Gambas
Saturday, March 24, 2018
Esas
piernas, dignas de un arácnido, que nunca acaban de plegarse de tan largas.
Rosa
Montero
Those legs, worthy of an aracnid, which never manage to unfold for being so long.
It is difficult in this 21st century and with its MeToo Movement
to discuss (as a man) what a woman may look like to me (a man).
In one of my first shows many years ago which I shared
with two other photographers (one was a woman) they featured female nudes that
showed parts but no face. My nudes showed the faces. I remember that someone
left a note that said, ”Thank you for the faces.”
In a trip to my native Buenos Aires some ten years ago (I
have returned twice since) I told my nephew Georgito O’Reilly, a loving father
who happens to play killer rugby and in his youth was a member of Argentina’s
Pumas that I could not understand those toothpaste posters in the streets that
featured beautiful Argentine women in bikinis. Ten years ago I was already part
of that Canadian mentality in which men learn about feminism and steer away
from calling women ladies or girls.
It was 50 years ago that I complained to my new Canadian
wife, Rosemary, that I did not like how she fried eggs, sewed buttons or hemmed
my jeans. Those who may be reading this would suspect that I learned to cook
eggs, sew buttons and hem jeans, pronto.
My nephew could not understand my criticism of the
toothpaste ads. His comment to me was something to do with me being gay.
Now that I have cleared the air, I cannot refrain from
stating here that not only am I a neck man (in reference to the opposite sex)
but also a leg man.
My admiration for female legs began with my admiring my
mother’s. In those days when you went to airports and passengers deplaned on
the tarmac (and particularly on the side not facing the airport window), I could
always tell which one was my mother. She had splendid legs. I must add here
that I inherited her legs and also a pair of lovely feet. My 75 year-old feet
look decades younger.
In 1968 while teaching English in Mexico City I spotted a
woman (from the back) leaving the school. She had long and straight blonde
hair. She was slim and she was wearing a micro-mini skirt. Her legs were from
here to there. That was Rosemary Healey whom I shortly married.
The two latter women caused me to almost have an early
meeting with death.
Of T I wrote here how the de Havilland Beaver I
was on almost crashed into Cold Harbour.
Of Nena K I can state that while driving down West
16th Avenue I spotted a woman with long and shapely legs, wearing a
tight black dress with slits on the side. What made me swerve the car (not
paying attention to the road) was more than the legs and the package
accompanying it. What made me swerve is that the woman whom I saw from the rear
was someone I knew well. I learned to dance the tango with that apparition of
beauty.
Robert D. Kaplan & Vladimir Putin's Character
Friday, March 23, 2018
I read the
NY Times Bret Stephen’s review of Robert D. Kaplan’s The Return of Marco Polo’s World – War, Strategy, and American Interests in the Twenty-First
Century with lots of interest.
My first
knowledge of this unusually brilliant man began in 1994 when I purloined his Balkan
Ghosts from some foreign hotel’s book shelf.
Then in
1998 under the tutelage of the Georgia Straight’s editor Charles Campbell I was
given the plum assignment to photograph and interview Kaplan. I was to write a
review of his An Empire Wilderness.
Kaplan by then
had this theory on how geography affects the decisions nations make.
Interviewing
Kaplan was a piece of cake (sort of) as I had gone to Lima in 1990 to interview
Mario Vargas Llosa for Books in Canada.
As you can
see I am not all that stupid a photographer. Some of us can write a splendid
declarative sentence in a pinch.
The Bret
Stephens review has one very splendid quote by Kaplan:
“A student of
Shakespeare would have grasped Vladimir Putin’s character long before an
international relations wonk.”
And there
is this:
“The very
idea that some sermon or blog or tweet has gone viral is a sad reflection on
the state of individualism in the 21st century. The electronic swarm
is a negation of loneliness that prepares the way for the new ideology of
totalitarianism.”
Peter Anderson That Lavinian Butcher
Thursday, March 22, 2018
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| From left: Daryl Shuttleworth, sitting Peter Anderson, back standing Lindsey Angell & Noel Johansen, March 21 2018 |
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After my short introduction an essay by Peter Anderson follows where he explains how he learned to speak Lavinian.
All my life
I have been mystified by:
1. How Noah
was able to board all those animals, insects etc into one smallish ark.
2. How
humans are able to learn to read music and play violins and bassoons.
3. How
actors and actresses (I am old fashioned) are able to act and to memorize their
lines.
Last night
number 3 was particularly in my mind when Rosemary and I experienced (the right
word here) the Nicolas Billon play Butcher directed by Kevin McKendrick. You
see many of these actors speak in mostly untranslated Lavinian. We will have to
wait for Mr. Billon to convert Butcher into an opera and then we will have the
benefit of subtitles.
So I
decided to ask Don Peter Anderson, one of the protagonists in Butcher to
explain how he is able to memorize a non-existent and really invented language
(inventors are Christina E. Kramer and Dragana Obradović.
