Monday, December 10, 2007


The last real overcoat I ever owned was when I was a child. It was a hand-me-down from my rich cousin Robin Tow whose father owned the ritzy Buenos Aires department store, Casa Tow in the late 40s. In Argentina the overcoat was never called an abrigo (Spanish for coat) but a sobretodo which means "over everything". When we moved to Mexico City it never really got cold enough for one. In my 5 years in Austin, Texas it was bitterly cold in winter but I got by with rain jackets.

It was in the Argentine Navy that I was issued something close to an overcoat. We called it a gabán. It was a poor quality canvas type blue raincoat. It had a cheap removable lining that was made of Argentine wool. It kept me warm even in those humid Buenos Aires winters when you could smell the River Plate as it sent cold winds that would sneak up Calle Corrientes. I would often walk up Corrientes to bars that served submarinos. These were glasses of scalding hot milk held by a metal cup and served with a long spoon and a large bar of bitter chocolate that melted away the cold.

In 1974 Rosemary, my two daughters Ale (6), Hilary (3) and I drove, from Mexico in our VW beetle to a holiday in San Francisco. One afternoon I went to an army surplus store and bought me a US Air Force overcoat that was a middle blue, double breasted with nice metal buttons. The material was like a thick wool blanket. It was heavy and it kept me warm. Because we had been teaching English in Westin Hotels in Mexico City we had a heavy discount at the St Francis Hotel on Union Square. On my way back (wearing my blue overcoat) to the hotel I decided to see a film I had read so much about. It was Deep Throat. This was the first pornographic film I ever saw. I never saw another. In front of me were two black men eating from huge bags of pop corn and exchanging loud comments on what was happening on screen. From then on I always associated my overcoat with that film. I wore it in Vancouver until age finally made me realize I was not going to be thin all my life the way my father had been. The coat felt tight and I got rid of it. Since then I have made do with raincoats over sweaters or simply braved the cold between my parked car and walking with Rosemary to the opera or the ballet at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre.

In the early 80s I photographed porn star Marilyn Chambers in her Four Season's Hotel room in Vancouver. Nearby was the scary man Chuck Traynor who had been Linda Lovelace's manager when Lovelace filmed Deep Throat. He was Chamber's manager. When writer Les Wiseman and I left Chambers and Traynor we felt a chill go over us.


Sometime in the mid 90s Wiseman and I passed by the Marble Arch and we entered to see a woman who was being billed as the new Marilyn Chambers. Her breasts had been augmented to resemble the engine nacelles of a B-24 Liberator bomber. Wiseman lost interest and beckoned us to leave. I stopped him when I pointed out the man who was taking the Polaroids of patrons posing by the Chambers replacement. "That's Chuck Traynor." It was and we promptly paid our $10 bucks each to have our picture taken. The whole point was not who was in the picture but who had taken it. I looked at Traynor and he never met my eyes. Wiseman told me he owed huge sums to the US tax department. He seemed to be almost another person. But he was still scary. The Polaroid disappeared in my library. Perhaps it is inside a book. Somehow when Traynor took my photograph the "stain" on my US Air Force overcoat disappeared from my memory.

I forgot all about it until this week when I finally bought myself my first real adult overcoat. It is a black, all wool London Fog. It is pristine and warm. I am a happy man.

Sunday, December 09, 2007

Yesterday was a sort of a dancing red letter day. At noon I photographed in my studio Grant Strate (about to be 80) who is a founding member of the National Ballet of Canada. After watching The Red Balloon as a visual appetizer for Rebecca and Lauren, the three of us watched Robert Altman's The Company (with Neve Campbell who also wrote the story). This is a dance film, part documentary which really is only for the serious aficionado. I was pleased that both Lauren and Rebecca enjoyed it. When Rebecca watched real dancer Neve Campbell remove bandaids and tape from her sore toes she remarked how ugly her feet were. I remembered asking Ballet BC dancer Lauri Stallings (photo in colour) if I could photograph her feet. "They are so ugly, "she said, "Why would you want to do something like that?" I wanted to and I did. I discovered a whole new world (notice that Stallings has her name and a personal number on the soles of her custom-made shoes). It was a world that Wyman completed in spades in his essay below. It all began when someone at the Sun (Larry Emeric, I believe) told me that Wyman collected ballerina's pointe shoes. When I suggested a story to him he readily agreed. In those days you could dream up stories. Newspapers and magazines would run them. I miss those days as much as I miss Wyman's arts criticism and reviews.

