Wednesday, March 07, 2007

This is a not too lame excuse for avoiding my blog obligations for today. The fact is that I have to interview the dancer/choreographer Emily Molnar at 1:15 with a new voice recorder I bought yesterday. I have to be able to set the correct time on the tiny unit before I can use it. I have a few hours to figure it out. The Sony broadcast quality tape recorder cannot be fixed. It has a cracked capstan so the recorded voices speed up and slow down randomly. I first bought it in 1990 to take to Lima to interview Mario Vargas Llosa. It was there that I made the first of many mistakes that one is capable of doing with this recorder. On pause the sound level meter happily tells you of the ups and downs of your speaker and the earphones show you that the microphone is working. But at the end of one of my Vargas Llosa interviews I had nothing. My affection for the Sony has been a troubled one. I hope that the Olympus may be a little more foolproof for a man who has had problems with resistentialism a word I first read about in William Safire's column. It has all to do with objects rebelling to human masters who mistreat them thinking that since "they" are machines they have no soul and can be mistreated at will.

Tuesday, March 06, 2007



Yesterday when I picked up Rebecca to take her to her piano lesson I had new CDs (with piano music) loaded and I played a sampling. Immediately Rebecca showed interest in Satie - Piano Works - Daniel Varsano - Philippe Entremont. She wasn't too interested in Miles Davis - Kind of Blue (So What with Bill Evans on piano). She commented that André Previn and J.J. Johnson play Kurt Weill's Mack the Knife & bilbao Song and other music from The Threepenny Opera - Happy End - Mahagonny (is that a long CD/record title?), sounded oriental but she wanted more Eric Satie.

I remember exactly the year and where I first heard Eric Satie. It was in 1967 in the apartment of my friend Raúl Guerrero Montemayor. He played the definitive version at the time which was with pianist Aldo Ciccolini.

I first met Raúl at my Tia Fermina's house on Miguel Servantes Saavedra in Mexico City. Raúl spoke more than 8 languages (German with a Yiddish accent, French with a Hungarian accent and whatever variation of a language you could think of!). Although he was of Filipino heritage he was blond and blue-eyed. There were those who asserted that Raúl was the illigitimate son of the first president of the Philippines, Manuel L. Quezon. The resemblance is most striking. Raúl was also first cousin to Yvette Mimieux. Raul became my friend and began to remove some of my rough edges. He took me to see French and Italian cinema. He introduced me to the wonders of Monica Viti and Antonioni. We talked about Sartre and books. We drank coffee at a very bohemian coffee shop called La Rana Sabia (The Wise Frog). We drove to Veracruz when I was 18 and I got my first glimpse, as an adult, of the sea (in this case the Gulf of Mexico). Raúl helped me out with my courting of Rosemary and later on became godfather of Hilary (photo above left) who is Rebecca's mother.

It was Rebecca choosing to listen to Erik Satie yesterday that brought home that realization on how important Raúl has been in my life and in my life with Rosemary.

Monday, March 05, 2007



I have observed three fools in action over the years and when they finally give up there are many more of the type to occupy their place. These fools have the ambition to:

1. Publish and or edit a magazine, tabloid or newspaper.
2. Start an art gallery.
3. Open a restaurant.

It was quite a few years ago that Urban Peasant, James Barber had to withdraw from his Commercial Drive restaurant venture Arriva. He was losing his shirt. But he went on the record in a magazine article, how the experience had not turned him off. He asserted that when the opportunity rose he would start a restaurant again.

Dianne Farris once told me that she had not only mortgaged her house away to keep her gallery going but that she was also painting herself into a plumbing corner as the bathrooms did not work. But she was going to press on with her dream.

I think it is the dream that keeps these three "fools" going. You have an idea, and reality (with its instant satisfaction) can be quick in coming if you publish a weekly or a daily. I have been privy to conversations between publishers and editors where the former would swear a no inteference policy so as to keep an editorial independence. And I have seen these promises disappear as "service" peaces became the norm for keeping a magazine afloat.

As a photographer I have been promised more times than I can possibly remember, "This is a new magazine and we can only afford this much, but as soon as we become more successful we will pay you what you are really worth." I have seen young photographers, illustrators and freelance writers be given "photo" or "writing" credits instead of hard cash. I have never had the heart or the gumption to tell them that money will never come and photo credits are not proper collateral at the bank.

But would be gallery owners, restauranteurs and publisher/editors keep passing by my horizon and for the latter I am almost never able to say, "No," when asked to help out for little or no money.

Could it be that I am a dreamer, too?

The prospect of seeing a magazine with my cover photo has always been an exciting delight. My latest effort is no less a delight. It was about a month ago that experienced editor/art director Bob Mercer told me he had the project to re-brand the most horrible (my word) magazine in Vancouver.



He said he wanted to turn around Vancouver Lifestyles Magazine (now called VLM)and wanted bold b+w covers. Best of all (this is how he lured me in) he wanted me to suggest who was the person I would want to photograph the most.

My answer was an easy one. I photographed the luminous Gloria Macarenko assisted by my secret weapon of so many years, stylist Maureen Willick.

When the magazine appeared last week I could not believe, that just for once, the spread looked better than I had imagined it.

