Frank's A Lot To Mac
Saturday, February 07, 2015
Sometime in the late 80s a young man suddenly appeared at
Vancouver Magazine, then on the corner of Richards and Davie. The young man was
an “aw shucks” sort of guy I often found in the corner office of
the editor, Malcolm Parry whom, then, we all called Mac.
It would be disingenuous on my part not to attribute
fully my success as a magazine photographer in Vancouver to the fact that I was
under the wing of Parry. Many others
were including quite a few writers, photographers, illustrators and art directors of note who since the 70s and 80s
broke out on their own.
I often chatted with the young man and when he found out
I had been assigned to photograph local fashion designer Catherine Regehr he
offered to assist me with the styling. I wrote about it here. Few who have
followed the career of the young man are aware that he wrote many articles for
the magazine downstairs from Vancouver Magazine, Western Living. Coupland
championed the grass-free lawn garden and revealed to us all the charm of the
English trug.
In September 1987 Parry launched a wonderful issue of
Vancouver Magazine that had all sorts on National Geographic-style photographs.
It was also the first appearance of Coupland’s Generation-X.
In today’s Malcolm Parry column in the Vancouver Sun
(Town Talk) Parry tells us about Coupland’s start in Toronto for a magazine
called Vista. Following my excerpt of that column there is Malcolm Parry’s bio
in the Vancouver Sun. Read it carefully and if you can read between the lines
you will know what I have always known. I was not the only one under Mac’s
wing.
FRANK’S A LOT:
Perhaps self-made billionaire Frank Stronach will visit Douglas Coupland’s
exhibition at Toronto’s Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art. If he does, the
Magna International firm founder should be applauded for launching the West
Vancouver-based writer-artist on his journey there. It was 1988 when
then-27-year-old Coupland joined the editorial staff of Vista, a magazine
Stronach had funded to the tune of $12 million. As an artist, it amused and
pleased him that Stronach’s daughter Belinda, then 22, would drop by to hang
valuable works by Andy Warhol and suchlike on Vista’s office walls. Meanwhile,
Coupland buckled down in the workstation he called a “veal fattening pen” to
develop a feature-article-turned-comic strip he called Generation X. The
magazine closed after two years. By then, though, Coupland had retained a New
York literary agent who successfully pitched the catchy title to St. Martin’s
Press. The subsequent 1991 book lit the fuse on its author’s stellar career.
The title, along with Coupland-conceived terms like McJobs, became global
catchwords. Such consequences would doubtless please the quirky Stronach, as
visiting Coupland’s exhibition may, too.
Malcolm Parry
Malcolm Parry was born and educated in England, where he
studied civil engineering and worked as a part time musician playing the
saxophone.
In Canada he worked as a commercial and industrial
photographer and later as the advertising and public relations manager of a
telecommunications manufacturing division of New York based General Telephone
and Electronics International, now the Verizon Corporation. He also freelanced
extensively as a writer and photographer for regional and national newspapers
and periodicals in Canada.
In 1970 he was the founding editor and later publisher of
the Vancouver-based business periodical B.C. Affairs and founding
editor/publisher of its spinoff periodical B.C. Industry Reports. In 1974 he
was founding editor and later publisher of the city monthly periodical
Vancouver Magazine. He remained editor for two terms totalling 15 years, during
which time he, the magazine and its contributors won many regional and national
and some international awards.
During that period he was founding executive editor of
Edmonton and Calgary Magazines and of the B.C. business periodical Equity. For
briefer periods he was editor of Western Living magazine, which publishes
editions in B.C. Alberta Saskatchewan and Manitoba, and was also editor of a
Vancouver city affairs publication titled V.
He was founding editor of the Toronto based business
magazine Vista, where he won a national award for art direction.
A Vancouver Sun columnist since 1991, he has written
about all manner of social, cultural, entertainment, business, education and
political doings and has photographed for publication well over 10,000
individuals and a lesser number of animals.”
While Malcolm Parry was editor of Vista, journalist Mark
Budgen and I were assigned to do two stories. For them we flew to Argentina and
Uruguay. In my closet I have a black Generation-X Vista T-shirt.
Te Puede Matar Una Guitarra
Friday, February 06, 2015
1964
Jorge Luís Borges
Ya no es
mágico el mundo. Te han dejado.
