Tag: Candid

Categories
Street Photography

Ordering À La Carte

Black & white photo through a window of a man sitting at a restaurant table and texting.
Texting at Sorrelle's, SE corner of Avenue Rd & Yorkville

Nice restaurant. Upscale. A little beyond us. But now and then, when we’re in the mood for something special, we change our clothes and go out for a treat. The people at the other tables are beautiful. Bright smiles and perfect hair. Gleaming eyes and posture that never flags. The brighter the smiles, the more Barb tells me not to slouch. I want to tell her that, unlike the other people in the room, I’m subject to the laws of gravity which drag me down toward the ground, and one day under it, but I hold off because the waiter has magically appeared beside our table. I realize he didn’t magically appear; it just seems that way. It’s more like he was a predator stalking our table from the long grass when he suddenly pounced. He asks if we’d like a drink to start. Or an hors d’oeuvre? We both ask for cocktails. Barb asks for some duck pâté while I settle for something from the vegetable realm. Two minutes later, the waiter appears again at our table, this time without the magical aura, and announces they have no more duck pâté so madam will have to select something else.

An underling arrives with our drinks, a sub-sub-bartender, someone who lost the latest round of dominance contests: head butting or chest thumping or whatever it is the wait staff do to decide who gets to wear the smartest clothes. Me Tarzan, you busboy. We smile at one another. We clink our glasses. We watch the hostess seat a couple at the adjacent table. Your server is Raoul and he’ll be right with you, she says, and she sashays back to the entrance. Our neighbours are young, hip, unsullied the way Brad and Angelina were unsullied before the tabloids turned them into twisted freaks underneath a Barnum & Bailey circus tent. He wears tight-fitting pants and reminds me of a flamenco dancer. She wears a black dress with a V cut so low we can see the diamond stud in her navel. Raoul creeps from behind a pot of tropical plants and asks if they care for a cocktail or an hors d’oeuvre. They order their drinks and tell Raoul they will be sharing a plate of duck pâté. Raoul says very good and waddles away.

Did you hear that? I whisper. And Barb whispers back that, yes, she saw how Raoul nodded and didn’t advise that they were out of pâté. It isn’t long before our neighbours are swiping dollops of pâté across their crackers and stuffing them into their mouths like kids with popcorn at the movies. I wave the waiter over to our table and challenge him, pointing to our neighbours and the dainty bits of pâté stuck in the corners of their mouths.

You told us you were out of duck pâté.

That is true.

Yet you served them duck pâté.

No, that is not pâté.

Of course it is.

Raoul looks to our neighbours and shakes his head. That is a spreadable meat made from duck liver.

Which is the definition of duck pâté.

You are mistaken, sir.

Increasingly, I find myself experiencing vertiginous moments like this when I grip the edge of the table and gaze across it to Barb and beg her to assure me that the table is real. I don’t think this is me growing old; I think this is the world turning on it’s head. Should we stay for the rest of our meal? I worry they’ll set coq au vin in front of me and try to persuade me it’s the aged bison I ordered. Carrots are beans. Water is wine. Jolly fascists will march from the kitchen, singing the national anthem, and serve my head on a silver platter while telling everyone it’s wild boar.

Categories
Street Photography

Flash Fiction: The Hero’s Secret Identity

A young man in jeans and T-shirt and wearing a lanyard with ID card emerges onto the sidewalk from an underground subway entrance.

Greg didn’t think it was a coincidence he shared his given name with the famous movie star who inspired his best idea to date. Like Gregory Peck posing as a Jew so he could report on what it’s like to get the short end of the cultural stick, Greg thought he could work up an amazing exposé by posing as a front line health care worker. Greg wanted to know what it was like to live with the exhaustion, the stress, the heartache, of working as a medical professional in the middle of a global pandemic. An opportunity like this doesn’t come every day, you know.

Greg had stolen hospital greens from a cleaning truck parked on Bond Street on the east side of St. Mike’s Hospital, and his buddy, Gordy, a digital artist, had agreed to make a fake ID. While Greg posed for his fake employee mug shot, Gordy confessed that Greg’s scheme made him feel uneasy. Gordy thought it was unethical. Greg told him to chill. It was a standard journalist thing, going undercover to find out what it really feels like to be on the front lines. Besides, he said, it’s not as if I’m gonna do anything medical; I’m just there to feel the vibe. As Gordy laminated the fake ID card, he made Greg promise not to touch any patients and, for god’s sake, don’t catch anything. Greg promised, then went home to binge watch old episodes of Grey’s Anatomy so he’d be up on his medical jargon.

Greg rationalized his plan by saying it was in the public interest to know about the suffering of health care providers, but he had to admit that he was equally drawn by the desire to know what it felt like to be called a hero. Normally, nobody would ever call a schmuck like him a hero. He heard how people leaned out their windows at night and banged on pots. And he heard how newscasters talked about their extraordinary sacrifice. Who wouldn’t want some of that recognition? On the subway for his first shift, ID dangling at the end of his lanyard and glasses steaming above his blue medical mask, he couldn’t help but notice the way people looked at him and the way it made him feel. He would have to make a note of this for his exposé. As he got out at Queen Street, a couple guys patted him on the back and thanked him for his sacrifice. He said thank you back and told them how he was just doing what anybody in his position would do.

