Monday, April 07, 2008


Last night I finished the latest novel by Cartagena born author Arturo Pérez-Reverte. It is from a series featuring his swashbuckler 17th century soldier of fortune Capitán Don Diego Alatriste. It is the 6th in the series. The first two were somehow translated into English even though these novels are written in a pseudo 17th century Spanish which is quite complex and the stories require a fair knowledge of Spanish history. I never knew, for example that Flanders was to Spain what Vietnam was to the US. In fact most of the gold and silver brought in Spanish galleons from her New World possesions disappeared there.



Pérez-Reverte has the Dumas nerve to announce the name of the three forthcoming sequels. I cannot wait. Feeling a tad depressed when I placed my book on the bedroom floor I went downstairs to look for the author's first compilation of his weekly columns for the Spanish literary magazine El Semanal. I doubt that Patente de Corso 1993-1998 (that translates to letter of marque) or its sequel Con Ánimo de Ofender (with a desire to offend) 1998-2001 will be translated into English soon.

I immediately found my most favourite essay, La Novia de D'Artagnan, which is an account of his experience with a young woman at a Buenos Aires bookstore signing. I took the liberty of translating it and hope that Alfaguara (Pérez-Reverte's publisher) does not sue me. When I finished Corsarios De Levante I felt sad that I know nobody with whom I can share my pleasure. I remembered the young girl's plight. Here it is, badly translated by me. But in spite of it I hope you understand my predicament and sadness.



D'Artagnan’s Girl
Arturo Pérez-Reverte

I figured she was in her early 20s. She was in the third or fourth row in that Buenos Aires bookstore where this author was signing. She seemed quiet and shy. She had a backpack full of books and when she finally faced me she took out a tattered copy of The Dumas Club which she had obviously read many times.

“I love D’Artagnan,”” she affirmed, “and the others.” Her voice quivered as if she had just confessed a prohibited or strange passion. She seemed like she was about to say more but didn’t and just stared at the book I now had in my hands. I wrote some warm words on the first page, I chatted with her and from there I shifted my attention to a 60-year-old woman, very handsome, with green eyes which must have been devastating on others in her time. While we chatted about Seville and the bars of Triana, I noticed that the young girl who loved D’Artagnan remained amongst the shelves with her backpack on her shoulder. An hour later, after saying goodbye to the owner and my friends she was still at the door. “I need to show you something,” she said. Her voice trembled, as if the effort to speak to me was difficult. “Please,” she added. We were next to Patio Bullrich, a fashionable mall near the Recoleta, so I felt I would not compromise myself to anything if we sat for five minutes over coffee. I looked at my watch, uncomfortably. I was in doubt.

“It’s too heavy,” the girl said as she pointed at her backpack. I began to laugh, and after a bit she did, too in her timid way. It would be impossible to not have coffee with someone who appeals to you with Porthos’s last words in the Grotto of Locamaria from The Man of the Iron Mask. So the young girl who said she loved D’Artagnan took the seat in front of me but sat on the edge. From her backpack she extracted some extremely used Alexander Dumas novels in old series installments. She had acquired them in old bookstors, she explained. Everything was there, The Three Musketeers, Twenty Years After, and The Vicomte de Bragelonne… She spoke. In spite of shyness, without even lifting her eyes from her books she spoke at length, without stopping, her many hours alone “traveling” the route to Calais, the corridors of the Louvre, fighting Jussac and the cardinal’s guards, flying the napkin at the bastion of St Gervais as a flag and escaping by sheer luck Milady's poisoned Anjou wine.

She knew it all better than I. And since she was a child, she affirmed. To prove it we played a game, a most entertaining game: The size of Constanza Bonacieux’s feet. Porthos’s three surnames. Beufort’s dog’s name. What woman uses the alias Maria Michon. Who is Bascarrat, in which chapter does he break his sword and in what chapter of Bragellone does his son appear. It what street does D’Artagnan live when he is a lieutenant of the musketeers. The only question she was not able to answer, evil Mordaunt’s father’s name, Milady’s secret son.