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When the 19th - century ballerina Marie Taglioni rose in her toes in La Sylphide , effectively redefining the expressive potential of the art form, Russian fans were so enraptured that they cooked her slippers and ate them.



Dance fans have always been extreme, of course (and I'm not even thinking about the hard-core toe shoe fetishists who have their own members-only Web site). Drinking champagne from the ballerina's shoe used to be a popular way for stage-door Johnies to demonstrate their adoration ... though if you tried it today you might find your fizz flavoured by an aromatic modern anti-fungal cream.

My own involvement amounts to a modest collection of signed, used shoes that function as memory-prods for some of the most sublime evenings I have spent in the theatre. Among them are several pairs from the magical Evelyn Hart, left,(as Juliet, as Odette/Odille, as Giselle), a pair from Karen Kain, and a pair I removed personally from the feet of Kirov Ballet's luminous Yulia Makhalina.



Yes, Personally - on my knees on a filthy floor, trying to avoid the scummy puddle from an overflowing sink, in a dressing room in the Maryinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg. She had just sent a packed house into a delirium of rythmic clapping a the end of Swan Lake, and here she was, bouquets still in her arms, flopped exhausted on a chair, letting me unlace the ribbons and ease the hot shoes from her exquisite feet.



Well, perhaps you had to be there. Often, after all, dancers' feet are not a pretty sight. They bruise, they bleed, they develop bunions. Vancouver's Jean Orr, Canada's first Giselle, remembers the days when "we didn't have all the wonderful toe protectors they have today. We just bled into our shoes." Then she'd go home and scrub the dried blood out of the satin with a tooth brush.



Realistically, there is no logical reason why human beings would want to dance on pointe . It's unnatural (human feet evolved the way they did for good and sensible reasons) and, for those who do it, it's uncomfortable and hugely painful.

So why do it? In a word, for art. Taglioni, who premiered La Sylphide in 1832, probably wasn't the first to dance on pointe. The historians place its start as early as the beginning of the 19th century, maybe before, though the shoes in use then were hardly more than slippers, and dancers stayed on their toes for barely a second. Even Taglioni didn't have the benefit of today's hard blocked toe shoes, because they hadn't been invented.

But she's the one who first used the trick to make an artistic impression. And that's the secret of its enduring appeal. Dancing on pointe reinforced the sense of ethereality and other-wordliness that was so vital to the Romantic ballet, with its tales of sprites and fairies and bewitchment. With feet that seem never to end, the ballerina seems to float, immortal, the epitome of feminine virtue, a spirit of the supernatural.



Examine the photograph on this page of Evelyn Hart in her dressing room. it's a typical dilemma for her: which shoes will she wear tonight? Will any of them be suitable? She will often try dozens before making a choice.



Like most professional dancers, Hart gets her shoes custom-made from cobblers who work to her unique last. Not that "cobbler" really defines the task. Ballet shoes are really layers of fabric and glue, baked to provide stiffness. They have a hard "platform" in the toe on which the dancer balances, and a series of thin leather and carboard soles. They don't usually come in lefts and rights; for that matter, a chosen pair may not actually match, since a dancer may have differently sized feet.

But the making of the shoe is only the beginning of the adventure. New shoes are often stiff and need breaking in to allow unforced jumping and rising into pointe. A ballerina must sew on her ribbons, and most will make person adjustments, some of them scoring the soles to allow the foot more flexibility, some ripping out lining, some darning the toes for better grip. Since a principal dancer can get through a couple of pairs of shoes in a single performance, this is an endless process.

