Monthly Archives: March 2023

photography, Rants and raves, Reviews, San Miguel de Allende

Frida Kahlo’s Hall of Pain museum in Mexico City, the artist’s own Graceland

They’ve got it all backward.

The Frida Kahlo Museum in Mexico City ought to start with the collection of medical harnesses and contraptions that the artist used to alleviate the pain, to stand upright, to obtain a modicum of normality in her life.

Instead, the very devices that she so cleverly hid beneath her layered dresses and shawls come at the end of the journey. They are shocking, horrifying.

They make you, finally, grasp the essence of the pain which dictated and influenced so much of her life and art.

It is only at the end that the courage, the determination, the resilience, the bravery of Frida Kahlo come into the clearest focus.

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fiction, Rants and raves, San Miguel de Allende, Writings

Fiction: The secret life of Gertrude Stein in America

Gertrude Stein had a problem. She’d always had the problem but it was all the more acute in 1934 when she stood before 500 people and tried to speak. 

She stuttered.

But that wasn’t the worst of it. Her stutter caused obvious discomfort among her adoring fans and that caused her to lose confidence and when Gertrude Stein lost confidence, she lost her line of thought. Which was not easy to follow to begin with.

The first couple of lectures on her long-awaited U.S. tour were described in the American press as disappointing and worse, confusing.

And this would never do, as she had six months of lectures across the United States lined up, each limited to 500 people maximum and each had been sold out months ago. 

In a bit of a panic, Stein told an assistant to reach out to her good friend Mina Loy, a bohemian Everywoman sort, living in Paris. A feminist, painter, poet, playwright, novelist, designer — god knows, if it was about art, Mina had done it. If anyone could punch up a speech and clear up her, um, diction issues, Stein reasoned, it would be Mina.

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Memoirs -- fact and fiction, photography, San Miguel de Allende, Writings

Jay, Jim, me and 10 bags of chips

Jay Leno autographs bags of chips in 1987 at his Beverly Hills home. I’m the terrorist-looking guy behind him. Photos by Jim Skovmand.

Recently, my old friend and colleague Jim Skovmand was searching for some papers on his computer when he came up with these photos, which he sent to me on Tuesday. What a great way to unlock a memory!

Jim and I joined the Copley Press organization around the same time, he in the photography pool and I with The (San Diego) Evening Tribune. The photo pool then was more like a deep lake – more than 50 photographers, editors, managers, and lab staff serving the Tribune and the rival morning paper, The San Diego Union.

As Jim recently pointed out, it took five years before we had an assignment together – that’s how big the new-gathering organization was in those days.

This was the assignment we shared and it was a doozie. 

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photography, San Miguel de Allende

Dancing their hearts out

It doesn’t look like a funeral, does it? But it is.

Up ahead of all the wildly costumed dancers is a more somber scene — the black hearse, mourners dressed in white shirts and blouses, somber and agonized looks on their faces. They walk at a painfully slow pace down Calle Insurgentes. The pace only enhances the sadness of the moment. In the front row, one mourner carries a picture of an all-too-young man. Beside him, another carries a stone urn with smokey incense.

I do not know who they mourn. I wish I did. It was not my place to ask during such a moment. I only know he had been a member of the Krazy Boyz crew.

Those are the dancers who follow the funeral entourage. You’ve seen them in scores of San Miguel de Allende parades and processions and celebrations. And yes, now, even a funeral.

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