Honest Stuff I Make Up · · Tucson
I ate dinner at 5:00 and now it’s 10:00, a whole seven hours till breakfast. And there is macaroni and cheese in the house that I want nothing to do with but it has somehow learned my name. So scared. If I don’t make it, I just want everyone to know the de Kooning behind the bedroom door I found at a yard sale in Chiapas.
Notes · · Hermosillo
I have been to two Mexican weddings in the past year. Both times I have agonized over what shirt to wear.
Last night my sister-in-law married her sweetheart in a cozy ceremony in the garden of a hotel in Hermosillo. As I was putting on a tie I had brought to wear with the white shirt and black slacks I had bought earlier in the week, Hiram asked if I didn't have another shirt.
“I'm afraid people will think you are a waiter.”
So I lost the tie and wore the other shirt — the one with the tiny polka dots.
On the way to the hotel, we passed a pair of missionaries dressed in exactly the same clothes I was going to wear originally.
Ho hum.
It's hot in the summer in Hermosillo and it's just as well I didn't wear the tie, which I had only retrieved in the first place from a box from the nineties in the closet because I felt guilty for not wearing a blazer I don't own.
At the wedding I took some photos because I can't not take photos. Later, looking at Hiram's brothers in the pictures I had a thought.
Light bulb.
What they are wearing is what English speakers call Mexican wedding shirts. They are for sale in many places in Tucson in many colors and styles, new and vintage, expensive and not.
The answer to my question of what shirt to wear was sewn into the shirt I could have worn.
Family and friends at Zayra and Arturo's wedding
Music · · Tucson
Qué bravas son las solteras. Dir. Tulio Demicheli. 1975
Her enthusiasm is immeasurable and I’m only guessing when I say her energy can be weighed in grams, but I will always be indebted to this song for teaching me how to say in Spanish my heart is beating so fast, which has come in handy.
Artists · · Tucson
Made this to help cope with the heat!! #hotterthanhell #tucson #arizona #illustration #hot
Notes · · Tucson
We were looking for something to do and Ken suggested bowling. I don't remember the last time I went bowling. I think this was maybe the fourth time ever. Golden Pin Lanes, the last non-chain bowling center in town will close sometime in the next year. We decided to go there.
Sounds · · Tucson
It's been almost a month since the May Odyssey Storytelling event and I'm still cracking up when I think about Drew Cronyn's story of finding life (and vocal) direction in an important book, Vene Aguirre revealing the identity of her true father to her dad, and other stories about faking it.
Sounds · · Tucson
Among many things, this is also the story of another young person whose life is forever changed after discovering the Beale sisters.
Everything is Stories: The Marble Faun “A story of a runaway, sexual identity, and survival in the wake of loss.”
Notes · · Tucson
I love Monster Children because its images of surfing and skateboarding remind me of what it's like to be young; I love Monster Children because its writing reminds me it's okay to put into writing how annoying things can be; I love the Australia Issue of Monster Children because it reminds me that I'm not the only one annoyed by U.S. news.
The Australia Issue. A concept that started as one thing and ended up completely contrary to what I intended at the close, for better or worse. The initial idea came about in light of over a year of being completely assaulted on all fronts with nothing but news of the United States. Sick of nothing but the frumpy clown in the White House, we thought shining a light on our own country, warts and all, would offer brief respite if nothing else.
Alistair Klinkenberg: The Australia Issue, an Introduction
Notes · · Decatur
Serena Joy, what a stupid name. It’s like something you’d put on your hair, in the other time, the time before, to straighten it. Serena Joy, it would say on the bottle, with a woman’s head in cut-paper silhouette on a pink oval background with scalloped gold edges. With everything to choose from in the way of names, why did she pick that one? Serena Joy was never her real name, not even then. Her real name was Pam. I read that in a profile on her, in a news magazine, long after I’d first watched her singing while my mother slept in on Sunday mornings. By that time she was worthy of a profile: Time or Newsweek it was, it must have been. She wasn’t singing any more by then, she was making speeches. She was good at it. Her speeches were about the sanctity of the home, about how women should stay home. Serena Joy didn’t do this herself, she made speeches instead, but she presented this failure of hers as a sacrifice she was making for the good of all.
