Monday, March 25, 2013
Artspeak # 2
"The artist brings the viewer face to face with their own preconceived hierarchy of cultural values and assumptions of artistic worth. Each mirror imaginatively propels its viewer forward into the seemingly infinite progression of possible reproductions that the artist's practice engenders, whilst simultaneously pulling them backwards in a quest for the 'original' source or referent that underlines Levine's oeuvre."
quote from Simon Lee gallery on an exhibition by Sherrie Levine.
I would like to read what this artist has to say about his exhibition of our kind of art.
Any clues?
Maybe this:
A painting is nearly nothing, but like a reflection in a mirror it exerts an enormous fascination. The mirror isn’t broken: instead of shards we simply have more mirrors.
Sunday, March 17, 2013
Mazatlán Monthly News Roundup
In between making movies we still have the time to draw your attention to what's happenin' in and around Mazatlán. It is March and soon the clocks will change to allow us more sunlight at some part of the day and more night at others. It's all very confusing really.
Guns and drugs are the scourge of our society and this month we uncover the extent of gun ownership amongst us.
Just to show MazReal is an unbiased news site we have invited far-right wing conservative investigative journalist, part-time fascist, Ayn Rand nut and woman about town, Justine "Bill" Farnsworth. "Bill" who can only be seen at the best get-togethers, restaurants and art happenings, has unearthed and brings to you an alarming truism. An alarming truism she claims she unearthed while nosing around the bathrooms and bedroom drawers at expatriate parties -
North Americans and many other nations love guns.
She takes up the story.
"Pemsi, my beautiful youthful Nepalese boy-servant and I spent the next weeks in a state of complete excitement, baking up a storm in the kitchen. I can only conclude that I overestimated the absorbency of Yak butter oatcakes, since I have no recollection of how we came to be found in Angel Peralta Cemetery the next morning, nor what we were doing naked on that mausoleum, with most of our clothes and rubber accoutrements scattered from the main gate gate like a trail of crumbs in a fairytale. The police seemed satisfied at my explanation that I was demonstrating to the fine-boned youth an early pagan ritual celebrating the rising sun by discarding our earthly clothes. 500 pesos sent the naughty men on their way.
Back to guns. My curiosity was piqued on seeing a picture of the stunningly beautiful hero of mine, Sarah 'Grizzly Mama' Palin smilingly caressing a high powered sniper rifle after ending the life of a rabid bear staked to the ground and a herd of vicious grazing domesticated Caribou while lying at a safe distance of a mile or two."We all got to eat." she said "And us Alaskonians have got good appetites." she added.
Women with guns? That's what I endeavoured to find out in this tranquil village of Centro Mazatlán. We all know that our nation north, south, east and west of the border love guns, we all know men love guns, ritually rubbing themselves all over in gun oil, caressing the barrels and getting off on the smell of cordite from discarded shells and I was determined to prove that us women are equally enamoured by guns but not necessarily the gun oil part of it. And we all agree that we need a closet stacked with guns to protect us from something or other. So I feverishly invited myself to all the parties in Centro to find out the truth.
Teenager Arngunnur Maliiinannguaggua originally from Yukon by way of Iceland demonstrates how to give the person on the other end of her 12 bore shot gun the steely eye to show that she really means business and will not hesitate to take a potential drunk's head off with a double barrel of buckshot if they so much as offer to buy her a tall latte down at the Looney Toons Beanpole on the Malecón.
"The animal from this coat I am wearing was at the receiving end of this very gun not so long ago." she added.
more gunz after the jump
Labels:
deaths,
expats,
guns,
irony,
john lennon,
mexico,
U.S expats,
violence,
women
Friday, March 15, 2013
Saturday, February 9, 2013
The Magic Lantern Carnival 2013 ................
The wheel has turned, Carnival is here again and Mazatlán is in a state of high excitement.
