[applause]
And enjoy your visit!
Vince
Click here to visit the main photo galleries at VMP.com or stick around and click here (or on the blog header from anywhere in the blog) to reach the Coriolistic Anachronisms home page and most recent posts.
My name is Vincent Mounier. I'm a photographer and designer of this site. My blog Coriolistic Anachronisms is now five years old. Find out more about the web site and me.
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Let me 
introduce you to my blogging and life soulmate. Different blogs, different views, different ideas, same passion.
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Part 3 of the rainbow evening shoot, here are my herons, photographed on the beach just across the street from home. I wasn’t the only one interested in the herons, as can be seen. They most likely nest in the huge rookery just a few blocks away on the edge of Stanley Park - guano smell and constant cacophony, if you ask me...
There is something to be said for living on the 15th floor of a Vancouver high rise. Beach Towers will have been a haven of peace and the most fantastic location I’ve ever lived in. In over two years spent in my 23 floor building, I’ve never had really inconsiderate neighbours. The premises are kept squeaky clean, 
the parking is hidden underground and newly repaved (ok, that was a bit of disturbance at times, but quite bearable.) The building managers were nice and the rental office staff, simply brilliant. How many people can say they walk in to see their landlord and are greeted with friendly smiles and a helpful attitude? When I explained I was leaving soon, I was simply told « How sad, we don’t want to lose you! » This coming from people who handle four towers - I believe that’s 600 apartments!
If I sound like I’m advertising, it’s because, well, I am. I honestly hope that someone will stumble upon my blog while searching for a place to stay and end up spending happy days here. I have nothing but praise for the Beach Towers and while I am aware that the experience might not necessarily be the same for everyone, I can’t remember ever finding a nicer, easier place to call home.
And then there’s the location. Last night when photographing the rainbow from my flat which faces east, I also leaned over to the northwest to get 
these shots of low languorous clouds clinging stubbornly to the slopes of the North Shore Mountains. Then I rushed out and simply crossed a street, and I was on the beach, interfacing with herons. I live at the end of a residential street lined with large trees and lots of flowers. Beyond my building is a park with a giant tree and a gazebo. Across the street, the Seawall launches in both directions, around Stanley Park towards Coal Harbour and Canada Place to the right, and back around False Creek bound for Kitsilano to the left.
Great gray herons are fishing by the shoreline and harbour seals surfacing a stone’s throw away. Within walking distance of here, in addition to seals and herons, I’ve seen bald eagles, river otters, raccoons, a beaver, swans, Canadian Geese, chickadees, jumpy squirrels, carps, cormorants, and I’ve so far missed the coyotes and hummingbirds. Sigh.
Quebec, here I come!
Earlier this afternoon, I called Marie on Skype. She answered a little out of breath, and untangling her earphones she said in an excited voice: « I was on the terrace. There is a 
beautiful rainbow! » Nice, I said, thinking that New York’s really got it all, mammatus clouds, rainbows and black cats.
Then later tonight, after the wind had picked up and blown hard bringing low grey clouds and rain, I caught a glimpse of orange light through my curtains and thought that maybe the sky was clearing a bit and allowing some sun to shine through 
before it sank beyond the world.
I got out on the balcony and my jaw dropped. Unknown to me, a perfect rainbow had formed to the east and was hitting the Shangri-La - highest tower in Vancouver - dead on. I rushed back in, grabbed both cameras and in my underwear, stood on the balcony and shot as fast as I could.
The sky was turning purple and windows were shining brightly in the evening’s first and last rays of sunshine. The rainbow seemed to be launching from within the Shangri-La in downtown and reached all the way to the other side of False Creek. At some point it even doubled up. Behind me towards the west, clouds lingered on the slopes above Howe Sound, fire within and shadows all around.
Later, the light seeming to last, I jumped in a pair of shorts and a sweater and ran out, tripod in one hand, camera in the other, a spare lens in my pocket and shoe laces untied. On the beach, I ran into two friendly herons. But that will be another post.
Of course, the title doesn’t mean anything! It never tried to.
