Camellia x williamsii 'Donation' 24 March 2022

My grandmother often quoted St. Luke’s 4-24 in Spanish, “Nadie es profeta en su tierra.” The lovely version in the King James Bible is:

And he said, Verily I say unto you, No prophet is accepted in his own country.

This has been my fate in achieving any kind of artistic success since I can remember having an inkling that I might just be some sort of artist.

Because I am approaching my soon to come (statistically speaking) eventual oblivion, I am putting my house in order.

Almost every day I sort through hundreds of negatives, slides etc. I try to throw away what I deem not important like my many lawyer headshots.

But the conundrum that haunts me are my around 1500 very large file plant scans which I began in 2001. These scans are accurate records (size, colour and date) of the plants that have graced our Kerrisdale garden and now my Kitsilano garden.

I am placing them in two exterior hard drives. Pending are the first three years of the scans which I put into CDs. I have to store the images in those.

On March 24 I finally noticed that my Camellia x wiliamsii ‘Donation’ was finally in bloom. In other years it has bloomed on the 20th and even before (I have those scans in other years with the recorded date).

Donation was Rosemary’s favourite camellia and one of her favourite plants. I smiled when I saw it today and I was quick to scan an open flower and two buds. I also felt the melancholy knowing that my pleasure could not be shared except in those lovely words also recorded by St.Luke, “Do this in remembrance of me.”

As for my plant scans they will be saved and archived as part of my legacy even though I take note of St. Luke’s warning that it might be for naught.

 

La mesa de la existencia - 25 de marzo, 2022 - Gaston Bachelard

The Poetics of Space (French: La Poétique de l'Espace) is a 1958 book about architecture by the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard. The book is considered an important work about art. Commentators have compared Bachelard's views to those of the philosopher Martin Heidegger.

Wikipedia

Gaston Bachelard coined a phrase that has remained with me for some time. Today I decided to take a photograph of the desk in my oficina. I was lazy and shot a few pictures. They were not quite sharp so I finally did what any good photographer will do which is to improve the capabilities of a camera by mounting it on a tripod.

Bachelard wrote of his work space, “the table of existence."

When Rosemary and I lived in Kerrisdale I had the handsome Edwardian desk in the picture above on one end of the living room. In the basement, in a very large room, I had all my negative files. In another room it was my darkroom. When Rosemary calculated my taxes she included the fact that a lot of our house was my work area. She would complain when I would use our dining room table to sort through slides.

Now, with no darkroom fumes in a damp darkroom, and my files all being in the same room as my desk, I find that my existence in it is pleasant. It is warm and dry and lots of light comes through the door and the window behind my CRT monitor. I have to adjust my Venetian blinds so I will not be affected by the glare.

Very important for my existence is that Epson scanner on the left of the photo. You can see the bamboo stick attached to my Art Deco lamp with a bloom of Camellia x williamsii ‘Donation’ suspended from it. I scanned the camellia and the results are here.

Living alone with two friendly brother and sister cats can be a bit melancholic in spite of the fact that they are affectionate. My office and the desk (a table it also is) is as Bachelard stated, my existence. I feel comfortable when I am in my oficina.

In bed at night, ideas come to my head in preparation for my next day’s blog. Sometimes like many a night I get out of bed and sit at my oficina chair after midnight.

With spring coming, my oficina existence will be shared with getting my garden ready for the season. Every year Rosemary and I opened our garden. We began sometime around 1990. Moving to the little deck garden in Kits never did change our habit. I will be opening the garden to the Vancouver Rose Society in June. I am sure that many of the visitors will be curious as to what is behind that door on the deck. 

I will quote Gaston Bachelard.

Rosemary 1968 & 2020

Of memory, particulary of the Borgesian kind, I have written in great detail (link below). But I still think I can add to my concept of memory.

Of  Memory - Jorge Luís Borges - Thornton Wilder

I am 79. My memory is very good except some names are beginning to fade. I need to use tricks to remember them. I remember Leonard Cohen by remembering Leonard Bernstein first!

But there is one facet of memory that I want to deal with here. I am purposely using the word facet as its original use is for the faces of polyhedrons. Think of a diamond and that it has sharp and rectilinear facets. A person's face has many sides (even profiles if you are a portrait photographer).

My Dictionary of the Spanish Language (RAE) defines faceta as:

2. f. Cada uno de los aspectos que se pueden 

considerar en una persona o en una cosa.

This translates to every one of the aspects that one can consider in a person or thing.

I am illustrating this blog with three of my photographs of Rosemary. The last one on the right is the most recent one that I took it a few months before she died in December 2020.

