What we think of today is not necessarily important, but what is remembered tomorrow most certainly is.

Information flows at a faster rate than ever before, in a volume greater than we are able to control, comprehend, or absorb. Scientists have resolved that human beings take in five times as much information than we did 30 years ago; the equivalent of 175 newspapers (given the dwindling size of today’s newspapers, this comparison is indeed subjective).

Not including what we take in on a need-to-know basis in our working lives, it is estimated we process more than 100,000 words, or 34 gigabytes of data, daily, exclusive of the idle hours spent in front of the television, or clicking away at video feeds on our laptops, tablets and mobile devices.

The impact of this information overload not only impacts our memory, but our memories. I am fascinated not only by what we can remember, but also by what we forget.

The human mind is an amazing commodity. We can marvel at what we, or others, think of, but even more remarkable is where our memories come from, or how they are stored. In the most simplistic terms, our memory is a filing cabinet where we tuck away thoughts with scraps of knowledge, addresses and directions, useless facts, and an assortment of utter bullshit. A more digital representation is one of folders and files we store on our organic hard drive.

It was once thought there was a central point in the brain that stored all this data, but developments in recent years indicate there is not one particular place, but memory is distributed, albeit inequitably, throughout our grey matter. Further confusing is that several parts of the brain must work together to remember one simple task.

Remember the adage It’s like riding a bike? Well, that alone requires the brain to use several components of this stored memory. The recall of the body’s physical motion comes from one part of the brain, the memory of how to operate the bike from another. It becomes further complicated when you throw in the reason you climbed on the bike in the first place, and decide where to go (the nature of how much thinking is required to ride a bike further reinforces the need to wear a helmet).

So why do we remember what we do? And why do we forget the important stuff, or what may have been important at the time? Age, and absorption of facts and figures, does enter the equation, but it still does not account for both the trivial and important information within our recall.

For instance, I cannot remember many (read most) of the periodic table symbols I was forced to commit to memory in high school, but I can remember brand logos of ski equipment, beer, and record labels from the same era.

I can’t remember the name of the company’s recently appointed regional vice-president (whom I have met twice), yet I can easily recall the name of original Police guitarist Henry Padovani, or the redheaded girl I had a crush on in Grade 7. I remember her address, her brother’s name, and, damn it; I remember the hurtful words telling me I wasn’t the one.

The names of musicians who played on hundreds of albums easily come to mind, but I cannot list all of this country’s prime ministers. I remember all 14 victims of the Montreal massacre (and can’t forget the man responsible for the slaughter), but could not tell you an equal number of newspaper colleagues I worked with at the same time.

My phone number from 40 years ago, or 20, is lodged in my head, but I can’t recall numbers I dialed regularly as recently as two years ago. Granted the convenience of storing the digits on a mobile device has made life so much easier, but that’s beside the point.

I remember my sister’s birthday ever year, but usually forget to send a card.

It has to be more than selective memory for, if that were the case, I’d remember more of the better and far less of the worse. Also, the short-term and long-term rationale seems to be hit and miss. Why do we remember what we do, and why do we retain some of the useless stuff (see above Police guitarist) and allow the important information to get lost in the files and folders within our minds?

There is a theory of limitations about what we can take in during a day, and much of the time the internal files fill up or become corrupted by the useless questions, comments, and responses that just happen every day. Do you need room for dairy in your coffee? Do you have a rewards card? Do you want fries with that? Can you spare a dollar? Slight, random, seemingly innocuous interruptions, that are not only harmful to the thought process, but they hinder true progress or performance.

It’s like trying to squeeze an extra 4.0 gigabytes of data into the 16 GB on your phone, or jamming another 156 pages into a 1.5-inch binder; there simply is not the space, and you will have to take something out to fit it all in.

You also have to remember to leave the important stuff where it is, and not overlook its importance as the new material comes along.

With all these questions, all this information, coming at us, we are forced to put aside what may be truly important, just to get through the day. We also have to decide if it is important, or valuable, enough to be remembered, while we are paying attention to what we truly need to know.

Once remembered, will it be remembered when it needs to be remembered?

I believe that in dealing with the daily decisions, directions, and distractions forced upon us, as it comes at us, we seldom take time for mindful thinking and processing of what is truly important. There is not enough meditation or contemplation; just outright sitting and thinking of what needs to be thought, and not struggling with in-box clutter and credit card statements that simply prove what we bought.

If forced to think, or over think, make sure you find time to make some of the thoughts good. If it is important, make sure it is more than a memory.

©2015 j.g. lewis

 

 

 

 

 

All she asked was for honesty, occasionally cab fare, and
a knife to cut the crusts from her sandwich.
She had no expectations, always washed her dishes, and
made the bed each morning, so as not to leave a trail.
She arrived with June.

