Saturday, March 01, 2008

A few months ago Abraham Rogatnick and I went to a preview performance of sections of the new opera Dream Healer based on Timothy Findley's 1999 novel Pilgrim. We were both pleased and looked forward to the premiere. That premiere is upon us as we will be attending that premiere on Sunday at the Chan at UBC.





Rogatnick introduced me to the composer Lloyd Burritt (below, right) an affable man with a catchy smile. I asked him if he thought his opera (The original adaptation and libretto were by Christopher Allan. The revised libretto and additional material are by Don Mowat) would have legs. With that smile of his he responded, "It is the only opera that I know in which one of the characters is a practising psychiatrist, and he is no other than Carl Jung."



In Findley's novel Pilgrim Jung is fascinated by a man called Pilgrim who is obsessed with the idea that he cannot die and has many failed suicide attempts. He recounts in details meetings with da Vinci, Teresa de Ávila and Oscar Wilde.

With singers Judith Forst, Mezzo-soprano as Lady Sybil, John Avey, Baritone as Carl Jung and, Roelof Oostwoud, Tenor as Pilgrim this promises to be the opera premiere of the season.

But there is more!

In 1988 writer Peter Buitenhuis interviewed Timothy Findley and I photographed him in a suite at the Hotel Vancouver for Books In Canada. Both Findley and his friend, William Whitehead, while not being able to penetrate the serious and studious professorial demeanor of Buitenhuis, charmed me. It was easy to photograph Findley. Whitehead became my de facto art director.

Buitenhuis made up for his seriousness with his research of the man. He asked Findley some interesting questions. These questions surely were in the Burritt's mind when he composed this opera.

Buitenhuis: I want to turn from questions of influence to subject. Your first novel, The Last of the Crazy People , might in fact be said to be the first of the crazy people you've dealt with in almost all your fiction. You certainly have a concern for the mentally obsessed and the unbalanced. Is this largely for dramatic effect, or is it because you yourself have a fascination with the world of the mentally excessive and unbalanced?

Findley: I think the latter. It's a conception of what other people call crazy. It is the ultimate simplicity. It may be focused on one gesture or one passion, but the way in which it is focused, with the mentally troubled, tells me so much about the human spirit and mind and the obsession with perfection.

Buitenhuis: Is there any other comment you'd like to make abou this collection (Stones) of stories?

Findley: No, except that I enjoyed writing it. It was a deliberate attempt to put a book of stories together rather than to collect stories that I had been writing randomly over time. I am not a short story writer, in the sense that Alice Munro is -a writer, by the way that I admire immensly. It was a new kind of writing, a new way of organizing a book. I set them all in Toronto, deliberately, and kept discovering that they were about brothers and sisters, husbands and wives, and parents and children, deeply committed relationships and the crises they provoke - the whole book had that. The copy editor giggled at the end of her work and said to me: "I don't think you realize this, but are you aware that the Queen Street Mental Health Centre is a character in every single one of these stories?" And by God it is!
Buitinhuis": And a very powerful character too.

Findley: And I literally didn't know that.

Buitinhuis: Back to the Crazy People!

Findley: Yes, back to the Crazy People.

Friday, February 29, 2008

My daughter Hilary as a girl used to run around the house with Rosemary's slips on her head. Curiously her daughter Rebecca has been known to do it as seen here. When I was looking at it today suddenly I had this memory for a poem that fit it. I rushed to the Selected Poems of Ogden Nash - I Wouldn't Have Missed It and furiously turned the pages until I found:




THE SNIFFLE

In spite of her sniffle,
Isabel's chiffle.
Some girls with a sniffle
Would be weepy and tiffle;
They would look awful,
Like a rained-on-waffle,
But Isabel's chiffle
In spite of her sniffle.
Her nose is more red
With a cold in her head,
But then to be sure,
Her eyes are bluer.
Some girls with a snuffle,
Their tempers are uffle,
But when Isabel's snivelly
She's snivelly civilly,
And when she is snuffly
She's perfectly luffly.

