Back in 2006 a famous and talented photographer from London UK dusted off his DV tape video camera and persuaded the famous and talented surfer David 'King Tuberattor' Urso to allow him to accompany him by bus to Playa Bruja and document his day. A warning by the touchy 'King Tube' - "Stay outta my fuckin' way man" urged the photographer not to stay in his way and film him from the safety of the beach. Accompanied by backing music from the excellent British trance group Groove Armada.The video was syndicatedaround the backyard. This was our first foray into video from a founding father of MazReal (he has since joined a Mexican circus troupe and is learning the art of sword swallowing. Go easy on that iron diet Mateo!!! Hahaha. He consequently got married to Araña woman and has a nest of 8 legged midgets) but since then the equipment is lighter and better and the learning curve has shot up but the results are 'movie quality', 'big screen' quality. The last season of House was shot on this equipment we have now invested in and we hope to proceed into the future with some hard hitting and beautifully shot video of stories and happenings in an around this steamy little tropical city.
Our next blog will be our 2010 introductory blog to our new ideas within the medium of video and the High Definition new Canon 5d2 equipment.
Excitement has again got the better of us and we are going to crack the seal on another freezer chilled bottle of Stolichnaya Russian vodka. So Nazdarovje Zalyoobov , Spokojnoj Noch.
To be a successful publisher you need to a ruthless, conniving, cunning, underhand, backstabbing bastard. Just take a look at some of the unsavoury champions of this industry –Conrad Black (Canadian) charged with racketeering, Rupert Murdock (OzStrayn), just a plain nasty James Bond villain bent on taking over the world and that other power hungry schemerRobert Maxwell from the UK and the Ukraine before that whose 'fraudulent activities were carried out intelligently, tenaciously and ruthlessly'. This fat, greedy tycoon was either pushed or jumped off his yacht after going into massive debt and defrauding the pension funds of his failing media empire. His body was found floating somewhere in the Atlantic causing a big stink no doubt.
To venture into the publishing business you need either to be already immensely rich or have to start from the bottom and work up, be nice and get backing from advertisers. In the small expat community of this tropical city, to be a publisher you have to be nice to everyone, do the rounds of openings and parties and look well groomed with a good set of smiling pearly teeth and more importantly write articles that keep your advertisers on board. That means write positive articles especially about food and drink because if you look at the monthlies published for the benefit of expats, they are generally kept solvent by the advertising revenues of restaurants and real estate agencies. Write negative articles and you will go down. Magazine design is also essential. Compare the designs of Mazatlán's two monthly information magazines - one is getting there and the other is positively awful.
To be a food and drink critic it is essential you keep in with the restaurants and bars and choose good establishments before you go so you can write a positive review. This also ensures the waiters won't spit in you dish before they bring it from the kitchen. I have worked in many of the top kitchens around Europe and I know that happens. (My rice pudding was voted best in London by a famous criticFay Maschler, but my spit roast suckling pig was given an indifferent review but that didn't warrant putting glass in the critics dish.) So if you fear having spit in your food, anonymity is the best approach and come with a guest as single diners can sometimes be picked out as a critic especially if they spend a lot of time perusing the menu, ordering many dishes and not eating them all and generally looking shifty writing on a pad.
Here at MazReal we don't have to be sycophantic and can be as disparaging as we need to be so we will be discussing two establishments - one an eatery that needs to be banned or even destroyed and the other is a bar in a very strange location.
THORNEYS SURF BURGER
Thorney pretending to share a joke with an imaginary long line of people waiting for service outside his dark hole-in-the-wall eatery 'Thorney's Surf Burger Bar'.
Thorney is the proprietor of a dirty hole in the wall that sells "The Surf Burger". It has a greasy grill, a grubby refrigerator and concrete tiled bar and metal stools to sit on. There are a set of white hand prints on the wall that seem to me to have come from a person frothing at the mouth dying of food poisoning trying desperately to find a way out. They go inwards in a disorientated way and I fear for that person's life. Thorney sleeps in the dark recesses of his hole on a brown stained mattress behind an unwashed curtain strung over a piece of string attached to the walls. Thorney hovers inside waiting for custom. Sometimes he leans on the 'Take Away' bar smoking a cigarette and swatting flies with a red fly swat that never leaves his hand. He told me he makes the best Surf Burgers in town and in fact makes "The Surf Burger." According to my research a surf burger is meat patty burger with fresh ingredients and sometimes a 'special' sauce that is served from a reputable bar or restaurant that is close to the sea.
On enquiry Thorney said after smashing a fly on the counter with his swat:
"I make my speciality surf burgers with mashed up shrimp and a special sauce."
He picked up the fly with his finger, looked closely at it and flicked it into his kitchen.
"You don't seem to be busy." I said looking at the dead coals under his grill.
Not one for conversation, "It gets busier." he said grinning a huge grin and taking a deep drag on his cigarette.
