Alex Waterhouse-Hayward

Raising The Bar by Lenny Kaye

2010-03-13T16:29:00.006-08:00

Recently I ran a picture of Lenny Kaye in this blog which accompanied an In One Ear column by Les Wisman from Vancouver Magazine. It is here. Kaye saw it. He was most pleased. I asked him if he would write a guest blog on his take on the whammy bar. Today he delivered.

Raising The Bar

By Lenny Kaye

I call it a sway bar, but it is also referred to as a whammy, a whang, and – most descriptively – a vibrato bar. It’s the lever you see protruding from a guitar’s bridge, and when grasped and pulled up or down, has the ability to shift the pitch of a note, a chord, or even all six strings in one swift motion. It can be used tastefully, as in a slight wobble, or radically, replicating the vertigo of a dive-bomber.
Usually, except when the guitar has a Floyd Rose string-lock upon it, it exacts its price on the player: the dreaded out-of-tuning. But usually the effect, emphasizing a trailing arpeggio with a bit of squiggle, or tickling a note as it sails into oblivion, is worth it. Or at least I think so, or should I say sowowowowo….
I love the sway bar, seldom play an electric instrument without one fitted, and have often been tempted to bounce upon it as one might a trampoline. The undisputed master of the technique – apart from such godlike creatures as Jimi Hendrix and Jeff Beck, both of whom used it to play entire melodies – is John Cippolina of the Quicksilver Messenger Service. In such recordings as “Babe You’re Gonna Leave Me,” “Codine,” “Pride Of Man” and the epic journey that is “Who Do You Love Me,” he wrenched and moaned his solos so that they seemed spoken in a foreign lingual, shivering and wobbling each phrase that he poured out of his custom Gibson SG.

It was Paul Bigsby who first put a springlike vibrato tailpiece on a guitar in the early fifties, followed by Leo Fender with his synchronized tremolo arm on the Stratocaster (though of course, this is misnamed, since tremolo is volume alteration, something a mere grab of a handle cannot do).

Wherever and whencever it comes, it adds a degree of expression to the guitar that falls easily to hand. My hand, especially.

# # #

Shelina The Graceful

2010-03-12T00:18:00.003-08:00

Shelina was a wondrous dancer at the Number 5 Orange Street establishment of Powell and Main in the last 70s. The D.J. at the joint had insisted she take ballet and dancing lessons as the D.J. himself was a prominent Vancouver jazz dance choreographer at the time. Shelina danced with grace. She danced like a slippery cat. Her body was lithe, and with no fat. Her curves were just right. She had a soothing voice and the only defect that made her pleasantly human was an ever so slightly prominent nose. I took some pictures of her at Wreck Beach sometime around 1979. I was experimenting with a red sensitive film called Special Order 410. It made skin look like porcelain. These pictures were my early crude examples of nude photography. Shelina was a patient subject, a delight to photograph.

Some years later there was a reunion of the circa late 70s and early 80s dancers at the Number 5 and I was invited. While enjoying the company of these wonderful women and reminiscing of old times when “dancers” danced I looked at Shelina and thought hard. She must have read my mind because she said, “I will dance for you right now if you like.” She climbed up on the stage and this she did. And for the first time and most probably the last time I felt like a real king as she danced just for me with her trademark grace.

From The Heart

2010-03-11T14:33:00.011-08:00

From the moment that I can remember being an individual I can remember my mother opening a heavy but small jewel box and showing me the heart of diamonds. Of all the jewels (purchased in Paris) that my grandfather Tirso de Irureta Goyena had showered on his bride and wife my grandmother Dolores Reyes de Irureta Goyena the only one that was left was the little quartz heart studded with diamonds. The rest of the jewels had been pawned off or sold to finance the divorces of my uncles and aunt.

When Alexandra Elizabeth (our first daughter was born in 1968) my mother told me that it was her will that the heart would be used to finance Alexandra’s university education. “I want her to have all the opportunities she deserves,” she told me.

Both Ale and Hilary managed to graduate from university here in Vancouver. Ale went to UBC and Hilary to Simon Fraser. What is to happen to that little heart of diamonds? I would think that my mother’s will, would transfer to our eldest granddaughter. We shall see and keep the little heart in its box.

Fulfilling the wills and desires of someone who is dead is something that most of us take most seriously.

I never thought that I would have to do this for someone else.

It was this past July that my friend Abraham Rogatnick shocked me with a statement that I first took lightly. He said, “If there is anything I want to do before I die is to go public on my stance that the Vancouver Art Gallery should stay put.” He wrote up his reasons and went to visit Vision Councellor Heather Deal. Deal red the “manifesto” and said something like, “Let’s wait and see.” Rogatnick told me, “I lost it and I yelled at her, what do you mean you are going to wait and see?”

I told Rogatnick to give me his manifesto and that I would try to see if anybody was interested. By mid August Rogatnick was ailing and I told him I had been unsuccessful in my efforts to get the radio, TV, web based magazines and our local newspapers interested. Rogatnick simply told me, “You tried.”

This past Monday I can say now that thanks to the intersession of the Vancouver Sun’s city columnist, Miro Cernetig, Rogatnick’s manifesto is up in today’s Vancouver Sun editorial page.

Rogatnick did not believe he was going anywhere when he died at the end of August of last year. I felt I had let the man down.

But Rogatnick was always pragmatic and he would probably agree with me that his manifesto might be that much more effective coming from the grave than when he was alive. My thanks to Miro Cernetig for keeping Rogatnick’s vision alive.

The Vancouver Art Gallery & The Boer War

2010-03-10T14:16:00.023-08:00

While driving Monday morning to Rona to purchase shady garden grass seed for my garden, I turned on CBC Radio 1’s Almanac and listened to Kirk Williams. He is the provisional host while Mark Forsythe is on holidays. Williams introduced a man whose voice was a dead ringer for Archibald Alexander Leach. It was a smooth and urbane voice. I would vote for the auditory doppelgänger or buy a used Toyota from him.

The Cary Grant impersonator was Michael Audain OC OBC Chairman Polygon Homes Ltd., Chair of the Vancouver Art Gallery Foundation, the Audain Foundation for the Visual Arts, and the National Gallery of Canada and most important is Chair of the group involved in the project to move the VAG to Larwill Park across from the Queen Elizabeth Theatre. He was calm and fielded questions (most listeners who chipped into the program were against the move) very well. He even managed to answer (it sounded good, I am not sure he made sense) when a speaker enquired about the in-the-red situation of the current art gallery and the fact that they are reducing staff and shortening their hours to save money.

It is understood that since the Province of British Columbia (which owns the property) does not charge the VAG rent, the reason for the red ink has to be explored and reconciled with a sum that would be upwards of 250 million Canadian dollars to build a new facility in the proposed site of Larwill Park which is the city block to one side of the Queen Elizabeth Theatre.

Larwill Park was a temporary (I understand that from the records) site of the Greyhound Bus Station. Previous to that it had served as a military parade ground and troops that were going to be sent to the Boer war were mustered there.

In the last few weeks several troubling incidents re: our city, have been revealed by the Vancouver Sun, the Globe & Mail and Francis Bula in her blog.

1. Under the mayorship of Philip Owen a deal was struck where the Vancouver Park Board sold Larwill Park to the City's Property Endowment Fund so that the Board could buy land along the Fraser River.

2. Subsequently we have found out that an office tower might be built in Larwill Park as a quid pro quo arrangement whereupon as Francis Bula writes in her blog(fragment of it in paragraph below)

The latest complication I discovered on Friday was that the city has already committed to using $48 million of the development profits from the site (most if not all of them) to pay for the QE Theatre renovation that happened in the past couple of years. More details on this confusing tale [in the Globe & Mail] here.

3. An article in the Tuesday Vancouver Sun written by Jonathan Ross explains why so much stuff happens in our city behind closed doors. It seems that many important decisions are made by our city bureaucrats and not by our elected officials.

4. Max Wyman told me he was privy some years ago to a meeting at the VAG that proposed the idea of incorporating the parts of the Simpson Sears building (designed by renowned international architect Cesar Pelli) with the VAG. An unnamed friend of mine said, “Douglas Coupland could place one of his airplane sized projects into that building with room to spare.” Wyman even told me that there were discussions involving he building of some sort of mechanical escalator between the VAG and Sears.

We (I) suspect that when Eaton’s had to vacate the site Cadillac Fairview (it leases the building from the city who owns the land) must have given Sears a sweet deal. But the sweet deal is not going to bring shoppers into a store that does not have a department that sells one of the Sears mainstays, Craftsman tools. I have to go all the way to Lougheed Highway to have my Craftsman lawnmower serviced. It would seem to me that if Sears could sublease part of the cavernous building, Sears, the VAG and we the citizens of this city would profit.

5. Miro Cernetig wrote an intelligent column on Monday on what is happening to our Robson Square Centre and particular in the light on how popular the location was during the 2010 Olympics.

To 5 I would add that I had several discussions on Robson Square with Arthur Erickson and my friend Abraham Rogatnick (who died in August 2009). It was our opinion that one of the biggest mistakes of our city was to bring in UBC to Robson Square.

The average person on the street is aware that Simon Fraser University is in town. Coincidentally he or she might even inform you that part of that downtown site on West Hastings was formerly a Sears store! I have attended countless seminars and lectures on urban affairs at SFU Downtown Campus.

How many people know that there is an important bookstore not far from Chapters on Robson and Howe? Few might know that UBC has a downtown campus in Robson Square and that the prestigious UBC Bookstore has a branch right there!

This general ignorance is that in my opinion UBC has botched its presence downtown. They have ill used the site and given it such a low profile that few know it exists.

In the past the Robson Media Centre (as it used to be called) had interesting cultural events in the premises and in particular in the Judge White Auditorium. It was in this auditorium whose sides had softly carpeted steps where some of us would slouch to listen to the likes of Arthur Erickson talk about our city. The auditorium was always full and I felt the richness of living with a city. I felt almost like an Athenian citizen of old.

What has happened to that auditorium? Is it used at all? This auditorium could be the very auditorium that Michael Audain says the VAG lacks.

It is my opinion (one I shared with Abraham Rogatnick) that UBC should vacate Robson Square and that it be taken over by the VAG.

In the photo above which I took for the Globe & Mail in 1997 that's, from left to right the then director of the gallery, Alf Boguski, curator Dana Augaitis and Michael Audain.

The Pleasures Of Editorial Collaboration

2010-03-09T12:02:00.012-08:00

Quite a few years ago I was sharing my studio with another photographer. One day I walked into the studio to get a piece of lighting equipment and I found the photographer there. He asked me, “In a few minutes I have to photograph a woman called Carole Taylor (she was then a city Councillor) for the cover of Vancouver Magazine. Who is she?”

My friend and previous fellow collaborator Les Wiseman (he was the writer) for many a story for Vancouver Magazine and TV Guide told me that one of the secrets of good magazine writing is to research your subject. It would seem to me that this intelligent piece of advice also applies to photographers who shoot for magazines.

This advice has served me well. Researching my subjects has always enabled me to connect with the person facing my camera. Since many of these persons when shooting for magazines are some sort of celebrity or politician they usually don’t give you much time. You are forced to find a common ground of interest quickly if you hope to get a picture that will be different from all others. When I faced actress Helena Bonham Carter I knew her grandmother was Spanish. I had found this out through research. I had a suspicion Bonham Carter spoke Spanish. Taking her photograph, while in the presence of an intrusive writer who had brought his baby to the interview, I was able to bond with her when I spoke to her in Spanish. In fact Bonham Carter wrote me a letter in perfect grammatical Spanish thanking me for the fun she had.

With the slow demise of many magazines many of the procedures that once were in effect have faded. At one time writers and photographers worked in tandem. Wiseman and I went to many rock concerts together and interviewed musicians back stage or in their hotels. Wiseman sometimes advised me as to what his tack was going to be in the interview. I would tell him what my possible approach to the photograph would be. But what worked best was Wiseman’s insistence that I remain in the room during the interview. It was here that I got many of my ideas for that photographic approach. This policy of allowing me to remain during the interview was also a technique shared with writers John Lekich and Christopher Dafoe. Both of them worked for the Globe & Mail. The former wrote as freelance art reporter and the latter was the arts correspondent in Vancouver.

