Halcyon Flickr Days

tribute, ©2005 Phil Hilfiker. Some rights reserved.

The other day, as I was going through my Flickr stream (or feed, or whatever it's called these days), looking for photographs for Part One and Part Two of my story about my not-quite last day in Paris in November of 2005, I looked at comments at various photos along the way, sometimes clicking on a commenter's name to see if by some miracle they were still active on Flickr. Overwhelmingly, they more often were not. This made me sad because at one time, Flickr meant so much to so many people. Hell, had it not been for Flickr, I probably never would have gone to Paris in that fall of 2005, or ever for that matter. But one of my contacts thought so much of my photography, which I would be the first to say was not particularly special to invite me to stay with her and her family. That, as I've said before, is another story for another time.

I'm not sure how I got to the photograph above, but once I did, all the joy of being on Flickr in those times came rushing back. In the event you didn't click on the photograph to see the text beneath it (you should, by the way), it was taken by my friend Phil on the first anniversary of his having created a Flickr account. His words give a little idea as to what the community was like at the time, which was tremendoously supportive and... communal.

It was also VERY playful. Memes (alas, not everybody tagged their photos for this one) were created and spread quickly around the site. An entire group was created for images built upon other people's photos, many of which would build upon another person's already Photoshop'd masterpiece. I don't know how it came to be known as Big Al Davies Collage Squad other than that maybe it had to do with Big Al's visage showing up in so many of them in the beginning.

One of mine, a favourite...

Big Al: Botanical Photographer. Some rights reserved.

I merged a photo of himself that Al had posted in his stream and Lily Pond by Catherine Jamieson. Unfortunately, because Al deleted his stream on several occasions (only to start a new one), the trail of source images can no longer be traced on many of the collages in the group.

While the hilariousness of this nonsense was addicting, it also served a purpose—for me, at least—in that it gave me an opportunity to develop my Photoshop chops. I previously had used Google's Picasa editor for my photo editing, which was a fine editor for most things, but it was nowhere near as versatile as Photoshop.

Getting back to Phil's photograph, he was one of the handful of people, I think, who made up the core of the collage group, along with me, Al, Steffe, Marya (rhymes with aria), and Jeff. But it wasn't one of his collages that prompted me to write this. It was the "tribute" photographs that followed the one above; the first one by Juliette...

tribute to phil, ©2006 Juliette Melia. All rights reserved.

Then my tribute to Juliette's tribute...

Tribute to Juliette's Tribute to Phil, ©2006 Patrick T. Power. All rights reserved.

Then Sandra's tribute to my tribute to Juliette's tribute...

paparazzi me, ©2006 Sandra Löv. All rights reserved.

It doesn't look so much like a tribute, I suppose, but it was an inspired tag-on nonethless. What struck me the funniest in all this was Sandra's reference to my contribution in the silly sequence of events.

This is what I prefer when it comes to an online life—not the sharing of memes generated by "Digital Creators" on Facebook, or the animated GIF responses (something which actually appeared on Flickr and ruined many a comment thread with their presence), but connectivity fostered by creativity.

As I was trying find a photograph I could use to wrap this up, I discovered a series of photo-merges I'd created using my Icelandic friend Helga's photograph of an Icelandic sheep, Salomon, which I dubbed Salomon's Travels. As I browsed Flickr, I would imagine Salomon making an appearance in others' photographs. Once I found something, the challenge was in processing Salomon's appearance to somewhat match up with the lighting in the photograph I'd chosen to bastardize. In this one I inserted Salomon into a self-portrait by another Icelander, Arnthor Birkisson

Salomon's Dark Side (with apologies to Arnthor Birkisson and Helga Kvam).

A great many of my friends on Facebook and other social media sites are those with whom I communed on Flickr, and we so often pine for those days again because of the uniqueness of the experience, which is sometimes difficult to put into words for people who never used Flickr.

