News is only a bulletin board away.
The Rainbow Grocery is South Fork’s main grocery and, besides food, you can buy fishing licenses here, camping gear, lures and flies, ice and bug spray. Right on the main drag, it is next to the Rainbow Motel , close enough to walk to on a chilled morning. Their bulletin board is so full of notes it needs some cleaning up by an assistant manager, or higher.
Their bulletin board has all the standard fare – ads for travel trailers and ATV’s, promos for upcoming Art Shows and Music concerts,cabins for sale, who to call to get your septic tank pumped.. If you need your dog groomed, your health improved, a place to live, a place to worship, you have times and dates and phone numbers.
Most people’s most important messages, though, will never make the Bulletin Board. Their special notices will stay locked up deep inside their hearts waiting for the right person to reveal them too.
I don’t want to know any deep secrets this morning and am relieved to see only trivial stuff.
I’m looking for what real estate goes for here in a place that is too cold for me to ever want to live.
I don’t want to know why someone can’t find love in a world precious short of it.
Warning about the side effects of exercise, however, are mildly amusing.
In Belize, karaoke machines appear in bars and hotel ballrooms with guests wearing Wal-Mart pineapple and palm tree short sleeved perma-press shirts. They sing into late hours and consume vast quantities of rum.
In Mogpog, karaoke machines appear in people’s front yards, or living rooms, and friends and family wear Rock and Roll T shirts, shorts, flip flops, sing into late hours and consume even larger quantities of Red Horse beer and home cooked food.
As competitors sing they are heckled, make mistakes and laugh. The music has to shut down at ten in the evening and each party gets a party permit from city officials before it can begin.
Holding a microphone, the star of the moment follows lyrics on a tv screen and sings the melody, adding emotion and dynamics. Some of the lyrics are in English and some are in Tagalog. When a song ends, there is a moment of silence as the machine calculates a final score and flashes it on the screen.
One hundred is the best score you can make,and, when someone gets a hundred, there are whoops and hollers.
One of the things I need to practice, before going back to Mogpog, is my singing.
The best way to describe my singing is that it sounds like a hungry cat with a tooth missing.
Not being able to sing shouldn’t mean we can’t be a star.
Trumpets are not quiet instruments.
In the Cancun Airport, Terminal Three, a trumpet and guitars serenade travelers arriving and departing from Mexico. The terminal is full of duty free shops, and, if you didn’t pick up gifts before, this is your last tax free shopping opportunity.
Mariachi music belongs to Mexico though Mexican taxi drivers often listen to Willie Nelson and Classic Rock. This knob of Yucatan, Mexico has more in common with the Caribbean than Mexico but this fiery Mariachi group plays their Mexican style music, in tune, with great expression and distinctive costumes.
Being a neighbor to the United States is like sleeping next to an elephant. When it rolls over you become sandwich spread.
I don’t want Mexico to become the United States and I don’t want the United States to just be a continuation of Mexico.
Maintaining your national identity, in an increasingly homogenized world, is a true work of love and an expression of freedom.
This music at the airport seems to capture the extroverted flavor of our southern neighbor in a nutshell and I sing along with the musicians in English, as they croon in Spanish.
There is room on the planet for all of us, and our differences.
Imitation is, a famous wit once explained, the greatest form of flattery.
Elvis Presley was a star and shone bright in Tinseltown for decades. In his Elvis impersonator show, Danny Vernon croons, tells jokes, moves his hips, loves on the audience.
Some of these fans saw Elvis himself in Las Vegas, watched his hips while he turned Rock an Roll into a money making machine. A good impersonator brings back old magic and Danny gives glimpses of the King.
This show is almost two hours and Elvis would approve.
Afterwards, Danny poses for pictures with the ladies, like Elvis did.
The ladies, old enough to be grandmothers, are giggly and reach for his sequins.
Even after death, Elvis casts a big shadow.
Some people grow bigger than life, even after they have vanished.
Elton might not approve, but a cheap radio, playing one of his yesteryear hits, provides music at the Rincon RV Resort Farmer’s Market.
Having the same feeling as watching a John Wayne movie on a TNT movie night, I listen to Elton belt out his early ancient hit to whomever is listening. Once a song goes out on the air, it has more lives than a cat.
Now, rumors of his lifestyle are far more interesting than his music, but good songs seem to outlast their composers and resonate across generational borders.
Ghosts stick around, but music residuals go on forever.
Art flourishes in the desert.
At the Tubac Art Festival, streets are closed to traffic, excepting horse drawn wagons, and tents are being set up while parking attendants put on their lime colored jackets and sunscreen.
Two of the parking lots are already full of cars by ten thirty, and, in the third lot, sightseers are getting their shoes dusty walking across dirt fields towards the Art Festival. Tubac is festive and shows us old and new restaurants, galleries, gift shops, restaurants, bars, white tents sheltering festival exhibitors.
