Rosa 'Souvenir du Docteur Jamain' 21 June 2019

As a Latin American from Argentina having lived in Vancouver since 1975 I have attempted to adapt and modify my previously macho sentiments. But the painful process did not begin in 1975. My mother told me to fry my own eggs when I told her I did not like them with broken yolks. My Rosemary from 1968 on told me to hem my own jeans and sew on my buttons.

But my other views on women experience culture shock. When I asked my Argentine nephew why it was that there were large ads featuring women in bikinis showcasing toothpaste, he rapidly asked, “Are you gay?”

It would be impossible for me to explain to my Argentine family that I have a friend who is an over 6ft saxophone playing transgender woman.

But there are some opinions about women that are cemented in both cultures and especially now with our overblown celebrity cult.

I remember seeing the Paul Verhoeven’s 1997 film Starship Troopers and being shocked at the perfect (for me almost robot-like/synthetic) look of Denise Richards. Since then a myriad of US celebrity women have taken up that mantle.

Rosa 'Mary Magdalene' and a worse for wear Benjamin Britten 21 June 2019

Even in this era of the Me Too Movement there is no equality when the looks of women are compared with that of men. Men don’t age. They gain character and toughness. Women age “gracefully”. Social media is full of pictures of middle-aged women in which friends and relatives post statements like , “looking good”(ugh!) or worse “still beautiful”. Nobody comments on pictures of men who may upgrade their avatar with a more recent photograph. Nobody will care, as they might be having in mind somewhere in their memory that image of the Marlboro Man.

Any classical music program or that of opera will feature photographs of the female singers taken perhaps after their “quince años”.

Not too long ago Adobe Photoshop came out with an innovation tool called Diffuse Glow. Since then women’s skin pores have gone the way of Oldsmobiles and Pontiacs. Bags have gone the way of the plastic ones.

As a young magazine photographer (it sort of ended when I was in my mid 50s) I was assigned to photograph young ballerinas or actresses. Women would call me up requesting I take “different” photographs when I tried to refer them to Sooter’s Studio.

Rosa 'Susan Williams-Ellis' June 22 2019 Note the difference between the new bloom on the left and the later one.

That has definitely ended in 2019. Such is the obsession of our time that women have to look perfect, that none will pose for me (even for portraits) as they are afraid of being exposed to some reality that does not compare to their own.

This is a shame. When I watch my Rosemary go for her bath her body is definitely not the one I first saw back in 1968. Rosmary makes no comment when I go to the bath because she is an old-fashioned and polite Canadian. While I am not fat my skin is beginning to prune up and I will soon have to invest in black turtle-neck sweaters. . If people ask and tell them I am practicing existentialism they will not understand. It was not only God that died in the 20^th century, so did philosophy.

In my pursuit of the handsome (in my eyes) and the erotic (in my eyes) I did manage to photograph a 61 year-old Kay last year. I had photographed her when she was 21. This was special for me. It was thrilling and I applaud her courage.

In the next week I will be taking photographs of a 62 year-old woman who lives in Italy. I photographed her first in 1978 (make the calculation!). She has told me that she is more sure and proud of her body now than before. I am not sure exactly what she means or what she will show for my camera.

What will make our session (I hope many more) is that I have convinced her (suggestion taken immediately) to purchase a Manfrotto (a very good brand of photographic light stands and tripods) clamp so she can mount her smart phone to her tripod. Since she is a photographer she also has lights and reflectors.

I am not going to purchase a ticket to Italy in the next while. We will connect via Messenger. I will then use my digital Fuji X-E3 to take what I see on my CRT monitor. Via the sound we will be able to communicate.

But this is much different than having a model (and good friend) in my studio. There is much more collaboration as it is she who first decides where her phone is placed and what I see. For me to impose a little of my own style I will perhaps crop (in camera) the images that appear on my screen.

The whole process has particularly been in my mind post opening of our garden to the Vancouver Rose Society a few weeks back. The once-blooming roses are gone and those that will be remontant are in that in-between stage where spent blooms share space with a few new ones.

I have noticed that many roses, past their peak lose all their petals. Others deteriorate slowly. Those that do deteriorate slowly have a beauty in them that reminds me of the many women of that age that I know. There is one in particular, Rosa ‘Souvenir du Docteur Jamain’ that will age to dark brown and not lose one petal. And of course that lovely English Rose, Rosa ‘Mary Magdalene’ goes from a flashy pink (you harlot, you!) to a virginal white.

I am placing these rose scans here and I hope this will reinforce some women that may see them that Photoshop is not the only solution.

In was almost 20 years ago that I realized something that should be self-evident to most. This is the fact that nostalgia is a longing for a place you are not presently in when you feel it.

