Saturday, August 02, 2025

From left to right - Rosa 'Crazy Love' - Rosa 'Margaret Merril'  and bottom Rosa 'Bathsheba' 2 August 2025

 

I'm just mad about Saffron

Saffron's mad about me

I'm-a just mad about Saffron

She's just mad about me

 

They call me Mellow Yellow

(Quite rightly)

They call me Mellow Yellow

(Quite rightly)

They call me Mellow Yellow

 Donovan

 

 

All my life I have been blessed or plagued by my ability to associate disparate things and situations. Today I noticed one rose, usually a white one, called Rosa ‘Margaret Merril’ that had a yellow centre. It was a favourite of Rosemary. Then I saw that Rosa ‘Crazy Love’ was all yellow and Rosa ‘Bathsheba’, not quite open, had some yellow two.

It was then easy to associate all three roses with a Donovan tune that Rosemary and I enjoyed while living in Mexico City in the late 60s and early 70s.

While the lyrics may somehow suggest that Saffron was a girl I associate the word  with Spanish.  Mexican rice is often cooked with that lovely version of the word in Spanish, azafrán. My online dictionary of the Spanish Language (RAE which stands for Real Academia Española) cites as its root what was immediately obvious to me. The word is of Arabic origin.

 Del ár. hisp. azza‘farán, y este del ár. clás. za‘farān.

 

 

 

Rosa 'Darcey Bussell' 28 July 2025

 

Rosa 'Darcey Bussell' 2 August 2025

 

I have often written here how my abuelita, María de los Dolores Reyes de Irureta Goyena would remark when I was a little boy and bored, "Alex suck your elbow". Or she might also have told me,"When the devil has nothing to do he swats flies with his tails."

This blog is a splendid example of swatting flies on a lazy Saturday afternoon.

The first scan is of the English Rose named after a retired UK ballerina, Rosa 'Darcey Bussell'. Unknowingly I brushed past the rose and the stalk with with one bloom and four about to open buds broke off. I scanned it. Then I put the stalk in a vase. Today I noticed that the buds had opened.

If anything it shows the splendid continuity of this rose.

That second scan is most special and perhaps a first for me. Because that one bud was touching the scanner glass it is much brighter. I could have easily have brought the blooms to almost match that brightness. It is beautiful just as it is. 

Jim Christy - October 1998

La memoria es individual. Nosotros estamos hechos, en buena parte, de nuestra memoria. Esa memoria está hecha, en buena parte, de olvido. Jorge Luís Borges

Memory is individual. We are made, in a large part by our memory. That memory is made, in a large part by our forgetting. Jorge Luís Borges.

 

When I look at the thousands of books in my Kits library and take into account the many that I threw away when we moved from Kerrisdale to Kitsilano I am most  aware that all those books (and so many I have forgotten what was in them) is what makes the man that I am now.

Now that I am about to become 83 I notice how from one day to the next I forget what I did with a photo file that I may have taken out for a scan the day before.

But Borges may be right that we must forget in order to remember. I wrote a blog about my friend and poet Peter Trower who died some years ago. In my authors file I not only found the file “Peter Trower” but another one called Trower, Pete & Christy, Jim. I had forgotten that I photographed the two friends for the Georgia Straight when both were living in Gibsons. In that file I found an 8x10 portrait of Christy partially under his car. I had completely forgotten I had ever taken it.

The print was and Ilford plastic coated photographic paper that we used in that last century because it could be rapidly dried with a blow drier to a glossy perfection. Before the advent of scanners, magazines and newspapers needed the glossy finishing to get a good black.

You will notice the yellowing which in time can degenerate even more.

I smiled when I saw the deterioration and equated it to my deteriorating memory. At the same time I asked myself how I could have possibly forgotten such a good portrait of a good friend. That it is a good portrait is my subjective opinion.

 

Widelux - Rosa 'Ketchup & Mustard' - Hosta 'Forbidden Fruit' 2 August 2025

 

When Rosemary, our two daughters and I arrived in Vancouver from our former home in Mexico City I was unable to find a job as a photographer. I ended up renting cars at Tilden-Rent-A- Car on Alberni Street. Because I was an idiot I did not enjoy answering the phone, “In Canada it’s Tilden, may I help you?” If anything I learned humility and my idea of becoming a famous photographer was forgotten.

When we walked in Stanley Park I saw young men walking with Hasselblad cameras around their neck. I longed to buy one but I could not afford one. I had to content myself with my ancient Pentacon-F and Pentax S-3.

