Tuesday, March 13, 2007


Every time Rebecca and Lauren come to stay with us on Saturdays with the usual sleep over, I am ostracized to what used to be Hilary's (Rebecca and Lauren's mother) room for the night. It is a sacrifice that has its rewards. It is during the day that the two girls make a mess of our bedroom when they raid Rosemary's closet. They take out her shoe boxes and within minutes there are shoes everywhere. Rebecca, in particular, looks to see what she can find hanging in Rosemary's racks. One of her favourite items is an aqua coloured satin nightie I bought Rosemary at Eaton's some 28 years ago. Rosemary unromantically pointed out to Rebecca that it was 100% polyester.

This time Rebecca combined clothing in the same time era as she also found a dress our Mexican housekeeper, Clemen, had made for Hilary an equal amount of years ago. Saturday was a dreary day so I marched Rebecca to our entrance for some photographs. She protested that it was too cold. Every time a car passed by she would run into the house. She did not want to be seen. I managed a few glum photos that I still happen to like.



That evening I watched The Saboteur, Code Name Marituri (1965) with Yul Brynner and Marlon Brando speaking a German accent as unconvincing as his bleach-blonde SS officer role in The Young Lions (1958). It was around 10:30 when Rebecca came down to watch the movie with me and by then it had been going on for almost an hour. It was difficult to explain to her who were the good Germans and the bad Germans. But she persisted a stayed until the end.

I think that the time for watching Beau Geste is coming up on us.

Monday, March 12, 2007


Marc Destrubé and the Axelrod Quartet will be playing Beethoven's Op 132 (5 movements): March 15, 2007, 8:pm, Scotiabank Dance Centre, 677 Davie Street with Peter Hannan, Kenton Lowen and Pissed Of Wild (in no particular order).


“Peugeot 505s are solid cars. They are used as taxis in Buenos Aires and all over Africa.”
Marc Destrubé


I always notice people who drive Peugeots or any other French cars. They are few. Most of these drivers are stubborn individuals. One of them to me looks like Antonio Vivaldi or Nicolo Paganini. I think I make this connection because I know he is Vancouver violinist Marc Destrubé.

Goethe likened listening to a string quartet to "eavesdropping on a conversation among four intelligent people." Perhaps that's why listening to one can seem like a such an intimidating experience, unlike, say, listening to an orchestra. Vancouver musician Marc Destrubé, first violinist of the Smithsonian's Axelrod Quartet, one of the world's best, thinks the experience should be anything but intimidating. "Our repertoire is immensely warm and inviting," Destrubé says. "Yes, I'm in the middle of it. But you have the chance to listen in on a private conversation among four individuals. Whereas a concert by the Pacific Baroque Orchestra, which Destrubé founded and has directed since 1991, is like going to a pop concert, the music being thrown at you. You are not looking into someone else's activity. The activity is there to please you."

I disagree with Destrubé's pop concert comparison. His violin playing adds that extra brilliance to the PBO concerts. But he may be right when he tells me, "Baroque music is a door into the appreciation of the music that followed it." After years of being enthused with baroque music I now have a nascent interest in the music of the 19th century as represented by quartets and other small orchestras. And I may be one of many others. It is only recently that I have also been interested in what in Vancouver is called New Music and often is presented by the society of that name, The Vancouver New Music Society. Being able to listen to this new music by Marc Destrubé, who has always made music warm and inviting makes this concert a hard one to miss.

In 1998 the Smithsonian's Smithson String Quartet changed its name to its present one after it received a gift from the self-taught ichthyologist and tropical fish expert Herbert Axelrod. The gift was a quartet (two violins, one viola and cello) of exquisitely decorated Antonio Stradivari instruments. Destrubé's instrument of choice, the 1709 "Greffuhle" Stradivari, is inlaid with gryphons and spotted leopards. Those leopards and gryphons must have their influence. Of playing on the Greffuhle, Destrubé says, "It has an intimate sound but a strong personality as if it were alive and you are going to battle with it." A seemingly out-of-the- blue offer, in April 2002, to be the first violinist of the Axelrod Quartet came at the right time for Destrubé.

