Archive for April, 2005
We’re headed to Guadalajara today for a wedding of a friend of Marcia’s. Beth and Taj have decided to stay in Mexico an extra week and so they’ve decided to tag along. I love the drive to Guadalajara, on the way we pass near Tequila and the surrounding area, which is lined with millions upon millions of blue-green agave cacti. Guadalajara is a megalopolis of whizzing cars and street vendors. yellow, green and red cabs. Palatial estates, plywood shanty towns and modernist office buildings. Upon entering town, we won’t pass go or collect 200 dollars, we’ll go straight to Carne Garibaldi’s. The most amazing (and fastest) placed in the world for a mexican classic “Carne en su jugo” (meat in it’s juices).
I can’t freakin’ wait.
Spring is in full riot here. Two weeks ago we were sleeping with all the windows closed, with 3 blankets and I was still waking up with a cold every morning. The water was freezing and after an hour of surfing my hands would be numb and my legs would cramp up. Now, we can’t sleep with any blankets and the windows and doors are all wide open. Cuddling is a sweat drenched affair and the water has literally warmed up between 5 and 10 degrees. The calm desert dryness (or in reality - a tamed humidity) has all but been forgotten and the famous jungle humidity of summer is slowly consigning my jeans, long shirts and tighter fitting clothing to the closet. The pool has jumped 10 degrees and is often warmer than the air. Those wispy high flying clouds are slowly being replaced by fluffy white low hanging clouds.
Summer is starting to encroach on spring’s territory.
When complaints about the heat are heard, those who’ve been here year round laugh, it’s as if we all feel that we are at the top of a waterfall, about to collectively jump off into summer. There is a reason why people leave Vallarta during the summer. and although I was here for the rainy part of the summer, I have not experienced the first part, where it is just as hot without the rain to cool things down in the evening.
The heat is comin’ on!
So with Beth in town with Taj, we had to do what any self-respecting local would do and take Taj out to the malecon to get his party on. We all met up at mom-n-dad’s apartment last thursday and headed out to Archie’s Wok for some good food. This particular night the food wasn’t so good, but that Panscrit dish they have really hits the spot, oh and really good limonadas with mint.
After dinner, the young folks split off and headed over to the malecon. We walked around for a while checking out the sights. There was this insane zen rock guy, who was balancing large rocks end-to-end on top of each other. There were maybe 30 little columns of rocks and we watched for ten minutes as he moved another rock back and forth in minute movement trying to find the center of balance. total zen.
We took the plunge and dove into Carlos O’Brian’s. Good place to start. The spring break crowd was long gone so there was a pretty equal mix of gringos and mexicans, all dancing to hip-hop, trying to get their cheesy-ass groove on. Through the blank lites and scheming eyes we caught this gringo couple dancing. They were so cute, probably just married. He was trying to act cool in his tshirt and shorts and she was a bit sauced in her long dress and heals. But it was the way they moved with each other. You could tell they were in love and just there to spice things up a little before they went back to their hotel to make love. They definitely had the most integrity of anyone in the place and it was good to see a young married couple having fun together without trying to hold on to their younger single years. ok, maybe I’m over analyzing this a little bit. cut scene.
Next, we moved on to La Bodeguita Del Medio. a cuban bar on the malecon that at first glance is a pretty cool place, but after being there for a few hours you realize isn’t so authentic. Authenticity aside, it’s a great place to catch a mojito and the regular cuban band that plays there. It was 2×1 night, unfortunately the dumb waiter didn’t tell us until after we had ordered, so he delivered 8 mojitos instead of 4. And I came up with the perfect theory on why they have 2×1 specials and then don’t tell you they have the 2×1 specials until after you’ve ordered. I’ll save that for another entry.
We left Bodeguita at about 1:30 or so and since Marcia and I usually go to sleep at 11:00, we were both dead tired (and I, admittedly, was a little faded). Beth and Taj were going to stay at my parents’ apartment, so we said goodbye and walked to the car.
Beth and Taj decided, unbeknownst to us, to keep the night going and went over to Hilo, another dance-type bar that was playing hip-hop where Taj spent most of the time watching an old crotchedy guy helping young ladies in skirts up on to the bar, so they could dance and then he could casually look up their skirts. At some point the old guy spotted Taj watching him and took off. Or so I am told.
and this was our night out in Vallarta.
Click here for the full slideshow
My sister Beth and her man Taj have been in town for a week or so and we’ve been galavanting all around town. Tons of new photos to show, as soon as i can get a moment in, to have a proper update.
