I’ve always been curious about experimenting with form in every way I can – I also like to try to impart some spirit of play, to go with explanations or explorations – heavy ones especially. It’s well known that brains learn better
As I mentioned in my first post about Guillermo’s remarkable show, he doesn’t just adore films, paintings and drawings, sculptures props and toys – like so many of us, he first fell in love with the horror genre (and was inspired to
I don’t this point can be made often enough – tacky, eclectic, oddball, low-rent, artsy and/or just plain freaky storefronts are by-far the best for both musing and photography. Nor is this for such an entirely obvious reason as that old mean-comedy
I was a convert to the idea that popular art, particularly sequential art (comics) was true ‘real’ art (without requiring any qualifying subcategory) from roughly the age of ten. 1975 was a cool year for that. Comics wise, we could still read
Caught a wonderful show on the weekend at the AGO – “Living with monsters” which is a sampling from the private collection of the brilliant filmmaker Guillermo Del Toro, who began as an amateur illustrator, then worked in special-effects, before finally getting
When I was a kid, we had a knife-sharpener man who would walk up and down every street in the neighbourhood every couple of weeks, ringing his bell in a very particular way (you never mistook the sound for anything else). He
Politics did not just become stressful, or a matter of life and death recently – my title comes from “You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you” a famous and still chillingly relevant observation from Plato. Like
Back in the mid-eighties, when I was still a bit of a waif, I had a weekly improvised-music session in my little basement flat, with the much older, brilliant, and incomparably determined free-improvising saxophonist, Maury Coles. We were often joined by one
I have yet to encounter any tradition with deep mysticism and insight at it’s core, which does not recommend a variation of the meditation of infinite-regression – that is, that (sometimes inspiring, and sometimes irritating) childhood state of asking why, where, how,
I’ve been fond of a great many cats over the years, but I think Moe, who was a really nifty puffball orange kitten who used to wake me up by licking my eyelids, and ran away when I was eight, was probably
Some days you take hundreds of shots to get dozens of useful ones – and some days you shoot a couple dozen – and get a dozen good ones anyhow. Sweet deal. Of course, I’m always especially pleased when really extreme lighting
I am pretty sure that a certain part of me will always feel just a little bit guilty, for the fact that I now use auto-focus by-default, even though digital photography systems have made this feature fast reliable and excellent. Tactically-sublimating masochist
When you see a big collection of them all in one place like this, it’s tempting to think of these light craft, many of which are available for rent right in the middle of the busiest tourist section of the harbourfront (active
I am, as I have noted repeatedly, an atheist – but you will have noticed, no doubt, that I am not one of the cliche snarky sneering contemptuous variety. The way the whole thing presents to my mind is different from many,
The artsy Queen West scene was always a curious mix, even back in the eighties, with the new music Rivoli, Cameron House, and Horseshoe tavern balanced by neighbourhood institutions which served the working artists (not yet driven out by high rents) like
Go as far back as you like in urban history – right to square-one if you want – there was always a square involved. I bet they even did temporary art installations at Sumer. Nuit blanche is an odd tradition in Toronto
One last series from the fan-expo, this time of stand-out individual costumes – soloists, if you will. I rather wish I had caught this first furry-bird in video, because even the walk had the exact right sort of cartoon surliness. Not just