Ya no
compartirás la clara luna
ni los
lentos jardines. Ya no hay una
luna que
no sea espejo del pasado,
cristal
de soledad, sol de agonías.
Adiós
las mutuas manos y las sienes
que
acercaba el amor. Hoy sólo tienes
la fiel
memoria y los desiertos días.
Nadie
pierde (repites vanamente)
sino lo
que no tiene y no ha tenido
nunca,
pero no basta ser valiente
para
aprender el arte del olvido.
Un
símbolo, una rosa, te desgarra
y te
puede matar una guitarra.
II
Ya no
seré feliz. Tal vez no importa.
Hay
tantas otras cosas en el mundo;
un
instante cualquiera es más profundo
y
diverso que el mar. La vida es corta
y aunque
las horas son tan largas, una
oscura
maravilla nos acecha,
la
muerte, ese otro mar, esa otra flecha
que nos
libra del sol y de la luna
y del
amor. La dicha que me diste
y me
quitaste debe ser borrada;
lo que
era todo tiene que ser nada.
Sólo que
me queda el goce de estar triste,
esa vana
costumbre que me inclina
al Sur,
a cierta puerta, a cierta esquina.
The Supreme Court, The Corcoran & Arthur Erickson On Top Of Thomas Jefferson
Thursday, February 05, 2015
In 2000 LML Payments Sytems, an international cheque cashing
software company based in Vancouver sent me to the US to photograph people in
the organization for their 2001 Annual Report. I had to go to Washington DC,
Phoenix and Dallas.
I decided that to properly shoot this I would take my medium
format camera (and a second one as backup) plus my almost compact studio
lights, a powerful (then) flash unit (a Norman 200B) for on location shooting,
plus the necessary light stands and heavy duty tripod. To carry all this I
brought a collapsible two-wheeled cart.
Perhaps it was the stress of the logistics but before I left
for the US I developed shingles around my waist. It was painful for me to even
sit in my airplane seat. In Phoenix it was 117 Fahrenheit. Between Dallas and
Washington DC I realized I had left my Norman 200B (battery operated) in a
Dallas office. I needed it for Washington DC where I was to photograph four
lawyers in front of the US Supreme
Court. They were to be the daunting faces of the company should anybody want to
infringe on their patents.
The Norman was shipped to DC by courier and I got it in
time. By then I was suffering excruciating pain.
At the Supreme Court I was pleasantly warned that I could
take as many pictures as I wanted as long as I took them on the other side of
the street. With a long lens I was able to compress the building and my Norman
200B worked just fine.
With the relief of having successfully finished my job I
decided I wanted to see some of the local galleries. Two of them were the
Corcoran Gallery of Art and the National Gallery.
I decided to go to the Corcoran first. I entered the gallery
with all my equipment. I told the guards of my mission to go to the National
Gallery and I asked them if I could store my equipment. Without even inspecting
it they smiled at me and allowed me to wheel my stuff into a room.
I remember all kinds of Singer Sargents but the painting to
remember was Frederic Edwin Church’s 1857 Niagara (7½-foot-wide) painting.
From the Corcoran with my equipment safely in storage I
stopped at the American Institute of Architects. On an inner wall I was looking
for the posted Gold Medal Award winners, for 1986 the winner was our very own
Arthur Erickson. There was something curious here. Thomas Jefferson had been
given his award posthumously in 1993. When I returned to Vancouver I ran into
Erickson and told him that his name was over Jefferson’s. With a wink he told
me, “I am on top of him and that’s the way it should be.”
A few days ago I read in my NY Times that the Corcoran
Gallery is closing and most of its collection is going to the National Gallery.
On Thursday, the
National Gallery announced that almost 6,500 works had been taken into the
overall collection so far. The museum’s holdings of 1,215 American paintings
alone will grow by 226, including beloved works like Frederic Edwin Church’s
1857 “Niagara,” a 7 ½-foot-wide blockbuster that Nancy Kay Anderson, the
curator of American and British paintings at the National Gallery, refers to as
“our ‘Niagara problem” because it is so important and so large that paintings
at her museum will almost certainly have to move or go into storage to
accommodate it. The process that has been underway behind closed doors at the
National Gallery — one large museum essentially digesting another of
considerable size — is, in its scope and particulars, unlike anything an American
museum has undertaken before.
