Some who read these pages might know that I have a long time project of taking pictures of people, mostly friends, who represent many professions here in Vancouver. I photograph them all wearing my mother’s red Mexican rebozo or shawl. My mother made an exploratory trip to Mexico around 1952 and came back with it to our then home in Buenos Aires. Since then I can remember the many occasions my mother wore it. She had different ways of wearing it. I was one way for Mass, another for a fancy party or a cocktail and in a completely different way when she wore it to keep her warm. She died in 1972 and when we moved to Vancouver in 1975 the rebozo has been kept as a treasure in a Mexican chest made of Olinalá wood in the Mexican state of Guerrero. The material of the rebozo is rough and nobody I know has been able to tell me if it is rough wool or cotton or a blend. Of the brilliant red I have always thought it to be some Mexican native plant dye.

One of the rules for those who pose with the red shawl is that they must write an essay on anything. I welcome them doing this shortly after they pose as for many the shawl has provided quick and wonderful inspiration.

It is also amazing how my over 40 individual red shawlers have managed to find a perfectly unique way of wearing it.

But at least ten of my red shawlers have not written their essays. They include Bill Millerd, Christopher Gaze, Bruno Freschi, Karen Gerbrecht and Artemis Gordon.

I do not post their pictures until their essay is submitted. They can write about anything and the only person who asked me for some sort of established length (I mentioned 500) wrote more on purpose. And of course anybody who knows George Bowering would understand!

 Now I feel that I can post this delightful Fuji Instant Colour Film picture (I scanned the peeled negative which I had to bleach to get rid of the accompanying gunk) of Katie Huisman. She is a seriously talented Vancouver art photographer. I think I am allowed (after all I set my rules here) to do this as I am not posting the actual real film (film transparency) but the Fujiroid.

I first met Ms. Huisman at Focal Point where we both taught. She was a quiet, pretty young woman who always wore a beret. I made it a point to berate (!!) her every time she showed up at school when I was sitting in the school lounge. I once remember asking her if she wore it to bed. She never reacted in a nasty way (it certainly was her prerogative to do so) and just took it with that “I will not reveal anything” smile of hers.

Our first real communication came when she asked me if I knew anybody who would provide a garden where she could take her students to shoot some nude for her class. At the time, my friend, architect Abraham Rogatnick was dying (we did not then know that he was giving up on treating his prostate cancer). Rogatnick lived around the corner from Focal Point. I asked Rogatnick who immediately assented. As sick as he was he peeked from his window as Huisman and class took their pictures.

It was only a few months ago that I asked Huisman to pose for me in the shawl. She did but as you can see the essay has not been forthcoming.

But something happened to me in the last few days. I remembered a book that had been given to me years ago by my free-lance writer friend (who has exquisite taste) Kerry McPhedran.

Chances are that the red dye of the rebozo is not vegetable but it comes from an insect called Dactylopius coccus or the cochineal that is found mostly in Mexico. Hernán Cortés as soon as he had subdued the Indians of the State of Veracruz (he had yet to vanquish the Aztecs in Tenochtitlan) he sent a delegation of Totonacs and booty to Seville. From there they went to Charles V (Charles the First of Spain) who was 19 but saw real red when he saw it. The rest is history and after gold, silver and chocolate, Mexican cochineal dye became one of the most valuable items of the new world.

 It would seem that Kerry McPhedran was only partially right about my ability to make connections. It has taken me 9 years to make it. 

Katie Huisman no longer wears her beret.  

It is the nature of Fuji instant colour peels to not be accurate in their display of colour. That perfect red will have to wait for the accompanying essay. 

Red shawl project

I read in bed today in my NY Times while having my strong mug of tea and munching on my cheese bread toast (that Rosemary burned) that folks who purchased clothes from Land’s End were incensed at having been sent as a gift a copy of the latest GQ Magazine that features model Emily Ratajkowski not wearing much but not revealing any of the serious parts.

It was sometime around 2006 (I started this blog in January of 2006) that I found out that somehow my eager subscribers from the UBC Botanical web site had severed connections due to the somewhat racy stuff that occasionally appears on these pages. That severing has happened with other organizations and I know a few acquaintances who refuse to contribute to my blog because of this racy content.