All is well. waves are good. working hard(ly).
taken while walking down the street from my parent’s apartment in Vallarta to the Zona Romantica and a nice little restaurant called Archie’s Wok.
what’s that sound? oh you can’t hear that?
It’s the sound of heavily crashing waves hitting the normally tranquil sands of Bucerias, 3 blocks from my apartment. This means the surf is up. and I am one happy camper. Today, I’m going to a surf spot called “Palmitas” up near Punta Mita, 15 min. north of here. The waves should be in nice form, let’s hope the wind doesn’t blow them out.
Did you know that surf wax goes bad? The wax on my board has been looking grey, glopped up in patches and has seemed to lose it’s stickiness lately. so today i scraped it all off into the size of a baseball and applied brand-spanking-new wax. there is no other smell quite like surf wax, in the world.
have a great weekend. you know where I’ll be.
Oops I did it again!
Louis Armstrong’s original recording. file this under “cute”:
Tuesday, Apr 19th, 2005
Categories: my photos
ok, i’m sick of all the text, so here’s a recent photo:
I caught this one down in the Zona Romantica in Vallarta. This is what a typical doctor’s office front door looks like in this area of Mexico.
As most everyone knows. I jumped ship back in August 2004 from a high-wire trapeze act of owning my own fledgling company designing websites for movies. My life in mexico, now, is tranquil and fun. My days are filled with working on the family business designing houses and developing housing projects (with the occasional marketing campaign thrown in for good measure) and exploring the many surf spots of the Puerto Vallarta area.
The first month or so that I was here I was on a pretty strict no computer diet. Weaning myself off the cpu drug (very strong drug indeed). After I slowly re-introduced the computer back into my life (strictly for work productivity), I began to read various tech related news columns and blogs, always keeping up with the latest in gadgets, Mac crap, programming, design, web design + programming, music and other things that piqued my interests. You can take the boy out of the city but you can’t take the city out of the boy.
Now I realize that I don’t talk about things on this blog that don’t have much to do with my simple life here south of the border, but my world is much bigger then just this day to day life. Today I launched my blog reader and the first item that came up was a news clipping about Adobe buying Macromedia. My eyes flew out of my head and a barely audible “whoa” escaped my mouth. My mind began whirling with what this kind of merger means for the industry that I left behind and the software that I pretty much use on a daily basis. For your average photographer, graphic designer, web designer, web developer and video editor this news is huge and sort of represents the closest thing to “Hell Freezing Over” kinda like Microsoft buying Apple. And I think it deserves mention here in these pages.
Adobe is a huge software company in so many different spaces, but the one space they couldn’t really get it together was in the web space and more importantly the intersection of design and programming. That’s not to say that there aren’t really talented people working at Adobe who understand both equally, because there are, but Adobe just couldn’t ever really get full momentum on their products (although I did use them religiously and even evangelized one or two). Macromedia on the other hand, had this space sowed up since day one. They had the design, production, animation and programming of web development worlds ahead of Adobe but they didn’t have Photoshop (which everyone in their right mind used for content creation). They were always there, riding the bleeding edge, listening to the designers and developers, communicating on a very open basis, incorporating tons of feedback. And Flash was always the killer app and with all the video improvements Macromedia has been pushing we are getting closer and closer to a full motion video web site. In the future I see websites being made in video composition apps like Final Cut Pro and put together in Flash. And on the programming side, the differences between designer and programmer all but disappeared. Macromedia is smaller, leaner and its far easier for good ideas to ascend up the chain of command (not to mention that most of the Macromedia employees benefitted from being former Adobe employees).
Back to Adobe, they have always had Photoshop. It’s just the killer app for so many different fields. And although a lot of people will come out saying that it might be the end of the world as we know it, I think this might truly be something positive. It will give Adobe that edge it needs in the web space and it will give Macromedia access to all the disciplines that Adobe excels in. I don’t think Adobe would buy Macromedia just to smother it. Bruce Chizen definitely sees that Macromedia have succeeded where Adobe has (with the best of intentions and most admirably) failed.
As the two companies get through the merger and regulatory obstacles I look forward to seeing what this new monolith creates. The one really crappy aspect is that now Adobe will basically have only Apple to compete with. and if Adobe stops making software for the Mac platform, we’ll be screwed. but i don’t think they’d ever do that. Let’s hope Adobe incorporates Macromedia’s no-nonsense, more ‘humanistic’ approach and that the two together can make music instead of making noise.
Now back to our regularly scheduled programming…
Monday, Apr 18th, 2005
Categories: surfing
It’s interesting.
I’ve never been one to watch weather patterns (or atmospheric schmata for that matter) but then again, spending the last 10 years in Los Angeles where there isn’t much of a weather pattern at all, one can’t blame me now can they?
