Saturday, January 15, 2022

 

Halloween - 1952 - Susan Stone is the girl laughing on the right

 

Primal Urge

Primal Urge II  Brian Aldiss

These evenings and nights I have succumbed to taking sleeping pills as I think lots about my current state of affairs. I eat, take care of the cats and with no work in the garden until, perhaps next month, this leaves me with writing. And of course there are all those menialities like vacuuming and doing my laundry. I think about what I want to write, knowing that this is good therapy when one has little to do or need to do.

Last night I was thinking about my relationship with the women who were part of my romantic life. I have written about it, the two links are above. I believe that I can add some fresh approach to my feelings. As I have included before in these blogs, many writers including Joan Didion wrote, “I write to find out how I feel.”

Today I found a new Argentine word “ñoño” which translates to nerd. I have been a nerd all my life and was even one before the word was coined. Now I would like to amend that by saying that what I may have been was a precocious nerd.

It was in kindergarten in Buenos Aires that I would lift the skirt of one of the Argentine quintuplets María Fernanda Diligenti. In Spanish a kindergarten is “jardín de infantes”. The word infante does not have the negative connotation of infantile. What did I know about the relation of a little girl’s underpants to my feeling some sort of attraction? I later graduated to shooting spitwads to girls I liked.

By the time I was 10 I felt differently about girls. This brings me to the crux of the matter of this blog. It was then, that without knowing anything about the birds and the bees, I understood that there were some girls I liked. I am not sure that I thought of the word attraction in relation to girls.

It was about this time that there were two American girls in my 5^th grade class that I enjoyed looking at. One was called Susan Stone and the other Mary Lou Chase. They were good friends to each other. 

I am not sure how a chauffered Cadillac came to be part of my life. Perhaps my mother interceded as she was teaching at the Belgrano R, American School while I was going to the nearby grammar school. Susan Stone’s father, the General Manager of General Motors Argentina,would dispatch his Cadillac to pick me up in our middle-class neighbourhood of Coghlan so that I could play with his daughter in their sprawling mansion in Belgrano. It was there where I saw my first TV. I have no memory of what Susan and I did for fun.

It was at night in those days that when my lights were out I would think of her and of Mary Lou. I had no concept of sex or anything related to the erotic. I would think (dream?) situations where I would gaze on their lovely smiles. No matter how I pushed wanting to dream of the two, I would soundly go to sleep.

 

Second row top -first 2 girls Mary Lou Chase & Susan Stone -1952 I am bottom right.

 

It was not until my 8^th grade in Nueva Rosita, Coahuila, Mexico where my mother taught in a two room school to the children of the engineers of nearby American Smelting and Refining Company that I began to see girls differently. My mother taught 8^th,7^th and 6^th grades. With five other boys I was in Grade 8. It was in Grade 7 that I immediately noticed a lovely girl with black hair and eyes called Anna María Ramos. When I had arrived I had been given the plum opportunity of having her as my dance partner in a school dance. By then I was well into becoming a ñoño and I could not dance well. I felt awkward. The closest I ever became of being some sort of beau of hers was to accompany her to the edge of the American colony where we lived where she was met by her Romeo (called just that) who she eventually married.

 

I cite my experiences with women here to explain the curious fact that while Rosemary and I had good sex for 52 years even until a couple of months before she died, I now have memories of her no different from those that I had for Susan Stone and Mary Lou Chase.  I see her face in my-before-I-go-to-sleep evenings with that curious unsexed, almost neutral but very lovely emotion that is devoid of any passion. 

 

In this fuzzy photograph on our way to Vancouver 1975 this is how I see my Rosemary

It would seem that I am going back to my emotional routes of when I was 10, but I will skip any thoughts that might come to me to want to lift a woman’s skirts.

 

 

Friday, January 14, 2022

 

 Gracias a la Vida - Mercedes Sosa - Joan Baez video

Indigenous music south of the Río Bravo - Reclaimed? 

Gracias a la Vida was composed by Chilean Violeta Parra who was of mixed blood. This video (link above) includes the well-known (but now dead) Argentine mixed-blood folk singer Mercedes Sosa singing with Joan Baez who is a Mexican/American. Is this Indigenous music? I believe it is. That it is in Spanish and not in an Indigenous language or dialect does not make it less Indigenous. in nature.

As time progresses inexorably, words lose their meaning or change.

Such is the once intimate visit (visit us at www.vancouvergarbage) or the lovely share which now involves placing videos you like with no explanation into social media. Another word is ghetto.

Chinatown in Vancouver is disappearing as such. When it opened years ago it was because the Chinese were not allowed or could not afford to live anywhere else. Now the younger generation of Vancouverites have to move to the slightly cheaper suburbs. A ghetto was once a place in a city. Chinatown was a de facto ghetto. Now a ghetto has been transformed into a wide ranging area.

The above is my entry into attempting to explain how the word Indigenous is currently going through another transformation from my perspective.

For those who have gotten this far you might want to consider what my grandmother used to say of people who stated what they knew as if they were experts. She said, “They have a doctorate from F.W. Woolworth’s & Co." I am no anthropologist or linguist. But in the Martín Fierro you will find, "The devil knows more not because he is the devil but because he is an old man."