Until 2002, as concertmaster of the CBC Radio Orchestra, he had such a gruelling playing and teaching schedule that it became impossible to juggle his concertmaster tasks with his international commitments. Diversity is another reason for Destrubé's success. He is a soloist, a director, a concertmaster for various orchestras, a teacher, and plays baroque, 19th- and 20th-century music. He has a soft spot for Russian composer Alfred Schnittke (1934 - 1998). As a director of the PBO he has commissioned works from contemporary Canadian composers, including Thursday night's performer/composer Peter Hannan.

And somehow he finds the time to take his wife and two children on camping holidays. The Victoria-raised Destrubé has an interesting background that may explain his attraction to diversity. His father, while a French Second World War prisoner of war in a camp in Austria in 1944, became sick and was transferred to a hospital in Villach. There he met his soon-to-be wife, a young German doctor. Such were the mechanical skills of the senior Destrubé that he soon was repairing hospital equipment and taking the pre-operation x-rays. Fudging on his health status, while being careful not to cross the Nazi hospital administrators, Destrubé never returned to his camp and married the doctor at the end of the war. An uncle who had moved from London to start a general store in Northern Alberta at the turn of the 20th century had retired in Victoria. The Destrube's moved there. To this day, Marc Destrubé drives French cars because, "My father always drove one." Destrubé's achievement at 52 is extraordinary, when you consider he became a musician later in life than normal. "I wasn't a prodigy. I made the decision to be a musician when I was 17 after I had started my pre-med studies. I then just worked hard [beginning at the Victoria Conservatory of Music]." By 1987 he was the first violinist for the Purcell String Quartet and was a founding member of Tafelmusik. Destrubé explained the challenge in quartet playing. "It involves skills that have to do with one's imagination as a musician. One must not only get along but also work with three people in an intense situation. It is the ability, as a first violinist, to stand out as a greater amongst equals and to be willing to discuss musical points on an equal level."

I have watched Destrubé at PBO rehearsals and I can confirm that he has a soft-spoken authority that must serve him well in the quartet.

Adendum by Marc Destrubé

Dear friends,

I thought you might like to at least know about this most unusual concert. The Axelrod Quartet will be playing Beethoven Op. 132 (5 movements), Kenton Loewen (amazing drummer) and I will be playing Peter Hannan's new piece (5 parts), with live electronics, and Pissed Off Wild (Kenton's band - the name says it all) will play (5 songs), all this in no particular order, and we'll all do something together at the end.
Marc

Vancouver New Music

Sunday, March 11, 2007


I love taking portraits and quite a long time ago I came to realize that hands could be almost as expressive as a face. But hands are difficult to photograph as they can be as big as the face. And when they are closer to the camera they can appear much bigger or when closer to a light they can overexpose. A hand in tension (or little fingers in tension) will be noticed before the face. A case in point is the little finger of Rebecca's right hand here. It detracts from what is one of my favourite pictures ever of her. It has the charm of being a Polaroid and so is one of a kind.



Fortunately Rebecca is taking ballet so she knows how to hold her hands with grace. With her help I have learned to take better pictures (even lawyers) as I always notice what the hands are doing.



Now that Lauren can take instructions when I photograph her I have been able to photograph her with Rebecca with some ease. I took this one last summer in the garden and Lauren is holding Rosa 'Sexy Rexy'.

In this next one Rebecca is in our back lane during a downpour. She is holding (but her hand barely shows) Rosa 'Charles de Mills'.



Feet can complicate things sometimes. Usually they are too far from the face to be noticed in a portrait. When Rebecca posed for me behind our gazebo with the hydrangea she asked me if she could place her leg thus. It looked very adult-like and I liked it. Rosemary didn't at first and now has begun to appreciate Rebecca's attempt at looking like an adult.



But it was only recently that I finally nailed a portrait of Rebecca and Lauren where to my mind the hands are perfect.

