Monday, May 31, 2010



Quite a few years ago whenever anybody famous came to town my relationship with Vancouver Magazine (then a most important city magazine) and one with Equity Magazine (a business magazine with Harvey Southam as editor) guaranteed me access. It was in fact Southam’s Equity which enabled me to bag an exclusive studio portrait of William F. Buckley. And some of the actors and directors that came to town that did not seem worthy of just a city magazine meant that my access came courtesy of the Georgia Straight. It was the Straight that assigned me to travel to Seattle to photograph Dennis Hopper, and the reason why I was able to photograph Vincent Price, Audrey Hepburn and Liv Ullmann.

But as soon as publicists realized that their real job was to prevent access to the celebrities they represented, access to stars waned. Only being assigned by such magazines as Vanity Fair or Time, guaranteed minutes in front of the camera. Local magazines were ignored. The Globe & Mail had some influence for a while. But thanks to the Globe I was to snap a photograph of one of my favourite authors Elmore Leonard.

It was about the time that my relationship to magazines was beginning to slide that I found out that Christopher Plummer was coming to town. Globe writer John Lekich was assigned to interview him on the set of the film he was making. I asked Lekich to get me access. Somehow it did not work out and it didn’t happen. I remember getting very angry at Lekich who told me, “Mr. Plummer says that the next time in town he will pose for you.” Plummer never returned and I never got my shot. It was about then that I began to let go of the imperative to “do” celebrities. I learned to relax. If I was assigned, it was fine. If I wasn’t it was fine, too.

In the last 10 years I have learned the pleasure of taking pictures of “every man” and “every woman”. It was my religion teacher back in Austin, Texas, Brother Edwin Reggio, CSC who told me that all of us were born with something most precious which was our individual human dignity. I have attempted and in some cases succeeded in capturing this in the people that have faced my camera. It has not only been a pleasure as, I must assert, that the pleasure has transformed itself into a passion.


A case in point are the persons you see here. They are Michael Unger and Bronwen Marsden. Michael Unger has been our model at Focal Point for some years while Bronwen Marsden has posed for my class only once. These pictures I took with my new iPhone to demonstrate to my class that the lighting is most important (more so than the camera and in some cases the photographer) and once it is established it is the relationship between the photographer and his/her subject that comes to bear. The iPhone’s lens forces the photographer to get really close. It is this intimacy which I think can be seen in these pictures which in spite of being impossible to colour correct and may not be all that sharp have a wonderful soft spontaneity that would have been shattered by the flash of a more sophisticated point-and-shoot. Because my iPhone is on vibrate mode in class, the added plus is that when you press the “shutter” button there is no noise. I find it wonderful.

Unger besides modeling is an actor and a stand-up comic. He gives classes to children at the planetarium on how to look for stars and planets on the planetarium’s telescope. Bronwen Marsden (who has a luminous skin that resembles Noritake china and beyond the capability of my iPhone to accurately record) graduated from Concordia University and is an actress and budding film director. Unger and Marsden may be famous at home but for me I appreciate that in the studio they are every man and every woman. In a world hungry for celebrity, Unger and Marsden are comfort food for the soul.

I have a feeling my Focal Point class would concur.

Sunday, May 30, 2010

"I've been afflicted for some time with belief that man can fly" Orville Wright



It was on Wednesday that on an impulse I decided to call Artemis (Arty) Gordon who is head of the dance program at Arts Umbrella. I wanted to tell her how I had enjoyed the end-of-the-year dance show (of all the classes from the beginners to the Senior Dance Company) held at the Gateway Theatre in Richmond.

The first thing Arty told me was, “Guess who’s in town? It’s your favourite dancer Lauri Stallings.” It was in 1996-1997 when I last photographed Lauri Stallings who was dancing at Ballet BC. Arty told me Stallings was in Vancouver to choreograph one of the segments of Dances for a Small Stage to be held from June 16 to June 18, I immediately became most excited. I had followed her career in the US from the Hubbard Street Dance Company in Chicago to her present collaboration and part of the Atlanta multifaceted arts organization called gloATL

At that point I did everything under the sun to secure a photo/interview with Stallings. It seemed it was not to be. I contacted Emily Molnar the head of Ballet BC. The reason I did this is that this 22nd installment of Dances for a Small Stage while having a slew of famous local and international choreographers (Stallings is one of the international ones) the dancers for all the segments will be dancers from Ballet BC. You can credit Molnar for achieving this great coup for dance in Vancouver.



After a few emails I got one of those that put me into a Saturday morning melancholy. I was glum and sat in front of my TV and watched war movies (the US Memorial weekend) on TCM to keep me distracted. That last email from Molnar said something like, “While Stallings would love to see you she is in town for such a short time that she cannot manage an interview with you. She says it isn’t personal.” That last statement really plummeted me into depression.

One of the most fantastic delights of photography is to photography people more than once and especially when time has passed. I was shattered because of what I had missed.

It was Saturday evening that I received:

Dear Alex,

Thank you for your email. I appreciate your desire and also want to respect Lauri's time and wishes.

I went back to her today with your thoughts and she has kindly offered to meet with you at 6:30pm at the Dance Centre by the Ballet BC studios this coming Monday, May 31. She will need to be somewhere by 7pm but is happy to meet with you for 15-20mins. Lauri leaves first thing on Tuesday so this is the only time she has available.

I hope this works for you. Please let me know.

Have a wonderful weekend!

Emily


My melancholy dissipated and it was rapidly replaced by the stress and worry as to how I was going to photograph Stallings.

The answer as to how I will photograph Stallings tomorrow Monday will be featured as a blog a few days before Dances for a Small Stage 22 begin on June 16.

Since this Sunday blog is being written on the evening of tomorrow I can only tell you that it was an exciting session and the photograph will be a killer. Meanwhile here are some pictures I took of Stallings in 1997 in which we explored the idea that ballet dancers were not swans but real people. And as a teaser of what those who might think about going to Dances for a Small Stage (and have some silly reason for not going) there is this which is raw footage of Stallings rehearsing her work, Citizen, with the New York City-based American Ballet Theater (including the dazzling Argentine ballerina Paloma Herrera) for the 1998-1999 season. And there is this video of the premiere performance of Zoot, Ballet Augsburg, April 23, 2010 at the Augsburg Opera House in which Stallings examines America’s 1040s “social exchange” with the Zoot suit to be found here.

Lauri Stallings

More Lauri Stallings

And More Lauri Stallings

And Even More Lauri Stallings

And Much More Lauri Stallings

And I found this

And this

And Some More

And Even More

Have I written about anybody else?

And the end for a while

Saturday, May 29, 2010



An English photography student of mine last year brutally asked me after I had shown him tear sheets and magazines with my photographs, "Alex can you show us any magazines that you have worked for that still exist?"

He could easily have asked, "Can you show us portraits of people you have photographed who are still alive?"

My friend Tim Bray has an extremely popular blog ongoing in which he never dates his postings and in some cases compiles several thoughts on his mind in what he calls fragments or Short-form fragments. This idea of his has much merit. In many cases I feel that I cannot write a blog when I do not have an accompanying photograph and I am loathe at downloading someone else’s.

The repeated cool rainy weather has slowed down the first-flush blooming of my roses so while our garden is pristine in its greenness it is skimpy in colour. This has not lessened this week’s melancholy.

