Friday, September 23, 2022

 

My neighbour's dahlia - 21 September 2022

 

The Spanish word desganado translates to listless. I prefer the Spanish term. Ganas is about wanting to do something. The preceding des renders it to not wanting to do something (or anything).

My friend John Lekich often used to tell me when I experienced something strange by telling me, “It is natural because it is spring (or he would add, summer, fall or winter).”

I believe my listlessness is not seasonal. It is part grief over my Rosemary’s death (why is that word now almost always replaced by that euphemistic passing?), my being 80, (that Oxford Comma) and losing friends and family almost every day. I want to call existential angst. 

  

It is not clinical depression. To begin with any counsellor I might go to would not know who Hegel or Sartre was. My feeling these days is of finding little will to keep on. My friend, architect Abraham Rogatnick told me a year before he died, "I am not long for this world and I am glad for it."

When I started blogging in 2006 I remember my obsession to blog every day even when we travelled. I would go to internet cafes.

Now my desire to blog is not a pressing one. I postpone from one day to the next. I walk the cats, cook to feed myself. I make my food very spicy and my tea very strong. My sense of taste is fading.

I never thought I would ever say that I am not interested in women. I can no longer abide in seeing women in tight yoga pants. I would define this century as the “Age of Cleavage”. I am tired of that. I enjoy women in dresses.

One of my daughters some months ago warned me that if I fell for some woman not to give her everything I own. I was shocked as at my present age I am only interested in one woman and that is Rosemary. The thought of any other woman is anathema to me.

The affection I crave of my wife sharing our bed is partially satisfied by my two cats who compete to get as close as they can when I turn off the lights.

The meaning of the day (while being aware that I am WTD, waiting to die) is satisfied a tad by my plant scanning. I know that my 3000 scans mean nothing to most people but I love them and each time I scan a plant it is just like that first time back in one lazy and hot afternoon in August of 2002.

With very few exceptions, my ethical system is that I scan only the plants in my garden (which was our garden).

The scanograph illustrating this blog is an exception that I will try to justify.

Since it is already fall, dahlias are everywhere and social media is full of macro photographs of pristine and colourful specimens.

The dahlia here is a Greek neighbour’s. He is currently visiting his home country. I snipped it and scanned it. It is lovely because it is not perfect or pristine.

Not that it is all that comparable; my other scan here is of my Asahi Pentax S3 which I purchased used in Mexico City in 1962. It served me well even in Vancouver from1975 until 1980. It works perfectly and I adore the exposed brass. 

Pentax and dahlia. Will my desgane be replaced by just a tad of enthusiasm?     

Wednesday, September 21, 2022

 

Lalita's feet

My feet

My Spanish Dictionary RAE defines pié (foot) as my legs' extremities and it says the root is from Latin. 

Pedis translates as “of the foot”.

Del lat. pes, pedis.

This has always confused me and I will explain why before I continue in this blog that is all about feet.

If pedis relates to feet why are pediatricians doctors that specialize on children and the foot doctor is a podiatrist?

It was sometime in the late 90s when I was often exhibited my nudes at Exposure Gallery group shows. A woman I did not know came up to me and said, “Alex why is it that you do not have any photographs showing feet?” I answered that I thought feet were the ugliest part of the body. Going home I realized that the woman had challenged me and I had to answer it in some way. 

Peggy modern dancer

By then I was taking pictures of ballerinas and modern dancers. Most of them had terrible looking feet and few even wanted to show them to me.

Lauri Stallings - ballerina

There was a beautiful server at the Number 5 Orange Street Strip Club called Lalita who resembled Sophia Loren. I asked her if she would pose for me. In my studio, using percentages she said, “Alex you can photograph 20% of this and 30% of that." When Tony Ricci who ran the Number 5 found out I had just photographed Lalita’s feet he was incredulous, "You mean you only photographed her feet?"

Your Feet - and upon the water, until they found me - Lalita

 My second opportunity with feet came with an exceptionally beautiful woman called Susan. With her I pretty went almost to 100% in exposure.

The Jeweler's feet  Susan

My Rosemary had legs that rivalled my mother’s. Her legs were perhaps 50% of the reason why approached her in Mexico City in 1967 and married her in 1968. 

In the Footsteps of my Mother's Feet

Rosemary had feet problem caused by wearing bad shoes that might  have been too small. Ultimately she had an operation to straighten her toes.

My mother’s legs and feet were beautiful and I believe I inherited them. I am not sure if my legs are what attracted Rosemary to me.

Alexandra & Rosemary

Some 20 years ago I went on a magazine assignment to write and photograph west Florida. In one place that I stayed I was offered a full massage or a pedicure. I was much too shy for the first so I opted for the second. I was taken to a long room that had many women all having their feet done. I sat down. The conversation that I overheard was so intimate that I blushed. My pedicure person upon seeing my feet remarked that they looked like the feet of someone a lot younger. I explained that I had been an eight and a half for many years and that my shoes fit me so well I did not have callouses or bunions.

