Ganas de vivir

"No se podía estar quieto. Había hecho el intento de dormir un rato para apaciguarse, pero el sueño se le había ido. También se le había ido el hambre. No tenía ganas de nada. Sólo de vivir".

Juan Rulfo, ¡Diles que no me maten!

 Fotos: Elliot Erwitt, St. Tropez (1959)

Pushcarts: Francis Alÿs, Alain Delorme

Francis Alÿs is a Belgian artist who has been working in Mexico City for the last twenty years or so. I first bumped into him when I discovered his series of pushcarts. The pics are cruelly urban.

 

Now, French photographer Alain Delorme is doing something similar in China, but with more poetic, harmonic colors.

"Nuit blanche"

Two years ago, I was daydreaming about being with my girl at the Café de Flore. Today, it's about the Café de Fiore.

Alexa Meade

Alexa Meade is an artist exploring new perspectives using body-painting made of acrylic. She paints people and things who stop looking like people and things, in order to reveal themselves as (im/expressionist) paintings. In doing so, she reduces three-dimensional objects to two-dimensional objects.

For my birthday I want a portrait by Alexa!

Three postcards from Hamburg

The Sartorialist recently said in a short, stimulating documentary film:

"I feel very lucky to get part of my day leading a visual life. (...) to go on just be in the world you are in, see it, keep your eyes open, and really relate to what you're seeing, react to what you're seeing".

I feel touched by his words, since I have became more and more conscious about the importance of visual life the last three or four years.

Obviously he refers to real world, but since I just wake up minutes ago and have seen just this flat where I am staying these days in Hamburg and, of course, the internet, I want to post three powerful images, two of the XIX century, one of yesterday.

When I saw this, I first thought it was a photograph. And I thought it was perfect in its composition. It is known that Maximilian brought the first photographers to Mexico, he was object of the first photographs in that country, and it is also known that the first photographers had a strong artistic education, mostly based on painting. So, it could be possible, that this dramatic composition had been captured by a master photographer. The black/white image did the trick.

But looking carefully it is just impossible to have such a drama in a picture, I thought. Indeed, it is rather a painting by French artist Jean-Paul Laurens called Les derniers moments de Maximilian (1882), which hangs in the Hermitage. It rather looks like this:

 

Then, while checking out the website of Hamburg's Kunsthalle to prepare my visit, I found this beautiful, minimal, super modern painting by Philipp Otto Runge (1777-1810) called Hund, den Mond anbellend. In fact, you can barely see the moon, which is being mostly covered by a bank of clouds (cirrus and nimbus "wrongly" sorted).

Runge, Hund, den Mond anbellend (undated)

Later, in 1926, Miró painted the same motive in a very different way, also modern, but without that breaking spirit of Runge. Rufino Tamayo did the same in different occasions, but Runge's is still my favorite.

 Joan Miró, Perro ladrando a la luna (1926)

 Rufino Tamayo, Perro ladrando a la luna (?)

And finally, an image by The Sartorialist, a fashion-blogger, who took last week this picture of a boyish girl in Florence. Red shoes are definitely my favorite, and in this case the match with her lips, hair lace and wrist band is just perfect. Her most feminine and shy attitude contrasts completely with her masculine outfit and selbstbewusst elegance. A great shot!

The Sartorialist, Black, White, Red, Florence -- Cristina  (2011)

Waiting in Houston

I am waiting in Houston for my flight. I observe the people running with their shoes on their hands to catch their flight, security personal attending an alarm ("17, are we clear?"), a 35-year old silicon Barbie in pink, not a single book besides my "On Chesil Beach", but tons of huge foam cups with soft drinks, a Serbian woman speaking on her cell phone holding a DHL package under her arm (now I understand less and less).

I was checking the beauty of the outside world thanks to the services of Google Street View and 9-eyes, while listening to my fav new band, The National. I am a big fan of flying birds on first plane (sometimes it's about butterflies), and creepy horses in the cities, or running children...

 

On books

The new purse trend

Paris on the footsteps of Madonna

Marilyn reading her husband's work

Life: A bubble on the road

Jennifer Khoshbin, Life Bubble 

Photo Credit: Peter Stackpole

I felt Stefan Zweig was describing me and my life when I read this:

"Vielleicht ist unser wahrer Weg dies, dass wir immer am Wege sind, wehmütig zurückblickend und sehnsüchtig voraus immer nach Ruhe begehrend und immer noch ruhelos; denn immer ist nur dies ein heiliger Weg, dessen Ziel man nicht kennt und den man beharrlich doch schreitet, so wie wir hier ins Dunkle und Gefährliche schreiten diese Nacht und nicht kennen ihren Ausgang".

Der begrabene Leuchter. Eine Legende (1937)

Life: plans and dreams

"And they had so many plans, giddy plans, heaped up before them in the misty future, as richly tangled as the summer flora of the Dorset coast, and as beautiful. Where and how they would live, who their close friends would be, his job with their father's firm, her musical career and what to do with the money her father had given her, and how they would not be like other people, at least, not inwardly" (Ian McEwan, On Chesil Beach).

Life is made of plans and dreams. A misunderstanding, a crime, a mistake, an accident, a disease, and they are gone or your life changes for ever.

I think of A, who always had "fiebre de horizontes". I think of M, who knew how to clear out the dust of such fevers. And of S, who fulfilled his own in a two-year-enterprise: he traveled by bike from Ushuaia to Bering Sea, and knows how to teach and defend the value of dreams.

