Since the AC unit in the car is Brad’s final tie to the First World we just got the AC filter changed in our Honda CRV. Here’s the before and after.
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Mi Tío Neftalie
Mi tío is schizophrenic, that much I know. I find myself staring at him as he maneuvers his space on the street in La Antigua or tries to find a narrative to all the stimulus that is rushing past him, a stream that flows through the gray matter of his brain and the neuropathways that are so different from my brain. I think, somewhere inside me are his genes and that possibility. I watch him and he knows I’m watching him, so he plays, changes from one side of the street to the next and waves back at me while the cars pass between us. Like the petulant and bossy niece I have always been with him, I tell him to be serious because he could get hurt crossing the street that way. He covers his cigarette with most of the thin, stretched skin of his hand. “Don’t worry so much, you’ll see how the electromagnetic energy flows through your eyes and into your liver where you can breathe better. ” I tell him to stay put while I go to the bank and “¡Tío, deje de molestar!” He laughs. I smile as I half turn my back on him, he waves back again knowing I’m watching.
Since December a plot has been brewing in my head to get him on medication and then build him a home in Media Luna with a bike on his own small plot of land where he can plant his own coffee and bananas and roam the fincas in peace. Here’s what we found:
And here’s him riding his new bike on the fincas:
He’d have a small bed, a table to read his newspapers, a small tv, and his new glasses. I can then come and visit him, sleep on the hammock and drink coffee on the porch overlooking the endless rows of banana and palm trees while he sits on the stairs and sings old boleros with his cracking, croaking voice – the same voice and song his father would sing before he disappeared into the fincas and was never heard from again. Here’s one of those songs by Antonio Aguilar–Hace un año that the entire family convinced him to sing in Brad’s studio:
LuchaLibre lives on in Guatemala
We picked them up in Zone 1, on the corner of third avenue this past Sunday afternoon – our friend Addison a tall, white, wirey, canche colocho, and the lean, well-postured and muscular figure of Cebero, the Austrian Guatemalan wrestler, strapped with his own 9 mm Spanish-made gun and dressed all in black – at one with the heavy metal persona he embodies. Cebero, not to be confused with his Wolfgang day-time persona, always carried his gun because “in Guatemala, everywhere you go, there are thugs that get mad at you for anything, a bad stare, walking on the wrong side of the street.” It was hard to miss them. Cebero smiled the biggest, most humble smile I’d seen on anyone in a while, thanked us as we got in the car and headed out.
We had to move quickly because we had to get Cebero to Zone 12 by 5 PM and negotiate how I was going to take videos at La Arena (where I learned upon arriving that they charged Q2,500 for any kind of professional filming). I was pushing my luck and I knew it, but I had to take that chance. Who would have guessed that LuchaLibre was still alive, but certainly not well, in Guatemala? This was no NachoLibre orphanage in the fields we were going to, it was one of the poorest, slummiest and unsafest parts of Guatemala City where there are no private parking lots for cars, the streets have that abandoned openness that makes for shooting ranges, hungry dogs, broken down cars and couples creeping quickly on the thin broken sidewalks. But no matter, today was “Ladies Get in Free Night” and we were rolling with one of the main wrestlers committed to his art form, regardless of the measley few quetzales paid per match. As we approached La Arena, Cebero throws on his mask and tries to find us a parking lot, to no avail, so he negotiates with the storeowner next door to watch our car. We sent him off and parked the car, threw our cameras backpacks on and looked back (we hoped, not for the last time) at our car. Every half hour I would come out shoot different light or record different sounds as an excuse to see if the car was where we left it.
Inside, the arena was empty, cool, dark and quiet and the smell of butter on microwaved popcorn swarmed around the doorway. I was hungry, but I had to set up my tripod and hope the owner of the ring, who was also a wrestler, would be understanding enough to let me shoot. I sent the message back with a young boy that “I am an independent periodista who just wants to tell the story of a wrestler and the wrestling scene blah blah…” Five minutes later, the boy pulls my arm and says, “The owner says it will cost you.” Right, I say, shoo the boy away and keep shooting.
