Category Archives: Rants and raves

Rants and raves, San Miguel de Allende, Writings

Dream assignment: The Wedding of the Decade or embedded with Taylor Swift?

I’ve been handed my first writing assignment in ages, covering a much-anticipated wedding in Portugal. At the same time,  an incredible opportunity has come up involving a full-time job for a major newspaper chain covering nothing but Taylor Swift.

Isn’t that just the way these things happen?

You are a nobody for years. Unread, unfollowed, untalked about, an aging ghost of a writer drifting through the literary fields. Suddenly you have to choose between the wedding of the decade and Taylor Swift.

The story of my life.

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

Thinking about Jimmy Buffett and Paradise: ‘I am still me, it’s the island that got small’

In counseling the British writer Robert Graves on a possible move to Majorca, Gertrude Stein called it “a paradise – if you can stand it.”

And that is as good an explanation as any of the complicated relationship many people have with Jimmy Buffett. The man sold a brand of paradise. Millions bought at least some version of it – be it a beachy lifestyle, the music, a devotion to margaritas, Hawaiian shirts and sandals, sportfishing, sailing, and all the Margaritaville bars, retirement communities, casinos, resorts …

Buffett wasn’t the first to turn a lifestyle into a commodity but few seem to do it better. Maybe Donald Trump. These days you can be a cradle-to-grave Parrothead with apologies toward none. More than anything, we worship success and if a guy sells a million records or makes a million dollars, he will find no shortage of admirers.

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photography, Rants and raves

‘If you look the right way, you can see that the whole world is a garden.’

“Everything is made out of magic, leaves and trees, flowers and birds, badgers and foxes and squirrels and people. So it must be all around us. In this garden — in all the places.” — The Secret Garden, by Frances Hodgson Burnett.

It is easy to get lost in a garden,

No matter how small it might be.

There you are, sitting in full possession of your mind

Ready to conjure great things that will soon become

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

In San Miguel de Allende, give us this day our daily miracle

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.

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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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Colonia San Antonio, photography, Rants and raves, San Miguel de Allende, Writings

Hey, buster, who are you calling the ‘friendliest city in the world’?

News item: Conde Nast Traveler names San Miguel de Allende the “friendliest city in the world.” It beats out Dublin, Lisbon, Bangkok, Copenhagen, Mexico City, and Bruges among others. The media company previously named San Miguel the “best small city in the world.”

This can’t be good.

I was asked to respond to all this by an otherwise sharp and responsible newspaper colleague. And so …

All right, the next guy who says San Miguel de Allende is the friendliest city in the world gets a punch in the nose, see?

A city with a reputation like that could get itself hurt, see? A city could pick up a rep-u-tation with talk like that, and not the good kind, see?

Other cities start thinking it’s a patsy and start aping all that friendly stuff and the next thing you know, you’ve got a six-way tie for the friendliest city. 

And that ain’t good for nobody, see?

Why, if everybody is friendly, then what’s this world coming to?

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

Review: If it’s ‘Wednesday,’ it must be Netflix

One of Wednesday’s (Jenna Ortego) many talents — besides deadly martial arts skills, frightening visions, icy stares, enormous eye rolls, and a disdain for all things human — is playing the cello. There is something very Sherlock Holmes about that.

You want to know what makes my day?

“Wednesday.”

Not the day, necessarily. The movie series that is on Netflix.

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

Movie review: ‘Spirited’ away

Ryan Reynolds and Will Ferrell sing and dance their way through “Spirited” en route to making a classic holiday comedy movie.

Let the Christmas movie season begin!

Contrary to first impressions, not all holiday movies this year are about:

  1. A high-powered, stressed out, high-pressure, mid-30s, professional urban woman who …
  2. Returns home to Hickville to help her Mom/Dad/kid sister/orphaned niece …
  3. To move into a rest home/restore a failing business/take over the family B&B/adopt a child …
  4. And falls in love with the hunky fireman/hunky plumber/hunky school teacher /hunky yoga teacher …
  5. Who really has a PhD/feeds the poor/is secretly wealthy/makes Christmas toys for needy kids/builds wooden boat/is Santa.
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Memoirs -- fact and fiction, Rants and raves, San Miguel de Allende, Writings

That time I tried to overthrow the local government at a Tiblisi puppet show

Editor’s note: In a newsletter for former Union-Tribune newspaper staffers, a colleague in San Diego recently recalled a review I once wrote that outraged the mayor and her staff. Jack Reber, the editor of the newsletter, asked if I would fill everyone in.

Glad to do it. But, as in my online days with SignOnSanDiego.com, I take great pleasure in scooping mainstream media. So, you will read it first, here on my own blog. My newspaper friends may get it at midnight tonight. (Sorry, Jack. I can’t help myself.)

Ah, the Russian Arts Festival of 1989. Gather round kids and I’ll tell you as much as is permitted by the several nondisclosure agreements I signed to gain a generous separation bonus from the San Diego Union-Tribune.

Obviously, I kid. There was no bonus.

My one assignment during the Festival was the Tiblisi State Puppet Theatre, under the direction of the great and late-Rezo Gabriadze (below with some of his creations). Georgean puppets aren’t like the Muppets, Shari Lewis and Lambchop, or Punch ‘n Judy. They tell real and elaborate stories, often tragic, and even violent or sexually mature.

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