This just illustrates what I think of the direction blogging is taking nowadays: a tangent to nowhere via this visceral need and pathetic attempt at magnetizing traffic by using catchy and keyword-savvy titles, and the corresponding topics. So what do I think? It’s SHIT. And yet I’ll bet anything that this very title will get me more traffic than a post about Stanley Park’s incredible beauty and the pictures that might go along...
It would seem that less and less bloggers are writing for the fun of it, for the pleasure of rambling, for the lust of a few puns, for poetic license, to say nothing, to say too much, to put foot in mouth and dots on i’s, to be unique. Instead, most are beginning to write for traffic and to please the masses, to attract numbers and distract them long enough to gain a numbed interest - click here and make me your fav, addict yourself to my keywords, chain your returns into my lack of creativity, me, me, me.
The hell with social networking and all those bright new ideas and startups turned giants, if all they can generate is stereotyped bulshit, the disapearance of individuality and the end of a properly punctuated sentence.
We didn’t need 15 years to evolve from IRC to messaging, to intelligent blogging and comments, back down to Facebook and finally as low as Twitter. We could have stayed there. IRC was geekier and funnier, and it was already invented.
If you want an antidote to all this crap, go check out some amazing mammatus. Really!
Or enjoy this from Bash.org, to make us smile after such a bleakly negativational post:
<reo4k> just type /quit whoever, and it’ll quit them from irc
* luckyb1tch has quit IRC (r`heaven)
* r3devl has quit IRC (r`heaven)
* sasopi has quit IRC (r`heaven)
* phhhfft has quit IRC (r`heaven)
* blackersnake has quit IRC (r`heaven)
<ibaN`reo4k[ex]> that’s gotta hurt
<r`heaven> :(Note from Vince:
Ok, this was for IRC geeks only - one must understand how the /quit command works otherwise it makes no sense whatsoever.
/me says too bad for you.
: - )
Once again - as I have felt it so many times before - time is up to its usual tricks, reminding me that it might well after all only exist inside my brain... It coils itself tightly like a threatened snake, slowing down to a hiss until an eternity seems to hang in mid-air, waiting for the strike. The rhythms around me appear to dash ahead and lose their depth while I curiously raise a hand in slow motion and watch my fingers wave against a background of furiously blurred, meaningless activity. It is a time of distancing, of chasms created and boundaries leveled. A time for counting one’s cards and preparing to throw them on the table, bluff exposed and hopes at their apogee. Soon the jump will come and all bets will be off. There will be no turning back, nor one wanted. The deeper the dive, the stronger the narcosis, erasing layers of surface boredom, years of flatness and adding a dimension. Once again, this time for good, two routes intersect, two navigators plot a common position and one duo moves forward, and up. I am so ready.
"Oh, the wind, the wind is blowing,
through the graves the wind is blowing,
freedom soon will come;
then we’ll come from the shadows."Leonard Cohen - The Partisan
(Adapted from La complainte du partisan
by Emmanuel d’Astier de La Vigerie and Anna Marly)
Nested right at the foot of Table Mountain, the Kirstenbosch National Botanical Garden 
is, among other things, an approach path for those headed up to the plateau and its reservoirs via Skeleton Gorge. But there is a lot more to Kirstenbosch than access up.
For one thing, it grows only South African indigenous plants. For another, it is home to very cute owls. So when we heard reports of chicks being spotted, we went for a visit and tracked them down. We found a parent and one young, the other two having presumably gone for a walk about.
... Forgive the captions but the birds’ attitudes easily lend themselves to interpretation...
Bizarre, beautiful, maybe simple, often exquisitely complex, at times shy and others outrageously loud, whether orchids or carnivores, these 
are the flowers and plants of the Western Cape. They are the fynbos, part of the Cape floral kingdom, smallest of the world’s six floral kingdoms but also the richest per area unit.
Most shots were taken around Cape Point, Table Mountain and Silvermine, magical places if I ever knew one, on many a beautiful walk with Marie, nature all around, peace within.
I will label each specie once my specialist has looked at them and pronounced a verdict.
