Saturday, January 28, 2012

Lauren at the Grand Canyon iPhone

This morning my friend Graham Walker and I rose early (he much earlier as he lives in New Westminster) and we met bright and early (8:20) at the Park Theatre on Cambie Street. We were there to watch (our first ever), live from the Metropolitan Opera House in New York a High Defintion broadcast of Handel’s baroque opera Rodelinda.


The experience was a revelation to me in many ways. Years back I had taken my precocious young granddaughter Rebecca (she was 6) to several small scale baroque operas performed by the Modern Baroque Company (alas they are long gone) at the East Vancouver Cultural Centre. Rebecca would smile when on the beginning of an aria I would raise one finger. When, as it often happens in baroque operas, it came around a second time I would raise two fingers and the third time, three. I never knew exactly why but it gave me a chance to listen to the wonderful melody and voice three times.

In Rodelinda this happens, too. The arias are called da capo which in Italian it means from the head. The host was the much diminished in size, but with her still spectacular personality and intelligence, soprano Debora Voigt. She asked every one of the stars, soprano Renée Fleming (Rodelinda), mezzo-soprano Stephanie Blythe (Eduige), countertenor Andreas Schol (Bertarido), countertenor Lestyn Davies (Unulfo), tenor Joseph Kaiser (Grimoaldo) and (but did not interview) bass-baritone Shenyang, the same question, “What is it like to sing an aria three times. All emphasized having to find a personal justification for the second time and then a further “in the head” reflection on what to add or reinterpret or confirm in the third.

For viewers, particularly when the cameras got very close it gave us a rare glimpse in all the acting that these singers (called singing actors by production director Stephen Wadsworth) had to do and do it well they did. The three time arias gave the other actors on stage plenty of opportunity to move and do things. This Rodelinda was much more a film. I would call it a film/opera and I believe all for the better. Who could possibly afford to fly to New York, pay at least $200 for a seat and then watch all the action through binoculars?

But that three time singing made me reflect on other situations of repetition.

In the late 70s and early 80s I was a stills photographer in the cavernous studios 40 and 41 in the bowels of the CBC building on Hamilton Street. The average variety show had four cameras (video tape in those days). Two were large monsters on rolling pedestals. One was up on a crane that could move up and down and swing around. The fourth was a small camera carried on the shoulders. When tape rolled all cameras were on the scene while the director would indicate which cameraman was to do what. The cameramen were all wired for sound.

Sometime in the 80s I was dispatched to Egmont to take stills of a drama series called Ritter’s Cove in which one of the stars was a yellow De Havilland Beaver.

On my first day of shooting I was shocked at the difference between the method used to tape a variety show and the procedure for drama in which only one camera was used. I enquired and was told that the camera (an expensive Arriflex) shot film not video tape. It was further explained the director would block (the term used in TV and in movies) the scene. The lighting was set and everything else was in standby. Then the actor or actors would look at the one camera and do their scene which always involved more than one take. After that’, the shot would taken from a different angle (the same camera) and the actor would repeat everything from that angle. Sometimes there was a third angle. It was then the task of the film editor to splice the different angles into a smooth narrative.

I called up my friend Michael Varga who after having retired as a cameraman at the CBC a couple of years ago is busier than ever. He explained to me that now in film (with digital movie cameras) the one camera deal is no longer a rule. Digital is cheap so most scenes are taken with multiple camera angles.

The other instance of repletion is one that hit home for me this past July when my wife, our two granddaughters and I visited the Grand Canyon’s North Rim.

We arrived late afternoon after a rainfall. The light was beautiful but muted. I had to make a decision on how I was going to photograph what I saw and how I was going to incorporate my granddaughters and wife.

I spied a young man with one very expensive digital camera around his neck. I then looked at what I had around me.


1. A 2¼ by 7 inch swivel lens panoramic in which I could choose to shoot either b+w film or colour transparency.
2. A Pentax MX dedicated to a superb 20mm wide angle and loaded with 100 ISO Ektachrome.
3. A Nikon FM-2 with 100 ISO Kodak Plus-X
4. A Nikon FM-2 with 800 ISO No Name President’s Choice colour negative film.
5. A Mamiya RB-67 Pro SD with two backs. One with Ilford FP-4 b+w and the other with 100 IS0 Ektachrome.
6. An iPhone 3G.

