Saturday, January 03, 2026

Book - Len Deighton's Cookstrip Cook Book - Zippo pipe lighter & cigar end cutters

 

In Mexico City in 1962, I was the definition of a nerd even though the word had not yet been invented. I was going to Mexico City College (recently I found out that William S. Burroughs studied there in the 50s) and studying engineering (not successfully). I decided to start smoking a pipe to give me some sort of class. I did not smoke cigarettes as back at St. Edward’s High School in Austin my school friends had handed me a Marlboro which exploded. They laughed and gave me another one. It exploded, too. 

I started smoking a brand that was considered the best in its time. It was called Edgeworth. Little by little I adopted all the mystique and tradition and started buying more pipes. The formula is that you never smoked the same pipe twice in a day so you needed as many pipes as you would smoke in one day and multiply that by the pipes you smoked in a month and resting them for a week.

 When I was in the Argentine Navy as a conscript form 1965, 66, 67, I was the only sailor allowed to smoke a pipe at his desk (at the US Naval Advisory Group). The American non-commissioned officers provided me with tins of Edgeworth. It was back in Mexico that I enjoyed a Scottish blend called Three Nuns advertised as “None Nicer”. While I was sort of a purist I rarely lit my pipes with a wooden match but with a my brass Zippo lighter.

In the late 60s my mother taught in Veracruz so I began to smoke thin cigars called Flor de La Costa. It was one evening in the late 80s when I was in the Mayan ruins of Palenque. that I had a magical night. By evening it was unattended so I decided to spend the night inside the main pyramid. I was attacked by mosquitoes but saved by those Veracruz cigars. In the early 70s I taught at a Jesuit University, Universidad Iberoamericana. In the photo below I am smoking a pipe made of pyrolitic rubber/plastic. I was allowed to smoke it in class.

 

 

In Vancouver by 1975, in the late 70s I started working with a urbane writer called Ben Metcalf. He was all about Hemingway, France, good wines, single malt whiskey and expensive cigars. I started smoking Monte Cristo Claros (15$ a shot and Americans when they came to Vancouver bought them) and H. Upmann, both of Cuban origin. It was the fact that I was smoking the Cohibas (also Cuban), when I photographed Robbie Robertson smoking one, that we connected and I got my fine portrait.

 

Robbie Robertson - October 1994

It may have been about 23 years ago, when I was in my Kerrisdale dark room and I became very dizzy as I was smoking a cigar in the unventilated room when I told myself, “This is stupid.” And I quit pipes and cigars. Rosemary stopped putting breath mints on my bed side table.

Few reading this might know why the Montecristo cigars were called by that name. Years ago Cuban women rolled cigars on their leg thighs. This is how Cuban cigars were made. They were entertained by a reader. Their favourite book was The Count of Montecristo.

And most reading this will understand how stupid I must have looked shooting punk bands at the Commodore while smoking a pipe.

 

 

 

Friday, January 02, 2026

Bud Kanke at Joe Fortes - November 1995

 

Sometime in the late 90s at a gallery opening of the Exposure Gallery I was talking to a woman photographer who like me had photos up on the wall in what was a group show. She had graduated from Simon Fraser at the same time as my youngest daughter Hilary. She told me, “Alex I could never photograph sewing machines like you once did.”

Some years back Vancouver Magazine art director Rick Staehling had dispatched me to photograph some sewing machines. Because my Rosemary told me we need the money (all the time) I did not protest. If anything Staehling taught me to be humble and to not be a one-trick-pony. Had the woman been a man I might have punched him. I didn’t.

In social media and in my Vancouver Sun I learned that prolific restaurateur Bud Kanke died on Christmas Eve. I had no memory of having photographed him. Today I went to my files and found him under the letter B. I believe I may have taken the photograph at Joe Fortes and the woman at the table may have been his wife Dotty. I also noticed that he is serving a wind labelled Kanke.

I am happy to find out that the folks at Vancouver Magazine gave me lots of jobs that were not really artistic. But they were, indeed important.

Thank you Malcolm Parry (editor) and Rick Staehling. 

Writers in Latin American countries like to call themselves cronistas (chroniclers). Carlos Fuentes, a Mexican was one of the most famous. In an important way for this city Malcolm Parry's Vancouver Magazine served to chronicle the happenings (not all important) of our city. We were lucky. Who is doing that now? 

Thursday, January 01, 2026

On my wall

 

 

 

 

I have written many a time how Latin American authors sometimes call themselves cronistas (chroniclers) and they write about the change they notice in their environment. One famous chronicler was Mexican Carlos Fuentes who in the title of his first novel (The Most Transparent Region) was met by incredulity as at the time Mexico City was suffering terrible pollution.

A menudo escribo sobre esa curiosidad tan latinoamaricana de muchos escritores se llaman cronistas ya que escriben de los cambios que notan en su medio ambiente. Uno de estos cronistas fue el mexicano Carlos Fuentes. Su primera novela La región mas transparente recibió mucha confusión ya que ya para esa fecha la ciudad de Méxícot tenía cielos no muy transparentes.

