Saturday, January 17, 2015

Arthur Neele, Angela Malmberg, Natalie Mackie & Konstantin Rusianov Bozhinov

From my mother’s side, the de Irureta Goyena surname we had marquis in Spain. While with the mingling of my father’s English blood I will not be a nobleman ever I felt like royalty on Sunday. The three of us and a full house that amounted to some 26 souls sat in a sunny west side studio to listen to Stile Moderno play baroque music of the 17^th and 18 century from England, Ireland and Scotland. We listened to the fine music with plates of nice goodies and good wine.


Some of the music, particularly the Scottish music compiled by Italian Francesco Barsanti (1690-1772) had the strange knee-slapping characteristics of Scottish folk music in which Mackie and Bozhinov conspired to drone their instruments in tandem so that they sounded like bagpipes.
The big and most pleasant surprise besides Barsanti’s compiled Scottish music (nicely arranged by Bozhinov) was the Irish music of the nicely named Turlough O’Carolan (1670-1738), Eleanor PlunkCaptain O'Kane, The Blue Angel, Tripping up the stairs and, Eleanor Plunkett, The Stone in the field, Maudabawn Chapel, also deftly arranged by Bozhinov so that the result made me want to drink beer not wine. I had never seen a lute (much less an archlute) swing!

While all this was going on, Lauren and Graham were collaborating on a sketch that featured the planets.

Illustration Lauren Stewart & Graham Walker

It wasn’t until the concert was over that I explained to Lauren that she was not far off the mark. Scientists of the 17^th and 18^th century thought that the planets made music as they moved through space. They called it Music of the Spheres.


 January 30, 2004
REVERBERATIONS

REVERBERATIONS; Move Over, Middle C: The Speculative Case for the Cosmic B Flat


Who knew? All those philosophers and scientists and theoreticians and composers who believed in the ancient notion of a Music of the Spheres were onto something. There is such a music, and it's the note of B flat.




These B flats may be the oldest and the longest notes in the universe, but just how universal are they? My eye was caught by another recent article in The Times, this one about a mysterious low hum that bedevils some people, a kind of basso variant of tinnitus, which is a high pitch likewise heard in the ears of sufferers. Are those sounds, I wondered, also in B flat, suggesting an even more cosmic implication for this once-humble pitch?


Courtesy of Mindy Sink, who wrote the article, I entered into e-mail correspondence with Dr. James Kelly of the University of New Mexico, who undertook studies of hum sufferers in Taos. Dr. Kelly first clarified for me the difference between frequency and pitch. ''Frequency is a physical measure,'' he wrote. ''Pitch is what you perceive.'' Since the black-hole B flat is 57 octaves lower than middle C, it cannot be heard, thus only questionably qualifying as a pitch.

Friday, January 16, 2015

Attila Richard Lukacs - Alex Waterhouse-Hayward

Thursday, January 15, 2015


The Music in the Violin Does Not Emerge Alone
I tend my flowers for thee
Lavinia Norcross Dickinson
Pray gather me anemone! 
Ample make her bed
His caravan of red 
Me-come! My dazzled face  
Develops pearl and weed
But peers beyond her mesh
Surgeons must be very careful
Water is taught by thirst
I could not prove that years had feet
April played her fiddle
A violin in Baize replaced
I think the longest hour
The spirit lasts
http://blog.alexwaterhousehayward.com/2014/03/i-left-them-in-ground-emily-dickinson.html
 http://blog.alexwaterhousehayward.com/2014/01/i-felt-my-life-with-both-my-hands.html
http://blog.alexwaterhousehayward.com/2011/03/currer-bell-emily-dickinson-charlotte.html
http://blog.alexwaterhousehayward.com/2011/06/i-could-not-see-to-see.html

Wednesday, January 14, 2015

This old blog from April 06, 2009 came to my mind these last weeks as I thought of my many wonderful moments with Sean Rossiter. The account of him watching me come down from the dressing room of the Number 5 Orange with a beautiful assistant helping me with my heavy equipment is one of my fondest.




A rare arts assignment to photograph baritone Greer Grimsley who is to appear in the Vancouver Opera’s production of Strauss’ Salome had me thinking. I am to photograph the man in a special effects studio where they are going to make a life mask from which they will then model St John the Baptist’s ( Jokanaan in the opera) severed head. It would seem that since time immemorial man (as in politically incorrect “the male of the species”) has been ready to give up just about anything to see a woman undraped.



That the current play by the Electric Theatre Company and presented by the Vancouver Playhouse Theatre Company, Studies in Motion – The Hauntings of Eadweard Muybridge has not created any obvious stir of shock or at least a stream of salacious blogs or letters to the editor (and it is a terrific play which I have seen three times) has something to say about the current state of affairs between man (the male of the species) and his forsaking of the enjoyment of the undraped female form. The play has a cast of 11 (about 60% men) and all undrape fully. If you sit on the front row you can dispense with the binoculars.



