“local”

As I said, today I’m happy and since my father isn’t coming to dinner (he has some appointment) and I’m home alone, I’m off to give myself a treat. I’ll go buy the previous-week Economist, which looks to be quite something (Inequality and The American Dream is the cover article, and the edition’s suvey is on logistics—need I say more?) and read it under a tree somewhere after eating Hindu rice at this very nice restaurant on Lopez Cotilla.

Next day update: Dinner was great, not so much for the rice (Biryani Hyderabad), which was a bit too spicy for my taste, but because I got to some interesting talking with the restauratrice, who gave me some very useful advice on my Honda: I could get almost free service checkups at Centro Magno’s agency, and they actually give free tours of the Honda plant here in Guadalajra (where they supposedly build a car in under two hours). I’m baffled at the incredible amount of local knowledge available if one will only listen.

They didn’t have the previous-week Economist at Galerias’ Sanborns so I had to settle with the previous-previous-week one, to which I gladly agreed once I realized it contained the 26-page technology quarterly. I gobbled up some it at the restaurant and then the rest up until late at night at Minerva’s Starbucks (it was too rainy outside for a tree and anyway, outdoors are heavily overrated). It was a wonderful edition—I was laughing so hard at times I got quite a few surprised looks. It felt like talking with a very witty, very sharp ole friend. And I found out two important things: I’d much rather read the day away than go watch a movie (and they cost about the same) and The Economist is far and away my favorite magazine.

My grandfather, Luis, is going to be 84 tomorrow (today, actually) and the whole family is hectic preparing him a humongous birthday. We, my sisters and I, are in charge of the digital accouterments and since I’d been wanting to create a photo mosaic for a while, I decided to give it a try today. What ensued baffled me.

I googled photo mosaic and went to the very first result, a 2004 engadget tutorial. The tutorial was very clear and to the point, and I donwloaded the freeware featured in it: AndreaMosaic. The thing was simple, unpretentious and surprisingly intuitive. Some minutes later I was off churning mosaics away and trying the different configurations.

It still took me the better part of the day to finish (with zam distractions) and get the thing 1.27×140m printed but, come on, I even feel ashamed of how little work I actually did. I’m going to be the one with the most impressive, flashy thing in the party and all the time I’ll just be thinking how disproportionate was my effort to the result.

Think about it for a second, a clueless guy in the middle of Mexico is able to churn out in a couple of hours (for something like 50 bucks) a graphical confection that would have floored anyone 50 years ago, that would have been nigh priceless a 100 years ago, and that would have gotten him burned at the stake earlier than that.

I’m unsettled and, frankly, the fact that it isn’t unsettling to anyone else is all the more disturbing to me (because that only hints at how fast this thing I did has already become obsolete). We’re smack in the middle of an art singularity of sorts.

A couple of months ago a prim little supermarket called Merkabastos opened 2 minutes away from my house. The store has been deservedly a hit around the neighborhood and now it battles with the oh-so-common problem of finding parking space for its customers.

Enter a pretty much vacant lot right across the street. Thru the years I’d seen it remain unused until some years ago it began to store construction machinery, and some years later they put a billboard on it (whose first customer, I might add, was the table dance on the other side of the beltway).

Anyway, what was bound to happen, happened: the Merkabastos management are renting the place as a parking lot for their customers and I find it amusing to think that the owner of the lot didn’t need to lift a finger to start earning a rent for her barren property.

Local Red Cross ads¹ (there are several versions of’em) are really good this year:

They make me think of Eliezer Yudkowsky’s sad, true words: “Death hurt us, so we will unmake Death. Let that be the outlet for our anger, which is terrible and just.”

¹ Their website’s flashy welcome is, alas, hideous.

This Thursday I went to my first Stereo Total concert and it was great.

Stereo Total —“yéyétronic, electropunky, kitsch & speed, sissilistening, bricolopop, Berliner juke-box”— is coming to Guadalajara! Yey! I still can’t forgive myself for not going to their now legendary 2003 concert (so long ago already?). In my defense, that concert (or more precisely, the notice thereof) was the first time I’d heard of them and it took me several weeks before I started to really dig them:

Ex fan de sixties (“Ex-fan des sixties, / Où sont tes années folles? / Que sont devenues toutes tes idoles?”), Babystrich (“Am Bahnhof Zoo hängt ein Riesenplakat: ‘Ego, Berlins größte Diskothek’”), Tokyo Mon Amour (“Ce jour-là en été sous le soleil”), Ma Radio (“Je ne peux pas vivre sans ma radio / Mon transistor j’adore”), Schoen Von Hinten (“Geh, es ist vorbei / Goodbye!”), Heaven’s In The Back Seat Of My Cadillac (“Makin’ love, makin’ love to you / Is a beautiful thing to do”), L’amour à 3 (“Je sais c’est démodé / ça fait hippie complet / mais je le crie sur les toîts / j’aime l’amour à 3”), Kleptomane (“Je pique c’est un tic / j’adore ça, ça m’excite”).

The concert will be part of some sort of France-Mexico musical festival, Mundo Latino. Date: this Thursday, May 4. Time: somewhat confusing, all one knows is that it’s somewhat after 8PM. Place: ”Terreno localizado en López Mateos, entre Plaza del Ángel y Plaza del Sol”. Price: $150 or $350. Be there. And if you are, say hi.

Siempre me ha gustado su estilo pero no suelo leer mucho a Germán Dehesa. Ayer que lo hice me sorprendi. La Gaceta del Charro, su columna en Mural, es tan evidentemente un blog! Es cierto que toda columna periodistica es, bien vista, nada mas que un blog atrapado en el papel pero la de Dehesa es cosa aparte. Irrepresiblemente personal y opinionated, plagada de in-jokes y referencias personales, es un filtro de temas muy diversos, como todo buen blog, pero el hilo conductor de todos ellos es siempre visible: Dehesa mismo.

...but I’m not. Let’s walk the biosphere while we still have it. I hear they’re gonna read Borges out loud tomorrow in the park. Yey!

Hot, frothy, cocoa and crusty birote (which is a Mexican bread that, in Guadalajara and in my lonely opinion, tastes a lot like a Manhattan plain bagel).

Nothing is meant with the title, it’s but a wonderful saying.

Warm beer, cold women. Black coffee, sweet cajeta.