Saturday, May 18, 2024

Rosa 'Leander' 18 May 2024

 

She lets him "whisper in her ear, / Flatter, entreat, promise, protest, and swear," and after a series of coy, half-hearted attempts to "defend the fort" she yields to bliss.

Wikipedia - Hero and Leander

 

I met Rosemary sometime in mid-December 1967 and we were married in Coyocán, Mexico on Feb 8 of 1968. It would seem that I was Leander to Rosemary’s Hero.

Rosa ‘Leander’ was hybridized by David Austin in 1982. Sometime around 1989 we bought the rose. We quickly found out that unlike most roses that need lots of sun, Leander managed to grow well in the shade. In our shady Kerrisdale garden she was a pleasant survivor.

When we moved to our small Kitsilano duplex with its small garden, we had to divest ourselves of many  plants, including my hostas and roses. We drove to our daughter Alexandra’s Lillooet where she has one acre garden and our plants found a home there.

But Leander had to come with us. Alas, after a couple of years Leander (I use the name as I don’t want to decide if the plant is a he or a she. I am being gender fluid) died. It is about impossible to find old English Roses (not old but simply from the end of the 20^th century as Austin's first rose, Constance Spry was introduced in 1962) in Vancouver so Rosemary became sad. About a year before Rosemary died her friend Jennifer Lamb brought us a rose she had rescued from a garden. She thought it was Leander. Leander it was and that made Rosemary happy and for me it was wonderful to see how she smiled when I showed her a scan of Leander.

But now in 2024 whenever these roses bloom for the first time as Leander did today I have that question in my head (a futile question it is but I cannot avoid it), “Why Leander and not Rosemary?” How can it be that she is not with me in Kitsilano today enjoying the sun and that bright Leander in all its pretty glory?

And because Leander is remontant, I will be seeing Leander often until the fall.

 

George Bowering

 

George McWhirter

Without wanting to be disrespectful I am losing patience with our Vancouver City Councillors appearing in photo ops in social media particularly when they are pushing culture.

With the demise of our newspapers and with on-line cultural institution promoters who depend on publicists (few exist) to find out what is going on in the city I do not see how we can navigate out of this.

Tomorrow Saturday 18 an institution, The Turning Point Ensemble will be celebrating their 20 year existence at the downtown campus of Simon Fraser University. This stellar musical group plays music of the 20^th and 21^st century. Who reading this knows of them? In New York City they would be famous.

I have stated before that the CBC does not need to sell adds as the Vancouver Sun and The Georgia Straight once did. They could have culture (dance, music, theatre, dance, poetry, novelists) on TV and on the radio. There would be tons of people they could interview.

They don’t. But we know what the traffic is on the bridges and we keep being told of the Vancouver temperature when in fact they get their info from the airport. I believe that the airport is in Richmond and at the height of the tower it is always two degrees colder.

In that last century I had access to celebrities and politicians because I worked for magazines and the Globe and Mail. I have portraits of Sting, Audrey Hepburn, Dennis Hopper and Martin Scorsese.

Access is now denied because these celebrities do not come to Vancouver.  But I am a lucky man because I have access that many people have forgotten.

Vancouver is a city with a poor memory for its past.

Who would know who the first Canadian Parliamentary Poet Laureate was? That would be George Bowering in 2001.

Who would know who the first Vancouver Poet Laureate was? That would be George McWhirter in 2007.

Both these men are over 80 and both have their marbles intact. How do I know? I have the lovely access of being their friends and we talk almost once a week.

McWhirter is of better health while Bowering cannot hear or see very well. He has an electric cart as he cannot walk.  His sense of humour and whit is intact.

These two have contributed lots to our city and to Canada. McWhirter translates into English the poems of the finest living Mexican novelist and poet  Homero Aridjis, right here in Vancouver.

But when they invariably die, as we all do, we will be quick to sing praises on how wonderful they were and how they are missed.

Does anybody care for them now?

It is time that our city Councillors stop appearing in photo ops and doing something to remedy the nebulous cultural problem of our city. With its booming real-estate, Vancouver is going upwards and onwards while culture is moving into the pits.

City Hall, CBC act!

An Open Letter to the City of Vancouver & City Hall 

An Open Letter to the Honourable David Eby - Premier of British Columbia 

An Open Letter to the CBC's Catherine Tait 

An Open Letter to the Lower Mainland's Dance Community

 

Friday, May 17, 2024

Arthur Erickson - 1984

 In geometry, a paraboloid is a quadric surface that has exactly one axis of symmetry and no center of symmetry. The term "paraboloid" is derived from parabola, which refers to a conic section that has a similar property of symmetry. Wikipedia

 

As portrait photographer, at least this one, I have found myself being alone with many of my subjects and experiencing a level of intimacy that is remarkable.

On good example is my relationship with architect Arthur Erickson that began in 1986 and ended a few months before he died in May, 2009.