The photograph of my feet I took today. Not bad?

Tuesday, September 20, 2022

Bob Olson - I992

 Robert Carl Martin Olson - June 29 1940 - Hannepin County, Minneapolis - September 15 2022

At the American Hosta Society National Convention I had lunch with a lovely man who was very frail.  Janet Mills, the designer (a fine one) of the Hosta Journal told me I was lucky as he did not lunch with anybody else.

I told him that as an Argentine I think a lot about the poems of Jorge Luís Borges who wrote many on the theme of wondering if he was closing a door for the first time or if his reflection on a mirror would be the last one he would ever see.

I elaborated on the idea that the Minneapolis convention would be my last one. I had met Bob in 1992 in the Columbus, Ohio Convention (my first one). It seemed that so many of the people we had known were all gone. His reply was, “I understand, Alex.”

Clearly I was out of line and when I returned to Vancouver I wrote to him that both of us (I am 80) would be alive for next year’s Iowa Convention and that we would laugh lots.

It was not to be.

While I have been an important magazine photographer in Vancouver and in Canada, Bob was one of the first mentors I ever had who suggested I might be a good writer and write for the Hosta Journal. This I did. I was proud as the Bob Olson/ Janet Mills had to be and has to be one the most beautiful plant magazines.

Thanks to Bob I was assigned to many magazine jobs as a writer.

Alex Summers & Gene - 1992

 

To me the roses and hostas in my garden all have the face of the people I knew. Many of these plants are the face of my Rosemary who died on December 9, 2020. 

 

Claire Richards 1992

 

Perhaps the funniest story about a hosta is the one about Hosta ‘Invincible’. I asked Paul Aden why he called it that. His answer was succinct, “I named her after my mother-in-law.

 

Paul Aden - 1992

 

Alex Summers was full of garden knowledge. He told me that it took 3 years to plan and grow a garden. You needed three more years for it to mature. Then you enjoyed it on the 7^th. But you had to begin all over again on the eighth. He further elaborated that in a garden you needed elevation, shade and water. You had to make sure you heard the water.

In the 2003 Falls Church Convention we were accompanied by our 6 year-old granddaughter Rebecca. Nobody seemed to want to sit next to Alex Summers in the garden tour buses as few could understand his very intelligent mumbling. That is how Rebecca and Alex became friends. She was also befriended by Mildred Seaver and they exchanged their reasoning for their like of the colour blue. Mildred gave her a blue plush toy animal. Mildred told me at the time that her favourite hosta was Hosta tokudama "Aureo Nebulosa

Mildred Seaver - 1992

 

Somewhere in my photo vaults there is a photograph of Rebecca and C.H. Falstad observing koi at a convention garden. 

It was George Schmid who taught me that there were not shade loving plants. He said they were shade tolerant.

All the above is to stress that the faces of my hostas are happy and warm people. I plan to go to the Ames Convention next year. I will miss Bob but I plan to make new friends so I can put more faces on my Vancouver hostas.

Bob Solberg - 1992

 

Glen Draper - 1992

C.H. Falstad

Mary Chastain - 1992

Warren Polock - 1992

Wolfram Geoge Smith - 1992

Tony Avent - 1992

Monday, September 19, 2022

 

Left -  Rosa 'Sombreuil' & Right - Rosa 'Margaret Merril' 18 September 2022

OPOSICIONES FONOLÓGICAS

 

posa

pesa

pisa

pasa

¡qué poco te exige la vida!

 Efraín Jara Idrovo (Cuenca, 26 de febrero de 1926​-Ib., 8 de abril de 2018)

 

It is impossible to properly translate the above my most frequent discovery of an Ecuadorean poet and writer. The poem in Spanish works with similar for-letter words that begin with p. Here is a translation of the meaning.

 

Poses, weighs, steps. Passes – How little life demands from you!

 

In finding this poet at this later stage of my life (80), it feels like opening the window in a stuffy and hot car. The poem has really nothing to do with my scan of the white roses in bloom in today’s garden.

But it the poem and the roses do make me aware of Idrovo’s statement that life demands little of one.

My mentor Brother Edwin Reggio, C.S.C. told our class one day in the late 50s in Austin,  that we were born with but one goal/purpose. This was to find out what we could do well. Our path then became one of doing it. He warned us that in not doing it this would amount to a tragedy.

 Looking at my career in photography which now seems to have been an easy one, perhaps it happened because of that awareness that Brother Edwin inculcated in me.

At my age I could be watching TV or sleeping, or as I often told Rosemary  "WTD" (waiting to die). Finding happiness in cutting the white roses today; arranging them on my scanner bed, (Oxford comma!) and then going through the entertaining process makes me reflect on the luck of having met Brother Edwin and the fact that my Rosemary loved white roses.

It is as simple as that and the Ecuadorean poet would certainly agree and with very few words.