“mexico”

Genial la mas reciente portada de Proceso. Todo un logro de diseño grafico en su simplicidad.

Las caricaturas de atras del Ocio, Pupa y Lavinia, de un humor neurotico y feminista (muy a la Maitena^{WP, IY}) que me fascina, son de ella y su trabajo de diseño tambien es muy chido.

No se por que me dio un gusto raro saber que es tapatía, ojala algun dia pueda conocerla (creo que anda por Canada). Bueno, el punto es que es mucho muy buena. Leanla. ^_^

May 10 yesterday was Mother’s day^WP here in Mexico and it was a messy affair, what with my now heart-wrenchingly weak grandfather back in our house and all the sad, crowded tension. Me, I put particular attention to the music. The undisputed classic poem for the day and inevitable tearbomb at elementary schools across the country is El brindis del bohemio (lyrics: “Sólo faltaba un brindis, el de Arturo, el del bohemio puro, de noble corazón y gran cabeza; aquel que sin ambages declaraba que sólo ambicionaba robarle inspiración a la tristeza.”), most famously declaimed by Juan Manuel Bernal. It is terribly cursi, pure schwarmerei and maudlin gesticulation, but at least it’s unabashedly so and good at it. That said, I’m glad we managed the day without it.

What surprised me yesterday was our reaction, my family’s and my cousins’, late at night and with some alcohol involved, to Denisse De Kalafe’s Señora, señora (lyrics). The song’s of course more than schmaltzy enough for the occasion but it is actually not that bad. And all of a sudden we all started singing it. We had all heard the song countless times and had been forced to learn the lyrics more than once for school recitals. It wasn’t this big emotional singing, at least not at first nor all along. It all started as some sort of joke but the song has a definite mood. And it was good to sing it.

Much less known (at least here in Mexico) is Los Churumbeles’ Cariño Verdad (lyrics), which, again, and this is perhaps inevitable, is guilty of sentimentalism, but it is all drown in some fantastic music. I didn’t even know what the song was about for a long time, always mesmerized by the tune alone.

Oh and one more song: Gloria Trevi’s^WP thankfully-breaking-the-maudlin-mood A la madre, which was actually quite an innovative, playful song back in the time.

btw, I came from the party with a cool CD Faby lent me: Rhythms del Mundo | Cuba. I had heard one of their songs thanks to Chef and it was very intriguing. The project describes itself as a “collaboration of Western artists and the Buena Vista Sound” (as if Latin America wasn’t Western) and the results are oddly arresting (Latin America appropriating the outside world!). It’s pop made salsa. It doesn’t always work wonders but it is always worth hearing. The two best tracks in my opinion are Coldplay’s Clocks and Maroon 5’s She’ll be loved. Check them out.

The other day dad told me he considered Mexico’s relative economic self-sufficiency—that if we had to, we could, more or less, feed ourselves and scrape some living with only our national resources—one of our greatest strengths. I didn’t buy it. At all. Self-sufficiency seems to me a much overrated, much idealized kind of economic independence.

I’m not self-sufficient, neither is my father, and I’m willing to bet that if you’re reading this, neither are you. Neither is anyone that lives in a city. The only truly self-sufficient people left in Mexico (and in the world)—indians who mostly grow and tend their own food, weave their clothing, and build their huts—live in what we call extreme poverty. Not all poor people are self-sufficient but all self-sufficient people are poor. The more self-sufficient the poorer. The more self-sufficient the more bounded to their own meager abilities, to their own fragile circumstances, to the weather (now when’s the last time you worried about it?).

We, the codependent, have made a different bargain with the world. We betted on specialization and cooperation, and I stand by that decision. It has given us far more wealth and independence than our forebears dreamt of. I don’t think you wake up at night scared of how much the butcher has over you because the only thing you know how to do is sing. Modern cooperation is breathtaking, isn’t it? This MacBook from which I write you, this computer in which you’re reading me—they required the work and talent of thousands of people around the globe.

All this begs the question: Why? What ties these invisible threads of people around the world into building the things you need? Why don’t you fear your butcher will extort you? Why are we all so reckless as to depend on each other for our very sustenance? The answer is trade and competition. Trade is simply the name we’ve given to peaceful cooperation and is the fiber that binds the world. On the other hand, competition, as much as it’s been demonized, is simply the prerequisite of cooperation—rather than being cooperation’s opposite, it is its complement. You don’t fear your butcher because you can always go to another one (or become one!)—it’s as simple as that. Cooperation without competition is indeed the fragile, vulnerable dependence most people rightly fear. Cooperation and competition—free trade, that is—is the resilient, magic codependence to which we owe our wealth and our freedom. (Think about it the next time you hear of a trade barrier of any kind, realize how it ultimately makes you more dependent, more subject to the whims of the special interests pandered.)

So no, I don’t think our relative national self-sufficiency is anything to be particularly proud of. It’s a blessing that we live in such a fertile, bountiful land. If we turn it into an excuse for isolation it’ll be our curse.

