Thoughts, Opinions, and Irrational Ranting

Stark and I went for a walk up Dundas to the Junction today. We are always fascinated by crumbling paint and old signs and have been trying to capture the glory that is old Dundas before it is completely and totally gentrified by hipsters and then glass condos. A lot of the stuff we found reminded me of my (still incomplete) Avenue U project.

When we walked far enough West (North? Who can keep track of Dundas’ shifting direction?) on Dundas, past the sight of our last gentrification photo project in the Junction, we reached a Maltese neighborhood. Who knew there was such a magical place? There was even a Maltese bakery promising something called Pastizzi. I thought that sounded promising, as anything that sounds like a combination of pasta and pizza would, but it was closed. Curses! I looked it up when we got home and pastizzi are ricotta-filled pastries. I MISSED OUT ON A NEW FORM OF DOUGH STUFFED WITH CHEESE. Goddammit. Well, reason enough to go back… unless the hipsters move in and it goes out of business first.

Anyway, walking back from the sadly closed pastizzeria (I have learned a new word, courtesy of Wikipedia) we passed a whackload of neat looking stores. It would seem that it is a hobby of THE ENTIRE Junction to collect old electronic and mechanical equipment. Almost every window, no matter what the content of the store, is filled with at least one old typewriter, transistor radio or product from brands like Electrolux or Westinghouse or RCA. Why? I don’t know. Maybe this is how the people of the Junction dealt with being denied alcohol for so many decades. But moving on, if there are two people in this world who appreciate the beauty of a broken radio from 1965, it is Stark and me.

So, a photo tour: Welcome to Toronto’s Little Malta

Continue on Cameracratic

I regret having to write this rather depressing follow up to my post on Hide/Seek, an exhibition of queer portraiture at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C.

For several weeks, a controversy has been brewing. Upset by the mere existence of the exhibit, a right-wing Catholic group stirred up some entirely disingenuous anger over the inclusion of David Wojnarowicz’s video “A Fire In My Belly.” The National Portrait Gallery and the Smithsonian chose to cave almost immediately to the pressure exerted by a hateful minority, erasing the pain and suffering of AIDS from history, and showing how little has changed between the creation of One Day, This Kid… and now. New York Times writer Frank Rich is absolutely right when he calls it gay bashing.

Now artist A.A. Bronson has requested that his work, “Felix, June 5, 1994″ be removed from the exhibit.

Here is the letter he sent to the Director of the National Portrait Gallery:

Dear Martin Sullivan

I have sent an email to the National Gallery of Canada requesting that they remove my work “Felix, June 5, 1994″ from the “Hide/Seek” exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery. I had resisted taking this step, hoping that some reconciliation could be reached regarding the censorship of the David Wojnarowicz video, but it is clear that this is not coming any time soon. As an artist who saw first hand the tremendous agony and pain that so many of my generation lived through, and died with, I cannot take the decision of the Smithsonian lightly. To edit queer history in this way is hurtful and disrespectful.

yours truly,
AA Bronson
Artistic Director

Bronson was a member of the General Idea art collective in Toronto, along with Felix Partz and Jorge Zontal. Partz and Zontal died of AIDS in 1994. Their art, as well as the collective’s papers are housed by the National Gallery of Canada.

Cross-posted to the CLGA Engagement blog

ArtInfo recently drew my attention to the National Portrait Gallery in a review of their show, Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture. Featuring the work of Annie Leibovitz, Robert Mapplethorpe, and Georgia O’Keefe, the exhibit explores the fluidity of gender and sexuality and how queerness has been coded into art from the 1880s until today. Most striking, for me, is the work of Romaine Brooks, who was as famous for her androgynous portraiture as she was for her relationship with writer Natalie Barney.

 

Self-Portrait, 1923 and Una Troubridge, 1924

Cross-posted to the CLGA Engagement blog

Proving once again that website design was the most useful and continuously rewarding course I took as part of my degree in Library Science, this weekend I managed to successfully install two new programs and one widget to the site. First up, the exciting new Twitter update widget on the right sidebar of this page. Hopefully this will help make this blog look a little more active in between my infrequent posts. The other two programs required me to install MySQL databases, which worried me at first, but everything seems to be working and nothing seems to have been irretrievably corrupted.

The first is a an archive of my Tweets (as dull as they are) using Tweetnest. This was relatively easy to install once I realized that I had to tell my FTP program to display hidden files. Before that moment of clarity, I was sitting at the computer renaming .htaccess files and wondering why they persisted in vanishing the moment they started with a dot.

Learning curve complete and confidence restored, I moved on to Omeka. I have been dying to try Omeka. I want to eventually use it to create online galleries for the CLGA (fingers crossed), but I thought it best to learn how to use it first. After a a bit of fussiness, it was successfully installed. I now have a totally blank canvas to play with… now, to memorize descriptive standards…