In what I believe is now an attempt at cruel and unusual punishment the folks of the Georgia Straight via the conduit of its somewhat pleasant Arts Editor Janet Smith have contacted me yet again to shoot the pictures for this coming week’s (Wednesday September 16) Georgia Straight Fall Arts Preview. I believe this may be my 15^th year at working on this assignment. I have informed Smith that next year when she phones again for this my wife will answer and tell her I am dead.

If you consider that I am an aging, rheumatic, chronic cougher, with an enlarged prostate, a heart that accelerates without notice and a mildly balding chap of 73 you might wonder if the folks on West Broadway cannot find younger blood to draw on.

But that is not the case so I am currently not sleeping nights while my brain whirs on photographs that would be easy if it were not for the fact that Smith (as usual) asked me, “Alex what’s this year’s theme going to be?”

Without unleashing the cat out of the bag the accompanying selfie reveals (in a subtle manner) two items that are central to this year’s theme. I will not make it easier for you folks by giving you two  hints. These two items have (or perhaps not) ancillary connections with Richard Widmark in a 1962 film called The Secret Ways and to Jimmy Stewart and a chap (also an actor) who was born in New Westminster.

On November 9, 2013 I read this http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/10/business/a-founder-of-twitter-goes-long.html in my NY Times. I was intrigued and I joined. By then I had written over 3000 daily blogs for my Blogger blog which I had started in January 2006. I would modify some of my blogs and re-post them into Medium. Every once in a while I did this backwards and wrote something in Medium and re posted it into my blog.

It was fun. I particularly enjoyed Medium’s statistics which told you if people had only glanced at your posting or actually read it. Like Blogger but much more detailed you could see where people came to see your blog. As of late I have noticed that entry to my Blogger blog is through Facebook and that Facebook is also important with Medium. Medium makes it easy to post your individual essay’s URL into Twitter and Facebook with two simple clicks.

One recent godsend was something called Import Story by which with the placing in a window your blog’s coordinates it would magically appear in Medium and you are given lots of control to modify it, change your pictures and move it around. Sometimes this feature does not work too well but I have found roundabout ways to do what I want in spite of the snags.

The folks at Medium do not resist to attempt to improve your experience and tinker with stuff. In one of these misguided (to me) bits of tinkering people who read your essay can now highlight paragraphs and sentences. I have yet to attempt to remove this (to me) defacement of my copy. I don’t understand this feature. That I am not under 30 but over 70 (in fact I am 73) might explain this.

When you have 3600 Blogger blogs and you find that quite a few of these might be modified to run in Medium you might happily take advantage of Import Story.

But no more to the many Uh –oh! I get when I attempt to open my statistics (Medium cannot seem to cope with my at least 150 postings) I now have one Uh-oh! that has been in effect for two days. It is the image above that tells me that I am toast for one day. 

As to what a Medium day is I am in confusion. It's been two already.

I may have been around 1982 when I first met Julie Menard. I called her the watch lady. In her profession she divested herself of everything within minutes of her performance. But she always kept her Cartier watch. Menard reminded me of a sophisticated version of Susan Sarandon. Menard’s skin looked like the coating on white Limoges china. She had a liking for red lipstick that set off her unsaturated skin. Her choice of music, too, was sophisticated. It was always obscure new wave that had to go with her sinuous, slippery sort of dancing.

She was an ice queen, more so because of the contrast between her stark white skin and her Revlon red lipstick. Her English was just about perfect but there was just enough French in it to make her that much more interesting.

There was a streak of existentialist sadness in her demeanor. But I was told she was tough. She had a little daughter and she did her best for her. One day I asked if she would pose for me. I remember that she lived right next to Grandview Park on Commercial Drive not far from where I was to photograph Dave Barrett by his Volvo a few years later. I picked her up in my yellow Fiat X 1/9 and we drove to Lighthouse Park in West Vancouver. We walked to the cliffs where I took the pictures on a hot sunny afternoon in summer.

I note that I used four film stocks. With my Pentaxes I loaded one with Kodak b+w infrared and the other with Kodak Technical Pan. With my Mamiya RB-67 I used Kodacolor in 120 and a Fuji HR- 100. The latter really shows off Menard’s white skin but unfortunately the negative has stained in places and you might note that there is some yellow in her white slip.

Shortly after I took the pictures she told me she was going back to Montreal and I never saw her again.