Shooting from the hip:

deriv. (Old West--when a person who 'shot from the hip' pulled their trigger in a proper draw (ie from a hip holster.) This is in direct contrast to a person who arrived to the gunfight with guns drawn. By extension, a person who 'shoots from the hip' possesses the positive quality of handling a situation in the prescribed mode.

For most of my photographic career I have chosen to use a medium format camera and good studio lights. I prefer to take a few (5 or 6) exposures as opposed to the technique (years ago) of banging off many with a camera equipped with a motor drive. I believe in deciding when I want to take my picture. This involves the anticipation of a moment. In modern dance, as an example, and particularly if you watch a rehearsal, you know when that peak (and always most graceful) movement will happen. After a while any photographer knows about a particular camera’s shutter lag. This means that the photographer knows the small transition of time between pressing the shutter button and the camera taking the picture.

In a studio this is not quite as important but the photographer has to know when the expression that is the important one is the one to commit to film or to storage card. In the case of my medium format Mamiya RB-67 Pro-SD I used the mirror lock mechanism. This means that subjects that watch my right hand and close their eyes when I press the shutter will be foiled as after they open their eyes, the left-handed mirror lock release (I use a cable release) will trip the shutter and their eyes will be wide open.

Shooting portraits in a studio and setting it all up used to turn off many of the art directors I approached for work. They did not like the perfect studio look. They wanted something “edgy”. I hated the word. One art director from a very good magazine who did give me an assignment stipulated I “shoot from the hip”.

This usually meant using a 35mm camera with a fast lens and fast film without any additional lighting. This sort of thing is now handled wonderfully by good digital cameras.

I did shoot from the hip a lot. And every time I picked up one of my Nikon F-2s I marvelled at the sense of freedom I experienced.

In these last few years I have been using the “shoot from the hip” technique with Arts Umbrella Dance rehearsals. And it does feel liberating.

In that past before to capture replaced shoot or take, this sort of photography was called the grab shot. You grabbed a shot (perhaps) in spite of situational adversity.

I took some photographs of Salem in her black Celica and I used my Nikon FM-2 loaded with a then latest Kodak 5054  T-Max film that could be rated at a very fast 3200 ISO. With my 50mm f-1.4 and 35mm f-2 I was able to shoot quickly. It is only today as I was going through these negatives that I noticed this shot. It has a sensual feel that reminds me of those Antonioni films that featured that wonderful Monica Vitti. Or it reminds me of the look and feel of Roman Polanski’s Knife in the Water.

Perhaps I should shoot more from the hip.

In 1968 when I was madly in love with my Rosemary (not Rosaline) whom I married that year in Mexico City we saw Romeo and Juliet. I had to point out to her that Olivia Hussey was 17 and that she had been born in Buenos Aires. Much was written then about Michael York’s Tybalt and John McEnery’s Mercutio. The former went on to better things and the latter sort of faded away. As much as I liked Michael York I have always preferred Basil Rathbone in that 1936 Romeo and Juliet. He was much darker. He was scary.

By 1970 my Rosemary and I were teaching English at large American companies in Mexico City. I had a class of 8 women (all executive assistants, the term used on the day). I decided to teach them (they never suspected) English with a Texan accent. I taught them to speak through their noses. During a three month term we ended each class with a 8 minute read of Shakespeare’s play. My knowledge of the play then is based on those three months of Texas twang.

My memory tells me that the second stage version of Romeo and Juliet is the one that my Rosemary and I saw on Friday, June 10. It was a Bard on the Beach production directed by Kim Collier. Since we have seen many a production by Collier we expected surprises. There were many but one I did not foresee was the presence of an angel in the audience.

I watched Bernard Cuffling for the duration of the first act. On his face I saw either smiles or laughter. Here was an actor enjoying his busman’s holiday.

Myformer Vancouver Magazine friend, Les Wiseman told me (many times) that you wrote only that which you knew something about or else you consulted a person who did. That was my tack. I talked, before the play began with Shakespeare scholar and UBC Professor Errol Durbach. I asked him about youth in previous Romeo and Juliet productions. He cited a not-as-well known 1996 film by Baz Luhrmann with Leonardo di Caprio (then 22) and Claire Danes (17). He told me that it was a good film but that it lacked gravitas as the actors were too young. Durbach did not predict that anytime soon we will have a stage production or a film with a 14-year-old Juliet (the age in Shakespeare’s play).

Bernard Cuffling added to this by saying that the words that Juliet says in the play would be out of the range (realistically) of any 14-year-old. And he told me, “I think Hailey Gillis (24) is very good. And she looks so Roman.” I would have added that both Gillis and Basil Rathbone’s Tybalt have similar Roman noses. When I mentioned to Cuffling (not having yet read Harold Bloom's chapter on the play later that evening) I asked him if the first half of the play is a comedy. Perhaps Collier helped by the performances of Andrew McNee as Mercutio, Ben Elliot’s Benvolio, Jennifer Lines’s Nurse, Andrew Cownden’s Peter and Scott Bellis as Friar Laurence to add a bit more comedy. Cuffling looked at me seriously and told me the second act is no comedy. We both agreed that while the two young actors, Andrew Chown (a most winsome and athletic one) as Romeo and Hailey Gillis’s Juliet are (as far as this city is concerned) not so well known the supporting actors are all so good that I wonder how any other good Vancouver theatre company is going to cope for the summer without them. That long bench of superb actors turns the whole idea of the usual play around. In Bard’s Romeo and Juliet the cast is star studded.

