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. 

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

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 21^st 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.

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.

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.