tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-47519230462772547782024-03-13T05:01:33.052-07:00A Year in San MiguelBradhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14962745741811438871noreply@blogger.comBlogger8125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4751923046277254778.post-74345379854583317722015-03-23T20:36:00.000-07:002015-03-24T10:49:40.880-07:00<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
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So a funny thing happened on our first trip to this part of Mexico which has since become something of a not uncommon occurrence.</div>
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We were walking along a street in Guanajuato on our first trip to that city when suddenly as we came around a corner just a whole lot of people were standing on both sides of the street waiting, it seemed, for something about to happen. A couple of nights before this a religious procession had walked by us, starting with priests with incense and a large flower-filled float carried like the Ark of the Covenant through the street, with a marching band and the Church bells going off like crazy, followed by hundreds of people walking and singing down the street. You can see a video I took of it <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJNI5xybRJo" target="_blank">here.</a></div>
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We thought something similar might be about to happen, but instead it was a very different sort of parade that came around the corner and down the street. It consisted mostly of kids, a couple of which held a banner for their school, but it was like no school parade I had ever witnessed. There was one kid dressed as the devil and another as kind of a pirate/bandito/Guy Fawkes character, both of whom brandished whips that they kept cracking at other kids in the parade (and at the crowd, which kept a respectable distance). A few other kids danced around, dressed variously as a black bull, another devil and assorted other adult-sized caricatures. Later there was a marching band, people dancing in native dress with the feathers and the paint and whatnot, but it was these kids that I found the strangest part of the proceedings. I just remember thinking, as I frequently do down here, that this is decidedly not Salt Lake City.<br />
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We've since had other experiences like this many times, where some cultural event starts happening unexpectedly around or near us, such as a parade, a procession or a marching band, sometimes in the middle of the night (like last night) or mysterious firework demonstrations at weird times (like this morning, beginning at 4 am and then becoming loud as hell and seemingly just outside my window from 6-7). The overall feeling is "What exactly is going on here?" Sometimes a Google search of Mexican Holidays will turn up a clue but other times one is left completely in the dark and totally baffled (turns out yesterday was Benito Juarez' Birthday, so Wake the Hell up, Everybody!)</div>
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-2PRsu56e2UU/VQ8cdt9fDyI/AAAAAAAAAfc/6YCIb4gaJiI/s1600/IMG_0528.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; display: inline !important; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-2PRsu56e2UU/VQ8cdt9fDyI/AAAAAAAAAfc/6YCIb4gaJiI/s1600/IMG_0528.JPG" height="200" style="cursor: move;" width="150" /></a>Where I come from, parades are a very different kettle of fish, especially those featuring kids. There was only one parade that happened in my neighborhood growing up, every year on July 4, and it went right down Evergreen Avenue, the street in front of my house.</div>
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I have very few memories of it growing up, but in 2001 my folks asked if my own kids, 6 and 8, would like to be in it. It consisted mainly of children riding by on bikes wrapped in red, white and blue ribbons and a few homemade floats pulled along by dedicated parents, watched by the grandparents and other family members.</div>
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In other words, it was super lame.</div>
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Like school plays, piano recitals, merit badge and graduation ceremonies, parades in the U.S. are generally something you get roped into watching because your kid is in them and you love them enough to sit there and suck it up for the duration. That's as true for the Pride Parade as it is for the 4th of July.</div>
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There have of course been many more parades since which fall into this category, such as the yearly St. Patrick's Day Parade, which apparently exists to celebrate the color green, Shriners in small cars, and Girl Scouts in full uniform, of which I have had two.</div>
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Around the turn of the century however, I began to be interested in going to Utah's biggest parade, which occurs on July 24th (Pioneer Day) and is WAY bigger than the July 4 celebration in Utah for reasons which are just too historically weird to go into. </div>
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This parade, a barely-disguised celebration of Mormondom masquerading as a Founder's Day Parade, has become an event that people actually stake out their places for and camp there like nerds circling the Apple store the night before a new iPhone release. </div>
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And despite the LDS overtones, there is a huge variety of people of all stripes hanging out and watching the festivities: families with kids who planned for the event with humongous colorful umbrellas, drunken rednecks with kids dressed only in diapers (it's also known as Pie-and-Beer Day), hacky-sacking teens, a few punk rockers, the morbidly obese stretching the limits of physics in plastic lawn chairs, and just a lot of interesting people of all ethnicities and social classes, which is of course why I tried to convince my kids to come with me so I could snap clandestine pictures of people and slip them later into paintings. My son John-David wised up after the first year but Grete humored me twice. <br />
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Here's <a href="http://bradslaugh.com/artwork/1638961_Family_Plot.html" target="_blank">one</a> painting where I slipped in some parade folks, and <a href="http://bradslaugh.com/artwork/1642086_Chessmen.html" target="_blank">another</a> here.</div>
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Why didn't my kids want to go to this event? Because my kids are smart and The Days of '47 Parade is, of course, super lame.</div>
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There will obviously be detractors from this point of view, as a lot of people go out to these things for some reason, but parades in the States, at least the part I'm from, have for the most part become these big corporate McFestivals that are just another vehicle for corporate advertisers and politicians (and in Utah, church leaders) to drape themselves in the flag or something with a shamrock on it or push the odd Mormon handcart. As such these big crepe floats are incredibly surreal with their over-the-top patriotism displays and huge corporate logos.</div>
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Beauty queens, state troopers driving their motorcycles around and around in figure eights, marching bands and the glamorous honkies of the late night news team: it is increasingly hard for me to connect any of this with my life, is what I am trying to say. Plus I really despise bagpipe music as a rule, of which there are at least 2 different outfits that come marching by in each parade, kilts flying and scottish junk presumably a-waggling beneath.</div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">We are the beautiful white people who bring you the News!</td></tr>
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The truth for me is that I actually <i>want</i> to <i>like</i> parades, filled with color and sunlight and spectacle as they supposedly are, but year after year I feel actually even more alienated by the parades of my own culture than I do when I am seeing a completely baffling one pass me by in Mexico and wondering what exactly it's all about, Alfie. <br />
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The thing about parades in Mexico, and many other places, is that they don't shy away from the darker side of the human psyche in the way that the antiseptic parades in the States have in the past who knows how many decades. One would hate for there to be anything that's not <i>nice</i> in one of these slow moving sequin shindigs. <br />
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I feel this way about a large amount of the art I see produced around me and shown in my home state. Put something weird or slightly disturbing in a painting and people assume you're a freak with some kind of psychological maladjustment, even as they cue up the latest <i>Saw</i> movie on Netflix. Half the fun of art history are all the gnarly and funky bits that show up even in, perhaps especially in, the Churchy stuff.<br />
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I love paintings that also try to take on the subject of the parade, especially when it's a really bizarre one. Heironymus Bosch is always good for a parade route down Psilocybin Avenue, especially when one considers that they were paid for by and hung in churches in the Netherlands before America was discovered by Columbus. That's not the kind of picture that was hanging in the foyer in the cinderblock chapel where I went to Sunday School growing up. Maybe if it was I'd still pop in now and again for a look.<br />
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One of my favorite paintings of all time, James Ensor's <i>Christ's Entry into Brussels</i>, is a parade scene of the strangest sort imaginable:<br />
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-HmZ6OJgSaOg/VRGHAnn1KVI/AAAAAAAAAmE/fpAa-eO5J5I/s1600/GOYA_-_Entierro_de_la_Sardina_(Real_Academia_de_Bellas_Artes_de_San_Fernando%2C_1812-14).jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-HmZ6OJgSaOg/VRGHAnn1KVI/AAAAAAAAAmE/fpAa-eO5J5I/s1600/GOYA_-_Entierro_de_la_Sardina_(Real_Academia_de_Bellas_Artes_de_San_Fernando%2C_1812-14).jpg" height="400" width="288" /></a>And another favorite, Goya's <i>Burial of the Sardine</i>, is another parade scene which has that "What exactly is going on here?" feeling that I wish would occasionally happen back home but never does, at least not in a real parade.<br />
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I would love to paint a painting of a parade someday that captures some of the weirdness that these paintings do, but looking through all the photos I took of parades back in the States I just don't see the source material there. <br />
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The daughter I dragged on those ill-fated outings is now all grown up and heading off this fall to Tübingen, Germany on a Fulbright Fellowship. Maybe you'll find the <a href="http://www.andynisch.com/fasnet-in-tubingen/" target="_blank">parades there</a> more interesting, Grete!</div>
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I can't remember the last time I really enjoyed watching a parade in the States, though of course I've never been to the Mermaid Parade in Coney Island or Mardi Gras in New Orleans. I suppose the addition of breasts would probably change the entire dynamic.</div>
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Do let's get back to Mexico, by all means.</div>
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-3eSYoOVK2qM/VQ80uWIzw7I/AAAAAAAAAhQ/PfaMo5TbOUI/s1600/IMG_1767.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-3eSYoOVK2qM/VQ80uWIzw7I/AAAAAAAAAhQ/PfaMo5TbOUI/s1600/IMG_1767.JPG" height="320" width="320" /></a><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-ZiUQrTqwsRc/VQ80uWKnrRI/AAAAAAAAAhM/yGx8jQeCXns/s1600/IMG_1732.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em; text-align: left;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-ZiUQrTqwsRc/VQ80uWKnrRI/AAAAAAAAAhM/yGx8jQeCXns/s1600/IMG_1732.JPG" height="200" width="200" /></a></div>
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Whew.</div>
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So the next parade we witnessed in Mexico was the Good Friday Procession when we came back to San Miguel a few years ago, and it is an unapologetically religious, (specifically Monumentally Catholic) reconstruction of the Passion of Christ, complete with Roman Centurions and some extremely serious guys carrying heavy crosses in the heat of the day.</div>
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<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-5qkZpJ9v1fI/VQ80vLWT0UI/AAAAAAAAAhg/ybyBrabfAkM/s1600/IMG_1775.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em; text-align: left;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-5qkZpJ9v1fI/VQ80vLWT0UI/AAAAAAAAAhg/ybyBrabfAkM/s1600/IMG_1775.JPG" height="320" width="320" /></a><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-bbW0GwPpQMY/VQ80vkbWo2I/AAAAAAAAAhk/VSOHh-CnKkQ/s1600/IMG_1794.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-bbW0GwPpQMY/VQ80vkbWo2I/AAAAAAAAAhk/VSOHh-CnKkQ/s1600/IMG_1794.JPG" height="200" width="200" /></a><br />
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<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-L-6JC9frtTE/VRGcS4eaiDI/AAAAAAAAAmw/M49CK-zjWNo/s1600/IMG_8450.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-L-6JC9frtTE/VRGcS4eaiDI/AAAAAAAAAmw/M49CK-zjWNo/s1600/IMG_8450.jpg" height="320" width="240" /></a>Following these hombres are (I suppose) the thieves who were crucified along with Jesus, being flogged by Romans (not really flogging them and nobody actually gets crucified, though I understand this really happens [<i>yikes</i>!] in the <a href="http://travel.cnn.com/explorations/life/whats-it-be-crucified-501065" target="_blank">Philippines</a>), and several other folks from the cast of characters from the Biblical story. The people in this parade are decidedly not messing around, and clearly working very hard. Several of the "floats" are really heavy affairs carried by 6-8 devotees dressed in black, which has to get super hot in the 84 degree weather of early April in San Miguel, and they are allowed to stop and rest every once in a while, the floats propped up on wooden supports while they catch their breath. I would pay good money to watch the Ten O'Clock Eyewitness News Lineup from back home do this.</div>
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I'm not what anyone would call a Believer by any stretch of the imagination, and the whole mythology (which I was also raised within) now strikes me as extremely odious, but this procession is really something to see.<br />
