Tuesday, April 27, 2010

Discarded hutch in the Laundry Room of my Building

I have an irrational discomfort, yes even a dislike, for regal old pieces of furniture that are not in someone's home. I always feel sorry for them. I wonder how many truly incredible Alice Munro-like, or Carol Shields-ridden, or even Mavis Gallant continental-style stories of life and love, of family history here in Ontario are stored deep in the cells of the wood of these magnificent pieces. I ache for their solitude and yearn to hear them speak.

The ones at each of my maternal and paternal grandmother's houses smelled wonderful. Each one smelled very differently from the other, but both managed to convey feelings of comfort, and security, and sunday dinners. The hutch and the big table, the well padded chairs, the bright shiny silver for special, the huge cotton napkins jammed into my shirt collar, even the carpet itself, all represented time standing still. There was no change/no time there in the formal dining room surrounded by those tall stoic hutches and the remainder of the furniture. We all loved it.

Monday, April 26, 2010

This one is a Jackson Strat-style body with a Floyd Rose bridge and whammy bar. I will do another scan and get the top of the guitar into the shot later on. Jackson, Charvel, and Kramer all had their day during this period. I never played this style of music particularly well, so I mainly stayed away from these axes.

I don't remember having this one around long; I may even have borrowed it just to make this shot. I do remember owning a cherry red Fender Strat with black hardware for a short time. These guitars were an entirely different animal than the Gibson-style guitar below, actually about as different as they could be, body styling aside. They were intended for playing metal and loud rock and roll, usually through a Marshall stack. This one is new and certainly has a nice finish. It has no pickguard which looks sexy when the axe is new but will not look too great if the guitar is used every night.

There was nothing mellow about the sound this guitar made, and it really didn't kick in till you overloaded it. As you will note there only only a volume control and in this instance only one humbucker. The volume control is situated a little closer to the strings. This would allow the player to utilise the volume control quite effectively as a playing tool by resting the baby finger on the control while picking the strings.

Tone was controlled through the myriad pedals and effects boards used by people who played this style of music; a tone pot on the guitar was often considered redundant. Most metal guitars had at least one humbucker, usually in combination with single coil pickups.

I really loved guitars with the Floyd Rose bridge and whammy bar, though. It was a treat to bend those string and not have to retune the guitar, at least not right away.

This guitar was actually a personal foreshadowing in one sense, though. I really likied the finish. I stopped buying a lot of coloured guitars soon after and stuck with the standard black finish, usually with a white pickguard.

Start-style body
Rosewood fretboard
Wider frets than the guitar below
One humbucker pickup
Floyd Rose bride and whammy bar
No pickguard
Carve front and back for comfort and ease of playing
This is a guitar I owned in the 80s. The image was taken using a Swiss-Arca 4X5 rail camera, hence the long field of focus. The shot was no doubt taken at f45 with a lens shift on, only way to get it all in and in focus.

This is a 4X5 transparency. The lower bouts of the guitar are cut off because my scanner has no provision for scanning 4X5 film. You get the idea just the same. It was a beautiful instrument. There is a funny bluish cast to the shot; I've taken most of it out here but it's still noticeable in the warmer portions of the shot.

I probably did not compensate sufficiently when filtering. This was an area you had to have down doing film photography, especially for transparencies, and most especially for transparencies going to a client or customer.


I bought this guitar at 12th Fret when 12th Fret was a small shop on lower Kingston Rd. The guitar was handmade by one of the luthiers employed there.

It was my idea to have the store's logo applied to the headstock (barely visible at the top in this shot). Curiously, no one in the shop had ever thought to do so.The guitar had one flaw. It was not made to be played by anyone with big, wide hands. There was very little room for getting around above the twelfth fret if you did not have narrow fingers.

It had many of the properties of an older SG or Les Paul. Mainly, it was a mellow sounding jazz guitar at respectable volume but when you overdrove it using whatever means you preferred, it howled and screamed and substained like no axe I owned before or since.
It never did break up like the late 50s SGs it most resembles. This was probably because of the more expensive pickups employed and/or
the quality of the wood and other materials used in construction. The carved body would also have an effect on the guitar's sound.

The little flat body 50s SGs that everyone collects now as vintage classics (worth a small fortune) were orignally made as an 'econo' line, probably in an attempt to wrest some of the fledgling pop/rock market from Fender. This was one aspect that gave the early SGs their distinctive sound, the cheaper materials used.


