From Xico

Concierto con Clavecin y Guitarra in a Beautiful House

Last night we went to a concert at the house of our wonderful dentist.  She is a vibrant very attractive woman who responds to life with every fiber of her body.  She and her husband live in a neighborhood called La Pitaya which is on the old road between Xalapa and Coatepec.  It tumbles down towards a small river, its houses tucked under a tangle of greenery.  All kinds of houses sit in La Pitaya from the grandest to the poorest, from upscale California suburban to tiny shack and they sit on everything from manicured lawn to farm. 

Marcela's house was designed by her husband, an architect. Marcela is the one who furnished and decorated the inside. It is small and simple and lovely, a seamless blend of Mexican and Japanese, set back on what seems to have been part of the property of a much bigger house. The main living area is broken into alcoves with nothing more than posts and levels distinguishing them, if I remember correctly, so that it feels intimate, though in fact it is roomy enough for about thirty five people to sit on chairs to listen to very fine music.  Which is what we did.

Marcela and some of the residents of La Pitaya have organized to collect money to buy a piece of land along the river in order to keep it forested and to I think try to work on cleaning up the water.  This concert was thus a benefit for the group.  The musicians also live in La Pitaya and donated their talents.  The harpsichordist is named Patricia Castillo.  She played La Egipiciana de J. Ph. Rameau; fantasía en d de Mozart and Tres Sonatas de Scarlatti.  I should have but didn't get the name of the guitarist, her partner in life as in the concert, but he was just as wonderful a musician as she.  He played pieces by Antonio Lauro and Manuel de Falla.  Afterwards they played three pieces together, seamlessly.

Here in our area people don't give standing ovations as easily as they do in the U.S., but the couple received as big an ovation as thirty five people could give.

After a bit of wine and some fresh-picked blackberries and bread and some local cheese, we gathered our friend and made our way through the cool damp evening to the car and then home.

Che Guevara at Harvard (sort of)

There's a neat collection of blogs at Harvard called FinalClub.org which essentially posts summaries of the lectures of various classes.  The one I've been following is on American protest literature, and this particular entry addresses the 1960s, particularly through the lens of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.  It is indeed interesting, and with a very telling critique of the failure of non-Civil Rights protests. One of the main criticisms of protest in the US at the period, and to some extent since, is that it turned into a movement of consumers rather than actors.  The blog entries are summaries with commentaries on the lectures, not the lectures themselves, and boy are they tantalizing.  However, in their own way, they are also adequate for casual readers like me. 

So all of this is because the lecture addresses the commercialization of Che Guevara:

Here is Stauffer’s trenchant point: redefining protest as a cultural act (an expression of freedom through sexuality, drugs and alcohol) is the establishment’s primary method of co-opting political protest. Whenever capitalist industries figure out how to make money from the activist ethos, they effectively reroute political transformation back through the sphere of consumption. (A recent example of this was the fad – no largely past, thankfully – of plastering image on just about everything possible. I once saw the Che image on a wall clock. Talk about the vacuity of commodification. Anti-capitalism sells! The best Che shirt Your Intrepid Blogger has ever seen had a caption below the standard image that said, “Your Logo Here.”)

On Guilt

An excellent essay on guilt in SLATE, here.

What Can We Do about Our Water

A few days ago, the town well, literally, ran dry. The river water source which still provides the bulk of our supply had been turned off as happens here at this time of year, usually because of mud: low levels? turbulence? Don't know why.  In any event our community's hard-earned new clean water source couldn't keep up with demand by itself. The fresh water source bubbles out of the hills and rocks about fifteen kilometers from here.  At its beginning, it is powerful and ample, but by the time it threads its way up and down hills, along roads and across streams to our colonia, it is not so powerful.  It is supposed to be stored in a tank.  We saw where the tank was to be built, but I'm not entirely sure it exists yet. Somehow, that water and the river water which has traditionally been our supply get mixed and delivered to all the houses via hose.

We store water at our house on the roof in a tinaca which holds several days' worth of water in reserve.  But we kind of lost track of when the water was on in the colonia and when it was off since this year for the first time, when the river source is turned off, the spring source continues, at least for awhile.  However, the spring source by itself doesn't always deliver enough pressure for water to get pumped up to the tinaca, and it had been coming out in a kind of weak stream for awhile..  So Jim climbed on the roof and and found it more than half empty (less than half full?)  So we joined our neighbors trekking to the nearby spring for back-up supplies (As I've mentioned, we have quite a number of springs in our area.  They aren't, on the whole, powerful enough for anything but as a supplement to a community's water supply.)  We have the benefit of a car, many people don't. And most of them don't have tinacas, so they don't have a back-up supply.Thus in dry spells you see lots of folks trudging along the road encumbered with collections of containers.  Some people use the spring water as drinking water, but it isn't monitored so we don't, although I have to tell you, we have drunk spring water, both from the spring closest to our colonia and from a couple of others and never gotten sick. At now-19 pesos for the biggest container of bottled water which holds nineteen liters (we think) it's too expensive for a lot of people to buy their drinking water.  And boiling drinking water requires fuel for heat which can also be a dilemma.