But then while looking for The Sniffle I found






AND THREE HUNDRED AND SIXTY-SIX IN LEAP YEAR

Some people shave before bathing.
And about people who bathe before shaving they are scathing.
While those who bathe before shaving,
Well, they imply that those who shave before bathing are misbehaving.
Suppose you shave before bathing, well the advantage is that you don't
have to make a special job of washing the lather afterwards,it
just floats off with the rest of your accumulations in the tub.
But the disadvantage is that before bathing you skin is hard and dry
and your beard confronts the razor like a grizzly bear defending its
cub.
Well then, suppose you bathe before shaving, well the advantage is that
after bathing your skin is soft and moist and your beard positively
begs for the blade.
But the disadvantage is that to get the lather off you have to wash your
face all over again at the basin almost immediately after washing
in the tub, which is a duplication of effort that leaves me spotless
but dismayed.
The referee reports, gentlemen, that Fate has loaded the dice,
Since your only choice is between walking around all day with a sore
chin or washing your face twice.
So I will now go and get a shave from a smug man in a crisp white coat,
And I will disrupt his smugness by asking him about his private life, does
he bathe before shaving or shave before bathing, and then I will die
either of laughing or of a clean cut throat.
Selected Poems of Ogden Nash - I Wouldn't Have Missed It

I photographed Maurice Depas (Maurice & The Cliches) sometime in the late 70s getting a perfect shave in the basement of the Hotel Vancouver.

It is patently evident that if one takes a bath first then the face becomes soft and supple and ready for that shave. That's what I do. The above poem appeared in the New Yorker on August 29, 1942. Nineteen forty two was not a leap year.

Thursday, February 28, 2008

A Hindoo is a Hindoo and a brother to the man who knows his
vernacular. And a French-man is French because he speaks his own
language.
Rudyard Kipling



As a boy in Buenos Aires the absolute exotic was India, not China & Japan. The only Chinese people I had ever seen were a couple of female math wizards in my class at the American School. I had spotted one Japanese man who was a florist/gardener. His name was Matsumoto. I had never seen a Hindu. All Hindus wore turbans in my imagination or lay on nail beds as seen on Ripley's.

I wasn't prepared for the day when my father brought two strange gentlemen for dinner. My father besides being a journalist (the Buenos Aires Herald) was a freelance translator for the Indian Embassy. He had invited a couple of the embassy officers for homemade curry. Only my father would do something like that. The two gentleman arrived in a Hillman Minx. For weeks my neighbourhood friends questioned me about the strange dark men and their just as strange small car.

I had heard my mother and grandmother talk about the bombays (rhymes with whys)of Manila. People from the Indian subcontinent were called that in the Philippines much in the same way as they may be called East Indian here in Vancouver. I only later found out why Indians were bombays and not Hindus. It seems that hindu with a t at the end is an extremely foul word in Tagalog.

The idea that all Hindus wore turbans (all those Hollywood movies with Bengal Lancers, and Kim with Errol Flynn) was further reinforced for me in Mexico when the legendary magician/hero Kalimán appeared in comic books.



He never killed anybody but would use a blowpipe with a tranquilizer to subdue his enemies.

It wasn't until I came to Vancouver, saw Gandhi and a Passage to India that I found out about partition and that only Sikhs wore turbans. But Bombay and India, nevertheless have remained on the extreme of exotic for me.

When Anosh Irani (above, left) came to my studio in 2002 for a Straight photograph for an article on his new and first play The Matka King it was like having Kalimán in my studio minus the white turban with the jewel in the middle. The play, The Matka King I saw with my eldest daugther Ale. We were both charmed. It was a fairy story for adults.

Bombay Black which I saw with Rosemary last night is another exotic fairy story for adults. Everything that happens is unexpected. It reminds me of Argentine tango companies being advertised in Vancouver as "Direct from Buenos Aires" as if a stopover in Houston would affect their authenticity. Bombay Black felt "direct" perhaps by the fact that a lot of the language used could be deemed anochronistic. It is a modern play about life in India now. It's the shits and other words like it and my suspicion that Padma (Deen Aziz) just might own a cell phone that gave the play that air of "direct from Bombay".

A murder may happen in this play (and I will not reveal if it does). The solution to getting rid of the body is in itself so surprising that it is worth the price of admission!

Our seats were in the middle of the middle (very Canadian) and I was able to see enough of Apsara (Anita Majumdar) in the little that she wore in the first act (when she danced!), that I can guarantee had I brought my usual binoculars I would have easily turned into a a cauliflower, a Brussels sprout or perhaps a stick of celery. For Majumdar has the power to turn all men into vegetables. Kalimán would have known that.

I would like to point out that this fine play and many others, as well as dance, the visual arts, film, opera, music, circus (yes!) and other cultural activities are part of the Vancouver 2010 Cultural Olympiad. These events are all listed in a brochure available, as mine was, at the theatre and probably in other cultural venues of our city.



