Beginning of the end

Winter is over. We've had three weeks or more of lovely clear, cold weather, with at least some sun almost every day. Then this morning we woke to rain spattering the windows under dirty grey clouds. The wind had rattled the apartment all night. The polar vortex has apparently spun itself away.

I fear we're now in for a month or more of yo-yoing temperatures, snow, rain, slush. If I could command the climate, I'd call for three months of temperatures between -10 and -2, no more than 10 inches of snow and sun every day. Then on March 1, the temperature would shoot up to 15, the snow and ice would melt and flowers would start sprouting.

Alas, that is not the Canadian way.

*

Not much of a walk today - certainly from the photographic point of view. I was out for almost an hour, though. About the only remarkable thing to report is that I had an in-person interaction with another actual human being. 

I had stopped to admire a house on Colborne St. near Dufferin, and took a picture. The owner, a guy who looked to be in his early 50s, was out shoveling his driveway. Whether he was suspicious at first - was I casing the joint? - or just friendly and proud of his house, or both, I don't know. He came out to the sidewalk where I was standing. 

'Everybody has to stop and look,' he said. 

'Well, it's a very pretty house,' I replied. I think he figured at that point that I wasn't a burglar. 

'If you have any questions...' 

So I asked him a few questions about the house. Italianate, built in 1879, he told me. He'd bought it 20 years before. I mentioned another small Italianate mansion I admire, on Pall Mall. He knew it. 'It's on Picadilly, though,' he said. 'I almost bought that house, over 20 years ago now.' (He was right, I immediately realized. I always get the two streets confused.)

I'd have loved to know more about who he was. He mentioned he'd moved to the suburbs when his daughter was four, but very quickly realized they really wanted to be back downtown. That's when they bought this house. 'Everything is happening downtown,' he said.

I figure if he is in his early 50s, he must be a professional of some kind, or come from a moneyed family. Who else could afford a house like this when they were in their early 30s?

It was otherwise photographically slim pickings. In those circumstances, when the creative juices aren't flowing, my motto is, take pictures of buildings. So that's what I did.

First St. Andrews United Church, Queens Ave.

St. Paul's Cathedral, Richmond St.

Dominion Building, Richmond St.

*

If you stopped watching NHL hockey years ago because a) there was too much fighting and general thuggery, b) the league let the fastest, most skilled players be held, hooked, slashed and tripped with impunity, slowing the game to a crawl, or c) there were just too damn many teams to keep track of anymore, this is the year to give it another try.

Thanks to rule changes and tighter enforcement  in the league over the last ten years or so, as well as longer-term changes in the demographics and economics of the game and, thanks to Covid-19, border restrictions, all of those ills have been reversed this year in Canada.

The game has changed in many ways. For one, it has become very expensive to play. So the demographic has changed, especially among elite players. They're mostly nice middle-class boys from the suburbs now, whose parents can afford the best equipment, the best hockey programs and the best extracurricular training. 

In the old days, the league was dominated by young men who were desperate to get out of whatever dreary futureless backwater they emerged from. They grew up tough and they were willing to do anything to succeed, to win. Including beat the crap out of each other. 

Brutality was taken for granted, part of the game. Today, it's not. Not that there isn't body contact and toughness, both physical and mental, but thuggery, brutality is, for the most part, a thing of the past.

Meanwhile gradual improvements in equipment and training have made the game faster and its best players more skilled - immensely, magically skilled. Watch video of games from the supposed heyday of the NHL in the second half of the last century and you'll see what I mean. Today's good teams would trounce even the great teams of the past. Assuming the game was officiated to today's standards.

And this year, because of Covid precautions and border restrictions, all regular season play is intra-divisional, and all seven Canadian teams are in the same Northern division. So you really only need to keep track of six other teams besides the one you're rooting for.

As a bonus, some of the best young players in the league, some of the most dazzlingly skilled, play in the Northern division. Connor McDavid and Leon Draisaitl in Edmonton and Auston Matthews and Mitch Marner in Toronto are at the top of the scoring charts. They produce highlight-reel plays on a nightly basis.

And of course, if you're from these parts, it helps that the Leafs are winning. In fact, they're way out in front, not just in their division but in the league overall. (Well, I've said it before: the times are out of joint.)

So that's my ad for hockey.

*

Meanwhile, down the rabbit hole in Montpellier, France, I found a few more previously rejected shots worth taking a second look at.

Caribana parade

Modern office/apartment complex on river

The googly-eyed smiley face was supposedly original to the city; it was ubiquitous

We need homes, they give us streets

The phone woke me from a not-quite-dead sleep at five this morning. I listened befuddled to a drunk at the other end, babbling incomprehensibly. Finally, I snapped and said, 'Who the fuck is this?' 