The situation was not helped by my finally pointing the TV remote and punching channel 46 (Turner Classics Movies) and watching in its entirety the longish 1969 Guy Hamilton film The Battle of Britain. Like most war films, even the good ones it is full of the clichés including marital discords and gruff leaders with hearts of gold. But this time around I noticed a name in the opening credits. The score of the film was composed by Sir William Walton. I forgot about until almost the end where the sound effects of exploding German bombers and the ack-acks of the machine guns of the Spitfires and the Hurricanes were all silenced and the airplanes magically danced like ballerinas with Walton’s beautiful score. One could almost be forgiven that it was a dance of death. .

Walton was commissioned to write the score for the 1969 film Battle of Britain. The music was orchestrated and conducted by Walton's friend and colleague Malcolm Arnold, who also secretly helped Walton compose several sequences.The music department at United Artists objected that the score was too short. As a result, a further score was commissioned from Ron Goodwin. (Goodwin, when told he would replace a score by William Walton, reportedly replied, "Why?") Producer S. Benjamin Fisz and actor Laurence Olivier protested this decision, and Olivier threatened to take his name from the credits. In the end, one segment of the Walton score, titled The Battle in the Air, which framed the climactic air battles of 15 September 1940, was retained in the final cut. The Walton score was played with no sound effects of aircraft motors or gunfire, giving this sequence a transcendent, lyrical quality.
Wikipedia

Friday, May 28, 2010



Sir Edmund Hilary climbed Mount Everest along with Nepalese Sherpa Tenzing Norgay on May 29, 1953. I heard about it on my radio in Buenos Aires. I was 11. I was excited. Mount Everest was one of the most exotic and forbidden places in the world. I am not too sure that the broadcast mentioned Tenzing Norgay. In 1953 the world was a white man’s world. At school when I would gaze at a map of Africa I would note that all the British possessions had a little red line around the borders. When I traced these maps for homework assignments I made sure I had my red Prismacolor pencil handy to draw the borders on Kenya, Rhodesia and Tanzania.

My grandmother was a diplomat in the Filipino Legation. There was no ambassador and the man in charge, Narciso Ramos had the position of Minister. He had a liking for me so I was invited to his home where I was exposed to a brand exotic I had never seen. His son, once showed up in a West Point uniform. Many years later General Fidel Ramos became president of the Philippines. In this milieu I learned to eat Filipino food including those curiously transparent noodles that looked like they were made of extruded cellophane. The minister taught me to sit on a small stool with a piece of flat metal with an end that had a serrated edge. With this cutcuran I was able to grind a coconut so that his wife could make a delicsious dessert called bibinka. In a short time I picked up lots of useful Tagalog.

My father who had ruined his chances to become the editor of the local Buenos Aires Herald by throwing an ink bottle at the publisher (my father was inebriated at the time) was a translator for the Indian Embassy. He would bring his friends (who drove exotic Hillman Minxes) from the embassy and feed them his own version of very hot curry. My neighbourhood friends would come to the house to ask me if the dark turbaned men were magicians. They like me had never ever seen any Hindus or as my father would have spelled that Hindoos.

At the American School where my mother taught she had some students who were from the Chinese Embassy. Younger siblings were in my class. I remember being invited with my mother for lunch and I marveled at the strangely shaped spoons that we used for the soup which was strange in itself. One of her fellow teachers was a Texan who wore cowboy boots. I was convinced that he was real cowboy who kept Gene Autrey peacemakers at home.

The Italians, the Germans, the Irish, the English, the Gallegos (from Galicia, Spain) the Russians (in Argentina even today, they call Jews rusos) were all commonplace and un-exotic in my Argentina. I would look at American magazines and wonder who those black people were. I became interested and investigated the American Civil War in books at the American Embassy’s Lincoln Library.

Argentina of the 50s was (as it is today) a class society in which dark skinned people were called cabecitas negras (little black heads) and anybody who was begging on the street was either a Bolivian or a Paraguayan. We read in school that most of the native Indians had been systematically eliminated in the late 19th century by General Julio Roca who gave his name to one of the Argentine railway systems.

My world was a normal one to me. Chinese with coolie hats planted rice in stylized maps. In those maps, men in short leather pants hovered over Germany and Mexicans slept under large sombreros while leaning against cacti. Every country had its place. Mexicans lived in Mexico, the Vietnamese in Cochinchina and Canadians in Canada. My grandmother spoke of an exotic place she had arrived at in the late 30s. With my mother, uncle and aunt to the Bronx they were headed to the Bronx in New York City by rail. They arrived in a Japanese ship in a place with mountains and trees called Vancouver.

In the late 50s I purchased a Pentacon-F single lens reflex camera. I treasured looking at the embossed leather on the bottom that read Manufactured in USSR Occupied Germany. I would gently caress the metal of my camera and think how foreign and how strange it was. It was foreign.

It was as strange as the first poppy-seed cookies and a peanut butter sandwich my mother once brought from her school sometime around 1951. I fell for peanut butter (it was not heard of in Buenos Aires) and even today I find it as exotic as I did then. As exotic as the first package of Lime Jell-O I ever had which my mother obtained from a friend who worked at the US Embassy.

In early 1960 I noticed a strange car in Mexico City. It was a Lada. I looked at it and thought, “This car, this metal, it was all manufactured in a perfectly different (perhaps alien is the better word) country."   The metal seemed to have a different shine to it. It was so because all countries were different. That was before globalization.

It took a while for me to understand that my used Pentax S-3 was a superior product to the Pentacon-F that represented a sort of primitive East German manufacturing base. My mother had told me that the Japanese knew how to imitate but did not know how to innovate. But it was about then, when those Pentaxes and those exotic rangefinder Nikons appeared on the market when my world began to change. The exotic, inexorably became less so. I remember sometime in 1966 when the first hamburger joint opened in Buenos Aires. Argentines scoffed at the idea that anybody would wan to eat ground meat. In my last trip to Buenos Aires five years ago, while strolling on the fashionable Calle Florida I saw at the intersection with Avenida Corrientes (the street of which so many tangos are about) a venerable art deco building with a prominent Burger King sign on it.

Now on any given Sunday my New York Times’ travel section has articles on places I had never heard of then. I could go there now on Airmiles.

I read that Viennese Austrians sometime opt for the local Viennese Starbucks because of the no smoking regulation as opposed to the Viennese coffee shops where excellent whipped cream on top of coffee is served but smoking is permitted. The world of difference is becoming one of boring uniformity.



It is for this reason that I like to read relatively obscure Spanish, Cuban, Portuguese, Italian, Argentine and Mexican authors. They write, still in a style where there seems to be a difference of approach. There is a difference of thought. Their goals seem to be different. I find comfort in this.

And I find comfort in going to my garden and gazing under the Western Red Cedar where I bolted some years a clunky but genuine Russian Submarine clock. You have to wind it once a week and there is no wondering why the Soviet Empire failed if this is a sample of the technology they were using to compete with the United States.

There is a comfort in the clunkiness and in the bright red star on its face. I can hear the second hand ticking on a quiet afternoon. I feel that the world can still reveal a bit of the exotic

Thursday, May 27, 2010



There are several “cures” for melancholy. When Rosemary gets it I always suggest we go to buy her a pair of shoes or perhaps indulge in a big chocolate shake at the Red Onion. For me one of the best ameliorators of melancholy is to gaze on nice pictures of my friends. If they happen to be beautiful, and of the female kind, it is all the better. As I battle this week’s intense melancholy I decided to look for pictures that would make me smile. These do. They are of friends (and my friends, too) Yuliya and Jo-Ann. The former (the one with the mostly intense gaze in many of the pictures) has an arcane degree from Simon Fraser but is a professional dominatrix.



