Ele Jou: seis, a sunday

bathroom view


cantilever disbeliever!


star gate


azure transom


cross-hatched hole


almost japanese


out of the blue, i developed a rather severe case of VERTIGO.
woke up several nights ago and the room was spinning wildly.
no alcohol imbibed in over nine years so i ruled out drunkenness.

i groped my way to the toilet by holding onto the walls and
nearly fell over just trying to pee. something like a gyroscope
going off course, PROFOUND DIZZINESS.
but a surprising lack of nausea, no headache, no earache.
a little like suddenly being on another PLANET where the
gravitational forces are unfamiliar and exerting themselves
from more than one direction at once.

when i am NOT able to operate habitually, as a result of some
physical challenge, my patterns become ACUTELY obvious.
needing to keep my head in a more-or-less fixed position, for instance,
suddenly i'm aware of how much, how constantly, i move my head -
all the damn time! and i must look like a dashboard doll.
listening to music is almost impossible without moving my head.
moving the rest of my body is almost impossible without moving my head.
and NOT moving my head makes me feel like a have a neck injury
or like i am a very contracted person or a person under heavy sedation.

sigh.

in fact, i am a person with Benign Positional Vertigo and i am about
to try a Modified Epley's Maneuver for Self-Treatment of BPV.
wish me luck...

meanwhile,
there are smells of sunday all over this town.
i took a VERY SLOW walk through and around my neighborhood
(Playa Sur) this afternoon and must have seen 15 extended families
in various stages of dinner: about to eat, eating or just having finished.
mainly, a lot of lovely wafts of home-cooking permeated the atmosphere
and made my nose happy.

i don't have to turn my head to smell at all..

Ele Jou: cinco, no mayo

(heriberto frias, street where we are living)


ladder without man

tiled surrounds with pigeon in window


tourist under glass


my Mazatlan dream fixer


SENSUAL ASSAULT is too strong and not exactly accurate.
sense parade? sense circus?
Round-the-Clock Sense-o-Rama!
Ola Mexico!

here is a game i like to play:
i ask myself this question when i travel anywhere
- how do i know I AM where i am?
using rational thinking is against the rules. it's all about sense cues -
roof lines, building materials, ambient sounds, smells, tastes.

being a person who is, by my own assessment, RIDICULOUSLY sensitive
(for instance, virtually disabled by the extreme receptivity of my hearing and smell), Mexico comes at me like gangbusters the minute i step out of the airport.
in addition to a LOT of people trying to suck us into timeshare promotions,
like jackals circling fresh roadkill, i'm SMACKED by new SMELLS and SOUNDS.
diesel fuel, ciarette smoke, cleaning products, cooking odors, personal hygiene items. radios at high volume, competing machine sounds, squeaking brakes, funny horns.
WOW - complete new olfactory and auditory palettes.
SENSE-o-RAMA-drama!

walking into our apartment: sense alarm!
WHAT IS THAT SMELL?
is it a propane gas leak? fresh paint? shellac from woodwork?
after a day of two, it all calms down and my schnoz acclimates.
the glorious and regular ocean breeze freshens the landscape
and restores my equilibrium.

the bicycles driving by with loudspeakers advertising Big Sales
at various stores, the power tools droning into the evening, the
children's high pitched laughter on the street all begins to fade
into the highly textured fabric which is Mazatlan.

ele jou: four, zut alors!

i studied primate behavior in chapel hill and though many consider anthropology a useless endeavor, it has served me well in many walks of life: restaurant work, the film business, and psychotherapy, to name a few.

i remember a kind of monkey that lived in an area where there were many poisonous plants. the newborn babies would cling to the front of the mother, riding on her chest for several months, and every time she ate something, the baby would smell the contents of her mouth. in this way, the young animals learned to distinguish nourishing foods from poison. a great system, really.

sadly, humans don't do that kind of training program. we are inundated with every kind of junk on earth offered up in brightly colored and aluring packages and we're weened on enough sugar and salt to kill a rhinoceros.

figuring out what to eat in english is a challenge for me. in spanish, shopping can really occupy a good chunk of the day.
i saw this attractive display at the Farmacia Guadalajara (this is a mini-supermarket that also has a pharmacy) and it looks, to the untrained eye, like bottles of soft drinks.
but NO: it's a mountain of dish detergent!

ele jou: tres

(how to keep a lightbulb)

(peli parade)


(shadow box)

(pattern cacaphony)

