FREE ANNOTATION AND HOT LINKS:
#1. GREAT ESCAPE: The plan was for me to get up early and walk Moppit so Rose could take an online yoga class before the sun turned up the heat.
The internet was down.
Tag Archives: writing
The almost-empty museum of beautiful flowers and cobblestone streets
A man and his wife and their dog go for a walk.
There is no punchline.
Stepping outside feels alien enough
Without turning it into something else.
San Miguel is pared to its essentials Continue reading
The Log: April 19 — Fight the dark side: Dance, sing, read, write poetry
ANNOTATED LOG:
#1 CONNECTED: Rose Alcantara’s daughter, Caira Button, celebrates her birthday today, far from her Chicago home but in very good company in Western New York. Rose sang Happy Birthday to her from our home in Mexico. Technology rocks.
#1A FACETIME WITH FAMILY: Spent almost an hour in a video chat with Ryan and Larisa and grandson Augie, who is saying his first words! They remain in place in San Francisco where it can’t be easy. One of the world’s most beautiful cities outside your door … and you can only look out your window.
#2 BIG OOPS: The worst thing you can do upon waking is open up Facebook. Trust me, bad news accumulates while you sleep. All this rage with no outlet …
C. Stimulus funds will reward more than 43,000 MILLIONAIRES with an average $1.6 million each.
#3 WELCOME RELIEF: Found in Garrison Keillor’s Letter from Manhattan. Crafting good limericks and simplifying life — that’s the life. “It’s been a quiet week in apartment 12B.” That’s the stuff.
#4 TELEVISION: “CBS Sunday Morning” is like nestling in with an old friend. I can hear my blood pressure settling down for the day.
#5 DISCOVERY: Nobody has a lock on the truth about coronavirus — yet — but everyone has an opinion. I found a reasonable voice in Richard Lehman, professor of Shared Understanding of Medicine at the University of Birmingham. His post in the British Journal of Medicine opinion page is calm, reasoned, informative, fact-based. I look for more from him.
#6 PAIRINGS: Pink Floyd’s “Ummagumma” goes especially well with Gore Vidal’s 1977 essay “On Re-reading The Oz Books” from the New York Review of Books archives.
L. Frank Baum wrote 14 “Oz” books, the unevenness of which Vidal excuses because the man was writing 48 other books at the same time.
I’ll admit it, “Ummagumma” and me on psychedelics did not go well in late-1969. It goes better with the Wizard of Oz. Wish I knew that then …
#7 VIDEO: I’m not sure where I found it but there is an amazing video of liquid-limbed hipsters holding a dance-off to the Devil’s Music, jazz, baby. On further research, I found an 8-minute version that says this is a Sunday night party during the Jazz Roots Festival in Paris in 2015. Swing, baby, swing.
#8 I WROTE A POEM: Titled “Remembering to Dance Like Nothing Else Matters.” The first half was inspired by this video and the rest is based on something that happened to me in the early-1980’s in Rosarito Beach, Baja, Mexico. I’m not a poet. These things just happen.
#9 PODCAST: While walking Moppit tonight, I tuned into the New York Times show “The Daily.” On Sundays, the program presents a spoken piece of long-form journalism borrowed from partner app AUDM. Today’s is “The Woman Who Might Find Us Another Earth.” Sara Seger is a brilliant astrophysicist, a certified genius, but befuddled by the most common challenges of living on Earth.
#10 SHORT STORY: Edna Ferber’s “The Gay Old Dog”(1917). Chicago man becomes a Loop-hound. That is not a compliment, or, wasn’t back in the day.
#11 I leave you with this, the BEST PLAGUE PARODY SONG YET:
Remembering to dance like nothing else matters
________________________________________________________________
Enough. Stop.
Let the outrage machine simmer.
Turn off the echo chamber.
Take a breath. Exhale.
Invest six minutes in some simple joy.
Maybe a memory or a YouTube video
Search for something like:
“Crazy good dancing”
And see what comes up.
Wantonly happy dancers
All legs and jazz and smiles
Effortless abandon belying the practice, practice, practice.