The human foot is a complex structure. It consists of 26 bones, connected by ligaments. Seven bones form the instep; five metatarsals form the ball of the foot; 14 phalanges form the toes (two in the big toe, three in each of the others).



The ideal foot for a toe shoe has toes of nearly equal length; long big toes or second toes can be problematic, because they have to support the whole body weight. In the process of lengthening the line of the leg, the point shoe helps tone the calf muscles, and develops strength in the ankles and feet, which lets dancers handle more easily the technical demands of modern choreographers.

The feet and legs are a dancer's most important tools, and they have to be treated accordingly. Dancers have their own rules for shoes. Keep the toenails trimmed short. Choose shoes that fit like a second skin - loose shoes promote blisters. (About three sizes smaller than your street shoes seems the preferred choice.)

To prevent the rubbing that causes blisters and bleeding, many dancers line their shoes with lamb's wool or other padding (though cushioned shoes are also available these days). Foot binding with tape is common, and dancers will also wrap their feet in newspaper before inserting them into the toe shoe. Sometimes people use bits of cotton to separate the toes, and tape toes individually with Elastoplast. Synthetic skin, widely available at pharmacies helps staunch bleeding.

Even modern dancers who work without shoes will tape individual toes to reduce friction, though many don't need to do that because years of barefoot work have developed protective calluses. Vancouver choreographer and former dancer, Judith Marcuse remembers using methylated spirits to toughen the skin so it wouldn't bleed and blister, though it was important to make sure that the calluses that were created didn't separate from the skin.

Former Royal Winnipeg Ballet principal Leslie Fields, a Vancouverite now living on Bowen Island, had her own way of reducing swelling. She would go back to her hotel room after a performance, pour herself a drink, sit on the edge of the bath and stick her feet in the toilet. Repeated flushing kept a welcome flow of cold water on the suffering toes.

It's equally important to keep the feet properly exercised. Isometrics are big these days. A lot of dancers travel with resistance bands to help strengthen foot and ankle muscles (Marcuse remembers using cycle-tire inner tubes for the same reason). Another preferred hotel-room oot exercise involves standing your toes on the edge of a telephone book and dropping your heels to the floor.

Ballet historian Lincoln Kirstein called toe-dancing "the speech of the inexpressible," though of course all dancing is. Every step the dancer takes, every posture the body assumes, is visible; and yet, from that vocabulary of motion, a non visible language of ideas and emotions emerges.

What pointe work contributes to this, along with all that ethereality, is a transformation of the line of the body - a re-proportioning of the torso and the leg's musculature that somehow lets us understand ideas like nobility and tenderness and power in new ways.

When a ballerina poses, unsupported, secure, on a single point occupying only the tiniest piece of mortal ground, her body in immaculate balance, we have an illusion of transcendental achievement and serene glory that is as enviable as it is remote.

When she bourrées with the precision and speed of a knitting-machine on her pointed toes across the stage in The Dying Swan, or when - in a modern ballet, let's say - she stabs the stage with an arched toe, she is bringing us more than mere beauty. She is expressing essential emotion that strikes, without the mediation of words, straight to the heart, straight to the soul.



Today, of course, any and every form of movement is grist to the choreographer's mill, and the dancer's foot is called on to be more versatile than at any time in history. Look at the poised and healthy force in Laura Monteiro's resting feet, the tough undersides of Martha Lenonard's toes (wearing white hat), the gnarled, veined authority of Daylan Pflug, with those ankle tattoos of dancing stick figures. They're the tools that help the body speak the inexpressibles to us. If movement, as we are so often told, never lies, the feet are essential tools of truth.

The Vancouver Sun, Saturday, February 24, 2001


When then veteran Sun reporter and editor Max Wyman wrote the above he had been named an officer of the Order of Canada a week before. He is currently dealing with mud slides in his job of mayor of Lion's Bay. I am sure that his pointe shoe collection has grown considerably since then. I have added two pictures here which were not used by the Sun for lack of room. One is of Evelyn Hart en pointe in the Dying Swan and the other is of Emily Molnar (the last photograph above) showing off her feet.

