Saturday, July 14, 2012

My Mother's Red Shawl - El Rebozo Colorado
Decker - Cat & Nick Hunt - 19th Century Amateur



Cat Talk


Call me Decker. Here I am ensconced on my person’s lap (Nicholas Hunt). My companion Black and a small female princess cat, Mitts, live here with me in considerable comfort and style.

Our people (staff) do our bidding and accommodate us on the club chairs, couches, and their laps. They feed us canned cat food which is pretty good although frankly not much of a variety. We really prefer our meat warm and wiggling. We have a very happy hunting ground right behind the blackberries; some days we score 3 or 4 bunnies each and our people applaud, though less enthusiastically I’ve noticed, if the bunnies are deposited on the rug in the living room. When I’ve killed I yowl; they know instantly that it’s the kill yowl and day or night they leap up to stop me from bringing in the poor bleeding creature. We eat everything except the tail and spleen. When I’ve had my fill I saunter away and leave the rest for the other cats.

I know that I am the favourite because when I call and caterwaul for fresh food, it’s done right away. Kibbles get dry so quickly and I do not like them dry. If I am late for breakfast I know it will be kept for me. Once I even had it presented al fresco when I was lounging in the garden. I know how to arrange myself decorously in line of sight, know that my people will notice and smile and say lovingly, “look at that cat!”



George Bowering Poet
Celia Duthie Gallerist
Linda Lorenzo Mother
Katheryn Petersen Accordionist
Stefanie Denz Artist
Ivette Hernández Actress
Byron Chief-Moon Actor/Dancer
Colin Horricks Doctor
Ian Mulgrew Vancouver Sun Columnist
Jocelyn Morlock Composer
Corinne McConchie Librarian
Rachel Ditor Dramaturg
Patrick Reid Statesman, Flag Designer
Michael Varga CBC Cameraman
Bronwen Marsden Playwright/Actress/Director
David Baines Vancouver Sun Columnist
Alex Waterhouse-Hayward Photographer
Lauren Elizabeth Stewart Student
Sandrine Cassini Dancer/Choreographer
Meredith Kalaman Dancer/Choreographer
Juliya Kate Dominatrix

Friday, July 13, 2012

My Mother's Red Shawl - El Rebozo Colorado
George Bowering - Poet



Look at That

Look at that photograph. Look at that man in the photograph. Well, there isn’t one. You are looking at a small two-dimensional something. You remember looking at an illustration in a culture magazine and saying to yourself, yes, that is Curnoe. But is it? Isn’t it a magazine illustration of a painting that was painted years ago by Greg Curnoe? So when you look at that photograph of the guy with a red shawl over his shoulder, some sort of imaginative power lets you make him adopt the right size and appear in three dimensions. Again—really? In our three-dimensional world, so-called, we see one side of anything. We get used to ascribing reality to that.

Then we try to represent that reality, to use a verb that Henry James thought would do the job here. Call it realism. Realism, I have thought since I turned twenty-one, is an admission of defeat. Whether a landscape or a kaleidoscape, it is an admission of failure. Sometimes a really likeable one, as in Each Man’s Son.

I have heard of great novels being called the “canon of representation.” But isn’t that kind of poormouthing a created art? The great quartets of Beethoven and Coltrane don’t represent anything (except the body of work managed by those geniuses). I am saying that word “representation” doesn’t properly refer to the art work; it refers to what the artist is doing, not so much on canvas or keyboard as in being oneself, maybe an advocate for presentation. Oh no, not again.

Because the referential act leaves out too much. Do you know what I mean? Too much that we do not want to slip away. I want to make it all cohere, like a fuzzy magnet. I am impatient with reference, with continuity, with unity, with the final coming to rest. Morse Peckham called his version of impatience a rage for chaos. I don’t think there is any such place. I’m the witch of And/Or.

Thus I have never been able to understand all those Canadian poets and fiction writers and especially professor anthologists who want to trace our literature to explorers’ journals. There are so many purposes for setting down words—why assume that frozen John Franklin is a model for you or me?

