Saturday, January 31, 2009



In the late 70s I started taking pictures of alternative rock bands in Vancouver. One of the best of the musicians was guitar player and composer Steven Drake. You can see him in six, just a small fraction, of the many I took of him for about 15 years. My favourite is the first one I ever took of him, the one with the picket fence. The man in glasses in front is Gary Cramer perhaps the only singer that in my book could compete with Art Bergmann. The band was called Gary Cramer and the Works.



The Works was the three piece band behind him. In later bands Drake fronted the Odds and an alternate version of it called the Dawn Patrol. The last I heard he was a music producer/recording technician. If indeed Drake is doing that there is no doubt in my mind he is really good at it.



Sometime around 1990 Drake composed a song with the startling (it was autobiographical, he told me) title I Was F..... Wendy Under the Stars the Night That Elvis Died. I believe that to get a chance for airplay he kept the title in the lyrics but changed his tune to Wendy Under The Stars. The jumping shots of Gary Cramer and the Works I took in the men's bathroom of the old Pier BC which is now Canada Place.







Bill Evans & Steven Drake

How did I end up taking pictures of Stephen Drake not wearing anything in my studio? Vancouver Magazine art director, Chris Dahl had told me, "Photograph Drake wearing a see-through white gauze. He is a Scientologist and I want you to make him look like he is from outer space." I proposed to Drake that he wear the white stuff and he countered with, "I would rather wear nothing." I took him up on it and the picture, while not revealing anything, was the first ever full-frontal nude in Vancouver Magazine.

Friday, January 30, 2009




In 1980 Vancouver Museums and Planetarium Association had money. They organized a huge display of old and rare musical instruments from all over the world called The Look of Music. With some of that extra money they even published a beautiful catalogue book with the same name as the show.


I have no idea what would have inspired Vancouver Magazine editor Malcolm Parry to dispatch me to take pictures of instruments, most of which I found at Ward Music. If you consider that I specialized in portraits and I had never done this sort of thing you can imagine my concern on failing. For one thing, wind instruments are very difficult to photograph as metal absorbs light and records quite dark. I don't remember in the end if my pictures were liked or not. Today, when I found them I decided to monkey with them by scanning the original b+w negatives and modifying them. I used such tricks as telling my scanner that the negatives were colour negatives or I scanned the negatives with a sheet of white paper on top. These resulted as negatives again which I reversed and added colour.

Thursday, January 29, 2009



A week ago Pacific Baroque Orchestra violinist Paul Luchkow and CBC Radio's Paul Grant (seen here with CBC's Margaret Gallagher) discussed the sound differences between a modern violin and a baroque violin in my studio. My studio has beautiful acoustics. Luchkow showed the four different violin bows he used and the mechanics of beefing up an 18th century violin for the higher tensioned 19th and 20th century version that we commonly call a modern violin even if the modified (beefed up and reinforced on the inside) happened to be an 18th century Stradivarius, Guarnieri or Amati. The purpose of modifyng those violins was to able to make them louder so they could be heard in the larger concert venues of the 19th century. As Luchkow played Bach and Grant recorded it I closed my eyes and came to a realization obout the immutability of radio. Let me digress so I can explain.


In the latter years of the 40s I remember being in bed with a hot brick in my bed to keep me warm in a Buenos Aires winter. Before I would fade into sleep my parents always made sure the radio was on to LRA Radio del Estado. This was the Argentine equivalent of the CBC but obviously less independent and much more state controlled. It was with LRA that I first heard classical music coming from the Teatro Colón (on the right hand side of the picture above, left which I took in 1965). It was because of it that when my friends asked me what kind of music I liked I would always reply that I liked Colón music. LRA (now called Radio Nacional) also played tango and there were some children's programs. But my favourite program was the Argentine superhero/gaucho El Poncho Negro. The program ran in some other station earlier in the day.

I remember exactly what I was doing an early afternoon of June 2, 1953 (because of the London Buenos Aires difference in time the event must have happened in the morning). I was 10 years old. I was glued to our large radio set in our living room. I heard my mother say, "Alex wash your knees and hands and come for supper." I remember answering, "I cannot I am listening to the coronation of my queen."

Another program I enyoyed was Tarzán - Rey de La Jungla (Tarzan - King of the Jungle) which was sponsored by Toddy which was a chocolate powder product which we children spooned into our milk.