Saturday, March 10, 2007




Around 2000 Time Magazine called noted oceanographer and explorer Wade Edmund Davis, Hero of the Planet. By the next year there were full page photographs of Wade Davis in the National Geographic labeling him just that. In 2001 when Davis was the Explorer-in-Residence at the National Geographic Society I was given the opportunity to take his photograph that September by the Georgia Straight. It was a thrill for me. I was going to meet this Canadian born man who had visited just about every remote spot of our planet. Surely the decision makers at the Straight were going to put him on the cover. They didn't and some unforgettable cartoon on some unforgettable editorial took Wade Davis's place.



The only record of Davis's trip to Vancouver was my little picture (the b+w one) in the Straight and the Vancouver Sun made no mention of the man.

Davis had been very cooperative in posing for me and even went as far of going for my idea for the Greek hero look with ivy around his head. As a Canadian he did suggest to me that nobody was a prophet in his own country. I keep seeing his picture in the National Geographic and as he rockets into further fame I can at least enjoy here the cover that never was. Davis and I had a lot of fun doing the table top of his things on my living room floor. His luggage had been lost so all he could bring was his razor, passport, business card, Swiss Army watch and I used my Nikon F-2 which was exactly like his. I remember that the folks at the Straight had wanted me to photograph Davis as he cleared customs to show the world traveler in action. Even in 2001 it would have taken me weeks to get the necessary permission.






Wade Davis Points Towards Biography

Friday, March 09, 2007


Around 1955 my grandmother worked in the Filipino Embassy in Mexico City. When the new consul, Johnny Hormillosa arrived my grandmother took him out to see the sites of the city. In one of the restaurants they visited, she had been most embarrased when in his Filipino Spanish, Hormillosa had asked for a clean glass with water. A few weeks later Jhonny (he insisted in spelling his name that way, but then his son was called Robin after Nigaraguan poet Rubén Darío) asked my grandmother to take him to that wonderful "Egyptian restaurant" (he pronounced that Egyptzian restaowrunt). My grandmother was all confused until Jhonny described the Egyptian costumes of the waitresses. It was only then that my grandmother realized that the waitresses of the ubiquitous Sanborns restaurant/drugstores wear a uniform based on those of the Tehuanas, the Mexican Indian women of the Tehuantepec Istmus. They could be seen as Egyptian if the viewer were the Filipino consul.

Last year when I photographed Pam in Nora's living room I asked Nora to decorate it Egyptian style and to make up Pam as an Egyptian/Coptic Madonna. I couldn't explain to either Pam or Nora that Jhonny would have approved.

Sanborns Morelia
Sanborns Cancun

Thursday, March 08, 2007


For a while in the late 80s I had a job that almost was a job. I was the Director of Photography at Vancouver Magazine. I even had a card that said that. It was my job to suggest ways of doing covers and illustrating features. I saw many illustrators and photographers during that time. I took care to not assign myself to shoot anything except when the editor, Mac Parry insisted I shoot it.

One day Mac came to me and said we needed to photograph Doc Harris ( a DJ of note then) with a woman that was beautiful and had cleavage. I immediately suggested the then very hot fashion photographer Chris Haylett to shoot it and I was in charge of finding the model. The cover had all to do with the Playhouse Wine Festival so I headed to the Vancouver Playhouse and asked to see 8x10s of their actresses and extras. I was given a pile of 100 and put them all on the floor. There were big smiles, beautiful glossy teeth and all the photos rapidly blended into one. But two photographs stood out and I picked them up and inquired as to who they were.



By coincidence they were sisters, Saffron and Camile Henderson, daughters of legendary BC rocker and guitarist Bill Henderson. While most of the other 8x10s had been taken by professional photographers the snaps of Saffron and Camile had been taken by their mother!

Mac and I agreed on Saffron for the cover and months later we found an excuse to run my picture of both sisters. I did these in my then huge Yaletown studio on Hamilton Street. Inga Vollmer did the makeup and (very important) made the dresses on the spot with bolts of satin I had purchased. Vollmer used safety pins and some quick sewing.

Saffron is in black and Camile in blue.

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.