I find it hard to reconcile this in the age of easily available (and free) pornography.

My definition of pornography is something done in bad taste. I have tried taking pornographic photographs but always a little controlling valve in my brain (good taste valve?) steps in and my pictures end up not being pornographic (as I see it).

As a much younger man the offers (in person, by telephone and by writing) of beautiful women who wanted to pose for me. The usual roundabout procedure was to tell me that they were not satisfied by their Sooter’s Studio pictures. My files are voluptuously straining from their metal confines.

But as I get older the new entries are far and far between. Perhaps it has to do to with my age. In Spanish I might be perceived as a viejo verde. Or we might be riding a new wave of puritanical sensibilities.

This is a sorry state of affairs as I feel that my photographic interpretation of eroticism is at its best simply because it comes from a mind that is detached from a body with no warranty.

But I persist in my self-censorship standards and today’s photographs will offend nobody, except perhaps some Canadian customers of Land’s End.

In yesterday’s Corte y Confección (a Spanish expression for the art of fashion tailoring) I playfully worked with some beautiful b+w negatives of my friend Kathryn which I cropped and eliminated the bits.

In today’s sequel I took pictures from a contact sheet of Kathryn where modern digital GPS camera technology would tell you that an image (the one on the left) was taken in a studio on the second floor of the Farmer Building (now gone) on Robson and Granville. The second picture (which I took of just those lovely legs) would be revealed to have been taken in UBC’s Endowment Lands. 

My camera was a Nikon FM-2 and the film was Kodak TMZ 3200 ISO processed in dilution B of Kodak’s HC-110.

Leonard Cohen - still alive but my index finger is poised for that homage

Hi Papi, you must have something to say of Lauren Bacall.

The above came to me today via facebook (note it must be written in lower case) from my eldest daughter Alexandra. Below is a rare rant. Best stop reading now.

I am a photographer but unlike Arthur Fellig (aka Weegee), a much better photographer than I will ever be, I am not an ambulance chaser.

In this 21st century in which the amateur (not in the good meaning of the word as reflected by English gentlemen of the 19th who loved whatever they were interested in, be it archaeology, growing pineapples in greenhouses or warfare, and thus called themselves amateurs) reigns supreme. They are journalists, photographers, designers but not yet doctors of medicine, civil engineers, funeral directors or masters of law. Those latter professions require study and perseverance. It is better, and far easier to publish a blog as I do, or "like" a statement or “pic” in facebook.

And so we face our flat-screen monitors and write with our left hand while our right hand’s index finger is poised to send our sentence of homage to Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan, Sophia Loren or Liv Ullmann (if anybody remembers her still) as any are bound to die soon.

We will then grieve and mention in trite sentences how it was that any of those great people somehow entered our lives. Perhaps it was a sighting at an LA restaurant, or as a stills photographer in the making of one of their movies. Perhaps it was falling in love while reading a poem by one of them.

In all truth I cannot find any fault in that, in the same way, that I cannot damn a man who might be playing air guitar while watching Art Bergmann play a real one on stage. If we cannot be St. Peter we must buy a bit of his upside-down cross.

Ex Premier Dave Barrett is still alive. In the back window of my Malibu I have an Australian Snowy River hat that I once photographed on him. My right hand index finger is poised to reveal to any who might have gotten this far in my rant the story of the Akubra hat as soon as Barrett succumbs to his personal but universal inevitability.

But seriously, I think that our relationship to a treasured actor, actress, poet, singer, novelist, historian, basketball player, is no different in a most personal intimacy that we might experience with the loss of a loved one or a best friend.

Why would I want to share my grief with 300 or 500 or 1000 or 25 friends I may have never met in Twitter or facebook?

Is there a first prize to be given to the first to post homage to such a loss?

If and when I see my eldest daughter I might share with her my memories of films I have seen that starred Lauren Bacall. But I do not feel a need to share any of that with anybody else.

Meanwhile, to me, all those tributes to recently dead actors seem no different from that American invention that is the roast. In a roast the roastee has to take long attacks on his or her character with composure because that is the rule of the game. But there is one important difference; the roastee is most always alive while the dead actor is definitely dead. The more famous, the more talented, the more perverse, the most infamous, like us must all die. And once dead, what happens after is of no consequence to he or she who is dead.