In 1956 I lost interest in radio in Mexico City when my grandmother bought a Zenith television set. It wasn't until the early 60s, when I developed an interest in jazz, that I started playing my radio again. I would tune my radio to short wave and listen to Willis Connover's Jazz Hour in the Voice of America.



Between 1956 and 1961 radio was almost as important as TV in my boarding school, St Edward's High School in Austin. TV had only three channels (or was it two?). The Brothers of the Holy Cross had strict parameters on how much TV we could watch. My favourite program was Have Gun Will Travel. At night when our dorm TV was turned off some of us had new-fangled transistor radios and we could sneak listening to them in bed. In my grade 10 Brother René Lenhard thought that education continued after lights out. He would play a variety of classical music (my favourite was the trombone part of Ravel's Bolero) but also some radio. Brother René must have liked Amos 'n' Andy as it was on every week. During the day the only good radio station was KTBC owned by Lyndon Johnson. This station, in a far more homgoenous time would play Elvis Presley, Conway Twitty and Pat Boone without classifying it.

I watched the Kennedy Nixon TV debate on the TV in our rec room pool hall. We all knew that Kennedy had won. He just looked better.

The Kennedy/Nixon TV debate was used by Marshall McLuhan to explain the concept of cool versus hot media. In our age of high definition TV it might just be obsolete. McLuhan called radio a hot medium. A hot medium is an inclusive medium. A hot medium requires minimal participation. A cool medium, TV, is exclusive and it requires high participation by the viewer how must fill in the blanks. McLuhan's explanation is misunderstood today. He explained that Kennedy's televised victory was due to the fact that he exuded an objective, disinterested, "cool", persona. Nixon was better suited for the hot medium of radio and those who listened to Nixon on the radio though he had won the debate. The misunderstanding comes from the fact that most of us state that TV is a passive activity. Perhaps if McLuhan were alive today he would change his tune.



As I watched (but better still) listened to the two Pauls discuss baroque and modern violins, as I heard Paul Luchkow play slow and fast Bach first with one instrument and then with the other, I saw the light!

Even if radio is dumbed down - Even if radio hires announcers with lisps and bad voices - Even if radio hires announcers who are gramatically challenged - Even if radio has advertising (not that I will ever listen to anything but no-adverising CBC), radio cannot be changed. Radio coming down from a satellite, radio coming through a cable or telephone cable, radio listened to from a computer or downloaded as a podcast, radio, the old-fashioned way, from the airways, it is still radio.

Radio is radio. And radio, sometimes, can be wonderful.

Wednesday, January 28, 2009


Tonight Rosemary and I went to see Somerset Maugham's The Constant Wife at the Stanley Industrial Alliance Stage on Granville. It was and Arts Club Theatre production deftly directed by Morris Panych (below, left) with lots of elegance and class. Both elegance and class are as endangered as marriage, newspapers and phones that are only phones. Even if the play had been a terrible play (which it certainly was not) the dialogue, the language, would have been more than adequate to keep me happy and interested.

The Constant Wife has language and more language. It has Maugham's witty, ascerbic, delightful language. It has a language that oozes with elegance. Elegance perhaps accompanied Audrey Hepburn into the grave. Or it could have been earlier with Noël Coward.

The bright, white almost sparse set (Ken MacDonald) was elegant and reassuring. I expected William Powell, Myrna Loy and Asta to enter any minute. There was a cocktail service on a table. The flower arrangements were changed frequently.



All the actors were superb in their parts. Bridget O'Sullivan playing Mrs. Culver reminded me of Agnes Moorhead. Celine Stubel (in colour here) was convincingly ditzy. And I know, because when she posed for me in my studio she was far from it.

It has been years since I last photographed Moya O'Connell (top, left). Age has made her even more beautiful. And age, too, seems to have deepened her voice for the better. I had to use my binoculars to make sure the lovely freckles were still there. Best of all I was wowed by the dresses, the hats and the stockings with the seam in the back. As a rude but wise Argentine once told me, "You start with your eyes where the seam begins, where ankle meets shoe, and then you follow it up until your imagination takes over."

The icing for my language cake was watching Nicole Underhay (playing Constance Middleton) dominate centre stage no matter where she was. And Nancy Bryant (costumes) did a superb job of cutting Underhay's dresses so they stroked her body in the right places. Underhay was pure sensual elegance. The men, Mark Burgess, Ted Cole and Mike Wasko were good but made superfluous by the women. They didn't have a chance. They were yesterday's cold mutton to today's lamb chops.