All right, I have strayed from that image of the old poet with the red rebozo over his shoulder. The photograph is by Alex Quarterhorse-Haywire or someone like that. What I have almost been saying is that I want to write fiction the way he photographs that rebozo. You see, it is an important item of family material. All my life I just have been offered stories that treat such items as “symbolic.” Not interested. For Alex it is an object that keeps showing up. Its reappearance is as pleasurable and meaningless as the alphabet. I love that. As soon as you start saying things about family heritage and matrilineal blah blah blah I am out of here.

But I should go back and make a little concession. Realism does not have to apologize for being around or for being a downer, as it so often is. Nor do other attempts to convey the real. That shawl looks very real, what with its colour especially, and I might even look convincingly like a Latin American uncle. But I did not feel any rush of recognition when I put it over my shoulder.








Celia Duthie Gallerist
Linda Lorenzo Mother
Katheryn Petersen Accordionist
Stefanie Denz Artist
Ivette Hernández Actress
Byron Chief-Moon Actor/Dancer
Colin Horricks Doctor
Ian Mulgrew Vancouver Sun Columnist
Jocelyn Morlock Composer
Corinne McConchie Librarian
Rachel Ditor Dramaturg
Patrick Reid Statesman, Flag Designer
Michael Varga CBC Cameraman
Bronwen Marsden Playwright/Actress/Director
David Baines Vancouver Sun Columnist
Alex Waterhouse-Hayward Photographer
Lauren Elizabeth Stewart Student
Sandrine Cassini Dancer/Choreographer
Meredith Kalaman Dancer/Choreographer
Juliya Kate Dominatrix

Thursday, July 12, 2012

In 1987 I flew to Mexico City. A friend asked me,” How would you like to photograph the actress María Anna Guzmán who plays Ophelia in a production of Hamlet in Spanish at the University of Mexico?” I rapidly responded, “Yes,”while feeling frustrated that I had only small cameras and no lights so I would have to make do with what I had. Luckily the lights backstage at the UNAM theatre were adequate for my super fast Kodak 5054 TMZ ISO 3200 film.




There is a willow grows aslant a brook
That shows his hoar leaves in the glassy stream.
There with fantastic garlands did she come
Of crowflowers, nettles, daisies, and long purples,
That liberal shepherds give a grosser name,
But our cold maids do “dead men’s fingers” call them.
There, on the pendant boughs her coronet weeds
Clambering to hang, an envious sliver broke,





When down her weedy trophies and herself
Fell in the weeping brook. Her clothes spread wide;
And, mermaid-like, awhile they bore her up:
Which time she chanted snatches of old tunes;
As one incapable of her own distress,
Or like a creature native and indued
Unto that element: but long it could not be
Till that her garments, heavy with their drink,
Pull'd the poor wretch from her melodious lay
To muddy death.

Hamlet - William Shakespeare

Wednesday, July 11, 2012

2001: An Appreciation of Sorts.

Guest Blog
John Lekich






When Alex asked me to comment on Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, I was initially reluctant. The upcoming local screening at The Planetarium will certainly be welcome by movie buffs and nostalgic futurists alike. But what could I possibly add?

Since its initial release in 1968, the film has been widely – and deservedly - praised by a legion of esteemed film critics. Thanks to that brilliant classical score and the kind of bravura filmmaking that reaches all the way back to the silent era for inspiration, its reputation has only grown over the years. No wonder The Moving Arts Film Journal voted it the greatest film of all time as recently as 2010.

Still, my appreciation of Kubrick’s masterpiece goes beyond anything you’ll see on the screen. Thanks to the neurotic coils fixed deep within the heart of HAL 9000, it was one of the first films to make me leery of computers – thereby justifying a lifelong mistrust of machines in general. (The first was an episode of the Twilight Zone entitled From Agnes - With Love and starring the great Wally Cox. But that’s another story.)

If you haven’t seen 2001, I won’t spoil things by going into detail about HAL. (Voiced to monotonous perfection by the classically trained Canadian actor Douglas Rain.) I will simply say that – in the last forty years or so - I have never been able to hear a distorted answering machine without thinking of dear old HAL droning that he is “foolproof and incapable of error.”

