Friday, September 28, 2007

Shortly before my mother died in 1973 (she was 62), I remember her telling me, "Alex I have been in school all my life." This is because she had been a teacher until 1970 when her Meniere's Disease completely took away her sense of balance and she became deaf. Her mother Lolita had been a teacher and so was I until I came to Canada in 1975.

Rosemary and I met teaching and we taught in Mexico until we left. In our present family our eldest daughter Ale is now keeping with the family tradition. She has always wanted to teach native children. She has her wish as half her 10 student kindergarten class, in her new job in a school in Lillooet is native. She moved there in July. I bequeathed to her my hardcover copy of Teaching As A Subversive Activity by Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner.

On Monday, since both of Lauren and Rebecca's parents were at work, Rosemary and I went to parents-meet-teachers day at L’École Bilingue. We sat on tiny little chairs in Lauren's kindergarten class and both of us experienced a special little thrill to see Lauren's name taped on the floor which marked where she sat. We were amazed at the amount of paper work her teacher has to go through. But we also found out that all the paper stuff that Lauren and Rebecca have to take home is now available by email. In Rebecca's split 5/6 class (Rebecca is in grade 5) we were barely able to comprehend how one teacher went twice a week, another three times a week and that a third taught the class mathematics. I was amazed to find out that these teachers welcomed email communication with parents. I am not sure that as a teacher I would want a meddling parent communicating with me daily (were she that meddling of a parent).

Being in Lauren's class shot me with nostalgia. I remember just about everything I did not only in kindergarten but in pre-kinder in Buenos Aires. In kinder, the famous Diligenti quintuplets (three girls, two boys) were all in my class. I may have been precocious before my time as I distinctly remember lifting the girls' skirts up on a few occasions. I remember fighting to be able to play the sandpaper blocks and being humiliated in having to play the triangle. It was the sissy instrument par exellence. It was in segundo superior (a sort of second grade for somewhat super achievers) were a photographer took our class picture and used a metal pan with phosphorus or magnesium powder. We would line up in lines before entering class and we had to extend our right arm and touch the person in front on the right shoulder and maintain that distance. It was called making distancia. In kidergarten we were given a little bottle of milk and cookies. I do not recall anybody ever having an allergy attack. After our meal we would rest our head on our desk for descanso. Very special to Argentines is the almost universal uniform which is a white smock (much like a nurse's or a doctor's) and it is called a guardapolvo (it literally means, it keeps the dust away). I wore one.

But what I remember the most is the smell of my classrooms. It was combination of the scent of real chalk dust (when blackboards were black and made of slate and not the easy-on-the-eyes green) and the pungent smell of the ink from the inkwells in our desks. And, yes we used papel secante (blotting paper) which had a particular smell of its one. I have some Kodak blotting paper still with which I sometimes dry my photographs. I remember the fear of having the yearly dyptheria vaccine. It was an injection that was on one's spinal column. To this day I will take a pill when given the choice over an injection.



A few years ago my Argentine friends and artists Juan Manuel Sanchez, Nora Patrich and I decided to have a show called Nostalgia. In this show with one model, the lovely Argentine Linda Lorenzo, we dressed her (and undressed her) and modified her looks to suit our fancy. We made her fit our rosy ideas of our past in Buenos Aires and Argentina. It was Nora who suggested the school girl. She found her old school girl guardapolvo (Nora never threw out anything) and we dressed up Linda. We didn't do this in the spirit of that Japanese fetish for schoolgirl uniforms. We genuinely tried to evoke our days in school.



Somehow the extremely curvaceous Linda understood our purpose and managed to look all proper in the uniform and I was delighted to take the shot. I am including a couple more of Linda to show that her talents surpassed our skills.

Thursday, September 27, 2007



My first direct involvement with politics happened in 1966 when with a Mauser on my shoulder I watched President Arturo Illía go home in a cab. Since then I have taken democracy very seriously. As soon as I became a Canadian citizen I began to vote municipally, provincially and federally. I don't quite understand Canada's parliamentary system. Nor do I understand how the Prime Minister has so much authority to appoint such positions as the Supreme Court Justices without any form of parliamentary check or approval. During an assignment for a local business magazine to cover a Socred convention in Whistler some years past, I was flabbergasted to see how politicians who were not getting the votes that they expected, would "cross the floor" (they had to do this physically and it was patently humiliating) to give support to someone they had loathed and spoken ill of in their speeches.

