Unusual and Unique Lots from Ineliz

The Lost Train Station – I love trains, especially travel by train. The grand old train stations are relics to their past. Sad to see them in decline. It hurts my heart for them to be so forgotten and neglected.

The Industrial House – I like old factories and old, sometimes derelict, buildings in general. I photograph old buildings where I live in rural Ontario, Canada. So, I can’t resist exploring an old building, even if it is fictional.

Victorian Library Ruins – I can’t pass up exploring a ruined library.

Scavenger’s House – Just as you would think from a scavenger, assorted this and that somehow pulled together into one unique place.

The Camera as a Divining Rod

I found this description on a site, Worksongs (now 404) by Andrew Emond.

I had just been talking to my nephew yesterday about that feeling of talking photographs without looking at every detail not relevant to the photograph. While I’m photographing, my mind goes into a different place. I’m seeing everything as light, shadow, angles, clear versus blurred, and so on. I don’t catch the words on a gravestone but I see that they will (or won’t) turn out clearly enough to read in the photograph. I walk around to find the angle that catches the mood, without taking the time to decide what the mood actually is. At least not in words.

It is a different connection to your surroundings when you look at everything a little distanced and yet more connected in other ways. I liked the analogy of the camera as a divining rod. So I have reposted Andrew’s description, as a quote. He has another site: Andrew Emond.

Worksongs Photography

Name : Andrew Emond
Location : Toronto / Montreal

Intent : Worksongs is basically the end result of me trying to gain a better, more direct connection with my immediate surroundings. I look at the camera as a sort of divining rod. It helps lead me to things I wouldn’t normally consider examining or give much thought to, like industrial processes or the way communities are evolving. I’m particularly interested in how elements of the old world are fitting in with the modern world, or in some cases aren’t fitting in at all — essentially where our society has come from and the directions we might be headed.

Ottawa’s Old Train Station

Bhat Boy’s exhibition, called the Old Train Station, featuring scenes from Ottawa’s original train station downtown [was] showcased at the Orange Art Gallery.

“One of the things that really interested me is that the old train station was the hub of industrial Ottawa before it became a government town,” Bhat Boy said in an interview.

According to a press release, the old train station, built in 1909 and located across from the Chateau Laurier was closed in 1966.

The Grand Trunk Station officially opened in 1912, bringing historic arrivals and departures, including New Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry departing for the First World War before the station was renamed to Union Station.

It was the arrival and departure points for everyone from King George VIII and Queen Elizabeth, former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and even Elvis.

Source: Ottawa Community News

A History of Toronto’s Underground Explorers

I don’t think of the drains and tunnels of the sewers often. Usually just when I notice a manhole cover on the street. I look for names and dates on those but I’m not jumping in to see what lies under them.

Following is a clipping from The Toronto Star newspaper. I’m happy I do know about most of the people mentioned in the article. I’ve reposted it here to preserve the information as an archive of Toronto’s underground explorers.

Toronto has nothing to compare to Paris’s Sewer Museum (yes, there really is one), but the past decade has seen a growing appreciation of our sewers by the “urban exploration” community. While you may have stood on a manhole cover, these folks opened it and jumped in.
Toronto’s own late Jeff Chapman (a.k.a. “Ninjalicious”) published his first printed issue of Infiltration, “The zine about going places you’re not supposed to go,” in 1996. Though Toronto may not live in the imagination of people around the world, Chapman made this city’s sewers famous for his global readers. His work lives on in Access all Areas, his book published just before his death to cancer in 2005, and at infiltration.org.
Similarly, Michael Cook, then a student in human geography at York University, started vanishingpoint.ca in 2003, a lush and wistful website that continues to explore drains and more in Toronto and beyond, exchanging bureaucratic sewer designations for romantically named journeys (the Wilson Heights Storm Trunk Sewer becomes “The Depths of Salvation”). These writers make Toronto’s sewers seem as magical as Paris’s, whether it’s a late-Victorian brick tunnel in Trinty Bellwoods, or a mid-century concrete tunnel in North York.
Less clandestine is the recently released anthology by Coach House Books called HTO: Toronto’s Water from Lake Iroquois to Lost Rivers to Low-flow Toilets. The essays within parse through the layers of water under Toronto looking at wastewater sewers, storm sewers and, of course, the buried creeks – some notorious, others forgotten.

Shawn Micallef is senior editor at Spacing magazine and contributed “Subterranean Toronto: Where the masquerading lakes lay” to the HTO anthology.

Source: Getting to know Toronto’s sewers | Toronto Star

The old rivers, creeks and such do interest me. Those forgotten and lost waterways. Not so long ago in our history we just took all our fresh water for granted. As if it would always be there, mysteriously replenished without any effort on our part. Now water is an issue. Getting water, cleaning water and keeping water are all important. Those long lost streams of water are being looked at again. But, some are too polluted, too misdirected to be useful now. The greening of our water supply is something I like to read about. Not greening with algae but greening as in making it work again.

