For Roland

Barry Calhoun Photography

Describing: Pascal Dangin

Dangin is on the short side, with a scruffy mustache and finger-in-the-socket frizz. He maintains the hours of a Presidential candidate; lately, he is a little tubbier than he would like. He was wearing, as is his custom, an all-navy outfit: New Balance sneakers, ratty cords, woollen sweater with holes in the armpits. He is not immune to the charms of things—he owns an Aston Martin, along with houses in Manhattan, Amagansett, and St. Bart’s—but, for someone who can pick apart a face in a matter of seconds (he once, apologetically, described his eyes as “high-speed scanners”), he is remarkably free of vanity.

—Lauren Collins, in "Pixel Perfect," a profile of Pascal Dangin, the world's foremost retoucher of photographs, in the May 12th issue.

[Extra: An example of Dangin's work, on the model who "needs the least help."]

It's a Goddy God World

I'm particularly fond of the dog.

Stooped and typing II

The title is a misnomer. As it happens, I'm lying nearly on my back, in a green corduroy armchair, feet up on a tufted leather ottoman. There's Frank Sinatra on the CD player, which is the only music to play with tufted leather ottomans. Laundry's going downstairs, so I've got 25 minutes or so. I'm going to pour out the remnants of the half-bottle of Bailey's Waterhouse gave me as a housewarming gift and try to reacquaint myself with the blogging instinct.

Women seem taken with this week's New Yorker cover, a painting of a cartoonishly wide-faced, narrow-eyed, and ivory-skinned woman whose hair and blouse both are converging thatches of vines and blossoms. Two made special mention of it. I think they think it's pretty.

In unrelated news, you'll see below that I was at Northern Voice, the "blogging and social media conference." (I include the quotation marks because that's the way I say it in my mind—the same as on the news, when you hear "Facebook, the social networking website" in each new report about the Filipino kid whose stabbing death on an East Van schoolyard provoked a flurry of RIP "wall" posts.)

I spend the day among the bloggers, and before I run down to secure my position among the dryers, let me tell you that they're smart, chubby, and casually dressed. That you could have guessed. Their defining characteristic, though, is more interesting, and more alien: an unqualified love of technology and, by extension, the future.

The belief seems to me to have an ominous underside, but I don't know why.

Dept. of stooped and typing

Um, if it's a cliche to be blogging in the Tim Horton's right next to a blogging conference, it's a new one.

Today is Northern Voice, which describes itself as a "blogging and social media conference." You'd think all these hip, connected people could come up with a name that sounds less like a souvenir shop at YVR, where tourists buy maple syrup, vacuum-sealed smoked salmon, and deep-green sweatshirts emblazoned with stylized loons.

Silly me, I woke this morning, ate a bowl of Raisin Bran, grabbed a coffee by the bus stop, and was out here 70 minutes before the thing started. I'm working on workaday time, obviously. I'm going to chill out here with a breakfastwich, or whatever they call them.

Oh, there's activity around the registration table now. I'll tell you what I see.

One overweight, bespectacled guy in a blue plaid shirt punching the air, animating a story. Star Wars blogger.

A half attractive girl in a black skirt with a slit, carrying a packing tape dispenser. She has a limp, though. Maybe she's a hot blogger.

An artsy-looking guy with tight jeans, bright orange Chuck Taylors, high feathered bangs, and a scarf. Emily Carr blogger.

Three girls behind folding tables: one's shifting from foot to foot, one's looking at a piece of A4, one's talking to the sort of older man that proliferate at Canadian universities (sorry, the conference today is at UBC)—kind bearing; red Gore-Tex windbreaker; longer hair, usually white; backpack with laptop inside. A kind of dorky intellectual yachtsman.

I gotta get over there. They're giving out the lanyards.

More to come.

Describing: Orlando Tobón

Tobón, who is sixty, is of medium height and corpulent. He has wavy, wiry black-and-gray hair and a mustache. His features are slightly askew: his mouth slants down to the left and the line of his front teeth is uneven. His eyes are dark and heavy-lidded, and his gaze is direct and comforting. Sometimes, he closes his eyes before he speaks, as if making an effort of memory or will. When he is seated, the desk appears to bisect him. He looks like a bust of himself.

