Tuesday, May 13, 2008



Since 1986 I have purchased many dwarf conifers and conifers for the garden. At first my inexperience meant that I had several coniferal deaths. Many of the formerly called chamaecyparis (false cypresses) which have been recently promoted to cupressus (the cypress family)and many pinus (pines) did not like the winter wet and relatively poor drainage of my garden. But many survived and even thrived.

Some years ago I purchased three Abies koreana 'Nana' or dwarf Korean firs at a UBC plant sale. The moniker nana was incorrect as the three grew quite tall and the tallest is now 9 ft high.

Korean Fir, (Abies koreana; 구상나무, Gusang namu in Korean) is a fir native to the higher mountains of South Korea, including Jeju-do island.

What is startling about this conifer is that the underside of the leaves (conifers have leaves even if those needles don't look like them) are silvery white so that in a wind the whole tree shimmers. Startling, too are the upright cones which in spring can be blue, purple of light green.

When I married Rosemary some 40 years ago she used to smile when we purchased a Canadian Christmas tree every year. In Spanish all conifers are pinos or pines. The more discerning might know the existence of abetos (abies or firs) or the existence of the extremely Mexico City pollution tolerant juníperos or junipers. Thujas (Western Red Cedars) true cedars and other exotic conifers are all but unknown. All conifers are pinos!

In our travels through Mexico in our VW beetle we saw many pines. In the mountains of Oaxaca, in Xalapa, Veracruz and elswhere. It was only here in Vancouver just a few years ago that I learned that Mexico is home to the greatest variety of pine species in the world.

It was also in Vancouver that I found out that the Western Red Cedar is not a cedar but a Thuja and that the one in my garden is a Thuja plicata and is not related to cedars but to the pine family. Furthermore I found out that the Douglas Fir is not a fir or (in the proper botanical name an abies) but a pseudo hemlock. Because a Douglas Fir looks somewhat like a hemlock (Tsuga) it is botanically called a Pseudostuga and are all part of the pine family. The useless fact to remember is that a cedar fence is really not a cedar fence (Western Red Cedar or Thuja plicata) and that a true cedar or cedrus is a conifer family from Europe. I have several true cedars in my garden and most are weeping cedars or Cedrus deodara .

Also salient, in my opinion, is the knowledge that one should never have a roof with cedar shingles. Years ago when I visited veteran broadcaster Jack Webster in his Saltspring Island retreat he started our barbecue dinner fire with cedar shingles.



As a parting shot I would like to rectify the idea that all conifers are evergreen. There are several that are not. I wrote about one of them here. You can see a branch of Larix kaempferi and its cones here alongside the Abies koreana's cone and a branch showing the silver underside.

Monday, May 12, 2008


While I have always enjoyed the comfort of spooning I didn't know what it was called until recently. Yesterday Rosemary and I had an intense day in the garden getting it ready for the Ballet BC Home & Garden Tour 2008.

We each work in our areas but we meet to move a plant. She will hold it up so I can see where the roots are and I go at it with a spade. I dig a hole and while Rosemary places the plant in its new spot I fill a bucket with our pond's water to puddle in the plant to reduce the moving shock.

It is about now when my friend Donald Hodgson and I would talk hosta on the phone. Hodgson died a few months ago. He had a home wholesale hosta nursery in North Vancouver. He selected tried and true hostas like Hosta montana 'Aureomarginata', Hosta 'Halcyon', Hosta 'Gold Standard' and such stalwart and beautiful species hosta like Hosta nigrescens. He lovingly grew them in large pots and then sold them to the best nurseries in town. Whenever I had a garden tour I would go to his house and he made the exception of selling to me retail so I could "bulk" up some of my hostas that were not doing too well or to fill empty areas of the garden.

We talked hosta and we talked on how lovely the garden got to be now when you could discern change and growth from one day to the next. The hosta leaves as the plants unfurled are a tender green and pristine with no slug holes. The first thing Rosemary and I do in the morning is to run to the bathroom window and look out into the back garden.

Last night we were exhausted and getting into bed and out of bed (perhaps to get a mug of tea) brought groans as our pained limbs protested movement. No amount of hand cream lessened the roughness of our hands.



But as I gazed upon this tiny flower, Omphalodes cappadocica a plant I would not have noticed anywhere I realize that Rosemary and I spoon in our garden. We fit into each other's tastes and somehow the end result, our garden, is definitely ours.

