Plaza Garibaldi, 2 a.m., and the mean streets are bopping. Beers flowing. Flowing friends. Tequilas, too. Maybe a few too many. What the hell. You’ll get a taxi … You are a writer and this is a first-person narrative. Maybe you’ll be able to sell the piece. Because you were shot after you boarded that […]
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New Yorker Janelle Lynch, at a relatively young age, has garnered international recognition over the last decade for her large-format photographs of urban and rural landscapes in which the human form is loath to figure. Landscapes devoid of human activity or, if depicted at all, reminiscent of a corrosive delineation, typify Lynch’s oeuvre — and […]
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Mexican-American author Daniel Hernandez has hit a fresh nail on an old head by exploring different youth cultures in Mexico City. Youth is a favored subject for a modern mass media obsessed with this demographic, and one would think the market was pretty well saturated by this point. Moving rapidly from an emerging subculture in […]
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Some years ago, during a lovely spring afternoon at his Mexican home overlooking Lake Chapala, artist Georg Rauch needed something to take to a monthly gathering of artists and writers in Ajijic. While fighting for the Third Reich on the Eastern Front, he had written letters to his mother – in all some eighty-four letters […]
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Aficionados of folk art of the state of Oaxaca in southern Mexico are already familiar with Arden Aibel Rothstein and Anya Leah Rothstein’s Mexican Folk Art From Oaxacan Artist Families. It was surprising to learn, however, that some people with an interest in the crafts of Oaxaca’s central valleys, are not even aware of this seminal work […]
Continue ReadingImmersed in the history of art and literature, weaved into the superstitions of the collective consciousness, and illumined by the silver screens of cinema, the Wild Man paradoxically basks in the light of celebrity while haunting a preserve of shadows. The “wild man” (and woman) has appeared in numerous forms throughout the centuries of art, […]
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I collect old books. There’s no more fun for me than to forage through secondhand bookstores, digging up the weird and wonderful, ’50s crime pulp and science fiction, 19th century poetry tomes, books on travel and adventure. In some of those cities where I’ve lived or spent time – Amsterdam, London, Melbourne, Stockholm, Tel Aviv […]
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In the novel “Virtual Light,” cyberpunk author William Gibson envisages a Mexico City of the near future where the air is a sooted ebon and the populace wears oxygen masks. It might seem far-fetched, but with the city’s population topping 20 million, and the city’s cars about a third that number and all of it […]
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The Primavera Forest is a protected area of oak and pine trees covering over 36,000 hectares, located due west of Guadalajara, Mexico’s second largest city. In 2010, the administrators of the forest published Aves del Bosque La Primavera-Guía Ilustrada (Illustrated Guide to the Birds of the Primavera Forest) by Oscar Reyna Bustos. Nature photographer Jesús Moreno described […]
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Mexican Mezcal in the Global Spirits Market: Unrivalled Complexity, Innumerable Nuances – By Alvin Gary Starkman, M.A., J.D. (Carteles Editores – P.G.O., Oaxaca, March 2014) Derived from the agave plant, mescal — or mezcal — has been enjoyed since before the Spanish conquest. Most is produced in the Mexican state of Oaxaca and, as with […]
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