Saturday, December 29, 2012

Veronica Vex, December 2012

Pepe le Moko: What did you do before?
Gaby: Before what?
Pepe le Moko: Before... the jewels.
Gaby: I wanted them.

Friday, December 28, 2012




In Buenos Aires as a boy I lived in two homes. One was in Martinez and the other in Coghlan, on Calle Melián. Both houses were within walking distance of the train station that went from the outskirts of the city to its core at Retiro Station.

All I remember of Martínez is the gate to the street, and the tan coloured baldosas (tiles) of the sidewalk. This ubiquitous Buenos Aires sidewalk baldosa would quickly loosen up randomly and when women (in particular) walked home (from work, perhaps) after a rainstorm they would find parts normally unseen to men suddenly wet from water that would squish upwards from the loosened baldosa. But since I was only no more than three or four, a baldosa was only an item I had to avoid falling on from my four-wheeled bike. A baldosa was hard and short pants did not protect my knees.

I may have been five when we moved to Melián. I have memory of three beds. The first was a crib. And the crib was in my parent’s bedroom. Our house had a living room and a dining room next to the bedroom plus a kitchen, and a bathroom beyond the kitchen. The bathroom had a device that shot water with force up into the ceiling. I did not know what a bidet was. There was an upstairs (access through outside stairs) which had two rooms. One was occupied by whoever was our housekeeper (first a couple called Celia and her husband Abelardo, both as black as betún, shoe polish as my mother often said, and then by Mercedes and her sister Enilse who lived in the adjacent room).

Somehow I have a few memories of being in that crib during the day with either a cold or some perennial stomach problem (the Haywards were prone to stomach problems). What is strange is that I remember being in that crib while sketching a cover of el Llanero Solitario (The Lone Ranger) comic book. I drew and sketched with skill until I was 14.

The bedroom (the house had been built in the early 1900s so it had very high ceilings) had a large door to the back garden and like most houses in BA at the time they were protected by massive steel shutter with horizontal louvers.

I was put to bed on my parent's wide bed for siesta and I could see flickering movement beyond the shutters. Perhaps it was Mercedes hanging the wash to dry. The flickering lights and shadows were magical and would eventually put me to sleep. Many years later I would associate those siestas and the flickering shadows with Plato's Cave.

At some point (was I five or six) I may have become precocious so my father banned me and the crib (it could have been a bed by then) to outside the bedroom, adjacent to the living room. By then I remember listening to evening radio programs while in bed.

Martínez, May 1943

Right after Christmas and the Epiphany (January 6), I was usually carted off to camp (as Anglo Argentines called the country). One place was called Glen Rest in the province of Córdoba. It may have been upon my return (was I 7 or 8?) when my father told me there was a surprise. Enilse had married her Tram 35 conductor so the room adjacent to Mercedes was empty. My father had installed a bed and decorated the wall with strips cut from my favourite magazine Billiken.

My father looked at me firmly knowing I would have to retire in the dark and go up those outside stairs to my room, and told me I was old enough to be brave and to sleep alone.

I don’t remember anything more but I have that lingering memory of sketching the Lone Ranger in my crib. And it was a pretty good likeness. I was good.

Thursday, December 27, 2012

Raúl Guerrero Montemayor Mexico DF, 1967


Not too long ago I was describing to a friend my method before I photograph someone I have never met. This often happened in my Vancouver Robson Street Studio which was at the corner with Granville. The building has been torn down. I told my friend that I would scan my subject and note positive features and negative features. After a few short minutes I knew (very important) what I could not do. What was left was what I could do. I likened this machine-like method to that of a computer. It was then that my friend said a most startling thing, “No, not like a computer, but a computer scans like a human being. You must thus say it is very human.”

This process also brings to mind the very early Star Treks (Odisea del Espacio in my Mexico City of the late 60s) with their onboard computer that only Mr. Spock seemed to know how to use. The computer had an almost (but not quite) sexless/synthetic voice that would utter stuff like, “Computing,” “Cannot compute, not enough information.” When it was the latter it was exactly as it was a few years later at the banks when my teller would say, “I cannot help you Mr. Waterhouse-Hayward, our computers are down.” There was a finality that went along with the preciseness of the zeros and the ones and with no space for anything in-between.

