Glenn Kubish

Happy end of the week, friends. Once a week I try to notice what I noticed made me happy or grateful, remember it, and then record it. So the noticing equipment doesn’t completely calcify. This week:                                 1. Flash of time   Placeline: middle of summer, Delwood, northeast Edmonton, 1978. I was 14 years old. Boston’s second album was still a couple of weeks away from landing at A&A Records in Londonderry Mall. What was there to do? Well, Edmonton at that time was about to host the Commonwealth Games. There was a new LRT line downtown. The Queen was staying at the Westin Hotel and would, the former Edmonton Journal reported, walk out of the hotel at such-and-such o’clock on her way to an evening function with so-and-so important people. I grabbed my camera and caught a train downtown from Belvedere Station.   The Kodak EK100 Instant camera, which emitted a snapshot from ...

So the noticing equipment doesn’t completely seize up, here are approximately three things I noticed that made me happy or grateful, notwithstanding everything else, of course.                          1. Stopping   For all of the good things about moving in the city by bicycle, and the list is legion—fresh air, exercise, smelling home cooking when you pedal by a house with a working kitchen, being under the sky, the stars, the clouds, in the snow and the rain, smiling hellos to strangers as they pedal by, primo parking by your table at OTTO, propelling yourself, not having to pay 5 bucks a gallon, and so on—the prime good of getting there by bicycle is how easy it is to stop on the way. Stop to talk, stop to listen, stop to look.   “Hey, that’s Mrs. K,” Auntie Shelagh said as we pedalled by the boys’ elementary school teacher walking with her daughter and husband. Back Shelagh flew on the 142 Street service road...

This photo arrived from the void the other day.  Shelagh's friends Wendy and John have been going through pics and reclaimed this one from oblivion for us. It shows their two boys and our two boys at the piano. Or, at least, their two boys (who both grew up to be musicians) and one of our two boys at the piano. Michael is the odd boy out in this pic. Characteristically, he makes his feelings known. It's a gift to receive a photo that you never knew existed. What notes is Eamon playing? Look at how B. is looking at his brother's form. Alex is so happy. Michael is so not. And the candles like descending eighth notes. I find myself scouring a new old photo for whatever data it preserves from the burn of time. Their teeth. Their haircuts. Is Mikey holding some kind of stuffed animal? The photo arrives with another insight. We carry each other's beings. Growing older and losing friends to death is devastating. At 56, I am beginning to glimpse that ghastly truth. When friends...

If memory is a guide, I've now been sick for exactly two weeks with a virus that planted its flag in my throat and then advanced to my lungs, sowing a confusion of drip and phlegm on its march. My artillery has coughed out weak replies. To those feeble rattles, the mocking invader has blanketed the countryside with "remember to breathe" tissues. I do wonder if it has actually been two weeks of coughing and hacking and sinus congestion like the Groat Road Bridge at automobile rush hour. Am I remembering right? The days blur into each other under a pattern that goes like this: sleep, take pills, use inhaler, swallow cough medicine, consciously inflate my zeppelin lungs. Then: watch whatever Top 100 sports highlights package is on TV, make it to No. 98, fall asleep under the sway of the monitor's hypnotic colours. I have omitted the less elegant aspects of the assault and retreat.  This is how desperate things have been. I haven't been on my bike for two w...

Let the record show that I once shared a bed with Perry Mah. It was April 1992. I was a young reporter with The Edmonton Sun. Perry and I were assigned to cover the flood in Peace River. The Sun was not a lavish outfit. The newspaper paid you in experience. Part of that experience was a tiny hotel room between us and nothing between us as far as sleeping infrastructure went. Good night, Kub, he said from the left side. Good night, Perry Mah, Perry Mah, I said from the right. That trip was important to me. I learned how to talk my way into a flooded mall. I learned how to anticipate the next angle, to see where the story was going—and then how to make it go that way. The water everywhere today was so obvious, but tomorrow people will start asking if there is disease in the everywhere water. Ask that question today. I learned how photographers work themselves into position to see the world that people will see in time. I learned how to sleep still. Perry took one picture of ...