Sunday, May 11, 2008


A seemingly unlikely confluence of events led to today's scanning of a small bit of lettuce. The bit of lettuce is what was left from Rosemary's lettuce, carrot, tomato and celery salad from last night's mother's day dinner. Perhaps it was precipitated when I opened the refrigerator this morning and the remnants of the salad, in a bowl we purchased in Málaga many years, ago fell out and broke.

It all began a couple of weeks ago when Rosemary and I watched in the Turner Classic Movies channel, Sam Peckinpah's 1965 Western Major Dundee with Charlton Heston, Richard Harris, Santa Berger, James Coburn, Slim Pickens and Jim Hutton. Ben Johnson and Warren Oates, two future staples of Peckinpah movies played understated (most uncharacteristic) roles.

And there was also Mexican actress Begoña Palacios.


One of the most often repeated and comforting scene of Peckinpah's Mexican Westerns (The Wild Bunch is certainly another) is a group of rough and tough gringos entering a Mexican village. They soon befriend the villagers and there is a party. There is a cheerful farewell in the end. Nasty Mexican Federales or in this case French imperial forces take revenge on the poor villagers for helping the gringos.

As I watched this fully restored (all the cuts were reinstated in a movie that caused so much uproar because of the director's overbudget and alcoholism) I thought of the fact that Heston went without pay to convince the producers to keep backing the production of the film. But I became melancholic and nostalgic when I noticed Mexican actress Begoña Palacios who convincingly (most demurely) competed with the much more voluptuous Santa Berger who proudly showed her cleavage while strategically pushing her Mexican rebozo to one side.

Begoña Palacios married Sam Peckinpah an extraordinary three times. Here is a short biography:

Begonia Palacios, in spite of being a well-known actress in her native Mexico, was better known as the three-time wife of director Sam Peckinpah. The actress and the director first met when Peckinpah cast her in his 1965 film, Major Dundee. The duo shared an extremely volatile relationship, as evidenced by their unusual three marriages. Palacios and Peckinpah remained close, despite their differences, until his death in 1984 -- he was reportedly journeying to see her when he was stricken, on her birthday no less, with his fatal heart attack. Palacios died in early 2000 and her ashes were scattered off the shores of Malibu, CA, the same location where Peckinpah's ashes were strewn. ~ Ryan Shriver, All Movie Guide

The next event that has led to the bit of lettuce happened yesterday in the afternoon when Rebecca asked me to play any music of my choice. I chose Aaron Copland's Lincoln Portrait directed by Maurice Abravanel and the Utah Symphony Orchestra. The piece was narrated by Charlton Heston. Rebecca had never heard of Heston, Ben Hur, A Touch of Evil and, much less, Major Dundee. We will have to see Ben Hur together. But Rebecca did comment that Heston's voice was most interesting.

For mother's day dinner the chicken I was making in the outdoor barbecue had to be finished in the oven when the gas was exhausted. I placed the chicken with the basting liquid in a pyrex dish and the result was a resounding and juicy success. After a dessert of apple flambé (with Pernod, butter and cream) we watched Rossini's Ghost from the series called The Composers' Specials . When Hilary was about to leave she said, "This has been an unusual mother's day."

I thought about it overnight.

Begoña Palacios would have been called "a lechugita" (a small head of lettuce) by Mexicans to describe her vuluptuous and lively nature. But better still she would be called "a mamacita" (little mother). Mexicans have a complex relationship with motherhood, and with diverse meanings of the word. This complex relationship was best explained by Mexican writer/poet/diplomant Octavio Paz in his book (1950) El Laberinto de la Soledad (The Labyrinth of Solitude).

It all began when Doña Marina (as Spaniards affectionately call her) or La Malinche, the disdainful Mexican epithet "sold out" her country by translating for Hernan Cortez and then complicating it even more by bedding the conquistador and having a son. To this day a "malinchista" is a Mexican who prefers foreign goods.

Mexicans have some strange expressions related to mothers and motherhood. "My mamacita" can be an endearing term describing one's dear mother or in most cases one's dear mistress. A mamacita is a lechugita , a beautiful young or not so young woman. When Rosemary would walk home from teaching English to our apartment in Mexico City's Zona Rosa, bricklayers and construction workers would shout "¡Mamacita!" at her. I don't blame them. Rosemary had beautiful legs and wore extra short mini skirts. That she was close to 8 months pregnant at the time had no bearing.

A papacito (or little father) has nothing to do with fatherhood and all to do with a man who is cool and can pick up women. A papacito has many mamacitas.

