Saturday, October 22, 2011



I haven’t seen Fleen for at least 15 years. Her name is Kathleen and people who know her have always called her Fleen. My name for her was Miss Mew. I always saw her as an exotic cat. She was an ecdysiast who in the early 80s danced in the best spots in town. My fave place to see her was at The 5, since sometimes, after her show, I would walk the three blocks to the then not-so-terrible Carnegie Centre to a punk band concert. More often than not the band was The Subhumans. Miss Mew would dress up in black and saunter over to the Carnegie. At the time I had yet to talk to her so I was careful not to seem like I was following her.

One of her charms, besides skin that resembled Devon cream (she had some secret makeup that covered her countless freckles) was that she danced to really obscure alternative rock music. Where else in Vancouver could one listen to Lou Reed in a bar?

By the time Les Wiseman and I convinced Vancouver Magazine editor Mac Parry to assign us to write and photograph a story on the Vancouver strip scene (with an emphasis on the money that was made) Young, Sexy & Well Heeled I was in speaking terms with Miss Mew. My friends made fun of my obvious like for Miss Mew and never understood that there was much more to her that met the eye.

Sometime in the mid 80s she formed a ban, a two piece band with a guitarist (she played the bass) called Two Lovely Children. They must have had some clout somewhere as they opened for a very good British punk band (I do not recall who it was). I remember with some grief that The Vancouver Province’s hip rock critic, Tom Harrison wrote a very short and very lethal review of that was something like this: “Two Lovely Children, one big reason for parents to practice birth control.”



At about that time I worked on a show that involved pictures of women, wearing nothing and photographed in a domestic situation. It was called Homebodies. Just when I was about finished I received a phone call from Miss Mew. She said, “From the grapevine I understand that you are working on a project. Just because I live in a room in the Niagara Hotel (now a much refurbished Ramada Limited Downtown), does not mean that you should ignore me for your project.”

I knew that Miss Mew was having a few drug problems which might have explained that she actually lived in a hotel that feature B-class dancers, a slight slip from her usual Drake, Cecil, Marble Arch and Number 5 Orange Street hotels.

I could not say no to her so I made an appointment to photograph her in her room. She carefully placed her white pumps, an apple and some flowers on the window ledge (she had planned all this) and then placed some of her studded paraphernalia on the bed. She posed with a very sad face and placed her hands in a most protective position. I snapped my pictures knowing that Miss Mew was giving me one of the best pictures I was ever to take. I have no heart to erase her breasts here as I think it would be a sacrilege to the vision she so carefully planned for me.

Friday, October 21, 2011

Two eccentrics - Ian Bateson & Mark Budgen

I have a friend who is English and because he is an English man, like many of his ilk he is a tad eccentric. He is about my age and while he has traveled widely he has never driven a car nor has he ever held a driver’s license. And yet you might suspect that my friend, Mark Budgen would be a Luddite. He is emphatically not.

He routinely (and has done so for years) downloads podcasts and listens to Norwegian classical music stations on the net. He knows how to navigate the web and is usually the first to know about the latest of anything, trends included.

Last Friday morning, Vancouver Sun Editor-in-Chief Patricia Graham announced to her startled news room that she was no longer in charge, her two hyphens-in-chief temporarily to be retired and that she was off to be Vice President of Digital Media. Mid morning I received an email from Budgen (he lives in Oliver, BC) asking me what I thought. How did he find out?

As I wrote yesterday’s blog on my love for true high fidelity sound I thought of Budgen. Budgen went from very good vinyl records to CDs and he bypassed the cassette tape era, obviously in the know that it was a doomed technology. I have hundreds of these cassettes and many are unplayable as the plastic has stretched and the “wow” is unbearable.

Since I now know that Videomatica (possibly closing in a month) no longer rents out VHS tapes I have to accept the fact that my VHS machine is as much history as my state of the art fax machine of a few years ago. I should have consulted Budgen about this.

