Tuesday, October 09, 2007


Not only do I not understand parliamentary democracy, crossing the floor, and no confidence votes I don't understand some of the other salient features of living in a democracy. An example is the strike. Why must so many people surround buildings and then march around with signs hanging from their neck? Prior arrangements could be made between the unions and the management to the effect that, "We won't be outside if you don't try to get in." Then those on strike could go on strike-pay holidays.

It was in the early 60s that I first read Albert Camus's El Extranjero ( I read it in Spanish) while living in Mexico City. I was deeply affected in reading how Meursault complained of the heat during his mother's wake and then how he went to see a comic movie after her funeral. This sort of thing made sense in a city (Mexico City) where bus drivers were paid per round-trip routes taken in one shift. The faster the drivers went, the fewer people to stop to pick up, the more routes they would finish and the more money they would make. It made perfect sense to me. And these bus drivers were told that if they ran over anybody they were to go in reverse and run them over again to make sure they were dead. Law suits were a pain in the neck. It was easier to pay off the widow or the widower, the mother or the father.

From living with the absurd I learned to live with the military logic of Buenos Aires under a general called Juan Carlos Onganía. On the day after the military coup, June 28, 1966, that sent our country doctor president Arturo Ilía (above in Time/Life photo) home in a cab, the first decrees passed by the junta (Onganía plus the heads of the Argentine air force and the navy) dissolved congress, eliminated all parties and the constitution was deemed a worthless piece of paper. Months before the coup, a local nespaper, El Mundo had published editorial cartoons in a Sunday magazine called Tía Vicenta in which Ilía was drawn as a turtle (slow democracy) and the general as a walrus because of his mustache. The general banned Tía Vicenta.


After these decrees the milicos decided that Argentine youth was being corrupted in dark night clubs. They decreed a minimum watts-per-square-meter in ceiling lights so that Argentine youths could count their money before paying their bill. This seemed entirely logical. It was also logical that my sailor's pay (equivalent to one US Dollar a month, since the pay rate had not changed since the 1920s) would be a crisp new bill in an IBM perforated envelope. Argentina was most modern!

Buenos Aires has an excellent, subway system, urban and interurban rail and many buses. You don't really need a car to go anywhere, except when you have transit strikes or general strikes. In general strikes the city stops except for the post office inside workers who must first throw all the mail that is inside, out the window, including the pay cheques of the retired. I saw this many times and when the strike was in the summer (as they often are) it was like a rare summer snowfall. With no transit, Buenos Aires becomes a knot of cars. But generals are logical and they often decide that public transit is an "essential" service. It was then that I first became aware of this word with so many meanings. So when the buses and trains went on strike, the petty officers of the navy ran the trains and we sailors checked for tickets, kept the train cars clean, etc. The air force petty officers drove buses and the army dealt with the subways. It was perfectly logical. Even Meursault would have nodded his head in agreement. And those sailors and soldiers of low rank had to pick up the garbage during general strikes. That was logical, too, since I was never singled out to do it.

I thought that upon coming to Vancouver that kind of logic would no longer come into play. That was not to be. I find that being on this side of the equator hasn't changed things much. Consider that our present city council and mayor (or whoever is in charge) stated (decreed?), when our city strike began some 81 days ago, that parking enforcement was an essential service but garbage collection wasn't.

I would not want the generals to come back, but if some retired old military guy with some semblance of logic would suggest we switch the definition of essential from parking enforcement to garbage collection, about now, that would suit me fine.

And as for Doctor Arturo Ilía I met him in 1972 when he was on a lecture tour through Latin America. He came to the Jesuit university, Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City where I was teaching spanish to foreign students. I was introduced to him. I told him I had seen him leave the Casa Rosada in a cab. With a little, but forgiving smile on his face, he looked at me and said, "It could have been worse, I could have been shot. And you were only obeying orders."

