Wednesday, December 26, 2007


The envelope from Paris arrived on Christmas Eve like clockwork. I never suspected that the French postal system was any better than the Mexican one! But for the last few years we have received a Christmas card from poet/novelist/environmentalist/diplomat/etc Homero Aridjis and his wife Betty. Aridjis is now the permanent Mexican representative to UNESCO in Paris. Of Aridjis I have written at length in this blog.
Here is one with a connection to Vancouver's George Bowering. The Christmas card always has a little cellophane bag with a Mexican tin Christmas ornament. I have a long string of them (I use red wool and Rebecca hung them on the inside of our front living room window this year). To this collection we can now add the watermelon. The card was not an ordinary one but a postcard announcing a documentary film by Homero and Betty's daughter Eva (screenplay, director and producer) La Santa Muerte narrated by actor Gael García Bernal.



I have yet to see the film but I read with relish Homero Arijis's own interpretation of the Mexican cult for death in his book La Santa Muerte. Since it has yet to be translated into English, an inkling of the plot can be read in this essay from the New York Times.



While the picture on the poster was on the sombre side I was delighted to find out that Aridjis has a new book out called Sicarios (Spanish for a hired assasin, lat. sicarĭus). The little deathly candle stick seen here is Pancho El Esqueleto. His story is here.

Tuesday, December 25, 2007


Even though it was only the second time that Abraham Jedidiah Rogatnick spent Nochebuena (Christmas Eve) with us it has become what feels like a long-time and pleasant custom. Abraham was late and Lauren kept asking,"Where's Abraham? When is he coming?"

There were two mutual conditions for his coming. On the one hand we told him not to bring anything (last year he spent a fortune in presents for everybody) and for my part I had to make sure that whatever I offered Abraham for dinner had no traces of onion. Many years ago Abraham found out about his allergy to onions while in a bus on mainland China.



Our menu was a salad of sliced tomatoes, fresh bocconcini and fresh basil, steamed carrots, green beans and white rice. Our main course was what I would call a two-front course. Rosemary put a chicken that Ale brought from Lillooet in the oven and I cooked tenderloin beef shish-kabobs. I made one without onions. To drink some had ginger ale and others an Argentine Malbec.



It was the dessert that was the success. When we first came to Vancouver I photographed a French-Canadian soprano (she was very tiny and very pretty) Ginette Duplessis who invited us to her house for dinner. Here is the recipe for her Pernod Pairs Flambé which were particularly enjoyed by Abraham.

Half, peel pairs.
Melt 1/4 cup butter / bubble not brown.
Put pears in, caramelize

2 oz Pernod
Fire it / let it burn till fire goes out.
Put in three tablespoons berry sugar.

Low temperature - add one cup of heavy whipping cream.
Put high to mix well.


I personally cannot stand Pernod or anything with a licorice taste. But the fired Pernod and the cream go through some sort of chemical change and the result is delicious. This morning I had what was left for breakfast with some very strong Indian cardamom tea.



Our other guest was Carlos Zamora Arcaraz whom we have known since he was born 32 years ago im Mexico City. His parents and his three sisters have been our friends since both our families moved to Arboledas, Estado de Mexico in 1971. Our daughters have ketp in touch traveling to Mexico and Carlos and his sisters coming to stay with us in Vancouver. This time around, Carlos (below left), who is a heavy duty star-salesman for HP Computers in Monterrey, Mexico had to balance pleasure with work involving his cellular phone and his laptop.



Abraham circumvented the not bringing anything by doing origami animals and origami Christmas ornaments for our tree. Since Abraham is an expert on Venice my gift to him was a photograph of a Venetian gondola that was purchased and restored by the Vancouver Maritime Museum. Abraham knew everything about the boat (he almost bought it) that in a travesty of Vancouver provincialism was almost converted into a gelato stand!



Abraham Jedidiah Rogatnick (the Harvard trained architect) that I would compare to an almost all-knowing philosopher king (particularly on anything related to Venice) is traveling with Mayor Sam Sullivan and partner Lynn Zanatta on boxing day for a 6-day tour of Venice. In a way Sullivan's Beatrice will be Lynn as Abraham will read sections of Dante Alighieri's Commedia in Italian in previously selected spots in the city.



Abraham was most interested in my copy of Henry James's Italian Hours which he eventually took home to read while forgetting his Venetian gondola photograph. He could not remember the name of the palazzo where James had stayed in Venice. We found it here and it is called Palazzo Barbaro.



