Up at 6 am thinking I’d get an early start writing, but I noted on Twitter that there was a fire on the TTC and the subway was closed on Line 1 south of Bloor. So I ate breakfast suspecting my wife might need to walk down to work if things weren’t cleared up by 7:30 am. Because she has to carry a heavy laptop, I act as her pack mule whenever she has to walk to work. She suggested she take an Uber but I said I’d carry her stuff down for her. As it turns out, she would have had trouble getting an Uber in any event.
After I said good-bye and carried on with my camera down to Front Street, I found all kinds of commuters standing by the taxi stand at Front near Bay waiting for taxis that never arrived, virtually all of them on cell phones apologizing that they wouldn’t make it on time to wherever they needed to be. One girl was on the phone to her mother, almost in tears, saying “Mom, I really fucked up this time.” Others had their heads buried in cell phones trying to book Uber rides which, because of the sudden spike in demand, were priced in the stratosphere. I felt a little predatory, taking advantage of people’s misery for my nefarious photographic ends. But I do have my ethic, and consistency demands that I adhere to it: if a person is so engrossed in their iPhone/social media, then they deserve to be shot (by a camera). So I sidle up as close as I dare which, these days, is directly under their noses, and I shoot.
I also spent some time in front of the ThatsHumanity installation taking photos of people walking past it. Personally, I don’t think much of it, at least not to the extent that people might label it public art. It is words cut into a giant metal cylinder, with backlighting to project the words outward onto the surrounding walls and sidewalk. The words make explicit the sentiment. To the extent it makes its meaning(s) explicit, it has more in common with pornography than with art.
Still, the installation is emblematic of our times when, perhaps thanks to social media, we may be undergoing a great global cultural shift (regression?) from guilt to shame. It’s not enough that we feel something; we must be seen to feel it. I think of the Homeric epics where the heroes go on at length about qualities like virtue because if they cannot publicly declare it then it isn’t real. The ThatsHumanity installation seems to function in the same way. We may be losing the capacity or perhaps the confidence to hold things quietly within, assured that simply to feel it is legitimate.
I note in the background banners marking 100 years of the Toronto Transit Commission, the cause of so much angst today.
Went from there to York Street and got an interesting photo, interesting because it was utterly unintentional. I saw a construction worker in hardhat approaching carrying four coffees from Tim Hortons. Clearly he was doing a breakfast run for some of his coworkers. I loved the way he held the coffees as if he were a waiter and I decided I just had to get a shot of him. But as I released the shutter, I fell off the curb. I hadn’t been paying attention at all. However, when I got home and examined the photo, I saw that my fall had produced an interesting effect. Most of the image is blurred, but the man’s face and the tray of coffees are clear. I’m not sure how this happened. Maybe he took a step up at precisely the moment I was falling down. Still, (to draw on my Homeric reference above) one should not stare a gift horse in the mouth.
Despite a local shutdown, that was nothing compared to the global shutdown that happened 3 hours later when Facebook and all its other properties went down. I wonder what level of anxiety commuters would have felt if, with plans screwed up by a fire on the subway, they hadn’t been able to post anything about it on FB or IG or WhatsApp.