I have shot many magazine, tabloid and newspaper covers since 1975. I noticed something peculiar about some of my better covers. This is that sometimes they can only be used once, and only once. After that someone might ask,"So why that composite picture of Iggy Pop smiling?"

About 20 years ago I used to frequent the monthly meetings of an organization called CAPIC (Canadian Association of Photographers and Illustrators In Communication). The talk then was about selling stock. One of our members a persnickety South African born Paul Little (he worked as a stringer for Macleans) would tell us from the back row, “If you do stock nobody will ever pay you to travel to Paris to take pictures.” He was usually hushed. But time has proven him correct and few photographers are now paid to go to exotic locations to take pictures.

As I look at my extensive collection of photographs, slides and negatives (b+w and colour) I realize that I have never ever been able to sell stock. The reason is that my pictures are too specific to a particular article. They are not stock pictures of people in general. They are pictures of particular people who cannot play the role of everyman or everywoman for an ad. This means that my pictures have value in other directions but not immediately as stock.

As an example look at the composite picture of Iggy Pop here where he is smiling in the right hand corner. When it became time to pick a picture for the article/interview that Les Wiseman made in May 1987 I was promoting the use of the picture showing Iggy Pop’s hands. I had mentioned to Iggy Pop (it was Wiseman who had said in the presence of the man’s handler, “What are we supposed to call him, Mr. Pop? “) that his demeanor and look resembled the famous photograph taken of Joseph Goebbels by Alfred Eisenstaedt in 1933. Iggy Pop got all excited and told me, “I was in Geneva, not too long ago in the very spot where that picture was taken.” He then struck the pose for me. But Wiseman insisted that Iggy Pop had been transformed and that he was now clean of drugs and alcohol and that the most salient feature of the new man was his smile. And that is how I came to print the composite to please Wiseman.

An editorial collaboration involves give and take. That is part of the tension but also part of the fun. This blog is a de facto magazine of mine since I singly decide which picture or pictures to use and I edit myself. The freedom is pleasant but the collaboration is not there. The thrill (or disappointment, sometimes!) of waiting to see how my picture is used or cropped has always been special. It is my hope that magazines in some shape or form come back so that photographers and illustrators of the generation that follow me will experience the thrills and excitement that I have in collaboration with Les Wiseman and other writers.

Who Shaves The Barber?

2010-03-08T18:51:00.007-08:00

Rebecca knows the meaning of the expression, “Who shaves the barber?” Every once in a while she will insist on taking my picture even when I am hovering around with my heavy medium format Mamiya RB-67 and my equally heavy tripod. These snaps were taken in June 2009 at the Nitobe Japanese Garden of the University of British Columbia. The girls and Rosemary love the place so we go often.

Rebecca was keen on photography a few years ago so we went to Leo's to buy her a digital camera. When it stopped working I bought her a new one. But there seems to be no follow up at home so she has lost interest even though she is so good in front of my garden. It is methodical Lauren who always wants to look through the viewfinder of my Mamiya and I am wondering if she just might inherit my vocation. It would be most pleasant to will all my useless film cameras (presently so useful to me) to my Lauren.

Just A Handful Of Magnesium Sulphate

2010-03-07T16:33:00.010-08:00

I don’t particularly like VanDusen manure Saturdays. It happens once a year and it happened yesterday. I drove over to pick up 12 bags of well rotted manure (it hardly smells) and brought it home. It was a nice enough day that I went at distributing it among my roses immediately using my large orange/red wheelbarrow. I mix the manure with last year’s fall VanDusen compost (another day I don’t particularly like). To this mixture I add handfuls of Epsom salt (magnesium sulphate) and generous amounts of alfalfa meal. The magnesium salts in early spring help the rose bushes absorb the nutrients that may be present in the soil. The alfalfa meal (which I buy at the Otter Co-Op in Langley) is supposed to induce roses to send up basal shoots (Nice thick and vigorous ones that grow to be healthy canes. These come up from the base root of the plant).

When Rebecca showed up at noon I told her that today Sunday we would to the same with her roses and that we would also prune them. And we would also transfer root-bound roses to bigger pots. I was going to bring a back of compost and a bag of manure plus my Epsom salt/alfalfa meal mixture.

I showed up at two and it was drizzling. Rebecca was dressed to the teeth and had a nice scarf draped around her neck and shoulders. “Do we really have to do this today?” she asked as she looked in the direction of a friend. It was obvious that I had interrupted a pleasant and lazy Sunday afternoon in which anybody with an attorney would be recommended to do nothing. I stuck to my guns, “We knew about it since yesterday. Let’s do it.” She accompanied me outside with her beautiful silver flats. I pointed out that she would have to change as she would be on her knees potting and mixing manure with compost. She relented and when she returned she was all enthusiasm.

We worked at her roses which all look very healthy in their pots even though most roses do not like to be in pots. Rebecca’s back yard is a concrete driveway so the pots are her only choice if she is going to have a garden. Her friend said, “You have a lovely garden.” Rebecca agreed even though her friend added, “Balfour owns this property and they don’t want to spend any money in landscaping; besides the home owners here want the space for their cars.”

While Rebecca’s garden is not big it makes up for it with an unusual collection of old roses and rare hostas. In May/June her backyard is a feast for the eyes and delight to the nose.

Her sister Lauren began her gardening a couple of years ago with my gift of some blue/yellow winter pansies. They are indestructible and they keep blooming every year. She also has a miniature hosta called ‘Peanut’.

Rebecca’s father predicted that Rebecca’s roses would all die this year, “She doesn’t take care of them.” I sort of beg to differ but I told Rebecca that this would be her challenge for the year by proving him wrong.

One of my loveliest rose in my garden is a Gallica of unknown origin called Charles de Mills. It blooms only once as Gallicas are old roses and this is their pattern. The blooms are complex with a myriad of petals. The flower itself seems as if someone went at the front of it with a sharp razor. The scent is heavenly and the flowers are a blue/crimson that defies description.

There is another attribute of this plant that is not generally known. It is one of the few roses that send underground runners (some go under wood fences) that grow to be little clones of the parent. After two years I severe the relationship with a sharp knife and re-pot the plant. This year Rebecca and my friend Paul Leisz are getting one. Paul’s is from last year while Rebecca’s is from two years ago. Last year her Charles de Mills (still in my garden) had at least 40 flowers!

I have placed many a picture of Rebecca with a rose in this blog. This particular one, taken last May/June, shows Rebecca, 11, more as a teenager looking to her adulthood. Her hair is adorned by a splendid example of Rosa ‘Charles de Mills’.

While Rebecca and I happily worked on her roses, her friend (in the drizzle) was busy texting with her thumbs. When I pointed this out to Rebecca’s father he said, “She is in high school. They all do that.”

Will Rebecca be like the rest? Will her love for roses and gardening continue? Will her roses die? Only time will tell. Meanwhile I just wish that treating would-be teenagers were as simple as throwing in a handful of magnesium sulphate and alfalfa meal on our beloved roses.

The Carrot & The Stick

2010-03-06T11:18:00.010-08:00

For close to 12 years we have been getting Rebecca (and then also her sister Lauren when she was born 8 years ago) on Saturdays. Both of her parents work so we do babysitting support.

Rebecca routinely babysits, on her own, for some neighbours so the writing is on the wall for us. Soon Rebecca might be trusted to take care of her sister at home or perhaps she will simply become an independent teenager, who will stay at home while we take care of Lauren.

For most of these years the Saturdays have been pleasant and heartwarming days when we have attempted to challenge the girls (the stick) with music, gardening, museum-going, ballet and modern dance evenings or concert evenings. The last one was a Gershwin concert at the VSO a few weeks back. I have picked films that I thought Rebecca should be exposed to such as Tarzan The Ape Man, Gunga Din and The Red Shoes. But “too much” culture can make little girls’ interest diminish so we have applied the carrot with plenty of food goodies they like like “double-stuff” Oreos and an unlimited access to the fridge. It has been Rosemary who has warned me about being too strict with Rebecca as she will not want to come to our house when she does not see the fun of it.

For a while I enjoyed whacking (gently) them on the head with the TV remote. When Lauren described this to her other grandmother I received a phone call from my daughter to cease the abuse, or else.

It is generally understood that grandparents play (when living in the same city) a necessary role in the education of their grandchildren. If the grandparents have funds in the bank, the help can be a financial one. If the parents work and cannot afford a babysitter, grandparents become surrogate babysitters.

The above can be seen in strictly objective terms. Grandparents do as they are told and perform as is expected of them.

But there is a subjective side to this. Grandchildren can grow on the grandparents. When they leave on Saturday nights we are left with a feeling of emptiness. The fine line between the carrot and the stick then becomes important when the implied (even if never uttered out loud) threat of ending the Saturdays and the Mondays (I pick up the girls at school on Mondays) is understood.

And with Rebecca at 12 it is only a matter of short time when going on a date with a girl or boy friend will trump a Saturday visit to the boring grandparents. This is inevitable and I can see the day coming. I keep telling Rosemary that we need to think of alternatives or our life will feel vacant.

Yesterday, Saturday was a preview of things to come. Rebecca brought her well-mannered friend Jessica. We took the three girls (including Lauren) to Watermania in Richmond. Jessica and Rebecca played and chatted in the water. They cast their disapproving eyes on a young boy who was extremely overweight. At one point I asked Rebecca if she wanted to swim some lengths with me so she could practice her beautiful backstroke. Her, “No,” was predictable.

At age 67 one side of me objected at the idea of having to share my precocious granddaughter with her friend. But I also understood that this was the way it had to be and perhaps some day in the not so near future I might again have a relationship with my granddaughter that will be mature as we explore cultural events together.

I watched Lauren in the wave pool. She is now not in the least afraid of the water. She has developed a self-confidence reflected by a wide smile as she navigated the deep end in a foam float. She would fall off every once in a while but there was no panic in her face. It was comforting to see her as it was to see Rosemary hovering around and keeping a watch.

Last night I caught Rebecca using her hands to pick up the shredded Parmesan to put on her gnocchi. “There is a spoon for that! I am shocked at your manners,” I told her, in the presence of her friend. Rebecca's wise mother turned to tell me, “There are times when you should not pursue a battle. This is one such time.”

Man Eats Dog

2010-03-05T09:45:00.004-08:00

Over There
Faith Healing and the Original Hot Dog
By Mati Laansoo
Illustration by Marv Newland
Vancouver Magazine, March 1982

According to the legend on which the original zodiac is based, the dog was the eleventh of the 12 beasts to visit the bedside of the dying Buddha. In celebration of Chinese New Year last month, I found myself eating man’s best friend; but first some events leading up to it.

The British burdened as they are with enduring affectin for their four-legged friends, especial dogs and cats (although hundreds of English Societies are dedicated to the welfare of donkeys, pit ponies, budgies and mice, etc.), went berserk recently after a pair of sensation seeking hacks discovered a few trussed up mongrels at a remote village market in Northern Luzon, in the Philippines. The pitiful photographs, bearing lurid captions, appeared in the sleazy tabloids, and the nation’s pet lovers howled in protest. While countless Third World infants were dying from neglect and starvation, 30,000 Britons wrote condemning letters on the Philippine dog crisis, and 21 Members of Parliament asked questions in the House of Commons. To the great embarrassment of the diplomatic world, Margaret Thatcher, herself a devoted pet fan, demanded from the Ambassador to the Philippines and end to this brutality. It took His Excellency several days to understand what the fuss was about. As usual in these matters, the reality is somewhat different.

Although the Philippines is unofficially a dictatorship under martial law, and everything there is officially censored, the smell of Weimar was distinctly lacking when I arrived in Manila on my fact-finding mission. The few gracious Filipino friends who had even heard of the great dog scandal they had unwittingly precipitated regarded it as a joke invented by the press. Top officials of the Ministry of Tourism treated the matter with gentle derision.

“Tell us about the Englishmen,” they asked. “How can a nation that lovingly breeds partridges and pheasants in captivity for the sole purpose of shooting them by the thousands be outraged about a few stray dogs enhancing the dinner table of poor folks? ”

In a gesture of accommodations to my hosts, I promised to taste the truth myself.

