Travelogue: Life is many postcards…

Posted on July 28, 2009

So I left the ladybug in charge of my cucumbers and packed my bags for good ol’ Acadie

I sure hope I don’t come home to something like this…

On the way, we caught a few severe storms… punctuated with pretty yellow fields like this

Visited great modern museums on the way

Au Québec, il y a beaucoup de “crémeries”. No matter how small the village, you’ll always find a moderately successful ice cream stands. This one was just hanging out there in the middle of nothing. Ice cream is always good. mmm.

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And as we crossed the Matapedia Valley, there was lots of pretty fog in the mountains. It feels like I spent the whole trip dozing off into sleep, waking up, taking pictures, dozing off again. If only it was so easy to take nice pictures… no effort required whatsoever.

Pretty skies unfolded constantly along the way

Then there was a rainbow… a little man, all dressed in green velvet, three inches, tall flicked a gold coin at us and disappeared into the forest on the back of a unicorn (who knew they were that small).

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.We saw a covered bridge…

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More pretty fog…

A “warning - bikes come around here too” sign

Fallen construction cones by the riverside

Altogether, it took about 12 hours to drive to New Brunswick yesterday. After being held up by one of our passengers who took a bit longer than expected to get ready, then some hold up at the car rental place… we finally left Montreal at about 11AM. There were some major thunderstorms around Quebec City, and we had to drive between 60 and 80 km/h on the highway for about an hour and a half in order not to crash or end up floating away in a ditch. Then there were more thunderstorms around Bathurst, which made us loose about another hour at ridiculously low speeds, but left us with a fabulous light show to watch while we were at it.

Last night, me and my grandpa got dressed up in old costumes in the middle of the night and took pictures. It was fun. Today, my great uncle, the clever and infinitely sweet priest, came over for breakfast. Then, later, my old pal Chris came to pick me up in his Green Hornet-green Bricklin (you know those cars that have doors that open from the top like wings). We got lost on out way to the beach, but then finally made it there.

We chilled there, smoked, talked about our respective visual arts.

I took pictures of junk on the beach while Chris took some of his ever ringing phone calls.

Just enough time to show me how to turn on a video camera, tell me that the basic was all about the kinetics of holding it steady and fluidly…  ring…

Pretty girl walked by on the beach…

There’s nothing like sand in your toes. Chris appears to enjoy that too. It’s the small things that make up the good life… he gets that too, that’s why he actually likes it living around here. You have to be the kind of person who can turn the most mundane things into magical moments. There’s lots of that to be had where I’m from…

Natural scenery. Chris was going to set it up “better”, but I like to take pictures of things as they are. Then I was saved by the bell…

Everywhere I go hang out these days, couples seem to be engaging in some pretty shameless groping. You’ll see that lots in public parks of Montreal, but apparently, New Brunswick beaches are no exception.

We hid our gear in the tipi while we were going to scope things out. … which never happened since his Inkerwoman called him home for dinner.

We got lost again looking for my uncle’s house… stopped to ask a man for directions, but since we’re both burnouts, we couldn’t remember what to ask for… so we drove on in the Bricklin, listening to 70s tunes. How very appropriate.

Then a picture of Chris’ favorite pinup flew in from the back.

Then I finally made it to my uncle’s house, where they like to catch black kittens in their lobster traps.

Then we walked around in the woods until we hit what is the startoff point of a blueberry field.

Then walked back…

For dinner, I ate a fabulous meal of traditional salted cod. Mmmmm, my favorite. I hung out with my goddaughter and her 5031 questions, answering every single one of them. I take it as a challenge to answer everything she asks. Clearly, if I was around her 24/7, I wouldn’t be able to do that and keep up. I’d probably loose my patience… but I’m not around her much. So I figure the least I can do to make up for the cheap birthday present she’s getting from her broke-ass godmother this year is to answer every single one of her crazy questions and open my mind to her way of thinking. It’s pretty fabulous. She loves me and my answers I think. She cried a whole lot when we left.

Now, the weather’s cool. It’s nice here since it always cools off at nighttime, and just by opening the windows and turning on a few fans, you end up even better off than with AC in the city.

I don’t come around here all that often, and I always feel privileged to get to come back home to a place like this in the summer… with the beaches, the fields, the ocean, the forest, the hicks, the bright minds… It takes a special type of person to be able to stand this life year round though. I’m still in training… not ready for that just yet. What I feel even more privileged about is to actually have a pretty awesome friend to hang around with. It never used to be this much fun coming home to Tracadie. Now, even though I love my family to bits, I get to escape, work and hang out with my pal and fuel up on a bit of “this is who I am in real life” before plunging back into the comfortable nest where people’s main worry is taking care of each other.

