Friday, May 16, 2025

Two Kodachromes

 

Two Kodak colour negatives

I have a friend who is unhappy about living in this century and tells me how lucky we (he includes me) to have lived most of our life in that 20^th century.

He may be right is some ways as many from my family and writers I worked with in that last century are all dead. But there is something to be said about stuff like Wikipedia or that my local Kitsilano Public Library will email to tell me that a book I ordered is available for pick up.

I sometimes harp on how lucky we were as photographers to have been pushed by pushy art directors to do stuff we did not want to do and that, invariably, they were right. They pushed us out of our everyday comfort zone.

Vancouver Magazine art director Rick Staehling, a serious movie fan, liked to use a concept he called cross-casting. As an example I was well known for my portraits so he sent me to cover a Socred convention in Whistler. I was out of my element. I had to try very hard. He was right.

Now in this century I have discovered the wonders of combining 20^th century technology with that of this century. I have a huge filing system of thousands of negatives and slides. I have come up with the idea of doing what I called scanner (EpsonV700) negative sandwiches without mayonnaise.  I look for 2 (sometimes 3) negatives and put one on top of the other. Best results happen if the negatives (or slides) are from the same session. I scan them. And wonderful they are! They are a sort of mechanical version of Photoshop layers.

I believe, considering that I have scanned well over 3000 plants from my garden, that the scanner is the lost version this century of last century’s fax machine.

I get at least two requests per month from above board American and Canadian institutions willing to pay me very well if I can send them via WeTransfer a photograph that they want. I go to my files (if they are film) scan them and send them. I have two exterior hard drives for all the digital photographs I take. I make money really not doing much.

Yes, we live in a good century if you are a photographer, but an old one who remembers stuff from that ancient 20th..

Rosa 'Charles de Mills' 16 May 2026

 

When people come to visit me and go out into the garden, at about now when my roses are beginning to Bloom, they ask me, “Alex which is your favourite Rose?”

My answer is the usual one, “It depends on the day.”

These people when they ask me about how I scan my roses I tell them that the most important part of it is to walk through the garden and the roses talk to me, “Alex scan me today.” They cannot comprehend how I sometimes acknowledge them and answer, “Will do.”

Every rose in my garden has the face of my Rosemary or a story on how and why she liked it. Every rose in my garden, when I look at her (some roses like Rosa ‘Benjamin Britten’ are “him”), brings their ancient lore to my mind. For one there is the fact that no fossils of roses have ever been found south of the equator. Or that my species rose, Rosa omeiensis sericea var. pteracntha (in my garden) is the only one with four petals instead of five.

Today I saw my first bloom of Rosa ‘Charles de Mills’. It is a Gallica rose introduced around 1786 that uniquely blooms more than once (in rose lore it is said to be remontant). Gallicas, originally grown in France, are hardy to zone 3. This means that my daughter Alexandra can grow it in her frigid and hot Lillooet.

There is another reason I adore Charles de Mills. Its appearance is described as blooms that have a unique flattened, quartered form. In my language it means that from the side, the blooms look like they have been sharply cut with a razor blade.

And so today, 16 May, 2025 Rosa ‘Charles de Mills’ is my favourite. On the other hand I also scanned Rosa ‘Olivier Roellinger’today. I predict it will be my fave tomorrow and will write about it.

Thursday, May 15, 2025

Captain Beefheart - January 17, 1981

 

Ashtray Heart – Captain Beefheart -1980

You used me like an ashtray heart

Case of the punks

Right from the start

I feel like a glass shrimp in a pink panty

With a saccharine chaperone

Make invalids out of supermen

Call in a “shrink”

And pick you up in a girdle

You used me like an ashtray heart

Right from the start

Case of the punks

Another day, another way

Somebody’s had too much to think

Open up another case of the punks

Each pillow is touted like a rock

The mother / father figure

Somebody’s had too much to think

Send your mother home your navel

Case of the punks

New hearts to the dining rooms

Violet heart cake

Dissolve in new cards, boards, throats, underwear

Ashtray heart

You picked me out, brushed me off

Crushed me while I was burning out

Then you picked me out

Like an ashtray heart

Hid behind the curtain

Waited for me to go out

A man on a porcupine fence

Used me for an ashtray heart

Hit me where the lover hangs out

Stood behind the curtain

While they crushed me out

You used me for an ashtray heart

You looked in the window when I went out

You used me like an ashtray heart.

 

The above lyrics are often in my mind. They were today, more and more. I contemplate my existence in a Kitsilano duplex with the company of brother and sister cats (Niño and Niña) in which I have daily a pattern of feeding the cats, paying bills, cleaning the house and figuring what I will eat. Few call me. At the most I can count on my youngest daughter Hilary’s phone call.  

I have no sense of purpose, and more so with the idea of my utility to others. Almost laughingly (not quite), I tell my two daughters that I will be more useful when I am dead as they will inherit money.

Having the time to think, I do a lot of it. Most of it is about how I cannot live without the physical presence of my Rosemary. Four years later I am in no better shape. We shared 52 years. I cannot adapt to living alone. The distractions of meeting, not too often,  people I know (who are still alive) for coffee is not enough.

 Because as a little boy in Buenos Aires I took trains to school or downtown to the movies with either my father or my mother and sometimes with my grandmother, the simile of riding a train is there all the time.

I board my train in our neighbourhood barrio of Coghlan. The train is almost full. In the stations down the line people get off. Somehow, without any explanation, when I get to the cavernous downtown station of Retiro, I am the only passenger.

This simile applies to the fact that most of the people that I have known, including family or people I worked with, are all dead.

