Saturday, June 21, 2008

It has been my experience in the past that bits and pieces of human anatomy don't mix well with plants or plant parts. The usual results either look in bad taste and anything combining red roses with the female anatomy is a cliché. But here is an example that did work for me. I had to submit a photograph to a show in Calgary called Mother Earth. I consulted with Katheryn Petersen who contributed her fine chest while my Clematis 'Montana' did the rest. Since this picture was taken the clematis died (it may have been around 40 years old) and as far as I know Peterson and her chest are just fine.

Friday, June 20, 2008



Just about every plant in our garden either Rosemary or I have chosen. Many of the roses were suggested by Janet Wood. Just about every suggestion of hers has been a very good rose. Only two people have imposed on me a rose. I was given no choice. Alleyne Cook showed up one day with a little pot that had a stick in it. He told me, "If you are going to have one rose in your garden it has to be Rosa 'Complicata'. The stick grew well and this once blooming rose makes up for it with hundreds of very large single deep pink flowers. The other unwanted rose was given to me by John Tuytle.

Last year he and his wife were very sick. I was to visit him with Rebecca. I never did. John was much too sick. This year he called and he expects our visit. But on his way to leave some plants for the VanDusen plant sale he dropped off a small pot with a Hybrid Tea Rose called Crimson Glory. Hybrid Teas are certainly not my cup of tea. The ones that have scent I don't like (with the exception of a hard to grow Double Delight. It is struggling in my garden at the time.) I don't like the scent oof most teas because while sweet it seems cold and standoffish to me.

In 1935 Crimson Glory was the finest red Hybrid Tea on earth. It had been introduced by Wilhelm Kordes. In time it seems to have faded and it has been replaced by other red roses like Mr. Lincoln. I like none of them. I would rather have my once blooming Gallicas or the English Rose L.D. Braithwaite.

John Tuytle, in the end was right. This is the first bloom from his plant. The red is deep and the insides of the petals are almost jet black. And the scent! It is not Tea Rose at all. It smells of fruits. From what I have read it seems that my gift horse has sired lots of very popular offspring. It lives in other plants. In my garden it lives on its own.

Thursday, June 19, 2008


Yesterday I had a visitor in my garden. I had not seen Patrice Bilawka for about 8 years. Those 8 years have been more than kind to her. She is even more of a woman and in the right places, too. It seems she is back to stay in Canada. She says she is tired of the heat and constant sun of Los Angeles. Can that be possible? My roses are having a hard time with our long cool and wet spring. But there were enough roses open yesterday and I gave Patrice a tour. We then had grilled ham and
Swiss pannini and sliced tomatoes. We drank my recent favourite tea, Kalami Assam.

As we looked at the garden and I made Patrice smell the roses I told her that at this time of the year, I don't want to think of anything, including sex. All want to do is go outside in the early morning to look and smell the roses and to find which new rose is jut out to greet me.

Today I cut this specimen of the English Rose Abraham Darby. It is 5 inches across and the perfume is strong and intoxicating. It smells of a mixture of fruit including a hint of the granadine they used to put in my vanilla ice cream sodas in Buenos Aires when I was a boy. I looked at Patrice in the eye when I told her about my non interest in sex. Her smile was demure and I can only hope that this other sumptuous specimen of beauty that she is just might pose for my camera again.

I just might forget Abraham Darby and all the others. For a while.

Wednesday, June 18, 2008


On Wednesday afternoons I pick up Rebecca at home and take her to her ballet class. When her class is over we go to Opera Sushi. Today was different. When I arrived at Rebecca's I was told by Hilary (her mother and my daughter) that Rebecca was punished because she had called her mother a jerk. She was not to go to Opera Sushi with me after her class. Rebecca does not like to be rushed into dressing (in this case into her ballet clothes) so she reacted accordingly. Hilary knows that traffic is bad at 5:30 so I have to leave on time. Rebecca said, "I really didn't want to go to sushi, anyway." At that point I stepped in and told her that if she said anything after I finished speaking I had the power to ground her (this means no computer and no TV for several days). Rebecca was quiet. In the car she had a few tears but I said nothing.

When I picked her up (a bit angry inside since I was not going to have the pleasure of her company at Opera Sushi) I also said nothing but I stopped at a coffee shop and told Rebecca we were going to have a chat. She got confrontational but we finally sat down.

I told her that many of the roses in my garden that were from the 19th century gave women no direct credit. I gave as examples Rosa 'Madame Pierre Oget', Madame de Brunel (her husband was famous), Madame Isaac Pereirie and finally Madame Alfred Carrière. I explained that not too long ago her mother would have been Mrs. Bruce Stewart and her grandmother Mrs. Jorge Waterhouse-Hayward. I explained that women had fought to be respected and to be called by their name. So roses increasingly were given names of women, independent of their husbands such as Madame Hardy or Mrs. Oakley Fisher. And modern roses like Jacqueline du Pre or Mary Webb celebrate women all on their own.

