In my little slice of Mexico there ain’t much shopping to be done. This is a good thing. No Sunday afternoon trips to the mall, no ridiculously large amounts of billboards showing off the next new must-have objects you don’t need, no slick gap ads, no if-you-buy-this-it-will-make-you-prettier-and-skinnier” ads. But on the other side of the coin, it’s hard to find good sources of inspiration past the internets and the culture around me. And mexican culture is by far the most inspiring thing in my life, but every now and then i ache for some good education on design, architecture, music, writing, art, etc… Recently, I found amazon.com again, after a few years of being weened off the amazon teet*. Somehow through sheer stumbling I realized that it’s insanely easy to get amazon shipped here to Mexico, direct to my address in about a week and a half. This is by far the fastest anything has been sent to me via my mexican street address or by a postal remailing service we have in Texas (usually takes at least a month and a half). Concurrently, I stumbled upon amazon’s trove of good art books and over the past few weeks I’ve been indulging in just a few good ones. As I sit here in my apartment on Sunday morning, i feel a connectedness in spirit, peering through the works/writings/architecture/design of Charles and Ray Eames, Barry McGee, Thomas Campbell, George Nelson, Alexander Girard, Ari Marcopolous, Margaret Kilgallen, Ricardo Legoretta, Craig Stecyk, Mike Mills, David Carson, Ed Templeton, Chris Johanson, Milton Glaser, Luis Barragán, John Hodgman, Hunter Davies, Mark Gonzales, Phil frost, Steven Powers and many more.
* There happens to be an amazing book store in Guadalajara called “Ghandi” that has tons of great art, design and architecture books but most are printed in spanish and so it’s a bit harder to justify putting down all that green for a book that’s past my language level. although I did buy the Luis Barragán book there and The Beatles biography by Hunter Davies (good book!).
i kept wondering what was the mail situation in mexico. u know, just in case we get the urge to move next to u one day. when i read this i thought, a week and a half is a long time. but then i thought, hey, that’s how long amazon usually takes for me anyways. and then i thought, hey, i never ever get anything in the mail other than bills and an occasional amazon purchase. so i’ll put a check-mark next to the mail question.
mel