Tuesday, March 30, 2010


My mother liked to use the word snooty to describe her taste for things. She preferred that word to the more usual refined. She would often say to me in Spanish, “Hay poca gente fina como nosotros,” or “There are few people with good taste such as us.”

When I was in my late teens she never said anything about my near obsession in reading any science fiction book I could find. As long as I was reading that was fine. But she would hand me books, every once in a while and tell me it was a good book. I learned to trust her taste and I have maintained my snooty taste for books since.

I no longer read science fiction but I still (with no apology) read mysteries. For many years the only female mystery author I read was P.D. James. I had a dislike for the likes of Mary Stewart and such books as her gothic/governess novel Nine Coaches Waiting which I remember buying for my mother. She loved it. It is only at this recent date that I have abandoned this silly idea and I have read all the books published until now by Barbara Cleverly. I joke around in telling that this real name sounds as manufactured as that other English author’s name, Penelope Lively!

And it is Penelope Lively which brings me to cite my reading relationship with Celia Duthie. It is Duthie who first recommended Lively to me. Duthie, much like my mother would have been impressed by Lively’s birth in Cairo.

For many years back when Duthies was the bookstore empire in Vancouver I would go in to the main store on Robson to ask for my favourite mystery writer
Jerome Charyn's latest. Every employee there and Duthie would ask me, “Have you read Michael Dibdin?” I finally broke down and bought my first Aurelio Zen mystery by Dibdin called Cabal and I was hooked. I first read ever book written by the man until that time and then waited every year for his next (and Robert Harris’, and John Le Carré, also authors Duthie liked). It was last year that I read Dibdin’s End Games which was his last as he died. There is nothing sadder that knowing that one’s taste for an author’s works can no longer be satisfied.



But there is another opposite side to that story. This is the discovery of authors who have written (they are usually prolific) a string of novels and one can indulge for some time. Sometimes I find them halfway so after reading their output I have to then wait for the next. That has been the case with Colin Dexter (alas he is now dead), Reginald Hill (he isn’t!), and Patrick O’Brian (he is!). And of course I am waiting for Barbara Cleverly’s next Inspector Joe Sandilands mystery and her next Laetitia Talbott one.

Then there are authors like Andrea Camilleri and his Inspector Montalbano series. I have read all the ones that have been translated into English including the latest The Wings of the Sphinx. The author, who is in his 80s, is still writing them, but I must wait for the translations as they occur.



One happy situation came my way some years ago when Duthie gave me a used copy of Arthur W. Upfield’s Venom House featuring his half breed inspector Napoleon Bonaparte (“Please call me Boney!”). I was hooked from the first. The writer and Englishman who had been sent to Australia as a young man by his father and died in 1964 had written 29 of them. It was up to me to find the other 28. Since Upfield has long been out of print this took some effort and I got as far as number 25. Each one of these can be read independently out of order and they all describe a way of life in the remote stations of Australia that has all but faded with modernity and globalization.

I do think that about now I might attempt to tackle Upfield all over again. I have been struggling (but with pleasure!) with Harold Bloom’s Where Shall Wisdom Be Found? At this moment I am finding out why it was that Plato was so much against poets and in particular with Homer. But the real gem of this book has been to find out that the Book of Job is well worth reading in detail.




Upfield might have to wait as I have “discovered” Father Andrew M. Greeley. But that is another story for another day.

Arthur W. Upfield

Monday, March 29, 2010

Alex at St. Ed's, Austin, Texas 1960

In a not so distant spring I remember being able to fall asleep listening to the splash of the pond fountain outside my window and wake up to singing birds in the morning. Six to 8 yours of sleep were compressed between the pleasures of slumbering into sleep and the awaking awareness that I was alive the next morning. Not so, anymore.

Aging bodies react differently to being in a horizontal position and pressures are brought to bear. I wake up three or four times during the night and I must visit the gentleman's room only to find out that the pressures were premature. But there are pleasures to be had here.

Nobody will ever convince me that death and sleep are the same. I will go as far as accepting Epicurus’ views that there is no feeling in death. And if there is no feeling there is no pain. If there is no pain there is nothing to fear. But not being able to wake up again (death), while not painful brings no pleasure.

The pleasure of sleep is threefold. Falling asleep can be wonderful. Waking up can be pleasant, too if one is not facing a stressful day. It is that in-between period, between sleep and wakefulness that seems to be the most interesting.

That in-between period involves dreaming. This idea was reinforced in my mind today by my taking my granddaughters to see Alice in Wonderland (the 3-D version). I dream almost every day and I can assert that I probably dream every day and that I am not aware sometimes because the dream slips away into some subconscious, a place populated by single socks and the source of clouds that marr empty and clear blue skies.

