Imperfect Sympathies
Thursday, October 16, 2025
 | Buenos Aires - 31 August 1950 |
"We
read not only because we cannot know enough people, but because friendship is
so vulnerable, so likely to diminish or disappear, overcome by space,time,
imperfect sympathies, and all the sorrows of familial and passional life."
Harold Bloom - How To Read and Why (2000)
That above
statement is now constantly in my thoughts.
Because my
Manila grandmother lived with my mother most of my life and she died in 1970 I
was very attached to my abuelita. In my present house besides having her
photographs I have some of her personal stuff including a silver drinking cup
when she was a little girl in school. The Living or the Dead
I agonize what to do with
her possessions as I am not sure that my daughters or granddaughters would
value them. I wrote a blog about it (link above) and
sent it to a first cousin in Buenos Aires who shared our grandmother. He
answered coldly without asking me about the possessions and told me that if nobody
wanted them just to throw them away.
Whenever I call anybody I
know I am met by a universally provided Telus answer. Generally I just hang up.
I remember many years ago that one of the members of the CBC Vancouver Radio
Orchestra had a hilarious answering machine message. It was funny and not
clinically cold.
Perhaps my anguish on this coldness has to do that I lived for many
years in Mexico where there is a lot of affectionate human contact universally
known as “the abrazo”.
As the days get shorter and I must now wear long-sleeved flannel shirts
I am not looking forward to my hermetic life with my two cats. To illustrate this blog my Uncle Tony (my mother's broother) took the photograph at my 8th birthday in our home in the Buenos Aires barrio Coghlan. How was I to know then that all those smiles one day would be wiped by death or Bloom's imperfect sympathies. The boy on the left in shadow was my friend Mario Hertzberg. He lived across the street. One day when I visited him I spotted a framed photograph of him. I inquired. He told me it was not him but of his brother who had died in a concentration camp in Germany because he was Jewish. It was my first awareness that the world was not just full of smiles. It was that same year, 1950, when my mother as she was combing my hair said, "Alex your fleco (bangs) on your head makes you look like Hitler. That was the first time I heard that name. At about that time he and I were walking one day to the train station and we were stopped by a Capuchin monk. He greeted us and asked us if we believed in God. We were affirmative but I pointed out that Mario was Jewish. With a big smile the monk said, "That makes no difference since we all believe in the same God." Take that 21st century! I'm in the centre, bottom row, and my father top left.
Fire Never Dies: The Tina Modotti Project - Movement Galore
 | Melissa Oei |
Last night I went to the opening of Carmen Rodriguez’s
Fire Never Dies: The Tina Modotti Project. I was sitting next to a man with a
lovely smile. He looked familiar but at my advanced age of 83 I had to ask him.
Kevin Kerr, he was and I immediately made his connection with the Electric
Company Theatre.  | Kevin Kerr uncharacteristically not smiling |
There was a ghost sitting not far from me. She was
Vicki Gabareau whom I had photographed sitting at the Cultch Theatre many years
ago when she had returned to her Vancouver home town.
 | Vicki Gabareau |
A third ghost was sitting next to me. She was my
Rosemary, who died five years ago and accompanied to most of the shows at the
Cultch and the York.
Nor far was my Chilean friend Carmen Aguirre and
costume designer Carmen Alatorre. I almost felt at home.
Why almost? In years back I was an amateur music,
dance and theatre critic with my blog. After a performance I would go straight
home, download my photographs and write. This time around, there was the relief
that I did not have to anything and just go home.
It was not to be, because I noticed in the credits:
Choreography: James Gnam. I never did photograph him (I did his brother Connor
Gnam) but I saw him as a stellar performer many times.
Looking at Kevin Kerr it immediately came to me that
many years ago an Electric Company Theatre had staged a production that involved choreography by Crystal Pite in which even the opening and closing of the
theatre curtains was choreographed. I wrote about that here. Studies in Motion with Crystal Pite
Watching all the performers dance and move, and
especially Melisa Oei as Sagradz Corazon
(lovely costume on her by Carmen Alatorre, as you can never go wrong
with fishnets) it seemed that every movement, not only the dances were
choreographed.
Because theatre can be choreographed I also know that
dance can be theatre. The
proof I saw in August 2023 when Béatrice
Larrivée & Noa Lee Ashkenazi in a performance at the Arts Umbrella Dance
Company’s theatre dancing the method Gaga (Batsheva Dance Company) was how
their facial expressions and their movements when they were close to each other
was all acting, all theatre. Béatrice Larrivée
I will leave others to write about Carmen Aguirre’s fine
play. For me I was moved by all that movement. But I must thank Aguirre for having Tina Modotti and Sagradx Corazon dance to some spectacular Ástor Piazzolla.
Vanesa - Lost - Then Found
Wednesday, October 15, 2025
 | Vanesa |
In that
other century when you worked for agencies, magazines and newspapers it was a
sacrosanct that all negatives, slides and prints were to be returned
to me. In this 21st century that has become fuzzy. Digital images
can be copied to be just as good as the originals. Thankfully since I am
retired I do not have to face that conundrum.