Rebecca understood what I was driving at. "I should not have called her a jerk, " she said to me apologetically. Perhaps Rosa 'Madame Alfred Carrière' was in my mind as she has been blooming for the last couple of days. Her flowers are all white if seen from far but when you get close you will notice a faint but attractive pink blush. Her scent is heavenly and today like an angel that she is she helped me bring Rebecca around.

Rebecca responds to logic and she understood that on Wednesdays, just before I arrive to pick her up she is statistically (she knows the meaning of this word) poised to have a fight with her mother. She told me she was going to try her best to avoid that mathematical possibility.

Tuesday, June 17, 2008


In 1959 Brother Emmett who was in charge of the St Ed's school bookstore and the mail kept nodding negatively every time I passed to enquire if I had a package. But one day (I remember it was very hot so it must have been an early Austin, Texas spring) he nodded positively and handed me a big and quite heavy package. Inside was the most beautiful glossy box I had ever seen. From it I pulled out my first serious camera, a Pentacon-F with an f-2.8 50mm Zeiss Tessar lens. The package had come from Olden Cameras in New York City. I had purchased an Agfa sillette the year before on a trip to Wahsington DC. The only two things both cameras had in common was that were German and they were shiny. This era, the 50s, is sometimes called the photographic chrome age.



Holding the Pentacon-F was magic. The world was there for me to capture (in a 50s sense of the word not in the modern digital capture meaning) and to control. I immediately felt frustrated when I found out that my Spanish teacher, Brother Anton had the same camera but with a superior and faster 58mm Zeiss Biotar. Within a year Brother Edwin, who taught me religion and forced me to learn to play the alto saxophone in the school band had purchased a new-fangled Japanese Konica.

More insult was added with furtherinjury, that Christmas when I was in Mexico City. My Uncle Tony showed up with an exotic camera I had never heard of called a Nikon SP. He told me my East German Pentacon was junk and that the future of cameras was in Japan. I was too respectful to point out that he was full of ...But the damaging seeds of doubt began to slip into my mind. I felt terrible. Then my friend Howard Houston from Austin came to visit me in 1961.He brought a Miranda Reflex that had all kinds of refinements and a faster lens. I was plain jealous.



I went to the Monte de Piedad, the Mexico City government pawn shop and spotted Mirandas that were all well over my budget. It was in Foto Rudiger, On Venustiano Carranza Street, downtown that I finally found a roughed up Pentax S-3 with a semi-automatic F-2 lens and, low and behold, with an innovation that was called an instant return mirror.



These cameras and even the "more recent" ones of my working collection like a heavy, black and serious looking Nikon F-3 with a huge motor drive that has more torque than a Toyota Prius, have a feel, a look, a beauty that the modern cameras do not have. It may have something to do with the fact that I sometimes think in Spanish. in Argentina plastic was always rendered as material plástico. It sounded and still sound cheap.

But I think there is another element here. I remember being able to open the doors of 50s vintage Chevrolets, Buicks and Oldsmobiles. On the sill you could read a beautiful stamp on the metal that said Body by Fisher. There was a pride in the ownership of such a car. My wife's Audi lacks that mystique even if it is a darn better car than those Bodies by Fishers from the Chrome Age.

Who can forget the look of the all black Canon F-1? It had the look of a modern Hummer except it seemed more authentic in its apparent beefy indistructability.

Things began to change for the worse when Olympus started selling units that featured ESP! Iamgine losing control to your mother-in-law. That's what ESP meant.

Now the image of a modern photographer is not of one looking through his or her camera to take a picture but of one looking at the back of it with a puzzled look.

Not too long ago a distinguished gentleman of a premier car dealership reacted to my comment of wanting to look under the hood of an Aston Martin. "There is nothing underneath, " he said, sadly, "It is just a Ford engine."

The magic of my East German Pentacon, the Pentax S-3, my Nikon FM-2s, the venerable F-3 is still in them. I can feel it when I hold them. The world still feels conquerable. But when I look at what cameras have become the seem to be Aston Martins with Ford Engines.

That Pentax S-3 still works as does my first, untarnished, but faded first love, My Pentacon F. Paul Leisz, my Hungarian bus driver friend came over on Sunday. He took pictures of my plants with his mildly expensive Nikon DSLR (digital single lens reflex). The pictures were all over-exposed. I metered the scene with my formerly state-of-the-art Minolta Flash Meter VF. I gave Paul the correct setting for his camera and told him to put it in manual. When he did the camera did not fire. "It will not allow me to take a picture because it thinks it is the wrong exposure." Imagine that! His mother-in-law is in control.

