I spent my last day in the U.K., after tak­ing care of some busi­ness mat­ters, wih my friends Skye and Natasha, Cana­di­ans liv­ing in London.

Skye took me to vis­it Bur­rough Mar­ket, near Lon­don Bridge. Housed in a con­fus­ing­ly laid out Vic­to­ri­an struc­ture, and milling with peo­ple, the mar­ket is a delight­ful chaos. There has been a mar­ket on the site, or at least near­by, for two thou­sand years. Bur­rough Mar­ket com­bines retail and whole­sale func­tions, and there’s a cer­tain amount of grime. This and the con­stant shout­ing of hawk­ers con­trasts with the anti­sep­tic qui­et that per­vades St. Lawrence Mar­ket in Toron­to. We had some fine Per­sian pastries.

Bur­rough Market

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I’ve col­lect­ed films for a long time. Long before it was pos­si­ble to keep them as com­put­er files, I was accu­mu­lat­ing video­tapes by the gross. I love films of all kinds, good and bad, and will watch all sorts of things that puz­zle my friends. Why, for instance, would any­one in 2010 want to watch Spooks Run Wild, star­ring the East End Kids, or a 1959 Swedish film about extrater­res­tri­als invad­ing Lap­p­land? Well, quite apart from the direct, child­ish plea­sure this sort of thing gives me, I can pre­tend I have more seri­ous, and pre­sum­ably laud­able reasons.

There’s an unfor­tu­nate habit among his­to­ri­ans to talk about such and such a point in time as mark­ing the begin­ning of “moder­ni­ty” ― a point fixed, accord­ing to fash­ion, any­where from the proof sheets of the Epic of Gil­gamesh to the death of Kurt Cobain ― but there are two points in time where it can be con­vinc­ing­ly argued that things did change for us quite dras­ti­cal­ly. After a mere thir­ty years of exper­i­ment, the tech­nol­o­gy of pho­tog­ra­phy became wide­ly avail­able by the ear­ly 1850s. The sober­ing real­i­ty of the Amer­i­can Civ­il War leaps out at us from the pho­tographs of Math­ew Brady, and it was­n’t any­thing like war was depict­ed by the painter Jacques Louis David. Read more »