With only one recently acquired cellphone (that gets some ten phone calls per month) I probably should have heeded David Pogue’s advice and skipped his NYT’s article introducing a new phone service (not available, of course, here in Mexico) that consolidates all your phone numbers into one (new) number. Geekiness prevailed and I carried on. Happily, for it is indeed a “rather brilliant melding of cellphone and the Internet.” Number consolidation is only the beginning, there are some quite intriguing (and yet so simple!) services on top and along.

Who would have thought? What with the iPhone^ELZR, Samsung’s touch-screen that mimics the feeling of pressing a mechanical button, Dodgeball, mobile phone maps, and now this, the dowdy “tele”-phone is interesting again.

That weird phone call I got weeks ago was from the prim (but ambitious) lil’ supermarket near my house (they got my number from my blog, go figure). Out of the blue they demanded, not rudely but not friendly either, my “cooperation” in taking down pictures of them I had uploaded to Flickr (for I wanted to write a review of how innovative and important the store really is—“The income level of a country is determined, above all, by the productivity of its largest industries. High productivity in the unglamorous “old-economy” sectors—retailing, wholesaling, construction—is most important, since more people work in them.”). Anyway, it sure looked like a big boatload of crap to me then. They weren’t giving me even hints of good reasons and still they threatened me—me, their most ardent former enthusiast—that they didn’t want to pursue the matter in a different way (wtf?). I instinctively groped for the freedom-speech martyr role, willing to fight the crusade against dimwitted, Pleistocene shopkeepers to its bitter end.

And so it would have likely been. But then father and Dragonball intervened^ELZR. “If you do something that you later find upsets a friend, what you do is stop,” was father’s simple but crushing argument. Dragonball’s was more subtle in its nonverbalness but you could word it into this feel-good motto: “enemies are future friends waiting to be made.” I’ve never kept enemies and so it simply kills me to have one. I can’t. Because even if they never actively hurt me, I’ve always been aware that there will come a time when their help would come in handy—and I need all the help I can muster. In the case of this shoppe, I saw them immediately as customers. If this harebrained scheme I hatch of creating an ad-based online interface to Guadalajara is ever going to take off, I will need the help and patronage of every local business I can find.

It took me weeks to visit them (see previous fear post) but when I did, yesterday, it couldn’t have gone better. I went there and defused the whole thing by admitting error from the very beginning and promising to take down the pictures as soon as I came back home (which I’ve done). What followed was two persons trying to outapologize each other. My caller revealed himself a friendly, good-natured man. Most importantly, I finally got to understand what got them so upset. To begin with, being somewhat new to the retail business they’re paranoid about security after lots of bad experiences and it totally unnerved them when this random guy was able to sneak behind guards (some of them undercover) and take pictures nonchalantly. The crux of the matter, though, was that it turns out my Flickr page was the first Google hit for the store (that happens a lot whenever I talk about something from Mexico, Google gives me a totally disproportionate pride of place—Imagery’s aftermath, I suppose) and that, combined with the anxiety of having problems with their webdevelopers (who haven’t been able to upload anything—not even a lousy banner—in six months), got them all worked up—how can it be that some random stranger is the one that tells the world what we are?

Now I offered myself up for the job and I may be the one building their web presence, which I’m sure would be a fascinating job. Amazing isn’t it?

I knew Luis González de Alba for his controversial, non-PC^WP opinions and that’s why I bought a popular science book of his in the last Spanish bookfair here in Guadalajara. The essays I have read have so far been overly digressive and frankly tedious overall, but there have been several fascinating insights here and there. My favorite of all:

I remember Andrea cringing when I read this to her, denying any link with the brutish Spaniards—Andrea, my beautiful, western-named, Spanish-surnamed, milk-white, hazel-eyed Mexican friend.

Fees in malls’ parking lots are a recent development here in Guadalajara^WP that has been welcomed with the fervent outrage one would have imagine reserved for true wickedness. It is all the more interesting then how quickly the new mode swept the city—I can only think of two malls that remain complimentary, Plaza Acueducto and Plaza Outlet, and it’s clear that they refrain from charging only to attract customers to their rather forlorn premises.

Despite the somewhat frequent calls that something should be done about this, that some new law should be passed to protect us customers from yet another new instance of capitalistic rapacity, I take them as nothing but inconsequential bursts of anger at the inconvenience. I take it as a given that we can all see clearly that mall owners have the obvious property right to charge whatever they want for the use of their premises. We, in turn, have the corresponding right of shopping wherever we want.

So instead I want to discuss here the deeper question of whether or not these parking fees better society. Is the money Parking Lot Operators (PLOs) earn the reward for a valuable service or ravenous plunder hiding under the banner of property rights?

...with a 65 by 20 meters (213 by 65 feet) lot in the ”primer cuadro”—the very heart of downtown, the area around main square—of a small, hundred-thousand people^ELZR town? (Ciudad Guzman^WP, that is)

We’re thinking of turning it provisionally into a parking lot, hence the above plan, but we’re still looking for an interesting business (other than the obvious answer of starting yet another hotel). Any ideas?