It sounded like he said, 'Jorvik,' but that can't be right. (Jorvik is the Viking name for York - and today the name of a popular tourist attraction that tells the story of the Vikings in that English city.) Maybe he said, 'Geordie.' In any case, he then said, quite clearly, 'I'm trying to get into unit 1104.' 

At that point, I hung up.

When I told Karen about it in the morning, the first thing she said was, 'Probably a homeless person trying to get into the building.' And I thought, yeah, quite likely. A few minutes later, she called out, 'Omigod, it's minus twenty out there!' 

And I put the two things together: it's minus twenty now at 7:30, likely colder two hours ago, and I possibly stopped a homeless person from getting in out of the killing cold.

This afternoon, I went for a walk and as I came back along Dundas Street I came to a boarded-up low-rise business building just west of Colborne. In the alley along side, a homeless person was lying, completely covered, on an air vent, boots placed neatly at his head. 

And when I came level with one of the picture windows on the building front, this is what I saw.

'We need homes, they give us streets.' 

In an entranceway way to the building next door, two more homeless were sleeping, all bundled up. In the little parkette half a block along, a homeless person - or group - had set up a large tent. And another half block along sat a police cruiser, motor running, the officer just staring out the window.

I know I'm late to the party on this. And I know this is a really tough problem. But shouldn't this be absolutely the highest priority for our cities? If nobody died from the cold last night in London, it's only the purest good fortune.

*

The rest of the walk was less...freighted. I continued collecting street art. This one is in a laneway just off King St. between Richmond and Clarence. 

I call this one 'Icicle booger'

I walked along York St. for a change - a bit of a wasteland - past the London Free Press building, which I understand is mostly empty these days. I dropped down to the tracks on Colborne to see if there were any railroad shots worth trying for. There weren't. 

But I did continue with my attempts to pay homage to Harry Callahan, one of my favourite photographers. I'm getting a little closer to the Callahan aesthetic, I think, though these are still in colour and Harry only used black and white in the period when he was making weed-in-snow shots.

And then on the last of the return leg, I saw a way to photograph the relief sculptures on the front of the Toronto Dominion bank building at Clarence and Dundas. I've tried before, but never been satisfied. This one, of the reliefs reflected in the mirrored windows of the building across the street, I quite like.

I think the theme is exploration and settlement. There's a factory worker on left, a sailing ship, a farm vehicle and what looks to be a cowboy. I'm sure I could find more information about them somewhere...

*

What was left of the morning, after a Portal call with Caitlin and Louis and my run in the gloriously sunny weather, was given over to Montpellier, 2015.

My beauties at the botanical gardens

A church in the old city that had been converted into an art gallery

Sawn-in-half bikes poking through the corner of a building are a familiar street art installation in the city

 

City of Lights

I left my walk until after dark today because Karen wanted to go over and see the Christmas lights at Victoria Park before they're turned off. They've been left on longer than usual this year, apparently the city's idea of a pandemic morale booster. 

Karen had read that they're supposed to be one of the best city Christmas light displays in the province - or maybe it was in the country. They are impressive.  

The skating rink is also open now that London has moved into the red zone - for how long remains to be seen. The ice looked surprisingly good. Apparently you have to order a ticket, and you can only skate for a maximum of 40 minutes from your ticketed time.

St. Peter's Cathedral & One Richmond Row

*

Another day down the photographic rabbit hole. This time, I ended up in Montpellier, France, 2015. Instead of looking in the folder with edited photos, I went instead to my archive of RAW files for the period at the beginning of our stay in France that year. The object was to find overlooked photos with some potential. 

This one taken on our first full day in the city, shows one of the most distinctive sights in Montpellier, the ultramodern streetcars decked out in pop-art paint jobs. We spotted this one a couple of blocks from our rented flat that first morning.

A week or so into our stay, we took a bus to a place 15 kilometers or so away called Aigues Mortes - Dead Water - named for the marshes around the town. It's famous for having an intact medieval city wall - that is, a wall that still goes all the way around the old town. The modern city has of course grown well beyond the walled part, but it's the walled part we went to see, a great tourist attraction.

Here's a shot in Aigues Mortes - again, one that I had completely overlooked when I was first editing these photos - that shows part of the wall and a building just inside that attracted me because of the arresting colour scheme. We don't see buildings that look like this in Canada.

And this knock-kneed critter was sitting on the canvas cover on a pleasure craft in the riverside marina just outside the old city wall - an egret, I think.

