Saturday, October 20, 2012

The Mason & Hamlin Organ
The Russian Hall
Neverland Burlesque
October 20, 2012

Veronica Vex

All photographs, Mamiya RB-67 Pro SD, 90mm lens, Fuji Instant b+w film FP-3000B

Friday, October 19, 2012

Colin MacDonald, October 24, 2012

"I do not often laugh, sir,” answered the unknown. “As you may yourself discover by the expression of my continence. But yet I mean to preserve the right of laughing when I please.”

A rogue does not laugh in the same way that an honest man does; a hypocrite does not shed the tears of a man of good faith. All falsehood is a mask; and however well made the mask may be, with a little attention we may always succeed in distinguishing it from the true face.

Alexandre Dumas, The Three Musketeers

Thursday, October 18, 2012




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

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.
Pino Rogeletti






Want to solve homelessness? Build more houses.
Mike Harcourt

Alex W-H

Trade imbalance? China? Outsourcing? Establish a universal minimum wage.
Alex Waterhouse-Hayward

Wednesday, October 17, 2012


I was 10 years old and I was going to the American Grammar School in Buenos Aires. Because my mother taught physics and chemistry in the nearby American School I was able to attend a very good private school without payment. My fellow classmates were the children of wealthy Argentine families or the children of American Embassy personnel or from other embassies and American corporations.

In all this I was the nerd who wore Argentine jeans (they looked like fakes because they were so) and I was almost the class nerd. I remember another boy called Pedro who was the nerd. When he stood at attention in the filas before we were herded into our classrooms his knees bent the other way. In his short pants (most of us wore short pants) he looked terribly funny. There were two girls in the class that I secretly admired. One was a blonde called Mary Lou Chase and the other a fine brunette, Susan Stone.

Somehow my mother had arranged that Susan's father (head of General Motors Argentina) would send his Cadillac to collect me so that I could spend the day with her. Her house was a mansion and they had something called television. I have no idea if Susan’s pleasant behaviour towards me was urged by her parents or that she either genuinely liked me or felt sorry for me.

At age 10 I would get into bed and attempt to dream about these two girls. The dreams never got anywhere. My scenarios did not prosper and I would just fall asleep. It was at age 10 that I discovered the dreams could not be generated into existence and that they were mostly random.

Perhaps my heavy duty arthritis medicines are the cause of the intense and strange dreams that I have had in the last couple of years. Because, as the old man that I am, I get up three or four times per night I have the chance to think about these dreams as they fade so quickly while I attempt to empty my troublesome bladder. My female cat Plata joins me and jumps on the sink and demands I pour fresh water into the mug I use to wash out my mouth after I brush my teeth. She is 14 and this indicates her kidneys may be about to fail. I welcome her comforting presence as I dissect my dreams.

In many ways I can force moments of nostalgia by thinking about nostalgic events of my past life. But I have discovered much more recently, that memories like dreams can happen randomly and that they are generated, as I illustrate here, by unexpected and innocuous objects like a spatula.

My mother was always a spatula freak. She was not a very good cook but she made beautiful lemon meringue pies. I licked the remnants of the lemon filling with the spatula she always handed me. Our kitchen drawer always had at least two. I marveled at how a spatula could to remove every little bit of my father’s  wonderful gravy (I inherited his talent for making gravy) from the frying pan.

The spatula, I saw it then, had that air of efficiency. It is an example of perfect design that would have been lauded by Cliffton Web's role of  Frank B. Gilbreth in the 1950 film Cheaper by the Dozen.

Alex W-H (left) aka Hopalong Cassidy & Susan Stone, extreme right

The spatula here is a new one I recently purchased at Ikea. For the last few years my granddaughter Lauren has not only used our old spatulas to lick up the ice-cream containers but she has also been biting off the rubber tips. She does the same with pencil erasers (I used to do that, too).

Every time I now open the cutlery drawer and see the bright blue spatula my mother’s face appears automatically. I welcome this. Now if I could only conjure, in my sleep, Susan Stone and Mary Lou Chase!

The other scanned item is my mother’s Sterling silver hand mirror. She always used to check on the hair bun she always wore on the back of her head. She used to complain of her straight hair and how unmanageable it was. I have the mirror in my living room coffee table (made of a large piece of plate glass over one of my grandmother’s Chinese, sandalwood chests). I use the mirror with my subjects that I photograph in my home studio in the red shawl series. They can hold the mirror in front of them and check out the draping of the red rebozo.

Tuesday, October 16, 2012

Takeshi Kitano

 In October 1996 I found myself in the Sun Room of the Hotel Vancouver with the Globe & Mail arts reporter Christopher Dafoe. We were there to interview and photograph Japanese film director (actor, amateur baseball player, poet, painter, etc) Takeshi Kitano. The film in question was called Kikujiro (Kitano played in it as Beat Takeshi) and it featured slapstick comedy with a surprisingly reduced violence. Many who have seen Kitano’s films would assert that his films have violent cop/gangster plots that appear so realistic that a few of Kitano’s followers suspect he might have gokudō connections.




Chistopher Dafoe confessed to me minutes after we left that he had been intimidated by the chain smoking man who could not sit still. But he did sit still for me. I took nine photographs of him. That would have been the end of that except that in the lobby of the Hotel Vancouver, once Dafoe was gone, I found myself facing Kitano’s assistant who informed me that his boss wanted to see me. I was intrigued and of course I could not refuse.