In bed at night their faces pass by my head in long unstoppable sequences.

Captain Beefheart may have been right, “Somebody’s has had too much too think.”

 

Wednesday, May 14, 2025

Rosa 'Emily Carr' 14 May, 2025

 Pulling a Garry Winogrand

 Halcyon Days

And my Rosemary 

Rosa 'Emily Carr'

 

It was sometime in 1991 when my Rosemary informed me, “Alex, tonight we are going to a meeting of the Vancouver Rose Society at Van Dusen’s Floral Hall."

We had moved from our strata title home in Burnaby 1986 to a splendid corner garden home in Kerrisdale. Rosemary was the expert gardener and I was the parvenu. By 1991 I was crazy about hostas. I had no time for roses.

When we arrived at the Floral Hall we sat on extremely had chairs. There were some boring announcements and they then turned of the lights to project slides. At this point I told Rosemary, “Why are we sitting on uncomfortable chairs and watching 100 bad slides of roses?”

Rosemary persisted with her interest and roses and I finally caught on. I did swear to myself that I would never photograph roses, especially with noon harsh light.

My “road to Damascus”moment happened on a lazy summer afternoon in 2001. I was bored. I looked at a lovely Bourbon Rose, Rosa ‘Reine Victoria’and wondered what would happen if I suspened it over my Epson scanner. Now today, 14 May, 2025 I may have over 3000 scans of roses and other plants from the garden.

Rosa 'Reine Victoria'

Since 1991 I have photographed roses only when I was taking pictures of our garden. Today I found myself not in the least guilty in breaking my objection to using a camera for roses when I saw a lovely yet-to-open bloom of a Morden, Manitoba rose, Rosa ‘Emily Carr’. There were two other unopened buds. I was not going to cut one just to scan it.

This rose, introduced in 2007, is hardy across Canada (Zone 3) and yet it is just about impossible to find in Vancouver. As a member of the Vancouver Rose Society only one other member has one.

I cannot wait for one of the buds to open. Only then will I cut it and scan it for my 2025 scan collection.

While all my roses may be different, to me, they have Rosemary's face. She never did tell me,"I was right, Alex." when I went crazy over roses. She was too gentle and polite.

Tuesday, May 13, 2025

Rosa 'Zéphirine Drouhin' 13 May 2025

 

It was not Death,for I stood up, Emily Dickinson

 It was not Death, for I stood up,

And all the Dead, lie down—

It was not Night, for all the Bells

Put out their Tongues, for Noon.

 

It was not Frost, for on my Flesh

I felt Sirocos—crawl—

Nor Fire—for just my Marble feet

Could keep a Chancel, cool—

 

And yet, it tasted, like them all,

The Figures I have seen

Set orderly, for Burial,

Reminded me, of mine—

 

As if my life were shaven,

And fitted to a frame,

And could not breathe without a key,

And 'twas like Midnight, some—

 

When everything that ticked—has stopped—

And Space stares all around—

Or Grisly frosts—first Autumn morns,

Repeal the Beating Ground—

 

But, most, like Chaos—Stopless—cool—

Without a Chance, or Spar—

Or even a Report of Land—

To justify—Despair.

 

My grandmother, María de los Dolores Reyes de Irureta Goyena must have had this mourning band made (I never asked her) in 1918 when my grandfather Don Tirso de Irureta Goyena died in 1918 at age 30. It is Stirling Silver and perhaps the black part could be black coral.

The bracelet has been in the family since. My mother wore it not only when my grandmother died in 1970 but also for going to the opera or the theatre as she thought the it had a sober but elegant beauty.

When I meet my oblivion our family jewels, including this bracelet, will probably not be worn by any of my two daughters or two granddaughters. It seems that in this century wearing jewels at social functions, operas, and theatres is no longer a custom. I am perhaps the only person left with memory of every one of those jewels and how my grandfather, Don Tirso, had them made in Paris for my grandmother.

When I saw this fading Rosa ‘Zéphirine Drouhin’ in a little bowl of water in my dining room I had the idea of scanning it with the bracelet. I do think that the rose, as it fades away, does show a mournful beauty.

When my grandfather died in Manila , in those times people went into an extended period of mourning for about a year. In Spanish the word is luto which comes from the Latin word luctus which stands for grief.

There are photographs in our family album of my grandfather wearing a black armband. I remember even my father wearing one when a relative had died.

My mother wore it not only when my grandmother died in 1970 but also for going to the opera or the theatre as she thought the it had a sober but elegant beauty.

 

More Emily Dickinson blogs

 Doubly Grateful

A Slash of Blue

For I - inhabit Her

In Ceaseless Rosemary

The Morns are meeker

A Favourite Just Noticed 

All the Witchcraft that we need 

It only gives our wish for blue 

My heart is laden 

Of bronze and blaze

The red and the white 

A Lady Red

Hands 

I took my power in my hands 

That clarifies the sight 

 Nature rarer uses yellow

Rosemary white and a bit of yellow 

Nature rarer uses yellow

Luck is not chance 

T is iris sir 

The white heat

I tried to be a rose 

nature rarer uses yellow 

The Tulip

Nor would I be a poet 

November left then clambered up
You cannot make remembrance grow
November
the maple wears a gayer scarf 

 A melancholy of a waning summer
Just as green and as white
It's full as opera
I cannot dance upon my Toes
a door just opened on the street 
Amber slips away
Sleep
When August burning low
Pink Small and punctual
A slash of blue
I cannot dance upon my toes
Ah little rose
For hold them, blue to blue