Saturday, March 17, 2012


In the last few days I have seen it attempt to snow from my living room window as I sit to write my blog. My computer and monitor sit on a desk that overlooks the garden. I can see the flakes gently fall and I have a memory of having seen something like this. It jars my memory until I recollect.  In a rush, I run down to my basement photographic files and look under Katheryn Petersen. I find the pictures I am looking for. One of them (the last one) is a rare b+w instant Polaroid slide. The pictures fit what I see from my window and a poem I first heard in class back in 1963.


Desert Places

Snow falling and night falling fast, oh, fast
In a field I looked into going past,
And the ground almost covered smooth in snow,
But a few weeds and stubble showing last.

The woods around it have it -- it is theirs.
All animals are smothered in their lairs.
I am too absent-spirited to count;
The loneliness includes me unawares.

And lonely as it is that loneliness
Will be more lonely ere it will be less --
A blanker whiteness of benighted snow
With no expression, nothing to express.



They cannot scare me with their empty spaces
Between stars -- on stars where no human race is.
I have it in me so much nearer home
To scare myself with my own desert places.

Robert Frost, A Further Range (1936).

Friday, March 16, 2012

Lauren Elizabeth Stewart in a perfect Alex face.

Our trip to La Conner began well on Thursday. I kept my mouth shut most of the time and did not tease either of my granddaughters, Lauren and Rebecca.



But on Friday, when the sun came out in an almost empty but not quite desolate La Conner I lost it. By the time we visited the Quilt and Textile Museum in the beautiful Victorian Gaches Mansion both my daughters were moping with what in my family used to be called the Alex face. Rebecca refused to pose for me and Lauren did so under duress as you can especially see by the first picture.




I drove back to Vancouver with regrets knowing that if my memory served me well, I would find pictures of both the girls' mother and aunt (my daughters) which I had taken back in the same place, the Gaches Mansion, in 1988. The photos are lovely as you can see here. Would I be able to return some day with Lauren and Rebecca once recriminations were forgotten? Only time will tell. My regrets are bitter at the opportunities lost. But then I sometimes think that my perceived talents as a good photographer are taken much for granted by my family.

Thursday, March 15, 2012




Today Thursday, Rosemary, Hilary, Lauren, Rebecca and I have driven to La Conner, Washington. In La Conner we visited the La Conner Quilt and Textile Museum in the historic Gaches Mansion on 2nd Street. I had a little light turn inside my head. I was convinced that I had been there before. Sure enough when we returned on Friday evening I found in my files: Ale & Hilary, La Conner -1988.




In those days my photography was still not something that was taken for granted by my family and Rosemary had made the effort to make sure that our daughters had the right dresses should I want to photograph them. Looking at these pictures I can see the problems of not having taken any kind of portable flash system. I had to expose for the faces of my daughters when in deep shade with a bright backlight. Some of these negatives (most except for a couple) taken with my Mamiya RB with a 6x7cm negative, would be just about impossible to correctly print on photographic paper in the darkroom. But the shadow/highlight tool from my Photoshop has done a pretty good job of bringing down the contrast. With these digital files I could get some pleasant giclées.



These photographs are a stark contrast to the ones I took of Lauren (Rebecca refused to have her picture taken) with my iPhone and a couple of Nikons. I will post them soon. I particularly appreciate more than ever how Rosemary made sure our daughters looked just right at the Gaches Mansion.






 
 



 
 

Wednesday, March 14, 2012

My Mother's Red Shawl - El Rebozo Colorado
David Baines - Columnist, Vancouver Sun







Because I investigate crime, albeit white-collar crime, people often ask whether I feel at risk. The answer is yes, but the risk is entirely legal. Physically, the street is quite benign. The reporters at real risk are those who work in countries where anarchy prevails, and right now, anarchy prevails in Mexico. So when Alex offered me this red Mexican shawl, I couldn't help but think of the dozen Mexican journalists who were murdered last year, nearly all targeted, many decapitated. Mexico is now the most dangerous place in the world for reporters, more dangerous than Somalia or Afghanistan or Iraq or any of those other places where summary executions, rather than libel suits, are used to muzzle reporters. I don't know where it will all end, and I don't think they know, either. Yet they persist, which is a pretty amazing thing.