Budgen’s tastes for the practical latest apply also to his sense of fashion. He wears jackets that I think might be very light yet are obviously rainproof and possibly bulletproof, too. His shoes (a man who does not drive must know how to walk and do so) are the best and some of them look like a cross between track shoes and mountain climbing ones.

But its Budgen’s ability to see trends and to read between the lines of what politicians say or read what lies behind the news that makes him a constant reminder that somebody should employ him soon and bring him back from Oliver, a place that certainly would not be a better place with his parting, but that Vancouver would certainly be one with one of its best eccentrics back.

The high point of any month is when Budgen comes to Vancouver (by Greyhound Bus) and he and my other eccentric English friend, Ian Bateson, meet up for lunch at out favourite Robson Street, the Next Noodle Bar. Our conversation is never long enough but it just makes me hope that the next one happens soon.

Thursday, October 20, 2011



On Saturday night I anticipate the arrival of my Sunday NY Times. My senses are attuned to hearing the loud thud (or feeling the vibration) that the heavy paper will make when it lands on my front porch.

I will immediately pick it up and race upstairs to bed to read my favourite section (it has gone through some name changes) which is now called Sunday Review.

In last Sunday’s I read a most interesting essay (written in a question and answer format) called Happy Birthday iPod! (its 10th anniversary from its introduction) written by Daniel j. Levitin, a neuroscientist at McGill University who is the author This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession.

This caught my eye:

Is iPod sound quality better or worse that a basic home stereo system?

Worse. The MP3 standard ruined high fidelity. It’s possible to upload CD quality onto the iPod. But most people opt for the default, lousy quality of MP3 and M4A compression. An entire generation has grown up never knowing high fidelity, never hearing what the artists heard in the studio when they were recording. This is a real shame.

This piece of news, something that did not startle me in the least came in the heels of an obituary published October 17 in the NY Times, Edgar M. Villchur, A Hi-Fi Innovator is Dead at 94.

Villchur (who headed a company called Acoustic Research) invented all kinds of hi-fi stuff like acoustic suspension speakers and most famously the AR-3 speaker and the AR-3A that followed. I owned a pair of these in Mexico in the early 70s. When I moved to Canada I sold them and bought a new pair when I arrived in Vancouver. I had been shocked at the difference in price between buying them in the US and buying them here so I did the very thing I had sworn never to do as we left Mexico and this was to smuggle or deal in the shady. I bought the pair and had them delivered to a friend’s house in Point Roberts, Washington. Then I brought the speakers (one at a time, in two smuggling runs) in the front of my Fiat X1-9. This mid-engine car had two trunks, a largish front one and one behind the engine in the back. This meant that the Canadian border agent had no clue and let me pass twice with my treasured speakers.

The speakers were stolen (I had left the front door unlocked) some 15 years ago when someone just walked in and carted them away with my CD collection. I had the AR-3As replaced (the insurance did so) with some very good JBL studio monitors.




The AR-3As in conjunction with my AR-3A amplifier and AR turntable (both the amplifier and the turntable a beauty in simplicity and reduced knobs) gave me the sound I had always wanted to experience. It is an experience that I still enjoy (as I write this in my living room, my JBLs in the other side of the room are pumping out  André Previn & His Pals - Shelley Manne & Red Mitchell – West Side Story) .

My experience with listening to music went from changing needles in my home radio/record player in Buenos Aires in the mid 50s (undecidedly low-fi) to listening to Yma Sumac in a device called a Hi-Fi player in the first furnished rented house we lived in when we arrived in Mexico City in 1954.

By the late 50s I had removed the speaker (and replaced it with a smaller one) from our living room Zenith console TV and placed it in an opening in my modern style closet. I sealed the opening and then covered it with (I remember so well!) with a green towel. The sound was my primitive version of Villchur’s idea that sealing a speaker enclosure increased bass response. My turntable was a Garrard which by not having an adjustable weight device for the tonearm ruined many of my early jazz recordings. But the sound was not bad even though the amplifier was a low watt Mexican amp.