Because Canada and the United States share a culture that I believe is Americocentral, those in Canada are not aware on how far Indigenous music and culture can go in our continent if we modify what we say is Indigenous.

Few in Canada might not know that the Indigenous Peoples of my native Argentina suffered the same kind of brutal genocide as those in the United States. The campaign to push them west in the 19^th century was called La Campaña del Desierto.  

But unique, I believe, is the fact that the prose poem work by José Hernández,  El Gaucho Martín Fierro, 1872 is considered seminal in having brought into being the concept of a country called Argentina. That its main protagonist, Martín Fierro is conscripted by the Argentine army to participate into military genocide is only now being seen with different eyes in this 21^st century. This is far different from those who say the Pierre Berton's book Vimy signaled the birth of modern Canada.

Mexico, where I lived for many years and married my Canadian wife in 1968, has a different narrative on its Indigenous Peoples. When Hernán Cortés arrived in what was yet to be Mexico in 1519 he used a woman called Doña Marina, but known by Mexicans in an unkind epithet as La Malinche as a translator and the help of the Aztec-subjugated Tlaxcalans to conquer the country in short time. To this day a malinchista (religions, nationalities, etc are written in lower case in Spanish) is a person who prefers imported goods over the local-made ones.

And yet while we all know that the United States had a Black president in Barack Obama, how many know that Benito Juárez a full-blooded Zapotec Indigenous man served as the 26th president of Mexico from 1858 until his death in 1872? And unique to Mexico, no statues to Hernán Cortés ever had to be taken down  as none were ever put up.

 

Benito Juárez

 How could this be?

I will give my personal explanation via my doctoral degree from F.W. Woolworth.

Columbus Day in Latin-American is called El Día de la Raza. Because there was much more intermarriage between the invading Spaniards and the local Indigenous peoples a more favourable expression was used to denote the making of a new race (raza) of mestizos. Another word is criollo. At first the word in Argentina denoted Spaniards born in the colonies. In the 60s Argentine composer Ariel Ramírez published his now famous and first ethnic Roman Catholic Mass, La Misa Criolla.

I believe that the concept of a mestizo is not used in Canada. The Indigenous Peoples are either full-blooded or described as of mixed parentage.

In Mexico, as in all other Latina American countries, there is an active and also sometimes hidden racism. In my Argentina a dark-skinned person is called a morocho. This can either be because of black hair or of dark skin. Those poor people who followed Perón were called descamisados (shirtless ones) and cabecitas negras (those with heads of black hair). They were singled out from the lighter skinned and more patrician white-skinned folks. Wealthy and or patrician white-skinned had no time for "cabecita negra" Maradona but love Messi as he is white.

In my years in Mexico we would discuss why it was that many Mexican women would wear lovely stockings on unshaved legs or why Frida Kahlo sported a moustache. In the 70s the Mexican police departments attempted to prohibit the sporting of moustaches by its malepolicemen. Full blooded Mexican Indigenous Peoples have no body hair or beards. The word used is lampiño. The unshaved legs and moustache declared to anybody, “I have Spanish blood and I am proud of it.” In buses I saw many ads for skin lightening cream. If someone who was dark-skinned told you they had a new love interest the obvious question to ask was, "¿Blanquito para mejorar la raza? Which translates, “Light skinned so as to better the race if you have children?”

While in Austin at a Roman Catholic boarding high school, I was in a racist limbo. I spoke Spanish but was white. The Mexican/Americans in the school shunned me as well as the white/Americans. When we would go to get cheap haircuts at the barber college on 6^th Street we were told to be careful as we might be rolled by “spics”. It was in those years that the Mexican/Americans began to use the term raza as “one of us”.  By the Mexican Olympics of 1968, the term raza de bronce, or bronze race was being used as Mexico began to take pride in their Indigenous heritage.

Before coming to Vancouver in 1975 with my Canadian wife and two Mexican-born daughters, I was from a school tradition where we were told about “los pieles rojas”, the red-skinned Indians and los "orientales amarillos" or yellow Orientals. Strangely I was taught that the Indians of India were Caucasian. A Caucasian in those days was defined by features and not by skin colour.

When I arrived in Vancouver I told Rosemary that I had seen what looked like Mexicans on the street and when I talked to them in Spanish they did not understand me. It was then that I found out the Canadian Indigenous Peoples were no different in appearance from those in Mexico.

My first job in Vancouver was washing cars for Tilden Rent-a-Car on  Alberni Street. As soon as I was promoted to counter clerk I was told, “Do not rent to anybody whose surname is George or John.” I asked and asked and finally I was told, “Because they are fu….. Indians!”

Soon after a man called Moving Rock wanted to rent a station wagon. I was determined to give him what he wanted even if he didn’t qualify. When he abandoned the station wagon in Arizona I was almost fired. And I was told, “No more Moving Rocks or Johnny Stones.” Johnny Stone was a black Seattle pimp who came to Vancouver and rented a Chevrolet Vega. He always paid and the car was always returned clean.

