Patina

As addressed in the |placeholder| classic post Mustache Woes, I’ve been trying to adjust my wardrobe fairly drastically in the past few months. So far, the lion’s share of it has been education on the subject; I may not have all the money in the world right now, but reading blogs like Put This On and Nerd Boyfriend don’t cost a thing (much like my love). Inspired by Put This On’s first video episode, I’ve made a small investment in a pair of raw denim jeans.

The Levi’s store seemed to have more employees than customers, and despite saying that I was happy to browse, and being told that I could have a look around, and if I had any questions just ask, I couldn’t seem to shake one peppy salesperson. (if I worked there I would definitely refer to myself as a Leviathan) Upon hearing the description of what I was looking for, she pointed me towards some boring jeans, pre-distressed, over-finished. Disinterested, I continued to wander the store while being offered tidbits of superfluous denimformation whenever my eyes lingered on a pair of jeans for too long. Eventually I spotted my quarry, the shrink-to-fit 501’s. “Oh,” she offered, dismissively, “those are the shrink-to-fits. There’s a whole… process with those.” Despite her warning, (because of it?) this “process” sounded like just the thing I was looking for.

Getting home with my new garment in hand, I excitedly consulted the internet for advice on how to properly imprint myself on my new pants. The process has proven to be a tad arduous; definitely more work than any other piece of clothing in my recent past, but I feel as though it’s going to be worth it. Provided they live up to the hype, I can see a that having a pair of jeans that one breaks in over months, whose patina and collection of scuffs and holes develop over years, as feeling much more significant than a pair of twenty-dollar jeans from Old Navy that may last six months and before being replaced. Imbuing an article with clothing with an animus almost like that of a companion seems silly, but there’s something very nostalgic and appealing to it.

It’s difficult for me to think about this without conjuring browned-around-the-edges kodachrome mental image of a weathered man, in his late forties, somewhere in a field, somewhen in the Fifties. He is stripping the branches from a sapling with a simple folding knife. He was given the knife by his father when he was a boy, and the oak handle has been polished walnut dark and smooth with use. The spine of the blade may be dinged and scratched, but the grind and the edge have been kept clean and straight with whetstone and oil: it cuts just as sure as it did when he was young. The handle has gently formed to his hand, converse to the callus on his hand from the rivet that holds the blade in place.

The sad fact is that I rightly describe this mindset as nostalgic. It’s definitely not extinct, but it is undoubtedly endangered by consumerism and the frantic pace of technological growth. Cell phones, digital cameras, PMPs and their ilk are especially to blame. I’m going to pass on any potential issues of planned obsolescence (fiendish as they may be), and simply address fashion as a driving force for constantly wanting the newest and the best. The very thought of passing your iPod down to your child seems preposterous; something which might be done out of poverty, definitely not out of tradition. Nobody’s going to hide their Blackberry in their ass for two years in a Viet Cong internment camp.

My jeans made me trip and fall today. I didn’t quite get my foot up enough while stepping up a high curb into a parking lot and my attempted recovery was prevented by the ridiculously stiff, raw denim. Dusting the gravel off my scraped palms, I looked down and discovered that, considering a few bruises and some embarrassment, my pants had fared much better than I had. Scuffs from falls are one thing, but as I’m expecting these to stretch and fade according to my life, to pick up small stains from spilled wine at parties and spilled blood on my bike or skateboard, to darken and fray around the cuffs from leather conditioner and shoe polish, to eventually soften and tear in the knees, or where loose coins and keys have slowly eroded holes through the pockets… I’m just going to say we’re off to a rough start but I think we’ll get along just fine, in time.

Malleability

Perhaps ‘adaptability’ or ‘mutability’ would have been a more accurate title for this post, but its impetus was a nine-day shift at work. I settled on ‘malleability’ as the word stems from the Latin malleus, meaning hammer, and by the time I garnered a day off I felt like I had been beaten with hammers. Art hammers.

Let me start, appropriately, from the beginning. Forgive me if you’ve heard this before, but I’ve decided to entertain the (fairly unlikely) possibility that people who don’t know me personally read this blog. Last July I was hired by Canada’s leading fine art auction house as a photographer for their Toronto office. Initially, I was not very keen on the job, as it sounded as though it would consist mostly of copy photography. Taking innumerable paintings (many of which from the boringly blobby Group of Seven), lighting them all the same way and pushing a button did not sound particularly glamourous, but hey, it’s a job in photography, and it’s only three days a week, so there’s plenty of time off to be a delicate arteeste.

It has turned out to be much more… good… than I expected. The irritatingly detail-oriented, very precise technique required to properly reproduce these occasionally brain-bashingly valuable objects has really helped me iron out some of the kinks in my traditionally slapdash approach to photo. And outside of the dark little pseudio they have me work in most of the time, the job has expanded to include various other tasks; art packing, installing, customer service, and so forth. Readers rejoice, I’ve stumbled back to my point.