It was only last week that Robert Kerr, the Program Director for the Cultural Olympiad came to my studio. I was expecting a man in a suit. His leather jacket and striped shirt were as refreshingly surprising as the contents of the brochure.



Bombay Black is presented by the Arts Club Theatre Company at the Granville Island Stage from February 21 to March 15, 2008

Wednesday, February 27, 2008

I am a man of fixed and unbending principles, the first of which is to be flexible at all times.
Senator Everett McKinley Dirksen




Today I read in the NY Times of the death of William F. Buckley. Of Buckley I have written at least three times, here, here and here. But I have something small to add and that is about an ambivalent concern I have always had for admiring conservatives while being proud of not being one. It all started with a lifelong admiration for the humour and the oratory of the Republican US Senator Everett Dirksen in the late 50s and 60s when I read Time Magazine without missing one week. I later found a new conservative champion in the no nonsense speaches of Barry Goldwater. He had me in his pocket when I found out that he not only was a fighter jet pilot but a sensitive photographer of the native peoples of his home state of Arizona. My mother, a lifelong liberal, could not understand my abandoning the liberal field. After all, I had championed allegiance to Adlai Stevenson in the playground of the American School in Buenos Aires during his campaign for presidency in 1952 when I was 10. I distinctly remember screaming, " Eisenhower to the shower!"

My only conclusion is that I have admired some politicians (without concern for their political stance) because of their command of their language either in their speaches or in their writing. Anybody who could write nautical books as William F. Buckley did could do no real wrong for me. And then there was that spy novel of his: Spytime - The Undoing of James Jesus Angleton. It has been one of my favourites.

Tuesday, February 26, 2008


I have written here before how with web communications I am tying the loose ends of my life. I am able, almost all of the time, to answer successfully to myself, "I wonder what happened to so and so? What became of him or her?"

At one time you lived in a neighbourhood or barrio. When you moved in you planted small fruit trees and perhaps an oak sapling. Then time, family stability and the fact most of us used to stay where we were born enabled us to watch the trees grow.

I find it amazing as I look out of my living room window, beyond the top of this monitor I am writing on, to see the Ginkgo biloba soar over our garage. It almost seems yesterday that we planted it as a sapling. We moved in, in 1986 and the tree must have gone into the ground around 1990. Time has passed and the trees that have survived and the trees that have died in our garden are reminders of how time is inexorable in its march forward. There is a little brass cat in our entrance hall that reminds me of the distant past and a not so distant one.

It was around 1972 that I was teaching Spanish at the Universidad Iberoamericana a Jesuit university in Mexico City. I remember the first day of that year's class which were mostly college students from the US. One of my students was a petite long-haired young girl with American Flag socks. She needled me with questions and never accepted anything as fact. I immediately took an interest in her. Thanks to her the class was a spirited class. Halfway through the term I would organize a weekend trip to Guanajuato, in the State of Guanajuato. We would rent a couple of VW beetles and with our own VW we would go as a caravan. Here you see the class outside the Iglesia de la Valenciana.



In the front row second from the left you can spot my wife Rosemary and our eldest daughter Ale. To her left you can spot Beth the girl who liked to wear American Flag socks. She hailed from Dubuque, Iowa and insisted it was not at all like Podunk. I gave her the nickname of Alice as even though she was childlike in appearance she acted like the intelligent adult Alice Liddell had been as a child.



We corresponded for many years and somehow never lost touch. I found out about her love for a Colombian neurologist. Beth went to marry him in Colombia and they then returned to establish a practice in Florida. Meanwhile Beth had shifted her interest in ballet to Tai Chi and became an instructor. She had two sons.

Perhaps some 13 years ago she came to Vancouver with her husband who was attending a conference of neurologists. When I saw her she seemed to be physically very fit and she matter of factly told me she could demolish me in a few swoops and kicks. I did not try to prove her right. She visited us at the Thursday Railway Club get together with my friends and brought me a gift.



It was a brass cat used as a repository for cartes de visite. It has been in our front hall all these years and it has reminded me that I had lost touch with Beth and I had no idea what had happened to her.

Yesterday afternoon I found her. Beth had left an on-line presence by having thanked a real estate agent for services rendered. That was enough for me and I then Skyped her!

Beth has grown up and she is now Elizabeth. She lives alone as her relationship faltered. She is a virtual nun. My only conclusion is that the men in her neighbourhood must all be blind.

I look forward to getting further news from Elizabeth and the hopes that she will lose her habit (the nunnery one) and get a life. She deserves one.