As I enjoyed Maugham's language I instantly remembered the last line from one of my favourite of his short stories from World Over - The Complete Short Stories of W. Somerset Maugham. The story is called Mayhew and it ends so wonderfully:

And yet to me his life was a success. The pattern is good and complete. He did what he wanted, and he died when his goal was in sight and never knew the bitterness of an end achieved.

There were lines like that throughout the play. I wonder how Maugham would have handled Twitter's 140 max characters?

Addendum

I ran into former Globe & Mail Arts reporter Christopher Dafoe. We talked on how we were enjoying the show. I pointed out that one of the reasons was Maugham's dialogue and use of language. Then I, depressingly added that language and its use are dying. Dafoe rebutted quickly, "Americans chose a president because of language." It is pleasant, sometimes to be proven wrong.

Tuesday, January 27, 2009


Hi Alex,

I went to the archives at the Library and looked through yearbooks.....I did not find a picture of the school bus....I guess that will just have to be a memory....
Regards to your family.

Bro. Edwin Reggio CSC



That bit of news a couple of days ago gave me only a small measure of melancholy as my memory of the Flxible Hilltopper is a strong one. I even remember, as if it were yesterday, the muffled roar of its engine. Watching it zoom by from the vantage point of my dormitory in the main building at St. Ed's High School was as thrilling as watching the McDonnell F-101 Voodoos from the nearby Bergstrom Air Force Base fly by overhead towards the Austin State Capitol on the horizon.

The Flxible Hilltopper was the bus that was attached to the nearby St Edward's University. We shared the campus. Alas we did not share that bus. It was called the Hilltopper because students of the university (the campus perched high on a hill overlooking what then seemed a far away and low skyline) were called that as were the school sports teams including the stellar basketball team. The horizon was only broken by the white marble State Capitol. The university was too small at the time to fund a football team. The Hilltoppers rode in style to play away games or cross-town to friendly games with the University of Texas (they were obviously part of a more important league). But often the Hilltoppers would whip the UT team. What was the secret weapon? We at the high school had a theory. St. Edward's (both the high school and the university was run by the Congregation (brothers and priests) of the Holy Cross. There was an Indiana institution (University of Notre Dame) run by the same order. As we understood it, Notre Dame would send some of its best freshman players who were having scholastic problems our way. The Texas weather would improve their grades and while here they ran and dribbled circles around the lumbering Texas Longhorns.

The Hilltopper was painted middle blue with a prominent bright yellow strip on the side. The shape was pure aerodynamics of the Chrysler Airflow kind and the scoop on the back was music to my eyes. It was the most beautiful bus in the world. The bus was technically a Flxible Clipper which was manufactured in the early 50s.

In 1913, Hugo H. Young and Carl F. Dudte founded the Flexible Sidecar Co. in Loudonville, Ohio, to manufacture motorcycle sidecars with a flexible mounting to the motorcycle. The flexible mounting allowed the sidecar to lean on corners along with the motorcycle, and was based on a design patented by Young. In 1919, the company's name was changed to The Flxible Co. so that the name could be copyrighted and used as a trademark (although it continued to be pronounced "flexible").

In 1957 I finished the 8th grade in Nueva Rosita, Coahuila. The closest grade 9 school in English was St. Edward's High School, a Catholic boarding school in Austin, Texas. I was shipped there by my mother. During those four years I would return to Nueva Rosita, or Mexico City for Christmas and for the summer holidays.

Except for a couple of exceptions those trips involved rides in wonderful buses, long gone, but still in my memory. One of those trips involved aerodynamics of the airplane kind. It was an airplane so beautiful which just happened to be the first commercial jet I flew in. It was a De Havilland Comet 4C. The air intakes flush and part of the wing were as beautiful as that scoop on the Hilltopper.



In 1959 on my birthday for some reason we were in Mexico City. My mother sprung a pleasant surprise. In an envelope I found an American silver Dollar and a one-way ticket via Mexicana de Aviación to San Antonio. I asked my mother why the silver Dollar was there. My mother taught physics. She knew her stuff, "Alex when you are cruising in the Comet try and put the coin on its edge on your serving table. You will be surprised!" I was both surprised and thrilled. No piston-engine airliner of the time, even that gorgeous Lockheed Super Constellation, could stop vibrating in the air. The Comet 4C the first commercial jet in service was smooth. The coin remained on its edge without falling.