The picture that illustrates this blog was my first photograph of him. When I contacted Erickson on the phone he told me to take Polaroids of different spots at the Museum of Anthropology at UBC. This I did. On the day of the portrait session I placed the Polaroids on the ground and he picked a two.

Henceforth in my many sessions with the man he opened up to me and we became friends.

When he would come to my studio on Robson and Granville he would tell me, “Alex you have God’s light reflecting into your studio from César Pelli’s Eaton’s across the street.” He knew I would understand as architect Pelli was an Argentine like me.

When I photographed him in his small house on the West Side I asked him why he had bought the place when with the money he had he could have purchased a place with a mountain or sea view. His answer, “I wanted to build something and grow a garden where all I would see would be only what I had built or planted.”

Another time when I was taking his portrait in his garden (he was wearing flip-flops) he said, "It seems you want me to look like Frank Lloyd Wright."

But it was on the last time that I saw him in early 2009 that I have memories that moved me and I feel grateful to have known the man.

I was at a function presided by Diane Farris. I noticed that Erickson was sitting alone at a table. It seemed that nobody wanted to sit with him as by then he was suffering the effects of Alzheimer’s. I sat down at his table and told him, “Arthur it seems to me that your architecture was influenced by the Spanish/Mexican architect Felix Candela.

I can report here that we talked for an hour on the merits of hyperbolic paraboloids (hypars) and how they were made possible by the varying slope of a straight line as seen in the calculus. Of hypars my blog link below explains in detail where hypars come from.

Hypars & Felix Candela

I have written at least 3 blogs on the subject of my discussion with Erickson on hypars. But I still wanted to do it all again. It was that tonight I caught on that in my portrait sessions there is an intimacy that could be lacking when people are interviewed.

 

Thursday, May 16, 2024

Las Tres Comadres

 

 

“...nada está perdido si se tiene por fin el valor de proclamar que todo está perdido y que hay que empezar de nuevo...”

“nothing is lost if one has as a purpose to state that everything is lost and that one has to begin again…” Julio Cortázar

 

My life at 81 can be defined as being a pile of stuff wherever I look. In one of those piles I found a single 35mm colour negative (Kodak Kodacolor) frame. I have no memory of having taken it nor can I discern if I took it in Mexico (probably) or in some trip to Europe with Rosemary.

When I scanned the negative I called it Las Tres Comadres. In Spanish a godfather is a padrino and a godmother is a madrina. The relationship between the godparents and the father or mother of the children is defined as compadre or comadre. As an example my friend Andrew Taylor, who lives in Guadalajara, and is my eldest daugther Alexandra’s godfather, is my compadre.

In Mexico that relationship is a warm one.

But in Mexico (and only in Mexico) comadres is used to define women of a certain age who might be seen gossiping. I saw the three women in my photograph, who are dressed in black, as gossiping women! Why not.

In this century anybody who shoots with a digital camera has in every exposure what is called EXIF metadata. It can not only give you the date and time, but also the geographical location using satellite technology.

 My Kodacolor negative is old technology and even though Borges wrote that in order to remember one must forget, all I can write here is that I have no idea at all about this photograph. It is not all that good or that bad. I just found it challenging to write here about the picture I took that is erased from my memory.

I was bothered by the very white paper next to the women. I could have easily removed it. But I kept it as I wonder what was on that paper.

Wednesday, May 15, 2024

Rosa 'Dr. Huey' - 15 May 2024

 

Rosemary was a strong willed person who would go back to our old Kerrisdale house to retrieve some of the plants we had left behind when we moved to Kitsilano. I did not have the heart or the stamina to return to a house that represented a rosy past (over 100 old roses, in fact). Even today I try to avoid driving on 41^st Avenue so as not to see the Athlone Street sign. This is more so now since Rosemary like our old garden is gone. A similar situation is followed by Joan Didion. I read in her The Year of Magical Thinking that she avoids going to the neighbourhood where she and her husband John Gregory Dunn.

One day a year before she died she brought a rose shrub and told me, “Alex, I found it in our back lane.” A few months later it bloomed. It was multipetalled (not quite that of an English Rose) and it had a yellow centre with yellow stamens. We had never had such a rose. I thought about it and came to this conclusion:

Rosa 'Dr. Huey' is a variety that was bred by Captain George C. Thomas in 1914 and introduced in 1920 by Bobbink and Atkins. It's a Hybrid Wichurana.

That rose was used a lot as a root stock for “better” roses that were grafted to it. Whatever rose we had had in that back lane had died and Dr. Huey simply did its thing. This rose grows all over the United States for the same reason. It is aggressive.

And yet is lovely and very fragrant. It is in a pot in my garden so it is not going to take over or bring my house down!

I started blooming yesterday and I smiled but was saddened at the same time. It survived. Why did not my Rosemary survive?

But the will to live of Dr. Huey, its beauty, its grace is all Rosemary.