Summer began, as summer does. You always know
it is coming and then, one night, it’s just there. She was there.
She said she wanted a summer love, the kind you would read about
in vintage magazines or a Harlequin paperback. Uncomplicated.

Unplanned, as it was. A patio.
A bartender, a warm breeze and a bottle of Malbec,
then another. The ream of bangles on her wrist chimed
with each movement. Her eyes shone bright,
but hid an untold sadness.
I didn’t have a type, and she wasn’t it, yet
she insisted she was.
She said she would prove it, almost as if it were a dare.
Many days were
daring adventures you would know nothing about
until you were caught in the middle.

Jazz clubs, after hours, because she knew a person
who knew a person. A foreign film, without subtitles,
or an evening at the Fringe, on a whim. Picnics at Sugar Beach,
wicker basket full of import beer, consumed quickly
from paper cups.
We rarely made plans. She was routinely late,
and blamed it on her father’s wristwatch. It needed a new battery,
and a cleaning, she said.
Sometimes you like it slow, when there is no place to go.

The universe has a plan, she said. Sometimes we
are not in control, although we like to think we are,
or would like to be.
I was more the planning type.
In my button-down world, things had a place,
although I was never quite sure of mine,
nor was I sure the universe would follow through.
So I tried to plan.

Romance. I tried to do my part.
Flowers were appreciated, she said, but an unnecessary expense,
easier liberated from gardens in late-night strolls through
unrecognizable streets and parks. Not fond of daisies, she said
she always ended up with the love me not. Black-eyed Susans
were her favorite. Lovely, and common, she said.
They could withstand the rain,
and the heat.

August heat.
She could convince you, with an unexpected phone call,
that a beach was a better place than a desk to spend the day.
Paperwork could wait, there’d always be more, she said,
but sunshine,
and summer for that matter, was in limited supply.

My honesty was not hers. She worked evenings, and later,
knew her wines, loved the tips, and enjoyed her job,
but that’s all it would ever be.
A few credits short of a useless degree, she said
she was too young to have a career. Her mother had a career.
Her father died when she was a teen, so Mom was always working.
A career never allowed for fun,
she remembered.

Maybe, after kids, she said,
and then
would then say nothing.
She had tried, once before,
with the husband and the house.
He was older, as well. A lawyer. She was wife number two
and spent most weekends alone while he said he golfed,
or tended to the kids from wife number one.
Or was, more likely,
on the search for soon-to-be wife number three.

Trust was her nemesis,
and truth rarely worked in her favour.
She’d said she had spent too much time alone, and
walked away from a relationship that promised nothing
and provided even less. If she were to be alone, she would do so
on her own terms.
Her terms included a downtown apartment
with more clothes than closets, and few close friends.
She adored dresses from the Sixties, hairstyles
from last week’s magazines, music that was now,
and would rather go barefoot than wear shoes without heels.
She walked her bike
more than she rode it.
It’s harder in a skirt, she said, and even more difficult with heels.

She rarely answered, or charged, her phone. Showing up
when she wanted, waking me with a whistle from the street;
the kind of tomboy whistles my mother would have detested.
Or she would sweet-talk the concierge
into letting her up.
Middle-of-the-night grilled cheese paired with one particular Bordeaux,
or another. Prosecco with scrambled eggs, or Zinfandel, because
it was chilled, and went well with the humidity,
and the colour of the clouds
at daybreak.

I woke once at 4 a.m. to find her naked on the terrace, the spray of the summer
showers dripping off her hair. She said she wanted to feel the rain on her skin.
She wanted me to feel it too, and brought her storm to bed.
The pillows will dry, she said.

She thought nothing of interrupting and would, often, correct my verse
with words that wouldn’t fit. Often, she said, my poems were about her
and I wouldn’t reply, as I knew they couldn’t be.
A muse has to play with your heart as much as your body.
There was not the time.

Summer ends, as it does. Cooler nights hint of autumn,
the new girlfriend smell fades, you tire of sand in the sheets,
panties left drying on the shower rod, and music,
if not of your generation, then of your choosing.

All I wanted was honesty, at least with myself, and a knife
to cut away patterns preventing me from seeing what this could be,
instead of what it was. Spirits wilt slowly with the Black-eyed Susans
in the melancholic mood of mid-September.
She said the universe does have a plan, but one
I wouldn’t accept.

She was like poetry, and had become a distraction.
While I spent time noticing the flowers, or savoring the taste
of new wines, I had been putting aside what was important.
Should you simply accept the convenience offered,
you may never know a deeper taste, greater love,
or the likely truth.