"The twinkling strings of coloured fairy lights promising us soup and warm hearth flies or is it fires, triggering in us a response that takes us back to our privileged childhoods and a Mediterranean red roof-tiled roof over our smiling upturned glowing faces. Walking down the pre-carnival malecón bathed in the warm light from those multi coloured shining hardbinge drinkers we break out in good-hearted gales of laughter and hand over all our pesos in a spontaneous burst of charity to that bare-arsed lady of the street we see everyday sleeping in the most unexpected place and the other wheelchair lady demanding money outside Santander Bank who has had a weeping leg for the last 12 years. Oh those finely built alpine wooded soon-to-be overflowing 'bathrooms' that bring a wonderous glow to our ruddy cheeks ...........(my God Mather! Enough of this crap. Tone it down for christ's sake - the editor.)
2013 MazReal entertainment correspondent Mather 'Dudley' Mathers is there to bring it alive without the rose tinted memories of his happy childhood being bathed by his Shona servants in colonial Zimbamboo Africa. Salud to you too Mather! Keep it simple.
"Mathers reporting. MazReal CEO - El Duke of Zenda - last year sacked the disgraced 2012 entertainment contributor - Zeke Fandango - for suggesting that to add some life to the carnival the prospective queens should each be given a machete, place them in the Bull Ring surrounded by baying males and let them get on with a Battle Royale where the last standing or even kneeling bloodied woman would be crowned the Queen of the Royal Machete and equally give the Laughing Kings a flamethrower and send them into the hills wherein they may toast each other to a crisp in a Fire Royale and not bother to come back.
These ideas caused a lot of offence as did the accompanying picture* (see it again below) of a hopeful smiling queen wielding a blood soaked weapon with the catchline - Muses With Machetes.
Culturas as we now know never did reply to Zeke's emails with the suggestions because as we all know this year we are back with the normal stuff.
more wonderful carnival happenings after the break
Wednesday, February 6, 2013
Even Quicker Restaurant Review - Molika
I swung by Molika thrice in the last two weeks and had an Angus beef burger on one day and duck on the other two.
The beefburger was so tasty I nearly went for seconds there and then and the duck with salad niçoise was so perfectly under cooked as it should be that I couldn't stop thinking about it so I returned and had another a few days later. It is so easy to fuck up duck and over-cook it and then it becomes tough and a waste of time but Hector's was perfect.
©2013 Jacques Tati
Quick Restaurant Review - El Presidio
If you want a fantastic meal of Mexican cuisine or just fine eating at a great price in Mazatlán this is the only place to go. El Presidio Restaurant and it's Chef Diego is on Niños Heroes in Centro. That street with Wing's Army and its deep fried frozen food and the expensive pizza joint La Mona also owned by Rodrigo who owns this place ( I was recently in New York and had a fantastic pizza there at half the price of La Mona's).
Now that El Presidio is up and running you can just walk straight passed all the other restaurants in town (maybe you will think twice when passing Molika where I would still choose if I wanted simply great tasting European food from its fantastic chef who took care of things at The Four Seasons in fancy London) without giving them a second glance and head up the road to this one.
There is no sign out the door except just inside a nice guy with a menu and a secret agent radio earpiece and if you haven't booked in advance he will probably speak into his microphone, nod his head and send you on your way with a polite "Sorry. We're full up."
more fine food after the break
Labels:
centro,
cuisine,
el presidio,
food,
mazatlan,
mexican food,
restaurant
Wednesday, January 16, 2013
Monthly Mazatlán Round-Up
MazReal's monthly round-up of local news comes at a time when this fine city is at it's fullest with our delightful friends the expats. Swooningly handsome Jim 'Knees' MacTavish and our stunningly beautiful Nigellisima talk food, cheeky Nate Slapper takes you to Cuba and adventurous explorer dangerman Dick 'Dangerman' van Dyck risks his neck riding our delighful public transport.
RESTAURANTS - The All-You-Can-Eat Craze
Sushi from The 貪欲な
There are a number of things that bother people who eat at restaurants. The main being that you can never get enough. But that problem has been eliminated by "All-You-Can-Eat Restaurants' popping up all over the place where everyone that encounters the problematic 'lack-of-food-on-your-plate problem' can swing by and eat until you throw up then eat some more.
Sushi generally comes in such tiny proportions that it can be very frustrating when the steep bill comes and you realize that that was it! So you take the fastest pulmonia over to MucDonalds in NoMa and fill the gaps in your stomach that the tiny portions of sushi failed to fill with the salty crap they serve there.
