Steak & Eggs in the desert

I don't usually eat steak and eggs. Watching the cholesterol. But Mary is away this weekend and I'm on my own. I went out on the art tours yesterday, and got to chat with folks I haven't met before, and this morning, feeling the need for a little more socializing, I decided to have breakfast at The Palms, on Amboy Road.

The Palms is an institution around here. A good place to run into people. How many times have we seen people pulled over on the side of Amboy, taking photos of the mountains enclosing our valley in the blue security of their weight, and we think, they must think this is the most deserted spot on earth? They should go to The Palms.

This morning, guys were dismantling equipment from the stage out back. In the back parking lot, folks car camping were stoking up their charcoal grills or heading to the two funky outhouses. Today is the day after one of the regular fun festivals that The Palms pulls together, bringing bands from L.A. and other parts out for a little musical adventure in the high desert. Run by the Sibley family (brother James and sister Laura are in the house band), the bar-restaurant-music venue is one of those hip-anarchic-laid back places you hear about, but never manage to run into, unless you live in Wonder Valley or any of the communities out here, like Twentynine Palms, Joshua Tree, or Yucca Valley.

I run into Almut, an old friend from the mid-80s in L.A., and she introduces me to Teresa Sitz, who is the rep on the local advisory council. I've met Teresa a number of times over the past year, but we never remember each other! But she remembers seeing me yesterday at the Glass Outhouse art fair, a little unofficial, makeshift add-on to the Hwy 62 Open Studio Art Tours taking place this weekend. She invites me to sit at the table with her and her friends. Ordering my steak and eggs at the bar, someone else says, "didn't I see you at the Glass Outhouse yesterday?" Everybody is really friendly here. When you live in such an isolated place, where everyone is so spread out across the valley, people are generally just happy to recognize a familiar face, or introduce themselves if they don't know you already.

I order my breakfast, get a small cup of intensely bitter Café Americano and sit down at the table. Teresa's friends are my age -- mid-50s, mid-60s, retired, living on the cheap in the desert (so I say, what do I know?). Teresa is telling someone about a program for free, or cheap, firewood for people without money. And then there are the folks in their forties, probably locals, in for breakfast or an early beer, long hairs, artists, self-employed (again, what do I know?). And then there are the music folks, musicians, people in for the event, mid-30s, composing themselves for the long drive back to L.A. or maybe another day out here (what do I ... ?). You've got to remember that the Palms is a small place and it's only 10:30am. The place is buzzing with people chatting at the bar, or hanging out in the back room over breakfast in the booths or the long picnic table, like me, or wandering in and out of the back where the stage is.

Brother James comes out of the kitchen with a breakfast plate, looking glinty-eyed (Teresa says none of them got any sleep last night because of the music fest) and walks outside, looking for whoever ordered steak and eggs. Teresa grabs his arm when he wanders back in and directs him to me. I'm pretty hungry by now. The steak's a little gristly but for $5.50, including two eggs, home fries and a buttery chunk of toast, what's there to complain about?

So Teresa and I chat about local issues ... tax increases for road maintenance and the local fire station ... the small fire station about a half-mile from our house is closing down ... Teresa is worried about what that will do to people who managed to get home-owners' insurance ... they'll lose it without a fire station nearby. But will the new fire tax keep the fire station around? Teresa has her doubts. Then she gets up to leave and Almut sits down and we talk about the book she is reading. She's in a book club; the only thing the group reads are books about the Mojave desert. There's a lot to read about, if you've been out here for a while and gotten a taste for the hidden complexities of desert life. But Almut has a drive to L.A., to hear the philharmonic playing a concert of baroque music, so she leaves. Now there's a guy sitting at the old piano playing jazzy versions of "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" and what kind of sounds like the Charlie Brown theme.

The backroom is now emptied out and after I've sopped up the last of my gooey egg yolk with the piece of toast, I go to the bar to pay my bill. There's only a few folks drinking coffee or beers at the bar and the bartender says the crowd has left to go see Mark Heuston doing an aluminum casting demonstration at his studio, another practicing local artist on the art tour. I saw Mark's demo yesterday. Impressive. All done with tools Mark makes himself. And Mark has one prosthetic arm, a fact not to be overlooked. The bartender and I chat for a couple minutes about other highlights on the art tour and I leave him a tip and go back to the backroom.

