¡Ay, Chihuahua!

The ultimate chachke.

Who wants one?

¡Feliz Navidad y Prospero Año Nuevo 2010!

Here's wishing you all a magical and colorful holiday season,

however you choose to celebrate!

***

Dancing with the Mojigangas

The Mojigangas of San Miguel

So you may be wallowing in the blues because your lover just left you for another, or your cat just died, or you are just having a menopausal day and feeling fat and old and worthless, hanging your head in the Jardin in under the laurel trees feeling sorry for yourself. It happens to us all. But when the mojigangas come waltzing around the corner of the church with their giant heads bobbing, swinging their arms and flashing their brightly painted smiles, you can’t help but laugh out loud.

Bouncy music sputters from the loudspeakers as the giant puppets twirl into the plaza, braids of yarn and colorful ribbons flying around their bodies that tower above the children that come to greet them. They sway and spin as if to say alegre! alegre! and before you know it you are up and clapping your hands as a fifteen foot high lady puppet comes wagging her way towards you and pulls you into the circle to dance, practically scooping you up in her enormous paper mache bosom that swells out of her ruffled hot pink dress.

It is impossible to stay depressed in this town. It won’t let you mope around for long before fireworks punch your eardrums or church bells slap you awake or music shakes your bones as if to say Hey! come on out and play! The laughing painted eyes of the mojigangas tease and flirt with you as if to show you that life is a playground, a party, a fiesta after all, and there is precious little time to be sad or angry at the world. So you bump your hips from side to side, awkwardly at first, shy and self conscious before this enormous creature, then poco a poco you find a rhythm, feel a loosening in your spine, and you begin to dip and turn, stomping your feet on the worn stone streets.

The feet of the mojiganga wear a pair of old sneakers with holes in the toes. The frayed edges of blue jeans peek beneath her skirts, where a teenage boy watches you out of the folds of lace and fabric. He sees a white middle aged gringa, her silver bracelets jangling as she raises her arms over her head, and something like a crazed grin creeping across her face as she sways from one side to another, as if she didn’t have a care in the world. As if she has been dancing this way her whole life.

***

Oh Christmas Tree!

Mexico City can now boast the largest artificial Christmas tree ever, thanks to Pepsi Cola. Measuring over 240 feet high it is an impressive changing light show- seen here in three of many versions. Can't wait to see what Coca Cola comes up with to compete.

¡Viva la Revoluciòn!

It is the 99th anniversary of the Mexican Revolution, and hundreds of moustached, rifle toting bandoliered second graders march through the streets of San Miguel like miniature Pancho Villas.

I am watching the parade from the sidelines, crowded under the shade of the laurel trees with the rest of the onlookers cheering on group after group of children and adults, including one band of old ladies in colorful skirts, toting rifles and marching left to right, left to right. Ten year old kids wielding machetes clashing them together over their heads in unison, enormous flags bearing portraits of Villa waving over dark heads shouting Viva! Que viva!

The other night from the comfort of our king sized hotel bed we had watched Antonio Banderas’ personification of Pancho and his bloody revolution and subsequent rise to power and eternal legend in a somewhat askew version of Mexican history.

But isn’t all history a romanticized retelling of monotonous and flawed facts of human blunder?

What makes Pancho Villa particularly juicy is his larger than life persona, his rise from rebel peasant to power and corruption, a story that seems to repeat itself over and over throughout the world. The eternal promise of change continues...

Open Studios!

I know, I know...it's been way too long since I've written anything here.
BUT, bear with me, there will be more soon.
Meanwhile, it's Open Studios time here in Santa Cruz and I am busy getting ready.
Then it's back to Mexico for the winter where I plan to slow down again and WRITE!
I promise...

Bird Paintings

 

Well now, another cool gizmo to show your pics. 

Here is a collection of my bird paintings.

Savor the Little Things

A page from my art journal

The swallows are nesting in the wall above my bed. They come in through the vent holes outside next to the garage and swoop in and out of the tiny holes in the eaves, quick and silent, slicing through the air. Last night we heard a tiny sound and stood on the bed with our ears to the wall, where we heard the peeping of baby birds. I remember last year on the day that the fledglings were ready to fly, the house was suddenly surrounded by swallows, as if they were coming to celebrate this big moment. They came as a community, ready to protect the vulnerable chicks as they leapt from the safety of the nest into their first flight into the outside world. They flew to the branch of a nearby tree and sat there for a while, astounded by their new reality. What impresses me most is how the whole flock of adult birds circled and swooped and brought them food, supporting them until they had the courage to take the next step.

*

Because it is Spring

because I have noticed the birds gathering grasses and twigs

the sweet lip of dawn revealing new blooms

trees sprouting leaves like a swarm of wings

because I feel the restless tug of my heart

familiar and insistant, with only a touch of grief

a quiet repressed joy unfurls, a spiraling tendril finding its way

because I have been sleeping for so long

because I have forgotten so much

the sigh of the shore

the soft wide curve of hip and belly

this mind is a fish, a star, a seed, a wild horse

because I remember the sheer joy of movement

the absolute pleasure of stillness

and the precious moment between the two.

***

Art Journal Pages

I have been teaching a class in Art Journaling.
Today we worked on found imagery and text
through the medium of collage.
It seems that the more layers we added
the more layers to ourselves we uncovered....

