The locos danced through the afternoon under a hot and humid sun, made more challenging by the layers of costuming and bulky headpieces. After hours of parading and trance-like dance, catharsis must come, a cleansing, a purifying, exhaustion.
I don’t know how they do it.
Still, as the sun began to dip behind the San Antonio church, the locos gave way to the folkloricos.
Continue reading
What’s a Sunday morning without a few crazies parading through the neighborhood?
Empty indeed.
We got our share today. The first of three parades around San Miguel de Allende began at the Parroquia an Antonio de Padua around 10 a.m. and danced down Callejohn San Antonio before hanging a left on the Ancha and heading for Centro.
Continue reading
“The artist is a receptacle for emotions that come from all over the place: from the sky, from the earth, from a scrap of paper, from a passing shape, from a spider’s web.” — Pablo Picasso
Spider webs are beautiful things. Unless you walk face-first into one in the dark of night.
Then, not so beautiful. Or interesting.
My friend Sonny once sat for hours on the floor of our Cape Cod house staring at a spider as it wove a stringy orb behind a door. Sonny insisted he learned a lot from observing the construction of the web.
Continue reading
Guitarists walk down Callejon de los Suspiros on a warm San Miguel de Allende morning.
_______________________________________________________________________
If you enjoyed this post, consider subscribing and passing on the link to friends. It is all free. To subscribe, click on the three-bar thing at the top of this page (in the red circle). Feel free to share this post!
Wow. Talk about landing on your feet, if only for one Saturday.
Last week, the popular Mercado Sano took a hit when an outside electrical fire forced its closing, through this weekend apparently.
What to do with the hugely popular TOSMA market that occupied the back parking and cavernous storage buildings?
Continue reading
I say it often, perhaps insufferably often for some people, but every day that I step out the front door in San Miguel de Allende, I expect a miracle to happen.
Oh, not a big miracle. Not always.
Just little miracles.
Like the smile on the face of a mother herding her three children toward the church.
Like the carpet of lavender jacaranda flowers worked into a patch of cobblestones.
Continue reading
Maybe if every place had a day when you could blow up life-size papier-mâché effigies of bad people, the world would be a happier place.
I was definitely in a happier place after watching San Miguelians blow up about two-dozen effigies on Easter Sunday. They call them Judases.
I know, not your typical Easter Sunday celebration. Just roll with it and enjoy.
All week San Miguel de Allende has been observing the tragic (or glorious) end of Jesus Christ, reliving his life and death in an almost real-time series of processions and pageantry. By Easter Sunday, the story is largely played out.
Time for some catharsis.
Continue reading
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.
Continue reading
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.
Continue reading
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.
Continue reading
Musings, Magic, San Miguel and More 