Walking east along Queen Street toward the hospital, Greg kept his head low, trying not to draw attention to himself, especially as he got close to the entrance where a group of security guards stood in a row, arms folded and looking stern. When he crossed Victoria Street, he noticed the news van with the dish on the roof and big logo on the sliding door and the cameraman and the talking head with perfect hair and microphone. This wasn’t the only news van. There was a whole row of them lined up behind the first van. And a whole row of reporters standing along the curb opposite the row of security guards.

The two rows—reporters and security guards—formed a gauntlet and running the gauntlet right down the middle of the sidewalk was a group of protesters shouting and waving signs. At first, Greg had no idea what the protesters were going on about, but as he got closer, he saw they were a bunch of whack-a-doodle conspiracy theorists who said the whole thing was a hoax perpetrated by the global elites to keep ordinary people under the boot. They were spreading the disease with cell phone towers. The whole thing was a big eugenics project. It was the product of covert biological warfare.

The marchers drew up to where Greg stood and they stopped. Greg was astonished at the number of marchers who needed major dental work. Another observation for his exposé. Somebody in the back yelled how health care workers were complicit in spreading the disease. That just set Greg off. He couldn’t help himself. He had to respond. It was a matter of honour.

Greg tore into an impassioned speech about being an ordinary working guy who suddenly found himself with a difficult choice: either play it safe and sit at home collecting welfare, or step up even though that meant risking infection. Well, virtually every one of his colleagues had chosen to step up and take the risk. Not because they’re special. But because it’s the right thing to do. What’s not the right thing to do … And Greg lit into the marchers, calling them ignoramuses and selfish buffoons, and giving all the news services terrific sound bytes. But Greg wasn’t about to go easy on the news services either, taking a step towards one of the cameras and pointing a finger at the lens and calling them irresponsible for their hackneyed bothsideism which tried to give legitimacy to a side populated by ignoramuses and selfish buffoons and …

Greg reached the climax of his set piece when a fist magically emerged from the crowd and flattened him. Stars burst like fireworks in a black sky. The copper taste of blood seeped down the back of his throat. He heard the sound of crunching bone and, afterwards, as he lay on the sidewalk, he felt a throb across the left side of his face that made him wonder if maybe rodents hadn’t burrowed into his head. Christ, he thought, I’ve taken things too far.

A police officer tackled the owner of the fist and two orderlies attended to Greg while one of the security guards ran off for an ice pack. The news services did what news services do best and made an indisputable record of events from seven different angles. When the police officer had cuffed the assailant and read him his rights and left him to cool off in the back seat of a cruiser, he returned to the scene and knelt beside Greg. The more the police officer leaned in to him and spoke in sympathetic tones, the worse Greg’s face throbbed. When the police officer explained to him the charges against the assailant and how they’d like Greg to make a statement if he was feeling up to it, Greg waved the man off. He struggled to his feet and wobbled a bit, then, unrecognizable beneath his purple eye and swollen face, he turned to the same camera he had accosted only minutes before, and said he bore no ill will for the man who punched him in the face. These are difficult times for everybody. For extra effect, he spat blood into his shirt sleeve. I’m sure that guy’s got it tough already. The last thing he needs is criminal charges against him.

Greg hoped that would diffuse the situation and give him a chance to slip away before someone recognized him. But it only made things worse. He heard one of the security guards shout that he was a hero. And one of the news people started rehearsing lines in front the camera: Now, folks, this is what real heroism looks like. Only moments ago …

Someone called for his name. Someone else asked what department he worked in.

Greg wanted to run away, but his legs felt like rubber bands. He wanted everyone to leave him be; he’d be fine if he sat here alone for a while. He wanted to tell them all to fuck off. But he couldn’t do that. One thing he knew for certain is that a real hero doesn’t tell his admirers to fuck off.

Categories
Street Photography

Flash Fiction: High Noon at the Schrödinger Corral

Black and white photograph through the window of a bar where a person sits alone at a table, legs crossed, right hand on a glass.

I heard a couple bangs like slamming doors, then I saw a couple plumes rising from the pavement at my feet, looking for all the world like miniature Old Faithful geysers. Someone further down the sidewalk screamed at me to get down but I stood in a dissociative befuddlement, doing my best to interpret the rising chuffs of dust, and failing. It wasn’t until long afterwards, when police questioned me, that I understood someone had been taking pot shots at me from the other side of the street.

Know why anyone’d wanna hurt you?

I’m a conveyancer.

That’s a reason?

I shrugged and floated away like an empty plastic bag pushed around by an afternoon breeze. The breeze didn’t have far to push before it found the door to a pub and pushed me right through and onto a vinyl covered stool where the bartender was all too happy to pour me a lager even if I was only an empty plastic bag. A couple mouthfuls of lager was all it took to set me off on a philosophical meander whose basic theme was meandering itself, or at least the randomness that a good meander depends on.

Although nearly an hour had passed since a stranger shot at me for no discernible reason, an image of the rising plumes stayed fresh in my head. And the feeling that went with it, too, the feeling of utter randomness. The stranger hadn’t been shooting bullets, but quantum particles. They had hit me. They had missed me. They were Schrödinger’s bullets. In law, the bullets had missed me. But in every way that mattered, the bullets had pierced my flesh and lodged deep inside me.

I stared at my pint glass and watched how the bubbles rose up through the straw coloured liquid, some bursting when they hit the air, others clinging to the inside of the glass. When I bent my ear close to the mouth of the glass, I could hear the tiny bubbles screaming. Maybe they thought I was their god and they were either screaming in pain as they burst out of existence or they were screaming in supplication: let this cup pass from my hands. As with my rising plumes, there was a randomness to the bubbles. Who’s to say which bubbles burst and which clung to the inside of the glass? I could make no more sense of the bubbles than I could of the bullets.

