Author: David Barker

Categories
Street Photography

Garbage

A night photograph of bags of consumer waste piled up by the Dundas Street entrance to Toronto's subway.

Coming out of the pandemic, I had great hopes. I entertained a fantasy that, as a society, we would engage in serious introspection, we would learn valuable lessons, and then we would apply those valuable lessons to other areas of our collective life. Just imagine, I thought to myself, if the pandemic’s lessons in epidemiology could provide us with transferable skills, like an understanding of how exponential growth works, or how statistical modelling can help us understand the consequences of collective behaviours.

But here we are! On the down slope of the 6th wave. With no guarantee that there won’t be a 7th wave (although Sting tells us that love is the 7th wave). And no guarantee that we have the stomach to do anything about it even if there is a 7th wave. While I understand that people feel frustrated and worn out, I also recognize that what we have faced—a pathogen—does not reason, does not negotiate, and does not favour one ideology over another. All we have in answer to it is a commitment to apply public health principles and a willingness to learn as we go. For me, that means getting all the vaccinations to which I am entitled, wearing a mask indoors where necessary, and avoiding large indoor crowds of unmasked people. Ideally, I place myself in proximity to people who share my approach so that we can be mutually supportive.

Unfortunately, a pathogen is the least of our worries. There are things we do to ourselves that pose a far greater threat. However, these other things play out on a timeline that allows us to be distracted by more immediate concerns. Consumerism is a fine example of a threat that routinely stymies our collective imagination. We are smart people, aren’t we? It should be no problem to apply our lessons about exponents and statistics. It’s a straightforward thing to extrapolate from a few bags of consumer waste to a situation in which the oceans bloat with plastic and microplastics circulate in the bloodstreams of every living creature on the planet, including you and me. This doesn’t even take imagination. All it takes is a pencil and a calculator.

You think wearing a mask is an inconvenience? Jesus fucking Christ, wait’ll you see what’s coming 20 years from now. We’ll remember these as the good old days.

Categories
City Life

Life’s Too Short to Worry about Shifting Usages

Adulterated Shop Sign on Queen Street West, Toronto
Adulterated Shop Sign on Queen Street West, Toronto

My post yesterday featured a blank-eyed Roman bust and dwelt upon the old cliché: the eyes are the windows to the soul. I wanted to know where the saying comes from and, after a cursory search online, I landed on a web site called phrases.org.uk. I have no idea if it’s a credible site and it doesn’t really matter. For my purposes, what does matter is that it offers an interesting illustration about the malleable nature of word usages.

The web site suggests that an early source for the idea that the eyes reflect a person’s soul is the Roman writer, Cicero, who was a contemporary of Julius Caesar. As you might expect, Cicero’s native language was Latin. But when the web site tells us this, it substitutes an asterisk for the letter “a” and gives us L*tin instead. Presumably the web site does this so that search engines don’t flag it as somehow derogatory towards a group of people. Not the group of people who lived 2,000 years ago and spoke the Latin language. Another group of people still alive today.

I think it’s reasonable to say that the word “Latin” accurately describes a dead language which people formerly spoke on what is now the Italian peninsula. “Latin” is not a word English people made up and imposed on another people; it is a word its native speakers applied to describe their own language long before English emerged as a distinctive language. However, as context changes, we find other meanings grafted onto the word “Latin” and we feel compelled to make adjustments to our usage.

Shifts in meaning happen all the time but most go unnoticed except by lexicographers. The shifts that attract our attention are the ones that do harm. The “N” word, for example, with its Latin etymology tying it to the Roman word for “black”, is now impossible to utter without racist associations. People twist themselves into knots over its appearance in literature and pop culture. Think Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn and Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction.

In the spirit of doing unto others as I would have others do unto me, I’m inclined to give Mark Twain a pass. He had no way to anticipate how the prevailing culture would overtake the “N” word. It’s important, too, to note that his usage appeared in a context that aimed to present a Black man as a flesh and blood character who warranted the reader’s empathy. I would hope for the same consideration in my own writing. I have no way to anticipate how context may overtake my own usages and end up casting a shadow across my benign intentions.

The concern nowadays is that humans no longer assess our usages. Bots on social media sites identify offending words and suddenly we find ourselves shadowbanned or our accounts temporarily suspended. Despite all the techno-optimism wafting through the air these days, there is no such thing as an algorithmic solution to the problem of context. The bots run roughshod over everything, so we protect ourselves in advance by inserting asterisks, dashes and numbers. What the f*ck? Oh my g-d! Quentin is such a sh1th3ad.