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<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-VKYxmcwNUbM/VQ-C0EmDO3I/AAAAAAAAAiY/nCUleJTombQ/s1600/IMG_3517.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-VKYxmcwNUbM/VQ-C0EmDO3I/AAAAAAAAAiY/nCUleJTombQ/s1600/IMG_3517.JPG" height="320" width="320" /></a><br />
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I imagine if one were counted among the Faithful it would all be very affirming and moving, but for me it was simply aesthetically beautiful, with the resonance of an event that taps into a symbology and tradition that goes back thousands of years.</div>
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I felt that way again when we came back for Christmas later that year and witnessed what seemed to be a spontaneous peasant procession for the Virgin that walked up the steps of the Parroquia just as Christmas Mass was ending on the morning of the 25th. It was very beautiful despite the off-tune singing led by a woman with a megaphone and a small group of people with a life-size statue of the Virgin. Then the people tucked fake flowers into various places on the Virgin as they set her down outside the church doors and sang another hymn. </div>
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<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-ohYF_rQm43U/VRDXtM28YJI/AAAAAAAAAko/9FKRKBsGvJQ/s1600/IMG_2685.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-ohYF_rQm43U/VRDXtM28YJI/AAAAAAAAAko/9FKRKBsGvJQ/s1600/IMG_2685.jpg" height="200" width="150" /></a></div>
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<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-krYxjuaHnSM/VRDW5tT6oAI/AAAAAAAAAkg/h_njCqy17Mk/s1600/IMG_2670.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-krYxjuaHnSM/VRDW5tT6oAI/AAAAAAAAAkg/h_njCqy17Mk/s1600/IMG_2670.jpg" height="320" width="240" /></a></div>
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There were people crying tears of real devotion and it made me wonder what could possibly move a person who doesn't believe to this degree. There was a tiny little bent-over woman with a cane who climbed slowly up the stairs to make her devotions. Like I say, I'm not a believer but I do believe in showing respect for what other people hold dear, and I was glad Sofi could be there to see it even she really didn't understand what was going on. Neither did I, to tell the truth.</div>
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However, despite myself, I thought of Steve Martin's <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wogta8alHiU" target="_blank">Hymn for Atheists</a>, and I mused that it's not too surprising there aren't any atheist cathedrals.</div>
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-zBoE57r-VKk/VQ-CzwQLRFI/AAAAAAAAAiU/0WayljKvOGA/s1600/IMG_1770.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em; text-align: left;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-zBoE57r-VKk/VQ-CzwQLRFI/AAAAAAAAAiU/0WayljKvOGA/s1600/IMG_1770.JPG" height="320" width="320" /></a>One bit of advice I would give to anyone who is staying in San Miguel during Semana Santa (which starts this Sunday, incidentally) and who is not 100% of the faith: Make sure you are on the same side of the procession as your hotel and that you are close enough to a side street to beat a discreet retreat when you decide you've had enough Passion for one day, because this event takes an improbable amount of time to come to a close and sneaking through to the other side of the street is not something that is smiled upon by the people on either side of that strait and narrow divide.</div>
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<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-gVz5WMJps4g/VRCm5IIBHTI/AAAAAAAAAjU/l7ge0FzgzUU/s1600/IMG_7185.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-gVz5WMJps4g/VRCm5IIBHTI/AAAAAAAAAjU/l7ge0FzgzUU/s1600/IMG_7185.jpg" height="320" width="240" /></a><br />
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Semana Santa is a whole scene here in Mexico, with different events and processions happening every day of the week, starting on Palm Sunday where people weave palm leaves into all sorts of interesting and clever shapes, and continuing through the week. Unfortunately Sofi had an ear infection on our first day, so she looks a little miserable after looking all morning for a doctor who was open on a holiday weekend, holding her little palm crucifix complete with little palm Jesus on it that she had picked out, though she had no idea what it was. </div>
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We certainly didn't go to all the events, as one procession goes a very long way IMHO. And then, on our last morning in San Miguel, which turned out to be Easter Sunday, after a terrible night's sleep filled with people walking up and down the streets all night making altogether too much noise, I woke at 5 am to a marching band playing Mexican Polka music at the loudest possible volume as they marched down the streets of San Miguel, seemingly around and around the block our rental house was located on.</div>
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Then the fireworks started going off. Not the quiet pretty kind that sparkle and shimmer and rain back down like squiggly little sperms swimming back to earth, but the big FLASH ones that just make a huge BOOM, echoing up and down the valley San Miguel is located in. It was still pitch black, mind you, with a full moon high above the city. Perhaps the thinking is that Jesus rose on Easter, and so should you. Here's a <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L8-9CEIrhqM&feature=youtu.be" target="_blank">link</a> to a probably boring little video I took about an hour after they had started in, had figured out they weren't going to stop any time soon, and had dragged Tracy up to the roof of the house we were renting for the week. What I am trying to say, is that when you come to this town, you might want to invest in some foam earplugs first.</div>
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[Side note: I'm no biblical scholar, but I think there's no way Jesus was getting up at 5 am that first Easter Morn. I bet they let him at least have a cup of java and read the morning paper before really firing things back up. I mean, give a brother a union break already.]</div>
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-43A1xrPPz_A/VRCf5uDbioI/AAAAAAAAAjE/KgP6sG3689c/s1600/IMG_8774.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-43A1xrPPz_A/VRCf5uDbioI/AAAAAAAAAjE/KgP6sG3689c/s1600/IMG_8774.JPG" height="240" width="320" /></a><br />
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Later that morning the entire town assembled for the event known as the <i>Firing of the Judases</i>. It turns out this does not imply giving Judas a pink slip for inadequate job performance, violating the terms of his Nondisclosure Agreement, and improper touching and/or kissing. No, turns out the firing is much more literal than this, and involves actual fire.</div>
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<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Half this penguin-dude's pants just burned off.</td></tr>
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When we got to the Jardin, which is the town square in front of the Cathedral, we noticed 16-20 life-sized papier maché effigies hanging by ropes over the street, with a huge crowd anxiously awaiting the beginning of festivities. Some of them were devils or demons as well as a few witches (the effigies, not the crowd, at least as far as I know), but most were just relatively ordinary looking Joes with Ross Perot ears and signs on them saying things like <i>Candidato Corrupto</i>, but also many more signs that said things like <i>Hotel Virreyes</i> and <i>Dulceria Goreti</i>. In retrospect I think these were simply the local versions of Corporate Sponsorship for each Judas, but who knows? Maybe somebody had a really bad night at Casa Canela. Considering the night's sleep I had just had, this was a real possibility.</div>
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<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-h-ukIisY4jw/VRC5mgpZMcI/AAAAAAAAAjk/abLM_vMpSl0/s1600/IMG_8816.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-h-ukIisY4jw/VRC5mgpZMcI/AAAAAAAAAjk/abLM_vMpSl0/s1600/IMG_8816.jpg" height="320" width="240" /></a><br />
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One by one the effigies were lowered, a fuse was lit, and the Judas was quickly raised back up while the fuse lighters ran like hell and the people pulling the ropes in the balconies above closed the doors. The Judas would spin slowly as rockets began shooting off (sometimes into the crowd!) from circular bands around his/her waist, and then slowly pick up steam. Some of them would catch on fire at this point, but most simply exploded with the force of an M80, which is almost certainly what they have inside. We kept what we hoped was a safe distance away, which increased a bit as the show commenced.<br />
<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-UF-OBLhfWso/VRGVi_0hjYI/AAAAAAAAAmg/HJtrdUEfB_E/s1600/IMG_8818.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-UF-OBLhfWso/VRGVi_0hjYI/AAAAAAAAAmg/HJtrdUEfB_E/s1600/IMG_8818.jpg" height="400" width="300" /></a><br />
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<span style="text-align: center;">There is simply no way I'm not going to show you a couple of videos of this. </span><br />
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<span style="text-align: center;">There's this one, which I'm fairly sure at least one of his unpardonable sins was wearing that pink leisure suit with the high fastening pants:</span><br />
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And then there's this one.<br />
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At least one of the Judases actually had candy inside, like a piñata with medium duty artillery, and when he blew up and rained <i>dulces</i> on the ground below some members of the crowd had to be encouraged to go back behind the ropes before the next Judas could be lit. </div>
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This is emphatically not something you are going to see in Murray, UT, folks.</div>
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<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-eBYhQvHjnFU/VRC_06gRu3I/AAAAAAAAAkI/BNA9OfpClGM/s1600/IMG_8869.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-eBYhQvHjnFU/VRC_06gRu3I/AAAAAAAAAkI/BNA9OfpClGM/s1600/IMG_8869.jpg" height="320" width="240" /></a><br />
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After the last Judas had been exploded, but before the street sweepers came in to clean up the carnage, there was a rush by members of the crowd on the parts and pieces left on the ground below. Then there was an informal marketplace of sorts selling the best bits of exploded Judas chum for the proverbial 30 pieces of silver by what I am assuming were the event organizers, or perhaps crepe paper black marketeers. </div>
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<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-n8nmAxm098E/VRC_wo5YxBI/AAAAAAAAAkA/l-1IUWo6-Qc/s1600/IMG_8879.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em; text-align: left;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-n8nmAxm098E/VRC_wo5YxBI/AAAAAAAAAkA/l-1IUWo6-Qc/s1600/IMG_8879.JPG" height="150" width="200" /></a><br />
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We didn't buy anything, but here's Straussy holding up a witches' head, and our friends who'd come to San Miguel with us ended up with an arm they snatched off the ground for free in their carryon. Sweet spoils of victory! Then we saw some kids walking a complete unexploded Judas (some of the effigies were traitorous duds), presumably still with the explosives inside, away from the battlefield. <i>Cuidado, Ninos!</i></div>
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<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-8bYkZA2GeDA/VRGUTwjewjI/AAAAAAAAAmU/sb2m18TY33Q/s1600/carav10.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-8bYkZA2GeDA/VRGUTwjewjI/AAAAAAAAAmU/sb2m18TY33Q/s1600/carav10.jpg" height="146" width="200" /></a>While I understand (and Sofi has already pointed out to me today) that this last was technically not a parade <i>per se</i>, I hope you'll not be a Doubting Thomas wiggling your finger around in my blog about niggling details. </div>
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I also want to insert a little clip here from one of my favorite shows of all time <i>An Idiot Abroad</i>, where Karl Pilkington, a very, <i>very </i>reluctant tourist, has a similar but much crazier Easter Sunday in Mexico City:</div>
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So, in closing, I would like to suggest that along with earplugs, you might wish to bring along safety glasses and perhaps some lidocaine when visiting Mexico during Holy Week. And always remember: Drop and roll, people. Drop and roll.<br />
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<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-6WdkCeT6CDA/VRC7iW5r0KI/AAAAAAAAAj0/oGVQpaI1VM0/s1600/IMG_8850.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-6WdkCeT6CDA/VRC7iW5r0KI/AAAAAAAAAj0/oGVQpaI1VM0/s1600/IMG_8850.JPG" height="480" width="640" /></a></div>
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I have more to say about parades in San Miguel, Little Flock, but this blog entry is too long already, so perhaps I'll write the rest in another epistle in a week or two after the Easter holiday. Until then, try to be of good cheer already.</div>
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Okay. So I got sick there for a while, sicker than I've ever been in fact, with bronchitis for over 6 weeks, which pretty much sapped any desire I had to paint or blog for a while. It also kind of sapped all my enthusiasm for being anyplace in the world except home in my own bed in Salt Lake City where there isn't any Mexican Oompah music playing at full blast at 2 am, as there was regularly from neighbors on both sides in the place we were staying until December. Then came the holidays, where we actually went to Cancun for a week before going back to Salt Lake for Christmas.<br />
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<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-UjR9CQ1kzig/VM5xo-NxrXI/AAAAAAAAAYs/rdoBGhhn0WM/s1600/A-a21O5CcAE89m3.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-UjR9CQ1kzig/VM5xo-NxrXI/AAAAAAAAAYs/rdoBGhhn0WM/s1600/A-a21O5CcAE89m3.jpeg" height="200" width="177" /></a>Tracy and I always pooh-poohed this kind of Mexican vacation that so many of our friends and family have taken over the years: pulling into a resort and planting yourself on the beach while they bring you drinks with little umbrellas in it and at some point you get up and stumble over to the buffet of crappy all-inclusive resort food. <br />
