I have noticed the social media trend to post pictures of oneself when one was young and gravity had yet to take its toll. This is especially of women of a certain age who like opera singers use pictures taken at least 30 years ago. So as not to be redundant one has to look fresh and young, “You are still beautiful,” friends post without thinking that the use of “still” makes it an insult. Or smart phone apps are used to blur and lift (perhaps?) features in those annoying selfies.

The picture of Sean Rossiter here. by then Western Living Magazine art director Chris Dahl. The man never allowed me to stay in the comfort zone and glory of past work. He always pushed for doing it different, I remember what he told me on how to take that picture of Rossiter:

Alex, don’t use your Mamiya and don’t use flash. I want you to use your Nikon with that 85mm f-1.4 lens. I want you to used hot lights so you will have to switch to Tungsten Type Ektachrome to get a decent flesh tone. And please use some dramatic lighting and some colour gels.”

In this 21^st century, digital wonders ads tell you that with the Mark III in your hand the world is in your hands. Nothing else is needed for you to “capture that amazing” image. And as I see these captured images I see mostly a vast wasteland of uniformity.

Lily of the Belly

This double sided row of dining stalls ran from the front door down to the bar at the back. To Lily, her Candia Taverna performance – swinging her hips, raising her arms, clicking her fingers and looking down at the diners, who looked up at her from their fodder at the stalls – was like belly dancing at the stable. Too much wagging in the aisle and Lily’s lace skirt would be soaked in sauce, but the cash was easily stuffed into Lily’s belt as she passed. Even the city police came back and poked in the odd five spot for her seven o”clock show…

While Lily danced,, there was always a pause while the guys got over their embarrassment and pegged a bill to her belt. It happened as soon as they saw the women were more enthusiastic about Lily than they were. For Lily always danced to women, demonstrating what women of her age had, what they could do with their own belly, if they had a mind to.

The book arrived at my doorstep in the hands of McWhirter, Vancouver's first Poet Laureate a month ago accompanied by a fine bottle of Spanish Tempranillo wine. Both were a gift for the use of my photograph in the back inside cover of this splendid collection of stories featuring (except possibly for two) wayward, assertive, modern, and a ribald, a word I have no memory of using since reading the Playboy Magazines of the 80s. The cover of The Gift of Women, an illustration by Olena Vizerskaya, harks back to the smooth, air-brushed record covers of Roxy Music with their languid women and in particular that one in Roxy Music Siren.

As I read The Gift of Women some of the stories reminded me of the erotic stories of Michele Slung's Slow Hand: Women Writing Erotica. Like in Slow Hand McWhirter's women always have the upper hand.

Some of the other stories, are ample proof that magic realism is not limited to Latin America or in Saramago’s Europe. Perhaps some of McWhirter’s flights into this realm ( Lily of the Belly features a family of raccoons and an extremely erotic bath in tub full of tomato juice) may have come via his friend, Mexican poet/novelist/environmentalist Homero Aridjis, whose many collections of poems have been translated by McWhirter. I must assert here that Afran the Kurd barber’s abilities to make bald post grow as he snips or an ancient aqueduct in Mexico in a land locked state that is able to flow into the sea are inventions that have no precedent for me.

And the humour of McWhirter, a story, Cup-W, featuring a French Canadian couple (she is stacked and so is he) and an Anglophone inside worker for CUPW in Hull written in the English spoken by a French Canadians reminded me of the poems of Cuban Nicolás Guillén which when read out loud sounded like the Cuban accent. And if that were not enough there is a ghost story set in a nun’s school for girls in Ireland.

George McWhirter

Easily this local book has to be one of the liveliest, funniest and best written books of 2014 which I have read this 2015. Like many novels or short stories written by poets (Homero Aridjis is one example) I found myself reading sentences and paragraphs over and over with McWhirter’s Ulster accent and cadence in my head.

