Saturday, September 09, 2023

Rhinoceros and oxpeckers

 

For at least 20 years my wife Rosemary and I went to the Arts Club Theatre openings without having to pay. Artistic Director Bill Millerd was a fan of my blog reviews of the plays in both the theatre on Granville and the one on Granville Island.

We had a similar situation with Early Music Vancouver and the Vancouver East Cultural Centre.

I made it a point that if I did not like a play or performance I would not write about it. My blogs contained my own photographs.

The situation went south when I had an Arts Club Theatre publicist tell me that I could not photograph her actors on the back alley and that I needed to ask permission in writing.

The Vancouver East Cultural Centre publicist said she saw me take some pictures at the Playhouse and that it was against regulations. She warned me that if I did that again I would be taken off her list. I promptly told her to take me off the list.

In the heady days of good publicists one of the best was Ballet BC’s Richard Forzley. He would call me up and tell me of a new dancer and would invite me to watch a practice.                 

Now in 2023 with media all but gone I wonder if publicists can send press announcements to anybody.

My guess is that both journalists and publicists are an endangered species.

On August 18 and I9 I watched a performance by a fantastic dancer, Béatrice Larrivée from the Bathsheba Dance Company. On both days the Arts Umbrella Dance Company’s lovely new theatre on Granville Island was 3/4s full with mostly her young female students from the classes she gave for a week there. I saw no media, no dance critics, and, incredibly, few if any dancers from Ballet BC.

Animals in Bed with Apples 

Béatrice Larrivée

Why?

I believe because few knew of the performance. Stir Magazine principals Janet Smith and Gaile Johnson at one time did dance criticism at the old Georgia Straight. Why where they not there? I would bet they did not know.

I have attended other dance and musical performances because I am on the email lists or friends with the people involved in Facebook.  

With the all about dead Vancouver Sun this situation will not improve. What is interesting to me is that if you want to call the diminished Georgia Straight, you cannot. It has to be by email. The same applies to Stir.

In this age of communication I would define it as the age of miscommunication. 

Our local CBC Radio and TV could step in but they are more likely to tell us about bridge traffic than inform us of cultural events.

.                 

Friday, September 08, 2023

Niña & her fave author

All cats are telephones

The Primal Urge 

A Triumvirate of girls

 

Except for the presence of my father until1952, I have been surrounded always by women.

There were a few girlfriends in my life until I met my Rosemary in Mexico City in December 1967 and married here on February 8 1968. We had two daughters and one of them Hilary, had two girls, my granddaughters Rebecca and Lauren.

In my very large metal archive cabinets in my Kitsilano oficina I may have at least 600 negatives and slide files of women in various stages of undress.

And now I must report something I never thought would happen to me. I have lost my interest in women. I am tired with this summer’s show of bums, gluteus maximus, yoga pants, cleavage, etc. I smile when I see a woman wearing a dress. Winter, it is my hope, will eliminate this tiresome show.

The only woman still in my heart and mind is my departed Rosemary. My daughters are relaxed knowing that they will not have to fight with lawyers to inherit from my estate as there will not be an interloping woman in my life. That I guarantee.

And yet, there is indeed a live woman in my life who is affectionate, gives me lots of attention and likes to sit on my lap. This is Niño’s sister Niña.

I see in her all those qualities that my Rosemary had except one. I depended on Rosemary’s intelligence and stability. That is being provided by the company of my male cat, Niño.

I wonder how my cats would handle the slim possibility that I may become a trans woman as only then I can be a genuine crazy cat lady?

 

Thursday, September 07, 2023

Peter C. Newman - Saturday Night - 1987

Peter Charles Newman CC CD (May 10, 1929 – September 7, 2023)

Author Peter C. Newman died today. He was 94.

 Peter C. Newman's Eyebrows

Bibliography - Wikipedia

1959 Flame of Power: Intimate Profiles of Canada's Greatest Businessmen

1963 Renegade in Power: The Diefenbaker Years

1968 The Distemper of Our Times: Canadian Politics in Transition

1969 A Nation Divided: Canada and the Coming of Pierre Trudeau

1972 Their Turn to Curtsy: Your Turn to Bow

1973 Home Country: People, Places, and Power Politics

1975 The Canadian Establishment: Volume One: The Old Order

1978 Bronfman Dynasty: The Rothschilds of the New World (published in America in 1979 under the different title, King of the Castle: The Making of a Dynasty)

