I wish I'd said that...

"It's like they took the iPhone, and made it larger." (Thanks, JD)

David Mirvish Books

I usually find time once a month to check in on an independent book store and peruse its wares. For the last three months each establishment I've visited has informed me of its imminent closure. So far these places have all been mediocre shops where I had to dig deep to find something I cared to take home with me. But yesterday the shop in question was David Mirvish Books.



If I'd known, I would have steered clear of it: a closing book store is a thoroughly depressing experience, and I've lost the carrion-cleaning impulse of my youth.



When it was fully stocked David Mirvish Books was a gorgeous space to browse around in. It had three levels; the upper and lower floors were accessible and visible to the main floor, which had a towering ceiling and an abundance of natural light. The place was loaded with coffee-table books displayed with their faces out. The building's location was prime -- snug inside Toronto's Annex, next to Honest Ed's and an easy walk from Kensington Village. When I lived on Brunswick Avenue a typical Saturday or Sunday would start with a meet-and-browse at DM's, followed by an early lunch at one of the Annex cafes or bistros.

Book stores and libraries are sacred spaces to me. There have been times in my life when I walked into a library and wondered if what I was about to encounter would precipitate a nervous breakdown or the rediscovery of my soul -- or both. As we try to gauge the sea-change sweeping over the written word and its dispensers it's tempting to have a go at the Emersonian approach -- "Why shouldn't it be a library purely of light and mind?" Another more common temptation is to equate the approaching digital library with the historical change from horse-and-buggy to horseless carriage.

I am not immune to the appeal of that last metaphor. But speaking as a thoroughly digitized Mennonite, the generation that fully embraced the utility and pleasures of the horseless carriage sacrificed a hell of a lot more than simple locomotion up a grassy hill and through the big woods. So too the bookstore and, eventually, the library. It's fine to greet the era of easy access to volumes of information, aesthetics and thought. And it may well be that book stores and libraries will become as quaint a memory as the hot-stove and cracker-barrel. But for now they remain precious public spaces I hate to see shuttered and abandoned.

Photos cadged from here and here.

Five Years of Sky-Writing

I nearly missed it, but my blogular salute to the late Patrick McGoohan and Ricardo Montalban marked the close of Whisky Prajer's fifth year in the blogosphere.

Right from the get-go I considered blogging to be little more than a form of sky-writing. I expected technological glitches to occur, and figured my words would likely disappear in some unanticipated internet shift. I did not expect the record to remain chiefly intact for five years and counting. How nice to still be alive and occasionally taken with thoughts that prompt expression. And how very nice to have the platform for it.

I still view it all as sky-writing, however. It certainly ain't painting on the walls of our cave. The apocalyptic in me expects to wake up some day and discover the slate wiped clean, without notice. With that in mind, this summer I collected a bunch of my favorite posts and started formatting them for print publication.

What I discovered -- what caught me off-guard -- was a marked difference in style and content that, for the most part, did not translate well to the page. All those links to other websites, articles, illustrations remained firmly embedded in the internet, refusing to budge when introduced to the page. These links didn't merely inform the content but were frequently used to justify the content. Precious few of them work as footnotes. In other words, even a cheerful Luddite like yours truly is changed when engaging the new media.

So it goes, and so it likely should be. Every essayist wants their words to become a permanent fixture in the public record; every college kid wants to be the next Matthew Arnold. There's no reason why seriousness shouldn't be an element in the blogosphere, just as it is in Zen gardens -- and perhaps even sky-writing. And there's no reason why most of these expressions shouldn't evaporate with the waning of attention.

Thanks for dropping by and reading. And a sweeping tip o' the hat to Michael Blowhard, whose early words on the 2Blowhards persuaded me to give this medium a go. Here's hoping we all get another five years of this!

In The "Not Dead Yet" Department: Analogue Film

I dropped off the "Family Foto" CD at the local mall's photofinishing center, then meandered over to the magazine rack to see what might be of interest. Lo and behold, Monocle was heralding "The great digital resistance movement." I scanned the cover article, which claims that in the field of skin tone alone, digital photos are grotesquely inferior to their analogue (film) counterparts.

