The East Coast and I
3 weeks in June and a day in May, 2006

What do you do when you save up a buncha monies and you quit your job? Take a damn break and fly somewhere out East and visit your friends that you haven't seen and cities you have never stepped foot in. And some you have. Well I'd never been to Eastern Canada before and so I figured I might as well go. THIS time I had my new best buddy with me, my Canon Powershot A620, which was a welcome change from my old clunky manual Pentax (but only in the sense that travelling with manual cameras is impractical; I love my Pentax dearly). A few of these photos are Anna's, too, so... yeah I don't know, give her credit. Mainly the ones of me, I guess.

BLAH BLAH BLAH okay I am quite a boring writer these days so I'll stop prolonging the torture and just get on with this crap...

OH BY THE WAY: I WARN YOU THAT THIS IS PRETTY DAMN LONG
(I now have realised how unnecessarily wordy I make everything. Sorry. )


After making me wait for hours outside Union Station in Toronto, my dear but somewhat tardy friend Anna finally escorted me back to her house, which is this big old pink mansion a few blocks from High Park. All the houses in this area were huge and lovely. Trick-or-treating heaven. Anna had a small bachelor suite, but it was ridiculously elegant for its size (check out the wood molding and panelling). Her bed is the centre hub of all activity: it quadruples as a couch, a desk, a table and a guest bed. Folds if necessary, can fit up to six on a whim, and has a durable futon mattress. Call Anna for details.

One particularily muggy day Anna and I went stomping around the city and happened upon the CN Tower, which I feel very akin to because of my initials; finally we meet, O Majestic One! Then Anna got a photography job out of the blue (did I mention she is Toronto's new hotshot fashion photographer?) and we had to go to a modelling agency to pick out some girls and hunt for a location... it was like all professional and stuff. Egad. But whenever I'm with Anna everything seems to turn into a photoshoot anyways. I'll spare everyone the outcomes of those moments (ie: PLENTY of bad posing on my part) cause Anna always puts the decent ones on her website, but look how pretty this is, at a church. Awwwwww. That blue door is so hot.
Okay I lied; I can't resist posting photoshoots. ME! In grass!
ANNA! Taking the world by storm!
ME AGAIN! Look, I'm in Toronto... in a walkway... and I have a cellphone on my nose. !!!!
This sighting at a thrift store really excited me... if only ALL stores could have a section designated purely for sequins, I'd be much more sparkly. So I guess to common folk it's a good thing they don't.
So I went to look at a bunch of art, but not much, since it seemed like every bloody gallery in the city was in the middle of installation. But the Mercer Union had this fun bouncy castle piece by Clive Murphy and man, did I have a good time on it. I also had to look at the OCAD building since it's so zany. Anna and I went up into the top and it was a bit of a shame since all the windows are so small (there could be a lot of potential for natural light otherwise). But it's the design section of the building, so it doesn't matter since designers are trained to view life lit by the stagnant glow of a monitor and thusly abhor any sort of natural light that could add a healthy depth and radiance to their pallor complexions.
And I know this isn't the best photo but I got in touch with my cousins Benjamin and David who I hadn't seen in at least 10 years! They both live in Scarborough and Benji (above) is now married to this lovely and hilarious woman Nadine (pictured here!). I don't have any photos of Dave and you can't really picture him in your head as my cousins don't look anything like eachother and not really like my aunt or uncle either, though Ben kind of resembles my brother, weirdly enough.
I also saw some friends, Mark and Adam, that I had gone to school with but had since moved out east and never called again. They had a nice house on Bathurst with three other roommates and three cats, including this one who seemed quite fond of laying spread eagle on the kitchen floor.
[Mark and Adam's roommate] Matt, Rhiannon (who is from Vancouver but was in TO at the same time, coincidentally, and was donning her t-shirt that said "Fuck Montreal") and Mark Buck. We were at this place called the Bistro which in no way was even remotely close to serving anything bistro-like, but you could get mini pitchers of high balls for ten bucks! Adam and I, who I became friends with in our first year of Emily Carr when he and roommates let me sleep on their couch during the week. Made me realise there's a sincere lack of gay men in my life right now.
After that I went out to see my friend Diana in Uxbridge, which is a town about an hour away from Toronto. A couple years ago she married our other friend's brother and moved out east to live with him on his family's farm, Willo'Wind. It's a small farm but in this photo we're at the back of the property looking over the beautiful rolling hill towards the little white speck of a house on the left, so it looks pretty huge. Okay maybe it is. We were also running since we were in a thick swarm of mosquitoes. Aww, ain't these two SOOOOOO cute. Diana and her boy Adrian are possibly the cutest couple in the world, which makes sense because all of Adrian's family (5 offspring, 2 parents and an uncle) is equally adorable. They also have this small pond on their property which Diana and I went swimming in. Well more like floating on the wood raft things since the water was kind of disgusting. But warm! So very, very warm.
WOAH CHICKENS!
LAMB!

