Wednesday, November 07, 2007


Amidst all the attention given to the sciences as to how they can lead to the cure of all diseases and daily problems of mankind, I believe that the biggest breakthrough will be the realization that the arts, which are conventionally considered "useless," will be recognized as the whole reason why we ever try to live longer or live more prosperously. The arts are the science of enjoying life.

John Maeda
Muriel Cooper professor of media arts and sciences at the Media Laboratory of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Last night I was one of the happiest of men. I attended a warm and exquisite concert by Early Music Vancouver that featured Andrew Manze and Richard Egarr. I was happy because I was there with my friends Abraham Rogatnick and Graham Walker. I was happier still because I had lured my wife Rosemary who was enthralled by the down home virtuosity of Andrew Manze ("Aw shucks I play the violin better than just about anybody in the world but I am not going to tell you this.") and Richard Egarr ("Aw shucks this classical fortepiano that looks like a glorified music box is so easy to play that anybody could do what I do.") The 20 minute pre-concert talk by the pair was part stand-up comedy and a spirited apology as to why they play music and (thank God) did not choose a career in plumbing.

We were asked for questions so I asked Egarr why he was not wearing his usually loud ties. He seriously(I think) told us that we were lucky to see them in clothes as the airline had lost their luggage.

From the atmosphere of an intimate concert in a neighbourhood church (in this case Shaughnessy Heights United Church) complete with coffee, juices and home-made cookies at the interval I cannot fathom why flocks of people will converge on a concert at the Orpheum featuring, perhaps a Schubert Symphony when for less money they might enjoy as I did (and from about three metres away) a Schubert violin and piano sonata.

In the concerts of the Pacific Baroque Orchestra (all held in churches) and in the majority of the concerts of Early Music Vancouver I never feel a barrier between the musicians and myself. We are welcomed to talk to them back stage or sometimes they mingle during the interval. I have seen my friend Paul Luchkow, a violinist with the PBO almost lose that infectuous smile of his when he plays sitting down in his other gig as a violinist for the VSO.

The exception to this difference between the warm congeniality of the former with the colder and more serious latter seems to be the Artistic Director of the VSO, Bramwell Tovey whose banter and easy to understand explanations of the musical goings on I appreciate. Another exception is VSO violinist, Robin Braun (above, left) who understands that if her career in her profession is going to evolve and prosper she has to promote it from the side. And she has an unusual web site if you realize that most symphony players don't have one. Braun is an accessible musician who shares a bit of that disarming ("What I do isn't as impossible as you might think," attitude of Manze, Eggar and Luchkow).

As I discussed with Luchkow last night the less than good attendance of the concert I wonder why there has to be that barrier between the audience of a symphony orchestra and the musicians and a barrier between those who attend the Orpheum concerts and those who opt for neighbourhood church concerts.

The virtuosity of Manze and Egarr is no less than those of the super musicians lured to play in Vancouver for the larger musical organizations. After listening to Manze and Egarr explain (with on the spot examples with their instruments) how an 18 year-old Schubert was influenced by Mozart I could now attend a Schubert symphony at the Orpheum and get that much more. But would I mingle with the musicians and bite on homemade cookies? I think that our city's musical companies should get together and compare notes.

Tuesday, November 06, 2007



He went to the chest in which vestments were stored and took out a linen alb, pulling the long white smocklike garment over his black cassock. He took up a gold-embroidered stole and, from habit, touched his lips to it before putting it around his neck. He walked past the dead priest, going to the door....He looked up at the sky. Soon winter snows would cover this vast, empty land. Here among the Savages, he would spend his life. He poured water on a sick brow, saying again the words of salvation. And prayer came to him, a true prayer at last.....
Black Robe, Brian Moore 1985

Photographed at Holy Rosary Cathedral on Dunsmuir and Richards.

Monday, November 05, 2007


Sometime in April 1991 the editor of Quill & Quire called me up and said, "Alex how would you like to photograph a 6 ft tall lesbian?" I was speechless, even after he said, "Your subject is going to be writer Jane Rule. The piece on her is that she is going to retire from writing because of her terrible arthritis which prevents her from articulating her fingers."

I did not know what to expect as I waited for her to show up.

In 1978 I had photographed a woman for a gay publication called Bi-Line. She was extremely beautiful and she was a lesbian who was treated by other women as a queen bee. They vied for who would wash her car or clean her house. She was obvious royalty. We met for coffee to dicuss our photo session and decided on dressing her in her karate clothing and I would photograph her after her workout. As I listened and stared at the woman I felt this incredible relaxation that as a man I did not have to worry about my sexuality, to make any kind of passes and I could just be myself. It was a liberating feeling.



