Sunday, September 07, 2008

Hilary, Lauren, Ale & Rebecca

There is no way that George Cukor's wonderful 1938 film The Women can possibly work in its 2008 incarnation. I won't bother to see it. How could anybody top this cast: Norma Shearer, Joan Crawford, Rosalind Russell, Paulette Goddard, Joan Fontaine and the unflappable, scary but ultimately kind Marjorie Main?

I recall that no men are ever seen and the only walk on male is a dog.

I feel the same about my very own women. Yesterday was a perfect day with all the women of my life present and accounted for and all at home.

Hilary's husband, Bruce Stewart has a new schedule which means we no longer get Lauren and Rebecca on Saturdays but on Sundays. This will probably mean no Sunday night film as the girls will have to go home early because of Monday school. We will also miss the lazy Saturday afternoon dinners with Hilary arriving from work. Since Bruce was always working I was the only man around besides Rosemary's male cat Toby. My exclusive isolation might be over.



There is one benefit to the change if we can somehow convince the Stewart family that Saturday evening dinners at our place will be welcomed. What made our family dinner even better yesterday was the presence of my other daughter Ale who was in Vancouver for the weekend. Our family was complete and I took advantage and took some pictures of the girls and then one with Bruce.

Alas even though I had thought the film in my camera was ISO 400 and I exposed it as such I was shocked to find out that the film in question was Plus-X ISO 100. I processed the film at double the processing time (from almost 5 to almost 11 minutes). While the negatives had a higher contrast they are not bad.

The menu last night was:

1. Barbecued pork loin (Stubb's Pork Marinade from Austin, Texas) served with Keen's mustard.
2. Cucumber salad.
3. Sliced tomatoes brought by Ale from her Lillooet garden.
4. Fresh corn on the cob
5. Mashed potatoes mixed with mashed carrots with lots of butter and cream.


We accompanied it all with my special iced tea (made with Russian Caravan tea) and Rosemary made a Pavlova with fresh peaches, strawberries and cream. Hilary insisted in adding Argentine dulce de leche. An almost perfect evening made perfect when I salvaged the grossly underexposed film.

Recipe for Iced Tea

1. 14 heaping teaspoons of loose Russian Caravan tea.
2. 6 cloves
3. 1 large tablespoon cinnamon
4. 1 teaspoon nutmeg
5. A large handufl of fresh mint

Pour just boiling water into large teapot (2 litre) and allow to steep for 10 minutes. Strain into large pot. Boil more water and re-fill teapot without adding any more ingredients. Steep for 10 minutes.

To the pot add the juice of 8 to 9 lemons and 8 oranges (strained). Sweeten to taste. The smoky Russian Caravan cuts the sweetness so more sugar might be needed. The secret to this tea is to score the pressed lemons with a knife and to throw them into the mixture for at least half a day in the fridge. When your guests arrive pour tea into a large pitcher and add ice to dilute the strong mixture to taste.

Saturday, September 06, 2008


I have been through this avenue before but not in colour. I have written about Malcolm Parry's privileged view. He maintains that the masses look up and the few, privileged, look down. Everybody looks up at tall buildings. The very few who can, get on the roof and look down. It helps that Mr. Parry is very tall and he is able to shoot down with his camera. He is renowned in how his extra height allows him to capture gossip cleavage like no other in his profession.



I have my own definition of the privileged view which has nothing to do with height. A couple of years ago the Georgia Straight asked me to photograph three rock bands inside Bradley's (a downtown strip joint). Don't ask me why it was that the Straight wanted this. But I took it seriously. Everybody can see a stripper on stage. But few get a glimpse into what happens in the dressing room. I had to go through a few Italian named bikers before I got a green light for the photograph. This was and is indeed a privileged view.



When Helen knocked on the door of my studio, I opened to find her dressed in her mother's kimono. She could barely walk everything was so tightly put on. She then slowly removed layer by layer for my camera. It was slow enough that I was able to do it in colour transparency as seen here, in b+w and in b+w infrared.



These are my privileged view.

Helen

more Helen

and even more Helen

Friday, September 05, 2008



Note: Blogger limits the size of a picture on its original format. But if you left click on this image it will get bigger and more so if you click again.


