These days and particularly on these uncharacteristically sunny Vancouver days I feel this empty thing in my stomach. I feel uneasy.

Both my Rosemary and I are more or less in good health. There is money in the bank and we live in a nice neighbourhood. Our deck garden is about to explode in the blooms of our roses. Food is good and simple to make. Breakfast in bed, every day with our Vancouver Sun and the New York Times in our hands is satisfying. And more so with the presence of our brother and sister cats, Niño and Niña.

This unease runs concurrently with thoughts into my past with all those people that are now gone.

There is one person who can, I believe, put some sense into my uneasiness. This is Dag Hammarskjöld, the second Secretary General of the United Nations.

It was around 1966 when I was a conscript in the Argentine Navy that I disobeyed the order of an Argentine Lieutenant Commander. He said he was going to arrest me and put me in the brig for a few days. He told me that he was going to be kind in giving me until the next day to get ready and order whatever I had to order in my life.

I decided I needed reading material. I went to the nearby Pigmalion (Pigmalión in Argentine Spanish) bookstore on Calle Corrientes 515. I was much too ignorant to notice a blind old man who was there frequently buying books in English. In this occasion I bought two books. One was the Phenomenon of Man by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and the other a slim volume that attracted my eye called Markings by Dag Hammarskjöld that was translated into English by Leif Sjöberg and W. H. Auden.

In that dirty brig I very quickly found interesting stuff by the Swede that I immediately underlined. Some years ago I had the book re-bound in leather in Mexico City. I often take it out from my living room bookcase. This is something I did today and I knew where I would find the relevant quote:

26.8.56

We really did not walk around yesterday to our lane garden so we did not notice that Rosa sericea ssp. omeiensis f. pteracantha was in bloom. But today we did. So this rose is the first one to bloom in our garden and it seems to have done it with a consistent schedule as she (for me she is a she) was the first as I wrote here.

Not a happy Good Friday 
A winged dinosaur

May is one of the finest months in a garden. Our plants and particularly my many hostas are unfurling without a bug or slug bite. They are pristine very much like a post pimple period teenager.

This rose has vicious thorns later in the season (but vicious enough now). The many thorns remind me of this lovely quote:

“We can complain because rose bushes have thorns, or rejoice because thorn bushes have roses.”

― Abraham Lincoln

Our columnar Magnolia grandiflora has lovely shiny green leaves but she will not bloom until late summer. The scent of her flowers is at par with that of the best roses. The scent is similarly complex and can be compared to the myrrh scented David Austin English Roses. Why am I diverging from writing more about this strange species rose, the only one to have only four petals?

Remembering the Lincoln quote reminds me of the huge Magnolia grandiflora that is on one side of the Capitol in Washington DC. It is very old and I like to think that Lincoln on his way in might have stopped not to smell the roses but those huge white magnolia flowers.

Abraham Lincoln 

Our original magnolia from our Kerrisdale garden did not survive the transfer. Here it is. The new one is thriving and will bloom,

Mark Haney & Marina Hasselberg

Isolation Commissions

If there is a an expression that defines this century and especially this 2020 lockdown is over choice. There are hundreds of cable programs and with Netflix there are hundreds of films. In YouTube if you think about some obscure song or composition it will be found.

My daily delivered NY Times is about the Covid-19 from the first page to almost the last. Our dear MSNBC newscaster (she calls it a show) Rachel Maddow is 100% about the Covid-19 with a few side diatribes to the current occupant of the White House. My forays (I was born in Buenos Aires) into the Argentine newspapers including the Buenos Aires Times in English which does not have a pay-wall are all about the impending default of the country’s enormous debt in the billions of dollars.

Where does one find solace? I have found a few methods. In one of them I realized that novels or books I had read in my distant past can be re-read because I am not the man today who was the man who read them then. My failing memory makes some of them like Susan Sontag’s On Photography  and Roland Barth’s Camera Lucida refreshingly new.

And I cannot evade the subject that I am tackling for a second time Julio Cortázar’s Rayuela in Spanish.