The guy is still playing the piano. I tell him he's sounding pretty good and he proceeds to tell me how joint trouble in his hands keeps him from playing the piano more. He's now playing drums for therapy, says pounding on the drums loosens his hands! So be it.

I go out the back door, check out the stage where the four hip-looking guys who were dismantling equipment are now sprawled about, laughing and chatting. The car campers are still doing their thing in the back parking lot. I get in my car and head home. Steak and eggs in the desert. Nice way to start the day.

Turista Libre teams up with Tijuana Photography Festival for tour of event sites

Originally published in the San Diego Free Press on Friday, 10/16/15.

Turista Libre tour of Tijuana Photo Festival captures border town’s moment of change

What better way to get to a photography festival than to sit in an old school bus with the artist-organizers and a handful of curious Americans, listening to booming dance music while the eastern hinterlands of Tijuana whiz past your window?

On Saturday, October 3^rd, I hopped on board the bus tour co-sponsored by Turista Libre, the Tijuana-based tour operator, and the coordinating team of the modest, but highly ambitious First International Photography Festival Tijuana (FIFFT). As artist Rebecca Goldschmidt told me, “We don’t just want to take people to the sites where the festival events are taking place. We want a dialogue.”

Indeed, the artists, architects and cultural promoters we met on the tour are also engaged in a dialogue with Tijuana, which is transforming itself from the place to go for a cheap drunk into a sophisticated international town with its eyes on Asia and Latin America. In fact, the title of the festival’s main exhibit, “Remedios Para El Sindrome de Archivo Ausente” (Remedios for the Absent-Archive Syndrome), expresses in somewhat obscure, but telling language, the mission of these young artists and innovators. Using the language of contemporary art and social criticism, they are plumbing Tijuana’s collective memory to recover its overlooked history, and in the process, transform the identity of the border town by locating what is absent, or missing, in the city.

Our tour began at the international foot bridge, where the Turista Libre school bus waited to take us to the first stop, the Escuela Libre de Arquitectura (ELA) and Centro Ventures, for a look at how architects and developers are reimagining Tijuana’s living and work spaces.

 “We’re in the middle of the Red Light district,” joked ELA director Enrique Gonzalez Silva. The small school sits at the intersection of Avenida Revolucion and Coahilla, down the street from Hong Kong, Tijuana’s mega strip joint. “We’re in a place where we don’t belong and we’re going to change things.”

How is the school “free?” In the sense that it is unaffiliated with other state or private institutions, and free from the traditional approach to architectural training that emphasizes theory over practice.  Gonzalez Silva stressed that the students – current enrollment is about 29 – are encouraged to think outside the box as they work on real-world projects.

Upstairs from ELA, Miguel Marshall, CEO of the development firm Centro Ventures, also stressed a pragmatic and socially conscious approach to building. In place of gentrification, Marshall talked about “urbanization”; that is, taking the city’s uninhabited spaces and creating housing and mixed-use facilities that reflect the everyday, lived needs of the community. CV projects include Bordofarms, a produce garden for newly-returned migrants, and an apartment complex in Colonia Federal for Tijuanans who walk across the border to work in the U.S.

But the firm’s best efforts have not always paid off. Marshall described Centro Ventures’ frustration with a project that converted the abandoned Mexicoach station on Avenida Revolucion into a state-of-the-art work space for free-lancers, only to see the property owner tear it down within two years.

Leaving the ELA building, our group walked past the giant silver arch on Avenida Revolucion and continued south on the street, avoiding the wily merchants who read out our name tags and personally invited us into their shops. Just past Calle Tercera, we came to our next stop, Pasaje Revolucion, home of 206 Arte Contemporaneo and Galeria la Blastula.