I used all the cameras while the young man took his pictures in RAW format. This means that he could then tweak his pictures to be b+w, colour and he could do all kinds of things to make his photographs different.

I will raise here one question in which those who know me will know my answer.

Lauren & Rebecca at the Grand Canyon Noblex Panoramic

In all three instances of repetition, the actor, the singer, the photographer had to go within himself to get more than  what is possible if done once. When I used 6 cameras, because of the nature of their different lenses and film stock, each picture was not only different but, specifically, each picture was new not a variation of another.

The young photographer RAW image, even after several tweakings and versions was still a variation of itself, the one. I wonder what an actor would think of all this?

Friday, January 27, 2012


When my mother traveled to Mexico from Argentina in 1952 she was given there a red rebozo. Its intense, rich red reminded me of the robe from that first Cinemascope production The Robe with Richard Burton and Jean Simmons. The robe was the robe of Jesus Christ. My mother's rebozo was made of rough cotton and the red came from a natural vegetable dye. I have treasured it all these years and I have often used it as a portrait prop.

Jennifer Froese

When I met Jennifer Froese, a friend of Bif Naked, she seemed very sad. She was the very opposite of her friend. When she posed for me this sadness was evident but wonderful at the same time.

She revealed her tattoo and here you see but a glimpse of it, partly hidden by my mother's red Mexican rebozo.

I wrote the above on Monday, January 11, 2007 and I must have taken Jennifer Froese’s photograph at least 10 years before. I guess it was then when I began to have inkling that my mother’s rebozo would some day become a project. The project is in progress as I have written here.

Linda Lorenzo

 

Nina Gouveia

And the pictures below, a couple that I took in 2010 that make the grade of my specifications plus a few more that are scanner Fuji instant film prints are a preview. The original Ektachromes will be the ones that will appear in this work in progress.

Dana Luccock - Singer

Sandrine Cassini -Dancer/Choreographer

Ivette Hernandez - Actress



Ian Mulgrew - Columnist Vancouver Sun





Meredith Kalaman - Dancer/Choreogapher



Brownen Marsden - Actress/Playwright

Thursday, January 26, 2012

Former Vancouver police detective-inspector Kim Rossmo on geographic profiling: "Statistical analysis of crime locations can disclose patterns and focus the investigation on specific suspects."

Vancouver, January 26, 2012

“I think this case should have been solved one or two years earlier," Rossmo said, "but we dropped the ball."

Cameron Ward

He agreed during cross-examination by lawyer Cameron Ward that if a judge's daughter had gone missing, it would have attracted more media attention and pressure from politicians to solve the case.

Wednesday, January 25, 2012

Aunt Hortense's  (Margaret Murray) funeral garb is enlivened by Hyrangea aspera var. Villosa, a relative of the much-scorned mopheads.

Come February, even if the days may be rainy and cold that’s when I take out my plant books and look to see what I may want to acquire for another new season in the garden.


Very few who may read this blog might know that for some years I wrote a garden column for Western Living Magazine or that I occasionally reviewed garden books for the Georgia Straight. I am going to place here one that is most relevant at this time of the year although there have been some significant changes in the gardening world of our city of Vancouver since I wrote this in August 1997.

If you go to garden clubs you will find that most there are old. There are few young faces. Vancouver used to have many nurseries with huge stocks of the latest plants. The nurseries are fewer and many nursery owners are unable to sell their property while the going is not all that bad, as it gets worse and worse.

Perhaps it’s because young couples are now buying and living in a condos. Perhaps it’s the idea of having a no maintenance garden. A nearby neighbour has installed a concrete garden in which the only maintenance needed is a yearly pressure washing to remove unsightly green moss.

Rosemary and I still have that garden bug so we are looking through catalogues in anticipation of spring.

Since I wrote that Straight book review we have at least 35 different hydrangeas and about 80 old and English Roses. I will add to the piece below scans of some English roses and hydrangeas plus the original picture of my friend Margaret Murray in my garden.



English Roses, Hydrangeas Awaken Gardener’s Lust

David Austin’s English Roses
By David Austin with photographs by Clay Perry.
Conran Octopus, 160pp $34.99

Hydrangeas: A Gardeners’ Guide
By Toni Lawson-Hill & Brian Rothera
Timber Press, 16pp $49.95

By Alex Waterhouse-Hayward


Although Vancouver rosarians may not have funny handshakes, they do have their secrets. Members of the Vancouver Rose Society order their roses in July, have them delivered in the fall, and plant them in November. Come spring, roses and perennials planted the previous season will have successfully jumped the gun. Nurseries generally put their plant stock on sale in the waning days of summer – another reason to do as rosarians do. And buying plants now may just be what you want to do when you read David Austin’s English Roses and Hydrangeas: A Gardeners’ Guide.


