Monday, May 07, 2007


They can't touch me now
I got every sacrament behind me:
I got baptism,
I got communion,
I got penance,
I got extreme unction
I've got confirmation
'Cause I'm a Catholic child
The blood ran red
The blood ran wild!

Now I'm a Catholic man
I put my tongue to the rail whenever I can.
From Catholic Boy - 1980


One of my fondest memories of my father is singing in bed with him. Our two favourite songs were My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean and Onward Christian Soldiers. It is only recently that I found out that the latter song was originally called St Gertrude by Arthur Sullivan who wrote the music.

There we were singing as loud as we could:

Onward, Christian soldiers, marching as to war,
With the cross of Jesus going on before.

It was in 1980 that I photographed Jim Carroll and his band at the Commodore in Vancouver. I was struck by the lyrics of his title song (above) Catholic Boy. He misses two sacraments(Holy Orders and Matrimony) although he must have been at death's door in one of his drug ODs to receive Extreme Unction.

For many years, until it closed in 1989, I was a patron of the Classical Joint on Carrall Street. I went on Thursday nights to listen to my friend, alto saxophonist Gavin Walker play with his ever changing band. What never changed was the repertoire of classic bebop and bossa nova tunes peppered with jazz standards. There was one that intrigued me.



It was Charlie Parker's Confirmation. Walker explained that as a boy Parker had sung in a Catholic Church choir and that indeed the name of the tune was Catholic.

I would only mention that Confirmation is the forgotten sacrament. This is the sacrament that follows First Communion and makes one a "Soldier of Christ". As it was explained to me by Brother Edwin Reggio CSC this meant that it was my obligation to find out as much about the Catholic Church and its doctrine so that I could instruct anybody who asked. Brother Edwin saw Confirmation as an obligation to teach and impart and not something out of Arthur Sullivan which would have us march with sword in hand to battle the hoards of infidels!

Taking Confirmation seriously (and I was confirmed) has enabled me to explain to Rebecca all the questions she asks every time we enter a church in Mexico or in Vancouver. It will give her a richer appreciation of art, music, dance and the architecture of Gothic cathedrals.

And there has been an added bonus. I have been able to fend for myself when my Argentine nephew, Jorge O'Reilly (who is a member of Opus Dei) tries to put one over me!

Sunday, May 06, 2007


Yesterday Rebecca, Lauren and I went to Sebastian Alexander Schallie's baptism at St Augustine's Catholic Church in Kerrisdale. The interesting ceremony was a complete Mass and I did my best to explain to Rebecca what was happening. I pointed out that to our left on the main altar we could see a stained glass window of St. Augustine and that we could tell it was he because of his bishop's hat. Immediately Rebecca asked me where St Monica's window was. I have told Rebecca often the story of the Bishop of Hippo(354-430 AD) who early in his life (when he was having lots of fun womanizing) prayed to God asking him, "Make me a saint, but not yet." And it was because he had been such a wicked man in his youth that his long suffering mother had been made into a saint. When we left the church I had a chat with Father Gordon Cook and asked him about Monica. It was then that I found that the church is named after another bishop, St. Augustine of Canterbury (birth date unknown but died 26 May, 604 AD) and there is no patient Monica in the premises.

Earlier in the day I had explained to Rebecca the Catholic concept of original sin and how baptism is the first sacrament of a total of 7. I explained how some Christian sects believe that sprinkling with water is not enough and total immersion is necessary. Shades of Achilles?

All this set me to thinking that as a youth my religion had been quantitative and not qualitative. Let me explain.

When I was 9 I would go to visit my cousin Robby Miranda who lived in Belgrano C in Buenos Aires. On Sundays we would walk to the nearby church on Juramento and Cabildo, la Parroquia de la Inmaculada Concepción but affectionately called La Redonda (the Round Church) because it indeed was round.



Robby and I would calculate to get to the Mass by the Offertory. At the time if you arrived a bit before the Offertory and stayed until the priest said, "Ite Missa Est," ("Go, the Mass is ended.") we would satisfy our contractual obligations to go to a complete Mass on Sunday. We then considered that on very hot days we stood outside the church's open doors and looked into the Mass. Did we have to be under the roof of the church to be in the Mass? We argued about this to exhaustion. We may have been too immersed in our discussion to notice that Father Virgilio Filippo (he was a great orator) usually insinuated in his sermon that unless we became good Peronists we would burn in hell.