The other, Jo-Ann is a psychiatric nurse. For some years she was my once-a-month Thursday model. Now that my studio is gone the garden will have to do and I will attempt to take some domestic nudes. With Yuliya I plan to visit her at her studio apartment and see what kind of pictures I can take there. Both women are highly intelligent and the latter a bit on the talkative. They make good company and they cheer me up.



These pictures here represent my attempt to confuse the issue of who is exactly in charge. It was fun doing it.

Wednesday, May 26, 2010


Tuesday was a pretty good day but Wednesday was full of SNAFUs all delivered courtesy of that obsolete device, the telephone that is simply a telephone.

So much has been written about how one must be careful with email communication as it is difficult to judge the meaning or intention of the person in what might seem like a terse and short communication.

My friend Nora Patrich and her husband Juan Manuel Sanchez decided three year ago to get divorced. They returned to Argentina in separate airplanes. Our life (a sort of bohemian one) together of daily phoning, the discussion of books, of music, of art and then being invited to drink mate at their home at any hour is all gone. And I have not been able to adjust at the loss of my friends. In many ways I resent their breakup. Nora has sent me repeated emails since then with such stuff as ¿Y? or ¿Qué pasó? Like a little boy that I sometimes am I was enraged by these short messages so I finally answered:

Dear Nora,

This is from Alex’s wife Rosemary. I have the sad duty to report that Alex died quite suddenly some weeks ago. It was a heart attack. Please don’t send flowers.

Sincerely yours,

Rosemary Waterhouse-Hayward


Of course this email must have at first puzzled Nora but she was smart enough to figure it out. I do get the occasional email but I never answer it. I still Skype her former husband.

I will probably not be able to hold off from communicating with Nora as the more I live in Vancouver the more I feel like that Juan-Manuel-Sanchez-penguin in the North Pole. I feel out of place and out of time. There is an increasing feeling of alienation (a word so popular in my 1960s). There is a feeling that either the world here in Vancouver is crazy or I am crazy. It is far more comfortable to think the latter over the former, but there is a lingering feeling I could be wrong.

Some weeks ago, out of the blue (something I do often) I called a former magazine editor/publisher and left a message (the usual one), “This is Alex; It’s not important. Thank you and goodbye.” A week later something else came up to remind me of the magazine editor/publisher so I called again. And I left a message.

Finally the magazine editor/publisher called back and admitted to me that he was calling back in reply to two received messages left on his machine. “Is it important?” He asked? I explained that it wasn’t. I was told that someone was with him so that he could not really talk to me and would do so a few days later. The call never did come.

It is my sense of manners and etiquette taught to my by my parents that I must reply to all communication. I reply to all emails and answering machine messages. I must admit that if the number on my call display is a 1-800 I let the phone ring.

Another friend was always at supper, not matter what time of the day I would call. I finally got the message. I told my eldest daughter Ale that I must have telephone bad breath. She told me that I have the tendency to call her up and to “dump on her”. That expression sounds terrible and it left me speechless.

My granddaughter Rebecca called me out of the blue to tell me that I could no longer buy her any plants (even small ones) and that any that I gave her in the future would be thrown away. The call was followed immediately by one from her mother telling me about the same thing. It seems strange to me to stifle and child’s interest in anything even if it is plants. I felt a tad hurt but I decided that I would do what Pam Frost (Vancouver’s Queen of the Garden) did many years ago which was to set aside an area of her garden for her daughter (by then the daughter was in her early 20s!) This way I will be able to give my granddaughters whatever plants I wish to give them. And they can kill them with neglect if they want to. That is far better than throwing them away.

I have come to the conclusion that I must learn to withdraw. Vancouverites are a strange ilk. I might have a friendlier relationship if I were to Facebook them. But this I will not do. I prefer to communicate with substance and at length. If this form of communication is obsolete then in obsolescence I will withdraw. Rosemary says that part of the problem is that I have too much time on my hands and that I have too much time to reflect. She may be right. But I am glad that I have the luxury of having time on my hands and that I am able to reflect. At age 67 (almost 68) it is important to be able to reflect.

The bad day ended worse and then like magic it fixed itself up. Rosemary let out both cats at around 8 p.m. A couple of hours later it was dark and only my female, Plata was at the front door. Rosemary’s Casanova was nowhere. We called and called and went out to look for him with flashlights. To no avail, he was nowhere. We have had these situations many times in the past. I did not look forward to a night of going down to check the doors to see if the cat had returned. I finally shook Casanova’s hard food bag and a few minutes later I heard Rosemary say, “Casa, please come in. You are a good boy.”

A bad day ended well.

Tuesday, May 25, 2010


Tuesday began well. I gave two lectures ( a split class) at Focal Point. Someone in the class had gone to the administration and demanded that yours truly give them a class on nude photography. I told the administrator, when the request was made to me, that I could not justify teaching that course curriculum to a class that was supposed to be about editorial photography.

About a year ago when I was editorial photography I was a bit on the depressed and bitter and I thought I was being realistic when I would begin the first minutes of the first class with something like, “You guys want to shoot for magazines and newspapers? Don’t you know that they are dead or dying? Why are you here? Prepare for a Plan B. Plumbing could be lucrative.” The administration of both Focal Point and Van Arts must have wondered why they had hired me. After all the students were paying lots of dollars to be taught and not to be told to switch to plumbing (or on my worst days I urged my students to slit their wrists).

A year ago I was suffering with these classes. I would not sleep the night before wondering what I could possibly teach anybody about that which until recently had been my bread and butter.

In fact in some cases I told my students that I had no idea how UBC, Simon Fraser and so many technical schools and colleges in Vancouver could have journalism departments. Journalism was dead I told them.

I felt like one of those who can’t (be a photographer) so that I had to resort to teaching about it. I felt cheap and dishonest.

Then one day I thought about the history of photography and how the English photographers of the Crimean war and their American counterparts in the Civil War had been limited to showing their photographs in salons and galleries. Photographs were converted into lithographs and only then could they be placed in newspapers and in such magazines of the 1860s such as Harper’s Weekly.

It was a photograph of the Steinway Building in New York City in 1873 that appeared in the New York Daily Graphic that changed the course of photography. The photograph was not a lithograph it was printed in something new called the halftone process. Even today if you look at a New York Times or the Vancouver Sun you will note that even the colour photographs consist of dots (a modified halftone process).

From then on the newspapers and magazines competed with each other to show the best photographs. Money was made available and photographers rose to the challenge. This was more or less the case until the late 1990s when the digital age and free on line reading of newspapers changed it all.

Without being negative about the present transition (what will happen, I have no idea) I teach editorial photography sort of like a history of photography as seen in magazines and newspapers. When those magazines and newspapers change to whatever is coming my students will be equipped in knowing how to take those pictures.

The administrators at Focal Point have noticed the change. They say I am a happy person and that I don’t complain. They say I don’t give them problems. I am happy teaching and I sleep well the night before. I feel that I am imparting important information.

And that was today. It was a good day.