Life with a Home Brewer

From a page in my art journal. ©Susan Dorf 2009

"There is more to life than making beer. There is drinking beer and blogging about beer."

When I first came home to what looked to be someone's dirty underwear soaking in my best cooking pot, I have to admit I was a little unsettled. Even after he explained to me that they were just used hop bags, they still looked disgusting. And what was all that sticky stuff all over the stove? Yeast starter? What the hell is that? Ugh. It had been several weeks since my husband had taken the one day Introduction to Brewing class at the local home brewing supply store and come home with a glazed look on his face and a starter kit to make his first batch of home brewed beer. Now he was moving from malt extract to all grain brewing and had acquired a mill and a few other bits of paraphernalia to make it possible. As long as it all fits under the sink, I said.

But really, I was glad to see that Mark had found a passion. After all, it’s good for a man to have a hobby, right? And this one made a lot less noise than the wood shop idea, and was much less risky and stressful than the commodity-trading phase. At least he wasn’t racing motorcycles or raising strange animals.
Still, I wondered how long it would last.

After the equipment started taking over the kitchen cupboards and then the kitchen itself, we bought a plastic shed for the back deck for him to store the accumulating burners, pots, kegs, CO2 tanks, grains, etc. And when the beer glasses collected from the various breweries and pubs and beer festivals began to shove the other drinking glasses and dishes into unapproachable corners of the cupboards, I agreed that he could use a shelf in the laundry cupboard for the overflow. Soon there were two shelves of glasses, a bin of hop pellets that looked like rabbit food, along with various other devices and several books on home brewing. Laundry and cleaning supplies were stacked on top of the dryer and our storage space was reduced to a few square feet. Then one day the freezer arrived on the back of a friend's truck and with some pushing and shoving was wedged in next to the washing machine. A few adjustments and attachments later, and it was goodbye storage, hello kegerator.

He kept meticulous notes on every aspect of his brewing process. And while his dirty clothes may have been sprawled across the bedroom floor and his bathroom took on the appearance of a war zone, the beer area was always spotless and orderly. He became manic about sanitation and cleanliness, and though my kitchen knives would disappear into fermenting kegs to become weights for dry hop bags, or my pots and measuring cups would mysteriously relocate themselves to the beer shed, I was told that I must never, ever borrow a beer utensil for anything else.
Some mornings he trots out to visit his fermenter the minute he wakes up, then comes back with a glass full of some cloudy yellow liquid as I’m trying to wake up, sitting down to a cup of coffee. ‘Taste this’, he says. ‘Tell me if it’s any good.’ He is a man possessed.

Little by little, the world of beer began to infiltrate into our lives. Weekend outings gave way to brewing Sundays. Our vacations and road trips were punctuated by tours of micro-breweries, (which I found I could use as leverage to my advantage, countering with museum and gallery visits.) My usual healthy eating habits became compromised with countless brewpub menus while participating in numerous taste evaluations of beer samplers. I learned about hops and how they are used as a bittering agent, used to balance out the sweetness of the beer to give it a fuller and more complex flavor. Gee, I found myself thinking, it sounds just like a relationship.

He explains to me about the yeast. How it changed the course of history by turning nomadic wanderers into agrarian people because they needed to cultivate grain to make enough beer to keep them satisfied.
One night I woke up to a strange rhythmic bubbling sound coming from the bedroom closet. When I opened the door I saw that his shoes had been shoved to one side to make room for the glass carboys wrapped in electric blankets like precious bundles. I pulled one of the blankets aside and stared at the foamy mixture inside. All of that yeast in there multiplying away in a feeding frenzy. Living organisms that through some strange intelligence knew just how much they needed to reproduce to consume the sugar provided by the malted grain. I knelt down to get a closer look at them. "What have you done to my husband?" I asked.
And that’s when I knew. This wasn’t just a hobby anymore. This was his calling.

He joined a homebrewing group where he and other brewers would gather together like mad scientists and taste each other's concoctions and talk endlessly about gravity and hop ratios and IBU’s and clone recipes along with the latest must-have brewing gizmos. He was a man communing with his tribe.
He would come home from beer festivals with a wild satisfied grin on his face, like a kid coming home from Disneyland. He would look like a walking advertisement for micro-breweries, laden with tee shirts and keychain bottle openers, bumper stickers, hats, glasses.
Here was a man who wouldn’t buy himself a pair of socks, who balked at the price of food and haircuts, and yet when it came to beer or beer related doodads, the money flowed from his wallet. There was no holding back.
After the arrival of the beer sculpture, the ominous skeletal multi-tiered monstrosity that appeared one day after he had befriended a welder, I knew that our lives had turned a corner. It was time to move. We needed a garage.

One night I asked him the question a wife should never ask her homebrewer husband.
"If you had to choose between beer making and me, what would it be?"
I could see the wires crossing in his head, the almost visible sparks as he struggled to find the right answer. Finally, "What the hell kind of question is that?" he said, and went out to the garage to check his fermenter.
I’m okay with it. Really I am. Because in my heart of hearts I know that when your true purpose and passion calls to you and makes you feel happy and whole, what choice do you have, really?

***
See Mark's blog at backyardbrewer.blogspot.com