Too busy obsessing over the Chelsea Hotel (and reading Chelsea Hotel* with stunning photographs by Claudio Edinger and written contributions by Arthur C. Clarke, William Burroughs, and other residents – it’s wonderful!) to write a proper blog post, so instead I give you another picture from Halloween that I didn’t post the first time around.

Soon, I hope, I will write real content.

*I popped over to the university library today and sure enough they had the book I’d seen mentioned several times in my research yesterday. Funnily enough, though, it was in the hotel and food administration section, not the photography section.

Anyone who knows me knows I tend towards obsessive thinking. For the last few years photography and researching related purchases and education have been the subject of much of it, although trips are right up there too – figuring out where to stay, getting the best deal in accommodation or finding the place that best matches our needs, researching things to see and do, that kind of thing. I’ve been wondering why it hadn’t kicked in for NYC, for quite a while now. I think maybe I just wasn’t ready to commit to either bringing our son with us, or leaving him behind — both options have major drawbacks. Not long ago, my son finally realized that it might be a lot of fun to hang out with Grandma and Grandpa for a few days, and now I’m really ready to leave him.

Sure enough, last night my obsessive thinking kicked in, and I’ve been researching, researching, researching online, mostly about where to stay. This evening, I’m obsessing over whether to stay at the Chelsea Hotel – you know, the title of Leonard Cohen’s song about Janis Joppelin? Yeah, THE Chelsea Hotel. I’m super keen to make pictures there and to see all the art that is all over its walls, but I’m not sure I actually want to sleep there. It’s hard to know from people’s reviews what you’re really in for, because everyone has different standards for comfort and different expectations, but surely it has to be at least a little better than the bedroom we stayed in in Havana? The bedroom itself wasn’t bad at all, but real Cuban plumbing is awful – you can’t flush any amount of toilet paper at all! And the shower head broke off so it made only a little cold, pee-like stream.

As much as I’m not one for roughing it (we never, ever camp), I’m awfully enamoured with the idea of staying there. Just do a little search on flickr for pictures of it and you’ll see why.

I was planning to write about something else today, but that doesn’t seem to be happening. Another day perhaps.

Here is a story my son just told me.

One time, a long, long time ago, I was lonely in my carseat. And I saw a light come down to the ground and the car got hooked up to the light, and I called, “MOMMY! DADDY!” because I was SOOOO lonely. I never want that to happen again.

(Do I need to clarify that this has never happened to him? Once when he refused to let me undo his carseat straps and refused to get out of the car, I left him in it while I unloaded groceries, but that was it.)

Now here is a picture that has nothing to do with that.

I’ve been walking by that trailer every day for probably two months. The other day I noticed a pregnancy test laying on the ground next to it. I tried to see whether it was positive or negative, but that part had fallen out I guess. Whatever the result, I couldn’t help but wonder if they made the woman who peed on that stick happy or sad. And where it came; I couldn’t see any other spilled garbage nearby, and it seems too big to be blown from away. Oh well… just another of life’s great mysteries I guess.

I’m definitely feeling a sense of completion about my series with John. I’ll probably still photograph him from time to time, but I’ve been ready for a week to start editing the pictures. I’ve been narrowing down my selections and my plan was to get work prints made of the top 60 or so and play around with sequencing and grouping them. But last night I decided to just see how far I could go working on my computer. I’m pretty happy with the sequence at the moment, although I may change my mind.

I can’t remember how much I’ve written about John here, so here’s a brief introduction. John has multiple schlerosis, which literally means “many scars.” It’s a degenerative disease that causes the nerves to harden with scar tissue. I first met on my first day at the Drop In Centre almost two years ago, and he was one of the first people I photographed outside in the smoking area. Most of his tattoos are in honour of his family. He was largely raised by his grandparents; I think his mother had some addiction problems and he never really had a relationship with his father. He has two kids and he’s been divorced by their mother for a very long time. He was diagnosed with MS around 20 or 25 years ago, and recently he’s been finding it increasingly hard to walk. At the drop-in centre, we’ve started carrying his meal to his table for him. This is all just off the top of the head, and I’ll make sure to verify this stuff before I publish the series in a gallery. John has a lovely deep voice and I’d really like to get an audio recorder and have him tell some of his own stories and make a real multimedia piece.