I arrived home and once I was in bed in the evening I finally finished the exquisite novel El Quinteto De Buenos Aires by Manuel Vázquez Montalbán. As soon as I had finished I realized that the only person I know with whom I could have possibly compared notes was Juan Manuel Sánchez who is living in Buenos Aires. I had called him about it and his girlfriend who is currently in Barcelona was going to buy him the book.

I began to read Cuban novelist Leonardo Padura’s Havana Fever (in Spanish the novel is La Neblina del Ayer or Yesterday’s Fog, and who thinks those names in English!). This book is not part of the so called Havana Quartet but does feature the retired police detective turned used book buyer/seller Mario Conde. I have already read the terrific Adiós Hemingway with Conde, Hemingway as protagonists and with a short but extremely erotic scene in a swimming pool involving Ava Gardner.

At the Vancouver Public Library I found Adiós Hemingway in Spanish so I plan to re read it. At home in my Spanish book shelf I have Padura’s first novel (1983) Fiebre de Caballos ( Horse Fever). In all his novels Padura manages to infer that things are not all well in Castro’s Communist paradise but he does it in such a way that he has managed to publish many books without any kind of censorship.

His detective Mario Conde is all noir, Cuban style. This means lots of rum and no whiskey!

But early into Havana Fever I had to lay the book down, turn off the light and go to sleep. Mario Conde has noticed a large mansion, a bit worse for wear, and he knocks on the door having the feeling the folks inside might want to get rid of the books. Conde now buys and sells old books to keep a meager amount of food on his table and the liquor to accompany it. The two old inhabitants of the house do indeed have a marvelous library and Conde feels for their necessity to sell. Padura writes:

As if the result of a malevolent wave of a wand, the shortage of everything imaginable quickly became a permanent state, attacking the most disparate of human needs. The value and nature of every object or service was artfully transmuted by insecurity into something different from what it used to be: be it a match or an aspirin, a pair of shoes or an avocado, sex, hopes or dreams. Meanwhile church confessionals and consultancies of voodoo priests were crowded with new adepts, panting after a breath of spiritual consolation.

The shortages were so acute they even hit the venerable world of books. Within a year publishing went into freefall, and cobwebs covered the shelves in gloomy bookshops were sales assistants had stolen the last light bulbs with any life, that were next-to useless anyway, in those days of endless blackouts. Hundreds of private libraries ceased to be a source of enlightenment and bibliophilic pride, or a cornucopia of memories of possibly happy times, and swapped the scent of wisdom for the vulgar, acrid stench of a few life saving-banknotes. Priceless libraries created over generations and libraries knocked together by upstarts; libraries specializing in the most profound, unusual themes and libraries made from birthday presents and wedding anniversaries – were all cruelly sacrificed by their owners on the pagan altar of financial necessity suddenly felt by the inhabitants of a country where the shadow of death by starvation threatened almost every home.

I suddenly got depressed. My largish but modest library will have to go before we move. I suddenly understood why Conde was so sad when he saw the marvelous collection in the old house. I also thought, “I will have to Skype Juan and tell him to buy some Paduras in one of the many bookstores on Calle Corrientes in Buenos Aires.

Without summer quite being here in this cool and rainy spring I could imagine that the sky over North Vancouver was cyan/blue. Cyan is that cold blue that presages, sometimes by late July, the coming winter that will be upon us at the blink of the eye. I turned off the light and tried to dream of Mérida, its humid heat, its ochers, browns and the warm Yucatecans. Or having a pizza on a hot midnight evening with Rosemary and Rebecca on Avenida Cabildo in Buenos Aires while sipping a cold moscato. We did so five years ago and I long for it.

Monday, May 24, 2010


In 1993 I photographed an old man wearing a pterodactyl tie. We became friends and he and his wife Betty visited our garden and then we went for lunch at the Avenue Grill on 41st. My daughters came along but, the youngest, Hilary does not remember.

What led to me writing about Ian Ballantine began this past Saturday night when we went to the Gateway Theatre to the Arts Umbrella Expression Festival 2010, which is part of their end of they year dance recital.

My wife and I went with some sadness because our oldest granddaughter Rebecca quit dancing at Arts Umbrella a couple of years ago even though she was offered a full year’s scholarship. She quit because of a laizzez-faire atmosphere at home. Rosemary and I would have pushed for the dance. But we are the grandparents and not the parents. We could not push. In fact my daughter thought that piano and ballet were too much for the girl since it was important that the girl study for her school. Now there is no piano or ballet or dance.

It is Rosemary’s and my belief that one should learn as many things really well as opposed to learning many things in a perfunctory manner. It is almost as if the world is now steering children to try life in twitter-sized bites. One will then grow up knowing lots of things but not knowing how to do any of them well. Rebecca is a beautiful swimmer (she inherited from my mother) and she wanted to go further into lifesaving. But our daughter has indicated that as long as Rebecca knows how to swim and thus not drown that is enough for swimming.



With our heavy hearts we watched our little Lauren (7) dance. Sometime in the end of her peacock dance she spotted us (we were on the front row) and she just beamed at me in delight.

It was after the performance that I was approached by a familiar looking gentleman with the comforting voice of a parent who must have a son or daughter in the Arts Club dance program. “We meet again, Alex,” he told me. Since I did not recall where I might have met him I said, “Where have we met.” As soon as I said it I remembered. It had been a couple of years back that he had approached me at the interval of onother Arts Club performance at the Gateway and he had asked me, “Are you Alex?” “How do you know?” I answered. “Because I have seen Rebecca around here and since I read your blog I assume you are Alex.” I was a bit chilled by all this. I had been warned to be careful about what I wrote into my blog and I was almost universally damned for posting photographs of my Rebecca and recently of her sister Lauren.



I sort of shrugged it all off and on Saturday night, again comforted by the man’s intelligent voice and demeanor we discussed the current trend (and is it a particularly Canadian obsession) in being so cautious that few people now say what they mean to say and use all kinds of filters in Facebook as a sort of remedy for a candidness that now is anathema. Talking to the man I was reinforced that I will not change the direction of my blog.

At a recent blogging convention (2010 Northern Voice) there were some blogging mothers who were telling us with glee how some of their children (who had grown up or become old enough to use computers and to Google) had complained that when they Googled themselves they could not find anything because their mothers had mentioned them with anonymous names or with initials in their blogs. “Mom, why didn’t you use my name in your blog?”

After the performance I photographed Lauren with my iPhone and I was quite pleased with the results. The colour of the phone is quite on the cyan side of things so I must first color correct the pictures with Photoshop before I can put them here.

Once at home the girls had a sleepover with us. I made some real popcorn (not in the microwave) and Rebecca and I sat down to watch a remarkable Mexican film called Bandidos in which four boys (not even in their teens) become bandits during the Mexican revolution. These children shoot and kill various adults in the film. Rebecca thought the film was quite violent (it was) but I still think that the treatment of the film very unlike anything we would do in the US or in Canada had its educational purpose. We enjoyed ourselves.

It was on Sunday night after a pleasant dinner that Rosemary, Hilary, Lauren and I settled down to see the end of a four and a half hour long film (originally the pilot of TV series that never was) called Dinotopia.

Rebecca had been in Quebec for the first two installments so she chose to not see the ending with us, opting to see it with her father who was quite keen after she heard so many nice things about this charming movie from Hilary.

The film, which aired on TV in 2002, was based on the book Dinotopia by author/illustrator James Gurney which was published with a lot of help from Ian Ballantine.