I will not go to Greenelandian extremes. Graham Greene for most of his life had a pad and pencil on his bedside table. He made it a habit to record his dreams. For me it is enough that I have post-it notes for marking good pages in the books I read and a Canadian Oxford Dictionary for reference.

The new evening bathroom arrangements give me the pleasure of being able to think, “I am awake. I was happily asleep and as soon as I finish I will go back to bed and sleep again. Should I wake up, one more time, the pleasure will be repeated.

At one time I suffered from severe bouts of insomnia. Those are gone as well as those migraines that haunted my waking days. I have never taken snuff. I understand that sneezing is as much of a pleasure as scratching an itch. I can assert that being able to fall asleep without a problem, knowing that I have a pretty good chance of waking up, is pleasant. I don’t miss the long oblivion of my nights of youth.

The current situation means that my dreams are now of two varieties. I have short dreams (fully complete but brief) or I have dreams that continue between periods of wakeful rest.

It is standing over the toilet that I attempt to write in my mind that dream before it fades. Greene was right.

My dreams are either bizarre (these are the ones I rarely remember) or they are fantastically realistic to the point that when I wake up I sometimes feel like that poor man in the hospital (in that Julio Cortázar story, La Noche Boca Arriba, The Night Face Up) who is getting over a motorbike accident. He has constant dreams of being taken up to the top of a pyramid to have his heart torn out by an Aztec priest. He always manages to wake up just before. But not the last time when he realizes that the motorbike and the hospital are the dream and the tearing out of his heart is the frightening and imminent reality.

One of those realistic dreams is the one where I often fly in a pool of air. I gently wave my arms and I am able to stay in place without sinking. I tell myself, “I fly.” Another dream has me playing solo alto saxophone to a large audience. At best I was an efficient player in my high school band. But here I wow them and the dream is so real that I am almost sure that I did play once, without reading a note. That day has faded and all that remains is the dream as proof that it might have happened. It is a sort of Alice in Wonderland.

But the one dream that has persisted for years is the one where I return to my St. Ed’s High School in Austin, Texas as either an older boy or a mature man. I explain to the undergraduates (I am usually there with an assorted variety of my former classmates) that my education and experience were so good that I have decided to extend it by returning to school.

Sometimes in this dream I knock on the door of the inner sanctum where our teachers, Brothers of the Holy Cross, lived. It was verboten to enter. But in my dream I am allowed in and I am greeted with warmth.

Part of this dream did become real last year in June. I returned to my school for an all classes reunion (1920-1967). When I arrived at the Austin airport and was met by my classmate John Arnold I was told that we and his wife were invited for dinner that evening with Brother Edwin at the inner sanctum of St Joseph’s hall. As Brother Edwin said grace and we were surrounded by the elderly faces of the other Brothers of the Holy Cross, I wanted to pinch myself just like Alice to see if I was in my dream.

Sunday, March 28, 2010



My first impression of art as a serious medium began sometime in 1955 when I visited for the first time the Castillo de Chapultepec, a museum/castle on a lofty perch of Chapultepec Park in Mexico City. It was there that I first saw the works of Mexican muralist Jose Clemente Orozco (seen below, is his Resurrection of Lazarus, 1942). My mother told me how she tried not to look at them as they unsettled her. Of course this made me look at them all the more. It was through Orozco that I found out that art did not necessarily have to be pleasant and beautiful and that it could contain a message for change especially within corrupt systems.

This idea had not clicked with finality in my head until 1999 when I went to see Carlos Saura’s film Goya In Bordeaux with my Argentine painter friends Nora Patrich and Juan Manuel Sanchez. The film was so good we saw it twice before the folks of our city found the movie much too complicated and it vanished in a week from showings at the Fifth Avenue Cinemas.

In my classes at Focal Point and at Van Arts when I teach editorial photography I point out that the Goya was one of the first artists to use his art to protest the tyranny of the conservative and corrupt Spanish monarchy, not to mention his fight against the total war that Napoleon Bonaparte had unleashed upon Europe.

It is only now that I can understand within me that without Goya, the careers of Mexican muralists Orozco, David Álvaro Siqueiros and Diego Rivera would have never happened. It is difficult not to see Goya’s influence in Edouard Manet’s painting the Execution of Maximilian where one of the soldiers is a facsimile of France’s Napoleon III. Manet put the blame for the execution of Maximilian, and the abandonment of the attempt of a French empire in Mexico, squarely on the shoulders of Napoleon III himself.