First Roll

Posted on July 26, 2009

I finally developed and scanned my very first roll on the new TLR. I’d never shot with a medium format camera before. This may be a bit too much fun…

Here are the most thrilling results.

Weekends du Monde au Parc Jean-Drapeau

Posted on July 26, 2009

Awesome breakfast

Posted on July 18, 2009

Lately I’ve been working on improving my “quality of living”. It’s been a long time coming actually. With the year I’ve had at grad school, I often felt that even though technically I have all the elements “on paper” to live a good life, I’ve been unable to actually make that happen. I’ve learned a great number of things over my recent trip to Europe, and the most important of them is that life gives you what you put into it. Give it passion and freedom and it boomerangs right back at you with happiness and adventure.
The major thing that I learned though, was in the South of France. The art of living slowly, eating well and making grand things out of the most understated elements. That actually all goes hand in hand. When I came back, I took the time to read Milan Kundera’s book, “La lenteur” (Slowness), in which he writes that speed is directly linked to the will of forgetting. He takes the example of a motorcyclist who, on the highway, with the speed of his bike, forgets everything about his life, for there is just him, the road, the wind… speed makes him forget about all of his life’s stresses and leaves him in an intense meditative state. On the opposite end of the spectrum, he talks about the slowness of medieval courting and how every calculated pause adds intensity to the experience of the lovers.
In most big cities around the world, slowness is almost nonexistent. Between the “Métro, boulot, dodo”, and the amount of up keeping required to make life go on (groceries, cleaning, laundry, etc.) there isn’t much time left for actual breathing or slowness. Every moment of our lives is so saturated with our “to do” lists that there isn’t any room left for any sort of poetry or for the ecstasy of simply living to creep up on us. Is this really living? I wonder. If so, why do such full lives actually end up feeling empty to most people?
Well, to make a long story short… eating is one of the things that we tend to do much too fast I think. Not only do we eat fast, but we don’t take the proper time to actually enjoy the experience of making real food happen. Not that this should be a complicated endeavor or that it should take hours at every meal… but I feel that a lot of the times, there’s absolutely no passion that goes into it.

Lately, I’ve been allowing myself to let go (meaning REALLY letting go of all the other things that should get done) and indulge into the experience of cooking. This, to me means forgetting all the work I have to do, forgetting about the cleaning that comes afterward, forgetting that what I’m doing is actually taking time. At that point, I stop thinking of food as something that I know. I don’t think about “meals” I’ve eaten in the past and things I’ve liked. I think of possibilities of food as a blank page. I take my reusable bag, my wallet, my keys and head to the grocery store. When I get there, I look at prices mainly. I go for the cheapest items (because I’m pretty poor these days) and imagine what good can come of them. Since it’s summer, there’s a lot of great deals to be had out there.
This morning, I looked into my fridge, and to my great delight, there was a lot of individual things left over from my week’s bargain shopping, just demanding to me eaten. A single potato, some zucchini, cherry tomatoes, eggs, garlic, spring onions… mmm… then add to that some breakfast sausages I had in the freezer and a piece of baguette… and there we go.
I honestly didn’t know where I was going with this, but as I was listening to CBC Radio 1, I let myself forget that time was going by and just let myself be creative with what I had. To my utter delight and excitement, I actually ended up creating one a great meal like I’ve been longing to make… As I saw the potatoes starting to brown in the pan, and the tomatoes mix in with the zucchini and green onions, I got overwhelmed with joy from all of those beautiful colors that started appearing in the said pan. Well, as it turns out, the food tasted just as wonderful as the experience of making it was. Ah, the joys of food. It takes time to make magic happen in the kitchen… or maybe it’s just a matter of forgetting about the existence everything else in the world for those moments and making a meditations out of it. Letting yourself be saturated with the slowness of the experience… The French, with their 2 hour lunch breaks, truly have one up on us, for they have actually realized that food isn’t only about fueling up the body and making hunger disappear, it’s about actually enjoying the experience of eating and allowing ourselves the necessary time to make that happen.
Vive la France!

Ricohflex Model VI

Posted on July 17, 2009

So even though I am pretty broke these days, I still managed to get my hands on this old school baby earlier this week for a completely ridiculous price (say, the price of a couple drinks at your friendly neighborhood pub). What’s outrageous is not what I paid for it, but the amount of money it will cost to actually use it. Oh well. There are worst things to blow a 20$ bill on these days I guess…

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View through the viewfinder… so crisp and clear, it actually makes my knees weak.

