Stuff

…it´s this one. Even better than I thought, 7 megapixels, wide angle and various other bells and whistles, just what I needed for when my bulky but lovely Pentax DSLR is overkill. It’s charging now and then I’ll wander off and try it out. Tomorrow I get me mugshot in the paper and I reckon a fair few Flickr peeps will also have their photo published too.

I bought a tripod the other day as Day of the Dead is when you really need a steady camera to take long exposure night pictures. Here´s one from Myrna´s house of the altar she made for her mum.

I watched Carlos Reygada’s latest yesterday, Luz Silenciosa, which is a relatively restrained film about the Mennonites in the North of Mexico. Very nice photography in it, but not really my cup of tea. By a long way. Frankly, I’d rather read a book of the pictures than have to bear 2 hours or so of very, very slow moving plot. Luckily Jose, Javier and Franz came round to provide a commentary throughout. Without that I’d’ve been asleep after 15 minutes. No gerontophilia this time, and that is something to be thankful for. After watching Japon I badly needed the mind bleach. I just looked at the IMDB page, one user has the perfect one-line review: “Art-house pretension at its most tedious” Amen to that.

Sita’s being interviewed today in america, and I haven’t heard from her today yet but yesterday she seemed well impressed with the place. It’s in the foothills of the Rockies, so that means I have no clue where she is. Upper Left Gringolandia? Looking forward to a phone call later…

Thanks Amy, Mum, OneWay and Flash for the congrats. I pick up me camera on Monday.

If you´re wondering where I´ve been and why the hell I aint been posting these last few days, check out the latest Day of the Dead related several hundred pictures on Flickr…

as per always, but I’m trying to fit in as much day of the dead nonsense as possible in our last few weeks. So today I went for a wander round the Mezquitan cemetary and am off in a matter of seconds to a display of altars in Casa Vallarta, then tomorrow morning bright and early I’m off with Javier and Ofelia to Patzcuaro to get a taste of the day of the dead Michoacan style. It’s non stop and I’m loving it!

Then to cap it all, I just won a camera for the aforementioned photo competition (see below and comments). Suffice to say I’m smiling even though my laptop’s about to give up the ghost. Aptly enough.

I’m well chuffed, one of the pix I sent to a local newspaper got printed today. Mine’s the top left one:

The competition is ongoing for a year and there’s cameras and holidays in Cancun to be won. Details in hungover Spanish here.

I can´t get my head around the time change yet and have been up for a while… Anyroad, just a quick post to thank Jana and Victor for hosting the pumpkin carving soirée yesterday, which was good clean innocent fun despite the Satanic connotations. And plentiful booze. Pumpkin carving is not really a big thing here, but there´s a host of other traditions available related to the Day of the Dead which I hope to be photographing over the next few days.

El Arenal is a sleepy little town on the way to Tequila. It’s also where the jimadores albureros were from, so yesterday I went to deliver them the photos. They weren’t there, obviously. It was 1pm ish and they were up to their elbows in agaves I expect. The matriarch of the family was there, however, and after a fair amount of explaining that I wasn’t trying to sell her anything she was all smiles. I had a quick wander around the town, there’s more to it that you see from the main road. The Guadalajara-Tequila railway passes through it and it has a nice traditional town square and church replete with its neon crosses on the spires. Something I hadn’t noticed before, but thanks to the zoom on me camera is that the neon crosses also have lightning conductors. So much for faith… He helps those who help themselves avoiding relampagazos I s’pose.

SuperNova, a fellow Flickero wrote me a nice email about his memories of the place, specifically a place to get drunk cheaply: Here’s a rough translation… (proper translations cost 50 centavos a word for the record)

Hi Gwyn:

In the interview that Sita did with us the other day I mentioned that my family used to go and buy our tequila in Arenal. I see you’ve been there. If you pass by there again, go to this place, it’s very peculiar. Outside there’s a shop where they sell soft drinks and snacks. You go through the side of the shop and there’s a patio with tables. At the back there they sell chicharron de puerco (glorified pork scratchings) and hot salsa. They let you sample their tequila, but they’re so generous that you can refill your glass as many times as you like. And that’s what people do: arrive, buy soft drinks, snacks, ask for a “sample” of tequila in their glass, then mix their drinks and enjoy the afternoon/evening. They keep asking for more “samples” and there’s no charge. They sell tequila in gallon bottles (with no label) and in normal bottles (with labels).