On this guitar the tone pots were especially responsive. They reminded me more of any older Tele that I had played than a Gibson. The sound was altered considerably, providing additional colouring and nuance, depending on where you set the tone, especially on the bridge pickup.
When the coil tap was employed in tandem with the tone pots it was quite possible to get a Fender-ish sound out of the guitar, something else a late 50s SG would never have been able to do.

All in all my
Gibson SG-style custom built 12th Fret guitar was a tremendous little instrument, totally versatile, quite functional, and so pr-e-e-e-tty. Who could ask for a better marriage of form and function?

I think this guitar cost me $500 in the late 80s. It was a steal. Apparently no one was interested because it was not a 'brand' guitar. Any player with fat fingers was turned off right away as well. I believe I recovered my money and then some when I consigned it a year or two later.

Those were the days, when guitars flew through my fingers without a thought. There was always another fine guitar to be played just around the next corner. To any of you who play now I say enjoy the moment. You never know when those guitars will dry up and become only a distant memory
(though a truly fond one) .


Handmade Gibson SG-style body
I forget precisely what sort of wood was use but it was good quality dense material
Body hand-carved with concave back for additional comfort (and sound properties)
I don't recall whether the neck was a screw on or through the body, probably the latter
Ebony fretboard
Fretwire was not really, really wide but wider than any standard off-the-wall guitar of that day
Brass hardware
2 styles of mini-humbuckers
Coil tap switch to utilise the bridge pickup as a single coil or a humbucker.
Volume and tone pots for each pickup

Sunday, April 25, 2010



Here are a couple of the honky angel the other day taken with a $2 C no-name camera from Hong Kong (free shipping!). I will slap up a picture of the camera somewhere in the next 24 hours.

These arescans of 4X6 proof with only nominal retouching of dust spots done.

I love this camera. Looks like it will work for a while unlike the used NN that I picked up in Value Village which did not like to advance the film (camera had bad karma anyhow). This camera seems to lend a dreamy softened quality to the pictures.

Right! The claim to fame is that it is water-proof. The camera is in a clear plastic housing which has actual seals around all the joints. This series was shot with the camera inside the water-proof housing.

Who needs $57-65 C Dianas and Holgas?



Had to crop the left corner off this one to get rid of my finger.

Thursday, April 22, 2010

The Hony Tonk Angel was in the square this afternoon (in the house?) singing and playing like a woman twice her age. Wherever this incarnation of The Angel hails from in time and space, she is channeling the voices of Appalachia at present in a way that sends shivers up and down your spine.

Great team. They kicked it off and each song was a runaway train from start to finish. He readily admitted that he is just learning her material right now, trying to keep up as best he can
(wouldn't know it). He knows a little gospel, a little trad, she knows a little old-timey stuff, and apparently some Eastern music. They just rip it up. So cool.

God I love real live music.




More on marriage later when I have a moment.

Sunday, April 18, 2010

Busy week last week.

A local business woman
has offered me some space to show a few of my pics. How exciting!

Had a rant in here about deadlines and the generally slipshod habits and thinking applied to the arts by too many people nowadays on both sides of the equation. Cut that bit out and plugged in the mini-rant below.

Musicians, painters, photographers, and writers sell out every week in order to pay the rent and eat. Artists sell out because there is no such animal as an RSP in their world. There is no pension fund. There are no private health plans (although I am truly grateful for the provincial government drug plan, modest as it may appear to be).

Artists sell out because they have to do so. I would.

Besides, the slow march towards mediocrity
by society at large still plods along. An ill-defined though now undeniable destination seems to be just around the next turn at every kink in the road.

In other words, more and more of the audience does not possess the acumen and/or the attention span required to 'grok' serious art. Pop culture has won the day for a generation or two at the very least.

At last, it would seem, we have Paul Simon as the seer, the medicine man who threw his magical McLuhan-esque word powder onto 'the fire that burns' 40-some years ago. "Andy Warhol won't you please come home" indeed.

Dylan? The jury is still out; history has not yet fixed a place in time and space for the thin wild mercury sound.


For all of that, a local business woman has offered me some space to show a few of my pics. So cool.

***



This is my friend Sue from down around London way. We are both beginning to relax a little when we make portraits of Sue. I think it shows in the work, don't you? Glam retouch applied but as I told Sue, you can't do this without a photogenic face beneath all the magic.

***


Le sacre du printemps

The square downtown is a great place to be when the first warm sunny days hit after a long grey winter. By July most people are less willing to have their picture taken. Early in the season it is rarely a problem. This is Marnie, a fixture on the square, who will busk for a few hours almost every day from spring till fall when the weather turns cold again.