Just as I now know about the seriousness of purpose of many artists I have also come to understand that art can also entertain, delight and even make us laugh. I am not an art historian so I cannot here reveal artists who are the equivalent to the unabashedly irreverent poems of Ogden Nash. It would seem to me that anybody would “get” that Salvador Dalí was not all that serious. In short I have come to understand that many artists have a tongue in check humor that they keep almost hidden and usually it is not to be discovered by the art critic. Art, in the minds of these art critics has to be serious. So they interview artists with reverence and write about their works without the slightest hint of fun or humor.

It was sometime in the middle 90s that artist Rodney Graham (he had a studio on the same floor as I did on Robson and Granville along with fellow artist Neil Wedman) knocked on my door. “Alex, I have a problem. I have been taking photographs of trees with a 4x5 inch camera and the images in the back of the camera are all upside down. What can I do about it?” I told him that he would have to spend lots of money to get a device that would right side up the image. I told them that most photographers had come to learn to take their pictures with the images pointing down.

It was in May 1997 that I was assigned by the Globe & Mail to photograph Graham. I was told that the writer would be Sarah Milroy. I contacted her and we met. She told me she was going to pursue the subject of “Postmodern Art as Seen through Rodney Graham’s Upside Down Trees”. I almost choked! Subsequent to my conversation with Graham at my studio Graham had shown high quality and large photographs of trees that were matted and framed upside down. You can purchase these at the Vancouver Art Gallery shop.

I decided to photograph Graham as an angry artist of the European 30s. I was going to make him look scary. This I did. Fortunately Milroy had caught on and had seen through Graham’s serious front and discovered his subtle and gentle humor. The Globe article, Saturday, June 7, 1997, ran my picture with the following and “all revealing” cutline: Vancouver’s Rodney Graham, a very serious goofball.



Since 1997 I have been on the lookout for the seriousness that our local artists seem to project and how critics read it and write about it.

Last week I had the pleasant opportunity to photograph Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun at the scene of his present show at the Contemporary Art Gallery. He showed up wearing a black hat, a brown leather jacket and dark wrap-around sunglasses. I didn’t have to ask him to know he would have refused to take the glasses and the hat off or even smile at my camera.

I broke the ice by telling him that I was intrigued by his little drawing under a centrally located glass cabinet of a wood screw and the word USUFRUCT. I told him that in Spanish this was a word that dry cleaners used when you did not pick up your item to be cleaned until months later. Through usufracción the cleaners could sell off or throw away your possession as they had the rights. Yuxweluptun smiled and told me that the word as he saw it was a legal term used in land claims and it plainly showed how people who owned lands, many times, had others who did not own the land profit from it. I did not have to pursue the image of the screw to know what Yuxweluptun had in mind and why he seriously told me, “This is the most serious item in this show.”

We ended talking about trees for a long time and we compared notes on how photographers photograph trees and how curiously I have discovered that trees have to be photographed in their entirety. They cannot be cropped. The same applies to the human face were you can rarely get away with topping a person’s head. Yuxweluptun showed me a drawing that was a close cropped view of the lower trunks of a group of trees. We saw this as an allowable exception.

During our portrait session my 10 pictures all looked the same as his expression was the same. In one I made a joke and he began to laugh. I took the picture. “You know, if I send this one to the Georgia Straight they will use it.” He looked at me and gently told me, “Don’t send it.” I didn’t but you can see it here.



Going back to Goya I have discerned lots of humor in his etchings Los Caprichos, particularly one sporting a fully dressed donkey and called “And So Was His Grandfather”

Now if we could only make our critics smile, just a bit.

Another artist with a sense humor Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas

And yet another Neil Wedman

Saturday, March 27, 2010


Happiness is:

A blog that Works and a pair of new sock. Better still happiness is a blog that works and four pair of new socks.


After my call for help, help came from home turf. Vancouverite Roland Schigas (an expert on web design) wrote in with some pointers. But it was Skunkworks and their webmaster guru Chris Botting who migrated my FTP Custom URL blog to a Blogger Custom URL blog. It all happened today without any fuss and everything looks the way it did before.

Last week I went to Mark’s Work Wearhouse to buy by two jeans for the year. In this last year I discovered that stretch jeans my size are far more comfortable than regular jeans my size. I buy a blue pair and a black pair. No matter how careful I am I still kneel (for picture taking or for gardening where I should use the old jeans) and the knees soon look unsightly. While getting my jeans I spotted some very nice socks. They were being sold at two pair for $9.00. I bought four pair. I was not only getting a 10% discount because of a sale but I also had a $10 coupon.