Pasajes, covered passageways usually packed with restaurants, produce markets and souvenir shops, are a unique feature of the city. In fact, Pasaje Revolucion is located close to two others, Pasaje Gomez and Pasaje Rodriquez, that were key to bringing art and culture back to a street savaged by the drug-related violence that reached its peak in 2008. Unfortunately, Pasaje Gomez has fallen on hard times again, though Pasaje Rodriguez offers an impressive collection of wall murals, along with small galleries, used-book stores and Mamut, a micro-brewery. Because none of the festival events took place in either of these two pasajes, our tour had to pass them by.

206 Arte Contemparaneo, which opened in Pasaje Rodriguez in 2012, is run by two sisters, Monica and Melisa Arreola, both architects and prize-winning artists in their own right. After a demonstration of amazingly flexible book objects currently on display, Melisa Arreola described the gallery’s mission as a show place for Baja California’s emerging artists and as a training ground for young buyers learning the art of collection building. Again, those themes of absence and recovery surfaced in the Arreola sisters’ mission: creating opportunities for intellectual exchange amongst Tijuana’s artists and a financial base, via art collection, that the sisters say is missing in the city.

Down the hallway, we got a helping the city’s pop culture history with a display of Lucha Libre wrestling masks and other memorabilia at Galeria La Blastula.

Our group next headed for a snack and a bit of Tijuana culinary history. Who knew that the Caesar salad originated in the kitchen at Caesar’s, the tradition-heavy, family restaurant on Avenida Revolucion? After a demonstration of the right way to make a Caesar salad (lots of garlic, anchovy paste and olive oil!), we chatted over plates of fresh salad and cold mugs of beer, getting to know each other better.

So, who goes on a Turista Libre tour? From the U.S. side, our group included a nurse and a dental hygienist, a couple of artists and one museum administrator, and professional photographers like Kristin Bedford of Los Angeles and Scott Davis, coordinator of San Diego’s Medium Photography Festival, one of FIFFT’s co-sponsors.  On the Mexican side, Remedios artists Rebecca Goldschmidt and Mariel Miranda were joined by Daril Fortis and Diana Haro, a cultural producer and host of Fuckup San Diego, a venue where working professionals discuss their business failures.

And then there were folks like concert photographer Paty Torres and Sarah Alvarado-Zarda, who easily shifted from stories about growing up in Tijuana to offering high-level critiques of her efforts, as an artist, to excavate the city’s hidden memories.

Daril Fortis, a Tijuana-based critic and writer who curated the “Remedios” exhibit, is also focused on reclaiming the recent past. He spoke to me about his research for an exhibit exploring Tijuana’s Queer history, which includes an archive that begins in the 1970s and covers the impact of La SIDA (AIDS) on the city’s gay artist community. “It’s hard to build this archive because much of the records are hidden away,” Fortis explained.

Already a bit tour weary and heady from beer at Caesar’s, our group now found ourselves at Index Open Studio, another innovative work space catering to freelance professionals, located behind the Jai Lai stadium on Calle Octava. We took advantage of the sofas in the lounge to lounge or snag an espresso or Café Americano at Interval, Index’s coffee bar.

And finally, we boarded the bus for that fun ride on the Via Rapida Oriente to Centro Estatal de Las Artes Tijuana (CEART), a massive arts and cultural complex within sight of the giant statue of Christ in the nearby Los Alamos neighborhood. Once I realized how far we were from Centro, I thanked Turista Libre for the good fortune of skipping the drive in my car!

The “Remedios” exhibit, located in a small exhibition space at CEART, was modest in scale, but grand in ambition. Featuring video projections, family photo albums, assemblages and prints produced by artists living in Mexicali, Ensenada and Tijuana, the exhibit mined the material records of a culture to re-examine the nature of social relationships captured in personal and public images. According to Rebecca Goldschmidt, not all of the work directly related to Tijuana. Instead, the exhibit reflected a broad range of approaches to working in recovered archives within the border region
.

Talk about ambitious. Along with the exhibit itself, the festival includes lectures on photo and cultural criticism, photography workshops and artist discussions, all held at the various spaces that we visited on the tour. That’s a full month’s worth of programming coordinated by a team of five or six people.

