

This year, it’s different. We know that transmission happens almost exclusively by aerosols, so disinfecting benches is a waste of time. We also know that the risk of infection outdoors is low, so going maskless in wide open spaces isn’t such a big deal. As a result, people are moving more freely through Nathan Phillips Square this year. Even so, there are obvious signs that we are still in pandemic times. The band-aid in the final “O” of the Toronto sign reminds people to get vaccinated. A sign of the times?

Categories
City Life

I love the smell of urine in the morning

Urine on sidewalk, Yonge & Dundas, Toronto

During the Covid-19 pandemic, I’ve developed a theory. I call it Dave’s Law, although I don’t expect it will ever make me famous. It goes like this: there is a direct relationship between infection rates and the presence of homeless people on city streets.

There may be any number of reasons for this:

For instance, when infection rates go up, more people work from home. While this doesn’t mean the number of homeless people goes up, it does mean that homeless people account for proportionately more of the people moving through public spaces, and so they are more visible.

Another reason may have to do with the possibility that the number of homeless people really is going up. With each spike in infection rates, the precariously employed and the precariously housed become increasingly vulnerable. The government can offer all the assistance it likes, this is only a band-aid approach to more fundamental issues. As many have observed, the Covid-19 pandemic has exposed fundamental flaws in the way we organize ourselves as social beings.

Every morning, as I walk through our city streets, I smell the consequences of our flawed approach.

Categories
City Life

Photos to calm the nerves

Graffiti on the side of a chimney, E & N Railway Trail, Victoria, B.C.

New infection rates are going up by leaps and bounds. They call it exponential. The omicron variant is taking over. Governments are imposing restrictions on gathering sizes. Schools may have to shut down again. The stock market is plummeting. Day traders are jumping off rooftops. And I haven’t got my wife a Christmas present yet. Ah, the anxiety!

For me, one of the antidotes to anxiety is to find a calming photograph and simply stare at it. It’s like an intervention. It interrupts all the voices that clamour for my attention. Most of that clamour is just click bait anyways. Why would I want to reward it?

There’s something about this chimney I found in Victoria a couple weeks ago, the way the green siding and the off-beige cinder blocks interact with the blue trim and blues of the sky. I treat it as shapes and colours with no particular message, and it sets my heart at ease.

Categories
Street Portrait

Merry Booster!

Dressed for the season at the corner of Front & Church Streets, Toronto

I went downtown and joined my wife for a booster jab at the pharmacy in the building where she works. Fewer people are going in to work these days, which means some downtown pharmacies have more supply of vaccines than arms to stick them in. It doesn’t hurt that my wife is on a first-name basis with everyone behind the counter. She chatted them up and before you could say “omicron sucks” they had me in on my wife’s coattails, baring my arm for a shot of Pfizer. My first two shots were both AstraZeneca, which seemed like a good idea at the time, but I’ve since learned that AZ is effectively useless at preventing infections of the omicron variant.

Afterwards, I went for a bit of a photo walk through the downtown core while the dull day fell to dull twilight and local businesses turned on their lights. Gazing through the doors of the St. Lawrence Market, I saw a masked couple dressed in holiday regalia, wandering through the market and chatting with vendors. I didn’t bother to go inside; I didn’t feel like fumbling with a mask. By chance, I found myself following the same couple down Front Street and when they stopped at a red light to pet a dog, I asked if they’d mind me taking their photo.

I said: Everyone’s so glum; it’s nice to see people spreading some cheer.

I thought maybe they were drunk or crazy. But no. They were regular people doing their best to lighten the mood and lift flagging spirits.