Rowan outside the Loyola Chapel at Concordia University

Roland Penrose on Joan Miró

"Miró’s . . . investigation of the world of dreams and the subconscious was made with the desire to approach, to use Herbert Read’s term, “the frontiers of perception,” regardless of the risks involved. There has never been any doubt in his mind that what is of real importance to him lies beyond painting. The degree of sheer visual pleasure that paintings give can be intense; but the more acute it becomes the more it is likely to provoke a further yearning, often ill-defined but of great strength, for a transcendental understanding of our condition. The work of art, then, as it leads us to the frontiers of perception, becomes the medium which can give access to new states of consciousness. In itself, though it remains the motive force, it becomes less important than the state of mind to which it leads. At the same time the artist himself also recedes into a condition of anonymity. “Anonymity,” Miró says, “allows me to renounce myself but in renouncing myself I come to affirm myself more strongly… The same practice makes me seek the noise hidden in silence, the movement in immobility, life in the animate, the infinite in the finite, forms in space and myself in anonymity.” Artists such as Miró, who have discovered through paradox that the finite statement of their work can b a gateway to a new perception of the infinite rather than an end in itself, accept the role of prophet, or rather seer. They become the intermediaries who, instinctively in the first place and later by their command of aids and techniques, can carry us with them into a more complete understanding of our human relationship to the great unknown, towards an accord between us and the nature of all things."

Roland Penrose, Miró,
Harry N. Abrams, Publishers, New York,
Pps. 193-194

The Molson Mausoleum, Mount Royal Cemetery

Several of these photographs show the inside of the Molson mausoleum; however, no one entered the mausoleum, it was just a matter of putting the camera where the door was slightly ajar. You can see that there is lots of room for future deceased members of the Molson family. Since these photographs were taken (around 2009). this mausoleum, and others, have had the entrance secured so that it is no longer possible to look inside. 

Mausoleum, Toronto, just off the 401 (two)

Mausoleum, Toronto, just off the 401 (one)

A quiet day at the cemetery, but isn't it always a quiet day there?

Thomas D'Arcy McGee, various images

A day in April, 2010 (2)

A day in April, 2010 (1)

Fire Station, Somerled Avenue

This is the fire station where my paternal grandfather, John R. Parker, worked up to his retirement in 1946. In the mid-1960s, when I was visiting for the day, there was smoke in his Hampton Avenue home and fire engines were soon at the door. Right away the firemen remembered him, even after so many years.

Meeting Audrey Keyes in 2005

In the image below, my brother's initials ("JM") carved when we lived there, maybe the June 1962 date was also by him:

Photographs, not in any order, of meeting my first friend, Audrey Keyes, after not seeing her since 1963. We met at St. Viateur Restaurant on Monkland Avenue in the summer of 2005; we revisited our old homes, in the same fourplex, on Oxford Avenue (not far from Monkland Avenue and the buildings owned by John Hoolahan, and written about by me in the Hoolahan's Flats poems in Girouard Avenue...) we're sitting on the front steps of the building, we're in the lane on the back stairs, and there are a few places inside the back stairwell where we had carved our initials in the wood back in the late 50s, early 60s. There's Veeto with her dear mother, Mrs. Keyes. Veeto, who used to be Audrey Keyes... what a joy meeting her again after all of these years. Coincidentaly, Veeto was born on the same day as Artie Gold, and knew Artie's good friend Mary Brown, and possibly her daughter Candy, a few years before Artie knew them... how our lives intersect, meet, and meet again sometime off in the future.

Keep on Killing

(Note: This stencilled message was seen on the day a group of us scattered Artie Gold's ashes; this was at the end of the walk, in Montreal's Chinatown. Was that September 2007?)

Macy's in NYC

Outside St. John the Divine Cathedral, New York City