Stuck in Seville

Every picture...  I went down a rabbit hole today, back to Seville, 2010. While rooting around for the pictures of street artists that I posted yesterday, I opened the folder containing all the shots I'd taken that winter, or all the ones I thought were worth keeping. As often happens when viewing old photos, I found myself thinking about some of them, 'What were you thinking?' 

In 2010, I was still learning how to use Photoshop to process pictures taken in the RAW format, and I had yet to acquire some of the add-on tools that I rely on now to get the most out of the images I capture. But the beauty of digital photography and Photoshop in particular is that it's possible to go back, even years later, and completely re-do a photograph. Which is what I spent a good chunk of time doing today.

Mostly what you do with RAW files is fix - or if you like, enhance - the colour and contrast. But I inevitably also adjust the cropping. Photoshop even lets you eliminate or at least mitigate the kind of lens distortion that gives you, for example, walls that lean in on each other - what you get when you shoot up at a building. So here's one example of a picture I renovated today. The first image is the version I considered to be a final edit in 2010. The second is the edit I did today.

The image as I'd left it in 2010 was crooked and distorted, the contrast was wrong - among other things, it looked over-exposed, which it was, slightly, but not unsalvageably - and the colour was wrong, way too yellow.

The picture was taken at the Palace of the Countess of Lebrija, a 16th century city mansion with architecture strongly influenced by Moorish styles. It features a fabulous central courtyard with an ancient Roman mosaic floor. Caitlin had just started her PhD at the University of York - we had dropped her off in York on our way to Spain - but such is the life of a graduate student that she had no problem getting away for a week-long visit in March. 

*

I got out for a walk in the late morning, not a long one, with no real agenda. The photographic results are disappointing: a bunch of pictures that don't quite work.

88 York St. rear

Harris Park

Under the Stanley St. bridge

Under the CN rail bridge

I keep trying to get pictures of weeds against snow - inspired by one of my favourite photographers, the American Harry Callahan. Here's what Callahan makes of the subject, one of many he famously took. Mine from today follows. I'm not quite getting the magic.

To get what Callahan is doing, it needs more abstraction, much more contrast, and simpler compositions. I'll keep trying.

Habit forming

Every picture tells a story  In thinking about street art in London, and the differences between London's scene and the European cities we know, I remembered I had this picture in my gallery. It speaks to the transgressive aspect of a lot of street art in Europe. When this photo was taken in 2010 in Seville, Spain, street art was probably already less frowned upon and policed than it had been. Still.

The picture was taken near the city centre, 100 metres or so from the Guadalquivir River. When I took it, I only noticed the painters in the driveway into the parking lot. I remember thinking, 'They've got a lot of balls doing this in broad daylight.' 

What I didn't register until some years later when revisiting the picture was the guy on the bicycle half way up the stairs to the bridge, and the other guy standing at bridge level near the top of the frame on the right. I'm pretty sure they're both spotters, keeping watch for police or Guardia Civil. 

Had the Seville civic authorities eased up on enforcing laws against street art? Quite possibly. There was certainly lots of it about the year we were there. Some of the pieces on the retaining walls by the river were a definite improvement on the otherwise drab riverside. Here are couple of examples. 

 *

When does a habit become an obsession?

The other day, Karen characterized my insistence on going out for walks every day, even in very cold weather, as "obsessive." It was like my penchant for straightening place settings at the dinner table, she said.

It's true that, to begin with, I did have to force myself to go out for walks in the cold. Once I'd done it a couple of times, though, I realized I was enjoying it. After that, I didn't have to force myself at all, I looked forward to it.

Still, Karen's comment got me thinking about the relationship between habit and obsession. 

She's right that my insistence on straightening knives and forks is borderline OCD, and I have noticed that as I've gotten older I've become more prone to that kind of mildly obsessive behaviour. It's also true that sticking to habits can sometimes look similarly obsessive. 

I'm very conscious of the need to form good habits and break bad ones, and from time to time I succeed in doing it. Once I've formed a good habit, I've noticed it's sometimes hard to not follow it. 

Like flossing my teeth, which I forced myself to start doing 25 years ago when I finally got sick of recurring gum infections. Now, I sometimes think as I'm brushing my teeth in the morning, 'Well, I'm pressed for time this morning, so I'll skip flossing.' But the next thing I know, I'm in the middle of pulling the string through my teeth.

It's like you're on automatic pilot and can't regain manual control. Which is also the case with knife and fork straightening. I don't think, 'Oh, they're a little crooked, I'll straighten them.' I do it without thinking.