With that in mind I did not expect to be woowed and wowed by Jane Rule. I fell for her immediately as she posed for me with her owl glasses. She had a delightful dress and she carried herself well considering she was big woman. At the end of our session she said to me, "Alex, I will need your help to go down the stairs and I would like you to find me a cab." As we walked down the stairs hand in hand I thought of that cliché that applied so well to the situation:

A lady is a woman that makes a man feel like a gentleman.

Sunday, November 04, 2007



"It's a Book-of-the-Month Club first," Nuff said enunciating each word with chilly distinction. "It's printed from the same plates as the first, or maybe even the same sheets are used; that's why it says first edition. But the binding is different, there's no price on the jacket, and the book has a blind stamp on the back board."
"How much is it worth?"
"This book? Five bucks, tops. There are eight million copies of it in the naked city."- from Booked to Die(1992), by John Dunning


Rosemary refused. I had asked my wife to call the Book-of-the-Month Club to cancel my membership. She was to tell them she was a recent widow. The next time, I did the calling. I wasn't swayed by their, "Sir, our records show you have been a member since May 15, 1975. Are you sure?"

It all began in 1968, when I was living in Mexico City. A friend had a diplomatic passport with access to the diplomatic pouch which meant she could bypass the notorious Mexican postal system. She bragged about the book deals she got from BOMC. I lusted after her unabridged Random House Dictionary of the English Language. But Even though I tipped my mailman at Christmas and for el día del cartero (Postie Day), I never got more than eight or nine of my National Geographics in any given year. The others would get "lost." I could never be a member of the BOMC.

When I arrived in Vancouver in 1975, I joined almost instantly. It was a happy day when I got my first shipment of "free" books. It included a copy of William Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.

Selecting and ordering my new books became a pleasant routine. Thanks to the BMOC I was exposed to John Updike, Margaret Atwood, V.S. Naipaul and Anthony Burgess. I discovered Elmore Leonard, P.D. James, Tony Hillerman and Colin Dexter.


It wasn't all fiction. I got hooked on Stephen J. Gould and Richard Dawkins. And there were all those wonderful reference books, like Benet's Reader's Encyclopedia and John Ayto's Dictionary of Word Origins.

When my friends (and in particular Paul Grescoe) told me my books were worthless, I countered that no dollar value can be placed on the pleasure of reading a good book.

By the early '90s my BOMC buys were being supplemented by purchases at local bookstores. Authors who interested me - Jerome Charyn, J. Robert Janes, even Walter Mosley - were not offered by the club. Not that my tastes were especially stuffy. BOMC also did not carry Bernard Cornwell's terrific but lowbrow Richard Sharpe series, set in the Napoleonic Wars. I gobbled them up as well as Stephen Coonts' The Flight of the Intruder.

By then I had discovered Manhattan Books (now Sophia Books), so I could read my favourite writers in Spanish": Alejo Carpentier, Homero Aridjis and Paco Ignacio Taibo II. I started losing BMOC order forms beneath piles of faxes and other places. Unwelcome and unordered Stephen Kings started appearing at my front door.

Then, in 1996, I met mystery writer John Dunning (above)and read his novel Booked to Die, about a Denver cop who is also a collector of first-editon fiction. The motive for the novel's multiple murders centres around what appears to be a worthless BOMC collection.

Booked to Die with its antiquarian-bookstore atmosphere, rings true because Dunning is also a keen book collector. In the novel, he reveals the crazy prices popualr first-edition fiction can fetch.

A friend, a local book collector Robert Blackwood, told me those prices could be corroborated on Abe Books, a web site with more than 50 million listings compiled from antiquarian bookstores in North America and elsewhere. There I found that Stephen King's Salem's Lot is valued at $450, Anne Rice's Interview with the Vampire at $2000 and my BOMC version of John Updike's The Coup at $5 (while the real thing goes for at least $50). Not surprisingly, Dunning's Booked to Die goes for at least $1000. And if your search in Abe you will discover that there is such a thing as an early as opposed to a later first edition. The price between those categories can be huge.

Also from Booked to Die , I learned that a good, clean first edition is worthless if:

1. The dustjacket has been clipped. It seems some booksellers routinely do this to BOMC books' jackets to hide their lack of price.

2. It contains a written greeting or dedication from anyone but the author.

While I do not regret my club years, I no longer want my books to come to me at the front door. Part of the fun of acquiring books is reading reviews and going out to look for them.

Now that Manhattan Books has resurrected as Sophia Books I can find or order Saramagos, Pérez-Revertes and Taibos.



When Mystery Merchant on 4th long closed I bought my mysteries or ordered them at Granville Books. When they closed I had to start going to Chapter's. But I have also discovered the pleasure of browsing at the many antiquarian bookstores in town, such as Lawrence Books and MacLeod's Books.