You can see the slideshow here.

So what do you think?

Here are 3 new blogs I read that have nothing to do with photography:

1. Mouse-traps and the Moon – my dear friend Sue writes about children’s literature here, and I love her approach. It’s also a great way to get book recommendations for my son.

2. The Slow Food Experiment – Veronica Mitchell started a new blog when she and her husband began a daunting slow food experiment: they only buy single-ingredient foods. Before I started reading, I thought we were doing pretty well with cooking real food, but I’m realizing we have a whole lotta blind spots.

3. Ottawa from the down side up – Junkie-Monkey is an active drug user (although he’s just fallen in love and been clean for 6 days). I’ve seen lots of photographs of drug users, but I haven’t often heard directly from a user in a public forum like this.

Enjoy

I must have been very young when I asked my grandma why she and grandpa slept in separate beds in separate rooms. It was unusual because my parents slept in the same bed, and so did my friends’ parents.

“He snores,” my grandma whispered.

Every summer I went to visit them by myself for a week. My grandpa always got up insanely early at 5 and was out of the house at his favourite coffeeshop (which I never did visit myself) before grandma and I woke up at the more civilized hour of 9. He’d come back after we were finished breakfast and ready to start the day, and then we’d do stuff like to go to Storybook Gardens or Wally World or shopping at the mall. Grandpa also went to bed earlier than us.

Later when I was an adult, they’d moved to a retirement home, and mostly they sat around in their overheated living space watching Lawrence Welk and baseball.

I always suspected that they never really loved each other. Grandpa seemed like such a stick in the mud compared to my vivacious grandma, and I remember when I was 8 or 9 asking my mom if grandma could come live with us when grandpa died. He ended up living a long life, and my grandma was very old herself when he died. I was shocked by how lonely she was after he died. She died within a year. That was my first inkling that perhaps the companionship that comes at the end of a long marriage is something much deeper than the burning love of youth.

I think about my grandparents often when I’m photographing my neighbours. Some of them are in their 80s, and I wish I’d been into this kind of photography when my grandparents were still alive.

There’s a group on flickr called 100 strangers. When I first came upon it a while back, I was all “Oh I don’t need to do the challenge, because I already photograph strangers.” But I realized I’m not actually doing it. If I have my ipod, I just zone into my own little world, and when I see someone I’d like to photograph, I can’t be bothered to pull myself out of that space. It feels like just too much effort to bother.

So last week I decided I wanted to do the challenge after all. On Thursday I took my new Yashica Mat downtown, with the goal of photographing at least a few strangers. I really struggled with the slowing down and waiting (I think I’ve mentioned before that patience is not my strong point), but I stuck it out and ended up meeting some new people.

The first was Daryl. I saw him when he was laying two red towels on the sidewalk in front of a fire hydrant. I approached as he attached an orange balloon the hydrant, to ask what he was doing, and our conversation became quite drawn out.

He was laid off from Skyjack more than a year ago, and plays a pipe to help fill the time using the set-up of towels and balloons and other small items as a circle of protection. He said it’s been a struggle. While we spoke, someone chucked a lit cigarette butt at his balloon and it popped. He shrugged when I expressed sympathy over the loss of the balloon – he had more in his bag.

I actually shot four frames of him, and I left and came back in the middle of those frames. I just knew I hadn’t gotten the shot I wanted yet. He was pretty much constantly on the move every time I started looking through the Yashica’s viewfinder so it was really hard for me to focus. This was the shot I wanted (although it’s a bit underexposed – my next purchase will be a handheld lightmeter). I wanted to show his amazing blue eyes, and before this shot he wouldn’t look at the camera or make eye contact with me.