 

 

 

 

It speaks of history, arts and culture,
and the ever-changing socio-economic
trends. A longtime destination, Toronto’s
Queen Street West is more than just a
street, and far more than a neighborhood.
Retail rules in a curious blend of
commercial and residential, everything
and anyone is out on the street. Musicians
perform for passing strangers, artists show
their craft, and crafters show their wares.
Poets offer words to those who will listen,
and fashion is right there; in stores or on
the people. Ethnicities mix, and cultures
collide, in food and drink or otherwise. It’s
cool in the clubs, late night on the street,
shoppers shop, and everyone eats.
Wealth walks and poverty sleeps.

 

 

    Just before four
      Or just after
Half moon on the midway
    Floodlights dimmed
Excitement gone with the crowd
  The Ferris wheel rests
    For the night
       A time
      When a stranger
     May more likely meet
              A knife
          Than a smile
   When the power of the sun is
 Nowhere to be seen
 Nowhere known
    Yet the heat is still present
Persistent
   Reflected and refracted
   From downtown concrete
           The air humid
               Dark
Suffocating
                  Blocks away
       A high-rise set amongst the clouds
Above the quiet
        Of long-gone crowds
Lovers unite
           Dissolve against
              One another
 Sensual shivers
  In spite of the heat
      Sweat on the brow
 Sweat on the sheets
      Awake or
   Awaken
   What it was
                  It still is
  Even the distance knows
     Still in the city
Still is not calm
    Humanity tucked away from it all
  Asleep
   Others are not
Tormented souls wander the night
       Confounded by loneliness
                   Emptiness
              Worthlessness
    Restless youth
       Careless and not knowing
Where they should be
   Where they are
         Silent as a shadow
             And just as flat
  They wait temporarily
  Time
      After Time
   Just after four
Or just before
      Someone smiles like a knife
   Someone
Tonight will fall
            Beyond the dreams that lovers hold
       Beyond the dreams they once were sold
         Out of time
  Out of place
Out of synch with the human race
      Lives now dimmed or cower
  Out of sight
Out of morals
  Out of light
          Unsuspecting souls
     Who know no fate
       Will soon make certain
   An unknown place
Beyond the silence
  Beyond the sight
     Someone else
         Will fall tonight
                 When lovers dissolve
             When lovers unite

©2015 j.g. lewis

“The single most important component of a camera is the twelve inches behind it.”
                                                                                                                                       – Ansel Adams

I grew up in a black and white world.

The first television images I can remember flashed from a behemoth black and white screen, but all media, at the time, were mainly black, white, and the shades between.

A newspaper, then the real source of news, was filled with glorious photographs capturing history as it happened. Even magazines were mostly black and white (images from LIFE magazine instantly flash in my head), and were for years. Outside of the occasional cover, the early Rolling Stone (then a tabloid, at first, without staples) photos were mostly black and white.

Significant moments are fixed in our collective psyche; the Kennedy assassination, fists raised symbolizing black power on the medal podium at the ‘68 Olympics, John and Yoko’s Bed-in for Peace, Nixon leaving the White House by helicopter, even Kurt Cobain’s memorial images from the ‘90s, all black and white.

Family snapshots in colour eventually came into our home, but the first adorable images of me in my high chair, or standing in front of the fireplace with my siblings, are recorded for posterity in black and white.

As the years and decades progressed, with advancements in the photographic world, film and equipment shifted towards colour. Black and white was still what attracted me to photography. About age 10, I made my first contact print with a DIY photography kit my mother found at a church rummage sale. It was like performing magic. I discovered I could make a photograph, and a passion was ignited.

Capturing images took over my imagination. I knew I wanted to be a photographer. I used to sneak off with my dad’s 35 mm. I volunteered as a yearbook photographer in junior-high school as an excuse to use his equipment. I fell in love with the camera.

My professional experience working with film began at age 16 when I secured a summer job working as a studio lackey. I did the stuff nobody else wanted to do, changing darkroom chemicals and hauling equipment around. I photographed products (cans of vegetables, boxes of wrenches, packages of underwear, spark plugs) on a medium-format camera, but mainly worked in the studio darkroom reproducing other people’s work for the advertising agencies and accounts the high-volume studio contracted with.

Many a workday was spent in the muted amber-tinted darkness, and I loved it. I felt a part of it all. I honed my darkroom skills so by the time I was hired as a photographer with a daily newspaper; I had that part of my act down pat.

The darkroom is the other side of photography — the part fewer and fewer people know about — taking the image from a negative and putting on the paper.

Most of my newspaper work was in black and white. Colour then, at a medium-sized daily broadsheet, was reserved for special editions and, of course, advertising. Colour photography, to me, has always seemed cold and calculated, where black and white has a soul, with textures and temperaments than can be seen and felt.

