Invisible Cities

January 26, 2010, at 7:23 pm

What was it that the Decentrists desired when they dreamed of the city as a garden? What did Le Cor­busier see when he ima­gined the towers of the Radial City, ges­tic­u­lat­ing like giant fin­gers in some obscure salute? Did any­one think to ask people how they wanted to live? Did any­one look around, to see the value of the city as a social and eco­nomic envir­on­ment? Now that the giant social hous­ing pro­jects are crum­bling, are we poised to make the same mistake?

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Mobile homes, under the sea

December 17, 2009, at 11:36 am

“We were blown away,” said bio­lo­gist Mark Nor­man of dis­cov­er­ing the octopus beha­vior off Indone­sia. “It was hard not to laugh under­wa­ter and flood your [scuba] mask.”

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Living Room

December 10, 2009, at 11:06 am

There is a fren­etic, agit­ated, almost crazed energy just below the sur­face of Bieke Depoorter’s photographs.

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There goes the neighborhood

March 21, 2009, at 9:38 pm

Where I am is Chin­atown, and it has been burn­ing down. It has been burn­ing my whole life, really, but these past couple week were par­tic­u­larly incendiary.

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Hustle and Bustle

January 16, 2009, at 6:01 pm

Some­times I feel like I must be wear­ing some sort of a sign, like a “kick me” on my back, or invis­ible ink on my fore­head that says “gull­ible.” I talk to a lot of strangers, and most of the time I enjoy it. In fact, I am try­ing to make talk­ing to strangers my […]

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What Are You Doing Here?

December 28, 2008, at 1:20 am

sparse

“What are you doing here?” said the pair of eyes behind the counter. Good ques­tion. John and I were going to find my grandmother’s house in Hyde Park, an upscale sub­urban com­munity north of the Uni­ver­sity of Chicago. To get there, we had to walk through Chicago’s notori­ous South Side. What the Viet­namese man […]

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Falling

December 18, 2008, at 12:55 am

Photo Detail  —  A sum­mer storm builds over Nanny Goat Hill

I’ve been work­ing on a big pan­or­amic photo (the final print will be about 2 feet by 4 feet) that I star­ted this summer.

It was July, and we’d just moved into the new apart­ment in Chin­atown. The liv­ing room was pretty sparsely dec­or­ated at that point, nonetheless […]

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The Commons

December 6, 2008, at 5:35 pm

Anna at The Commons

My friend Melanie has a favor­ite neigh­bor­hood cof­fee shop, The Com­mons, on Col­lege street in Toronto West. It’s a cozy little inde­pend­ent place, com­plete with edgy baris­tas, well-worn benches, and fine young things. It has four long tables, and a good vibe. Like most local cof­fee shops, the reg­u­lars here know […]

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Art Attack!

November 1, 2008, at 8:47 pm

This Sum­mer, I had the good for­tune to pho­to­graph the Second Annual Time Squared event for Gal­lery 101. Artists are crazy folk, and per­form­ance artists are a spe­cial breed. I had a lot of fun, even though I was soaked through and through by pour­ing rain at the end of the day.

Per­form­ance art is a tricky […]

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