Chances are that I will never ever get shingles again. But my troubles had not ended. Once on the airplane ready to return to Vancouver a storm started. We stayed on the tarmac for five hours (we had to help ourselves to water as by some strange law the flight attendants could not serve us while on the ground). The airplane finally returned to the terminal and I slept the night on a long seat. Everybody was shouting and clamoring for attention. I decided that would not help. The woman behind the desk agreed and rapidly got me a seat in the first plane out. Unfortunately I did not make in time to Vancouver when the folks of the US magazine Better Homes and Gardens was going to shoot our garden for a spread. The spread did appear. But I felt a bit left out!
The Triomphante Reeds Of The Cascadia Reed Quintet
Wednesday, February 04, 2015
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| Marea Chernoff, Colin MacDonald, A.K. Coope, Olivia Martin & Shawn Earle |
When I attend a movie at a local Multiplex I am offended by
the stink of fast food, loud soundtracks and that constant repetition to “enjoy
the show”. I cannot understand why we must be exposed to commercials. When I
leave a Multiplex I am smothered in guilt.
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| Jurgen Gothe |
That is not
the case when I go to a good local concert. And this particularly applies to
the longstanding tradition of Wednesday Noon Hours at the UBC School of Music.
The school features concerts by top notch musicians (many are instructors and
or principals in varied BC orchestras) for $5.
Today I
attended a performance of the Cascadia Reed Quintet
Marea
Chernoff: oboe/English horn
Shawn Earle:
clarinet
ColinMacDonald: soprano/alto saxophone
Olivia
Martin: bassoon
A.K. Coope:
bass clarinet.
The varied
and most pleasant program included one wonderful gem. This was the arrangement
of Jean Philippe Rameau’s Suite la Triomphante. It was refreshing for my friend
Ian Bateson and I, regulars of the Early Music Vancouver, Pacific BaroqueOrchestra and Stile Moderno concerts to listen to baroque music not (and I
repeat not!) played by authentic instruments of the time. Of particular delight
was to listen ever so clearly in the quintet the sound of that unusual
instrument (usually buried in the back of a symphony orchestra) of A.K. Coope’s
bass clarinet. This clarinet has an unusually high upper register but can still
go lower than a bassoon.
Part of the
La Triomphante was movement Fanfarinette which for many years was the opening
theme for the popular afternoon CBC Radio show Disc Drive hosted by JurgenGothe.
Any program
that includes anything by Arvo Pårt and finishes with a jazzy (Colin MacDonald
on his alto saxophone) Day Dream by Billy Strayhorn has to be unusually good.
And it was. We left refreshed (without guilt) and I had enough time to
photograph Chernoff’s beautiful shoes. I suspected they may have been an
expensive purchase at Gravity Pope. I was wrong. Chernoff, who plays as the
principal oboist for the Kamloops Symphony bought them there!
Colin MacDonald explained that the inspiration for the Cascadia Reed Quintet came from the Dutch group Colefax. So much good stuff in dance and in music comes out of the Netherlands. It is not generally known that many of our city musicians and dancers have studied there.
So many
inhabitants of this city complain that it is a “no fun” city. I think
otherwise. And consider that having fun here is not always even expensive.
Because Bateson and I arrived early we went for a walk. I pointed out to my friend that in a city where it rains a lot there are few covered walkways at UBC. One of the rare ones is outside the UBC School of Music and leads to the Belkin Art Gallery and the Frederick Wood Theatre. At the end of the walkway there is a replica sculpture, Asiatic Head, by Otto Fischer-Credo. It would have to be sheer coincidence that he was not dancer Cornelius Fischer-Credo's father. Cornelius Fischer-Credo now lives in Florence. I wrote about him here and here.
 |
| Cornelius Fischer-Credo |
 |
| Asiatic Head - Otto Fischer-Credo |
Otto Fischer-Credo (1890-1959)
Asiatic Head, 1958
concrete
190 x 70 x 51 cm
(UBC Archives photos #1.1/15927-3 and #1.1/1416)
A replica was made in 1977 by Gerhard Class. Made of marble sand and polyester resin it is now located at the north end of the covered walkway between the Music Building and Lasserre. It was donated to UBC by Mrs. Astrid Fischer-Credo and exhibited on the UBC campus as part of an exhibition of outdoor sculpture organized by the Northwest Institute of Sculptors.
