27th Street

July 8, 2017

Way Out West

Listening to Way Out West, by Marty Stuart and His Fabulous Superlatives. This is Marty Stuart’s ode to California, full of twangy surf guitars, excellent songwriting, a taste of far-out gospel and as a bonus, some irresistible instrumentals. This is the kind of record you want to listen to in the car, volume cranked up, heading west. It’s Marty Stuart at the top of his game, with great help from producer Mike Campbell along with Kenny Vaughan and the rest of the Fabulous Superlatives.

Highly recommended.

July 8, 2017

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Drama over the board

From a Go game last evening: the large white group on the right side is dead.

White was doing OK with a good territory in the lower left and another along the top, but I poked at his shape on the right side and my stone along the right edge of the board put 3 stones in atari. If white defended the stones, my next move would destroy his eye space. White could not save his stones and the game was over.

I love the drama of a big kill in Go.

July 7, 2017

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The King Street Experiment

Toronto City Council has approved a one-year pilot – beginning this fall – which will significantly change the way people get around the city. For a 2.6 km stretch between Bathurst and Jarvis, there will be no through traffic from private vehicles allowed. If you drive onto King in the restricted area you will have to turn right at the next intersection. The idea is to make the King streetcar line more efficient. According to the Toronto Star, the King line carries 65,000 people each day and is the city’s busiest surface route.

We live in Long Branch in the southwest corner of the amalgamated Toronto. I go downtown perhaps once or twice each month, for instance when I want to visit Yumart, my art dealer. Unless there is some kind of event that will bung up traffic, I typically drive. Outside of rush hour, I’ll take the Gardiner Expressway to Jameson, go up Jameson to King, and then drive along King and look for street parking between Bathurst and Spadina. I try to arrange my business so that if it is during the week I can get in and out before 3:00 when street parking is disallowed. I won’t be able to do that anymore.

We live a short walk from the streetcar line, but if I do take public transit downtown, I rarely take the streetcar. That’s because the streetcar is notoriously slow past Ronsesvalles. Instead, I’ll either take a Kipling bus to the subway, or drive to Islington subway, park there, and take the subway downtown. Even going to Spadina and King, it’s preferable to me to take the subway to Spadina and the Spadina car south than it is to take the streetcar east.

Another option is to take the Go Train. It’s fast, but there are some downsides to it. To start with, there is very limited parking at the Long Branch Go station, which is just far enough west of us that I don’t want to walk there, and taking the streetcar west to the Go station is additional cost and time.

If the King Street experiment is successful and the streetcar becomes a much faster option, I’ll use it. I’ll walk up the street to Lakeshore and take the streetcar downtown – and be happy about it. I’m not attached to the idea of driving downtown. I do it because the transit option hasn’t been very attractive for me. To me the big question is this. Will the experiment speed up the streetcar enough to make it an viable and attractive option? It will certainly make it more onerous to drive downtown – and not just along King Street.

It’s my expectation that as the city continues to grow, it will become less and less reasonable to take a car into the core. I’m good with that as long as we aggressively invest in transit improvement along the way. It will not take a year for us to know if the King St Pilot is working. I think it will be obvious very quickly. It’s going to affect my own habits, but I’m willing to change. Let’s see what happens.

Toronto drivers and transit users, what do you think?

July 5, 2017

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Chanterelles!

chanterelle buttons

I met up with my brother the trout, Salvelinus fontinalis, this morning to do a little foraging. The good news is chanterelles have begun fruiting in the Enchanted Mushroom Forest. They’re still pretty small, many still buttons, but we found around 30 of these tasty mushrooms, and with the addition of a few good-sized edible boletes, there will tasty mushrooms on the menu in the Comfort Food Diner tonight.

The spot we foraged is one of those places that never gives up huge numbers of mushrooms but reliably provides plenty for the table, time after time. To give credit where it is due, my brother found this place (never mind where it is) along with a number of others I visit. The thing about mushrooms is they tend to be localized. The best spots continue to be the best spots, and often acres of good looking forest are mushroom-free zones. Through a combination of careful research and field trips, Salvelinus has sussed out the best spots in a number of public forests. He is remarkably good at it.

There were not huge numbers of mushrooms in the forest today. Besides the chanterelles, which were scattered about seemingly haphazardly, there were some corals (which I don’t pick for the table – I understand they can cause gastro-intestinal distress in some people) and quite a few inedible wax caps. The boletes we picked were the only ones we saw, with the exception of a small number which were well past their expiry date.

It was great to get out in the woods with my brother, and a meal of wild mushrooms is always a treat.

July 4, 2017

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Banjo Practice – Gonna go Huntin’ for the Buffalo

I learned this tune at Midwest Banjo Camp at the beginning of June this year, from Cathy Barton Para. It was in a class about tunes played by Ramona Jones, but I think she got this one from Jimmy Driftwood.

This tune is played in a special tuning on the banjo which Cathy referred to as Ghost Riders in the Sky tuning. it’s aEACE. So if you were tuned to an open A, you would just drop the second string from C# to C.

