Teaching English Joke of the Day

Friend: You have to meet my new apartment.

Me:      Sounds good. Only, in English you can't "meet" an apartment.

Friend: This one you can. It has that much personality.

My Name Escapes

The Occidental Swamps! 

 

Teaching English Joke of the Day

Me:            Do you know this word: "grapefruit"?

Student:    Is it uva?

Me:            Nope, that's "grape". This is toronja. Completely diff—...well
                    now, that would make sense, wouldn't it?...

Spanish Lesson: The Mexican Rennaissance

This weekend some Mexican friends and I played that parlour game where you get a card with a character's name written on it stuck to your forehead and you have to ask the other people in the game yes-or-no questions to figure out who it is. One guy received Miguel Ángel. I had no idea who this was. Someone from the Mexican Revolution? I remained silent throughout the guy's questions, and only became more confused when I found out this historical personage was neither Mexican, Spanish, nor Portuguese. About three questions from the end of the round I realized it was Michelangelo.

The day before, I had been equally confused by a bus with words the Pato Lucas and a picture of Daffy Duck painted on the back. That night I learned that in Mexico, Daffy Duck is called Lucas. No idea why.

Here's how one friend explained the rules of the game to another: "Have you seen the movie Inglourious Basterds?...."

Adventures in Rhythm: Paco Solo

 

El Camarón de Isla accompanies Paco de Lucía with his knuckles.

The Vampire Thing Never Dies: They Put it in a Book

Apparently I write "travel writing." My piece on vampires and tourists for last October's Believer is featured in this year's Best American Travel Writing. It's guest-edited by Bill Buford. I was excited because I thought I knew who that was, but then it turned out I was thinking of Bill Bryson. It's cool though—Bryson did in fact guest-edit Best American Travel Writing at one point.

Somehow I ended up in the company of heavy hitters. The volume has a piece by Ian Frazier, a New Yorker contributor who wrote a book called On the Rez that I read years ago when I volunteered on a Lakota Indian reservation in South Dakota. There's David Sedaris, that guy who writes whiny stuff, also often for the New Yorker. Then there's Christopher Hitchens, who writes bestsellers about Henry Kissinger and God. Also there's a guy who hosts an old-timey radio variety show.

Antiquariana: Old Tibet

I happened to find a first edition copy of Seven Years in Tibet in a bookstore and bought it for some reason. Put off by visions of Brad Pitt's bleached hair, I avoided Heinrich Harrar's 1953 memoir for months. I'm glad I finally opened it. Among its most memorable passages are those about  witnessing religious events or dealing with yaks:

"And after long and enjoyable chaffering we bought a yak. This was the fourth in our line of Armins and he was no different from the others except that perhaps he was naughtier."

"While at Sangsang we had made friends with some Sherpas....They gave us valuable advice regarding our preparations and helped us to find a new yak, which was a real service to us, as we had hitherto invariably been swindled when we bought one of these creatures. We noted with satisfaction that our new yak was a well-behaved beast....In his youth his horns had been removed and the operation seemed to have improved his temper without diminishing his strength. He wore the usual nose-ring. With a very little encouragement one could get him to exceed his average speed of two miles an hour."

"The medium became calmer. Servants held him fast and a Cabinet Minister stepped before him and threw a scarf over his head. Then he began to ask questions carefully prepared by the Cabinet about the appointment of a governor, the discovery of a new Incarnation, matters involving war and peace....I tried to pick out intelligible words but made nothing of the sounds. While the Minister stood humbly there trying to understand the answers, an old monk took them down with flying pen. He had done this hundreds of times in his life as he was also secretary to the late Oracle. I could not prevent myself from suspecting that perhaps the real Oracle was the secretary. The answers he wrote down...relieved the Cabinet of a heavy load of responsibility."

Stranger with You: Coyotes in the Burg

During the first week of September I had to go back to New York unexpectedly. I took the L train out to Brooklyn to have dinner with a friend. The first thing I saw when I stepped out at the Graham Avenue stop was a shiny new restaurant called Mesa Coyoacan. It had a sign featuring howling coyotes. This was very strange. Coyoacan is a leafy upper middle class neighborhood in the southern part of the Distrito Federal that used to be a separate city. Diego Rivera and Freida Kahlo lived there. It would be like if you went to Mexico City from New York and the first thing you saw was a restaurant called The Park Slope Table.