The most complex term involving the word mother in Mexico is madre or mother. "Te voy a dar en la madre." which losely translates to "I will give it to you in your mother, " means, "I am going to fu-- you over, and get even with you." Octavio Paz mentions the curious fact that this fictitious place, this abstract place (the mother in you that I am going to get at) is nowhere and cannot be found anywhere. Mexican's will commonly utter, "Me dieron en la madre,", when they suffer a financial problem, had an automobile accident or failed a test in school.

Yet "a toda madre" (sort of all mother) is used to denote something fantastic. ¡Vancouver "es a toda madre! would mean that Vancouver is a happening place. But "no vale madre" (it's not worth a mother) means that something is worthless and shoddy. To confuse it further, "Vancouver es un lugar padre," (Vancouver is a father place) means the same thing as !Vancouver es a toda madre!

Such is the alternate almost obscene meaning of madre and mamacita that Mexicans reserve another variant "madrecita" (little mother) which has not sexual meaning and is a pure, long sufferning and kind mother.

Such is the Mexican obsession with motherhood that the ultimate insult is to state that your oponent should have sex with his mother. The perennial American (Frank Sinatra used it a lot) finish to a song "ta, ta, ta-ta-ta - tá-tá" means just that. For many years Mexicans would honk their car horns to insult those with lesser motoring skills. Expensive fines were instituted by the authorities to counter this vehicular obscenity. So ever-so-quick Mexicans simply honk their horn twice, tá, tá. Everybody knows this is not an endearing motherly term.

And yes, Begoña Palacios in Major Dundee, is a lechugita, a mamacita. Her performance is "a toda madre" and Charlton Heston "les dió en la madre a los Franceses" soundly defeated the Frenchies. In fact since mother's day in Mexico is always celebrated on May 10th and the Mexican defeat of the imperial French forces in Puebla happened on May 5th, the Puebla holiday is sometimes called "La Media Madre" or "half mother".


¡Begoña Palacios, mamacita, mamacita!

Saturday, May 10, 2008


Lauren, Rebecca (both dressed to the teeth) and I attended the Arts Umbrella Dance Company Season Finale last night at the Vancouver Playhouse. I have gone to these before with Rebecca and it features the Senior Company Dancers and the Apprentice Company Dancers. As a special treat that happened because of an exchange program the evening also featured Joffrey Ballet School Dancers (no less!) and a finale, Samsara (choreographer Margo Sappington) that combined both dance companies and brought down the house with intensity, music and costumes to die for.

Rebecca and I go to a lot of dance and Lauren is becoming an aficionado, too. We know what we like. I find it curious that even if you compare this yearly Arts Umbrella tradition to any other dance performance by any company, be it Canadian or international, only the Arts Umbrella performance seems to be, essentially, intense and pure dance. Only La La La Human Steps from Quebec leaves me as exhausted and satiated.

Last night was no exception. At a pre-performance reception were Rebecca chatted with Emily Molnar and Tiko Kerr, we were asked when we felt most alive. The question was immediately answered that dancers, the Arts Umbrella dancers, feel most alive when they dance. That made me think as I am too self-concious when I dance the Argentine tango to feel alive. I am much too worried if I am doing the right steps.

I would say that I feel most alive during a portrait session. There is that instance when I know I have my shot. And I know I can quit at that moment and not fret anymore. Attempting to take that photograph with fewer and fewer exposures (in an age of digital regurgitation) is specially satisfying.

In a number before the intermission, Grosse Fugue (by dazzling Toronto choreographer Roberto Campanella) in a beginning with absolute silence (Beethoven was to be later) Alex Burton and Alyson Fretz danced together. Burton's profile would have launched a thousand ships of Amazon women. Burton and Fretz, for a few moments, were the ultimate Romeo and Juliet falling in love. The sexuality, intense as it felt to me, was romantic, classy, tender. I felt like running up to Ballet BC's John Alleyne (sitting in the back row) and saying, "Mr Alleyne, choreograph your version of Romeo and Juliet. You have your dancers here, and now."

I was alive.

There were some moments of retrospection for me. I wonder why Rebecca and her powers that be do not understand that women like dancer and choreographer Emily Molnar, and dance director Artemis Gordon (seen here with Alex Burton) instill in dancers a way of life that will make them better persons even if they ultimately do not become dancers. They learn unflinching commitment and a desire to do their best in a world that is bocoming more and more a world of mediocrity and incompetence.