Among other things, 2001 is a timely reminder that all forms of mechanized advancement come with a corresponding measure of technological retardation. Recently, I had the eerie pleasure of hearing a synopsis of my novel read by a computer- generated voice. It made HAL sound like Richard Burton reading Dylan Thomas. Thanks to 2001, my skepticism toward such things was already fully primed. And, for that, I will always be eternally grateful.

Author John Lekich is a film critic for the Georgia Straight.


Johnny Tomorrow, The Planetarium - 2001: A Space Odyssey

Bowie2000

Tuesday, July 10, 2012

Guest Blog
Michael Unger
a.k.a Johnny tomorrow

Michael Unger - Johnny Tomorrow With Harold the Zeiss Projector

I am a collection of molecules called Johnny Tomorrow and I am a traveler of time and space. In the summer of 1983 I saw Return of the Jedi in the theatre which became a seminal moment of my childhood, forever establishing my place in the Star Wars Generation. It was a phrase I coined after Neil DeGrasse Tyson extolled on the virtues of the Apollo Generation, young people who witnessed the incredible achievements of the Apollo space missions thus propelling them towards ambitious undertakings that have changed our society. Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, James Cameron, Sally Ride, Richard Branson are just a few among in that club. For my generation though instead of being inspired by actual events rooted in science and exploration, we were inspired by science fiction, movies, music, books, and video games. Even if Star Wars wasn’t really the impetus it was probably some other forms of fictional entertainment that has led us away from the dreams of real space exploration that those of the Apollo generation did. But what Star Wars did for me was set me on my own inner exploration of the cosmos. It planted the idea in my head of distant alien civilizations, and eventually I began seeking out deeper science fiction which led me back to experience something that the Apollo generation would have seen in 1968: Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Going back in time and witnessing the Apollo moon landing doesn’t have the same effect if you know it has already happened, but if you’ve never seen 2001: A Space Odyssey you can come close to that feeling of experiencing space science fiction at it’s greatest. The future wasn’t quite what Kubrick and author Arthur C. Clarke had in mind, we’ve taken a bit of detour, but we need to get back to visions of infinity and beyond.

On July 13 at 8pm the H.R. MacMillan Space Centre will be presenting 2001: A Space Odyssey inside the planetarium theatre. The planetarium also opened in 1968 which makes it an appropriate venue to revisit this 44 year old classic. I also premiered “Johnny Tomorrow and the Way of the Planetarium” for the 2010 Vancouver Fringe Festival in that same theatre. Stay tuned for the next installment The Johnny Tomorrow Chronicles within the next year.


The Ramans do everything in threes

Monday, July 09, 2012

With my looking forward to this Friday’s screening (big screen! great sound!) of 2001: A Space Odyssey, I have been giving much thought to the film’s transition from ape/animal to ape/man. There is that marvelous slow motion sequence where the apes throw up into the air their primitive weapons and…

I have written here a few times about Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s explanation in helping us understand the “sudden” rise of human consciousness. He likens human consciousness (borrowing from the calculus of Newton and Leibniz) the idea of slicing segments (parallel to the base) in ever smaller ones. Ultimately that little circle will become a point in space. It is then that man thought. Eric Fromm and many liberals in the Catholic Church see no conflict (with the bible story) of the idea of apes suddenly arriving at thought. Those with religious views will see the hand of God in the breathing of that consciousness.

I like to use Teilhard de Chardin’s cone explanation for many other such logical conundrums. In my grade 10 religion class with my now mentor and friend, Brother Edwin Reggio, C.S.C. we used to attempt to make him forget about a pop quiz we was supposed to give us or simply waste time by asking questions such as this one. “Is stealing $1000 from a little old lady a mortal sin?” Brother Edwin’s answer was an invariable, “Yes.” Our next question was, “Is stealing a quarter from a little old lady a mortal sin?” The answer was usually (until he caught on), “Now it is a venial sin.”

For those who may not understand the difference, here it is. If you were to die (without either the benefits of absolution in either confession of the extreme unction) right after stealing those $1000 you would go straight to hell. In the case of the quarter St. Peter would make you park for a while in purgatory until you were cleansed with some old-fashioned suffering of which the bible does not elaborate.

For me purgatory would be listening to Erin Burnett on CNN for more than five minutes and hell would be Burnett for ever.