In late November, we had our annual live auction in Toronto. In order to drum up appropriately lucrative enthusiasm, we crammed our gallery space with what would later amount to be $20.8 million in art and opened our doors for the public to come and see what was on offer. As part of this, the management dragged me out of the basement, tossed me into a suit, and had me stand near the door, simultaneously acting as security and reception. It’s been a very long time since any job I’ve held has required me to cordially speak to strangers, and that ability has atrophied down to a pale, vestigial nub. The fact that I was a new employee there, and mostly unschooled in the prices, bodies of work, media, histories, even the names, of the artists whose work we were displaying only complicated matters.

I will spare you all the excruciating minutiae (excrutiae?) of those boring/draining/scary days. The result was a startling improvement in my ability to talk to people I don’t know. “What’s that, Max? You’re saying that if you do something, you get better at it? Stop the fucking presses!” It was a very effective reminder of the fact that one’s self is amazingly ductile. Like most (sane) people, I feel as though my mindset is fairly stable. I feel the same way about things one day as I did the day before, as I will the next. I love a good shower. I hate olives. Vocoding is the devil. Everything seems stable, inert, reliable. In this case, given the appropriate stresses, I was startled how easily I overcame my introspective, (occasionally bordering on misanthropic) tendencies, overcame the awkwardnesses that cripple many of my casual social interactions and found myself going out of my way to engage strangers. Cracking jokes with Starbaristas, trying to get a smile out of reliably unpleasant transit employees, or trading stories with people while waiting in line.

The auction’s over. The art is sold, and I can retreat to the comforting, easy pseudio and settle back into my life as I know it.I may feel a hint of regret as I slowly relax back into my shell, but that regret is tempered by the knowledge that the way out again has been made a little easier.

Quick and surreal

I’m at work. I’m taking photographs of upcoming lots being offered for sale on our January 2010 online auction. A series of lots are all from the same consignor, so they share a similar number. I’ve been copying and pasting the file names and changing the appropriate information.

Work is a little slow today, so I’ve been browsing the internet intermittently, researching things that catch my interest, collecting images for an upcoming project, and reading various blogs. I’m not really paying particular attention to anything, just sort of pleasantly drifting through the motions.

I export an image from hasselblad 3f to jpeg (a graphite sketch of a young man in a beret) and then casually CRTL-V in the file name. It appears as:

“We are unable to transmit through conscious neural interference. You are receiving this broadcast as a dream.”

I catch a frisson before my pesteringly constant conscious mind figures out how that happened and puts everything in a reasonable framework. I think I’d prefer the alternative.

Back to work.

Purgatory

Lately I have been working eight to ten hour days, standing in a gallery, minding art. It has been vaguely hellish.

It’s easy work, to be sure, but mind-numbing. There is almost nothing to do, but interruptions are regular enough to completely prevent any sort of coherent, interesting, or creative train of thought from developing.

I have plans, though. Oh the plans. Photography plans – ideas for new constructs, having been reassured that my sad-nature-ghey images don’t read as such. Blog plans – ridiculous posts on Norse mythology, iPhone ownership, recent media consumption, and my increasingly passionate affair with running. Two and a half more days and then I may be rewarded with a sweet slice of freedom… and you, my faithful reader(s?) may have proper, entertaining blog content.

For now:

Monday night, waves.

A lady and I made an improbably long trek down to see this installation under the Gardiner Expressway earlier this week. It was unexpectedly cold (yes, it gets colder when the sun goes down) and I was bundled in a preposterous jacket borrowed from work. The installation was lovely. Surreal, irregular waves washed northward towards the city, accompanied by appropriate sound effects from a center-mounted speaker. The recorded breaking waves mixed strangely well with the constant rough whisper of vehicles passing directly overhead. It’s a shame they couldn’t do the whole underside of the Gardiner, the length of the expressway gently lapping at Toronto’s southern edge and disturbing the sleep of hobos and condo-owners alike.

Choice

This post is inspired by the Radiolab episode on the same subject. For those of you not familiar with Radiolab, it’s an NPR show and podcast which covers variously interesting subjects from an inquisitive, pop-scientific yet usually fairly intellectual perspective. Occasionally it delves into the schmaltz that some NPR shows are infamous for, but the shows are largely informative and entertaining. The episode on choice was particularly… choice.

