09-4-9

I find it amusing that people find the time to do things like this. I'm glad they do.

09-4-8

09-4-7

09-4-6

09-4-5

09-4-4

What's the view like from where you work?

09-4-3

I'm reading a book called "The Middle Stories" by Canadian author Sheila Heti. It's a type of free flowing thought that loosely becomes stories or at the very least ideas about stories. It's a quick read, you can find the whole thing on her web page and then decide afterwards if you want to send her a buck or two for writing them. My impression of these stories is that they are, well, random. They are written by intuition rather than being thoughtful, contrived narratives. The length of each story supports this, being long enough to contain a thought but not long enough to contain a thoughtful thought. Is this good? It's honest. I like honest.

09-4-2

09-4-1

...and then leaving home...

09-3-31

09-3-30

Kinda like painting. Travelling is so quickly translated into memories, vague ideas about time that changes from when you take off to when you land. Stranger ideas about places, three different airports in five days, and the transition points are all so similar, cartoonish.

09-3-29

This is the Bowness part of Calgary and though even it hasn't entirely escaped the rampant gentrification that a city with too much money forces its more modest neighborhoods to endure there is a lot of Bowness that looks just like it did 20 years ago. I wanted this one to look like a 20 year old photograph with its "off" colour balance. The easy part was finding houses that looked the part without telltale signs of the 21st century lying about.

09-3-28

09-3-27

09-3-26

09-3-25

The Bonnie Prince Billy played in Vancouver tonight.

09-3-24

09-3-23

09-3-22

09-3-21

She's completely blind and spends the better parts of her days right here. I'm glad the sun finds her sometimes since it's hard for her to find the sun.

09-3-20

09-3-19

09-3-18

A good friend of mine gave me a small handfull of 1" C-clamps. They are the cutest little things, not particularly robust, not all that well made, they are as basic as a C-clamp can get. They look like toy versions of bigger clamps. This picture doesn't show the scale of that clamp very well, it would fit nicely into the palm of my hand with room to spare. Today I was welding up some bars for my friend's shop and these little clamps were the perfect tools to have.

09-3-17

The sky was swimming in water this morning. It's a fleeting blue that was only there for the length of a song and then it was gone.

09-3-16

I taught her about Fleetwood Mac's Tusk album this morning. We danced. Tusk was found for $2.99 at Audiopile in Vancouver and looks good on the shelf next to the Talk Talk record I picked up last week and talked about here. Oh yeah, if you go back to that entry and click on the Talk Talk link you'll see I found the actual video that goes along with the song. Good stuff.

09-3-15

This may be the beginning of something.

09-3-14

I have a photograph for today. I'm not very happy with it so I'm going pass on putting it up here for now.

09-3-13

09-3-12

I got a record player the other day. It's the first one I've ever owned though I'm no stranger to records. I grew up on records. I have a couple hundred of them, or well over a hundred anyway. Since getting the record player I've picked up five, maybe six records because I quickly realized my back catalogue of vinyl was informed by very immature musical taste. I acknowledge the role that Quiet Riot played in my development but I maybe don't need to hear it again now that I'm an adult. On the other hand there's records in my collection that I haven't heard in years that I am happy to experience again, like Jackie O by John Couger (no Mellencamp yet) set to an organ more suited to your grandmother's basement than a rock and roll record.

I don't buy the argument that vinyl sounds better than digital. It's a thin argument at best. Vinyl is never superbly clean so there's always interference from little bits of entropy that gather in the grooves. Since getting this record player I've "back to backed" a couple of records that I've managed to collect on both vinyl and CD and to my ears the CD ever so slightly edges the vinyl for clarity and depth of sound. Of course I don't have the world's best record player though it's not a bad one either.

But I do find the format interesting. All my life music has endeavored to become more portable. It went from records to 8-Tracks which were bulky but certainly more easily played in a car. Then there were audio cassettes which were amazing. You could throw a player on your belt and block out all the world's problems. ("I had so many problems and then I got me a walkman." - Frank Black) Of course tapes were replaced by CDs and then there was the MiniDisc which quindublicated (technical term) the capacity of a CD. Now we're toting around 120GB of music on an iPod (my 80GB iPod is full, it will be time to get bigger soon) and all of a sudden you're walking to the corner store with enough music to listen to for over a month without hearing the same song twice. Music has gotten very convenient.