I like this one kind of slow and haunting but it’s nice sped up some too. Maybe I’ll record a faster version sometime down the road.

July 3, 2017

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Black-crowned night herons

Over the past several days, there have been black-crowned night herons hanging out in Sam Smith Park. If you want to see them, head for the bridge just to the west of the yacht club and look north. You will likely see a couple people on the bridge with serious camera lenses. Sometimes the herons are on logs and other times in trees. A few evenings ago, I saw 4 of them at the same time.

I don’t have a fancy camera, but I do have a point and shoot job with a decent zoom on it. I brought it along when I walked The Partners into the park after dinner tonight and managed to get a couple decent shots from the bridge. I imagine the serious photographers with their crazy-big lenses capture the birds in hyper-detail.

Looking down into the water from the bridge I’ve seen the flashes of alewives, and I figure the night herons are hanging out to enjoy the easy pickings while these small fish are in to spawn. From the same bridge you’ll also see gulls diving for the alewives. It looks like there are plenty of fish to go around. It’s always a treat to see gulls feeding on fish instead of hanging out in fast-food parking lots, mooching greasy fries.

If you stop in at Sam Smith Park for a look at the night herons, take a walk to the field that is just east of the yacht club. I think of it as the swallow field because there is a big colony of tree swallows living there and they’re lots of fun to watch. There must be 40 houses there for them, and they filled up fast when the swallows showed up this spring.

A few evenings ago I was walking the path through this field and saw a Cooper’s hawk perched at the very top of one of the trees. Sam Smith Park is an awesome place to see all kind of birds. Later in the summer – in September – when the Monarch butterflies migrate through, this same field is an excellent place to watch dozens and dozens of these lovely butterflies.

We feel really fortunate to have Sam Smith Park a short walk from our home.

July 3, 2017

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Newf Joy

We took off for a few hours today, leaving The Partners to look after the house. Before we went though, we took them to the leash free park over at Etobicoke Creek so they could romp and swim and chase and generally have a ball.

July 3, 2017

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A few considerations in painting

I’ve been making paintings for a lot of years now and sometimes the whole damned thing remains a mystery to me. I guess that’s what keeps me doing it. I’ve never been a painter who exhibits a bunch of variations on a motif or anything like that. I can’t help but make things more difficult for myself.

When I have an exhibition of new works, I stop and reflect. How did I get to this place creatively? How did I make these things? I don’t mean technically – I understand that. I mean, of all the possible images, how did I get to this one?

Then comes an even more difficult question. How do I find new ground, break through nagging limitations? Sometimes the questions are the most basic. What is painting to me? Why am I driven to making images?

There have been times when I’ve worked on certain paintings for a very long time, years in fact. And there have been other paintings I’ve abandoned after years of consideration. Add paint. Scrape off paint. Obliterate an image or part of an image. Mask part of a painting. Develop tactics to force myself to push my painterly ideas off the edge, to a place I don’t quite understand. Easy to say I suppose. Francis Bacon once said, “The job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery.”

I asked myself would happen if I started messing with non-rectangular shapes? I began by working on some shaped encaustic pieces which I exhibited at Yumart last year.

The Source, 2016 encaustic on wood

Breaking out of the rectangle forces a certain kind of early commitment in the process of making a painting. Whatever else happens in the painting, it is defined in part by the shape. With the new pieces I’ve been messing around with, I’ve been trying to change up my strategy of labouring over a painting for a long time, allowing the image to emerge after many sessions in the studio. I’m looking for a starker expression. I’ve been throwing some old habits out the window.

Under Cover, 2017 Acrylic and spray paint on masonite

I’m working with shapes cut out of masonite which float out from the wall. I’m also working on each piece individually instead of in groups. What I mean by that is that I have a history of working on a group of paintings at once. I might have 6 or 8 going in the studio. At different times, I’d add one in or take one out of the mix, and usually I’d allow ideas going on in one painting to inform what’s going on in another. There is a lot less of that going on in the new works

My next exhibition is in October. That gives me around 3 months of working time. There have been some shapes I’ve come up with but for one reason or another, I can’t manage, that sit in the scrap heap. I have a number of new pieces I’ve been living with, another drying in the studio, and I have some others still knocking about in my imagination. One thing is certain and that is that these works are unlike anything I’ve done before.

July 2, 2017

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It’s good for the rhubarb…

That’s what my father used to say whenever we’d have a rainy stretch. Never mind he never grew rhubarb. He grew just about everything else though, and he had a green thumb. My love for gardens and gardening came from him for sure.

He’d start his tomatoes down in the basement under lights. Then out they’d go to the cold frame to get hardened off. There were lots of veggies, and a MacIntosh apple tree which produced the tastiest apples, a cherry tree whose bounty was regularly gobbled up by the birds, and wonderful purple and yellow plumbs. Whenever I eat Ontario-grown yellow plumbs today it takes me right back to those days.

All the rains we’ve had this year must be good for the rhubarb. Everything else is thriving too. Here’s a taste of the July garden here at 27th Street.