Until recently, rose fandom was evenly divided between two camps. There were those who liked the sweetly scented, disease-resistant, but once-blooming old roses (many with the names of long-dead French women, more difficult to pronounce that botanical Latin) and those who preferred the repeat-flowering (remontant is the technical term) but higher-maintenance hybrid teas and floribundas – the moderns. Then in the 50s, English plantsman Austin started tinkering with old and modern roses in his Shropshire nursery to see if he could combine their most positive features.

Rosa 'Fair Bianca'

His first success, Rosa 'Constance Spry' ( Rosa ‘Belle Isis’ x Rosa ‘Dainty Maid’), in 1961was the beginning of a line of almost 100 beautifully shaped and wonderfully scented roses, named after Shakespearean characters (Sweet Juliet), English writers (Jane Austen), saints (St. Swithun), and horticulturalists (Gertrude Jekyll) or graced with such odd as Financial Times Centenary. You would think that this relatively new class of roses would have helped patch up the long-standing differences between those old-rose buffs who cite the ancient tradition of the Gallica roses grown by the Romans, and the modernists whose idea of a rose is a perfect, huge (sometimes scentless) hybrid tea. But despite the almost three decades of success of his roses, Austin is still perceived as the new kid on the block and his roses are considered, by some, those newfangled English ones with the funny names.

If roses are just plants you want to savour in other people’s gardens, Austin’s book offers and intimate history of the rose, with photographs so real you can imagine the blooms’ smell. Even those who garden and might want to try roses, this book offers plenty of practical, easy-to-understand advice from a master, including tips on that bête noire of the novice gardener, pruning. If after reading David Austin’s English Roses you absolutely must have Fair Bianca so as to smell the white licorice/lemon-scented blooms, and the local nurseries are out, try the Brentwood Bay Nursery, near Victoria. They stock most of the English Roses and will ship before November.

While I don’t need an excuse to place the exquisite Austin book on my coffee table, why would I spend $15 more for a book on hydrangeas? And why would the two men who built the National Hydrangea Collection in Windermere, Cumbria, choose to write it? After all, we know that hydrangeas, aka mopheads, aka hortensias, are boring. Or are they?

The problem is partly one of perception. There seems to be a collective consciusness associating mopheads with Hortense, everyone’s spinster great-aunt (when “spinster” was acceptable vocabulary and wearing black meant someone had died).

That’s a shame, because Lawson-Hall and Rothera enthusiastically explain that in the 13-species Hydrangea genus only two, arborescens and macrophylla, contain mopheads. Yet some macrophylla species, like Hydrangea macrophylla ‘Mariesii’, are among the loveliest lace-caps around. Perhaps the real reason for the relative unpopularity of hydrangeas (only in Vancouver, as there is a growing interest in them worldwide, judging by the innumerable articles in recent garden magazines) is that plant snobbishness dictates that desirable “specimen” plants be hard to find, expensive, difficult to grow, and disease-prone. The very opposite would define most hydrangeas.

Hydrangea macrophylla 'Ayesha'

If you’re like me, after reading these books you will want to explore the rose garden and the hydrangea bed at the VanDusen Botanical Garden. You will smell the English Roses and look for the climbing Hydrangea anomala ssp. petiolaris, the gigantic and primitive looking (the leaves are as raspy as a shark’s skin) Hydrangea aspera ssp. sargentiana. Perhaps you’ll also do what I did. I searched until I found the ultimat mophead, Hydrangea macrophylla ‘Ayesha’, and bouth her – after all, she looks pretty good. She’s next to my Hydrangea serratifolia, a rare climber from Chile and Argentina. She’s slow to get established and it may be five or six years before I see her yellow flowers. How’s that you plant snobs?