Alex Waterhouse-Hayward
Lauren Elizabeth Stewart
Sandrine Cassini
Meredith Kalaman
Juliya Kate

Tuesday, March 13, 2012



For a while in 1987 I had an exciting job (invented by the admirably visionary Vancouver Magazine Editor Malcolm Parry who understood that the position of photo editor would be important to magazines in a near future). I was named Director of Photography. The magazine had no art director at the time and Parry could not find one willing to do the tough job. So he did most of it himself and left me with the job of looking for good photographers and illustrators while stressing that I should not give up my tasks as his photographer of choice for his magazine.

Hot Shots -the West End

The September 1987 issue became my best issue as a contributor as writer, photographer and director of photography.

In the latter job I had to recruit local photographers to shoot pictures of Vancouver with the mandate that they should wow much like the pictures of the National Geographic. The project was named Hot Shots. We picked local landmarks and found creative ways of shooting them. I took two of the pictures and had the cover which consisted of my using a 1000mm Minolta lens and camera to photograph a photographer standing on the Woodward’s sign. For two of the other shots I discovered I was not afraid of heights or ever suffered vertigo. I climbed the flag pole on top of the BC Hydro Building and took pictures of a worker a few seconds after the horns were quiet. I would have fallen off the pole had he not warned me how loud they were. As it was, I was hanging from the pole with one hand while taking pictures with a Pentax fitted with a 20mm wide angle to take the shot. The shot to represent the West End was special for me as it introduced me to model Katheryn Petersen whom I was going to photograph for many years. By her side was my Time Magazine cover of Ben Johnson and William Gibson's Neuromancer.

I took it from one of the windows of the old Vancouver Sun building on West Pender. The third task, as a writer, was the first ever essay/profile on writer William Gibson. It was here where my wonderful world came crashing.

Oh Canada! from the BC Hydro Building

By the time I had submitted the essay Parry had hired an art director that I had recommended. This art director did two things. He told me that since I was a photographer writing a piece on a writer it would be fun to hire someone else to take the picture. The resulting photograph was neither here nor there (I can not opine here objectively). Secondly he told me that my position was history.

All the above rushed to my head last Tuesday at Focal Point. I was teaching there and in one of the rest periods an old man came to the office. He had pig with wings on his lapel. He told me about it and how he had been a flier. We began to talk airplanes and I asked him what you called a Texan trainer in Canada. “That’s a Harvard!” From there we went to flying esoterica. He topped it when he told me that in the mid 50s he had designed a heating system for the Lancaster Bomber. He explained that this WWII vintage plane had been purchased by the Canadian Forces and used for reconnaissance and anti-submarine warfare.

I asked his name. He answered, “Tony Swain.” I knew we had Malcolm Parry in common. It was Parry who for that September 1987 issue of Vancouver Magazine had dispatched me to the Delta Airport to find a man who would fly me in a Harvard to photograph a flying acrobatic team, The Ray-Ban Specials flying upside down (some of them) through the Lions in North Vancouver. The man had also flown the airplane upside down, but fortunately I had taken the precaution of gulping down many Gravols. The man had been Tony Swain!

Tony Swain at Focal Point

There was another element in That September issue that again proved Parry’s visionary genius as the article that you see below by a then unknown Douglas Coupland proves quite nicely.

Illustration Ross MacDonald/Reactor

Monday, March 12, 2012

Michelle Porter

A random look into my photo files brought me to one I had no memory of. It was Porter, Michelle – theatre director. Inside I found b+w negatives of a very young woman. There was also a tear sheet from the Georgia Straight, October 1-8, 1998 which was an interview with Porter by theatre critic Colin Thomas. The interview was about a forthcoming production of The Life of Galileo by Bertolt Brecht at the Vancouver East Cultural Centre.

Thomas’s piece has an interesting first paragraph, particularly, if seen from the context of the disappearance of the Vancouver Playhouse Theatre:

Director Michelle Porter went to UBC on a physics scholarship; at the end of high school, her marks on the provincial-government math and physics exams were in the top two percent. But when Porter got to university, she went into theatre. So it makes sense that she is directing Bertolt Brecht’s The Life of Galileo; the play argues passionately for the important and thrilling nature of pure research, but it also argues for placing science in a moral context – the kind of context the arts provide, the kind of context science in our culture increasingly lacks.

Further reading of the essay helped me connect the dots to my own past. My parents, for reasons that only now I begin to understand took me to see translation of this play into Spanish in Buenos Aires when I was 8 or 9. It was a theatre-in-the-round type of production which was called Galileo – Galilei. I have no idea which version this might have been as Brecht wrote various adaptations of his original. One in particular, in which he worked in tandem with Charles Laughton, seems to be the most popular.