Saturday, December 08, 2007


Brief Encounters 8 at the ANZA Club( I went last night on the last night) brought the combination of talents that at a first impression one would think shared no common ground. This unlikely idea came from the combined heads of the The Tomorrow Collective made up by modern dancers Mara Branscombe, Katy Harris-McLeod and Jennifer McLeish-Lewis. These three women confirm my suspicion that Vancuouver dancers are not only graceful, but articulate and intelligent, too!

Brief encounters gives 12 artists, paired up, two weeks to think of something. In most cases none of these artists and performers have never met before. To me it is going to be hard to surpass the ultimate brief encounter (Brief Encounters 6, I think) between Butoh dancer Jay Hirabayashi and a female bagpipes player.

But close was the collaboration of cellist Cris Derksen and Norman The Hairguy. Besides listening to Derksen's avant garde electronic cello The Hairguy injected some humour and made it twice as memorable.


The only damper for me is the constant filling with sound (sometimes silence between performances is like Champagne between courses) by soundman Jacob Cino. He insists in playing reggae with drums, drums with reggae and drums with drums.

My revenge would consist in putting him in a room and have him listen to all of Haydn's symphonies. But this is just a small quibble. For Brief Encounters 9, April 16th to April 18th, I will take ear plugs. Meanwhile here's to the three beautiful black-wigged women of The Tomorrow Collective. Below is one of them, Katy Harris McLeod

Friday, December 07, 2007

When I was 21 I wrote some poems to Buenos Aires cemeteries. I evidently thought then that I wasn't immortal. Now, for a change, I am afraid not to die.
Jorge Luís Borges




I remember very well sometime around 1950 riding a colectivo (bus) with my cousin Wenceslao and my Uncle Tony. We passed by a cemetery on our way to General Electric Field in the outskirts of Buenos Aires to fly a U-control Stuka (It crashed and burned as the wings bent and done to scale made it highly unstable. In the photograph in the above link my Uncle Tony built a Stuka with more conventional wings and this Stuka flew well.) As the colectivo was rounding the cemetery my Uncle Tony told us, "Some day when I am dead, and buried in yonder cemetery you will come and visit me and remember our good times together." My Uncle Tony died a few years ago in North Carolina and I was never able to find his son Wenceslao so we will probably never share those memories again. Three prominent Canadians died recently and I wrote my little memorials here: Jane Rule, James Barber and Norval Morrisseau. The latter's death and my remembering what Chris Dafoe wrote brought a rapid, pleasant and funny response from Dafoe:

The obit in the Globe ran under the byline of Donn Downey (aka Doctor Death), the longtime obit writer (and former entertainment editor) who obviously banked this one way back when, figuring Morrisseau was likely to pop off at any moment. In fact, he survived Downey by more than six years. Then again, I suppose it is the hope of every writer that their work live on after they die. In newspapers, obit writers are among the few who can count on that happening.

Somehow I find that funny and it made me remember another incident, not funny at all, that happened to my mother, Filomena de Irureta Goyena when she was a child in Manila. She wrote about it in this poem penned in Veracruz, Mexico in 1965:











Posthumous Gift

"Your birthday's coming soon
What will you have for then?"
"But it's three months away....
Oh yes, I want the doll house in the store."
"Let's go see it dear child
It will be yours, I promise."

October came & took my father beyond
(or so they said)
My birthday just a few days later
Brought with it the doll house
And the card "To my dear daughter
On her birthday."

"He can't be gone, Mother!
See his card, his gift.
He's here, I know he's here."
I didn't believe or understand
Till I was seven years old.



Death
More Death
Even More Death
And Even More Death
And More

Men for All Ages

They were men for all ages
Captain Kirk, Spock, Scotty and Bones
They were men for all ages
Somehow evil was overthrown
They always strove for honour
Never fought for gold
Live long and prosper
Never really got old
Live long and prosper
Never really got old

Joe Keithley, Falling Apart Songs, SOCAN


I received an invitation from Joe "Shithead" Keithley to attend his band's (Band of Rebels) CD release party and fund raiser to help Marc Emery in his US court costs. The show was at the Plaza on Granville and Smythe. The Plaza used to be a movie theatre and its conversion was a happy one. It was an excellent venue with a very good and very loud (naturally!) sound system.