Categories
City Life

To the Museum or Bust!

A marble bust sits in a museum gallery while a young woman passes in the background.

Further to yesterday’s museum post, I note that museum exhibits serve as an obvious reminder about the fleeting nature of life. We who are gaze at those who were but are no more. Dinosaur fossils. Mummified remains. Roman busts.

Whenever I visit the local museum, the Royal Ontario Museum, I pay a visit to the gallery of classical busts. I like to pretend I’m schmoozing with people from the past. Afternoon drinks with old (really old) friends. Selfies to post on the ancient Roman social media site, VoltusLiber. Unfortunately, after a few drinks, their eyes start to glaze over.

Sculptors have always had difficulty with the eyes. They look blank and eerie. In fact, Roman sculptors working in marble had no trouble at all with eyes because they painted them in. They had no scruples about painting their work to make it as lifelike as possible. But in the intervening years, the elements have worn away the paint. It was the sculptors who came later—Renaissance and Neo-Classical artists—who complained about the eyes because it never occurred to them that classical artists had painted their marble. Even where they did suspect that their predecessors were more relaxed, conventions had become so entrenched that later artists couldn’t persuade their patrons to try new things. And so blank and eerie eyes gaze back at us across the centuries.

To my way of thinking, blank and eerie eyes may be more realistic than carefully painted irises and pupils. They say eyes are the window of the soul. It’s impossible to say who the first “they” is, but people have been saying this since at least the days of Cicero who, ironically, is the subject of many blank-eyed sculptures. The problem is that no matter how precisely we represent a person’s eyes, the sense of an essential personality conveyed by that representation is illusory. Maybe our belief about eyes has something to do with empathy. Humans are keyed to feel something when they look into another’s eyes.

However, personal experience (and rational thought) contradict this belief. People with visual impairments give the lie to the “window to the soul” conceit. When I gaze into a person’s injured or unseeing eyes, their eyes tell me nothing about them as a whole person. Conversely, the fact that they cannot gaze into my eyes in no way hinders them from perceiving me as a whole person. Whatever mysterious alchemy constitutes the self does not depend on eyes. Similarly, the belief that we can learn something about ancient cultures by gazing into representations of ancient eyes is silly. In fact, ancient sculptors may have done us a service by leaving us with blank and eerie eyes; they force us to seek out more credible sources for our convictions about what our predecessors were like.

Categories
City Life

Old Bones

Shadows of a dinosaur skeleton at the Royal Ontario Museum
Shadows of a dinosaur skeleton at the Royal Ontario Museum

There’s nothing quite like bones from the Late Cretaceous period to remind you that you’re going to be dead for a lot longer that you’re going to be alive. Compared to the millions of years you have ahead of you as a corpse, the handful of years you have as a living breathing creature pass in the blink of an eye. My wife and I didn’t set out with that in mind when we booked our tickets to a special dinosaur exhibit at the Royal Ontario Museum, but it didn’t escape our thoughts as we observed how shadows of the ancient bones played across the floor and danced with our own footsteps.

I am a rational soul and tend not to tie myself up in anxious knots over the prospect of my own death. Age may have something to do with my willingness to entertain thoughts of death. Experience, too. A brush with death does tend to clarify one’s thinking. Then there are my vaguely Buddhist habits: for a time, I was a regular in a community that engaged in traditional Tibetan meditative practice (until surprise, surprise the leader died). Holding one’s own death in mind turns out to be a paradoxically liberating thing to do.

The deliberate contemplation of death is not unique to Tibetan Buddhist practice. I’m reminded of the Capuchin Crypt beneath the Santa Maria della Concezione dei Cappuccini where tiny chapels have been formed from the bones of 3,700 monks. The purpose of the chapels is to remind worshipers that their time on earth is fleeting. A plaque declares: “What you are now we used to be; what we are now you will be…” As an aside, I can’t help but hear these words in the voice of Yoda.

Playing on the walls of the museum exhibit were animated videos featuring 3D dinosaurs. It seems that digital animation is paleontology’s answer to breathing life into Ezekial’s dry bones. The dinosaurs may be long dead but, like gods, we can bring them back to life. We watched to the end of a video then read the credits scrolling down the wall. Noting the name of the production company, we wondered why it sounded familiar, then realized that our son had just that week gotten a job working for the production company. It creates a lot of children’s programming, including a show about dinosaurs. It hired our son to do a job that didn’t exist even 10 years ago.