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Or worse, you get sucked into a timeshare that is kind of exactly like joining a cult. At some point you're sitting down in a room with wide-eyed people in suits, hopefully with friends you've dragged along, like some kind of multivitamin multilevel marketing scheme from Utah County. I mean, I wasn't born yesterday; I've seen <a href="http://southpark.cc.com/clips/153326/timeshare-conspiracy" target="_blank">South Park</a>.<br />
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<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-lgQqZuyOWqQ/VM5jK6HKEMI/AAAAAAAAAX0/d_X7f3JsFrc/s1600/cancun.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-lgQqZuyOWqQ/VM5jK6HKEMI/AAAAAAAAAX0/d_X7f3JsFrc/s1600/cancun.jpg" height="221" width="320" /></a>Jive plastic places like Cancun do not even remotely resemble what Mexico is really like, we argued. You might as well be in West Palm Beach. Emphatically not our thing, we insisted, clinging to our Lonely Planet guidebook, feeling superior and planning our next trip to someplace with an improbable number of X's and the suffix <i>uatl</i> at the end of its name.<br />
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Then Tracy's folks went and totally bought a timeshare in Cancun, and invited us all to come down with them for a week during the Christmas break. All right, we thought, but then we're going somewhere else afterward, somewhere inland, for another week and spend Christmas in some real Mexican town. I mean, how bad could the Beach Resort Vacation really be?<br />
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Now I'm not going to say that we were completely wrong about it, and then try to get you to come to a half hour meeting with me, but I will say that there is definitely a reason why people like to do this particular kind of vacation. Turns out lying on a beach with a good book and a cerveza with your family around you is pretty darn therapeutic, especially when you are just coming off six weeks of bronchitis. True, it's nothing like Mexico, but bad it emphatically ain't. <br />
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<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-XBWEhcQO6DE/VM5-0qRHByI/AAAAAAAAAZI/78bw3YnSiyw/s1600/602982.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-XBWEhcQO6DE/VM5-0qRHByI/AAAAAAAAAZI/78bw3YnSiyw/s1600/602982.jpg" height="320" width="210" /></a>Our first trip there I read Marcel Pagnol's <i>My Father's Glory </i>and<i> My Mother's Castle</i> in their entirety to Sofi (except for the last two pages, where in typical French fashion he feels like he has to kill everybody off in as tragic a way as possible). The title sounds like something out of the Mormon Fiction section, but is in fact Pagnol's memoir about growing up in the countryside in the South of France. So even though our bodies were lounging on a manicured beach in Mexico, our minds were crawling around the hills of Provence catching cicadas and chasing thrushes out of the lavender. I say two emphatic thumbs up, <i>avec ou sans</i> the last two pages. <br />
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Meanwhile, Sofi drew in her sketchbook the entire time, which is more than I can say about how productive I was artistically. I have to admit it was a pretty awesome way to spend a week overall. It was here that I finally perfected my approach to tanning, which is to slather on the sunscreen 45, lie mostly in the shade for the entire week and wait for that happy day when some clever geneticist invents a spray-on Stem Cell Mestizo #5 lotion. This approach is not for the impatient, but it works for me.<br />
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<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-47Uq0X2f3oU/VM5uoWV5IdI/AAAAAAAAAYY/8X7dpsHFZv0/s1600/IMG_3402.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-47Uq0X2f3oU/VM5uoWV5IdI/AAAAAAAAAYY/8X7dpsHFZv0/s1600/IMG_3402.JPG" height="320" width="320" /></a>When we weren't lying around dreaming about the French countryside, we were playing in the water, and it has been really awesome to watch Sofi go from being very apprehensive about the surf to becoming a sea otter in the last couple of years.<br />
<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-IxeS03E7kZE/VM5wv5QYk3I/AAAAAAAAAYk/3egIZ3bmN20/s1600/IMG_0021.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-IxeS03E7kZE/VM5wv5QYk3I/AAAAAAAAAYk/3egIZ3bmN20/s1600/IMG_0021.jpg" height="320" width="240" /></a><br />
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She also has her little cousin Ellie to play with while she's down there, and it has been great for her to be the big kid for a change, the opposite of her usual experience with her older sibs who are now both in college.<br />
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<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-zDuN9vurFy8/VM57cFwPGjI/AAAAAAAAAZA/_Vw_lIV8DWQ/s1600/IMG_1759.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-zDuN9vurFy8/VM57cFwPGjI/AAAAAAAAAZA/_Vw_lIV8DWQ/s1600/IMG_1759.JPG" height="240" width="320" /></a>There's also an absurdly beautiful Infinity Pool and at least four different hot tubs at this sweet place that Straussy's parents bought into, and while I stick by my assessment of timeshares in general, I gotta say that this particular one is a super cherry setup. I have said no to meeting invitations a total of twice in three years and so far nobody has come to my room with an E-Meter or some "literature". Notice also I am not telling you the name, as I'm perfectly content for all of you not to "buy in". Go find your own cult, people.<br />
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I'm glad it's not one of those All-Inclusive Resorts, however. At the first of the week we just go buy groceries and cook for ourselves the entire time. There are kitchenettes in each unit and several common BBQs to choose from. And the Cancun Costco sells booze! Swoosh!<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">This is about the extent of my experience of the Cancun Night Life</td></tr>
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<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-lXxzVlkxq8k/VM6AfJZuXvI/AAAAAAAAAZU/yY-aPAGktig/s1600/IMG_2012.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-lXxzVlkxq8k/VM6AfJZuXvI/AAAAAAAAAZU/yY-aPAGktig/s1600/IMG_2012.JPG" height="240" width="320" /></a>We Strauss/Slaughs are not big night owls, though there's a huge Cancun nightlife scene if that's your bag. I dunno. We're always there for the Winter Solstice and we're right on the far eastern edge of the Central Time Zone, so it's completely dark by 6 pm and the sun rises at like 5:45 am or something. This means we're usually sawing logs by the time Señor Frog's is even opening for the night. I love to sleep with the windows open and listen to the surf all night long, and sometimes, far away, there is the sound of bass thumping from a distant dance floor.<br />
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The sunrises are also almost embarrassingly pretty, and I'm of the opinion that as cliché as it sounds, enjoying long walks on the beach is not just something to put on your OK Cupid Profile. It's hard for me to think of a better way to spend a morning.<br />
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It happened that the first time we went to Cancun was the week of the Winter Solstice in 2012, which you may recall was a time when many assorted religious, new age and numerology crackpots as well as the odd Hollywood movie producer thought might be when the world was going to end. This was all supposedly based on the fact that the Mayan Calendar was set to come to an end on Dec. 21, 2012. Lots of hay was made about the 12-21-12-ness of it all (though of course that's not how the freaking Mayan Calendar would have read, Der), with not a lot of rumination about earlier disappointing recent Apocalypses such as Y2K and 2011's May 21 Rapture, apparently called off due to bad weather. Some folks just really can't wait for it all to end, I guess.<br />
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Anyway, there was just no way I was going to be anywhere else than on top of or at least in front of a Mayan temple on the solstice of the end of the Mayan Calendar, so I rallied the troops and we planned an excursion out to Chichen Itza, a place I've wanted to visit my whole life. Unfortunately, due to various scheduling issues, we had to settle for going a couple of days before the Return of Kukulkan and perhaps a host of bloodthirsty Mayan and/or Aztec Overlords, on the 19th of December.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Abraham and the skeptic</td></tr>
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I talked with our tour guide Abraham on the two hour drive out into the jungle, and he agreed that the popular understanding of the Mayan calendar prophesying the end of the world was mistaken, reassuring us that the world was not going to end in two days, but then he went on to say that there was merely going to be a planetary alignment with all nine planets (Pluto's not a planet, but I wasn't going to argue) with the galactic center, which would then result in 3 days of darkness. <br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Abraham layin down the facts.</td></tr>
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I asked Abraham how exactly that was going to work with the total darkness thing, and he said that it was because Venus would be between us and the sun. I pointed out that this had already happened back in June during the Transit of Venus, and that we'd all watched it with telescopes and special filters on Library Square in Salt Lake City, and that Venus had only been this tiny dot passing in front of the much larger solar disc. He nodded politely, with the patronizing look of a man who still thought we totally should have sprung for the Travel Insurance.<br />
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Anyhoo, Abraham had lots of interesting other stuff to say about this crazy game the Mayans played with these heavy rubber balls that they had to bonk up through small stone hoops at the height of basketball nets with, like, their hips or something, while the king and all the aristocracy watched and cheered from on top of the walls. And if I understood correctly the winners, not the losers, then got sacrificed to the gods right there on the fifty yard line instead of the post game interviews. Finally, a sport for those of us who were always picked last in gym class.<br />
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Chichen Itza certainly felt more authentically Mexican than anything else we'd experienced that week, which isn't to say that it's not a major tourist trap filled with tchotchke shops and people hustling you constantly. Some of the stuff is most definitely the same old mass-produced crapola you see everywhere in such places in Mexico, but there were also some real artisans making and selling handmade work that was really cool. <br />
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We bought a hand-carved wooden mask from these Mayan woodcarvers Abraham hooked us up with (who knew there were still Mayans?) that we've been really happy with, and he even has a little Chichen Itza pyramid on his head to remind us of the place when we're back home. <br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-tFHaz9HHL6g/VM6bEg3I1iI/AAAAAAAAAa4/TC1mzkjMWLQ/s1600/Valladolid%2B3.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-tFHaz9HHL6g/VM6bEg3I1iI/AAAAAAAAAa4/TC1mzkjMWLQ/s1600/Valladolid%2B3.jpg" height="201" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Valladolid</td></tr>
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When you go to Chichen Itza, make sure to make a stop in this charming little town called Valladolid. If you have time (we didn't) you can also go swimming in one of the cenotes, or sinkholes filled with water, which are like little grottos. This had been our original plan but ultimately Chichen Itza proved to be a long, hot and humid day and we were all hungry and super grouchy by the end of it, with a two hour drive still ahead of us. Also, when you go to Valladolid, do not space out and leave your debit card in the friggin ATM. Luckily, I realized this just in time, and I ran back in a panic to see the next guy standing there looking at my card still poking out of the slot while the machine beeped like a McDonald's French Fry Machine. ¡hijole!<br />
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Two days later on Dec 21st, Tracy, Sofi and I greeted the Solstice and the dawn of a new Mayan Era in the Temple of the Scorpion, which just happened to be right next door to our Timeshare. I totally talked Kukulkan out of killing all of you and eating your hearts. He was actually a great guy, and we've stayed in touch.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Cd2GGu7-3n0/VM6VD-F0h0I/AAAAAAAAAag/TvMGwiuWmqE/s1600/IMG_5122.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Cd2GGu7-3n0/VM6VD-F0h0I/AAAAAAAAAag/TvMGwiuWmqE/s1600/IMG_5122.jpg" height="320" width="240" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">My son John-David, who does not have a<br />
palm tree growing out of his head.</td></tr>
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The next year our big Mayan outing was to another set of ruins called Tulum, which is much closer to Cancun, coastal and far less stiflingly hot and humid than Chichen Itza. This time we were also joined by my son John-David, who was out for Winter Break. Going to ancient places like this is crucial for getting a sense of where you are relative to the age of the world, I think, especially for those of us who live in the States and may not actually be surrounded by any structure older than 100 years old on any given day. There are several members of Congress that I think this could greatly benefit from this.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">You can't see him, but he's back there.</td></tr>
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Along the way to Tulum we popped into a pretty cool little coastal town called Playa del Carmen where a guy actually asked John-David and me if we wanted to come into his place and "meet his sister." We said No Gracias, though I'm sure she was a lovely person. Later some kids asked us if we wanted to come see an alligator, which also sounded interesting, and indeed there was totally one living in this crappy trash-filled pond behind a little Virgin de Guadalupe Shrine that was in the rear of their shop. Somebody ought to clean that mess up, I thought, but I suppose I wouldn't want to do it with that big lizard in there either.<br />
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Ultimately, the shrine and the kids were a lot more interesting than the reptile, which like every alligator I've ever seen just sat there like a freaking log, surrounded in this case by old cheetos packages, used tires and antifreeze bottles.<br />
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<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Ws6_T3WE5t0/VM6dqGKCfxI/AAAAAAAAAbE/w14iJhiaicM/s1600/IMG_0027.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Ws6_T3WE5t0/VM6dqGKCfxI/AAAAAAAAAbE/w14iJhiaicM/s1600/IMG_0027.JPG" height="240" width="320" /></a>Well, I guess I need to wrap this sucker up.<br />