I had originally journeyd to Baguio City in the Northern Philippines to check upon the doings of the Reverend Anthony Agpaoa, the celebrated faith healer who had been practicing psychic surgery on Western Canadians, among others, for many years. Tony had built up a large cult, and sensibly specialized on the profitable cancer patients. His trained eye singled out terminal cases who were left to die in their hotel rooms while the hypochondriacs, who made up the majority of his clientele, came back refreshed from the cure. Two weeks in the balmy tropics did wonders for the frozen Canadian winter blues. Tony bought and old Catholic monastery high on a hill overlooking Baguio City, rebuilt it and named it the Diplomatic Hotel. The package healing tours that soon sprang up included the charter flight, full room and board and daily afternoon trips to surrounding tourist spots. Early mornings were set aside for knifeless surgery to cure glaucoma, deafness, rheumatism, epilepsy, diabetes and leukemia. While all this went on, there was an outstanding warrant for his arrest in the United States for practising medicine without a license.

Tony’s vaunted gift was that of healing without the knife. His bare hands would routinely cut through skin, muscles and bowels to produce little bits of chicken liver and other conveniently available organ meats that had been prudently concealed in his sleeve. Of course, he left no mark nor even the slightest scar to show where the miracle had taken place, but there was no question in the minds of the grateful that Tony’s healing powers had come from anywhere but “up there.”

Tony always told his patients that he himself was not immortal. Everyone’s time would come sooner or later, he said and his, I was to discover, would come sooner. On the morning that I arrived at the Diplomatic Hotel, it was announced that the Rev. Anthony Agpaoa had suffered a massive heart attack on the evening before and was now in a coma on full life support systems at the military hospital. This news by no means deterred the 40 good citizens from Alberta and B.C. who continued to be operated on by four assistant healers, suspicious looking youngsters in T-shirts and Adidas runners who bore an uncanny resemblance to Manila cab drivers.

But back to the main story: man eats dog. The morning’s doings at the Diplomatic having left me somewhat puckish, my guide drove me to the Five Sisters Restaurant of the Slaughterhouse Compound. There I met the jovial proprietress Mrs. Marcia C. Villaneuve, a locally celebrated cook. The restaurant was empty except for a lone Jeepney driver eating his daily dog, and a quiet foursome dining on a mixed menu that included the house specialty. I learned from Mrs. Villaneuve that in the remote barrios of the Philippines, where the average income is less than $5 a week, homeless mongrels are sometimes sold for food instead of being gassed to death by the SPCA. She went on to point out that “fragrant meat,” as the Chinese call it, is considered a delicacy only when the diners know that it is dog they are eating.

I ordered a round of San Miguel beer for the Five Sister’s lunchtime patrons and a plate of canine casserole for me and my guide. The dish arrived promptly, a rather nondescript gray in appearance, its gravy dotted with a few bay leaves. The taste was very much like some of the better Chinese meat dishes done in garlic and black bean sauce: a bit chewy, somewhat spicy and vaguely redolent of pigs’ trotters with all the little leg bones and knuckle joints to crush on. Appearances notwithstanding, it was very tasty, and arguably good value at 10 Pesos, or $1.35.

Of course, I complimented Mrs. Villaneuve on the delicacy of her dish, and she in turn beamed her approval and suggested that I pass on the recipe for culinary adventurers overseas. The carcass she said, should be skinned and hanged by a competent butcher, after which the choice meat should be cut into bite-sized pieces and cooked in rice vinegar for a very long time until it becomes “al dente.” After that, the meat is salted and simmered in a broth of oil, garlic, bay leaf and pepper, with a dash of monosodium glutamate to bring out the bouquet. It is then served piping hot in its own rich gravy, with a side order of fried noodle and sliced green mangoes. All cultural impediments aside, the dish (as many early European navigators in the region have testified) is delicious, although like the barnyard chicken who has become familiar enough to have earned a name, likely less so if you happen to have known the dish wagging its tail earlier.

I confess that after my Philippine luncheon I now look at my canine friends with renewed respect, and rather suspect that that the feeling is mutual. These days, whenever I meet dogs fooling around in the street or being tedious at the pub, I just point my finger at them, like Charles Bronson in Death Wish, and they smarten up real quick, because they know.

An Apology For My Rosy Past

2010-03-05T09:40:00.003-08:00

Some of you might suspect that I am running out of ideas and inspiration to write my daily blog and that I am getting ready to shelve the now four-year-plus project. This would be far from the truth as I have no problem in drumming up stuff to put up here. If anything one of my problems is to stop my desire for multiple blogs in one day. This is a rare example of one.

So why is it that I am resorting to pulling a Lazarus on articles written many years ago by writers that I admired who worked for the magazine, Vancouver Magazine, run by Mac (a.k.a Malcolm ) Parry? You might suspect that to anybody my age (67) the past will always be rosier and better. In fact I would not agree with you. So much stuff nowadays is so much better.

When we arrived to Vancouver in 1975 the city’s bread was a distinct but nondescript variety of cardboard. I longed for the bolillos of Mexico and the handmade corn tortillas. But it has all changed. Even Safeway now bakes a credible croissant and a three-cheese focaccia. My wife’s Sony clock radio (with a CD player) sounds better than some of my early stereo systems of of rosy yesteryear. The plastic housing of modern lenses might not have the heft or the feel of my old Takumars and Nikkors but their computer designed optics surpasses my old clunkers in performance. And to end all arguments about that rose and better past what would be your old-fashioned equivalent to modern Viagra?

Nevertheless I don’t completely accept that the present is better than the past. My granddaughter Rebecca refuses to use my mother’s cook books. She will not consult Mary Lou Glass’s Recipe for Two (1947), Rombauer/ Becker, The Joy of Cooking (1953 Edition) or Marion Brown’s The Southern Cook Book (1968). But although she says that the recipes she finds on the internet are better because they are more modern she will have several helpings of Adalyn Lindley’s Chicken a la Barbara from the latter Southern Cook Book when I prepare it for some of our Saturday dinners.

What these stories and essays from the past do prove is that during Mac Parry’s stewardship of Vancouver Magazine from April 1974 to December 1988 we had a lively, intimate, warm, interesting, challenging city magazine that was visually arresting with many illustrators and photographers who contributed. The magazine had a policy of monthly “piss-ups” where contributors would feast on terrible chips and cheap raw-tasting Portuguese Vinho Verde or beer. Writers, illustrators and photographers would compare notes and ideas would spring from these for future issues of the magazine.

It was Mati Laansoo (who is not ashamed to admit to have eaten dog), an Estonian writer with Texan tendencies to collect small arms and store them under his pillow who recently told me, “Mac was like William Shawn. He liked to surround himself with a variety of good writers, and illustrators and he encouraged them to give their all.”

It was Mac Parry who first instigated me to write my first piece on my experiences as a sailor in the Argentine Navy. I remember a young man who came in one day with slides of people wearing Hawaii T-shirts. He ran a piece on that subject a few months later. One of the pictures featured a Santa Claus attached to two scantily clad (tiny T-shirts) in Hawaii which elicited hate mail a few hours after the magazine hit the stands.

This was indeed the case when Laansoo’s Over There hit the March 1982 stands. There were letters and furious phone calls from pet lovers.

I remember that March 1982 very well. A month before Mac had taken me to the Cecil Hotel for a beer and told me, “Sean Rossiter has written a piece about his cat. It has cancer. I want you to go home and photograph your cat and make sure its whiskers are sharp. But I did not only have the cover. I also had some interesting pictures for a piece written by Les Wiseman.

At the time writer Les Wiseman and were avid followers of the descendants of Salome and we came up with a ploy to convince Mac that it was worth a feature. We convinced him on the business side of exotic dancing.

I think that in 1982 Mac had skillfully managed to keep his independence as an editor from the hands of our publisher Ronald Stern. It seemed like Mac could run articles about nonsense (such as the piece by Ben Metcalfe in this blog a few days past) or wild dogs in Iran and Stern would not protest about these stories not having the substance to attract advertisers to the magazine’s pages. In fact Mac came up with the idea for running two different covers that March. One was to feature the cat and the other a stripper. It would have been an experiment that would have preceded Chicago Magazine’s run a few years later featuring the city’s mayor smiling in one batch and serious in another. Stern quashed the plan and I never had to test the waters of demanding a double cover pay!

The illustration to Laansoo’s piece is by our very own famous illustrator and animator Marv Newland. I suspect that he used a cheap copier type technology to come up with the concept. He did confirm with me (yesterday) that Laansoo did indeed provide him with the restaurant’s bill of sale as proof. In the illustration, the man on the left is Mati Laansoo. The man on the right (described as “my guide”) by Laansoo is Gary Marchant. Marchant wrote what is considered to be one of the best travel columns ever, anywhere, called Faraway Places for Vancouver Magazine.

I remember with great fun the day that Marchant told me a story of traveling through some remote African country (it could have been Chad). He arrived at a small town exhausted and hungry. He inspected the large pot simmering over a fire at his little hotel. He spotted some bones in the stew. The cook gestured with his arms to represent a bird so Marchant assumed the stew was chicken or some similar fowl. He helped himself to a large portion. He was licking his chops when he spotted a little horrific skull staring at him. It was the little head of a bat.

Perhaps my past, or at least my past as a magazine photographer was a rosier one. Perhaps the present with the universal and all-encompassing presence of the net has made those magazines of my era irrelevant. My friend Mark Budgen says I am sentimentalizing it. My friend John Lekich says that those magazines had heart and the present ones don’t. You who read this can be impartial judges.

As for me I remember my grandmother’s words, “Nadie te quita lo bailado.” Nobody can take away from you the pleasures you had. And many pleasures I had reading the stories of Lansoo, Wiseman, Lekich, Marchant, Hunter (Bob), Metcalfe and many others who all wrote from the heart.

El Santo De La Trompeta

2010-03-04T11:24:00.003-08:00

Throwing Dishes & Blueberry Cream Pies

2010-03-03T10:48:00.007-08:00

I divide the people that populate our world in two. There are people who throw dishes in anger and those who don’t. I am from the first category.

On Sunday Rebecca stamped her feet and started yelling how she hated making pie crust. She showed it to me and told me, “It’s too hard. Something did not happen right.” And she promptly threw it into the kitchen trash can and stormed off.

At age 12 we are all saying that Rebecca is at that point in her life where she is about to become a woman in body while the mind is not quite there yet. I am not all that sure of this.

In 1957 I took this picture of my Revell replica plastic kit model S.S. Constitution (Old Ironsides) with an Agfa Silette. I placed my finished ship on a bed of cotton. The picture is not all that sharp. I have played around with Photoshop here to make it look like a fake late 19th century photo.

My S.S. Constitution survived with many other models I built (cars, airplanes, ships and tanks) so that when I became a late teenager I gave them all away to my cousins, the Forments. There were several models that did not survive. One I remember well was H.M.S. Bounty. I was carefully applying the rigging (black thread) with tweezers when something just did not occur to my liking. I screamed. I got up. I threw the ship to the floor and then I jumped on it. My mother was all upset and almost in tears. I never quite outgrew these fits of destructive temper although I must confess here that when I am about to throw something I always weigh its value as opposed to its immediate need in my life. It might take a short second but I always think it first.

I had been considered a gifted painter and drawer since I was 5 and by the time I was 10 I had been given many lessons. It was about then that I would become frustrated with an attempt to paint this or that that I would pick up my work in progress and tear it up as loudly as I could. At age 14 I suddenly and finally stopped painting. I received my last paliza (whipping) from my mother as punishment for my artistic block.

My wife Rosemary, at first, like my mother did not know how to deal with my fits of temper. She would tell me to stop while screaming or crying. This always made it worse as I had an audience. In our early years of marriage most of the beautiful tea cups (some were Noritake or Wedgwood) went flying across the kitchen narrowly missing my distraught Rosemary. Here are two cups (the upper one is Wedgwood, and the lower Noritake) that survived my china onslaught.