Turn your mind to the sun

rash mortal.

the eye’s light has no power

for it only sees what happens.

Focus in that radian centre

and seek to contemplate the eternal light

Ergi La Mente Al Sole

Luigi Rossi – 1597-1653

A couple of days ago on Saturday I atended the last concert of 2014 Vancouver Early Music Festival. The concert was called Vanitas Vanitatum. I wrote about it here.

Today Monday I was ruminating about the concert in particular as Rosemary and I attended the lecture (At UBC School of Music's Gessler Hall) of Dutch harpsichord maker Ton Amir whose topic was the symbols behind the Dutch paintings of the 17^th century. The talk was called Memento Mori. 

Alexandra Waterhouse-Hayward - Lillooet Sept 2012

One of the pieces on Saturday was Luigi Rossi’s Ergi La Mente Al Sole (Turn your mind to the sun). It was all about the sun and by the end how the sun is really in the shadow of God. The line “turn your mind to the sun” made a connection in my mind. The lowly but tall sunflower is called a girasol in Spanish. That translates to “turns to the sun”. That (a blinding light of inspiration?) all led to what I write below.

One of those most pleasant of annual pleasures happens when my oldest daughter, Alexandra arrives in the spring from her home in Lillooet with several pots of tall sunflowers (Helianthus annuus) which she grows from seed in her one acre property in that place that every year happens to compete with Lytton as the hottest spot in Canada. In fact today (I am writing this Monday night) it hit 37 Celsius in Lillooet.

There is not much sun in our garden and one of the last refuges for it is on our back lane which we have converted into a lane garden. Ale’s sunflowers are at their peak now and a few of them have dropped their yellow petals. I find that the spent flowers much like the Vanitas movement of Dutch art in the 17^th century have a beauty even though they remind us of the passing of time and that inevitable death.

You make serene our days

O infinite source of rays

the sustenance of life

you form and show for them.

Without you, a dark prison

for us would be the delightful earth

and in the darkness of grief

all nature would weep

Ergi La Mente Al Sole

Luigi Rossi 

Rosemary and Alexandra, Feb 1969 Mocambo, Veracruz

EL SUR

Jorge Luís Borges

Desde uno de tus patios haber mirado

las antiguas estrellas,

desde el banco de sombra haber mirado

esas luces dispersas

que mi ignorancia no ha aprendido a nombrar

ni a ordenar en constelaciones,

haber sentido el círculo del agua

en el secreto aljibe,

el olor del jazmín y la madreselva,

el silencio del pájaro dormido,

el arco del zaguán, la humedad

–esas cosas, acaso, son el poema.

THE SOUTH

To have watched from one of your patios

the ancient stars,

from the bench of shadow to have watched

those scattered lights

that my ignorance has learned no names for

nor their places in constellations,

to have heard the note of water

in the cistern,

known the scent of jasmine and honeysuckle,

the silence of the sleeping bird,

the arch of the entrance, the damp

–these things perhaps are the poem.

Translation by William S. Merwin

 If you ever visit Buenos Aires and ask any porteño on the situation at the time they will tell you it has never been worse than at that precise moment. I sometime wonder that if you feel great pain, will extreme pain be just the same? Porteños complain about everything. In the winter they complain of chilblains in the summer of the heat.

In Vancouver, when it rains, Vancouverites complain about it. When it is hot, as it is now, they complain about it. My Rosemary, not a Vancouver-born Vancouverite, is complaining of the heat and nags me to put sprinklers here, there and everywhere.

I happen to love the heat and to be able to open windows. The opening of windows is verboten in the winter as heat bills are high and we must save.

I happen to love the heat. I love humidity, its smell in heat. It, the humid heat, reminds me of the tropics. My mother was born in Manila and often spoke of the heat. She never complained of the Buenos Aires heat.

In the late 60s and early 70s my Rosemary and I would drive our Beetle from Mexico City to the gulf coast port city of Veracruz where my mother lived.