Ian Ballantine had come to Vancouver in 1993 to push Gurney’s book. I had immediately purchased the book which was a complete delight. Unfortunately I had taken it to Buenos Aires some years later and given it to a nephew.

The book is out of print so I have had to order one via Abe Books from a bookseller in Devon for $1.00 plus $6.00 shipping! Why have I ordered it? Lauren was so interested in the film that we stayed up until 11:30 last night for the ending of the film. Her birthday is at the end of June and I am sure that the book from Devon will be here before.

The book is slightly different. Perhaps the biggest difference lies in the cute librarian of the film who is a cute talking small dinosaur but in the book he has a human assistant librarian who is the spitting image of Ian Ballantine. His name Nailab is a sort of abbreviated palindrome for Ian Ballantine. Luckily I had kept Ian Ballantine’s calling card!



I have explored further the Dinotopia books and I have found that James Gurney has a beautiful Dinotopia web site and that he has indeed published a sequel called Journey to Chandara. I have already received a reply from Gurney who is going to send me an autographed copy for Lauren. It will arrive by her birthday. This is going to be one birthday that will seem like my own. I cannot wait!

The man wearing the pterodactyl tie was remarkable in many ways that few would know now. When he died in 1995 I cut out his obituary from the NY Times and put it into my files with his negatives. I reproduce it here as it is well worth reading.


March 10, 1995
Ian Ballantine, 79, a Publisher Who Led Move Into Paperbacks
By MARY B. W. TABOR

Ian Ballantine, a pioneer in publishing and founder of three important paperback houses, died yesterday at his home in Bearsville, N.Y. He was 79.

The cause was cardiac arrest, his office said.

In a distinguished career that spanned more than five decades, Mr. Ballantine, who was devoted to the notion that people would read a wide variety of books if they were affordable and accessible, founded Penguin U.S.A., Bantam Books and Ballantine Books.

Born in 1916 in New York City, Mr. Ballantine showed an early fascination with publishing, when, as an undergraduate at Columbia University, he wrote a paper in which he described paperbound books as the great hope of publishing.

In 1939, as Pocket Books prepared to introduce one of the first American paperback lines, Mr. Ballantine, fresh out of the London School of Economics, arrived with a stack of paperbacks published by Penguin Books in Britain. He and his wife, Betty, opened Penguin U.S.A. and began importing such classics as "The Invisible Man" by H. G. Wells and "My Man Jeeves," by P. G. Wodehouse.

In 1945, the Ballantines left Penguin to begin a reprint house, which they named Bantam Books. Just months later, having bought the paperback rights for 20 hard-cover books, they released their first list, including "Life on the Mississippi" by Mark Twain, "The Grapes of Wrath" by John Steinbeck, "The Great Gatsby" by F. Scott Fitzgerald and several westerns and mysteries.

No longer were Americans, many of them former servicemen and women in the habit of reading paperback books distributed during World War II, limited to the costly hard-covers found in urban bookshops. They could now buy paperbacks in train stations and other retail outlets throughout the country as well. Hardcover editions had sold for $2 or more; the paperbacks cost 25 cents.

In 1952, the Ballantines founded Ballantine Books, turning their focus to paperback originals, or books first published in paperback form instead of hard-cover. While broad-based in their selections, they found their industry niche by publishing the science fiction, fantasy, western and mystery genres.

"That's where they made one of their most distinctive contributions," said Irwyn Applebaum, president and publisher of Bantam Books. "They really helped make the genres of science fiction, fantasy, western and mystery true mass market best sellers by nurturing a whole generation of novelists."

The Ballantines published a successful and original line of military histories and first-person accounts of World War II. They also developed lines of science fiction and fantasy, including the works of Ray Bradbury, who wrote "The Martian Chronicles," and Arthur C. Clarke, who wrote "2001: A Space Odyssey," and J. R. R. Tolkein, author of "The Hobbit" and "Lord of the Rings" trilogy. And they acquired, edited and published books by Carlos Castenada and Tom Robbins.

In 1974, the Ballantines sold the business to Random House and rejoined Bantam Books, where they worked with such authors as Chuck Yeager and Shirley MacLaine.

To his employees, Mr. Ballantine was something of an enigma, sometimes stern, sometimes playful. "Talking with Ian was a cross between a friendly browbeating and a sprinkling of pixie dust," Mr. Applebaum said.

Until his death, Mr. Ballantine maintained an editorial office at Bantam Books at 1540 Broadway in midtown Manhattan and still spent his days wheeling around a cart filled with illustrations and manuscripts.

In recent years, the Ballantines also worked under the name Rufus Publications, named for Mrs. Ballantine's dog, where they edited and put together illustrated art and fantasy books, like "Faeries," by Brian Froud, as well as the 1992 best seller "Dinotopia," by James Gurney.

The Ballantines were the recipients of the Literary Market Place's Lifetime Achievement Award last month.

He is survived by his wife; a son, Richard, who lives in England; a brother David, of Bearsville, and three grandchildren.

Sunday, May 23, 2010


The woman wasn’t wearing anything. She had a big smile and with a heavy lisp she said to me, “Hi, my name is Jill and I am an actor.”

Since this was sometime around 1979 I was confused. The woman had voluptuous hips (and voluptuous everywhere else) and a narrow waist that would have made Victorian gentlemen gag on their claret. Facing me was a woman yet she called herself an actor. I thought to myself, “What is the market for a woman with a heavy lisp who calls herself an actor? “

The fact is that Jill Daum became a consummate local actress. I choose actress because I still have a fond memory for the PanAm stewardesses in their tight suits and when possible I try to bring up the subject of Amelia Earhart since I then use that beautiful word aviatrix.



Daum took speech therapy lessons and lost all vestiges of her lisp. But that was later. I had to photograph the woman facing me who wasn’t wearing anything. I wasn’t either as we were both sunning ourselves on Wreck Beach.

I did get to photograph Daum a few times. And with her I went the gamut from the landscape nude (“Look, doesn’t the human body resemble a sand dune in the Sahara?) to the domestic nude. Of the latter I have some exquisite photographs of Daum in her bathtub (no water) where I used a special film, Kodak SO 410 which had been manufactured to photograph solar flares but which we photographers used to render the human skin as magical. But I cannot show you those pictures here because of my self-imposed restrictions on nudes. Nor can I show you the beautiful pictures of Daum sitting by her kitchen range. The straight lines of the range contrast ever so nicely with her curves. But I do think I will show you one of the pictures where you cannot only see those hips, that waist but also that pair of wonderful dimples. These are from a series where I used Kodak b+w Infrared film.

If I am a fair photographer now it has all to do with the people I photographed early in my career. I really did not know what I was doing but Daum had patience and a smile that always set me straight.




It was a particular pleasure for me to introduce Rebecca to Daum the other day when we went to the opening of Buddy – The Buddy Holly Story. Daum has elegant gray hair and she has that smile. And I did notice that the hips and the waist were all there just as I remembered them some 31 years ago.