It took a while but Rosemary figured it out. She stopped being my audience and ignored my outbursts. These outbursts were almost always followed by intensely powerful migraines. My intelligent Rosemary gave me no comfort. It was sometime about 10 years ago when my weekly migraines suddenly ceased and I have not broken anything for years.

I observe in Rebecca something of myself. I am going to see if I can approach her with logic and explain how I was and how I regret the destruction of my H.M.S. Bounty. I have told her that anger and temper are never an excuse for rudeness. I think I will give her as a gift my two cups (I do have the saucers as Rosemary must have hidden them during one of my tantrums) and perhaps they will serve her as a guide to controlling her temper.

Ever patient and low key Rosemary removed the pie crust from the trash can and rolled it out and lined a Pyrex pie plate. Rebecca was furious but she calmed down enough to say, “I will finish it.” This she did. She followed the recipe blindly and added the full count of sugar. The pie was too sweet. She was furious and refused to take a few slices home for her father.

Just a few minutes before I started this I helped myself to the last slice of Rebecca’s blueberry cream pie. It may have been a tad sweet but thank God for women like my Rosemary.

Noble-Winged Seraphs Envied

2010-03-02T20:00:00.027-08:00

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.

She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.

Chapter 1, Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

Some months back I took my two granddaughters to an Arts Club production of a musical called Nevermore: The Imaginary Life and Mysterious Death of Edgar Allan Poe. Even Lauren who is 8 managed to enjoy the musical play. She liked the costumes which resembled a modern Goth version of Alice in Wonderland. Rebecca had many questions on Edgar Allan Poe so I read The Telltale Heart to her after dinner. I did not do as a good a job as Iggy Pop and she found Poe a bit on the dull and repulsive side. She thought the Vincent Price version of The Fall of the House of Usher, renamed The House of Usher was cheesy. But at age 12 she knows more about Poe than the average 12-year-old and perhaps Poe might grow on her in the future.

My interest in Edgar Allan Poe began in 1957 when one of my English teacher Brothers of the Holy Cross at St Ed’s High School in Austin, Texas played a record in class. It was James Mason narrating Poe’s Annabel Lee. It was only a few weeks ago that I found the recording on one web page and as par for the course in this day and age of Google there is no information on date and record label. In fact my searches have taken me nowhere.

But I have a vivid memory of that recording but not vivid enough to remember that the recording had music in the background.

Thanks to James Mason I became a lifelong fan of all things Poe. I have read everything Poe wrote.

Of late I have read books in which Poe is a character such as in Matthew Pearl’s The Poe Shadow and Louis Bayard’s Pale Blue Eyes. The former is an extremely convoluted novel and the latter a bit more satisfying in which Poe, as a young cadet in West Point, assists a famous investigator after several brutal murders occur at the school.

I also liked Laura Lippman’s In A Strange City, 2001 (a novel in her series in which the main protagonist is a young female journalist-turned-nvestigator who lives in Baltimore, where Poe died and is buried). The novel centres around the well-known Baltimore ritual: Every year, on Edgar Allan Poe's birthday, a mysterious figure visits the writer's grave, leaving behind three roses and a bottle of cognac. When Tess gets wind of a plot to unmask the so-called Poe Toaster, she decides to stand guard. To her amazement, two visitors approach -- and one is shot and killed.

Some reader’s might know that for the first time ever the Poe Toaster did not show up this year on January 19.

I enjoyed a the 1951 film The Man With the Cloak (based on a short story, The Gentleman in Paris, by John Dickson Carr) with Joseph Cotten, Barbara Stanwyck, Leslie Caron and Louis Calhern. Cotton plays a failed poet called Dupin (!).At the end of the film, when Madeline (! The Fall of the House of Usher), played by Leslie Caron, goes looking for Dupin at a bar to thank him for a service rendered. Dupin's generous bartender Flaherty (Jim Backus) tells her he has gone, leaving only a seemingly worthless IOU for his sizable bar bill. On one side is a draft of a verse about a woman named Annabel Lee and the IOU's signature, which reveals Dupin's real name: Edgar Allan Poe.

While researching a bit of Poe to explain to Rebecca, I found out the hitherto (for me!) connection between Edgar Allan Poe and Vladimir Nabokov. It seems that the novel (published in Paris in 1955) was going to be originally called A Kingdom by the Sea. Humbert Humbert’s first love (unconsummated) is a young girl called Annabel Leigh.

This has led me to be currently reading The Annotated Lolita, Edited and with a preface by Alfred Appel, Jr. Two bookmarks are compulsory equipment here to keep track of all the footnotes, explanations, parody, coincidences (probably all intentional on the part of Nabokov) of this annotated version.

This Lolita came to me via former Vancouver Magazine associate editor (“Rock’roll died after the Beatles.”) and Nabokov scholar, Don Stanley. Three weeks ago the door bell rang at 8 in the evening. I opened the door to Don Stanley and wife. He said, “I have something for you,” and handed me the annotated version of Lolita.

One mystery remains for me. Since we know Nabokov published Lolita in 1955 (Olympia Press, Paris). When did James Mason record his reading of Poe’s Annabel Lee? Was the recording a possible reason Mason was chosen for the role of Humbert Humbert in Kubrick’s film Lolita in 1962? Or was it all Nabokovian coincidence?

The stand-in for Lolita here is Vancouver actress and mother of two, Corrie Clark. Clark recently conveyed to me the following:

These days I am working hard on screenwriting, among the days of motherhood. I am currently writing a screenplay about Emily Carr and again, ironically her
relationship as a 'surrogate mother' to a little girl who eventually lived with her for a few years when she was ...yes, 12.

Lady Fey by Ben Metcalfe

2010-03-01T16:18:00.020-08:00

A moral tale of endurance in Depression-era Manitoba
by Ben Metcalfe

This story is about a fan dancer, a bush pilot, a Mountie, my father, my brother, George Lloyd, Jimmy McGuire, Fats Hamilton, the Uptown Theatre in Winnipeg, Charlie Chaplin and myself.

That is about everyone. Unless you want me to count the dog team. They were certainly in it and part of it, although I can’t speak for them, and I don’t know anyone who can at this late moment in time.

But it all began with the fan dancer. That’s for sure.

Now, there have been four professional dancers in my life of any account qua dancer. One, of course was my beautiful Aunt Vera Dudley of the Ziegfield Follies; another was Carioca, a belly dancer who performed a the Dugout, an esoteric bar in the basement of the Metropole Hotel in Cairo during the Second World War until the British arrested her as a spy; another was Margot Fonteyn, with whom I appeared as a super in The Sadlers Wells production of The Snow Queen at the Orpheum in 1957, thanks to Hugh Pickett; but before them all came the fan dancer.

Her name was Fey Baker, and she was the first, and if the trend continues, the last fan dancer in my life.

Fey was not, of course, the only fan dancer in the world at the time. It was, after all, The Depression, which had not even been capitalized as yet, or accorded the definite article, and was known simply as “a depression.” Fan dancing was a very big then, like miniature golf courses, flag pole sitting and roller skating across the continent in the summer time. Sally Rand was at her peak, and very soon to be immortalized at the Chicago World’s Fair where she would give new hope to every working girl who was not working. There were, consequently, lots of fan dancers.

Fey Baker, I suspect, was one of those girls who had been unable to get a job at Woolworth’s or dealing off the arm in a greasy spoon, although the only evidence I have for her neophytism is the fact that she traveled with her mother as her chaperone. It just did not seem reasonable to my 13-year-old mind that a real fan dancer would travel with her mother, let alone have a chaperone. I could have been wrong.

Chaperoned or not, though, she created a sensation in the clerkishly respectable little inner suburb of River Heights when she turned up as the star turn during the intermission between the double bill at the garishly new Uptown Theater.

It was somehow aptly innovative of The Uptown, that while the cheaper movie houses in the shabbier corners of Winnipeg were giving away china to get you in. The Uptown should give you a fan dancer, so to speak.

True, you did get to keep the china, but you had to see at least 48 movies to acquire a full set, whereas you could take in a full set of Fey Baker at one sitting.

Naturally, my friends, George Lloyd, Jimmy McGuire and Fats Hamilton, and my brother Robert and I, all devout if sudden aficionados of the dance, were anxious to see Miss Baker.

Naturally is putting it mildly. Considering that we were all suffering the angst of early puberty, a condition well known pathologically for its virility, virulence and voraciousness, not to mention its lack of discrimination and discretion, we were, let us face it, openly crazed with lust.

The only naked woman any of us had seen in our lives were our respective mothers, and that when we were only three at most. The chance of seeing a strange woman, especially a woman of Miss Baker’s proportions when (by all public accounts) she was stark naked, albeit tactically obscures here and there now and again by one or another of her fans, drove us into a frenzy of collective fantasies of such recherché and rococo variety as only a Seventeenth Century Florentine jade could invent ad libitum.

We were determined to see Fey Baker if she were the last thing we would see on earth. We were already going rapidly blind with desire. There was, of course, a problem. One was permitted to attend the movies only for the Saturday matinee’s wholesome fare of Tom Mix, Ken Maynard, Andy Clyde and Johnny Weismuller, whereas Fey Baker appeared only in the evening séances.

The price had something to do with it in that time - a dime vis-a-vis a quarter – but the main consideration, especially in my father’s view, was that the movies were bad enough morally in the daytime without compounding our turpitude by going to them after dark, with all the night-time’s concomitant evils.

My mother lived for the movies, but my father preferred church, which was a combination of opposites out of which they concocted the perfect compromise: my mother went to church with him on Sundays, and my father went to the movies with her on Wednesdays. I suppose it was a measure of their respective devotion that, while my mother never showed a sign of repentance or conversion in all her life, my father did succumb, over the years to the charms of Charlie Chaplin.

Indeed, even by this time, Charlie Chaplin had become for my father the epitome of all secular virtue. What with the depression on earth and war in the wind, not every prospect pleased my father, but God was still in his heaven, and only man was vile, with the exception of Charlie Chaplin.

Imagine our delight, then, to learn that Charlie Chaplin’s new film, City Lights, was going to be shown at The Uptown during the week when Fey Baker would do her own stark naked thing with the fans!

Instantly, with the perception of young hawks, we discerned the slightest, hair-wide fissure in my father’s most fundamental principle, and forthwith we began a campaign to breach it wide enough to let two pubescent voluptuaries pass through. Our wedge into his resolve was the thought, perfectly plausible at the time, that unless we saw Charlie Chaplin’s new film now, at night, we would never see it in our entire lifetime.

From this distance in time, and in the taunting light of my own failures later to see through the blandishments and deceptions of my own children, I do not mean to gloat when I say that my father swallowed our rationale hook, line and sinker. I beg his forgiveness now, but we were uncommonly proud of our guile at the time. The prospect of his sons never seeing Charlie Chaplin’s film was too much for him to bear, and he cracked.

And as soon as he cracked, George Lloyd, Jimmy McGuire and Fats Hamilton had but to convey the news to their own Dads, and they were as broken reeds before a withering blast of boyish pleas for justice and equity in our block.

I can still hear Fats Hamilton’s old man musing along the lines that, if Joseph Bennet Betcalfe would make an exception in this case, James Hamilton sure as hell might, too.

And so it was settled. We all went to see Charlie Chaplin and Fey Baker in City Lights on the opening Monday night: my brother and I, George Lloyd, Jimmy McGuire and Fats Hamilton.

And all our fathers.

And we all agreed it was a hell of a fine movie. My own father enjoyed it so much that he went to see it again with my mother on her regular Wednesday night out.

As for the fan dancer, her name never came up, except when the gang was in a committee of the whole the following days in the school washroom, hallways, lobbies, playgrounds, street corners, garages, tree forts, empty box cars, woodsheds, public libraries and anywhere else we could get up a quorum, which was usually any two of us, or one if necessary.

From one meeting to the next, it was moved, seconded and carried that Miss Baker had revealed more and more and more of her most intimate body to our committee than she had shown advertently or inadvertently to anyone.

Within a matter of days, in fact, it became clear to us all that she might as well have left her mother the chaperone at home, for all the good she did, and her fans to boot, for all they concealed of her flesh. Very soon, then, we realized that she had singled us out in the front row, where we had persuaded our fathers that we could see City Lights better, and had been making desperately lewd attempts to get us to go home with her after the show.