Lose yourself in the motion
In the ecstasy
In the rhythm and youth and heat and sweat.
Remember all the times you
Could have danced and chose not to.
Too late for regret but ample time
To remember.
And wonder if every step not taken
On some lacquered floor
Now rises up like bile,
Angry fingers dancing across a cold keyboard
Dance, dance in your room.
Dance, dance in your yard.
Dance, dance in the office.
Dance, dance in your cubicle.
Dance, dance in the post-op.
Dance, dance in the checkout line.
Dance, dance on ZOOM with everyone you know and strangers.
For once, we have the space to dance.
Social distancing creates its own stage.
Dance as if the sanity and safety
Of the whole world depends
On your awkward, gangly, unique
Beautiful, joyous, free steps.
Don’t post, don’t throw more flames on
Facebook fires already consumed.
Step away from the keyboard
And dance, dance, dance.
Recall that long-ago Sunday trip
To storied Rosarito Beach Hotel,
Safely south of Tijuana’s gamey streets.
A womb of illusions and harmless fantasies,
Behind ancient stone walls,
And thick oak doors. An escape
For those who could not afford a flight,
Could not afford a house in Palm Springs,
Missed the invite to Malibu.
The bar on the bluff
Overlooking the crystalline capped surf
Contained like a landscape in glass windows
And tinkling bar glasses
All glass and lapping cerulean expanses.
Like flying. Above it all.
With a white baby grand on a lemon oak-panel floor.
And kids, Hollywood kids
Refugees from the studio lots and unemployment lines
And waitress jobs, and parking lots
All tumbled down to Rosarito, answering a primal cry
For something exotic, something foreign
Something away, just far enough away
To rekindle thwarted dreams
Here, in the Rosarito’s bar
We’re all somewhat mysterious celebrities,
Stars on the lam, like Gable, Lombard, Bogie.
Bar the doors to the imaginary paparazzi,
Warm up the piano,
Let the revue begin! What
Did they say … Let’s put on a show!
Kids with a thick dossier of rejections
And even more talent
Leap to the floor
Singing and dancing with abandon
Sweaty abandon, finely honed and practiced abandon
From high school musicals and college debuts
And second rows on stage
And gaudy rock-star glutted stripper bars.
Icy margaritas fuel scorching moves,
torching songs.
Saucy, sultry, racy chops
Designed for the lines of thin summer dresses
And nicely fitted khaki slacks and T’s.
Star-struck dreams are tossed,
With flaming hot ambitions,
Into the dance floor bonfire,
Like nothing matters, when
Come Monday,
Everything will.
But not now, god willing, not now.
Now is only the music and the chops
And the hothouse air and tropic sun
And shimmering mirrored ocean below
And Spanish exclamations from smiling bartenders
And the illusion that we are all
In a Cinemascope Technicolor
Foreign film, the script of which,
Is within our own power
To write.
Every moment is a closeup
Everyone is a star. Everyone is
Hitting it big.
Monday is an opening-night away.
More margaritas, amigos.
More music, more dance, more song
For up North, a thousand more
Just like us
Are having their dreams coddled and crushed
On the mercilessly hot streets of Hollywood.
But not you, not me
Not today.
The war will still be raging when we return.
But we will rejoin the fray with smiles
A new, fresh look for the face.
Isn’t that worth it?
April 16: The ‘Luminous’ Log … now with 100 percent more annotation!
On March 27 I began logging my day’s activities into my now-useless appointment calendar. For the time being, there would be no luncheon dates, no concerts, no coffee meetups, no flights to visit grandchildren, no weddings, no visit to Mexico City with friends.
But how was I filling my days? They seemed to be drifting — without recollection of where I’d been, what I’d accomplished, where I was headed — from one gray fog-bound sea to the next.