Monday, February 25, 2008


When our first daughter Ale was born I felt the excitement of that first child. When Hilary was born it seemed to be different. But because Hilary was clingy and Ale was independent Rosemary and I showered Hilary with extra attention. In many ways our older Ale resented all the attention on Hilary. I have discovered that one has to be, where possible, as impartial as one can in giving attention to one's children.

A friend from my old days at Wreck Beach, Maanus Pikker recently came for our family Saturday afternoon dinner. He told me that watching Hilary's daughters, Rebecca and Lauren was like experiencing Ale and Hilary all over again. Lauren is blonde and Rebecca is a brunette. Maanus said that they even resembled my respective daughters.

I have always maintained that new-born babies are "plants" that have a personality that only a mother can discern. For me it has been hard to photograph Lauren until now. She is now 5. Somewhere around age 4 a child (in my experience) is finally able to understand the command, "Look in here in the lens of my camera." Since age 4 Rebecca has staired at my lens with narry a smile. At first there were protests from her family, "Why don't you photograph her smiling?" They have given up and are now used to the serious look.

At about age 3 Lauren had an intermittent problem of suddenly blinking her eyes randomly or when looking at the camera. We were told by her doctor to ignore it and not make an issue. Since then the problem has disappeared and Lauren will stare at me from her side of the dining room table.

Lauren used to scream about not liking her food and while she is still particular the screams and the crying have dissipated. When I take Rebecca to some dance function Lauren asks, "Am I going?" I have noticed that on Saturdays she suggests to me that she and I might go for a walk around the block. Lauren will sit on my lap without being asked.



Yes, I am being charmed my my other granddaughter and as Lauren stares at my camera I think that I have a new subject that will keep me occupied for time to come. And I do believe that with her precise and persnickety ways I may have finally found someone to take over in my profession of photography. But best of all I have learned that as much as I love Rebecca for the way she is I cannot expect anybody else to be like her. Without having to compare, I can simply accept, marvel and enjoy the diversity.

Sunday, February 24, 2008


'I am in the presence of the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come?'said Scrooge.
The spirit answered not, but pointed onward with its hand.

'You are about to show me the shadows of the things that have not happened, but will happen in the time before us, 'Scrooge pursued, 'Is that so, Spirit?'





The keynote speaker of the Vancouver blogging conference Northern Voice 2008 was Matt Mullenweg who pioneered a blogging program with great educational possibilities (it is used, among other things, in universities by professors and students so that they can link to each other) called WordPress. This program is very popular with bloggers. In my case this blog is not generated by WordPress but by a proprietary program of Blogger.

The articulate 23-year old showed us a slide of himself taken in 2002, with the White House in the background. The teenager, in glasses was unassuming. I looked at it closely and immediately thought of Charles's Dickens's A Christmas Carol. The young man in the photograph represented our present. Had Scrooge talked with him then he would have been the Spirit Of Times To Come. Mullenweg has modified our world to what it is. Bloggers are changing news, periodicals. The Wikipedia will soon make other encyclopedias as obsolete as the spelling of it (encyclopaedia). WordPress was one of the programs that pushed our world to where it is today. As I listened to Mullenweg talk about things to come I again saw him as the Spirit Of Things To Come. This 23-year-old young man, this clean cut young man with the smile, the young man who believes that all things are possible and positive (the idealism of youth) convinced me that our future is not bleak if people like him manage our world, behind the scenes, with computer programs that few of us understand.

It was sheer fun to watch Alan Levine tell a story in 50 possible ways (he showed us about 10) using different free Web 2.0 tricks to display them. The story of a Dalmatian that is found and then lost and then found again was hilarious in all the versions that I saw. It was neat to see that these knowledgeable geeks have a keen sense of humour and fun.

One of the buzz expressions of the conference was computer clouds. The first person to use it yesterday was Marc Canter. He had strong opinions and I agreed with most of the ones I understood. He seemed to think that we now have the power to transform capitalism into a gentler, kinder and less greedy form.

But it was Boris Mann, one of the organizers of Northern Voice who finally explained to me with panache, yellow paper and a marking pen the concept of computer clouds which if I understand well is a sort of computer power outsourcing. He confirmed the shocking news that I heard from Marc Canter that for the first time more computers are being bought by the likes of Microsoft, Google and Yahoo than by consumers like you and me.



Pity that our local media had no interest in accompanying the Spirit(s) Of Things To Come. I feel a bit smug to know that, at least, I know!