Another solace is listening to music. What possible music will entertain me or inspire me now? Few will understand why I don’t ever want to listen to Bach’s Double Violin Concerto or that (I will offend many) I have had enough of his cantatas, so many I have witnessed live. I am not interested in further exploring Beethoven’s symphonies or most composers of the 19^th century.

I find interest in the refreshing idea of listening to baroque music of the 17^th century but alas! Early Music Vancouver’s concerts have been cancelled for the season as have the new music and the little-performed works courtesy of our Turning Point Ensemble.

And I cannot forget to mention those new music festivals courtesy of the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra.

A particularly astounding tradition in Vancouver is that musicians of the baroque, classical or new music variety, when of the male gender, put on their pants one leg at a time. By this I mean that these musicians, including those of the female gender, are human, warm and approachable. Through magazine assignments I have photographed many of them and become friends with some of them.

So it is the personal side of music that makes listening to the music I now like an attractive one.

A case in point is the Isolation Commission series put together by Little Chamber Music and the Composer in Residence at the Mountain View Cemetery (since 2015), bassist Mark Haney who in my estimation is the most handsome bassist around. There are 28 of these Isolation Commissions as I write this. For 200 bucks you can commission an artist of your choice to play something from their living room.

Mark Haney - Photograph - Angela Fama

There is an intimacy here that cannot be found in the best YouTube performance videos (even though this series can be also found on YouTube). And the choice of music, at the very least is refreshingly eclectic. One of my faves is this one by my friend and violinist Cameron Wilson.

Cameron Wilson & the Wahs play Cream 

There is another music that also pleases me. It is the music of my upbringing in Buenos Aires and my years in Mexico City. One of the Buenos Aires memories has to be Piazzolla and particularly this one which I first heard in 1966 when I bought the record.

Another is associated with a great Mexican film noir Salón México and its connection to Aaron Copland's El Salón Mexico. The links to the film and the composition  (directed by Copland in the presence of a young and handsome Leonard Bernstein) are in this blog.

As for any jealousy about Bernstein's looks we have the Vancouver Opera's Leslie Dala who besides competing with Haney for a musical beauty pageant happens to be a fine pianist.

Of movies we don’t bother with Netflix. We are addicted to TCM’s Noir Alley with Eddie Muller at 9pm on Saturdays. On other days an hour or two of news is about all the TV we can stomach.

It is most pleasant to listen to music coming from the living rooms of our Vancouver musicians. To me this reflects a uniqueness that contradicts all those who call our city boring.

About Remittance Girl

Remittance Girl is the pen name of a Canadian writer who inherited and then squandered the talents of both her mother, the composer, and her father, the writer. She produced her first piece of erotic fiction at the venerable age of 36.

Born in Toronto, Remittance Girl spent her childhood at bullfights and in Catholic churches in Madrid, Spain. Her adolescence passed locked away in a selection of chilly boarding schools in the south of England. In her early twenties, she was a vocalist in a number of alternative bands. These experiences proved to be an excellent recipe for the formation of a rather perverse imagination.

The persona of Remittance Girl was born on the web in 1998 when she moved to Southeast Asia and began writing in earnest. As a perpetual expatriate, her stories often take the point of view of an outsider looking in. They examine eroticism in the face of personal and moral dilemma, and cultural disorientation. The express purpose of the work is to both arouse and disturb, often at the same time.

Remittance Girl's influences are broad in scope: from the poetry of Federico Garcia Lorca, the novels of Jane Austen and Kobo Abe, the music of Erik Satie and Metallica, to the films of Ridley Scott and the murky deviance of Japanese hardcore animation.

Her short stories have been published in M. Christian & S. Vivant's 'Garden of the Perverse', Lisabet Sarai's 'Cream', Violet Blue's 'Girls on Top', D.L. King's 'The Sweetest Kiss' and M. Jakubowski's upcoming 'Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica, Vol. 9', among others. Three of her books, 'Gaijin', 'The Waiting Room' and 'The Splinter', are available through Burning Book Press. An anthology of her short stories is available: 'Remittance Girl' from Coming Together Press.

Remittance Girl now lives in a house with a giant mango tree in the garden and a cat named 'seven'. She writes, teaches, and grows orchids.

Sample some of her short stories by visiting her site at www.remittancegirl.com