At the end of the year, however, I intend on posting my last photograph on Instagram—assuming that I continue to take at least one photograph a day between now and then—and then commencing anew at Flickr. I don't care if Instagram is the place to be for everyone else. I've decided that it's not for me.

Unfriend

Today I decided to block a friend on Facebook. At this point, I guess I can call him an ex-friend.

We've known each other for as long as I can recall. He and I grew up on the same street about a block and a half away from each other. I can't recall how we came to meet for the first time other than that at that time—the 1960s and into the 1970s—everyone seemed to know everyone else within a couple of blocks of home. He's a year older, went to different elementary and high schools that I did, so we didn't have age or school in common, it was more than likely the overlap of friends.

Regardless, we became pals during high school. He had a 1950s vintage Pontiac or Chevrolet or Buick and I recall him driving us to one of my classmates' party in Genoa, Ohio one weekend, and having to drive home in a pretty thick fog. After high school, we went out drinking together, often to Charlie's Blind Pig near the University of Toledo (which everyone knew as Toledo University—or TU—at the time), or to a pizza joint in north Toledo. In 1973, I believe, he suggested I apply for a job with Commercial Aluminum Cookware in downtown Toledo, where he worked. I was working only part-time at Big Barney Auto Wash, just up the street from home at the time, but it was time to move on, so I applied and got hired.

We worked together at Commercial together for a couple of years-plus (he would retire from there), continued going out drinking together, and regularly golfed together, whether weekly with a bunch of guys from work or just the two of us on the weekend. We go to the driving range fairly often. There was a group of us from our neighbourhood that at one point or another worked for Commercial, also probably at his behest. The bunch of us listened to music a lot together, talked about our new stereo gear, went to concerts and one music festival. All pretty typical stuff that neighbourhood friends do. I became a pretty serious fan of Bob Dylan thanks in large part to having borrowd a copy of his Greatest Hits record from this person, a story for another time.

Pretty much all those relationships fell away, however, when I went off to university in the mid-1970s. I developed new—albeit not particularly long-lasting—relationships while at school; I fell in love a few times (ultimately with the woman I would marry and be divorced by) lived briefly in Minneapolis, Minnesota and Columbus, Ohio, and except for a few years right after getting my degree, I've lived in Michigan and now, California.

Now, I know that I am not the best human being on the planet. I try to be helpful and useful, kind and generous; I endeavour to not purposely hurt people. That said, I know that I have let many people down in my lifetime. One thing that I haven't done, though, is to baldly lie about a friend. But that's what this person did. The lie was work-related.

We were paid hourly to produce cookware, whether spinning pots and pans on lathes, creating baking pans on presses, stamping aluminum with the company name and product number... just a few of the myriad tasks that went on at the factory. I probably spent most of my time trimming the burrs from the edges of saucepan covers. If you worked forty hours a week, you were paid a base wage, but if you worked forty-eight hours a week, the hourly wage went up. I can't recall the specifics, but it was a pretty significant increase from the forty-hour rate to the bonus rate. Our usual starting time was 6:00 a.m., and each day, we would punch in at that time and punch out at 5:00, with an hour lunch usually at noon. I don't recall anyone who didn't opt for the forty-eight- to fifty-hour week. We were given six or seven minutes grace on our clock-in, meaning that if you punched in outside of that grace period, say at 6:08, you were docked an hour. There were many times that coming in late would have meant losing my bonus pay for the week, so I'd call in sick instead. Everyone did this.

One morning, the floor supervisor, Bill, called me into his office. I liked Bill for the most part. He was a golfer and part of the golfing group I mentioned, he played euchre with us during lunch—smoked like a fiend—but he could be a son-of-a-bitch when he put his mind to it, and on this morning, it had come to his attention that someone was punching in other employees' time cards so that they wouldn't get docked, and that somebody had accused me of doing it. I denied doing it, of course, because it hadn't been me. When I asked who had accused me, he told me my, uh, friend had accused me. When, of course, he had been the miscreant.

