Saturday, August 03, 2013
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| Raúl Guerrero Montemayor |
I am a creature that is a product of the mid 20th century. I can tell you about ice boxes, Henry Js, and I personally watched Eva Perón plant a tree near my school. I remember that a Turnpike Cruiser was a Mercury and when Raleighs like Model T’s came in one colour, black.
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| Ian Bateson |
When I hear an airplane I look up into the sky and I could bore you with the delights of Pan Am gum-chewing stewardesses on board Lockheed Super-Constellations.
I still shoot cameras loaded with film and I can instantly describe to you the smell of fixer and the wonder of seeing a blank sheet of photographic paper, its latent image, slowly transform itself into a picture in what is still magic to me.
I cannot explain to you how a laser somehow reads a round sheet of pressed plastic and sends the sounds of Gerry Mulligan playing My Funny Valentine into my ears from that end of my living room to this end of it where I write on a keyboard that shows my tappings on a cathode ray tube monitor. In fact my Sony Trinitron is also a cathode ray tube device. The CRT and the laser in my CD player are both part of a fading 20th century that is sharp in my mind because I was born in 1942. It’s anybody’s guess which will go first my CRT monitor or me.
At this time phones and cars that are computers when my iPhone 3G is only a phone to me and as I advance the film in my Pentaxes, Nikons and Mamiyas I am mocked, ever so gently by four friends. They have phones that are computers and they treat them as such. Two live in Texas and two here in the Lower Mainland. The two in Texas can comprehend and even suggest ever so slight improvements to one of my Lower Mainland friend’s, Ian Bateson's project which is the electronic book, My Mother’s Red Shawl. These two in Texas are St. Ed’s High School alumni, Mike O’Connell and Howard Houston. North Vancouver resident Ian Bateson has designed my E-Book. It is a brilliant concept of which, its full capability I have yet to understand. You see I can explain how that compressor on the top of our new electric ice box would make the inside cold but I am unable to comprehend this book that has no paper (but I am told that it can). My other friend, Richmond resident Paul Leisz knows how to navigate Bateson’s magnum opus with ease but is too un-Texan to suggest and improvement.
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Mike O' Connell, Alex, Brother Edwin Reggio C.S.C.
Howard Houston & John Arnold November 2010 |
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| Paul Leisz |
Not that an improvement is in any way needed. Until I can understand better what this new creature, My Mother’s Red Shawl, truly is, I can at the very least point you in its direction. If you never had an ice box or remember the exact shade of blue of all Henry Js then you might, much more quickly see the excellence in My Mother's Red Shawl.
Eventually, before my CRT monitor gives out I, too will see the light.