—Alec Wilkinson, in "The Patron" (Nov. 26), a profile of Orlando Tobón, the 'mayor' of New York's Little Colombia.

Hottest seat sales in Asia

I used to fly this airline regularly when I lived in Taiwan. It's the national carrier, and it's had four fatal crashes in the past 13 years. I know one of their pilots, and I'll pass on his advice: "Never fly China Airlines unless you absolutely must."



The cause of the fire was a loose landing-assembly bolt that punctured the fuel tank. It was a brand-new Boeing 737 and had just arrived in Okinawa after a 90-minute flight from Taipei. All 157 passengers and eight crew escaped alive.

Libel, American style

From a New York Daily News article about O. J. Simpson's recent robbery arrest in Las Vegas. Italics mine:

"They might actually nail him this time," said Marcia Clark, the Los Angeles prosecutor who bungled the Simpson murder case in 1995, when a jury let the Heisman Trophy winner walk in the slaying of his wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her pal Ron Goldman.

In this new drama, Vegas cops say The Juice led a group of pals - including a buddy who was in Sin City to renew his marriage vows - who burst into a hotel room Thursday night. Guns drawn, two of the men confronted two sports memorabilia dealers who were trying to sell some Simpson-related items as Simpson barked orders, Lt. Clint Nichols said.

"It was kind of scary," said Tom Riccio, another memorabilia dealer who tipped off Simpson about the sale and said he was there when the alleged theft went down.

Seems oddly sensitive, that second articulation, no? I suppose the reason that you can call him a murderer but only an alleged thief owes to the fact that the theft is still being prosecuted. To my Canadian ears, though, that first paragraph sounds presumptive and more than a little defamatory.

Of course, libel law here is much harsher than in the States. Canadian journalists are like that abused child from your primary school class—the one who, when the teacher raises her hand to fix her hair, recoils in fright.

On fruitful procrastination

This latest video project leapt out of an afternoon that should produced something else—namely, a job. But, well, you take your distraction where you can can get it. The outdoors have begun beckoning me less; summer is fading from my window, and I've turned the baseboard heater on, although just in the mornings, the last two days running. Take a look.

Moon Ascent


This one I assembled from a bunch of still photographs and an audio track I stitched together on Audacity, an excellent open-souce editing program. The song is Air's "Modular Mix," which has some celestial elements, although it's far from their best song.

All in all, it's the technically superior of the two "flight" videos, but to me it falls flat in the switchover from moon to earth, which is accompanied by a 16-beat song loop that feels like waiting. I may go back and edit it some more when I have my next burst of industry, but I probably won't.

(To potential employers reading this blog: After that first burst of industry, do the smart thing and hand my projects off to a closer.)

And Then So Clear


This second one is more crudely rendered, but it seems to hit a chord. I made it six or seven months ago, while in the blush of my first contact with YouTube, and then, after watching its meagre return of hits (200 or so after two months), forgot about it.

To my surprise, the video began to pick up momentum (and generous comments from viewers), and it now has nearly 16,000 hits. Of course, teenage girls' mugging for their digital camera generates seventy times that traffic in the same amount of time, and that can only mean that the world is spinning at the correct velocity. I think the market for tenderly-wrought electronica may be just about at its saturation point.

Dept.of Morning Light

It's six forty-two a.m. Just finished a bowl of granola and non-dairy "soygurt"—the latter a leftover from my aborted attempt to make a cilantro curry for someone who doesn't eat dairy. A half-cup of coffee left. The crows are squalling on Nelson.

70
My words are very easy to understand and very easy to put into practice. Yet no one in the world can understand them or put them into practice.

Words have an ancestor and affairs have a sovereign.
It is because people are ignorant that they fail to understand me.

Those who understand me are few; those who harm me are honoured.

Therefore the sage, while clad in homespun, conceals on his person a priceless piece of jade.

Italics mine. Eastern opacity aside, I'm back, and I'm considering my comment John McPhee's excursion (why does it always have to be a synonym of voyage?) onto Oakmont, the site of the just-past U.S. Open, won by this man.