I soon learned to get work with those cameras and I forgot about those Hasselblads and bought a medium format Mamiya RB-67. Jobs happened because magazine art directors rapidly discovered that the 6x7cm format of my Mamiya fit a full page bleed (on vertical because of the revolving film back) and made a splendid two-page spread on a horizontal.

I have many cameras. The reason I bought them is that they had necessary features that were important in my editorial photography. One was the ability of a 35mm camera to synchronize at a high shutter speed with studio flash. I have to Nikon FM-2 for that reason.

In Vancouver it was the kiss of death to fail at an assignment. I had those two Nikons in my camera bag in case one failed.

In short I was never a gear head. This is the present definition of a photographer (mostly males) who like to collect cameras (and they must be in pristine condition) which they like to show off and wear around their neck. It is a tragedy if they do not take photographs with them.

Yesterday Friday I went to a presentation downtown of the near  production of a new Widelux swivel-lens 35mm camera  inspired by Jeff Bridges who loves them and has been shooting with one for years. The camera is going to be built from scratch in Germany.

At the presentation, a very interesting one with lots of pizza and drinks there were all those male gearheads with cameras around their necks. The Wideluxes were all like new. Only two women showed up (one with her husband). I could not understand why not one of those photographers (is having a camera around your neck make you one?) did not bring any photographs to show.

I obsessively printed for a week my Widelux photographs or found them in my files. I brought two little portfolios. Perhaps a couple of the people there may have asked me, “How did you do this?”

In Vancouver there are two possible solutions to deal with the above. One is to take photographs and print them because it is fun and not care if anybody else is interested. The other is to become bitter and depressed. Thankfully I have avoided the latter.

Today’s blog image is a scan of a rose, in which each bloom persists in its beauty and a Hosta that is one of my faves as it always looks lovely.The scan is just an example of doing something that is fun without accounting or caring if anybody else shows interest.

I am not a gear head.

Friday, August 01, 2025

 

Les Wiseman - 1989

  

My friend Les Wiseman started a monthly rock column for Vancouver Magazine in the late 70s. I was his photographic associate and I had to learn lots from him. A few years before I thought that Alice Cooper was some woman singer. In short I knew nothing.

In short order Les Wiseman had many followers. For one, he was a good writer, and best of all, a good music critic has to be a snob. He disdained run of the mill rock bands and preferred the ones that were a tad edgy like the New York Dolls or Motorhead.

He was adamant that if I did not like Lou Reed I was going to be disassociated from him. And so Caroline Says became one my favourite rock songs.

By the early 80s we both knew that taking photographs of singers at the Commodore from the front stage and being forced to take microphone photographs was a no go. Fortunately there was an all-powerful record rep (first CBC and then Sony) called Dave Chesney who knew the value of Wiseman’s In One Ear so we were given access to back stage or hotel interviews and I was able to shoot my pictures at the interviews (with no mike!)

Today feeling a bit of melancholy slightly alleviated by the presence of my cats Niño and Niña I decided to go down to my oficina and randomly look at some files.

I had completely forgotten that I had photographed Debbie Harry with her band Blondie (but one stage). I managed to take this photograph of her without her mike. It does not stand out in my books. I don’t even think that anybody will call me and say, “Alex you photographed Debbie Harry!”

In this century without magazines or real newspapers, and with Dave Chesney a White Rock Councillor ( a very good one) all I can look forward to is that Chesney, a widower is getting re-married on August 9th. I will take some pictures. Are there back stages in churches or will the judge be behind a microphone?

 

Thursday, July 31, 2025

Kenneth Branagh posing for me as Hamlet on January 10, 1997 at 3:45pm at The Hotel Vancouver

 

 “If it be now, ‘tis not to come: if it be not to come, it will be now: if it be not now, yet it will come: the readiness is all” -Hamlet - William Shakespeare.

 

When I recently read that while reading Hamlet, I felt a sort of comforting solace as I wait for my 83d birthday at the end of August.

In the last few weeks I have been printing 81/2 by 11 inch prints and combing my files for already-printed 8x10s. I am placing them in neat black archival portfolios that I purchase at Staples. I started with two that I labelled Family I and Family II. I now have 33 of them and counting. Each folder has 24 prints. There is Dance I,II,III, Portraits I,II,III, IV, V and so on. When I eventually cease to wait, my daughters will not have to comb through boxes full of photographs.  All of (or most) of my best photographs will be there for them to dispose as they wish.

I was about 11 when my grandmother María de los Dolores Reyes de Irureta Goyena, who was a coloratura soprano, introduced me to Shakespeare’s Hamlet in an unusual way. She told me about a four-act opera Amleto by Italian Franco Faccio from a libretto by Arrigo Boito. Its premiere was on May 30^th, 1865 at the Carlo Felice Theatre in Genoa. It was then performed at La Scala on the 12 of February of 1871. From that point one I was hooked on everything Shakespeare.

