lee curtiss

Also, I continue to be stoked about this…

Según yo, Detroit siempre está bienvenido al DF. Lee Curtiss @ Pasaje América el 19 de junio.

Postópolis!DF

Yeah! I am stoked about Postópolis!DF, a conference on urbanization scheduled for next week in DF.

It’s being put together by a group of bloggers, including my favorite DJ ever, dj/rupture. It is going to be held at this awesome art space, El Eco, that I just discovered a couple of weeks ago while seeking shelter during a rainstorm that passed over el Jardín del Arte on Sullivan, near Paseo de la Reforma.

To make matters even more dope, it looks like Rupture is dj’ing the wee hours of Sunday morning at Salón Calavera.

Here’s the Postópolis facebook event for those of you who maintain your social calendars that way.

mexican DUI, friend in jail

So… I got to hang out in a Mexico City police station last night. My friend got arrested for failing a checkpoint breathalyzer. As far as I know he’s still in jail [update: they let him out at 2pm the next day]. I had to leave to work, but his girlfriend was there with him.

The station was Tlatelolco, by Tepito and la Plaza de las Tres Culturas. Kinda shabby, but they had snacks. There were a lot of people in our situation so actually kind of a fun crowd. We chastized the cops for not telling us they were going on a coffee/donut run.

An option of paying to go home was presented to us initially (500 pesos), although I think it was a multa not a mordida, but we didn’t have enough cash and they wouldn’t let us go to an ATM. In theory I would have resisted offering a mordida, but given the fine my friend faces (4000 pesos) and the fact that he’s, yeah, probably still in jail, I am not so sure… Anyway after he sopló (blew) and we incredulously asked if there wasn’t “something” we could do, they told us we were out of options as the breathalyzer result couldn’t be un-recorded.

Just so y’all know, the legal limit here is 0.04, as opposed to 0.08 in most US states. I tried this argument on the police officers, no dice. They later let me drive my friend’s car, after laughing at my gringa driver’s license.

My friend blew a 0.078.

[update 2: my friend’s 4000-peso fine was dropped, after his uncle paid a lawyer 1500. my head is swimming now as i struggle to recall the differences between paying a cop to let you off and paying a lawyer.]

salsa de gallo… o sea, ¿tiburón?

After my magical bus ride to Naucalpan today ended, I was spat back out in Polanco, where I stopped off in the (Wal-mart owned) Superama.

Where I bought this. Notice anything different about the bottle? Why, that’s not a rooster– ¡that’s a tiburón!

And what’s more…

HECHO EN MEXICO. 30 pesos, bitches, compared to 80 for the Thai stuff.

P.S. The term for knock-off or bootleg brands here is “marca patito,” “little duck brand.”

turbo sonidero futuristico

Wow, so this is pretty cool. Turbo Sonidero Futuristico, this guy from San Jose and Puebla, does cumbia in kind of a chopped and screwed style though I doubt cough syrrrp has anything to do with this whatsoever. Maybe consider a sort of Freescha/Tobacco vibe? But definitely it’s own thang.

magic bus ride to naucalpan hoy

Reason number 4 jillion why I love México is that dudes are real smooth here.

Fíjate en ésta, una nota que me pasó un güey cute en el pesero hoy, mientras él estaba bajando. Waaah… he had been reading some kind of academic stuff, semantics or something.

Just to quell any questions, it is extremely unlikely I will ever see this dude again (and considering my social dimness, even less likely that I would recognize him). The bus was heading to Satelite and dude got off somewhere between Defensa and the Estado de México state line. Which makes it all the smoother that he gave me this note as he was getting off the bus.

For those of you with impaired Spanish, the note says, roughly, “What lovely eyes… that you should have a day so [lovely].”

Not to beat a dead horse– I’ll be adding this to my collection of trinkets and whimsical experiences from random dudes— but the magic of all this is I am pretty sure they just do it because it’s fun. It obviously makes my day, and I think that’s genuinely a pleasure for them.

Also, on this same bus ride, I bought some camotes from an ambulante, a guy who boarded momentarily just to hock them. I was the only one, although there were only about eight other people on board. Then a couple minutes later another guy got on selling alegrías and palanquetas, and three people rushed to buy them (including dude). What I’m saying is, I think I started a meme. At any rate it was lunchtime, so peops were prolly hungry… I know I was.

The camotes were pretty good.

Also this frail old doctor sat next to me and the bus driver slammed on the breaks causing me to nearly crush him.

Then I went to the Naucalpan Wal-Mart for an AV cable, some superglue, coathangers, and an LCD cleaning kit. Mwah ha haaa…

putos impuestos

man, i am obsessed with taxes recently, sorry.

just wanted to note the horrified/sympathetic expression on my accountant’s face when she realized i can’t claim my rent, aka 75% of my claimable expenses, as an expense (bc subletting).

riesgos comp

Mextape by 8106.tv with Reactor 105.7 FM. I like the Quiero Club and Los Amparito tracks.

Checkin out the Patomachete session on the station’s main page right now, too. Also good.

tropicaza

Here we go. Jae-Young, a friend of mine from the community radio station I worked at in Richmond, pointed Tropicaza out to me. A DF deejay doing vintage psych stuff. I love this mix and definitely want to check him out some night soon.

His stuff really goes with the show Jae-Young is involved with on the radio station, WRIR, Mellow Madness, if you want to hear more like it.

language architecture

Man, everyone’s obsessed with Hemingway. I think I really started noticing after I had a really vivid dream about him, induced by anti-malarial drugs. I dreamed he was still alive, had faked his own death and was hanging in Boquete, Panama. I believed the dream was real for like 3 hours after I woke up. That may have awakened me more to Hemingway in general.

Anyway. I guess I say “obsessed” because a lot of people at my old job (The Martin Agency) seemed really into him. For a lot of internal communication, people in the agency were adopting this weird, very controlled, curt-but-gentle voice that I suspected was supposed to be emulating him. It bugged the crap out of me. Crispin Porter + Bogusky does it too. Like some queen gliding around the court making the subjects aware of her benevolence.

Hemingway was too good of a writer to sound like that though. The point is you don’t notice how he sounds, just what he is saying.

Besides my malaria dream, I guess I have been thinking about him a lot because of speaking my second language all the time. When your vocabulary is smaller than your ideas, you have to come up with creative ways to communicate using simpler words. And not just that, you also have to come up with creative ways to structure your ideas so that they complement each other and highlight what you want to highlight. You start talking in stories.

This is also related to teaching. I believe I have mentioned that before, but here’s another good example: Stephen Hawking wrote an article about a time machine for the Daily Mail. Do you know how dumb the Daily Mail is? Total tabloid, but obviously Hawking is cool with that.

I finished reading his article in a really good mood, not just because it made me think about the fourth dimension, but also because of how Hawking makes the mechanics of time travel really clear and simple. I’m glad his intelligence includes the ability to explain things well.