Vancouver - March 1992

Robert MacNeil - January 19, 1931 (Montreal) - April 12, 2024

When I met newsman Robert MacNeil in March 1992 I faced an affable and happy man who instantly became interested in the fact that I was Argentine and that I had been in the Argentine Navy as a conscript.

He smiled wide when I told him that from 1958 until 1961 when I was attending a Roman Catholic boarding school, St. Edward’s High School in Austin, Texas that our two favourite TV programs were Have Gun Will Travel and watching Walter Cronkite.

Looking back at that, I think of his quote in today’s New York Times (I scanned my hard copy obituary and it is below), “Television has changed journalism, utterly, not just for television, but for print and everybody else. ‘It’s changed the whole culture and ethos of journalism. And to have been able to hold the line – perhaps Canutelike – against the tide that’s going to engulf us all in the end, for a few years, has been a source of gratification for me.” 2000/2001Archive of American Television. I think that this quote is what makes us now mistrust news information.

Walter Cronkite, Dan Rather and Robert MacNeil would now be seen as boring.

Boring  news had weight.

The Proslogion (Latin: Proslogium, lit. 'Discourse') is a prayer (or meditation), written by the medieval cleric Saint Anselm of Canterbury in 1077–1078, serving to reflect on the attributes of God in order to explain how God can possess seemingly contradictory qualities. This meditation is considered to be the first-known philosophical formulation that sets out the ontological argument for the existence of God.

Wikipedia

Marc Destrubé - my music mentor

Before I proceed to writing about the 4pm concert this coming Saturday at St. Anselm’s Anglican church I would like to point out former CBC Radio man Bill Richardson’s 2004 radio program Bunny Watson (Katherine Hepburn’s name in the 1957 film Desk Set) in which Richardson would introduce two or more themes with no apparent connection and then find them by the end of the program.

I was raised as a Roman Catholic in Buenos Aires and studied at Catholic boarding school in Austin, Texas from 1958 to 1961. It was there where I was taught to read music and I played the alto saxophone for the school marching band and jazz band. My musical education ended there.

At that school we found out that St. Augustine (the Bishop of Hippo) and St. Thomas Aquinas were noted Christian philosophers. How was I to know that the Burgandy-born  St. Anselm (1033/4–1109) was the first man and philosopher to write about the proofs for the existence of God?

And I could not proceed here without pointing out that my Argentine father was an Anglican and all that I possess of him is his King James Bible? In that bible, St. Luke (22:19 records what I think is the most beautiful sentence in any language:  this do in remembrance of me.

It was in past November that I attended my first concert at St. Anselm’s. Marc Destrubé played Johann Sebastian Bach - Partita for solo violin Nº 2 in D minor, BWV 1004 known as the Chaconne.

What made that concert special is Destrubé's way with words in explaining what he was going to do. This is the sort of performance that if one is lucky one will hear it live perhaps once in a lifetime. I had heard it once before played by Monica Huggett.

On Saturday, this amateur music critic can reveal that I have had a musical education of sorts by no less than the man I first heard in 1991 at Ryarson Church play in a concert featuring my fave Vivaldi, his Gloria RV589. I was there with a stopwatch to find out how fast (the faster the better) they would play the work with a difficult trumpet part.

Since then Destrubé has gently educated me with his easy to understand explanations to this neophyte. I know for example that violin bows are made with hair from male horses as female horsed urinate on their tales and this renders the hair not good. And he did tell me that Louis Spohr invented the violin chin rest sometime in the 1820s. Few here might now that Destrubé is the leader of the Smithsonian-based Axelrod Quartet that plays on beautifully filigreed Stradivarius instruments. It was with his locally based Microcosmos Quartet that I heard all of Bartok's and Britten's quartets. Who but Destrubé would allow me to be on my back under a harpsichord during a rehearsal?

Enough with all that. 

I predict that this Saturday, the work by Heinrich Ignatz Biber ( Stráž pod Ralskem, 12 August 1644 – Salzburg, 3 May 1704)  will be played first or last. Why?

Biber was one of the pioneers of something called scordatura. I asked Destrubé to send me a paragraph explaining it. His answer was that he has lots on his plate and could not do it by today Thursday. My Portland baroque stand-up bass player Curtis Daily said that scordatura is playing a violin that is detuned.

When I sent this good Youtube video explaining scordatura Desrubé answered:

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=At0VNSx0pq0

Hi Alex,

Glad you found that.

I should just say that the particular scordatura in the video is a very exceptional one (with the strings crossed); the basic message is right-on though, that the retuning of the strings makes for different sonorities than usual, generally much more resonant ones for playing in a particular key.

Marc

And so I look forward to Saturday’s concert and those lovely moments after with goodies.

Alexandra Elizabeth - 14 on Mayne Island ferry

Recently I have been on this inclination to write about portraits and what makes them so.  I did this here.

The Perfect Portrait

When you have been doing something for a while, if you do not get good at it, that is the time when one should switch careers. At a Vancouver photography class I told my students that they should have a Plan B (plumbing) and a Plan C (electricity). Shortly after that I was fired.