When the first match is about to start, I get the official public shaming. “Could the woman with her video camera please stop filming so that we can get on with the match?” Sigh, I shut off the camera and close the screen. “Could she please put the camera away?” I take the camera off the tripod. At this point there are about a hundred people in the ring watching me. I yell across the bleachers: “The camera is off!” The crowd repeats it. “Please put the camera and everything away,” the announcer politely says again over the intercom. Everyone watches me pack all my gear away again, except for my microphone and Zoom recorder. Then I’ll make it a radio story ’cause you can’t keep a journalist from her story! I grumble to myself.
The fight begins with nothing really out of the ordinary, except each subsequent fight is starting to fall into one of two camps: All Spectacle or This Is For Real. When two or three guy team up on one wrestler, things start getting fiesty and the 80-year-old woman behind me screamed: “Tear his f**king balls off!” I turned around and she smiled really sweetly. “I really like that wrestler,”she said. Later that evening the wrestlers took the fight to her:
The crowd was making itself known.
The rest of the matches did not disappoint and by the end of the evening I was off those bleachers and following the wrestlers around with my microphones as they pummeled one another. They made each other beg as I held my microphone near. My favorite moments include the fancy footwork fight:
The pummeling:
And at the end of the night, the ring belonged to the kids:
Winging It In Todos Santos
The town of Todos Santos floats above the clouds, positioned safely beyond that world of concrete, black bus smoke, and the bustling human activity back on earth in that almost border town we call Huehuetenango. And so we climb. As the sun surfaces and kisses the terracería red, we’ve gone off road and all we can see amid the dust clouds are human shadows elongated along the side.
This is what trucks are made for, not a four cylinder wannabe SUV like ours, but six or eight cylinder growling beasts that eat the road beneath wide rubber treads and merciless traction. We keep moving upward, past a low-rider with scorpion decals stuck on the side doors like temporary tattoos. The plants know something we don’t know: somehow they grow out of hard rocks without any space of green wasted while the cactus defiantly sticks out its thorns against this moon-like surface. Small childrens’ faces peek out from the farm houses dotted along the barren, flat expanse at the top of this highland. Men wear traditional red and white-striped pants and there is a swagger of comfort and fullness in their every move as they haul pounds of wood, dirt, tools and water to their homes. They’ve been here a long time and we’re just visiting- that’s obvious.
We’ve come to train some young radio journalists and have grand ideas about staying overnight and living a little rustic for the night. After an unsuccessful to attempt to scale an unbelievably steep hill that supposedly leads to a hotel, we shamefully return to the stern grimaces of the towns folk staring at us as we reverse our way down. We drive about three miles on another steep grade, lured by colorfully painted houses. Alas, our vehicle surrenders to the sheer physics of the situation, and Brad is forced to make a 10 or 12-point turn to get us back down the hill. It’s painfully obvious at this point that “rustic” has just kicked our ass.
15 minutes later a large oil rig gets stuck in a ditch in front of us, and not a single car can go up or down the mountain for miles. But the men of Todos Santos are a hearty lot, and their solution was to remove the guard rail and create a new lane! Hey, who really needs guard rails on a 8000 ft. elevation mountain road anyway?
The real test was when we crossed with a little help from our friends:
The Señor Sepultado Floats Through Town
Out of the thick cloud of incense, dark night and rain the procession of Señor Sepultado de San Felipe floated out of the ether of La Antigua’s narrow streets, on the shoulders of a hundred black-hooded men and cutting the river of the throngs gathered along the embankment. Warmed by the heat of dozens of small candles lit up behind me and cradled in people’s hands to keep the wind away, the mothership slowly made its way towards the illuminated cathedral like a dock where everything had suddenly become slow motion with the faith worn on people’s faces like a morning waking.
Christ had died that day, been sepulchured and his figure was taken out of the escuela de Cristo and Aldea del Apóstol San Felipe accompanied by funeral marches, the holy Mary (the Maria Santísima de Soledad de la Parroquia de Nuestra Señora de los Remedios Templo de la Escuela de Cristo) and a parade of angels. It was a prelude to Easter or Sunday of Resurrection and one of the few opportunities to see the intricate carvings of the the Christ that the Facebook Fans are still raving about. The two processions looked like entire cities that lasted well into 3 in the morning on Saturday, April 3:
Presenting BradElectro
Big shout-out to Brad for getting himself on the cover of Urbnet Magazine. Here’s little snippet:
“While he never stole his older sister’s records, young BradElectro did sneak into her room to find out what the big kid’s Top 40 radio station was. This was a difficult task— what with all the yelling, kicking and punching. Undeterred, Brad limped back to his own room and accidentally tuned in Magic 108 FM— the legendary Black frequency of St. Louis. Playing perfectly on cue, Kool and the Gang’s new hit record, “Get Down On It” bumped out of the box and time stood still. The mothership had landed and a young hyperactive boy was forever funkified for life.
