Wharehouse

“It is not a very fragrant world, but it is the world you live in, and certain writers with tough minds and a cool spirit of detachment can make very interesting and even amusing patterns out of it. It is not funny that a man should be killed, but it is sometimes funny that he should be killed for so little, and that his death should be the coin of what we call civilization. All this still is not quite enough.”

Raymond Chandler, The Simple Art of Murder

“You may think you know what you’re dealing with, but believe me, you don’t.” Noah Cross to J.J. Gittes

Chinatown, where secrets go to live. What ring of hell would Dante have use to described this labyrinthine neighborhood of duplicity? The dark underbelly piled up with pasts too numerous to remember, too horrible to forget. A fact all too familiar for private detective Jake Gittes (Jack Nicholson), a one-time Los Angeles cop and seemingly the only honest man in town who has worked the beat in Chinatown before and has come full circle to see firsthand how quickly blood seeps into these infernal streets.

What makes Chinatown, a gritty film noir portrayal of corrupt L.A. politics in the 30s, Roman Polanski’s (Rosemary’s Baby, The Pianist) masterpiece is not merely Nicholson’s deft acting, nor Robert Towne’s (The Yakuza, Ask The Dust) Chandlerian script, nor even the instantly absorbing mise-en-scene and camerawork by John A. Alonzo. Nothing so tangible can be identified to explain its ability to exceed the clichéd conventions of the detective genre, yet it’s the small attention to details, like Gittes’ off-putting nose bandage, Jerry Goldsmith’s hauntingly sparse score (written in 10 days) and the haunting phrase which the movie ends on, “Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown,” which give the film its transcendent power.

Robert Towne had originally planned a trilogy with J.J. Gittes serving as the narrator, or conscious, on the murky foundations of Los Angeles (Chinatown – Water, The Two Jakes – Oil, and Cloverleaf – Freeways), but may have abandoned the idea with the relative lack of success of the Nicholson-directed Jakes. An incredibly ambitious idea which peaked with Chinatown’s hyperbolic depiction of the California Water Wars of the 10s and 20s. Instead of co-opting a characterization of the real life William Mulholland, he split the turn of the century head of the Los Angeles Department of Water & Power into two characters, the “good” Hollis Mulwray (murdered husband of Faye Dunaway’s Evelyn) and the “bad” Noah Cross. Eventually resulting in the proverbial dam breaking loose, and the waters flowing from the north, destroying all in their path, flooding into the south, the “bad” Mulholland (Cross representing greed) prevailing over the “good” Mulholland (Mulwray representing innocence) with Gittes (possibly a metaphor for the rest of us?) left to look on powerlessly.

What subtly emerges through the film is not so much the constant deceptions Gittes has to muddle through (Evelyn Mulwray’s rather big secret for one) to find the truth, nor the fact that the majority of the movie has little to do with Chinatown as a physical place as opposed to metaphysical construct, and not even the relative little importance Hollis Mulwray’s corpse represents (it is merely a vehicle for the deluge), but rather the softly persistent ideas of memory and loss. When it comes to women the best medicine might be the whiskey J.J. Gittes consistently slugs down, but to help the forgetting process or to aid in it we don’t know. Gittes’ inability to take his own advice given to a client, “Have you ever heard the expression ‘Let sleeping dogs lie?’ Sometimes you’re better off not knowing…” comes back to haunt him, as it had before and, most likely, as it will again.

June 8th, 2008 | Tags: California Water Wars, Film Review, Los Angeles, Raymond Chandler, Robert Towne, Roman Polanski, The Simple Art of Murder, Whiskey | Category: Film | Leave a comment

We are a culture of collectively useless maps.

Temporary tracings of lead-lined roads destined for incomplete blurbs in fractured future histories.

The End Is Always Nigh.

A permanent thrust.

An endless surge.

A future replete with the repeated follies of past failures.

A perpetual one-night stand.

I think about making lists, lists like the above, but I do not make them. I have a million of them, ready to pen at a moments notice, in sequential order no less, should I find a free leaf of paper and a pen I trust.

I suppose I am intimidated by notebooks, piled and priced so attractively in stores worldwide, so naked and inviting, so full of potential. So much so it mocks my own, I have to avoid the thought of forests themselves. Trees mock me.

So I turn to women. Their skin my scroll, my nails, my eyes, my breath. The ink, my member. The implement of my only truth, scribing toward a sum greater than mere physical bodies tumbling in the halflight of the visible spectrum. Somehow further than the flimsy synapse lapse of post-coital glow. The writing on the wall, or the sheet, as it were.