Since I’ve been here, in Mexico, I’ve payed close attention to the weather. why? because weather produces and hinders waves and swell patterns. And being a totally gonzo surfer, I watch weather patterns like BIll Gates checks his stock portfolio. hourly, minutely, perpetually. I’ve learned some incredible info about the weather patterns here in the Bahia de Banderas.
When I first got here in August, the rain season was in full swing. the clouds were low, cottony and thunderous, the water was warmer then the pool, almost crystal blue and the currents and swells came from the south. My favorite surf spots: “Pools” and “Burros” are situated at the top of the bay, angled almost due south, hence getting the best of the south swells.
As Fall set in, the rain stopped and the clouds disappeared, the current still generally came from the south with an occasional northern swell moving in caused by the storms up north out in the middle of the pacific. As a northern swell hit, you could feel the first hints of cooling water. The extreme humidity of the summer air slowly turned to a slightly less form of humidity.
As Winter set in, not a drop of water fell from the sky all fall and winter long and the lack of water slowly turned the ultra-green ultra-lush vegetation on land from a vibrant jungle to an arid brown scraggly dessert jungle. The clouds came back, but this time they were very high and wispy, blanketing the sky and traveling fast. With those clouds came the wind. Towards mid-day the wind would really kick up and make the waves very choppy and hard to ride and would continue until just before sunset. The currents shifted to the north, bringing the colder water down with the swells, the water turned a dark emerald green and seaweed started to grow in places I had never seen it. Surf spots that were outside of the bay, like Sayulita picked up in wave size and were rarely flat. The southern facing spots inside the bay all but became unsurfable with the exception of Burros, which is blessed with a perfect sea-floor geography but even Burros was prone to flatness without a nice swell to boost the height and the speed of the waves.
And now, Monday, April 18th, here we are, in a general northern current scheme at the tail end of winter, but something amazing has happened. Over the past few days, the air has been getting hotter, the sun much stronger and we’ve received our first Southern Hemisphere swell. That basically means that a large storm, possibly around New Zealand has sent a swell all the way to our shores however many thousands of miles away, strong enough to kick up 8 foot waves for 4 days straight. and with the swell comes the faintest hint of warmer waters. Dive down five feet or so and you’ll still feel the cold, but just on top, maybe a foot down, you can feel the water heating up several degrees, no doubt pushed north by the swell.
Over the next month or so, the current will slowly begin to come from the south and as summer sets in and the rainy season gets under way in June, the hurricanes in the southern hemisphere will send good waves our way until mid-october. A friend told me, recently, that “they” were predicting at least 14 major hurricane systems this year, in the pacific. To your average meteorological minded surfer, that means good waves all summer long and with the return of the rains, brings the return of the humidity and jungle.
I can’t freakin’ wait.
This is Pedro, a wonderful old caballero guy with the most friendliest personality. Pedro rides around Sayulita on his four-wheeler with a make-shift cutting board and warmer stuck on the back. He is immaculately dresses in his spotless cowboy hat, whitest-white starched collared shirt, silver watch, creased jeans and impeccably well kept cowboy boots. I’ve never seen anyone dress quite as well as he does, driving around selling stuff off the back of a four-wheeler, true professional - he is. Pedro sells an insanely good snack called “elote” or corn. He takes the corn out of the warmer filled with hot water, and cuts the corn off the cob right in front of you, loads it up in a plastic cup and you have your choice of toppings: a grated parmesan-like cheese, chile, lime, salt and crema (creme, some people use mayo - which Marcia says is gross, pronounced: geh-roass). My favorite is just with chili, extra lime and a pinch of salt. He then adds a little of the water from the warmer to make it a soupish type snack that you eat with a spoon. 10 pesos or 1 dollar. yum yum.
Pedro is the kinda guy, who you’ll never find if you’re looking for him. but just when you least expect it, there he is with his four-wheeler and stash of expertly prepared corn goodness.
Saturday, Apr 16th, 2005
Categories: my photos
i love the colors of this shot.
Pinky and Marcia. in the new office.
Friday, Apr 15th, 2005
Categories: Uncategorized
This is my cousin. Wendy Mason. total.art.star. currently in the first year of the MFA program in Art at CalArts (my alma mater).
This is a still image from a 3 minute Flash animation loop called “The Wave”. Wendy uses painting, puppetry, fabrication, manufacturing, computer aided design and animation to explore her crazy-ass childhood growing up in a log cabin in New Hampshire in the middle of freakin’ nowhere!