If one of us forgot momentarily some particular suggestive gesture on her part, or some interesting detail of her body, like a hair or an unusual coloration of the flesh in some out-of-the-way crevice, another would remind him of it without the slightest disjunction of continuity either in theory or in practice.’

The Uptown held her over for two weeks, but although she left town, we held her over as long as we could in our committee meetings until something better turned up, which it did not.

And then the big story broke…

The first I knew of it was from my father mumbling, “Well what do you know about that? “ and shaking his head reflectively as he passed The Winnipeg Tribune to my mother over their after-supper cup of tea.

“Hmmmmmppphhh,” said my mother, after reading the headline and passing the paper back to my father. My mother never read more than the headlines, and then only at my father’s suggestion. Usually, he would read the entire edition, from the front page disasters to the back page horoscopes, then fold it up and put it down with the comment that there was nothing in the paper again. My mother knew that he was keeping an eye out for the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and would let her know in plenty of time it they should turn up at Portage & main. Meanwhile, she relaxed, or worried about whether Clark Gable was suited to Carol Lombard.

This unusually sanguine attitude of my father to a piece of news did, however, arouse my own curiosity, and I turned my attention from my homework to the front page where the main headline screamed out in black letters the size of boxcars:

FAN DANCER & BUSH PILOT
DOWN IN NORTHERN BLIZZARD

Yes, it was none other than our own Fey Baker, who had gone north from her Winnipeg engagements to entertain the miners in the then-new frontier mining town of Flin Flon.

On the flight back, the plane had disappeared, and was long overdue.

Now, whereas the Fey Baker fantasy had been held over, as I say, by our committee as long as it was feasible, it had been receding and becoming vaguely blurred and generalized quite naturally before the onslaught of the Stanley Cup play-offs and the careers of the brothers Conacher, etcetera.

The news of Miss Baker’s plight jolted us back to fantasy.

Without much delay, our committee met the next day in every possible nook and cranny of school and neighborhood to review this revitalizing turn of events, to concoct and embellish new scenarios and to take turns to play the role of bush pilot, whose luck we could not entirely believe.

The fact that the fan dancer and her escort were lost in a mean temperature of some fifty below zero did not chill our imagination. Indeed, our imagination was too preoccupied even to think if about providing Miss Baker with anything warmer than her fans. How she endured, I have no idea.

A fan dancer lost in the wilderness with a bush pilot! How can you impossibly improve on a story like that?

Well you cold send a Mountie out to look for them with a team of sleigh dogs, couldn’t you?

You certainly could, and they certainly did, and the ensuing tension was even more exquisitely unbearable.

Hitler was taking over Germany from Field Marshall Hindenburg. Mussolini was preparing to seize the entire Mediterranean Sea, Britain was going off the gold standard, Dillinger was shooting up the United States, Roosevelt was launching his New Deal, the Liberal Party of Canada had been given a well-earned rest from power by the conservative Janitorial Party, and Japan was moving into China.

But not as far as our committee was concerned. For us there was only one current event: Topic A.

Unaccustomed as we were to reading more than the funnies and the hockey scores, we were now unconscionably interested in the front pages of the daily press insofar as they informed us the progress of the search for the fan dancer and her bush pilot and, as was bound to happen, the Mountie, too. Because, soon, enough, all three were lost, and apart from everything else, this created complications in our committee.

We did not quite know, in our mid-western simplicity, how you handle this kind of ménage à trois. If we had even heard of a ménage à trois.

The best we could come up with was that the bush pilot and the Mountie would simply have to take turns being in love with the fan dancer, while the fan dancer would simply have to be in love with whomever stayed in the cabin (we eventually built them a cabin, but Miss Baker still naked) while the other one went out to hunt for food and chop firewood.

There was a certain reluctance for a long time, too, for many of us to become the Mountie. Not that we had anything against Mounties at the time. It was just that we had all got so comfortable in the role of the bush pilot.

Meanwhile, the search went on. And, eventually, of course, the most publically exposed ménage à trois in Canadian history was found and brought back to civilization, where, as they returned, there was a great deal of public speculation as to whether Fey Baker would marry the bush pilot or the Mountie,

It was written into the manners and the mores of that place and time that no girl, fan dancer or not, could spend so long in the bush with two men without marrying one of them very soon.

My mother, who was a follower of such things as Rose Marie in real life, figured it would be the Mountie who got the girl. But my father pointed out that it would have to be the bush pilot, because the Mountie was under marrying age according to the prevailing stringencies of the Force. And there the matter ended as far as my parents were concerned

As for our committee, we continued to raise the matter for speculation some time after it had dropped by society as a whole.

We dallied, briefly, over the rumor that the sleigh dogs had suffered badly in the event, having been eaten by the Mountie the bush pilot and maybe even the fan dancer, too, just to keep up their strength in the rigors of the Manitoba winter. But this was never established incontrovertibly, though it has a plausible enough ring to it.

Life eventually resumed its everyday course. George Lloyd became and anti-submarine bomber pilot in the RCAF, and survived to retire and play golf; Jimmy McGuire was shot down and killed over the North Sea as an air gunner with the RCAF; Fats Hamilton has been trying to console his parents for the loss of his brother Jim, with the Seaforth Highlanders; all our Dads are gone, of course. The Uptown Theater is now a bowling alley; and you know what happened to Charlie Chaplin, apropos which I must confess to the shades of those Dads that we did, in the event, get a number of other chances to see City Lights, although we had no way of predicting Television then. And, anyway, I have since figured that we are quits, seeing as how we helped them get to see the fan dancer, too.

Maybe the bush pilot and the Mountie are still around and will come forward to sue me, and they are most welcome. There’s a couple of things I would like to ask them.

As for the fan dancer, I never heard of her again, but I can say fondly and sincerely now, as Jimmy Durante might have said, “Good night, Miss Baker, wherever you are.”

And with Browning, “How did we love you? Let me count the ways. “

First published in the January 1980 Vancouver Magazine

Behind Lady Fey

The photograph that appeared in the January 1980 issue of Vancouver Magazine which was used to illustrate one of my favourite pieces ever written by anybody (in this case by my friend, E. Bennet Metcalfe) has an interesting story on how it came about.

In the late 70s and early 80s Vancouver Magazine was a Mecca for the best editorial illustrators of the city and the country. These were Marv Newland, Brent Boates, Ian McLeod, Ian Bateson, Barb Wood, Bernie Lyon and more that I cannot remember.

In my presence (probably an editorial gaffe as I should not have been privy to the conversation) art director Rick Staehling proposed Metcalfe’s piece should be illustrated while the editor, Malcolm Parry argued for a photograph. Lucky for me Parry prevailed and I was assigned to shoot it.

I chose a gay review club on West Pender Street called BJ’s because they had an old fashioned type stage and a spotlight. As my subject I chose my blood sucking friend Inga V who was an experienced dancer with and sans fans. Plus she had the added talent of being a makeup artist and stylist. I don't remember where we obtained the feathers. They probably had them in the costume department of BJ's.

I have always been proud of my ability to shoot well-exposed and sharp photographs. For the first time (and last) I saw myself focusing and then unfocusing my lens a tad, to get and old-photograph blurred look. I helped this along by using a slow shutter which might have been 1/15 second or slower.

My Passion For Fashion

2010-02-28T20:37:00.009-08:00

This is a guest blog by my granddaughter Rebecca Stewart, 12.

I have always had a great passion for fashion. I find that fashion is like art, your clothes are the canvas, and the accessories are the paint which is the finishing touch for a great piece of art.

This first picture is one my favorite pictures because it reminds me of the picture of Gemma Ward in my Teen Vogue handbook that I keep in my brown pleather tote. The scarf I am wearing is a white printed scarf by Old Navy.

I would choose flats over tennis shoes any day because you feel pretty in them but there is no need to worry about foot problems, which stilettos will cause. I love the neutral metallic color of my Aldo statement flats.

One of my favorite things to do on a rainy afternoon is to bake. Though baking is entertaining, it can be messy as well, so my solution was to find a cute and useful apron, to protect my black clothes from flour dust.

You wouldn’t believe that this blue satin-like dress is actually one of my grandmother's old night shifts she used to wear a long time ago. I just love the icy blue color.

As you can tell I quite enjoy wearing scarves. This one I’m wearing is a floral printed scarf from Old Navy.

These days I have been wearing my turquoise Olympic sweater because the Vancouver Olympic Games are happening as I write. You might not see it but there is an inukshuk on the front of it.

I adore this painting (by Jim Cummins) of my mum, it looks like her. So I decided to wear this Twilight shirt because my mum is a real twi-hard.

This floral dress is one I got in Los Cabos Mexico. I felt it was appropriate to do my hair in a messy updo, to show the dresses halter straps. Behind me is a painting (Jim McKenzie) featuring my Aunt Ale and my mother on a ferry boat in Active Pass.

This shirt was given to me by friend Mina and I like the colors. That’s me in the background a long time ago.

This last photo is not that special but I still thought it would be nice to have it here because it includes my sister Lauren. I am playing the piano while wearing a very baggy button up shirt so I cinched it with a studded blue belt.

Dilations Into A Runcible Cat

2010-02-27T12:40:00.003-08:00

The following column by my friend Ben Metcalfe (1919-2003) appeared in the January, 1980 issue of Vancouver Magazine. The wonderful illustration was pointillistically drawn by my friend Ian Bateson (who is very much alive).

Everyone knows that Edward Lear was queer for runcible things, like hats and spoons and cats, but does anyone know what runcible is? I doubt it very much.

The only possible exception could be myself. At least I have tried to find out, not alone for the sake of disinterested scholarship, although scholars are welcome to the pickings, but because I have a runcible cat.

Since Lear implanted it there in the late Nineteenth Century, the word runcible has been entrenched in facetious English usage; if rarely called upon, always available. Yet no one, not even the fastidious H.W. Fowler, nor his successor Sir Ernest Gowens, nor the great Oxford Dictionary itself, has dared to explore it, define it, or at least venture, if ever so roughly, when and how it could be used.

Except that it became suddenly my own ineluctable portion to enquire into its mysteries root and branch, I, too, might have continued mutely to acquiesce in its existence without knowledge of its meaning.

Which, thinking on it, is not precisely true, for it is the very pith of runcible that one knows its meaning without necessarily knowing that one knows it – something, in other words, that can be learned, not taught. Else how, for instance, should I have perceived without instruction that I have a runcible cat? Yet I did.

It was perhaps his contrast with the other one, who is definitely an unruncible cat, if that is the proper word for a cat that is not runcible, although I shall be coming to that problem shortly.

Certainly, everything else being equal, if you happened upon a runcible and an unruncible cat in the same moment, you would know immediately which was which. I know that I would, although I would not go so far as to say the same for hats and spoons.

Our runcible cat’s name is Mr. Smith. At any rate, that is what we call him. If T.S. Eliot was right about cats, and I daresay he was, Mr. Smith has two other names: his real name and the name he calls himself. Mr. Smith, however, is the only name I can vouch for; and he does answer to it in his way.

Our unruncible cat’s name is Hui Neng, after the Sixth Patriarch of he Ch’an Sect (638-713), the famous Dhyana Master of the Tang Dynasty, which has nothing whatsoever to do with his unruncibility but only with the fact that I was given him by an equally unruncible shopkeeper in Chinatown. He, too – I mean Hui Neng – probably has two other names, both secret, and once had a fourth, Candy, given him by his previous proprietor but rejected by myself as utterly inappropriate.

Now, in this short space, I have already extended the word runcible into two derivative forms; i.e. unruncible and unruncibiliy, both admittedly too loose for comfort, so it is imperative that we look into Lear’s original word lest we wallow in misconstruction.

The word runcible itself is apparently an adjective of sorts, though with subtly plausible affinities to an unused (because unknown?) verb, which may or not be runce, or even runc, and, whatever it is, may or may not be transitive; it is of no consequence.

It may be best at this point, too, that I remark that I am merely a writer, neither a grammarian, nor an etymologist, nor a linguist, but merely a writer.