So it was that four years ago when Rosemary, Rebecca and I went to Buenos Aires I felt I had the obligation to take Rebecca to La Redonda for Sunday Mass with my godmother and first cousin Inesita Barber O'Reilly Kuker (above left). This we did and we had a lot of fun. The officiating priest resembled matinee idol Cornel Wilde. I could almost imagine his foil hidden under his chasuble. From our seats, which were halfway down, (it was very hot but I did not think it was proper for me to suggest to Inesita that we step out!) Rebecca kept waiving at the priest. You would have thought that Inesita would have taken it all very seriously. But no, she thought it was all very funny and I heard her giggle. After the Mass we had medias lunas and café in the cafe outside and it was very special that my godmother could be sitting at the table with my granddaughter. I felt some sort of symmetrical order and that all the religious instruction I had received from my mother and grandmother (and Brother Edwin at St Edward's in Austin) I had passed on to Rebecca and that it would serve her well as it had served me.

The reason Inesita had been chosen as my godmother was that her mother, my Aunt Inés had divorced Barber to marry Alejandro Ariosa (which explains my middle name of Alejandro). So instead of my aunt being my official godmother (though se was de facto) her daughter Inesita took on the responsibilities of taking care of my spiritual life or helping in other ways in lieu of the absence of my parents. I must report that Inesita has been the perfect godmother in all respects.

Yesterday the priest's sermon at St. Augustine was a bit long and Rebecca asked me, " When is he going to shut up?" I confessed to her that we were participating in a complete Mass (thinking about what dispensation I would have looked for so many years ago that would have enabled me to avoid Mass on the next day, today Sunday.) and that we needed some patience. I explained to her the beautiful compactness of Latin and what Ite Missa Est meant. When the time came the father said, "The Mass is ended, go......" and I missed the rest because Rebecca at 9 had the same smile of relief that I myself must have had when I was 9 and Robby and I ran out of La Redonda to play rolling down on the grassy slopes of our favourite park, Barrancas de Belgrano and then buy a porción of pizza at the nearby Belgrano C train station restaurant.



Rebecca, at 9 is much too young for me to explain a further mystery about La Redonda and how it figures in the plot of my favourite Argentine novel, Ernesto Sábato's Sobre Héroes y Tumbas. This will happen, when like her grandfather, she shifts from the quantitative to the qualitative.

St. Augustine of Hippo and St. Thomas Aquinas are really the two most important saints of the Catholic Church in reference to doctrine. Aquinas modified and adapted Aristotle's concept of the unmoved mover as his "proof" of the existence of God. I always saw God as a very special bowling ball that somehow moved all the other bowling balls in a row (as they are automatically returned) without It moving at all. The three finger holes on the ball are sheer coincidence and have no bearing to the Holy Trinity.

I have told Rebecca the story of St Augustine thinking on the problem of the Holy Trinity while walking on a beach. "How could God be three distinct persons, the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost and somehow all be (and certainly not share as that would be heresy) the nature of God?" He spotted a little boy (sometimes in my story he is naked) who was running to the sea with a sea shell where he would scoop some water and then run back to the sand where he had dug a little hole. He would then empty the shell into the hole and repeat his procedure. Thinking this a bit strange, Augustine stopped the boy and asked him what he was doing. "Sire, I am emptying the sea into the hole." "Child, that is clearly impossible," Augustine retorted. The little boy then said, "Far easier for me to finish my task than for you to find an answer to your problem." And then I tell Rebecca the little boy vanishes in a poof.

It was a few years ago in 1997 that I found a little book called That Same Flower by Norwegian author Jostein Gaarder. This book is a translation from the Latin into Norwegian and then into English by Ann Born. The book is supposed to be the letters that St Augustine's mistress, Flora Aemilia wrote to him.

How did Gaarder find the letters?

In 1995 Gaarder was browsing in an antiquarian bookshop in Buenos Aires' old district of San Telmo. It was there that Gaarder claims he found the letters in a box labeled Codex Floriae. Inside he found an introductory greeting:

Floria Aemilia Aurelio Augustino Episcopo Hipponiensi Salutem

We do know that Augustine did have a mistress called Floria who was the mother of his only son. They lived together for over a decade in Africa and then in Italy, until Augustine banished Floria with the intention of marrying a woman of higher social status. He never did and chose a path of asceticism.

From the book I copy:

You thought I bound you to the world of the senses, leaving you no peace and quiet in which to concentrate on the salvation of your soul. As a consequence, nothing came of that proposed marriage either. God desires above all that man should live in abstinence, you write. I have no faith in such a God........But why? Well, because you loved the salvation of your own soul more than you loved me. What times, Esteemed Bishop, what manners! (O tempora, o mores!)