At the time, I completely severed ties with him. I didn't speak to him for at least a year, despite that I saw him five days a week at work. I can't recall why I lifted my year-long silent treatment, but I did, and things basically went back to normal. I think that the rest of the employees saw us as a Laurel and Hardy or some such inseparable duo since we hung out so much together during and after work hours. We pulled practical jokes together. But the lie should have been a warning.

I missed another sign I probably should have seen at the time. One night, we drove to Bowling Green, Ohio (about twenty miles south of Toledo and where I would eventually go to university) to go to the bars. We must not have stayed too long because on the way back home, President Richard Nixon was giving an address to the nation, which we listened to on the radio. I despised Nixon, who would have been embroiled in the Watergate scandal the night of our little drinking sojourn. I recall mocking almost every single word that came out of his mouth because I knew to the depth of my being that he was a nasty, lying son-of-a-bitch. I was told to shut up. It didn't hit me until recently that he had to have been a Nixon fan, too.

Fast forward to 2015: I helped to organize a reunion at my elementary school. Originally, we had planned it to be just our 8th Grade class, but other classes caught wind of it and wanted to attend. We decided to make it an all-inclusive reunion, allowing anyone who had gone to school at Good Shepherd to come, and almost five hundred people showed up. As did my, uh, friend, who took photographs during the event, which was great because the niece of one of the organizers, who had volunteered, must have screwed something up because I didn't see a single picture she'd taken. As one of the organizers, I allowed him to attend even though he didn't attend our school. But since he lived right across the street, knew so many of the attendees, and had played hockey for years with one of the other organizers, I said OK. It was great to get reacquainted after so many years and to meet his wife. We had already connected on Facebook, but hadn't engaged with each other all that much. We spoke on the phone at length later that year and I learned he'd nearly died due to issues with his heart—the physical one.

Fast forward again to 2024, an election year: I should not have been surprised to find that that he's a Trump supporter. I have family members that are Trump supporters, so it's not like I live in a totally protective political bubble. I guess I was surprised by the vile, ugly, mean, viscious, disgusting, untruthful crap that he would share about Kamala Harris not only to his page, but as comments on my page. I deleted them, of course, just as he deleted my fact-based reminders that he supported a lying, cheating, convicted fraudster, adjudicated rapist, and insurrectionist. A couple of weeks ago, I changed my share settings so that he couldn't see my new posts, particularly if they had anything to do with the election.

His ugliness didn't end, of course, on election day. Something he shared on his page popped up for me to see (to be clear, this was not something he posted to my page) and I began to question why I bothered staying connected to someone so hateful and hurtful who supported someone so hateful, hurtful, and self-serving who was going to yet again be the most powerful person in the world, who had vowed to hurt people for no reason other than that he could. After a few days of thinking about it, I unfriended him on Facebook. I didn't block him, though. I saw that he "followed" me, which meant that he could comment or Like or see some of what I had previously posted, including a photo I had taken of Kamala Harris when she was running for the Senate in 2016 because he had once commented on that. He was not one to comment very often anyway, so I thought I could just quietly disappear from his feed.

Today, though, he commented on the photo of Harris again. I assume he discovered I'd unfriended him, because it was a nasty comment about me and my choice to live in San Francisco. I didn't even read the whole thing before deleting it, to be honest. I should have done a screencap of it to include here but I decided to get rid of the ugliness before anyone else had to see it. I recall he used the word sissy (or sissified) and something I think was supposed to suggest that I was gay, either because he believes it or that I'd be hurt by it. And it was then I decided that yeah, I'd made the right decision to unfriend him.

And then I blocked him.

This Old Sweater

Moi, ©2024 Patrick T. Power

My friend Greg wrote about an old shirt that he owns, and since it's my hope to write here on a daily basis (at least for a little while), the topic inspired me as I, too, have an article of clothing that I have been wearing for a long time, and which still brings a certain comfort to me.