This should be a picture of Cara, but I screwed up loading the film, and didn’t wait for the arrow, so the single shot of her I made was actually made on the paper that pulls the film into place. Somehow I doubt that counts.

Despite that error, I love the way the Yashica Mat is changing my approach and process. There’s an irrevocable feeling that comes with the physical presence of film, good and bad, that I don’t get shooting digitally. I’m way more deliberate, and that deliberateness is really helped by the waist-level viewfinder. The ground glass already looks like a photograph, except that its relationship to reality is severed because the image is reversed left-to-right. Also, it takes me so long to focus that I can wait out discomfort, and if I miss a moment, I just wait for another one to come along.

This is Dirt. She started our conversation by asking about my camera. I told her about my 100 strangers project and she was very willing, but I could see she didn’t want to make eye contact with me or the camera.

This is Bruce. He followed Dirt here, because she used to live here, so they stopped for a stay. She and Bruce have been travelling around the country, and soon will be setting off back out west. They made such beautiful music that I didn’t want to leave; I wanted to just follow them around the country listening to their music.

Adam doesn’t go to school, but Megan and Amanda were both on spares from school. They sat patiently like that while I focused and focused and focused. Amanda, the blonde, joked about being discovered for America’s Next Top Model.

Well lookie there. It’s day one of Nablopomo and we forgot to fall back last night, so I really have an extra hour today to blog.

Last night we went trick or treating, and it was really nice. My son had a few people he wanted to see, and I wanted to make sure to see the people I’ve been photographing so I could introduce them to my son. Last year, my son wasn’t particularly interested in trick-or-treating, and it felt a bit awkward knocking on a whole bunch of doors that belonged to people I had no clue about. But since I’ve been photographing some of them, I’m really feeling more connected to people. I watch Bob’s tree, which is still holding onto most of its leaves, and worry that he’ll have to rake them himself. One night I walked by Joan’s house and saw a single light on in the basement where she watches tv and thought about the rest of the dark house surrounding her.

Leona, one of the neighbours I’ve been photographing, even dressed up (and yes, I brought my camera trick or treating, just in case):

(I’ll post some of the other pictures of Leona and her husband Ron another time.)

Last week I saw a whole bunch of cars at Bob and Gladys’s house, and I was suddenly worried that something bad had happened to one of them. I phoned the next day to make a time to photograph them again, but it was really just an excuse to make sure they were both ok. Bob ended up cancelling our session for a medical appointment, and when we trick-or-treated there last night, he limped to the door. He said his leg was all swollen, and he’d been for x-rays but they didn’t yet know what the problem was. He was camped out by the door, because otherwise it would be too hard for him to go back and forth from the family room in the back to the door. He was missing the ball game. He gave out apples, and when we got home with a full basket of candy, it was the apple that my son was most excited about. If I didn’t know Bob, I probably would have been worried about my son eating it, but since I do know Bob, I was just pleased that my kid was more excited about an apple than candy. I also know Bob has fruit trees in his backyard so the apples could even be homegrown, although I can’t remember if they’re actually apple trees or something else.

My son dressed up as a witch.

It was a good thing I took pictures last weekend when we first got his costume, because he pretty much refused all pictures on the actual day (well, days plural – Friday was the big day at daycare). This is him on Friday morning, running away from the camera and yelling No Pictures!

As usual, my husband carved the pumpkin.

My son got his own little pumpkin when his daycare took a field trip (literally) to a local pumpkin patch. My husband carved it.

So that’s it for Halloween. In totally unrelated news, I think I’m coming down with a cold. Tune in tomorrow to find out for sure.

Alright, I signed up for nablopomo. That means I’ll be posting every day for the month of November. I don’t know, it sounded like a good idea at the time.

Also, I’ve been on twitter for a little while now. You can follow me here if you want. It’s possible my daily blog posts will be made in 140 characters each.

I went to another Roller Derby last night. Here are a few of my favourite pics:

You can also see a slideshow of all the photos from both roller derbies.