But I have admired and enjoyed the freedom that our politicians have to move around at will in our city. In his worst moments of unpopularity I waited for Premier Bill Vander Zalm to photograph him with a buddy from Holland (who was into trains) as they inspected CP's rail yard behind the old CP Train Station. Vander Zalm arrived, parked his Volvo across the street on Cordova and before he crossed the street to meet me he put coins into the meter. He was dressed in a smart black leather jacket. There was not one security man in sight.

I enjoy discussing politics with my friends Mark Budgen, Ian Bateson, Abraham Rogatnick and Sean Rossiter. Occasionally my right-wing friend, ex Fraser Institute David Hanley surfaces and he adds to my mix. The first thing I do in the morning when I pick up my Vancouver Sun is to look for Section B to read about Vancouver politics. In Wednesday's Sun I did not find one reference in Section B on the fact that we are living through a long city strike.

To my amazement I read in Allen Garrs'column, titled, Ladner Courted for provincial run, in my Wednesday Vancouver Courier, that there is a big chance that our next mayor will be Carole Taylor. She would not run provincially and her provincial seat would go to the miffed and ignored (Garr was precise in saying that any reference he made to our lofty loonie was not a reference to ",....His Worship") NPA Councillor, Peter Ladner.

This sort of news would make banner headlines in any other big city daily in any part of the world, (It is becoming hard here not to break my rule of never ranting in this blog!) or it would have been mentioned on CBC Radio.

So with Courier in hand I went to get a haircut with my local Kerrisdale hairdresser. I told Richard Jeha what I had read in the paper. He was astounded. Could it be that only in Vancouver would the hairdresser be the last person to hear such news? And, even after this badly uninformed citizen of Vancouver?

Thankfully I could be worse informed. My friend Mark Budgen is a shrewd observer and knows much more than meets the eye. When I called him one day to ask why it was that Allen Garr, an avid bloodhound at the heels of the NPA, had only marginally slapped Ladner's wrist for writing a column about the city strike for the Vancouver Sun (and the Sun should have at least featured a column my a union member to counter Ladner's) he explained to me about the relationships that reporters have with their sources. It sounded like spook speak to me. Budgen said that a reporter's duty is to protect his or her sources, but at any given moment a reporter should be able to let go and burn his or her source when absolutely necessary, if editorial independence is to be maintained. This is why reporters on a city beat (like the Vancouver Sun's Frances Bula) should be re-assigned. If they linger in their beat they lose their independence and become PR pipe lines for their sources. It is Budgen's theory that Ladner is Garr's source at City Hall. Garr was then unwilling to burn Ladner when Ladner wrote that Sun column.

Wednesday, September 26, 2007




In the mid 90s and even into the first year of the 21st century a group of four architects (not quite, as one was close to being one but wasn't), one freelance journalist and one Vancouver Sun writer would meet on Thursday early evenings for beer at the Marble Arch. Without getting into trouble I think I can name Sean Rossiter as being the freelance scribe in question. I would occasionally attend these gatherings, bracing myself to tobacco fumigation as a couple of the architects smoked lots. They would order pitchers of beer and talk about golf, sports and comment on the salient attributes of the women on stage. I never did drink and I abandoned pipe and cigar smoking about 15 years ago. But this is the closest I ever got to the idea of male bonding. For me it has been always difficult as I don't fish, golf or do any sports or care for hockey. I felt like an interloper but I was made welcome. I marvelled at how these guys would suddenly know they had had enough to drink and no matter how interesting the conversation or the sizable beauty of the dancer's attributes these guys would stand up and go home. I felt like a wimp as I only drank soda water. If Tony Ricci, the guy who ran the joint, happened to be there we would be unable to pay for any of our drinks. I received unlimited soda waters. Even when Tony wasn't there, Danny the Greek would send a tray of flaming Sambucas our way. We would toast in his direction and down the hatch the concoction went.

Since we were all Canadians, we exercised our male right to eat a hamburger while watching a woman undrape (as they say at Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design). We had gained this right by going all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada via our proxy, Gary Taylor, God bless him! The menu was brought by a variety of employees who were in that Never-never land of not being exotics or sassy waitresses. Tony Ricci would have thrown us out if we had ever called any of them servers. After all he had literally hand picked them. So the persons emerging we gave several nicknames and our favorite of all was Lisa The Kitchen Goddess.

She was intelligent, slim and tall. She served us well and when I requested she pose for me in my studio she did. For this photograph I used the unlikely combination of a very sharp and fine grain film called Kodak Technical Pan Film with a terrible, unsharp, single focus box camera called a Bessa with a 6x9 cm format.