Just don't try to sell your BOMC books to them. They won't buy, although Robert Blackwood did cite one exception. Such is the rarity of the 1952 first edition of J.D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye (over $10,000) that pristine BOMC editions will trade for $300.

As a result of my better book-buying habits, I no longer pay "shipping and handling" charges and don't even think of the lost "bargains"."

As Ruby, the expert bookseller from Booked to Die , says, "A book has always cost about what a meal in a good restaurant costs. Did then, still does. I get sick hearing how expensive books are. Which would you rather have, a good book, or a tender steak? I know what I'd take, seven days a week."

But then Ruby did not know then of the bargain section of Chapters where one can buy a good book and have money left over for a tender steak.

Saturday, November 03, 2007



"What brings you to La Plata? Don't tell me you've come to study?"
"I've come to take photographs of the city. I'm a photographer."

The Adventures of a Photographer In La Plata, Adolfo Bioy Casares 1985



When I went to La Plata, the capital of Buenos Aires Province in 1966 I had no idea who Adolfo Bioy Casares was. My sailor friend Felipe Occhiuzzi and I had obtained a weekend leave so we had decided to take a bus to La Plata and visit the La Plata Museum, famous for its dinosaur finds. We managed to find a pretty girl to snap our picture in front of it with my Pentacon F camera.

This Tuesday during a break of my class, The Contemporary Portrait Nude, at Focal Point I went for a coffee at Bean Around the World which is next door on 10th Avenue. There in one corner I spotted my friend Brian Nation (a photographer, poet, writer, web designer, etc) and Canada's first ex (2002) poet laureate, George Bowering. Both smiled and I never got to sit down as Bowering said, "Alex, I am going to Buenos Aires. My favorite Argentine writer is Bioy Casares. Do you know where he lived in Buenos Aires?" I did not know but I mentioned a book Casares had written about La Plata and Bowering knew all about it. I felt that somehow I had to take a picture. But all I had was my very large Mamiya RB in a small bag. I took it out and measured the light with my Minolta meter. The exposure was was f-5.6 at 1/8 second. That was iffy but I slapped on the Polaroid back and took this picture that you see here. I gave it to Brian Nation who posted it the very next day in his blog. I downloaded it to here.



Some years ago I had to photograph Bowering for Books in Canada. I took Bowering to Nat Bailey Stadium to take some baseball shots.









One of the pleasures I used to have when Duthie Books on Robson existed was to visit the store and sometimes buy a book which I would then peruse in the Murchie's store on the other side of the street. Both are gone. But I fondly remember going up to Thea, (Bowering's daughter) who worked in Duthies and I would ask, "I am looking for a book called The Poet In Danger of Extinction." At first she was extremely serious in telling me that no such book existed. Then, when she caught on, she would just smile. Her smile was just as infectious as was Bowering's when I told him this story on Tuesday.

In Mexican poet/novelist Homero Aridjis's Eyes to See Otherwise - Ojos de otro Mirar Selected Poems. published in 2001 and edited by Homero Aridjis's wife and George McWhirter (born in Belfast) who happens to be our 2007 Vancouver Poet Laureate there is this poem:

The Poet In Danger Of Extinction

1
- The poet is in danger of extinction -
said the man with the moustache.

- The poet is someone from another age
who wonders through the day saying things
nobody understands - said the woman.

- While your bricklayer falls of a building,
the poet calls to us in the dead
language of mankind - said the shopkeeper.

- The poet writes books nobody
wants to read or sell or publish -
said the Professor.

- We ought to form a society
to protect these poets
in danger of extinction - said the woman.

2
- Baudelaire never was that popular -
said the man with the moustache.

- Dante, after seven hundred years
hardly anybody reads him - said the woman.

- Gongora - after the revival and reappraisal
is ignored all over again - said the Professor.

- What can we do so the public gets to know
poets better? - asked the shopkeeper.

- Nothing, absolutely nothing - said the poet.

- Didn't they say this was the type of person
who was already in danger of extinction? -
asked the man with the moustache.

3
The poet said:
String moons
through the smoggy streets;
in the world of communication
reach out through the dead languages;
in a marketplace of goods
that are smelled, pawed over, eaten
or shelved for a thousand years,
touch the body of a woman who never was.
See, in front of my bedroom window
the poet, my double, dodge between the cars,
lika an animal in danger of extinction.
Homero Aridjis

Of George Bowering's favourite Argentine writer, this is what Jorge Luis Borges wrote:

We met in 1930 or 1931, when he was 17 and I was barely past 30. In these cases it is always supposed that the older becomes the master and the younger his pupil. This perhaps happened in the beginning, but years after, when we began to work together, Bioy was in reality, while secretely, the master.