No argument from me there. In fact, I could add a few complaints to the specter of this widely embraced digital revolution. To wit:

Digital photos waste a heap of the photographer's time. The disc I dropped off had 150 images on it, culled from just over 900 that had been taken in the last four months. Many of the non-essential photos were pictures of the cats, taken by my daughters; others were simply botched shots of family members growing weary of the digital delay and blinking, or letting their smiles droop. These have to be culled -- but the work doesn't end there. Even the "good" shots seem to require some Photoshopping. Red eye removal, cropping, a little tweaking of the color-balance, perhaps a special effect or two. This is all Gee-Whiz Fun ... the first time or two. It quickly gets to be a chore.

Excess. Overabundance. Digital Gluttony. 150 pictures in four months?! How in the world did that happen? There used to be a time when dropping a 36-exposure roll into the family camera was to risk the film's chemical expiry. Now the family averages 450 printed photos a year. But that's not the worst of it: the pictures are all mediocre. "Why is this so?" you ask. I have a theory...

Digital photography is an impediment to the photographer's eye. Analogue photography forces the photographer into scrupulousness. If you botch a shot, you waste your money. If analogue is going to work, everybody has to play their best game: the photographer, the subject, the developer. But more than anything, the photographer has to pay attention. Digital photography is so darn flexible, the photographer gets to thinking that even a crappy shot can be salvaged on the home computer. Well, it ain't necessarily so.

My trusty old single-lens reflex camera is still in use. And those are the photos my family looks forward to seeing the most. And on this point I shall stop, lest I begin to pine for the lost nights of the family slide show.

Inspiration provided by JD.

Graphite vs. Wood

Ringette season has returned. It's a popular sport around here, but not nearly so popular as hockey, so I had to do some driving to get my daughter a new stick. The gent who sold it to me tried to persuade me of the virtues of graphite, but all I could see was the $75 price tag. I said, "When my daughter can play a $75 game, I'll buy her the $75 stick."

I relayed this exchange to the local sporting goods guy. He shook his head. "I can't get over the kids who say they won't play hockey with anything less than graphite. So far all the hockey records were established by guys who used wood. What's graphite got that's going to beat wood?"

He was just warming up. "And golf clubs! You can pay $1000 for a driver that hits the ball farther, straighter, higher. But if all this research and technology and money has gone into the science of the club, why are the pars still the same? The course just up the road here has been a par 3 course for the last 50 years. The clubs some guys use, you could buy a car with that money. But they still play a par 3 game.

"Of course," he added, "if you want to spend the money, I'm not going to stop you." And he was talking to a guy who clearly was not going to spend the money.

Defending Culture vs. Defending Your Job

I thought I'd riff off of some other bloggers, chiefly Prairie Mary (here and here) and Michael Blowhard (here). It's curious, I think, to note where the dividing line has been drawn in the supposed conflict between arts-talk on blogs vs. arts-talk in newspapers and magazines. Lately the chattering classes have devoted their verbiage to resuscitating the dying "Book Reviews" of various large-distribution newspapers. The tactic of choice, it seems, is to denigrate bloggers as merely "opinionated" while upholding critics as "learned" (would-be generals in this "fight" include Richard Schickel and Lindsay Waters).

My question is, who, exactly, are these arguments directed toward? Perhaps Schickel wrote in the hope he might spur the declining readership of the LA Times to champion the restoration of its Book Review. If that was indeed the case, I'd suggest his supercilious tone was a grievous misstep: anyone who could be bothered to read his jeremiad was likely a) a literate blogger and/or b) an employee of the publishing industry. Schickel and his fellow culture vultures would do well to attend Sunday morning church or Shabbat synagogue. In our circles it's common knowledge that a pastor/rabbi can only do so much finger-wagging at the congregation before attendance — and the offering envelope — take a hit.

It's also disingenuous to attack people who consider, promote or flame particular aspects of "arts culture" in their spare time for free (especially after praising Orwell for writing on the cheap). Culture is not what's being defended, here. Culture is simply humanity-dependent, and ebbs and flows in whatever direction humanity is pointed. Take what comfort you can from that observation and move on.

I'm guessing Schickel's target audience was his boss. If that's the case, his strategy was, on the face of it, quite brilliant. By now the number of people linking to his piece probably exceeds the number of people who subscribe to the Times. "Hey Boss, dig this: two months later and people are still linking to me! Now, uhm, could we talk about my contract?" It's a clever gimmick, but its novelty dooms it (and possibly RS) to the status of one-hit wonder. How does public consumption of this piece rate next to, say, any of his glowing reviews of Clint Eastwood?

