I Had the Strangest Deam 

Farine Five Roses, Lachine Canal, Montreal

With a calm canal flickering by one shoulder and a near full moon over the other I couldn't escape the feeling, an intense feeling, of deja vu. I had been here before and I knew every detail. It had been a dream but now I was experiencing it for the first time for a second time. I knew from the moment I stepped from Saint-Ambroise to Turgeon and the eery familiarity of the cascading light over the red brick houses that this was the same surreal, I'm talking Giorgio de Chirico surreal, setting I had wandered through in a dream I had years ago.

I rarely remember the dreams we apparently have every night. Such is my sleep cycle I guess. But occasionally I will awake fresh from a dream in the way that I not only remember it afterwards but that it stays with me for a very long time.
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Receipt Diary 

Dig a little deeper and you can expose the complete EXIF data for every photo taken.

For years I’ve kept receipts. They have piled up on dressers and side tables. On the surface I keep them in case I need proof of purchase for a return but more deeply, they are a record of my life. Paper print-outs of data that record where exactly you were at what time, doing exactly what. Paper fossil records of a day in the life. I’ve definitely missed some including items purchased where I refused a receipt or lost an inconsequential one (ice cream bought at a truck, items at a corner store, a fast food meal purchased with the tap of a debit card), not to mention use of things procured within a mobile phone app or on a tap-to-use transit card. Yet this marks a journey of just some of the data bread crumbs I’ve left behind. You can even garner the exact time the photos were taken (somehow that seemed like overkill - or I was too lazy to note it). I’ve added notes where I remembered the transaction but amazingly you forget what it was you were thinking or even doing despite having an actual record of it in your hand. This seems a little strange to share how much I spent and what I bought but it also feels “truer” if that makes sense? I’m not sure why I’m starting this on August 5? Maybe it was the first August receipt I could find. I’ve also included my activity data to fill in when I wasn’t buying something. It’s strange how there are very little impressions from these moments yet it feels like it adds up to something. This is how I spent August including a week on vacation in Québec.
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I Miss the Honky Tonks, Dairy Queens and 7-11s 

Road image via Top Left Pixel

Every road trip needs a playlist. These are not the songs we played from the dashboard of a car but ones that came to mind or we sang aloud as bugs flew into our smiles. Some are obvious and cliché. Some are obscure and fitting while others are simply the songs that bubbled to the surface when my spongy brain was squeezed of all its hydration.

You can download the tracks here (warning: it's a 150 mb file. Note: if using iTunes, import the files as you normally would, then import the playlist – that's the XML file – and the playlist should appear in the sidebar along with your other playlists). I'll make an embedded streaming version to play from this page when I have the time.

You can purchase the playlist in iTunes (will open in iTunes).
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Let's Go to New York 

image via Flickr

Since planning a get-away/escape/vacation a few weeks ago, this is all I can think about. Escaping to New York. Not the shiny, glowing, sparkling, dirty, glassy, grimy, heavily populated city of New York but the green, brown, rivered, open road, heavily treed upper New York bit. The bit that goes through towns with names like Watertown (is it underwater or just near water?) or Syracuse (excuse the Syracuse, as the saying goes, right?) or Potsdam (damn the pots, and their holders!) and winds beyond Lake Placid (young men aren't so fond of Lake Flaccid; even less so young ladies) to Lake Champlain and Burlington until finally you sneak up on Montreal like a marauding army sulking in the underbrush waiting to pounce.


View Bicycling Directions, Generally in a larger map

This is the general plan and route as expressed by one Glenn Gobuyan, who, by dares and taunts has concocted his idea of jolly easy-as-she-goes route. Pish-posh. It's not quite 800 KM, averaging only about 100 KM per day.

"It's not really that much. Should be easy." said Mr. Gobuyan via video chat last Saturday. "I might change my bearings in my touring bike before I head out." he added casually while looking around for his tent like it was a misplaced pillow.

Meanwhile, I've been madly buying all the stock of energy bars, sleeping bags, tents, tarps and inner tubes the city has to offer in a frantic rush of fear. "You're really going to do this?" said my legs to my brain. "You don't go out on Saturday night for fear of being too far from the toilet!" said my stomach. "Not to mention your fondness for the couch, television and heating pads." my back chimed in. Screw all of you, I say. Shut up, Legs. Shut up, Stomach. Shut up, Back. We're going and you had better get used to the idea before you find yourself heading Eastward with only a bit of fabric and chamois cream between you and an aerodynamically shaped bicycle seat.

Very Nice, Indeed 

"Very Nice, Very Nice" via NFB.ca

Last night on TVO, I caught the last half of a film about Arthur Lipsett, a NFB film maker who made a seven minute short called "Very Nice, Very Nice". Made in 1961 "...Lipsett's first film is an avant-garde blend of photography and sound. It looks behind the business-as-usual face we put on life and shows anxieties we want to forget. It is made of dozens of pictures that seem familiar, with fragments of speech heard in passing and, between times, a voice saying, "Very nice, very nice." It was was critically acclaimed and plays frequently in festivals and film schools around the world."