MINI HORSE! (There were two other big ones as well!)
GOAT! Oh my, the goats were absolutely the cutest things EVER. Not only were they much more affectionate than the lambs, but you could just tell that they understood you. Plus they they try to jump in trees, which is basically like one bajillion on the cute meter.
DIANA MILKING A GOAT! (She and Adrian make goat cheese!)

Plus the funniest pot-bellied pig, Roxanne. She'd grunt all the time and do weird things like stand in the shed staring at the wall for an hour.

I was there for three days and one of the days we just spent weeding the garden, which is a common task on the farm. It's not a big garden, but see where Diana is? That whole green section behind her is basically weeds, and the whole section in front of her is what she's weeded already, and the little tiny strands of green are carrot sprouts which at this point were actually smaller that the weeds. So you can see how time consuming this whole thing was... it took the two of us to get it finished by the end of the day. That's what you get when you garden organically: really insane. On our way back to Toronto we were waiting at a bus stop where there happened to be a thicket of clovers, and I saw and picked out a four-leaf clover (because I have a gift like that, fo' real), but then I started to see MORE of them and then even MORE and it got to the point where I had to stop looking in the grass because it got too fucking werid. I found 13 and Diana found 6 or something ridiculous like that. Yeah, no shit.
So I went back to Toronto for another few days and then took a train to New York. I think I could just stop right here: look, American flags, yellow taxi cabs, and a hot dog... does it get any more New York that that?!? The answer is no. My pal Andy and I took a lovely walk around the bottom coast of Manhattan and saw this strange monument (I guess in the West Village?) for the Irish Hunger crisis. You walk up the back which is like an Irish garden with "authentic" stone walls and look out over the top to see a "breathtaking view of the Statue of Liberty"... which you can't even really see at all 'cause there's a building blocking most of it. I had no idea there was such a large, passionate bunch of Irish potato famine sympathizers in New York.

I think this sign really speaks for itself. And my own immaturity at taking the photo.

