My Baby.
Archive for May, 2006
Desmond Dekker RIP
One of my musical heroes died today: Desmond Dekker. Ska and Reggae legend.
Mexico-in-English
It’s funny what Google Analytics can tell you about people linking to your site, I just found this while rooting through my logs: Mexico-in-English: Quality Peoples. A review of my site by a person who blogs about Mexico and it’s relationship to the US (I think). Pretty cool read.
Found Object
I found this note posted to a bus-stop shelter on an ad for dog food in downtown Guadalajara. The note says “Comunicate con tu mama enferma” (Call your sick mother) with a phone number. I was blown away.
70 Percent
I received an email the other day from someone asking about my water photos taken with the Pentax Optio WP. This guy, it turns out, runs a site called 70Percent.org. I casually checked it out, to find that it’s a full social-community site aimed at surfers and water lovers, they call it a “Waverider’s log”. You can add your local breaks to a google map, with lots of nice descriptive features and keep a “sessions” journal that documents your session activity over time (perfect for those of use with creaky memories). And what’s even cooler is that you can decide which parts to show everyone and which parts to keep secret (like that super secret local break that you don’t want to tell anyone about). You can keep a blog on the site ala MySpace and you can even fill out an “Illness Report”, for that relatively famous break you frequent that has the unfortunate downside of being positioned next to a rather large town with no sewage treatment plant. Illness Reports are submitted on an anonymous basis and 70 Percent will use the info to help raise water quality awareness.
All in all, a very cool site. Great ideas involved. The site is still in Beta, but if you’re a wave lover and want to network with people who share you passion, this site is for you.
Good Waves.
Summer is barreling down on our heads now, it’s only in the high 90’s during the day but the humidity is insane. And it’s not even raining yet. The water is blue blue blue. We woke up a few mornings ago to a few drops of a light drizzle. Which is unheard of around these parts, cuz everyone knows that it will start raining on June 15th. And that’s a fact. I guess I proved myself wrong, in the last sentence, but what the hey! this is my journal.
Surfing has been good the past few days. Yesterday at Burros and then today, a failed attempt at Veneros (with no waves) and then back to Burros for some pretty good 6 footers, but way too many people in the water. I had some pretty good rides and two of the worst wipeouts I’ve ever had. One, dropping in on a cresting wave and then falling over backwards, and instead of penetrating the water, just sliding down the front of the wave and snapping my neck as my head hit the water. ouch! But I guess it comes with the territory. I can’t complain, it was a good day.
There is a new addition to my surf quiver. That’s right a new longboard. My good friend Meagan just packed it up and moved back to the US and she needed a good home for her ridiculously long, longboard. I’ve been wanting one for awhile and so things just worked out. I’ll post photos in the next few days. The board is a champ and rides so smoothly. Thanks Meagan!
Kiwi says that there are supposed to be 8 footers on thursday, let’s hope he’s right.
Grocery Store Signage
No matter where you are in the world, you can bet that the guy who does the hand-drawn barker signs for grocery stores is a graffiti artist. it’s a universal truth. don’t fight it. Example below was taken in Guadalajara. Either I’m right or this same exact guy does the grocery store signs for the Trader Joes on La Brea and 3rd in Los Angeles:
Jonathan Schloss
Jonathan Schloss - Architect. file this one under: wish i could do this. excellent website and architecture. [via M.Mejia at k10k]
Infinite Photomosaic
Infinite Photomosaic. This is absolutely incredible. I want one for my photos! [via kottke]
Lovely Ladies
We were wandering around downtown GDL on Saturday night, looking for a bar that had long since closed down. While we idled in one of the many squares, trying to figure out what to do next, I wondered over to the entrance of a bar. These two ladies were hanging out front and they instantly started asking me questions about what I was going to do tonight and who I was with and where I’m was from. They were very sweet and open. I asked if I could take their picture and they were delighted. They asked if I wanted to come into the club and for a second a thought it would be a great idea, just to stretch my cranium a little bit. But then quickly thought against it, what’s the use if I couldn’t take photos. And this was the kind of club where cameras were definitely not welcome.
Those ladies were beautiful and courageous. and I told them so.
72 Hours
lunch with the Varas. clicking shutters while driving. bochos. taquerias. conversations in salsa clubs. seniors and señores dancing to live cuban music in the square. highway construction workers. laid-back arm-chair lounge spots. lovely trannies. tianguis and tonala. parking and no-parking signs. vw vans and bugs. blurred conversations. unconventional hair salons. toes on a smudged windshield. kids with machetes selling coconuts. a huichol on a cellphone.
All in the space of 72 hours in Guadalajara. slideshow or photoset.