Fischer-Credo was born in Berlin in 1890 and died in Vancouver in 1959. He studied at the Akademie der Kunste in Berlin from 1908-15 and the Royal Academy of Art in Paris from 1919-21. Fischer-Credo lived in the Philippines, Mexico, Cuba and the United States before coming to Vancouver in 1957. His first solo show was in Manila in 1926. A major commission in Vancouver includes a life-size crucifix in yellow cedar for Our Lady of Sorrow Church at Little Flower Academy.
And communication from Cornelius via facebook:
2:28pm
Cornelius Fischer-credo
ciao Alex, wow blast from my past. W've been living in Florence
for the past 11 years. Ironically 'm moving back to Vancouver this summer.
Yes Otto was my father, born in 1890, he was a sculptor,
studied at L'ecole Des Beaux Artes in Paris in the teens and early twenties
(his painting instructor was Gaugain). He lived and worked in Asia for 8 years,
China, Japan and mainly Manila. there's an interesting blog about architecture
in Manila that speaks about him that I can send you.
He and my family were living in New York city (the west
village) when WW2 started and they were forced to go back to Germany. He was
indoctrinated into the Third Reich and did war art (even a bust of Hitler that
I recently found out still exists). After spending 5 years in a French prisoner
of war camp in Algeria, he did restoration work for a number of years in Bonn
and then in the late 50s my whole family immigrated to Vancouver. He died in
1958.
There you have a brief history of my father Otto. I will
send you the link.
The Ghost and Mrs. Muir & Calabria Bakery Pizza
Tuesday, February 03, 2015
You can be much more alone with other people than you are by
yourself, even if it's people you love. That sounds all mixed up, doesn't it?
Mrs. Muir
Anybody turning on a TV and randomly tuning to Gone With the
Wind would find it almost impossible not to linger or even see it to the end. There
are some films like Gone With the Wind that are iconic for certain generations. My guess is that both
of my daughters (in their 40s) would linger on Star Wars.
It may have been not too many years after The Ghost and
Mrs. Muir was released in 1947, directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz and with Rex
Harrison, Gene Tierney, George Sanders and a very young Natalie Wood, that I
saw the film with my parents in Buenos Aires. There is one scene that became
embedded in my brain and I anticipate it every time I see this film. Mrs. Muir,
an old woman now sits at a wing chair and picks up her hot milk. You see her
hand pick it up and then her hand droops and the glass falls to the floor.
Rex Harrison’s voice is as memorable as Tierney’s unearthly
beauty.
After seeing it once I saw it again years later with my
mother, then with my wife and then with my two daughters. Lately I gave the
film to my eldest daughter who lives in Lillooet and she saw it one evening
when her sister Hilary and daughter Lauren when they were there for a visit.
Just a few days after a dinner of homemade pizza (Calabria
Bakery dough) Hilary, Lauren, Rosemary and I sat down in the den to see The
Ghost and Mrs. Muir. This film is one of my Gone With the Wind type iconic
films. I enjoy it every time and wonder where all those actors with wonderful
voices have gone to. All I have to do is remember Sean Connery and Audrey
Hepburn in Robin and Marian to almost grieve at the loss of the great voices
(well Connery is still with us).
But for me the real wonder is to watch Lauren, 12 and to
realize that I was a lot younger when I saw The Ghost and Mrs. Muir and how
wonderful that 65 years later there we are seeing it again. What would my mother have thought of Lauren her great granddaughter? Strange to see a film in which an older actress plays the very young Natalie Wood. When we first saw the film she was an unknown.
Next on the iconic lineup will be Laura.
The complete script for The Ghost and Mrs. Muir.
Onomata - Me & My Cello
Monday, February 02, 2015
As an early teenager, 15, I fell in love with Anna María
Ramos in Nueva Rosita, Coahuila in Mexico. I was in the 8th grade in
a room that also accommodated, in parallel rows, perpendicular to the large blackboard, the 7th and 6th
grade, My mother was our teacher. The
school, I believe had two additional teachers and rooms for the
other classes.