So my question now is when is a young man who likes to photograph undraped women become a dirty old man? This is a personal, immediate question for me that has a lot of relevance.

I teach nude portraiture at Focal Point with some regularity and I am asked what models I may want to have for the classes. Since I am an avowed heterosexual who likes to boast of objectivity I make sure we have both male and female models. When I have to make my choice of female models I do my best to stay away from any model who might be younger than 25. I feel more comfortable with models that are 30 or over. I don’t want to be accused of being a “viejo verde” Spanish for dirty old man.

Some 10 years ago I photographed a health writer in my studio who had never posed undraped before. She had obtained a Brazilian to prove a point (apparently, found out it is not all an esthetic reason the women and now men get the wax jobs). Her point is that God (Teilhard’s) had put hair where our skin is especially sensitive. Removing the sensitivity deadening hair gave women and men more pleasure.

Sometime during the shoot she looked at me in a way that disturbed me and she made the comment that ran something like this,” How would you know anything about this? You are old and sex is behind you.” I was shocked. She did not have to state that sex between consenting old people is a form of pornography.

So again that question that I keep making to myself, “Should I stop teaching these nude classes and stop all photographic activity involving the undraped female figure (regardless of her age)?

All the above is but an overture and an excuse to run here some sexy pictures that will make a writer friend of mine’s day. He is a gentleman, the kind that sends flowers as a thank you for almost any occasion. He dresses like a gentleman and adores cerebral women but disagrees with me that Eva Marie Saint is more beautiful than Grace Kelly.

These sexy pictures have an interesting story that involves Texas. It was in Texas where I made that most important transition of playing with toy soldiers one day (Teilhard’s cone be damned) and suddenly on the next day I was interested in girls.



By the time I was in grade 10 in that neo-Gothic (Gothic Revival is supposed to be the accurate nomenclature) building that was St. Edward’s High School I and my fellow boarding classmates were churning (I must state here to prevent a fulminating communication from Bob Mercer aka The Fiendish Editor, that churning is here used as an adjective not as a verb. Churning libidos, with churning as a verb would make us butter nuts) libidos that were exacerbated by the fact that the only woman on campus (during the day) was a fat cook in the kitchen. I must insist in being accurate here in adding that she was also black.

We had a friend, a teasing friend, called Bonnie.

Bonnie would call us on Friday evenings. Our libidos were especially raw as we anticipated our Saturday leave to downtown Austin. Most if not all women in the city knew about us so they would avoid us. Only the girls at St. Mary’s Academy, on the other side of town, understood our plight. They were kept busy and tired by the nuns who made them play lots of volleyball. Volleyball was originally the first Vatican approved method of birth control.

Bonnie somehow had found out the unlisted number of our public phone that was just outside the door to our dormitory. Whenever we made any calls we rarely used coins as we had one of those coat hanger wires. You would insert the wire through the coin return and with a few wrist flicks (we were very good with wrist flicks) dial tone was always the reward. Bonnie would call and talk to us for hours. My guess is that she single handedly invented phone sex. She just had not figured out that she could make money at it. She kept us going for hours and any attempts to meet up with her at a movie house so we could make out were always dashed. She never would turn up for the appointed date.

But a nerdish and awfully shy tenth grader did get to meet her. In fact that nerd was me.
During one of our conversations I told her I had just acquired a Pentacon-F single lens reflex camera and that I had become quite good at taking pictures. She consented to my taking her picture on the condition that I never tell any of my fellow classmates and to never show the pictures to anybody. I promised I would do as she said. I must confess that I have finally broken that promise but I suspect Bonnie would never mind in the least.

I didn’t expect a beautiful girl when I met up with her at a warehouse not far from the Harry Ransom Center by the University of Texas.

Bonnie, she must have been 16 to my 15. She was kind, not in the least at all like the image she conveyed on the telephone (we called her a prick teaser). She was almost shy and never did even hint that she would take off any of her clothes for me, not that I would have ever dared to ask. But I did manage to take a few pictures with Kodak Tri-X and the only lens I had at the time a 50mm F-2.8 Zeiss Tessar. Even now I see them as charming. I looked at them today and it seems to be that there is some Bardot in her.