I had to call up McWhirter to tell him how much I had laughed reading his book. He answered thusly in an email:

Dear Alex:

Thank you for your phone call. Making someone laugh makes my work worthwhile. I’m in the line of James Stephens, Flan O’Brien and that strain of Irish storytelling. Particularly, Stephens in his autobiography, which is hilarious. When I read his ‘a horse, some ladies and a rhinoceros’ episode, I was smitten with the spitting image of my own imagination and hyperbole wielding wit, which I didn’t need so much as emulate in words as to slow similar words down and write them to a piece of paper. In short, the words came tripping out of me and I tripped over them.

 George

Sarita

For a while I have meant to do what I did today that is New Year’s Day. I have noticed this reflection on my bathtub wall many times and noted when it happens.   My intention never saw fruit until today when I asked my Rosemary to bring me my Fuji-X-E1.  She was a bit worried about my having an accident. But I can report that everything worked find and the camera never touched water. 

Corina

In reference to my early romantic life I have written about it here. I wasn’t to know until a few years later how insular the Anglo/Argentine community was in Buenos Aires.

While in BA during my two year stint in the Argentine Navy between 1965 and 1966 I fell for three women. That one of them, was my first cousin Elizabeth Blew, added just the right touch of spice.

I should have known then how it would all end but I didn’t. The three women, Susy Bornstein, Corina Poore and Elizabeth Blew all had an accent that resembled that of the Queen of England.

Susy

It wasn’t until about 15 years ago that Elizabeth revealed to me that she knew Corina as both had gone to that private school for girls, Northlands.  In fact not too long ago both had attended a 50 year class reunion and Corina had traveled from London for it.

What I did not know was that Susy had also gone to Northlands. When I re-posted this blog a few days ago Elizabeth decided to facebook Corina in the following manner (I am recalling it as Elizabeth seems to have taken down the message):

Elizabeth

Corina, Alex and I are first cousins. My mother was a Hayward. There is this lovely picture of Susy in Alex’s blog.  I was unaware that she had died. Here it is.

I berated Elizabeth for his citing that she had previously told Corina that we were cousins. Elizabeth’s reply:

Give me a break!  50 years later, yes, 50 years later, situations such as this one .... are amusing . I'm quite aware that Corina went off to art school and Susy was "the friend". 

Perhaps Elizabeth had forgotten about this

There is one thing that worries me and that is the fact that Elizabeth finds my concerns (50 year old concerns) strange. There must be something wrong with me.

My life until now has been populated with mentors who have guided me on the right paths. Thanks to Google I know that Mentor was the assigned man by Odysseus to take care and advise his son Telemachus while father was away in Troy. When Telemachus is grown and his father has yet to return, he and Mentor go in search. It is  at this point that our Mentor is taken over by the wise Athena giving even more credence to the important role that mentors play in our lives.

This is a rough list of my mentors up to know:

George Waterhouse-Hayward:  He died in 1965. More than anything he taught me (not too well) the value of patience and the importance of avoiding bitterness. His King James Bible, Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory, Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities and Edward Fitzgerald’s translation of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám have been constant sources of inspiration. My father once told me, “If you want to learn how to cook you must first be able to make sauces.”

Brother Edwin Reggio, C.S.C. : I lost Brother Edwin in 2013 and we were friends until then. He once told me, “These two glasses (a small one, and a big) one, both full of water are equally full. The same can be said about happiness.”

Raúl Guerrero Montemayor:  I lost him in 2013. I always went to him for advice. His advice, “Alex if you think this will make you happy, buy it.”

Juan Manuel Sánchez: This 80 plus Argentine painter now lives far in Buenos Aires. He once gave me a book, a Chilean translation into Spanish of Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain. “Read it.” I did and a lot of my life changed with that book.

Captain USN Onofrio Salvia. This wonderful man whom I worked for as a translator while in the Argentine Navy I contacted a few years ago before he died in his late 80s. His piece of advice has always been with me. “Alex, it is obvious that you and military life don’t see eye to eye. It is useless to rebel as they will arrest you and throw you into the brig and you will prove nothing. Wait until you have reached a position of power and then change what you do not like.”