Does this mean Mexico City is trendy now?

Elsewhere in Mexico: Tepoztlán

(Click for larger images.)

Church.

At a restaurant.

Seed mural, cathedral.

At the market.

Near the market.

It's a fiesta of flavor.

Old men, street.

The guidebook said Tepoztlán is kind of a hippie town.

Fake cacti.

Herb cross on a door.

Pink virgin.

Rock virgin.

Climbing to the temple.

Still climbing to the temple.

Coati with coati.

Coati closer.

Coati in trash container.

View from the temple.

Everyone's a Critic: Captain Beefheart on Politics

From a 1980 performance of "Dirty Blue Gene" on French TV.

Beefheart: (singing) "She's. Not. Bad. She's. Not."

(Song ends. Applause.)

Beefheart: (speaking) "Reagan's bad!"

(Applause, shouts of approval from audience.)

Beefheart: "He saddle-soaps his hair!"

(Confused silence.)

On the Street: Chinese Cranes

"Half-constructed high-rise apartments, ensconced in scaffolding and green mesh, stood beside towering cranes. The pace of development in Putian, a secondary provincial city with a population of about three million, was dizzying. A cluster of unfinished apartment buildings visible from my hotel window seemed to be a floor higher every morning."

-Nicholas Schmidle, "Inside the Knockoff-Tennis-Shoe Factory," The New York Times, August 19, 2010

"From our slight elevation in the north of the city we looked out over crisp blue air and high clouds, the sprawl of endless neighborhoods, and, hovering over them, a forest of cranes—Beijing transforming itself."

-Robert Haas, "Two Poets", The Believer, June 2010

Adventures in Rhythm: Julian Bream Accompanies Himself

You missed that cue!

Stranger with You: That New Deck Smell

Once when I was working at Vice, Pat O'Dell explained to us why he called his skateboarding show Epicly Later'd, but now I forget what he said. I think it was just two words he and his friends used all the time: "epic" for "cool" and "later" for "not cool."

 

That theory seems to be supported by the fact that Hollister, purveyors of fake South California surfing lifestyle equipment, have called their new dude-perfume "The Epic Hollister Cologne." I was like totally blown away when I saw an ad for this in Mexico City the other day.

For a piercing cultural criticism of Hollister's epic/later new Manhattan flagship store, the phenomenon of immersive retail, and more reasons why I will probably never go to California, see young Molly Young's piece in the current Believer. Here's the best line:

"In an era of T9 input, text messages begun with I would automatically fill in mstoned."

Mexico City: Scenes—Cleaning All the Windows

I haven't had much time alone during the past four weeks, and nearly all that I had was spent writing, so when I had some spare hours today I found that my room was in desperate need of tidying. Cleaning is alternately satisfying and depressing for me. On the one hand I can pretend that my life is organized and well decorated, and moves steadily forward to a soundtrack of Handel's Concerti Grossi. On the other hand I'm confronted with all its detritus, aimless scraps, and unsent postcards.

Everyone's a Critic: I Thought of Josephine Baker, He Thought of Rousseau

(Art Ensemble of Chicago, by Anthony Barboza)

See the new issue of Whitewall magazine for my interview with photographer Anthony Barboza, who shot the cover of You're Under Arrest (Miles Davis's greatest album ever??) and owns the gun featured therein. If you're lazy you'll want to know that the piece is on page 76.

The issue also has interviews with Marina Abramovic and Patti Smith.

(Sun Ra at the Knitting Factory, 1992, by Anthony Barboza)

 

(Chico Freeman at Visiones NYC, 1996, by Anthony Barboza)

 

Antiquariana: Old England in 3-D

When I worked for a rare photography collector, I came to know a few images by the stereoscopist and chronicler/artificer of 19th-century British village life, T.R. Williams, while flipping through the Encyclopedia of 19th Century Photography. But the Encyclopedia tends not to mention things like the fact that one of the foremost aficionados of Williams' stereoscopic views is Brian May, guitarist for Queen. Apparently May has just published a book about Williams and his elaborately constructed three-dimensional idylls. New York Times article here.