There was a feeling of randomness, too, in the sensation that rose to my brain each time I drank another mouthful of lager. It was as if, once inside me, the lager continued to release bubbles and they rose through my blood/brain barrier and attached themselves to neurons where they whispered subtle instructions to my soul, some of rage and some of consolation, some of fear and some of wistfulness. I had no idea which feeling would prevail. To be truthful, I’m not sure prevailing was their game. In keeping with the quantum bullets that had/hadn’t come hurtling at me that afternoon, I was inclined to think these were Schrödinger’s feelings. I felt angry and I felt at peace. I felt consolation and I felt desolation.

I ordered a second. It would take me all afternoon to figure out what I was feeling. Even then, I had no confidence I’d be any further ahead. I’d figure things out. I’d never figure things out.

Categories
Street Photography

Flash Fiction: Interview with the Greatest Living Poet

Candid street portrait from behind, focussing on ear lobes and facial tattoos. The subject has hair slicked back and smokes a cigarette. The smoke obscures an already blurred background.
X’s features lay indeterminate inside that grey smog.

Everyone has heard of X, our country’s preeminent poet, a fact made more remarkable because, in today’s prosaic world of Tik Tok influencers and power-hungry demagogues and anti-vaccination marches, it seems improbable that there would be widespread interest in the traces of one person’s poetic imagination. I already knew something of the enigmatic X because, when I was an undergrad student, I roomed with someone who went on to do a Ph.D. thesis on the poetics of X so, when I got the call to do a profile piece for the zine, I had an in.

My friend sent me to a non-descript address in the suburbs. It could have been anywhere. Dandelion infested lawns. Power mowers whining like cicadas in the heat. Garden hoses left uncoiled by the garage. It was a matter of some embarrassment that I hadn’t read anything by X, but every bookstore (even virtual bookstores) told me they had nothing in stock. I couldn’t even reserve any of X’s works through the public library system; the people I spoke to speculated that maybe clients were stealing X’s books (even virtual books). X was, after all, a popular figure. Legendary even. If it came to specifics, I’d have to bluff my way through the interview.

I found X sitting in a garden of plants I couldn’t identify. X was smoking a cigarette—vaping is for pussies (not my words)—and the hot afternoon air was so still that each exhalation added more smoke to a growing cloud that had settled around the poet’s head. X’s features lay indeterminate inside that grey smog. The hair might have been blond or brown; the eyes, green or blue. In fact, I couldn’t be certain X was a man. I had assumed, but maybe I wasn’t even using the right pronoun. When X greeted me, the voice gave no clue as to gender. Years of smoking had turned the voice into an understated gravel pit that could have belonged to anyone.

So what’ve you written lately? And as soon as the words had bounced off my tongue, I felt like an idiot.

Through the cloud of smoke, X offered what may or may not have been a smile. I am a poet, X answered.

The economy of words. The compression. The indeterminacy of meaning. The shamanic vibe. All these things were the hallmark of a great poet. And yet all these things were also a source of frustration for someone trying to nail down a piece for a struggling arts zine.

I am a poet because I am a poet. Not because I write poetry.

But if I apply a Butlerian approach to identity, I’d challenge your poetic essentialism and say your identity as a poet depends on the performative aspects of poetic production.

X laughed and laughed until the laughter turned into a hacking fit and X nearly fell onto the patio paving stones. Christ, you’ve been spending too much time with that postdoctoral nitwit friend of yours.

But you still write poetry, don’t you?

I tried once, but it scared the shit out of me.

Referring afterwards to my notes, I see that I wrote a gigantic “PHEW!!!” And underneath: “At least I know now why I couldn’t find any of X’s works.” Then, on the reverse side of the same page: “This A-hole has never written a single fucking word!”

So what is it? I asked. Anxiety? Fear of failure?

X drew on a freshly lit cigarette, held the smoke in for a minute, then expelled it into the ever-present cloud: Nothing so pedestrian.

As I understand it (assuming there’s anything at all to understand), X rests the full weight of personal poetics on a notion of opportunity cost which (because X wants to appear intellectual) can be reduced to the Latin maxim: expressio unius est exclusio alterius. Saying one thing forecloses the possibility of saying something else. If we say X has green eyes, then we have prevented ourselves from saying that X has blue eyes. But X wants to savour the possibility of having both green and blue eyes and wants the feeling to go on and on forever. So it’s impossible to say either. X struggles against the law of non-contradiction. X wants to kick the young Wittgenstein in the nuts. X wants to drown positivists in Heraclitus’s river.

In a way, said X, I’m the greatest poet who’s ever lived. By writing nothing, I leave the field open to infinite possibility. No other poet has been so expansive.

X wrapped things up with a personal mantra: Specificity destroys possibility!

Even so, for all this abstraction, I faced the practical matter of a deadline. Zine publishers love their specificity. In the end, I wrote the best article it was possible for me to write. I submitted a blank page and a yellow sticky with a note: “Feel free to make of this whatever you like.” I may well be the greatest zine writer who’s ever lived.

Categories
Street Photography

Flash Fiction: Passion

Black and white photograph of a man in business attire pulling a roller bag behind him with one hand while glancing at a smart phone in the other hand.
On his dating profile, he said he was passionate

Soooo…It sez on your profile that you’re passionate.