Wednesday, April 14, 2010

My sister Allison came to visit with her boyfriend Ken. Of course I got them up in front of the camera. Allison also asked for a couple of shots of the two of us together. We have never been particularly camera-shy (especially me) when you get right down to it.
This is what you get. Everytime. We've been mugging for cameras since we were teenagers.

Tuesday, April 13, 2010


Really moving along now. There has been a battalion of bricklayers moving around the building for the past few days. They go like little machines. It's amazing to watch a bricklayer. Craft, technical prowess, and strength are all required to do the work.
All the glass and most of the doors are in which I am sure is a nice stage to get past for most of the workers. It would be a pleasure to be sheltered on rainy cold days.
It is gritty, dirty work is construction, but there is an obvious pride exhibited by everyone on this site. I also notice that there are few, if any, small men doing this work. The short people who are on site are muscular and square. The taller men are just BIG.
Over the years I have come to regard Old Quebec Street with a heartfelt, ironic fondness. It could all be simply sad were it not for the foul odour of backroom deals and dark stories that accompany the construction of this mall. It is, then, a monument to how fucked up things can get and still proceed. I wonder whose children got their teeth straightened, or went to university, or put a down payment on a first house on the kick- backs and payoffs that must have surely taken place.

Old Quebec Street, an utter waste of space, time, and money.


cavernous
[ˈkævənəs]adj suggestive of a cavern in vastness, darkness, etc.

ster·ile (strl, -l)adj. Lacking imagination, creativity, or vitality. Lacking the power to function; not productive or effective; fruitless:

useless [ˈjuːslɪs]adj having no practical use or advantage. Informal ineffectual, weak, or stupid

stink
(stngk) n To be highly offensive or abhorrent. b. To be in extremely bad repute. Slanga. To be of an extremely low or bad quality: This job stinks. b. To have the appearance of dishonesty or corruption:

Thursday, April 8, 2010

This business of putting up a show is quite the undertaking (yes, I am possibly mounting a small show here in Geulph).

If you surrender to all the local 'craft' shops in town you spend hundreds and hundreds of dollars and still not do not end up with precisely what you have envisioned
The purchase of cheep frames at IKEA or other outlets is only the beginning of the battle.

Ultimately it does not matter. There is a surge of energy, a circle of impossible karma, that takes place anytime you expose your art to a larger audience. 'Twas the same when I played, 'twas the same when I wrote poetry and stood up to read it in high school (that took REAL cojones), it is the same for visual artists, be they painters, photographers, or mixed media artists.



I have seen no better expression of the human condition, the need to 'talk' to one another on a basic level than I see and hear regularly in the square downtown. Let's do some talking people, and I am not writing about that barbed repartée employed almost exclusively and enjoyed far too well by all and sundry up on the hill.

Love pink. Love anything, truly, Let's get there. The sooner the better.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4fWN6VvgKQ
(*shiver* Dave's gone all hippie . . .).

Sunday, April 4, 2010

One of many picture making opportunities that are scrawled on my mental 2Do List is to get up on the railroad bridge over the MacDonnell/Woolwich intersection. I finally remembered to have a look today. I came at the bridge along the rail line from the station over at Gordon Street.
I wanted to do this because it is always good to see familiar territory from a completely different perspective.






The shot above was cropped about 5% on the left and bottom edge. All other shots came OOC and are presented here with no crop. It's good to make sure you can do this once in a while in spite of the technical advantages our computers and the digital age allow us to utilise.








Inside Outside

Did I forget to mention last time that Red Brick
offers
the best take-out coffee in Guelph?



(See March 15 blog entry)

Saturday, April 3, 2010

It's quiet in St. George's Square on a holiday weekend. Of course it is completely dead on Good Friday, but it is still fairly quiet today.

That's a good thing because it gives me a little elbow room. It's simpler to talk to people for some shots. It's easier to catch people enjoying themselves in other images.



Jean Marc is in full voice today. Because it is a quiet day there are no beat cops around so the kids who show up are generally left alone. Jean Marc is a natural musician. I've seen him playing many instruments quite well. He sings with abandon, enjoying the attention as only a young man can do.




In a candid shot you find people truly relaxing and often doing something interesting, reading, or working at a laptop in a way that would not be possible on a normal afternoon. The square is quiet, not jammed full of hot, stinking buses and crowds of people hurrying along and only passing through.