By the early 70s I was a firm believer in the accuracy of sound recordings and I would show anybody who was remotely interested a b+w photo from an AR (Acoustic Research) brochure that showed the Fine Arts String Quartet in a Cambridge, Massachusetts forest playing next to a an AR-3A. People around them, we read, were unable to discern the difference between the live playing and a recording.

At the time I listened to classical recordings in three labels that I really liked. They were Angel, Archiv (mostly baroque music) and Turnabout ( I remember a very good recording of Vivaldi’s Gloria and some lute piece transcriptions of Bach’s violin sonatas). These three record companies stressed the accuracy of the sound. By then I had plunked good money to get a Shure cartridge for my AR turntable. Later on I invested in a Stanton.



The sound in my living room I liked to boast was accurate. I could play the initial bars of Richard Strauss’s Also Sprach Tharathustra ( the only version I was able to find in Mexico City was a quadraphonic one!) ( without distorting the very low pedal bass of the organ. But it wasn’t only Strauss. There were many jazz recordings in which I enjoyed the then most fashionable separation of stereo channels. Gerry Mulligan’s sax on the left, Art Farmer’s trumpet on the right, Brubeck on the left, Desmond on the right.

I have not changed my musical tastes much since and I of course do not agree with the concept of surround sound or increasing bass output or much less the idea of “improving” sound.

For me the most memorable sound event of my life happened on January 27, 2006 at the CBC’s Studio 1. It was there that I listened to Mozart all day and in particular to the Borealis Quartet. I was sitting pretty close and yet the sound from each instrument was distinct and had its place in the space my ears said the sound was coming from. This was not surround sound. This was not with an enhanced bass response.

It was accurate, live sound, sound that Edgar M. Villchur would have appreciated. It was a sound that sadly so many people now would find much too flat for their taste.

And this is a real shame.

Live versus recorded
Shostakovich - Stalingrad - Kharkov & Kursk

Wednesday, October 19, 2011

Aconitum carmichaelli 'Arendsii'

My wife is a plant snob in the good sense. By this I mean that she likes plants not common in most gardens not because she likes to boast about them but for another reason for which I can only guess.


Most of us conventional gardeners like to have a nice colourful garden in the spring that extends to summer. But by the end of October it is a bit cold to sit on a garden bench to look at a decaying garden with few plants in bloom,

My Rosemary has a fondness for hellebores which flower in very early spring before I am not quite ready to go out to it. And in the fall she has a love for the extremely poisonous (I must treat her well!) aconites or aconitums. Most of these tall plants have blue flowers. Any plant snob, with any kind of sophistication like my Rosemary’s, would understand that a true blue is the most beautiful colour in a garden. Only a pure white can compare.

It took 20 years before Rosemary accepted any orange and it had to be through the introduction in our garden of Rosa ‘Westerland’ which is a brilliant orange rose with the scent of artificial apricot jam.

It takes me much longer to realize how right Rosemary is about her plant choices. Today I asked her why she liked her aconitums and in particular the tall Aconitum carmichaelii 'Arendsii'  (anywhere from 6 to 7 ft) you see here. She said, “I like them because they are tall but do not flop (I would argue with her about that) and they bloom now when nothing else is around.



I’d better not show too much interest in these aconitums as if I do Rosemary will transfer her interest to something else. On the other hand that could be a good thing as I would then learn all about a plant that in most cases would be outside my so limited radar.