Ordinarily, Janice wouldn’t be so forward, but it was only two minutes into the meet-up and already they’d fallen into an awkward silence and Janice was desperate to move things along so she didn’t drift into her usual daydream about an alien spaceship that beams her aboard and whisks her away to the planet of men who are actually interesting.

Yeah, passionate.

That was it. Nothing more. No elaboration. No self-aggrandizement. At this point, Janice would’ve been happy for some straight-up bullshit. But nothing. Christ, she couldn’t even remember his name. She was afraid he’d coalesce into a generic cardboard cutout. She’d toss him onto the heap of generic cardboard cutouts she was collecting in her bedroom.

The boy pulled off his beret and began to fondle it nervously on his lap. Janice noted that—Oswald! That was it! The improbably named Oswald. With his goatee and receding hairline and his cup of dark roast diluted with half a cup of milk and five packets of raw sugar.

What’re you passionate about, Oswald?

About?

Yeah, what about?

Was that a shrug? It was hard to tell. He’d raised his shoulders, but that could’ve been him shifting in his seat. 

Maybe I’m wrong, Janice said, but I don’t think of passion as something that happens in the air. It’s attached to other things. Passion for justice. Passion for poetry. Passion for synaesthesia. See what I’m saying?

I suppose what I meant is that whatever I commit to I commit to with passion. No half measures. I dive in. All of me. That sort of thing.

So, Oswald, what’re you committed to? Right now?

Again with the shoulders. He may have been shifting in his seat, but this second time around was pushing the needle more to the shrug end of the scale.

I guess I’m passionate about being passionate.

Oh, come on.

Why not?

It’s…it’s… (Janice knew there was a word to describe what Oswald was doing, and not a complimentary word either, but the word eluded her in the moment.)

This is the world we live in, you know. Where people are expected to be passionate about things. What’s wrong with being passionate just for the sake of being passionate?

But listen to you. We could have a good argument about this, but you don’t even raise your voice.

As an answer to her spaceship daydream, Janice had a passionate argument daydream where she and her coffee date get into a blistering disagreement, practically strangling each other across the table, and the whole thing leads inevitably to the kind of sex that sets the world on fire.

Oswald shrugged. This time it was definitely a shrug. An indisputable shrug. She could get others in the coffee shop to swear affidavits attesting to the shruggishness of the shrug.

I don’t know, Oswald said. It just seems like the sort of thing you’re supposed to put on your profile. Most of the time, I couldn’t give a shit about what’s going on.

So. What? You’re passionate about slacking off?

I guess. Doesn’t really matter to me.

Categories
City Life Public Art

When your eyeballs explode in the vacuum of space

A child wearing a Toronto Blue Jays hat climbs on a sculpture of a Toronto Maple Leafs goalie with a sign that says: Please Do Not Climb On Sculpture
Sculpture in The Distillery District, Toronto

My son attacked me with a baseball bat the other day. Obviously I’m fine. Even so, it’s left me on edge.

My relationship with my son changed the minute he discovered that I’ve played bit roles in action flicks. When the robbers storm the bank, I’m the first guy they shoot in the head. When the platoon takes the hill, I’m the private who steps on a live grenade. And when the aliens attack the spaceship, I’m the astronaut whose eyeballs explode after he gets sucked into space without a helmet. Each time, I’m gone in the first big scene and the movie goes on without me for another hundred minutes.

Josh thinks it’s the coolest thing to watch his old man get destroyed a hundred different ways. So the other day he invites all his school friends over because they don’t believe him when he brags that his dad is indestructible. I walk in on a roomful of nine year olds and all they want to know is if I’m made of rubber or maybe titanium wrapped in latex, like in that movie, you know—what’s it called?—Sperminator? And they giggle.

I try to explain to them how the studio applies CG effects in post production, but their eyes wander and they start to squirm. They want to watch more clips of me getting my arms blown off. I try to explain that when I have that look on my face, it’s because I’m acting, not because a bullet is actually going into my head. I go: you know how you can send photos of yourself and the messaging app puts cat ears on your head? They all nod. Well it’s like that, only instead of cat ears, it’s high res blood. I hear the creak of gears turning inside their tiny little heads, but the gears don’t turn fast enough to make the connection between cat ears and exploding eyeballs.

I tell them I’ll go make some popcorn. Josh says he’ll put on the next scene. As I’m walking to the kitchen, I hear the familiar dialogue from a motion cap scene I did for GTA. I’m a loser who gets rear ended driving a Ford Pinto. I get out before the car blows up, but the thugs come at me with a baseball bat anyways. It occurs to me then that the kids are too young to be watching this scene, what with all the gratuitous violence and swearing. I’m sure I’ll get a call from somebody’s parent.

I come back to the TV room with a bowl of popcorn and Josh comes at me with a baseball bat.

He shouts: He’s made of rubber and I’ll prove it!

It’s amazing what happens to time when the adrenaline kicks in. I’ve noticed the same thing on movie sets. It’s like the frame rate jumps to ten thousand so you can slow things down and still keep your movements smooth and seamless. In that instant, I see how Josh’s face is contorted, not with malevolence, but simply with effort. Popcorn explodes like there’s a tiny grenade planted inside the bowl and the kernels seems to hang suspended in mid-air. A roomful of nine year old jaws gape in wonder as the rubber man executes a sideways twisting move and avoids the baseball bat.

