Saturday, July 01, 2023

Rosa 'Sombreul' 29 June 2023

 

Cultivo una rosa blanca – José Martí

 

Cultivo una rosa blanca,

En julio como en enero,

Para el amigo sincero

Que me da su mano franca.

Y para el cruel que me arranca

El corazon con que vivo,

Cardo ni oruga cultivo

Cultivo una rosa blanca.

 

I have a white rose to tend

In July as in January;

I give it to the true friend

Who offers his frank hand to me.

And to the cruel one whose blows

Break the heart by which I live,

Thistle nor thorn do I give:

For him, too, I have a white rose.

 

I am writing this blog 29 June 2023 and the May/June first blooms rose season is over. Some of my roses will come back later and in the fall. I spotted these two lone white roses, Rosa ‘Sombreul’. I knew I had to scan them. But what could I possibly connect them with? I hit paydirt with Cuban patriot José Martí’s poem Cultivo una rosa blanca. The lovely poem is about love and forgivness.

 

I am sure that had Rosemary been alive and on our bed I would have said to her, “Rosemary look what I found. Let me read this to you.”

Friday, June 30, 2023

 

Stephen Douglas Owen - September 8, 1948 – June 29, 2023

When Nixon declared he was not a crook we Argentines laughed. For us and in many other countries of  Latin America, dishonesty is one of the requirements to become a politician.

Throughout my years as a newspaper and magazine photographer I photographed many Canadian politicians, federal and provincial.

Because I have a subscription to the fading Vancouver Sun, this morning I found out in a rare obituary that Stephen Owen had died. I photographed him for the August 1991 Georgia Straight. We had a long chat, I remember iit was about politicians in Latin America. I was charmed and particularly affected by his easy going, but obvious intelligence. At the time he was the Ombudsman.

In my memory of other Vancouver politicians that impressed me with their candid behaviour, Art Kube (the man who cried) was one of them.

Art Kube

I recall going to a neighbourhood meeting presided by John Turner and I could not believe that there were no guards at the door with assault rifles which would have been the case in Argentina.

Another politician who impressed me by his no nonsense demeanour was Jack Munro.

Jack Munro 

Stephen Owen's cousin Philip Owen, was another politician (Vancouver Mayor) who I instantly liked when he pulled out his scissors.

 Philip Owen

Today being the day before Canada Day we should all reflect how lucky we are to live in this fine country where politicians cry.

Finally I would like to point out that the lighting on Mr. Owen is called Rembrandt lighting. One side of the face is darker than the other. Rembrandt and many other painters posed their subjects close to windows. Now with the advent of cellular phone cameras the concept of this lighting is all but forgotten and now faces are equally lit on both sides and the effect , in my opinion “falls flat on the face.”

Thursday, June 29, 2023

Rosa 'Princess Alexandra of Kent' & Rosa 'St. Swithun' 29 June 2023

 

Until I left Buenos Aires for Mexico City in 1953 in our Coghlan neighbourhood, I was called el inglesito (nationalities are never in upper case in Spanish). I spoke English but was perfectly fluent in Argentine Spanish.

An English Boy from Coghlan

My father was born in Buenos Aires but his parents were from Manchester.  My mother was from Manila but her maiden name was the Basque de Irureta Goyena.

In Mexico my grandmother was the de facto cultural attaché of the Philippine Embassy. We went to many of their cultural gatherings. Paradoxically because of it my grandmother gave large parties in our house and her guests were the Mexican muralists and writers.

Until my mother sent me to a boarding school in Austin, Texas in 1958  we lived the high point of Mexican filmmaking, literature, etc.

Four years in Austin made me feel not only an American but somehow also a Texan. I know how to hook’em horns.

The City of Austin 

On Being a Texan

In 1966 I went to Buenos Aires to fulfill my obligation as a conscript of the Argentine Navy. I swore allegiance to our flag in a tearful ceremony made up of hundreds of sailors in their dress uniform.

I returned to Mexico in 1967 and in short order I married my Canadian Rosemary and we had two daughters born in the Tacubaya neighbourhood of Mexico City.

We drove to our new home in Vancouver in 1975 and some many years later I became a Canadian citizen.

In 2000 I became enthralled by the concept (I was slow!) that in order to feel nostalgia for a place you have to be somewhere else. With Argentine artists Nora Patrich and Juan Manuel Sánchez we had a show we named Argentine Nostalgia.

Linda Lorenzo - Argentina

For years I photographed Ivette Hernández  (from León Guanajuato) on the theme of my Mexican nostalgia. I jokingly tell friends that If I were to live briefly in Venice I would want to photograph a woman with an umbrella and pursue my Canadian/Vancouver nostalgia.

Ivette Hernández - The Human Factor 

The Warmth of Mexico in Ten Parts

And so it goes the complex feeling in me of belonging to all the above places and somehow not belonging to any of them.

My mother used to smell me behind the ear and would tell me I had the scent of an Englishman. I am crazy over properly made loose tea (I have ten tins of the best variety of tea) and only before Rosemary died did she reveal to me that she hated my cucumber sandwiches with homemade mayonnaise.

I remember well June 2 1953 in Buenos Aires as my mother called me to lunch and instructed me to wash my hands and knees. I told her. “Mother I cannot as I am listening to the coronation of my queen.”

My Argentine Englishness

This confusion on my many national nostalgias I believe is a pleasant one. When I run into people from the US, from Texas, Argentina, Mexico and Canadians (when abroad) I can switch my accents to the proper lingo of the place. It is fun.