Chapalita
We were in Guadalajara, this past weekend, hanging with Marcia’s family once again. It was a nice, small, quick trip this time. On Saturday we had lunch with Marcia’s abuelita (grandmother), Margarita. She is the matriarch of the family and a strict catholic, so an introduction has been long in the waiting and handled gently. All went well as she occasionally held my hand and patted my knee. We got along great with small conversation and big smiles.
Margarita lives with her eldest daughter and granddaughters in a brand-spanking new gated residential community called “Chapalita Residencial”, a geometric puzzle that if you were to un-focus your eyes, would look like various combinations of tiny boxes, sort of like a three-dimensional crossword puzzle with color. Or maybe something out of mondrian painting gone horribly awry.
I had always seen Chapalita from a bridge close-by, it’s blocks of color, the same 5 or 6 basic shapes interlocking in 20 different ways. As we entered the security gates and pulled on to the entrance boulevard, I knew that I’d have to take a few minutes to take some photos.
The houses are all jammed together in matching blocks of color and brick. Everything seems to be in 3/4 size, as the houses look small, the parking areas look small, the roads even smaller. It’s as if the “bigger is better” concept had never reached this place and that’s not necessarily a bad thing, but please let me explain further. It seemed as if every space from public to inside the houses themselves had been re-engineered to allow for the smallest possible area usage. From the width of the staircase to the length of the parking spot, when empty all looks great but with usage it’s like watching a cartoon of an overly packed suitcase with all the clothing seeping out the sides. This is a case of ultra-maximization of peso per square meter usage of space.
Chapalita feels like it was made by Ikea. Seemingly interesting design, but thoroughly missing any underlying details. As if no one had used it prior to putting it together. Something like this would be gorgeous if done in Sweden or Japan, but here in Mexico it just doesn’t have the detail in either the engineering work or the finishing detail to make the “less is more” approach work. In this case, less is, well, less. As with other developments in the past, this one offers that brief glimpse of utopian hope that you get from owning something brand-new and clean. I wondered to myself as I walked the clean, car-less streets and rows of empty houses, what will this place look like with 5 to 10 years of neglect.
Sunset over the autopista
I took this shot, last night on the autopista (highway), as we were coming back from Guadalajara.
Telefunka
This is a series of images taken at a Telefunka concert on the malecon in downtown Vallarta. Telefunka are an electronic/rock outfit from Guadalajara. To unfairly pigeon-hole them I’d say they are a mix of: Daft Punk, Air, Mano Negra and Radiohead (sorry guys!). This was the first time I had heard their music. I have to say they put on a pretty good show, just the right mix of live instrumentation and electronic back-up beat and synth action. I did a preliminary snoop on the internets and couldn’t find any free mp3s, so maybe I’ll have to “find” some tracks to post here (maybe they could use the exposure).
Black and white concert photos have always been their own unique genre and stand heads above their color counterparts. The album cover photography of Blue Note Records comes to mind. Kinda beats the purple and green colored images, we’re all use to seeing, just because the disco stage lights are cheesy doesn’t mean your photos need to be.
So with that in mind, I processed the photos in Aperture, using the “monochrome mixer” palette. Watching splotchy colors turn to rich variations of grey, I tweaked the red, blue and green channels to emphasize or de-emphasize areas of the photos accordingly. It was my first experience trying to achieve a black and white look, digitally. I think they turned out pretty well. The most interesting thing was that after I had made a first edit of 60 or so images, I converted them all to b+w. It was pretty amazing how the aesthetic qualities change in the switch. Some photos I would have rejected, if I hadn’t seen them in b+w and others I would have included.
So the lesson is this: prune images first (under/over exposed, bad composition etc…), convert to b+w, prune some more. prune even more. upload. enjoy.
Claire goes swimming
Hey! My photo of my little cousin Claire has been blogged over at John Watson’s photography themed blog Photodoto! John is an great photographer and writer, so I feel very honored to be featured on his site. John also programs the most excellently wicked Flickr toys found on one of his other blogs at Flagrant Disregard.
Incidentally, this photo was taken in early September 2005, in the last dying days of summer, at the family ancestral home in Frenchtown, New Jersey. Ya see, the pool guy hadn’t really been taking care of the pool, so it was growing green algae. That didn’t bother the kids from using the pool for hours on end. By the time this photo was taken, the disturbed algae had turned the water into a brilliant emerald green and you can see a slideshow of more pics from this set here. This photo was taken with a Pentax Optio WP.