Children hold an ambivalent place in conversations about mortality. On the one hand, they are a source of hope insofar as they offer us an extension, both imaginatively and genetically, into the future. On the other hand, their youth reminds us of the very thing that is slipping away from us. Sometimes, they go out of their way to remind us that we are becoming superfluous. Never is our obsolescence so apparent as when they roll their eyes while explaining to us for the umpteenth time how the smart TV works. Now I understand how my parents felt and I hope they forgive me the impatience I showed while trying to set up their VCR.

Categories
Street Photography

Will public libraries become a distant memory?

Night shot of a woman walking past the entrance to the Yorkville Public Library in Toronto
Toronto Public Library, Yorkville Avenue

Carrying on with my May theme of “things that were but are no more” I give you public libraries. With the approach of Ontario’s June 2nd provincial election, incumbent Doug Ford has announced that he will be halving provincial support for both the Southern Ontario Library Service and the Ontario Library Service-North. Ironically, if Ford had spent more time in these institutions when he was a younger man, he might have learned how to pronounce them. Instead, he routinely abuses our ears by calling them libarries.

This isn’t the first time Doug Ford has exhibited hostility towards libraries. More than 10 years ago, as a Toronto City Councilor, Ford found himself in a war of words with Margaret Atwood over his attempt to chop municipal funding to local libraries. Again, if Ford had spent more time in these institutions when he was a younger man, he might have found himself better armed for the battle. Then, as now, he went on about libarries and said of Atwood: “I don’t even know her. If she walked by me, I wouldn’t have a clue who she is.” In the same CBC article that disclosed this nugget, we learned that his brother flipped his middle finger to a woman who yelled at him for driving while talking on his cellphone. Ah, Robbie, R.I.P. as you float around in the Elysium Field of witty ripostes.

The problem with defunding libraries is part practical and part symbolic. Libraries provide countless non-obvious benefits to a community. People who foster a social democracy cast of mind have little difficulty noticing these benefits. But for those more politically keyed to believe that people should get only what they deserve or have paid for, such benefits pass mostly invisible. That’s shorthand for: I don’t feel like listing the practical benefits of libraries because, if you don’t know what they are or don’t believe they’re real, then I’m not writing this for you in any event. Persuasion is a waste of time.

In symbolic terms, libraries represent a commitment to learning, literacy, research, and perhaps most importantly, to the written word as a shared resource. Politics aside, knowledge is inherently social, and if you hamstring its social dimension, it withers. The body politic withers. Civil discourse withers. We are all diminished.

Although Doug Ford can’t find the minuscule sum in his budget to ensure that his libarries thrive, he has no difficulty pledging $1.2 Bn for a new prison in northern Ontario. Let’s be blunt, this is just an overpriced housing scheme for Indigenous people. I wonder if Ford has the imagination to see how public institutions like libraries serve a prophylactic function, disrupting the path that leads to a prison’s front doors. For $1.2 Bn, the new prison better have a top notch libarry.

Categories
Street Photography

Continuity Is For Wimps

A middle-aged woman with glasses carries a plastic tray with some plants and wears a white T-shirt with the words: "Continuity is for wimps"
Woman buys plants in Kensington Market, Toronto

I don’t know what it means to say that continuity is for wimps. I do know that I am capable of reading a four word sentence—almost any four word sentence—and egregiously overinterpreting it. Sometimes what makes a sentence great is that it provides fertile ground for overinterpretation. Without that possibility, it would be just another boring sentence.

In the context of words, continuity may have something to do with flow. In turn, flow may be related to the passage of time. When we read a good paragraph, we say it conveys a sense of continuity to the extent that it carries us seamlessly through time from start to finish. The conjunctions and, but, and or (language’s logical operators) contribute mightily to that sense of flow. But the use of conjunctions by itself isn’t enough; their use has to be apt. “Montezuma shouted at Mary, but the dog had died.” This may be a fine use of a conjunction. However, we can’t know this without context. The dog might have no connection whatsoever to the relationship between Montezuma and Mary. A dishonest author may have tried to falsify the existence of a relationship.

The word but can anticipate a reservation, too: “I like you, but … ” Nobody wants to hear the second half of that sentence. In situations like this, we cry out to the speaker: if you feel a compulsion to make your sentences flow, now would be a good time to resist; chop things up like a fresh green salad.