Monday, June 16, 2008


As I write this, 11:15 Sunday night it is still father's day. I have been thinking about it all day. In the afternoon the Waterhouse-Haywards (Rosemary and I ) and the Stewarts (Hilary, Bruce, Lauren, Rebecca and the grandparents Nana and Doug) we all had chicken at my favourite place, Nando's on 41st. I was sitting in a corner so I had time to think.

I wrote about my father and the little I knew him here and here.

In 1957 when I finished grade 8 in Nueva Rosita, Coahuila Mexico my mother had few options. She could send me to the conventional state schools. But my mother wanted the best for me so she decided to send me to the nearest boarding school in the US. That happened to be St. Edwards in Austin, Texas.

Little I was to know when I arrived ( I remember crying I missed my mother so much) that I was going to have many surrogate fathers who would each teach me something of value and in such a way that somehow I would grow up to be of some use to society without too many complexes as baggage. In no special order here they are.


Brother Gregory and Brother Theodosius

It is appropriate that Brother Gregory and Brother Theodosius (photo above, left) sit side by side in my 1960 Edwardian (the name of our yearbook). I never got to know them well because I only had them as teachers and I never dealt with them as dorm prefects, etc. Brother Gregory was always cheerful and warm. From him I learned the perfect beauty of plane geometry and how neat and tidy its two dimensions were. With his class under my belt I was not quie prepared to the cold and precise Brother Theodosious. We were almost afraid of him simply because of his stern face. He never punished us or shouted at us. But then, we never misbehaved. I was able to discern his love for how mathematics worked in an ordered universe. When years later I learned to calculate the volume of a sphere using the calculus I understood (if only for a few seconds) how unimportant our complicated human lives are in comparison to understanding the comparative simplicity of mathematics.



Brother Hubert

Of all the brothers I got to know Brother Hubert most. Besides teaching me ancient history I learned to be frugal. He re-used everything and years later, after he died, they found in his two rooms up the attic of our neo-Gothic building that he had been a prodigious pack rack. Rumours state that there was a fully assembled Model T Ford up there. How did he get it up there? I spent long hours re-winding dance streamers in the school shop that he ran. We chatted. He never gossiped or ever said bad stuff about anybody else. But what he taught me best was to love history and in spite of wars and famine to see the positive. If anything he prepared me to read, comprehend and appreciate the books of Teilhard de Chardin.



Brother Francis

I have had a bad back for a week and going up and down the stairs is excruciating. I understand now the terrible pain that Brother Francis lived with. He always walked stooped over (even though he was a young man) like Groucho Marx. He looked and talked like a living saint. I don't think I ever saw him lose his temper. He was a living example of absolute equanimity. He taught me American history and he did it with so much passion that to this day I think I have an edge when I read articles in the NY Times about primaries and caucuses. He taught me to be curious about people so that I wanted to read more about them. Brother Francis must have been a lefty because I learned to love President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. And I could tell you all about Sacco and Vanzetti, and the Dred Scott Decision.



Brother Stanley

From Brother Stanley I learned stuff that would probably have landed him in jail because of an SPCA complaint. After all, he devised contests in his biology class where the prize for keeping a dissected frog alive the longest was a box of cigars. I won a box once. His physics class was so difficult that I dropped it. He looked me straight in the face (and when he was serious he was scary) and told me, "It is difficult to quit. But the more you do it the easier it gets. Soon you will be quitting anything and everything that is too hard." I still dropped his class but after that I stuck to my guns with just about everything else. Brother Stanley taught me to be persistent and to love pizza.

Brother Rene

Brother Rene was a brother who never taught me in class since I only had him as dorm prefect in grade 10. He was the one who played classical music (or Amos and Andy) after lights out over the dorm sound system. He wore short Wellington boots with one of his pant legs casually semi tucked in. I thought it very cool so I bought the same boots. I admired his masculinity and of all the brothers at the St Ed's he was my male/father figure role model. We rarely misbehaved because we had a quiet respect for him. He wasn't warm, he wasn't cold. He kept his distance just right.



Brother Vincent

I had Brother Vincent for English and as dorm prefect in my grade 9. He was a sculptor so I learned, through his example, to love the arts, specially painting and sculpture. He took our class to Washington DC and I was so struck by its beauty that I have returned many times since.



Brother Dunstan

Brother Dunstan was my English and English lit teacher. He was hip. He told us about a young English playwright called Pinter. I love Shakespeare because of Brother Dunstan. Even though he had infinite patience he called me in one day and told me, "Unless you improve your handwriting, which is currently illegible, I will not read your homework assignments anymore." For better or for worse I so admired Brother Dunstan's class that I became an insufferable elitist snob.