I have never seen anyone sitting at his bar enjoying The Surf Burger and I presume the only people he may persuade to enter his premises are those unfortunate people who carry a white cane and wear dark glasses. If they are even more unfortunate to have lost their sense of smell and taste he may watch them get stuck into one of his legendary surf burgers but I don't think they have ever left the premises. I now know that 'special' ingredient he keeps banging on about is 'blind person'.
Thorney and his fly swat sharing a joke with no one in particular.
Hang on a minute maybe we should have second thoughts about blowing up Thorney. You've all seen that interminably long cartoon about Parisian rats cooking 5 star cuisine called Ratatouille, well we think Thorney keeps a rat in his hat that dictates in squeaky rat language what goes into THE Surf Burger and in fact it is absolutely brilliant. I did however notice his hat moving around his head during the short interview but that could be roaches. So in conclusion it is probably a wise move to allow Thorney's Surf Burger Emporium to stand as it is as a classic example of how not to get into the business of hygienic public catering.
We have a new art critic - Drake Lovelace - who will make the rounds and comment back here on MazReal and decide once and for all who we think deserves to be labelled creative artists in old Mazatlán. The reason so much average or absolutely awful art gets promoted is that no one seems to understand what criticisms are; if nothing is properly criticised, mediocrity triumphs. A critic is basically an arrogant bastard who says, "this is good, this is bad" without necessarily being able to explain why. The truth is, we feel this stuff in our bones and therefore feel we are right. Of course, by being so blunt, we run the risk of vilification. But we are just trying to be honest.
Art is an adventure into an unknown world, which can only be explored by those willing to take risks." said Mark Rothko the great American Abstract Expressionist and an art walk itself should also be an adventure. I am that new critic who has been paid vast sums to spend time in this fine city of Mazatlán to walk the art walk incognito and drink beer in the local bars. On the art walk I have come across one or two local artists who can be labelled creative and adventurous and mysterious and in the words of that great essayist, critic and poet Paul Valéry, “To find is nothing. The trick is to add to what you find” and the Mazatlán artist Lucila Santiago is a great finder. She also knows how to keep a sense of mystery to keep the viewer fascinated.
Her latest on-going project is called ASTILLEROS– Shipyards. This particular shipyard owned by Strategic Marine Australia is off the road that leads out to the airport and here they built 50 metre aluminium boats for PEMEX used for oilrig to shore personnel transport and next to it a smaller yard with two bright red tugboats sitting onshore undergoing repairs.
Picasso said “A green parrot is also a green salad” With it he meant that an artist who copies the scene in front of him diminishes its reality and blinds himself to the real scene.
Lucila Santiago sees things otherwise and these wonderful paintings from her recent exhibition Astilleros reinforce that idea.
Unfortunately I have come across many artists on the art walk who are more than mediocre and are in fact downright awful. More about them in further blogs. In the meantime I, Drake Lovelace, will be touring the studios and establishments of fine art in Europe brushing up on the knew talent and casting an eye over the old masters while the Mazatlán art scene closes its' doors for the Mexican summer. Let us hope there is some intense creative activity going on behind those doors and under those brain chilling air conditioning systems.
As the dying echoes of thundering motorcycles fall silent we can all count ourselves lucky that another spectacular show that the Mexicans are so good at organising in that characteristic haphazard way has livened up our expat lives once more.
We can put away our spectator folding chairs, our portable beer insulators, our leather waistcoats, skull and cross bone do-rags and chaps and go back to our lives of folding chairs on the beach and beer insulators and our uniform of baggy vests and shorts to the knees and flip flop shoes and grey ponytails daydreaming that we were the guy riding the Victory bike whilst a glamorous Latina in tight leather was perched on back with her arms wrapped around our jiggling beer belly.
Moto Week and the sound of heavy rock and rumbling exhaust pipes has swept through and out of town for another year along with its cast of characters and clowns and village idiots and female accessory pillion passengers.
We generally think of motorcycle gangs as being like something out of the movie Mad Max 2; roving leather clad unwashed evil sons of bitches terrorising small towns, gang raping women, chain whipping grannies whilst their equally greasy abused female pillion poseurs look on smiling through rotten teeth. However this gang of thousands that tore up the malecón were pussycats by comparison and would rather crash and burn than knock an old lady or even a diminutive Chihuahua over on a pedestrian crossing.
These participants, equally leather clad and in gangs – Los Halcones, Los Dragones, Los Butres del Desierto, MC Vikings, Murcielagos, Moto Brothers all get together on this day and drink cheerfully together, slapping backs, ruffling kiddies hair all conducted in a spirit of jolly bonhomie.
However who knows what happens after they hit the open roads of Sinaloa? Maybe a truce is established for this one-day of the year and the rest of the time they get back to dealing in drugs and weapons and slaughtering one another? But to our worldly trained eyes we feel that most of these guys are dentists, doctors, mechanics and even maybe Seventh Day Adventists who like posing in leather and pretending to treat their women as goods and chattels sitting uncomfortably with their ass in the air on the seat of a large dangerous rumbling hunk of steel and chrome.