Friday, November 02, 2007


Sears and I have had a fond relationship since 1957. In 1957 I bought my mother a Kenmore beater in Austin, Texas and it worked until a couple of years ago when the motor finally burned out. The shoe you see here (the left one is in my closet) looks like a normal dark brown wingtip. But it isn't. I bought it in the Mexican branch of Sears, Sears Roebuck de Mexico SA de CV. The joke at the time(1968) in Mexico was that it was modified to be pronounced Sears Roba A Mexico or Sears Robs Mexico. I bought the pair of shoes in 1968 in their brand new store on Avenida de Ejercito Nacional Mexicano about four blocks from my Tía Fermina Miranda's house in Colonia Irrigación. What is special about these shoes is that they are not made of leather. They are made of Dupont Corfam. This was supposed to be a plastic that could breathe. Perhaps they didn't breathe enough for most people as Dupont's venture into shoe material was a failure. To make them shine a wet paper towel was all I ever needed. I rarely wear these shoes because I no longer have brown Harris Tweed jackets or cream coloured slacks. But they are in excellent shape.

When Ale (38) was 14 we were living in Burnaby. I noticed that she was growing up. So I said, Ale, let's go to Sears. In Sears I found a venerable looking matron salesperson and I said to her, "This is my daughter Ale, can you fit her with a bra?" Since then going to Sears has meant going to buy one's first bra in our family.

Sometime in 1985 we bought a washer/dryer combo at Sears. They are still working like new in our present basement. Sears Craftsman lawnmoers have not been as hardy. In 1986 when we moved to our present house on Athlone I was obsessed with the perfect lawn. I bought a re-conditioned Craftsman reel mower. I retired it when I came to appreciate the wonders of mulching lawnmowers. We are into our third Craftsman. I presently go to Sears to buy my boxer shorts. The Sears brand fits me just right.

I wonder if Hilary will tell Rebecca, "Let's go to Sears," when the time comes.

My studio is blessed with light that comes from the building across the street. It happens to be Sears

Thursday, November 01, 2007


I hate halloween.

It wasn't until my waning last years in Mexico City in the early 70s, when American culture was moving south, enexorably, as Mexicans were moving north, that I became aware of the phenomenon called halloween. Street urchins would come up to me and stick their hand out and plead, "Jefe, dame mi halloween." Mexicans had become aware of the festivity perhaps thanks to the American style drugstore chain called Sanborns. Mexico had its own holiday. November 1 is celebrated as All Saints Day, and November 2(All Souls Day)is Dia de los Muertos. Recently local and federal Mexican governments have been trying to stamp out the custom of having picnics in cemeteries on the day of the dead. Families will spend the day on top of their departed loved ones'graves. Bakeries make a brisk business selling sweet bread with the shape of bones on top and personalized sugars skulls (the name of your sweetheart on the forehead and dazzling sequins in the eye sockets. The cheap tabloids have a feast day writing up the most grizzly murders of the day.

I have never been prepared for numerous and unceasing knocks and doorbell ringing.I hate halloween.

But I remember those halloweens in Burnaby in the middle 70s and early 80s when my two daughters were young girls. It often rained and they would come home cold and wet. I felt sorry for them. They ignored me as they emptied their large black garbage bags of sweet booty. I ignored their protests when I helped myself to the chocolate covered peanuts. I tried to disappear on those nights to punk rock concerts the Japanese Hall or the Odd Fellows Hall. And until now I hardly ever made myself answer the door on halloween. Rosemary has had that chore all along.

But yesterday we finally had the perfect excuse not to be home. We went to the opening performance of the Arts Club Theatre Company production of The Glass Menagerie. On the way to the Stanley Industrial Alliance Stage we stopped to snap a few pictures of Rebecca and Lauren all dressed up and ready to go for their loot. I looked at Hilary (34) and fondly remembered the picture I had taken outside our Burnaby townhouse some 30 years ago.



The Tennessee Williams play has an excellent cast. Gabrielle Rose with a suffocatingly good Southern accent is the perfect has-been genteel mother, Amanda. Her shy daughter, Laura is played by Cherise Clarke in a performance that reminded me of a wonderful Mare Winningham that I photographed so many years ago. Both Winningham and Clarke had a silent presence. During last night's play it seemed as the less Clark said the more Rose said. This was fascinating as I could even see a physical family resemblance between them. Craig Erickson played the overachieving Jim with convincing aplomb but it was Robert Moloney who played Tom (Laura's brother and Amanda's son) that I felt drawn to the most. His hair would stand up in such a way that I thought of an even more serious and tragic Stan Laurel.

Rosemary who is always so critical said of the one hour long first act, "That was short," to my amazement. I had an excellent time. I never had to open the door to screaming children, not even once.