Photograph - Alex Waterhouse-Hayward

I proudly remember changing the sparkplugs on my Mexican VW Beatle when we were living in Burnaby in the late 70s. I would then turn the distributor a bit to the left or right and go up a hill until it was in the right place.

Because Mexican gasoline had so many impurities, before we moved to Vancouver I would remove my VW’s gasoline tank and clean the sludge with paint thinner. The sludge was there even though I had an additional gas line filter.

For many years I repaired many of my cameras and I feel that I am not all that mechanically uninclined. All that changed in the 90s when I started using computers. For a few years I wrote articles for the Vancouver Sun and a garden column for Western Living using email since I did not know how to use Word.

In this March, 2019 my monitor is a Dell Cathode Ray Tube unit and my Photoshop is 14 years old. Six years ago my Rosemary urged me to acquire a digital camera (a Fuji X-E1). I now also have an X-E3. Whenever there is something about my camera that is beyond my comprehension  go to Jeff Gin at Leo’s for help (a good reason buy a digital camera there if you are a Luddite as I am).

In that last century I was a good photographer because I was “cutting edge” with film cameras and lighting systems.

In this century all that is very old hat.

That brings me to this!

My eldest daughter Ale left for Puerto Vallarta/ Guadalajara yesterday. I sent books, films and music CDS to her godfather (and my friend since 1961) Andrew Taylor. I vowed three years ago to no longer buy books but get them at our excellent Vancouver Public Library.

While in Venice I found out that Donna Leon had just published her 27^th Commissario Brunetti novel, Unto Us a Son is Given.  To read it I would have to put my name under a long list of others clamouring to read it. Then I had an idea. If I bought it Saturday and read it on Saturday night and Sunday night I could send it to Andrew with a smile on my face!

But there was this:

Gonzalo appeared a few times in magazines like Chi and Gente, but as time passed, the photos grew fewer and smaller and moved further towards the back of magazines. When Brunetti thought about the photos that accompanied the articles, it seemed to him that Gonzalo had grown not only older, but paler  and less vibrant.

This, Brunetti knew, was what happened to people who retired. Like photos left too long on the wall, their colours began to fade. Hair followed life and began to grow dim, the brightness of their eyes diminished. A strong jawline became harder to see; skin dried and grew more fragile. They remained the same people, but they began to disappear. Certainly, others no longer noticed them, nor what they wore nor what they said or did. They were there, hanging suspended, washed out and considered useless, trapped behind the glass of age. Dust gathered on the glass, and one day they weren’t there on the wall among the other fading photos, and soon after that people began to forget what they looked like or what they said.

‘Oh how very clever you are,’ Brunetti said to himself.

On February 12, Edith Iglauer died. Obituaries appeared in BC Bookworld and the Globe & Mail.

Since I spend upwards of $1600 per year on my NY Times subscription I am not subscribed to the Globe&Mail in spite of the fact that my Times is delivered by the Globe folks. The Globe has an insurmountable pay wall so I was not aware of her death until I read the fine obituary in today’s (March 18, 2019) New York Times.

NY Times Obituary 
Edith Iglauer & Valerie Gibson

While it is understandable that our Vancouver Sun is moribund (who will write their obituary when it finally succumbs?) I have not been able to find any indication in that newspaper (I am subscribed) that this great American writer is dead.

But I feel no anger. If anything I feel lucky to have had the pleasure of working for magazines (in the example here, Western Living) who gave me access and connections to so many great people, mostly who because I am about to be 77, are all but gone.

I can still find pleasure in being able to spot Jay Hamburger (one of Eglauer’s two sons) at the theatre or at a restaurant and to be able to loudly exclaim, “Hamburger!”

The last time I saw Iglauer it was at Arthur Erickson’s garden home. She had that patrician (to me) gray hair and that charm that I so remember.

When I scanned this Western Living frontspiece today I became aware of something I had forgotten. If Eglauer looks so special it is because for many years my editorial secret weapon was makeup artist Inga Vollmer.

In the past when my Rosemary and I traveled abroad we always had our granddaughter Rebecca in tow. This time around she refused to budge from her home in Burnaby. Alas! How would I be able to 

take photographs in Venice or in Florence that would be different from the norm?

I found a beautiful young Venetian woman with blue hair who was going to pose for me. At the last moment she cancelled and I was in Venice with an efficient portable studio light and no subject to photograph. This to my dismay did not last long as I photographed my friend, period cellist Claudio Ronco and his wife Emanuela Vozza with that light by a canal right outside their home. In a soon-to-be blog I will write about them.

In Florence chance brought us in contact with a handsome rickshaw (electrically assisted) driver. A few days later, and after a haircut and with his sunglasses he greeted us and I did not recognize him. 

I knew that this was an opportunity that I had to take advantage of. Carlo Eugenio Raffaelli (born in Edinburgh, Scotland) was a too good of a subject to ignore. I asked him about his plans and it seems he is studying to be a an opera singer at the Conservatorio di musica Luigi Cherubini. He is a tenor. He was willing to pose for me to get a free headshot!