As I sat with my friend in Mexico City last week, a friend who has an incurable prostate cancer we talked about our mutual pasts, our mutual friends and asked each other questions which began, “Whatever happened to…?”

My friend was an elegant man who spoke many languages and had traveled the best and most beautiful cities of Europe and the Orient. As he lay in bed I saw his many pairs of shoes and loafers and knew that they as well as his beautiful suits and sweaters were toast.

By the wall there was a watercolour that resembled Tulum in Mexico. But it was not so. It had been given to him by the Hungarian countess and it was a picture of Ragusa, now known as Dubrovnik. I told my friend I had been in Dubrovnik and I had visited the nearby island of Lokrum where Maximilian, the Emperor of Mexico installed by the French in the 1860s had had a summer home. I told him I had seen an ashtray with the ashes of his last smoked cigar before he went to Mexico and his eventual fate in front of a firing squat at the Cerro de Las Campanas in the now State of Querétaro.

My friend helped me buy a coffin for my dead mother and somehow was present when we buried my grandmother Lolita near Cuernavaca in the State of Morelos.

My friend insisted on telling me the story. It seems that two “pelados” (ordinary men) were tripping over the ground in an effort to take my grandmother’s coffin to its resting place. My friend indicated we should help and the four of us finished the job with efficiency. My friend said, “I could not but think that your grandmother who was a haughty woman would have approved of the fact that the two lowly men were being helped by two of a better class.”

We spoke of going to see French films at the Cine Chapultepec on Paseo de la Reforma in Mexico City. We refused to see the close to one hour of government propaganda news reels (featuring presidents of Mexico cutting ribbons to the latest Social Security hospital). This meant that there were few seats left and we would sit in separate areas of the theatre. When the inevitable bidet jokes happened we could hear each other laugh. We were the only ones who knew about bidets.

My friend and I spoke of many other things. He was exhausted and he would fall asleep. I would walk back to my hotel to freshen up and return for another bout of conversation.

Flying back, with the memory of his tears as I said goodbye to him I suddenly came to me that a man unlucky enough to suffer from the indignity and pain of prostate cancer has one positive advantage going. This is an ability to tie loose ends, order one's life, the past as best as one can, and to make sure that the future is an easy one for those who are left to deal with the eventual paperwork needed to handle a dead man. For such a lucky man, death is no longer a surprise but something that is faced slowly, little by little until resignation settles in (I am guessing here).

By being with him I was helping him defragment his life. Files were being pushed back and forth. Loose ones were placed with others.

After defragmenting one’s life the body may be exhausted but the mind will be lightened, loosened up and ready for what may follow.

We defragment our computers. This is an extremely human activity which a computer can only, at best, mimic.

Wednesday, December 26, 2012

Homero Aridjis, 72 México DF 16 de diciembre, 2012

Autorretrato a los cincuenta y cuatro años


Soy Homero Aridjis
nací en Contepec, Michoacán,
tengo cincuenta y cuatro años,
esposa y dos hijas

En el comedor de mi casa
Tuve mis primeros amores:
Dickens, Cervantes, Shakespeare
y el otro Homero.

Un domingo en la tarde,
Frankestein salió del cine del pueblo
y a la orilla de un arroyo
le dio la mano a un niño que era yo,

El Prometeo formado con retazos humanos
siguió su camino, pero desde entonces,
por ese encuentro con el monstruo,
el verbo y el horror son míos.


Self-Portrait at Fifty-Four Years Old

I am Homero Aridjis,
I was born in Contepec, Michoacán,
I am fifty-four,
with a wife and two daughters.

In the dining room of my house
I had my first loves:
Dickens, Cervantes, Shakespeare
and the other Homer.

One Sunday afternoon
Frakenstein came out of the town movie
House and on a stream’s bank
held out his hand to a boy, who was me.

The Prometheus pieced out of human remnants
went on his way, but since then,
out of that encounter with the monster,
the verb and the horror are mine.