Years later, fresh out of art school and living in Chicago, Brad eventually grew tired of the insular gallery scene, and wondered if he might be able to reach a wider audience through music. “If you show someone your new sculpture, half the time they don’t even know what to say,” Brad explains. “But play them a piece of music and they’ll either love it or hate it- at least they’ll be able to express an opinion.” Brad never received any sort of formal musical training but he had an extensive record collection, a souped-up PC and a brand new copy of the music sequencing software ReBirth. It was time to get down on it indeed.
BradElectro has been performing live electronic music in clubs, undergrounds, renegades and churches for more than 7 years. His current residencies include Los Deepness at the Oasis in Oakland, and Sync at Temple Nightclub in San Francisco. Originally beginning with the classic MMT-8 hardware sequencer, Brad switched to the Roland MC-909 and now currently rocks Abelton Live alongside an arsenal of outboard effects and trusty Mackie mixer. Gear doesn’t make the groove but it helps, and BradElectro is definitely not just a laptop jockey. Musically, his love for vocals and melody is obvious in his songs, but like many of his Chicago heroes, the man can get tracky as well.”
Holy Friday, Black Friday, Great Friday
At 3:30 Thursday morning and by the light of the full moon as the rooster crowed a couple times, my husband and I threw on our sweaters and jeans, stumbled out into the quiet streets of El Calvario and into our car. We knew we were taking a chance by driving into La Antigua Guatemala on Viernes Santo, Good Friday, we might even have to walk home, but not knowing what to expect our car was our life raft. We were, however, determined to catch a glimpse of the Romans in their full armor and horses at the entrance to the city and retrace Jesus’ march along the Way of the Cross and through the Twelve Stations. It was Holy Friday, Black Friday, Great Friday and as we drove past Río Pensativo, with a few random shadows ducking into side streets, we had our doubts about whether we’d see even one Guatemalan upright and sober, much less dressed as a Roman. I thought about stopping and asking the next person, “¿Disculpeme, pero dónde están los romanos?” “Excuse me, but where are the Romans?” In our sleep deprivation – unlike other more knowing souls, we had only taken a 30 minute power nap – we just pushed ahead like late nights in San Francisco when we’d go searching for a rave or warehouse party in the most unlikely of urban places. We were not prepared for the full-scale production we were about to witness.
We turned left into Antigua Guatemala and the city was all ours with not a single car or bus cruising in from Guatemala City only to be funneled into cobble-stone streets and a bee-line string of cars into the heart of the crowded town. It’d been like that the entire week and so we’d become embedded on the other side of town, sequestered really, until this morning when space to drive was like fresh air. We drove north towards La Merced Church and as we approached, the cars began to pile up on the side of the south side of the streets , parked in random directions with crowds poring in from La Calle del Arco to the food stalls which had now become permanent fixtures right next to La Merced. They brimmed with churros, chuchitos, quesadillas, fried platanos, ponche, coffee, big rafts of thick smoke broken by lights that illuminated the crowds sauntering towards the entrance of the Church, the purple-caped men carrying sharp spears in one hand and a tamale in the other, the tents pitched between the stalls and the church, and the alfombras, colorful, intricate and immense.
The car pushed us ahead towards Alameda Santa Lucía, one of the main streets of La Antigua that leads you south into Ciudad Vieja and Escuintla, and on most days reminds you of a miniature version of rush hour on the Santa Monica Freeway or the San Francisco Bay Bridge if you were sharing the street with zigzagging pedestrians, stray dogs, tuk-tuks, cyclists, motorcycles, venders, looming buses and broken down cars. But today it was silence, with the crouching bodies of people, young and old, laying down their alfombras by the light of one light bulb and together creating a path that lit the entire street as far as the eye could see. We parked along this street and began our walk towards the church, staring in awe at one alfombra after the next , some long and sprawling for blocks, some depicting entire scenes of Jesus Christ, while others were laden with melons, mangos, split open papayas, egg shells, candles, fluttering butterflies, architectural buttresses, straw crosses.