Of the play I remember the elaborate costumes, the round stage and a telescope – nothing more.

With Rosemary I go to many plays in Vancouver and we rarely see children, teenagers or young adults. Much the same is the situation at the Vancouver Opera and in dance performances that are not well promoted Ballet BC matinees.

During this protracted labour confrontation between our BC’s teachers and the provincial government I have seen extra curricular activities at my granddaughters’ schools all but disappear. My oldest, Rebecca was all ready for a formal dance last year and had even purchased a vintage black dress when the dance was cancelled.

But I have noticed that Eric Hamber Secondary School where one of Rebecca’s friends attends and is part of the theatre program, that the program has been active, nonetheless. Rebecca even attended a production at Eric Hamber with her friend.

I cannot write here how many times I have been in a local theatre like the Stanley where persons (youngish to middle age) near me have commented, “This is an interesting looking place. I had not been here since it was a movie house.”

That comment brings to mind one I heard over CBC Radio some 15 years ago when writer/actor/composer John MacLachlan Gray, who at the time had an executive position in the Canada Council uttered something like, “I have not been to the Vancouver Art Gallery since Luke Rombout was its director.” I found it astonishing that Gray had not been curious enough to visit his city’s premier art gallery for so many years.

In my efforts to steep my granddaughters into an appreciation of the arts, I began when Rebecca, now 14, was 4; I made the mistake of using the word culture. I told my daughter and son-in-law that I wanted to take the girls to cultural performances. The word culture soon became anathema and Rebecca would tell me, with a high level of anger, “I don’t want to go to anything that has to do with culture.”

Things improved when I stopped using the word and tricked the girls into going to see stuff that involved funny names or unusual music with unusual instruments. They went along for a long while until suddenly as, childhood shifts into the teenage dark ages, baroque music, dance of any kind, and even theatre and musicals became some sort of lofty form of entertainment that had no bearing with facebook and the more relevant culture of text-on-a-device.

But as I wait for the current dark ages of my granddaughter shift to some sort of renaissance I believe that her friend at Eric Hamber is meanwhile growing up to an appreciation of theatre even if the word culture is not cited. I can only hope that all the theatre, dance, music and visual arts that Rebecca and Lauren have been exposed to will leave a germ of a mark in them that like a moss spore will waken to life and thrive.

And so with the demise of the Playhouse and the unhealthy financial situation of most of our local arts organizations I keep wondering when parents of our children will understand that a “cultural subversive activity” has to be integrated into their education. This involves taking those children often to these events until they become not unusual but normal. Normal, but at the same time a necessity, like bread and butter (unless you are a celiac like one of my granddaughter’s grandmothers). The reward will be threefold. The aging audiences of Vancouver’s theatre, opera, and dance community will be rejuvenated, seats will be occupied, helping the organizations approach that in-the-black Mecca and children will grow up appreciating the values inherent to the arts.

It would be nice if I could tell my parents now that their experiment in taking me to that play so long ago bore fruit. All I can do is to continue with my cultural subversive activity!

As an example I might just invite Rebecca to a play (I will say it is hilariously funny) that features that neat and funny guy from the A&W commercials. I will not tell her that it is Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest with Ryan Beil (I will not tell her that it also includes Simon Bradbury, Charlie Gallant, Allan Gray, Amber Lewis, Ella Simon, Deborah Williams, Allan Zinyk or that it is directed by David Mackay and that it is an Arts Club Theatre production at the Stanley. I used the same tack to convince her to see last year's production of Billy Bishop Goes to War with Ryan Beil. This trick might just work twice.

Sunday, March 11, 2012



Jellybean Beaudine, Pino Rogeletti, Art Bergmann, Ray Condo & Bud Luxford

As a photographer I have always considered that there are two main classifications for it. Of that I have written here. The idea, that photography can either be active or reactive, has made me think of late that I can transfer that theory of mine to that of how we in Vancouver react to bad news.

We took for granted the Georgia Medical Dental Building, the first and second renditions of the Hotel Vancouver, Eaton’s and a few more that we blasted into smithereens. They went down without much of a fuss and they are all forgotten. We have by now forgotten the existence of  the excellent CBC Vancouver Orchestra. The same will happen when the wrecking ball takes down the newer version of Eaton’s/Sears. It will be forgotten, too, if not for its beauty but for its perceived ugliness and without any consideration of its possible value as a really good shell and a truly excellent space for the Vancouver Art Gallery.