Life is also made of phases. And transition is hard. C'est la vie.

Photo: Richard Avedon, "Suzy Parker and Robin Tattersall, robe de Dior", Place de la Concorde, Paris (1956).

Hermann Rorschach, Brad Pitt

 1910

2008

Any similarities with reality is a mere coincidence!

Talent is just around the corner. Who will discover it and pay for it?

Schopenhauer: "Talent hits a target no one else can hit. Genius hits a target no one else can see".

Biografiarse es traicionarse

Publico en el actual número de Letras Libres una notita sobre la "nueva" Autobiografía de Mark Twain.

Aquí.

Violence: Mario Broekmans, Mussolini Headkick

Mario Broekmans: The Wheel or The Female Christ (1983)

Mussolini Headkick: Themes for Violent Retribution (1989)

2010 is finally over, a loooong and unsexy year, despite all the kindness of friends and amazing new people I met.

I am fed up with ignorance and violence, particularly in Mexico, and I cannot understand Canadian people like these, which I found some months ago while doing some research, as well as these pics I am posting now, as symbolic sign of a unlucky year which is over. Governments should be putting some order there.

In 2011, Greece is starting a Wall on the border to Turkey to stop illegal immigration. Europe is copying the Wall on the American-Mexican border. What did they learn from the Berlin Wall?! What the heck!? Europeans should had thought about it when they were colonizing the rest of the world...

Good is that America will end the invasion of Iraq. Finally! Next challenge is to stop the weapon business, which is destroying the peace of some many countries and families.

Personally, I will get more interested into rugby, a sport for real men, since I cannot stand anymore the FIFA-mafia and the always-crying football-players. To compensate, I will get more into fashion models, since I prefer to see their legs than those of the rugby players...

Clouds and worries

I was driving pretty worried and thinking about an email I got recently. I dropped my brother at the airport, who is flying this very moment to Cancún, tuned a violin concert, but I couldn't get rid of my thoughts... When I saw for the very first time in my life a lenticular cloud. Not only one, but three at a time!

They were behind our Cerro de la Silla. And although they didn't wipe my worries, it was a magical moment, since I had been "chasing" these clouds for a long time. Unfortunately I had no camera with me. So I sped up, came back home, took my camera and drove to a nice spot.

After a minute, a Jeep came towards me, three ugly bodyguards with suits and sunglasses came to me and asked me to leave, since allegedly that was private property. "No, it is not, I am on the street, and this is public". We had an argument, and I just cannot understand this people, either extremely rich and stupid guys or drug dealers (who are also as stupid as rich). So I moved my car two meters back, changed the lens, and my clouds were gone...

There is this instinct of taking pictures to hold a moment. But sometimes is better not to take that picture with the camera, but with your mind. Today's clouds and violin concert were a nice gift.

Foto: Big lenticular cloud close to Mount Rainier, Washington, by Kevin Ebi

Un homme et une femme

These are two clips from Claude Lelouch's "Un homme et un femme" (1966). The first one is a monologue of a man driving his car, the second one is a dialogue between this man and a woman plus a selection of her memories (also, a hommage to samba). The first one represents a man with his plans to surprise a woman he is in love with; the second one is the dream of such a man: a woman who is absolutely in love with his guy.

Monologue

Dialogue

Via JMP

Gone with the wind

Armando Salas Portugal is the best photographer of Monterrey. Like Juan Rulfo, he succeed in capturing the most melancholic stamps of the Mexico which doesn't exist anymore. Today's Mexico is wild, urban, violent, the old one belonged to the campesinos, the honor and the "ahí se va"...

I have the ability of looking for what is gone with the wind. I cannot find that Mexico, which I love, but I still hold on to it. That is the state of melancholy. Like Armando Salas Portugal's pictures: that forest was chopped down, that field is now producing tequila for export, the beach sports now hotels for gringos, the next field is a marihuana plantation, the last tree fall down to make room for a new road. Like Atget's Paris!

The same seems to happen with Love. You grasp it, and it's gone again. You touch it, and you contaminate it. You want to understand it, and you rationalize what is not to be understood but received. You receive it as a gift, buy you get afraid of it. You have it in front of you, but you are busy with your past. When you realize, it is gone with the wind.

German Christmas

The last years I have been observing myself getting less and less involved in the Christmas spirit. I feel increasingly distant and skeptical. All those masses buying frenetically go on my nerves, and the absurd of so many "traditions" seems odd to me. The better I understand Germany, the more I feel that Christmas is a German export, where "Gemütlichkeit" the keystone is. Besides "posadas", which are truly Mexican by origin, the rest is a hotchpotch of Italian (the Nativity Scene) and German (Tannenbaum, Adventskranz, carols, etc) delicacies with a lot of American consumerism.

Good for the Germans, who developed their own festivity. And the rest of the world? Shopping, Kitsch, pre-ordered feelings of peaceful joy and happiness... A new book tells the cultural history of German Christmas, read a review on The Times.

Foot, feet

Adolph Menzel, Fuss des Künstlers (1876)

Ricard Avedon, Rudolf Nureyev, dance, "en pointe" (1967)

Fussverrenkungen (2010)

Eberle & Eisfeld, Füsse des Künstlers Unthan (?)