 
 
 
 
 

Geranium 'Rozanne'

                                                                                   

Brother Cadfael's poison

Tuesday, October 18, 2011


"Back When" by Tim McGraw



Don't you remember
The fizz in a pepper
Peanuts in a bottle
At ten, two and four
A fried bologna sandwich
With mayo and tomato
Sittin' round the table
Don't happen much anymore
We got too complicated
It's all way over-rated
I like the old and out-dated
Way of life
Back when a hoe was a hoe
Coke was a coke
And crack's what you were doing
When you were cracking jokes
Back when a screw was a screw
The wind was all that blew
And when you said I'm down with that
Well it meant you had the flu
I miss back when
I miss back when
I miss back when


I love my records
Black, shiny vinyl
Clicks and pops
And white noise
Man they sounded fine
I had my favorite stations
The ones that played them all
Country, soul and rock-and-roll
What happened to those times?
I'm readin' Street Slang For Dummies
Cause they put pop in my country
I want more for my money
The way it was back then
Back when a hoe was a hoe
Coke was a coke
And crack's what you were doing
When you were cracking jokes
Back when a screw was a screw
The wind was all that blew
And when you said I'm down with that
Well it meant you had the flu
I miss back when
I miss back when
I miss back when

Give me a flat top for strumming
I want the whole world to be humming
Just keep it coming
The way it was back then
Back when a hoe was a hoe
Coke was a coke
And crack's what you were doing
When you were cracking jokes
Back when a screw was a screw
The wind was all that blew
And when you said I'm down with that
Well it meant you had the flu
I miss back when
I miss back when
I miss back when


It was somewhere near Texico (by Clovis, New Mexico) on the Texas/New Mexico border on our way back from south Texas that my fiery Rebecca startled me. We had had many confrontations on her use of computers and her iTouch to constantly facebook. Her remark confirmed that the both of us had, at least one thing in common. We often listened to country & Western radio stations and Rebecca would say, “There is nothing like listening to this music in the right states.” The ads were for state fairs and farm equipment. The voices of the announcers were down-home. This is what she, “This music is about nostalgia and about romance.” She was right and there was a song (see above) that confirmed it all.




It is still difficult for a 69 year-old-man to remember back when… and in particular back when I was 14 which happens to be my granddaughter Rebecca’s age right now.

With the teachers on this limbo-like-sort-of strike-that-is not-quite Rebecca will not be getting marks at the end of this first school semester. She is in grade 9. I have told her (seeing that both Rosemary and I have been teachers) that the impressions that teachers get of you in that first semester can be pretty permanent and if you are not doing much those impressions can be irrevocably damning.

Rebecca has a new love interest and both Rosemary and I suspected that there has been lots of coasting. I remember that when I was 14 I was getting mediocre grades in school. It was not until I started my grade 9 at St. Ed’s in Texas (a Catholic boarding school) did my grades not only became better but they became extremely good. What was the change? It was an imposed evening study hall in our dorm. We were not given a choice. I had no laptop, no electrical devices to distract me. I either read a book (and that was good) or I studied, and that was good, too. Our TV was monitored and we were allowed measured time periods we could watch TV.

In south Texas I finally told Rebecca that she could only use her mother’s laptop for one hour during the day (and night). At first she protested but she soon adjusted to the restriction and did fine. This was probably because she had not informed me (but I had suspected) that the iTouch (that I had given her!) had a an app for facebook. When I threatened to take her iTouch away that produced terrible confrontations and I was told that I had no authority to do this. So I took away (or better still) hid my iPhone charge which she used to charge her iTouch.

You can understand that by the time we were driving back to Vancouver (near Clovis, New Mexico) there was a palpable resentment in the Malibu.

When I started in that grade 9 in Austin, I soon found out it was difficult for me to fit in. I was not a Latino because I did not look like one and I spoke perfect English. I was not an American Anglo because I spoke perfect Spanish. I was in a middle that I soon accepted as an inevitable personal status.

Rebecca’s mother made some of her wonderful pineapple squares and told her daughter that she might want to take some for her friends at school. She was met by a barrage of angry statements that nobody did this sort of thing and she was not going to do it either. In fact Rebecca keeps much of her unusual life a secret from her friends in her effort to be like everybody else.