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<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-ruszUdM9yDA/VM6eHoq17HI/AAAAAAAAAbM/l7zX760lJGU/s1600/IMG_0634.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-ruszUdM9yDA/VM6eHoq17HI/AAAAAAAAAbM/l7zX760lJGU/s1600/IMG_0634.jpg" height="200" width="150" /></a>So essentially we go back to Cancun again and again now. It's a trip we look forward to and schedule for the same week in December every year, a place where a kid can make sand angels or a sandman and celebrate the holidays by swimming right up to the bar and ordering a virgin strawberry daiquiri for herself and her little cousin, because Happy Hour means two for the price of one!<br />
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Unlike the other places we've gone in Mexico, I can't imagine how I would ever make any art about this place. It's too slick and geometrical and yes, too bourgeois for me to ever find my way around it as a subject, so we've always used it as a place to springboard to another part of Mexico that has something we can sink our visual teeth into. Someplace where there is some culture that has emerged out of this country we've come to love over the years.<br />
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It's also just way too damn <i>purdy</i>. Like many American artists, I think I'm kind of self-conscious about putting anything too picturesque into my work, as if we've all somehow become embarrassed by beauty, though I'm probably a little less shameless in this regard than some. This may sound a bit weird but in Art School that shizzle is pretty much drummed right out of you and it is seen as super unsophisticated to paint something unapologetically beautiful just for the sake of enjoyment.<br />
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There are of course a lot of <i>purdy pitchers</i> painted by artists these days; just pick up a copy of Southwest Art and you're gonna see just a bunch of sunsets over Red Rocks (as well as a whole lot of seriously morose Native Americans), and to tell you the truth I have never in my life, before or after Art School, cared one bit about any of that stuff. I simply can't imagine trying to paint anything like that with a straight face, and yet I find that I crave this kind of beauty around me on a regular basis, just not paintings of this kind of beauty. A real sunset over real red rocks? You bet, though not so much the morose Native Americans (though I totally get it, people). Also, I never wonder whether a real sunset would match my couch.<br />
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What I have ultimately learned from Cancun however, is that someday when I cash it in, and it turns out that Reincarnation is the deelio, I am totally coming back as a pelican. I don't know if there's a list you have to get on for that or not, or if you have to know somebody, but I am telling you those things are totally working a sweet angle. Look for me in the surf, is what I am saying, people.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Bradathon Livingston Pelican.<br />
I will never paint anything remotely similar to this.</td></tr>
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This year was of course different from all other years, as we did not have plans for going anywhere amazing after Cancun, having just come from someplace amazing (though truthfully I wasn't really appreciating it much those last few weeks while I was coughing up my own weight in phlegm). <br />
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Instead, this time we went back home to Salt Lake for Christmas, where I could climb in my own bed, or a reasonable approximation of it anyway at my folks' house (ours is rented for the year) and indeed there was not the least hint of Mexican Oompah music there. We spent some quality time with the fam and the older kids who were on break from College, and had a couple of meals with friends before hopping back on a plane for Leon and the rest of our stint down here in San Miguel. Even though as a general rule I pretty much hate Christmas and the rest of winter in Salt Lake, I have to say it was a really nice break. <br />
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<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Em8HV9M5_kw/VM6vnR7WRDI/AAAAAAAAAcY/eYhZwqvquu4/s1600/IMG_0256.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Em8HV9M5_kw/VM6vnR7WRDI/AAAAAAAAAcY/eYhZwqvquu4/s1600/IMG_0256.JPG" height="480" width="640" /></a>Though when we got off the plane and were finally on the road back to San Miguel on New Year's Eve<span style="text-align: center;">, in teeshirts with the windows rolled down, and then made our way up our quiet little street strewn with holiday flags, I have to say it felt great to be back.</span>Bradhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14962745741811438871noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4751923046277254778.post-3643304654091540032014-11-03T09:51:00.002-08:002015-02-01T08:04:03.631-08:00<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-yQb-bzlsf1A/VFWKrMdk59I/AAAAAAAAARc/_aMHnWrfSGU/s1600/IMG_4839.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-yQb-bzlsf1A/VFWKrMdk59I/AAAAAAAAARc/_aMHnWrfSGU/s1600/IMG_4839.JPG" height="494" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">One of Tracy's pieces from her show at the Loge. Es muy bien, no?</td></tr>
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<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-3ftUEiLXERk/VFWM0WK70fI/AAAAAAAAARo/KOG7Pvldg7o/s1600/IMG_4848.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-3ftUEiLXERk/VFWM0WK70fI/AAAAAAAAARo/KOG7Pvldg7o/s1600/IMG_4848.JPG" height="320" width="257" /></a><br />
I thought I might take a little jaunt away from the trip in Guanajuato this week to talk about our efforts to use the images from this and other places to actually make art.<br />
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As I said in the last post, Tracy and I spent three nights walking through the alleyways and streets of Guanajuato on our first visit, but we also spent the four days bookending these nights exploring that town, collecting images for Tracy's December '08 show in the University of Utah's Loge Gallery. Tracy spent the next several months creating an impressive number of mixed media works based on this material, as well as images from Taxco, Oaxaca and a few from the South of France. It was an eye-poppingly colorful show, and almost all of the images have since found happy homes in the the houses of groovy people. <br />
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<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-LRlT83fb93A/VFWQK8X1fmI/AAAAAAAAAR0/4-N6bsMMDpQ/s1600/IMG_5208.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-LRlT83fb93A/VFWQK8X1fmI/AAAAAAAAAR0/4-N6bsMMDpQ/s1600/IMG_5208.JPG" height="320" width="180" /></a><br />
It took me quite a bit longer to start using any of these as source material, however. Tracy and I have built up an absurd number of photos in the old iPhoto library over the years (71,440 as of this writing, and she's out shooting more as I type this), and sometimes the sheer volume of the material is daunting. There's so much to choose from, but it also feels like just a whole bunch of haystacks to go looking for needles in.<br />
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-36rX5sj0UYQ/VFWS1A29UDI/AAAAAAAAASA/OBgDpCwGQQQ/s1600/IMG_4827.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-36rX5sj0UYQ/VFWS1A29UDI/AAAAAAAAASA/OBgDpCwGQQQ/s1600/IMG_4827.JPG" height="234" width="320" /></a><br />
The other thing that frequently happens in our household is that when one of us starts mining a particular vein, the other one feels like they can't really touch it. This isn't said overtly and is even occasionally denied by the person working that vein, but I think we both feel this pressure to stay on our own side of the artistic bed.<br />
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There are similarities in the way that Tracy and I work as well, which is one of the first things that drew us together as a couple, but which occasionally people who aren't looking very hard will say annoying things about, such as "You two paint exactly the same!" (actual quote from an actual museum-art-collector-type person). But it is true that Tracy and I have been barking up adjacent if not conjoined trees since even before our eyes met across a crowded room back in '02, and it's also true that we have influenced each other heavily ever since, on and off the canvas. How, Dear Reader, could it not be so?<br />
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<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-6m-UQbki66E/VFZltGLSQsI/AAAAAAAAASc/CLsaPTteWrU/s1600/IMG_2415.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-6m-UQbki66E/VFZltGLSQsI/AAAAAAAAASc/CLsaPTteWrU/s1600/IMG_2415.JPG" height="320" width="260" /></a></div>
<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-WLqcbc3AJZ0/VFZl7dlpdYI/AAAAAAAAASk/0JKKlqj-PeM/s1600/Dreamy%2BProfessor%2BPose%2B2006.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-WLqcbc3AJZ0/VFZl7dlpdYI/AAAAAAAAASk/0JKKlqj-PeM/s1600/Dreamy%2BProfessor%2BPose%2B2006.jpg" height="320" width="278" /></a>Aside from a show we did when Tracy was eight months pregnant, where we both painted about 10 or so paintings each from the same model setups, and hung our paintings up side by side like this, Tracy and I have kind of kept to our own individual subject matters.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-XgdExqscCyk/VFfPThrMB0I/AAAAAAAAAWo/7unmwgCsR8k/s1600/St.%2BJeannet%2B3.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-XgdExqscCyk/VFfPThrMB0I/AAAAAAAAAWo/7unmwgCsR8k/s1600/St.%2BJeannet%2B3.jpg" height="320" width="236" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Plein Air in France, where they invented the phrase</td></tr>
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However, I was very interested in the beauty of all of these places we'd been, and in their sheer visual weirdness when compared to the very sensibly laid down grid, boring architecture and muted tones of the town I live in. Even though I've painted plein air on most of our trips to Europe, I sort of felt like Tracy owned the photographic images from our excursions to Mexico, France and other places we'd been to, and I didn't want to infringe on her turf.<br />
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-lUzynKHLNZA/VFaAoV6DXPI/AAAAAAAAATs/SosfzKUgdRU/s1600/Shakespeare.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-lUzynKHLNZA/VFaAoV6DXPI/AAAAAAAAATs/SosfzKUgdRU/s1600/Shakespeare.jpg" height="282" width="320" /></a></div>
Also, a lot of my subject matter over the years has been about the very banality of growing up in a certain place and time in the U.S., and I really didn't know how to fit these picturesque locales into my body of work. I've had a love/hate relationship with working from photographic reference for many years, sometimes swearing them off completely for a while and then coming back to them when I saw an image that was completely irresistible. But when I'd worked from photos before it had nearly always been from old family snapshots that have a certain dorky nostalgia and time-muted color sensibility, mostly from the 1960s and 70s. I really liked these new digital images we were accruing, but I just didn't know what to do with them, if anything. <br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-G6WAIuBbTYk/VFaBQgmcVyI/AAAAAAAAAT0/2O9mCGQ0alY/s1600/hirst-damien-1965-royaume-uni-oleoylsarcosine-3578988-500-500-3578988.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-G6WAIuBbTYk/VFaBQgmcVyI/AAAAAAAAAT0/2O9mCGQ0alY/s1600/hirst-damien-1965-royaume-uni-oleoylsarcosine-3578988-500-500-3578988.jpg" height="320" width="234" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Hey! That's New! <br />
One of Damien Hirst's Polka Dot paintings</td></tr>
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This kind of inner critical dialogue can sometimes make an artist self conscious, and self consciousness kills art like roundup on so many dandelions. Somehow there also has taken root in Western and particularly American Art the High Holy Doctrine of Unprecedented Uniqueness, which is that your work must break out anew as the Next Big Thing like Athena from the skullshards of yesterday's misguided tradition. <br />
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Continuing the Greek myth riff, this new Promethian fire, brought down the mountain of cranial grey matter from the solitary (and almost certainly New York based!) artistic genius, hopefully arrives just in time to save Western Civilization from stagnation by ushering in the New Paradigm, whatever that is. <br />
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This is all of course complete and utter Clement Greenberg B.S., but it is one of the primary myths (and not one of the good kinds with minotaurs and togas) left over from Art School that a painter may have rolling around their cranium when they sit down in front of a blank canvas. It's also one of the many reasons contemporary art has become so utterly dreadful, but that's a whole other rant for another day. One tries to empty one's mind of unhelpful myths, but sometimes it can be a challenge. <br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-cI4X4M99sNg/VFWVHYkPFqI/AAAAAAAAASM/uVprUXVh_sA/s1600/plugsculpture1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-cI4X4M99sNg/VFWVHYkPFqI/AAAAAAAAASM/uVprUXVh_sA/s1600/plugsculpture1.jpg" height="223" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">High Water Mark of Contemporary Art: "Tree"<br />
Paul McCarthy's 80 Foot Butt Plug in Paris two weeks ago.</td></tr>
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What is known today as the Art World is a very noisy place, filled with a whole bunch of stuff catering to the One-Percenters or Po-Mo art critics or God knows who, that frankly Tracy and I are just really not very interested in or moved by. While there are of course a lot of interesting artists still working all over the world, it seems that the most famous people who refer to themselves by that moniker today are 99.9% P.T. Barnum, and in my opinion they are pulling their ideas out of a different place than their grey matter, in the case of Paul McCarthy quite literally. <br />
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Still, there are some noted exceptions, like David Hockney, who is still kicking and continues to inspire artists like Tracy and me.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-VtewW-noEVs/VFaKAcSEqcI/AAAAAAAAAUE/A5duVfqKmMY/s1600/photo%2Bmontage%2Bby%2Bdavid%2Bhockney.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-VtewW-noEVs/VFaKAcSEqcI/AAAAAAAAAUE/A5duVfqKmMY/s1600/photo%2Bmontage%2Bby%2Bdavid%2Bhockney.jpg" height="425" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">David Hockney Photo-Montage</td></tr>