Brother Myron

Brother Myron had a short temper and when he lost it he yelled at us in German. We loved to pick on him (we were very cruel) and see how short his fuse was. But on a one on one basis he was mild, quiet, extremely intelligent and kind. So I went to him and told him about my handwriting problem. Brother Myron told me, "Go and buy an italic nib for your Esterbrook pen and I will teach you how to write legibly." This he did but to an extreme. I had to buy another pen so I could have two nibs. One was for black ink and one for red ink. The red ink pen I used to write much larger capital letters for the beginning of paragraphs. Brother Myron taught me to make complex capital letters with lots of flourishes. Brother Dunstan gave me A+s for my essays.



Brother Anton

One year I decided to take Spanish. I was simply lazy. German and Latin involved too much work. Brother Anton taught Spanish and he managed to not be intimidated by the one student in his class who spoke the language perfectly, me. He taught me grammar. My lack of proper grammar meant that when I tried to use logic it failed me as Spanish grammar is not all that logical. Brother Anton had a Pentacon F camera with a F-2 Biotar lens. My Pentacon F with its F-2.8 Tessar lens was a tad inferior. But we compared notes on what in those years, 1956 was a new-fangled type of camera. It was called a single lens reflex.

Brother Edwin

Of Brother Edwin I have written lots here and and here and in many more places but this will suffice. I think that of all the brothers listed here Brother Edwin is the only one who is alive. I correspond with him with frequency.

Sunday, June 15, 2008

The CBC has not figured in a positive way in a couple of my blogs lately: 1.CBC Vancouver Orchestra. 2.Hockey Night In Canada Theme Song. But I must attempt to go positive with this broadcasting corporation that has brought me so much pleasure, knowledge, friends and my first photographic job in Canada. This positive story begins with a positive but negative contribution via an email remark on my Hockey Night In Canada blog. It came from Sharman King (seen here in a photograph I took for Quill & Quire in 1995. I have forgotten who the woman with him is who is holding Michael Cluckner's book.) who is both the owner of The Book Warehouse and a professional musician who plays the trombone and the bass horn for the Vancouver Opera Symphony. Whenever I go to the opera I chat with him when I look down on the orchestra pit. Sharman King is a man with passion for music. And this is what he had to add on Dolores Claman's Hockey Night In Canada Theme Song: comments: I don't know if you will remember the original version of the theme, orchestrated by Dolores' partner Jerry Toth. Arni Chykoski, who grew up in New Westminster, was the lead trumpet, arguably the best lead trumpet player in a big band setting, ever. His last six notes of that original version were simply stunning in their perfection and ring in my head to this day. In their search for a younger demographic (which they will probably never attract) they're removing many of the ties that bind us. Sharman King has found the real reason why I am so upset with all the CBC changes. It is in that last paragraph. But: When I first started taking pictures of variety shows at the CBC in the mid 70s I felt that I was an outsider as a free lancer. I was not part of an institution. There was no esprit de corps for me and I could not share the complaints (part of that institution!) of my new CBC friends about the "mother corporation". But friends like cameraman Michael Varga, other cameramen, or employees in lighting and staging made me feel at home. One of the places I felt at home at the CBC was the cafeteria. Through the years many attempts were made to improve the food in spite of the constant jokes about CBC cafeterias in Wayne & Shuster (I was a fan!). The food, at best was adequate. The company was special and the highlight was a Shadbolt triptych mural on the west wall. At first I didn't notice it but with familiarity I began to appreciate is happy colours. The CBC cafeteria was finally closed and coverted into a radio studio. The Shadbolt vanished. Every once in a while I would ask but I was always given an, "I don't know answer." It may have been either Paul Grant or Michale Juk who passed on my request to the building manager. The man called me one day and took me to a basement where I saw the mural. He explained, "We currently have no room for it and it would be a pity to put in on one our many halways. They are too narrow for anybody to appreciate the mural. Don't worry it's safe with us and as soon as we find space for it, we will put it up. " In any of the Latinamerican countries I have been in that mural would have ended its days in some executive's living room. It is a relief to be in Canada where there is still some accountability. I believe that Vancouver is not kind or respectful to its architects. When the CBC Vancouver building was finished in the 70s it won its architect, Paul Merrick (working for the venerable city firm, Thompson Berwick and Pratt) a Governor General's award. I always liked the building even though many who had to work in it didn't. Now that the building is being "improved" and will have a condo attached to it, I hope room will be found to display that Jack Shadbolt mural. Not only will I smile but I am sure Sharman King will, too. another Shadbolt.