The spring water comes out of its pipe and the crevices in adjoining rocks deliciously cold any time at all and as I mentioned in the past, people come by to shower in it, to wash their cars with it, just to cool off in it even when they don't use it as a main water source.

Tinacas are ubiquitous on houses in Mexico outside of poor areas.  Our tinaca is surrounded on three sides by a brick wall -- I guess the original owner thought it was ugly.  However, this makes it difficult for me to get a good picture to show you, but here's one that'll give you an idea. 















The spring is along the road I showed you pictures of on blogs dealing with when the bridge was broken.  We park and generally I watch and Jim bears the burdens.  Here he is going down to the spring.             















The river you see in the upper left quadrant is the river after the water falls river you see from our house blends with the river at the bottom of our property.  Although the latter is closer, the only time we ever see it from our house is when it rises very high after torrential rains.

Looking upstream here, you see the bridge we cross when we turn right instead of left to go to Xico instead of Coatepec.
 The foundation of this bridge is really strong: it is an old railroad bridge.  It, too, was recently repaired and remodelled.  We were a little disappointed because we wanted to give you a thrill ride over the pre-repair version which had broken railings and chunks of concrete missing.  But the BASE is VERY STRONG.  There was a little shrine half-way across the old bridge.  It got moved to the end of the bridge and got much fancier.  Whenever we come home from Xico around dusk, we see people carefully lighting the candles in it.











Here is Jim getting water from the spring (it's channeled through a pipe).




















And here he's putting the water in the Rav 4 while another man waits to go down.  The man didn't have any buckets or anything.  He might have been going to get a drink or take a shower.  People do that all the time.  The water is always cool and refreshing.






















As I've been saying, water shortages and lack of clean water are big deals here.  Below is a translation of an article from the Diario de Xalapa about water.  It is commentary by several experts in our area and it was on the front page.  The original article in Spanish is here.

And here is my rather clunky translation.

 

Raymundo León/Diario de Xalapa

Axlapa, Veracruz

Academics of the Institute of Ecology and the University of Veracruz asserted that it was urgent to develop concrete measures to conserve water in the region, declaring that there was no cultural pressure to do so.  They were critical of the the fact that at present everyone  wants simply wants to dig more wells to get water instead of thinking first of how to regenerate it.  This is a grave situation, they agreed, because they are draining our reserves. Furthermore, they said, instead of saving water we can save, people want to get it away from their houses as fast as they can.  For instance, when it rains, the water is drained away instead of put in storage areas which would aid in conserving the water tables of the region.  The academics maintain one must ad problems of the chaotic growth

The Happy Journey from Xico to Col. Ursulo Galván

(Just when I thought I'd more or less mastered how to insert pictures so they were more or less okay in their placement, Typepad went and changed its formatting stuff.  Now as you will see below, I'm all mixed up again.  I even looked at the HTML.  I have no idea what's going on. -- Esther)

We've been hiking around starting near the Panteón (cemetery) of Xico.  You can see some pictures from 2006 of the Panteón here.  This day we decided to try a small path that goes off to the right above a field.  We assumed it would meet back with the larger road we normally go on.  It didn't.  In fact, we found we could go all the way home on it, though just before we got on the road into our Colonia we slipped and slid, just a tiny bit lost  down some muddy trails in a cafetela.  I don't have pictures of that.  I got quite dirty.  Jim didn't.  I don't know why, but if there's mud to slip in, I do.

At the start of the path, we looked down on Xico.















A section of path paved with stone.  We can be really far off the beaten track and find segments of cobbled path and road.  We wonder, always, how old they are and who built them and who might have walked on them.  A friend's father told us he had some built to his ranch when he first move to it in the 1960's.







A burro we found who'd gotten a bit tangled.  Jim untangled him.  He was quite grateful.  The wooden saddle is ubiquitous here on both horses and burros.                                                                              








Jim walking down the path.  We came across some mountain bikers who told us that in fact we would
 eventually get to Ursulo if we kept going in the direction we were going in.  So we did, always trying to pick out the more main-looking trail, though at one point we weren't quite sure we were right.  After not such a little while, ahead of us were the bikers again, coming back up hill towards us, bikes held high over their shoulders. But they told us we were on the right path, they weren't.  Whatever. We kept going.




A very old rock wall.





















A view of Acamalín. We hardly ever get out of sight of Acamalín.




















We were walking along a ridge.  Here is a view looking down the other side.















Tree laden with Spanish moss.                 




















Back on the road going into Ursulo Galván, we passed Paul the English gardner and his companion Valentina's house.  Valentina designed the grill work on the upstairs window and Paul and a friend made it.

That's all for now.

