Friday, April 19, 2024

Rosemary in Venice 2021

 

Anemone coronaria 'Carmel Pastel Mix' - 19 April 2024

In my years as a magazine (etc) photographer in Vancouver the most important consideration I ever had when I was about to take a photograph was the word justification.

This meant that I had to have a good reason for taking the photograph and the methodology behind it.

Today is Rosemary’s birthday. She was born April 19 1944. This date has always been one I cannot forget as my Arrgentine birth certificate states I was born April 18, 1943. That is nonsense as I was born on August 31, 1942.

Rosemary and my daughters always made the joke that I liked to celebrate both my birthdays.

Today is Rosemary’s birthday. I feel compelled to write this blog. My youngest daughter Hilary said I did not have to write anything.

Yesterday she and I went to see a wonderful one-woman play based on Joan Didion’s  book The Year of Magical Thinking.

 I have embedded in my head that she said in an interview to the New York Times:

 “I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.”

 This makes it obvious that I have to figure out how I am handling a beautiful sunny day with my Rosemary.

And so I will bring that word, justification, here again.

My patio had this very nice pot of Anemone coronaria ‘Carmel Pastel Mix’. Rosemary adored Anemone blanda. In my scan records I have no Anemone coronaria. I know she would have loved these. I also know she would have been upset if I had snipped them for today’s scanning. She is not here. In her memory I look at these Anemones and while I miss her intensely I smile just a tad.

 

Rosemary with her Anemone blanda August 2020

 

Cameron Wilson

 

The Sea and the Bells is a work I wrote in the winter and spring of 2003-04. It was commissioned by the Vancouver Philharmonic Orchestra and premiered in February 2004 with the orchestra and soprano Rosalind Beale Dala. It is dedicated to the memory of my friend and colleague Wallace Leung who tragically passed away in early 2002. The piece is based on poems by Pablo Neruda and is scored for soprano soloist and orchestra.

Neruda was Wallace’s favourite poet and these poems are among the last Neruda ever wrote. They deal with his longing to retreat from life’s noisy busyness and include the final love song to his wife. They are deeply personal poems, expansive and universal.

To accompany these majestic words I wrote music in the style of the various genres that Wallace loved; everything from spaghetti westerns to musical theatre.

This is only the second ever performance of this work It is an honor for me to have the VPO perform it again many years later with Evelyn Thatcher, Wallace’s fiancé at the time of his passing, singing the soprano solo.

Cameron Wilson

There is something about Vancouver, which some people consider to be a cultural backwater, that features a group like the Vancouver Philharmonic Orchestra (started in the 60s) and the Turning Point Ensemble now celebrating its 20^th anniversary.

My introduction to the Vancouver Philharmonic Orchestra began a little before Wilson’s The Sea and the Bells. Somehow I met up with the orchestra’s Spanish conductor Juan Castelao who had taken the direction of the orchestra after Wallace Leung’s death.

Castelao had unusual ideas. One of them involved having the orchestra play the first symphonies of well-known composers. In my memory was Bruckner’s first. In a recent communication with Castelao, who now lives in Valencia and is a musicologist, he wrote that it was Bruckner’s Zero Symphony!

In that premiere (which I attended) of Wilson’s composition the soprano, Rosalind Beal Dala I now know is Leslie Dala’s wife.

Dala and Wilson have something in common. I believe that when they arrive home (not usual as they have busy schedules) their family forgets who they are and what they look like! They are peripatetic (look it up).

For me the idea that Leung would consider Pablo Neruda his favourite poet makes me smile as Neruda was an avowed communist just like Cuban Nicolás Guillén.

Nicolás Guillén   

 

Chilean's know this: Pablo Neruda's original name was Eliécer Neftalí Reyes Basoalto (Parral 12 July 1904 - 23 September 1973) It is now believed that he was poisoned to death by the authorities. Here is the introduction to Pablo Neruda’s book The Sea and the Bells

 

Inicial

Hora por hora no es el día,

es dolor por dolor:

el tiempo no se arruga,

no se gasta:

mar, dice el mar,

sin tregua,

tierra, dice la tierra:

el hombre espera.