He came to our hotel room (I thought the drapery would make a good background) and he posed. The chair photos you see here involve a purposeful camera failure where I drastically underexpose my Fuji X-E3 and use a magical f-stop, 7.1. 

While I was taking his photographs I was nagged by a memory. When we got back to Vancouver and only a few hours ago I figured he had a passing remsemblance to Austrian actor (The Red Shoes) Anton Walbrook.

I have a feeling that I have photographed a future excellent , soon-to-be-famous tenor!

Consider the following varied facts:

Rosemary and I went to the UBC Downtown Campus last night, (a moribund kind of place as UBC has virtually killed the once popular city centre).

We were in the now UBC Theatre (once part of what was called the Robson Square Media Centre). Few in the jam-packed audience might have connected the comfortable theatre to its builder, Arthur Erickson.

We saw a film, Dishonour, directed by Terry Turner and produced by his twin brother Timothy Turner.

Dishonour web page

How could a film (a short one) about Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) have been a delightful one in spite of its horrific (sonic) ending?

Rosemary was reluctant to go when I told her the subject of the film.

At the gathering I ran into the Turners’ older brother Rob Turner. I did not ask him what most people ask me when they meet up with me after years of not having seen me, “Are you still…?” Why is it, I asked him that lawyers are never asked, "Are you still lawyering?"

Terrence Turner, Timothy Turner, Chris Bowell and Rob Turner at Circle Productions, circa 1987

The fact is that the Turners represent a talented bench (and active one) of persistent talent in a city where people (and talent) disappear from one day to the next.

It may have been sometime around 1986 that I first rant into the Turner twins. They were elegantly dressed and they had the then just discovered CBC radio personality Vicki Gabereau.

Vicki Gabereau at the Culch circa 1986

Shortly after I went to Vancouver Magazine Editor Malcolm Parry and told him, “I want to do a picture story about twins and I want my family doctor Elliot Mintz to write it." Parry’s answer was an efficient, “Do it.”  

From that first instance of the twins posing for my photograph, they have persisted in our city as a fountain of talent that continues. Rob Turner’s company (videos and commercials) Circle Productions also perseveres and is doing just fine, thank you.

I would have never suspected that when Tim Turner called me early last year to enquire about lighting that he was doing this for this film (must I say a “cutting edge” film? Must I say a “sensitive and important film?”).

The Turner’s, in order to make this film, decided on one actor who would play all the 6 parts in a darkened studio with one light and three props, an on-air sign, a pair of glasses and a child’s doll. Searching for that one actor took them from Vancouver, to Montreal and finally to London where the 61^st of 67 persons who came to the casting session was Mimi Ndiwen. She is formidable.

It is not always that I see my Rosemary smile. This she did last night. She thoroughly enjoyed the evening even though the ending of Dishonour is one that we will surely not forget for a long time. Amazingly (in a horrible sort of way) FGM not only affects 200 million children around the world but it is also happening in our own Canada and here in Vancouver.

It is our obligation to somehow remove this tradition (mostly one to keep women as virgins in preparation for giving pleasure to men) and replace it with another.

After arriving home I perused my NY Times and found this. Who would have known that there are other forms of surgical procedures that affect the rights of women?

Where to start? Tell people about this film.

On Sunday March 10^th my Rosemary and I attended the Arts Umbrella Dance Company’s There and Back Again – Travel through the history of ballet at the Scotia Bank Dance Centre.

The principal reason why we went was to see our granddaughter Lauren Stewart, 16, dance the first part of the program. We stayed, as anything having to do with the Arts Umbrella Dance Company will always be refreshing and thrilling.

In a later blog I will post the photographs that I took of the dance involving our granddaughter and the rest of the program.

During my long career as a magazine photographer I had the obligation to deliver photographs that went hand in hand with the copy of the essay or magazine article. As an obsolete, redundant & retired kind of guy I can now do stuff in which if I fail I will not have to answer to anyone.

So this blog and the photographs are all about the feet and legs of dance. Without them there cannot be any dance. That is not quite true as I have in the past witnessed modern dance performed on wheel chairs! Some years back Max Wyman, the almost retired renaissance man and former dance critic and I worked on a photo essay about dancer's shoes for the Vancouver Sun. A blog that is similar is here.





This lovely poem by Emily Dickinson is the reason for the blog's title.
 

I cannot dance upon my Toes - Emily Dickinson

I cannot dance upon my Toes—
No Man instructed me—
But oftentimes, among my mind,
A Glee possesseth me,
That had I Ballet knowledge—
Would put itself abroad
In Pirouette to blanch a Troupe—
Or lay a Prima, mad,
And though I had no Gown of Gauze—
No Ringlet, to my Hair,
Nor hopped to Audiences—like Birds,
One Claw upon the Air,
Nor tossed my shape in Eider Balls,
Nor rolled on wheels of snow
Till I was out of sight, in sound,
The House encore me so—
Nor any know I know the Art
I mention—easy—Here—
Nor any Placard boast me—
It's full as Opera—

More Emily Dickinson

a door just opened on the street 
Amber slips away