From the Musketeers we shifted to The Count of Montecristo and Queen Margot. From Dumas we went on to Sabatini, Salgari and the others, between Scaramouche, The Black Corsair and The Prisoner of Zenda. When I mentioned Rupert of Hentzau and Mexican swashbuckler actor Yáñez’s laugh I noticed she was crying. She did it silently and gracefully. Tears were running down her face and falling on the discoloured covers of her old books. I was disturbed so I asked her why she was playing this unpleasant trick on me. She lifted her face. She was serious: “I had never been able to talk about all this with anyone,” she said. I knew this was the truth. After I had paid for the coffees she began to slip her books into her backpack with a sweetness and care. She was careful not to bend the covers as if they were precious objects. She stood up and said, “I wish Ruritania existed.”

“It does,” I answered, “it borders Syldavia to the north and on the south with Castle If.”

She still had tears but I saw her smile. “Then, I will pay for the next coffee,” she said, “If we ever see each other in Zenda.”

After a fleeting kiss I saw her disappear in the crowd with her heavy backpack full of dreams.

Arturo Pérez-Reverte



When I thought on how I was going to illustrate this blog I remembered my fading and stained proof in dancer Marthe's files. She was from Montreal. I photographed her because she had the most amazing presence, strength and legs. Even though she is a bit older than the girl cited in Pérez-Reverte's account I think she is just fine.

swashbuckler
more swashbuckler
and more

Sunday, April 06, 2008


They say children grow up a lot sooner these days. Maybe that's not true and what is true from my point of view is that it took me a long time to do so.

In 1985 Vancouver Magazine dispatched me to photograph an article on boxing written by Jim Christy. It involved boxers like Tony Pep and Michael Olajide. In the end Olajide made the cover. Part of my assignment had me photograph several boxing matches. One thing is to see a boxing film and quite another is to hear the punches and see the blood. With me in all those matches was Vancouver Sun photographer Steve Bosch. He was the paper's boxing expert simply because he chosen years before the night shift. Most boxing matches happen at night. The young, athletic and beautiful Olajide was matched against an older white man who was going to be his cannon fodder and he would allow Olajide to climb up into stardom. The fight was no match and the older man was being devastated by continuous and well placed punches. The man's trainer threw in the towel on to the ring. The old man lowered his guard. Olajide noticed that the judges had not seen this so he swung at the man with a punch that floored him for the ten-count. I was too amazed to take any picture. Next to me Bosch's motor drive whirred away. He got his shot. I didn't. It was then that I gained a great respect for the true newspaper photographer who somehow manages to suppress instincts and emotion to get the job done.



Three weeks ago Lauren, Rebecca, Rosemary and I went to VanDusen and we watched an "opera" that included two male Canada geese and a female. It was a courtship that was being interrupted by a less agressive male who seemed to be desperate. Rebecca informed us that it was unlikely that latecomer would find a partner. She said this with confidence and with a matter of fact coldness. The fight between the two males got vicious. The dominant one was pecking the other with the determination of killing him. We were able to approach the pair to within a foot but we were ignored.



I could have gotten an exciting shot with my Nikon FM-2 in the way that I did not in earlier years capture Olajide's haymaker. But again I could not suppress my emotion. We shouted and threw dirt at the pair until the injured one was able to limp away. Rebecca was silent for the rest of the day. There was a look of sadness, almost agony in her face.

Yesterday we went to see Tiko Kerr's show at the Winsor Gallery. Rebecca was surly and did not want to go. I told her to turn off the computer. She was playing a game. "Make me," she said. I threatened to ground her (I have been given this authority by her parents and it involves a curtailing of computer and TV privileges for whatever length of time I stipulate). But I have rarely followed through with the threat and by the time we arrived at the gallery Rebecca was charmed by Kerr's paintings. Some were extremely large. I spotted the luminously beautiful Barbara Bernath (standing behind a computer in the gallery's back office) who in her youth played drums for such bands as 50% Off which was fronted by no less than Lincoln Clarkes. Rebecca enquired about the self portraits which were collages using hundreds of injection ampules and other medical paraphernalia. Trying to soften the blow I interjected that Kerr had haunted the back alley bins of the Vancouver General Hospital to find the stuff. Barnath interrupted to explain, very clearly, that Kerr who has AIDS, takes a huge amount of medication every day. "The AIDS virus will never go away," she explained to Rebecca. When we left Rebecca asked me (whispering so Lauren would not hear) on Granville, "Is Tiko Kerr g - a - y?" spelling out the word. I answered that he was and that he suffered for many years and had been near death until a special medication was provided only after newspaper articles and a general uproar in Kerr's favour had forced the medical bureaucracy to provide the drug. In the end Rebecca posed by her favourite Tiko Kerr painting which happens to be my favourite, too. It's the one with the float plane and the blue sky. Both of us were hoping it is a Beaver.