I can only hope that editor/art director Bob Mercer's dream comes true.

Sunday, March 04, 2007


In my relationship with Rebecca and Lauren I try to look back and remember how it was with my abuelita. She was the only grandparent I ever knew. I am unsuccessfully wanting to see myself through her as I was then and I can only wonder at the parallels with my relationship with my granddaughters.

I was 8 when my grandmother took me to see all 15 episodes (244 minutes) of Spencer Gordon Bennet's Superman (with Kirk Alyn as the man of steel). I would have never known that the serials were being shown in downtown Buenos Aires as I did not read newspapers.



My only conclusion is that my grandmother found out about the screening independently and made the choice of volunteering to take me and sit through a 4-hour long program. All I remember is a huge stomach ache and how I cried on the train on our way back home.

Of late I have been having a bit a problem taking Rebecca to dance and concerts as not only do I have to convince her but also I must appeal and convince her mother. Just because I am older, in this day and age, does not necessarily mean that I might have a leg up on what is culturally advantageous for my Rebecca. Last night I was bitterly disappointed that Rebecca did not accompany Ale (Rebecca's aunt and my daughter) and me to watch Day Helesic's (above, left) performance as a horse (Genuine Risk) at Edam as well as seeing Rebecca's friend Anne Cooper (and Delia Brett, and Monica Strehlke) in Peter Bingham's One thing after another. Would Rebecca have been as mesmerized as Ale and I were in watching Carolyn Chan dance Jay Hirabayashi/Kokoro's Trans?

I can only wonder if my grandmother ever wanted me to see (or did she want to see? Alas! I never asked her.) a Randolph Scott Technicolor western and my mother turned her down that I had too much homework or that I was too tired.



The homework is long forgotten. Would I still remember the Randolph Scott film I never saw? Would I remember my grandmother's smile as we spooned our strawbery ice cream sodas at the Roxy, around the corner from the movie houses on Lavalle?

How many times did I unknowingly disappoint her?

Saturday, March 03, 2007



Unlikely things happen in films. Who would have ever guessed that Yuko Mishima's The Sailor Who Fell From Grace From The Sea would have been made into a movie re-set in Dover with Sarah Miles and Chris Christofferson? That was the case in 1976. I remember seeing the almost blatant nude shots of the couple in Playboy. Then I enjoyed Sarah Miles in The Big Sleep (1978) with Robert Mitchum. They had worked together to my satisfaction in Ryan's Daughter (1970).

And so I was pumped up for my photo engagement with Sarah Miles in 1987. The session almost became an anticlimax to my expectations and only now can I accept it all and even smile thinking about it.



Sarah Miles faced my camera with her hair up. In a Michael Caineish accent she instructed me, "I have here a transparent blouse. Make sure my tits don't show!"

Friday, March 02, 2007



A bad cold can devastate an old guy like me. As I walked down the stairs this morning nothing was working and the knees just about buckled. It made me remember Vancouver dancer Cori Caulfield who can walk, move, dance with such ease as if she had Teflon in her joints. And so I have the opportunity to put up this photo of her which is one of my favourite pictures ever of a dancer.

Cori's back, a lovely back is all that the one that I saw so many years ago, wasn't. I was with my father and we were taking the subte back from a movie on Lavalle Street in downtown Buenos Aires. We were on our way to Retiro station and the train to Coghlan. It was near carnival and I spotted the bare back of a woman on the end of the other subway car. There was a lot of singing and chanting. It was one of those murgas or carnival street bands that sing the samba in the streets of Buenos Aires during carnival. I was repelled by the woman's muscular and ugly back. I was only 8 or 9 and I did not understand at the time that she was probably a man dressed as a woman.

In some way when I photographed Cori with her apple I exorcised that terrible image from so long ago.

Cori Caulfield on space

Thursday, March 01, 2007


On those Friday evenings of long ago we could smell the humidity and hear the insects as our VW went down from Mexico City's 2250 meters to Xalapa's (in the state of Veracruz) near sea level. In the darkness, our VW's ancient 6 volt headlamps could not show us the spectacular gamut of greenness of the jungle vegitation that defines for me what Xalapa was and is. But we had passed through Xalapa enough times during the day to remember the green of this city of coffee and the famous Olmec heads of its anthropolgy museum. It was a green that may have eluded a young woman that I spied staring at shot glass of creme the menthe at a Jefferson Airplane concert I had attended in San Francisco in 1967. No drugs could have revealed for her the greenness that Rosemary and I could imagine, and, at the same time smell in Xalapa on our way to Veraruz and my mother. We would look forward to the unmuffled sounds of sea level and the smell of salt and the Gulf of Mexico.

If a blog has a limitation it is here where it is obvious. You cannot smell nor in its present configuration hear any sounds. Worse of all there is no room for the space of a panoramic that will show the scope of Mexico's landscapes or the wonder of its ruins. Forunately in Andrew at Paricutin (above left), Rebecca was there when I took my friend's picture last year.



Maybe this year, if we go to Oaxaca, she will also understand the scope of the ruins of Montealbán. Jorge, Andrew's friend and mine can be seen here leaning on a stella at the bottom left.