Then there are all the old drains. Some are antique, over 100 years old. People may wonder about what is down there: lost treasure, old pipes, stagnant water, etc. I admit I would like to see the old pipes, the old drains and mechanics. Did some long ago worker leave a name in a little corner niche? Did they add some extra trimmings, fancy workmanship and decorations to anything they did? What little unknown secrets are there under every city?

Victoria Day: The Holiday Becoming Lost in Time

Victoria Day celebrates Queen Victoria’s birthday. This year it will be on May 21st. There will be people who don’t know who Queen Victoria (1819 – 1901) is. Maybe they know her for the century she influenced with Victorian fashion and protocol. They aren’t likely to know much about Queen Victoria herself. Some won’t even know who that fat woman in the old photograph is – her tragedy, her triumphs, her life as a young woman, a monarch, a wife, a Mother and then an old woman. It’s sad to see someone who was given a day of the year to be celebrated, now become forgotten gradually.

victoriaselfportrait1835 — 1835, Self Portrait by Queen Victoria

Victoria was –

Born in Kensington Palace, in London, May 24, 1819.
She was baptized Alexandrina, after one of her godparents, Emperor Alexander I of Russia, and Victoria after her mother.
Became Queen of an empire at 18.
Popular respect for the Crown was at a low point at her coronation, but the modest and straightforward young Queen won the hearts of her subjects. She wished to be informed of political matters, although she had no direct input in policy decisions.
Privately, she attempted to influence government policy and ministerial appointments. Publicly, she became a national icon, and was identified with strict standards of personal morality.
The longest reigning British monarch and the longest reign of any female in history, 1837 until 1901.
Married Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha in 1840.
The Mother of nine children – four sons and five daughters: Victoria, Bertie, Alice, Alfred, Helena, Louise, Arthur, Leopold, and Beatrice.
Widowed in 1861.
After Albert’s death she became withdrawn and unpopular until reappearing in the 1870’s.
Had her Golden Jubilee in 1887 and her Diamond Jubilee in 1897.
Died in 1901 (January 22) at Osborne House on the Isle of Wight.
Her reign brought a revolution in British government, huge industrial expansion and the growth of a worldwide empire (Canada, Australia, New Zealand, India, and large parts of Africa.).
The national pride connected with the name of Victoria – the term Victorian England, for example, stemmed from the Queen’s ethics and personal tastes, which generally reflected those of the middle class.

The Official Website of the British Monarchy – Queen Victoria

Wikipedia – Queen Victoria

BBC History – Victoria

Victorian Station – Queen Victoria

PBS: Queen Victoria’s Empire

What holiday is being swept into the past in your own country? What do you know about the background, history and the reason for the original holiday? How does knowing more change your feelings about the day?

Hikikomori

I enjoy finding a new word. Today I found Hikikomori. It comes from Lawrence Pearce in his post to get votes on which title to use for his book. I know agoraphobia is also a fear of the outside world, people tend to shut themselves in because they don’t want to be out in the open, exposed.

Note: Hikikomori is a Japanese term describing those who never set foot outside of their own homes or even bedrooms. One of the main characters is an Hikikomori.

Could you write about a Hikikomori? Where would the story begin? Could they find some peace, a solution, a way out of themselves? What do you think about this social sort of fear yourself? Are they too self-involved? Could this ever happen to you? Has it? (If you stay home a week, not going out for any reason, would you still be able to step out after a week of being sheltered, safe in your home environment, and not feel even a little self conscious about putting yourself out there – for the whole world to see)?

Other Resources:

Wikipedia: Hikikomori – a Japanese term to refer to the phenomenon of reclusive people who have chosen to withdraw from social life, often seeking extreme degrees of isolation and confinement because of various personal and social factors in their lives.

HubPages: The Hikikomori Phenomenon

Hiki Culture – Forum for reclusive people.

NY Times: Shutting Themselves In

Michael Zielenziger: The Story Behind Shutting out the Sun

Here I was living in a country that was still so prosperous, where the gap between rich and poor was far narrower than in the United States, where fewer homeless and destitute line the streets than in New York or San Francisco, Yet I found that:

more than one million young adults shut themselves in their rooms for years as a time. These adolescents and adults, known as “hikikomori”, withdraw from societies for months or years at a time, not going to class, not working, not even leaving their homes, and often not even abandoning their rooms. These recluses become wholly dependent on their mothers to feed them.

three times as many people die each year in suicides than in car accidents. Japan’s male suicide rate in particular had exploded and become the highest in the wealthy, industrial world.

Japanese women have systematically chosen not to marry and bear children. Today Japan has the lowest birthrate in the world. And beginning in 2005, Japan’s population began to shrink in absolute terms, as more deaths than births were recorded. Within fifteen years, one in every nine Japanese will be over age 80.

Half of all unmarried men 18 to 34 tell government census takers that they have no casual companionship, friendship and certainly no regular sexual relationship with a female. 40 percent of all women are also equally lonely.