Many of my favorite images are still black and white; Adams’ landscapes, Walker Evans and Robert Doisneau’s glimpses of real life in earlier times, Jean-Perre Laffont’s view of an era more familiar, the surrealism of Man Ray, and the fashionable cutting-edge eroticism of Helmet Newton. Even my favorite album covers are monochrome; London Calling by the Clash, Patti Smith’s Horses (early Robert Mapplethorpe photography) and Springsteen’s Born To Run. I still, for inspiration, will leaf through the National Press Photographer’s Association annuals.

When you work with a camera long enough, as you begin to see the world in black and white, it becomes a part of you. You know what each lens can do and which camera body to count on in certain situations. ‘F8 and be there’ was the standard mantra. You become friends with light, learning the traits and tendencies and how it will attach itself to your film.

My first SLR camera had nothing automatic. It wasn’t until the late 70s when Nikon introduced automatic metering, but by this time I knew how to read light and never used the settings. The difference between correct exposure, many times, went back and forth between an f stop and an F word.

And lenses? There was nothing automatic about them. Manual focus, and you had to be fast. Zoom lenses were available, but the quality was never there. For that reason you carried a canvas bag stuffed with a handful of fixed-focal-length lenses. Equipment was made of metal, aluminum, and glass. Motor drives were an add-on. Size was size, it didn’t matter, and it came with a weight. You hold a deep appreciation for a certain era of photographer when you look back on older Sports Illustrated magazines, knowing that everything captured was captured honestly. It was slight of hand, intuition, and having the right eye.

I left the newspaper as the world began whispering digital. First-generation digital imaging had just arrived at the newspaper, and we had to then scan actual negatives into the computer.

Almost a decade later, in an effort to get back to photography, I purchased a digital body. I played with it a bit, but it mostly sat and collected dust. I made a point, through 2008, to use the camera, each and every day. I fiddled around, marveled at what it could do, though I never took it seriously. I never took it to the next level.

I even spent a weekend learning, in an intensive workshop, Apple’s Aperture software. It was more my lack of hands-on computer skills, than darkroom knowledge, that held me back. Learning the digital darkroom was important to me as I knew the wet darkroom so well, and believed you have to know both aspects of photography for it to be a craft, or an art.

Yet, I never full embraced digital photography until this year. Along with producing images for this site, there was this burning need to take it further. In the cooler months I set a goal, a simple photo essay, which would allow me to explore a topic and become more familiar with my equipment.

Plenty of hours have been spent on this project over the past six months. Now in the ‘darkroom’ stage, it will find space here in the coming weeks.

I’ve learned a lot about photography, and more about myself, through this focus on what I enjoy. What I found, mostly, was that the change was not so much in equipment and but in mindset.

Black and white was comfort for me. I knew film and paper, what it had to do and what I wanted it to do (not always the same ting). Shooting an assignment or subject, I always saw the potential image in black and white. You learn, intrinsically, to adjust for skin tone, or artificial and low light, and you come to understand the limitations of the equipment and the media, and your work within.

It was easy, or became easy, in black and white. It seemed organic.

Digital is different. Totally. It felt synthetic, or artificial, and it was uncomfortable, at first.

Yes, there is the B&W setting, but digital photography, now like life itself, screams colour. Digital is immediate. The image you create is right there, immediately. You can see what you have captured on a tiny screen at the rear of the camera. There is no waiting the hours or days to get back to the darkroom.

Your work is present, in full colour, in the now. And the camera has become a piece of technology, not just a metal case to shield sensitive film from the light. Even lenses are vastly improved. They are faster, smoother, more flexible, and they can make life easier.

With these changes, you have to think differently. First thoughts are still on form and composition, but a photograph is now — like money, movies, and memory — all about digits. It is no longer about film grain and speed, but pixels and ISO. It is, from the start, more adaptable, perhaps even more suitable to today’s hectic pace. Digital is clean; certainly nowhere near as messy as what photography used to be (I can’t tell you how many good shirts have been ruined by caustic darkroom chemicals), and it now easier to package, to share, and to send.

Digital is not better (far too subjective a term) but just is what it is.

I had to get my head around that, and do so by thinking of my past work as black and white, my new work in colour. Digital, to me, is colour. Digital is efficient, therefore, digital may be more challenging.

This has inspired me to look deeper, to think a littler harder, at how to make the equipment work and how to make a photograph. I suppose I’ve warmed up to colour. Again, as it was decades ago when I was caught up in the magic of photography, I find myself today wanting to learn more about what it, and I, can do.

Indeed, it is digital, and it is different, but — as it has always been for me — it is still magic, and it is still about discovery.

“The voyage of discovery is not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.”
                                                                                                                                    – Marcel Proust