“We didn’t have any financial support from anyone,” artist Mariel Miranda told me when I asked about funding for the festival. “Everyone is working as a volunteer and we begged and pleaded with businesses to find spaces for the venues, to get plane tickets, and to feed everyone. Other festivals this week have 6 and 7 million pesos to work with. We just had ourselves.”

Miranda, in fact, is one of the standouts in “Remedios.” Her striking photo-montages, joining people from distinct classes and social backgrounds into startling hybrid portraits, are the result of research into the private archives of two fotografos ambulantes, or strolling photographers, the men with Polaroid cameras who wandered the parks and public events, taking snapshots of people desiring a memory of the moment. With the advent of smart phones and digital cameras, the fotografo ambulante is a thing of the past.

“These weren’t anonymous subjects,” Miranda says of the people in her photo montages. “The photographers knew their neighbors, who they were photographing. So the images are documents of people in their social relations, presenting themselves at their best and revealing their public selves. And I’m interesting in gender issues as well, of the traditional roles of women and how they present themselves in public.”

From CEART, we sped through the glittering lights of cosmopolitan Tijuana to our last stop, La Caza Club, for a taste of contemporary Tijuana cuisine. If Caesar’s was the big eatery for an older generation, La Caza Club was their kind of place – slick and trendy, with food everyone raved about.

As we exchanged hugs and phone numbers at the border, I thought about Rebecca Goldschmidt’s call for dialogue. After spending a day talking non-stop with these artists, and listening to the architects and curators describe their commitment to recovering what is missing in the city, I couldn’t help but think of all of them as hip young change agents caught up in a historic moment as Tijuana transforms its identity before our eyes. I think they are helping to make it happen. That is quite remarkable. What a ride!

The photography festival runs through the end of October. Check the web site for details.

Turista Libre offers more tours this month: A Tijuana Brewery Hop and photo opportunities in the Cinco y Diez neighborhood, both on Saturday, October 17, with a tour of Valle de Guadeloupe wine country the following Saturday, October 24. In November, visit Tijuana’s main cemetery as the city prepares for the Day of the Dead. Go to the web site for tickets and more tour details. Note: Turista Libre uses PayPal for ticket purchases.

Back Home

 

OK, the fun's over. Back in the studio, writing first draft of my tour bus article. Hate first drafts, but love the rewriting process. To be continued ...

San Diego

I've only been gone 4 days, but it feels much longer than that. Intense couple days, speaking Spanish, feeling my way around a world that was not absolutely alien, but demanding in its own ways.

Didn't go to CECUT & entijuanarte on Sunday as I had planned because I was exhausted. We had heavy rains overnight & throughout the day, & I was a little sleep deprived ... Avenida Revolucion on a Saturday night is disco hell ... sat in a coffee shop, writing up my notes when the guy sitting across from me sat down at my table & said, "I've been watching you. Tell me, how do you write? Can you teach me to write?" He was an engineering student from Saudi Arabia, living near Palm Springs, struggling with writing in English & we proceeded to have a fun, all-over-the-map conversation about Tijuana, Middle Eastern history, Arabic. I had a second cup of coffee & suddenly felt like I had poisoned myself with caffeine ... later, I stopped at Tijuana Tilley's, an old restaurant & ate too much & now I was miserable ... I checked out of the Villagran & got myself to Rosarito, to discover no one home on Calle Higo & no electricity ... talked with the neighbors, got some cold drinks & a flashlight & settled down, to write a little more, play the ukulele & turn in early ...

Today, wandered all over Playa de Tijuana in the rain, at one point negotiating my way through a street market, all the time trying to find Antonio Escalante's house ... I kept saying to myself, maintain your spirit of adventure ... finally, got some good direction's from Juan, Antonio's partner, & there we were, after a month's worth of emails, finally talking face-to-face. In 2010, Antonio, working with a loose team of artist-collaborators, helped revive Pasaje Rodriguez & conducted the artists' call that brought muralists in to fill the old market corridor with wonderful murals ... the murals, in fact, got me going on a research binge on the role the two pasajes, Gomez & Rodriguez, played in the revitalization of Tijuana via art & culture ... Antonio's story was too involved to get into here, but essentially he described the classic conflict between artists & property owners, & differences of opinions over art between an older generation of artists & younger artists, & an indifference towards art in the general public ... he was philosophical about the current situation in the pasaje:  while the murals remain, all of the first wave of galleries are gone, replaced by very small venues for young artists & lots of used - book stores ... "We had our movement & now other people are doing what they believe in. It's a different generation."

