Pigeon-feeding, Popular Culture, and Echoes of the Freemasons

I intended to take a ballet class tonight -- but as I was stuffing my workout clothes into my backpack, a friend called to invite me to dinner. With my calves already sore, and already feeling a bit hungry and rushed, I pulled the workout clothes out of my bag and hopped on the subway to meet him for Thai food.

Emerging at Yonge and Bloor, I found a strange woman with a shopping cart piled with buckets of birdseed. As she sprinkled seeds on the sidewalk, she cooed at the pigeons and began speaking to them -- affectionately, it seemed -- in a language I couldn't understand.




Then -- with bellies full of mango chicken and green curry, I walked with my friend to a building on Yonge just North of Bloor: the headquarters of MTV Canada.




It's quite an exceptional space -- a former Masonic Temple that has been converted to various small TV studios. My friend (who runs lights for a few of the MTV shows) gave me a tour, and I snapped a few photos -- with a strange degree of trepidation.





Despite its conversion to a pop culture mecca, the building retains many original details -- which lend the space an incongruous sobriety. I felt like an interloper...

To see abandoned fragments of the masons' rituals, out of their formal context, felt surreal -- and perhaps even disrespectful. What right do I have to photograph the relics of the freemasons -- and to document something I do not understand?



So I've decided to do a bit of reading about the masons... and to go back again in the next few weeks.

I hope that a deeper awareness of their rituals may let me capture something I felt I couldn't really see tonight.