Upstate concerns an aging property developer from Northumberland and his relationship with his two adult daughters.
Tag: Books
Holy Wild, by Gwen Benaway
Even a cursory reading of Holy Wild assaults our senses with a relentless documentation of the many ways a trans woman is despised for who she is. Cries of pain at the violence visited upon her. Lamentations at the betrayals. But also hope. Hope for a new life through a new body and through new relationships that promise understanding.
Open City by Teju Cole
Ostensibly, Open City is the narrative of Julius, a young doctor completing his psychiatric residency at a Manhattan hospital. He is of mixed race which gives him the advantage of a certain flexibility (he straddles cultures) while simultaneously giving him the burden of a certain aloofness (he belongs to nowhere and to no one).
Absolutely on Music, by Haruki Murakami
Absolutely On Music is a series of conversations between novelist Haruki Murakami and conductor Seiji Ozawa. I was too young to remember when Seiji Ozawa was conductor of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra (1965-1969).
Talking To Strangers, by Malcolm Gladwell
Malcolm Gladwell is a public intellectual for people who don’t feel any pressing compunction to think.
Bedroom Eyes
This photograph raises too many questions for me to let it alone. Given that I discovered it as an insert in a book about romance, my initial supposition is that the book was intended as a gift to the woman’s lover; she was using the photograph to indicate that she came as part of the package.
A Handmaid’s Tale
When I need to clear my head, I go for a long photo walk. I use my camera as a tool to silence the interior chatter by shifting my attention to the visual field. It’s the mental equivalent of splashing cold water on my face. I had just such a need on Friday, and hatched a vague plan to take a photo walk that would end at the mouth of the Don River. For reasons I could not possibly have anticipated, I never reached my destination.
Migraines and Photography
Reviewing the art, I realize how varied migraine experience can be from one person to the next. For example, my migraines invariably begin with visual aura. There are six types of aura, but I’ve experienced only four. Mine start with scotoma (holes in my field of vision where things disappear), followed by tunnel vision, hemianopia (half the field of vision is obscured), and concluding with fortification spectra whose outlines shimmer almost like electric arcs.
Photography Betrays God’s Creation
“To fix fleeting images is not only impossible, as has been demonstrated by very serious experiments in Germany, it is a sacrilege. God has created man in His image and no human machine can capture the image of God. He would have to betray all his Eternal Principles to allow a Frenchman in Paris to unleash such a diabolical invention upon the world.”
Jonathan Miller’s Nowhere In Particular
I recently bought a used copy of a photo book, Nowhere In Particular, by a medical doctor/TV and theatre director/photographer named Jonathan Miller. It features photos of rooftops, corrugated sheet metal, bits of canvas, and (mostly) palimpsests of weathered posters and torn advertising.
Fetishizing the Really Real
The production of ever-higher resolution cameras may be understood as a commercial answer to late modernism’s disaffection with the limitations of reality and its desire for the “really real”.
White Picket Fence
In his book, The Ongoing Moment, Geoff Dyer writes at length about the white picket fence as a photographic subject. He begins with a well-known photograph which Paul Strand shot in or about 1917.
The Grammar of Photography
Do photographs have a grammar?
Synaesthesia and The Ongoing Moment
Geoff Dyer’s The Ongoing Moment is a continuous cover-to-cover meditation upon the art of photography. I say “continuous cover-to-cover” because the book has no breaks, no arbitrary chapter divisions. Instead, it’s a series of riffs that follow one another in an associative way. He writes about Stieglitz and his relationship with his wife, Georgia O’Keefe…
Ravines In Toronto
I grew up in Willowdale near a ravine and a nameless creek that flowed into the Don River. I played in that ravine. Pheasants flew out of it and strutted through my back yard. Weird shit happened down there, too.