1981 The Canadian Establishment: Volume Two: The Acquisitors

1982 The Establishment Man: Conrad Black, A Portrait of Power

1983 True North, Not Strong and Free: Defending the Peaceable Kingdom in the Nuclear Age

1983 Debrett's Illustrated Guide to the Canadian Establishment (editor)

1984 Drawn and Quartered: The Trudeau Years

1985 A History of the Hudson's Bay Company: Volume One: Company of Adventurers

1987 A History of the Hudson's Bay Company: Volume Two: Caesars of the Wilderness

1989 Empire of the Bay: An Illustrated History of the Hudson Bay Company

1991 A History of the Hudson's Bay Company: Volume Three: Merchant Princes

1989 Canada: The Great Lone Land

1991 Canada 1892: Portrait of a Promised Land

1993 Promise of the Pipeline

1995 Nortel, Northern Telecom: Past, Present, Future

1995 The Canadian Revolution: From Deference to Defiance

1996 Defining Moments: Dispatches from an Unfinished Revolution

1996 Vancouver: The Art of Living Well

1998 The Canadian Establishment: Volume Three: The Titans

1998 Sometimes a Great Nation: Will Canada Belong to the 21st Century?

1998 Canada: The Land that Shapes Us

2002 Continental Reach

2004 Here Be Dragons: Telling Tales of People, Passion and Power (Autobiography)

2005 The Secret Mulroney Tapes: Unguarded Confessions of a Prime Minister

2008 Izzy: The Passionate Life and Turbulent Times of Izzy Asper, Canada's Media Mogul

2010 Heroes: Canadian Champions, Dark Horses, and Icons

2010 Mavericks: Canadian Rebels, Renegades, and Anti-Heroes

2011 When the Gods Changed: The Death of Liberal Canada (originally titled: Michael Ignatieff: The Man In Full)

2016 "Hostages to Fortune: The United Empire Loyalists and The Making of Canada"

 

Since we seem to have a little knowledge of Canada’s past and immediate past, few might be aware who this Viennese-born man was and how important his contributions have been.

I will diverge a tad to explain that what Newman did would have been appreciated in the Latin American countries and especially in Mexico. In Mexico his name would have been followed by two words – autor y cronista.

In a past in the 19^th century we had historians. Now a historian is a person who studies a remote but not immediate past. Thus in Mexico a cronista is an author who records and opines on events as they unfold. They become for me a living archive. If you place in Google Cronistas Mexicanos  you will get a long list of them.

I am hard-pressed to name any Vancouver ‘cronista’.

Few if any will know that Prime Minister Lester Pearson assigned Patrick Reid to find someone to design the Maple Leaf Flag and that it became just that in 1964. Until Reid died in 2015 I would cross the street in Kerrisdale’s 41st Avenue to greet the man. Anybody in my native Argentina would tell you our flag was designed by Manuel Belgrano.

Patrick Reid& the Maple Leaf Flag

My wife Rosemary and our two daughters arrived in Vancouver in 1975. I went to a now gone bookstore on Granville and asked for a book about Canada. Pierre Berton’s Vimy was placed in my hands. It was the first book about Canada that I read. In it I found out that Berton stated that Canada became a country at that bloody WWI battle. I have not forgotten the book. I treasure it.

Vimy & Pierre Berton

Of late there a rumours that our Vancouver Hudson’s Bay Company store on West Georgia is moribund. In some way Hudson's Bay, just like the de Havilland Beaver helped bring British Columbia’s interior into the fold, did the same for Canada .

P.D. James & the de Havilland Beaver

Peter C. Newman’s three books on the Hudson's Bay Company:

1985 A History of the Hudson's Bay Company: Volume One: Company of Adventurers

1987 A History of the Hudson's Bay Company: Volume Two: Caesars of the Wilderness

1991 A History of the Hudson's Bay Company: Volume Three: Merchant Princes

 And a few more chronicled how our vast wilderness became Canada.

I have written a few blogs about Peter C. Newman and I can even boast that my name along his on a book cover Vancouver – The Art of Living Well that was published in 1996.

 

Through the years I managed to photograph this man three times. My favourite was the first time in 1987 as he was my ticket to shooting for the then fabulous Saturday Night. I got the job for the 100^th Anniversary of the magazine because Annie Leibovitz turned down the job.

What is really important about this man is that he was a genuine chronicler of what made our country be what it was. 

The only other man who always wore a Greek hat was artist Toni Onley. 