I gave Juan a ride across the border, good company as we inched our way towards the custom booths ... he had even more stories about the ups & downs in the pasajes ... I dropped him off where he could catch a bus to LA & I got myself back to Ocean Beach ... sitting on my cot, finishing this up & heading for bed ... what an adventure - my first solo jaunt to Tijuana. More to come!

Tijuana

How many festivals can one city have this weekend? Besides the two I'm dropping in on, there's an October festival, a theater festival & I think I heard about something else. Wow, Tijuana, where you get your energy?

The First Annual International Festival of Photography Tijuana is an enormously ambitious undertaking, pulled together by a handful of artists who are engaged in a rigorous examination of the culture they live in and desperately want to understand & transform.

The Turista Libre bus tour was such a wonderful, inspiring opportunity to dialogue with the artists & cultural promoters who are rethinking the everyday foundations of their lives here. Revolutionary comes to mind & fun!

My phone is almost out of juice. For the complete version of this story, read my article in the San Diego Free Press Web site. But wait until I write it first. ¡Adelante!

In Tijuana/Rosarito

Walked around town like a wired zombie. Couldn't sleep for anything last night, decided to spend tonight at our old apartment in Rosarito, where there is an autumn chill in the air & a few hundred less cabs & busses & motorcycles racing in the streets.

A real find. The TJ in China Project Space, a nice whitewall gallery competing for slickness with its much more commercial neighbors. The project, started by Tijuana artists Mely Barragan & Daniel Ruanova, puts the city's artists into an international context by exhibiting them with Chinese & other artists in a Beijing space hosted by Ai Weiwei.

As artist & TJ in China collective member Talia Perez explained to me, they are  following a "Glocal" model, thinking globally on a local scale.

The current show in the Avenida Revolucion space is heavy on conceptual art strategies, applying the methods of science & surveillance technology to a transformational reading of cinema and robotics. For instance, Monterey - based artist Ernesto Walker randomly sets a minature robot on a Mars Voyager-like trek about the space via remote control. A very fun & mystifying exhibit, the best I've seen since I got here.

I first came across Tijuana art through projects launched in the eighties, a kind of confrontational conceptualism that set out to show Californians just how Mexican their roots are. Talia Perez agreed that you don't see a lot of that kind of art in Tijuana, mostly because younger artists have little sense of recent art history. She pointed out that galleries like 206 Arte Contemporaneo & Blastula are trying to raise the level of discourse by holding talks & workshops on art history & criticism.

Heading back to TJ tomorrow for Turista Libre's bus tour of sites participating in the First International Photography Festival Tijuana. Should be fun. I should be well-rested.

In Tijuana

In my room, Hotel Villagran, on Calle Tercera, connected to Pasaje Gomez. A day with its up & downs.

Ups: Got across the border& found my hotel easily (thank you, Google Maps!). Likewise, got to Playas & back via surface streets.

Downs: Bad Internet connection, didn't see that Antonio Escalante wasn't going to be in Playas! Have to reschedule our talk.

But getting in lots of conversation, Spanish & English, with folks at parking lots, shop keepers, the hotel staff, & with Gato Omar at Gypsy Cats & with Stu, of Voodu Stu, the New Orleans-inflected restaurant in Pasaje Rodrguez, where I ate tonight. Heard interesting things about the ups & downs of the emerging art scene here.

Manana in la manana, heading to Rosarito to see Aldy & Heri, the folks who rented to us this summer. Great, hard working big hearted couple. Mas manana.

Photo captions go here: El Faro, the lighthouse, in front of the Playas bull ring & the U.S. border fence.

Traffic tonight on Calle Tercera, 3rd Street.