A new one is making the bed when I get up. One morning last week, I dragged myself out groggily after a bad night's sleep and thought, 'Can't be bothered today.' But before another coherent thought had entered my head, I found I was straightening bed clothes and plumping pillows.

So is that obsessive? 

Maybe, but if it is, so what? Most people would say that flossing your teeth and making the bed when you get up are positive. Even if the habits become "obsessions" - and I'll admit it's sometimes a fine line between the two things- aren't they still mostly positive? I'd say so.

In fact, I'd say to be a true obsession, a habit would have to have some negative impact. Going out for walks in sub-zero temperatures - as long as you're properly dressed - doesn't have any negative impact I can see. 

*

Went for a walk as usual this afternoon, with camera. It was snowing and damp. It felt colder at -3C than it had the day before when it was -7C and sunny. A mixed bag of photos from a circuit that took me over to Victoria Park, through the park, down Wellington St. to the CPR tracks and across Pall Mall to St. George and so home.

St. Peter's Cathedral

St. Peter's Cathedral and One Richmond Row

One Richmond Row

St. George St. at Ann St.

St. George St.

St. George St.

Victoria Park

Sunshine, lollipops...no roses yet

To those who may occasionally drop in to this blog: if it seems by the way it's written that I assume an actual audience for my ramblings, and because of this you are concerned about my grip on reality, rest assured. With that out of the way, welcome back (ha-ha, a little joke), and on with the show.

*

What a glorious day! When I got up this morning, the Weather Channel reported that it was -17C - yikes! - but the sky was blue, that pale blue you get in winter, and the rising sun was reflected in the windows across the street. 

By the time I got out for my walk about 11:30 - after a brief video chat with Caitlin and 35 minutes on the bike with Secrets of the Saqqara Tomb (see below) - it had turned into a perfect winter day: about -6C with bright sun sparkling on the snow.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. I still have left-over business from yesterday, or left-over pictures anyway. Here are some more from my tramp around downtown in search of street art.

Fullarton St., federal building (not street art)

Spotted on Queen's Ave. (also not street art)

Alleyway from Richmond St. to Spageddy Eddy's restaurant

Alleyway from Richmond St. to Spageddy Eddy's restaurant

Back of north side of Dundas St.

Regarding the message in the second picture: People whose lives have been blown up by the pandemic - lost jobs, kids underfoot driving them insane, loved-ones dead - might feel justifiably a little resentful about the glib message of "solidarity" in the windows of insurance broker NFP's offices on Queen's Ave. 

Are we really "all in this together," or are some of us basically screwed while others are faring relatively well, even thriving? (Don't get me started on Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, whose net worth increased $75 billion in 2020.) 

*

I've mentioned Secrets of the Saqqara Tomb (Netflix) twice now. Although I haven't finished it - I've been watching in half-hour chunks while on the stationary bike - I can recommend it highly. 

It's the story of what happens after the 2018 discovery of an intact 4,500-year-old tomb in an ancient burial site outside Cairo. A couple of things make the doc extraordinary. 

First, there are no non-Egyptian characters. The Saqqara tomb dig was done by Egyptian archaeologists. All the experts quoted are Egyptian. Many speak only Arabic, with subtitles. I don't know about you, but I almost expect to hear plummy British or cultured-sounding German voices in programs about Egyptian archaeology. Not this one.

The other interesting feature is the story-telling. It's almost like a fiction film. There are characters we get to know: the lead archaeologist, a couple of his staff (including one young fellow who picks up his boss each morning and drives him to the site on the back of his motorbike), a pair of hieroglyph interpreters, an expert in animal mummification (a delightful woman who switches back and forth between fluent English and Arabic, sometimes in the same sentence) and the foreman of the works, a thoughtful older fellow who makes the case that the ancient people the team is digging up, or hoping to, lived not so very differently from many modern-day Egyptians.

There is also tension in the story. It sounds a bit contrived, but there is something about Ramadan coming which will shut down the dig for the holidays. After which the government is threatening to end funding - unless maybe the archaeologists can make another splashy discovery at the site. Will they come up with something good in time?

The pacing is more like a fictional film too. The story is told in roughly chronological order, but there are several strands the filmmakers switch back and forth to. All in all, it makes for surprisingly engaging viewing.

*

Back to the beginning: my morning walk. No real agenda for the picture taking, just back to the river and capture snow. I was practically never out of sight of our building. It was a z-shaped walk, up one side of the river, down the other.

Here's a sample.

Blackfriars Bridge

View south from Blackfriars Bridge

Harris Park

Eldon House