Be that as it may, the deepest one can dig with satisfaction into the roots of the word runcible in the Oxford, or any other dictionary of the English language is runci.

Before runci, one gets runca, as in runcation, meaning the act of weeding; and words like runch (a kind of weed); runchie (another word for weeds, used generally by rurigeneous, that is country folk); and after runci, runcle ( a kind of beet). All of which take us nowhere, and leaves cats, if not hats and spoons, far behind.

So back to runci…

The first possibility is runcinate, an adjective signifying a surface that is saw-toothed, with lobes curving towards its base, deriving from the Latin runcina, meaning plane, but apparently often mistaken for a saw.

This characteristic might well occur in spoons, I suppose and (although God know how) also in hats. But while it is more or less true that a cat’s tongue is more or less runcinate, it does not seem quite enough to justify calling the whole cat runcinate, let alone runcible. For would not that make all cats runcible? And is it not the whole point that all cats are not runcible?

Hui Neng would certainly testify to that. And I imagine that Lear would agree. So much for runcinate.

The second, and last, possibility is runcival, meaning several and mutually unrelated things, but interesting at first sound because, if one were to imagine a Spaniard enunciating runcival, one would certainly hear him say runcible, for Spanish-speaking peoples, especially Castillians [sic], cannot, or at any rate do no, sav V, but turn it into B, as in Biba Zapata!

Would that Edward Lear had been even remotely Spanish, and at least half our quest would be done. He was, of course, not.

Neither is it recorded anywhere that he was afflicted by one of those charming impediments not unusual in the speech of the English educated classes, the most common of which turned the R into a W, as in Wichard, or Wonald, or Wuth. Or wuncible? But, of course, that wouldn’t do; and in any case he was, again, not.

Perhaps, where there is plenty of room for speculation, runcival, or rouncival as it was commonly spelled after its first appearance in the Sixteenth Century, wormed its way into Lear’s yeasty mind, fermented there and gave off a more esoteric form.

It is a curious enough word in its own right, thought to derive from the place name, Roncevalles (bramble valley), a tiny, lovely place in the Pyrenees not far from Pamplona. And, while today it means only a large variety of garden pea, it was once used to denote giganticism, robustiousness, a heavy fall or crash, a form of alliterative verse, a witch, and was perhaps the best of all possible nouns for a woman of large build and boisterous or loose manners. Curious indeed, and precisely the word for Judy LaMarsh, but not for our Mr. Smith. And least of all for Hui Neng.

Yet Mr. Smith is undeniably runcible in the precise way that Edward Lear unquestionably meant the word to signify, whether or not it seethed up out of his awareness of runcival.

How so, if he is not pea-like, alliterative or witchy, and not even rarely falls heavily about the place like a big, boisterous woman (although he is big); how so is Mr. Smith or any cat runcible?

It is not because of the word, of that much we can be sure.

Cats do not fit themselves to ready-made words, not runcible cats, that is. As the line comes before the meaning in calligraphy, so does the runcible cat appear before the word.

People and most others – Hui Neng, for example make themselves look like available words; such as beautiful, slim, clever, rich, adorable and popular. Not so a runcible cat.

For a runcible cat there is no word, wherefore he is runcible. It is as simple as that. Or as the scholars say, Q.E.D.

Edward Lear, however, knowing that people need words whether or not they understand their meaning, and being the greatest wordsmith of us all, smithied us a word that clearly means everything and nothing at once.

And he employed it with such aptness as left nothing to doubt. As in…

His body is perfectly spherical,
He weareth a runcible hat.
Or…
They dined on mince and slices of
Quince,
Which they ate with a runcible spoon…
Or…
He has gone to fish, for his aunt
Jobiska’s
Runcible Cat with crimson whiskers!

Runcible is as runcible does, of course, notwithstanding the fact that no one knows what it does, and that probably goes for hats and spoons as much as it does for cats, although I do not claim to speak for hats and spoons in this case. Only cats.

Four Men Of Impecable Good Taste

2010-02-26T20:28:00.010-08:00

I fell for the first Canadian I ever met. I married Rosemary Healey in Mexico City in 1968. I knew nothing of Canada.

She told me of a man called Pierre Trudeau who was the Canadian Prime Minister and she played me records of Gilles Vigneault. I wasn’t fazed by the first ( I did not understand Rosemary’s hero-worship of the man) nor was I impressed by the singing of the second. My mother had harped for many years about an “ugly French Canadian patois”. The few Canadians I had been exposed to had been the rowdy French kind in Acapulco and Veracruz. My mother had told me, “They are French Canadian,” as an explanation for their loud behaviour.

Then my Yorkshire friend (and godfather of my eldest daughter) Andrew Taylor brought a record album that had a deadpan and depressing looking man on the cover. He sang a melancholic song called Suzanne and an even more depressing So Long Marianne. On another day he insisted on playing a record by a woman called Joni Mitchell. I was into Joan Baez and Carole King. I was not interested.

I did not find Canadians in the least exciting with the exception of my lovely wife. I was much too busy admiring her shapely legs and feeling how lucky I was. I was impressed on how she planned to go to the hospital to have our first daughter on a Friday so as to go back to work as soon as possible the next week. When my friends asked my about my wife I would invariably say she is of a “hardy Canadian stock”. Very soon Rosemary wore the financial pants of our family.

One day (before we got married) I took her to lunch to a cocina economica (a cheap Mexican home-style restaurant with a fixed daily menu) and I was shocked to see her use a toothpick. I had to explain to her that this would be considered uncouth by most of my friends and my mother. She never ever used a toothpick again.

When we finally decided to move up to Vancouver with our two Mexican-born daughters I remember distinctly that my youngest daughter’s godfather, Raul Guerrero Montemayor, a polyglot who had been educated in Switzerland, told me, “I am sure you will do well in Canada but don’t forget that the fact that Canadians are mostly white does not necessarily make them civilized.” He used the more encompassing Spanish term “educado” which includes culture, manners and education.

It was in Vancouver that through my early introduction to CBC Radio I found that the correct pronunciation was not New-Found-Land but Newfun-Land. I was hooked to the CBC then.

For many of my years here (well into the early 90s) I felt like a tourist in a beautiful city (in spite of its architecture I would tell my visitors from down south). I did become a Canadian citizen but having been born and raised in Argentina and then in Mexico made it difficult to experience the kind of exuberant feeling displayed these last weeks during our very own Olympics.

Time has warmed me to Leonard Cohen and Joni Mitchell and I am proud that Trudeau was a Canadian statesman. I enjoyed his deft manipulation of language. But more than anything I admired Trudeau’s intelligence and class. Rosemary was right all the time.

Of late I have been thinking a lot about class and good taste. I cringe at many of the Olympic shenanigans reported by the much too gushy Vancouver Sun. I prefer the understated and not complete (at least not 100%) acceptance of the 2010 Winter Olympics when I listen to Rick Cluff’s Early Edition on CBC Radio 1. I have been listening to him daily as I take my Rosemary to her Sprott-Shaw computer classes downtown at 8 A.M.

It was on Monday, listening to the banter between Rick Cluff and Steve Armitage, that I was finally feeling awfully proud about being Canadian. Here are two men with beautiful voices (rare in contemporary radio) discussing with wit, class and intelligence the possible final medal count for Canadians. I lightly object to Cluff’s description and insistence on the term “veteran sportscaster” to define Steve Armitage. I don’t think Armitage needs any such definitions. He is simply a superb sports journalist and not at all like the male, hockey shouter/sportscasters of “our” NBC/CTV Olympic network.

We Canadians may be understated. We may be reluctant to brag and we may be defined by others as being colourless, bland and boring. I am beginning to understand that fallacy.

But I see that my initial opinion upon listening to that Leonard Cohen album back in Mexico may have been a bit much too sophisticated for this now reformed unsophisticated Latin. Canadians grow on you in the same way that Canada has grown on me.

For many years I boasted that I had never ever seen a single complete episode of the Beachcombers. I have always been quick to opine that I loathe TV. Part of the reason is that there is a lot of good television if you look for it and I have always been afraid of TV addiction.

CBC once assigned me to go to Gibson’s Landing to photograph the Beachcombers’ cast. I talked to one of the producers on the phone and made it a point to brag on my ignorance about the show. “I know who Bruno Gerussi is because I have seen him in Super-Valu and McCain’s Pizza TV ads. But clue me in on the others in the cast.” I was truly stupid and ignorant and rude! The man (I don’t remember if it was Marc Strange, Philip Keatley or Hugh Beard) told me on the phone, “I’ll meet you at Molly’s Reach.” I remember saying, “Molly’s Beach?” I had not yet learned to mask my supposed superiority!

Yesterday I attempted to figure out the subtlety of Canadian hockey figuring that the slower version (as compared to the men's) Canadian female team might help. It didn’t and I am still in the dark on this Canadian game. During one of the ads (this was during the Canadian/US final) I channel surfed one up from channel 9 to channel 10 which was showing an old Beachcombers. This episode involved the determination that a cow was simply meat and that he (Jackson Davies) could dispatch the animal with no problem. Within seconds there was Bruno Gerussi, Pat Johns and Robert Clothier on the scene bringing me back memories of my day at the Reach. I knew who they were because I had photographed them. In one short interval, where Jackson Davies talks to the cow and ends up shooting at a tin can instead was pure and good TV. They were five or six minutes that somehow justified all the bad stuff surrounding it in other channels. It was understated and it went straight to my heart.

I think I am beginning to understand what it is to be Canadian and I am feeling very proud to be one. My wife, would be too polite (and much too classy) to point out how wrong I have been since I first met her in 1968. I am sure that if I had been the one with the toothpick she would have found a more polite and kind way to let me now about my transgression.

In the CBC TV and Radio group picture which I took around 1980 or 81 that’s (from left to right) Phil Reimer, Bill Good Jr. and Steve Armitage on the front row. I took the picture of Bruno Gerussi for a CBC open house. I have many portraits of Jackson Davies. I could not possibly go wrong with that man. This one is but one of the pictures. And I made Leonard Cohen laugh (by telling him to not even smile) so I could erase for ever that cover of his in Songs of Leonard Cohen.

Another Find From My Grandmother's Trunk

2010-02-25T21:03:00.005-08:00

When we Left for Mexico City from Buenos Aires in 1955 my grandmother gave me a small can of aluminum/silver paint and told me to put our initials on the heavy wooden trunks that had been in our family since the 1920s. For her trunk I was to put the initials DIG which stood for Dolores de Irureta Goyena. Through the years and after many moves the trunks are all gone but one. The one that remains still has my unsteady hand letters DIG and it is that trunk that I have been investigating these days. As we say in Spanish, “Cuando el diablo no tiene nada que hacer con el rabo espanta moscas.” This translates to, “When the devil is idle, with his tails he swats flies.” I have been idle with a persistent cough and rheumatism in my elbows and hands.

Yesterday I found the April envelope with the pictures of the Edwardian or early 20s Latin woman. Today I found the startingly modern (the crop and the angle) photograph of a mysterious undraped woman with her cat.

I am beginning to suspect that my grandfather Don Tirso de Irureta Goyena, a famous man of letters, a defender of the Spanish language and a prosperous lawyer who bought one of the first motorcars in Manila, might have also have had a hidden talent. Could he have been a good amateur photographer? I suspect he might have had an assistant in this venture as he had a Japanese driver. What other tasks did the man have besides driving my grandfather to work?

Why didn’t my grandmother throw these pictures away? At the time, in the late 1910s, they would have been scandalous. This envelope, with the pictures of the woman with the cat had the name Gani y el Gato (Gani and the cat). Who might have Gani been? I guess it will remain a mystery as those who were around at the time are all dead.

I wonder what tomorrow will bring as I examine the contents of my grandmother’s trunk.

April From The Past

2010-02-24T15:51:00.019-08:00

I found these pictures in an envelope in one of the old chests that used to belong to my grandmother. I have no idea who the woman is nor do I know who took the pictures. One of the pictures looks like an early colour photograph that may have been printed in the early 1920s. I was shocked to find the nudes. I never revealed to my grandmother when she was alive that I was interested in photography. We always talked about art. Both of us painted. She taught me to use pastels. She often told me that the Manila family pictures had been taken by a Japanese photographer. Most of those photographs have a stamp in the back. The ones in the envelope titled April, have no markings that could give me an indication of their provenance.

