Kitsilano - 5 July 2025

 Two Men for All Ages

D.O.A. & the Man in Orange 

I first met Joe Keithley aka Joey Shithead sometime in 1979. Both his D.O.A. and Art Bergmann’s numerous bands exist wonderfully to now. Both Bergmann and Keithley serve as my inspirational mentors to keep at it even though I am 82.

At yesterday’s performance at the Burrard Stage of Kitsilano Day, Keithley and drummer Jim Jones played punk that seemed to me the music of right now. It was fresh even though folks in the crowd were mouthing the lyrics.

I can assert, even though I am an amateur, that the D.O.A. I heard yesterday, minus a bass player (definitely not needed), was one of the best two-man bands I have ever heard.

Keithley, who is a Burnaby councillor, has never let go or changed his views on what is right. He has been inflexible in the direction of the lyrics of his songs. In that last century we had folk music. I would assert that folk punk is alive and well in Vancouver thanks to Keithley and Bergmann.

My fave Joe Keithley song is his Men for All Ages which is all about the original cast of Star Trek. Indeed at yesterday’s performance, where I saw people of all ages, I was introduced by Keithley’s wife to their two very young grandsons who were in attendance.

Men for All Ages - YouTube 

We are indeed lucky.  

Addendum: This former professional is indeed slipping. My Fuji X-E3 camera informed me that the battery was about to go. I used my new Galaxy phone. Not one of the pictures I took with it were up to my standards. The five I took with the Fuji, until the battery went dead, had the only decent photographs. At one time, on assignment, I would have taken two cameras, one extra battery and definitely one extra storage card.

Felix Candela's El Altillo church in Mexico City

The writer here failed his starting career as an engineer in 1962 because he could not understand what capacitance was so he failed electricity.

Fortunately for me I continued studying philosophy with the eminent Ramón Xirau. I was not keen on Plato but since then I can happily state that I am Platonist. When I take portraits (people do not smile and my subjects stare into my lens), I feel the retracting (from the Latin to remove) of something of their essence. We cannot be exposed to perfection, so Plato stated, but we do get a glimpse of it. A good portrait does just that.

Fortunately, too, a professor called Chicurel gave me a good basis into understanding the calculus and its quirky infinitesimals.

When Leibniz and Newton independently discovered the calculus in the 17th century the first practical use of it involved killing more people.Calculus could predict where a cannon ball would fall with good accuracy.

Calculus, in showing us what the varying slope of a straight line looks like on a graph, brought us the now famous hyperbolic paraboloids sometimes called hypars.

A few months before Arthur Erickson died he was alone at a table in a function presided by Diane Farris. Nobody wanted to sit with him as he had Alzeimer’s. I went to his table and sat down. I told him, “Arthur, our mutual friend Sean Rossiter told me that you were influenced by Mexican/ Spanish arquitect Felix Candela.” Arthur smiled and for the next hour we talked about hypars and calculus. These usually roofs that show that when a straight line has a varying slope,the result is curved roof.

While I was sniffing in my bathroom yesterday I could smell the fact that I had to change the kitty litter. My Rosemary would have told quite before and I would have followed her instructions. I suddenly stopped and noticed her presence.

I don’t believe in spirits or ghosts. How can I explain this presence? Rosemary died on December 9, 2020 and minutes before she died she asked, “Am I dying?” I now believe, using a combination of Plato, Leibniz and Newton, that whiff of essence that I can see when I look into people’s eyes and which can be retracted by my camera does happen. But most of that essence remains in the person. When Rosemary died, her spirit did not completely go away. Some of it, infinitesimally small, has remained.

I felt it.

Rosa 'Emily Carr' 2 July 2025

The obverse side

We live now in the world of influencers who are iconic and stunning and we opine on them by using emojis.

In that last century I used to make fun of my writer friend John Lekich as he liked to use the word invoke in his reviews of films.

Now in this century I will write this blog using two words (associated with each other) which are invoke and conjure.

This lovely red rose, Rosa ‘Emily Carr’, introduced in Morden Manitoba in 2007, is all but unavailable in Vancouver Lower Mainland nurseries. I found it at the UBC Botanical Garden Shop in the Garden (my Rosemary used to work there) five years ago. I cannot imagine how a rose with that name that is hardy across Canada is not better known here.

The scan you see is of the same rose that I scanned on 24 June. It has been in a little vase with water in my kitchen since. That is amazing endurance for a rose.

Rosa 'Emily Carr' & Crambe maritima - 24 June 2025

To me this rose invokes/conjures the face and memory of my departed Rosemary who never saw it bloom. Seeing it on my kitchen counter was a bit like gazing on her face.

Note how lovely the obverse side is.

Will influencers ever know the meaning of obverse?