 

 

Y solo

su campana

allí está entre las otras

guardando en su vacío

un silencio implacable

que se repartirá cuando levante

 su lengua de metal ola tras ola.

 

De tantas cosas que tuve,

 andando de rodillas por el mundo,

 aquí, desnudo,

 no tengo más que el duro mediodía

 del mar, y una campana.

 

 

Me dan ellos su voz para sufrir

y su advertencia para detenerme.

 

Esto sucede para todo el mundo:

continúa el espacio.

Y vive el mar.

Existen las campanas.

Thursday, April 18, 2024

Julie-anne Saroyan - Corey Philly - Melanie Yeats - 18 April 2024

 

 

I took the bags [after Dunne’s death] of his clothes] to St. James’. One day, a few weeks later, I gathered up more bags and took them to John’s office where he had kept his clothes. I was not yet prepared to address the suits and shirts and jackets but I thought I could handle what remained of the shoes, a start.

I stopped at the door of the room. I could not give away the rest of the shoes. I stood there for a moment, then realized why: he would need shoes if he was to return. The recognition of this thought by no means eradicated the thought.

I have still not tried to determine (say by giving away the shoes) if the thought has lost its power.

The Year of Magical Thinking

 

Joan Didion - the shoes 

Joan Didion - the ordinary instant

Today is my Argentine birth certificate birthday, April 18, 1943. Tomorrow is my Rosemary's real birthday, April 19 1944. My father forgot to register me when I was born 31 August 1942.

I am placing these dates here because in tonight’s play The Year of Magical Thinking at Burnaby’s Shadbolt Centre for the Arts, the director Melanie Yeats chose like Didion to emphasize the importance of dates.

This one-woman play, Corey Philley, with sparse and elegant production by Julie-anne Saroyan where you cannot possibly sit comfortably in your chair. You are on the edge not wanting to miss what Philley is going to say. The play is 90 minutes long (no intermission) but time seems to pass quickly. Those who have read Didion’s book (I have) are alert as to what director Melanie Yeats will pick from the book.

I was especially hoping that Philley would, in her impersonation of Didion, might mention John Gregory Dunne’s shoes.

She did!

It was satisfying but anybody who listened to everything else that was said tonight would know that Didion would never forget, (and leave behind) the memory of her husband’s death (30 December 2003) and her daughter Quintana (26 August  2005).

My Rosemary died on 9 December 2020 and Didion on 23 December 2021. I started reading The Year of Magical Thinking on October 2021. I was astounded from the beginning to find out that Didion started writing the book two days after Dunne died.

I have now read all of Didion’s book essays and while I have lost my melancholy for my loss I find that have a companion in my grief. That Didion is dead, makes no difference.

Tomorrow Saturday is the last showing of the play. I recommend it highly.                       

Wednesday, April 17, 2024

 

 

Trivet : late Middle English: apparently from Latin tripes, triped- ‘three-legged’, from tri- ‘three’ + pes, ped- ‘foot’.

 

Every day as I look around my small Kitsilano home I am overwhelmed by the stuff in it. That the stuff is all high quality does not help me. Rosemary and I had a penchant for acquiring beautiful ceramics, antique furniture, rugs, a 120 year old Chickering baby grand piano, books (expensive ones) and added to all that many expensive and rare plants for our garden.

 Every wall in the house has a framed photograph or painting. I keep thinking as I have since Rosemary died on December 9 2020 what will happen to all of this? What will my two daughters do?

 I have made sure that my life insurance no longer has Rosemary as my benefactor. It has been changed so my daughters will get the money when I meet my oblivion.

My worst concern and worry (somehow becoming less important as I mature into real old age) is what to do with my extensive photographic files (digital and analog). I know that donating it all to an archive is fruitless. I believe that an archive is where documents and photographs die.

 But I cannot proceed here without some levity. What you see here are 7 ceramic trivets and four Mexican woven ones.

Rosemary always wanted to have a Victorian crank table. We had one for our Athlone, Kerrisdale home. She made sure that the lacquered top was protected by a plastic under tablecloth and over that a collection of nice tablecloths. Whenever possible she would buy a trivet.