My mouth agape as I stood by the First Station of the Cross where Jesus Is Condemned To Death by Pontius Pilate I heard hooves and galloping and turned towards La Merced to see the Romans on their white horses riding into town with their full armor and swords. “The Romans are here, look,” I told Brad, my husband, and we got out of the way for the dark, short Romans on their white steeds. As so it was the beginning of the procession which was scheduled to leave La Merced Church at 5 a.m. much to the anticipation of the bodies piled up with their hot coffees and banana bread by the entrance of the church. Thinking ahead, Brad took a place at the front of the gathering crowd at the first bend of the procession. I went towards the church, crawling underneath Romans, food stalls, legs, and ladders to see the beginning of the procession.
On my tip-toes, I saw the bus-long float carrying a red-robed Christ and his wooden cross surrounded by dozens of orchids and flowers hoisted on the shoulders of at least a hundred purple-clothed men. There was clouds of incense and the prayers by the priests were almost sung in rhythm. I could not make the words out, but I knew the journey well, I’d grown up with it as a Catholic. We were embarking upon The Passion of Christ—all the events and suffering of Jesus in the hours before and including his trial and execution by crucifixion. We had been preparing for it the entire duration of Lent and now we had arrived and were faced with, albeit in an allegorical sense, the suffering of one human being. I turned back to be with Brad for the First Station and to see how far we could make it along the all-day march. We were surrounded by thousands witnessing the procession and as it made its way towards Alameda Santa Lucía, we marched with it, flanked on our left by believers paying their respect, making the cross along their forehead and across their chests. Small candles were lit one by one and then the dark pierced their multitude like pearls or fireflies along the path. We all moved as one unit as the procession made it past The First and then the Second Station, and by the third station Brad sat by the curb of the road by Alameda Santa Lucía and said, “I had no idea.”
Neither did I, I thought to myself as we drove home to the blue light of dusk over the volcanoes. I remember as a child we would go to the beach during Semana Santa (my family are coastal people after all) and then when we moved to Guatemala City. There is where I remember standing next to my grandmother, surrounded by people crying as they held small candles when this looming figure of Christ passed. That figure instilled me fear and awe. It created a narrative in my mind. Standing there my grandmother taught me to make the cross with her and to remember how one person’s suffering can impact so many of us. Even today, she reminded me, we remember together. It’s a lesson that transcends Catholicism and which I’ve taken with me into my Buddhism—how we have to be mindful of how we help to reduce suffering in the world, not perpetuate it.
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Domingo de Ramos Brings in Holy Week
I’ve had to brush up on my Catholic liturgy today by calling mi abuelita and having her explain to me the significance of Domingo De Ramos or Palm Sunday. She tells me that Holy Week begins with Palm Sunday of the Lord’s Passion, which is really the triumph of Christ as Messiah as he rides into Jerusalem through the ritual of the procession of the palms by the Catholics, and the announcement of the passion in a Mass narrative. Some drama happens when Christ sees all the folks selling outside the church (ah-hem, not like something like that would happen outside La Merced church in La Antigua).
People carry palms and bouquets which are blessed objects consisting of palmas y ramas de olivo o laurel. La Antigua was full of them, all shapes and sizes sitting right next to the mango on a stick saleswoman. This Sunday definitely had the twofold aspect of both the glory and suffering, not just on Christ’s face as he was marched from La Merced church and back, but on the poor clean-up crew’s face as they swept up all the alfombras trampled on by the float carriers.
We’re days away from Holy Thursday, right outside Lent, and then it’s full steam ahead into resurrection Sunday. We won’t be spending too much money on gas this week because after Wednesday the streets of LAG are filled with Semana Santa revelers!
Pillow Fight in La Antigua
For a Saturday the town was quiet with the silence of anticipation. Cuaresma is reaching its climax in La Antigua and sometimes a pillow fight in the middle of Parque Central is exactly what you need.