Tubac is off Highway 19, between Tucson and Nogales, and, according to my brother Alan, who was here some years ago, looks different than it was.
” None of that was here, ” he remarks and points at a cluster of shops, each one trying to attract buyers with signs and special sales.
February is a prime time of the year for retailers here and a proprietor shows us his hand woven rugs from around the world as we zip into his shop to look at western artifacts.
” Is it hard to make it here in the summer, ” I ask?
The man squints a bit as if he were outside in a spotlight sun.
” We do the best we can, ” he says, ” you have to be adaptable. ”
This annual festival will draw thousands and some will buy. Most will look, socialize, eat, deal with parking and logistics, take pictures and enjoy the event.
Art, for me, is always a festival.
I buy something small by a Chinese man who does watercolors of goldfish and I bet the ones he drew, and filled in with color, were part of his dinner last night.
Art, in the East, is as far from cowboys and Indians as you can get.
There are only three countries in the world that have a primitive art movement. One is in Haiti, another is in Yugoslavia, the last is in Nicaragua.
In the southern part of Nicaragua are a group of 26 islands in a province called Solentiname. A Catholic priest arriving there many years ago noticed locals painting on gourds and helped them move their inspirations to canvas. Local artists continue to paint and earn livings from this stylistic folk art.
This room, at the San Francisco Convent Museo in Granada, is dedicated to the Nicaraguan primitive art movement that celebrates nature, community,order, and color.
The works and artists, though different, all belong in this room. They work within a style that is larger than they are, an ocean that supports their boats.
It is like the Garden of Eden calling you home.
The intensity of the artist’s focus is like the eyes of a tiger watching you from inside it’s cage.
Ann’s art studio is also a gallery, a meeting place, a classroom, a resource of information, a great place to pick up a brush if you have an itch.
Studios, as opposed to galleries, are works in process.
There are finished and unfinished compositions on the walls, stacked in corners, left on easels. There are cans of brushes and rags, solvents and photographs of scenes that interest pinned to boards.The discussions here are about color, line, proportion, texture, what you want to say, how to put paint on a flat canvas to get a three dimensional shape and how to create art people want to buy.
Some of the works here have Nicaraguan scenes while others channel European or American traditions.
A studio is a place of discovery.
All these projects are around me, whispering, laughing, demanding attention, asking me to purchase them and find a place at home to show them off.
The pursuit of art is noble even if it gets messy and expensive.
Saturday is laundry day, and trombone day.
Over the blue wall, next door, someone is practicing trombone. I was up late listening to Masterclass You Tube Videos by Hal Galper on jazz improvisation, hearing, thinking, the tribal attitude, musical tradition.
Learning to play jazz is like learning to walk, learning numbers and letters, reading, all over again.
You start at one note and then find the next one that sounds good. You put them in an order that is pleasing and play till you have it where it sounds good to you, and to an audience.
According to Hal, we don’t have slow hands, we have slow brains.
While I listen, and hum along, a lizard scales the blue wall, rests on the top ledge, looks over the other side. He catches the morning breeze.
Making sounds is one thing; making music is another.
I need to go practice.
Getting triggered by your surroundings, goes to the heart of Scotttreks.com
Our Lady of Assumption Cathedral is also called the Granada Cathedral.
The church dominates the main plaza of Granada, Nicaragua and was begun in the 1500’s when the city was being colonized by Spanish conquerors. The church still serves the community and at a recent evening Mass was filled with locals as well as tourists who make the place one of their must do stops.
This Cathedral dwarfs other churches in the city and is not as ornate or beaten down as its competition. It is still a simple box covered with smooth plaster, tall bell towers, and is painted a striking color you can see from a distance. In its shadows is the main city Plaza, a collection of horse drawn carriages lined up in front of the Alhambra hotel, vendors selling sunglasses and food, tourists, and locals who have nothing better to do than people watch and take photos and videos for their Facebook page.
Walking into a Catholic church brings the usual statues, pews, robed white plaster men commemorated for dedication, nooks with burning candles, dizzying rotundas, a sense of space.
The unusual in this church is a Genie lift that supports an artist painting on the ceiling.
The cast of characters is to be expected. There is God, Adam and Eve, all of Noah’s animals, angels and scenes of Creation.
This morning, when there is no Mass, I find the lift extended and observe a little man on the platform high above me patiently expanding his assigned themes. He is no Michaelangelo and this is no Sistine Chapel, but the effect is still jaw dropping. The ceiling is huge, and, with so many sections to be filled, it is hard to believe the task will ever be finished.
But, completed or not,it is certain that this project will outlast many men and make the point continually that we are alive for a purpose, just not our purpose.
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