In that other century photographers, particularly magazine and ad photographers, they were directed (pushed) by art directors and design directors. It is that missed direction that has photographers in this century to be rudderless and lost at sea.

My friend writer John Lekich and I often tell each other that we were born and lived in a good century and that this one is one that is not to our pleasure.

In that 20th I learned lots to point that I played a trick for fun but I never told the art directors in question what the game was. In those day days of shooting film, I would take to the magazine the b+w contact sheet or the slides. The art director would pick one of the b+ws or a slide. In the car, just for myself, I had the 8x10 print that was indicated by the art director with a red x-mark on my contact sheet. As for the slide I always knew which one they would pick.

It had little to do with knowing the art director’s likes, but more, that after many years in the business, one knew what was good and what wasn’t.

This brings me to this picture that faces me when I leave my bedroom and step into the stairs to feed my cats and make by breakfast. It is a portrait of my Alexandra when she was 14 (she is now 55) on board the Mayne Island ferry.

There is something about this photograph that pulls me in every time I walk down the stairs. Wind in ferries is good for hair. I have quite a few photographs of my wife, daughters and granddaughters on ferries. But what is this one all about? Had I shown the contact sheet to that art director this one would have been printed and in my car to be brought the next day. I never wanted those art directors to suspect. But perhaps they knew.

Hilary Anne Stewart - Burnaby - Circa 1977

Yesterday in a happy/melancholy feeling I wrote a blog (just below) centering on my eldest daughter Alexandra. Today, a sunny Wednesday I feel I must give my younger daughter Hilary Anne equal time.

Nicely kissing my independence goodbye

When she was born 51 years ago my Rosemary was already on the way of becoming a proto feminist. She said she wanted a name that was epicene for our second daughter. By epicene she meant without sex and that it was up to the person having such a name impose on it their feeling of who and what they were. We chose Hilary (with one l) knowing that in Spanish Hilaria was a terrible sounding name.

Hilary became her name in that she was less brooding than her older sister and she did a lot of smiling even though I have that T-shirt of her crying when she was 2.

To this day she is a happy woman with a semi-crooked smile similar to mine and to my mother’s. In fact Hilary reminds me of my mother.

From my mother and her mother she inherited a sense of good taste and snobbishness in her likes for films. It is because of that taste for good films that she and I frequently go to the Park, the 5^th Ave Cinema, the Rio, the Pacific Cinematheque and the Vancouver Film Festival Theatre. Our routine involves going to a restaurant afterwards. In our last outing to see Perfect Days a few days ago I chose to make Yorkshire pudding (in the style of my Rosemary) with my good beef gravy.

Hilary is the wellness manager of the Burquitlam Safeway so I have a morning pill regimen that I believe keeps me in good health. She notices when I do stuff that may not be safe and immediately informs Ale who then calls me to be careful.

I am taken care of by my two daughters and Niño and Niña give me constant attention and warmth. They are cariñosos (a nice Spanish word that translates to affectionate).

Except for the absence of my Rosemary (something  feel and note at all moments) I think I have little to complain about.

Thank you Hilary and Alexandra.

Alexandra Elizabeth -Burnaby circa 1979

All my life I have attempted to be independent. Now at my age of 81 it is not all that easy.

Every year, sometime in early June, I participate in the open-garden week-end of the Vancouver Rose Society. What this means is that I am now dealing with my garden so that it will be as good as it can in June. 

The perils of opening a garden

In my deck there are some rotten planks. I used to fix those. But I no longer have a saw to cut the planks that I buy at my neighbourhood lumber yard. I was at a loss. I told my Lillooet daughter Alexandra. She went on Google and found a handyman called Edward. Edward called me a couple of hours later and today he visited and inspected my deck. He is a sweet Russian gentleman who was impressed by my Russian submarine clock on my officina door, and when I showed him my Russian Horizont swivel lens camera, he smiled. It seems I am in good hands and he will repair my rotten planks in one or two weeks.

In a long past blog I read what is below. I am quite obsessed with the idea of exploring my memories (which by definition have to be in the past).

In a NYTimes review of André Aciman’s Alibis–Essays on Elsewhere - reviewer Teju Cole writes:

We enjoy with him the satisfactions of coincidences, and of dreaming of pasts in which we dreamed of the future from which we are now dreaming of the past.

It immediately made me think and on my bed with my two cats on top of me, I glanced at the two portraits I took of Hilary and Alexandra sometime in 1979 when we lived in Burnaby. I took both photographs, in which I sandwiched a Patterson Screen with my colour negative in my enlarger, to a U-Frame-It store in New Westminster.  Both photographs have faded because they have been exposed to light all these years. When I scanned Ale’s photograph I was able to fix it. But I have noticed that the correct version seen here becomes overly yellow in both Facebook and Twitter. What is afoot with them?

I look at the sad look on her face. It seems that even then I was not keen on making my subjects smile. I love the sadness in her eyes which now somehow reflects the loss of her mother three years ago and her concern over her old father living alone with two cats.

Those little adults & their unsmiling faces

Between my Hilary calling me up every day and making sure we see a good film at a theatre together and Ale getting me a good handyman I can state, unequivocally, that it feels fine not to be completely independent.