Tuesday, January 24, 2012





For many years I could not figure out who Bill Richardson was. In fact I simply did not like him when I heard him on the radio. Then the CBC hired me to photograph him at a Tupperware party that included a baby called Hayley Turner who was 16 months old. I have no recollection of the date. But Richardson had quite a time attempting to make Hayley react for my camera. My guess is that you can know your Lucias, Manricos, Brunhildes, handle dogs, write wonderful plays, write books about beds and breakfasts, create one of the best ever CBC radio shows in my memory, Bunny Watson, but he cannot handle babies.


Then Richardson became just about my favourite person in Vancouver.

It happened at a Western Magazine Awards function in which he was master of ceremonies. One particular writer whose name I will simply say was D kept winning all the awards. After each award the writer would make a speech. When it came to get the big award of the night D won it and spoke for a long time acknowledging both mother and, Martin Heidegger several times. At that point if my rubber chicken dinner had included stuffed eggs or ripe tomatoes I would have thrown them at D.


There was a door prize which was a weekend at the Empress Hotel in Victoria, all expenses paid. D won the prize!

Richardson gave D the envelope and said very clearly and quite loudly, “Congratulations D and I hope your butt falls off.” From then on Bill Richardson was my hero.

My wife Rosemary and I knew that we would have a great time tonight at the opening of Bill Richardson and Veda Hille’s Do You Want What I Have Got? A Craiglist Cantata. Hille, is  a wonderful composer, singer who can play a mean piano while standing and write music for a carpenter’s saw.

The musical play opened at the Arts Club’s Revue Stage on Granville Island and is the Arts Club’s participation in this year’s Push Festival.

I knew we were in for a pleasant evening because I was able to count with the fingers of one hand the times Push Festival’s dour Executive Director, Norman Armour smiled while making his shortish speech.

Of the musical I can assure you that the six performers, J. Cameron Barnett (he plays a mean tenor sax and meows a mean cat), Dmitry Chepovetsky (can grow twice the size at will), Bree Greig (plays a mean flute, can alternately use a hair brush as a mike or as a hairbrush, and enjoys smelling young men in buses), Veda Hille (plays a mean piano even sitting down) Selina Martin (a cat lady, and hat lady, to end all cat ladies and hat ladies, plays a mean saw) and Barry Mirochnick (whose beautiful hair made me ponder my now firmly established sexual proclivity) can all sing, dance, act and do just about anything else with aplomb.


The musical is cute, it is funny, it is relevant to the times (I wonder if anybody will understand it 20 years hence but then I will not be around to find out) and the songs are all catchy and, in spite of some here and there small obscenities (it is pink! it is pink!) it is in perfectly good taste. In short it is a funny musical.

But this man, who was born south down Argentine way and can dance a reputable tango noticed the extreme pathos of  Do You Want What I Have Got? A Craiglist Cantata.

I am sure that the presence tonight of those just about extinct newspaper editors (the Vancouver Sun has not had one for a while) or managing editors (the Vancouver Sun has not had one for a long while) would have found nothing to laugh about, particularly anything connected with Craig Newmark.

But for me there was much more in this musical. It seemed that all the lively songs were about lonely people, living in abject anonymity that wanted to be noticed and perceived as human beings. They were the ones wearing the pink hat, jogging sans shirt at the lakeshore or tapping with angst at their laptops at Starbucks. In a world of fame, instant fame, viral blogs and viral Youtube, they wanted to seen, not just virtually, in a world of mediocre and gutless thumb up facebook tags.


Kudos to the play’s, and the Art Club Theatre's resident  dramaturg, Rachel Ditor, who must have made countless journeys as a go-between Richardson and Hille and the director Amiel Gladstone. Ditor enthusiastically informed me this was a play not to be missed. She was right. But she didn’t warn me to bring a hanky. This is a funny musical that made me want to cry.

If at this point you ask yourself, what the heck is a dramaturg you are in good company. I happened to see Vicki Gabereau with Fanny Kieffer before the show started. I asked Kiefer if she knew what a dramaturg was or did. She answered, " I don't know and consider that I studied drama in ...." I told her to ask Gabareau whose intial reply started with an obscenity, " .... if I know," but then did reveal a good idea of what a dramaturge (Gabareau inserted that optional and usually more common e) does and is. If you want to find out what a dramaturg is and does, you might find out soon. I suggested to Kieffer that she might want to invite Ditor to her Shaw TV show and get the definition from the horse's mouth.

This daily blog which I began in January 1996 is based on Bill Richardson's concept for his CBC Radio show Bunny Watson.