Even though I was in my pijamas and in bed by 10, I managed to get dressed and showed up at the Plaza, an hour later, with an element of anguish, dread and caution. Would I enjoy myself? At 65 am I too old for this sort of thing?

I was wrong on every count. The band was excellent with lots of variation. They would have a sax and trumpet or they had an extra drummer or a female vocalist. The band count was anywhere from 6 to 10 members at any given moment.

And the songs! The songs! I heard the ultimate rock paean to the original Star Treck (Men for All Ages), and a pop song I will be humming for a long time called People Power.

But what was the best was to run into faces from my past. I could have taken a digital camera along (there were many with digital cameras there) and show you what they look like now after 30 or more years.



But I think I did well to leave my camera at home. I would rather remember them as they were, in their prime (although Joe seems to be from a Punk Portrait of Dorian Gray and has weathered very well).



If I am 65 then DOA's original manager, Ken Lester would be close to my age. An old man he was with a smile on his face, all excited about the band's performance. "Alex they have rehearsed for about 6 hours for this and they never had all the band members in place at any given time." They sounded great to me. Ken is seen in the colour photograph sitting at Christmas dinner in a black tux. The little boy was and is Bev Davies's (read below) son.

The scary (but never scary in real life) Randy Rampage (below) with his long bleached blond hair and his motorcycle boots gave me a hug and placed a copy of the CD in my hands. "I am relinquishing my $0.14 royalty by giving this to you," he said.



Jumping around, pogo style, up front was a stubby man with a smile on his face. It looked like former singer (The Subhumans) and former bassist (DOA) Wimpy Roy (in top b+w photograph second from left). But it couldn't have been Roy because of that smile. But it was. I tapped him on the shoulder and he beamed at me. At one time I would have treated him with a touch of fear and respect.

The band was so loud that I had to resort to the old trick of chewing on a VISA receipt and making a couple of moist little balls which I forced into my ears. The low frequencies sort of disappeared and I could hear Bill Runge's sax and John Korsrud's trumpet.

When the concert was over there was enough clapping that the band came back for an encore. And that's when the fun really began. The first encore was my fave People Power and then Joe's "bunch of reprobates" including Randy Rampage and Wimpy Roy jumped on stage and joined in for killer renditions of Goodnight Irene and Born to Be Wild. It was then when I spotted ex-punk photographer Bev Davies (sorry I don't have a picture of her) and the lovely Susanne Tabata (below, right) who is working on a documentary on Vancuver's punk scene of the 70s and 80s.



I had my picture taken with them and I felta bit old but I kept thinking of all my friends there who surely must be Men for All Ages. After all these years they have stuck to to their guns and unwavingly have stuck to what they do best which is to entertain us while making us aware of the inhumanity and greed of our times. Ah! If we only had a little help from:

Captain Kirk, Spock, Scotty and Bones



When I got into my car I slipped the CD into the player and I am happy to report that this is one "punk" record that is clean, hummable and the lyric sheet included is not really necessary. It's that clear.

Thursday, December 06, 2007


As more and more films deteriorate to glorified music videos or offer a half'n half vision of animation with the real, Rosemary and I have found solace and pleasure viewing the films of channel 46, Turner Classic Movies (TCM). I must even admit that we have some jury-rigged TV trays and we watch films while eating. Recently we viewed Cecil B. de Mille's The Greatest Show On Earth. Host, Robert Osborne made a comment on how this film was one of the last that represented the end of an era. There was hope and redemption in this film. There was little indication of the angst of a possible atomic holocaust. There was no revelation of the extreme greed of modern capitalism that so sadly affects our present times.

In many wasys Frank Capra's It's A Wonderful Life (1946) to me is a similar film. It is a classic three act film/play where we meet the hero in the first act, are introduced to the conflict and villain in the second and see the resolution in the third. But this is a film that somehow escaped my radar because my parents never took me to see it. My first viewing happened in Vancouver in the mid 70s.