Last week Rosemary, girls (Lauren and Rebecca) and I decided to see what the new UBC Canopy walk was like. The folks at the UBC Botanical Garden and Centre for Plant Research (yes that's its official name) decided that the best kept secret in our city (a world class botanical garden) needed to be better known so that more visitors would turn the turnstiles. That is the goal of the canopy walk. A path up in the trees, all in lightweight aluminum and suspended by the trees and reinforced from the bottom in a way that all the metal allows the trees to grow without restraint, soars and for some who may notice, sway and swing a bit. If you are afraid of heights stay away. If you like excitement don't.

Rosemary felt shaky and Lauren was cautious for a few minutes. But as soon as she got her sky legs she was walking on the narrow pathways (looking down was especially thrilling) full of confidence as some of the rest of us.

But the best feature of this walkway is that it pulls you into the garden and once you are in it your eyes will open to all the wonders there.

Rebecca and I walked (on the ground now) and we touched and felt the leaves of the rhododendrons of the garden (one of the biggest in North America). Most had indumentum a felty undergrowth on the leaves, sometimes white or red or cinnamon coloured. This indumentum reminded us of the soft inside of a cat's ears. And to Rebecca's delight we found rhododendrons that not only had indumentum but tomentum (the indumentum equivalent on the top of the leaves). One in particular amazed us as it felt like stroaking a snake's skin.

the Canopy Walkway.

Thursday, September 04, 2008

In his 1979 book Arabia, Jonathan Raban describes how he eventually was able to, "Just be sitting at table among mosquitoes with glasses of Stella beer..." with his fellow travel writer of note, Jan Morris when both happened to be in Cairo. He tells it like this:

As James Morris, she had lived in Cairo on a houseboat in the 1950s. James Morris had been the correspondent in the Middle East for the London Times, and before that he had worked for a news bureau. Jan Morris, commissioned by Rolling Stone Magazine, was revisiting Cairo for the first time since she had changed gender, and she was nervous about what Jan might see in James's city."

Or as Morris herself told Raban, "I'm so frightened of going back to places and finding that I liked them better as I was than I do as I am."


Like most men I have been sexually confused many times. I remember the first time. I was around 7 years old and the day was such a shock to me that I even remember I was in a colectivo (a Buenos Aires bus) on the fashionable then (and now) Avenida Esmeralda. A woman got on with a strange little person. He or she was wearing a dress but he or she had a shaved head. Until then I thought that boys and men had short hair and wore pants (short or long but preferably short) and girls and women wore skirts or dresses and had long hair. I was confused. Was she a boy or was he a girl?



My second moment of sexual confusion happened when I was around 8. It was a Buenos Aires carnaval and people dressed up and sprayed each other with pomos which were large toothpaste type tubes made of metal and full of perfumed water. I had gone to see a western with my grandmother on movie theatre row on Avenida Lavalle.



We were in the subte (the Buenos Aires underground) on our way to Retiro train station to take me home. From my vantage point I could see the end of the other subway car and there was a woman's bare back facing me. She had long hair but something was wrong. Her back did not look like a woman's. What could she possibly be? I was confused.



Not long after an American girl came to my house to play and asked me, "Do you want to see it?" I was much too naive to figure out what exactly I was going to see. When I saw it, "it" did not resemble at all what my precocious (so I thought) friend Mario had told me that girls had up front. I was confused again.



In more recent times I have been repelled by the usual macho reaction to seeing two women together. These are usually photographs of gorgeous women with red fingernails and fantastic bodies interacting on divans. It ocurred to me that there are better and more interesting ways of showing these most feminine activities. A film, Bitter Moon directed by Roman Polanski comes to mind every time I think of this. In this film both Peter Coyote and Hugh Grant (both playing idiots) are left in the lurch in the end by the two women of their life, Kristin Scott Thomas and Emmanuelle Seigner. When these two abandon their men and proceed to dance with each other I was wonderfully shocked.



I had something of the sort in mind when I placed Ms. Hernandez and Cordelia in front of my Ikea mirror.




In one of the many books by Jan Morris that I have read I remember a wonderful sentence that she wrote upon seeing a large portrait of British Lord Admiral John Arbuthnot Fisher. I recall that Morris wrote something like, "The man that I was, admired the man that is in front of me and the woman that I am, could possibly have loved the man that he was."

