aberration

9.6.12

Lucky

Lucky Peterson works the crowd at the Starlight, June 8, 2012

We're lucky for a lot of reasons in Waterloo Region, one of them our deep connection to blues music and its best performers.
Last night, too few of us took advantage of this good fortune when Lucky Peterson came to town.
It's not that the audience at Waterloo's Starlight Social Club didn't appreciate Peterson's high-energy performance, a show rounded out by his wife Tamara's soulful vocals, and Waterloo native Shawn Kellerman's stellar-as-always guitar-playing.
It's just that the crowd was too small to really catch fire, thus denying the bluesman and his band a decent payback of energy.
More crucially, the crowd was probably too small to have generated the kind of income a professional musician not only deserves, but relies on to pay his band and cover touring costs.
So it was with some angst that Peterson, who is 47 and has been performing since he was 3, addressed the crowd during the show's last two songs.
"We've got CDs and T-shirts for sale," he said, and then he said it again.
As the blues fans filed out to be replaced by a much younger dance crowd, I approached the bar to get my wife a glass of water. I sensed someone to my right, and when I looked, it was Lucky Peterson.
After we shook hands and I thanked him for a great show, he looked at me intently and, with a hint of exasperation, told me that "no one's buying any CDs."
He drained his can of Bud in as little time as it took him to order it, then returned to the stage to gather his gear. To get there, he had to run a gauntlet of young women dancing to the DJ, essentially oblivious to the big man in the shiny jacket, not to mention his musical achievements.
I mentioned our conversation to my wife and, chastened by Peterson's words, we bought a CD. We then found him in the shadows at the side of the stage, where he sat heavily, winding cable with practised hands.
"Peace," he wrote on the CD liner, then made sure we found his wife so that she could sign it, too.
The dance beat thrummed on, the young women still oblivious as we left to walk home.
Sometimes, I guess, we don't know how lucky we are.

Sign on a tavern wall in Tweed, Ont., June 2010

27.5.12

Just our type

Local readers will know the Iron Horse Trail as the former rail line that runs like a black ribbon through the core neighbourhoods of Kitchener and Waterloo. For those of you from away, I'll say this: The trail is an urban gift whose value has grown in tandem with the number of people choosing to leave the car at home and find other ways to get around.

To coincide with the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences taking place in the area this week, some creative, community-minded people decided to set aside this afternoon for Animate the Trail, to give us all a chance to celebrate the Iron Horse, enjoy music and local crafts, and make some new friends. The event was refreshingly short on bureaucracy and long on spontaneous creativity, a kind of pot-luck of community involvement.

My beloved and I decided to get in the spirit by putting an old typewriter (they're all old by now, aren't they?) on a table and inviting people to bang out a few lines of whatever was on their minds. We had no idea how or even if anyone would be interested, but before long, they were stopping to have a go at our 1950s-era Smith-Corona Sterling (just like this one but dark grey).

Our old Smith-Corona clearly needs a new ribbon, but our guests gave it a good go.

It was fascinating to watch people of various ages react to the machine. Kids were all over it, of course, though it was clearly counter-intuitive to them that they should have to be so forceful on the keys, given how easy it is to type on a computer. Older folks looked on with knowing eyes, and not always through a mist of nostalgia; typing meant endless days of drudgery for many, particularly women, back in the day. Those in the middle of their lives seemed to marvel at how quickly the typewriters were made extinct, and recalled high-school keyboarding classes that gave way to university computer courses.

Between visitors to our trailside table, I turned to my BlackBerry 9900, with its familiar QWERTY keyboard, to capture these few close-ups of the old Sterling. We hope to bring the typewriter back into the light again soon, at Waterloo's upcoming series of Open Streets events. Hope to see you there.

25.5.12

More keys, and a trip to Planet Dumpster

Maple keys, Victoria Park, Kitchener

So enamored am I of Darin White's macro-on-the-cheap solution for BlackBerry that I couldn't resist a lunch-hour photo excursion through downtown Kitchener today. Not only can you find plenty to shoot when you get up close and personal with your surroundings, but it's also good fun to make oneself the object of quizzical, if not mildly alarmed, stares from passers-by. Of course, having the audacity to ride a bicycle on a moderately busy street can draw the same looks in this town, but I digress. Like I said in my last post, 'aberration' is a word of multi-layered meaning.

Speaking of multi-layered, I had the happy accident of discovering another set of keys to shoot today, these ones of the organic maple variety. Like the metal ones I shot the other day, these were just lying there, not doing much of anything, when I moved in with my 9900. Aside from the amazing web of veins, I like the potential suggested by maple keys, even if only a few manage to become trees.

Planet Dumpster, Joseph Street, Kitchener

I also encountered a decidedly inorganic object on my walk, a graffiti-festooned garbage bin behind an insurance building. The great thing about the macro, however, is how close you have to move in to find focus, and by then, the object often looks like something else entirely. In the case of the dumpster, it looked to me like a Google satellite view of some unexplored planet...or perhaps some badly-polluted corner of our own.

23.5.12

A new leaf

An early trial of Darin's MacGyver-esque plastic-bubble-and-Scotch-tape macro kit for BlackBerry

So, I guess it's time to change things up a bit here at aberration, which, if you hadn't noticed, is a word-nerd attempt at a clever double-entendre. All you photo people out there will know the term from the phenomenon called chromatic aberration, a distorting effect due to a particular type of lens failure. Of course, aberration is also the term for something that isn't quite, well, normal. And while I could very well be talking about myself there, I'm actually referring to the BlackBerry cameras I use to make the images on this blog, because it's not normal for people to attempt art on a BlackBerry. Is it?

I haven't posted many words here since I started this project a couple of years ago, having preferred to let the pictures do the talking, but I'm feeling suddenly chatty of late, after meeting some interesting people here in K-W with a similar penchant for aberrant behaviour, photographically speaking. People like Darin White at makebright and Mark Walton at Foto:RE, both of whom suggested, on the separate weekends that I met each of them for the first time, that we convene at 8 or 8:30 a.m. Weekend early risers? Definitely aberrant.

Anyway, anything posted here before today was taken on a BlackBerry 9700. Going forward, you'll see mostly images from my 9900, with a few 9700s thrown in. If you care to know that much, just ask and I'll tell you. You'll also see some colour here from now on, and a few photo sets instead of just singles.

I promise to post a bit more often from here on in, and if I don't, call me out like Darin did the other day. It's the reason you're reading these words right now. Thanks, Darin.