I snatch the baseball bat from Josh’s hands and order him to his room. Then I tell the kids the party is over. Call your parents and have them pick you up. Nobody whines because they’re too busy going on about how Josh’s dad really is made of rubber. Did you see how he moved? Next time I come over, I’m bringing my dad’s gun; I bet Josh’s dad can dodge bullets.

Categories
Street Photography

Things Are Opening Up

A man wearing a mask passes a store window that has been papered over but has the word "open" in red letters still stuck to the glass.
Man Passes Store Window, Yonge Street, Toronto

Things are opening up now.

That’s what Jeremy’s father had said when his parents came upstairs to his bedroom to tell him he’d be going back to school.

But I’m already at school, and Jeremy pointed to the tablet sitting upright on his makeshift desk.

Honey, we’re talking about real school. You’ll get to see your friends.

Jeremy didn’t think much of his first day back at real school. The problem with friends at real school is that when they shove you at recess you fall down in the pea gravel and tear a real hole in the knees of the new jeans your mother bought you special and when you get home you’ll have to tell your mother how you tore your jeans on the first day and she’ll give you a lecture about not appreciating all that you have. Jeremy didn’t see how appreciating your new jeans would keep your so-called friends from shoving you at recess. Maybe he’d figure that one out when he got older. If his friends didn’t kill him first.

On the way home after his first day of opened up school, Jeremy noticed something he’d never noticed before. Standing at one end of the longest street between school and home, Jeremy looked to the far end of that street and saw how it was littered with discarded masks. Most were blue or white. Some were cloth with logos or patterns stamped onto them. A couple were funny, with cartoon characters or teeth or giant lips. Some lay in the dirt by the curb. The wind had blown a few under shrubs in front of the building where he went to get his teeth cleaned. There was even a mask hanging from the lowest branch in a tree. When Jeremy got close, he saw that it was an Arthur the nerdy aardvark mask, nothing any normal child would wear.

Jeremy had an idea. His mother would give him proper hell for this one but, seeing as she was already going to give him proper hell for the knees of his new jeans, he didn’t see how things could get worse. He pulled off his own mask, a white N95, and tucked it into his back pack. Then he pulled down the Arthur the nerdy aardvark mask and put it on. It didn’t smell as bad as he thought it might. He could hear his mother scolding him, telling him he was being gross, yelling at him about germs and the need to be hygienic. Jeremy didn’t know what the word hygienic means but he figured it had something to do with not putting on masks that other people have worn.

As soon as Jeremy put on the mask, it felt as if he was somewhere else, like someone had flipped a switch and there he was, instantly transported. He could hear three older kids, like the bullies he knew from school, teasing him. Only they didn’t call him Jeremy. They called him Arthur, or shitface, and they kicked him, and when he wet himself, they howled like animals. Jeremy tore off the mask and when he looked down at his crotch, he saw that his jeans were dry. What he’d felt seemed real enough but it must have been virtual, like going to school on his tablet before the world opened up.

Jeremy threw the Arthur the nerdy aardvark mask into the bushes and tried another mask, a blue medical mask that was clean except for a patch of lipstick on the inside. Right away, the mask dunked him in a world of chatty Cantonese and, for reasons couldn’t grasp, she understood every word. She was complaining to a friend that she never had enough money, always behind on the rent and the car payments, and although the books she kept told her there should be enough, there wasn’t; the money seemed to evaporate. She worried that her husband was gambling again. If one of them got infected and they couldn’t work, she didn’t know what they’d do. When Jeremy pulled off the blue medical mask, he found that he was gripping his stomach like there was an acid hole burning through the middle of it.

Finally, Jeremy put on a mask the colour of night. It was dirtier and smelled of something he couldn’t name, though it reminded him of the smell on his father’s breath whenever he went out with the men his mother didn’t like. There was a sweet yeastiness mixed in with the mud. He became a man of few words, with no friends to speak of, who drifted through the streets cadging coins from strangers and taking shelter underneath the bridge behind the school. He didn’t like to wear a mask, but he needed it to get into certain places, like the shelter where he sometimes slept, and the clinic where they treated the scabs on his feet. He’d only had the one mask for months but now he knew where he could score a clean one.

Jeremy tossed the black mask onto the street and ran home. He didn’t understand why everybody was so excited about the world opening up. As far as he could tell, it was open enough. Any more open, and it would make him bananas.

Categories
Street Photography

Managing The Little Shits On The First Day Of Wizard School

A person wearing a sun hat and a T-shirt with the word "Slut" on it walks down the middle of Toronto's Church Street holding a soft drink.
Slut, Church Street, Pride Toronto 2022

It was the first day of a fresh term at the Academy of Magical Arts and the air crackled with excitement as the children took their seats in the Great Hall. The new students, young and fresh-faced, had been allotted seats at the front where they had an unobstructed view of the raised platform where the Head Wizard and other members of the teaching staff waited for the children to settle.

The hall was a fine example of late Gothic architecture with its stone columns rising to a rib vault ceiling and its pointed arches inset with stained glass windows. To the left, the windows featured scenes of wizardly prowess drawn from the Academy’s own ancient lore; to the right, a procession of the Academy’s luminaries literally illuminated by a brilliant morning light shining through the glass. Had the children been older and more attuned to affairs of the world, they might have appreciated that the grandeur of their surroundings demanded a tuition that only the most privileged could afford, billionaire fantasy authors, for example.

The Head Wizard rose and greeted the children with a tired speech he had delivered year after year until now, well on his way to senescence, the best he could manage was a somnolent drone. The aging pedagogue thought to himself how much he hated the little shits and prayed that none of them possessed enough natural ability to read his mind. He concluded his greeting by announcing that it was time for the sorting hat and he surrendered the proceedings to his number two.