May 23rd, 2008 | Tags: Mapping / Listing, Sex, Sugardisaster | Category: Sueños | Comments (2)

Tokyo is concrete, electric, sublime, frenetically interconnected in ways neural synapses are jealous of. Though after a while of prowling the backalleys and neon-lit boulevards, the tiny 5-seat bars and the swanky Roppongi clubs, the Ginza haute couture, the Harajuku freak show cosplay and the Kabukicho sexshops you slowly start to realize there is a disease running rampant as a misguided synapse, a freak malignancy most people have that they live with in silent submission, or maybe it’s remission – the look-busy-while-not-actually-doing-all-that-much-disease called isogi-byo.

Though I do realize this sickness could be an epidemic in the making in every major metropolis, what I see before me everytime I forget where I am when I awaken is a rapidly aging country of 125 million conformists with particularly bad strain of the virus who have lost their bliss. That or never followed it in the first place. The disease is spreadable by coming in contact with too many hungover salarymen, commuting via the vast network of sardine-can packed trains and subways, everyone hypnotized by their supercharged mobile phones (keitai-byo) and/or the latest ipod, where smug perverts (chikan) feel up Louis Vuitton ensconced women or are accused of such and won’t doing anything about it, working 3 parttime jobs (baito-byo), milling about in coffee shops between jobs, snapping photos of people who I think I’ll never see again, yet constantly do, tumbling around Shibuya with the rich teenagers and buying beers and Chinese Tangerines for the bums laid up against Gap and Banana Republic, and then comes the rain, trying to wash all the Tsukiji fish guts down the drain, the Kabukicho multitudes of shy, unmarried men (hazukashi-byo) pouring out of sexshops open for business right behind Police stations and City Hall, where the public servants go to get serviced, the Asian version of the greasy spoon boasting whale sashimi, horse sashimi, what could be dolphin skin soup with grated garlic and ginger, empty Suntory and Black Nikka premier whiskey bottles lining alleyways you’ll never know, but from which you smell egg breakfasts at 6 in the morning at people’s shoebox apartments who are somehow familiar, you’ve seen them in a dream, you’ve known them in a past life, at some level somehow there’s a shared camaraderie, slowly watching the price of tuna rise above the price of gas and saying fuck it, ordering some anyway, eating it with disposable chopsticks (waribashi-byo) made from yet another clearcut forest in Southeast Asia which adds to the flooding of 1/3rd of Bangladesh, and overall getting blinded by the morning sun finally overcoming the rainy season clouds and 60s era neon so all this blurs together into a kind of silent beautiful despair. Rife with the gooey, sexy, glossy stuff, Tokyo is an addiction. We’re all mainlining.

Loudspeakers and bullhorns, explosions and genocides, ladybugs and dragonflies, breezes and whispers, mikan & cherry blossoms, soba and grated shoga, chrysanthemum sushi and ochazuke, bamboo and mini maple leaves…all these things intermingle whenever I think you might be slowly stretching out another one of your beautiful days into the coming spring nights warmer and warmer all the time. It’s nice knowing that regardless of voicemail and other illicit rambles lost in the ether and the inevitable email address shuffle, that you are in the world breathing beautiful light into people’s lives.

January 7th, 2008 | Tags: Cosplay, Harajuku, Japan, Kabukicho, Roppongi, Shibuya, Toky, Waribashi, Whiskey | Category: Photographic, Sueños | Comments (1)

Jack Bauer can do it with his eyes closed, TC from Magnum P.I. makes it look easy, Murdock on The A-Team was supposedly insane and he could do it, yet flying a helicopter is anything but easy. Once you get up there, over all the little two-legged ants running around their infernal mazes in gas-guzzling SUVs, you realize that you have the potential to project yourself faster -in any direction- than you’ve ever gone. You, in a 4-cylinder rotor-driven machine with no doors that doesn’t actually want to fly. No, all it wants to do is to spin like a top and explode on something. It’s quite something to go up in one as a passenger and hang out the side snapping photos from 500-1000 feet up. Yet it’s quite another to do it with the childhood friend you used to cut classes with to go guzzle bottles of tequila while parked in a big brown stalker van, who intermittently breaks into NWA lyrics flying over Compton and wonders aloud if the seatbelts will hold (while making hard right turns over power lines, vats of chemicals and the 405 freeway).

[singlepic id=219 w=320 h=240 float=left]Meet Matt, gentleman, scholar of life, helicopter pilot, born two years 1 day after yours truly. During my last trip to the the west coast he was generous, wily and resolved enough to get the two of us up in the air in the two-seat Robinson R22, usually hovering at around 500 feet, over Long Beach, the RMS Queen Mary (the white dome situated next to which was the onetime home of Howard Hughes’ Spruce Goose), landing us in an airstrip in Compton, and finally circling the skyscrapers of downtown Los Angeles at an altitude of well over 1000 feet.