Here is
what Anderson wrote:
For the past year I’ve been learning a language that does not exist. When Nicolas Billon conceived of his play Butcher,
now on at the Cultch until March 31, he wanted his examination of
revenge and justice to not be tied to a specific political, ethnic
conflict. While the play takes place in Canada, the story is
backgrounded in the fictional country of Lavinia (named after Titus
Andronicus’ daughter Lavinia, the innocent victim of a brutal
revenge-fueled rape and disfigurement) which bears some resemblance to
the countries of the former Yugoslavia.
The character I portray speaks
entirely in Lavinian, a unique language created for the play by
professors Christina Kramer and Dragana Obrodovic. It’s been said the
language would sound vaguely familiar to a slavic speaker, something
like an English speaker hearing “Jabberwocky.” When people ask me how I
learned Lavinian all I can answer is “practice.” Which the dictionary
defines as: “repeated exercise in or performance of an activity or skill so as to acquire or maintain proficiency in it: it must have taken a lot of practice to become so fluent.”
In preparation for the role I spent close to a year istening to a
recording of the Lavinian spoken in the play (line by line along with
the English translation) made by Dragana. Every morning for months, I
took a walk around Trout Lake, listening to Dragana’s voice on my iPod
shuffle, muttering to myself in Lavinian. Passing joggers steered well
clear of me. I said every line hundreds of times. Sometimes the words
came easy, but other times my North American tongue had difficulty
wrapping itself around some of the trickier vowel and consonant
combinations. I’ve always had difficulty rolling my “R’s” — many YouTube
tutorials later I made some very little progress (and drew heart from
the fact that Vladimir Lenin could not roll his “r’s” either - a fact he
was painfully ashamed of).
Slowly, the sounds and words became clearer.
I began to recognize individual words (“ali” meaning “but”) and
grammatical constructs, and to know what I was saying when I said it.
Not unlike learning a part in English actually. Ironically, once in
rehearsals, I found the real challenge was no longer speaking the
Lavinian, but listening to the English my colleagues were speaking as if
I didn’t understand it, taking my cues from things like body language,
volume, intonation.
The play Butcher is like a set of
nesting dolls, mysteries within mysteries within mysteries. The language
of Lavinian is one of the tools Nicolas so effectively uses to create
the atmosphere of suspense that permeates the play.
Butcher at the Cultch - The Death of a Genocide
Wednesday, March 21, 2018
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| From left: Daryl Shuttleworth, sitting Peter Anderson, back standing Lindsey Angell & Noel Johansen, March 21 2018 |
Tonight
Rosemary & I witnessed (this word is used correctly here) the opening of Nicolas
Billon's play Butcher directed by Kevin McKendrick at the Cultch’s Historic
Theatre.
Butcher is
a play in which nothing is what you think it is from the beginning to the
absolute end. This is an easy play for me to write about as I cannot (and will not) write much about it and I will not give you information that may be crucial and spoil your enjoyment.
I can say that
the excellent Don Peter Anderson who plays Josef and who usually has scintillatingly
perfect diction did say, "OK," and I understood that when he said it. He speaks (and others may) an
invented language called Lavinian created by Christina E. Kramer and Dragana
Obradovic. If you want to find out where this language comes from, consult
Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus or, perhaps you might not have missed (I didn’t!)
Titus Bouffonius. It opened at the very same venue in November of last year and
happened to have Mr. Anderson in the cast.
After the play I was undecided if Don Peter Anderson was in need of a pedicure or not.
The
invented language had one word that I recognized immediately because of its
root. The word sounded something like curvetnya. Anybody who has ever heard
Russians, Poles, Hungarians (curvaa!) use that word will know it means whore.
For those into details English writer Anthony Burgess wrote the Paleolithic language
for the 1981 film, Quest for Fire.
The play
also features an insufferable English lawyer called Hamilton Barnes, played
very well by Noel Johansen who later in the play reveals to have a sensitive
Achilles heel.
The midnight shift policeman (on Christmas Day) Inspector Lamb, Daryl Shuttleworth,
perhaps is stupid or perhaps not. He does not seem to know the difference between Latin
and Greek and his jokes (some are puns) are terrible. I have never ever seen a
cop as pleasant as this one. Is there something wrong here? My lips are sealed.
This leaves
me with Lindsey Angell who has played sultry sirens in her past. Here she is
not that in the least, but I would not venture to disagree with her that her
favourite colour is purple.
Without
revealing too much about this black comedy (or is it a comedy black?) I can say
that I have personal experience with some of the events that may be ancillary
to Butcher.
While a conscript
in the Argentine Navy in the mid 60s I met a beautiful (with a beauty spot on
his left cheek), blonde, blue-eyed young lieutenant, Alfredo Astiz who some years later when he was a commander
would transport political prisoners of the Argentine Dirty War in helicopters.
Over the River Plate he would slit their stomachs (so they would sink) and drop
them, alive.
I have
never been able to reconcile the man with the pleasant voice that I met with
the monster he became.
Only last
week this essay by the daughter of a disappeared and subsequently murdered
father wrote of her experience of finding the man leaving a house not far from
her own who was the culprit. General Luciano Benjamín Menéndez who died at age 90
in a comfortable military hospital.
Butcher is
a brutal play. A play that most venues in our we-are-always-pleasant Vancouver
would not present. It takes the guts of the East Vancouver Cultural Centre to
bring us plays that are relevant to our disturbing times.
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