The Vampire Thing Never Dies: Ceasescu Exhumed

This is possibly the first in an ongoing series of observations about the vampire thing and how it never dies. Then again we are all sick of vampires at this point.

Yesterday the New York Times announced that the remains of Nicolai Ceausescu and his wife were being exhumed to prove that they had been buried where people thought they had been buried after their executions under dubious circumstances in 1989. Some Romanians, including Ceausescu's children, suspect that the couple were not buried in their official graves.

As Romania's dictator for twenty-five years, Ceausescu ruled with an iron fist and favored isolationist politics, keeping the USSR out of his country. The medieval Romanian prince Vlad Tepes ("The Impaler") held a strange fascination for Ceausescu. Vlad, who sometimes called himself "Dracula," is most famously remembered as the very loose inspiration for Bram Stoker's Romanian vampire count of the same name. But among Romanians he was remembered as a ruler with an iron fist who favored isolationist tactics, keeping the Turkish Empire out of his country for most of his rule. Ceausescu worked hard to make Vlad a national hero in his own image, and to make himself a national leader in Vlad's image. He ordered a nation-wide observance of the five-hundredth anniversary of Vlad's death in 1976, and issued stamps bearing Vlad's image. As he fled the mobs that threatened his life in 1989, Ceausescu took refuge in the village of Snagov, where Vlad is said to have been executed and buried under dubious circumstances in 1476. (The location of his grave is still a matter of debate, and attempts to settle the matter through exhumation have proved unsuccessful.)

It should be noted that in European folklore, a vampire could usually only be identified by exhuming his or her grave. A body that had not decayed naturally was presumed to be a vampire.

Some choice quotations from the Times article:

Ceausescu's alleged remains were better preserved than those of his wife...

....

Ceausescu was toppled Dec. 22, 1989, as Romanians fed up with years of draconian rationing and communist rule revolted. He tried to flee Bucharest by helicopter but his pilot switched sides. After a summary trial, Ceausescu and his wife were executed by a firing squad three days later.

Oprean's wife, Zoia Ceausescu, had sued the defense ministry in 2005, saying she had doubts that her parents were buried in the cemetery. She died of cancer in 2006 and her brother Valentin took up the case. The couple's other son Nicu died of liver cirrhosis in 1996 and is buried in the same Ghencea cemetery.

....

Ceausescu was also known for the fierce way he stifled dissent with his Securitate secret police, which were believed to have 700,000 informers in the nation of 22 million.

 ....

Aurel Chiubasu, 66, a former carpenter in a military unit, heard about the exhumation and rushed over to tend his wife's grave nearby.

''I didn't agree with him being executed but the family has the right to know where he was buried,'' he said. ''People speak like it's not him there and he's buried somewhere else."

Mexico City: Scenes—New Sounds

I haven't posted anything in a while because I was working on a sound-and-word project (you could probably call it "music") with my brother. In a bit of a role reversal, he made the words and I made the music. But now it's finished and it will be featured as part of a group arts show that a friend in Brooklyn is organizing. It's this Friday. You should go. Yes, you.

 

The Davis Brothers' contribution to the show is three short word-and-sound pieces (vulgarly referred to as "songs"), with texts by my brother about Mexico City, and music by myself that mostly consists of sounds I recorded on the streets here.

Hopefully I will get back to posting more soon. However, for those of my avid readers who  thirst for more, slake yourself below on some pics from a recent trip to Teotihuacan.

Elsewhere in Mexico: Teotihuacán

Click for larger images.

What it all looks like.

 

Map so you don't get lost on the Avenue of the Dead.

 

Guy selling bows and arrows.

Flora.

I didn't go there.

Guy descending pyramid.

Another guy selling bows and arrows. Hunting is big with the Teotihuacán crowd.

 Pyramid of the Moon.

Related

I have been informed that it is now summer in the US. Here in Mexico City it does not feel like summer, because it never does not feel like summer.