I explained that it was nice that a fit and happy Kerr now had sold many paintings for very good money. Bu Kerr's happy ending has come with a realization for Rebecca that life isn't easy and that it is not all fun and games. I think that knowledge is captured in a picture I have been afraid to post here. I took the picture in Lillooet in the fall. Rebecca borrowed Ale's (my daughter and her aunt) top. She wanted to look older. She does. I am sad.

Saturday, April 05, 2008

"All mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, it is but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated... As therefore the bell that rings to a sermon, calls not upon the preacher only, but upon the congregation to come: so this bell calls us all: but how much more me, who am brought so near the door by this sickness....No man is ever an island, entire of itself...any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee."

John Donne, Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, Meditation XVII



For years I have strived for self-sufficiency. When we first arrived in Vancouver I continued with my custom of tuning our VW Beetle. I even had a fine set of spark plug adjusting blades. But it was in Vancouver where folks said,"Alex you make money as a photographer, repairing you car takes you away from making money and the money you save by tuning it yourself is negligible."

In my very large and heavy camera bag I carry a complete set of jeweler's screwdrivers and a pair of needle-nosed pliers. Camera lens and camera body screws tend to loosen up in vibrating airplanes. I avoid a few camera breakdowns with the frequent tightening of little screws.

My problems in my much vaunted self-sufficiency really began when I switched from a Remington Portable No 2 (my grandmother's portable) to a primitive Smith Corona word processor. When I had breakdowns I had to go to Polson's and cajole the repairman to do his job post haste. Suddenly I felt helpless.

Not too long ago I had to scan some transparencies for a client and I had a three hour deadline. Whe I opened my PhotoShop program I was horrified that after a couple of seconds it would close. I found what the expression "corrupted file" meant pronto. This expression now joins "we have issues" and the "computers are down" which signify we are in an area that is beyond our expertise and control. Luckily I also had Paint Shop Pro 8 as a backup and I was able to meet my photo deadline.

I have written here before how as a photographer I have to depend (and I am lucky) on having a support staff. Hungarian Viktor repairs my flash equipment and German Horst Wenzel sees to may cameras. Hungarian Paul Leisz installs programs into my computer, debugs it and every few years takes me to a place on Bridgeport Road where I order up a computer with Paul's suggested components.

Without those three people the latent images of my photography would remain so. Unfortunately my world isn't all that simple considering the intense plumbing problems we have in our house, "You are going to have to rip out that bath tub and that is going to be very..." Suddenly my life got even more stressful and complicated when my blog started deteriorating on Monday. My friend and web designer (he and Chris Botting designed my web page and this blog) Doug Jasinski wrote in an email, "I unleashed this crack that this blog means to you and now I have the responsibility to score you some more by fixing it." Unfortunately Doug Jasinksi and his company Skunkworks are going through a very busy period and my blog perhaps had to wait before it could be looked at. I was desperate.

The blog lost its RSS feed and then I could no longer upload photographs. I found a roundabout method of uploading but it involved no control of placement or size.

In extreme desperation I appealed to the Grand Master Guru Tim Bray. He was in Chicago but promised to look into it. He finally arrived yesterday and sat by my computer. I explained as best as I could. He then opened up one of those boxes in the middle of my monitor and started typing in code stuff that made reading Caesar's Gallic Wars in Latin seem easy. I have never ever seen anybody type such apparent gibberish so quickly. Bray's only complaint was, "Why does your name have to be so long?" The result in the end was that it all became worse. The guru said, "I don't understand Blogger." This was a revealing statement of sorts when you think that many of the elements within Blogger he probably created. Bray went home. Within minutes he called to ask me for my Blogger password. An hour later he called again, "It now works." And work it did. If anything it seemed to have some sort of special web-based lubricant. Everything worked more quickly.



The above makes me think of Charles Proteus Steinmetz (right), the Russian-born American electrical engineer and mathematician who pioneered the concept of alternating current. He and my 10 year-old mother where on the same ocean liner in 1921 when he told her a story. I have heard this story where the person in question was Edison so perhaps it is an aprocryphal one. Suffice to know that the gentle and very short (he suffered from dwarfism and was a hunchback) Steinmetz told my mother that one night he was woken up by a man banging on his door. "We have power problems. We need your help." The man and Steinmetz went to the New York company whence all the electric current that lit the now darkened New York city came from. Steinmetz studied the works and then inserted a fuse he took out of his front pocket. The lights came back on. "I will send you my bill for $1001," he told the relieved man. "Why $1001?" he asked. Steinmetz answered with supreme confidence, "$1 for the fuse and $1000 for knowing were to insert it."