Cuba yet again: post-Fidel

When it comes to Cuba, and Israel's enemies, for that matter, our tendency in the U.S. to demonize ends up causing us a lot of problems.  Cuba's government is a family-run dictatorship on a poor island.  It is a complicated affair because the people on the island themselves have a lot of mixed feelings about their situation, kind of like people in a dysfunctional family where there are parents who may be way too harsh but insist they are doing it for the kids' own good.  But Cuba remains a culturally vibrant place with a very high literacy rate, for instance.  We are not doing anybody any good by insisting that, in our own view, it is the monster under the bed and it needs to be feared and isolated.

Here is a link to an article on post-Fidel Cuba.  The author is on the faculty at the University of Nottingham in Britain which has a Cuba studies program in partnershiip with the University of Havana.

A Bit More on Cuba

According to this slide-show history of the great and mysterious old gangster Meyer Lansky in today's NY Times, Lansky had an apartment in the same building as one of my close college friends AND in Cuba he built a huge resort hotel and casino and shared the gambling profits with Fulgencio Batista, the dictator that Castro overthrew. 

Incidentally, I worked at LIFE magazine in the mid sixties in the department that integrated advertisements and articles into the magazine.  In those days, there were what seemed an incredible number of regional editions: six.  These six editions were characterized by inserts of a number of pages with regional advertising.  Anyway, I was in charge of maintaining the "dummies" of all the magazines -- the national as well as the regional -- as they proceeded through all the steps to publication.  This meant I spent my time cutting and pasting, cutting and pasting as articles changed, and new ads came in and so forth.  Literally, in those ancient days, I would get copy printed haphazardly on big pieces of newsprints, cut it more or less down to size, slap tape on the back and then slap rubber cement on the tape so that I could easily pull it up from one page of the "dummy" and paste it down on another as the editors changed their minds from one day (minute) to the next about where it should go. Articles weren't supposed to reflect negatively on advertising (a plane crash on the same page as an airlines ad, for instance), colors weren't supposed to clash, ads weren't to reflect negatively on stories ("the family that prays together stays together," which was a public service ad, for instance, next to a story about the Pope as a possible Nazi sympathizer.)

So back to Cuba.  There was in my office at LIFE a Cuban refugee, a very dapper man from a family that was prosperous in Cuba before they had to make a run for it. I remember him as being pretty nice and not overtly political, but when the subject of Castro and the Revolution came up, he would shake his head and wonder why the campesinos had wanted a revolution: at his father's place, they always had enough to eat and shoes to wear and Sundays off for church.

Che, The Movie

At Cannes, Steven Soderbergh presented a perhaps not quite finished version of his new movie, Che, starring one Benicio del Toro.  In describing the movie, A.O.Scott is skeptical about Che's nature and legacy.  Che, according to Scott, seems to have turned into a revolutionary who came to believe the old saw that the ends justify the means.  There's plenty to discuss here, for sure.  Anyway, Scott is not at all sure the movie, like many fine movies he sees, will ever make it to the shores of the U.S.  I'm pretty sure, in its finished form it will make it here to Mexico.  I don't know enough at all to make grand pronouncements about Mexico, but being human, I do it anyway.  THIS grand pronouncement is that it seems that there is a less shocked, more nuanced view of history and historical figures here than in the states because perhaps people have learned through experience that principles and real life come banging into each other all the time, and that sometimes real life and high principles just don't go together.  We've I think masked this truth from ourselves more successfully in the U.S. in some ways, certainly regarding our past as a nation.

Anyway, you can read A.O.Scott's interesting article here.

A Cartoon for Today

A cartoon from today's Diario de Xalapa:








Translation:  From my perspective, of course you can see we're winning.
The poster says, "Trends in the War Against drug lords."

Unfortunately, we could substitute any number of things for "el narco."

The Price of Bread and Sweet Rolls in Veracruz

From the Diario de Xalapa, "Another hike in bread prices in June." 
Here's the accompanying picture:















You'll notice that most of these items look kind of like cookies or Danish pastries.  In Mexico, bread can either be sweet: pan dulce or not: pan de agua like bolillos, pan francés, pambazos, etc.  Obviously, this is a picture of pan dulces.  In a Mexican bakery, or panadería, whether it is free-standing or in a corner of a supermarket, you get a large metal tray and a pair of tongs and walk around and pick out your stuff.  Then you go to the counter where it gets bagged.  If you've got something sticky, the attendant puts it on a square of thin plastic and twirls the edges to make a little packet.

The price of pan is going up again because of the world-wide scarcity of wheat.  So says Bichir Sakir Nahum Lajud, adviser to the bakery industry in Veracruz.  Apparently, price rises will depend somewhat on the US decision to augment by 20% lands dedicated to grain production.

In the article, which is in Spanish, you can also see that to some extent, bread consumption has gone down recently because of our terribly hot weather. But prices will rise.  Here is the link to the article.