(stripes and balls)






i forget how, in truly foreign places, even simple things can be exhausting. this is especially true for a person like me who wrings the most out of every experience. for instance, i want to learn spanish. of course, i did not study spanish, i studied italian but CLOSE ENOUGH! it is a romance language and if i get a root concept, it can be amended with some shifting of emphasis and vowelage. i constantly ask: ¿cómo se dice que en español? (how do you say THAT in spanish?) and slowly, slowly, i am gathering a vocabulary. plus, i have some strong pantomime skills and am not afraid to look foolish. this helps a great deal.

i watch the way people use their lips, the shapes they make as sound comes out of their mouths, and this is my detective work (in places like denmark, it is useless because they do not make sounds with their lips - they make sounds from somewhere half-way down their throats. but here in mexico, words sound a lot like they look...). i am a papagayo (parrot) and, like a child, for better or for worse, i learn by repeating what other people say.

it was Sarah's birthday today and we brought her two flowers from the market, a book and a printed scarf. also we took her to a special coffee place where she had the best chai latte of her lifetime.

(long live queen Sarah)

we walked a very very long way today and now i must put my feet in bed.

ele jou: two

(cashew tree)

(tile explosion)

(aqua edge)

(frond on yellow)

(toilet view)



ele jou: two

last night we went to see/hear flamenco at the cultural center art gallery. it's a stunning building with a huge interior courtyard open to the sky. for the performance, they pulled a black cloth over the space to make a temporary kind of roof. therefore, in amongst the folding chairs were enormous trees which added to the drama considerably.

the flamenco was non-traditional which meant no narrative, per se, and some fancy, quasi-experimental choreography to boot. amazing costume changes, skintight on the women with red or white flounces for kicks and spins. lots of devastating attitude and vogueing. one woman sang fado, one classical guitar played and the master was a middle aged man who danced a solo that left many of us breathless. well, actually panting.
lots of body-slapping, finger-snapping, hand-clapping of the kind that makes a person like me just want to dance all night.

meanwhile, in the Plazuela Marchado (the little plaza nearest where we're staying in the centro historico), they were busy Crowning the Queen for the upcoming Carnaval, due to begin March 3rd. (and no, friends, Queen here means something VERY different than it does in San Francisco...)

the theme of carnaval this year translates as: The Return of the Muses. and based on the scaled and single-fin outfits adorning gigantic nearly-naked posters of women popping up everywhere, the Muses appear to be MERMAIDS.
this seems fitting in a town whose vivid life revolves around the sea.

(Insurgentes bus)

today, we wrestled with the BUS SYSTEM.
we planned a trip to the Juarez Flea Market and our friends got information that we should take any bus that said JUAREZ which passed on the big street at the base of Heriberto Frias where we are living. once down on the big street, we double-checked with ladies working in the Farmacia Guadalajara. they consulted with each other and told us to take the Insurgentes bus.

when the Insurgentes bus came, we boarded, paid our 5.5 pesos (about 44 cents), got paper transfers and i asked the driver whether he went to the flea market. he shook his head and gave us a disgusted look. perplexed, i asked him again and he angrily refunded our coins, grabbed our paper transfers and basically kicked us off an otherwise empty bus.

Andrew and i were a little dumbfounded - that challenging combination of confusion, anger and shame that can accompany foreign-language transactions. i engaged a youngish guy who came to sit on the bus bench and he studied the map with me and determined a) where the market was exactly and b) confirmed that we DID indeed need an Insurgentes bus but told us to go up to Benito Juarez to catch it. we walked the two blocks and crossed the street to wait.

we waved by at least 12 buses destined for other places before another Insurgentes bus arrived and this time happily took our fares and allowed us to board.

we reached the market, an only sunday affair, which dominated a huge square and all the streets radiating out from it for blocks and blocks. a profusion of used and new clothing, cosmetics, toys, electronics, shoes, food and drink were in evidence. in addition, we heard about but did not see an open-air peluquería (hair salon). it was madness of the most delightful variety.

someone Sarah Farthing has translated my ELE JOU into the French
as SHE PLAYS (elle jou). i like it. because i do.

hello ele jou

2.19.2011

starting somewhere is almost as hard as starting nowhere.
but Mazatlan IS surely somewhere and i am surely here.

first hurdle: swallowing the word BLOG has been impossible for me
and has kept me from having any kind of regular electronic post.
perhaps this makes me an aesthete? or just a person ridiculously
sensitive to the slings and arrows and language. i simply cannot embark
upon a path that makes me think of gagging and choking (blog, like glob,
like clog, like blob, like gag... you get the point).

so i have invented some words that sound beautiful to me and, with
that, can allow myself to launch a record of this travel:
ELE JOU simply stands for elec-tronic jou-rnal.
say it with a slight french accent and i suspect
it will make your mouth feel as happy as it does mine.

welcome to my ELE JOU: MEXICO.