In Japanese society the making of sushi is generally considered to be an art form that combines visual presentation with flavour hence the high prices. But here in Mazatlán that problem of eating practical and functional art has also been eliminated in bypassing the visual delights of colour and form and filling your table with long thin pink and grey things chopped into bite size chunks.
The latest is a sushi restaurant called THE貪欲な豚 near the Plaza Dominguez. THE貪欲な豚 is a well kept secret because the members of the shadowy あなたがクラブを食べることができるすべてのhave kept it so secret and dark that only they know where it is. The door is black and the wall is black and at night it is invisible.
THE 貪欲な豚 is an intimate joint run by a good friend of mine Yohei Hanaya Jnr. great grandson of the famous sushi maker from the 18th century. Yohei or YoHey to his friends used to be big in the Tokyo branch of the Yakuzi (Jacuzzi bathing gangsters) where he was bath attendant. YoHey escaped Japan by the skin of his teeth after boiling alive five gangsters when he went outside for a cigarette after forgetting to switch on the heat thermostat for the jacuzzi. He found his way to the docks after befriending a gang of sailors he picked up at Vitrolas' Japanese branch in the Tokyo docks and worked his passage on a Mazatlán shrimp boat that had got lost and found its way to Japan. On the return crossing he learned the art of serving shrimp sushi to the Mexican shrimp sailors and also had a part time job as a rent boy serving the hunky seafarers. They befriended him and helped him set up THE 貪欲な豚 with shrimp cartel money, it is said. But don't mention it because the shadowy あなたがクラブを食べることができるすべての have ears everywhere.
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| This is not the actual restaurant. But it will serve food kind of similar to this in a different kind of restaurant that is not as clean as this one in Singapore. |
THE貪欲な豚 is small and has the gloomy mystique of an East Asian backstreet brothel and opium den with it's blood stained ceiling, floor and walls, bare-flamed Angor Wat wall candles, bare-arsed Malay waiters and a 52 inch flat screen TV and video pumping out ear-bleeding music and unintelligible classic Japanese 日本映画 movies. Heavy Mediaeval furniture and refectory tables are scattered haphazardly around and the atmosphere alludes to a private bawdy London East End Victorian slum pub except in one corner where a burbling tank filled with gurgling fish alludes to a Beijing street market for it is from this bubbling, ganurdeling tank that your meal will sometimes originate. (That is if you order the baby crocodile sushi)
But hey we are getting diverted with inane chit chat - we are forgetting the food. If, like me, you and me have a dose of cold turkey for want of food, any food, since visiting the all-you-can-eat breakfast at Hotel Freeman an hour back, then you, like me, like you, we and me are in luck. Because once you settle in, your table is soon groaning with stuff. Stuff that looks like sushi, and maybe is, or maybe not, but probably is because this is a sushi joint.
It's soooo much fun because it has now become a guessing game and you may be eating anything including delicate slices of glistening raw horse meat recently shipped in from France sitting on a bed of sea cucumbers and Galapagos puffer fish livers or rice wrapped in salivating Easter Island sea weed, Chilian sea urchin tongues and veal just shipped in from Tuscany. Or it may be big chunks of pink gleaming Firth-Of-Forth farmed SalmonTrout literally slathered in a mouth-watering fricassee of Thames River eel and Cod roe recently shipped in from the Great Barrier Reef in StraliaLand all served on a pristine mountain of heavenly steamed rice recently picked grain by grain by galley slaves from YokoOnoLand.
Who knows what the hell it is that is passing into your salivating, gaping jaws, but my God is it good. So good in fact that it has turned hardened atheists into God fearing, bible punching Moonies.
So if you are low in funds and feel a yen for a belly full of 'sushi' and are passing by a black door on Calle Capitan y Tennille, why not slip in and get involved in the ALL-YOU-CAN-EAT fashion at THE貪欲な豚*
Small Print
Receptacles are handily provided to throw up in.
There is no cast iron guarantee that this is actually a 'sushi' restaurant.
* see Google Translate
Smaller Print.
This restaurant does not exist except in the mind of our 'food writer' Jim 'Knees'' MacTavish. So no suing MazREal when you cannot find it in your craze to locate food to fill your stomach.
More articles after the jump
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