Mexican Submarine: March 2007

They're Coming To America

The Arizona Highway

Mexico: Colors and Textures

Photos of some of the things we saw in Mexico are now up on Flickr.

Find Myself a City to Live In

I'm tired of reading reports that value cities based on access to jobs and prices of homes. Here's a guide to why you should really choose one city versus another:

Quality of Oxygen
I believe that higher altitude cities as well as coastal cities have a different density of fresh oxygen that creates a more spacious feeling in the head that allow different kinds of thoughts and dreams.

Circle of Friends
A city embodies the aggregate personality of its citizens, yourself at the center. In a broad sense, the peope in your city are a circle of potential friends. By virtue of its origins and people, a city holds more or less inclination and skill to have fun, family, art, danger, money, religion, music, health etc.

Use of Free Time
Culture can be thought of as all the discretionary activities and modifications of a city. Beyond its functions, what does a city do with its free time? How late does it stay up at night? How much energy is put into opera vs sports? Choice of cultural activities reflect the interests of its people and the energy which they create. Especially important are non-commercial activities, because these represent gifts given freely and therefore with greater feeling.

Night Life
The point about nightlife is not to measure how much clubbing a city provides. The point is how much energy does the city have to stay up at night? Are there only bars open or can you also shop for electronics and take a horse ride in the middle of the night? Because people work during the day, nightlife is a measure of how much extra energy people have. Just enough to get through the day then go home and rest, or enough energy to work through the day and then create yourself at night? Often it is only the young (at heart) who want to spend their evening hours this way, so the amount of nightlife is really a measurement of how young (at heart) and social the city is. In Mexico, there are a lot of retired people, but these people are quite young at heart.

Live Music
Live music is an easy barometer to use, because music is the immediate accompanient to life, even say the background music in movies. This scale goes from no music > recorded predictable music > thoughtfully selected music > live but familiary music > and finally live original music. The importance of this is not just that I have a particular interest in music vs. say photography or philosophy. Live music is a shared experience and it shows that the people want to be together in public and enjoy the boogie of life.

Little Bricks vs. Large Bricks

In Mexico, there are some very tiny businesses. There may be a small papeleria that only sells stationary supplies and a carniceria for picking up meat for dinner. One woman and her daughter just sell a stack of jello to school children. It definitely takes more trips to get what you need, compared with conglomorized stores of America.

However, these little shops are evenly distributed everywhere, so there seems to always be one on your block or on the way to where you're going. I like the rhythm of traverssing this pedestrian fabric. Everywhere in the world, it is more pleasurable to have more entities that do less, rather than less entities that do more. Conglomerization creates efficiencies. Specializataion creates diversity and possibility.

Our friend Chris today pointed the difference out as: It's not that there isn't culture in America but it is getting harder to find. When there is culture it is on the fringes. Space is more filled and there is less freedom. A lot of things have been figured out and what's left to do has become so complex, it's harder to see the rewards.

Time versus Money

Akire was reading from a book last night that in Mexico, time is not money. I found the concept shocking because I had thought time and effort, effort and value, value and money were equated in all cultures.

But if you are paid a low enough wage, then it becomes more valuable to use your times in ways other than converting it to money. For instance, if working another hour only paid enough to buy a few more beers, it wouldn't be worth it; you'd prefer to spend that time instead with family and friends and forego the beers.

We all need to convert time into money, since money is more fungible than time. But there is a problem with being too well compensated--as a society, we get tempted to overdo it.

It is possible to convert money back into time, say by buying yourself a few months of rent and food--but this only works if people will let you out of your obligations. As a society, we need more options for conversion in this direction and more options for not converting in the first place.

The Ring of Compromise

Our friend Bill proposed to our friend Beth while we were away.
In Mexican Spanish, Engagement Ring is translated as "Anillo de Compromiso".

You heard that right, Engagement = Compromise.

Language: the Gate and the Bridge

When you travel in a foreign county, the foreigness--especially the language--lends a giddy color to the entire environment.

Foreign language has a very valuable masking value. Billboards and advertisements become rendered as pure visual design. Abstracted from their crass messages, they become more like graffitti. The murmur of conversation becomes like pure music, devoid of complaints, banalities, and pointless speech. A meditative air exists punctuated only by extremely deliberate attempts to communicate. A retreat from language and its pressures. Returning to an English environment one immediately hears the imposition of thoughts from every direction.

The fun of learning a language is remembering the challenge of speaking in the first place. It's actually fun to understand and be understood. You revisit the subtle distinctions say between too and very, tall and high, wet and moist. It reminds you question distinctions in your own language, like under and beneath. The doors of perception and open and close.

And who hasn't felt attracted to someone due to their accent and charming malapropisms? Foreign accents are like women. There is a hint of strange other parts that don't fit in a normal way.

A Short Era

Performances excerpts of the legendary open mic at Gypsy Cafe in San Miguel. Followed by scenes from our climactic final party complete with hobos, banjos and fire dancing.