My guess is that this is most normal. It was when I was 21 and in the Argentine Navy that I attempted to become an individual in an organization that demanded blanket uniformity. I had a tailor sew a crease on my pants (not allowed but corporals did not bother to notice) and we all had patented methods of bending our plastic (German submariners type) navy caps to make the shape our very own. I wore very good sunglasses most of the year and in the winter I wore expensive Argentine black leather gloves instead of the issued wool. I bought a handsome black leather briefcase in which I stored my reading material like Time Magazine.

It was once while on a train going to my job as a translator that a man in civvies pointed out that I was not wearing my cap and that I was reading a magazine (Time). He told me that this was not in the regulation. He asked me for my particulars (my naval identity number) and by the time I got to the office an arrest order had arrived that cited gross insubordination. The man had been a scary officer in the Argentine armed forces security service.

So Rebecca at age 14 wants to fit in. She has the most beautiful curly, heavy hair I have ever seen. She wakes up at 5 every morning to straighten it and applies her makeup to look as perfect and as much like everybody else in her class. By the end of the week this reduced sleeping makes is so that by the time she visits us on Saturday noon she is more likely to retire in what used to be her mother’s bed to have a siesta.

We have a pact in that I can now tell her how wonderful she looks when her hair is curly and she will not become angry. She has learned to take that as my personal compliment.

Because of the non-teacher’s strike a dance she was going to go (invited by her new love interest) has been cancelled. Her mother had taken her to a vintage clothing store to find her a dress and then she bought her new shoes.

This disappointment has been partially ameliorated in that she is going to wear the dress and shoes this Sunday. Rebecca and I are going to attend a matinee performance of the Vancouver Opera production of West Side Story. She has until Monday afternoon to write me copy (her review) so we can blog it for that evening. I know she will do a very good job yet like all the other fine jobs she has written for me she has kept it a secret from her contemporaries. Few really know about her trips to Argentina, Uruguay and Washington DC. They don’t know that she has gone to Mexico three times, Morelia, Guanajuato and Mérida and to Texas, twice.

Perhaps the hiding of all her experiences began some years ago when she told her friends she had spent an afternoon in Mayor Sam Sullivan’s office with her grandfather and friend Abraham Rogatnick. They called her a lier.

My friends all tell me that all those years of taking her to ballet, modern dance, theatre and baroque concerts (with a smattering of Philip Glass and Turning Point Ensemble concerts) will have left an indelible presence in her brain.

Meanwhile I long for my Rebecca to stop straightening her hair and revealing that wonder that her real curly hair is. I meanwhile enjoy how she is able to navigate with adults in conversation or how she is able to talk about her love of roses to an audience of 500 plus avid rosarians. It is only time before she understands that individuality and not conformity is what separates us from ants and bees.

Monday, October 17, 2011


Lauren is 9. I was younger, perhaps 7 or 8 when my mother would plunk me into the electric train that went from Belgrano R (where she taught high school and not far from the grammar school I went to) to Coghlan, a Buenos Aires suburb, where we lived. This was not often. My guess is that she had to stay after school for some important meeting. I was trusted to get on the train and to get off in the next stop. looked forward to this as Mercedes Basaldúa, our housekeeper would be waiting for me at the platform with a chocolate covered vanilla bar. Its brand name was Noel and Argentines called it a bombón helado. This was a treat and she would walk us home where if I were lucky there would be my most favourite carrot soufflé ready to be taken out of the oven and served with her spectacular milanesas (breaded veal cutlets). In those days there were still vestiges of the English train system (they had built our trains) mentality and perhaps due to the similarities between our Juan Domingo Perón and Benito Mussolini the trains ran on time and with a precision that Mercedes could buy the ice cream bar knowing I would arrive before it would melt.


It was in that spirit that Rosemary and I picked up Lauren (9) at school and we surprised her by telling her we were going to the main branch of the Vancouver Public Library (she loves the lower section for children and youths) but first we would have some crepes in the store that is on Robson and opposite the library. Everything happened as we wished it to. It was a pleasant afternoon. We arrived home and heated the chicken soup I had made in the morning and made everything ready for the arrival of Lauren’s mother and sister Rebecca (14) for a rare Monday family meal.