On other years going back and forth between my school and Nueva Rosita involved two buses and a car. Someone would drive me from Nueva Rosita to Piedras Negras. I would cross the bridge to Eagle Pass. Eagle Pass then looked much like many of the towns in American Westerns films. While the streets were paved the sidewalks were high from the ground and boardwalks. Many were covered by the overhand from the building. Sometimes I would go to the Eagle Pass Hotel for breakfast. On the way to breakfast I would pass the main room that had a fireplace with Winchester repeating rifles on the wall. One time a tall man with hat and cowboy boots emerged from the coffee shop and he noisily sauntered on the boardwalk. It was John Wayne.

In Eagle Pass I took a Continental Trailways to San Antoni. And, (yes!) it was a  Flxible Clipper.  Thinking back I realize that each bus driver had a personal punch with which he marked my ticket. The Flxible would take me through towns that are now all romance to my ears. Then, they were depressing as each brought me closer to school and away from my family. I was always a tad homesick. The bus stopped at Crystal City (the first city in the US to "go Mexican") voting in the first Mexican American city council around 1960. The Raza began in this lazy town with noisy swinging screen doors. The only language to be heard in the bus was Spanish. We then then stopped at such places as Carrizo Springs, and depending on the route of that day, Uvalde, Pearsall and Dilley before it arrived at the San Antonio bus station. There I switched to the imposing but not as beautiful Greyhound Scenicruiser.



From the lazy narrow one-lane highways between Eagle Pass to San Antonio I was suddenly on a four-lane divided highway all the way to Austin. Texans called it an expressway. These concrete expressways were part of the Dwight D. Eisenhower System of Interstate and Defense Highways. This is where the American love for driving began. I remember that both Bob Hope and Bing Crosby appeared in full-page Life Magazine ads extolling the virtue of driving on concrete! The purpose of the concrete (while it was smooth for cars) was to stand the weight of battle tanks and artillery.

Only once was I driven from Nueva Rosita to San Antonio. Jeanette Frazier, a widow who owned a large hacienda in Sabinas, Coahuila told my mother she was driving (in a big 1954 Buick Roadmaster) her daughter Cornelia to Uvalde to visit family. The town was close to San Antonio. Cornelia Frazier was a bit younger than I was. She was beautiful, spoiled, remote and didn't give me the time of day. We both sat in the back seat in complete silence all the way to Uvalde.

She was my first Estella. Today, Cornelia lives in Eagle Pass, not far from her mother who is in her 90s.

Monday, January 26, 2009


When my grandmother would feel frustration she would often say, "Nadie es profeta en su tierra." Translated to English it is "No one is a prophet in their own land." The quotation is from Christ himself in Luke 4, 21-30. In Nazareth, the city of his childhood He told his listeners that He indeed was the Messiah. The crowd grew angry at His blasphemy.

The quotation is especially relevant in the Vancouver arts scene. Wonderful dancers and actors (as an example) languish here for years yet when they move they are often a success. It is then that our newspapers will suddenly run glowing articles on them. A recent example is Jason Wu who designed Michelle Obama's ball gown. It seems that Wu might have stopped in Vancouver for some time (the YVR men's room?). That was enough for the paper to claim pride in a Vancouverite who made it big elsewhere.

This happens everywhere else. Consider Argentine national poet, Leopoldo Lugones. His son Polo is credited with the invention (use of) the Argentine cattle prod as a torture instrument during Argentina's dirty war. Few in Argentina might know of Lugones's fame abroad and his influence in the invention of the Taser. But then even in infamy one cannot be a prophet in his own land. On the other hand while the policeman Lugones is somewhat known around the world for his contribution, Lugones father is all but unknown.

Shifting to an infamy of a smaller kind, on Saturday, after much nagging I finally had my granddaughters in the car on the way to my studio to take their portraits. It had been a while (sometime in late summer) when I had last had them in front of my camera. I get very little support either at home or at Rebecca and Lauren's home. Like churches, newspapers, I am becoming invisible. If I cannot be seen, what I do cannot be missed or appreciated.

