Let's put on a show!

My friends Michal and Yaniv at the Yonge/Eglinton Aroma Espresso Bar have booked me for a three-week photo exhibition. The pictures, which I hung on Saturday night, are virtually all from Faces on Places, my book on Toronto's gargoyles and other architectural sculpture.



It seemed like a good theme for the period leading up to and including Halloween. Stop by if you get a chance, between now and the 6th of November.

The strange obsessions of the gargoyle hunter

I don't expect to get much sympathy, but truly, being a gargoyle hunter is not easy. It's not easy on the hunter and it's not easy on the hunter's friends. The only person it's at all easy on is the gargoyle (and yes, I realize I just called a stone building ornament a "person").

If you've been following this blog of late, you'll know that I spent 10 days at the end of July in Chicago with my sister Roxe, the family genealogist (whose life is also hard, but I'll her get her own blog to complain about the travails of the family-hunter). We attended one arranged family reunion (the Murrays) and a dinner Roxe organized with a few members of the Kalodimos side of the family.



As you can sort of tell from this map of Chicago* I posted in our hotel room, replete with little Post-It flags showing all the places we had to go, we had some ground to cover. For reasons too complicated to go into here, Roxe did all the driving and I did all the navigating. But everywhere we went, I was checking out buildings for interesting faces. (While I was navigating - which is easier and safer to do than gargoyle-hunting while driving.)

To her credit, Roxe did not wring my neck, although she did ask several times, "What?! What happened?! What are you looking at?!" thinking a crime in progress or a crash site had caught my attention.

She also agreed to drive up and down Clark Street so I could find this fellow



who I shot when I was in the city in 2004. On that trip, I rode the #22 Clark bus all the way to the northernmost end of the line, way past Diversey where I lived for a short time. (Sorry to bore those not familiar with Chicago with these details.) It was a long ride, up to Devon (which Chicagoans mispronounce). It was on that bus ride that I saw this guy, hopped off and shot him (and a partner he had on a neighboring building) and I thought it would be fun to find him again and reshoot him.

We drove up and down Clark Street three times — and I never saw him or his friend. Who knows what happened to my stone friends? I fear his building may have been torn down in the intervening six years. I actually felt bereft... until Roxe had enough of Clark Street and announced that we were going to do some actual genealogy work, whereupon she turned into one of the cemeteries just off Clark where our maternal grandparents are buried.

* A common feature of Chicago maps is the truncation of the South Side. To any Chicago mapmakers who might be reading this: give us back the South Side! It should be possible to put the whole of Chicago on a map. Besides, the South Side is an important part of the city. When was the last time the North Side baseball team won a pennant, never mind the World Series, hmmm?

Deerly departed

I have just returned from a family reunion in Chicago. Actually, not having ever heard of these relatives, let alone met them, I suppose it was more of a union than a reunion. Part of the trip involved going through cemeteries and shooting family monuments (and interesting cemetery sculpture, following the lead of Pamela Williams - see links; results will be posted shortly).

We noticed a couple of bucks wandering through one cemetery, eating the flowers and whatnot, and spent about 20 minutes following and shooting... I mean, photographing them.

Yes, the first pic (top) was shot through the car windshield, but then I got out and followed them around:

Surprises in Scarborough

This Reading girl and her Riting and Rithmetic friends were a pleasant surprise I discovered on a Scarborough public school. I'll be including all three Rs along with other Scarborough finds, in addition to a sampling of pictures and update on some of the buildings from Faces on Places when I speak to the Scarborough Historical Society in two weeks. (See the link to the left, under "Mark Your Calendar.")

St. Terry of Assisi

Ah, Terry is tired tonight. I am on a committee that reviews animal research that's done at one of the teaching hospitals. I am tired because tonight I read all 17 new research proposals we'll be discussing at next week's meeting. It's mostly mice and rats that are involved, but they have to have adequate anesthesia and analgesia too.
I just got home and it's late and I'm tired and Euripides wants to play and his claws need trimming so when he paws at me to be picked up, he really scratches. And then I bark at him.
I gave most of my energy tonight to little mice and rats, and now I am barking at my cat. Not so saintly...

Oh, the picture. It's the neon sign for a pet supply store in my neighbourhood. I also shoot clever neon signs. Remind me to tell you someday the hilarious story about how I looked all over San Francisco for a neon penny loafer.