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One of the things Tracy and I have learned over the years from Hockney's photo-montages is that they have a much more interesting spatial (as well as temporal) relationship to the viewer than any individual photograph, and this space in some of them (though not so much in this one) begins to bend in ways that are closer to what it is like when you are actually standing in an environment that curves around you in every direction. The image is also fractured in interesting ways that recall cubism, though in my opinion this fractal effect always looks a bit tricky when you try to do it with paint.<br />
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-6oWBjLCuLIg/VFZ7jd6AayI/AAAAAAAAATc/idCJllwHI1Q/s1600/Casa%2BAzul.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-6oWBjLCuLIg/VFZ7jd6AayI/AAAAAAAAATc/idCJllwHI1Q/s1600/Casa%2BAzul.jpg" height="418" width="640" /></a>Add to this spatial idea the weirdness of actually standing in a place with winding streets like Guanajuato or San Miguel, the extreme light contrast and the color of these places, and it seemed like there might be something interesting to really track down here. In the last few pieces for her show, Tracy was using this multi-vanishing-point bent space perspective to great effect in her pieces, and some of them had become quite large. I also liked how she was bringing people, cars and animals from other source images into her composition to balance them and create new relationships between the characters and compositional elements.<br />
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Earlier that year, Tracy and I had worked together on a mixed media piece based on a hilltop town in France where we explored these ideas, and this collaboration reignited my interest in the images in our photo library. I started digging back through the enormous number of pictures and figured out how to stitch the montages together in photoshop and similar programs instead of printing them all up and doing it with scotch tape on the studio wall. I'd been playing with this for fun since I bought my first Canon PowerShot G1 back in '01, and even as far back as 1992 I was combining analog photographic imagery in the good old fashioned cut-and-paste-with-real-scissors-and-real-paste way, but in 2008-09 I started really pursuing digital stitching extensively as a compositional tool.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Hh8-Zz3I8G0/VFeupjQe8mI/AAAAAAAAAV8/0Km9qxB1hT4/s1600/SM41.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Hh8-Zz3I8G0/VFeupjQe8mI/AAAAAAAAAV8/0Km9qxB1hT4/s1600/SM41.jpg" height="265" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Worth pursuing</td></tr>
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I ended up making a large number of these montages over the last 5 or 6 years, many of which are enormous jpeg files that would sometimes crash my old Mac. Most of them will never end up turning into paintings but occasionally one will really stick out as something worth pursuing. <br />
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There are of course many people in the world and probably on your block making panoramic photos every day, and there are now programs and even apps for your smartphone which do everything for you and smooth out all the seams between the individual images so they even move around your screen like Google Street View. But I prefer the clunky old manual photo stitch that shows all the rectangles and color and value inconsistencies from the source files, as they have that fractal Hockneyesque neo-cubist space thing going on in them, and I can try different incarnations of the same image, deleting or moving characters around like a collage and then deciding whether to pursue any given image further or not. My montages are intentionally pretty rough as I don't really want to spend all my time in photoshop, and I think of them as studies for the real thing. Essentially, I'd rather get painting.<br />
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<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-AbBYrC3xB8c/VFbz07NUjeI/AAAAAAAAAUU/jeVLT8OG194/s1600/SM37b.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-AbBYrC3xB8c/VFbz07NUjeI/AAAAAAAAAUU/jeVLT8OG194/s1600/SM37b.jpg" height="454" width="640" /></a></div>
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<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-xlE_kJBuKl4/VFb_1h8BhVI/AAAAAAAAAU8/jWdHnnAHdK0/s1600/IMG_3898.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-xlE_kJBuKl4/VFb_1h8BhVI/AAAAAAAAAU8/jWdHnnAHdK0/s1600/IMG_3898.JPG" height="240" width="320" /></a>I still did some old-fashioned manual montages with tape and physical photographic prints like Hockney did, as it's actually pretty fun for an afternoon or so, and a very tactile and direct process, but somehow the photos feel kind of dead to me after they've been printed, whereas they literally glow at you when viewed from the screen, which glow gives you something to aspire to when you bust out the paints. That deadness in your standard print from the Costco Photo Lab is one of the main reasons why I've disliked working with photos in the past. Still, sometimes this is the approach that makes sense, especially when there are a lot of photos that would create an enormous file or crash the program, my computer, and then my brain. Here's a <a href="http://bradslaugh.com/artwork/2408690_Hollywood_and_McClelland.html" target="_blank">link</a> to the painting I did from this montage, if you're interested.<br />
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I know some artists who declare from the rooftops that working from photo reference is always bad. At least one of my professors in Grad School, Alfred Leslie (an artist way more famous than I'll ever be) was always railing about the evils of artists using photography, and he sometimes went to extraordinary lengths in his own paintings to only work from life. Once he had an actual jeep dismantled and brought into his third story studio with a crane through a large window and then reassembled for a series of paintings about the untimely death of his friend the poet Frank O'Hara. <br />
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-rOeO25Ju7AA/VFb8dUmc_vI/AAAAAAAAAUk/eCjfKSMCycI/s1600/Untitled-5.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-rOeO25Ju7AA/VFb8dUmc_vI/AAAAAAAAAUk/eCjfKSMCycI/s1600/Untitled-5.jpg" height="245" width="320" /></a>Here's a <a href="http://www.marquette.edu/haggerty/exhibit_2014_08_Leslie.shtml" target="_blank">link</a> if you want to take a look at a slideshow of the paintings from this cycle, all of which were (apparently) painted strictly from life, even the crazy one with naked people running all over the place and the guy flying through the air. But I've come to believe that photographs are just another tool in the box, and that many of the images I want to create would be impossible without them. If you make the decision to only work from life, then you are accepting the limitations of that particular decision, and your paintings are going to look a certain way. I wanted mine to look a different way.<br />
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Whatever. Alfred's got paintings in the Smithsonian and the MOMA and I don't. He's also a terrific guy if you ever get a chance to meet him.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-eUU3JRB3YPg/VFcFeXI9s-I/AAAAAAAAAVU/xhlNFk5WgqU/s1600/VG4153.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-eUU3JRB3YPg/VFcFeXI9s-I/AAAAAAAAAVU/xhlNFk5WgqU/s1600/VG4153.jpg" height="320" width="237" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Crazy Studmuffin d'Art</td></tr>
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In any case, photos are certainly not as good as actually being there. Van Gogh's night paintings are amazing partly for the fact that he was standing out there in the streets of Arles with a straw hat with candles he'd attached to it so he could see what he was painting. Still, all his neighbors thought he was totally nuts and more than 80 of them signed a petition asking for him to be evicted and perhaps committed. Ultimately, they were kind of right, it turns out. He was and still is the major Studmuffin of western art, and the standard by which all artists since are compared, but let's face it: he was also kinda bonkers. He's become the Tragically Crazy Jesus of Art, as has perhaps been observed by others.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-LFmgbJPn5H8/VFe-su6881I/AAAAAAAAAWM/mtHyZveKw_M/s1600/IMG_2574.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-LFmgbJPn5H8/VFe-su6881I/AAAAAAAAAWM/mtHyZveKw_M/s1600/IMG_2574.JPG" height="320" width="238" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Painted this puppy plein air</td></tr>
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Ultimately, this anti-photo rhetoric just seems mostly like old fashioned Ludditism to me. I've painted outside plein air at night several times, and sometimes I came back with something interesting, and sometimes I didn't. The truth is I really like painting night scenes but I usually get real sleepy around 10:27 pm every night, especially if I've had a glass of wine or two. Plus it's not the safest thing to do, even in a quiet town like Salt Lake City. My friend John Erickson was painting outside in the Avenues one night when some Yuppyspawn teens drove by and threw a Snapple bottle at him. Little jerks. <br />
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I've also had to come to terms with the fact that I'm not the most facile plein air painter. It's true that plein air painting has a certain urgency and energy that is frequently absent in works from photo reference. But it takes me way longer to bring an image together than people who are really good at this kind of painting, like my buddy <a href="http://www.dougbraithwaite.com/www.dougbraithwaite.com/Home.html" target="_blank">Doug Braithwaite</a> who absolutely kills every time he goes out outside with his brushes.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Ze-OvW_kLVQ/VFfK7W0D6bI/AAAAAAAAAWc/4_1IzdgpFx4/s1600/renoir202.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Ze-OvW_kLVQ/VFfK7W0D6bI/AAAAAAAAAWc/4_1IzdgpFx4/s1600/renoir202.JPG" height="320" width="251" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Renoir. What a douche.</td></tr>
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I'm sure there were artists who railed against these new whippersnappers who started buying their paint in tubes back in the 1840s when this technology first became available, instead of grinding their pigments with a mortar and pestle and adding linseed oil every morning for a couple of hours like a real artist did. But as Renoir said, "Without tubes of paint, there would have been no Impressionism." Course I hate Renoir. He was right though: No tubes, no Monet, and by extension no Cezanne and most definitely no Van Gogh. Tools are neither good nor bad. It's just that you need to learn how to use them.<br />
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-9PxxsYTRrfw/VFb-r1bwZyI/AAAAAAAAAUw/3ju0tNFhttA/s1600/Foire%2Bdu%2BTro%CC%82ne%2B4.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-9PxxsYTRrfw/VFb-r1bwZyI/AAAAAAAAAUw/3ju0tNFhttA/s1600/Foire%2Bdu%2BTro%CC%82ne%2B4.jpg" height="320" width="255" /></a><br />
<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Kl69TghxgRI/VFcIyMNkz8I/AAAAAAAAAVg/_7Ye0zSg7Cc/s1600/Foire%2Bdu%2BTrone%2B8.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Kl69TghxgRI/VFcIyMNkz8I/AAAAAAAAAVg/_7Ye0zSg7Cc/s1600/Foire%2Bdu%2BTrone%2B8.JPG" height="320" width="293" /></a><br />
On one of our trips to France we had also spent time walking around in an amusement park in Paris right after a May rainstorm, and I had snapped off a great many night photos that were pretty intriguing.<br />
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The technicolor carnival lights reflecting up in all those pools of water on the pavement was super seductive. I began to work from some of these images on a small scale to test their viability as subject matter, and to see what it was like to work directly from the digital images, which could be adjusted or expanded when necessary. It turns out that people liked these little paintings immediately and all of them disappeared about as fast as I could paint them, which is always nice. But more importantly I started to get a sense for using this tool to create works that still had the feeling of walking around in that French carnival in the brisk Parisian night.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-kjFCVHauZsg/VFcKvSFqbQI/AAAAAAAAAVs/v-s5bQ7tWBQ/s1600/Guanajuato1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-kjFCVHauZsg/VFcKvSFqbQI/AAAAAAAAAVs/v-s5bQ7tWBQ/s1600/Guanajuato1.jpg" height="318" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Guanajuato 1</td></tr>
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Come on, Brad. I thought we were talking about Mexico here. <br />
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Okay then, let me try to catch us up. A little over two years ago I finally painted my first work from our initial Mexican excursion to Guanajuato for an invitational show at the Salt Lake Art Center's (now UMOCA's) annual Gala Fundraiser. It was a fairly modestly sized offering but I was pretty happy with how it turned out and it got snapped up pretty quickly by a friend of that institution who has collected a few pieces of mine over the years and who even commissioned a large <a href="http://bradslaugh.com/artwork/1643469_Carol_s_Mini_World.html" target="_blank">piece</a> a few years back. It also felt like in these night photos I was able to finally take ownership of some of these images, as Tracy had not worked with any of them. The night stuff was just not her thang, it turns out. It was mine.<br />
<br />
This painting made me want to work more in this vein, and it also made me want to get back to San Miguel as soon as possible. Turns out that year we went twice, bringing our young daughter Sofi with us both times, to see what she thought of the place.<br />
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Bradhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14962745741811438871noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4751923046277254778.post-33757709354341966022014-10-22T10:41:00.002-07:002014-10-22T12:25:10.744-07:00<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-L58S9DLObf0/VDXi6J7aZdI/AAAAAAAAALs/T2ZSFjvwkxY/s1600/IMG_0806.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-L58S9DLObf0/VDXi6J7aZdI/AAAAAAAAALs/T2ZSFjvwkxY/s1600/IMG_0806.JPG" height="328" width="640" /></a></div>
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Well, I suppose I should endeavor to get us somewhere closer to the present tense with this blog deelio. But before I do, I want to wrap up our first trip to Guanajuato and the rest of our initial 2008 visit to this part of Mexico which has held our attention for so many years.<br />