Speaking of fresh green salad, I think of all the times during Trump’s term in office when I heard people complain about how the orange wonder’s speech came off sounding like word salad. America’s foremost pussy-grabbing toupee wearer has a mind remarkably untroubled by concerns for continuity. The stuff in his brain at the beginning of a sentence may not be the same stuff in his brain at the end of a sentence. Pit him against a consummate prose stylist, Julian Barnes, for example, and the difference is stark. Reading Barnes is like drinking a smooth 21 year old single malt. Listening to Trump is like drinking screech scraped from the sides of a barrel and boiled in a tin bucket.

Even if we suppose continuity is for wimps, I’m inclined to think it still depends on who’s pulling the levers. There are extraordinarily discontinuous writers—most notably poets—who still manage to produce compelling work. It’s not so much that they’ve turned their backs on continuity so much as that they’ve foisted responsibility for it onto their readers.

Categories
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
Architecture

Buildings that were but are no more

Night shot of a low building illuminated by a single street light.
Algoma Street South at Night - Thunder Bay

When I began sifting through my photo archive for images related to this month’s theme (what was but is no more), I was astonished at the number of buildings I have photographed that have later met with accelerant and a lit match. See my previous post on Notre Dame de Paris. I swear I had nothing to do with it. Today’s featured photo is a night shot of a building on Algoma Street South in Thunder Bay, ON. I shot this in May, 2016 and a few months later it was gone.

There have been a rash of fires in the vicinity. Two years ago, a building on Bay Street went up in flames. Before that, it was the Hells Angels clubhouse. And in December, the town lost the historic Finnish Labour Temple and, with it, the Hoito restaurant, located just around the corner from my lonely building featured here. There isn’t any evidence to suggest that these fires are connected. But when there are so many fires in close proximity, one does wonder.

As far as I’m aware, none of these fires resulted in injury or loss of life. Even so, each of them has been an occasion for grief, especially in the case of the Finnish Labour Temple, which had been a community hub for more than a century. There is something shocking about fire, something irrevocable. We do our best to clean up the site, but traces remain for years. We smell it in the soot. We see it in charred bits of wood.

Whenever I drive up to Thunder Bay, I see evidence of fire all along my route. In the town of Heyden, just north of the Sault, there’s Pruce’s Motor Inn lying in ruins, ironic given that the local fire station is just next door. And 20 km west of Nipigon was a gas station, abandoned for years, then torched to the ground. Further along, in Dorian, another motel was abandoned then torched, or torched then abandoned. Sometimes it’s hard to tell which came first.

For a lot of sites in Northern Ontario, it’s typical simply to walk way. Let nature deal with the charred remnants. Snow melt and rain turn it into a black slurry. Seedlings hatch there. Moss and lichen creep over the exposed surfaces. In time—natural time, not human time—the burnt out buildings vanish beneath a layer of living matter, joining a larger cycle of decay and rebirth.

The Finnish Labour Temple and Hoito Restaurant in Thunder Bay, Ontario
The Hoito, Thunder Bay, Ontario (2015)
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
Architecture

Notre-Dame de Paris

Interior shot of the Cathédral de Notre Dame, Paris
Interior shot of the Cathédral de Notre Dame, Paris

Continuing with the month of May’s theme of “what was but is no more” I offer a wide shot inside Notre-Dame de Paris beneath the site of the former spire. On April 15, 2019, the roof caught fire during renovations and, among other damages, this caused the central spire to collapse. Because it is a building of both religious and national importance, the French legislature resolved that, instead of modernizing the building, it should be restored to its former glory as a preeminent example of French Gothic architecture. Hopefully, the workers who perform the next renovation have better luck than the previous workers.

This calls to mind the Ship of Theseus paradox. First proposed by ancient Greek philosophers, the paradox asks what would happen if you replaced each piece of Theseus’s ship, board by board, until none of the original boards remained. Could you call the resulting ship the Ship of Theseus? Or would it be a new ship? We can pose the same problem in relation to the human body which is “refurbished” every 7 years. Can we say that we are the same person we were 7 years ago when our present body shares none of the physical material that comprised our former body? Memory gives us a sense of continuity, but memory may have no bearing on the problem of identity.

As for the Cathedral that stands on the Île de la Cité, I’m inclined to think it ceased being the Notre-Dame de Paris years ago, back when French society determined that it was a secular society that, among other things, would forbid Moslem women from wearing hijab in the public sphere. Theoretically, the same rules apply to the Cathedral at least to the extent that the Cathedral is a symbol of national secular pride. This makes for a very different building than the building which figures in Victor Hugo’s novel. If all it’s good for is to rouse politicians like Emmanuel Macron into fits of patriotism, why not burn it to the ground?

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.