Wednesday, November 10, 2010

In Mexico a boliche is a bowling alley. In my birthplace, Buenos Aires, a boliche is your corner café, bar or if you want to call it that, the joint. Because liquor laws are a tad more liberal all of these cafes serve wine and spirits yet minors can enter and sit down and order lunch. Many of these boliches are actually in corners (one of the more famous ones is La Biela, seen below) and the entrance is exactly at the corner so that instead of it being a sharp one it is a lazy straight one. In the summer the windows are completely open and sometimes the windows are low enough that you can rest your arm, while sitting inside and yet just be three or four feet from the sidewalk.


These boliches serve good coffee. Most Argentines will usually order a café cortado. This means that you want your very dark and very strong coffee slightly sweetened by a touch of milk or cream. Should you be suffering from a headache, one induced initially by a hangover you will be able to order your coffee with a bit of the hair of the dog. You can order, for example a café con grappa or as Italians call it café corretto.

My friend, the Argentine painter Juan Manuel Sanchez returned to his native Buenos Aires some four years ago. I Skype him with some regularity. I ask him if he is painting. The man is 80 so he might have a good excuse for slackening off. He tells me, “I don’t paint as much as I used to because I like to go to some nearby café and sit with friends and discuss art. Or I like to watch people go buy. I take my sketch book.” I listen to this with jealousy as I miss having coffee with him. We used to often go to Café Calabria on Commercial and on summer days we would sit outside with our cappuccinos and we would talk about Thomas Mann, Borges, Picasso and photography.

I miss my coffee culture because I have had it since I can remember. While still a boy my mother took me to the Café Richmond on Calle Florida after the movies. She didn’t yet know (this was the early 50s) that Jorge Luís Borges was a patron. All I knew is that their desserts were heavenly. By the time I was a 21 year old conscript I would stop at the main train station of Retiro (on my way to my desk job at the Senior US Naval Advisory Group) to have a large tostada ( a very large slice of toast) with very good butter (unsalted) and a strong café con leche. I would dunk my toast with relish.

Sometimes on my way back to my pension in Beccar I would stop and have an extremely strong expresso in one of the many stand-up cafes on Calle Florida. The waiter would coldly and efficiently place a tiny cup with (always) an accompanying glass of water in front of you. I would down it as quickly as I could and I was off.

It was at a corner boliche where I had my first and last rendezvous with my red-haired first cousin Elizabeth Blew. I was smitten. She was beautiful and had one of those upper class British accents that made me feel like a gentleman even if I were wearing slightly soiled Navy whites. It was the sudden entrance of her boyfriend (an extremely tall and large young man of Norwegian origin) dressed in his Argentine Army conscript uniform, circa WWII Wehrmatch when I knew immediately that I was no match. I gave
my suit up.


In Mexico in the early 60s and late 60s I learned that cafes were the places where you met your Mexican friends. If you were lucky you might perhaps be invited to their homes at a later date. But it was normal then to have friendships that consisted of coffee and a movie or a concert and no more.

In and around 1967 I had a friend who was an urbane older man who had been educated in Switzerland. He spoke several languages. He would suggest we got to see French or Italian films. With Raúl Guerrero Montemayor I saw some of the best of those films. We would often meet at three possible cafes. One was called la Rana Sabia (the Wise Frog) where they served black coffee, men wore black turtle necks and the background music was be-bop. Another was el Kinneret which was a corner café right in the smack of the then not quite-yet-so-famous Zona Rosa or Pink Zone. I would drink my coffee with Raul while staring at beautiful blonde gringas and icy mexicanas. The third joint of choice was not far and it was called Café Tirol. It was owned by a friend of Raul’s called Jaime Vidal. Vidal was also a jeweler and one of his projects was to build crossbows using truck suspension springs. I almost never noticed a man, a few years older than me, who was the resident chess shark at the Tirol. He became my favourite Mexican poet and novelist, Homero Aridjis. Watching him play one day I knew I could play with him for more than five minutes before he would have me in some untenable position.

It was at the Kinneret where I once saw Louis Armstrong having a sandwich. Nobody seemed to know who he was. He was a black man almost invisible in Mexico City.

