Saturday, April 16, 2022

 

William Richardson

Bunny Watson was a Canadian radio program, which aired Saturdays on CBC Radio One and Sundays on CBC Radio Two.

Named for Katharine Hepburn's librarian character in the movie Desk Set, the show was hosted by Bill Richardson and produced by Jennifer Van Evra and Tod Elvidge in Vancouver. Inspired by the Hepburn character's quote that she "associates many things with many things", Richardson explored a particular theme each week through a free-association sequencing of music, literature and film.

The show first aired in the summer of 2004. In one of the show's most notable episodes, on October 2, 2004, the poet and performance artist Meryn Cadell came out as transgender.

The program ceased to air on the full CBC network in 2005, although repeats continued to air for some further time in Nunavut to fill a scheduling hole created by time zone differences, and on Radio One's Sirius Satellite Radio channel to fill a scheduling hole created by the satellite channel not broadcasting local programs.

Wikipedia

 

Read today in the Globe and Mail that Bill Richardson is happily stocking shelves, at Whole Foods. Yes he might be happy but I am not.

That Corporation that serves the people of Canada has a poor memory except for telling us about traffic problems on the Second Narrows Bridge.

It was Bill Richardson’s Bunny Watson that inspired me to begin my blog in 2006 and to make it much like Richardson’s program in that my now over 5500 blogs deal with free association.

I have fond memories of Richardson hosting a Western Magazines Award evening (when we had really good magazines in Vancouver and in Canada). A particular writer (I will leave him unnamed) kept winning all the awards. After each award he gave long speeches and in one of them he even dealt with Martin Heidegger. The last prize of the evening was a weekend-for-two at the Empress Hotel in Victoria. And our winner was that winner. When the winner went up to collect his prize, Richardson loudly said, “Congratulations and I hope your butt falls off.”

From that point I became a rabid fan of Richardson and appreciated that the Renaissance man had a very good foundation in music. His Saturday Afternoon at the Opera was superb.

With that stellar CBC Radio arts reporter, Paul Grant retired to Moose Jaw and with his position not having been replaced, the propagation of culture news is pretty well gone from our local CBC stations. I can only cite CBC Ideas and The Debaters as superb intelligent programs. Otherwise intelligence seems to be stuck on that Second Narrows Bridge.

You all at the CBC should be ashamed. You are part of this peculiar defect in Vancouver, a City with a poor memory for its past.

 

Friday, April 15, 2022

 

 My Mother the Poet I

My Mother the Poet II

 

Even though 72 years have transpired since I last spent a Good Friday with my mother and grandmother in Buenos Aires I still await the day with a tad of depression on what is really a sombre day. No matter what your religious beliefs may be, a day about a death is a day that is one for darkish reflection. In Spanish deep shade is sombra so the root to latin under/shade is much more obvious. And sombre in Spanish is sombrio. 

 The Argentina that my mother wrote about in her poem (below) Argentine Nostalgia has dramatically changed since she wrote about it in December 1956. But she may have been right about the sombre people she remembers. With terrible inflation and an uncertain future of monetary default there is little to be happy about in my Argentina of today.

 

 

Every time I read this poem I am hit with nostalgia for Buenos Aires. But this is complicated as there is the Buenos Aires before we left for Mexico in 1953, the Buenos Aires of my two years in the Argentine Navy in the mid-60s. A Buenos Aires I returned thrice in the late 80s, 90s and early 2000s and then there is the Buenos Aires that I went with my Rosemary after that. And another, the one this last Decemeber without Rosemary.

 

With her gone my nostalgia, as I write this after midnight so it is now Good Friday, is a nostalgia that is sombre. My mother writes of the austere colours that Argentines wore in her time so this nostalgia is more a sobering one where I reflect on the death of a man/God and the inevitability of my own.

The mate and bombilla in this scan is of a mate and bombilla that was my father’s circa 1940. It has always been with me and when I am visited by my older granddaughter Rebecca (not frequent these days) we share some yerba mate. While I am a purist and do not like to sweeten it I do accept her request for some sugar. After all she is the only person I know in Vancouver that likes to share a mate with me.

Thursday, April 14, 2022

 

Trillium grandiflorum - 13 April 2022

Trillium grandiflorum (white trillium, white lily, wakerobin) flowers Apr-May in the hardwood forests of western and central Québec and in the lower Ottawa Valley, Ont. It has been the Provincial Floral Emblem in Ontario since 1937. The roots were valued for their astringent and antiseptic properties.

