Mum says it was fine to celebrate last night since I was born at 2am ish and we’re 6 hours behind GMT.
Happy birthday to Keith Chegwin, James Earl Jones and Susanna Hoffs out of the Bangles, if they’re reading too…
Since Pat’s leaving this morning, we had our b-day celebrations a day early and went to La Matera to eat our own weight in perfectly cooked very rare steak. We sampled a couple of Chilean wines and at the end of it Sita got a waiter to come over with a mil hojas cake with a candle and i was sung (with varying levels of expertise), Las Mananitas. It didn’t reach the level of brutality that Ed mustered with his pinata, and that’s a good thing. Jose also showed up with the latest Propaganda (Jose’s an incredibly accomplished poet… among other things). Anyroad, a few more beers and comeraderie at home and then off to bed latish. A fine, fine night all round. The only negative point is that I might not be up for Fernando and Aldo’s DJing this evening, then again, maybe with a strategic power nap… I’m not as young as I used to be you know. I don’t know how these kids manage it. The prospect of a quiet evening in with Sita, vino tinto, scrabble and one of the DVDs she got me is looking better every minute. Thanks for all the emails and comments, muy amables todos.
This is my fave pic from today:
with this one a close second: 
Click the cowboys pic for a look at all the new photos from Zapopan, Chapala, Ajijic and Jocotepec. V. nice day it was, i had my favourite fish (and favourite Spanish word) for lunch, huachinango (red snapper), sita looked on in disgust as Pat and I worked our way through whitebait type fried fishy things and we took in the view of the lake. Great weekend all round. La Matera tomorrow evening for a pre-bday bash and Tuesday for continued festivities.
Ma Come No was the Italian restaurant of choice for Friday evening’s celebrations. Highly recommended, we suggest the Spanish Tempranillo… Saturday had me and pat checking out the patchouli oil and Tim Burton sponsored hippy market, the Tianguis Cultural before hightailing it over to Zapopan to see a disturbing statue of Juan Pablo II with little Juan Diego, huichol history (including unexplained taxidermy), modernish art in MAZ the Museo de Arte de Zapopan, and a filling lonche with all the requisite salsas. Sita took Pat to our little neighbourhood coffee shop, Starbucks for bickies and cafe and then supplies in Gigante. Victor and Jayna came round for lemon chicken and suchlike. After they left we watched Lord of War, Nicholas Cage as the prototypical arms dealer, then bed.
This morning: Skype with mis abuelitas and brekky, now we’re off to Chapala to check out Jocotepec, a little further on from Ajijic, where i went with Monica, Daniel and Ed last week. Pizza and a movie this evening… Little descriptive detail here since we’re in the key finding stage of leaving the house, cheers 
Just had to leave the office and go home to check in on everyone after I got the alarming message that our kitchen had exploded. Sita had lit the oven to make toast for her and Pat. The flame had gone out and the kitchen smelled of gas. She tried to light it again, only to have it explode, shunting the cupboards to the side of it about 4 inches, blowing open the doors and firing all the hobs/rings all over the kitchen. Obviously just the wrong combination of butane and air… Sita got off with a ringing in her ears and a sudden crowd of neighbours and Avon ladies advising her to eat bread to get over the shock… Blimey. Quite a morning. Anyroad, it looks like the stove´s alright and after putting things back in their place Sita seems OK too, and luckily she´s got the ever-reliable Pat for company. Looks like it´ll be The Waffle Factory on Avenida Mexico for breakfast though… The photo is of my little desk in me office, there’s a couple more photos on Flickr of the view of the plaza and the bar where Sita and I met, and where we took Pat last night before a meal of Ropa Vieja in the Cuban restaurant, La Bodeguita del Medio.