Thinking back on Steinmetz all I can now say to Tim Bray is, "I owe you big, "as my friend Tony Ricci would say.

Friday, April 04, 2008

Graham Walker and I attended an Early Music Vancouver concert of J.S. Bach's 4 Orchestral Suites played by the Belgian group Il Fondamento. It is not often that one gets to listen and see a large 18 piece baroque instrument orchestra so Walker and I sat in the front row to get a full (loud) sound. All performers were dressed in black and my eyes lingered on the female bassoonist who was dressed in an old fashioned black and very frilly dress. She was wearing black hose and black flat shoes. I could get a glimpse of the shoes and the ankles and I felt like a naughty Victorian gentleman. I looked at the faces of the musicians, I froze them in my mind like a Daguerreotype camera and tried to imagine them in the 19th century or even further back as Flemish portrait paintings. I lingered again on the unlikely named bassoonist. The program said she was Alain De Rijckere. I imagined her as a Vermeer by a window, with little on, gazing with pride of purpose.



After the concert Walker and I had a chat with the very friendly violinist Johan Van Aken. Being able to chat with musicians is one of the additional pleasures of Early Music Vancouver concerts. It's far more intimate than seeing 19th century clothed members of large orchestras up on a stage and to be subjected to the stiff protocol of the concertmaster shaking hands with the director. An older man, sitting on the right with his oboe, Paul Dombrecht was the director. In the Bach suites without oboes the first violinist Dirk Vandaele nodded his head in direction.

Van Aken told us that he had done many of the transcriptions and annotations to the Il Fundamento CD that both Walker and I bought. The CD featured Juan Crisóstomo de Arriaga Orchestral Works 1818- 1824. The Basque composer died in Paris when he was 20. The prospect of listening to new music (for us anyway) from an unknown composer (to us) was exciting.

I dared in the end to mention to Van Aken my infatuation with the bassoonist and I enquired how a woman could be called Alain. "No, she is not Alain. She is an Australian called Jane Gower. If you want I will introduce you to her." For a few seconds my visions of the Flemish painting (as replicated with a camera) came crashing down but I quickly shifted to an Australian outback. But I felt too shy to accept Van Aken's offer and, of course I now regret it.

What does Il Fundamento, a formerly Flemish but now Australian bassoonist, and a long forgotten Basque composer of the early 19th century have to do with Don Ameche?

For one while this blog is broken and I have a limited ability to post pictures with some sort of control I enjoy posting large photos as they appear large. For most people who might read this blog today they will probably not know who Ameche is. And that is perfectly fine. But just freeze your sight on the man and perhaps imagine him as a movie actor playing D'Artagnan with foil in hand. You could be right or you could be wrong. That's not important. It's the imagining that is.

As I played Il Fondamento's Juan Crisóstomo de Arriaga I tried to imagine him at his deathbed (he died of tuberculosis) with his friend Spanish pianist Mateo Pérez de Albéniz bedside. When Arriaga died Albéniz sent the composer's belongings to his home in Bilbao and wrote a letter to his father.

Early Music Vancouver's next concert

Thursday, April 03, 2008

Last night Rosemary and I attended the opening of the Arts Club Theatre Company production of Michele Riml's Poster Boys at the Granville Island Stage. Scott Bellis, convincingly plays the older man who in his youth came out and dumped the ad agency executive bride at the altar and Luke Camilleri is the young man who without being ambivalent about his sexuality wants to be like his boss, the powerful ad agency executive played by Lois Anderson. Both Camilleri and Bellis are very good but they cannot compete with Anderson or Daniel Arnold who plays the younger man and the other woman in the play. Both Anderson and Arnold are superb dramatic actors, but they also shine as comedians. Below is a profile on Lois Anderson that has just appeared in the April issue of VLM (Vancouver Lifestyle Magazine).

What can I say about a magazine editor that responds to my, "Bob [Mercer] we need a profile on a fine actress," with, "Alex, do it."