“Naps,” seemed to be the only achievement that I recalled with any clarity. That, and pointlessly angry and condescending posts on Facebook. I had to be doing more than clicking “Like,” “Angry, “and “Love” buttons, right? Oh, and “HaHa.” Continue reading
Entering Phase 2 of the coronavirus with the help of the Camino, history, humor, and Garrison Keillor & Randy Rainbow
Decontamination crews are spraying down the streets of San Miguel de Allende today. The visuals alone ought to drive the doubters indoors. (Photograph by John Bohnel)
So, Mexico entered Phase 2 on Tuesday. While the president still hugs and kisses the babies and young girls, his Health secretary has called for restaurants and casinos to be closed, for public gatherings to disperse — you know, the same stuff we have been doing in San Miguel for a couple of weeks now.
Only, a lot less.
Phase 2 is clinically called the “community transmission phase.”
Phase 2 feels like Mom calling the kids inside to safety — after it starts raining. The kids have been playing outside, conscious of the dark clouds building. Continue reading
Exit, stage left, smoking Glock in hand
A two-character, three-page play written to honor a talented theater critic, newspaper colleague, and friend who just announced an early retirement. The characters in this play no way resemble my friend. That would be purely coincidental …
Curtain goes up, in an empty theater.
On an empty stage, two characters face each other. One, Jim, is fully lit. The other is in the shadows. We enter in the middle of a conversation.
Voice: You’re sure? Continue reading
Dancing for the lives of all women
Just before 4 p.m. on a brilliant and blazing Sunday afternoon in San Miguel de Allende the sound of a boombox rose above the usual bustle and cacophony of the Jardin Principal.
As if on cue, the several venders with their bright balloons and bouncing pencils were swept away like neon flotsam and jetsam on the shore.
A lone, tall, leggy blonde in jeans and a black top stepped to center stage and began to dance. She got the attention of the milling crowd. A second woman, all in black, bounded into the open space and the two danced as one. (Full disclosure: Woman No. 2 was my wife, Rose Alcantara.) Continue reading
In a chaotic world, writers play with the traditional structure of novels
The recently concluded San Miguel Writers Conference and Literary Festival made one thing pretty clear: Playing with time and structure, in the hands of inventive authors, makes for storytelling that is both challenging and riveting.
The chronological timeline seems so passe, when you add up the considerable success of the featured keynote authors.
Consider:
- Delia Owens wrote “Where the Crawdads Sing” in straight chronological order. Then, in a brilliant move, she chopped the novel in half and wove the two disparate timelines into alternating narratives.
- Colum McCann’s soon-to-be-released 400-page novel “Apeirogon” is broken up into 1,001 numbered cantos, a nod to the “1,001 Arabian Nights.”
- Ian Williams structures his debut novel, “Reproduction,” along mathematical/genetic lines. It is written in four sections mirroring the cycle of life and death over several generations. Williams begins with two people and then formats the book as if the characters are “reproducing themselves” toward the inevitable end.
- Madeleine Thien’s next book, on the philosopher Spinoza is a ways off but in her keynote address she took her audience down a beguiling and meditative path through time, space, and imagination — in and out of rooms, real and imagined, and all inhabited by some aspect of Spinoza. There was nothing linear or chronological about it
- Tommy Orange begins his debut novel, “There There,” with a powerful essay on the very real acts of violence and genocide experienced by Native Americans.
Delia Owens explores impact of isolation in ‘Where the Crawdads Sing,’ and discovers millions of friends
Hal Wake and author Delia Owens dazzle a sold-out Gran Salon Ballroom at the Hotel Real de Minas during the closing night of the 15th annual San Miguel Writers’ Convention. (Photo by Mary Finley)
Select one of the following:
- “Where the Crawdads Sing” is a stunning debut novel about a young girl who grows up alone in a North Carolina swamp with only Nature to nurture her. Her story if folded within a tale of romance and a murder mystery.
- “Where the Crawdads Sing” is a science-based allegory about the primal needs of mammals for community and the impact and consequences of growing up outside the socializing influence of the herd.
- “Where the Crawdads Sing” is a figment of your imagination because, good lawd dahling, everyone knows crawdads do not sing.
- The correct answer is a combination of bits and pieces of A, B, and C.
You said “D”?
Yes, you did. I distinctly heard you say “D” under your breath. Don’t try and wriggle out of it now. You said “D”!
Well, you are correct. Continue reading
Musings, Magic, San Miguel and More 