My first photographic jobs were for the CBC. While there I never saw an Indigenous person of any kind, even as a stagehand. In fact the only Indigenous persons I ever met up with were Pat John in the Beachcombers and Buffy Sainte-Marie in CBC variety shows.

There is an increasing respect in Canada for all things Indigenous. In my native Argentina, the adored writer Jorge Luís Borges, went on the record disparaging Canada sending a totem pole as a display of its high culture. In his literature Argentine Indigenous Peoples do not fair any better.

But there are now signs in my Argentina of the necessity of removing statues of General Alejo JulioArgentino Roca who was president from 1880 to 1886 and from 1898 until 1904. It was he who as a young general was in charge of the now infamous Campaña del Desierto.

In many ways we in Canada are ahead on these important processes called reconciliation and reclaimed But I do believe we must widen our horizon and include the Indigenous Peoples in the rest of the continent. 

A very bright spot here in Canada for me is the pioneering work by Indigenous Peoples dancers to incorporate traditional dance with contemporary modern dance. One such luminary is Byron Chief-Moon.

Byron Chief-Moon

Besides being an inspirational dancer he is a fine writer.

 

 

Thursday, January 13, 2022

 

In my youth I was no different from those of my ilk. By the time I had a record player I would play over and over again music I liked.

In the late 50s in Austin, Texas this meant The Everly Brothers, Brenda Lee, The Ventures (and believe it or not) Conway Twitty.

Then by the 60s I became a more discriminating follower of Miles Davis who was my introduction to jazz as was the Dave Brubeck Quartet.

In the early 70s I acquired an Acoustic Research transistor amplifier and a pair of AR-3A speakers. I even had an AR turntable. I was a discerning audiophile. And I have been ever since.

In this 21^st century I believe that good sound in the reproduction of music has gone to the barking dogs.

The beginning of the end for me happened when 5 years ago we purchased a Chevrolet Cruze that had no CD player.

I must interject here to clarify to those who love vinyl. I purchased lots of brand new records that had built-in scratches and even the best of turntables (I have a Sony linear tracking one with a Stanton 500 MKII cartridge) will have bothersome clicks. CDs eliminated all background noise (only John Cage would have objected). I have a good vinyl collection that contains records that never became CDs.

I cannot comprehend how folks listen to music while driving with their smart phones connected to the vehicle’s sound system. Furthermore I must point out that while almost all kind of music is available on YouTube you must first be aware of the existence of that which you want to listen to.

Whenever I visit my native Buenos Aires and stay at the Claridge Hotel on Calle Tucumán, I walk around the corner to Calle San Martín, to Casa Piscitelli. I am greeted by the owner Ing. Fabián Piscitelli (his father opened the store in 1939) who will place in front of me CDs or DVDs that I will surely like. This past December one of the CDs was Ariel Ramírez – 20 Grandes Éxitos.

 

In that CD I have become obsessed with Nostalgias Tucumanas.  I have been playing it over and over in my very good home sound system that has JBL Studio Monitors. I like Nostalgias because of the combination of Ramírez’s piano, a large Argentine drum called a bombo, and a very small guitar called a charango. The composition was composed by a noted Argentine composer, singer and guitar player called Atahualpa Yupanqui.

And (very important!) because I have the CD and I know the existence of the composition I was able to find it on YouTube. And here it is below. Note the strange rhythm. This is called a zamba (with a zed!).

Because of my present obsession with Nostalgias Tucumanas I have been playing the CD in my car with a Sylvania CD player that I connect to my car’s sound system. I place the player on two woollen winter gloves to prevent it from sliding. The player does not skip at bumps but will if it slides.

 

To finish this sort of rant I want to clarify the Americocentric concept of what is Indigenous music. I love CBC's Reclaimed. They play Canadian and American Indigenous music.

But (but!, but!, but!) are Canadians and Americans aware that most of the music south of the Río Bravo (Rio Grande) is Indigenous all the way to that southernmost city of Ushuaia?

Listen to that bombo in Nostalgias Tucumanas. This is splendid Indigenous music. 

Nostalgias Tucumanas - Ariel Ramírez on piano 

Nostalgias Tucumanas - Los Chalchaleros

And Ariel Ramírez in one of my fave ever of his compostions on solo piano

Alfonsina y el mar

Wednesday, January 12, 2022

 

Rosemary & Alexandra 1969

Today is January 12 2022. I woke up early so as to make my 7:30 appointment with my ophthalmologist Dr. Simon Warner. I will have new glasses next week.

Having these activities keeps me distracted and they give me a purpose from one day to the next. It is only when it gets dark early in the evening, and I get the cats in, that somehow I have time in my hands and feel a bit lost.

 So that is when I cross my small deck into my oficina to sort through negatives of the family in Mexico from a faraway past.

I believe that we humans are so, because we have the ability to associate and to find patterns. Today’s involve double negs that sit next to other double negs.  The first three are on one strip of  six exposures. Thirty five millimeter film had either 20 or 36 exposures. I would cut them in sixes in order to make those contacts of old.

Three of the strips make sense but the last one does not. I know they are Rosemary’s lovely legs. It seems I was experimenting with reflections on a window and I can discern a kettle!