Lois Anderson

My granddaughter Rebecca and I watched in 2002 the Leaky Heaven Circus’s not too reverential nativity play Birthday Boy. That’s when we discovered Lois Anderson’s playing St. Joseph to a black Virgin Mary. We laughed. Since then, I have watched Anderson in dramatic roles including last year’s Trout Stanley where she went from comedy to drama and ended up sexy. She won a Jessie Richardson Award (five Jessies in all), in 2007, playing a 17 year-old Salome in the Leaky Heaven Circus production of Salome. While Anderson denied that she is sexy, she did tell me during our photo session and interview in my studio, “I am 42 years old right now and I had to seduce King Herod as a 17 year-old. We pulled it off.”

Anderson is a sculptor of sorts. “I have been doing this since I was 24. I can sculpt my career. I can seek out comedy and drama. I love choosing the next part and having to do something that I have not done before. This is how I’ve lasted.” Besides sculpture, Anderson has toured France in a circus knife board act (on the receiving end) and lists circus silks and the trapeze as additional skills. Her two daughters, Anuska (13) and Elena (10) have had a trapeze in their room most of their life until the current landlord objected to making holes in the ceiling.


While Anderson played Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz in Grade 6 it wasn’t until she was at an archeological dig in the Negev Desert when she was 24 that she decided to pursue acting.

Lois Anderson will be appearing in the Arts Club Theatre Company’s production of Poster Boys directed by Andrew McIlroy which is based on the true story (written by Michele Riml) of two gay men who posed for a series of VanCity ads (that were meant to be gay) in the 90s in Vancouver. The play opens March 27 (until April 26) at the Granville Island Stage.

© 2008 VLM/Alex Waterhouse-Hayward

When Daniel Arnold showed up in my studio in the fall of 2007 for a photograph for the Georgia Straight I was particularly impressed by an actor who had a way of looking right at me. He had a smile. I captured that smile but I would rather show Arnold's serious side here. He was so easy to photograph that I took one Polaroid and then four exposures with my medium format camera. The man that plays the sensitive young gay architect and Lois Anderson's character Caroline's alter-ego (dressed as a woman with a red wig and sunglasses, and intelligently underplayed) is a completely different man from the man who was in my studio. It just shows Arnold's superb range. Poster Boys is a comedy (I laughed lots and as loudly as the man who was on my right, lawyer Christopher Dafoe). It is also a tragedy of sorts. All in all Rosemary and I went home satisfied and Arnold and Anderson's performances will linger in our memory.



Inside joke, my friend Larry will be surprised they changed his name to Yvette.

Wednesday, April 02, 2008

It would seem that I have an unplanned blogging vacation. I am unable to post photographs with any kind of regularity and words are iffy, too. The problem with Blogger, is that they are owned by Google and they are now so huge that there is no support staff either by phone or by email. This morning I called Google in California and had the luck to talk to a human being. The moment I mentioned the word blogger, he hung up. As soon as it is feasible I will be switching my blog to WordPress. Until then I cannot forsee when I will blog here again.

I seem to be able to post photographs that I have up in Photobucket.com. The only problem is that I am unable to size them or to move them around so that copy surrounds the photographs. But at least I can provide a needed service to one my fans who has demanded to see Zanna Downes's fishnets. Here they are:

Tuesday, April 01, 2008




Today I begin my first class of a 10-week (every Tuesday) at Focal Point called The Contemporary Nude Portrait. I teach it at least twice a year and it seems very popular. I have been thinking this morning of my class notes and what to compose for the class. Today it is a lecture and then we alternate shooting sessions one week with lecture on the next. Suddenly I thought of Zanna Downes. Below is my story on this wonderful woman.


During my tango dancing days, some years ago one of my favourite partners was one that intimidated me with her precision and her matter of fact, "This should be easy for you, Alex," which of course it wasn't. Zanna (short for Alexandra) Downes was a beautiful woman with the most exciting legs this side of Marlene Dietrich, particularly when Downes wore her trademark fishnets. Another intimidating factor was her Miss Moneypenny accent. There was no way I could be James to her Jane.

One day while dancing (you should never talk while dancing the Argentine tango) I put forward my frustration at wanting to find a woman over 50 (a definitely over 50) who would pose for me undraped. "I am tired of taking photographs of perfectly perfect young women who are to young to show character. Downes just whispered in my ear, I'll pose for you. And this she did.