In 1953 we moved from Buenos Aires to Mexico City. We rented a house on Calle Shakespeare (corner with Lafayette). We had to pronounce the street name to taxi drivers as Shah-kes-peh-areh or they would be confused. 

By 1965, when I was in Buenos Aires doing my two years as a conscript in the Argentine Navy, I was readin as much of Jorge Luís Borges as I could. It was then that I discovered his astounding essay on Shakespeare the man.

 

Everything and Nothing  J. L. Borges

 

There was no one in him; behind his face (which even in the poor paintings of the period is unlike any other) and his words, which were copious, imaginative, and emotional, there was nothing but a little chill, a dream not dreamed by anyone. At first he thought everyone was like him, but the puzzled look on a friend’s face when he remarked on that emptiness told him he was mistaken and convinced him forever that an individual must not differ from his species. Occasionally he thought he would find in books the cure for his ill, and so he learned the small Latin and less Greek of which a contemporary was to speak. Later he thought that in the exercise of an elemental human rite he might well find what he sought, and he let himself be initiated by Anne Hathaway one long June afternoon. At twenty-odd he went to London. Instinctively, he had already trained himself in the habit of pretending that he was someone, so it would not be discovered that he was no one. In London he hit upon the profession to which he was predestined, that of the actor, who plays on stage at being someone else. His playacting taught him a singular happiness, perhaps the first he had known; but when the last line was applauded and the last corpse removed from the stage, the hated sense of unreality came over him again. He ceased to be Ferrex or Tamburlaine and again became a nobody. Trapped, he fell to imagining other heroes and other tragic tales. Thus, while in London’s bawdyhouses and taverns his body fulfilled its destiny as body, the soul that dwelled in it was Caesar, failing to heed the augurer’s admonition, and Juliet, detesting the lark, and Macbeth, conversing on the heath with the witches, who are also the fates. Nobody was ever as many men as that man, who like the Egyptian Proteus managed to exhaust all the possible shapes of being. At times he slipped into some corner of his work a confession, certain that it would not be deciphered; Richard affirms that in his single person he plays many parts, and Iago says with strange words, “I am not what I am.” His passages on the fundamental identity of existing, dreaming, and acting are famous.

Twenty years he persisted in that controlled hallucination, but one morning he was overcome by the surfeit and the horror of being so many kings who die by the sword and so many unhappy lovers who converge, diverge, and melodiously agonize. That same day he disposed of his theater. Before a week was out he had returned to the village of his birth, where he recovered the trees and the river of his childhood; and he did not bind them to those others his muse had celebrated, those made illustrious by mythological allusions and Latin phrases. He had to be someone; he became a retired impresario who has made his fortune and who interests himself in loans, lawsuits, and petty usury. In this character he dictated the arid final will and testament that we know, deliberately excluding from it every trace of emotion and of literature. Friends from London used to visit his retreat, and for them he would take on again the role of poet.

The story goes that, before or after he died, he found himself before God and he said: “I, who have been so many men in vain, want to be one man: myself.” The voice of God replied from a whirlwind: “Neither am I one self; I dreamed the world as you dreamed your work, my Shakespeare, and among the shapes of my dream are you, who, like me, are many persons—and none.”

 [From Dreamtigers, by Jorge Luis Borges, translated by Mildred Boyer]

 

The above essay is amazingly fun to read. It is Borges on an unusual positive vein. More often he is a melancholic man, who as he became blind, he seemed to be waiting for that final Hamlet moment as I am.

 

1964 – Jorge Luís Borges

 The world’s lost its magic. They’ve left you.

You will no longer share the bright moon,

Nor the leisurely gardens. There’s no longer

A single moon that’s not a mirror of the past,

A crystal of loneliness, a sun of torment.

Farewell the mutual hands and brows

Love neared. Today, you only possess

A loyal memory, and empty days.

Everyone loses (you repeat, in vain)

Only what they own not, and never

Owned, but courage is not enough

 To acquire the art of forgetting.

 A symbol, a rose, can tear you apart,

The cry of a guitar can kill you.

 II

I’ll not be happy. No matter, perhaps;

So much else exists in the world.

A single moment is deeper, and more

Changeable than the sea. Life is short,

And though the days are very long,

One wonder still lies in wait for us,

Death, the other sea, the other arrow

That frees us from the sun, and moon,

And love. The delight you brought me.

And took from me again, must be erased.

What meant everything, must be nothing.

I have only the pleasure of being sad,

The idle habit that inclines me to seek

The South, a certain door, a certain corner.