Seeing it as a play in the Arts Club Theatre Company's production on the Granville Island stage was a refreshing treat over the yearly viewing of the film as a Christmas tradition. The fine adaptation as a play by Philip Grecian retains elements of the film by intelligent projection of parts of the film as part of the set design.

But my wife, who is a fan of director Dean Paul Gibson (above) wasn't fooled. She (She-who-does-not-like-anything) looked at me with a smile during the intermission and told me play has all kind wonderful Gibson touches. Perhaps she is right. Gibson's touches are based on the humour of a director who happens to be a fine actor and has the potential of being the best stand-up comedian this city has ever seen.

The cast is good but of special note is villain Henry Potter played by Kevin McNulty. I was never convinced by Lionel Barrymore in the film version. Kevin McNulty, who has a passing resemblance to Carroll O'Connor, is believable (scary real) as the modern greedy capitalist. He reminded me of past logging company and energy company executives I have photographed for business magazines and the Globe & Mail.

The whole situation of the huge conglomorate attempting to forcibly take over an independent institution (that is helping the disavantaged acquire homes of their own) parallels what seems to be the ills of Vancouver. At a recent city affairs lecture at Simon Fraser (downtown campus) ex-premier and author, Mike Harcourt said "There is one simple way to solve the problem of the homeless and this is to build them homes."

Or another comparison with the villanous Henry Potter is the situation of Arthur Erickson's Graham House in Horseshoe Bay. The present owner, Shiraz Lalji, wants to build a new, bigger home on the site, which he bought in 1988 for $925,000. He has applied for a demolition permit, which will probably be issued in the next few days. Reporter John Mackie of the Vancouver Sun recently wrote:

Shiraz Lalji is one of three brothers who own West Vancouver's Larco Developments, which owns Park Royal Shopping Centre and recently spent more than $1 billion buying seven buildings from the federal government and then leasing them back for 25 years. In 2006, Canadian Business magazine ranked the Lalji family the 50th richest in Canada, with a net worth of about $928 million.

I am guessing that Lalji, who probably lives in a wonderfully apointed flat in London would stay in Vancouver for a couple of weeks a year. Why would our architectural heritage in any way be of his importance?

But this has to end on a more positive and hopeful note. I am thinking of Sasa Brown (below) who plays the town's "fast girl" Violet Bick. To me she is much more interesting than the angelic and perfect Mary Hatch Bailey played well, as well as the plot allows her to, by Jennifer Lines. When Sasa Brown moves on stage, she moves on stage! And then I spotted those silk stockings with that seam in the back ("Start at the ankle and follow that seam all the way up, until it disappears... ," someone once told me.) on Brown's legs. Plus she wore satin!



In a perfect It's A Wonderful Life, Clarence Oddbody would not give George Bailey the chance to see a world without him being born. It would be a world where he would have married Violet instead of Mary.

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Addendum
December 6 in the afternoon.

Henry Potter 1, George Bailey 0

Arthur Erickson's Graham house was demolished today.

Wednesday, December 05, 2007

Norval Morrisseau, 1935-2007




Sometime near the end of May 1999, Chris Dafoe, the Western Arts Correspondent in Vancouver for the Globe & Mail called me up most enthusiastically that I had to photograph a native (Ojibwa) artist, Norval Morrisseau with a strange ex-street person of Hungarian extraction Gabor (Gabe) Vadas. Vadas was Morrisseau's "adopted" son ("His kinship with the old man is not recognized by family or law," Dafoe wrote) after they met in the streets of Vancouver or as Dafoe wrote (he had interviewed both Morrisseau and Vadas at Joe Fortes on Thurlow and Robson):

A dozen years ago, those same people [diners at Joe Fortes] might have stepped over both the old Indian and the young Hungarian on their way to this restaurant. In the late 1980s, both Norval Morrisseau and Gabor Vadas were living on the streets of Vancouver. Morrisseau's presence on those streets - the news that he was selling sketches for the price of bottles of booze, sleeping in parks, prone to unintelligible rants, telling people that "to get drunk in Vancouver is the most beautiful thing there is" made national headlines in 1987. He was, after all, one of the most important artists this country had ever produced, a member of the Order of Canada, a man whose work was collected by major galleries across Canada and around the world.