Do You Want What I have Got? A Craiglist Cantata - January 19 until February 11, 2012 at the Granville Island Review Stage.

Monday, January 23, 2012

Every time I pass the Hongkong Bank building on Georgia and Hornby I think of many things including a big hole, Henry J cars, Gary Taylor's Bradley's, Henry John Kaiser, his grandson Edgar F. Kaiser Jr., French fries and a Giorgio de Chirico painting that went up in flames.

For me it all started outside the American School on Freire in Buenos Aires in 1951My mother taught there and I walked a few more blocks down the street to the American Grammar School. Parked in front on Freire, one of the students had brought his brand new Henry J. It was a smallish car with unusual fins and it was painted in a bright middle blue. I had never seen a car that colour and that shape.



The car was the brainchild of Henry John Kaiser and Joseph Frazer. Kenry J Kaiser, an American had moved to our Vancouver in 1912 and had started the Henry J. Kaiser Company Ltd in 1914 which built the first concrete paved roads in Cuba. During the war Henry Kaiser had innovated the rapid construction of modular-built ships (using car assembly line procedures) which became the famous Liberty Ships (the later ones were called Victory Ships. One Liberty Ship was built in four and a half days. These ships transported, as an example, thousands of Sherman tanks as fast as the Germans destroyed them. Henry J Kaiser's son, Edgar F. Kaiser continued with the family tradition (he supervized the building of Liberty and Victory Ships in Vancouver) and had a reputation of pushing his employees to their limits.

It was in the late 80s that I first met Edgar Kaiser's son, Edgar J. Kaiser Jr. I was to photograph him many times. I quickly found out that he spoke a perfect Argentine Spanish. The reason was that he was in charge of the Kaiser car production in Brazil in Argentina and Brazil which made cars into the late 1960s after the company had stopped production in the US in 1955.

I remember vividly the Kaisers in Buenos Aires as they were extremely large cars in comparison to the smallish Peugeots, Renaults, Austins and Fiats that were more economically priced.



To me those Kaisers were beautiful with a curvy windshield and curvy side windows that reminded me of art deco structures like the American Chrysler Building. Only a few years ago when I photographed my favourite military airplane, a Grumman A-6 Intruder at the Pensacola Naval Air Museum did I finally notice the resemblance between car and plane.



The hole (if you notice on the top right of it, you will read Bradley's which was Gary Taylor's last venture in the entertainment business) preceded the building of the main branch of the Bank of BC. Its CEO was Edgar Kaiser Jr. When I photographed him with the model of the building which then became the HSBC bank he shouted at the underlings that told him that the architects had decided on a particular colour for the building's glass.



I remember him saying something like, "I don't care what they say, this is my building and I will decide on the colour of the window glass." I never found out if he indeed prevail with his choice.

On a previous occasion I photographed him for Equity Magazine. We used a beautiful chess set as a prop. I conciously cropped out of my camera's viefinder a beautiful Giorgio de Chirico painting (in the photograph you can get a hint of the bottom frame). Years later when I photographed Kaiser who was backing a venture that proposed installing French fry vending machines in airports, etc I asked him about the de Chirico. Kaiser's house had gone up in flames a few years before. He looked at me sadly and told me it was gone as well as most of his extensive (one of Canada's largest) art collection.


Articles had appeared at the time on the French fry venture that reported that the machines had a tendency to catch fire and also stank of cooking oil. There is no way that Mr. Kaiser will pose with chips for you, his publicist told me." I showed up the morning of the shoot and had a nice chat in Spanish with Kaiser and asked him if he would pose with product. Without any hesitation he sent the publicist to buy some chips at MacDonald's and then we filled an empty Spud Stop container and I took my shot.

Sunday, January 22, 2012

Teresa Wilms Montt

For some years I could not figure out the Spanish fact that Charles V preceded Charles II. It is only a bit later in my life that I figured it out. Charles I of Spain became Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor.

There is an apocryphal story about the multi-lingual Charles (the emperor Charles). The version that I heard came from my Spanish grandmother. Charles V was asked which of all the languages he spoke,  was his favourite. His answer was, “It depends. In matters of diplomacy I use French, for business I like English, for making love it’s Italian.  I pray and talk to God in Spanish.  I shout at my horse in German.”

Shortly after the Beatles became popular I found that the German versions of Beatles songs, and German rock’ roll off-putting. I felt the same about Mexican Cesar Costa singing roquenrol. But rock’ roll in French and Italian seemed fine to me.