I had a talk with a very good friend recently about how neither of us were really listening to music any more. It was a bit like a heroin addict arbitrarily giving up the needle and I wonder if it's because somehow music had lost its preciousness in its convenience.

Which is where the record player comes in.

For the first time in months I'm listening to music again. I mean, there's always been noise on in the background but I'm actually sitting down with headphones on or just properly placed in front of my speakers and doing nothing but listening to an album from end to end. I attribute this to vinyl. The format demands attention. It's a bigger and less convenient effort to make it play. There's the delicate retreiving it from a cardboard envelope, the meticulous brushing of the vinyl's surface to minimize the popping static, the careful placement of the stylus. And it's not so easy to skip songs or change from one record to the next by pushing the "skip record" button like I have on my 5 disc carousel CD player.

But I will admit this too, I feel like I've joined a club I don't necessarily want to be a part of. Vinyl is rarer than CDs and you need to go to shops chock full of hipsters and buy music from somewhat arrogant music afficianados. It's embarassing to see old, used Joy Division records selling for over $10. Fortunately there are still gems of shops and gems of deals to be had. Today I'm listening to Talk Talk's The Party's Over which I bought for 99 cents. It's a really good record that's not been spotted by the hipsters because their blinders are tightly bound. And I managed to score a John Coltrane double LP for a rather expensive but worth it $15 from when he first stepped out from Miles Davis's shadow to record something on his own. Is it ever incredible.

Is it a regression? Probably. And it's inspiring me to reevaluate other aspects of what I do. Photography for instance. I've been picking up old manual cameras for under $100 with an excellent lens and I may start to use these more and more. The conscious decision to pay for and commit to each and every image may prove interesting. It's an idea right now but it's a seed that's growing. I might line myself up for a bit of a hiatus from my daily image in that I might endeavor to put a roll of real, tangible film into a camera and shoot a single picture every day. Of course this would mean I wouldn't get the photos back for a month and it would mean one heck of an update to the blog one day but, like I said, it's an idea that seems to have taken hold. Maybe one day soon I'll begin. In the mean time I'm going record shopping.

09-3-11

homage. I'm a little sad I didn't have the lens hood on this one. I like the flair effect from shots taken into the sun when it's done right but in this one it's very distracting.

09-3-10

Dad got new headphones today. Sophie approved.

09-3-9

I've not eaten here yet but I will.

09-3-8

They add "you can't be fond of living in the past,
Cause if you are then there is no way you are going to last"

09-3-7

09-3-6

The Washington is a 7 story residence in Vancouver's DTES. It's a truly beautiful old building with amazing views from the rooftop in one of the seediest parts of town. It's a good place to be most nights.

09-3-5

09-3-4

This makes me really happy.

09-3-3

09-3-2

She's an amazing little punk.

09-3-1

09-2-28

09-2-27

We took turns spinning on the spinny chair in the living room. For the first time she understood what being dizzy was about. She thought it was great. "Again" she said, over and over again.

09-2-26

I take more and more of this "type" of photograph. I'm not sure what the motivation is. Today it might be about edges. There were times when I lived in Toronto when I started to feel claustrophobic, or perhaps more accurately "trapped." I feel trapped in Vancouver. When you feel that way you sometimes need to take a trip to the edge and see there's really nothing keeping me here. There isn't a wall or a fence or anything. Just openness. And I can leave any time I want. Today I was at the edge of Vancouver looking out at the ocean. I would sit at harbourfront in Toronto and look out at Lake Ontario and realize the same thing. There it is, nothing.

09-2-25

I'm finding the 16:9 format of the Panasonic LX3 camera very rewarding.

09-2-24

09-2-23

DTES. It really is quite a soulful experience.

09-2-22

This is Vancouver's Downtown East Side. It's viewed by most as a slum, a decrepit wasteland of drug addicts, poverty and crime. And it's really quite beautiful in the morning.

09-2-21

09-2-20

09-2-19

Perhaps I should have been a painter. Sometimes the exercises are all about composition and texture and little about the subject matter. Trees are beautiful when they are naked.

09-2-18

This is taped to the "control" panel where I work. I've read it a hundred times. I might read it a hundred more.

New camera today. It's a Panasonic DMC-LX3. Tiny little point and shoot with a great macro feature and one of the widest and most open lenses available on a camera that fits in your pocket. The lens is by Leica. My love/hate relationship with point and shoot cameras continue. This replaces a Canon G9 which was both amazing and one of the most frustrating little cameras I've ever owned. I think I like this one more. But I'm not sure.