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<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-3hJgq6korTQ/VDXlo5YjPCI/AAAAAAAAAL4/bIsYqp33hkc/s1600/Guanacolor2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-3hJgq6korTQ/VDXlo5YjPCI/AAAAAAAAAL4/bIsYqp33hkc/s1600/Guanacolor2.jpg" height="253" width="320" /></a></div>
After spending four nights in San Miguel, we repacked the backpacks and hopped on the 90 minute second class bus to Guanajuato (if you're flying Air Slaugh, you're flying Coach). We found that this town is somehow even more adventurously colorful than San Miguel. This might be a bit much for some Northern European temperaments, but Tracy and I have long ago abandoned the taste for beige, burgundy and taupe. All the same, Guanajuato was like a visual jolt of espresso.<br />
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<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-nhWbJZRwApQ/VEBRcjJqMYI/AAAAAAAAANQ/S9rgD55097Y/s1600/IMG_2946.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-nhWbJZRwApQ/VEBRcjJqMYI/AAAAAAAAANQ/S9rgD55097Y/s1600/IMG_2946.JPG" height="320" width="240" /></a>It's also laid out, if that's a phrase that even applies to such a place, in the wildest and most organic way possible. Whereas San Miguel is organized in a way that more or less makes a nod toward some idea of a grid (albeit crossbred with a web spun by a dyslexic spider), the streets and callejons (alleyways only big enough for walking) of Guanajuato seem to have totally grown like a series of neurons from many hubs around the valley it's located in. And like neurons, you're not really sure how the whole thing actually works, but somehow it totally does. <br />
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It's also reminiscent of someone dropping an entire pot of spaghetti on top of a gopher hole, each strand a street flowing over the mounds of dirt and down into the space below.<br />
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<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-ycKyLNMD6gM/VEbh35L_iLI/AAAAAAAAAOM/b3oBG9vHtNc/s1600/IMG_2882.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-ycKyLNMD6gM/VEbh35L_iLI/AAAAAAAAAOM/b3oBG9vHtNc/s1600/IMG_2882.JPG" height="320" width="240" /></a></div>
However, calling them streets does not really give you a sense of what the passageways of this place are like, as many of them are really too narrow for even one-way traffic, and many of the callejons are essentially cobbled-over trails with the occasional stairway worming its way up through all these colorful stuccoed buildings. What I'm trying to say is that, like Taxco, the space in Guanajuato is superwack, with the amazing addition of full spectrum color. <br />
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It's also much bigger than Taxco, and you get the feeling that it would take a really long time to explore all of its polytechnic nooks and crannies. What should be a horizontal landscape is almost always extremely vertical, and what should be a level surface to walk on is usually set at a 45 degree angle. Even those streets where cars are actually allowed are ones I am personally glad I am not expected to drive.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-FAkzBo1rRSQ/VEblIoQ_qOI/AAAAAAAAAOY/liuvZN4F0lk/s1600/Guanapano.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-FAkzBo1rRSQ/VEblIoQ_qOI/AAAAAAAAAOY/liuvZN4F0lk/s1600/Guanapano.jpg" height="264" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Which is not to say that there aren't some impressive horizontal viewing opportunities.</td></tr>
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<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-8QH8P_xClp8/VDceMXRXNwI/AAAAAAAAAMc/44qPjjrVNWg/s1600/IMG_7694_thumb%5B1%5D.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-8QH8P_xClp8/VDceMXRXNwI/AAAAAAAAAMc/44qPjjrVNWg/s1600/IMG_7694_thumb%5B1%5D.jpg" height="240" width="320" /></a></div>
Actually, before noticing the color blitzkrieg and the trippy space upstairs, the first thing that struck me in Guanajuato is that the whole city has a network of tunnels running under it. As I recall, we popped up and down into them a couple of times as we entered town in a taxi from the bus station, and we saw several openings to this subway-for-autos later as we walked around the town snapping pictures. You can read all about the history of the whys and wherefores of this on Wikipedia, so I'm just going to talk about our own experiences here, which was a little reminiscent of being in a Hogan's Heroes episode.<br />
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<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-JemrTanO5dk/VDce1P_WfQI/AAAAAAAAAMk/9PY14UVOlZk/s1600/Guanacolor.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"></a><br />
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<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-0Sla0DG7LkY/VDcdU8SHndI/AAAAAAAAAMM/B7Et6cQ-jvE/s1600/Guanajuato%2C_Guanajuato.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-0Sla0DG7LkY/VDcdU8SHndI/AAAAAAAAAMM/B7Et6cQ-jvE/s1600/Guanajuato%2C_Guanajuato.jpg" height="240" width="320" /></a></div>
<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-JemrTanO5dk/VDce1P_WfQI/AAAAAAAAAMk/9PY14UVOlZk/s1600/Guanacolor.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-JemrTanO5dk/VDce1P_WfQI/AAAAAAAAAMk/9PY14UVOlZk/s1600/Guanacolor.jpg" height="320" width="191" /></a>I'm not a big fan of spelunking in general, as there are too many bats, roaches and pee pee smells in your typical tunnel/cave/New York Subway Station for my taste. But this popping in and out of the auto tunnels of Guanajuato is a solidly synapse carbonating bonus, IMHO. One moment you are in a colorless claustrophobic subterranean space and the next you have popped up into Candyland.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-qCw5-6DcjLs/VEfWBy3MUxI/AAAAAAAAAQE/7Dv7H88c140/s1600/Guana.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-qCw5-6DcjLs/VEfWBy3MUxI/AAAAAAAAAQE/7Dv7H88c140/s1600/Guana.jpg" height="422" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">What, are you kidding me? How is it possible that a place like this actually exists?</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-wTRpCg0GBEY/VEfRBNjOLDI/AAAAAAAAAPw/OcEuzjSnZeY/s1600/IMG_3079.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-wTRpCg0GBEY/VEfRBNjOLDI/AAAAAAAAAPw/OcEuzjSnZeY/s1600/IMG_3079.JPG" height="240" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">That's right. I totally wear socks with sandals. <br />
You got a problem with that?</td></tr>
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<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-qFtg50eIxeg/VEfQRGFUAFI/AAAAAAAAAPo/DnCRNSn0EbQ/s1600/IMG_3082.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-qFtg50eIxeg/VEfQRGFUAFI/AAAAAAAAAPo/DnCRNSn0EbQ/s1600/IMG_3082.JPG" height="200" width="150" /></a>Another striking thing we noticed about the town is the Central Square, which was treelined like San Miguel's, but which had extremely dappled light and was terrific for people watching. As we sat down that first night to have a quiet meal here, there were no fewer than three mariachi bands as well as a couple of Norteno outfits all playing at the same time. Guanajuato doesn't really do Peace and Quiet.<br />
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Guanajuato is also a College Town, full of students of one of Mexico's major Universities walking up and down its streets.<br />
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Interestingly, it's also a town with a serious Cervantes obsession:<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-KbhvOVoQpY4/VEfMRlGPLBI/AAAAAAAAAPU/3QDqBzHdQzs/s1600/Tribute_to_cervantes_guanajuato.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-KbhvOVoQpY4/VEfMRlGPLBI/AAAAAAAAAPU/3QDqBzHdQzs/s1600/Tribute_to_cervantes_guanajuato.jpg" height="300" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Cervant-O-Rama</td></tr>
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Every year Guanajuato holds an international Festival called the <i>Cervantino</i> that draws people from all over the world (again, sadly not when we were there), similar to the Cedar City Shakespearean Festival in my home state of Utah, which I somewhat shamefacedly confess I've never actually been to, even though it's only four hours from my front stoop.<br />
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However, in my defense, if Cedar City looked like Guanajuato instead of the McHomes Legoland Sprawl-O-Rama it has become since I graduated from High School I'd be there every year. Yeah, that's right, Cedar City, I'm callin you OUT.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-XIXNiwV0bF8/VDdAxd6pbKI/AAAAAAAAAM0/7mVF4y2y7Go/s1600/Guanajuatostitch18.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-XIXNiwV0bF8/VDdAxd6pbKI/AAAAAAAAAM0/7mVF4y2y7Go/s1600/Guanajuatostitch18.jpg" height="320" width="217" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Notable corner in Guanajuato</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-gqBZsrwR0bo/VEfNUbnWXTI/AAAAAAAAAPc/AKGTL20QIGw/s1600/picture-uh%3Dde50ac6f3d1d798f70a98873ffb18823-ps%3De5697b51243cd2f4b44481ea98351ea-4237-W-75-N-Cedar-City-UT-84720-1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-gqBZsrwR0bo/VEfNUbnWXTI/AAAAAAAAAPc/AKGTL20QIGw/s1600/picture-uh%3Dde50ac6f3d1d798f70a98873ffb18823-ps%3De5697b51243cd2f4b44481ea98351ea-4237-W-75-N-Cedar-City-UT-84720-1.jpg" height="240" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Jive Plastic Ranchburger at 4237 W 75 N, Cedar City, UT,<br />
apparently. Which photo I swiped off yonder Internet.</td></tr>
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Of course, it's not just Cedar City that bums me out in this way, Dear Reader. It seems like my entire home country is hellbent on becoming a jive plastic coast-to-coast stripmall, complete with regularly occurring Winger's and eight other McChains, all designed by the same anonymous architecture school flunky and serving the same bogus foodlike Soylents that are turning us all quickly into extras from Wall-E, with a nod to the set of Bladerunner in the host of LED Billboards stretching off in all directions, obscuring whatever landscape our ancestors may have once admired. That's right, U.S. I'm callin you OUT with three separate movie references in the same run-on sentence.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-CrIupMiiyF8/VEb4OEfEs3I/AAAAAAAAAO0/WqsB8OJqA5A/s1600/Billboard-600s-600.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-CrIupMiiyF8/VEb4OEfEs3I/AAAAAAAAAO0/WqsB8OJqA5A/s1600/Billboard-600s-600.jpg" height="152" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">How amazing would it be if these abominations dropped like so many dominos?</td></tr>
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Anyway, I digress.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-LKDELcT2HPg/VEbnyIBBXeI/AAAAAAAAAOk/KOthM02b5J8/s1600/IMG_8360.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-LKDELcT2HPg/VEbnyIBBXeI/AAAAAAAAAOk/KOthM02b5J8/s1600/IMG_8360.jpg" height="320" width="240" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Don Quixote at the Cervantes Museum</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-c23QSa4j0is/VEB_Vov8N6I/AAAAAAAAANw/2U3eE7EO-gE/s1600/les_callejoneadas_blog.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-c23QSa4j0is/VEB_Vov8N6I/AAAAAAAAANw/2U3eE7EO-gE/s1600/les_callejoneadas_blog.jpg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Callejoneadas,</i> also swiped off yonder Internet. <br />
Almost all my photos were super blurry.</td></tr>
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I reckon the fact that these two locales have nothing to do with their festival's Patron Saints is testament to the sheer enthusiasm of their founders and the devotion of those who keep the flames fanned year after year. <br />
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There's also a very impressive Don Quixote Museum in Guanajuato with traditional and Contemporary art from all over the world referencing Cervantes Iconography, and every night of the year there are college students dressed in 17th Century period costume performing <i>callejoneadas,</i> which consist of guiding small groups of people through the darkening alleyways of this crazy town, telling stories, performing skits and playing songs on traditional instruments while the audience members walk along behind, drinking wine from small ceramic flasks that they give to you at the end as souvenirs. <br />
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That is also decidedly not happening in Iron County, Utah.<br />
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<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-vjf63GSXhfg/VEfXLYwRL2I/AAAAAAAAAQM/uP-ObgkmJJU/s1600/Guanajuatostitch11.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-vjf63GSXhfg/VEfXLYwRL2I/AAAAAAAAAQM/uP-ObgkmJJU/s1600/Guanajuatostitch11.jpg" height="323" width="400" /></a>Alas, we didn't go on one of these, fun as they sounded, as it was felt that my Spanish was too utterly and embarrassingly minimal to get the full benefit, but I did take some super blurry pictures of one that I happened upon, not realizing the wall I was leaning against to steady myself was crawling with flying ants. Luckily, the hombre next to me tapped me on the shoulder and pointed it out in time for me to deal with the situation. Silly Guero, he perhaps thought as I slapped them off of my shoulder and neck in the deepening darkness.<br />
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<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-bLe447Wxtag/VEfdV8lQEVI/AAAAAAAAAQk/2_P12YoHZZE/s1600/Guanojuatostitch7.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-bLe447Wxtag/VEfdV8lQEVI/AAAAAAAAAQk/2_P12YoHZZE/s1600/Guanojuatostitch7.jpg" height="400" width="198" /></a><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-zk8XzfdTwmo/VEfczqA1dUI/AAAAAAAAAQc/sX69ze2inj4/s1600/Guanajuatostitch14.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-zk8XzfdTwmo/VEfczqA1dUI/AAAAAAAAAQc/sX69ze2inj4/s1600/Guanajuatostitch14.jpg" height="320" width="256" /></a><br />
Still, as dusk began to fall on Guanajuato, slowly surrendering into night, we noticed immediately that the callejons and plazas of this town began to be transformed into something really magical. The combination of the strange cobblestoned spaces, the streetlights playing on the colorful buildings and the narrow vertical spaces, increasingly muted by the darkness, was irresistible.<br />
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We pulled out both cameras and started to go to town with them, thinking perhaps we might be able to stitch something interesting together later when we got back to Salt Lake.<br />
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For three nights, we prowled around Guanajuato during that perfect interval when the streetlights began to dominate the sky until it was so dark that the cameras were only taking blurry photos, and all the color was gone. <br />
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One of these days, one or both of us will need to make some art from these, we thought.