In Spanish a trivet is a trébedes and even though the word is in plural it is used as singular.

 Its definition by the RAE (Real Academia Española) is no different from its etymology in English.

 RAE - Trébedes: Del lat. tripes, -ĕdis 'que tiene tres pies'.

Tuesday, April 16, 2024

 

Having lived in four countries (Argentina, Mexico, USA[Texas] and Canada I have met quite a few remarkable women . Of one of them, my Rosemary Elizabeth Healey Waterhouse-Hayward , I have written about lots in these parts.

There is one woman that was featured in one of my first blogs in March 2006. I think I want to revisit it with more detail.

March 1, 2006 blog

Sara López Colodrero the Irureta Goyena was married to my uncle Antonio de Irureta Goyena. They had a son Jorge Wenceslao (alive and well now living half of the year in Buenos Aires and the other half in in Goya, Province of Corrientes). We were good friends.

Left to right - my mother, me, my grandmother, Tía Sarita, Uncle Tony & Wency- my mother and grandmother are wearing Filipino dresses and my Uncle Tony a Filipino Barong Tagalog

 

It was in 1950 when my mother hired a photographer to take portraits of us in our long and narrow garden in the Buenos Aires neighbourhood of Coghlan (named after an English railway engineer). The  photographs are inside a nice red leather album that I have in my possession.

My Tía Sarita had an aunt caller Raquel who owned a very large ranch called Santa Teresita in Corrientes. It was perhaps in 1951 that Tía Sarita, Uncle Tony, Wency, my mother and I boarded a stern paddle wheeler that took us up on the Paraná River to the capital of the Province of Corrientes, Goya. On the way we would spot yacarés (crocodile in the indigenous language of Northern Argentina and Paraguay, Guaraní which is far more melodious than Italian ). From Goya we went on an open bed truck in the evening to Santa Teresita. Such was the transparency of the sky that I could have read a book in the massive brilliance of the Southern sky where I could spot the Southern Cross. 

Alex & Wency

 

An epiphany of light & the Southern Cross
 

The ranch was big enough that it took de sol a sol (from sunup to sundown) on a horse to traverse it.

One day I saw a gaucho leaning against a tree sipping on a mate. It was a routine as he was there every day until one day he wasn’t. I asked Tía Raquel what had happened. She told me that another gaucho had borrowed the mate without permission so the under-the-tree gaucho had knifed and killed him. Tía Sarita had told him to vanish so that the authorities would not find him.

One day we went swimming in the Río Corrientes. We were not allowed to enter the water until a gaucho on a horse went into the river and trotted around. It seems that those nasty piranhas did not like the smell of a horse and would go to other parts.

In all of this was my Tía Sarita who said little and smiled even less. One hot afternoon I was told to take a siesta. Outside my window I heard my mother and Tía Sarita chatting. My mother was told, “Our boys are almost men. Next year when we return (we didn’t) we should have them lie with two indias  so they can find out what it is to be a man.”

Before I left Argentina, after my military service in the Argentine Navy, sometime in October of 1966, I visited my Tía Sarita. She gave me three gifts. One was Sóngoro Cosongo by Cuban poet Nicolás Guillen. She placed in my hand a switchblade and told me I need to protect myself in my journey back to my mother in Mexico in an Argentine merchant marine ship. The third gift was a little bottle of whale oil so that my switchblade would open quickly.

Looking back at this women I can state that she was singly responsible for introducing me to poetry (a poetry I could understand. This led to discovering that other Cuban, he the inventor of magic realism, Alejo Carpentier and more recently the Cuban Raymond Chandler, Leonardo Padura.

I cannot write her for sure if it was because of her or my grandmother that I was introduced to Ernesto Lecuona who my grandmother said was the Cuban Gershwin. Below is a link to my fave composition of his La Malagueña. There is another Malagueña composed by Mexican Agustín Lara.

The date inside my Sóngoro Cosongo of 1967 in the leading photograph is wrong. It should be 1966