It has been barely ten years since I used to have weekly coffees with my photographer friends Ian and Patrice. It was at one of the cafes, Zubeez (where I took the coffee picture above) that I came up with the idea of the three of us taking pictures (separately) of one model and then having a one evening show in my studio. I spied a beautiful young woman who was our waitress and I called her over and told her of our plan. She said yes and that became the first of two more subsequent joint shows. The name of the waitress was Moya O’Connell who is now an actress of note at Stratford.

Once Juan Manuel Sanchez and his wife Nora Patrich returned to Argentina (by separate ways) my days of going for coffee ended.

Today I called Raul Guerrero Montemayor (he is in his mid 80s) and told him how I missed going to a café. He told me that he rarely went to a café and gave me his reasons. “In Mexico City if you have to drive you must realize that parking is impossible. If you go in the Metro it’s like a sardine can plus it stinks. If you go on a Sunday when there are fewer people and you, perhaps walk to a nearby café there is the threat of violence. Besides most people have forgotten how to converse. They can talk about the past or gossip. That’s it.” He further added that you can do almost everything right at home.

Here in Vancouver, Raúl’s reasons for not going for coffee are not relevant and yet… Raúl did say, “You can do almost everything at home.”

I can put the electric kettle to boil and make myself a strong cup of tea or even a homemade café con leche. I move to the living room and place my mug on a coaster on my desk. I click on facebook. I can chat with Nina who is in Southern Spain or exchange niceties with my local friends in Vancouver or with local friends from Vancouver that I have never met in person who are my friends.

I can read how Nina says that she has had a nice meal of fish and that she is going to watch a film that will make her feel warm. Some friend suggests one. Nine responds, “Thank you that’s lovely.”

Many times when I do this I want to immediately write in answer to the facebook “What’s on your mind?”

How can so many people do this? How can so many people write so many inanities and banalites? So there is a lovely sunset over English Bay? Who bloody cares? I don’t care. I reflect that there must be something wrong with me if so many others find the facebook exercise satisfying.

Then I remember what Raúl said to me today. “Alex your business is to write and you have a way with words as that is also part of your business as a photographer. For most of us, writing is difficult, very difficult. And we have forgotten to carry a conversation because we stay mostly at home.”

Is Raúl right? As I have written before, even incoming phone calls are sparse for me. More that one of my friends has pointed out that there is no need to talk to me as they can be up to date as to what I am doing through my blog. You can no longer surprise people into a phone conversation with Caller ID being so universal.

I have a friend who invariably cuts me off with something like this, “I have to go, the plumber is here.”

When the internet first became an existence that we all knew was here to stay I noticed adds inviting us to “Visit us at www…” The word visit, such a warm word soon lost its luster. Even your local plumber invited you to visit his web page. A similar thing has happened to that erstwhile warm and intimate word chat. There are quite a few people still alive to remember having tuned their radios to an American president who broadcast 30 “fireside chats” between 1933 and 1944.

Even in a medium where you could not see Franklin D. Roosevelt’s face, it was his voice, his human voice that raised the temperature of humanity, an erstwhile warm-blooded species.



I look at all the lonely people.
I look at all the lonely people.


Eleanor Rigby
Picks up the rice in the church where her wedding has been;
Lives in a dream.
Waits at the window,
Wearing a face that she keeps in a jar by the door.
Who is it for?

All the lonely people, where do they all come from?
All the lonely people, where do they all belong?


Father MacKenzie
Writing the words of a sermon that no one will hear;
No one comes near.
Look at him working,
Nodding his socks in the night when there's nobody there.
What does he care?

All the lonely people, where do they all come from?
ll the lonely people, where do they all belong?
I look at all the lonely people.
I look at all the lonely people.


Eleanor Rigby
Died in the church and was buried alone with her name.
Nobody came.
Father MacKenzie
Wiping the dirt from his hands as he walks from her grave.
No one was saved.
All the lonely people, where do they all come from?
All the lonely people, where do they all belong?

Eleanor Rigby, The Beatles