For four days I have put on a nice, clean pair of brand new socks. This is about as cheap as sheer pleasure can be. Buying the socks reminded me of my mother who used to buy shoes when she was depressed. I thought that was a good idea and through the years I have modified that by saying that the quickest way to eliminate depression is to buy a pair of shoes, or some socks. But the quickest cure has always been a nice and thick chocolate shake.

Thanks to Skunkworks and Chris Botting for saving my hide and to Roland Schigas for responding so quickly for my cry for help.

Friday, March 26, 2010

This blog is now located at http://blog.alexwaterhousehayward.com/.
You will be automatically redirected in 30 seconds, or you may click here.

For feed subscribers, please update your feed subscriptions to
http://blog.alexwaterhousehayward.com/feeds/posts/default.

Thursday, March 25, 2010

 

 

Well my sweet baby wears fishnet stockings
When she starts a rockin' there ain't no stoppin'

Singing wop bop a doo dop fishnet stockings
Shoo wop a doo dop when she's rockin'
Bop bop a doo dop there ain't no stoppin'
Rockin' with my baby in her fishnet stockings

Well she's got a pair in pink
She's got a pair in red
When she puts the black ones she makes me loose my head

The Stray Cats

As far as I know I am not a sexual deviate. I dislike fetish and fetish photography. I don't understand the pleasure of tying up people or being tied up. My tastes are pretty simple.

But I do like fishnets. In fact I would venture to admit that I have a fetish for fishnets and particularly if the fishnets happen to be torn. I connect fishnets with sleazy, dark and mysterious. Which is why I have a particular liking for the pictures you see here of Roxie, the Polish-born banker who lives in Manchester. She dresses and looks like a sophisticated James Bond woman. She has money. She seems well-behaved. It is because of it all that Roxie shines in fishnets. If I had had the time for more photographs I would have photographed her in a private school uniform. That's another fetish of mine, in case you didn't know.



A few years ago I was driving North on Granville and I crossed King Edward Avenue. That is where York House School is. As I was passing the bus stop on the Northwest side of Granville my right eye caught two York House students in a passionate embrace. They were kissing. I almost lost control of the car I was so shocked and affected by the sight.

The particular look of the first 6 pictures here is the result of using the now sadly discontinued Kodak b+w Infrared Film. One had to shoot through a deep red filter (a No. 25) and once one focused one had to unfocus to the infrared mark on the lens. Infrared film's spectrum focuses at a different distance. Most photographers who ever used the film tended to print their pictures light. Mine here (or at least on my monitor) are darkish which is the way I like them. I have a few rolls of Kodak Infrared film in my freezer and I am looking for the appearance of someone like my Polish banker to pose, perhaps in fishnets.

Wednesday, March 24, 2010


You can sit and look at art in a gallery. At Joji’s you can have your hair done too. Borrowing the idea from the yearly Artworks On The Drive, when stores on Commercial Drive display art on the street, Joji has a monthly art show in her salon. She has featured Jan Crawford, Dana Irving, Katarina Thorsen and the photographs of Natasha Moric.

Joji, from Hull Quebec, has been on the drive for five years and says, “I have brought a downtown salon to the Eastside. Many of our clients are artists who are demanding. We are up there with Suki’s as one of the ten best in town. We believe in doting over and papering our clients to the hilt. You can sip coffee from Casa del Café while you get your Japanese shampoo.” If it weren’t enough you can always walk down a block to Joe’s Café, buy that special Mexican Chicken at the Nazarene Market, up a block, or stock up with groceries and vegetables at the Santa Barbara Market next door.

If you don’t spot Joji in her gaucho hat at your next appointment, don’t be surprised. She is probably perfecting her style at the London Academy or the School of Vidal Sassoon.



If you wonder about the above piece an example of “service oriented editorial drivel” I can only cite my ignorance on the matter. I wrote it for Western Living sometime in the late 80s and I am not sure they ever ran it accompanied by my photograph of the beautiful Maurice and the Clichés groupie and model, D’Arcy.

Of the places mentioned Joji’s remains as does the Santa Barbara Market and Joe's Cafe.

In the heady days of magazines in Vancouver, the 80s!, we freelancers just didn’t wait for the phone to ring with the next assignment. We indulged in the daring sport called speculative work. In my case I photographed D’Arcy (film cost money) and interviewed Joji and then wrote the piece. The idea was that magazine editors were a tad lazy and they liked being offered a package. For me, this was not usually the case. It was easier for a writer to convince an editor on a speculative piece than for a photographer to do so with an editor. It was after a few of these failures that I began to concentrate on writing pieces without offering pictures to accompany them. My success rate improved and in most cases I was assigned to take the pictures