Well, here I am on day 3 at me new job. I was first in the office and managed to walk here from the house despite a late night jam session with Aldo’s band (more of which later). It appears my main job is to research the history of the Camino Real de Tierra Adentro, make notes and find a way of presenting it as a documentary project to possible funders. It’s a lot like being a student again, except this time I’ve got a PC and not the Acorn Archimedes as a partner in crime and I’m reading more during the day than back in Swansea. I’m also working on some postcard ads to advertise my web services to the many specialist shops that are in this mall. It’s a nice easy start and I’m very much in favour of the 10am start time. So I’m getting plenty of creative input. I even suggested Les Rythmes Digitales for a demo yesterday and they went with it. Which was nice. It’s a little too early to try and incorporate scrabble into my schedule though, and maybe hold off the Skype for a week or so.
So last night I went round to Aldo’s mansion in Zapopan where he was practicing with the band to be Guadalajara’s premier covers group. It was v. impressive, musically as well as in range. I played The Cure’s Just Like Heaven, Jarabe de Palo’s La Flaca and a couple of others. They played everything from Judas Priest’s “Breaking the law, breaking the law” to Toto’s Love isn’t always on time, with riotous aplomb. Fair play to ‘em. They’re definitely out of my league musically, but I had fun.
Sita and I stayed in last night saying ‘thanks, but no thanks’ to a party invite and chilled with a bit of Scrabble (one all), the last of the 2 buck chuck and a DVD Sita picked up called Grizzly Man. I’d wanted to see it for a while and it was worth the wait. Thoroughly recommended. I’ve done a complete review (it’s been a while) which you can click here to read. Ah, what the hell I’ll include it in the ‘extended entry’ text you can read when you click the comments button too.
Work tomorrow, so for this avo I’ll be messing around with Flash MX trying to use the stuff Ed taught me last week and maybe a foray to some mercadito or other. I was chuffed to see a comment from me Grandma in the blog. I wonder what she made of the interweb experience. There’s a fantasticly lovely story about her first visit to a Scottish-themed restaurant she was recommended by a friend, called McDonald’s or something similar, in Taunton town centre. Don’t forget to ask her about it when you see her. They serve these tasty sandwich things. And you can get soft drinks with it! I’ll be sure to check it out next time I’m back in the old country.
Love will tear us apart
Timothy Treadwell loved grizzly bears; he lived among them for twelve odd years, filmed them, tried to protect them and ultimately was savagely killed by them along with his girlfriend in Alaska. This film, directed and narrated by acclaimed German film maker Werner Herzog, tries to understand his motives and offers differing views on Timothy’s quixotic approach to wilderness conservation.
Let’s start with the cinematography. Using a hand-held digicam Treadwell’s footage is undeniably impressive. You can tell the zoom button is rarely used as he captures shots of fully-grown bears checking out his camp and shooting him hungry stares as he waxes lyrical about his favourite topic. He explains how he cannot be seen to be weak and refuses to give ground to the alpha males or tries to stroke the bear cubs with the mother just yards away. Ozzie Crocodile Hunter, Steve Irwin, has nothing on this bloke. If a fight ever ensued, you know that Timothy would come off a very poor second and since the manner of his death is revealed early on in the film you always feel that violent dismemberment is a distinct possibility. The 100 plus hours of film that was edited into this film captures the full majesty of the expansive landscape and also the personal drama and relationship with nature incredibly.