I am sure that I may be doing a disservice to women mentors here and I had plenty of them! They range from my mother and grandmother to my very own Rosemary.

It has been in the last few days of Christmas time idleness that I thought of one more mentor.  While I was born n 1942 due to bureaucratic errors my birth was recorded almost a year later in 1943. This mean that as a conscript sailor I was from  Clase 1943. By the rules of military order a sailor from the 1942 class outranked me.  I was only a month in my military service when I met Bjerre (of Danish extraction his name is pronounced Pierre-eh with that initial p pronounced as a b). He was a handsome and very cool lad. Since we called each other by our surname I have no recollection of his first name. Bjerre was  in his second year of our two year conscription period) sailor. We called him and their kind, conscriptos piola. Piola in Argentine slang means quick-thinking, almost sly.  He told me, "Those three white stripes on your collar are in honour of Lord Nelson's famous three victories, The Nile, Copenhagen and Trafalgar." I have since found out that the British navy had issued collars with three white stripes before all of those battles. But it rang true and I have never forgotten. While he might have erred in naval history his advice was always good enough to prevent me from falling into the traps that other tenderfoot sailors got into. Once his stint was over and I lost contact with Bjerre I tried to model myself after the crafty Dane.

I believe that there was one act of personal craftiness on my part that was directly inspired by Bjerre. I had a cushy job as a translator of Captain Onofrio Salvia who was the Senior US Naval Advisor. But I was still subject to those terrible summons for reinforcement of military training or to the orders of lowly corporals who would make me clean huge kitchen bells (over huge stoves).  One day went into Salvia’s filing cabinet and purloined a nice 8x10 glossy of the then Argentine Chief of Naval Operations, Contraalmirante Benigno Varela. I put a dedicatoria in one corner, “A mi amigo Jorge Alejandro”  Contraalmirante Benigno Varela. I placed the photograph under the glass of my desk. Within days treatment improved and I was no long called for duty for military instruction drills.

But my “friend” had limits in a an ability to save me.. I was told by a chubby Argentine Captain to report every day at 6 am to translate documents for him. I told him this was impossible as my train from the pension where I lived (this was in fact a privilege) did not have a train that would get me to the office on time. The Captain looked at me and it was then that I lost it. I told him in what was then defined as pure insubordination,” I flatly refuse to obey your order.”  The man looked at me and said, “In time of war I could have you shot. Or I could send you to one of our remote stations in the Antarctic. Your only contact with the female of the species would be penguins. But  need you. I will have put in the brig for two weeks and every day you will be escorted here at 6.”

I am sure that Bjerre would have known better. But then mentors  always do.

The one undeniable and irrefutable fact that has emerged in the chaos that this last week has been has been that pi to four decimal places is 3.141. My dyslexia and other factors beyond my control should have sent me to another dimension where that figure would not have been the correct one.

My overture to install a password to my computer a week ago (the value of pi to four decimal places) caused my computer to crash. My windows XP is now history and will soon have to deal with the complexity (not an improvement in my opinion) of Windows 7 plus that I will be pouring out of pocket for a digital and slightly more impervious solid state hard drive.

In my effort to protect my wife’s iPhone 4 form unwarranted attention by a visiting teenager I showed how easy it was to install a password on my iPhone 3G. I keyed in pi to four places and everything was fine for almost a day. To my horror when I attempted to type 3141 on my phone the phone told me it was the wrong one. Further attempts led the phone to lock up and make me weight, 5, 10, 15 minutes and finally one hour and a half. I gave up in horror knowing the only fix was taking my phone to an Apple Genius who would electronically dismantle my phone (all data lost).

But in the morning yesterday (I write this on January 1, 2015) I keyed in 3146 and the phone opened. As soon as I could figure it all out I took out the code and my iPhone is happily working.