My Rosemary who usually dislikes most everything had two very positive comments. “I think that Scott Bellis is superb as usual. And I really like Jennifer Lines who more and more sounds like Katherine Hepburn.”

In the late evening I read Harold Bloom. This Shakespeare bible is at my night table during Bard and it is perhaps the only quality I share with Christopher Gaze, the Artistic Director of Bard on the Beach. If you check on the right hand side of the photograph here with his wife Jennifer you will not the heavy tome on his night table. 

Bloom mentions several times that Mercutio pretty well runs away with the play and that Shakespeare had to kill him in order to continue with the play. The important plot twist is the interference by Romeo that kills Mercutio who is unaware of Romeo’s marriage to Juliet. Bloom translates for the ignorant (me!) some of Mercutio’s words. As an example:

I love be blind, love cannot hit the mark.

Now he will sit under a medlar tree

And wish his mistress where that kind of fruit

As maids called medlars when they laugh alone.

O Romeo, that she were, O that she were

An open-arse, and though a poperin pear!

[II.i.33-38]

Bloom explains (who would have known?)

Mercutio’s reference is to Rosaline, Romeo’s beloved before he falls, at first glance, in love with Juliet, who instantly reciprocates. The medlar, rotten with ripeness, popularly was believed to have the likeness of the female genitalia and “to meddle” meant to perform sexual intercourse. Mercutio happily also cites a popular name for the medlar, the open-arse, as well as the poperin pear, at once pop-her-in her open arse, and the slang name for a French pear, the Poperingle (named for a town near Ypres). This is the antithetical prelude to a scene that famously concludes with Juliet’s couplet:

Good night, good night. Parting is such sweet sorrow

That I shall say good night till it be morrow.

Of Nurse Bloom writes: The two fatal figures in the play are its two liveliest comics, Mercutio and the Nurse…Juliet’s Nurse, despite her popularity, is altogether a much darker figure. Like Mercutio she is inwardly cold, even toward Juliet, whom she has raised (and we find out that Juliet had a “twin sister” who died called Susan.  But not exactly as Susan was the Nurse’s daughter who died at birth so the Nurse then became Juliet’s wet-nurse). Her language captivates us as does Mercutio’s, but Shakespeare gives both of them hidden natures much at variance with their exuberant personalities.

There were two further surprises. Since Christopher Gaze always introduces the season and the first performance of a play (like his buddy, Artistic Director Bill Millerd of the Arts Club Theatre Company) this time around Director Kim Collier seconded (I am going to introduce all the performances of R&J, Alex. Kim asked me to do the opening Chorus speech because I am welcoming the audience and I can just flow into it seamlessly. Christopher) him to perform (and a fine performance it was!) the prologue to the play.

The second surprise was one of those famous food trucks. It was there,  before the play began, to left side of the portable washrooms. Tables had been set aside for the hungry-before culture fans. I was told by one of the gentlemen in the truck (Mathew) that they will be there for other opening performances and for special days.

I would like to point out a few more things. Dawn Petten, who plays Lady Capulet is one of Vancouver’s finest comedy actresses (I am old fashioned and I am partial to words like actor, dominatrix and aviatrix). Here she does a really serious role and plays to the hilt the coldness (jealousy of the Nurse?) of a detached mother to Juliet. And David McCormick, the Fight Director, has given both Mercutio and Benvolio some fine humorous activities with their foils. Sound Designer Brian Linds produced what must be the first ever presence of heavy metal in a Shakespeare play. Plus before the play there was some fine 20^th century modern piano music that I rather enjoyed.

She is the fairies' midwife, and she comes

In shape no bigger than an agate-stone

On the fore-finger of an alderman,

Drawn with a team of little atomies

Athwart men's noses as they lie asleep;

The evening was most satisfying and the only other Romeo and Juliet that I can compare it is to one years ago in which I watched Evelyn Hart dance.

Louis Gaspard Amédée baron Girod de l'Ain (18 October 1781 – 27 December 1847) was a French lawyer and politician who became Minister of Public Education and Religious Affairs in 1832.

All of the above is but an introduction to what here in Vancouver might be seen as a sensitive topic. This is the fact that this almost 74 year-old man is going bananas not to notice all the women wearing shorts with the recent hot weather.

My granddaughters have told me that the dress code in school is that a girl has to stand up and lower her arms. Shorts cannot be shorter than the tip of the hands.

I have been noticing how this rule does not seem to apply to young women not going to school. What am I to do? Must I not turn around or look in any direction except in front when I am driving? You cannot text and drive. I don’t. But is there a summer bylaw in Vancouver prohibiting reacting to the distraction of women in shorts?

This brings me to Tarren. I have written before (but I will write about it here again) how coming back in a de Havilland Beaver from a shoot for the CBC in Egmont one afternoon the pilot suddenly jerked the plane and we lost altitude as we were about to land in Coal Harbour. Somehow he gained control and the landing was smooth. As we deplaned we were greeted by a beautiful woman with a melodious voice (Mae West would have been jealous)”who said, “High Alex!” She was wearing red satin short shorts or hot pants. It seems that both of those terms have disappeared as shorts are now all short. The pilot said something like this to me, “You know her? She is why we almost crashed.”

Not too long after, Tarren posed for me in my Burnaby studio with our cat Gaticuchi and she wore those red satin shorts.

And going to the close, I must point out that in my many years of studying the female form, Tarren not only had grand legs but she also (and this is most important if you want to wear shorts) had the most magnificent gluteus maximus I have ever seen.

At this point I know my Argentine nephews would nod in approval.