And so from my home in Vancouver,  I have worked on photographs about my nostalgia for my boyhood and adulthood in Buenos Aires and the same for Mexico City and Mexico.

But of late my nostalgia is for five years that I spent in Austin, Texas that were formative in my teenage years.

While living with my mother in Nueva Rosita, Coahuila (a mining town run by American Smelting and Refining Company) the American-based school finished with the 8^th grade. The nearest school was the Catholic boarding school, St. Edward’s High School in Austin. 

I was there for five years until 1961. It was there where I had my first girlfriend and had the annoying problem of having to squeeze pimples at night before bed. It was there where I listened to music that would remain indelible in my brain.

It was there where I experienced Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet at the University of Texas all in a nasal and terrible Texan accent.

It was there that I experienced chomping on a Texas-sized steak on a metal plate that was so hot that it splattered grease on my shirt while listening to Bill Black’s Combo.

It was there where we took girls to make out with at the tower of the University of Texas Library Tower before anybody thought of going up there to shoot people below.

It was there where I witnessed my first Cotton Bowl.

A few years ago I went to Austin to visit my old friend and mentor Brother Edwin Reggio, C.S.C. When I deplaned at the Bergstrom Austin Airport I spotted some young women wearing skirts and cowboy boots. I kind of new I was home.

In 1991 I photographed Bonnie in my Vancouver studio. She had an amazing resemblance to Brigitte Bardot. I took many photographs never feeling an ounce of nostalgia for Texas.

That has changed.

On June 11th my friend Ian Bateson went to a show at Yukiko Onley’s Visual Space Gallery.  I wrote a preview here.

Even though I knew about Coop’s work I was completely astounded by the show.

At age 77 I am an amateur photographer. I never went to school to study the profession which I have practiced successfully in Vancouver since 1976.

I have photographed modern dancers, ballet dancers, strippers since 1980. I have gone to countless dance performances and interviewed dancers. I know nothing of dance. I am not a dance critic.

Since 1989 I have exhibited my photographs in galleries here in Vancouver, in Alberta, Buenos Aires and most recently in Venice. Some may say I am an artist. I would not know.

 I am not an art critic.

Based on my above ignorance while having been exposed to art most of my life I can state with 100% certainty that Elsbeth Coop is one of the most startlingly original artists of our city.

I do not believe that she lives under the shadow of her better known sister Jane Coop, pianist and music professor at UBC. If anything I believe that Jane Coop has been instrumental in bringing Elsbeth Coop’s work to be seen for the first time since the early 2000s.

If there is any logic (intelligence) in the artistic circles of our fair city, Elspeth Coop should not fade away. Her work has to see the light again.

Flor de la Vida - Acrylic on Canvas - 2003

51st Street Stop - Acrylic on canvas

Rat In Someone Else's Maze - Acrylic on canvas

Poupée - Photogravure

Here in Vancouver I would have to be an ostrich (since I am Argentine make that a rhea or South American ostrich) not to know that June was chosen for LGBT Pride Month to commemorate the Stonewall riots, which occurred at the end of June 1969 in the United States.

The worst I could do would be to state here that I have many friends including family friends who are gay. That amounts to saying that I am not racist because I have black friends.

There has to be more to that understanding of the personal acceptance of people, regardless of their race, religion or gender of choice.

As a product of the 20^th century (firmly in it since I am 77) my recollection or doubt about the immutability of sex as that of female or male happened as a boy of 8 on a bus with my mother on the fashionable Esmeralda Avenue in Buenos Aires. A little person with mother in tow boarded the colectivo. This person had very short hair but was wearing a skirt. This left me with a confusion that lasted for a long time even though I finally found out about mothers shearing little girl’s hairs with the idea that the new hair would be fuller. Until then skirts made a person a girl and pants (particularly short pants since that’s what I wore) a boy.

Things became more complicated when my mother took me to see a film with Katherine Hepburn. This mannish woman wore pants! 

For years hence I would often listen to my Filipino grandmother tell me that my great aunt Pilar de Irureta Goyena who lived in Manila dressed like a man, rode horses and had been given a trophy for her riding skills by General Douglas MacArthur. I was not to know for many years that the expression “dressed like a man” was code that my great aunt was a lesbian.

When my mother and I were living in the Nueva Rosita, a mining town in Coahuila, Mexico I was 15, I suddenly developed  breasts that were awfully sensitive and almost hurt. At night I though about this and felt confused about my sexuality. I finally told my mother who took me to the doctor. I was told that this was normal and the swelling would recede as my body became what it was supposed to be. I was much too young and too in that century to tell him that what he was telling me was politically incorrect. But he did tell me something else. "Not all men have sensitive nipples. Consider yourself lucky." 