I was never able to show her the pictures. Her phone calls suddenly stopped and we never heard from her again. There were other girls who began calling us. But by then the thrill (at least for me) was gone.

Last July when Rosemary, our two granddaughters and I drove to Texas I had a sudden memory flash. I swore that as soon as I returned to Vancouver I would look in all my files for those pictures of Bonnie.

What caused that sudden memory flash? I happened to see a beautiful woman wearing a dress and cowboy boots. I suddenly felt nostalgically at home, in Texas.

Sunday, July 08, 2012



Rosa sericea ssp. omeiensis f. pteracantha

 It seems it was only yesterday, but in fact it was at least three that I raced Rebecca and Lauren across the football field of nearby Montgomery Park and won. Now I can barely walk up or walk down our stairs at home without my knees buckling. My friends tell me its time to sell. They give me all kinds of logical advice. Our house is worth a lot of money, so we must sell now. We are too old to keep the house in shape and money is not in the bank for necessary repairs to the bathrooms. The house needs a paint job. I counter with the argument that when house prices fall, as they may be bound to, while our house will sell for less a smaller house or condo will likely go for an equivalent drop in price. I could be wrong.

Both Rosemary and I are committed to staying while we enjoy the garden. We sit on our bench in the sun and her cat Casi-Casi comes over and hops on. He bakes for a while and then, the smart cat that he is, he jumps off and seeks a shady area nearby. His favourite is by our Acer griseum and Rosa 'Complcata'.

English Rose, Rosa 'English Elegance'

Today I told Rosemary that some of the tasks we meant to finish by now have not been started. I have to shovel some pea gravel onto the paths that are too shady for grass. The new dressing of gravel gives the garden an orderly and fresh look. Then there is the very long laurel hedge. When we first came to our present house I tackled that hedge, once, to prove a point, with secateurs. For years after I used hand clippers and in the last two years I have resorted to electric shears as my arthritis flares up at the wrists and the elbows. This year I will rent a gas hedge clipper which should do the job with some ease.

We have to power wash some of our picket fence sections and gates, before we paint.

Top Rosa 'L.D. Braithwaite', below left Rosa 'William Shakespeare Right, Rosa 'Charles de Mills'

Rosemary and I have spoken about our situation for a few years. Some of this speaking has involved shouting, “I can no longer work with this garden or this house.” “Well then you go and live somewhere else,” one of us will counter. But now we have a mostly unspoken agreement that we will stay until a health problem affects one of us so that the garden would then be an impossibility to maintain for one person.

Perhaps our reasoning does not make any sense particularly when we are told that we should be looking for a place that we might want to move to.

For me the most traumatizing aspect is the idea that I might have to finally retire my darkroom, the problem of doing away with 4000 books. Do any of our daughters have enough wall space for all the framed pictures and memorabilia of our combined pasts?

I have thought that the most practical solution to this conundrum of getting rid of stuff would be for Rosemary and me to visit Ale in Lillooet. I would then hire an arsonist to start a fire. We would arrive back to cinders. “My negatives, they are all gone!” It might just be a relief to have nothing!

But as we sit on our bench with Casi-Casi, who is eying my female cat Plata whom he might chase around the garden, I look at my roses. There are about 80 of them. Some are rare old roses that in the present climate of nursery stock reduction can not be replaced if they die. I look at them and I grieve that my granddaughter Rebecca has lost interest in the. It was only a couple of years ago that she could identify at least ten of them by scent alone with her eyes closed. Rosemary does not particularly have a sensitive nose.

Rosa 'Crocus Rose'

I do. To think of their scent in May before any of my rose bushes are in bloom and to then smell them in June and now and have my memory dully confirmed is a pleasure that I cannot explain to my friends or the pushy real estate agents that come knocking to our doors.

At the end of the day we will stay. We will hope that next spring will bring roses, hostas and Rosemary’s perennials back from their winter retreat. The promise of the scent of the roses, not to mention that of some of our hydrangeas, is all that I need to keep gardening even if I wince in pain every once in a while.

As Casi-Casi lies placidly on his shady spot, I can rationalize that it’s all for him and that is a good enough reason to stay.











Rosa 'Paul Ricault'



Rosa 'Chapeau de Napoleon'