A buzz rose from the children, none of whom knew anything about a sorting hat. On acceptance to the Academy, the children had received reams of printed material describing everything from payment to code of conduct to curriculum to travel instructions. But nowhere did the printed material mention a sorting hat.

The Head Wizard’s number two, a benevolent woman with a not-so-secret addiction to certain potions, rose from her seat and settled the children with soothing tones. The sorting hat was nothing to worry about. Just a fun way to divide the student body into its appropriate groups. She explained that each new student would take a turn putting the sorting hat on their head and the sorting hat would assign them to their proper group and, as a bonus, it would assign their proper pronouns.

After the greater part of the student body had submitted to the game, the children began to recognize a pattern. Invariably, the sorting hat took the children who had penises and put them in the boy group and assigned them the he/him pronouns. As for the children with vaginas, the sorting hat put them in the girl group and assigned them the she/her pronouns.

The process was quite orderly until one of the children with a vagina (whom the hat had put into the girl group) corrected the benevolent elderly teacher when the old woman referred to them as her.

The child said they were non-binary and insisted on being addressed as they/them. All their life, people had called them she/her but it didn’t line up with the way they experienced their body in the world.

Are you suggesting that the sorting hat is wrong? The benevolent woman’s tone was not so much patronizing as indignant.

I don’t know that it’s a matter of right or wrong? Right and wrong are simple binaries, just like boy/girl, and that’s the problem. In a way, I feel sorry for the hat for having such a limited view of human experience. One of the reasons I’ve come to the Academy is to find a magic that might transform my body so that it lines up with how I feel. 

The Head Wizard wasn’t having any more from the precocious shit and interjected, speaking with more force than at any other time that morning: This is the way they’d always done things. They trusted the hat. The magic the girl sought came from the dark arts and the dark arts were forbidden at the Academy. The only magical transformation the girl would find here went in the opposite direction; it would transform how she feels to line up with her body. And that was the end of it. If she didn’t like it, she could go back where she came from and live amongst the Muddles.

Categories
Street Photography

Statistical Photography

Black and white photo of a woman wearing ear buds and smoking while texting on her cellphone.
Shot on SE corner of Queen St W and Bay St, Toronto

I’ve noticed that in the curation of my own photos, there’s a statistical process at play. I go out and I shoot and I shoot and I shoot. When I’m done, I dump my images into a folder and do a preliminary cull. Typically, half my photos go into the trash right at the start. I load the rest into Lightroom and begin a closer examination of my shots, flagging those I like best for post-processing adjustments like colour correction and cropping.

So far this year, 1 in 14 of these images have made the cut. That’s 1 in 28 of my total. In any given year, that leaves me with a thousand or so images of a certain quality which I then cull to a hundred or thereabouts, those I regard as suitable for print. In other words, I end up with 1 in 10 of the 1 in 28. If my math is accurate, that means that, on average, I make 280 images for every one that really satisfies me. That ratio is pretty consistent year over year.

No doubt other photographers function differently. Some take greater care at the moment they capture the image, making sure they release the shutter only if they know the image is good. For them, the ratio of satisfying images is higher. But that isn’t me. I can’t afford to be so precious. I subscribe to the Wayne Gretzky school of photography: the only thing I know for certain is that I don’t make 100% of the shots I don’t take. So I shoot and I shoot and I shoot.

As odd as it may sound, the global pandemic has provided affirmation of my approach to photography. The pandemic has made me daily mindful of statistical thinking and its importance to public health policy. No one action will guarantee that I avoid the Sars-Cov-2 virus, but if I wear a mask and get vaccinated, and if others do the same, then collectively we improve the odds that everyone will avoid the Sars-Cov-2 virus. It’s all a matter of statistics.

Applying the same kind of thinking to my photographic practice … no one photo may be a great photo, but if I keep shooting, and if I do my best with each shot, then, statistically speaking, at least a few of those shots are going to be good. The real trick is recognizing them when they happen.

Categories
Street Photography

Photographic Clichés

A woman cleans the interior face of a store window, holding a bottle of window cleaner in one hand and a white cloth in the other.
Window Cleaning on Spadina Avenue

I remember hearing a story about a university student taking an English Lit course. The class had been assigned Shakespeare’s Hamlet and on the first day of lectures the professor asked: “So what did you think?” The student put up his hand and said: “It was great, but there were too many clichés.”

I have no idea if the story is true. In fact, I’ve heard it so many times, it’s becoming a bit clichéd in its own right. But the story points to the fact that every cliché was once an original thought. Before there were new age self-help gurus, there was Polonius saying to his son: “To thine own self be true.” And before we had hedge fund managers standing on ledges, we had Hamlet saying: “To be, or not to be. That is the question.”

Although photography hasn’t been around quite as long as classic literature, it has explored huge swaths of what it is possible to say with images. It has developed a canon of “great” images and these images have produced a kind of stylistic grammar. Want patient suffering? Look to Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother. Want the 1000 yard stare of collective trauma? Look to Steve McCurry’s Afghan Girl. Want puddle jumping? Look to Henre Cartier-Bresson’s Behind the Gare Saint Lazare.

Tourism has added to the range of our stylistic grammar. For example, if you Google “holding up the leaning tower of pisa” you end up with enough visual cheese to make a thousand pizzas. And, of course, there’s the selfie. Here I am in Times Square. Here I am in front of the Eiffel Tower. And here I am at the Taj Mahal.