The book is a delightful one night read and what is most interesting is that our concept of the terrible mother-in-law has not changed in the least with time. It seems that while Monica was a good mother and a saint she was a bitch.

Saturday, May 05, 2007

There were so many locusts in our Buenos Aires garden one year in my youth that we could barely see the blue sky. My mother and Mercedes, our housekeeper, banged pans with their lids in a futile effort to scare the large green monsters away. A few weeks later the sky was blotted out by waves and waves of white butterflies. The ten plagues of Egypt that finally convinced Pharaoh to release the Israelites were no simple bible tales that had been read to me at Sunday School. Our own plagues were my early dose of cinéma vérité. Then there was the year that my mother almost burned down one of our huge palm trees. She was out at night hunting for slugs (with scissors) and held a candle in one hand to see. She got too close to the palm (Buenos Aires is a city of palms and jacarandás) that the dry peeling bark caught fire and it spread like a pirate gunpowder keg to the top in a flash. By the time the bomberos arrived the fire had gone out as quickly as it had begun. It was a miracle to me that the palm tree survived as our plum trees somehow survived the locusts. Our garden had all matter of interesting insects and bugs. We had large black ants and large red ones that I avoided as they had a painful sting. We had four-inch-long rhinoceros beatles and at night in the summer, fireflies were in such abundance that we would sit in the garden to watch them while my father drank his mate and my mother her tea. I was given milk with a chocolate powder called Tody. I really liked it because Tody sponsored my weekly radio program, Tarzán (El Rey de la Jungla). My all-time favourite episode featured a totem pole (?) made of a mysterious substance called radium. I had cut out Tarzan's picture from the Tody container and glued it on my turtle's plastron (the under part of the carapace). It was this turtle that had a fondness for hybernating under a pile of fall leaves. One year my mother gave me permission to burn the leaf piles and......I remember crying to my mother, "I murdered my turtle!" I spent a lot of time in the garden as there were several fruit trees to climb and sample including plum trees that had green plums (yellow on the inside), yellow plums (yellow on the inside) red plums (yellow on the inside), red plums (almost black on the inside) and a tree of special plums that were a cross with a cherry tree. When I wasn't sampling the plums I was waiting patiently for the níspero to ripen. I avoided the brevas (the early figs) and the figs that followed. When they splatted on the brick path they looked so unsightly that I developed a distaste for them. I hated the tree because its smooth bark discouraged my climbing. And one bite of an unripe persimon, from the tree my father insisted on calling the khaki, cured me from ever trying this fruit again. Two summers ago I bought a used Nikon FM-2 from Leo's Camera and tested it with one roll. I snapped a few pictures of Rebecca and her butterfly/koy net by the rose bed in the waning days of that August summer. The exposure metre did not work so I returned the camera. Perhaps I should have kept it. This photograph is one of Rosemary's favourite photographs of our granddaughter. While Rebecca did see Buenos Aires fireflies three summers ago I have yet to tell her about the ten plagues of Pharaoh's Egypt and the year of the butterflies and the locusts.

Friday, May 04, 2007


I had been looking for this photograph for a long time but I could not remember either the name of the movie or the director. So the photo lay buried in my files since I took it in September 2000. I had been assigned then to take a picture for the cover of the Straight (one of those now rare photographic covers) and the instructions were to make the picture look gritty like the movie.

It is no accident that the man (or woman) in charge of the camera work during the making of a movie is called the director of photography. When I met up with director Ross Weber and his cast of 6 actors at house in East Vancouver I felt a bit like a director of photography. I had fun arranging the actors in my frame.

Taking pictures of more than three people is very much like taking pictures of a rock band, which is no different from snapping one's family. I use the same technique to photograph a group of lawyers. The secret is to place the persons, one at at time, in your location of choice. In this case it was a bed.





It was very difficult not to notice Frida Betrani as seen here in the centre of the photo so I had to place director Ross Weber in the front to give him a better chance to stand out.

With digital cameras (the very expensive ones) only now being able to expose at the extremely fast ISO (light sensitivity) of 3200 it is interesting to note that back in 2000 Ilford's Delta 3200 was a cutting edge film for medium format cameras like mine.

Thursday, May 03, 2007



Some 12 years ago I received a phone call from Adrian du Plessis who wanted a favour. He had a friend who had the ambition of being a photographer and he wondered if I could help her. That is how I met Nina Gouveia who ended up being my Tina Modotti.



As a young teenager I had lived with my family on Avenida Tamaulipas in Mexico City, about two blocks from Avenida Yucatán where Edward Weston had taken a nude photograph of Tina Modotti (Tina on the Azotea) on the roof of the house he was renting in 1924. Only now do I understand the wonderful significance as I treasure Edward Weston's Daybooks. Through the years I have read them often and I was jealous of his bohemian existence and of being able to ask the beautiful Modotti to follow him up to the roof for some photographs.