Rebecca and I missed Nina Davies our most favourite and flexible dancer. She has back problems (at this moment unresolved). I have watched Davies dance for some four years and I have chatted with her and her mother Kitty. At age 16 she is the very model of the girl I would like Rebecca in some way to resemble. But let me end with a humorous note. Artist Tiko Kerr introduced a gentleman to her. "Rebecca, this is my husband Craig." A few moments later, a puzzled Rebecca asked me, "How can that be?" And then she immediately said, "Oh, yes I understand now."

I was alive.

Friday, May 09, 2008


I first met up with the "Three Musketeers" (my name for them), Kim Collier, Jonathan Young and Kevin Kerr, founding members (1996) of the Electric Theatre Company in 2001. I was comissioned by them to take pictures of the actors involved in a play adapted by Vancouver's Carmen Aguirre from Jorge Amado's novel, Donna Flor and Her Two Husbands. The project also involved Argentine artists Nora Patrich and Juan Manuel Sánchez. On opening night, in the reception area of the East Vancouver Cultural Centre, Patrich, Sánchez and I had photographs, paintings, sketches with photographs and other variations that showed the characters of the play in their roles. It was the Electric Theatre Company that probably innaugurated the East Vancouver Cultural Centre tradition of having at least one production per year (be it a play or a dance performance) featuring full nudity. In fact it was Donna Flor's first husband (Ty Olson) who made the Vancouver theatre audience receptive to having a man on stage nude and who dangled his parts for most of the performance. Carmen Aguirre was Donna Flor. She shed her clothes for the last act.

I dealt with them in 2003 for The Fall . It is hard to distinguish who acts, who directs and who writes the company's plays. I do believe that Kevin Kerr does not act. He is a playwright who won the Governor General's Literary Award in 2002 for his play Unity (1918) but both Collier and Young (married to each other, photo above, left) write, act and Collier directs. All three happily co-write many of the company's plays.



In 2006 the company staged Studies in Motion written by Kevin Kerr (right) that was based on the story of photographer Eadweard Muybridge. This wonderful play (nudity but this time at UBC's Frederic Wood Theatre) broke new grounds as all movement was choreographed by Kidd Pivot's Crystal Pite. After seeing this play I thought that theatre would never be quite same again for me. And that has been so. The Electric Theatre Company keeps challenging this concept of what theatre should or can be.

Last night Rosemary and I were challenged but entertained in the company's performance of Jean-Paul Sartre's No Exit. Both Rosemary and I had read the play many times but we have never seen it performed. No subsequent staging that we might see elsewhere will be able to match the bells, the whistles and the sheer technical wizardry of this production. And Kim Collier's direction was tight and to the point. Stuff had to be edited out. As an example when I spotted Crystal Pite I asked her, "How would you have choroegraphed this play? How would you have prevented the actors from ever blinking their eyes?" With a smile she answered, "I couldn't have." So any mention that the protagonists can never close their eyes was taken out from Paul Bowles' translation.

The three actors who are in "The Room", Laara Sadiq, Andy Thompson and Lucia Frangione show no redeeming qualities (terrific acting) and thus show why they are in hell. I never felt sorry for them and I now understand why my theology class before lunch in my Catholic boarding school in Texas seemed like hell. As we would say in Spanish, it was an antesala del infierno or ante room to hell. The class seemed like it would never end.

But it was Jonathan Young's performance as the valet that I enjoyed the best. Last year I thought his Ruby Slippers paticipation in Trout Stanley was the best performance by a male actor that I have seen in years. And Rosemary still talks about his acting in the company's 2004 play, Palace Grand (picture here of Young smoking a joint).

Young is a handsome actor. But he is slim and almost as small as Collier. He can (I am sure) almost make himself disappear so you won't notice him. And he rarely yells. You pay attention because you want to listen to him. In No Exit, while I didn't give a damn what happened to the three in the room I felt anguish for Young's valet who it would seem will have to spend an eternity dealing with people of no consequence. A worse hell I cannot imagine.

By accident I saw the CBC film (2004) A Bear Named Winnie on TV over the weekend. It is based on the true story of a Canadian soldier, enroute to World War I from Winnipeg, who adopts an orphaned bear cub at White River Ontario. It is named Winnie (for Winnipeg) and eventually ends up at the London Zoo where it became the inspiration for A.A.Milne's Winnie The Pooh stories. He is fussed over by two men. One of them is Jonathan Young who plays a veterinarian soldier called Macray. It was in this film (a film that shows that the CBC can deliver good Canadian goods when it wants to) that I noticed Young's chameleon qualities. But it was this line in the film that stopped me and made me notice, "I know everything, I have done nothing."