We sent our world famous documentary photographer out to mingle and risk his life lying in the path of Harley Davidsons and Victorys to get that icon shot and capture the feel of the day.
Hang on, where the hell is NoMa? It is a land of lost souls north of WeMa, EaMa and SoMa.
NoMa is the snappy txtmsgN nomenclature chosen by magazine editors and marketing people in Mazatlán to describe an area of Mazatlán roughly situated around La Marina and Sabalo Cerritos that is rapidly being turned into a microcosm of modern North America – restaurants, pizzerias, coffee shops, high rise apartments and artificial lakes that used to be home to nature.
After the shenanigans of April Fool's Day we took a Toreos bus and hopped out on top of a hump back bridge on Avenida Sabalo Cerritos. Overlooking the Marina we could see across the razor wire and high brick walls that surround the NoMa residences of modern houses uniform in design with a patch of grass out front and a patch out back. Interspersed amongst the finished buildings were half built skeletons of brick and wire and piles of dirt and overturned wheel barrows and empty bags of cement. A guard sat asleep in a guardhouse next to a big gate.
Further on we can see high-rise condos with large banners draped across the entire frontage – For Sale and one pronounced it was SOLD! Almost like winning a gold medal at the Olympics. I was expecting to hear The Star Spangled Banner and see a Star and Stripes being hoisted up one of the numerous flagpoles.
Outwards in all directions across scrubby and thorny tracts of land were interspersed gated high-walled concentration camps of uniform modern houses with For Sale signs everywhere.
A golf course cut out the scrub to the left and just down the road a blue stylised sculpture of a dramatically leaping marlin proudly proclaimed PACIFICA! Yet more tall apartments overlooking a circle of water. The apartments draped with colourful banners shouting at everyone to INVEST, INVEST! VIVÉLO! Live what? A marketing person's vision of your future. Living behind high walls and razor wire.
And on street level behind more brightly coloured banners sat construction machinery idly waiting. I pressed my nose against the window of the flashy marketing suite with its nautical motifs but it was locked and empty.
Dodging traffic we crossed Av. Sabalo Cerritos we came upon a lonely mall of three high walls hiding the surrounding thorny scrub splattered with rubbish, the ubiquitous cement bags and paper caught in the thorns of trees. Inside a restaurant called Bengali and a coffee shop called SoleMare, both empty with waiters in aprons lounging outside waiting for custom and a small supermarket Scorpio 2 and Scorpio 3 and the other shops empty.
Already feeling depressed by the emptiness and lack of soul this place called NoMa exuded we chased down a Cerritos bus heading for SoMa or is it WeMa or EaMa.
NoMa is American living. Take Phoenix Az. for example, it is a rapidly expanding city outwards into the desert like a Big Bang. People want to live there to get away from the crime of LA or the weather and the crowds of the Big City East and play golf so the city expands to accommodate them. First streets are built then houses next to them and a mall is placed conveniently close by and filled with coffee shops and branches of businesses that are in every other mall dotted around Phoenix and desert sucking golf courses. It is clean and easy to park and familiar. But that formula also spells soulless, boring, uninspiring and unstimulating. However as many new American towns have been built to that formula it is part of the way of life and it tends to be exported when we invest in developments in other countries. So here in NoMaz that is what you get. Many people will feel comfortable with it but for this writer it is an example of the slow creep of a monoculture based on an American way of life, a community of people hiding behind walls. Only going out to drink coffee or take a meal. The reality is that they are making themselves prisoners in their own lives.
NoMa.......?
In the future that thorny land between high walled developments may be built upon and the gated communities may fill up but I know for certain that most of those new restaurants and coffee shops we see today will have packed up and long gone and new ones may have taken their place or there may be For Sale signs on the front windows. But NoMa will still lack soul and be uninspiring. But if that suits you why not come here and VIVÉLO!!!!
Or Mazatlán?
We here at MazReal would like it if they gave the Mexican names back – La Marina and Sabalo Cerritos. We may even start a campaign - NoMore NoMa!! However the staff at MazReal are a lazy good-for-nothing bunch so they will probably not get around to it.
Postscript:
To give a balanced picture we ought to mention that the English exported their lifestyle to half the globe for over 400 years as did the French and the Spanish. The English, their global vision somewhat reduced these days, are doing it now in southern Spain (they even had the clout to elect an Englishman as mayor in one big expat community), the Germans on the Spanish Canary Islands, 380 cultures are exporting their lifestyles to London as are the white South Africans and to anywhere else that will have them, the North Africans in Paris and the Turkish people to Germany, Koreans to Seattle and the Chinese in Las Vegas, Indonesia and Africa. The list goes on. So as not to make the Canadians feel left out, they are doing it in a small bar on the Malecón. The one with a maple leaf on the outside.