The word password has been in my mind now for some days and I thought about the Spanish equivalents. It is far more interesting in Spanish. During the long war to push the Moors out of Spain the Spanish army had to devise safety protocols for sieges and when opposing armies where close to each other. The first method was to give out a “nombre”. More often it was the name of a saint that the Moors would be ignorant of.  In time that password became a “santo”. As soon as the Moors caught on the Spaniards imposed a second password, a counter-password or contraseña which was called santo y seña  which was later simplified to contraseña.

I wonder if the banking term to counter sign does  not have some relevance to the above.

The concept of having a pen pal is lost in this 21st century.  Few now would know that it involved making snail mail friends with people you had never ever met or inclined to ever meet in the future.  Having a pen pal was movement that was promoted by many schools and you would have a pen pal living in the opposite end of the world.

I never had a pen pal but I have had something close to that in my internet friend Dana Moreno López.  I have written about her a few times before.

Dana does selfies
Modeling nude
My friend Dana Fotera
Dana Fotera & Graham Greene

 I believe I must write this version now.

In 2001, over those languid Christmas holidays that used to be a staple of my life and before social media brought banality into our life full-time I participated in photography forums. In one based in Spain I read a very good account on how a model should deal with photographers. Dana (at the time she used the handle Dana Fotera) wrote in detail how the photographer and model should meet before photo sessions over coffee and how parameters would be set. From that point Dana and I became friends. She would send me jpgs of herself taken by very good Spanish photographers. I used to show these pictures to my classes at Focal Point where my students developed a liking for the in your face girl with the freckles.

Sometime in the mid-2000s Dana had a heart attack. She might have been around 21 then. At surgery before any of the knives appeared she almost died because of a severe allergic reaction to anesthesia. She was told it was far safer for her to live with her heart problem than to challenge her chances with an operation. Dana was living at home. She was a kindergarten teacher and a very good amateur photographer who specialized in photographs of young female gymnast athletes.  I had no way of understanding on how in the then (and perhaps even now) conservative atmosphere of Spain she was able to hide from her father her penchant for posing with nothing on.

She is now one of my fave facebook friends and  we have a persistent running little conflict on the fact that I believe that the best pictures she ever took are the ones she took of herself. At  my age  I am no longer impressed by the fashion poses and fashion looks. But I am impressed by series of underwater pictures her friend Teco has been taking of her. In all of the photographs, Dana always does nothing to hide her myriad freckles.

The reason for this blog came about when recently after seeing one of her breathtaking self-portraits (mostly with window light) I wrote in Spanish, “Finally I have seen the humanity in you.”  Her quick answer was, “We are all human.”  I don’t think she missed the point,. I think she wanted to assert her right to disagree.

By my inaccurate calculations if Dana was 21 when I first met her in 2001 she would now be around 35. She is much too young for what will follow below which will be my diatribe on a trend I see in social media and just about everywhere else. That it is happening at a time when women have been “liberated” is troubling. It is troubling because the trend seems to be generated by women themselves.

Because of 

my age, 72, many of my female friends are this side of 50 and close to mine. In social media they do everything to hide what they look like now. Some of them post pictures of their offspring. Others pose behind nets or in distorting mirrors. Yet others use obvious photo “improvement” programs to eliminate pores, bags, wrinkles and unsightly hair colour. When these women post these pictures, the superlatives from other women know no bounds. There is one frequent one that would infuriate me were I the woman. “You are still beautiful.”

Sometime in the 90s I read a column (a female columnist) in Esquire in which she gave advice to gentlemen who wanted to get to first base with high fashion models. "These women are tired at hearing how stunning they are. Point out their intelligence and they shall be yours."

Why must the posting of female selfies always have to have statements of agreement on beauty?  Why does this not apply to male selfies?

I used to say that in male portraiture wrinkles  gave men character while in women it was considered character assassination. Nothing seems to have changed. An exception to all of this is my non-plus-ultra fave Charlotte Rampling who poses exactly how she is.

I can predict that Dana Moreno López will never fall for any of this. She will always appear exactly as she  is with all her proud and very human freckles. I look forward (if I am still around) to seeing her photographs (preferably those self-portraits) when she reaches 40 and beyond. That will be one hell of a woman.