My friend Chuck from Vancouver (who's family is from New York and happened to be there the same time as me) and I hung out one day and had a blast. We did crazy things like go to the brand-new Apple store on 5th Ave! We are INSANE!
We also are both total losers and tried to find the set of Spiderman 3 because I remembered passing it on a bus, and after a good hour of searching (ie: walking around in circles) we finally found it! Look how excited Chuck was; I fulfilled all his dreams in that one day. We didn't see Toby but we DID see a stand-in in Spidey costume, and someone blonde who we took to be Bryce Dallas Howard, the girl playing Peter Parker's new love interest Gwen Stacy. Yeah! Then we went and saw Rent. Yeah that's right, we saw RENT on BROADWAY. After Rent we sang our way to the house of Chuck's sister's loaded friend, who lives off Park Ave in this seven story HOUSE. As in, every floor is part of their HOUSE. And how, you ask, did I get this photo from the top of the Chrysler Building? Oh, naiive friend, I was not on top of a that famed tower; this was merely the insane view from her ROOF!
This family was so classically wealthy that at 21 she even lived with a baby brother from some sort of parental second-marriage and her dad like owned Harvard. And they had this crazy statue in their entryway of a racing skier which was LIFE SIZE. This thing was absolutely excessively amazing! A few days later Andy and I went to this Museum Mile festival where all the galleries and museums up by Central Park have free admission. After seeing new work by Kara Walker we went to the rooftop of the Met (my most favourite place EVER) and saw work by Cai Guo-Qiang, which included these crocodiles impaled with scissors and knives confiscated at airports.
This other piece by him called Transparent Monument was a big glass pane with "dead" birds laying along its base. Fantastic! He was also doing these gun smoke sculptures entitled Clear Sky Black Cloud, "an ephemeral sculpture that consists of an actual black cloud appearing above the Museum’s Roof Garden Tuesdays through Sundays at noon." Unfortunately, we were only able to see video of this.
By the time we were ready to hit the free Guggenheim (which is normally $18 to enter) we were discouraged by giant lineups. Then, across the street we saw this beautiful vision: sunlight! through trees! and we forgot all about admission prices, because how can you think about monetary value when a monumental gift from mother nature like this is priceless?
I ended up going with Chuck's family to their cabin in the Hudson Lake area, a few hours north of the city. It was a relaxing day of standing around in matching outfits drinking Pabst, playing with small dogs, and breathing in fresh air. We were so in the thick of nature that I was even able to climb a tree. Take THAT.
We played a few games of scrabble while there, and I managed to get my best score EVER, which was 268. And that's not bad for a two-player game, but there were THREE of us, uh huh! And we drank TEA. Aww, the generous and hospitable Ansbachers: Chuck, Ted, Emily, and Barbara. And the Yorkies, Missy and Sadie. And their cabin.
On Fifth Ave I also happened to stop by mega-toystore FAO Schwartz right as they were in the middle of a Pirates of the Carribean look-alike contest! Which was possibly the most amazing thing I have seen in a long time. Did you know that pirates use digital cameras? They do!
And they also have crises where they, okay, need to just, like, get outside and have a cigarette and call their agent.
I also popped down to Philadelphia for the weekend to visit my friends Jackie and Jen Wechsler, whom I went to school with and who both recently moved there and who I hadn't seen in two years. Jackie (here) lives downtown above a laundromat, and it has this nice patio roof which (and you can't really tell here) is painted silver. Jen lives in a little bachelor about 20 minutes away, and she has this super adorble kitten which she likes to strangle.
We also met up with our pal Seann who still had the two remaining Frida Kahlo tattoos from last year when I was there! This time Jackie and I wore them 'cause Seann grew out of that phase of his life in my absence.
He has since moved on to miming. With statues.
Some crazy house on South Street. This is what happens when you graduate from one of the many art schools in Philly, get a big inheritance and don't leave your house for 20 years except to collect garbage and buy grout. Okay, Cheesesteaks. The two big steak places are ingeniusly located right across an intersection from eachother. Geno's is on the left (with a giant glowing sandwich above it) and Pat's is on the right. Both have huge lineups at all hours but real Philadelphians know that Pat's is the original. If you tell someone you had a cheesesteak they ask you, "Did you go to Pat's?" and then they inform you about how it's so much better.
A real cheesesteak is supposed to have Cheez Whiz on it, hence the giant horde of cans. Look, processed cheese has evolved to the point where it can even take your order! Mmmm... steak, provolone, onions, ketchup, hot sauce and orange grease dripping down your arm. Jackie and Jen somehow managed to get cheesesteaks without the steak because they're insane (and by that I mean vegetarian).
Jen and Jackies's older sister Linda (far left) took us to some Luau-themed party where we drank a lot. They are all so cute and so very short. I mentioned the anomaly of "water ice" last time I went to Philly and now here's proof that it exists. I still don't get the name.
Montreal! I took a train from New York back up to Canada and met Anna (who came to do a photoshoot for YWCA) and our friend Melinda. Melinda has this lovely studio on Saint Laurent and since they were having a big street sale outside they opened up their studio and sold clothes and jewelry to the public. Melinda was also rocking this HOT Commes des Garçon skirt that her boyfriend Kenji bought her, which is party made of out of a tonne of zippers sewn toegther. All the people I met in Montreal were somehow involved in fashion and were all ridiculously stylish. I guess that's Montreal for you.
Anna and I hiked up Mont Royal to get a nice view of the city.
Anna trying on her new Ann Demeulemeester designer skirt. Well, the utility sack that came with it anyways.
The Notre-Dame de Montreal.
This is Anna getting her prayer on.
Nice building.
Habitat '67: Moshe Safdie's housing development from the 1967 Expo.
Screw New York; Montreal has multiple 24-hour bagel factories which means you can get a fresh, hot Montreal-style bagel at 2 am! THE BEST THING I HAVE EATEN IN YEARS! Oh my, I'm salivating.
Holy crap food: roast chicken sandwiches, smoked meat sandwiches, poutine and mango on a stick, thanks to the street fair. YUM. Food really is the best part of travelling.
Anna and Melinda carrying a giant bag full of Anna's photo equipment for the YWCA shoot, which, by the way, I got to model for. Cause I am SO PRO.
Montreal is even beautiful when it's raining like crazy! Oh, il pleut es trés, trés beau quand c'est français.
We met this guy one night while we were having poutine in a park. He had customized his cellphone by fitting it into an old fisher-price walkie-talkie. I don't remember his name but he looks like a Dave.
And then he showed us his moves. Woah!
A lovely antique store front.
A lovely cake painted on a patisserie window. The lady working there came outside and yelled at me after I took this.
I also took a bus out to visit my Aunty Linda and Uncle Andy in Sherbrooke, about 2 hours outside of Montreal. When I got their they had just had a big windstorm and their power was out, so we ate by candlelight. So cute!
So that may have been slightly out of the ordinary, BUT then the next day, Andy took me out for a drive and then his car battery died. Coincidence? OR CONSPIRACY??? Two power-outages?
Linda then took me to this great thrift store (I love her!) and THEN we went out for Poutine at a place called Louis' (which is not only my dad's name, but the correct spelling of it). UNE CONSPIRATION DEFINATE! And then I come to the end. I will finish on a photo of a picnic we had on on Melinda's rooftop, overlooking the Mile End area. It was really nice having the the delicacy of veggie weiners and lime juice and hot sauce. On that note, au revoir.

Holy crap that was long. If you've made it this far, you clearly were very, very bored
or didn't really look at anything. I'm sorry for wasting your life.

Thanks, though, to everyone who put me up and put up with me. I love you all. Fo' real.

OH and if anyone has seen the sunglasses I am wearing in these pictures let me know because I lost them in early August in Vancouver.