Little by little the architects went their separate way. The Arch closed and I have never seen Lisa the Kitchen Goddess again. If Danny is no longer with us I am sure he is serving flaming Sambucas somewhere up there.

Tuesday, September 25, 2007


Driving past the Stanley Park rose garden last week on my way to West Vancouver I noticed that some of the roses had not given up yet. Some of them had buds but they will ball up with the recent rain and cooler nights. I saddened at the thought. My melancholy dissipated as I thought of a happier time that happened this week but back in 1995.

I was driving to Horseshoe Bay in a maroon Maserati Bi-turbo and my passenger, the English writer Louis de Bernières, turned from looking at the roses, fingered the single mandolin string we had purchased at Ward Music (then on Hastings) and said through some unspoken chain of connections, "My grandfather, my father, and I all had a bad right leg because of our fascination with motorcycles."

He was speaking to me in the tangential magic realism of his early books (The War of Don Emmanuel's Nether Parts, 1990, Señor Vivo and the Coca Lord, 1991, Cardinal Guzman, 1992) and has what seems to be a symbolist's fascination for motorcycles, Lee Enfield rifles, his grandfather's life story, and mandolins.

Earlier that day, when I had entered his room at the Holiday Inn on Howe Street, I was surprised to see a case for a flat-bottomed mandolin. De Bernières said: "Yes, there's a mandolin inside it. I have three. I have a nice round-backed Italian one, the sort that slips about. It's a fake Italian one from Czechoslovakia. I have an absolutely exquisite one from Portugal. It's a flat-back and it really sings. Even the bass sings, unusual for mandolins, which are quite trebly. And this is my traveling mandolin. It's a Portuguese imitation from Spain. It has no volume, so it's ideal for hotel rooms." Removing it from the case, he sat down to play Vivaldi's Concerto for Mandolin in C major.

De Bernières was in town to promote his then latest novel, Captain Corelli's Mandolin. But at the same time he was taking advantage of this North American leg of his tour to search Nanaimo for traces of his grandfather, who disappeared from England in the 1920s and surfaced in British Columbia in the 1950s. "People ask me if I am going to write about him. He was 96 when he died. He had a long and picaresque life which ranged from Ceylon, Africa, the Northwest frontier, First World War, the RAF in the Second, and so on. I would love to turn it into a novel but my father and my aunt are still alive. I could cause some hurt and upset. Mario Vargas Llosa (the above listed trilogy by de Berniéres reads like translated Vargas Llosa on acid) upset his relatives with Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter. So did Isabel Allende. Maybe they think that art is more important. I don't."

He explains in obscure fragments, how his grandfather ended up in B.C. "My grandfather had a misunderstanding with his daughter, my aunt. He thought she was going to get married in New Zealand. He waited and waited to hear from her and didn't. As it happened she had not married and had stayed where she was in England. It was a futile misfortune." Searching for his daughter, whom he never heard from again, de Bernières's grandfather came to Canada.

Quiet and self-effacing, de Bernières rarely volunteered information. His remark on his family's fascination with motorcycles came only when I asked him why he had so painstakingly described a BMW motorcycle's advance/retard lever in Captain Corelli's Mandolin. When I asked him if he played the mandolin because he was a failed violinist, he replied, "I did play the violin for a while and my cat would howl, but no. I played classical and flamenco guitar until I damaged the ligaments of my hands." While talking about Spanish Guitars, de Bernières confided: "The three members of the military junta in Don Emanuel are named after the three most famous guitar-makers in Spain. And that Canadian poet living on a Greek Island in Captain Corelli's Mandolin is your Leonard Cohen."

As I dropped off de Bernières at the ferry terminal I wondered (and still wonder) whether I'd ever find out how his grandfather(not to mention his father and himself) hurt his leg with a motorcycle. I hoped then and hope now, that he might risk offending his father and aunt. We would be richer for it.

Monday, September 24, 2007



When I took this picture of artist and musician Jim Cummins a.k.a. Braineater in October 1983 I may have taken my first photograph where I was aware that a single photograph sometimes could not tell a story or paint a true picture. Cummins posed for me and when he raised his hands I saw the most beautiful hands I had ever seen on anybody. Cummins's studio (he moved as often as his studio's frozen rents were unfrozen) on Water Street, where it intersects with Cordova, had white brick walls. I had an idea. I asked him if I were to make an 11x14 inch print if he would finish it for me. He accepted the challenge while I convinced Vancouver Magazine art director Rick Staehling that this photo would need a joint photo credit. Soon after this photo illustration appeared I hired Cummins to paint both my daughters (Ale and Hilary, seen here) individually. He demanded that I give him some snapshots.