In the late 50s in my Roman Catholic St. Edward’s boarding school in Austin the closest I ever got to hear about homosexuality was when my friends would insult each other with the epithet “homo”. We preferred the word pansy and we thought our classmate Buddy Lytton was that because he was a male cheerleader. It never occurred to us that Lytton was no such thing. In a claustrophobic boy’s school he was with girls from the St. Mary’s girl’s school across the city. He was smart.

In retrospect one of our dearest teacher brothers, Brother Dunstan,  C.S.C. who taught us English and literature was effeminate but that did not faze us at all. Perhaps our ignorance of what Brother Dunstan was had to do a lot with just that, our ignorance.

I remember that whenever we went into the offices of the brothers who were our floor or dormitory monitors that their door was always left open. Only in retrospect have I figured out why that procedure was always followed.

If there were any shenanigans happening in those bunk beds between my classmates I must have been out of the loop because I never knew of any stories.

In my two years in the Argentine Navy I never met a flagrantly gay sailor, non-commissioned officer or officer. But then it is only in the later part of my life that I figured out that my father’s alcoholism was not the only kind. There were a few I discovered who drank only when they were home in the evening. The idea that to be gay is to be effeminate (in that 20^th century meaning of the word) was something I did not consider while I was that navy conscript. Nor, of course that not all gay women are butch. And then there was Jane Rule.

It wasn’t until a year before I married my Rosemary in 1968, that in my confusion as to what I wanted to do with my life, our family friend Raúl Guerrero Montemayor took me under his wing. He invited me to live in his apartment and he taught me how to teach English and found me a job (where I met Rosemary!). A cousin of mine suggested I sleep at night with a book on my bum for protection. I was offended and never told anybody about it. Raúl was one of my best mentors, he was a witness at our wedding and he was my youngest daughter Hilary’s godfather.

I went to see him a few years ago when he was dying of prostate cancer. In tears in bed he told me, “The tragedy of my life is that I never lived the life of that what I was. I lived another one and it was a lie.”

I was shattered as I bid him goodbye and returned to Vancouver.

In 1977 my first photo job was working for a gay publication called Bi-Line. Writer Jack Moore and I were the only straight freelancers. By 1978 I had the need for a good studio flash system. There was one for sale by a Victoria photographer for $3200.

In my naiveté I went with a pile of Bi-Lines to my Bank of Montreal branch on Willingdon and Hastings. The loans officer was a white-haired and dour seeming Scottish woman. She asked me what my collateral was. I presented her with my pile of publications. She leafed through them. There were plenty of nude men photographed by one Strut McPherson which was my by-line.

I was given the money.

Here in Canada I had a first cousin who lived in Toronto who had a higher up job at the Royal Bank. When he was doing his stint in the Argentine Army (while I was the sailor) we had nothing in common. He would talk of Wagner operas. I knew nothing of them. By the time we had a long evening at his apartment in Toronto a few months before he died of AIDS we were good friends and I was a convert to opera and Wagner. His family in Buenos Aires invented some esoteric disease which was the one that had killed him.

During my work at Bi-Line it was generally discussed by all that one of our Prime Ministers had either been gay or bi-sexual. I got to know city Aldermen (as they were called then) who were gay and in the many times I photographed Raymond Burr the man who opened Burr’s hotel room door was his partner in full eye makeup. So loved was Burr by the media that there was never a peep about his sexual preference.

While working for Bi-Line I was assigned to photograph a real lesbian "Queen Bee". She was beautiful and all her house work was done by “worker bees”. While sitting with her at a café before our photo session I felt this relief that I did not have to prove my masculinity in her presence and that she was not in the least interested in me as a man. Somehow this made me feel liberated and that I could just be myself. It is a lesson I have never forgotten.

Another woman of that persuasion, one likes to wear fake beards and loves bacon, told me once what nobody has ever told me about my career. She said, “Thank you Alex for never taking a bad photograph.”

In the many years that I have photographed my favourite Canadian guitarist, composer and rock star, Art Bergmann I began to understand that I had something that was female within me. I understood his electrical and erotic presence. I was attracted to it and I understood why young women were up there watching how he stood while playing his guitar. That finding of the female within me has helped me photograph men rather well. Thank you Bi-Line, thank you Ron Langer (he was the editor).

I have yet to completely ignore when two young men holding hands pass me by these days. For me it is no different from raising my head to the sky when I hear an airplane. It is the habit that comes from having lived in another century. I cannot yet take it all for granted.

In Mexico (to finish this long thing) I had a friend who was Cuban. He spoke perfect Castilian. We both taught in the same Mexico City high school. Somehow in some strange way I called him Jorge (his name) and he called me Jorge (my real first name) and we did this in formal Spanish. We used the word usted not tu for you.