In contrast with March of the Penguins, for example, Grizzly Man’s focus is not on the animals themselves, but on one man’s obsession. Park Rangers and ecologists discuss whether this hands-on approach is really beneficial to the animals. Treadwell makes clear his pacifism and that he would never harm a bear, while the rangers explain that to maintain their numbers a 6% cull is necessary each year and that having the bears get used to a human presence is probably not in their best interests. With each passing year Treadwell associates more with the bears than civilization, highlighted well when he films fellow bear watchers with the kind of paranoia that comes from sitting in a tent with just your teddy for company for weeks. Treadwell is clearly a driven man, and Herzog suggests that this drive comes from wanting to belong to something simpler, nobler and fairer than his life in Los Angeles or Florida would allow. I love that Herzog points out that nature is far from this Utopian ideal. Nature is brutal, dangerous and based on a hierarchical food chain and that’s something Morgan Freeman never mentioned about his penguins (“This is a story about love…”). Treadwell turns a semiblind eye to evidence that mature bears have obviously devoured one of their offspring, mentioning all kinds of mitigating circumstances like they would have died of starvation if they hadn’t eaten him…
The score by Richard Thomson is fantastic. On the DVD there is a 45 minute mini documentary about its making which could easily be watched in isolation from the film. Thomson is perfect for creating the rough-edged, plaintive soul of the film, nature with a hint of menace, beauty tempered with imminent brutality. Seeing how he crafts the guitar sounds, with cello and acoustic bass, around the progression of a scene is a lesson in professional sound tracking. Herzog is also instrumental in the direction of the sound track. My favourite moment comes when he berates the percussionist for sounding too much like a ‘bongo playing hippy in Golden Gate Park’. While Treadwell has undeniable hippy tendencies, Herzog eschews direct musical clichés and encourages the band to explore the space and atmosphere of Alaska without sounding like ‘music for truckers’. Again, compare this to the saccharine Penguins soundtrack which had more in common with Bambi than the unforgiving Antarctic wasteland where it was filmed.
This is a fascinating film which succeeds on many levels. It is perfectly paced featuring candid interviews with friends and colleagues, interspersed with the choicest footage of the bears and, more importantly, the man. Had Treadwell lived to edit his own documentary together it would have been very different, no matter what Herzog implies in his commentary. His film would have been geared towards painting the bears in the best light possible and excluded much of the inherent violence. And the scene where he rants for 5 minutes using very Californian expletives about the attitudes of the park rangers would probably have been left on the virtual cutting room floor. This film is an engaging and fitting tribute to a man whose passionate obsession with bears led to tragedy, yet whose story and filming can inspire similar passion about the wilderness.
A quick pause as Ed (who’s done a grand job of blogging the last couple of weeks’ travels) left for Guanajuato and Daniel and Monica head for the land of stringent planning permission. It was grand to have everyone around, quite a start to 2005 and the fun doesn’t stop there, we’re counting down to Ms Duffy’s arrival…
So the year so far in summary, comment if you’d like elucidation on the following:
Monday: Mexican locksmiths, Breakneck speeds and Ian, Adriana, Jose, Sita, Daniel & Monica restaurant antics.
Tuesday: Breakfast in Cafe D’Val, Tonala for arts and crafts and monica and daniel’s ever expanding small bowl collection. Downtown Gwod and La Fuente cantina… 2 buck chuck
Wednesday: Intro to Flash MX 2004, Slow Food and Fast Times. 2 buck chuck
Thursday: Chapala, Mariachi, Ajijic, no Mexican Hat Dances. 2 buck chuck
Friday: Lie in, San Juan de Dios (mio que comi?), La I Latina (best restaurant evah), El Pull-Bar, Virtual bowling. 2 buck chuck
Saturday: Central camionera nueva, Adieus, The Perfect Client, Skype and Lemon Chicken. 2 buck chuck (if there’s any left…)
Shall return to complete sentences in the near future. But as I say, it’s been a fantastic couple of weeks, thanks to all concerned. Viva Calle Garibaldi!
2 buck chuck
PS. Only 2 games of scrabble in 10 days… shall get my fix in tomorrow and say hello to my old friends xu, xi, qi and qat
I’m doing a bit of editing of all the 300 odd photos i’ve taken over the last few weeks. I’ll post the stand out ones here possibly today/tomorrow… Certainly before I start my job on Monday though. I’ve been having a fantastic few weeks, couldn’t have asked for better. After I phoned about 12 different hotels in PV to be told they’re all fully booked, Sarita found a cancellation on craigslist.com and we phoned him and she hooked us up (as they say in these parts) with probably the best little apartment we could have hoped for. In the old town, great views, comfy bed, prestocked fridge with the leftovers of the family who’d been there before. Grand. I’ll do an entry with some photos and comments presently. Happy 2006 and thanks for all the comments in the last week. Cheers!