George Waterhouse Hayward  - far right - Carabobo Street 1965

 I was in Buenos Aires for Christmas. I belive it proper to place this blog that I am writing today 9 January 2022 in memory of my father.

 My mother used to always tell me, “Alex, you will never understand because you will never be a mother.” It was only after she died in the presence of my Rosemary and me in 1972 that a few years later I figured I could have told her, “Mother, you will never understand because you will never be a father.”

My father George Waterhouse Hayward was a flawed man I adored. He was a terrible alcoholic. He left our home voluntarily around 1952 to live in a pension. By then he might have lost his job as a journalist for the Buenos Aires Herald.

It was in those years before he left home that he would disappear. I would ask my mother about his whereabouts. She would answere,"He wrote something about Perón for the Herald that Perón did not like so he is spending a few days at the Villa Devoto prison." 

He would come regularly on weekends to take me to the movies. If he arrived drunk (that was the case sometimes) he embarrassed me when I was playing with my friends in our Coghlan garden.

We would take the train from the Coghlan station (named after a British railway engineer) to the cavernous Retiro Station. We would then descend in mechanical stairs to the underground “Subte” and get off at the Lavalle station. From there we had a couple of streets of movie house next to a movie house. After a couple of swashbucklers or Westerns my father would take me for pizza at Las Cuartetas on Calle Corrientes and from there for an ice-cream soda at the Roxy.

la gomería - the tire shop

My mother who was a tad cold with affection (“Love is doing, “she would say) could not understand my warm relationship with my father. In spite of everything I adored him.

In 1954 my grandmother, my mother left Perón’s Argentina for Mexico City without telling my father.

In 1965 I returned to Buenos Aires for two reasons. One was my then patriotic idea that I had to serve my country as a conscript in the Argentine Navy and the other was to find my father. Find him I did.

For reasons that escape me I have no memory of our weekend conversations. The only photographs I took of him are here. A gomería is a tire repair shop and the car, a Morris Oxford was put together in Argentina as a Siam Di Tella. His friend the policeman will have a bearing to this account.

Sometime in 1966 my not quite uncle Leo Mahdjubian (an Armenian who was in the famous Black Watch during WW-II) called me up at my navy office and said exactly in these words, “Alexander, your father kicked the bucket yesterday on the street. He was taken by a policeman to the Pirovano Hospital where he was declared dead on arrival. Because of the police intervention you will have to go to the police station to sign documents.”

I did and to my shock at the police desk I was told, “This is irregular as the dead man’s son was here a few hours ago to sign the documents.” It was then that my mother’s account that I had a half-brother was confirmed.

The next day I received a phone call from the policeman (the one in the photo) who told me, “I was your father’s friend. I took him to the hospital and emptied his pockets as their contents would have disappeared inside the facility. Your father was working at a laundry making money to bribe a general so that you could be sent back to Vercruz, Mexico where your mother lives. There was a considerable amount in his pockets.” The policeman and I met for coffee and he gave me the money. With that money my father paid for a modest funeral and was buried for a 7 year limit at the municipal La Chacarita (where Juan Domingo Perón is buried).

I carry fond memories of my father and I believe I may have inherited four of his qualities:

1. He was a good cook and so am I.

2. He was a journalist. I believe I am not a too bad a writer.

3. I inherited the Hayward stomach. If I get sick I only throw up that which made me sick.

4. I don’t gain weight.

Estado de México - 1972

It was in1992 that I met in Vancouver a Jewish, redhaired Mexican who had an art gallery called the Threshold. He attempted with mixed results to introduce to culturally deprived Vancouverites the wonders of Mexican muralists and artists.

I wrote about him here.

And here.

As I try to organize my old negatives in these cold January 2022 days, I stop to look at some of the photographs that I took in Mexico as a street photographer.

Frid told me that my so-called talent of taking photographs of undraped females was a total waste of my talent. He said I should have returned to Mexico and to keep shooting street photographs. He said I was very good and that what I was doing was a tragedy.

These two photographs here were taken one right after the other at a church in the Estado de México not far from where Rosemary, our two daughters, my mother and I lived in Arboledas. I would sometimes pick up my Pentacon-F and my then improved camera, a Pentax S-3 and go exploring with friends in what we called camera safaris.

In this church they had a Jesus outside in a horizontal position that was known to have miracle-inducing ability to cure diseases. People would come and touch their affected limbs, stomachs, etc and touch the corresponding parts on the Christ.

The first photograph I know elicited a remark from my mother that Mexicans were in general fatalistic and depressed peoples. I would have agreed with her when looking at the little boy, much older than he is in some way. But I would have added that the folks who lived in Yucatán and Veracruz who were more Caribbean in nature where a happier people.

I seems I snapped my photograph at the right time. And yet I like the second one I took right after. It is an after-the-fact photograph that leaves many questions unanswered.

We live in a century (the 21^st) where people say, “What I do is art because I say it is art. I don’t care what you say to the contrary.”

We live in a century (the 21^st) where Henri Cartier-Bresson, and Leonardo da Vinci would seek employment insurance after a few months in Vancouver. Neither men would understand what “an installation” is. Perhaps female artists would fare better with the current feminist movement. I know for a fact that a teacher of History of Art was recently (I will do my best not to divulge the teacher or the school) told to minimize Picasso as the artist had not treated his female partners well and furthermore had abused them.

The lost art of the airbrush might also be in disuse with temperas and Liquitex.

If something takes time it is not worth doing.

