Hal C. Banks lived near my family's home in Pointe-Claire, a suburb of Montreal. He was an American mobster and labour organizer who came to Canada with the approval of Prime Minister Louis St-Laurent and Quebec Premier Maurice Duplessis to bust the Canadian Seamen's Union, which their governments thought were controlled by Communists, and replace it with the Seafarers International Union . My mother told me that Banks was a nice guy when he wasn't beating up members of the CSU, loved giving out candy on Hallowe'en, and every few weeks there was a new Mrs. Banks at his place. However my sister says he just gave her a piece from a box of chocolates when she went to his door. He lived on Lake St. Louis and had a big boat that was too deep to dock by his house, so, without asking permission, he brought in a dredge on Good Friday and started digging a channel through the lake to his dock, finishing up on Easter Monday. Of course, no civil servant was working on the long weekend, so he got away with it. He ultimately fled Canada after being charged after one beating, and stayed in the USA after his extradition was refused by Dean Rusk, US Secretary of State.
Roddy Frame, co-founder of the 80s pop band Aztec Camera, said in a Top of the Pops X post "It was in one of my deep thinking, psychedelic periods when I was about 15… because the bands we were listening to had names like The 13th Floor Elevators and all that ridiculous crap, we came up with the name Aztec Camera.".
Leica released an "Aztec" limited edition presentation case and attache case for its R-3 and R-3 MOT cameras in 1979, which would have been around when Frame was 15. The only thing particularly Aztec about them were they were made from amatl wood, the bark of which the Aztec used to make paper.
Sad to hear Steve Hibbert died suddenly. He's best known as the Gimp in Pulp Fiction - he friended me after our mutual friend Krystal died and I enjoyed reading his posts. He liked posting art by painters who lived in California where he had lived, like this painting by, as Steve put it, "Laguna Beach's own Edgar Payne" :
(Edgar Alwin Payne (1883 - 1947), Red Mesa, Monument Valley, Utah, 1935, oil on canvas, 25 x 30 inches, purchased with funds from the Phyllis C. Wattis Endowment for Modern and Contemporary Art, Museum #2008.14.1)
This is part of a batch of films I just had developed. It was on TMAX 100 35mm film and by far it was the one that still had good image quality after 30 years of latency. I think this might be from around 1994. The E-6 slide films were mostly without any image left at all, the C-41 Ilford XP2 were badly faded, the Japanese Konica Infrared black and white were bad and the Ilford HP5+ were a bit better, but the TMAX 100, both 35mm and 120, were still worth developing even after 30 plus years at room temperature!
I can't remember who the man in the photos is - I think he must have asked me to take portrait photos of him since I'm with him in more than one location in Toronto. He probably was someone from my Toronto Japanese Language School class that was held on Saturdays at Orde Street Public School. I'm hoping that they'll get to him!
