Sometime in 1978 Kathleen came to my Burnaby studio for a photo session. I had this idea of putting a white rose overnight in a glass of water with blue food dye. I wanted a blue rose.

I almost cringe when I look at this photograph today in this 21^st century. My progress in taking photographs that please me without offending too many others has been a long one. I have almost developed good taste. I would never photograph a woman with the following elements present: train tracks, angel wings, Corvettes, Harleys or anything that remotely resembles boudoir. I would not almost cringe, I would cringe if I did that sort of thing.

What saves this old colour negative is the fact that Kathleen was lovely and sweet then and since I photographed her in 2018, she is lovelyand sweet now.

In was around 1987 when my Rosemary persuaded me to go to a Vancouver Rose Society meeting at the Floral Hall at VanDusen Botanical Garden. The folks projected over 100 bad slides of roses and I found the chairs uncomfortable. But Rosemary persisted and we both came to love roses, particularly the old roses and the English Roses.

There is no such thing as a blue rose. I can only plead ignorance and a terrible bad taste. Fortunately there were no angel wings around in my studio.

I have been indoctrinated fully and these days I would never call a woman a lady. A woman is just fine. But I could not resist placing the lyrics to that song. Has it seen better days?

Red Roses for a Blue Lady

I want some red roses for a blue lady

Mister florist take my order please

We had a silly quarrel the other day

I hope these pretty flowers chase her blues away

I want some red roses for a blue lady

Send them to the sweetest gal in town

And if they do the trick, I'll hurry back to pick

Your best white orchid for her wedding gown

We had a silly quarrel the other day

I hope these pretty flowers chase her blues away

I want some red roses for a blue, blue lady

Send them to the sweetest gal in town

And if they do the trick, I'll hurry back to pick

Your best white orchid for her wedding gown

Your best white orchid for her wedding gown

Songwriters: Roy C. Bennett / Sid Tepper

Red Roses for a Blue Lady lyrics © Universal Music Publishing Group

selfi

Del ingl. selfie, der. de self 'uno mismo'.

1. m. autofoto. U. t. c. f.

RAE Diccionario de la Real Academia Española

In that ancient and past century I remember how most of us did not like to listen to tape recordings of our voices or seeing pictures of ourselves taken by others. I had a distant relative we called Pardelillo who lived inViña del Mar, Chile who would mail us portraits of himself. All my grandmother would do upon receiving them was to smile.When they piled up she would throw them away.

In his visits to Buenos Aires he would go with my grandmother and mother to the shopping district on Avenida Cabildo and Juramento to look for joyería de fantasía (costume jewelry). In those years I had no inkling of the existence of gay men. This is something I now understand. But what was it that made Pardelillo a harbinger of things to come, the 21^st century obsession with exhibiting oneself in the portrait/self portrait?

There are two words which were used in that 20^th century which have all but disappeared. I was cautioned when I started seeing a lovely Argentine girl that her mother was a nymphomaniac. That other word with rare coinage these days is exhibitionist.

Cindy Sherman may be the most successful American photographer these days. She only photographs herself to express social values or to protest them. She uses many costumes and makeup.  I don’t have much fondness for her photographs.

In that century, and in the 1950s Bunny Yeager thought that the men who photographed her were dolts. So she began to take her own portraits. She became so good that she may have been singly responsible for the amazing popularity of Bettie Page whom she photographed with two chettahs, Mojah and Mbili, at the Boca Raton, Florida wildlife park, Africa USA. Page who could sew very well made the outfit she wore in the famous photograph.

The only kind of selfie that I allow myself is the once-a-year photograph that I take on my birthday in front of a mirror. I also like to photograph many of my subjects facing a mirror so that I appear behind, covered by my camera.

I do not understand why women, especially, post photographs of themselves in social media. The bulk of them are terrible phone selfies that disfigure their faces. The softening of their face skin makes them even more abominable to my eyes.

With all that out of the way I would like to introduce my new friend Emily Lauren. I wrote about her here. She has a talent of taking the most beautiful self-portraits which because of the quarantine I can only see in my monitor from the Messenger videos she sends me when we connect. These I re-photograph with my Fuji X-E3. I think that I can live with the unsharpness and the texture of my monitor in the photos. It is part of the charm.

There is one constant in all these photographs that Emily Lauren takes. There is a constant sadness in her eyes. I have no idea why this is the case. But I do recognize a new thing when I see it. I hope she persists with this talent which so few in this century seem to have. It is the talent of style.

Mi abuela María de los Dolores Reyes de Irureta Goyena nació en Manila pero se educó en Valencia en el siglo 19.