She was never confused. I am sometimes.

Wednesday, September 03, 2008


While I have written about the notable Mexican actress Dolores del Río here I must stress that the most famous Mexican actress of them all was María Felix (April 8, 1914 - April 8, 2002). She is not well known abroad (as in North America) because she never made a film in Hollywood. She lost to Jennifer Jones the part that was allegedly written for her in King Vidor's 1946 film Duel In The Sun because of prior commitments.

Mexicans and the Spaniards share lots of tradition and history. They also share statements that are rarely contested simply because the rest of the world does not give these two countries any weight. The Spaniards believe that the most perfect and beautiful painting in the world is Diego Velázquez's Las Meninas. I agree. I saw it at the Prado Museum many years ago with my wife and daughters. We all remember its luminous magic.

With equal passion Mexicans assert that María Felix was the most beautiful woman in the world when she was alive. I would agree, too. She had a throaty voice and in a world of macho men she could make men cower in fear with just the raising of one of her dramatic eyebrows. It was said that she had an affair with the married and powerful Mexican president Miguel Alemán. It was said that not only did she have an affair with Diego Rivera but with his wife, Frida Kahlo, too. I saw many of her films as a boy in the 50s and by the beginning of the 60s there were rumours that "La Dueña" would spend a month in Paris asleep. The French had discovered (so the story went) a method by which after a month's deep sleep, La Felix would wake up rejuvenated with skin like the skin she had had when 20. I believed the story. That somehow this Mexican Helen could be affected by the ravages of time was a possibility we refused to consider.



When Ms Hernandez was lying in my studio's psychiatric couch (I purchased it many years ago from a retiring shrink for $100 which included the delivery to my studio)  for this installment of my Mexican nostalgia I thought she was perfect.

Tuesday, September 02, 2008

I prefer women with a past. They're always so demmed amusing to talk to.
Lady Windermere's Fan - Oscar Wilde


In 1959 while living in Mexico City my mother took me to the theatre to see an adaptation into Spanish of Oscar Wilde's play Lady Windermere's Fan. I remember little except the voice of Dolores del Río who played Lady Windermere. I was electrified by it and by the noise of the opening and closing of her fan with the flip of the wrist. I had never seen her live but had admired her in her films, both Mexican and my favourite of hers in English, John Ford's The Fugitive.

When I posed Ms. Hernandez this morning wearing my grandmother's light green Spanish mantilla and her fan I could almost hear that voice again.

The other haunting image of The Fugitive is played by that other noted Mexican actor, Pedro Armendariz. He was a handsome man with a beautiful face and voice. As a Police Lieutenant he is in search of our whisky priest, Henry Fonda. In spite of it all Armendáriz was able to distill some humanity into what was supposed to be the role of a fanatical unbeliever.

Those who may be regulars of this blog should not expect soon any attempts on my part to pencil in a moustache on Ms Hernandez to pursue my nostalgia for Pedro Armendáriz.

Monday, September 01, 2008


Today Rosemary almost turned on the furnace. She felt cold. Many of my multipetalled English Roses have buds that probably will not open if the cooler weather persists. But some of my roses surprised me, opening up and perfuming the garden as an almost last gasp before the smell of decaying falling leaves of the season that is upon us takes over.

Dichroa febrifuga is a half-hardy shrub that is related to hydrangeas. We have it in a pot under the cherry tree. We are going to take our chances this year and we are going to plant it in the ground. The blue flowers are followed by metallic blue berries. It is native to Nepal eastwards to southern China and into south-east Asia. The specific epithet febrifuga is in reference to the use of the plant as a febrifuge, acting to reduce fever.

There are two unlikely companions here made so by scanning them together. Rosa 'Ferdinand Pichard' like most roses prefers full sun while Hydrangea macrophylla 'Ayesha' grows best in partial shade. Notice the little florets of the hydrangea that resemble tea saucers. This is the only hydrangea that looks like this.






Not far from the dichroa I have a few smaller hostas. One of my favourites is Hosta kikutti var. leuconata.. The leaves are narrow and elegant and have startling white undersides. Before the flowers open the scape looks like an exotic bird. This hosta blooms late in the season and its flowers are lovely.