Dafoe finished his fine interview:

As lunch wound down and the coffee grew cold, Vadas continued to talk about life with Norval. When he was asked how their relationship has changed over the years, it became clear that he sees himself s more than just a caretaker or an agent, even more than a son. "Our relationship started out as student and teacher, because Norval is a grand shaman," he said. "I think it has evolved into a relationship of two teachers. Norval has figured out how to get the power and how to hand it down to me. He's taken me as an apprentice. If Norval died tomorrow, he wouldn't be leaving this world, because he would continue to see it through me."

The old Indian looked on silently, through heavy lidded eyes, as his Hungarian son talked excitedly about mystical tales of legend and the power they possess. It is a world the old man knows well, a world that has been much kinder to him than this one.

Chris Dafoe, April 10, 1999 The Globe & Mail

Tuesday, December 04, 2007


Excuses sometimes happen for very good reasons. For example it is very pleasant to be depressed if one then has the excuse to ameliorate it with the purchase of a pair of shoes or a thick chocolate milkshake at The Red Onion on 41st Avenue in Kerrisdale.


In the case here the excuse is hazy. The excuse is a book I bought for a quarter not too long ago at a book bin in Safeway at Oakridge Centre. It came as a discard from the West Vancouver Memorial Library. It is a 1982 British Edition (Butler & Tanner Ltd) of The Noël Coward Diaries edited by Graham Payn & Sheridan Morley. The picture of Noël Coward may have been taken in the 60s judging by the tie and the vintage typewriter (could it be a Hermes or an Olivetti?). But the other photos could represent the Coward years earlier in the 20s and 30s.



The diary covers from 1941 to 1969 which is way off, to match the look of the photographs I took perhaps 15 years ago at Hycroft (the University Women's Club of Vancouver) at 16th and MacRae Avenue. The clothing and underwear came from the collection of Ivan Sayers and the Vancouver Museum.

But the excuse is sufficient for me to note here some of my favourite entries of this book that never leaves my bedside table.




Saturday August 6 1960 Paris


....I have just read carefully, Waiting for Godot, and in my considered opinion it is pretentious giberish, without any claim of importance whatsoever. I know that it received great critical acclaim and I also know that it's silly to go on saying how stupid the critics are, but this really enrages me. It is nothing but phoney surrealism with occasional references to Christ and mankind. It has no form, no basic philosophy and absolutely no lucidity. It's too conscious to be written off as mad. It's just a waste of everybody's time and it made me ashamed to think that such balls could be taken seriously for the moment.



To continue in this carping vein, I have also read The Charioteer by Miss Mary Renault. Oh dear, I do wish well-intentioned ladies would not write books about homosexuality. This one is turgid, unreal and so ghastly earnest. It takes the hero - soi-disant - three hundred pages to reconcile himself to being queer as a coot, and his soul-searching and deep, deep introspection is truly awful. There are 'queer' parties in which everyone calls everyone 'my dear' a good deal, and over the whole book is a shimmering lack of understanding of the subject. I'm sure the poor woman meant well but I wish she'd stick to recreating the glory that was Greece and not fuck about with dear old modern homos.

Tuesday 11 December 1962 London

....On Monday I lunched with Joyce and did some shopping, and in the evening took Rebecca to the premiere of Lawrence of Arabia. It was a grand gala for the Queen, Prince Philip and all. A truly magnificent picture, brilliantly directed and acted and superbly photographed. Peter O'Toole very fine and far, far more attractive than Lawrence could ever hope to be. I said to him afterwards that if Lawrence had looked like him there would have been many more than twelve Turks queueing up for the buggering session....



The woman (right) on the first photograph above is Patricia Keen one of the bassoonists of the Vancouver Philharmonic Orchestra. She is also the woman in the second photograph, right.