Alex Cox - October 1996

Death and the Compass - Film

El Patrullero - Film 

Alex Cox - My Last Movie (my blog) 
 

My repeated melancholy caused by the memory of the death of my Rosemary on 9 December 2020 keeps me on my bed with a next to no desire to read a novel from beginning to end. The closest I get is perhaps one or two Borges poems or one short story. That keeps me sane.

A few days ago I noticed the last two paragraphs of his La muerte y la brújula, published in1942, (in Spanish only the first word in the title of a novel, poem or short story is capitalized). The story is an elaborate and confusing one. Here is that paragraph in both Spanish and English (my translation):

Aguárdeme después en D, a 2 kilómetros de A y de C, de nuevo a mitad de camino. Máteme en D, como ahora va a matarme en Triste-le-Roy.

Para la otra vez que me mate – replicó Scharlach – le prometo ese laberinto, que consta de una sola línea recta y que es invisible, incesante. Retrocedió unos pasos. Después muy cuidadosamente, hizo fuego.

 Wait for me in D, two kilometres from A and C, again halfway on the path. Kill me in D, like you are going to kill me now in Triste-le-Roy.

For the next time that I kill you – Scharlach responded, I promise you that labyrinth, which is but a straight line that is invisible and never ends. He retreated a few steps. Then, very carefully he fired.

A brújula in Spanish is a magnetic compass. Originally the word came from Latin via the Greek and it means box. In the Borges story the compass does not appear physically. It is but a metaphor.

My story on all of this will start with the fact that in 1958 in my freshman year at St. Edward’s High School in Austin, Texas I was obsessed with flying saucers. I had read that the presence of one would affect the nearby magnetic field. I went to an army surplus store and bought a large compass. To it I attached a little bell that was battery powered. I managed to open the compass and put two stops on either side of North. My setup worked only too well. As the large tractor trailers that passed by the nearby Congress Avenue affected the magnetic field and my bell would ring in the middle of the night. Brother Vincent de Paul,C.S.C. our dormitory prefect, put a stop to my experiment.

In 1984 American film director, Alex Cox launched his film Repo Man which made Harry Dean Stanton a star. In 1996 Cox came to Vancouver and at the Pacific Cinematheque he presented us with his film The Death and the Compass that was based on the Borges short story. The film was in English but absolutely Borgesian. Consider that Cox filmed it in Mexico City and a large part of the film was done inside one of the then dirtiest of all oil refineries, one in Azcapotzalco.

I was able to take some portraits of him in my studio and we became friends.

Now with the advantage of Google and Youtube you can find the film.

But there is more. Cox must have fallen in love with Mexico as he made a film in Spanish (and he has a part in the film) called El patrullero which is about a young police academy graduate who has to learn to deal with corruption. And yes that film is also available in Youtube.

All these unlikely films are really a manifestation of Borgesian labyrinths. 

Another blog about a Borges story that connects with Memphis 

Rosa 'Ketchup and Mustard' 13 August 2025

Rosa 'Boscobel' & Rudbeckia hirta 16 August 2025

In the 80s and 90s I used to tell people that Vancouver was a world class city because Kodachrome could be processed here. It was, first, in West Vancouver, and from there Kodak moved to Vancouver proper on How Street.

In those 80s and 90s photographer Fred Herzog would invite a few of us to his home where he would project his Kodachromes on a large projection screen.

He did not really become famous until technology caught up with the reproduction of Kodachromes. Until the new era of digital scanning and inkjet printing, Kodachromes could only be appreciated through projection. The then classic darkroom practices took away sharpness and shadow detail from Kodachromes. Cybachromes were even worse as they made the colour almost garish,with that over-the -top shine in contrast and shadow detail all but disappeared.

The early inkjet prints of Herzog’s Kodachromes finally made them look like Kodachromes.

Kodak closed their Kodachrome processing plant and Kodachromes disappeared from history.

I firmly believe that if Fred Herzog came back to our 2025 Vancouver he would feel lost. Colour has disappeared. It has been replaced by tall condos that are blue, green or grey. Most of our then famous neon signs are gone. Another photographer who would go on unemployment soon here would be Cartier-Bresson. Our streets are either boring or terrible if you go to Main and Hastings.

My Rosemary in our garden at first liked “colores sobrios”. Sobrio in Spanish has no connotation with sober. It means understated. Then as the years progressed in our garden she started liking yellow, orange and red. By the time we moved from our large corner garden in Kerrisdale to Kitsilano 9 years ago she was buying colourful perennials and she adored the Black Eyed Susans you see here.

My scans are no longer sobrios (well sometimes they are as hostas have understated colours in their flowers). Suddenly to help take away my melancholy (just a tad) for my loss of Rosemary I am scanning plants of loud colours and mixing them in ways that many years ago Rosemary would have considered verboten.

There is a word in Spanish much more evocative than garish. Colorinche, defines colours in bad taste. I think my scans here are a garishly lovely.

And so  with my two scans here today, I dedicate them to the memory of my Rosemary and to that friend Fred Herzog who would feel lost on Robson.