A correction: 

I loved your blog on Peter C. Newman. But I have a request for a slight edit at the end. We both knew another Peter who always wore a Greek Fisherman’s hat, even when he was in the hospital bed. Peter Trower. I think he deserves to me included as part of an illustrious trio. Interestingly, few of the Newman obits mention that he was a renowned Stan Kenton scholar. He often claimed that listening to Kenton taught him how to write. I think that’s pretty cool. Thanks for caring. John Lekich

Peter Trower

 

 

 

Wednesday, September 06, 2023

 

It is still a good scanning season here in my Kitsilano garden. It is tough to justify running them here in my blog if I have no immediate reason. In today’s case I resorted to Google and put in “two roses”. I was rewarded by Édouard Manet’s Two Roses on a Tablecloth – 1883. It is displayed at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.

I was then inspired to place the two roses on my dining room red tablecloth. The results please me as I am sure that Rosemary would give me one of her signature smiles.

This sort of activity distracts me from my inability to learn to live alone with my two cats.

 

Sunday, September 03, 2023

 

On March 10 in 1876, the first telephone call was made by Alexander Graham Bell as he demonstrated his ability to "talk with electricity". The first phone call was made to Thomas Watson, who was Bell's assistant. "Mr Watson, come here. I want to see you," were the first words transmitted.

In this 21^st century, had Graham Bell made that call, Thomas Watson would have not shown up. He would have been having supper.

A couple of months ago I made a list of ten phone numbers and called each one. These were the results.

1. We are about to have supper, will call you later. (He didn’t)

2. We are having supper, will call you later. (He didn’t)

3. Alex, I am on my way to North Van, will call you later. (He didn’t)

4. Alex, it is 9pm. You woke me up, I will call you later. (He didn’t)

5. The phone rang and rang. No answering machine.

6. Left a message on the answering machine. (He didn’t call back)

7. You cannot connect with this number as dialed. The landline in question is in transition to be disconnected.

8. Answer by email: “I don’t read my emails and I have the ringer on my phone on silent mode. If you want to talk to me, text me first”.

9. Somebody did answer and we had a short chat.

10. My friend, artist Martin Guderna, always answers the phone and I can even call him after 10pm. A explanation for this anomaly is that his father Ladislav Guderna was a surrealist painter.

 

The first phone in my memory was in 1954 in Mexico City. By then the Mexican phone company demanded that anybody who wanted a phone had to buy shares in the company. All Mexicans saw this as a bribe. All phones were black.

In 1959, in our St. Ed’s Catholic boarding school in Austin, Texas, we had two coin public phones outside our dorm. It didn’t take us long to devise the use of a twisted coat hanger wire that bypassed using coins.

A woman called Martia (knowing we were an all-boys school) would call us and talk sexy. This was my first experience with phone sex.

In 1966, while in the Argentine Navy I received a phone call from my not quite uncle Leo Mahdjubian. He said, “Alexander, your father kicked the bucket yesterday. He was taken to the hospital by a police sergeant and pronounced dead. You will have to go to the police station to sign some documents.”

The worst phone call in my memory happened not long after. I was in my pension on a dark, cold rainy Buenos Aires evening. My girlfriend Susy was on the phone and she said, “Alex you will never amount to anything. You are uneducated. I am leaving you for a violinist at the Teatro Colón. Don’t ever call me back.”

I blame Steve Jobs for the present situation where a phone is of no use except to look at it while crossing at an intersection and to post emojis on social media.

My friend Mark Budgen, a friend now dead, might have known what was to happen in this century. In that last one he answered my phone call, “Alex I cannot talk to you. I am monitoring a fax.”

I have a good friend who says he does not have email or a smart phone. He has landline at home with an answering machine but is never there. I get one phone call on Monday’s or Tuesday’s at 11:30 in the morning. What this means is that I can communicate with him only on his terms.

As it is now, living alone with two cats, one of my few avenues with humanity is the phone call. I should consider that that avenue is only twofold. I get phone calls from my two daughters. And that’s it.

I am still in good health so the idea of going to a senior’s home is not yet viable. Would I be able to take Niño and Niña with me? I would not have my garden or my oficina. But the idea of being in a place with in person humans is not such a bad one. Is that my future?

I wrote in this blog about the mostly Latin American concept of the "cronista" or chronicler. In some way I feel that my over 5894 blogs are a sort of chronicle of what happens in this city, forgotten by many, but also what I observe as the direction this century is going towards from my venture point of being a product of the last century.