I counter demanded that he, at least, photograph them if he were going to work from photographs. This he did. I have both paintings (very large) at home on the wall and when I look at them I think of the man with the beautiful hands. I think of the man that I run into on Robson Street quite frequently. He is always generous, polite, warm and as friendly as can be. Can it be that the avant-garde can also be defined as generous, polite, warm and friendly? My guess is that it can. Cummins has stuck to his principles of what his music and art should be. He has fun doing it.

If you happen to recognize him on Robson, look at his hands.

The 11x14 finished print of Jim Cummins hangs in the darkest corner of my basement. I don't want too much light to hit it. Without realizing the worth of an archival image I gave Cummins an early Ilford Multigrade resin coated photographic print to work on. While I have always properly washed all my photographs the archival state of this print is in doubt. It looks perfect today. Tomorrow (or soon) I will have the image drum scanned and saved as a digital file.

Sunday, September 23, 2007


As summer wanes and we think about turning on the furnace I gaze upon this picture of Rebecca and think of the warm (hot, why not?) days we had in our July vacation in Texas and Yucatán. I long for them.

When Rosemary, Rebecca and I were in Mérida, Yucatán we had been forewarned by Hilary (my daughter and Rebecca's mother) not to even think about going to a beach. She particularly pointed out Can Cun. Hilary had read too many newspaper reports of Canadians being murdered there. Rosemary had indicated we might have taken a bus from Mérida (facing the Gulf of Mexico with its port of Puerto Progreso) to the seaside resort of Cancun, west in the state of Quintana Roo on the Caribbean. Foreign tourists avoid the placid and extremely shallow beaches of Puerto Progreso. There is no surf and one has to wade in luke warm waters for a long stretch before hitting the deep end.

Luckily our hotel, Casa del Balam had an excellent little pool that Rebecca enjoyed several times a day and helped cool her down from the near 40 degree temperatures and a relative humidity that always exceeded 90%. But we did manage to hit a beach once. We visited the Biósfera de Celestún not too far from Puerto Progreso and facing what is the fuzzy demarcation between the waters of the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea. These biospheres are areas that the Mexican government has set aside to protect the flora and fauna of the region. This particular one in Celestún featured thousands of flamingos. Rebecca enjoyed the flamingos. Not far from the site was the small town of Celestún with a long beach of white sand. Just like in Puerto Progreso the waters were shallow. It was horribly hot and there was not one palm tree to be seen or a beach umbrella to be rented. I enquired as to the why. A fisherman pointed at a nearby lighthouse. It looked like a miniature version of the Tower of Pisa. Unwilling to fight the elements but unwilling to move to safer grounds the inhabitants of Celestún live and survive through all those hurricanes we in Vancouver read about with the detachment that comes from geographic distance.

I took the above picture of Rebecca in one of the few places I found that had some shade. I used my swivel lens panoramic camera, a frequently under performing peace of equipment. This time around it surprised me with clarity and drama (a yellow filter helped) and I don't have to wonder how Celestún braved the hurricanes that followed. I am sure the inhabitants simply shrugged their shoulders and hunkered down.

Saturday, September 22, 2007


My Rebecca will eat sushi anywhere and anytime. The same applies to pancakes, specially the thin Dutch variety called pannekoeks. Rosemary and I take her and Lauren to the Dutch Wooden Shoe Cafe on Cambie. Rebecca and Lauren frequently go with their parents. Besides the delicious pannekoeks (Rebecca has a fondness for the cinammon and confectionery topping) she enjoys the warm bantering of owner John Dys who is in the kitchen but is always there to greet patrons. It was John Dys who founded the De Dutch Pannekoek franchise.

By a convenient coincidence we in Argentina have our own version of Dutch pancakes. We like them big and we like them thin. We call them panqueques. We slather them with butter and dulce de leche. Sometimes we layer them with apples and burnt sugar, German style. Whenever Lauren and Rebecca sleep over I must (I need not be nagged on this) make panqueques for breakfast. When possible we have a jar of Argentine San Ignacio Dulce de Leche handy. But both Lauren and Rebecca opt for the confectionery sugar and cinnamon. It's hard to break that Dutch Wooden Shoe combination of John's.