We were in Vancouver last month for the Springsteen concert , and, with a couple of extra hours to kill before show time, I showed our youngest son, Mike, the place where I used to live:  1516 Burnaby St. I brought a couple of black-and-white photos from that time and tried to better use the photographedmonton  technique I discovered here . This time it worked better, so I was happy about that. But I should have experimented with the now shot in colour for a different effect of the passage of time. Then, Mike gave it a shot with a different photo from back in the day: What I didn't realize until looking at the two now-and-then pics was the passage-of-time effect achieved by having my left hand turn into his. That will always be a thrill of my low level of photography: seeing what you didn't see at the time, even if it was right at your fingertips. Tweets by @Kub64

This morning I took this photo of Gretzky (in happier times :) -- I mean I physically took the photo -- and, adjusting for a few decades, re-placed it in its original location. It's an archeology, of sorts, that consists of literally laying the past over the present to obtain an effect of the passage of time or, what is probably more accurate, the jumble of time. Now, I didn't get it right, or as right as the artists behind sites like FILMography, which can be unearthed and marvelled over here . But there is a common fascination with memory, the intersection of time, the dance between visible and invisible and other themes that drop in and vanish just as quickly. It's also a fascination with the photograph as an artifact. A photograph preserves a memory and it is then itself preserved in an album or a shoebox, inside a frame, behind glass, in a wallet, locket, purse, or between the pages of a book. But when that photograph itself is freed and is taken back to the ...

I have said it before in this blog, but it bears repeating, and that's that sound, according to Ong, "exists only when it is going out of existence." Here is the rest of the quotation from Orality and Literacy : "[Sound} is not simply perishable, but essentially evanescent, and it is sensed as evanescent. When I pronounce the word 'permanence', by the time I get to the '-pence', [sic] the 'perma'- is gone, and has to be gone.... All sensation takes place in time, but no other sensory field totally resists a holding action, stabilization, in quite this way."  The notion of secondary orality means much more than the strand of thought with which I cling to it. But it makes sense to me that there is something essentially oral, fleeting, evanescent, about the text and pic-based media in which we now move. (I thank my MACT professor, Gordon Gow, and my boss, Peggy Garritty, for pointing me and keeping me in this interesting direction...

Sylvia Plath put it this way: "I thought the most beautiful thing in the world must be shadow." Now, I don't follow all of her meaning, but I think it is a beautiful sentence. A couple of weeks ago, cycling on the 142nd St. bridge over the Mackenzie Ravine, I looked down to my right, and, there, down, down there,  rippling over the August leaves below, was my projected image. It was a split-second of thrill. A couple of days ago, that unexamined thrill returned virtually from Mars, where Curiosity has made its presence felt. The unmanned NASA rover has been sending back images of the red planet, shots of the buttes and mesas, Gale crater, the rocks and dust scattered by its landing, Mount Sharp in the distance. It's all fascinating. But what's memorably quirky is the shadow of Curiosity that is captured in some of the pics. It's like a photographer who doesn't quite get it right. Doesn't quite get himself out of the shot. This morning, back he...

Higher, stronger, faster are the three words that guide the efforts of Olympians, but, for the television storytellers at London 2012, it's more like higher resolution, stronger effect, and slower. Much, much, muuuuuuch slower. Slow motion is everywhere in these Olympics. We have mentioned this before (May 22, 2012 blog "Slow Down, You Move Too Fast), but it bears a quick review. The technology has advanced to the point where video almost surrenders to the medium it pushed aside: photography. And, so, now we see the bead of perspiration, the droplet of water, the look of determination. And all in HD. It is brilliant. We can see with the eye of the expert. If those synchronized divers do their water-bound artistry too fast, we can see where the one on the right actually came out of her pike a little too soon. In field hockey, we can see the stick laid down to set up the penalty shot. In water polo, we see the leg kick that moved the ball up to the player's hand for...