When I first gazed on the apparition, she had large black
eyes and dramatic eyebrows; I knew I first had to know her name. Once I did I
would think of the name and daydream. The name became the apparition of my delight. It was
impossible to separate the name from the person. Anna became her name or
perhaps it was the other way around. I was not yet aware of Plato’s forms so I
had no idea on how naming things and persons is an exclusively human (very
human) endeavour. To know more about this read here.
I have a new friend. His name is Curtis and he plays a
baroque bass. He is most pleasant, he is intelligent and he is a warm person.
But there is something that sets him apart from all the people I know. He is
either unable or unwilling to name things.
He told me that if he ever had children they would remain unnamed. Could
the naming of things somehow make them ours and his reluctance to not name be a
demonstration of a free spirit willing to live and let live?
Curtis came to Vancouver (he lives in the US) a few months
ago and when I asked him if his bass had a name he told me no. It had to be my
friend Patricia and her bass Nicolo who finally baptized Curtis’s bass Amelia
suggesting that some basses are female and others male.
I have another friend, a baroque cellist and her cello
seemed to be unnamed. In facebook postings I would read “Cello and I …” I
enquired and I was told that cello was called Grace.
I must now confess that when I photographed a fine female
librarian with her cello I did not ask for the cello’s name. Certainly, the
pattern shows, that it must have one. I wonder.
A Mission In Africa Or On The Deck Of A Ship?
Sunday, February 01, 2015
Twice in my life I almost made a decision that may have
saved me from the perils of the one I must face now.
That is the peril of having things.
While at a Roman Catholic boarding school in Austin we were
often asked if we felt we had a vocation. This was Catholic school recruiting
talk to lure us into becoming a Brother or Priest of Holy Cross. I must admit
that for just a few seconds, every now and then I thought about it.
I was attracted to the concept of simplicity and not owning
too many possessions. I had seen how a few brothers had been summoned and told
they were being sent to a mission in Africa or Brazil. I had seen how easy it
had been. They might have sent a few letters to their relatives, then packed a
suitcase with a few black socks, black slacks, a couple of black brother
vestments, a few white shirts, a sweater and a bible. And that was that.
Then I would look at my Pentacon-F with its 50mm lens and I
knew I wanted an 80mm portrait lens. I also wanted a pair of black cordovan
Bostonian loafers and… the list got bigger.
A few years later ( I was 22) I was on the deck of the
Argentine Merchant Marine ship Rio Aguapey (I was the only passenger on a free
ticket back home to Veracruz after two years as an Argentine Navy conscript).
We were in the port of Santos in Brazil. The deck was infested with insects and
the docks looked filthy. As we shoved off the insects disappeared and I was on
board a clean ship, the smell of paint was comforting, with no earthly obligations or commitments. For a few days
the idea of joining the Merchant Marine became attractive. Those people on the
dock in Santos had no choice but to stay and live there. Here on board I would
be free of it all. But after talking to my friends, the young officers, it
became obvious that they had poor family lives and a terrible prospect of ever
having a wife that they would be loyal to. Still the compactness and the fact
that my cabin had only my necessities (including a book on the philosophy of
Spengler) and nothing more persisted in being attractive to me.
Now in February 2015 the end looms much nearer than on
that deck at Santos. I have asked my eldest daughter Ale in Lillooet to make a
trip, early spring so that she and her sister Hilary can look around the house
and make a list of what they might want to inherit.
Rosemary has found our will and we will make a new one. I
will write little essays explaining the framed photographs on our walls and
paste them behind.
Both my daughters were born in Mexico but as strange as
it may seem the oldest, Ale feels Mexican while the younger feels Argentine.
This would help them decide who wants what.
Perhaps we will put our house on the market in the coming
fall and move in spring. We will make sure that wherever we move our two cats can follow us.
It will be tough to get rid of so many books. One sad
decision I thought I would have to make became less so. Rosemary asked me if we
should heavily prune the trees on our garden to give my roses and her
perennials more necessary light and sun. I answered that this was not
necessary. My beloved roses and I are on the same boat of decline. The ones
that survive will go to gardens of friends. Those that don’t will remain in my
memory until that memory goes.
Meanwhile I think of those pair of “what ifs” and wonder
where I would be now. Would it be a mission in Africa or on the deck of a ship?
I have a nagging suspicion that my third choice was the best.
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