My story probably isn't half as interesting as Greg's, but in February of 2005, I attended the International Folk Alliance conference in Montréal, Québec, Canada. I was booking a folk music concert series at the time, as well as coördinating the music for the now-defunct Great Lakes Folk Festival. It might have been my first time out of the country as an adult, now that I think about it, as the only time I recall being in Canada previous to that was on a family vacation as a kid.

Since it was February in Montréal, I naturally brought warm clothes with me because I expected to wander from the hotel while I was there. I had joined Flickr the previous September (I can't believe it's been over twenty years now!) and had become part of a thriving community of people sharing photographs and stories and their senses of humour and so many aspects of their lives. No social media site can match that today—not Facebook, not Instagram, not the hellscape once known as Twitter. Flickr was the be all, end all of social media.

But I digress...

I was staying at the Hyatt Regency, just a short walk from Old Montréal, so I planned to get to the oldest part of the then three-hundred-sixty-three-year-old city to take photographs to share on Flickr. I didn't have a really heavy coat at the time, despite that I lived in Michigan, but layers would keep me warm. One of the layers was this sweatshirt.

Trois, ©2024 Patrick T. Power

Odds are you haven't been to a Folk Alliance conference before, but during the day, there are break-out sessions about various aspects of the music business aimed at both musicians and bookers/producers, along with official showcases by musicians produced by the Folk Alliance. Musicians also hold "guerrilla" showcases, typically in their bedrooms or in suites if they happen to have garnered sponsorship. I've not been to a conference in quite some time, but the guerrilla sets were discouraged while the official showcases were going on so as not to splinter the audience during that block of time.

So, once the offical showcases had ended late in the evening, the unofficial showcases would run until almost all hours of the night. Since the hotel was pretty much nothing but conference goers, it didn't tend to create a problem. Also, there were "non-music" floors for people who had more interest in sleeping than attending these mini-concerts. Perhaps the biggest problem was—as a booker wanting to check out specific musicians—being able to get from one room to another in short periods of time, especially if it meant going from one floor to another when everyone else was trying to do the same thing at the same time.

Which is what leads me to the sweater. You know... the one in the photograph at the top of this page?

I can't recall the specific circumstances of the night in question, but it's all too likely that I had returned to the hotel either from a walk or from having dinner with several friends, and after dropping off my coat in my room, I went about my magical mystery tour wearing the XXL sweater, and somewhere along the way, I got too warm wearing it so I took it off and carried it around with me from showcase to showcase. I most certainly had a conference tote bag with me, but as it was no doubt filled with CDs and press kits, the sweatshirt was either tucked under my arm or—more likely—tied around my waist so that I wouldn't have to carry it under my arm, and somewhere along the way, either in a hotel room or hallway or elevator, I dropped it. When I noticed it, I backtracked a bit in hopes of recovering it but to no avail.

So, on my flight out, knowing that the airplane cabin would be cold (they're always cold!), I bought a new sweater at an airport gift shop, and while it no doubt was expensive to some degree, I have certainly gotten my money's worth out of it over the course of the last nearly twenty years. It has also made an appearance in many of the self-portraits I've posted at Flickr since that time, although sometimes not always an obvious component of the photographs. It has traveled to Paris, Oslo, Prince Edward Island, and the United Kingdom as well as many places throughout the United States in twenty years. In fact, one totally unexpected benefit of wearing the sweater in Paris in 2005, when Bush was President, was that people guessed that I was from Canada. That was nice.

Unlike Greg's shirt, my sweater hasn't developed any holes. The zipper is still intact, but the elastic at the ends of the sleeves has been stretched out from pulling the sleeves up to my elbows too many times. The green in the fabric has also faded a fair amount. Like Greg, I put it on during the cold months while I'm indoors to help against the chill in the air (especially since our steam heat seems to work only when it's warm outside), and lately, unike Greg, I've even been wearing it outdoors.