I do believe that in some way this trip to Venice will be a turning point for our mayor and I hope that it is all for the better of our city. Sullivan will have the best of company and we can only be happy that we shared with Abraham (85) another memorable nochebuena.




It is appropriate that Lauren and I appear last here. I was tickling Rebecca and Lauren (who is always there to defend her sister) swung back (for more momentum and force) with a crystal necklace (given to her by Hilary) in her hand and struck me in the forehead. I momentarily blacked out and quickly discovered I was bleeding. Today I have a painful chichón (bump) and cut and the realization that I am lucky that Hilary did not give Lauren a pen for Christmas. It all brought memories of Deborah Kerr being hounded by a couple of demonic children (similar to Lauren, perhaps?) in the 1961 film The Innocents based on Henry James's story The Turn of the Screw.

Monday, December 24, 2007



Christmas for me, besides representing an umbearably hot midnight Mass in the midst of a Buenos Aires summer, has always been about mechanical toys and things I wanted and mostly never got - no electric train, no motorbike no rifle. Even now, when I am past being excited about a new computer I think of gadgets. I think of gadgets I now don't want or need. This time around I have the ability to grant (when I can afford it) someone else's wish for a gadget or electronic equipment. I have already mentioned here how Rebecca is getting a glow-in-the-dark Sony clock radio/CD player tonight.

I have been thinking of stereo equipment as I was playing records yesterday with a Sony linear tracking turntable. I could never have afforded one when they were in fashion, but a few Christmases past I bought one for only $100 at a Sony Store because it had a cracked cover. I ordered a new cover for next to nothing and I have been happy with my obsolete turntable since.



Christmas 1977 I was working for a gay/bisexual publication Bi-Line and the editor told me to create and shoot an ad for one of their advertisers which was a semi-sleazy sound equipment retailer called Vancouver Sight & Sound that used Shakespeare's (Twelfth Night)quote:

If music be the food of love, play on...

as its main identity. At the time I had been seeing many alternative scene rock bands including one very strange one called E. It featured gary bourgeois (I think he liked his name like that) on keyboards and a beautiful light-as-air but very tall singer who went by the name of Deborah E but we all knew to be Gina Daniels from the local cult TV show , The Gina Show. I suggested that Gina Daniels would make an excellent model.



At the time political correctness had yet to arrive. We photographers shamelessly posed women, with not much on, by cars, floor lamps and anything else anybody would want to buy. Why not stereo equipment?

Sunday, December 23, 2007

For Christmas 1980 Les Wiseman inaugurated a new feature idea for the then adventurous Vancouver Magazine. The In One Ear rock music column would feature a local band photographed and interviewed around a Christmas scene. This first In One Ear Christmas involved the hard core punk band the Subhumans. Others followed, DOA, the Modernettes and an even a more mainstream Kenny Coleman seen in that previous Modernettes blog. One of the strangest involved a band called Corsage. This was for Christmas 1983 when the alternative music scene's most interesting player was amateur golfer, professional grunge dresser and rock promoter Bud Luxford. Of Corsage, Les Wiseman wrote as an introduction to that Christmas In One Ear: Imagine, if you will, another sort of white Christmas, the kind that surrounds more of our metaphysically distressed than you care to imagine. Padded, white, quilted canvas walls, floor and ceiling; the glare from a 200-watt insect-repellent bulb that seems to do nothing for the white spiders that pop up between our subject's arm hairs. Imagine the purgatory of a young rock musician with a sense of the absurd, for we have just stepped through the doorway which leads to the Corsage Zone. In the picture with Phil "The K" Smith in the centre, and clockwise from the upper left, Rodney Graham (the doctor), Chris Grove, Scout Farelaine,Bill Napier-Hemy he's far right in this link, Jade Blade, Dale Powers and Robert Walker. Of Robert Walker even my Rebecca would know that's Tony Baloney. Tony Baloney is the man with the crosses on his glasses, far right in the third picture in this link.