Wendy is a participating artist in this year’s CalArts Open Studios.
Go Team Wendy!
Marcia and I went in to Vallarta yesterday to run some errands (Vallarta is around 30 minutes south of Bucerias - yes, we live in the boonies. thank you. we like it out here in the sticks). Along the way we stopped at Mary’s very excellant vegetarian buffet and had a really nice veggie pozole and most flarkin’ insane corn bread I’ve ever had. it had no grasa (fat) in it, but was still moist and juicy with bits of corn. yum.
The real focus of our trip was to check in with my nerd compadré Miguel. So he could teach me some tricks of the new RAW format for digital cameras and photo retouching action since he’s basically got the bay covered when it comes to good looking landscape and architecture photos. and to “borrow” a 6 month stock of tv shows and movies in digital format, since I don’t have TV, Satellite, Tivo or Netflix. Neither does Miguel, but what he does have is a fat internet connection, the sleuthing skills and the hard drive capacity to rival even the most intensive Tivo user.
Thank you, Miguel*
*.
Tuesday, Apr 12th, 2005
Categories: my photos
i caught this writing on a wall down the street from my house while walking home from my exquisite lunch of fish tacos from my favorite little fish taqueria in Bucerias “El Rincon de Ensenada”.
Tuesday, Apr 12th, 2005
Categories: my photos
Just in case you are new to my blog or don’t check it very often, which I assume is most everyone, here are all of my photosets that I have posted to Flickr, collected on one page. check it out, maybe you missed something.
Day - hot pink. a traditional color in this area of mexico.
Here are some photos of our new office that I recently designed. a mix of warm mexican modernism and bare bones quick-n-easy construction. makes for a nice working environment. sandblasted windows, palapa roof, hot pink, yellow/green, black and white with a touch of silver.
Night - the greenish color of the back wall lights up the sand-blasted glass - like a light box. beautiful.
Guess who almost got his ass kicked yesterday, surfing in Sayulita? me. that’s who.
I didn’t even do anything reminiscent of annoying gringo surfer tourists with chips on their shoulders. no. i just smiled and snickered at a wave that looked like it was gonna be a nice one and then mushed out at the last second. This nasty mouthed local asked me what I was laughing at and gave me his hardest stare, thinking I was laughing at him having missed said mushy wave. I tried to diffuse the situation, since I don’t like being thought of as a gringo tourist. but I guess that’s probably all I’ll ever be, so without much ado…
Here is some advice to incoming tourists* who are staying in Sayulita and plan on surfing:
1. Never drop-in on anyone else’s wave. it’s not their wave until they catch it, but if someone is closer to the breaking part of the wave and they get up successfully, it’s their wave (this applies to locals too, who more often then not, will ignore this rule).
2. Know what you are doing in water. even the nice local groms will give you flack if you get in their way when they are riding a wave. when paddling out to the line-up, learn how to avoid surfers who are in the lane. better yet, ask your instructor to give you advice on this. if, god forbid, your flailing pink body is responsible for a taking a local down, you might want to think about getting out of the water, it’s just not worth a second try.
3. If you are a seasoned surfer, don’t act like a jerk. The locals can be jerks most of the time. Don’t take every wave you see, help the learning gringos understand the rules and lead by example. good surfing is universally recognized; behave like an adult. There’s already too much testosterone in the water, take a tip from the ladies: Have fun!
4. If you provoke a local (or in my case above, he’s just an asshole who eats too much chile) don’t push it. stay away from him. if he keeps giving you bad looks, get out of the water, for now. it’s not worth it. The problem with getting into scuffs with a local is that locals form packs and as recently as a month ago a visiting tourist got beaten pretty badly. do not mess with the locals.
5. Have fun. Know the rules and above all be safe.
I’m going bananas. in a good way.
The surf is up and i’ve just spent all morning surfing up in Sayulita. The surf wasn’t the best, but it was the best I’ve had in almost 2 months, for sure. Some large sets, not well formed and too many people out in the line-up, but it was great to get back out into the water. I feel like my love handles are starting to eat my mid-section. I came home, took a nap and refueled and now I’m about to go back out to Punta Burro for another session. Punta Burro will most likely have larger times in between sets but the form of the wave will be better and there will most likely be less people. Oh I can not freaking wait. It’s been so long….
Henry Bartholomew Crawford and me. hanging in his front yard in Venice, California. November 04.