So here is my question to myself. When I Remember (randomly or purposely) my Rosemary, is the image in my memory from one of my many photographs of her (a few framed around the house)? Or are they memory images as I remember her from one situation here or there, recent or then?

Others, not portrait photographers might only have a family album for visual reference and they can look at individual pictures in that album. But with hundreds of pictures of Rosemary in my computer and in my negative, print, slide and colour negative files I believe that my memory of my Rosemary is one of many facets.

Obviously if I want to remember Raymond Burr after having seen Rear Window at the Hollywood Theatre with Hilary this last Monday, my memory is threefold. There are the images of Burr I remember from the film (or Perry Mason) or they are of the fact that I met him and photographed him twice. This makes it a tad more complex as I may remember him in the film, him in person and him in my photographs.

I will pose this question, which is the true memory of Burr? I would think that the answer is that all are true.

Because I rarely look at photographs of my father (I have no more than 7) , my memory of him is a fading memory of the times I was with him and before he died in Buenos Aires in 1966. I visited him on weekends. My memory has not recorded our conversations. I will never know why. But strangely I remember his scent which was of a lavender aftershave, Old Smuggler Whiskey and his Player's Navy Cut cigarettes.

Memory, as Borges said many times, involves forgetting first.

Dan Sherrod's last car

While I rarely bring back an old blog in its entirety and just post a link within another blog, this time I will place that original blog (below) about my former classmate from Odessa, Texas who died last Saturday. I received an email communication from his son Chris. The communication is below. And after the original blog on Dan Sherrod, Shelley Berman and Buttermilk.

It was only yesterday that I wrote this obituary about Sherri Decembrini. At my age of 79 I feel like I am in Agatha Christie's novel And Then There Were None. I feel that as so many of my former classmates from St. Edward's High School in Austin, Texas die, the least that I can do is to record their passing.

 On Wed, Mar 23, 2022, 11:55 AM Chris Sherrod wrote:

Hi Alex, I'm Chris Sherrod, Dan's son.

I wanted to let you know that we came across your blog post again on a google search for some of dad's pictures. What a great story. Such a good memory. I know he enjoyed it when we saw it the first time.

Sadly, dad passed away very suddenly last Saturday morning. Organ failure.

He always was a comedy fan which probably shaped my desire to get into movies and animation. Just to get him to laugh.

BTW, Dad did buy a 2018 flaming yellow Mustang GT. It was his favorite.

Chris

In 1959 I was an unsophisticate of 17 at St. Edward's High School a Catholic boarding school in Texas. I was in the 10^th grade living in a huge dorm with bunkbeds. Years later when I saw old b+w photographs of the dorm it reminded me of some German Stalag.

Aston Martin DB4

I had a telephone chat with Sherrod who told me he once owned the Aston Martin DB4 his father once (or twice) drove to St. Ed's. We were awed at the car. We were allowed to open and close the doors that made a thick and rewarding clunk of a sound. He is about to sell his over 10 year old Corvette and I believe he told me he was going to buy a Mustang.

Finding out last night that Art’s wife, Sherri Decembrini died made me feel hopeless. With my Rosemary’s death on December 9 2020 I have not gotten over it and I know that there is nothing you can tell a person whose spouse has died that can help in any way. This is something one has to navigate alone.

Zippy's birthday Sept 7 2014

Art Bergmann has been part of my life since 1977  We are friends.

March 2009

On a positive note in these dark days I would like to bring up the subject of Ukraine. This is a Ukraine before the terrible invasion of the country by Putin’s hordes.

In years back I liked to say that Malcolm Parry’s office at Vancouver Magazine was like Ukraine. I believe that there are no tall mountains there. The country has suffered invasions from west to east or east and back for centuries with no way of stopping them.

Malcolm Parry’s office always had its door open. Politicians, thugs, boxers, actors, prostitutes, rock stars, writers, photographers, policemen, etc all were welcomed to Parry’s office. And because I was often in that room I met all those people and somehow photographed many of them.

Because of Les Wiseman’s In One Ear rock column in that magazine and since Wiseman was a music critic snob (most music critics are), he liked Art Bergmann. Bergmann became a frequent subject of his column and I was the assigned photographer.

I have no memory as to why I went to Art and Sherri’s pad near Oak Street to take the kitchen and bed photographs. All I know is that there does not seem to be one bad image in the whole lot. 

The couple trusted me and thanks to that these photographs are as good as they could possibly be.

In the months that follow Art will have a difficult time. I have found that writing my blog has helped me deal with my grief. Perhaps Art will now write some of the best songs of his life, after all Sherri was a companion of inspiration.

With Art's parents

March 2009