We taught English in American companies so this meant that we would leave after our last classes on Fridays afternoon. Almost halfway between Mexico City and Veracruz we would plummet from 2,250 to 817 metres when we approached the city of Córdoba. By then it was night and you could smell that tropical heat. In Córdoba after a fine coffee (Veracruz has excellent and well made coffee) on the plaza I would change the carburetor jet of our VW. The jet allowed for more fuel to enter the carburetor as there was more oxygen to mix with it. Then we would open all the windows and glory at the feel of the heat and humidity. We could hear the insects and birds. It was a tropical paradise for our senses.

In Veracruz the tropical heat came with the smell of the decay of a port city. I liked those smells of salt, bunker oil and fish. Rosemary who was born in New Dublin, Ontario, could not handle the heat and spent most of the day taking cold showers.

On the Zócalo Rosemary and I would go to the Parroquia. It was a corner coffee establishment to one side of the local church. La Parroquia had walls of white tiles and waiters who might have been born for the job and had retained it. The corner coffee establishment had portales. In fact the zócalo of Veracruz is a four sided portales. Here we could sit or be inside under the large whirling fans that moved the air. But on the portales side we could listen to the marimbas that played and that for a few pesos would compose personal lyrics about you on the spot and sing them, competing with the sounds of the clanging streetcars and the ever honking cars of restless jarochos (as Mexicans call people of Veracruz).

In the Argentine Navy it was a high-ranking admiral who decided when the cool Buenos Aires spring met up with the humid hot summer. When the admiral decided for us, only then, could we switch from the heavy dark blue woollens of our winter uniform to our lighter white cotton summer one. My companions complained but I managed to not sweat and I ignored the whole thing. I guess I like to feel hot.

In Vancouver there are about two weeks when at night you can sleep on the bed without anything on and not under sheets. I find this luxuriously exotic/erotic. Unfortunately Rosemary doesn’t and she complains oblivious to my naughty advances.

Heat and cigarras are part of each other in the tropics. A cigarra is a cicada. Their afternoon drones give me nostalgia for tropical siestas with the anticipation of a cool drink and meal in the evening. In Veracruz this included walks with Rosemary on the seaside Malecón (before I married her) holding hands and enjoying the sea breeze.  

I cannot explain the paradoxical delight of leaving my friend Michael East’s air conditioned ranch house in south Texas, and to experience outside the furnace-like heat a couple of years ago. Lauren, now 12, could not and can not understand why I wore blue or black jeans in that heat. I have told her that I do not usually wear shorts because I am ashamed of my legs. In fact I inherited my mother’s beautiful legs. I guess I need not worry of insects or in Texas of marauding rattlesnakes.

It is hot today and I hope it persists a few more days. I can take Rosemary’s nagging to position the sprinkler. The heat simply makes me understand that in the past one never thinks that the precise moment of that present will one day be a memory, even a nostalgic memory.

I live the memories of the past in this present while the present quickly recedes into a past to make fresh new ones for tomorrow. 

As for the picture of Rosemary and Ale taken so long ago I remember Rosemary's bikini well. I purchased a bra and panties at a department store. Rosemary and I decided on the happy material that featured pink hearts. Then I carefully took the bra and panties apart and I made a pattern. We cut the material and Rosemary sewed her bikini. Later we made one out of a black almost latex-like material.

Medicine is powerless

Quinine  is useless

you can never be healed

  You must die. 

Anon, Passacalli Della Vita

Last night’s final performance of 2014 Vancouver Early Music Vancouver left me almost satisfied (I wanted more) and very melancholy.

The lyrics to the songs performed were sad and depressing straight out of Johann Paul Friedrich Richter’s weltschmerz. But that was not the reason for my melancholy.

My melancholy came about as the result of having gone to all the concerts and lectures of the 2014 Vancouver Early Music Festival. The performers and the audience, we all shared in a love for the baroque, the reading of music, the heat of summer in these sunny days that we experienced in the UBC School of Music at the Roy Barnett Recital Hall. The sounds, smiles, the clapping are now all in my memory. As were the warm pre-concert talks with Early Music Vancouver’s Artistic Director Matthew White and his guests, all erudite but down to earth.