Carlos Fuentes y "La región más transparente" su novela debut (1958), es un retrato polifónico de la Ciudad de México postrevolucionaria, donde la "transparencia" no es literal, sino una metáfora de la búsqueda de la verdad social y moral, contrastando la idealización de El Valle de México (Alfonso Reyes) con la realidad compleja y a menudo corrupta de una metrópoli en mutación, explorando identidades, clases y la búsqueda de la democracia en el México moderno.

Carlos Fuentes’s La Región Mas Transparente is a 1958 debut novel. It is a polyphonic portrait of Mexico City, not literal but a metaphor for the search for social and moral truth. It contrasts with the ideal one of  El Valle de México by Alfonso Reyes in contrast to the reality an often corrupt one of a metropolis in change, and exploring identities, social classes and the search for democracy in a modern Mexico.

I believe that it is this desire to chronicle important events that led me to instantly find two Argentine authors, Jorge Luís Borges and Julio Cortázar who wrote about the new year. Below what they wrote in both English and Spanish.

Creo que por el hecho de que los escritores latinoamericanos les gusta ser cronistas encontré inmediatamente dos pequeños ensayitos  por Jorge Luís Borges y Julio Cortázar sobre el año nuevo. Los ensayos siguen en español e inglés.

“Como siempre a esta altura del año, me invade un gran deseo de volver a ver a los viejos amigos, tan alejados ya por esas mil razones que la vida nos va obligando a acatar poco a poco. Usted también, creo, es sensible a la amable melancolía de una sobremesa en la que nos hacemos la ilusión de haber sido menos usados por el tiempo, como si los recuerdos comunes nos devolvieran por un rato el verdor perdido.”

Julio Cortázar

 

"As always at this time of year, I'm overcome by a strong urge to see old friends again, so distant now due to the many reasons life slowly makes us accept. I think you're also sensitive to the gentle melancholy of a long chat after a meal, where we pretend we haven't been as worn down by time, as if our shared memories could give us back our lost youth for a while". Julio Cortázar

 

Final de año

Ni el pormenor simbólico

de reemplazar un tres por un dos

ni esa metáfora baldía

que convoca un lapso que muere y otro que surge

ni el cumplimiento de un proceso astronómico

aturden y socavan

la altiplanicie de esta noche

y nos obligan a esperar

las doce irreparables campanadas.

La causa verdadera

es la sospecha general y borrosa

del enigma del Tiempo;

es el asombro ante el milagro

de que a despecho de infinitos azares,

de que a despecho de que somos

las gotas del río de Heráclito,

perdure algo en nosotros:

inmóvil,

algo que no encontró lo que buscaba.

Jorge Luís Borges

 

 

END OF YEAR – Jorge Luís Borges

 

Not even the minutiae of replacing a three with a two,

not even the empty metaphor

that summons an agonizing year and another that emerges,

nor the fulfillment of a convoluted astronomical deadline

surrounded with cataclysms of clappers and shouts,

can undermine this serene midnight plateau,

even as they make us wait

with a fantastic display of doom and gloom,

for the twelve dark chimes.

The true cause of our fascination

is the universal, fuzzy suspicion

of the metaphysical possibilities of Time,

it is the bewilderment of the miracle

that in spite of such infinite alternatives

something may sometimes persist in us

motionless.

 

 

 

Wednesday, December 31, 2025

Pedro Meyer - 1 December 2025, Coyoacán, México

 

 Pedro Meyer - 91

If I became a reasonably good photographer and I look at that career from the vantage point of today December 31st I can ascertain that it is all due to the fact I had many fabulous mentors that began with my parents and grandmother, the Brothers of Holy Cross at St. Edward’s High School in Austin and many more.

 Because I am 83 a product of a century when most people died in their 70s, I have outlived all my mentors except for a few. Two important ones are ex Vancouver Magazine editor Malcolm Parry and art director (also for that magazine) Chris Dahl.

 

Chris Dahl & Malcolm Parry

Just when I thought all that was over and I could just quit and wait for my oblivion I went to Mexico City on December 1^st to photograph 91 year-old photographer Pedro Meyer. What I faced with my camera was a very busy photographer who uses a digital Leica to take his photographs. Since two years ago he became almost blind he is only able to discern light and shadow and some movement.

A man so excited about photography at that age has given me the push to keep doing my plant scans, portraits and writing my now over 6700 blogs.

Against statistics I have a mentor much older than I am.

I like to associate. A few days ago my Portland visitor Curtis Daily and I went to the Polygon Gallery to see the Lee Miller show. I was particularly drawn to Miller’s great inspirations in Man Ray’s darkroom reversal prints that are called solarized. I have one that happened to me by accident. But this b+w negative portrait that I took of Meyer reversed in Photoshop will do just fine.

Solarized Isis 

 

Isis

Thank you, gracias señor, por la inspiración, for the inspiration, de continuar con lo hago, to continue with what I do. Twenty twenty six promises to be a productive one for me.