Saturday, May 22, 2010


Ambiente in Spanish is not all that equivalent to either ambiance or atmosphere. It is closer to the French milieu. Since I can remember I was surrounded at home by an ambiente of music, books and film. Because I am that old we had no TV yet. Radio was important and I listened to lots of it. At night my mother would put me to bed and she would switch on our wireless (as my father called our radio) to LRA Radio del Estado. I was lulled to sleep with concerts of classical music from the Teatro Colón. When people asked me what kind of music I liked I would always say, “The music of the Teatro Colón.” I had no concept of anything called classical music. In those late 40s and 50s of my life the Argentine tango being popular (in all the meaning of the word) meant that we never listened to it at home. My parents were snobs. I grew up to classical music. This was reinforced by visits to my grandmother’s apartment in downtown Buenos Aires. My mother would play the piano (Chopin, Beethoven, Schubert) and she would accompany my uncle Tony and my grandmother who sang songs of Gershwin and others that were popular during WW II. Sometimes my Aunt Dolly would play her violin.



I was no older than 9 when my father and mother took me to Bertolt Brecht’s play Galileo Galilei in Spanish. I remember vividly that the play was in a theater in the round. They also took me to a summer outdoor production of the Barber of Seville. I must have gone to many amateur and professional performances of Gilbert & Sullivan musical. My father loved them.

I had to take guitar lessons (I was not very good) and I went to drawing classes. Before we left Buenos Aires for Mexico City in 1955 I had to take lessons in Argentine folkloric dancing. It involved lots of zapateado (foot stamping).



In Mexico I rebelled against the guitar lessons but my mother insisted I take art lessons. I never did tell her some of the unintended fringe benefits of her idea. My teacher was an English man called Robin Bond. During the war he had been drafted by the British Army to help in the camouflage of ships, tanks, trucks and warehouses. This kind of work served him well when he moved to Mexico City in the early 50s. Bond was an expert in how colours would reproduce in different shades of gray. He became the best set designer for TV in Mexico. He worked for the Mexican TV company Televisa. At the time, of course TV was in black and white.



Bond had his house and studio in la Zona Rosa which was not yet the tourist Mecca it became in later years. It was with Bond that I learned about the bohemian life. As Bond lived it, it meant that he would go to bed around 2 or 3 in the morning and he would wake up late morning. It meant that I often arrived to my class when he was still in bed and I would see some woman run, quite naked, into the bathroom. He would then offer his friend and me very strong coffee. He smoked lots. On other occasions I would show up and Bond would be drawing his friend (there were many different ones and they were always nude). He was so immersed in what he was doing that it was about that time that he began to mix his colours on his walls.

I was attracted to this sort of life. I was fascinated. Bond was always kind and gentle with me. To this day I have a memory for the smell of his studio which was a blend of cold coffee, tobacco and oil paints.



One day I could no longer paint or draw. I was too old (15) to be spanked when I told my mother that all I could do was to stare at a blank canvas or paper and that I could not do anything. She was furious but she realized it was futile to punish me. But by then the shape of my life had been set by the example of my parents and family. I had been raised in an ambiente artístico and I would never ever be able to live without a constant reminder of how important art, music and later dance would be in my life.



This ambiente artístico hit its heighest moment when I befriended the Argentine painters Juan Manuel Sanchez and his wife Nora Patrich. The situation lasted for close to 10 years until they abruptly decided to call their marriage quits three years ago and they went back to Buenos Aires in separate planes. For 10 years I shared their bohemian life, (not quite as I had to get up early to either teach or work). I talked to them every day (in Spanish) and we shared books and films. We worked on colaboraciones which were studio sessions (in my studio or in their home which was full of antiques, books, real Picassos and etchings of Goya. In 10 years Juan Manuel Sanchez gave me an arts education.

I marveled on how one day when Chilean director/actress/playwright Carmen Aguirre (a stunning woman) came to my studio. I checked my watch and within two minutes she was “en bola” (nude). Sanchez had and has a way just like Robin Bond had. It was Sanchez who taught me that my desire/obsession to photograph women in the nude was perfectly natural and logical.



One day Sanchez told me a joke ( a real story). It seems that he and some friends were having cafes cortados (strong Argentine coffee with a drop of milk) in a café in Buenos Aires when someone asked him who his favourite saint was. Juan answered, “Santa Conchita.” The joke is entirely Argenitine. Conchita is the Spanish (but certainly not Argentine!) endearing way of calling women who are named Concepción which is usually short for the complete María de la Santa Concepción. The problem in Argentina is that thanks to Linnaeus who identified the anatomical bits of a clam with sexual underpinnings, a concha in Argentina is a woman’s private part. A conchita would thus be a little cute one.

Taking Juan’s idea to its end we brought in several models of different ethnic backgrounds into his living room and Nora, Juan and I painted, drew and photographed ethnic Virgin Maries. The one here is a severely cropped (so you cannot see that which is the raison d'etre) of the picture of an Santa Conchita de Valparaiso or translated into English Holy Mary of Valpariso, Chile. Which brings me to C, the Chilean subject of today’s blog.



While I had been taking many nude photographs of women in my studio, the garden or in my favourite location a “suite” in the fleebag Marble Arch Hotel, I had never done so with two painters. This was a different and much more rewarding experience. I had to do my photo setups slowly so that my Argentine friends could sketch. This taught me to observe. We began to draw from each other for inspiration. With Sanchez and Patrich I took some of the best nudes of my life. As always because they were portraits they do not seem to suffer as much as they should when I crop them to fit within the standards of my blog where I determined over four years ago that I would do my best not to show nudes, or at least without the conchitas and the other bits and pieces that just might offend somebody.

C and her animator husband were happy in Vancouver but they were unable to get a permanent visa and had to return to Santiago. They have been successful in obtaining that visa so they are returning in June or July. I look forward to taking pictures of one of my best muses.

C has what I think is a immensely erotic mouth, more so as it seems to be the right combination of petulance, disdain and voluptuousness. This voluptuousness of the lips spreads to the rest of her body. Her breasts are magnificent and her extremely white skin glows in some of the pictures here were I used Kodak b+w Infrared film. In some of the other photos I used very fast film with the existing light of the Sanchez/Patrich living room. There is some degradation of the image because of the cropping out of the interesting parts!



Last Tuesday I decided to teach my two Focal Point classes at home. The idea was to teach them to use studio lights in the garden and learn to mix existing light with artificial light. The weather was not cooperative so we stayed mostly in the house and they shot in the living room, the dining room, the den and the entrance. One of the models, a lovely woman of uncertain age willingly took it all of quite quickly and some of my students (in their 20s and early 30s) photographed their first nudes ever. I felt a bit frustrated in being the teacher and not one of the photographers.

But I somehow felt a bit like being on Robin Bond’s side and even Sanchez watching my students develop their style in my home with the help of an excellent nude model. I hope my students get to meet a Bond or a Sanchez who will explain to them the wonders and why we must all do this without ever feeling any pang of guilt.

Both Rosemary and I do our best to give our granddaughters a bit of that ambiente artístico in the hopes that they will grow up with inquietudes. Inquietud in Spanish is a feeling of unfulfillment that can only corrected with a plunge into the arts.

Friday, May 21, 2010


As I realized how the march of time is pushing me inexorably to that event of no-feeling that Epicurus advised us not to worry about I find myself reflecting on some of the things I have done in my life. Because I am a photographer I have been especially looking back through my memory to the images that remain embedded, or in the case of the ones here, that have been seared into cortex of my brain.

These were the first pictures I ever took of the extremely beautiful Ona Grauer. I had met her behind the bar of Uphoria a restaurant owned some years ago by an Iranian who had been a financial advisor to the Shaw. Many of us went to the bar for two reasons. One of them happened to be the largest variety of single malt Scotches and town and the other was the snappy, almost rude Ona.