Monday, October 08, 2007


Here’s the thing: the Net’s killer app has always been other people. There are side benefits, like access to all the world’s information. But the links that matter aren't between pages but people, and they’re strong and rich and subtle. Multiply the infinite flavors in human relationships by a thickening bundle of means-to-connect; that product is what’s new and what’s good and what’s exciting. People who are looking for the Next Big Thing are mostly looking in the wrong places. And anyway, you don’t need to look, it’ll find you.

From a fragment in Tim Bray's ongoing


The above statement and what followed hit me hard. The idea that a self-defined computer programmer (Tim Bray of Sun Microsystems) would be at all interested and aware of intimacy in human relationships, instantly removes him from my obviously misguided idea that computer programmers are people who are extremely shy, avoid all human contact and hide behind impenetrable technical methods and terms.

In my life I have achieved a relative amount of intimacy through writing. At first (and almost all of my life) it was frustrating. I had learned the qwerty keyboard but my dyslexia made typing a chore. Writing long hand became a problem after age 30 when, for reasons I cannot understand, my handwriting rapidly deteriorated and became illegible not only to me but to those I wrote to.

I was liberated around 1990 by a Smith Corona PWP (personal word processor, see above photograph) which enabled me to correct on a small screen without having to violently tear out the sheet of foolscap, rumpling it into a ball and throwing it into the waste basket. I avoided computers and computer attached word processors even when I hooked up to the internet in January 1995. At the time I was writing quite a few freelance stories for the Vancouver Sun and I wrote them all in Eudora and sent my finished copy as a Eudora document.

Since 1995 I have seen a familiar pattern of sudden intimacy that generally breaks down quite quickly. Friends or relatives of mine get hooked up to the net and I suddenly get requests for detailed accounts of my life until the very minute I press-and-send. These emails are followed by jokes with hundreds of disclosed recipients and if my friend or relative is from Argentina I get inundated by the best (read worst) SPAM in the world, Argentine Spam. I think I understand.

These people who are new in the net suddenly feel that those that they communicate with are part of an "intimate" and personal community. They don't stop to think that it is a virtual community and we cannot visit them for tea. My relationship with these friends and relatives soon sours when I reply to them and all their disclosed recipients with an email that has an attached nude of questionable taste. I cannot abide by this forced sense of intimacy that I am supposed to feel by being reachable by email.

When I first started this blog I had the idea (for exactly one day) that I wanted feedback. I quickly came to realize that I was not interested in the opinions of people I did not know and I could do without comments here. I have seen to many photography forums, plant forums and otherwise excellent on line magazines like BC's The Tyee fall prey to nasty ranters who live (many do) in bleak parts of BC's interior.

While I direct the personal intimacy of my blog towards myself, my immediate family and a few friends, I have become aware that writing on a monitor screen can often be dangerous in ways that haunt us (sooner) or later. In the first election that Stephen Harper was running for prime minister I was genuinely afraid he would win. As someone who has always voted NDP I was in a moral quandary. I decided to post my decision the evening of elections in the The Tyee's, Election Night Forum. I wrote that I had photographed and taken the posters for the electoral campaigns of both Jack Layton and Ujjal Dosanjh. I liked and admired both. But with my fears that Harper could win I had decided not to vote with my heart (the NDP) but with my brain (the Federal Liberals). This was then posted by CBC National on to their TV screens that evening and I have never heard from the NDP for photography work since.

I still do not understand the intimacy of being part of Flickr or facebook. They seem to be larger versions of my friends's communities.

But there is one attribute of the web and email that I still enjoy. I am able to have good written communication (be it intimate or not) with my friends (I never send them jokes or any other type of junk) and especially with my first cousins in Buenos Aires. One of them is also my godmother and she is 85. Until we began to write via email she was a remote relative. That, she is no longer.

Sunday, October 07, 2007


I photographed Raymond Burr twice. The first time it was 1986 (seen here in colour) and the second time a few years later. In the first sitting I worked with writer Les Wiseman and Vancouver Magazine and in the second with John Lekich for the Georgia Straight. I remember the second session better because of my two camera failures.