This time around Rosemary did not tell me how she had wasted her time and how she need not have accompanied me. She did not tell me that her time would have been more usefully had working in the gaden before the inevitable rains come. Just this once she listened when I told her, “Lauren will not be coming here every Monday and she is not going to be a little girl for long. Let us enjoy her as a little girl for as long as it lasts.”

Sunday, October 16, 2011

Johnny Weissmuller by George Hurrell

This past Saturday my wife Rosemary, daughter Hilary and her two granddaughter Lauren (9) and Rebecca (14) sat down to watch a Tarzan film after a pleasant home cooked meal (I’m the designated chef). It was the fourth installment of our favorite Tarzan films which must not only include Johnny Weissmuller but also Maureen O’Sullivan. The film (1939) in question was Tarzan Finds a Son (Johnny Sheffield). There are two more to go on our jungle marathon, Tarzan’s Secret Treasure (1941) and Tarzan’s New York Adventure (1942).

Currently as I write this, Monday morning, these films as DVDs while in theory are available at the Vancouver Public Library they are either checked out or listed as “Group Problems” (whatever that means).

All six films (two per DVD case) are available right now at Videomatica.

Videomatica, no matter what you have been told is still open. It is my feeling that the so called saving of the Videomatica collection by one of the two Vancouver universities is not quite a done deal yet. Videomatica is busy renting out stuff but if you still have that VHS playback machine, forget it. No VHS tapes are available. This means that if you want to see the Glass Key (1942) with Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake you cannot as Videomatica had it only as a VHS. Our Vancouver Public Library does not have it and it also does not have the 1982 Wim Wenders wonder Hammett with Frederick Forest. The only known copy (as far as I know) was the DVD (no out of print) at Videomatica and it is listed there as broken.

I believe that Videomatica might just coast into November and meanwhile I am renting films with one hand while my desert island film supplier sinks (and I try to bail out the water as best I can). This means that just about every day I think of a desert island film that I want to see before it is gone.

Not that it will be gone for a long time. Supply and demand will eventually have to come to our rescue and perhaps Ted Turner’s TCM will start a Netflix (TCMflix?) type on line film site for connoisseurs. It has to happen.


Meanwhile there is Gunga Din and Beau Geste, This Gun for Hire, and Sahara, The Wind and the Lion, and The Man Who Would Be King - ditto for all the Buster Keaton films and Laurel & Hardy’s The Music Box. They are all waiting at Videomatica right now. Imagine a Toy Story told from the point of view of films that are no longer seen and have been abandoned. These are films that would be in that no longer-Roman Catholic-limbo. Limbo does not exist anymore. Perhaps these films will go, limping as elephants are want to do in Tarzan films to that great elephant cemetery to die.

It has come as a shock for me to find out that our very good Vancouver Public Library does not consider itself a repository of any archive. This means, I would surmise (perhaps at an extreme), that if not enough shy young men go up to some librarian to ask for a copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover all known copies will be chucked out or put in those wonderful bins where you can still buy good books for $0.25. By this logic films that are not seen (when was the last time you had an urge to see John Pozer’s 1991 The Grocer’s Wife with a delectable Nicola Cavendish?) will be sent with the elephants as only the VPL has a copy and not Videomatica.

What that means is that the VPL has never had the intention of collecting films for their archival value and would have never have considered (and indeed they have not) to buy the Videomatica collection. Shame on them!

Meanwhile play that desert island game and go and take out a film, while Videomatica is  around. And if you look here you might just want to donate $15 and save an elephant.

As for me we will finish our Tarzan cycle in two more weeks and if Videomatica is still open I will take out Greystoke - The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes (1984) with Christopher Lambert, Andie McDowell, Ian Holm and Sir Ralph Richarson in his last screen appearance. Will Tarzan's elephants be around to save us for another day?

Mama don't take my Videomatica away!

Tarzan's Opinion on the above