Critics are right to be concerned — whenever my job is on the line I do some hustling, too. But if, as is commonly claimed, the web is killing the newspaper (and publishing, and music, etc.) is it really such a good idea to berate its most active participants?

Jumping To iPod

There were two sights to greet me when I stepped out of the car at the 18th Annual Gathering of The Nick Adams Society. The first -- a deliriously happy subset of mates on the verge of killing a bottle of Caol Ila (the best whisky this year, but not quite as fine as last year's Bowmore Darkest) -- was pretty much a given. The second was not: the supply of this year's music did not issue forth from a Montreal Boom-Box, but from a jauntily propped iPod and a pair of high-end computer speakers.

I was amused, and made a few snide comments ("Aren't we too old to fall for the hype? Hey, that's not the U2 model, is it? It is?! Oh, we are definitely too old to listen to that shite!"). But over the course of the next day and a half, I became duly impressed -- won over, even.

This is my wife's birthday present:



She gets it tomorrow, the day before she boards a plane for San Francisco. In past business trips, she's been able to get a whack of work done on her lap-top while flying. What with the latest scares, the only thing she can now expect from her long flight is bad food, dodgy customer service, and unpredictable company (the terrorists have succeeded, damn their eyes!!). I have loaded this little gizmo to the walls with four gigs of her favourite music, while practising the greatest of restraint and not embedding one single tune that would qualify as one of my personal favourites (anything from these guys, for example). Here's hoping it makes her flight and her time away a shade more enjoyable.

Now, as I've noted before, I have become a Linux man. So when I first went shopping for an MP3 player, I wondered if there mightn't be something on the market that plays OGG. files (if you haven't played around with sound files, OGGs generally have a greater "depth" to them than AAC. or WAV. files, do -- nevermind MP3s). There is, in fact, quite a variety of players that support OGG files, so I stood in the MP3 aisle of a sound superstore and pondered all my options.

And pondered. And pondered.

And gradually took note of just how many freaking options there are for iPods. Dock 'em here, or dock 'em in this, or hook 'em up to this baby. You say you'd like to listen to your iPod while driving? Well you can!

Throw in the fact that I, your humble scribe, qualify by default as "the geek" in our marriage and it suddenly became clear that the decision was made for me.

In theory I am all for challenging iPod's command of this very significant corner of the market. I have purchased nothing from iTunes, and do not foresee the day when that will change. But at this moment, I'm guessing the suits at Apple get on their knees every morning and thank the Maker for Tony Fadell, much the way John Travolta and Sam Jackson do for Quentin Tarantino. Thanks to Fadell, iPod does not simply "have control" of this market: it owns it.

iPod still won't play OGGs, but that's become a moot point. At a certain age (*ahem*), you're no longer able to differentiate soundfile dynamics in earphones the size of jelly-beans. When I need the sound quality, I play the CD. When I need background music (which, for a kitchen guy like me, and a commuting woman like my wife, is 99% of the time), a half-decent docking station is just the thing.

Filling the iPod has been fun -- it scratches the geek itch to lurk among Linux forums, take notes and ascend the learning curve. Thanks to Linux, I'm able to rip a number of my wife's favourite discs, despite Sony's (to name just one corporation) abominable copy-protection programs. Understand: I'm not advocating music stealing. I walk the line in that regard, because I've got enough musician friends to keep me honest.

I've already paid to listen to the music; I am not now, nor have I ever been, a "file sharer"; I just want to play the music on my chosen device. But these copy protection programs are heinous things -- they are, in fact, much more agressive than mere "protection". The old department store adage, "When someone steals, we all pay the price" takes a nasty turn with these computer-hashing execute-files. They're the equivalent of walking in to a store, and being forced to leave your pants behind when you exit. No thanks.

So now my wife has 900 songs of her music tucked into a device the size of a cheap cigarette lighter. I'm looking at the growing pile of homemade CDs (again: perfectly legal transfers of purchased MP3s to CD) on our stereo -- discs fated for a landfill, when they finally glitch. And I'm thinking, How many of those failed CDs would it take to justify the expense of....