Ella me enseñó muchas expresiones y refranes populares de su juventud. Como vivía en la era victoriana usaba palabras que eran eufemismos por las que eran prohibidas. Un ejemplo era, “en donde la espalda pierde su nombre.” Pero igual me decía que un vaso que yo creía era de cristal, según ella era “culo de vaso”. A veces ese lugar, en donde la espalda pierde, su nombre era un trasportín o donde estaba la cara fea con el ojo que no ve.

Al repasar las fotos de mi amiga Shelina que tomé en 1978 me vino la idea de combinarlas con unas hermosas palabras  del poeta/escritor uruguayo Eduardo Galeano.

Gente curiosa (Eduardo Galeano)

Soledad, de cinco años, hija de Juanita Fernández:

-¿Por qué los perros no comen postre?

Vera, de seis años, hija de Elsa Villagra:

-¿Dónde duerme la noche?¿Duerme aquí, abajo de la cama?

Luis, de siete años, hijo de Francisca Bermúdez:

-¿Se enojará Dios, si no creo en él? Yo no sé cómo decírselo.

Marcos, de nueve años, hijo de Silvia Awad:

-Si Dios se hizo solo, ¿cómo pudo hacerse la espalda?

Carlitos, de cuarenta años, hijo de María Scaglione:

-Mamá, ¿a qué edad me sacaste la teta? Mi psicóloga quiere saber.

Eduardo Galeano, en Bocas del tiempo

In the midst of weeks of an uncharacteristic Vancouver sun, in spite of the pandemic quarantine, my Rosemary and I feel relaxed and working in the garden to get our plants ready for late spring is fun. We are accompanied by our Niño and Niña our delightful orange and white, brother and sister cats. And yet there is a bit of edge in waiting for something to happen. I tell Rosemary, “Will we be able to travel before we die?” Or I tell her, “When I die you will have to get an electric can opener.” Worse than all that, is if she goes first. I would not know where to begin to pay bills and deal with the bank.

For be the most famous poem that mentions the month of April is T.S.Eliot’s  The Burial of the Dead from his 1922 The Waste Land. It’s negativity has all to do with the end of that terrible was that was WWI.

I will inject a tad of cheer by placing here a scan of a plant, Hyacinthoides non-scripta, known to most as an English Bluebell. It was hiding at the roots of one of our potted roses. Rosemary says it came from our old garden. It was almost invisible surrounded by the vegetation of other plants. But I think that its persistence against all odds injects into this blog an element of hope.

The Waste Land

By T. S. Eliot

                                  FOR EZRA POUND

                                IL MIGLIOR FABBRO

              I. The Burial of the Dead

  April is the cruellest month, breeding

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

Memory and desire, stirring

Dull roots with spring rain.

Winter kept us warm, covering

Earth in forgetful snow, feeding

A little life with dried tubers.

Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee

With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade,

And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten,

And drank coffee, and talked for an hour.

Bin gar keine Russin, stamm’ aus Litauen, echt deutsch.

And when we were children, staying at the arch-duke’s,

My cousin’s, he took me out on a sled,

And I was frightened. He said, Marie,

Marie, hold on tight. And down we went.

In the mountains, there you feel free.

I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.

  What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow

Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,

You cannot say, or guess, for you know only

A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,

And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,

And the dry stone no sound of water. Only

There is shadow under this red rock,

(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),

And I will show you something different from either

Your shadow at morning striding behind you

Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;

I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

                      Frisch weht der Wind

                      Der Heimat zu

                      Mein Irisch Kind,

                      Wo weilest du?

“You gave me hyacinths first a year ago;

“They called me the hyacinth girl.”

—Yet when we came back, late, from the Hyacinth garden,

Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not

Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither

Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,

Looking into the heart of light, the silence.

Oed’ und leer das Meer.

  Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante,

Had a bad cold, nevertheless

Is known to be the wisest woman in Europe,

With a wicked pack of cards. Here, said she,

Is your card, the drowned Phoenician Sailor,

(Those are pearls that were his eyes. Look!)

Here is Belladonna, the Lady of the Rocks,

The lady of situations.

Here is the man with three staves, and here the Wheel,

And here is the one-eyed merchant, and this card,

Which is blank, is something he carries on his back,

Which I am forbidden to see. I do not find

The Hanged Man. Fear death by water.

I see crowds of people, walking round in a ring.

Thank you. If you see dear Mrs. Equitone,

Tell her I bring the horoscope myself:

One must be so careful these days.

  Unreal City,

Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,

A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,

I had not thought death had undone so many.

Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,

And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.

Flowed up the hill and down King William Street,

To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours

With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine.

There I saw one I knew, and stopped him, crying: “Stetson!

“You who were with me in the ships at Mylae!

“That corpse you planted last year in your garden,

“Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?

“Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed?

“Oh keep the Dog far hence, that’s friend to men,

“Or with his nails he’ll dig it up again!

“You! hypocrite lecteur!—mon semblable,—mon frère!”