Rising up from Long Beach Harbor, where the moist ocean air meets the dry desert wind it’s hard to tell if it’s smog or low-lying cloud cover you’re flying out of as the rush overtakes you. Suddenly you can see the whole picture, you can take in the whole view. You can see the true desert sprawl of Los Angeles county, ranging from the watering post port of Long Beach (the world’s largest), the rusted wagon wheel that are the oil derricks and processing plants of Long Beach, the flat cellblock architecture of ghostown Compton, the recent development of subdivision communities in what used to be orange groves, the old railyards and storage facilities rotting like a wasteland of metal and dust, over the merciless postwar housing boom, the showdown on main street of the Wilshire Corridor and there you are, approaching the hills to the north, there is the oasis of downtown shimmering in the heat.

Truth is, once taken in from the sky at 100 mph, these seemingly fragmented and disparate wastelands coalesce into a kind of monument to human adaptability. Of stamina and the will to overcome the elements. Hemmed in to the north by the forested hills, the east by the Mojave and the west by the Pacific, LA has always attracted the best and the wost of all things: weather, natural disasters, riots, sports teams, etc. Now long since established, the trick will be not to merely overcome the elements (mudslides, wildfires, smog) as the next generation of Angelenos awakens to this desert bloom of a city’s socio-political, environmental and economic problems, but rather to harmonize this area the Spanish first named, “Bahia de los Fumos” (Smoke Bay) as far back as the 16th century, for the next 500 years.

Thanks for the perspective Matt.

June 1st, 2007 | Tags: Chopper, Downtown L.A., Helicopter, Howard Hughes, Long Beach, Los Angeles, RMS Queen Mary, Robinson R22, Spruce Goose | Category: Photographic, Viajero | Leave a comment

A response to Open Letter To The Perfect Drunk

Pros:

*Cool, Basic Water.
*You realize you didn’t steal a car at 4am to make sure you have coffee in the morning.
*Finding a mysterious half-full bottle of Absolut chilling in the freezer.
*Belle & Sebastian
*Realizing you do have enough Coffee for the cure (and a blender to grind it).
*Knowing the boon of waking up to a successfully plugged in and charged mobile.
*No one, especially not the cops, wants to have anything to do with you this Monday (or at least they can’t find you).
*Being surprised so easily and often is, like the Love Boat, exciting and new.
*Leftover Pizza.

Cons:

*Waking up to the slow realization that Beergoggles can be converted to work with Gin (Geer-goggles).
*In one of your many hyper-surreal daydreams, you relive the regret of saying all those idiotic things about that not-as-attractive-as-you’ve-hoped girl’s tattoo (of a Nirvana lyric…C’mon).
*Not knowing if it was a dream, a movie or really you flashing your high beams and gunning the engine in a “borrowed” car at the bored Yakuza Sergeant in the tinted Lexus.
*Waking up with fingernail goop/gunk/gis not unlike that of a cadaver in an coroner’s autopsy report. “Victim showed signs of a struggle…”
*Mosquito bites.
*Wondering where all these damn tomatoes came from.

May 28th, 2007 | Tags: Coffee, Geer-goggles, Hangover, Pizza!, The Perfect Drunk, Whiskey | Category: Booze | Leave a comment

Dear PD,

I have found you. At long last I have glimpsed, nay- known you beyond your usual flirtatious ways. You, Perfect Drunk you, you playful bitch, you got sauced last night and I had my way with you. And you liked it. Ha HA (Me standing with manly flowing cape and leather accoutrements on cliffs overlooking the sea beneath a daunting sky laughing haughtily)!

No really, I liked it too. Actually, Perfect Drunk, I just wanted to say thanks. Thanks for last night. Thanks for finally showing up. Thanks for finally giving me what has eluded me all these years. And when I least expected it. Who knew Masa would call me up out of the clear blue sky telling me he needed a fourth to pair up evenly with some ladies he had arranged an impromptu dinner with not four hours hence? How could one know that my vocal cords, in conjunction with my lungs, mouth and voice would completely lock my brain out of this one? In a revolt the impact of which will remain largely debatable for years, the Coup d’Etat of my Major Organ by an unlikely triumverate could shake the very bodily foundations we’ve come to live by. That and answering in startingly good Japanese- Japanese that’s just a little too good, a little beyond our range, you know- but Masa didn’t blink (as we were on the phone I’m not sure about that). He did quickly applaud the choice of my rebelling organs- basically telling Mr. Brain to F-off- and had me to meet him in typical Tokyo fashion: at the statue of the dog. Weird. Intriguing. If there’s a chance of meeting you there, of course I’m in PD.

An aside: My grandfather always preached the gospel of you, Perfect Drunk. “It’s like a good Bloody Mary,” he’d always go on about after one or two of his own Vodka Tonics, “a little spicy, tart, there’s the crunch of the celery and you know the Vodka’s there, but no one ever got really tight on one, just comfortable…and…” he would add shaking his finger, “still in control, mostly anyway.”