At age (almost) 72 I feel there is lots of room in me to be surprised, challenged, entertained, enthralled, and excited. The EMV festival did all that. And it’s not all quite over.

Tomorrow at 5:50 in Gessler Hall (in the basement of the UBC School of Music) I will listen to a talk by Dutch harpsichord maker savant Ton Amir talk on the subject of Memento Mori in Dutch and Flemish art. Memento Mori is related to the artistic movement of the 17^th century called Vanitas and closely associated to Jean Paul Friedrich Richter and, yes! – the theme of tonight’s program Vanitas Vanitatum put together and directed by Philadelphia transplant in Montreal, organist, harpsichordist, professor, etc Hank Knox.

Vanitas Vanitatum featured Italian and German/Italian (Giovanni Girolamo Kapsberger,1580-1651) composers of the 17 century. There was a brilliant lute solo (one of those long ones that resemble the even longer archlutes) Kapsberger’s Toccata Settima – Libro primo d’intavolatura de lauto, 1611, by Sylvain Bergeron and a harpsichord solo, Girolamo Frescobaldi’s Ricercar Terzo, 1614, by Hank Knox. There were also one lovely Biagio Marini, 1594-1663 sonata, Sonata sopra Fuggi Dolente core and his Passacaille. Both were performed by Knox, Bergeron and violinists Chloe Meyers, Chantall Rémillard and viola da gambist and cellist Beilian Zhu.

The real core of the evening were the choral pieces in which we heard soprano Jacqueline Woodley, soprano and mezzo-soprano, Krisztina Szabó, mezzo-soprano Sylvia Szadovszki, countertenor (billed as a high tenor in the program) Jacques-Olivier Chartier, tenor Colin Balzer and baritone-turned bass Sumner Thompson. 

Knox somehow blended and mixed those six singers in ways that delighted me. You can find in YouTube many versions of the songs performed last night including this one, of the anonymous Passacalli Dell Vita. almost as good as the one I heard. It is by ARTEK. But it does not have that injection of variety that Knox gave us and it is treated with over-the-top bufoonery.. Best of all the lyrics of all the songs which are terminally depressing:

You die singing

You die playing

the lyre or the pipe

You must die.

Were played with a swing with graceful swerves of the violin bows and with Bergeron playing his lute, almost (but not quite) like an electric guitar. A wonderfully depressing concert somehow ended on the upbeat with that Passacalli which is really just an old-fashioned ground. 

 

Rosa "Wild Edric' August 9 2014

One of the reasons I love 17^th century baroque is that the composers like to throw in those odd notes that you might think are bad notes by performers but are not. Violinist Marc Destrubé likes to call them (and he smiles when he tells me this) blue notes. The first time around those notes sound like Thelonius Monk’s right-wrong notes. Of late I have heard fewer and fewer. I noted about four in the evening. Destrubé has told me that as I increasingly become used to them these odd notes are not odd anymore.

One salient one was in Domenico Mazzocchi’s (1592-1665) Da Tutti Gli Horologi Si Cava Moralitá with tenor Colin Balzer.

In the line chál ciel misura il regaloto errore (for it is heaven that measures all sin in order) Balzer uncharacteristically sounded off (he was not!) on that word regaloto.

And then! And then! he sang the last line:

Misurar non la deve altro ch’il pianto (and is not to be measured except by weeping)

and I came to understand where the Portuguese Fado came from. It was the best part of a wonderful evening.

And yet I was left thinking by the haunting lyrics of Marco Marazzoli, 1605-1662, Elena Incecchiata (the Aged Helen)  in which Helen of Troy, after its fall looks at her image on a mirror. It ends:

She spoke, then broke the mirror

in which once she delighted:

and the fragile glass demonstrates to us

how frail a lovely semblance is.  

Viveca Lindfors, October 1992

I then recalled that in October of  1992 I photographed Swedish actress Viveca Lindfors in my studio. She told me, "Alex, photograph me as I am. This is my face and I am proud of it." Unlike Marazzoli's Helen, Lindfors knew all about mirrors and about frail semblance. In the depressing lyrics of those 17th century composers there is hope and that hope is to accept the folly of vanitas vanitatum et omnia vanitas.