Then details follow on the name of the place and how to get there. If you’d like to know more shoot me an email and I’ll pass on the directions. Far be it from me to bring unwanted attention to what sounds by all standards a fine institution.

Suffice to say I think we’ll be going back. Anyone fancy being the designated driver?

I had to help her finish it. After devouring my own molcajete de pollo y chorizo…

Fine night out last night to la I Latina with José and Christina. Let´s see what revelry today brings.

Si estás aquí gracias a la página de César, pos qué chido! Como vas a ver hay muy poco de interés aquí si no me conoces ni eres miembro de mi familia. Pero a lo mejor te interesaría ver mi fotoblog, Mostly México con fotos de mi México lindo y querido o mis sets en Flickr.

También hay otra discusión sobre los carros camaleón en el blog de mi amiga, Ana.

Bueno, pues gracias por pasar y si quieres dejar un comentario, échale. Inglés, español o francés sirve. Gales también, de hecho, con los servicios de traducción de mi mamá…

Cheers!

I uploaded this video to the wrong YouTube account… never mind. I’ll re-upload to mine at some stage… Till then, enjoy. I might get round to subtitling it in English, too. But don’t hold your breath 😀 I was having a bad Spanish day but… the gist is basically that they recognise me as the gringo who went paparazzi on them a while ago by the train track and ask if I have any photos from then to show them, then we chat about the job. They’d been working since 7/7.30 that morning and it’s hard work as you can see. The agave piNas weigh 40 kilos plus, and they’re all destined for Cuervo’s La RojeNa factory. Anyroad, hope you like it. There’s a DVD quality version if you fancy a copy. With a menu and everything… I´m available for multimedia projects, weddings, quinceañeras, bah mitzvahs…

With Sita’s vast intellect and my, er, camera we’ve gone and got ourselves published!

Article from Gastronomica (1700k PDF)

While I’m typing this I’m processing the photos of the jimadores from Monday into a slide show DVD thing. It’s taking forever and I’m fairly sure it’s crashed, but I think it’s going to be worth it. I edited the sound with audacity and the result is very pleasing. It’s basically me asking the jimadores stupid questions and promising them I’ll deliver copies of the photos to them today. Which is still the plan as long as Farmacias Guadalajara, GDL’s ubercatholic chemists deliver the pix before 3pm. If not it’ll be tomorrow… I’ll shove a low quality version up to YouTube once I get a chance.

I started another photography class yesterday. It was great fun. 2 hours long, with a break in the middle and a bloke with a fantastic sense of humour teaching us the basics of contemporary photography. I’m really looking forward to the next one. I met a nice bunch of people there and we went for a few drinks afterwards as all good students should. Also, Sita’s made another shortlist for a professorship in the States so all in all a very good day all round.

…funny James Bond related cartoon.

… that peanuts grow underground? And in agave fields no less…

Am a bit knackered now, I also took about 200 photos of jimadores, if I gather up the energy I´ll write about them, I also recorded the conversations I had with them hopefully for a video spectacular coming soon!

On Friday the carpenters finally came round with all the bits and pieces they´d measured to repair our waterlogged kitchen panelling. It was all going great guns and I was ready to find out where the mice were hiding when they removed the oven. Turns out they were living in the fibre glass insulation material INSIDE the oven and had horded Atticus´s biscuits and FSM knows what else and it smelled rank. So we had a sterilise-the-oven session and i took a couple of photos of the carnage. I´m not posting them though, because it makes me queasy just thinking about it. After all that we needed a stiff drink so we went to the Famosos Equipales where Jana serenaded us with unique versions of Johnny Cash songs and we put the world to rights.

Saturday was Flickr Tour #7 to Tequila. And although the turnout was less than usual (9 of us) the planets aligned and along with the planned stuff (centre, museum, Columpio, Cofradia) we also stumbled upon a traditional dance presentation and saw people chucking agave piñas into a truck. Afterwards Mario recommended a beer and botanas place (you drink and the food comes along with it, tapas style, but less delicate) where we snacked, played pool and stuff. All me photos here, all photos from everyone here.

By Sunday I was knackered, but got a fair bit done on the chamba front despite my laptop being back in overheat-and-turn-off-with-no-warning-after-15-to-20-minutes mode. Luckily I have Ana´s slow, but reliable desktop as a back up… Sterilised the rest of the kitchen then went to see The Killers do their stuff at the spanking new Auditorio Telmex. We were up in the nosebleed seats, but they put on a good show. Basically songs from the first album were fantastic, and songs from the second were Springsteen.