Rosa 'Emily Carr' 30 June 2025 - Illustration by Graham Walker

The luckiest moment of my life, besides having been born was to spot, from the back, that woman with straight blond hair in a mini skirt and with legs to rival my mother’s. It was sometime in mid December 1967 in Mexico City. A month and a few days later we were married in Coyoacán, Mexico City. We had two children and in 1975 she strongly persuaded me that Mexico was not a place for our young daughters to grow up in. We were to move in our VW Beetle to Vancouver, British Columbia. By 1977 I was an established magazine photographer and between the both of us we manged to buy and move to a house with a large corner garden in 1986. I now live in little house in Kitsilano. I share it with two brother and sister cats. Rosemary died on December 9, 2020. I am financially stable thanks to Rosemary’s handling of our funds.

Through the years I worked with editors, art directors and graphic designers. One in particular is Graham Walker. Together we did quite a few brochures. We frequent avant-garde concerts and those of baroque music.

A few days ago he sent me his lovely design to celebrate Canada Day tomorrow. I decided to do collaboration by scanning my Morden Manitoba 2007 introduction of Rosa ‘Emily Carr’.

This blog is in memory of that woman who was my wife, Rosemary  and a celebration that with the turmoil in our world now, I live in the right place because of her.

Hosta 'Hirao Majesty' 30 June 2025

In 1950 in Buenos Aires I was 8. One day my mother who taught at a private American high school took me to have lunch with one of her students who was Chinese. We were served soup and I immediately noticed the white Chinese spoon. I was drawn (did not know this yet) by its simple and elegant design.

Since then I have equated the spoon with the best of modern Swedish design. 

In the late 80s I was assigned to photograph the UBC anthropology professor (he was accused of several crimes including murder). I wrote about it, (link below) as I had to ask him why the Japanese had copied Chinese characters but not the spoon. His answer was a simple one, “Cultures adopt from other countries only what interests them.”

Cyril Belshaw &the Wondrous Chinese Spoon 

At my door I have a large shine green hosta from Japan called Hirao Majesty. Unlike many other hostas that grow their flowers on scapes (the hosta term for stem) either in clusters at the end or many flowers down the scape, this one has one single and for me extremely elegant flower. It is particularly lovely before it opens.

Scan of Rosa 'Double Delight' 30 June 2025 with photograph taken with Fuji X-E1 and a Lensbaby

Rosa 'Mrs. Oakley Fisher' 30 June 2025 - scan

I believe that because I have been a photographer since 1958 and a magazine photographer since 1977 that I can see what is coming and what is disappearing.

I have written several blogs on the loss of style. I have and identifiable style not because of personal merits but because pushy magazine art directors made me do what I did not want to do and they were invariably right. Photographers now without any push take pictures in almost complete isolation.

The extreme telephoto lenses gave us tight shots of eagle heads. I think that this sort of photography will disappear with Artificial Intelligence.

 Artificial Intelligence - My Take

The macro lenses and phones with macro capabilities give us very good close-ups of flowers. Here is where I will insert my small beef.

In that world of garden enthusiasm in the l 90s of that last century people who had good gardens would say, “I like plants.” They would never say, “I like flowers.” People who grow roses never say, “rose bushes.” The simply say, “I have these roses.” And people involved in gardening, like my Rosemary was, always used the botanical name for plants. Thus a Pseudotsuga menziesii is a Douglas Fir.

It was on a lazy and warm summer afternoon in 2001 when I felt bored. I tried something. I cut a couple of Rosa ‘Reine Victoria’,a lovely Bourbon Rose, and placed it over my scanner. I suspended the rose with a little bamboo stick so that the rose would not squash on the glass. It seems I was lucky. Since then I have compiled at the very least 3000 scans of our roses, other plants, hosta leaves and hosta flowers.

Rosa 'Reine Victoria' - scan summer of 2001

From the beginning I had a goal. This was to scan the rose at 100% size, included the exact date and I was most careful in being accurate with colour. I thought that botanical organizations in other countries would have been interested in comparing notes. They were not. I have a few very large prints of my plants in my living room. People who visit say, “I like your photographs of flowers.” The moment I correct then that, “They are not photographs. They are scanographs and I am a scanographer.” They then lose interest and turn around.

My aversion to taking pictures of “flowers” began in the early 90s when my Rosemary forced me to go to a meeting of the Vancouver Rose Society. Once we were there I told her, “Why have you brought me to this place with uncomfortably hard chairs and we are subjected to looking at over 100 bad projected slides of roses?"

Taking a photograph with a macro lens of a rose in situ to me does not show that accuracy of the scanned rose or show a respect for the plant. When I place my rose on my flatbed scanner I work around with the leaves to show the rose at its accurate best.

I must admit now that sometimes I forget that accuracy and I get artsy. Of late I have found tremendous pleasure in showing roses that are past their perfection. There is beauty in wilting death.

Rosa 'Darcey Bussell' and Rosa foetida 'Austrian Copper' 21 June 2025