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-bpR1Aof86lI/VCQNTgf6wsI/AAAAAAAAAHM/tFwetle25jI/s1600/Guanajuatostitch6.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-bpR1Aof86lI/VCQNTgf6wsI/AAAAAAAAAHM/tFwetle25jI/s1600/Guanajuatostitch6.jpg" height="151" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Guanajuato</td></tr>
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Tracy and I were in Taxco looking at pictures of Guanajuato on the internet in a little room off the lobby of the Hotel Victoria. It was May 2008. We had returned to Mexico after nearly 3 years, this time on the (tax deductible!) pretext of doing research and gathering additional reference material for a show that Tracy had been invited to hang at the Loge Gallery of Pioneer Memorial Theater that December. We were, it is true, also doing some limited research on mezcal, which the locals drink with salt ground up with something mysterious and exotic called <i>jumil </i>(pronounced hu-Meel). Turns out <i>jumil</i> is an edible beetle, a stink bug actually (!), that migrates through town every November with several million of his buddies, and around which there is an entire festival centered. The folks grind em, roast em, and even eat them raw. We weren't there during this time of year (thank God), but we did try the <i>jumil </i>salt chased by the mezcal in a little clay shooter made just for the ritual. It was all right, but it decidedly did not taste like chicken.<br />
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(Side note: How is a Fiesta based entirely around eating stink bugs not called the <i>Jumiliacion</i>? C'mon, Mexico! Missed opportunity!)<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-D9eXbCtdIEE/VCRrUfqTOxI/AAAAAAAAAIg/uHGhPACkldw/s1600/jumil.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-D9eXbCtdIEE/VCRrUfqTOxI/AAAAAAAAAIg/uHGhPACkldw/s1600/jumil.jpg" height="145" width="200" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>¡Jumiliacion! </i></td></tr>
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Anyhoo, this time we'd brought 2 digital cameras with us and had shot, including our first trip, over 800 photos of Taxco, and we were starting to feel like it was time to move on. <br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">One of Tracy's works from her show at the Loge </td></tr>
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Our original plan was to go south back to Oaxaca, where we'd only spent a few days back in December of '05, but I was balking at the 8-9 hour bus ride this would entail. Then Tracy started talking about a couple of towns up north she'd visited years before, and showed me some pictures that looked a bit like the panorama at the top of this post. Wowsers.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-CKEKziwbOsc/VCRSxnM2LfI/AAAAAAAAAHk/-OOpyoCbLt0/s1600/IMG_2185.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-CKEKziwbOsc/VCRSxnM2LfI/AAAAAAAAAHk/-OOpyoCbLt0/s1600/IMG_2185.JPG" height="300" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">San Miguel De Allende</td></tr>
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She also mentioned that if we went to Guanajuato we might as well stop for a couple of days in a town on the way called San Miguel de Allende where she'd once spent a freezing Easter Eve trying to sleep on the roof of a hostel with some other students she was traveling with (one of whom was trying to get amorous all night long on the pretext of conserving body heat).<br />
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<span style="text-align: center;">I thought this place looked pretty groovy too, and it was only a five hour (second class) bus ride away! Even more palatable if we broke it down and made our way up there stopping in maybe one or two other towns along the way, we reasoned.</span><br />
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<span style="text-align: center;">I hoped we would be able to find subject matter that was as interesting as the town we were leaving, but these two cities seemed really colorful, which would be very different from our experience of the unified white gestalt of Taxco. At the same time they're both set on hilly terrain and would give us the up/down space we were interested in.</span><br />
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<span style="text-align: center;">Unfortunately, we discovered at the very first city we came to (Toluca) that not every town in Mexico is equally picturesque. We were trying to skirt La Ciudad to avoid as much as possible the Cloud of bad air that hovers over the Greater Mexico City Area, as Tracy was recovering from some bad respiratory gumboo. Even when you're healthy, you can actually feel the air of that town mucking up your bronchioles every time you pass through it, and you spend all day clearing out your throat.</span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-k5UV7om5G9k/VCWSNd9HAJI/AAAAAAAAALY/mslOkBMiSto/s1600/IMG_2050.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-k5UV7om5G9k/VCWSNd9HAJI/AAAAAAAAALY/mslOkBMiSto/s1600/IMG_2050.JPG" height="320" width="240" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Taco Alley in Valle de Bravo</td></tr>
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<span style="text-align: center;">(Another side note: It's noticeably better now due to lots of progressive steps in the last decade by the Mexican Government, but still not what one would call Bueno. Tracy and I've spent a few days in De Efe but overall we figure if we want to breathe crappy air, we can just stay home in Salt Lake.)</span><br />
<span style="text-align: center;"><br /></span><span style="text-align: center;">On a lark, we spent one or two enjoyable nights in a little resort town called Valle de Bravo, which is apparently world famous for parasailing as well as watching the monarch butterfly migration at a certain time of the year (not when we were there, however), but we decided we just needed to head north to the towns we wanted to see. This place was the first time a street vendor ever called me <i>Guero</i>, which I thought was awesome.</span><br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">First picture we took in San Miguel</td></tr>
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<span style="text-align: center;">Alas, we took a bad turn on the wrong bus, which ironically ended up tacking a couple of hours onto our journey and even more ironically plopped us right back into the middle of Mexico City and The Cloud, but after some time in the terminal with Tracy using her magic Spanish words between coughs, we made it onto the right bus, one without obnoxious video screens, though it became quickly clear that San Miguel was on the other side of five hours of Mexican Polka music from the direction of the driver. Fortunately, we had learned our lesson three years before and had packed foam earplugs. I'm actually a pretty big fan of the accordion but <i>Ay Caramba! </i>Enough is decidedly enough, Amigo. </span><br />
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<span style="text-align: center;">Tracy and I finally arrived in San Miguel, exhausted from a long day traveling, just as it was beginning to grow dark. We splurged and took a taxi from the bus station to the center of town rather than walking, which in Taxco is called the Zocalo, but in San Miguel is called the Jardin, a beautiful tree-lined square dominated by a majestic cathedral called the Parroquia that is even more impressive than Taxco's Santa Prisca. I'm not what anyone would call a Believer, but I have to say that it's hard for me to imagine a group of atheists building something so formidable.</span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-mixDBtBRM8k/VCTyvbGgSiI/AAAAAAAAAK4/9TCWe0yTnZ0/s1600/IMG_1374.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-mixDBtBRM8k/VCTyvbGgSiI/AAAAAAAAAK4/9TCWe0yTnZ0/s1600/IMG_1374.JPG" height="320" width="240" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Sweet B & B: Casa Carmen</td></tr>
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<span style="text-align: center;">We dropped our backpacks off at the lovely Bed and Breakfast recommended in the Lonely Planet guide, and returned to the Jardin. There was a slight sprinkling of rain as we strolled with our cameras, and the square was dotted with people just hanging out and enjoying the beautiful night atmosphere. </span><br />
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<span style="text-align: center;">I'm really going to like it here, I thought.</span><br />
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<span style="text-align: center;">About this time we were missing the kids quite a bit, so I shot a little video for them:</span><br />
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It was dark enough that we really didn't have a sense of just how colorful the town we had just entered in fact was. But the next day, as we began walking around, it quickly became clear that we had stepped into someplace pretty amazing.</div>
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<span style="text-align: center;">It was actually hard to find anything in this town that wasn't just super interesting to look at. The light glows off everything in a crisp, fully saturated way, and the town somehow pulled off being incredibly colorful without ever being garish. I had no clue how this could be accomplished on the scale of an entire town, but we've subsequently learned that in the Centro Historico, you get to choose from a predefined and well-thought-out set of harmonic colors, after which the city will paint your house for you. Having just had our house painted in Salt Lake before we left a month or so ago, this sounds like a pretty sweet deal to me.</span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-4ahCsR9C1CI/VCRyyFBhlsI/AAAAAAAAAI8/BUcTb85A4Q0/s1600/SM81.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-4ahCsR9C1CI/VCRyyFBhlsI/AAAAAAAAAI8/BUcTb85A4Q0/s1600/SM81.jpg" height="256" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Like I said, the place is kinda crazy photogenical.</td></tr>
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<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-c5ON4j6oizE/VCV0ZwnMidI/AAAAAAAAALI/uhfkv6VNMhc/s1600/SM33.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-c5ON4j6oizE/VCV0ZwnMidI/AAAAAAAAALI/uhfkv6VNMhc/s1600/SM33.jpg" height="400" width="231" /></a><span style="text-align: center;"></span><br />
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<span style="text-align: center;">We began snapping pictures like possessed people, and whereas we thought the 874 photos we'd taken in Taxco was an impressive number, </span><span style="text-align: center;">as of this writing </span><span style="text-align: center;">we're now at slightly more than 7,900 in San Miguel and Guanajuato combined. True, many of the photos are blurry, mediocre and completely unusable as reference, and some of them involve small people traveling with us putting rabbit ears behind the heads of bigger people (and thinking that's just the most hilarious thing in the world), but we have been able to stitch a few into some kind of compositional shape, and there's a million little gems that you see when you are just out walking around.</span><br />
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Of course, Tracy's been the one who has made the most of the material we've gathered in this town and its neighbor Guanajuato, and her show of mixed media works in December '08 was truly outstanding. <br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">What Arnold was talkin bout, Willis.</td></tr>
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She assembled the photo montages manually with Scotch tape on foam core a la David Hockney and worked from them that way, as we hadn't fully figured out how to do it in Photoshop yet, and she would bring a person from one environment and put them in another in a way that was extremely cool and very unfussy.<br />
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I learned a lot from Tracy, watching her process over those months. Almost every painting and drawing she made in this series has also found a very groovy home to live in, though it took a while for people to come around and open their hearts and wallets. The groovy home this one found, however, is ours:<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-bsHOk0INUmY/VCTeEM8sRHI/AAAAAAAAAJk/AP_m-eX9qjI/s1600/IMG_4809.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-bsHOk0INUmY/VCTeEM8sRHI/AAAAAAAAAJk/AP_m-eX9qjI/s1600/IMG_4809.JPG" height="498" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Crumbling Beauty</i>, from Tracy's show in the Loge Gallery. We're keeping it.<br />
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<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-ieOBJ_G95bY/VCTfS_7oLzI/AAAAAAAAAKA/1_a6Wvir1jY/s1600/IMG_1459.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-ieOBJ_G95bY/VCTfS_7oLzI/AAAAAAAAAKA/1_a6Wvir1jY/s1600/IMG_1459.JPG" height="200" width="150" /></a><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-6-HLdb2yJvU/VCTfOHFwAgI/AAAAAAAAAJw/INlBvEH8rN8/s1600/IMG_1470.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-6-HLdb2yJvU/VCTfOHFwAgI/AAAAAAAAAJw/INlBvEH8rN8/s1600/IMG_1470.JPG" height="200" width="150" /></a>We both fell instantly in love with San Miguel, and while we initially planned to stay perhaps one or at most two nights on our way to Guanajuato, we ended up staying twice that long on our first trip, wandering through the alleys and curving streets, taking pictures and sampling as much of the local fare and culture as possible.<br />
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The people in San Miguel are as amazing to photograph as the architecture is, and everywhere we looked there were details that startled, surprised and, as corny as it sounds, delighted us.<br />
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There are lots of places I've gone in this world that just a whole bunch of people seem to really want to live in. New York, for instance, which I can personally spend about 3 days in before I want to flee like it was Superstorm Sandy hitting during a bedbug convention. Still, I suppose eight million people can't be wrong, yes? <br />
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I could probably also live in LA, though I doubt I could ever really love that town, despite the fact that both these cities have amazing art museums, endless cuisine options and very lively creative communities.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-v5zXEj9ZcyA/VCTpvrY7R2I/AAAAAAAAAKo/I7ttSENJTwE/s1600/SM62.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-v5zXEj9ZcyA/VCTpvrY7R2I/AAAAAAAAAKo/I7ttSENJTwE/s1600/SM62.jpg" height="398" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">What, are you freaking kidding me?</td></tr>
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I sometimes joke that I live in Salt Lake because it's a great town to take vacations from, but I do have a real affection for the place, though it's the affection of someone who's been married for nearly 50 years to a very nice person who also smacks when they eat. There's something to be said for knowing where everything is: all 3 Home Depots, which mechanic won't rip you off, where to get good olives, what time the wine store closes, and which bakery can transport you to Paris if you close your eyes while taking a bite of the <i>pain au chocolate</i>. <br />
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It's also where nearly all our dearest and most amazing friends are.<br />
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Still, there's only a handful of places I've been in the world that have made me fall in love with them instantly. I'd put Paris and Bruges on that list, as well as Port Townsend, Washington. Not really so much of a Big City guy it turns out, with the exception of Paris (though DC is completely underrated). I could totally hang for a serious amount of time around San Remy De Provence, Arles or Nice, for instance. <br />
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But ever since stepping foot into San Miguel de Allende, Tracy and I kept asking each other the same question: "Could you ever live here, at all?"<br />
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Bradhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14962745741811438871noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4751923046277254778.post-22522846340331925002014-09-14T10:40:00.001-07:002014-09-14T17:55:57.811-07:00<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-3-N_lJIlH0Q/VBWi8n_fD2I/AAAAAAAAAEQ/z7f0YjE3PcI/s1600/IMG_1587.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-3-N_lJIlH0Q/VBWi8n_fD2I/AAAAAAAAAEQ/z7f0YjE3PcI/s1600/IMG_1587.JPG" height="200" width="150" /></a><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-WD41zHyc5DI/VBWjAHmy-KI/AAAAAAAAAEY/f7ZSGmWSLiY/s1600/IMG_2061.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-WD41zHyc5DI/VBWjAHmy-KI/AAAAAAAAAEY/f7ZSGmWSLiY/s1600/IMG_2061.JPG" height="320" width="240" /></a>Right. Where was I? Taxco. Fireworks. Pozole and Negra Modelo. Talking for some reason about Christmas in late August. I mentioned perhaps that Taxco has the craziest open air market space I have ever been in, alternating between claustrophobic and sort of thrilling. Our future exploring the hilltop towns of the colonial highlands of Mexico has been largely an expansion of this experience, which I expect is similar to what a rat in a maze feels like coming around each bend and finding there a new piece of cheese. It is true that occasionally the cheese is a bit stinky, and not always in the way a French acquaintance describes as "Stinky like I like it." Still, I never get tired of exploring this place, as it makes the neurons in my eyes and my brain percolate like a Folger's commercial. Mexico is truly one of the most amazing places I've ever been.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Down the rabbit hole</td></tr>