I have done my best to scan these pictures and make them as clear as I can. It is such a shame that there is nobody alive who can tell me who the lovely Latin looking woman is. Could her name be April?

The Cat Out Of The Blog Bag

2010-02-23T21:24:00.005-08:00

I am not letting the cat out of the blog bag by placing this picture of Rebecca here. A week ago I called her up and asked her if she would like to pose for me in some fashion shots. She was to pick the clothes and then write about them in her very own fashion blog. She liked the idea and immediately said she would do it.

I had a job today to photograph 10 lawyers (a large Canadian tax law firm) today and not having a studio anymore I told my contact at the firm that I was prepared to show up at their office with a portable backdrop. I thought it would be a good idea to try out the setup at home and use Rebecca as my subject. I came up with the idea of the fashion shots and I was going to use a neutral gray backdrop. The idea was to make sure it would work well. I did not do this as I explain belos. But all went well at the tax law firm.

We have lived in our Athlone Street house since 1986 and except for our garden which has appeared in gardening magazines (including the American publication, Better Homes & Gardens) and has been on countless tours (bus loads from different garden clubs, city tours and the last Ballet BC Garden Tour) the house itself has rarely appeared in any of my photos. I decided that I would do Rebecca’s fashion pictures taking advantage of our home which is an eclectic mix of stuff from all over the world. I would take (and did take) pictures of Rebecca using my medium format camera with colour transparency film. The pictures are taken. Now I must wait for Rebecca to write about them.

The pictures here are two Fuji b+w instant prints that will surely look all that much better in colour.

My Olympic Beaver

2010-02-22T13:59:00.015-08:00

No matter how much metalworking finesse goes into the construction of a prototype airplane, there is a roughness around the edges, a dimpled aluminum skin and a general lack of finish that is the mark of a hand built machine. Details come later. The esthetics can wait. No need for a racy paint job. Let’s see if this thing will fly.

Still the de Havilland Canada DHC-2 Beaver prototype that Wing Commander Russ Bannock climbed into shortly before 10 A.M. on August 16, 1947, was a handsome airplane in its own way: a sturdy-looking, squared-off, pug nosed fuselage, fronted with a big, flat, no-nonsense radial engine with its bulk set on thick landing-gear struts that gave it the look of a heads-up bulldog ready to leap off the ground.

The Immortal Beaver – The World’s Greatest Bush Plane by Sean Rossiter, 1996, Douglas & McIntyre

This blog has been in my mind for the last week but it finally put itself in front of me when Rebecca on Saturday said that there was a very big squirrel in the garden that just might be eating Rosemary’s bulbs. Just to be cute I told Rebecca that it was not a squirrel but our resident beaver and that it had good teeth. In the presence of her mother Rebecca (12) alluded to other qualities of beavers and I kept my mouth shut being happy that at long last Rebecca has moved on from innuendo jokes on flatulence.

Today Sunday (I am writing Monday’s blog today) I was enjoying my New York Times in bed (on paper, not on a computer monitor screen). I heard a noise and matter-of-factly I told Rosemary, “That’s a de Havilland Beaver.”

With a modified (restricted) air space over Vancouver since a bit before the Olympics began the sounds over our house (we are at 41st and Granville and thus not far from the Vancouver Airport) have radically changed. We no longer hear as many commercial jets. There are three distinct airplane sounds over our house which must be some special corridor. One is the almost unceasing sound of helicopters that must be ferrying officials, politicians, athletes and Olympic guests from the airport or from Richmond Olympic facilities.

Helicopters of the blacker kind made my Strathcona- resident friend Mark Budgen, finally move to Oliver, B.C. for the duration of the games. It seems that these big black helicopters would fly back and forth early mornings over his house and rattle his dishes. The same noises have driven my friend Ian Bateson batty. His design firm Baseline is in the Vancouver Block on Granville and Georgia. Oliver does not beckon as he has to make ends meet and continue his work.

I seem to have better luck. While the helicopters are a pain the sounds of the other two types of aircraft are much to my liking. A pair of F-18s keeps booming around in the mornings and then there is that Beaver. It could be one or many. But I have taken possession of them, and converted them to my one Olympic Beaver.

It occurred to me this morning that Sean Rossiter’s comparison of the Beaver to “a heads-up bulldog ready to leap off the ground” is open to my own re-interpretation.

Casa (short for Casanova) has been at home now for a week. He is Rosemary’s 17 pound cat. Casa (he is as sturdy looking as a de Havilland Beaver) has quickly ingratiated himself with his owner and has quietly finessed himself into an appreciation by my snobbish, female cat Plata. They now sleep at the foot of our bed (on an Eaton’s blue blanket) a mere inches apart. When I go up the stairs to our bedroom to check on Rosemary’s progress with her Word and Powerpoint classes (she works in bed with her laptop) I find the big presence of Casa on the bed a comforting one. The world is just fine if Casa is there and that Beaver flies over my house with an equanimity that comes from having done it since that prototype first flew in 1947. When the Olympics are gone I will miss my Olympic Beaver but I know it (he?) will be flying elsewhere with regularity and dependability. Some things don’t change. Thank God.

Some may wonder about the sounds of airplanes to a discerning ear. Most will readily admit that for better or for worse Harley Davidsons sound different to most other motorcycles. The same difference applies to Beavers. There is a primitive put-putness to the Harley sound that is paralleled by the Beaver. The Harley sounds as if is not tuned. My friend Sean Rossiter (not an expert on motorcycles but indeed on airplanes) explained today Sunday that Harleys have symmetrically oposed cylinders, two of them, and that there is no way to make such an engine purr like Rosemary's Casa. He further explained that the Pratt & Whitney radial engine of a de Havilland Beaver is air cooled. He told me that water cooled airplane engines bring with the cooling an inherent noise supression that is absent with the air cooled radial engine. It is the Beaver's sound that for me is a trademark to its very dependability. It is a handsome low frequency sound that does not beat around the bush. Rossiter told me that our beloved Grumman A-6s were very loud because the engines were turbo jets. It seems that the transition to the more quiet turbofan engines passed me by. "F-18s make a lot noise even though they are turbofans because the pilots are making the noise on purpose to make their presence over our Vancouver skies clearly evident." "Do they make more noise when they switch on the afterburners?" I asked him. "Yes." Some years ago when Rebecca was around 7 I took her to an Abbotsford Air Show. "What is your favourite airplane here?" I asked her. "The F-14 Tomcat, " she replied. I asked her why. "Because it is loud." That my Rebecca chose the very plane that somehow has carried the mantle of that other great Grumman plane the A-6 (the Tomcat is also manufactured by Grumman) made me instantly appreciate her more.

We will have to book a flight in a Beaver, soon.

I'll Remember April - In February

2010-02-21T20:10:00.004-08:00

Rosemary came home from Safeway yesterday with something called rainbow, three cheese, tortellini. We were to have that for supper with the girls and with their mother Hilary.

During the day I took some photographs of Rebecca. I had come up with the idea on Friday on having her bring stuff to wear and for her to write a guest blog on her idea of what fashion is all about. Since of late she has moved from the books section of the main branch of the Vancouver Public Library to the teen section where they have teen magazines I have noticed she likes to read teen fashion magazines.

I photographed her in the park and then making sticky cinnamon buns in the kitchen, a photograph at the piano and a few others. Lauren felt left out. I told her I would photograph her on another day.

I circumvented the problem of what to do with the rainbow, three cheese tortellini, by making a white béchamel sauce to which I added some chopped onion, three tablespoonfuls of ketchup, some white wine, a bit of chicken broth extract and a teaspoonful of Spanish paprika. I thickened the sauce with cream and grated some good Parmesan and old white cheddar. The girls had second helpings. Dinner went smoothly. We had Rebecca’s excellent cinnamon buns for dessert.

Before dinner Rebecca had gone upstairs to put on one of Rosemary’s dresses for a shot. Meanwhile Lauren came down wearing a pink dress. “It almost fits me,”she said. Our Mexican housekeeper Clemen had made the dress for Hilary some 33 years ago. Lauren’s hair was a mess. “If you want me to photograph you, you have to brush your hair.” “I don’t want you to photograph me.” She changed her mind and went up to brush her hair. Rebecca told her, “You look silly with your ears showing.”

I took a couple of transparencies. Lauren looked so cute I decided to shoot a couple of Fuji instant pictures. While my Ektachromes are accurately exposed this Fuji instant picture film is all over the map. The highlights had lost their texture so I had to fix them up. The snaps are pleasant to look at nonetheless.

After dinner I told Hilary that we could either watch Robert Mitchum and Jean Simmons in Angel Face or Clark Gable, Spencer Tracy, Claudette Colbert and Hedy Lamarr in Boom Town. That was not to be as Hilary is into speed skating. Even Rosemary was watching. I sadly moved to the living room and put on the 1958 recording of Stan [Getz] Meets Chet [Baker]. I sat down to exquisitely put myself into a melancholy mood. Just a few seconds into I’ll Remember April Lauren came into the living room and danced with a big smile on her face! I was saved from that exquisite melancholy. We scanned both the Fuji prints and here they are!

The Three Czechs

2010-02-21T19:19:00.009-08:00

I find the concept of nationality when associated with Sports a somewhat troubling one. I have watched my Argentine football team lose too many games particularly when they played in Mexico City. The excuse, then, was the city’s altitude. The Mexican sports announcers pointed all kinds of other deficiencies in my Argentines. I began to dislike these announcers that my mother (a fan of football) called buitres (buzzards). What really made my blood boil was when my Argentine players would fall to the ground and which this impartial Argentine thought were vicious Mexican fouls. The buzzards discounted these as obvious examples of Argentines doing what they did best which was to dance the tango. The idea of dancing the tango is associated by Latin Americans as an example of soap opera over-acting.

I left all that behind when I came to Vancouver in 1975 were I was introduced to something called ice hockey on my portable b+w TV. In those days few players wore helmets or at least the one who seemed to be the best, Guy Lafleur didn’t. Even I could see he had style and speed as I watched his longish hair sweep back as he skated. I could never understand the function of the Hammond Organ that kept playing the Mexican Hat Dance.

I explained to my Argentine cousins that Canadians played a game on ice in which they would almost kill an opponent with a stick. An official would come and say, “You have been a bad boy, so go to the penalty box and sit there for a few minutes.” My cousins did not believe me and to this day I find the hockey penalty concept as alien and difficult to comprehend as Canada’s parliamentary democracy.

It was sometime around the mid 80s that my friend Paul Leisz took me to a real live Canucks game and I began to appreciate the sport even if I will never understand the subtleties of the game. It is much too fast for me to understand them.

It was also in the 80s when my good friend Mike Varga (surely the best Canadian CBC hockey and sports cameraman in the business) took me into a CBC command van where I was able to see the Hockey Night in Canada director (like a general in the field) direct his many cameramen on a wall-full of TV monitors. His job seemed to be as difficult and stressful as that of an air-traffic controller.

In the 80s, too I was commanded to follow coach La Forge to Edmonton where his Canucks were playing against Wayne Gretzky’s Oilers. I had been further commanded (by Vancouver Magazine’s Chris Dahl) to take action pictures of the game. My experience in hockey photography was as limited as that of boxing. It was nonexistent. I didn’t know where to stand to take my pictures. Mike Varga was in his special booth and he invited me to join him. There was a plastic or glass wall separating us from the Oiler’s bench. Wayne Gretzky was right there trying to figure where he had seen me. I had taken his picture on his 21st birthday in CBC’s Studio 40 in Vancouver.

My knowledge of hockey has not improved since but that did not prevent me from watching the Canadian team play Switzerland and today against the United States. When convenient I try to tell myself that I am Argentine-born so I should not be concerned if the Canadians (not we) lose. They did lose and I am a tad sad. But being older and wiser I am not going to let the emotions of those games of the Argentine football team back in Mexico City affect my morale. It is only a game I say to myself. It is not important.