Nina may have learned some photography from me but it all happened because she faced my camera and only rarely did we take photographs together. The first time, when she came to my studio we had a mano a mano with my camera. I would take a picture of her and then she would immediately take a picture of me until we exhausted a 20 exposure roll. Here are two from that series (the one with her upturned hat above). We also photographed her friend Bif a couple of times. In one of the sessions we used Toni Ricci's excellent penthouse in his Marble Arch Hotel (the Paris Hilton of our fair city) as seen, below.



Nina was quite short and darkish. She had been born in British Guiana and I always suspected her parents were gypsies because they moved a lot. Nina always looked ten years younger than she really was. I always made fun of her taste for big boots which always made her look even shorter.



Because she was a yoga instructor she had tremendous flexibility and strength for posing and for keeping her poses.



Luckily I did realize from early on that she was a photographic treasure and I photographed her often but not as often as I would have wanted until she and her family picked up sticks and moved to Spain.

My friend, Argentine painter Juan Manuel Sanchez loved to work with Nina and we did several joint projects that we called "colaboraciones". He said that Nina was very "plástica" by which he meant her flexibility and tone. Nina not only posed in silence but she also had her own ideas.



In one she wanted me to photograph her with a strippers's tassle. We also had great fun transforming her old apartment on Maine Street into a temporary 1940s Mexican house of ill repute just for an afternoon and just for my camera.

Wednesday, May 02, 2007


I am not sure that learning how to diagram a sentence ever led to me seeing the light or to apply it to everyday living.

But I can safely say that there are two pieces of knowledge learned at school that I have been able to apply in a practical and useful manner. Both have some connection to water and to Sir Isaac Newton. Every couple of years I have to drain my fishpond. This used to be a messy job until I remembered that if I put a hose in the pond and sucked on the end and placed the hose in a lower part of the garden, the pool would drain by itself thanks to gravity. If I drained the pond on my rose bed I found that the pond water, rich in organic silt, gave me bigger and more plentiful roses in May and June.

For years I have known how gravity affects the human body. Never more so than now when at age 64 I look at myself in the mirror. This means that I have known to never photograph a woman on her back as gravity pulls down and makes her look fat. But I accidentally learned that there was a happy exception and that you could place a woman on her back, as long as she was in a tub of water. This is a prime example that confirms Newton's Third Law of Motion that states formally:

For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.

Water in a tube gently pushes back (counteracting gravity) on a woman's body lifting any part of her body that just might sag!

Since I have been of late writing about roses, here we have a photograph of Rose (Terri Casel) showing how Newton's Third Law works. As for Rose blowing into the water both Newton and competitor Huygens would have argued about the wave-particle duality.

Tuesday, May 01, 2007


Rosemary has an exclusive talent for seeing beauty and garden worthiness in plants that I often not notice. A case in point is Lathrys vernus the spring flowering member of the pea (and sweet peas) family. The Royal Horticultural Society says of this plant:

These pretty, ground-hugging spring peas can be found to the right of the main track to the Fruit and Vegetable Garden, just after crossing the bridge over the stream. At a time of year when yellow flowers (daffodils, primroses, celandines) and blue flowers (bluebells, Anemone blanda, grape hyancinths) predominate, it is refreshing to come across an unusual plant with distinctively different colouring. Grown at Rosemoor for the first time in 2004, Lathyrus vernus proved to be very popular with our visitors.

Of the plant itself the RHS says:

This is a clump-forming, herbaceous perennial with upright, angular stems, mid- to dark-green leaves, with two to four pairs of sharp, pointed, pinnate leaflets, up to 8cm (3in) long.

The flowers are produced in short racemes of up to six flowers, 2cm (0.8in) in length, reddish-purple in colour and becoming shaded greenish-blue with age.

The plant may cause mild stomach upset if ingested.

Rosemary rapidly loses interest in the plants that make her excited and she shifts to her next find. When she noticed roses I thought she was crazy. She dragged me to boring meetings of the Vancouver Rose Society that featured slide shows of badly photographed roses. Worst of all the chairs of VanDusen's Floral Hall were hard. The same happened when she had a preference for hardy geraniums. When I became interested in the geraniums she was into ferns. And so it has been through the years as our garden changes as our interests shift. If this were not the case and both of us loved roses (as I love roses) we would have 1000 roses and nothing else!

Bless Rosemary for her exclusive tastes.