Walk The Line
I’ve had some Johnny Cash songs floating around inside my computer for years, several with my 5-star seal of approval. About two or three months ago we started listening to the man in black on repeat. We eventually got around to seeing the film WALK THE LINE, which we both really liked. We were amazed at how well Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon performed the songs, not to mention the acting, story, direction, etc… Marcia has been practicing her June Carter-Cash (via Reese Witherspoon) singing impersonation since we stepped out of the theatre and I bought several more songs. Johnny Cash started to become the defacto go-to artist on the iPod. Our favorites: Walk The Line, Ring Of Fire, Jackson, Fulsom Prison Blues, I Still Miss Someone, A Boy Named Sue, Man In Black.
Today I downloaded the WALK THE LINE soundtack, the songs from the film as performed by the actors. As I listen to them, it amazes me how rich and full the songs are (compared to Johnny Cash’s original versions), no doubt enhanced by bleeding-edge recording technology. Joaquin’s voice is as dead-on as can be, it’s like listening to a slightly updated version of a Johnny Cash impersonator who lives, sleeps and bleeds in Johnny Cash’s throw-away clothes. Joaquin does a pretty damn good job. Reese Witherspoon actually has a better singing voice then June Carter-Cash and in a song like Jackson, you can really see the difference (in this man’s opinion). But there’s just nothing quite like the original Johnny Cash songs, they’re like a slice of recorded history, oozing with soul, grit, tragedy and redemption. Cash’s songs are beautifully all over the place. Joaquin’s have the “steady feeling of a freight train” helped along by regularized timing of digitally edited drums, bass and guitar. Where as Cash’s songs are the main course, Joaquin’s are a very interesting, complementary side-dish.
In the voice of June: Y’all Can’t Walk No Line.
Space
I’m currently digging on this interactive piece called Space by The Barbarian Group. love the architectural, spacial qualities. commissioned by Getty Images. [via k10k]
Beach Culture
I took this series of photos on Sunday, a slightly crowded day out at Punta Burros, our local surf spot. A good opportunity for me to whip out the 100-400mm lens. Lots of people on the beach and in the water, well, enough for this small hidden gem to feel a bit crowded.
Southern Swells
The barometer and thermometer have both been ticking upwards little by little each day. Summer is bearing down upon us and mark my words: one month from today, the big mass of gathering clouds will open up and all hell will break loose, ushering in the much needed rainy season.
With the onset (actually more of an onslaught) of summer comes a change in the direction of the swells. Summer is the time of the southern swell as the storms in Antarctica whip up heavy wind patterns and splash them across the west coast of the americas, Mexico being a prime central location. Unfortunately, Puerto Vallarta is sheltered by a large bay, that dampens the direct force of waves as seen in other areas like Puerto Escondido, but I’d like to think that it makes for a kindler, gentler surf population and a great place to learn to surf.
We are getting the first of these southern-summer swells. And we be enjoying it like nobody’s business. And since the beginning of summer also conveniently coincides with the first major stretches of a slumbering low-season, the crew have all suddenly found themselves with a bit more free time.
Oh, how convenient.
Imaginary Foundation
File this one under “Why didn’t I think of that?”: Imaginary Foundation
A Trip to Tepoztlan
The day after Emmanuel’s wedding, we all hopped in the car(s) and took a drive up to Tepoztlan, a small village about a half-hour from Cuernavaca. Tepoztlan has a small pyramid at the top of a mountain range that that town sits at the bottom of. They say that it is the birth place of Quetzalcoatl. The town itself seems very colonial and cute. Lots of spiritual folk mixing with the nahuatl natives makes for an interesting little town. We spent the day walking the streets, checking out the Sunday Tianguis. We didn’t quite make it up the mountain to the pyramid, all the more better reason to come back. There is a large concentration of energy in Tepoztlan similar to that of Sedona AZ and I could definitely feel the town’s good energy supply.
I spent the day getting to know Marcia’s family better (me, still with camera in face) but more talking and more fun. The kids broke off from the older generation as they headed to a mexican restaurant for mole and us kids decided on the infamous thin-crust pizza joint IL Trovatore. And my goddess was the pizza good. Not Funicula good, but good enough to make this pizza fiend smile.
Wedding in Cuernavaca
Here is a set of photos from a wedding we went to in Cuernavaca, for Marcia’s cousin Emmanuel and his wife, Aga. Going against the grain of a traditional mexican wedding, Emmanuel and Aga had their’s during the day. It was wonderful for me to get to know Marcia’s family: tias, tios, primas, primos etc… The wedding was wonderful although I didn’t dance too much, which in hindsight, I kinda feel like a schmuck. The ceremony and reception were held at a beautiful garden style hotel called Hosteria Las Quintas. Enjoy:
