i q r a

Who Wants to be Mayor?
Meet the Candidates

Wednesday October 4, 7:30-9:30 pm
St. Lawrence Centre, Bluma Appel Theatre, 27 Front Street East in
Toronto, 2 blocks east of Union Station

http://forum.stlc.com/forum.php

Scarborough Civic Centre Square on flickr, on photopia.

I have been pleasantly surprised with response to this photo.

First, Josh over at Torontoist dropped this into the photoTO file with the headline of Stand Up, Scarborough.

Second, over on my flickr, the above-for-me average number of photo views and comments for my posting there does indeed encourage me there exists a visual appetite for these kind of montage stitched together photographs.

Let me start this again.

When I first installed this for want of a better word, experiment, the intention was to keep it separate from my other daily worlds, both online and real life.

Iqra was simply supposed to be a place to give background and depth to a few photo entries on my primary photoblog, photopia, beyond simply the daily captioning accompanying each photograph.

That plus I had intentioned to document the twists and turns, the ebb and flow, of what I learned about photography and the way that education informed my picture taking. I wished to look back and read what about my visual zeitgeisting to learn how I was coming along as a photographer.

Well, that’s hardly happened thus far, though I’ve mentally blogged many many entries.

I often stopped short of posting those thoughts on screen ’cause my feeling was that photograph spoke for itself and didn’t need any further ’splaining.

And now…my feelings have changed…. so, let’s give Iqra another go. I got tired of all the comment spam, hence only registered users may share comments, and in a further attempt at twarting comment spammers, I capitalized i q r a to I q r a and haven’t heard from them since (!).

I do have have a need to word blog about a number of photos posted recently, so expect a few back dated entries popping into the archives now and again.

Keep Smilin’

~ HiMY! ~

update: not a single spam since the capitalizing of iqra to Iqra, not even in the akismet queue. Soooo the comments are re-opened to unregistered readers.

On thursday, march 14, 1968, exactly three week’s before his assasination, martin luther king jr met with 78 nonblack minority leaders at paschal’s motor lodge in the heart of black atlanta.

At that meeting were wallace ‘mad bear’ anderson from the iroquois confederation in upstate new york, a deputy of cesar chavez, tillie walker and rose crow flies high of north dakota’s plains tribe and dennis banks of the anishinabes, and peggy terry who despite being raised in a white supremacist ku klux klan kentucky family, she joined dr. martin luther king jr in his poor people’s campaign.

Attending that historic meeting in 1968 was Richard Ismael Norman.

Photographed above on the evening of tuesday february 21, 2006 at fran’s restaurant in downtown toronto, ismael kindly shared his memories with me of that day and his meeting dr. king and the other poverty nee civil rights leaders of the 1960’s.

Greg Allan: March 6, 1973 - June 16, 2002 | Adam_Baum: PostNuke .50 - .714

This morning I upgraded the wordpress software powering this blog to the latest version, and while browsing and bringing myself up to date on wordpress happenings, I came across this ‘books’ plug in module.

Having installed it, I am now seeing how it will fit into Photopia / IQRA.

This being the first Book entry, I am including my own book which I wrote three and a half years ago.

Next, what is expected of me for a review my own book???

;-O

Wednesday night, a couple dozen Torontonians (and an ex-pat Canuck from Ft. Myers, Florida who was avoiding Hurricane Wilma and visiting family), gathered across from the U.S. Consulate in downtown Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

We held a silent candlelight vigil to mark the 2,000th U.S. Service Personnel death and the 100,000 Iraqi civilians who have died since the war of convenience and occupation of desperation began.

I arrived at a quarter past 5 pm and met Stan, who had learned of the vigil through the afsc website, and thereafter another vigilkeeper who learned of it through the United For Peace and Justice Website.

Stan planned to recite the Hebrew Prayer for The Dead during the vigil.

We began at 5:30 pm and spread our ‘End The Occupation’ banners as well our ‘Toronto Coalition to Stop The War’ banner.

Several passers-by smiled and automobiles honked their horns in support as they drove by.

We then created a giant ‘2000 TOO MANY’ sign on the sidewalk by taping simple cash register lengths of paper into the outlines of the letters .

Alex of TVAC (Toronto Video Activist Collective) filmed much of the vigil for a future feature.

As in the Viet-Nam era, many U.S. War Resisters are finding their way north of the U.S. border and seeking asylum here in Canada. A number of them are in Toronto. We have an active ongoing War Resisters Support Campaign for them, providing legal, housing, and financial/employment assistance.

Canada is complicit in the Occupation of the Iraq by proxy. Canada has ground troops in Afghanistan and police forces in Haiti. Our troops there mean U.S. troops and supply lines are freed up for use in Iraq.

With the passage of time, Afghanistan may grow to become Canada’s own Iraq-like quagmire.

Our Candlelight vigil here in Toronto being outside of the United States, is our way of letting the American People know that your friends to the North have not forgotten about you nor your just fight to end this unjust war and illegal occupation.

Our vigil ended at 6:30 pm, which was was 10 minutes past sunset time, and time for me to open my fast up the street at Masjid Toronto.

I’m glad this vigil came together on such short notice, and am sad that it had to be held at all.

Oddly, I hadn’t realized that today, September 18th is the one year anniversary of this here my very own photoblog. :-O

Though I had posted photos with earlier dates showing, I was backdating them to the day the photo was taken rather than listing the date as when they were posted onto p h o t o p i a.

So, it’s kinda a weird thing that today also ended up being the day of the Toronto Area Photobloggers at Apple Store presentation event I helped organize for tonight at 7 pm.

I am pensive and worrying not too many people will show up and the evening will not run smoothly, Matto hadda pull out at the last minute as something unavoidable popped up.

And I hafta go do the Terry Fox Run right after I blog this.

Very well then, Happy First Birthday to p h o t o p i a , my photoblog.

:-)

I’ve had sitting on my hard drive three recordings of Gabriel performing in quicktime format. They were taken the same time the accompanying photo was taken.

I debated how exactly to include his music onto photopia, and finally decided on embedding a looping 7 second record within the photo’s caption. I feel satisfied now. Something was missing as I first uploaded Gabriel’s photo. Having stretched myself to stretch my photoblog with audio and video, I feel satisfied nothing more is missing from photopia’s last entry for 2004.

Click Gabriel plays 8 days a week and treat your ears.

How could I return to photoblogging for fun? Hasn’t the world changed? Aren’t people fighting for survival at this very instant. And me still having ‘fun’ with this website? In a word. Yes. I surfed around the web, and noticed it was kinda ‘quiet’ with the number of comments dwindling on many photoblogs I frequent. I dunno if it be the christmas to new year’s lull or are others feeling the same as I?

I entertained a few thoughts on the types of photographs I wanted to post onto photopia with respect to the Tsunami. My first thoughts were of a photograph taken of the Pacific Ocean just south of the Golden Gate and north of the Sutro Baths some weeks back.

The magnanimity of the Ocean, capital “O”, can at once be calming and catastrophic. I posted the photo earlier today with some intentional resizing and cropping to fill the screen. Hence allowing the photo to impact and humble one who loads up the webpage for the first time.

My captioning of the photo with the single word ‘yes’ is first a reminder to myself that YES, it can happen anywhere. It can happen here, in the San Francisco Bay Area. Yes, it can happen in my hometown of Toronto, inland peninsula be damned: Hurricane Hazel found and wound its way into Toronto from the Atlantic and submerged the city once before.

Upon first learning of the tsunami, it had hit Aceh, 81 reported dead, yet not India nor Sri Lanka, a few hours later and the gravity of reality, thousands missing, would enter my consciousness.

This catastrophe is 9/11 a hundred fold.

Finally stayed on my ass, sat in front of the ‘puter, and ‘upgraded’ to Folderblog v 2.02.

Why so long? I dunno. fear of…success?

I thought almost everything was running fine with the fb 2.0 preview version, except for those tiny annoyances that fb v 2.02 resolved with respect to its preview version, which has powered p h o t o p i a til a few minutes ago, when I finally uploaded the version 2.02 files.

I needed to upload something to see if the minor aches and pains had gone away, hence the two rather unremarkable water fountain pictures played guinea pig today.

For me, no more minor annoyances.

For visitors, ‘cept for the teeny tiny itsy bitsy weblink in the bottom right corner to this here new Iqra ‘photo’blog, p h o t o p i a looks the same as before.