Posts in category "Photos"

House Show 2009

The house show (announced ear­li­er this year) was a huge suc­cess. I moved a bunch of fur­ni­ture around in the liv­ing room and trans­formed it from this:

Venue before

To this:

Venue after

There were almost 30 peo­ple crammed into my liv­ing room for a night of inti­mate music and an ice cream bar1 (on which I spent near­ly $100, includ­ing all the fix­ins). Admittedly, I got a lit­tle over­stim­u­lat­ed and pan­icky some­where in the mid­dle, due to all peo­ple, but Pat and Jen came and talked to me, and they calmed me down. It also got real­ly hot with all the peo­ple in there, so I cranked up the A/C a few hours ahead of time.

Arne, who goes by the stage name Duryea Hawkins and was Shane’s sur­prise guest musi­cian, com­plete­ly blew every­one away with his open­ing num­ber, named Snowman. At the end of the song, you can hear Dan say, “Wow”. It’s so good, I have it on con­stant repeat at the moment.

Once again, Shane ded­i­cat­ed a song to me (woo!), my favourite of course, It’s A Drag. He also did a few new songs I had nev­er heard before; one of the best parts of con­certs is being able to hear new mate­r­i­al that a musi­cian is work­ing on.

And for the first time, I got to see Jesse rap in per­son. He was going to do an all acoustic show, with sev­er­al exot­ic instru­ments, but then Nick (who does the back­ing vocals/beats and goes by the stage name Rockefort F. Loopfrog) bought a loop machine, so they decid­ed to use that instead. Quite dif­fer­ent from the stu­dio pro­duced sounds that I’m used to hear­ing from Jesse, but just as good.

The artists all went home hap­py with the mon­ey that was donat­ed2 and made from the swag they sold.

Since it was my first house show, I real­ly want­ed to enjoy it instead of fuss­ing with get­ting the prop­er shot, so I set up my cam­era and left it on in the cor­ner. Next time, I’m going to do a bit more cam­era work.

  1. This must have been a fair­ly mem­o­rable part, because peo­ple like Jess called it the Ice Cream Party instead of the House Show. [↩]
  2. Legally, as the venue, I’m not allowed to make mon­ey, so I have accept “dona­tions” as a cov­er charge. [↩]

Small Town Photo Trip

Field 2

Tina and I head­ed to a cou­ple of small towns around Ottawa. She had her Nikon and I was armed with my new Canon 5D Mark II, which is a full frame cam­era and gives me such won­der­ful­ly wide angles. You can see her shots at her flickr set. They give me great ideas on how I can look at things from anoth­er per­spec­tive because they’re so dif­fer­ent from mine, approach­ing shots from clos­er ranges and com­pos­ing with more diag­o­nal angles.

Field 1

This is by far my favourite shot (above), and I’ll prob­a­bly get a large print of it when I have the mon­ey. There’s a series of acrylic paint­ings by Ken Vincent at the Koyman Galleries in Ottawa, and I’ve always want­ed this one in par­tic­u­lar because the colours and the moody clouds speak of pure emo­tion to me, and I nev­er believed I was capa­ble of cap­tur­ing such moments with my last cam­era1. The price — $2300 for a 28“x61” paint­ing — had always held me back, but now I’m con­fi­dent I can get that elu­sive look I’ve been try­ing to cap­ture, myself.

Continue read­ing “Small Town Photo Trip”…

  1. A Canon Digital Rebel Xt [↩]

People Being Nice To Me

Tao Te Ching cover

Louise gave me a gor­geous copy of the Tao Te Ching. It’s trans­lat­ed by James Legge, with clas­sic Chinese art from the Cleveland Museum of Art. What’s espe­cial­ly cool is that the fonts used for the titles is Avenir, which is the same font I used for my sec­ond Tao tat­too.

Tao Te Ching page 1

It’s per­fect because I feel like I’ve strayed from the path late­ly. It’s been a few weeks since I picked up the book and read a few vers­es.

Tao Te Ching page 2

I real­ly like the fact that many of the pages have no vers­es, and only art­work. It’s nice enough that I’ll prob­a­bly keep it out on my cof­fee table, instead of in my book­shelf hid­den in a clos­et1.

Bamboo bookmark

She also gave me this bam­boo book­mark, with a Confucian say­ing on it. I find it fun­ny because Confucianism oppos­es Taoism, though they both have very good ideas.

Continue read­ing “People Being Nice To Me”…

  1. Not that I don’t like to dis­play books, I just pre­fer to keep a neat house. [↩]

Surviving Mooncake

A few weeks ago, I received a pack­age wrapped in brown paper at work. It took me a few moments before I rec­og­nized the return address; from the woman who birthed me (I pre­fer not to use the term “mom” any­more). I did­n’t want to open it, because my first sus­pi­cion was that it was a box of ears. Why ears? Well, I’ve seen Oldboy, and let’s just say that in the movie, the main char­ac­ter does some­thing sim­i­lar as an act of penance to some­one he wronged.

This woman can also have a twist­ed sense of log­ic, and it would­n’t me sur­prised if she cut off her ears, along with some­one else’s, to show that she was try­ing to make up for the way she treat­ed me by pun­ish­ing her­self, along with anoth­er poor, unfor­tu­nate soul who donat­ed their ears to the cause. But it was heavy, and curios­i­ty fre­quent­ly gets the best of me, so I opened it, and dis­cov­ered it was a box of moon­cakes. Four moon­cakes, to be pre­cise, and the expen­sive kind with the dou­ble yolk. Then I real­ized it was the Mid-Autumn Festival, so this kind of del­i­ca­cy was­n’t so out-of-the-ordi­nary.

My next thought was that they were laced with arsenic. Who knows what this woman is think­ing; every now and then she goes fuck­ing crazy. I told my office-mate, who said, “They aren’t poi­soned! Your mom’s just try­ing to reach out to you.” I did­n’t believe her, so she said she’d take one home and feed it to her fam­i­ly to prove it to me.

Unfortunately, my co-work­er is only in the office once a week. So there I was at home on the week­end, with these deli­cious, though poten­tial­ly poi­soned, moon­cakes on my counter, wait­ing to see my co-work­er in six days so she could tell me if she start­ed devel­op­ing any signs renal fail­ure.

Part of me was also think­ing I should just throw them out. By eat­ing them, I was accept­ing the ges­ture by this woman — in oth­er words, for­giv­ing her — which was def­i­nite­ly not the case.

The thing is, I’ve always had a weak­ness for moon­cake. Those heavy, deli­cious lit­tle pas­tries that are only made more spe­cial by the fact that they’re only avail­able twice a year (the oth­er time being Chinese New Year).

So I told myself she was just repay­ing part of the debt she caused from men­tal anguish, and there went my pride. I ate just eat a lit­tle piece — an eighth of one cake — and wait­ed a few hours to see if I start­ed expe­ri­enc­ing vom­it­ing, nau­sea, or seizures. Then one piece led to anoth­er, and by the time I knew it, half a cake was gone.

Mooncake

This was sup­posed to be a pic­ture of a box of moon­cakes, but this is all I have left now.

I’m still alive.