Last week I went to the Pacific Cinematheque to see a Chilean film.

Some years ago there was a venerable rosarian in our Vancouver Rose Society. His name was Dennis Yeomans. He was an Englishman who had been born in Chile. He corrected my pronunciation. Chilean is to be pronounced Chílleean (with emphasis on the i). So you now know.

I was invited by that Red Riding Hood of a near past who also happens to hail from Chile. Her name is C Valparaiso. The Cinematheque was full of Chileans with a smattering of folks whose first language was English. I was careful with my wallet as we Argentines, when robbed in a bus, will immediately know that the offending thief has to be a Chilean. Strangely enough, Chileans in buses, back in their country, think thieves are all Argentines. But, "al fondo" we are friends!

We share a language and a similar way of life. While Jorge Luís Borges is famous around the world and to some degree so is Julio Cortázar,  Chileans, to their credit, can cite poet Pablo Neruda and Isabel Allende. And now they can even boast of Roberto Bolaño. But it is still quite a shame as both countries have a rich literature that should be better known.

The film in question was Teresa (2008) directed by Tatiana Gaviola. It was an account of the life of Chilean poet Teresa Wilms Montt, 1893-1922.

As the film rolled I had many thoughts. One was that the film was a dramón ( a Spanish word for an over-the-top performance in such stuff as telenovelas).

Then there were the many quite erotic bed scenes. Such stuff is now quite a bit more explicit. The scenes in Teresa lacked that soft focus but had a look that was so much in vogue perhaps 20 years ago. I found them nostalgic in some way. I think I appreciated that lack of explicitness.

There was little in the film that really exploited the fact that Wilms Montt was an avant-garde proto-feminist languishing and suffering in a terribly conservative society. There is a moment in the film where she tells a Chilean politician, “We women should be allowed to vote.”

It seemed to me that Wilms Montt, the protagonist of the film, had one big flaw which was her ability to quickly remove her underwear at the least provocation.

Some facts were sort of twisted. She fled to New York and the film’s version of the story is that her jealous and extremely vindictive husband reported her to the authorities so that she was accused of being a German spy and deported to Spain. Other accounts have her going to New York to volunteer as a nurse for the trenches of WW-I.



What is absolutely true, and the film shows it well, is that after her first infidelity (with her husband’s brother) she is banished to a nunnery which was more like an insane asylum/prison. She was helped to escape by a famous poet Vicente Huidobro (my grandmother would say, “Only his family knows who he is,” and this is patently unfair a statement in connection to the poet). But Wilms Montt was prevented from ever seeing her two daughters. She managed to see them later in Paris shortly before she committed suicide.

A dramón? Yes!

But there is something else that I thought about as I watched Teresa. The language of the film was poetic, the landscapes of Chile sublime. In a sense many a word in Spanish is a poem just as is. Consider ojalá (I hope, and its origin is Arab) or alcaucil for artichoke. Or susurrar for whisper.

When the actors were not speaking there was a beautiful voiceover. I soon caught on that these words were Wilms Montt poems. There was no way that the subtitles could possibly convey the richness of her passion and love of language. I felt sorry for the Anglos in the audience.

The most wonderful moment happens when her lover a young Spanish doctor, whom Wilms Montt calls Anuarí, proposes marriage and she rejects him. He comes close to her with a knife, holds on to her and stabs himself and dies on the spot. The voiceover (I will not translate it!) is like this:

Apareciste Anuarí, cuando yo con mis ojos ciegos y las manos tendidas te buscaba.
Apareciste, y hubo en mi alma un estallido de vida. Se abrieron todas mis flores interiores,
y cantó el ave de los días festivos.


Me amaste, Anuarí, y alcanzé la Gloria suspendida en tus brazos. Desapareciste, y quedé sola, los ojos naúfragos en noche de lágrimas. Bondadosa ha vuelto tu sombra, entre ella y el sepulcro espera una hora mi alma.


My only consolation to any who might be reading this is that Shakespeare in Spanish, as good as translations can be, cannot match the original ring of the language, English.  Those Anglos in the audience of the Cinematheque need not have been jealous. As for me I see lots of Chilean literature in my future.

As I left the Cinematheque, in a hurry to look up all I could find on Teresa Wilms Montt, I understood, more than ever the limitations of only speaking one language.