He was secretive about his life. He was a very good chess player and partnering with him in bridge we never lost.

Only once did I come to suspect why he was so secretive. In the Zona Rosa I watched him leave his car with a young man. And I knew.

Not too long ago he visited us in Vancouver. Rosemary had a real affection for him. When in Mexico, Jorge would call me to find out if my mother (who was living with us) was deafer than usual. If that was the case then he would show up as my mother would tell him his fortune. Jorge said my mother was really good when she was deaf. InVancouver Jorge told me that with his special cocktail he would not die of the AIDS he had contracted.

And for the finish a small explanation of the photograph you see here. A few months ago Rosemary and I went to Venice and Florence. In a Florence church the  Basilica della Santissima Annunziata I spotted this rainbow Christ. There was no explanation that I could find. But I think that it is a good way to illustrate this little essay of mine.

Rosa 'Ebb Tide' - 18 June 2018

Dechronization of Wild Edric

As a child my mother would often say in my presence, “Hay poca gente fina como nosotros.” By this she meant that few people at the time in Buenos Aires had her exquisite taste, elegance and manners. She was a snob.

Thus I had all the elements of becoming one. And so I became a snob.

Here in Vancouver while working for Vancouver Magazine with my In One Ear ( a monthly column or rock music) cohort Les Wiseman, he told me, “You must like Lou Reed and if you are going to listen to heavy metal it has to be Motorhead.” Wiseman was a snob.

When my wife and I began to garden in our corner garden in Kerrisdale in 1986 the colour of flowers had to be white or blue. She had a predilection for gray plants which were difficult to water (only under the leaves). Rosemary was (and is) a snob.

I became a garden snob, too.

One day Rosemary came home to tell me that the hydro wires had been cut at a house on Cartier. At the time many houses were being torn down. This was around the late 80s and early 90s. So with wheelbarrow and spade, in the dark of night we liberated some plants. One was a healthy rose. To Rosemary’s horror, when it bloomed (we gave it the name of Rosa ‘Cartier’) it was (for me) a lovely, blowsy but lurid red/orange. Eventually Rosemary tolerated the rose. 

One day Select Roses man, Brad Jalbert came for a visit and upon seeing the orange rose he said, “Alex I never expected to see Rosa ‘Allthat Jazz’ here." Not much later Jalbert persuaded me to purchase Rosa ‘Westerland’ an orange floribunda.

This floriferous climber with the scent of synthetic apricot jam grew on Rosemary. From orange we then absorbed yellow, too. It was the sight of Rosa ‘Mrs. Oakley Fisher’ in Janet Wood’s garden. This yellow rose is a tea rose. Since it is not a tea rose this was a plus for Rosemary.

But with the exception of Rosa ‘Westerland’ our garden then and now has nothing but English Roses, species roses and Old Garden Roses. There are none of those “questionable” floribundas.

But it was last week that at Garden Works I spotted an deep maroon rose that was very fragrant. It was Weeks Rose Rosa ‘Ebb Tide’. It seems that this rose had been for sale at the UBC Shop in the Garden where Rosemary works on Wednesdays. When I showed Rosemary the rose she told me that she had instantly liked it and that she had been afraid to mention its existence!

Until I saw Ebb Tide, Weeks Roses was to me an absolute no-no for anybody with my mother’s (and my) class.

I have to admit now that I have pleasantly downgraded myself!

  

In mid-May in our garden there is always that excitement of plants that begin to Bloom. This is the case with our 40 roses that somehow fit in our small Kitsilano garden. Then two weeks ago most of those roses were gloriously in bloom.

Now most that may read this blog know that there are really three kind of roses. There are those mostly old roses of the 19^th century and beyond that may bloom once. These we call non-remontant roses. There are others that in late fall come back with a few flowers before they wave goodbye.

Modern roses including the English Roses that resemble old roses are remontant. This means that they flower freely during the summer all the way to the fall (but sometimes sporadically).

In order to help those remontant roses one has to deadhead the old blooms. This way the rose does not spend energy converting them to hips.

But it is truly a sad occasion when one cuts the roses of a rose like this Gallica, Rosa ‘James Mason’. What you see here are the last two flowers. And so James Mason bids us goodbye until the next year. 

After it blooms sometime in early fall I must prune the bush to size as I cannot allow plants to be too big in our constrained-for-space garden.

I am sad. At the very least this blog and scans of James Mason from other years can reside in my memory and I can begin to feel that hope that all gardens are of renewal in an immediate future.

Roses in spite of being difficult (so do some people say) are for me something in this world of changes that somehow gives me a stability to soldier on.