We treasure the Park Theatre on Cambie and some of my friends have told me how in their infancy they saw this or that film in it. When the Park goes, and it is inevitable that it will, there will be no peep except for the numerous reactive posts on facebook and a couple of articles in the Vancouver Sun and the Courier on, “Alas! Another Vancouver treasured landmark is no more.”

That is precisely what has happened in the last week. Predictably those on facebook, a Mecca of predictable uniformity, have noted a pattern of three in the demise within a week of the Vancouver Playhouse Theatre Company (not to be confused to the still standing but mostly ignored poor sister, or is it brother, of the Queen Elizabeth Theatre), the chain of Book Warehouses (technically not a demise of the usual sort but more a purposely self-inflicted one) and the eventual destruction of that most ugly structure of concrete and R-bar which is The Ridge Cinema.

Protesters have reactively complained about our boring Vancouver and how this is a cultural shock on our culture. They complain that a few tourists might opt for other better cultural beacons as our city fades into the small town small mindedness of whence it came. Then after a few days of this they might return to the latest postings of the latest hyper-viral (first coined it would seem by the folks at CNN) video-a-la-Kony.

Soon the Playhouse will be forgotten as will the Ridge and The Book Warehouse. Kindles will be snapped up and orders to Amazon.ca will resume.

The problem, as I perceive it from this West-Side-Mecca-of-Culture that is Kerrisdale, is that we in Vancouver complain after the fact, but do nothing even when the soon-to-die body begins to show no brain action on the oscilloscope.

I smile at the perceived passion of a picture of a local playwright (hint, she is a woman) writing her latest play on the sidewalk of the Vancouver Playhouse (the building) who has the intention on stopping somewhere either at City Hall or the CBC. If our city is the city that I think it is she will be soon arrested for loitering or for defacing city property – culture be damned.

In 1980 when our city was supposed to be even more boring, alternative rock promoter impresario Bud Luxford (black sheep brother of one the VAG’s most prestigious curators) released a record partially funded by a Grant McDonagh (who had made a fortune smuggling Zulu spears into Canada). The record Bud Laxford Presents included a song by one Pino Rogeletti and the IUDs called Where Have all the Flowers Gone. The song more or less accurate in music had lyrics that Pete Seeger would have disavowed but perhaps have agreed on. Seeger’s lyrics were like this:


Where have all the young men gone?
Long time passing
Where have all the young men gone?
Long time ago
Where have all the young men gone?
Gone for soldiers every one
When will they ever learn?
When will they ever learn?

Rogeletti’s had some differences like this one:

Where has Zippy Pinhead gone?
Long time passing
Where has Zippy Pinhead gone?
Long time ago
Where has Zippy Pinhead gone?
Gone to Yellowknife to be a cunt.
When will he ever learn?
When will he ever learn?

At the end of this fine punked up song Pino says his goodbyes and adds a startling if obvious recommendation:

“To all those starving children in underprivileged nations of the third world I say to them, ‘Eat, eat,’ and all will be well with you.”

Not too long ago, perhaps even as recently as two or three years ago, our ex Premier, Mike Harcourt pointed out publically at a lecture that I was privy to listen to at Simon Fraser University’s downtown campus, that “The problem of homelessness can be solved by building homes.”

Both suggestions, the one by Pino Rogeletti and that of Mike Harcourt have that element of forceful activity not to be seen by any of most of our fair city’s inhabitants. They know how to complain. They know how to link to media publications that state the problem or mention the demise of the various cultural institutions to be grieved. But I am sorry to say, they are unable to actively pursue any activity that might address the problem and solve it.

You might ask what it is that I do. When possible I go to the theatre and to the movies (avoiding when possible the multiplexes) and to dance performances and to concerts and to opera. I pay senior citizen rates (I am one as is my wife) and I take my daughter and granddaughters.

This pays for and occupies seats. Seats, the occupied kind, are the ones that keep arts organizations solvent. Harcourt, Rogeletti would both agree on the plan.

Sharman King ,unidentified admirer & a most appropriate book title

I must point out here, with an element of reservaion, that I no longer buy books or read them on any Kindle. I happily spend my time at our city's excellent public library. But I do support one third of the Book Warehouse's owners. I go to as many performances of the Vancouver Opera Orchestra and The Turning Point Ensemble. By occupying seats I support the salary of the very excellent bass horn and trombone player Sharman King.  He, his wife Diana King, and Tommy Banks are the ones who are closing one of our city's cultural institutions that we will soon learn to forget. We have a lot of practice in this.