Saturday, December 22, 2007


The photographs in my files have no date and I never kept a copy of the Georgia Straight in which one appeared. My guess is that I took the pictures in the late 80s or early 90s. I can remember vividly everything else. I knocked on the door of one of the rooms in what was then the Pacific Palisades Hotel on Robson Street. It was run by Mel Zajak. He was discrete and liked to play golf so many movie stars (before Vancouver really became Hollywood North) stayed at his hotel. I photographed many of them but the most memorable was the melancholic man who opened the door, and said, "Please come in. I hope you don't mind but we are going to have lunch in together and we shall first drink a white wine." The man, unshaven and wearing a black hat, was actor Rod Steiger. I stared. He explained, "Today is Saturday and on Saturdays I never shave." We shared a club sandwich but I don't recall the wine. I was too fascinated by the charm and the kindness of the man who told me how he had read tons of books on Napoleon and read the headlines of French newspapers of the time in order for him get into the mind of Napoleon whom he played in the 1971 film Waterloo. But the most remarkable performance I have ever heard from an actor came after the coffee.



Steiger told me that the one part he had always wanted to play was Winston Churchill. He then recited in its entirety, Churchill's June 4, 1940 speech before the House of Commons:

...We shall not flag nor fail. We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France and on the seas and oceans; we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air. We shall defend our island whatever the cost may be; we shall fight on beaches, landing grounds, in fields, in streets and on the hills. We shall never surrender and even if, which I do not for the moment believe, this island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, will carry on the struggle until in God's good time the New World with all its power and might, sets forth to the liberation and rescue of the Old. .

I closed my eyes and the man in the room was Winston Churchill. I broke the spell when on a lark I asked him what was the gum he chewed through most of In the Heat of the Night (1967) as Sparta, Mississippi, police chief Bill Gillespie.

"It was Dentyne cinnamon."

Friday, December 21, 2007


The Christmas Rose is not a rose at all but a Helleborus niger. It blooms about now but it gets unsightly black spots in our garden so we don't grow it. Perhaps this hellebore does not like our rain. Rosemary prefers the Heleborus argutifolious which flowers later in the winter.

My garden has been put to bed and I try not to look at the last of my decaying perennials and hostas disappear into the ground. Some of them are confused with our warmish weather and I would believe have adapted and become evergreen. An example is my handsome



Hypericum androsaemum 'Albury Purple' (right) which looks great and will remain like that unless we have a heavy snowfall which would break off the brittle stems.

But I have my very own Christmas Rose(s), if a bit worse for wear. They managed to open today in my winter garden. The roses are both English Roses bred by Shropshire rose grower David Austin. The pink one is Rosa 'St Swithun' and the white Rosa 'Fair Bianca'.

Thursday, December 20, 2007





Even though I recently posted here some architectural photographs I am not an architectural photographer nor have I ever wanted to be one. The same applies to landscapes and when I see a good one I usually buy the postcard. An architectural photographer more often than not has to abide by rules that stipulate that the parallel lines of buildings have to be rendered so. These photographers have to master the swings and tilts of bellows 4x5 inch cameras so as to control the apparent distortion of wide angle lenses or when they shoot up on a tall building. Another tremendous challenge of the architectural photographer who might specialize in house interiors is that the light of the inside of the house (tungsten) has to be balanced to the usually stronger daylight of the outside.



But I do have some landscape and architectural photographs in my files because I was ordered to take them by former Vancouver Magazine art director Chris Dahl.



He could not tolerate photographers who specialized so he forced me to take all kinds of stuff I was not in the least interested in. And, of course, I now appreciate his nagging and the experience.



I have written before about shooting with panoramic cameras that have a swivel lens here and here. The pictures in today's blog I took with a precursor to my Russian Horizont. It is a Japanese Widelux which is as unreliable as the Horizont.



The Horizont has better optics than the Widelux while the latter has a slightly more reliable shutter. Both tend to have light leaks. One of the pictures here (it has red streaks on the left side) is the result of such a leak.


I do not remember why it was that Chris Dahl asked me to shoot the Vancouver skylines of which the most successful had the Marine Building on the right side. The ones on the Cambie Street Bridge I took for Gus Tsetsekas of Signals Design Group for a design conference poster. My daughter Ale drove my Fiat-X19 roadster while I stood up with the Widelux. We went back and forth on the bridge from near sundown until the sun set.


I remember getting quite dizzy. For he Vancouver skyline shots I took some while holding the camera in as steady a manner as possible. Some of the others I took by jarring the camera slightly while the lens was swiveling. Looking back at them they seem to have been fun. A busman's holiday it was.

Blogger formatting does not permit images to be more than 5 inches wide which makes Widelux panoramics look small. But if you click on the images the image will enlarge.