If anybody had told anybody in Vancouver that our fair city would one day not be known for its excellent strippers, its squeaky clean strip bars and that by 2009 there would only be three strip bars left within city limits they would have not been believed. But that is a fact that strip bars are all but gone and the B-lineup St Regis is now a luxury boutique hotel! Who would have known? I don’t frequent the strip bars. It is not really my sudden shame at liking something that is a bit frowned upon by civilized society.



It is more about being 67 and I am losing interest. The idea of a good book, a large mug of tea and bed in the evening is far more an attractive idea than lounging at a bar looking at women take their clothes off. But what do all those young men do these days? Watch pornography on their computers?

It will always be the same that things were better then than now. Punk music then was real punk music. Now it is derivative and imitation punk music. Strippers then danced. Strippers now take their clothes off, period.



I am sure that I am wrong on all counts and there must be many dancers of note. I know of one who was a ballet dancer before she switched to nude pole dancing. When I last saw her a couple of years ago she was the best pole dancer in the province.

Perhaps my lack of excitement is that the age difference between dancers and this old man becomes a gulf. It was in the late 79s that Vancouver Magazine assigned me to take pictures of women wearing eyewear from boutique frame stores. The art director, Rick Staehling asked me, “The models you used are most unusual. Where did you get them?” I fudged the answer as I did not have the heart to tell him that I had picked my favourite exotic dancers and I had enjoyed giving them their checks for modeling with their clothes all on.



It was at Tony Ricci’s Marble Arch that I could walk in and sit by the bar and talk in Spanish to Jorge the barman. He would offer free drinks but I always had soda water. I felt like Humphrey Bogart walking into a bar. Jorge and Tony made me feel special.

But it was at Tony’s Number 5 Orange in May 1990 that I felt king for a day. I had been assigned by Equity Magazine to take pictures for an article called Sex Sells. Having been convinced through the years by Malcolm Parry to seek the privileged view in all things I knew what I wanted. Parry defines the privileged view more like what you see when you look down as opposed to what you see looking up.



Anybody (of the legal age) can enter a strip club. At the Number 5 Orange Street the tradition has been to see the fully dressed woman step down to the dance floor on a lit Lucite ladder that connects to the roof. As Mac would have said, “Anybody can watch her come down. But to be up there and watch her go down, that would be special.”

I asked Tony if I could take pictures in the dressing room. He smiled, “Anything you want, Alex and I’ll have Daniele accompany you up to make it easier for you.” Daniele was simply one of the most gorgeous women I ever met in my life. Up we went.



I decided I would photograph the whole routine of one dancer. I was in luck because Portia Winters was up there so I took many pictures of the process. I learned one interesting fact about strip bars of those years. There were traveling male hairdressers who did hair for the dancers. One was there to fix up Portia. Remembering Mac Parry I managed to photograph Portia going down the golden stairs.



The best moment of the day came when I finished and Danielle (Kimberly) and I went down to the bar. Danielle had well toned arms and helped me with my heavy lights. My friend Sean Rossiter happened to be in the bar and when he saw me and my assistant and, where we were coming from he just about collapsed with wonder. He has never allowed me to forget the day. Not that I would.

Tuesday, January 13, 2015

William F.Buckley Jr. - Alex Waterhouse-Hayward

Somehow the differences between the right and the left have become more distant even though communism as we knew it is gone and the most Dickensian and corrupt capitalist nation in the world is the former Soviet Union.

Because I lived for five formative years in Austin, Texas I consider part of me to be American and I have always been interested in American politics. Were I truly an American I would vote for the Democrats as I deplore the almost across-the-board stupidity of the Republicans who have long forgotten that they were (and certainly are not now) the Party of Lincoln.

When some years ago I had my chance to take portraits of William F. Buckley I was thrilled. I might not have agreed with his pragmatic (to be fair) conservative views but I loved his command of English.

When I spotted this article in my daily delivered (hard copy) NY Times I didn’t feel that “sharing” it in facebook was quite the right thing. It would probably be lost to many. Now here is the article in its entirety and I hope the NY Times Copyright Police  and writer David Segaljan do not come after me.

Credit Ginny Rose Stewart for The New York Times

By DAVID SEGALJAN. 12, 2015

Mr. Buckley didn’t just devour the stuff; he rhapsodized about it, telling readers in a 1981 column in National Review, the magazine he founded, that when he first married, he told his wife that he “expected peanut butter for breakfast every day of my life, including Ash Wednesday.”

This lifelong passion was nurtured during Mr. Buckley’s years in an English boarding school, when his father sent twice-a-month care packages that included grapefruits and a large jar of peanut butter. To his astonishment, British pals who shared in his bounty loved the grapefruit and spat out the peanut butter.