There is more. The three musketeers met while studying theatre at Langara's Studio 58. Carmen Aguirre studied there and has written plays for it including a most entertaining adaptation of Argentine writer Julio Cortazar's story The Rules of the Game.

A few weeks back I photographed Antony Holland who was the founder of Studio 58. His latest project is minimalist theatre. He believes that strong plays don't need staging or props. He would perhaps not approve of the Electric Theatre Company's No Exit. I would only say to this gentle man that more than anybody in Vancouver he is singly responsible for the machinations of his students. They will perhaps some day return to his minimalism. Meanwhile he should take some credit for the sheer brilliance of those whom he has inspired.

Luckily for the other theatre companies of our city, these three musketeers are only three. Were they four there would be no competition.



Addendum

Hey everyone! Just wanted to let you all know that I will be doing a public reading of Blue Box, my new play, during The New Play Festival, which takes place during Magnetic North, the national theatre festival being held in Vancouver this year.

Blue Box is a one-woman autobiographical dark comedy about sex and politics. Can there be sex without politics? Can there be politics without sex? The play takes place in the Third and First worlds, from the eighties into the new millenium, during revolutionary and post-revolutionary times.

Here's the info:

Blue Box, written and performed by Carmen Aguirre, directed by Brian Quirt.

A Nightswimming commission.

When: Wednesday, June 11th, at 9pm

Where: Playwrights Theatre Centre Studio at Festival House on Granville Island. 1398 Cartwright Street, a few doors down from The Waterfront Theatre.

Admission: $5 at the door.

Would love to see you all there! Please pass it on.... Carmen Aguirre:)

Thursday, May 08, 2008


It is vivid and indelible in my memory. I was 7 or 8 years old and I was with my mother in a colectivo (a Buenos Aires bus). So vivid is my memory that I remember that we were on the fashionable Calle Esmeralda. A woman got on the bus with a little creature in tow. He or she was wearing a dress but he or she had very short hair (a crew cut). I could not decide if this was a boy dressed as a girl or some kind of strange girl. When I was that age the difference between the sexes was obvious. Boys wore short pants and men wore long pants. Girls and women wore dresses or skirts. When my mother took me to see a film with Katherine Hepburn I was most confused. Here was a woman who almost had a man's voice. And she wore pants. Not long after a little American girl came to my house to play and asked me if I wanted to see it. It was then that all my confusion about the sexes began.



Now that the 20th century has slipped into the 21st it seems obvious that skirts and dresses will go the way of Body by Fisher.

That is why I long for the nostalgia of my past in Argentina where in my imagination (perhaps) women were women and I was never confused (except for that little girl who must have had very thin hair). I can relive that nostalgia by glancing through the files of Linda Lorenzo.



This Argentine beauty posed for Juan Manuel Sanchez, Nora Patrich and me in my studio or in Nora's house for over a year. We drank mate, spoke Argentine Spanish and relived a life when everything was in its proper (for us) place.

Juan asked Linda to pose with a guitar. I was appalled at his cliché on how a guitar resembles a woman. But Linda posed and I snapped my picture and joked with Juan. Now that Juan and Nora are divorced and live in separate aparments in Buenos Aires with new partners I would be prepared to photograph whatever cliché Juan could cook up just to share the comfort and joy of gazing at a woman who is woman.



On Friday I am going to the the end of the school year performance of the Arts Umbrella senior and junior dance companies at the Vancouver Playhouse with Lauren and Rebecca. I have expressly asked them to wear dresses. Rebecca was reluctant but she agreed. What joy!

Some years back I spent lots of time at Juan Manuel Sánchez and Nora Patrich's house. My wife started suspecting something and asked me bluntly. I responded in a way she was not expecting and I wrote about it here. Rosemary then accepted my daily mate (Argentine gourd tea) journey to Nora's and our constant telephone communication. Rosemary knew it was good for my soul and for my artistic morale.

But these good things ended when Nora and Juan divorced and both moved to Buenos Aires. Juan has an younger mistress and Nora has found a man in politics who shares her leftist leanings of her "causa". Nora and Juan don't see each other and rarely communicate.

When I have Rebecca in the car and I am taking her home the route passes by Nora and Juan's old house. One of Nora's daughters still lives there. Rebecca notices Juan and Nora's paintbrushes (in bottles) by the windows and a couple of little Argentine flags. Rebecca knows and doesn't ask. She knows how I miss them because she misses them, too. She also misses sipping the hot and bitter mate, the smell of paint and the "alegría" of our conversations. Juan said he would not attempt to teach Rebecca to draw and paint until she were 11. Juan believed children should be allowed to paint with freedom and without adult restrictions until that age. It would be about now that Rebecca would have walked the two blocks for her lessons with Juan.