We lapped up her treatment of us with relish. I made it my mission to photograph. These are the first pictures I took of her. She came back to my studio many times and I photographed her in my garden twice. Then she got busy appearing in science fiction series being filmed in Vancouver and I lost track of her. I have found her again.



Of the many women that I have photographed, it was Ona that my wife Rosemary was the most friendly to. I have never know quite why. I remember that with another woman, whom I will call here the Baltic Surprise, Rosemary seem to not like. Every few minutes Rosemary would open the window into the garden and shout, “Alex is phone for you!”



Since at least 14 years have passed since I took these pictures, I believe I could take pictures of Ona that would be fresh all over again. Fourteen years ago she had this extremely happy personality that was almost unsettling. Perhaps with age and experience she will have become another person. I would like to take her pictures and compare. This is one of the pleasures of photography.

Thursday, May 20, 2010



I introduced my granddaughter Rebecca to the suave man with creamy white hair. We (and with my wife Rosemary) were in the lobby of the Stanley Industrial Alliance Stage of the Arts Club Theatre, moments before the opening night performance of Buddy – The Buddy Holly Story. “Mr Robinson this is my granddaughter Rebecca. I told her that you met and interviewed Elvis Presley and that once your hair was red.” Red Robinson answered, “I also met and interviewed Buddy Holly and (pause) it is hard to believe that my hair was once red!”

Red Robinson had looked at me quizzically when I had approached him to remind him that many years ago I had photographed him with a favourite painting of his of Elvis Presley, an original by American artist Leroy Neiman. “I gave it to Bruce Allen down the road from me.”

It was about then that the ever-smiling and ever-prosperous looking Arts Club Theatre Company Executive Director, Howard Jang approached me to tell me, “Red has a special place in today’s show.” I was curiously intrigued.

I was intrigued but not in the least interested by anything having to do with Buddy Holly. I was at the show to make sure my granddaughter gets a balanced education on all things musical, theatrical, dance, etc. I won’t go as far as saying I hated Buddy Holly when I was young. I will simply say I had several reasons (to be listed below) not to like the man. It had all to do with his looks. I was prepared to see a show and to not be affected by it in any way. I was to be proven wrong.



The beginning of Holly’s career paralleled my beginning of my stay as a boarder at St. Ed’s High School in Austin, Texas. We were in a huge dorm which had around 35 bunk beds. The ceiling, a neo-gothic building was so high I could imagine clouds on some days. My fellow boarders were mostly cool kids from Texas with a smattering of Latinos from Mexico, Central America and Peru. The cool kids were up and up with all that was new. I was stuck in my appreciation for the music of Mexican guitar trios. I didn’t loathe rock and roll, I simply did not like it one way or another. The only station that played music that my fellow boarders liked was KTBC. It was a local station owned by a Texas senator called Lyndon B. Johnson. The station did not call itself anything in particular so it played songs by Conway Twitty, Brenda Lee, the Everly Brothers, a few token Presley songs to prove it was cutting edge plus stuff from Paul Anka and others. By the second year in 1958 one of my roommates, who was from Buddy Holly’s town of Lubbock drove me crazy playing Buddy Holly. When it wasn’t Buddy Holly it was Paul Anka droning on with Diana. My roommate'sgirlfriend back in Lubbock was called Diana.



I had an admiration for Dan Sherrod (seen, below right), another classmate of mine from Odessa, Texas. He was sophisticated. His father owned the Aston Martin dealership in the town. Dan read Road and Track and knew how to pronounce Peugeot. He liked Shelly Berman, owned that prized album The Gibraltar Grand Prix with Peter Ustinov and was the only person in all of St. Ed’s who knew who Juan Manuel Fangio was. Then one day I spied an album on his desk. It featured a nurdish looking guy with big glasses. I looked at it. I then went to the bank of mirrors on one side of the dorm and looked at myself in the mirror. I came to the conclusion that Sherrod’s attraction to Buddy Holly had all to do with the glasses. While Sherrod had warmed to this resemblance I was indiferent. I left it at that and rock and roll never did affect my passion for music one way or the other. I must admit I liked the harmony of the Everly Brothers and I was not all that repelled by the foghorn voice of Brenda Lee. I simply could not understand what Buddy Holly was all about. If anything I hated (yes! Hated) how he pronounces pretty in Peggy Sue. My roommate from Lubbock had dumped Diana for a Peggy!




My relationship with rock and roll would change in the late 70s when I first heard Art Bergmann at the Smiling Buddha in Vancouver. It was then that I began to appreciate the wonders of a well-played electric guitar.

I have no idea how accurate this extremely professional musical is. Buddy manages to chart a course on how Holly progressed from country music to that new-fangled stuff called rock and roll. With my granddaughter Rebecca I felt we were taking an interesting course in music and learning about all the steps. How and why did Holly incorporate a celeste into his music? How did a sleeping and drunk drummer contribute to the rhythm section of the Crickets? Important for me was how it soon became evident to Holly that he needed a second guitar. As I looked at the big smile on Rebecca’s face, who seems to know much more about Holly and Richie Valens and the Big Bopper than I ever knew, I realized I was becoming enthused with the music of Buddy Holly. I was doing my damndest not to tap my feet as I just might indicate to Rebecca that I liked it a lot. That would certainly be verboten! “Do you like this?” she asked me. All I could do was to nod a yes.

By the time Michael Scholar Jr. (as Ritchie Valens) interpreted a swinging and almost flawlessly devoid of any accent La Bamba I was hooked to this show.

The cast, headed by Zachary Stevenson as Buddy Holly (he can sing, he can act, he can play a mean guitar, he can hop around the stage like a pro) is professional, musical and inspiring. Jeremy Bryant, as one of the Crickets who plays bass has even contributed to Joey Shithead’s DOA. He can play that bass while riding it like a camel. I could go on. But I must first mention two local performers who stood out. One is Sibel Thrasher whom I first met while being a stills photographer at the CBC in variety shows of the late 70s. She was spot on as a performer of the Harlem club The Apollo. Rosemary was especially enthusiastic (very rare with my dour wife), "The old man who played the Clear Lake MC (Alex Willows) was terrific."

The other performer that stood out for me was Denis Simpson. He is smooth as the MC at the Apollo. He can sing, he can dance and he can even doo-wop.

As we left the theatre with a smiling Rebecca (and surprisingly Rosemary, too) I felt that I can now look at myself in the mirror with the glasses and say to myself, “Well Alex, looking a bit like Buddy Holly isn’t all that bad!”

Buddy Holly is on until July 11. It would seem to me that as many parents as possible come up with the idea of taking the children they might find special stuff to learn from this charming musical.

I found out what Red Robinson's contribution to the show was. His voice was used here in there to announce that a Holly tune was number 1 in Vancouver, etc and it was Robinson's voice that finally broke to us the bad news of Holly's airplane crash. It was Rebecca who seemed to know that while all that was up on the stage was a skilled performance by eager and professional actor/musicians, the man with the cream coloured hair sitting a couple of rows in front of us, was the real thing. Rebecca's parting shot was, "What a voice!" Even Rebecca may have noticed the decline in the voicemanship of those who are in radio today.

Wednesday, May 19, 2010

Tom Harrison
By Les Wiseman


I may have met Tom Harrison (seen here with Iggy Pop) when we were both interviewing our mutual hero Lou Reed on his Rock’n’Roll Heart tour. Tom was immediately nice to me, which I appreciated because he was a bigshot and I was writing for The Ubyssey, UBC’s student newspaper. I remember when I first started covering punk for The Ubyssey, my editor, Bruce Baugh -who had actually MET the venerated Tom Harrison, told me that Tom liked this “punk crap,” so maybe I should give it the benefit of the doubt.