New Westminster born (1917) Burr was a very large man. In order to take the best portrait I used a longish Mamiya lens (140mm, the lens in the bottom of the picture). With this lens I could focus on his face (while being not too close) so that all of Burr's features were in a proper proportion.



That second session Burr was much larger and spoke about restaurants with Lekich. I took a Polaroid with the 140mm which pleased Burr and me. When I put on the b+w film back and took my first exposure, nothing happened. The main spring of the lens's shutter had failed. I was then forced in using that not-as-long 90mm lens (the upper lens in the picture) which if used at the distance I had used the 140mm would have made Burr's nose look extra large. I had no choice except to use that 90 but pulled back to get more of the body (something I did not want to do) with the idea of then cropping in for the magazine. And that's how it was.

When I processed that roll I noticed that one exposure was a double one. This rarely happened or happens with my Mamiya RB Pro-S or the newer model I now have the Pro-SD. These cameras have an excellent double exposure prevention mechanism. It is only for today's blog that I ventured to see what that double exposure looks like.


Burr was one of the warmest and most charming men I ever met. His role as the would-be wife murderer in Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window scared the hell out of me the first time I ever saw it. It always troubled me to reconcile the actor acting that with the person I photographed twice. Yet I think that this double exposure somehow shows that duality of the charmer and the man capable of cutting up his dead wife with a saw and stuffing the parts in a suitcase.

Shortly after I took that second picture I decided I would never take my chances again and I purchased a second 140mm. I never leave home without both of them in my camera bag.

Saturday, October 06, 2007


For those who don't want to read yet another gushy account on my perfect granddaughter Rebecca, stop reading now. And if that weren't enough I am bonding with Rebecca's sister Lauren and more gushy accounts on her will soon follow these pages.

Hilary's (my daughter and Rebecca and Lauren's mother) godmother, my Argentine born cousin Rosario (Chayo) says foam just pours out of my mouth when I write about my granddaughters. She does the same when she proudly tells me of her much accomplished twin sons, Paul and Roncito. Foam was pouring out my mouth last night.



Last night Rebecca and I went to the East Vancouver Cultural Centre (affectionately known as the Cultch by its enthusiastic patrons). We were there to see Noam Gagnon's The Vision Impure. We were amply informed, several times (they felt like warnings to me), that the show had loud music, smoke, strobe, foul language and nudity. Rebecca and I survived it.

Rebecca is a veteran of Chick Snipper's 2003 Slab (also at the Cultch) in which three dancers wore, as Rebecca likes to say, "Nothing." And 2003 was back then so no matter how many times Gagnon threatened or hinted that he was going to take it all off he never did! Nudity applied to seeing the incredibly strong and talented Sonja Perreten's chest.



One of the dancers in Slab (besides Kathleen McDonagh and Anne Cooper) was Susan Elliott (in charge of rehearsals for The Vision Impure). Her mother, Jo-Anne was sitting next to Rebecca. She recognized Rebecca from a picture that she has of her with Susan so they chatted and compared notes most of the evening. We were also sitting behind videographer artist and photographer jamie griffiths (she insists her name be in lowercase) who besides lighting designer, Itai Erdal (left), composer Stefan Smulovitz (below, right) and others (including the wondrously voiced Viviane Houle) were involved in making this show a show we will long remember.



We liked all of it but we particularly liked a segment of narration of a person's body parts (none that you might think) in relation to the soul and existence, danced solo by Gagnon with skill, humour and whimsey.

We finished the evening with sushi (Rebecca) miso (me) at Kishu Island on Main and Broadway. Rebecca said, "This is becoming a ritual." Yes.

