2005-07-12 - 1:11 p.m.
What I'm listening to: Stop me if you've heard this one before-The Smiths.
Another sleepless night. Don't know what it was, but just couldn't slumber last night. It wasn't the heat, because I was comfortable. I saw the sky begin to go blue, so I would say I got to sleep by around 5am or so.
Something that I would like to do this summer is go on a nocturnal walk, as Brassai and Henry Miller did in Paris in the 1930s. That's where Brassai had the chance to take some of his most famous photographs. They would just wander, and he would shoot. Miller was a companion as well as a mock bodyguard.
I was thinking that last night would have been a good opportunity to do some of that type of shooting. There was a nice breeze last night, and the city was still still, evening though the first cars of the morning were wizzing by my building.
If there is another sleepless night tonight, I will hit the pavement by around 4am or so.
In other news I've been playing around with the digital camera more. The purist in me is beginning to realize how expensive being a purist really is. But, when I do explore nocturnal Montreal, I will indeed do it with a digital camera, for stealth and low-light capabilities, mostly. also, it would be interesting to continue the geneology of night photography, where typically photographers used the smallest, stealthiest cameras available at the time. Sort of like a nocturnal spy, exposing the evil night to the daytime viewers. A lot of the rhetoric is just dripping with Freudian ideology, but hey, I find these flawed theories to be the most interesting, not because of their perceived truth value, but of how they work discursively. To make a long story short, if you can't beat the ideology, might as well join it and try to understand why it is so difficult to beat.
But, this new digital 'toy' isn't too bad as an image making apparatus:
I also do love the long shadows and warm light of the evening:
This is something of a self-portrait. When I travel, I usually insert my own shadow or reflection into the images. Makes me a stronger part of the image or the composition, rather than having some stranger take my photograph and be forced to put on a fake 'retail employee' smile. I'd rather author my own shadow.
Then again, this fake smile is pretty interesting, as I feel the need to retain a sense of formality and pleasant distance with this stranger. It would seem that the entire exchange is based on this smile, and it would be counter-discursive of me to frown, or worse, look moderately sad to be in a new place. But what happens when the photograph enters into my archive?
"That was me in (insert generic place name here), and I refused to smile, so I probably didn't have a good time."
I'm on the search for a film, "Afterlife". It was recommended to me last night, and the local video store didn't have it. I ended up getting "Laura" by Otto Preminger with Gene Tierney and Vincent Price, and "Jules et Jim" by Truffaut. I've always wanted to see the latter, but never got around to it. The former is part of my recent facination with watching films in black and white. I just don't enjoy colour films anymore. Black and White is so much nicer to look at, and besides, most of film noir is in black and white, and everybody in those films is smoking, which is nice to watch in black and white.
Talk is cheap...I need a smoke...