In the back seat Rebecca was crying. "I hate to have my picture taken by you. The sessions last for three hours (not true!). Why can't you take pictures like my other grandpa. I don't even notice when he takes them." The only kind remark I could utter in defense of my kind of portraiture versus the snapshot technique was, "What I do is different." Once in the studio Rebecca made an agreement with Lauren that she would go first. While I was taking pictures of the more positive inclined Lauren, Rebecca was playing with her twin screen game box.

By the time Rebecca sat down to face my camera she apologized for her behaviour and settled in.



I have been compiling a mental list on how the world is rapidly changing in 2009. TVs and computer monitors will become one and the same (and the shift will not be in the middle but towards the laptop!). YouTube is second only to Goggle as a search engine. A younger generation finds a static image surrounded by copy (type) as not useful in comparison to an image that streams and moves with a soundtrack. The British writer Julian Barnes predicts that in our lifetime people will enter churches without knowing their purpose. My Rebecca has no concept of the newspaper.

I am adding my type of portraiture to the list of bygones. We are returning to the era of the Kodak Instamatic (not instant at all, and Kodak gone) of quick images made all the more cheaply by not having to think about the expense of using film.

My kind of portraiture where I use an artificial light source that mimics the Flemish painter's window is all but forgotten. Perhaps as forgotten as is Jan van Eyck except in very small circles of decaying highbrows.



I have been fascinated by whatever spark of soul that is in a live person's eyes that is not there when that person dies (many 19th century photographers parked their tripod and cameras in front of dying adults and children in a futile effort to capture that moment of life shifting into death). I have been interested in the stark portrait for a long time and recently I have found ways of paring it down even more. I eschew long lenses and now use a lens that gets me as close to my subject as possible so that I am in their face. There is no music in my studio and I don't tell my sitters (they are usually standing or sitting on the corner of a chair) to relax. I want to make them feel on edge. I want that visual confrontation.

Perhaps it is a fear of visual confrontation that is causing this shift towards the snapshot capture. It is far more comfortable to make friends with an anonymous person in one of the online social networks. We never have to look at them in the eye.

Sunday, January 25, 2009

I may have been some 13 or more years ago in the month of May when I was pruning my laurel hedge. A car stopped and a man got out and with that gentle dolphin-like smile of his and a warm soft-spoken baritone voice said, "How are you Alex? I haven't seen you or many of my other friends since I became part of the film business."

I looked at him and instantly felt the vacuum of a friendship I had treasured. I felt the loss, the loss iteself, before me. What he did and friendship somehow were at odds. I have "lost" many others to the film business.

Peter Lando has first entered my life, gently at lunch some 27 years ago. He had arrived in tow of free-lance writer Kerry McPhedran. Both Lando and McPhedran were working on a job of museum display work for D (David) Jensen & Associates. Lando and I began to talk and he described his interest in anthropology and mentioned Native Canadians. I decided to push his button and told him that there was no way a long house and Native Canadian chant could ever compete with Gothic cathedrals and Bach cantatas. Our conversation grew heated and at one point Lando stopped and said, "You are joking, aren't you?" I think I may have answered, "Sort of."

That evening Lando called and said, "I had a good time today. We should meet at the Railway Club and converse. We could invite some friends who also like to converse." And that is how our long, every Thursdays at noon lunches began lasted for at least 20 years. The stresses of freelance work, city traffic and other factors finally killed the every Thursday meetings which we now hold perhaps once a year.

At some point Lando married a wonderful South African woman, Marianne Kaplan. She is an independent filmmaker with lots of gumption. She and Lando decided to get married in South Africa so that they could have an excuse to enter the country with a movie camera. Kaplan wanted to work on a documentary on apartheid.

About 9 years ago I ran into the Lando's (by then they had two boys) on a ferry to Saltspring that stopped at many islands. We had a chat and Kaplan looked at me and said, "Why have you disappeared? Why have you not called us? " I felt terrible but I coldy answered, "You guys are in the film business. You guys just disappeared."

On Friday I read in the Vancouver Sun that Peter Lando has received an Oscar nomination for his set design work in The Dark Night. I felt proud of the man and I wanted not only to wish him well but to hug him with warm congratulations. But I also felt a bitter loss that the price somehow for me was the fading away of a friendship.

I find it fitting that I looked through all my photo files and could not find one image of the man with the gentle dolphin-like smile.