Kitano had brought a girlfriend along, Kyôko Kishida, who was in some of hot water back home. I felt I could not press Kitano for details. Kitano told me that in exchange for finding Kishida a temporary apartment to keep her away from Tokyo for a month I would have access to the taking of some photographs. The scary serious man smiled just enough to add that she was interesting to photograph.

He was right. I found an apartment for Kishida in False Creek and I did take her pictures. She spoke absolutely no English. Our communication was limited to gesticulation. Kishida (I have no idea if she had ever done any domestic chores in her life) wanted me to photograph her cutting a cucumber, trying some sweet breakfast cereal, and other domestic activity. The most interesting one was when she sat on the floor to paint her toe nails.

Only now do I feel safe to publish these pictures in my blog. After the month was over I drove her to the airport and I wished Kishida good luck. I have never heard from her or Kitano since.




 

Monday, October 15, 2012

Crumpets and Tea, Marsden Room, Vancouver, BC

B. Marsden - genteel hostess of the Crumpets & Tea Marsden Room

Welcome!

Crumpets & Tea – Marsden Room, a tea room with international flavor, provides a singular downtown Vancouver eating experience in a tastefully decorated space. The down-home culinary environment touts the artful eyes and experience of B. Marsden. Marsden is known to many in Vancouver as a sales manager and decorator of the Berryhill Arts & Crafts Center in Spuzzum where Marsden was the decorator of the Christmas House.

Sunday, October 14, 2012



Argentine Nostalgia

I thought I’d never miss: -
The wide expanse of pasture of the pampas,
The lead gray skies & stratus clouds
The whistling, whining, violent “pamperos”,
The wet moist cold,
The hot damp heat,
The monotonous landscape
Bare of trees & bushes 7 human beings
Populated by lazy, cattle.

But I do,
And remember,
The balmy breezes of early spring,
The mauve of jacarandá trees in early fall,
The crisp, white frost of midwinter,
The golden yellow of the aroma in late spring
The pungent, acrid odor of the figs in midsummer.

I thought I’d never miss:
The untidy almacén at my corner
Overflowing with cellophane bags of capeletti & ravioli
And mounds of sacks of new potatoes,
Reeking of onions & “tipo Roquefort cheese”,
Of smoked ham & bacon hanging from hooks
Or:
The heated discussion of the Italian neighbours,
The chattering, singing & crying of their children,
The clatter of their plates & knives - they ate
In the patio & almost lived there,
Their plaintive singing of their summer land
And the merry quartets from Barbero & Rigoletto.
Or:
The austere grays & browns & blacks
That Porteños think proper to wear,
Their sober silence and quiet in public vehicles
The busy little sidewalk cafes under striped awnings,
The interminable wait for tram 35,
The long and never ending route it took,

But I do,
And remember:-
The exquisite taste and stark simplicity
That Porteños think proper for wear,
Their polite “permiso” as they sidled by you on colectivos
The gracious old-fashioned cadence of the
“Cuando” danced in a café.
The beautiful church on Juramento and Cabildo
I always watched out for out of the window of Tram 35
The expectation of getting to Mother’s flat,
At the end of the line,
And the warmth I’d get there!

Filomena de Irureta Goyena de Hayward
Nueva Rosita, Coahuila, Mexico
Dec 5, 1956




In the flora of the Southern Hemisphere at the latitude of Buenos Aires, similar to that of South Africa, many of the plants that grow so well there do rather nicely up here in my Vancouver.

This is especially the case with my hydrangeas. I have at least 35 different kinds and several species of this trustworthy plant that has no insect enemies or blights that I know of. They are faithful and only require pruning at the right time and watering in the very dry months of September/October. They don’t die when they need water. Their leaves drop like an angry cat and you know. A good watering and overnight my hydrangeas perk up like Rosemary’s cat, Casi-Casi. These hydrangeas unlike other plants have flowers that when they are past their prime their bright colours shift to quiet pastels and by winter they turn brown, very beautiful still. Some gardeners say that the brown flowers protect next spring’s buds from frost damage.

While most hydrangea manuals never mention it I have found that the paniculata species and subspecies as well as Hydrangea quercifolia all have an intense honey scent when their flowers set pollen.

In our garden, which is a shady garden becoming more so because of our maturing trees, the hydrangeas seem to do just fine in deepest shade.



When I look at them about now they always remind me of my mother’s poem about her nostalgia for Buenos Aires. If there is one theme in her poem it has to do do with sober and proper colours.

If she were to return to Buenos Aires now she would be shocked by how globalization has brought the lurid, the bright, the snappy and the saturated colours that the age of the computer monitor has ushered in.

The CRT (cathode ray tube) monitor on which I am typing this is balanced for a gray that is neither warm nor cold. I have made it as neutral as possible for my subjective eyes, different eyes to those who are reading this. Because I shoot Ektachrome 100G (and will switch to Fuji Provia as Ektachrome has gone to the world of discontinuance, a Kodak-coined expression) the colours of my portraits are restrained and not supersaturated as those from the enhanced CMOS sensors of the contemporary digital cameras.

I believe that the sound of my living room speakers that reproduce my records and CDs is likewise accurate to my ears in the same way that I may assert that the colours of my photographs are.



If I would pick the one word that defines the present age I would say it is the almost disappearance of subtlety. This lack of it of course affects how we perceive colour. We may be slowly loosing our perception of pastels in the same way we may be losing our perception of taste unless it is heavily salted.

Today in the rain, I walked around the garden and with the low contrast light of the rainy afternoon I perceived that my hydrangeas (and my spent roses) were crying for my attention.

They were doing so with great subtlety.