“No wonder,” he wrote in that same column, “they needed American help to win the war.”

For years, Mr. Buckley’s favorite brand was Red Wing, produced in this upstate village 45 miles southwest of Buffalo. A jar of the peanut butter had been sent to Mr. Buckley soon after that 1981 column by the executive who then ran the company, Douglas Manly.

Mr. Manly was right. Mr. Buckley’s son, the novelist Christopher Buckley, said in a phone interview: “My dad’s one true quest in life was for the Platonic ideal of peanut butter. And I remember one day he announced, with a look of utter transfiguration on his face, that he had found paradise on earth in a jar with a yellow cap. And it was called Red Wing.”

This doesn’t necessarily mean that the flavor of Red Wing will disappear. The peanut butter made here is what is known as private label, produced for supermarket chains catering to value shoppers. If you ever bought peanut butter sold under labels like Wegmans, Price Chopper, Our Family or Tops, you were eating Red Wing.

Mr. Manly sounded skeptical. “We can’t be sure,” he said, “because they won’t be using the same equipment or the same personnel.”

“It was a whim,” he said of that fateful jar sent to the offices of National Review, while we drove to the Fredonia factory in his Hyundai Elantra. “I didn’t really think that anything would come of it.”

Mr. Manly ticked the box for two cases of Red Wing, and when Peggy went to fill his order, he gestured toward the factory floor and said, “Let’s go.”

That included a peanut roaster once hailed as the world’s largest, built to process 10 tons an hour. Mr. Buckley was on hand for the 1982 ribbon-cutting for this industrial behemoth because soon after he discovered the joys of Red Wing, Mr. Manly invited him to speak at the ceremony.

There are articles of Mr. Buckley’s visit, which lacked only a brass band and bunting. When Mr. Buckley and his wife, Pat, reached the roaster, a few hundred employees were waiting to hear him speak. In a photo of the event, Mr. Buckley grins in a white lab coat over his jacket and tie.

He took questions from reporters and confirmed that his friend Charlton Heston shared his devotion to peanut butter. Though the actor, Mr. Buckley added, is of the “chunky reform faith.”

For years afterward, visitors to Mr. Buckley’s home in Connecticut who expressed any peanut butter enthusiasm were dared to resist Red Wing’s charms. He praised the brand so extravagantly during a radio interview on Manhattan’s WMCA that the show’s host, Barry Gray, said listeners cleaned out local stores.

In 1985, a New Yorker writer and fellow peanut butter aficionado, James Stevenson, wrote in the magazine about a pilgrimage to Fredonia and his own one-man taste test, conducted, he explained, because he was skeptical about Mr. Buckley’s judgment in international affairs, economics and virtually everything else. But the man was right about peanut butter.

Is it really worth all the fuss? Mr. Manly is hardly emphatic on the question. This may seem surprising, but he was around for Red Wing’s food-lab formulation, in 1965, and he says the idea was to knock off Jif, then the favorite in the Northeast.

The company wanted a leading-brand impostor because its sales pitch to supermarket chains was essentially, “This is identical to the best seller, but less expensive.”

Red Wing may have bowled over Mr. Buckley because it was far fresher than anything he’d ever eaten. Or not. Brand devotion is often a mystery that flavor can only partly explain. Perhaps discovering an unbidden jar with an uncelebrated name helped hook Mr. Buckley back in 1981. Perhaps he’d never tried Jif.

But the younger Buckley didn’t keep it all.

Monday, January 12, 2015

Sunday, January 11, 2015

My Mother's Red Shawl - El Rebozo Colorado
Jorge (Georgito) José O'Reilly - Primo/Sobrino - Amigo - Campeón de Rugby

Yo lo fui a buscar cuando llegó al Aeropuerto de Ezeiza y lo llevé en la despedida también. Durante su estadía lo transporté algunas veces de un lado para otro e hicimos algunos programas familiares, no tantos como me hubiera gustado, pero estábamos en  tiempo laboral y nos quedaba poco tiempo disponible para visitas sociales fuera de horario.

La verdad  es que yo no sabía cómo colocármelo porque entendía que era una prenda femenina y como soy un poco rústico, me sentía medio incómodo. Primero me lo coloqué como una bufanda pero era muy grande como tal, así que finalmente me lo puse en un hombro como se acostumbra a ver a  los gauchos salteños  en el norte de la Argentina.

A pesar que me parecía un poco raro y que Alex me agarró desprevenido, acepté sacármela de esa forma. Realmente accedí porque sabía que era importante para él y le di el gusto. Además sabía todo lo afectivo que tenía para Alex y porque no decirlo era de mi tía abuela política que nunca conocí pero lo más importante era de la madre de mi primo/tío Alex a quien quiero y aprecio como un buen amigo y nunca se lo dije.