Homero Aridjis
Eyes to See Otherwise – Ojos de otro mirar
Selected Poems
Edited by Betty Ferber and George McWhirter

Tuesday, December 25, 2012







Lauren Stewart, Christmas 2012


Christmas 2012 will not be a positively memorable one. I was melancholic after visiting my sick friend in Mexico City and as soon as I was back on Wednesday the 19th it seems bits of Mexico City smog remained in my lungs and precipitated a pulmonary infection. Come Christmas Eve I was not well and I had terrible coughing spells. I was not keen on taking the usual stressful (the family always groans and objects) Christmas snaps. But today, December 29, we have Lauren, 10, sleeping over and she will carry on her shoulders the hefty image of Christmas 2012. She asked me why Pancho el Esqueleto was in the picture. I asked her if she remembered Abraham Rogatnick (who died three years ago). She told me she did. In Christmases past Rogatnick was with us for Christmas Eve dinner. Rogatnick gave me Pancho el Esqueleto a year before he died. I miss the man. Christmas for me is about my past. I remember my father, especially as well as my mother and grandmother. I remember those first Christmases with Rosemary in Mexico when we barely had money to buy anything. I remember Christmas with our daughters when they were young.


Lauren in her picture here represents the Christmases of her future (a future unknown to me) that will soon be her own Christmases past.




Meanwhile as I write this I hope that my other granddaughter who had made this Christmas an unpleasant one, will find order, and a code of ethics and behaviour that in this age, a post-God age, cannot seem to find comfort with Tolkien. Bilbo Baggins can never replace the tired old saints who Rebecca might just discover some day.

Monday, December 24, 2012

Lauren Stewart & her Sanborn's Can Cun sailor dress

Going back to a city that was so much a part of my life was exciting, off-putting, challenging, stressful, surprising, pleasant, nostalgic and ultimately even more than all that. Cities refuse to fit in with one’s idea of what they were about and the reality of what they really are cannot be understood with my mere four days in Mexico City.

Flying over the city, at night annihilates any idea of what one might think is a really big city, unless you happen to do the same over Tokyo.

Going through customs immediately made me think that everything was possible or not possible and that routine was a word that can never apply to a city such as Mexico City.

When I was about to take off in my predictably, boring (in that most Canadian definition of boring) Air Canada flight I knew that I could not breathe in relief (the stress of the expectation that something, unexpected can always happen in Mexico) until I could hear the wheels of the undercarriage being tucked in.

In Mexico City, after years of having lived there and after years of not having lived there, I still walk around, sit, relax, sleep, laugh, smile and even go to the bathroom with every one of my senses working full-time.

My relatives in Argentina do not believe me when I tell them that the electric (plugged into the wall) Kit-Cat clock in my kitchen tells accurate time even after a year (I do not tell them of the wind storms that sometimes make trees in our back alley fall and electricity is cut off for a few hours). I tell them that in Canada we have, air, space, water and 110 volts that are unwavering and as steady as the 60 cycles of our alternating current.

Candy bars I used to buy when I was 15, still available at Sanborn's

Being in Mexico always makes me think of Carlos Fuentes’s novel El Gringo Viejo and how Ambrose Bierce went to Mexico to die. Unable to control his personal destiny on his own, Bierce depended on Mexico and its gods to take care of business. I must have since Bierce disappeared in that country where things happen and some never do unless you have enough money in the pocket for a bribe.

On my way to Mexico City I had chatted with all my close seat neighbours. Coming back (via Toronto), a Mexican widow by the window seat and I exchanged notes. It seems we had both married within months of each other in 1968. I had spoken with one of the flight attendants, Marcos who was an Argentine. His boss the senior flight attendant was into cats so we showed each other pictures of our loved ones. When time came for the on board food service my fellow passengers could but not notice that I had been also served with a little tub of Häagen-Dazs vanilla ice-cream that had been “purloined” on the side from first class.

It was only when I was in my Boeing 777 cattle car that reality set in. I was in the middle seat between a young woman who never looked at me (and I had to avoid looking at her cleavage until she finally covered it all up) and who passed her left hand, then her right hand over her strands of hair for a solid four and a half hours. She watched movies on her seat without earphones. The man on my right, a youngish Ottawa bureaucrat (coming perhaps via Toronto) was reading Six Easy Pieces: Essentials of Physics Explained by Its Most Brilliant Teacher by Richard P. Feynman but alternated this watching a film about a grown man who talked to a talking Teddy Bear and another that featured a crazy American comic actor who happens to swear like his mother when he is bitten by a snake at church. For four of those almost five hours three babies cried without stopping. I told the bureaucrat that this was one of the worst flights I had ever been on. He could not understand and dismissed me with a lukewarm smile.