But what does this have to do with me? Likely this is a similar phenomenon to that when you learn a new word: you tend to notice it everywhere. Since listening to that episode I’ve been examining the role of choice in my life in a different way. Some anecdotes:

- I was out for a walk with a friend I hadn’t seen in years. We were chatting about her intent to investigate tree planting next summer. While it would be extremely easy for me to get sidetracked on funny tree planting stories (lord knows I sure as hell had plenty to tell that day), the point is that I found the entire process of tree planting extremely calming. Once I had settled into the routine and learned the ropes, there was nothing that I needed to worry about, nothing to choose. At any given minute I knew what I was doing and what I was going to be doing next. Wake up, make lunch, plant trees all day, come home, eat dinner, go to sleep, repeat. My choices consisted of “ham and cheese or PB&J sandwiches for lunch today?”, “filth-encrusted blue cargo pants or filth-encrusted green cargo pants?”, or “which scarcely-playable CD should I listen to?”. (that second choice was soon obviated by the blue pair literally disintegrating) As someone who often feels the need to inspect decisions from every angle, the loss of choice was (paradoxically) liberating.

- The aforementioned Radiolab episode contains an interview with Oliver Sacks, who has chosen to give up choice in his diet. Every week, his housekeeper brings the same groceries, and he eats the same meals and snacks. Every day he buys exactly one dollar of 72% cocoa-content chocolate from a store in his neighbourhood. As modernity has provided limitless choices for many in the developed world, he has chosen to spare himself some of the torment of decision from the areas of his life where he can allow it. I’d go into further detail on the episode, but if your ears have an hour to spare, I’ll just recommend you give it a listen yourself.

- I’ve often enjoyed letting chance rule in small parts of my life. Most recently, and most randomly, I was out for a walk with someone I see slightly more often than once every few years, and we were at a loss as to where to go. Having always wanted to try a randomized approach to moving through the city (as inspired by Situationist International and psychogeography) I rolled a die* to determine our direction and we set out. Granted, we only managed two rolls before my ingrained, order-loving, direction-finding tendencies took over, but it was a pleasant introduction to a different approach to participation in the city. I’ll have to give it a slightly more committed attempt and report back… and hope that the cruel vagaries of chance don’t have me walking around the same block for hours.

 

* yes, it was a four-sided die, 1-N, 2-S, 3-E, 4-W (and nerdier yet, it was a virtual four-sided die)

Slow, slow, glacially slow.

Baby steps, baby.

It strikes me as a little too sad-nature-emo, but I can’t seem to help myself. So, nuts. I’ll do this, and I’ll do it well.

Sensory Highlight Reel

Maybe it’s performance anxiety, but I haven’t been able to string together a coherent series of ideas for a blog post in about a week. Hence:

• The first bite of the corn cake with mango salsa at Saving Grace, last Sunday. It was a piping hot, slightly greasy, lightly fried cornbread patty accompanied with a salsa that was sweet and spicy and very fresh. My entree was tasty too, but it was that first bite of the appetizer that let me know what I was in for.
• The palette of the Leslie St. Spit. It feels like there are more neutral tones out there than there are colours in the rest of Toronto. The brown wet, glistening sand, bleached logs with a range that would put Weston’s peppers to shame, the coarse, palest cream of weathered concrete, and piles of rocks, tiles, rebar and bricks. The bricks! Left there for decades to be slowly worn down by the lake to look like porous red cheerios. That’s not even mentioning the dunes of dead leaves and the clumps of now-bare young trees, their bark varying from smooth, shining and russet to soft/scarred grey-green. Or that huddled group on the northern shore, about two-thirds of the way to the point, that were still dressed in brilliant yellow leaves that seemed to catch the sun no matter when it was. Or the impossibly spring-green grass, grown confusingly tall and soft where the rest of the ground plants were dark, gnarled things that were well aware of the oncoming winter. Or my traveling companion’s pearl earrings.
• Walking along the arrow-straight gravel road (we’re still on the Leslie Spit, here) with the November sun hanging low in the sky, even at 3pm. It was holding court directly over the road and everyone seemed to be walking in the same direction, towards it. The glare was almost blinding and turned the other walkers and cyclists to silhouettes, vague memories of people trudging down the path to where we all go when our name is spoken for the last time.
• The pencil-crayon orange red and deep forest green of a roasted squash, its rind glistening from its time in the oven.
• The stench from the slaughterhouse at the foot of Tecumseth, forever wafting over to Front and Bathurst. There’s a slaughterhouse there, right?
• Running along the lakeside Martin Goodman trail tonight around nine. The Canadian National Exhibition was all lit up for the Royal Winter Fair, aglow in sodium vapour orange with tungstens and flourescents picking out the highlights. The searchlights on the Direct Energy Centre groped blindly at the sky like the bio-luminescent tendrils of some horrible deep-sea creature. Most of these were obscured in an out-of-focus dazzle (thanks, myopia) which went well with the mounting running-induced delirium. I found the entire show to be a little off-putting, but bearable, until the trail converged with the edge of the lake. Lake Ontario was an abyss. The water was smooth and swallowed what little light there was. The stars were snuffed out by light pollution (and again, myopia) and I had no way to gauge scale or distance. There was no visible horizon line or… anything. Just 120 vertical degrees of pitch darkness dwarfing the railing at the water’s edge. This massive nothing was within arms reach on one side while the fairground loomed flickering on the other. I had a premonition of the trail slewing violently underneath me and everything tumbling into the cold mouth of the lake, but it passed almost as soon as my oxygen-deprived mind brought it up.