When I look as successful painter friends who
enthusiastically tell me that they have sold something I cannot understand how
they must feel about losing their work. They have lost it haven’t they in spite
of the money in the bank.
The closest I get to that painter/artist is when I
lose a slide, photograph or negative.
Yesterday I re-purposed and old blog and brought it back
and placed in in Twitter/X and Facebook. The blog illustrates the writing of my
Newyorican friend, writer Jerome Charyn. I cited his autobiographical book
involving his mother. I illustrated the blog with two lovely portraits of a
young woman called Vanesa. The Dark Lady from Belorusse
I looked everywhere in my files and because I could
not remember her last name it seemed that she was lost. Her pictures (2), where
in my computer with no last name.
Because
I am a dyslexic I often misfile stuff. I went through three drawers of women I
have photographed ( 500 plus). There was nothing. I tried again and I hit pay
dirt. I had misfiled it. And the file was just plain Vanesa with no date or
other reference.
In the file there were these two oddly printed
photographs. I have no idea how I got those (to me) interesting results. I then
picked the last negative from the session; scanned it and added red in
Photoshop. Because I used 220 film in my Mamiya RB-67 there were 20 exposures
in all.
I have found Vanesa. Who was she and where is she? I
will never know.
Eres la razón de mi existir, mujer - Agusín Lara
Tuesday, October 14, 2025
 | Tarren |
Mujer – Agustín Lara
Mujer, mujer divina,
Tienes el veneno que fascina
En tu mirar.
Mujer, alabastrina,
Eres vibración de sonatina pasional.
Tienes el perfume de un naranjo en flor,
El altivo porte de una majestad.
Sabes de los filtros que hay en el amor
Tienes el hechizo de la liviandad.
La divina magia de un atardecer
Y la maravilla de la inspiración.
Tienes en el ritmo de tu ser
Todo el palpitar de una canción,
Eres la razón de mi existir, mujer.
La divina magia de un atardecer
Y la maravilla de la inspiración.
Tienes en el ritmo de tu ser
Todo el palpitar de una canción,
Eres la razón de mi existir, mujer.
My mother was an early
feminist as was my grandmother. When I asked my mother to sew a button for me
she said, “You can learn. Do it.” I
once complained that her fried egg for me had a broken yolk. I was told to fry
my own eggs.
Rosemary took over very
well the functions of the male person in a marriage and she handled finances
and insisted when she knew that she was dying that we had to make a will. She
refused to hem my jeans so at first I did it, then I went to Mark’s Warehouse
and bought jeans of the exact length.
All the time this macho
man drove a terrible Fiat X-19 or an even worse Maserati Biturbo. But I must
clear the air a bit in that this man never grew a moustache, a beard or ever
wanted to have motorcycle. I am now very happy with a boring but efficient
Chevrolet Cruze.
Because I lived in the
golden era of film and music in Mexico, between the mid 50s to their decline
when we left for Vancouver in 1975, I have in my head a most romantic view of
women.
But there was a problem
for male Mexicans in that last century, for them there were two kinds. One, the
wife was the mother of your children. If you wanted to have fun then you needed
a mistress. These men saw sex activity as two types. For a while Mexican Social
Security paid benefits to both wife and mistress.
And then after all the
above I think of my good friend Tarren who for me is defined by the lyrics of a song by Agustín Lara, a famous Mexican composer of romantic songs. His song Mujer came
to mind as my two cats snuggled beside me tonight and I told myself I had to
get up and write this blog.
That Silver Lining
 | Isis - November 1990 |  | Kodak T-Max 3200 |
In Spanish
when something untoward would happen to me my grandmother would say, “No hay
mal que por bien no venga.” That translates literally to, “Nothing bad happens
that for a good reason it happens.” In English the equivalent is, “Every cloud
has a silver lining.”
The key to
consistent photography lies in that very word, consistent. When something
unexpected ruins your photograph you can track it back if you have that
consistent system.  | The original solarized print |
In
photography many a fabulous result has happened because of a mistake in that
consistency. I had a Man Ray event in my darkroom work once. My involvement with
a darkroom began in 1961 and stopped 8 years ago when Rosemary and I moved from
Kerrisdale (I had a darkroom) to Kits where I have an oficina (computer,
monitor and scanner). I print inkjets. The combination of scanning my negatives with my good scanner and the resulting inkjet provides shadow detail that has always been there but that a traditional darkroom could not.
My Man Ray occurred
when I had projected a 35mm negative of a lovely ecdysiast called Isis on to
8x10 photographic paper. I put it into the developer. The image began to appear
and somehow for some reason I turned on the darkroom lights. I turned them off quickly but the “damage”
was done and I had a very nice solarized print a la Man Ray.
Because I
still teach or try to teach in these blogs I am placing here how it all happened:
1. A scan of
the original negative. Because I had her right hand little finger much too
close to the edge that was a salient mistake.
2. In the
solarized print I had added by edge burning some black to give her little
finger some space. This original solarized print is quite light.
3. I scanned
that number 2 and with my 22 year-old Photoshop-8 I have darkened the print and
added a bit more contrast, etc.
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