The Canadian Encyclopedia

My youngest daughter Hilary tells me that just about now I have the pleasant distraction of scanning my plants. It means I can sit inside my warm, neat and clean oficina, at my desk, and go through the repeated wonder (at least 2000 previous ones since 2001) of scanning a flower or plant. What I would have a hard time explaining to her is the amount of intimacy this involves.

I have written before that printing a portrait negative in a darkroom and then spotting the dust specks of the dried print does not compare to seeing the image on my monitor and going through details that even any woman applying makeup in front of a mirror might not see. I feel privileged but also like an intruder.

We men in the garden like big bold plants (at least this one). That is what attracted me to hostas back in 1986. Somehow thanks to Rosemary I noticed the charms of smaller ones. Consider the trillium seen here.

It is a small woodland spring plant with a very small flower. We used to have many. Some Rosemary brought back from her mother’s garden in New Dublin, Ontario. There are only two left.

Scanning this trillium is no different from me walking into the guest bathroom that has many framed portraits of Rosemary.

This trillium is Rosemary’s face.                                     

Wednesday, April 13, 2022

Firoz Rasul - Ballard Power 1997

 

Few remember this Crimean war.

The Crimean War was a military conflict fought from October 1853 to February 1856 in which Russia lost to an alliance of France, the Ottoman Empire, the United Kingdom and Piedmont-Sardinia.

Wikipedia

But people remember the US Civil War.

Both wars were covered by photographers, but none of the photographs were seen except in galleries. It wasn’t until the late 70s of the 19^th century when the halftone process was invented that photographs began to appear in newspapers.

The combination of photographs with writing began a mutual process in which one helped the other. The process popularized magazines and good newspapers. They all competed in having original photographs that would not appear in competing publications. Money was spent to send photographers all over the world to take these photographs.

This mutual process had its apogee in Vancouver in the 80s and early  90s when city magazines (Vancouver Magazine), shelter magazines (Western Living) and business magazines (BC Business and Equity) ruled the roost. Even in the beginning of the 21^st century the Georgia Straight published original photographs and very few provided by the organizations they wrote about. And in those beginning years of this century the Vancouver  Sun and the Georgia Straight competed in wanting to have original photographs.               

All the above has pretty well ended in our city. Now, in my estimation, few photographers can make ends meet as photographers.

Many place their very good photographs in social media or in whatever gallery may be open to showing them. But for me, since I was a magazine photographer, photographs by themselves are only the half of it.

Those photographs (phones are extremely good cameras), as perfect as they are, do not tell a complete story if they are not accompanied by typography.

In those heady days of magazines and newspapers, I had to see art directors who showed me manuscripts I had to illustrate with a photograph or photographs. From Toronto, or other cities in the world, I was phoned or sent instructions via couriers. Then when technology started, those manuscripts were sent via fax. These were followed in emails. From there I witnessed a problematic change. I would be told to take a photograph before the writer had interviewed the subject or subjects.

And then all work stopped.

In this blog I show an elaborate photograph which without the copy would have no meaning. I know I photographed my subject Firoz Rasul in 1997. He was the CEO of a Vancouver company, Ballard Power that was a pioneer in hydrogen fuel cells. Currently Mercedes Benz, the largest truck maker in the world is considering if it should produce electric or hydrogen fuel cell trucks. It was Ballard that in 1997 had approached Mercedes Benz.

 

I took Rasul’s photograph with my medium format camera. I then borrowed a blueprint of a fuel cell. I projected my b+w negative on 8x10 inch Kodalith film and processed it in photographic paper developer. What I had was a large b+w slide. Since I was not adept yet at using a scanner I placed the slide on the blueprint outside on a cloudy day and re-photographed it with my medium format camera. I know this because I kept a b+w Polaroid that shows my garden behind the photo. A bonus of the method is that by using my camera for the last shot my trademark filed-edged enlarger negative holder shows.

 

I know that there is a wonderful pleasure in taking a photograph and looking at the result and liking the process. But to see one’s photograph go hand in hand with copy is what I call "one & one are one".                             

                              

 

Tuesday, April 12, 2022

 

As devastated as I was at the death of my mother on her bed in 1972 in Rosemary’s and my presence in Mexico City I was able to share my grief with my life’s partner. I did not know or think then that on December 9 2020 I would lose that companion or that I would be writing about that today.

Who will be first? 