Henry is the most tech saavy baby in the entire world. He’s not only figured out how to use a computer but he has his own flickr account. Henry’s parents, my good friends, Bart-n-Megan have been helping Henry with his mouse skills, he hasn’t quite gotten the whole motor skills thing down yet and he keeps getting his food in the keyboard, but boy are his photos great. Go check out his photos and say hi.
the view from our little piece of heaven, in sayulita.
the taco stand on the corner in bucerias.
bucerias sunset. april.
on the road home from Punta Mita.
This is a photo of Mary Seggerman Fladung working the cellphone like the tireless, business saavy creatively insane woman that she is. and she’s my momma. Today she turns 16. Everyone wish her a happy birthday. Thank you.
Things are starting to look up. let’s hope it stays that way.
For all you veggie foodies, this is a collection of “The Holy Triumvirate” of vegetarian food in and around Puerto Vallarta. I’m sure there are one or two more, but with three top notch places to choose from, the veggie visitors of you, will never go hungry.
Roots vegetarian cuisine: Better then the best veggie restaurant in your city. Yeah, even you New York (well, maybe not NY, or SF for that matter, but close). Andrew rocks the house with his Black Bean Cakes, Sweet Ginger lentils and Veggie Dahl. all dishes come with roasted veggies and a really amazing asian pod bean thingy that is off the hook. read more about Roots here.
Mary’s Vegetarian Buffet: traditional mexican cooking without the meat. What did we have today? whoa. Albondigas de Pepitas de Calabaza (meatballs with a special kind of Zuchini). two words: insane. yeah, i know that was one word. Mary’s food doesn’t need another word. In addition to the dish of the day, there is a second dish and a full salad bar with a veggie ceviche which is scrumdittleyumshus. and a sauteed soy tofu salad thing that keeps Marcia going back for 2nds. and 3rds. and 4ths.
Planeta Vegetariano Vegetarian Buffet: killer buffet with 4 or 5 typical mexican dishes a day with huge salad bar. The tomato/basil salad is one of my favorites and fresh fruit aguas (waters) are wonderful. desserts are always great too.
Huitlacoche: corn fungus delicacy
Sometime ago, around a year or so, we traveled up to San Sebastian del Oeste, a small mining town a treacherous 2 hour drive up and over the most insane sierra mountain passes. In this charming hacienda style town carved out of the hillsides there was a little almost gourmet restaurant. Since it was really the only restaurant in town, we had lunch/dinner there 3 times over our two day stay. The owner of the restaurant, a sweet jewish mexican lady, served us the most amazing Huitlacoche soup. The taste and texture (i’m big on texture) were so subtle and tasty, I ended up eating Huitlacoche 3 times in 2 days. Huitlacoche is better known as the fungus that grows on corn. In the states it’s considered a plague and here in Mexico it’s a delicacy. It’s good stuff. Today I was reading Boing Boing and they had an article on the wonderful stuff. Here’s a link to it’s page on Wikipedia.
Yesterday I went up to Sayulita to hang out with Isaiah and Jess. I brought the surfboard along, but since there were no waves, we went with Isaiah’s parents, Ira and Sylvia, on a little tour of Sayulita. I showed them my parents’ land overlooking the water just south of town and the beach nearby. Ira has a friend, I think his name is T.R. (an old surfer-type guy). He and his wife are also from Santa Fe and live on the south side of sayulita out in the jungle. They are building 5 or 6 balinese/indonesian style houses perched on a small hillside, each house having it’s own one bedroom guest house nearby. The houses are shipped over from Bali and then pieced together here. They are calling the little colony “Bali-ville”. Small but charming, the houses each have their own personality and character, the development is a total mexico meets bali retreat. I hear there is one unit left, and from what I saw there was only 1 unit already done (or halfway done) and 2 others with the foundations and basic wood structure in place, which means TR’s concept is a great one. I was very inspired by the trip out there and loved the way he had integrated the balinese materials with mexican materials and landscape so well it looked effortless. The end result will, no doubt, be beyond beautiful.
signage recently seen in Puerto Vallarta:
Yesterday, April 2nd, was Marcia’s 28th birthday. We partied like aging slightly impotent rock stars. We went out for a night on the town with Pinky and Indalecio. Indalecio dragged us through Carlos O’Brian and The Zoo (a local O’Brian varation). We watched the spring breakers get their party on and although the places we found ourselves in were dodgy and not our first choices for places to hang in, we still had a good time in the spectacle of it all. Indalecio tried his best to make sure we had a good time and although his choices may have been misguided, his efforts were most certainly noble. It was kinda like being in vegas, one big social experiment. but when you live in the boondocks of a city half the size of milwaukee, sometimes you just gotta take a dive and check out the local party spots. Marcia and I ended the night by staying in town at my parents’ apartment. All in all a great birthday for my baby.