History. Comfort.

My Last Day In Paris, Part Two

or Not My Last Day In Paris, Part Two

Sumei ©2024 Patrick T. Power

After parting with Sumei, a light rain began to fall in the city as I made my way to Le Dock. Based on the photos I took, I rode the métro to a stop near the Louvre, probably Concorde, then walked from there. Amongst my favourite things to do in Paris (or, really, anywhere, I guess) is to photograph the reflections in the wet pavement. And so it was that I noticed the reflections of the red illuminated awnings of the entrances at the Ritz Paris in Place Vendôme.

Ritz Paris, ©2024 Patrick T. Power

Everything so far had gone swimmingly, and I took to heart the first three letters of the name of a shoe store, I think, or maybe one that sold clothes in general. La joie. Joy.

La joie, ©2024 Patrick T. Power

I must have gotten something to eat at around this time as I didn't take another photograph for well over an hour, and didn't get to Le Dock for another hour after that. While I recall so much about the day and the trip, I'm at a loss as to the space of time between Place Vendôme and Le Dock.

Sebastien at the bar, ©2024 Patrick T. Power

Ten or twelve of my friends made it out that night, a Tuesday, as well as a couple I think I'd never met before, and borrowing a mobile, I called one more—Phil—to encourage him to show up. It turned out that it was a good thing he did.

Aru, Me, Pierre, and Audrey, ©2024 Patrick T. Power

A native of Switzerland, Phil had been living in Paris for some time. He's a musician and founded/runs a music school. When my original lodging plans hit a snag, he let me stay at his place for two or three nights. This is important to note because Phil's ex-girlfriend from Sweden, Linn, was also staying with him for a spell as she was in Paris for a medical appointment. She and I had talked at some point and we discovered that we were scheduled to fly out on the same day.

With only a couple of exceptions, I probably knew Phil best of all my Flickr friends, so I was hoping to see him before I left. At around 11:30 PM he made it. Almost immediately, he said, "I wasn't going to come because you were supposed to leave today." I said, "No, I leave tomorrow." He said, "No, you were supposed to leave today, because I took Linn to the airport this morning, and you were supposed to leave on the same day she did." Of course, he was right, but as I had my backpack with me which held my itinerary, I got it out to check it.

Un vol raté, ©2024 Patrick T. Power

With that revelation, of course, there was really nothing I could do except carry on with the fun. Figuring out what to do to get home would have to wait until morning. Which, of course, it did.

Mes amis, ©2024 Patrick T. Power

But all of a sudden, it occurred to me that had I made my 1:55 PM flight, I would be landing in Detroit at 5:05 PM, which pretty much was what time it was in Detroit at that very moment. My friend Melissa had offered to pick me up at Detroit Metro, which meant that she might very well be sitting in her car wondering where the hell I was. I borrowed Phil's phone and called her. As I think of this now, I was incredibly lucky that in November of 2005 both she and Phil had mobile phones, because I wouldn't get one for another five years. Anyway, she was just about to arrive at the terminal when I reached her, and being the kind, sweet human being that she is shrugged it off as no problem. (I think. I hope.) While it was a pretty big inconvenience to have wasted four hours of her time (in rush-hour traffic, no less), it could have been SO much worse had I not remembered this. The rest of the evening is a bit of a blur to me now, and not because I was drunk (I wasn't). I went back to my hosts' apartment not knowing what I was going to do. I hoped, of course, that Northwest Airlines would work with me to get me on another flight, but I would soon learn a lesson about airlines and missed flights.

The following morning, my host, Catherine, with some assistance from her brother Julien helped me to book a flight home. At the time, it was considerably cheaper to book round-trip—versus one-way—tickets, so that's what we did, but in order to keep the price down, we went with a departure date that would mean nine more days in Paris.