Somehow I have now been thinking a lot about my mother. It distractd me from my daily and constant grief over Rosemary and especially as the evening progresses.

I have been reading my mother’s poems daily. It is a sad sight to see how her lovely handwriting begins to deteriorate in the few poems she wrote in 1972.

But this writing is a happy one. I wrote in this blog that I did not know why Rosemary and I gave my mother’s bound poetry book the title Things and Thoughts. Last night I read the poem with that title that you will find below.

 

 

 

The three initials stand for Filomena de Irureta Goyena. When she married my  divorced father she was not allowed to have his name. Only when she taught in schools did she add de Hayward skipping the complicated Waterhouse.

She mentions three objects. I never saw this poem while she was alive and she never told me about that candlestick. But the shell with the two embedded pearls I have had all these years. I gave it to my Lillooet, BC daughter Alexandra. Of the fan I wrote about it here.

 

It is amazing how through reading a dead loved one’s poems, how much I lost (but now gained) in not asking questions.

The Eugenie in the poem was:

Victoria Eugenie Julia Ena of Battenberg (24 October 1887 – 15 April 1969) was Queen of Spain as the wife of King Alfonso XIII from their marriage on 31 May 1906 until 14 April 1931, when the Spanish Second Republic was proclaimed. A Hessian princess by birth, she was a member of the Battenberg family, a morganatic branch of the House of Hesse-Darmstadt. She was the granddaughter of Queen Victoria. Unlike other members of the Battenberg family, who were accorded the lower rank of Serene Highness, Victoria Eugenie was born with the rank of Highness due to a Royal Warrant issued in 1886 by Queen Victoria.

Wikipedia

 

 Where do I keep that fan?

My grandmother who lived in Valencia, Sevilla, Madrid, Manila, the Bronx, Buenos Aires, Mexico City and Veracruz spoke of all those places with delight but I never had a sense that she felt she belonged to any of them. She had moved too many times. “Her two “camphor babies” were her home,” my mother used to say. These were intricately carved chests that traveled with her since the early 30s. The two chests are in my living room and they are a constant reminder of the only grandmother I ever knew and loved. Inside those chests are a collection of Spanish fans, shawls, my Mappin & Web birth spoon and other mementos of the life of my grandmother, grandfather, my mother and me.

Monday, April 11, 2022

 

My maternal grandfather was a writer and poet as was my mother and her sister and brother. My father was a writer and journalist.

It would seem that I did not inherit any of the rhyming and just a bit of my father’s writing.

I never liked poetry because in school I was forced to memorize it and I could not. My mother spent long evening hours making me repeat a homework poem I had to memorize. It was only here in Vancouver that I discovered the beauty of poetry. I read it and I love finding poems that I can match with my photographs.  

Emily Dickinson

Julio Cortazar

In 1963 while attending the University of the Americas in Mexico City in my literature class I had a teacher who looked like Robert Frost and had been his friend for years. I sat in the back row bored. Obviously I was more of an idiot than I may be now.

It is my pleasure to place here the only poem ever written to me. No passionate girlfriend ever did. It was my mother.

 

I was doing my military service in the Argentine Navy and she wrote Prayers from where she was teaching in Veracruz, Mexico.

Here is my poor translation:

To Alex – Prayers

It may be that you will return

Or perhaps you might not

But I want you to know

That I will be here waiting for

News from you

Every once in a while

 

I wish for you the best

That life may bring you

A brilliant career

A woman to love you

As you deserve

For all this I pray

 

My son, may God bless you

That the little Virgin protect you

So that you will always have

Integrity and be good and fair

All this and much more I wish for you.                                                                                                                                                                                                       

 

My mother may not have gotten it all especially about my brilliant career but she did get Rosemary right. Two years after this poem I returned to Mexico and found a woman to love me

What I could not have ever guessed that there was also an instant love between them. My mother was not that mother-in-law. They got along like mother and daughter.

 

Rosemary, my mother and Alexandra - 1968 - Veracruz Mexico

Rosemary and I watched my mother die in bed and I will never forget that because we were so broke, Rosemary's parents paid for the funeral.

I now have no memory of the story behind the title of my mother's book of poetry, Things and Thoughts that we had bound in Mexico City by a Frenchman called Millioud. Because my father was a divorced man and divorce was not allowed in Argentina my mother and father married in Uruguay. Legally she could not retain the Waterhouse-Hayward so all her documents had her maiden name  Filomena de Irureta Goyena. I added "de Hayward".

                               

 

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