As evidenced by today’s featured photo, I am a great practitioner of the visual cliché. In fact, I am absolutely shameless in my taste for visual cheese. I have a couple thoughts on this. First, trying to put my own spin on what the masters have done before is a great way to hone my craft. Second, let’s be realistic. With eight billion people on this planet, the majority of whom now walk around with cameras in their pockets, the chances of me coming up with anything original are minuscule. Even if I do come up with an original idea, it’s likely that other people are coming up with the same idea simultaneously.

In such an environment, it makes more sense simply to revel in cliché. Own it. Roll around in it like a pig in mud.

Categories
Street Photography

The Migraine Dress

A woman walks along Queen Street West in a Zig Zag patterned dress.
Woman walks along Queen Street West in a Zig Zag patterned dress

I get migraine headaches. They are textbook classic migraine headaches. Most of the time, they follow the same pattern. First, I see a hole. A spot goes missing from my visual field. Maybe I’m reading, and as I move my eyes from left to right, the words on the right disappear as I shift my gaze. It’s as if all the words tumble into a black hole. Or maybe I reach for something and I notice that my hand has disappeared. It’s an odd feeling to lose track of your body parts.

Next up are the fortification hallucinations, jagged lines shaped like the parapets of a medieval fort, but unlike fortifications, these lines shimmer, and they’re lit up like electric arc lights. When the fortification hallucinations start, the whole world lights up and quivers. The woman’s dress shown above, looks a lot like the start of a migraine headache. Clearly, this woman does NOT suffer from migraine headaches; if she did, she would avoid this dress like the plague.

These preliminary stages are called the aura. There is speculation that they are the source of stories about poltergeists. Many people, myself included, report an extraordinary sensitivity to sounds and strange auditory sensations. While this is probably caused by a sudden rush of blood through the ear drums, I can understand how premodern migraine sufferers might have thought they were hearing ghosts. At the same time, I experience a taste/smell of icy mintiness. And let’s not forget about the numbness that typically affects my left hand and the left side of my face (because the migraine headache affects the right side of my brain).

Of all the preliminary stages, my favourite is transient aphasia which typically lasts between 10 and 15 minutes. I use the word favourite loosely. It’s such a weird experience to hear words inside my head but find myself unable to communicate them. The experience makes me feel horribly for those (like Bruce Willis) who have permanent aphasia because of a brain trauma or progressive dementia.

On a couple of occasions, I have had a journal close at hand when I happen to be entering the aphasic stage of migraine and so, as an experiment, I have recorded whatever happens to enter my head as I pass into and out of my aphasic state. The results are odd and I have shared them on my other site, nouspique.com.

Then comes the headache proper. Most of the time, medication keeps the worst of it at bay. But there are times when nothing helps. It feels like somebody has taken knitting needles and a hammer and has pounded the needles up my nostrils through my brain and out the top of my head. The next day, it feels like I have a hangover from the bender of the century.

Why would anyone wear a dress that looks like that?

Categories
Street Portrait

Curiosity

A woman with a heavily tattooed arm, and wearing strong makeup and a hairnet, sits in Toronto's High Park.

Curiosity is a mental posture worth cultivating in the pursuit of street photography. There is something to be said for revisiting the mind of a three year old and asking Why? Why? Why? wherever we turn our gaze.

I’m not a Roman Catholic, but curiosity has led me to delve into Roman Catholic theology. I am particularly taken by the writings of the Jesuit philosopher, Bernard Lonergan, whose monumental work, Insight, rests on a simple observation: all human beings are born with an unrestricted desire to know. Curiosity.

For Lonergan, curiosity is the default condition of human consciousness. At one time or another, virtually all of us stray from that default condition, pulled by what he describes as distortions in our thinking. Many of these distortions happen because of the socializing process we call growing up. Adulthood has many things to commend it, but sometimes its demands can stifle curiosity.

Street photography (or any photography for that matter) can be a wonderful antidote to the dangers of growing up. It stimulates curiosity by encouraging us to look at our world in fresh ways. This is especially important when we encounter people as the subjects of our photographs. Curiosity pushes us to see beyond those habits that distort our seeing, habits like the impulse to judge and the entrenchment of personal bias. Curiosity demands that we see the more that rests inside each person we encounter.

Alongside curiosity, I find a delight in difference. This delight doesn’t find expression in a salacious voyeurism: look at this strangeness I’ve captured. Instead, it’s more an expression of relief. It’s such a relief that people don’t look or think like me. What a dull and narrow world that would be!

Categories
Street Photography

The Naked Truth

A man stands naked on a busy street corner.
Butt naked at the intersection of Church & Bloor, Toronto

I could stand butt naked (or is it buck naked? I’m never sure) on a busy street corner, and nobody would notice.

That seems to be the way it is for me. I write. I photograph. I create. But I attract very little attention to myself.

In the world at large, it seems as if people are scrabbling over one another for attention. Despite talk about cancel culture and deplatforming, never have so many of us had so much access to tools designed to amplify our voices. In fact, our apparent anxiety about cancel culture and deplatforming implies that we regard widespread attention as a right. We have the right to develop a personal brand. We have the right to carry media studios in our pockets to promote that brand. We have the right to be famous.

I regard myself as a bit contrarian and, certainly when it comes to digital culture, I feel like I’m forever walking into a serious headwind. Still, I feel that my time has come. No, I don’t think I’m on the cusp of becoming famous. Only that I’m better prepared for an inevitable and impending oblivion.