Tom has always been nice to me, immediately giving me gigs at The Georgia Straight when I got out of university in 1978. Sharing his beer at umpteen Commodore gigs. Tom has always had a rock’n’roll heart and he has given to rock’n’roll as much as it has given to him. Rock journalism in Vancouver IS Tom Harrison.

He has hung with the greats. I remember him at a Pretenders gig at the Queen E. He was ecstatic at having interviewed Chrissie Hynde that afternoon and having finished the invu harmonizing with her on some old garage-rock tunes. I remember having dinner with him at his house one night when he whipped out a pic of him and Keith Richards together -man, was I envious. We were in his home, which was lined with records. He asked what I wanted to hear and I said the third Velvet Underground album and off he went in search of it. When he had been gone for a long while, we went to find him. The quest had proved too much for him and we found him passed out in a chair among a zillion albums.

I recall one night after a concert by Squeeze, we were at an after party at the Luv-A-Fair. It was Tom’s birthday and we got thrown out. So I went back in, under the guise of getting my coat, and smuggled some beer out. We went across the street to a construction site and sitting on stacks of Gyproc we drank and had a great time, just the two of us.

But, even without him being a terrifically nice guy, he would still be a cultural treasure because of the massive volume of articles he has written about the greats and those he felt just deserved some ink and recognition. Tom has given a lot of breaks to a lot of musicians. He has made careers, mine included.

Of course, Tom continues to write today, as incisively and honestly as ever. He is a great journalist and a great entertainer. He has also been a broadcaster on both radio and TV and is an accomplished drummer and singer.

The greats in this business are known by the addition of an expletive adjective inserted as their middle name. He is Tom “Fuckin’” Harrison.



OUT FOR LUNCH - CONTINENTAL
By Tom Harrison
The Province, Friday, May 10, 1985

It was Doug Hughes, the former regular occupant of the Out For Dinner column, who suggested Niki’s Caprice Restaurant. “I go there all the time,” said Doug, currently the assistant marketing director of the Vancouver Symphony.

“He comes here all the time, “said Chef Niki, the one-time owner of the popular Chez Luba. That’s what he said,” said I, author of today’s review.

“I like your pictures,”offered Art Bergmann, surveying the hundreds of autographed photos of dancers, film stars, musicians and other celebrities that had made the trek with Niki from Chez Luba to his Richards location two years ago. “Those,”Niki boasted proudly, expansively, “are all my girlfriends. Who,” he asked, suddenly curious and fixing Art with an inquisitive stare, “are you?”


“He,” I explained,” is the leader of one of the city’s best rock bands called Poisoned.” “You are a good-looking young man, Niki told him, glowing with Hungarian good cheer. “Rock music, eh? Oogie boogie. Striptease!”

Chef Niki, if you haven’t guessed, is an extremely personable, gracious gentleman who will be 93 years of age next week. His Caprice Restaurant has an old-fashioned continental style, informal and quaint but with an attention to service and detail.

If Art and I had come to dinner Thursday, Friday or Saturday evening we would have basked in the radiance of a blonde woman at the piano and her violin-playing accompanist performing, in Niki’s words, “beautiful gypsy music.” But this was lunch, so I made do with a special, poached turbot in lobster sauce, while Art was attracted to the coulibiac.

The turbot, Atlantic white fish, was served with a mound of rice, spinach and carrots. Coulibiac, Art discovered, is similar to a coarse pate in a light pastry crust.

“Let’s face it,” he said, probing the solid pink slice, “It’s salmon loaf.”

Fair enough. The exalted coulibiac, a favorite of Russian royalty, equals salmon loaf. Art Bergmann’s trademark as a songwriter is that he doesn’t mince his words. One of the most respected figures of Vancouver rock underground, he has taken steps to “cross over” with a powerful new six song mini-LP, simply titled Poisoned.

Niki’s Caprice Restaurant, 722 Richards. Telephone 685-2352. Open weekdays from 11:30 to 2:30 for lunch; 5:30 to 11:30 for dinner. Saturdays, 5:30 to 11:30. Closed Sunday, All major credit cards accepted.

Tom Harrison is a Province music Critic.



OUT FOR DINNER - Chi Chi place to drop anchor
By Tom Harrison
The Province, Friday April 19, 1985

This column has reviewed family restaurants in Surrey before, but never with the esteemed Surrey-ologist, David M (left in picture below), and his musical collaborator in the rockin’ folk duo No Fun, Paul Leahy (bottom right).

“We come here all the time,” says M as we are seated in the smoking section of Chi Chi’s Restaurant. “It is our favorite place,”the murmuring Leahy concurs. “Foodwise, it’s a lot like McDonald’s, except Mexican,” M says. “The food is cheap and the servings are big, which appeals to Surrey’s people quite a lot. Surrey people are big eaters.”


“Try not to be negative, David,”cautions Leay. “We want to come back here.” “Hunter S. Thompson says that no matter how fragmented your life is, everybody has a psychic anchor,” M says. “His is breakfast: mine is Chi Chi’s.”

Scanning a menu dotted with such items as Chimichangas (four types of filled tortillas plus beans and rice, $5.25), the Chihuahua (three flautas, choice of filling, the ever-popular beans and rice, $6.95), margaritas and Mexican “fried” ice cream (French vanilla deep fried in corn flakes and cinnamon coating, $2.95), M immediately decides on his staple, Nachos Especiale (nacho chips covered in cheese, tomato and onion) with a side order of refried beans.

Leahy likewise opts for his usual, the cheese and onion enchilada ($3.25) and is in luck – today the cheese and onion is Chi Chi’s luncheon special: $2.95 with beans and rice.

“At our level of the music business,” M explains as he gingerly slides a Nachos Grande (chips under cheese, ground beef, beans and jalapeno slices, $5.95) off a hot plate, “you have to be cost conscious.”

No Fun last Friday managed to divide a sellout crowd as opening act for Al Stewart at the Commodore. At least half the audience hated the duo; the other half has expressed an interest in the band’s two latest releases, the abridged cassette version of No Fun’s massive Snivel boxed set, and a new cassette of old No fun nuggets, realistically and drily called Old.

While David and Paul explain how Leahy no longer is a pizza delivery man since being robbed and beaten in a church by pizza bandits, I consider the Chajita. The beef Chajita for one ($9.95) is strips of beef, sizzling on a bed of onions, accompanied by rice, shredded cheese, guacamole and sour cream. You can have a wonderful wallow by slapping various portions onto your tortilla (you get three), folding it like a burrito and chomping down.

Chi Chi’s is fun. As David M seest it, Chi Chi’s doesn’t try to present itself as authentic, and as franchises go, it is a lot smarter and several steps up from the ersatz Mexican junk food pit stops. More like the Keg of Mexican restaurants than a McDonald’s. Chi Chi’s is at 15140 – 101st Ave, Surre. It’s open seven days a week from 11 a.m. to 11 p.m. Monday to Thursday; until midnight Friday and Saturday; noon to 10 p.m. Sundays and holidays. Chi Chi’s accepts Visa, Mastercard and American Express. Phone 589-2145

Tom Harrison is a music critic for the Province