As I was thinking about hockey today I had a pang of memory overcoming me when I read about Jágr being the best player in the Czech team that lost (also today) to the Russians. I went to my hocke files and found an envelope in which I had written Canucks – The Three Chekes [sic]. When I looked at the pictures I had printed I remembered a bit. The picture must have been taken either 1990 or 1991 (or perhaps a bit earlier) when Jágr had played with the Pittsburgh Penguins (a fact I did not know but found in Wikipedia. Remember I know nothing about hockey). A sports writer for Vancouver Magazine (one that had the credibility of writing for Saturday Night but I do not now remember his name) had concocted a column that was about the three Czechs who must at one time had played together. I know that the man on the left is Jaromír Jágr but I have no idea who the other two may have been. They must have been Czech players for the Canucks.

But as I look at this picture it grows on me. I notice that I used Ilford HP-5 with my Mamiya RB-67 camera. This was the Ilford equivalent to Kodak’s Tri-X. I must have known that I was not going to get much time to take their pictures (in all I took 8 exposures) so I did not pack lights.

I wonder if such a picture could be taken today? Would there be access? To me it looks like three young men in happier and more innocent times.

I am glad to hear (as I watch Olympic Men’s Hockey) that there is no Hammond organ playing the Mexican Hat Dance.

My friend and sports enthusiast Jack MacDermot has this to day about the photograph:

Hi Alex

I'm about 95% sure about this:

It's the 1992-93 Canucks, since that is the season that all three players (if I've properly identified them) played for them, according to the record book.
It could be a year or two earlier if it was training camp or exhibition season because the third player (Slegr) hadn't made the team yet, but had been drafted.

So...

1. My first reaction was "That's Petr Nedved, not Jagr" and upon looking at more pictures online I'm pretty sure that's right.

2. Robert Kron

3. Jiri Slegr (son of former defenceman Jiri Bubla, famously caught in drug deal)

I guess the only way to confirm this would be with someone who knew the team well at that time but that's my best guess.

Hope this helps,

Jack

Addendum: The original writer, Brian Preston has this to add to Jack MacDermot's accurate take on the men in the picture:

I do remember that day. Slegr was the baby faced
rookie but he did progress into a good pro, and did
go on to win a gold medal with the Czechs at the
Olympics in 1998 I believe. I remember Robert Kron
commenting after you took the shots: "We're
hockey players, not strippers." He was having
second thoughts about it. I never did talk to any of
them later to see what they thought of the photos.
Kron was the older (28 or 30 year old) father figure
to Slegr the new arrival who spoke no english yet
and Nedved was also young and considered very
immature. Win, lose, he didn't particularly care,
hockey was just fun to play. A big goofy kid. Now
they're all finished with the game, and middle aged.
It would be interesting to see what their lives are
like now. Probably all back in the Czech Republic I
would think.

And he adds these details:

Funny how a thing you haven't thought about in years can become vivid in the mind again-- I don't remember much of the interview but I do recall Kron told me he became a dad at nineteen and I said Wow, and he said why does everyone say wow here, where I come from that's normal. I remember that because it was in the story I wrote. I find with these old things I wrote nearly twenty years ago I remember exactly what's in the story and not much else-- so the story has replaced the memory, and become the memory. But I do remember watching you work and being impressed with how quickly you got the job done, very unhesitating and confident, which had them responding like players to their coach... you probably could have got them down to their jock straps...

Brian Preston
Victoria

Auntie Winnie's Hands

2010-02-20T11:16:00.019-08:00

Lolita has been on my mind of late simply because I happen to be reading The Annotated Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov, Edited with Preface by Alfred Appel Jr. As to why I am reading it my readers here may have to wait a couple more days for a full explanation.

I mention Lolita because the idea of an older man interested in young girls is an experience I have never had. When I was interested in 12-year-old girls I was 10 or 12. I have never felt much of an attraction for a woman much younger than I. And as I get older that gulf seems to get wider. The voices of the announcers of the young females on CBC Radio sound like Canadian variations of Valley Girls of yore. They don’t excite me. Give me Barbara Budd from As It Happens if you want to get any kind of a rise from me. I am not interested in re-gaining my youth through interaction with a young woman or a young girl. It seems that a young blonde girl (in combination with a bright red Mazda Miata) is supposed to give the aging man a sense of a new-found youth. I have never felt that. For me it has been quite the opposite.

Many years ago in the beginning of the 70s I was teaching a grade 12 class in a Mexico City private school. I would often say to my class, “I feel so young when I face you.” One day I was taken to task and one of my students said, “That must be because you are surrounded by youth.” My reply shocked them, “No, it is because I am surrounded by prematurely old people set in their ways who must practice all kinds of self-imposed regulations (particularly dress ones) to feel that they fit in.”

I have often wondered why politicians such as Winston Churchill became more conservative with age. I always thought that one could risk more when time is short. And yet there were people like Bertrand Russell and Linus Pauling who became more liberal and forward thinking as they aged. I mention this as one of my blog follwers sent me a missive suggesting that I was stressing much to much the "age thing". Quite to the contrary I want to point out all the advantages. About a month ago I lost all the data on a hard drive. It included a year's worth (2009) of plant scans and a Power Point presentation that my granddaugther Rebecca and I did at the World Rose Convention back in June. I was devastated. But I noticed that as days became weeks the sense of loss was diminishing to the point that I did not feel the loss at all. When John from Powersonic (in Richmond) called to say, "I have retrieved the data (including those plant scans and the Power Point Presentation) from that drive. It will cost you $600." I felt like saying, "John it is not important at all, anymore. Few things at my age are and that's good!"

It did not come as a shock to me when last week at a birthday party at an East Broadway Japanese restaurant honoring my friend Charles Campbell ( a sort of snobbish “I protest the Olympics” sort of party as it began at 7 pm the day of the opening ceremonies) when another friend Maja Grip told me, “For the first time I see that you are aging.” I felt like countering with a kind reply (kind replies come with age) in which I would have said, “For someone your age who never flaunted her charms you are showing today a fair amount of very attractive cleavage.”

It was about 5 years ago that I had a model that I have photographed many times during the years come into my studio. She was a beautiful woman who in the last 10 years has cut her lovely hair and worn clothing she would have never worn before. It is almost as if she wanted to hide her beauty to be accepted for who she is. I would argue that individuality is what makes us be me and not her and part of that individuality is how we look. A world of look-alike clones would be a most confusing one.

As I was adjusting my camera settings she looked at my hands and gasped. “What is it?” I asked. She said nothing. I knew that she had noticed my weathered/age/garden hands and suddenly noticed that I was a much older man. It could have been that my hands were an equivalent to looking at herself in the mirror.

Hands have always been important in my life. I remember my father’s strong but small and elegant hands stained by his Player’s Navy Cut cigarettes. I remember my mother’s beautiful piano hands with long slim fingers and immaculate finger nails. She also had beautiful feet which I inherited. Alas I did not inherit her hands but until that model had noticed my hands in the studio I had always bragged about my gentleman’s hands. They were hands that were soft and uniform in colour with nicely kept nails. I bragged that I didn’t have the hands of a ditch digger.

But garden work and particularly the caring for my beloved roses have changed that. Just the pruning of a viciously endowed rambler, Rosa ‘Albertine” a few days ago has left my hands with scratches, wounds and festering sores.

Rosemary cannot remember when it exactly happened that she stopped being able to trim the nails of her right hand. She comes over to my side of the bed (the left side) and sits on the edge so I can trim her nails (anybody out there, a small portable hand vacuum would make an excellent Christmas present).

I have few memories of my father’s older brother, my Uncle Harry and his wife Winnie. One involves a nighttime dinner at their Acassuso home in Buenos Aires. I could smell Uncle Harry’s predilection for tobacco and alcohol as I watched him whip up some Colman’s mustard. I may have been 7 or 8 but I did notice that he put in a teaspoonful of sugar into the mixture. His hands were big. They looked like a working man's hands. Last year my first cousin Willoughby Blew came to visit us with his wife from Florida. He watched me put sugar into my Coleman’s (now Keen’s) powder and said, “Just like Uncle Harry used to make it.”

It is the other memory of my Auntie Winnie serving us tea in her quintessential English dining room on a sunny afternoon when I noticed her disfigured hands. She could barely lift the tea pot to serve us tea. I have no other image of Auntie Winnie. Her face is a blur but her hands are as sharp in my memory now as the shock of seeing them as a little boy then.

That memory is reinforced every night when I sleep. I move around and my hands get caught under the pillow. My pinkies throb. I have arthritis. At my rate I will soon not be able to prune my roses as the secateurs will be unmanageable in my hands.

But I know for sure I will still be able to stir in that sugar into my mustard.

If anybody were to ask me precisely what my style is when I shoot my portraits I would answer, “I like eye contact with my camera and I always try to incorporate my subject’s hands. After our face, our hands reveal the most about us.”

The Dithering Photographer And His Clones

2010-02-19T21:50:00.010-08:00

About 10 years ago three photographers (I was one of them, and one of the others was a woman who also became one of my subjects) had a project which we repeated three times. It started at a downtown café called Subi’s. I told the other two that we would pick a fairly attractive female and bring her to the studio for a group shot. Then during a month each one of us would photograph her and make sure that none of us were aware of what the other was doing. At the studio I would plainly tell our subject, “If at any time any of us ask you to undrape you must do it. If there is any objection to this, tell us now.” Then we would have a one night show in my studio. One of our subjects Corrie Clark reneged on our instructions and I had a hard time (I succeeded in the end) in making her undrape.

It took me years to go through the normal channels of not knowing how to convey to my subject that I wanted her to take it all off. I had not discovered the direct approach nor was I aware that for every photographer that wants to have the model take it all off there is a large multitude of subjects who will readily volunteer if asked.

With one model in particular I was particularly indirect and obtuse. I dithered around taking pictures that were not satisfying me in the least. Finally my model said, “Is this what you really want?” and she lowered the straps of her slip and exposed her breasts. I blushed and took my pictures.

Since that one time I have learned to put my cards on the table. There was one young woman who told me, “You can only photograph 25% of this and you can only go as far down as here. I turned off my lights and told her that she could go.

In another occasion I had two very beautiful young women in my studio and to break the ice I told them, “I have two daughters who are both older than both of you. I am not in the least interested in you except as my photographic subjects. I prefer women my age and that is why I am attracted to my wife. I just want to take your pictures.” They looked at each other and walked out of my studio. Since then I have been ambivalent about being direct and in some cases I have chosen to say less and take more pictures instead.

Of late, without my studio, I have given the whole process some thought. I occasionally teach a nude portrait class at Focal Point and with my instructions my students become my surrogates and take pictures my style. This led to one of my students saying to me in the presence of my other students, “What you want to do is to turn us into little Alexes.” He got up and walked out and never did return.

It had all begun when my student had projected some pictures which we critiqued. One of our models had been slightly on the large size. I always tell my students that it is our obligation to make people as good as we can and if possible even better. A lot of this can be done with lighting and camera angles. The moving of the body can diminish neck folds (anathema!) and I tell my students I don’t want to look at armpit folds (double anathema!). The student in question did nothing to hide the model’s pendulous breasts. I pointed this out and was told that there was nothing wrong with pendulous breasts. I asked one of my female students if she would be happy with pictures that showed her breasts as being like that. She agreed that she would not be happy. To finish the argument my student said, “We pay the model. We can make her look anyway we want.”It is in such times that I feel like picking up sticks and moving to Trelew in Patagonia and learn to speak Welsh. But that is not a viable option at this moment.

I photographed María de Lurdes Behar three times. The third time she was one of my tub women for a show. The first time around I took pictures when I was still in the height of my dithering period. It was 1990.

After some exposures I finally came up with enough nerve and most of her clothes were discarded. Some of these pictures are extraordinarily beautiful. Because my intention was always to photograph the model undraped I never did look at the pre-undraped exposures with any interest, until now.

At my age I find my drive (that one!) is diminishing and my idea of what is erotic is more in the direction of subtlety. Clothed, is now suddenly much more interesting. I found a couple of pictures of María de Lurdes which I think are beautiful. I hope that anybody looking at them might just agree.