In that light I smiled when a former exotic dancer friend of mine who went by the name of Tiffany asked me, “I am curious what does a photographer have hanging on his wall? “

My answer was a quick one, “Family portraits.” That is not quite true. In 1977 I had my first all person show (my first and last at a restaurant) of street photographs I had taken in Mexico. Many of those grace the walls of the stairs to our (now my) guest room.

I started taking photographs around 1958. Since then I have shot the gamut from portraits to landscapes. I would think (and I do) that I know a good photograph when I see one.

My photography, which was born in that last century, involved lots of knowledge that did not include auto-buttons. I had to learn from scratch. Based on that experience I have little patience for contemporary photography which I think has little style while being sharp and ultra-saturated (meaning the colours are super intense). And of course I avoid all art installations.

How Orange is Trump?  

Newton, Scriabin, Leopold & God, But Shirley Wasn't Always Blonde

I can remember a memorable (in negativity) one at the former Emily Carr College of Art, before it became, to me, the colorless behemoth on the former tractor and forklift lands. It had a full-size replica of a doctor’s waiting room including boring magazines on the table.

The family portraits on the walls of my Kits home stare back at me and I try to think on how I should weigh their value to me. I cannot.

And yes Tiffany, the family portraits on my walls are proper portraits. They are not snaps. Thought went into taking them and in every single case they all posed for me and took my instruction.

That procedure, I believe is lost and deemed irrelevant..

 

Lago de Guadalupe, Estado de México - 1971

Mondays are laundry days in my Kits home. In years back Rosemary would wash lots of stuff at least three times a week. I manage now twice.

Monday is important because I wash my sheets and pillowcases. There is a distinct pleasure in taking a bath in the evening, sprinkling myself with some lavender talcum powder and slipping myself between fresh, clean sheets.

The photograph here I took around 1971 not far from our Arboledas, Estado de México little brick house. We lived there with my mother and two daughters Alexandra and Hilary.

Rosemary and I taught English at American companies like Colgate and General Motors. The pay was pretty good but we had to navigate the terrible freeway called El Periférico. No matter how carefully I drove we would experience at least one fender-bender with our VW Bocho or Bochito (bug).

My mother had helped us buy our little house and she got along famously with Rosemary. While Rosemary was mostly silent about her feelings towards me my mother would say, “You have to treat Rosemary well. She adores you.”

In those languid days we sometimes had languid siestas. What a luxury they were in a life and times that now seem to be so far away and so simple.

I have been writing of late blogs that I insert back to December of last year. I would like to think that my blog is a daily blog. This seems like cheating. This laundry blog I am writing today January 10 2021.

Aplastamiento de las gotas – Julio Cortázar (In English below)

Yo no sé, mira, es terrible cómo llueve. Llueve todo el tiempo, afuera tupido y gris, aquí contra el balcón con goterones cuajados y duros, que hacen plaf y se aplastan como bofetadas uno detrás de otro, qué hastío. Ahora aparece una gotita en lo alto del marco de la ventana; se queda temblequeando contra el cielo que la triza en mil brillos apagados, va creciendo y se tambalea, ya va a caer y no se cae, todavía no se cae. Está prendida con todas las uñas, no quiere caerse y se la ve que se agarra con los dientes, mientras le crece la barriga; ya es una gotaza que cuelga majestuosa, y de pronto zup, ahí va, plaf, deshecha, nada, una viscosidad en el mármol.

Pero las hay que se suicidan y se entregan enseguida, brotan en el marco y ahí mismo se tiran; me parece ver la vibración del salto, sus piernitas desprendiéndose y el grito que las emborracha en esa nada del caer y aniquilarse. Tristes gotas, redondas inocentes gotas. Adiós gotas. Adiós.

I don’t know, look, it’s terrible how it’s raining. It’s raining all the time, dense and gray outside, here drops, dull and hard, come against the balcony with a splat!, squashing themselves like slaps piling one onto another, how tedious. Now a droplet appears just at the top of the window frame; stays there quivering against the sky, shattered into a thousand subdued glints, about to fall down but won’t fall, still won’t fall. It holds on tight, all nails, doesn’t want to fall and it’s clear it grips with its teeth while its belly grows bigger and bigger; it’s now a majestic drop hanging there, and then plonk, there it goes, splat, undone, nothing, only a clammy something on the marble.

But there are those that kill themselves and surrender right away, sprouting in the frame whence they jump off outright; I can even make out the dive’s vibration, their little legs falling off and the inebriating scream in the fleetingness of the fall and their annihilation. Sad, gloomy, despondent drops, plump and gullible drops. Good-bye drops. Good-bye.I don’t know, look, it’s terrible how it’s raining. It’s raining all the time, dense and gray outside, here drops, dull and hard, come against the balcony with a splat!, squashing themselves like slaps piling one onto another, how tedious. Now a droplet appears just at the top of the window frame; stays there quivering against the sky, shattered into a thousand subdued glints, about to fall down but won’t fall, still won’t fall. It holds on tight, all nails, doesn’t want to fall and it’s clear it grips with its teeth while its belly grows bigger and bigger; it’s now a majestic drop hanging there, and then plonk, there it goes, splat, undone, nothing, only a clammy something on the marble.

But there are those that kill themselves and surrender right away, sprouting in the frame whence they jump off outright; I can even make out the dive’s vibration, their little legs falling off and the inebriating scream in the fleetingness of the fall and their annihilation. Sad, gloomy, despondent drops, plump and gullible drops. Good-bye drops. Good-bye.