Tag: looking back

by jad

Montréal: Expo Dream

One of the Montreal things that I’d read about obsessively before going was Expo 67, the great World’s Fair that took place here on Canada’s Centennial. It’s a multilayered megaevent that’s still seen as Canada’s cultural “Camelot” or even “last good year,” and there’s a lot to say about it, but during our stay at the In-Terminal Hotel, one thing of that era stood out: I couldn’t help but imagine the excitement that people must have felt as the world and even cosmos seemed to be getting smaller and smaller. You can’t really think of that decade without thinking of … Continue reading “Montréal: Expo Dream” →

by jad

Montréal: Airport Swim

This time last year, I was telling you about our little cocoon of comforts by a lake in Idaho. I hadn’t planned to tell you about this cocoon of comforts on our last night in Montreal exactly one year after I told you about that cabin by that lake, but I’m not surprised by the coincidence. x I told you about that lake of baptisms and the washing away of shame, so it’s only appropriate that, one year later, I’d tell you about a dinky little overchlorinated pool on the eighth floor of an in-terminal hotel where silly people try … Continue reading “Montréal: Airport Swim” →

by jad

Let Us Compare Mythologies

Leonard Cohen’s first publication was a book called “Let Us Compare Mythologies,” a phrase that kept nagging me as significant to my trip to Montreal. What if we compared mythologies? Settler versus indigenous; English versus French; Expo 67 versus FLQ 70—what would we find at the other end of that trigonometry? That line comes from the slim volume’s second poem, I would learn, one with a most elusive title of its own: FOR WILF AND HIS HOUSE. The poem itself is a touching testament to the harsh contrasts of Jewish agency within Christian structuration. You can find it online read … Continue reading “Let Us Compare Mythologies” →

by jad

Montréal: Postscript

As someone from someplace oft described as “a land of contrasts,” I understand at a visceral level how asinine descriptors like that are; for what is a city but a mixed multitude and condenser of opposites? There are cities where this mixity is thrown in stark relief as harsh lines of stratification, it’s true – San Franscisco comes to mind right now – but we rarely use the language of “contrasts” there; haves and have-nots are not the kind of duotone that capture our imagination. No, lands of contrast excite the eye like a splash of modern art. It’s the … Continue reading “Montréal: Postscript” →

by jad

National Camera Day: Смена-Symbol in Everett

So apparently today is #NationalCameraDay, which makes it a great day to share the (unedited) results of my very first roll using the Soviet-era (1972 to be precise) LOMO Smena Symbol. I’ll have lots to say about the camera itself in the next post, but first, a few words about the content itself; I hate feeling like I’ve wasted film, so I try to take meaningful shots whenever I can. But I also had no idea how this fully manual, viewfinder-style camera would perform, or if I’d botch the whole thing up trying to meter for the first time, so I … Continue reading “National Camera Day: Смена-Symbol in Everett” →

by jad

Birthday Polaroids ’23

I very rarely acknowledge my birthday beyond mandatory staff cake and some social media posts (though apparently not every year, as I noticed scrolling through this app last night), but it has happened maybe 2 or 3 times in my life. The very first birthday party I threw for myself was in 1999, at the Fuddruckers in Kuwait, where I made sure I’d planned plenty of games and activities so no one would get bored, and we didn’t have to dwell on how it was a combination going-away party as well. The next time I let myself be celebrated was … Continue reading “Birthday Polaroids ’23” →

by jad

Montréal from Seattle

Christine and I are going to Montréal in a couple of weeks. It’s going to be my first international trip since becoming a U.S. citizen and the first time back on an airplane since getting my green card and landing here. There are a half dozen reasons to be excited about visiting this oddball part of North America, but our primary impetus for wanting to go in the first place was to visit a Mohawk Catholic shrine as part of @christine.bingham.art‘s ongoing book project based on her series of mirror saint paintings. I’ve been reading a lot about the history of … Continue reading “Montréal from Seattle” →

by jad

Megapixel Memories

This last batch of recovered files from 2011 is probably my only and very modest foray into #urbex, apparently taken on an old Nokia phone. The space would feature in a @suzieselman music video, so all credit to finding the location and having the guts to “trespass” goes to her. I love how weird and ghostly the image rendering is in all of these. The metadata says that these were taken on an N97 mini, and yet, for the life of me, I can’t remember ever owning one of those, especially when it was supposed to have a 5 megapixel … Continue reading “Megapixel Memories” →

by jad

GEO+NAFSIYA: GREENING THE GREY

Another set of photos from Beirut that I found as old attachments is this series I’d apparently taken for the long-defunct outlet “Hibr.me.” It depicts GREEN THE GREY, a “public intervention” in June 2011 meant to celebrate green spaces in a city in desperate need of them, or what @beirutgreenproject‘s co-founder Dima Boulad would later call a “peaceful protest” to coincide with World Environment Day. Patches of grass were laid out in car-centric Sassine Square and we spent the afternoon hanging out. It was as simple as that. It pains me to reflect on just how utterly prosaic the politic instantiated … Continue reading “GEO+NAFSIYA: GREENING THE GREY” →

by jad

Sleepless in Beirut

Google had been bugging me about my cloud storage for a while before I finally clicked the link the other day to hopefully free up some space; a couple of scrolls later, I was punched in the gut with attachments in emails I’d long forgotten about, with files and photos I thought I’d lost forever, including these from a project I worked on with a then-anonymous blogger in 2011. You read that right – an anonymous blogger; this was 2011, after all. More on that later. Thank God for metadata because I simply have no recollection of ever using a … Continue reading “Sleepless in Beirut” →