Nora was a different kettle of fish. She was impulsive yet calculating. I always made fun of her leftist philosophy while dependent on her Visa card to get Airmiles points. I called it "causa de tacita de thé" or a leftist cause while holding the delicate tea cup.

As a young teenager on her way to school Nora would pass by the taller (studio) of the famous Grupo Espartaco artist (Grupo Espartaco was a group of Argentine painters who protested the military juntas of Argentina with mural art) Juan Manuel Sánchez and she would spy at the paintings. In the mid 90s after marrying two previous men she finally married Juan Manuel Sánchez. She brought him to Vancouver where Juan, not able to speak the language became a penguin in the arctic.

He was out of his element. As he looked out of the window of his taller on to Douglas Park he felt alienated in not being able to understand the game being played. I tried to explain but Juan never did understand or want to understand what baseball was. Juan is back in the city he loves but after having experienced some the benefits of Canada and Vancouver like our health system or the fact that electricity is constant and communication dependable he is now perhaps a polar bear in the antarctic. Nonetheless he is able to walk down from the taller to the nearby pizzería El Cuartito and savour a porción with his beloved moscato (a very cold and very sweet fortified wine that tastes like fine grape juice).

As time passes my disdain for of Nora's causa and her constant praise for the Cuban health system and her criticism of Bush (Bush was singlehandedly the cause of global warming) is fading. I think it was all hot air. Nora had suffered terrible face cancers and our Canadian health system had been kind to her. She and Juan had a wonderful show of joint murals (painted in my studio on large rolls of canvas) that went from one town to another in all the major provinces of Argentina. The tab was picked up by "the culturally disadvantaged" (as Nora and Juan often complained) Canadians. It was the Canadian embassy in Buenos Aires that promoted their art. The Argentine economy was much too poor and in disarray to fund culture.

And so I miss Juan but I also miss Nora. My bitterness at their ruining of my artistic life by leaving me alone is fading a bit and I am beginning to seek out other outlets. But that does not prevent me from basking in the memory of those wonderful times.

Here you see Nora Patrich and Linda Lorenzo in Nora's living room. That smile! Nora had props. "I need a violin," I would tell her and she would fish one out from somewhere. She had a collection of fans and old dresses. Dresses that made Linda look fabulous. Being in Nora's living room was inspiration enough for anything. Nora had some original Goya engravings on her wall, a Picasso on another. A whole wall housed art books in Spanish. The other photograph shows Nora's painting in her paradoxical style. She had a causa yet her paintings never showed what was wrong with the world. Her women seemed to be ideal women who had no cause and just stared out of the canvas in wonder at the beauty of our world. The position of her woman's hands represents the female sexual organ. Nora was very frank in her discussion of sex and political correctness was not part of her causa. The photograph attempts to display a Borgesian obsession with the labyrinth.



Linda is wearing a Mexican rebozo that was given to my mother by her sister Dolly in 1951. It is made of raspy and rough cotton and the red dye is a brilliant vegetable dye. It smells of the Indian sandalwood chest I store it in.

And below is a photograph that combines all the paintings and the labyrinths we could muster.

Wednesday, May 07, 2008


I know very few people in Vancouver who have a memory for buildings that are gone or for buildings that have been modified. A pleasant exception is my friend architect Henry Hawthorn.

Few who might find themselves at the corner of Fir and West Broadway would suspect that the strange white building that is now the Filpino bakery Goldilocks (the largest bakery chain in the world), used to house est (Erhard Seminars Training). Encounter sessions would be far livelier with Magnolia macapunú ice cream on the side.

In 1982 I photographed a revival rockabilly band Buddy Selfish & His Saviours in what for many years seemed to be a permanent fixture of our city. An Italian gentleman (an Italian version of Dorian Gray as he always looked the same) had a barbershop on the corner of Commercial Drive and 1st Avenue. Perhaps only two or three years ago it became a Mexican fast food restaurant (a very good one).

When I stop at this corner I think of the Ian Tiles (sitting on the barber chair) and the other members of the band. On the far right is Colin Griffiths (ex-UJ3RK5), then Bob Petterson, Nick Jones (ex-Pointed Sticks) and Andy Grafitti (ex-UJ3RK5).