More Autumn

The other day I was out for a walk in the west end. I hadn’t thought ahead to bring my camera, or even my phone – it started out with me going to grab a coffee, but after the coffee had been successfully grabbed I just kept going. I headed along College until Dundas so rudely veers north and cuts it off, then through the resultant tangle of streets wedged between Bloor and Dundas and High Park. I took alleyways and changed direction almost randomly, but always ended up facing the slowly setting sun.

I hit High Park around five o’clock. Instead of my normal reaction, to take the variously winding, thickly treed trails as an invitation to meander, I cut straight across, ignoring signs warning of poison ivy and indigenous plant replacement projects. Hopping the marsh at the north end of Grenadier Pond and wending my way up a steep sidewalk, I realized I was in a part of the city I had not visited before. The houses here were large and new, belonging to the rich. I glanced past the spread of extravagant houses down a narrow street, I saw what I can only describe as a gentle housing gradient; each house slightly smaller, slightly older than the previous. New designy mansions gave way to post-war bungalows and then to those even older. As the road began to slope downhill again the houses got larger again: old art-deco apartments and once-great stone manors now split into dozens of apartments.

I was so absorbed by the shifting architecture that it took me a long to to notice that the layer of leaves on the ground had grown much deeper than anywhere else I had been; more than the usual rain-flattened layer on the sidewalk, the huddled piles in the gutter. This was ankle-deep and getting deeper. Brilliant red and yellow sugar maples mixed with ruddy black oaks, tossed together with ash leaves spotted with mold and spade-shaped birch. As I rustled onward through the leaves. Although I felt the sidewalk continue to follow the curve of the hill down into the ravine ahead, the mass of leaves stayed level. I persevered until I was up to my waist, then stopped and stood, half bemused and half defeated.

I could make out the top of a sign for a parkette up ahead, and past that, a roof of weathered blue copper shingles, breaching the sea of leaves. The house itself was buried to the eaves. I stood a little longer and took in the whole scene. I was so engrossed, and listening to my iPod, that I didn’t notice a small gray-haired head next to me. She was almost up to her neck in leaves, and was speaking.

I popped my earbuds out and awkwardly apologized. She smiled and ran her hand through her thin hair before launching into a story so eloquent it seemed rehearsed. Maybe she does this a lot.

In a soft, slightly accented voice, she told me about Healey MacMillan and Maggie Temple. He was the chief urban planner in Toronto in the late 1930s, and this was his revenge. At the outset, the story was one I’ve heard countless times before, she may have even used the phrase ’star-cross’d lovers’. As a young man he had loved the eldest daughter of a lumber baron who lived in that house. (she gestured towards it, her hands lost in the leaves) Something went terribly wrong between them, she didn’t know the details, but she did tell me how MacMillan, after years of research and subtle manipulation, crafted his retribution in the streets themselves.

Showing a monumental lack of foresight found only in the heartbroken, MacMillan laid the streets down in a series of bizarre convolutions, varying wildly from Toronto’s staid grid. The streets channeled the easterly autumn wind and twisted it, hurtling around corners and down tree-lined avenues. In addition to the standard banks of dark cloud and rain, they gathered rolling tumults of leaves all across the West End and were funneled together to here, to Maggie’s doorstep. The winds, now a wet, howling gale, collided with each other and deposited his gift to her. My volunteer guide wasn’t sure if this had been his intent, if he had considered the leaves, or just wanted the petty revenge of rattling her windows and sending cold breezes down the manor’s halls.

It doesn’t matter now, she said. The Temples moved away some time after the war, and now a rich couple uses it as their summer home, paying exorbitant amounts for the leaves to be trucked away each year after MacMillan’s gift arrives in full. Almost on cue, a breeze shivered past us, rustling the countless leaves. I thanked my guide for her time and decided to leave before the wind picked up.

I headed north, hopeful to find Bloor Street and a subway station. The sun had set half an hour ago and my belly was empty.

Progress work.

This is step one.

I have been thinking about an image for a long long time now. Hopefully I’ll have a rough copy tomorrow… obviously there’s a long way to go, but… it begins!

This is a net for netting things.