Around that time, someone tried to shoot her and missed; her secretary, who was standing right behind her, was killed instead. Someone else planted a bomb in her car but it went off too early. Though some people said she’d put the bomb in her own car, for sympathy. That’s how hot things were getting.
Luke and I would watch her sometimes on the late-night news. Bathrobes, nightcaps. We’d watch her sprayed hair and her hysteria, and the tears she could still produce at will, and the mascara blackening her cheeks. By that time she was wearing more makeup. We thought she was funny. Or Luke thought she was funny. I only pretended to think so. Really she was a little frightening. She was in earnest.
She doesn’t make speeches any more. She has become speechless. She stays in her home, but it doesn’t seem to agree with her. How furious she must be, now that she’s been taken at her word.
Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale
Cineclub · · Tucson
Mister Lonely. Dir. Harmony Korine. 2007
You are not alone. Actually though, you are. If you believe you can fly, you can. Actually though, you can't.
Links · · The New Yorker
The thing you’ve got to understand is that I grew up being marketed to, so there aren’t many advertising tricks that work on me. Seriously. Ever since I was a child, companies have been telling me to buy, buy, buy—making me think, on some subconscious level, that my needs are the only ones that matter. And I believed it all. It wasn’t until years later that I realized how lonely this had made me, and that mere accumulation doesn’t lead to happiness. I finally understood that no company or product or advertising slogan could provide the companionship I needed. But it was too late. Decades of being told what to buy—and what to feel, and how to think—had left me numb. I carry that numbness everywhere now; I fear that it will never leave me. So, anyway. Maybe write a funny jingle about that?
River Clegg: How to Market to Me
Notes · · Tucson
How effortlessly we forget the Spanish word for sprouts.
Cineclub · · Tucson
First of all, I want to say something about a pair of Parisian twenty-somethings I met at a street vendor’s crepe cart in 2010.
I was trying to remember French prepositions I didn’t learn in high school so I could ask for Nutella and coconut on my crepe when two sleek young black men who looked like dancers from Madonna's “Truth or Dare” introduced themselves like this:
“Hello. Please, please say aus coco, again.”
So I did and when they stopped laughing they lamented their lives in Paris with the same hopeless tone of street people begging for money for food. “Paris is so boring. Please, there is nothing to do here. We are dying of the boredom.”
They said they wanted to live in the United States, where life is like in the movies.
“You are from Arizona? Cow-boy!”
I thought about how when I was a teenager, all of my pals would have lived in Paris given the chance. Then I thought about how young people are bored no matter where they are.
Swagger. Dir. Olivier Babinet. 2016
“Swagger” is a beautiful environmental portrait of a group of African and Middle Eastern youth at a school in a rough neighborhood on the outskirts of Paris. The things they talk about are the same things young people everywhere talk about: Dreams, love, the future, and what it feels like to be an outsider.
But when they speak of being outsiders, it's with a bittersweet degree of understanding of the World that most of us don’t have the credentials for. They dream of being French and living in Paris; and even though they are, they aren’t.
So close and yet so far away.
If you like honesty, light, hope and laughter or even if you don’t like any of those things and the only thing in life you like is drone photography, see this movie.
Music · · Tucson
If you've been alive anytime in the last 46 years, you've heard the song Popcorn in one form or another.
Notes · · Tucson
The owner of the market was cashiering and couldn't remember how to ring things up. He said, “This is my store, but every time I have to work the register it's like groundhog day.”
People have really warmed up to this analogy. I hear it a lot anymore.
Links · · Provinciano
A falta de dinero, las canciones de Juan Gabriel me inspiraban a grabar casetes con canciones de la Hora de los Novios de Radio 14 que luego regalaba. Mi primer crush lo tuve en la secundaria y grabé un mix que empezaba con Me Gustas Mucho. Preparé todo para el momento de entregárselo, la grabadora, las 6 pilas de 9 volts, una tarjeta hecha a mano en forma de corazón, el segundo receso antes de la clase de Ciencias Sociales, pero no lo hice. Me quedé con este y con muchos casetes que nunca entregué.