I’ve always believed that what we put in our brain directly influences who we become. That’s one of the reasons why I refuse to watch violent and horror movies, and will always favour comedies and adventure stories. I’ve long been a firm believer of visualization as a training tool for physical activities and even after 20 years away from Aikido, I still catch myself mentally rehearsing tsuki kote gaeshi and shomen uchi irimi nage.
I recently found a fascinating CBC documentary via Stumble Upon; it’s called « The brain that changes itself » and it talks about the emerging concept of neuroplasticity, which is the ability for our brain to change and rewire itself upon learning or receiving new input. That’s a drastic departure from traditional brain science that had it all figured out: our brain was a fixed machine. It would start aging and decaying and the process would never stop until the end. Trauma was irreversible and no new neurons could ever be created.
With the new concept of neuroplasticity, this all changed. Scientists are beginning to realize that our brain, like most of our body, has the ability to adapt and regenerate. But what’s even more fascinating, it would seem it is able to reprogram, or rewire itself to use various areas to perform a given function - in other words no single region of the brain can be exclusively associated with specific tasks and activities.
What’s more, studies are showing that our thought process has a direct impact on brain development and hence, on our personality. At some point in the documentary, neuroscientist Alvaro Pascual-Leone is explaining a study he conducted where subjects were instructed to rehearse a five finger piano sequence for five days, after which their brain was examined via transcranial-magnetic-stimulation (TMS). A specific growth was registered in the motor cortex region associated with playing the piano.
However he decided to push the experiment one step further and repeated the process with new subjects, this time instructing them to only mentally rehearse the sequence without actually touching the piano or even moving their fingers. Stunningly, he found out that the same growth was registering in the brain of these passive subjects, without any actual physical practice!
At that point of the interview, he goes on to say: « What that ultimately means is that one needs to be careful what one thinks... »
It gives me chills.
To my everlasting shame, I think I just spent a moment looking at my latest English Bay pictures and might even have let out a sigh of satisfaction. Then of course I froze, having been given a taste of what Marcel Pagnol called « flagrant délit d’humanité » - I caught myself in the act of being human, hence weak. There’s nothing wrong with being happy with my own work now and then, I reasoned. But there might be something wrong if I fail to realize the futility of it.
So after a thoughtful episode, I have bad news for some of us, especially those who own pieces of art worth millions of dollars. For reference, Andreas Gursky, the German photographer I was writing about recently, is famous for holding the world record for the highest price paid at auction for a single photographic image; a few years ago, somebody, somewhere, decided to pay 3.3 million US dollars for one of his large prints!
Because you see, it would seem that beauty is a scam, and art along with it. A great, masterful illusion conceived and perfected by the human mind in order to make our earthly existence more bearable. The very fact that we observe our universe defines it, quantum physics has shown that. However, we must be lucid enough to understand that none of our very subjective beauty criteria truly exist out there. The fact is there are no such things as colors. Nor is there anything like shape, or texture. No sounds. No smells. And hence, no beauty.
The above qualities only exist in our intellect as a translation by our senses of the universe, adjusted through our imagination and tweaked for cultural standards. Think about it, a dog must see something when looking at a Picasso, but it certainly wouldn’t call it beautiful. (Well, I wouldn’t, either.) Every creature on earth sees or perceives a completely different universe. None is more real than the other. In fact, none are real, period.
In the end, the only beauty is in the way our brain is able to decode essential physical data and output a rendering of it that creates a tangible and comforting reality and accepts subjective criteria such as size, time, quality and beauty.
My pictures might look good to me one day, and bad another. They might always look bad to you. Or someone might buy one of my prints for millions of dollars (wishful thinking.) But in the end, they are just a paradox: a material representation of something that is immaterial. Atoms representing other atoms.
English Bay didn’t exist more that night than it does right now. The universal substance it is made of was there all right, a fluid quantum soup as some call it, but nowhere in its atoms and particles does it mention a bay and calm water and boats and a park. They are just particles, energy as potential and probability.
The rest is our creation, our rendition. So instead of judging the beauty around us, maybe we should look inwards and assess the beauty within. Because that’s where it all starts, and where it all ends.
Serendipity
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« Feesh! »
Date of comment: 2009-06-30 23:33 • Reply