Apparently, it’s not a bad camera at all, though it’s still not worth a fortune even 60 years later. Most of the reviews I’ve read are talking about a stiff focus, which is also the case with mine, though not a major problem. This model was made in 1953 and was originally geared towards the general public. So it’s never been a “professional” camera, even though back in those days, mostly privileged families could afford such a sweet little jewel since I believe cameras were a luxury item even for a while after the release of this one.

When I showed up at the store, I asked the guy for prices for other models, of which the cheapest 6×6 was 120$. When I asked about this one, the guy said it was broken and he didn’t have time to fiddle around with it to figure out how to heal it. After I asked him to take it out of the glass case, he realized that the shutter wasn’t broken, but that it needed to be cranked a bit in order to “unlock”… but at that point, it was too late, he had already quoted me the price “as is”. After I paid for it, I almost ran out of the store feeling like a thief, in total and utter disbelief for the unrealistic price I had paid for it. I’m a lucky gal…

For the photo nerds: photos shot with Vivitar Series 1 Macro lens, 70/210mm, 1:3,5 mounted on my Nikon D50.

Bowerbirds, Megafaun, and Vicious/Delicious @ Sala Rossa - July 13th

Posted on July 14, 2009

Last night I went to see Bowerbirds, down at Sala Rossa. I discovered this band through a friend of mine over the Christmas holidays. There’s a lot of nice perks to having friends with similar musical tastes, but discovering new bands, I feel is one of those privileged moments that just keeps on giving. This gets even better when I finally get to see those new discoveries play their music live. I don’t know if you realize how incredibly lucky we are here in Montreal to have a ridiculous amount of fabulous bands rolling in every week to share their music with us. I can honestly say that I can count on one hand the amount of bands I love that I have yet to see.

 

I also love it when at a show, I’m caught off guard and end up loving other acts of the evening, and last night I was pleasantly surprised by the two other bands that took the stage before Bowerbirds. This, to me, testifies to good show planning; another reason why we should be thankful to have such great production companies in this city (i.e. BSTB). Not only do they bring in the bands we all know and love, but they manage to swing musical discoveries for us audience members while they’re at it. I think that’s great… really. Keep reading for less ranting about how great I think Montreal production companies are, and more about the actual show.

The show started off with Vicious/Delicious, a local band that plays a kind of spacey retro-rock that strongly reminds me of Velvet Underground. To be honest, I wasn’t expecting to be hit with such a big sound at a show that promised to be essentially folk, but I must admit that it was a nice surprise. They sounded pretty great. The only thing that puzzled me is that I still can’t figure out why they had three guitars players up there, because most of the time, at least two of them were playing sensibly the same riffs. Nevertheless, this is a band that I would recommend seeing live. They’ve got their act together and I think they’re really quite promising.

Next up was Megafaun. All the way from Durham, North Carolina, these three bearded gentlemen loosened up the slightly cynical audience with some of the best stage banter I’ve heard in a while. Between their songs they told us funny stories about crossing the border earlier that day. During their performance, I got to thinking about what truly makes a band great and started checking off a list of essential skills that this band displayed. To make a long list short, the trio had a great stage presence, displayed well-above-average musical talent, and had interesting and creative musical arrangements. Bref, all the required musts of musical entertainment in my book.

 

Speaking of talent, Bowerbirds! This was my second time seeing them. They are currently touring their new record, Upper Air. I haven’t had the pleasure of hearing the actual record yet, which is a shame since what I’ve heard live so far is pretty great. Whereas their previous record, Dark Horse, was mainly lead by Phil Moore’s exquisite classical guitar, the new songs venture into the steadier rhythms of the acoustic guitar. Whereas the previous record had some gypsy undertones, their new songs appear to be geared into a folkier style, with a fuller sound. Moore appeared to have a bit of a hard time keeping the fussy acoustic guitar in tune, but this wasn’t a major issue. Their lyrics are great, and pair up with beautiful melodies in intricate and well-thought-out rhythmic measures. Add that to exceptional vocal and musical arrangements, and you’ve totally got me. Bowerbirds is a truly excellent band and their live show lives up to every expectation I had. Simply beautiful!

 

By-the-way… anyone else having a hard time figuring out the actual starting times of the Blue Skies Turn Black shows? Or is it just me? They don’t list it on their show listing page… Is there a trick I’m not aware of? If so, PLEASE feel free to share.

Photos by SarahBrideau.com

Flickr Update

Posted on July 14, 2009

My Flickr site has been updated in collections for easier viewing (i.e. Europe individual sets are all grouped in the “Europe 2009″ collection).

You will also find that my sets have been reduced to 25 photos. The photos that were previously in the sets are still available for viewing, only no longer grouped in the sets.

Happy viewing.