Friday, October 05, 2007


Our city strike is the excuse Rosemary and I are using for not venturing into the garden. At about this time on any other year we would be busy cutting back some of the plants and I would be pruning to size the rambler roses like Rosa 'Albertine'and Rosa dupontii. The latter is about 14ft high. Our large green bin is full and with the city not picking it up for at least a couple more weeks I would have no place to deposit all the stuff I would cut. In years past we have taken advantage of some of the neighbours' green bins which never fill up except with grass clippings. We use grass clippings for mulch in late summer to keep the dry areas of the garden moist, we put them into our compost and in most of spring and summer I leave the clippings on the lawn.

Yesterday it rained while the sun was out. My Hungarian friend Paul Leisz says one of the few Hungarian sayings of his youth that he remembers is the one that applies to that rainy sun. Hungarians say that when that happens it is because the devil is whipping his wife and that explains the confusion.

Ale is coming this weekend from Lillooet and we are to have our Thanksgiving dinner on Saturday night. I will have to go into the garden today and see which ornamental grasses I can divide so Ale can take them back. We are experimenting to see which of our plants will survive Lillooet's Zone 3 weather. Any hostas would as would roses that have rugosa parentage. Rugosas originated in Northern Japan, Korea and Siberia.

Before I mowed the lawn (I try to do this before it rains) I brought in a few flowers which I scanned. The light blue delphinium grew nicely in our back lane but Rosemary is disappointed that this New Zealand variety is not the deep blue she really covets. The dark red rose is English Rose Rosa 'L.D. Braithwaite', the about to open bud is Reverend Pemberton's Rosa 'Bishop of Darlington' and the near white rose is the Bourbon rose Rosa 'Mme Pierre Oger'.

Thursday, October 04, 2007


Some years ago I photographed a high tech executive. I then took the photograph to my friend Ian Bateson who manipulated it so that instead of having the executive look at the camera he was looking down. I placed by straight 8x10 next to a computer monitor and I loaded Ian's digital image on to the computer. The resulting photograph showed the executive on the screen looking down on himself on the desk. What was particularly striking (for me) in those early days of Photoshop was Bateson's ability at manipulating the photograph with the skill of an illustrator and artist who had, in his youth, done his share of life drawing. Bateson knew (and knows) how skin behaved. He knew (and knows) how skin droops. He was able to manipulate Photoshop realistically because of his knowledge of anatomy.

In the early 80s I was blindly pursuing the photographic "art" called glamour photography. Glamour is an in-between (between the clothed and unclothed) type of photography that is now seen, because Maxim rules the magazine stands, as tame and cheesy. The king of glamour (note that Americans do not use that u in colour and behaviour but keep that u in glamour) was Peter Gowland.



He pioneered in the 50s and 60s the use of the electronic flash with young women wearing bikinis while frolicking in California beaches. And like Bunny Yeager, who made Betti Page famous he photographed his women uncloathed in poses that did not show any of the bits and pieces.

In the 80s the process was to get the young lady to come into your studio. You had that perfectly stupid idea that some wine and loud heavy metal music would eventually lead the young lady to suggest that she would take it all off. And, yes, this happened a few times. And I felt extremely guilty about it. It is far easier now to book a model who will come to your studio and undrape immediately. And in many cases not only do you not pay them but you have young women calling you and willing to pay you if you will photograph them undraped.

Lost in all this is the fact that if one studies the undraped human body and experiments in the movement of limbs one is able to understand how the body behaves. One understands how to manipulate grace if grace is not there. And once these bodies are photographed with clothes - grace, poise and confidence can be exploited. My portraits today are all the better for all those glamour photographs and nudes I shot in my past.


In my attempts at glamour I remember fondly Annette (top left and right), who patiently posed for me for lighting experiments I had no idea on how to do. And she even managed to look her best in spite of those lighting experiments.

Here you see a photograph of Peter Gowland with that horrible pioneering flash unit the Honeywell Auto Strobonar. I had a couple of them (they still work!). They had a habit of failing when you needed them not to.



And also here is a photo by Gowland of the exotically named Ava DeLa Sabliere.