Within three, almost four days, the predictability of things Canadian and the unpredictability and uncertainty of a friendly country, which is especially friendly if you speak the language, became most obvious to me. My Mexican Spanish came back with a fury and before I knew it I was almost a Chilango, a long-time resident of that place where the eagle bit on the snake.



As friendly as Mexico City felt I am not sure I could ever go back to live there. On street corners I saw men with dark glasses hovering around big black SUVs. They looked idle but perhaps they were not.

Walking the streets I saw that the life of the streets in Mexico City is that of our Main and Hastings multiplied by a factor of one thousand or more. I saw the anguish on the faces of young people and old. It was the anguish of having to cope with the stress of living in a city that represents the future of most cities of the world if we do not do something now.

There was an old Native Mexican woman sitting against the wall of a very dark street at 10 in the evening with an array of goods that nobody would ever buy. The goods brought a level of respect to her obvious profession of beggar. A little girl by her side said in Spanish, “Abuelita (little grandma) when are we going home?” By my logic that woman would have lived very far away. Would the little girl get home by midnight? But like a Mexican who has lived in that city for such a long time (even though I can no longer claim that) I did the usual and kept on walking without stopping to give. I felt ashamed.

But I cannot end this with such a sad note.

I went to Sanborn’s a few times. Sanborn’s has the best that American drugstores have and more, with the Mexican twist that you can eat, (even dine!) buy books (a great selection), electronics, jewelry (very good assortment of Mexican Sterling Silver), clothing, candy, cakes, cookies and the list goes on. In the bookstore I found many books but only purchased four, including one which is the latest novel by my fave Arturo Pérez-Reverte.

It was quite a few years ago that at a Can-Cun Sanborn’s I purchased the little sailor dress I have photographed both my granddaughters in.

Some things in that huge city (a city that is constantly sinking into the lake it drained) will never change. And one of those things, I can happily report here is that Sanborn’s has not changed, and in fact was every bit exactly how I imagined it to be.

Unfortunately this picture of Lauren with her violin in her Sanborn’s sailor dress is much too small for her to wear it again. Will I be around when one of their offspring might just put it on? Only time will tell. And seeing that we are indeed in Vancouver, Canada, my chances are pretty good.

Sunday, December 23, 2012

México DF, 17 de diciembre, 2012

My friend was 86 the day before, December 16. I was sitting with him in his den, in Mexico City surrounded by books in many languages including a few dictionaries which include two, Tagalog – Spanish, and Tagalog – English. He was in pain and he gestured for me to remove his slippers and lift his feet on to the sofa. He asked Jorge Alejandro, his man-Friday and nurse to bring us coffee. Jorge Alejandro did but my friend reacted in horror. It seems that Jorge Alejandro had poured the coffee into the cups. My friend repeated, “The ritual, the ritual, you have eliminated the ritual.” Jorge Alejandro had brought the coffee machine with the plunger already plunged!

This ritual had to be performed at the time of serving. The last time I had seen that  coffee machine, a French press, the person doing the plunging had been the Hungarian baroness Andrea back in 1967. Andrea had been a friend of my friend. She had escaped Hungary with her life, her husband and her carpets inside a horse cart. It was my friend who taught me that the best carpets are always hung on the wall. You would never walk on them.

The French press that Jorge Alejandro had pressed in the kitchen had been an inherited gift from the baroness when she died. My friend had a particular love for this high-strung woman whom I had both feared and admired. She was haughty and serious but when she smiled (not often) I melted.

I explained to Jorge Alejandro, a patient and kind soul, that his master only has ritual to fend off the indignity of having to wear paper diapers to sleep, to be helped to the bathroom or to be bathed and fed.

Jorge Alejandro understood and smiled at me with his eyes. I told Jorge Alejandro the story of the baroness. My friend corrected me and informed me that in fact Andrea had been not a baroness but a countess. I might have contradicted my friend but that would have broken the wonderful spell of the moment as we sipped our coffee and my friend said, “I regret the moments of my life that I imagined but that I never lived.”