In her Norton Lectures: Spending The War Without You, Laurie Anderson has this to say about our creative impulses:

We’re also the first humans who face the possibility, some say the probability, of our own extinction. And we’re the first humans who are trying to find the words for this. But here’s the thing about stories. A story is usually something you tell to somebody else. And if you’re telling a story to nobody, is it still a story? And this is our awesome job. We are the first humans to try to do this: to tell a story to nobody.

I’ve pulled the quote from the second of the CBC Ideas broadcasts starting at 36:20.

Laurie Anderson gives me hope because she makes it clear that I’ve devoted my whole life to the bleeding edge of our latest (ultimate?) cultural trend: I’m seasoned in the art of telling stories to nobody. I have no expectation of fame or even of a modest reputation, and I have no confidence in a posterity to receive my creations.

That isn’t as depressing as it sounds. It’s simply to note that I act on interior motivations. I do what I do because I have to. Obsession. Compulsion. Call it what you will. I prefer to think that I am motivated by the immediate pleasure I feel at the very moment of creation. It is a quiet and private satisfaction and it is enough.

Categories
Street Photography

People Not Doing Things

A man offers a pamphlet to a passer-by who ignores him completely.
Pamphleting in Dundas Square, Toronto

There is a kind of street photograph that I try to avoid at all costs. It’s the “catch whatever’s walking down the sidewalk” photograph. People being people. People going to work. People going home from work. People waiting for the light to change. People walking at night. People walking in the morning. People walking in dull light. People walking in bright light.

Yawn.

I prefer to capture people engaged in interactions either with other people or with their environment. People kissing people. People yelling at people. People avoiding puddles. People protesting things that make them angry. People spray painting messages on walls.

In the first case, I could photograph a cardboard cutout on the sidewalk and you wouldn’t be able to say for certain whether it was a flesh-and-blood person or a poster from the print shop. In the second case, my photograph would capture a dramatic encounter impossible to replicate no matter how many times I revisited the scene.

However, every rule has its exceptions, as does the rule about photographing people only when they’re engaged in interactions. In today’s photograph, a man offers a pamphlet to a passing woman who emphatically ignores him. This documents a deliberate refusal to engage.

In a way, this encounter typifies all contemporary public discourse. Never have so many people had so much to say. And, thanks to universal literacy and social media, never have so many people had the means to disseminate their messages. At the same time, never have so many people found themselves the unwilling audience for so many messages. Never have so many people felt so overwhelmed by the sheer noise of others exercising their constitutionally protected freedoms.

Increasingly, this dynamic produces an exchange in which one person does their utmost to promote a message while another person, the intended recipient, does their utmost to ignore that message. As Janis Joplin never said: “Freedom’s just another word for making a nuisance of yourself.”

Categories
Street Photography

Pushing back against Susan Sontag: Cozy in Plato’s Cave

Man in tie and overcoat walks past the west entrance of Toronto's Fairmont Royal York Hotel.
York St., West entrance of Fairmont Royal York Hotel

The first essay in Susan Sontag’s book, On Photography, is titled “In Plato’s Cave.” I love Sontag’s writing. It does what all good writing should do: it provokes me. It doesn’t try to be my friend; it tries to make me think.

The trope of Plato’s cave—firelit shadows dancing on a wall—suggests the basic mechanisms of photography itself. Instead of firelight, photographers rely on sunlight or flashes; instead of shadows, they capture light reflected from their subjects; and instead of a wall, they cast that light on film or image sensors. Sontag invokes the trope the way clergy tell a parable: it has a didactic purpose. Like the dancing shadows, the reflected light we have captured on our image sensors is a dull likeness of a fuller reality that lies just beyond our apprehension.

But there’s something about Sontag’s tone that troubles me. She expresses her views in extreme terms:

All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability.

I’m troubled by her use of the word all. She lays this down as an absolute law of universal application. She leaves no room for variations in personal experience.

At the end of the essay, she offers another grand pronouncement of universal application:

Needing to have reality confirmed and experience enhanced by photographs is an aesthetic consumerism to which everyone is now addicted. Industrial societies turn their citizens into image-junkies; it is the most irresistible form of mental pollution.

First published in the New York Review of Books nearly 50 years ago, her words have taken on new life in the post Instagram age when people will produce 1.72 trillion photographs in 2022. How prescient! say her admirers. Well. Yes and no.

While I do agree that we are a society of image-junkies, our addiction goes beyond image-making. We are addicted to stimulation: binge-watching Netflix shows, road rage in GTA, Twitter hate-fests, Tik-Tok porn, live-streaming Ukraine gun battles. An image avalanche may well be the least part of our addiction.

What Sontag’s observations may miss 50 years after the fact is that, among the countless motivations for making images, many contemporary image-makers may use the process as a defence against over-stimulation. Like so many others, I answer Sontag’s invitation to turn around in Plato’s cave and stare at the world as it really is, only to find a world so saturated with stimuli that I find myself inundated.

My reality is a media-saturated reality. The only way I can cope with its overwhelm is to turn its tools on itself. I don’t make photographs to colonize the world, or to commodify it, or to fetishize it. I make photographs as a way to throw up a buffer between myself and a fuller reality. I tighten the frame and get rid of the colour to make the buffer more effective. Without that buffer, I would go crazy. I need Plato’s cave. I need the protection it gives me from a version of the real that isn’t interested in my well-being.