More than what that NFB synopsis suggests is how incredibly modern the film feels. It's a bit of a lesson in both editing and collage, and is far more influential than realized (George Lucas counts Lipsett's "21-87" as an important influence). I don't really understand why I hadn't heard of this film. It seems as though we were force-fed Norman McLaren and Donald Brittain in school but nothing about Lipsett. Perhaps it's because he became mentally ill and withdrew from friends and family, eventually committing suicide in 1986. Fortunately, in 2006 the film Remembering Arthur was made and illuminates his work as well as his personal troubles. Enjoy seven minutes of surprise and delight.

Three Days in a Foreign City

Montreal as seen from a moving bicycle. Image via Flickr.

A small fan by the bed passes over me like a search light. Thin sheets flutter and the hair on my legs bristle. It is no relief. I feel like I'm slowly cooking from the inside out. A hot late summer night in Montreal. It's dark but light from the nearby houses is soaking through the room. Morning comes too soon and a heavy rain wakes me but at least the heat has fizzled out. Cooler air starts to penetrate the small apartment where we're staying.

It occurs to me that no other city confounds me like Montreal. I can never make sense of its cardinal points. Maybe it's because the city feels canted on the diagonal or that I'm always looking at the foreign feeling streetscape or the people or more significantly the Young Women of Montreal.

The Young Women of Montreal wear high boots and short breezy skirts. They wear large fashionable sunglasses, and snug, plunging v-neck t-shirts that reveal elaborate tattoos or unique jewelry or uncommonly graceful necks. Their posture and poise is remarkably upright compared to the common hipster slouch of Toronto. Theirs is a walk of confidence, ease and certainty. Like dancers versus sulking teens. Young women of Montreal wear little make-up while older women of Montreal wear too much. Though to be honest even the older people seem younger and move with same thrust as their youthful counterparts. Montreal feels younger, more energetic, more awake than Toronto.

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Riding the Rails to MTL

I think I knew this already but the elegance of rail travel has long since passed in this country. From the incredible cost to the inane boarding procedures and the spotty schedule, it's a wonder Via Rail still exists. Let's not discuss how slow the train travels, the loose rattling sound of disrepair I've put up with for 5 hours (or that we still have another hour to go), the busted bathroom or the outdated "snack cart". Via Rail could use an entire overhaul. There's really no reason not to just take Porter Air. The cost is comparable, the trip shorter and the service is better. According to Porter, flying their small aircraft is also greener but I'll leave that up for debate. Yet, I'm still looking forward to seeing Montreal, seeing our friends, and being faaaaaar away from the Air Show in Toronto. I'm also grateful for NOT working on the house as it has been my unfortunate tradition for the last several years to actually labour on Labour Day Weekend. Montreal, home to Habs, steams and Poutine - I embrace you. Don't disappoint me.

The Illustrated Man

via This Magazine

A friend just sent me this brilliant book, The Shatner Show which documents 76 images/illustrations/portraits by various artists inspired by the man hisself. This is exactly why "we stand on guard for thee".

Shirt Not Required

"Bon F***king Soir, Montreal, nous sommes The Stooges", and with that, 61-year old Iggy Pop kicked a hole through the Montreal dusk.

We've just come back from the Osheaga Music Festival and seeing Iggy Pop and the Stooges do their thing (re: create mayhem) was a highlight. We weren't really that interested in the headliner, The Killers, especially after the likes of Iggy, Cat Power, Metric, Plants and Animals, Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings, Booka Shade and Sebastien Grainger. It's been awhile since we've been to such a thing but it was worth the crowds, the muck and urinating into a weirdly public urinal to hear and witness great music. Sometimes it's worth overcoming your worst fears to experience something special. At least this time it was.

My Winterpeg

We've been enjoying a short trip to Montreal this weekend and while we were in town we took in a showing of Guy Maddin's My Winnipeg. It was an oddly endearing and endearingly odd film. It was also refreshing to see such a unique (and Canadian) film and voice on a big screen rather than having to seek it out on video.

Tomorrow, we'll join a few thousand "youth" in the rain at Montreal's Osheaga Music Festival (God help us).

in a darkened room

Museé d'art de Joliette: 19,800 seconds, 2007
Code: DR1

People: David Ross, Contact
References: Dark Rooms, Musée d'art Contemporain de Montréal


For over two years now, Dave Ross, a good friend of ours, has been engaged in a futile task. He has been photographing darkness. Not just any darkness, but the darkness of artists' storage spaces. The surprising thing about darkness is just how much it reveals. The results of these long exposure photographs (and I do mean long — sometimes days in length) are often amazing and mesmerizing. The images are made by the almost imperceptible drips of light that, over time, eventually saturate the film and are not only a document of the unseen but of the passage of time it took for the image to be created. Looking at the photos you become increasingly aware of the emerging detail you begin to see, in much the same way your eyes adjust to diminished light in say, a dark room. The longer you absorb the blackness, the more your mind wonders what you are in fact seeing. You may even feel as though you are actually only looking at black and the details are more like the after image burned on your retina. Then, if you've been staring long enough, the image becomes an after image that you see even when you've looked away — as if your own eye is behaving exactly as the film did, slowly having the room interior burned into your rods and cones.

This summer, eight of the images will be exhibited at the Musée d'art Contemporain de Montréal as part of the Quebec Trienniale. Yet the cost of photographing, printing and framing these pictures is noteworthy. To offset these expenses the artist has made available two smaller scale prints for $125 each. To order prints contact Dave Ross before March 21st and indicate which of the images shown here you're interested in. Find out more about the project here.


Museé d'art de Joliette: 1,260 seconds, 2007
Code:DR2