Part One

My Last Day In Paris, Part One

or Not My Last Day In Paris

Canal Saint-Martin, ©2024 Patrick T. Power

Probably anyone who knows me even a little knows that I love Paris. Thanks to the generosity of several Parisians, I made my first trip there in November of 2005. I have many stories to tell from that time, but because someone posted something to Facebook this morning that reminded me of something that occurred nineteen years ago esterday, I thought I would write about that day.

First, I have to preface by saying that my trip was to last two weeks, from 1 November (when the plane left Detroit) to 15 November. At some point during that last week, I decided to make a trip to Madrid, Spain to visit another friend whom I'd met on Flickr. When I booked that flight, my plan was to go to Madrid for three days and two nights, return to Paris, take the whole next day to wander the city one more time, then leave for home the following day.

That was the plan anyway.

Everything actually went pretty smoothly, and on that last full day, I contacted a few of my friends and recommended we get together one last time at Le Dock, a now-defunct bar not too far from L'Opéra Garnier. One of our Flickr pals, Phillipe, was a bartender there, and the place was sort of the unofficial Flickr watering hole.

So, that morning, between 9:00 and 10:00, I caught line 1 at the Place Blanche métro station, which was just across the street from where I was staying, and headed to Place Saint-Michel. The trip required changing trains at Gare de L'Est (made famous in the film Amélie), and as I waited for my connection to arrive, I decided to sit on the platform for a while and people watch. In the mornings, as you might imagine, trains were packed with commuters, and as I watched them load and unload every few minutes, I imagined a series of photographs taken over several hours from the spot I was sitting, recording what each train looked like as the doors closed before departing. While I waited, a young woman rushing to get onto a train, unwittingly dropped her scarf. I hurriedly picked it up and handed it to her just inside the door, in time for the doors to close. I took but three frames while I waited at Gare de L'Est, all of the reflection in a stairwell.

À Gare de L'Est, ©2024 Patrick T. Power

Once at Saint-Michel, I walked around the area looking for souvenirs for my kids (I am SO BAD at buying gifts for people), took a few pictures at the fountain at Saint-Michel as well as along the Seine, then walked over to explore around Cathédrale Notre-Dame, then Hôtel de Ville before catching another train at the Hôtel de Ville métro stop. I had arranged to meet a friend in the Belleville section of town, so I got off at République station. My route took me past Canal Saint-Martin—also made famous in Amélie—along the way, so I stopped to take a few pictures. The panorama at the top of this post was taken there. Along Boulevard de la Villette, I came upon this woman in a beautiful coat.

Sur Boulevard de la Villette, ©2024 Patrick T. Power

I met my friend Sumei, but not before getting a photograph of part of the façade of Palais des Glaces, a theatre on Rue de Faubourg du Temple.

Palais des Glaces, ©2024 Patrick T. Power

Sumei and I headed back to Canal Saint-Martin and we took a bunch of pictures there, me with my Nikon CoolPix 8800 (a rather glorified point-and-shoot) and she with her dSLR, a Nikon D70s.

Passerelle des Douanes (Prisma conversion), ©2024 Patrick T. Power

Sumei is another of the people I met via Flickr, and, in fact, I think this was our first in-person meeting. We stopped to have a coffee at Brasserie de l'Hôtel du Nord on Quai de Jemmapes, which runs along the east side of the canal. Hôtel du Nord is famous as the setting for the eponymous 1938 film. After coffee, Sumei had a little business to tend to. She worked for real estate company at the time, and she had to get a signature on a lease or a deed or something in the La Chappelle neighbourhood, so I accompanied her. Afterwards, we visited Église Saint-Bernard-de-la-Chapelle (Saint Bernard Church of La Chapelle), which was built from 1858 to 1861. I have a thing for religious iconography, despite my atheist ways, so we spent about thirty minutes there before she had to get on her way home in the south of the city.

Église Saint-Bernard-de-la-Chapelle, ©2024 Patrick T. Power

Part Two