The true meaning of blogging had been eluding me for quite a while, now, Mr. Anderson. In one life, a blogger works for a respectable company, has a social security number, pays his taxes and helps his landlady carry her garbage. The other life is lived on computers where he goes by a mysterious alias and is guilty of virtually every writing crime there is. One of these lives has a future, the other does not. (I’m not sure which is which.)

In any case, last night while writing I Don’t See Red, it suddenly dawned on me. The real nature of blogging is simple. To BLOG is to Bitch, Lament, Object and Gossip. Amen.

It’s the colour of blood. It’s the pride of Utah. It’s the nature of Betelgeuse. And it’s sorely missing from my daily life.

Vancouver is a kingdom of blues and greens - the changing blue of the ocean, the lush green of everpresent forests; the blues when it rains for too long, the greens that wanted peace.

Our municipal police colours reflect it. The Canucks abide it. The new West Coast theme at work proves it. Subdued colours, easy colours, passive colors. But where are the passion of reds, the warmth of oranges and the brilliance of yellows? Where is rebellion and what about fire?

I long for the orange glow of a sunset in Arches National Park, for lava flowing down the slopes of a raging volcano, for the red rocks of Canyonlands, for the pink hoodoos of Bryce at sunrise, for the infinite red rainbow of stone in Antelope Canyon, for the dark red wines of Napa Valley, for the blood-tainted soil of l’Estérel, for bright red tiles on the roofs of Provence...

I dream of a harsh and inhospitable Mars while standing on our lush and fluid Earth. What a contradiction! But never mind the grass; the rocks are always redder on the other side of the fence.

Walking a thin grayed line, a blunt razor’s edge posing no real threat, he stands with one foot in the sun and the other lost in the deep shadows of relentless darkness. Life unfolds before his weary eyes on seemingly hand-colored monochrome stock, sketchy and jumpy, remake of an old classic. It feels surreal and distant as he glides through strange days, in and out of a fog bank that could as well be inside his mind. Faces appear at close range but they are blank and their unseeing eyes are staring past him at another plane of that reality. Music comes and goes, rising in slow crescendos and falling suddenly to near-silent reveries. The rain is ever-present, never completely overwhelming but still spraying his soul with a fine mist that tastes like tears. Thoughts soaking in a viscous stew of rancid habits and tangled patterns, he struggles to paint a smile on himself while waiting for the next exit sign to break the routine and get him out of the rain. Once again.

It was a terribly sad day but sadness must subside. Here are the pictures taken before bad news. I had rented a small boat from Sewell’s Marina in Horseshoe Bay and gone for a quick hour-long ride to Pam Rocks to pay the harbour seal colony a respectful visit. I was granted the rare pleasure of spotting a couple of visiting Californian Sea Lions. The joy of being alone once more on the water, away from land and in such exceptional scenery, was almost unbearable.

For the last seven years, a Vancouverite by the name of Kent Avery has been balancing stones on English Bay. Thousands - if not millions - of people have photographed his amazing and delicate work, yet the man remains elusive. Gliding like a ghost over his work, he is talked about but seems rather content remaining outside of the direct spotlight. Talking with passers-by on the Seawall, you’ll hear that some have seen him work, others even say they know him.

In any case, his art is what matters. He endlessly stacks rounded stones in gravity-defying little towers that last only as long as nature will let them. A high tide, a storm, and the sculptures are thrown down, and Kent must get to work again. People stop and stare, amazed by the grace and audacity of the whole idea. It seems as if the stones were glued together or stuck on a central pole. But they are only balanced on top of each other and held by nothing more than patience and intuition, ephemeral masterpieces granted a life of a few days, or maybe a few weeks, of pure glory...

Spring came in through the back door this year, silently and without glamour. I never went on long flower shoot excursions and Abe was content taking these pictures a few streets from home. Still, there are flowers everywhere. It’s time to smell them.

There’s this large library, filled with millions of books. We pick one up, generally a scary, tension-loaded story, and we start reading. As the plot unfolds we become nervous and stressed, identifying with the distressed protagonists and forgetting that we have control on our reading. We begin to turn pages faster, our movements harsh and our breathing shallow. Then suddenly we tear the corner of a page off. We grab a roll of scotch tape and reattach it, and we keep on reading. Another page is torn. Out comes the tape. This repair is a little less precise. Then it happens again, and again. Pages now get torn and taped back in carelessly. Corners are poking out, entire paragraphs disappear, pages stick together, massive use of tape makes the book swell and the cover crack. But tape manufacturers comes out with a new kind of better, fully transparent tape. So we buy it and keep reading, tearing and taping. The book’s condition gets worse. A new tape dispenser is introduced, allowing us to hold the book with one hand and read on while taping back with the other; the dispenser has tripled the cost of our tape but we keep buying. More tape is needed now because reading with one hand makes us clumsier. We never stop reading and destroying books. The tape companies grow bigger. They start advertising and promoting books because tape has become an integral part of reading. So we go to the library and pick up a new book.

[Sound of a vinyl record scratched by the record player’s needle]

Oh, wait a minute. I don’t think I ever explained my analogy. The library is our body. Books are health and mental issues. The tape manufacturers are doctors and pharmaceutical companies. Tape itself is modern medicine.

About the author: He lives in Downtown Vancouver with 100,000 other readers. Organic tape is very trendy around there. And still nobody wonders why they need it in the first place. Copyright 2007. Printed in Canada on taped recycled paper, 347 body parts. The end.