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One of the things I have noticed about being in markets anywhere else in the world besides the U.S. is that they actually smell like something. Like melons, for instance, which, similar to truly ripe strawberries, don't always smell altogether great. (Side note: Never shout "Bueno Melones!" in a Mexican market, despite the overwhelming temptation to do so).<br />
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Or like guava, which smells unbelievably good. Or papaya, which smells kinda barfy when it's at a certain point of ripeness. I learned in Mexico, France and Italy that the food almost everywhere else in the world has just a lot more aroma and flavor than where I live. In the States we shudder at the thought of a fishy smell when we're walking past the seafood at Kroger's but we're somehow okay with feeling our way through the fallout cloud of the perfume section at Macy's.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Hola, Guera! </td></tr>
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This market was really something to walk through, and unfortunately no photo can really capture the experience of it properly, as it winds through narrow tarp-covered callejons that go up, down, sideways and even over footbridges in ways that were frankly not obviously rational or even always pleasant, especially when we suddenly found ourselves in the meat section, with full sides of beef and pork hanging around us. <br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Super fresh, super tasty produce.</td></tr>
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Still, there was sort of a food court area where families sat and had lunch, and conjunto and mariachi music playing from several speakers instead of muzak or Popular Hits From The 80s (which I've heard enough of to last several life sentences served consecutively). It could not be more different from shopping in the U.S. if it had been conceived by George Lucas.<br />
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Tracy and I thought about this place for nearly three years until we decided we needed to go back, this time in the spring of '08. We stayed across the street from the place we had found in the Lonely Planet guide the first time, at a hotel called Los Arcos that looked like this inside:<br />
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It was awesome though just a bit over our budget and was right downtown where there's a fair amount of traffic noise, so after a couple of nights we moved to another spot called the Hotel Victoria. It had an amazing view of the city and the main Cathedral Santa Prisca, in front of which is the town square, which in this town and other towns in southern Mexico is called the Zocalo. The Zocalo is surrounded by silver and jewelry shops, which Taxco is famous for, and restaurants that are great for hanging and people watching in. The trees of the square are filled with tropical birds that made just a whole bunch of noise but which I never actually saw up there in the dense branches.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Hangin at the Zocalo with Straussy and a well placed plant</td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The view from our room at the Hotel Victoria</td></tr>
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The Hotel Victoria was awesome and had the feel of a hotel that had its heyday back in like the 1950s, but which had aged quite well. It was super quiet in that part of town and in May, we felt like we had the place to ourselves.<br />
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One sweet memory I have: It happened that Tom Waits' Glitter and Doom Tour tickets went on sale on our second or third morning at the Hotel Victoria. I remember frantically trying to get tickets the moment they went on sale from the one computer for guests in the hotel, which had a really slow internet connection. All the Los Angeles and Phoenix tickets disappeared in the first 30 seconds, but we snagged a couple of seats in El Paso: a sweet pilgrimage story for another day, kids (It was awesome, BTW).<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Sweet ride!</td></tr>
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Anyway, did I mention that there were an improbable amount of Volkswagens somehow negotiating the crazy tilt-a-whirl streets of this town all day and night? Some of you may have noticed I have an affinity for old cars, and particularly VW bugs and buses, which tend to turn up in my paintings with an improbable regularity, whether they are tooling up a 60 º angle cobblestone street in Mexico or rusting away in a junkyard in North Salt Lake.</div>
<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-eTK2pY-x0mA/VBW8cHmajJI/AAAAAAAAAFo/ujFAMGJxWd0/s1600/Fear%2BThis.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-eTK2pY-x0mA/VBW8cHmajJI/AAAAAAAAAFo/ujFAMGJxWd0/s1600/Fear%2BThis.JPG" height="170" width="200" /></a><br />
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There's something really anthropomorphic about them, which is of course why there was never a movie called Herbie the Love Buick.<br />
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The chosen vehicle for getting around in this town, as well as every taxi we saw there, was the good old Bochito, as the classic bug is known here in Mexico. Careful asking for one however, as the word is also apparently slang for a Mexican prostitute [Side note: my grip of Spanish is extremely limited, but shouldn't that be Bochita?].</div>
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All the buses in town are old VW buses with the sliding door removed and no seat belts. It costs like 3 pesos to go anywhere you want in town, providing a car can actually fit down or drive up the street, which is not always a given. <br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Still own it.</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-x9HharfCzrI/VBYyOBsdufI/AAAAAAAAAG8/kqB42QnQxBM/s1600/IMG_1739.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-x9HharfCzrI/VBYyOBsdufI/AAAAAAAAAG8/kqB42QnQxBM/s1600/IMG_1739.JPG" height="200" width="150" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">San Francisco ain't got nothing<br />
on Taxco</td></tr>
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Ironically, I just sold my 1973 Westfalia Camper Deluxe Special (The Flaming Carrot), which I had and threw $100 bills at for 15 years, in no small degree to help fund this year's unpaid sabbatical to Mexico [Insert frowny face emoticon here]. However, I still own this painting of it called Nightcrawler. Not that I didn't try to sell it like 20 times. Think I'll keep it now.<br />
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After several days in Taxco we began looking around for other possibilities, and we considered going back south to Oaxaca, which is an amazing cultural and culinary hub I'll perhaps tell you more about another day. But then Tracy showed me some pics online (after we had scored our Tom Waits tickets) of a couple of towns about a 5 hour bus ride north called San Miguel de Allende and Guanajuato.<br />
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See? I'm getting there.Bradhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14962745741811438871noreply@blogger.com10tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4751923046277254778.post-47557416601626085182014-08-30T06:46:00.000-07:002014-08-30T06:57:50.135-07:00"Why Mexico, Brad?" you ask. "And why, specifically, San Miguel de Allende?"<br />
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What insightful questions. You are obviously a curious and intelligent reader. Well, that's a bit of a story which might take me more than one post to fully flesh out, kids.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-HKGst7J0df8/VAEw4vIRVVI/AAAAAAAAACA/-QSQmVWoxuA/s1600/IMG_3759.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-HKGst7J0df8/VAEw4vIRVVI/AAAAAAAAACA/-QSQmVWoxuA/s1600/IMG_3759.JPG" height="320" width="240" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Taxco looks like this!</td></tr>
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It all began back in 2005 when Tracy suggested we take a trip to some of the colonial towns she had visited when she was studying Spanish on a study abroad program several years back. Like most Americans, Mexico for me at the time meant sitting on a beach with some kind of beverage, preferably with a little umbrella in it, Jimmy Buffet playing in the background. I told Straussy I'd go to her inland hilltop town on the condition that we take the second leg of the trip in someplace I'd heard of with a beach and a bar.<br />
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We started off in Taxco, an amazing town famous for its fine silver work that reminded me of hilltop villages I'd crawled around with Tracy and other friends in Europe, with the particular aesthetic that every structure in town is painted white with a red portion on the bottom, like towns I'd been to in Europe and Israel. The effect is that the entire city feels unified like a single work of art, and in the case of Taxco, with nearly cubist space. It was like Europe, except that we arrived right at the Festival of the Virgin of Guadalupe, just a couple of weeks before Christmas.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-9Q_dZ7gU8TQ/VAG4JiSNmNI/AAAAAAAAACc/sj_r3nTv7N4/s1600/171-0423215410-Clockwork-Orange-DHS-treatment.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-9Q_dZ7gU8TQ/VAG4JiSNmNI/AAAAAAAAACc/sj_r3nTv7N4/s1600/171-0423215410-Clockwork-Orange-DHS-treatment.jpg" height="213" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">It was like this.</td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">He knows if you've been bad</td></tr>
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It turns out that during this trip Mexico both ruined and then saved (or at least began the process of saving) Christmas for me, and it all began with the bus ride from Mexico City to Cuernavaca, and then to Taxco. What happened was: There was a movie on the bus, and it was called The Polar Express, dubbed into Spanish with the worst vocal talent Latin America has to offer. The screen was directly in front of me, the too loud blown-out speaker right above my head, and there was no escape from the most messed up piece of film I have ever been subjected to. I was literally strapped in (seat belt) and could not turn away from the horror of this film set entirely in the CGI Uncanny Valley, with wrinkly little evil elves monitoring every child in the world in the giant NSA-like complex of screens in the arctic, keeping track of who has been naughty and who has been nice. I said to Tracy as we finally arrived at our destination, "I truly despise Christmas. The whole jive plastic enterprise."<br />
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There followed several days of falling in love with a town filled with mask shops, open air markets that occupy a crazy rabbit warren space in the middle of town, a near constant stream of vintage-style Volkswagens puttering up and down the tiny one-way streets, little family-owned restaurants that served four different kinds of pozole, all of them awesome, and regular doses of Negra Modelo. We took a hike up to the very top of the town, where there is a huge crucifix that looks down over the whole enterprise.<br />
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The weather was beautiful, and the people were incredibly kind, and the food was delicious. It felt gritty and real and about as different a place from the incredibly domesticated city where I live as it is possible to be.<br />
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<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-_aR2JcbRMi0/VAHEX5ootqI/AAAAAAAAADM/fv5h3M2Jbyc/s1600/IMG_4824.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-_aR2JcbRMi0/VAHEX5ootqI/AAAAAAAAADM/fv5h3M2Jbyc/s1600/IMG_4824.JPG" height="262" width="320" /></a><br />
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The light gleamed off the town and we both imagined stitching photos of the town together and working from them extensively when we returned. Of course Tracy's the only one who actually did this, to great effect:<br />
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Then, a few days later, after we'd spent all day every day exploring the cobblestoned maze that is Taxco, filling our memory disks with pictures that Tracy would ultimately pick from for a series of drawings and paintings, we passed a huge structure in front of one of the churches that had been constructed with scaffolding, several paper maché people and animals, and many, many rockets. Intrigued, we asked around and arrived with the rest of the town at the little square on the appointed night. All the little girls were dressed as the Virgin, and all the little boys were dressed like Juan Diego with little beards and mustaches. We were completely surrounded by the entire town when suddenly this happened:<br />
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Caballeros were standing underneath the structures with their families and slapping the sparks out with their cowboy hats. It was very much exactly not like being anywhere in the United States. <br />
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I held a little kid up so he could see the action. Neither of us burst into flames.<br />
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And then this happened.<br />
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It was super loud and super awesome.<br />
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And it made me think that Mexican Christmas might just be a whole lot more interesting than the jive parade of Chinese-made crap every store I'd been in had been assaulting my senses with since, like, August.<br />
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More research would clearly be necessary.<br />
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The beach portion of this trip hardly deserves a mention, other than to say that Acapulco is emphatically NOT like Neil Diamond says it is, which makes me also wonder just how Sweet Caroline really was. Bomp bomp bomp.<br />
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More soon.Bradhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14962745741811438871noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4751923046277254778.post-1783721889410769452014-08-29T09:08:00.002-07:002014-08-29T09:08:22.180-07:00<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-GGWkj0MuYVY/VACg-7I-jBI/AAAAAAAAABg/HmSY9QwDqss/s1600/IMG_0351.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-GGWkj0MuYVY/VACg-7I-jBI/AAAAAAAAABg/HmSY9QwDqss/s1600/IMG_0351.jpg" height="320" width="239" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">At the Jardin on our first day</td></tr>
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So,<br />
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We've gone and moved to Mexico for a year. Several people have asked us what this is all about, and I've been intending to start this blog for some time, but the last several months have been a complete blur getting everything ready at home: squirreling nearly everything we own into storage like some extended large-scale game of tetris, moving out of our house and our studio and renting them both out for the year.<br />
<br />
Anyway, we've finally made it down here, found a place to stay after a two-week landing in a house that has been terrific, though perhaps a bit small for us. We've been able to get Sofi enrolled in the great little Waldorf school right outside of town, and figure out how to get her to and from the bus stop, a half hour's brisk walk through about three Mexican barrios.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-VCMBwQdJOuU/VACh6dJFRXI/AAAAAAAAABw/CpWa-sZsqpU/s1600/IMG_6545.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-VCMBwQdJOuU/VACh6dJFRXI/AAAAAAAAABw/CpWa-sZsqpU/s1600/IMG_6545.jpg" height="320" width="240" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Working on a little night scene</td></tr>
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The place where we've been staying for the last couple of weeks or so has worked out well, and has the added bonus of a studio space to work in. I'm about 60% through my first painting down here and will post a pic when it's done. We're going to limit the size of our pieces down here and work on acid-free rag paper that we can mount to supports when we get back home in order to keep things as portable as possible. We're about to move to our first longer-term place, where we'll be until just after the New Year. It's owned by an artist as well (seems like everyone in this town is an artist, which makes me want to introduce myself as an Investment Banker), and we'll have space to work there as well. We've now been in this town longer than we ever have stayed here before, but it feels like we just landed.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-biTeWHfvXjw/VAChwXQtMxI/AAAAAAAAABo/m1uTctA-Yy0/s1600/IMG_0376.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-biTeWHfvXjw/VAChwXQtMxI/AAAAAAAAABo/m1uTctA-Yy0/s1600/IMG_0376.JPG" height="320" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Playing with bubbles at the Parque Juarez</td></tr>
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Not sure how this blog thing is supposed to work (I confess I rarely read them), but I've always thought Facebook was a poor place for anything other than the short and snarky post. I'll stick lots of pictures in here because this place is a continuous multiple eyegasm.<br />
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More later on the whys and wherefores of our move. I just thought I'd better get something written down before too much time had passed. Off to paint now!Bradhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14962745741811438871noreply@blogger.com7