At the same time I think of a Spanish word arraigado, which means to be close to something or place, and wonder what it would be like to be from Nanaimo and never having lived anywhere else. What would my nostalgia be?

I enjoy reading Jorge Luís Borges as he is part of movement  in Latin America called costumbrismo. This is literature, art and music from one place. Argentine tango is really the music of one city, Buenos Aires, and Borges often wrote of corners in Buenos Aires that I have known exactly. Americans cannot trace jazz to one city. I wonder what Canadian literature is of one place.

 

Costumbrismo

El Mate Curado

As an Argentine

Meanwhile I scanned two English roses, Rosa ‘St. Swithun’ and Rosa ‘Princess Alexandra of Kent’ and conjured this blog as an excuse to illustrate it with the scan.

Wednesday, June 28, 2023

Rosa 'Buttercup' &  Hosta 'Island Breeze' 28 June 2023

 

In quite a few blogs I have explained that when I started scanning the plants from my garden in 2001 my intention was to render them accurately, note the date, scan them at 100% size and make the colour as exact as possible. 

 

Through the years, especially with my roses I found myself scanning them several times during the season, year after year.

 

 

Now with time in my hands, and living alone with my two cats, I distract myself by going beyond accuracy so that some of my scans exceed the idea of accuracy, and they are beautiful artsy fartsy examples of the Spanish saying that, “When the devil has nothing to do with his tail he swats flies.”

 

Of late I have discovered the wonderful combination of mating roses with hosta leaves. In today’s five scans I was playing with the discovery that Hosta ‘Island Breeze’ had a yellow colour (bleached by sun or just a hosta doing what it likes to do which is to sport) that matched the yellow of Rosa ‘Buttercup’. This rose was introduced by a local man called Robin Dening. Rosemary loved its colour. When the rose died I was able to get another one from Dening’s hands.

 

 

Tuesday, June 27, 2023

Rosa 'Darcey Bussell' 27 June 2023

  

I was never a friend of poetry. In the late 50s at my Austin, Texas boarding school, St. Edward’s High School, I could never earn extra points in my English classes as the idea was to memorize a poem. My memory was suspect for this sort of thing. I hated poetry.

Then in my 11^th grade we listened to James Mason, on a record, reading Edgar Allan Poe’s Annabel Lee. That may have been the jolt I needed.

Further jolts came from the poems that my mother wrote. A few were dedicated to me.

Una mujer para amarte - Filomena de Irureta Goyena Hayward

But my ignorance of poetry persisted.  In 1967, when I was a conscript in the Argentine Navy, I disobeyed vocally to an Argentine Lieutenant Commander. He told me he could have shot me in time of war or could send me to the Argentine Antarctic where the only women would be female penguins. He told me he was going to put me into the navy brig for a week but would do me the favour of allowing me to go to a bookstore to buy some books, “You are going to need them.” I went to the Librería Pigmalion which sold books in English. While there I noticed a well-dressed older man who seemed to be almost blind. In my complete ignorance it was only months later I figured out that the man was Jorge Luís Borges.

I have made progress for all that lost time as I read at least one poem or story by Borges every night. There is something about this poet that causes in me a deep feeling of nostalgia for the country where I was born.

When I started blogging in 2006 I found that mating my photographs with poems was a good pastime.  Now all these years later I know most of the poems of Emily Dickinson, Jorge Luís Borges, Alfonsina Storni, William Carlos Williams, the sonnets of Shakespeare, Julio Cortázar, W.H. Auden, Robert Frost and (yes!) Ogden Nash.

It seems that few in this century understand that the first photograph to appear in a newspaper in the mid-1870s, using the brand new halftone process, was a photograph of the Steinway Building in NY. From that point on photographs and copy became dependent on each other. Photographs, more often than not need context.

For me it is fun to look at one of my photographs and then to search for the proper poem to illustrate it.

Today 27 June 2023 I scanned four Rosa ‘Darcey Bussell’ and I knew that there were few poems that to me adequately go well with red roses. Inevitably it is one of my most favourite Borges poems, La Lluvia or The Rain. While I will insert a translation into English, the expression, “el curioso color del colorado,” somehow does not translate all that well to, “the curious colour of colorado” as in English we only use the word red but in Spanish colorado and rojo are synonymous. 

La Lluvia  - Jorge Luís Borges    

   

 Bruscamente la tarde se ha aclarado

porque ya cae la lluvia minuciosa.

Cae o cayó. La lluvia es una cosa

que sin duda sucede en el pasado.

Quien la oye caer ha recobrado

el tiempo en que la suerte venturosa

le reveló una flor llamada rosa

y el curioso color del colorado.

Esta lluvia que ciega los cristales

alegrará en perdidos arrabales

las negras uvas de una parra en cierto

patio que ya no existe. La mojada

tarde me trae la voz, la voz deseada,

de mi padre que vuelve y que no ha muerto.   

 

 

The Rain :: J. L. Borges

The afternoon grows light because at last

Abruptly a minutely shredded rain

Is falling, or it fell. For once again

Rain is something happening in the past.

 

Whoever hears it fall has brought to mind

Time when by a sudden lucky chance

A flower called “rose” was open to his glance

And the curious color of the colored kind.

 

This rain that blinds the windows with its mists

Will gladden in suburbs no more to be found

The black grapes on a vine there overhead

 

In a certain patio that no longer exists.

And the drenched afternoon brings back the sound

How longed for, of my father’s voice, not dead.

 

[From Dreamtigers, by Jorge Luis Borges, translated by Harold Morland]