Today, while I was happily driving my rental boat around the waters of Howe Sound, watching the sleepy seals and sea lions, others were getting terrible news. Then my phone rang. I am so speechless that I’ll let someone else give farewell.

« ... But to Sam the evening deepened to darkness as he stood at the Haven; and as he looked at the grey sea he saw only a shadow on the waters that was soon lost in the West. There still he stood far into the night, hearing only the sigh and murmur of the waves on the shores of Middle-earth, and the sound of them sank deep into his heart. Beside him stood Merry and Pippin, and they were silent.

At last the three companions turned away, and never again looking back they rode slowly homewards; and they spoke no word to one another until they came back to the Shire, but each had great comfort in his friends on the long grey road. »

J.R.R. Tolkien - The Return of the King

Godspeed to you. We’ll all miss you dearly.

I was

Lying in a den in English Bay
With a slack jaw, and not much to say...

So I went for a long walk and I sat right where the ocean touches the sky with fingers of salt and whispers of eternity...

It might be Easter, but last night was Christmas. No, really: I was invited to a private « behind-the-scenes » visit of the IMAX theatre at Canada Place. Now, I’ve always been a big fan of the IMAX technology, just because it’s bold and it’s good and it’s large and it’s daring. But thanks to John, the senior projectionist, I spent an hour and a half in movie wonderland, on the other side of the curtain – so to speak – and the IMAX magic finally evolved in my mind from a hazy mystery to pure technological madness.

There’s nothing reasonable about IMAX. At 70 mm and 15 perforations, the film frame is the largest ever designed, 10 times bigger than normal 35mm film. The camera required to initially record images on such large stock is gigantic. Conventional cinematographic techniques must be adjusted for such scale; the 5 to 8 storeys high IMAX screen will show a whale at its actual size. Then in comes the 3D edge where twin lenses record a stereoscopic image on two different film rolls that will be projected simultaneously and polarized, to be viewed through similarly polarized glasses. And then there’s the sound: 6 channels of pure thunder.

John knows his stuff, he’s been doing this for over 8 years. When I arrived, a movie was finishing. He initiated the switch over sequence to the next movie while explaining what he was doing. « I don’t want to interfere with your timing », I told him worried that my presence would be distracting. « No problem » he answered with a smile, « I know exactly how long this takes. 12 minutes. But I can do it in 6. » I sensed a very legitimate touch of pride there, as he was literally gliding above the ground of his projection room, winding here, switching there, lining this up, cleaning that up, adjusting some things, controlling others, and commenting all along.

The IMAX projector at Canada Place was installed for Expo ’86 and became the first permanent 3D setup. It’s not the most current design and yet it is totally space-age. Of course when I talk about « the projector », I should say « the projectors », since there are actually two of them, each handling its own roll of film, a left and a right, that end up forming the 3D movie. They are mounted on hydraulic platforms to allow moving them apart for easy access between movies.

Powered by arc-welders installed on a lower floor, the projectors are air-cooled by a compressor. The lamp themselves, 15,000 watts of pure xenon power – it is said that if one could be installed on the moon, it would be visible to the naked eye down on Earth – are water cooled. They generate so much heat that they could ignite a piece of wood placed near the film plane. John explained that the lamps, each worth some six thousand dollars, are so dangerous that he has to wear special impact-protection clothing when changing them.

He proceeded to rewind the right film, the left projector having been upgraded to a newer system loading the film from the inside of the roll and transferring it to a new plate, where it is ready to play again. Then he started loading Deep Sea 3D, my favourite IMAX movie of all times.

The heart of an IMAX setup is the innovative film transport system called Rolling Loop which breaks all the rules of traditional film projection. While a conventional projector simply drives the film in front of the lens with the intermittent help of a wheel grabbing the perforations as they become available, making the whole process too shaky and unsteady for IMAX quality, the Rolling Loop does much more. It uses a continuously revolving mechanism which advances the film horizontally (IMAX movies are thus projected horizontally rather than vertically) in a smooth, wave-like motion. During projection, slack sections of film exactly one frame long are formed in special spaces; then each frame is positioned on fixed registration pins, and the film is held firmly against the rear element of the lens by a vacuum. As a result, the picture and focus steadiness are far above normal standards.

IMAX film rolls do not include an embedded soundtrack as do conventional films. Instead, the 6 channel soundtrack comes on a DVD. It is loaded onto a computer hard drive and read by the Digital Theatre Audio Control (DTAC) system which distributes it directly to the amplifiers without the need for decoding as with Dolby. The soundtrack is initially synchronized to the movie with the help of special cue frames and the DTAC then locks the movie and soundtrack together. With 14,000 watts of power, sound quality is unsurpassed and perfectly even, regardless of where one sits in relation to the screen.

I stared in awe, speechless. Down below, in the theatre, the audience was smiling at the dance of turtles getting their shells cleaned by schools of colourful fish, on a perfectly chosen soundtrack. They probably were tempted to extend their arm through the air and touch the turtles which appeared so close and so real. But I could have done better; I could have reached out and actually touched the film, as it was rushing past me towards the projector at a speed of over 300 ft/min. I was in the projection room of an IMAX 3D movie theatre. I was behind-the-scenes of a movie system ahead of its time. I was in a sorcerer’s lair watching a sacred ritual. I believed in magic.