The Story on How Kodachrome Was Invented 

Hosta 'Invincible' 16 August 2025

 

Paul Aden - 1992

 

I have a friend, Christapher Dafoe who was the Vancouver arts reporter for the Globe and Mail. When he interviewed people I was there to take the portraits. I marvelled as to how he would sit with a celebrity. The celebrity would look at Dafoe’s face and just open up without Dafoe having to ask questions. By far he was the best reporter I ever worked with.
 

Some photographer may have a hidden talent. I have it. This is that during my intimate sessions (close to the face with a large camera) I ask questions that others would not.

In 1992 I travelled to Columbus, Ohio for my first American Hosta Society Convention. I photographed many of the hosta greats. One of them was a taciturn man called Paul Aden. His claim to fame at the time was a very large light green to yellow (depending on how much sun it gets) hosta called Hosta ‘Sum and Substance’.

We who collect hostas know that there are very few hostas that have fragrant flowers. This is why the species hosta, Hosta plantaginea is called the August Lily. Aden had introduced it in 1986. Aden had a habit of giving names to hostas introduced by others. His reputation was a not a good one.

I did ask the question. “Why is your hosta called Invincible? His answer was quick. “I named her after my mother-in-law.”

I have never been able to find someone in the hosta society to tell me why some hostas will have only one scape (stem) with flowers while others will have many. Invincible is most floriferous. 

Bruno Gerussi

 

Peter C. Newman

The Hudson's Bay Company (HBC) is a Canadian holding company of department stores and commercial property. It is the oldest corporation in North America, founded in 1670 and currently being liquidated, and is headquartered in Toronto. Wikipedia

I collaborated a few time with writer Peter C. Newman who died in 2023. I read a couple of his books on the Hudson’s Bay Company and I was impressed to find out how this company pretty well made the territory we call Canada today.

For 25 years I worked as a freelancer for Canadian Pacific Limited. I took photographs of their railroads (and the last caboose), airplanes, courier trucks and of executives of Marathon Realty. 

In the late 90s I was dispatched to an interchange near Lytton where CP Rail traded places with CN Rail on the Fraser Canyon. I was given a walkie talkie so I could stop the train crossing on the bridge. I would stop it whenever I could see Toyotas, Mazdas or Datsuns. My photographs were made into large prints and given to the Japanese car manufacurers as gifts. The location showed mountains, a river, and trees.

When I was doing freelance work for the CBC I was sent to Molly’s Reach to photograph the popular program (CBC called these drama) the Beachcombers.

Throughout those years our Vancouver Sun was a fabulous newspaper. I can now report that all the above, and the paper as we knew it, are now gone. The CBC, particularly the radio, has now switched from culture to telling us about the news that our former newspapers ignore.

Around 1530 Spanish bishop Vasco de Quiroga travelled from Spain to New Spain (later called Mexico). On his way he read Sir Thomas More’s Utopia. It so affected him that when he arrived to what is now the state of Michocán he went to every town and suggested that the inhabitants build or make something. To this day Santa María del Cobre makes exquisite copper wear. And Paracho is home to the best guitars in Mexico. In many ways Vasco de Quiroga was a proto communist.

In 1967 I was sent home to Veracruz where my mother lived when I finished my two year conscription in the Argentine Navy. I was onn board a Victory Ship (an improved version of the Liberty Ships) called the Río Aguapey. Henry Kaiser had solved the problem of the German navy sinking all those allied ships on the Atlantic by using a system of modular building where his Liberty Ships from start to finish were finished within a week. Man years later I discovered that my Rió Aguapey had been built in the Burrard Shipyards.

In our province you can buy Cowichan sweaters, peaches in Peachland and wine. Nothing else, as far as I can tell is made or manufactured in British Columbia.

For years I bought Seagull Frames, made of pewter that came from Pugwash, Nova Scotia. They were lovely and I would take these to my family in Argentina as a Canadian treasure. The company was purchased by a US company.

My eldest daughter Alexandra lives in Lillooet. The town's motto is "Guaranteed Rugged". What could they make there with that wonderful expression. And some of us know that if you live in Lillooet and in most towns of the interior you cannot go anywhere without a car. The Lillooet railroad station, a lovely one, is empty. That all mostly began when Premier Campbell sold BC Rail to CN Rail. CN Rail promptly closed it down.

So today, August 16, 2025 I understand that I live in a diminished Canada that has no real Canadian content TV or some of those Canadians films from the past. What do we now do?

Dennis Hopper & Gavin Walker

In my 83 years I have only smoked two cigarettes. It was in 1959 in my Austin, Texas boarding school that three of my classmates offered me a Marlboro telling me that I would like to smoke it. They put it in my mouth, they lit it, and it exploded. They all laughed and offered me another one. It exploded again.

Around 1963 I began to smoke a pipe and later on I alternated it with Mexican or Cuban cigars. Twenty years ago I was smoking a pipe in my unventilated darkroom and became dizzy. It was then that I decided that smoking was a silly habit and I quit.

The above is but an introduction to a couple of men who smoked Kools. Of Gavin Walker I must mention that he died a couple of weeks ago and it has affected me lots as we were very good friends.