accozzaglia,
Sorry to hear your camera bag got pinched. As a long transplanted Montrealer (ok mostly gone native in Greater Toronto), my knowledge on what's going on in the city of my birth is sketchy other than a few Flickr groups. I think they have meet up like the ones in here in the GTA. Good luck with McGill, the move and finding the tool who made off with your cameras.
I appreciate the condolence. It's wasn't my camera bag, but my messenger bag. Not only were cameras inside, but also my work laptop with a year's worth of my thesis notes, my identification, my uni paperwork, and all my other academic work for the last year. The legal/academic papers and laptop were only with me because I didn't trust leaving them at the hotel. So it was a perfect storm of bad — unprecedented for me, as I can't ever remember having all that with me at once when out and about. It's been long enough now that my anger is being superseded by the resolve of rebuilding, infused with a new kind of proprietor vigilance (translation: escalating and shifting an already fairly strong awareness to surroundings by articulating defensible spacing in a new way).
OK, that translation was no more helpful.
Since the theft, a lot has gone through my mind, but perhaps none more so than having listened to five different people recount five separate theft incidents at a "downtown Starbucks" — all but one either confirmed or assumed to be the location where I was, while the other was on the Ste-Catherine location (to those not in MTL, there are a total of two in
centreville, or downtown, while the rest are mostly clustered out west in the Anglo ghetto). That, plus the Starbucks supervisor being wholly aware that their security camera had been disconnected for months and didn't seem to care about reconnecting it, makes me really wonder if there isn't something bigger at play here. As an urban designer, it's a new, vexing question I'm trying to ask and approach.
Worse, having learnt a little more about
état civil, the distinct system of Québec law, even if I had seen the perp(s) and chased them down, my laying a hand on them, even as they'd have my bag in their hand, could have me apprehended for "assault". In the case of one story in the five aforementioned, this actually happened to one woman who chased after her thief. Both were stopped by police and apprehended. The guy claimed the laptop in the bag was his, but she responded, "OK, explain how my face is on the desktop and why my passwords work?" When her claim panned out, the thief made up an excuse that he "picked up the wrong bag." Apparently, the police didn't arrest him. In another story, the draft of a novel two years in the making, was taken. The novel was never re-written. In all, this system of procedure has left me a bit incredulous.
It won't mar, hopefully, my upcoming experience at McGill, but as I've had a bit more than a week back in Toronto (mostly rebuilding my life and documentation from scratch, literally), my feelings on Montréal are becoming a bit more . . . complicated. I want to be there and hope it'll be a great, redeeming two years, but I worry in a way that I haven't here in Toronto (where yes, my car was once broken into before) or elsewhere. At once, I feel both vulnerable and disallowed to defend myself (unless it's my body under attack, and even then, I don't know to what extent I'm "allowed" to fight back).
As for photography, I am still without a 35mm SLR and will be for a bit longer. My Pentax 645 was home, but one lens (my 75mm, not L.S.) was in the equipment bag inside my messenger bag. After seeing how well the Asahi Pentax H2 w/ 50mm f/1.4 Super-Takumar
turned out in low light, I am likely to replace it with the same lens on a similar, pre-Spotmatic body with clip-on meter. I really loved the simplicity and lightness, and the glass just amazed me. As for the stolen Nikon F-801s, I don't know what I'll be doing yet. I just really miss and pine for shooting Kodachrome and have gotten so frustrated when I'm standing somewhere, see a great shot, and then remember that I have nothing on me to capture it.