PD, let me tell you: This is how I try to drink. With you in mind, but always trying to be a good grandson. I try to heed words of wisdom, but all too often the all-powerful desire to just “have another” (which I attribute- along with my stomach’s amazing ability to digest anything- to being a rare mix of Scottish/Cherokee) takes over after the glass before you mysteriously empties itself. Over and over again. It’s tough to measure whether or not you are exceeding your target consumption rate of one drink per hour when you mix shochu with water over ice and you wear no timepiece. You trickster you.

Especially this being Japan. In search of you, the Japanese consume the most spirits in the world. Hands down # 1. Sorry Russians (keep slogging down the antifreeze). Although the Koreans and their small green bottles of Soju are catching up, the Japanese by far outdrink all of their Asian neighbors, as well as the rest of the world (yes, even the Germans), despite their genetically unfavorable disposition toward alcohol in general, due to a lack of acetaldehyde dehydrogenase type I (ALDH-I) which causes extreme facial and cardiovascular reactions, headaches, nausea, and the infamous tie-on-the-head-at-karaoke, etc.

The simple facts remain that alcohol consumption has quadrupled in Japan since the 1960s. There has never been a prohibition. There is nothing amoral about drinking. It is the social lubricant par excellence and is basically how the generally über-shy Japanese men still manage (though barely) to populate the country. Truth is alcohol is not even considered a drug here. Hence the lack of regulations on drinking, such as the ability to purchase alcohol 24 hours a day, no laws prohibiting public consumption (even as a passenger in a car), the rare D.U.I. checkpoint featuring police asking you to breath into their cupped hand which they then smell and base their decision to allow you to continue or apprehend you, and of course the famous beer/sake vending machines (though sadly these are fading away). Though the majority of the natives don’t fastidiously take advantage of the aforementioned “loopholes”, many of the expatriots residing here do. The Japanese are pretty staid about their drinking until it comes time to drink: (unless you’re the Finance Minister) after work.

Or as a part of work. Without the after-six salaryman crowd out sousing up prospective clients, the well-maintained independent drinking/eating establishments that still thrive here (franchises have not made very much headway at all) would for the most part be bankrupt. It is a part of national duty to drink one for the team. In order to keep the economy running (from the DTs) and business breathing (hard and heavy from Cirrhosis), everyone drinks excessively to let off stress, which in turns more than likely multiplies stress. Add the popular possibility of nomihodai (all-you-can-drink) and if you are an up-and-coming young salaryman, you are out at the bars every night of the week. As demonstrated by Masa last night, “I’m so bad drunk, Manny-san, but one more! YES!” All in pursuit of you PD!

But I digress. Only becasue I can handle it. Because the combination of beer, shochu, water, sashimi, tofu (when I ordered edamame they called me “quaint…like a country person”, when I ordered shishamo (pregnant River Smelt) they pretended not to hear), spinach salad, deep fried Sea Bream (the head was amazing!) all slowly consumed in small proportions over three hours added up to you Perfect Drunk. You know how you are: not too wobbly, not too weary, though quite upbeat and charming. And of course you lead to great ability at speaking that dapper, witty brand of Japanese the four JAL stewardesses (ranging from cute and sweet to dropdead, “Ring for another bag of honey-roasted peanuts, Manny! Hurry!” gorgeous) just love. Did I thank you yet, Perfect Drunk?

In the end, we parted ways after collectively having finished a bottle of Satsuma-Imo (Sweet Potato) Shochu, I had been challenged to and won three arm wrestling duels (ambidextrously no less) and the young lady seated facing me, who had been playing a drunken footsie with me for two hours, asked me for my phone number. I don’t know when the last time someone played footsie with me and asked for my phone number. Here’s me waiting- excitedly like a small girl in a dress and pigtails to hear the ice cream man- for her call.

PD, even missing the train and walking the 30 minutes home (amidst a silvery drizzle of rain) sort of considering stalking all the ladies’ legs beckoning to me in the gentle midnight cool to drift almost instantaneously into R.E.M. where I dream of a desert oasis housing a carnival on the banks of a beautiful and ancient river. I find myself amidst an oddly large amount of British people where we play with shotguns and use paint in strange and ritualistic ways. I wake up laughing several times. At one point a robed Jesus walks through holding a plate and comments, “The hummus is good today.” I wake up when the saran wrap I’m trying to rescue a family of Alaskan Huskies from washing away down the river with snaps and I dive in after them. No alarm, no nothing.

You snazzy minx you, Perfect Drunk, you segue into the Perfect Hangover. You’re not a Yanni hangover: nauseous, headachy and semi-retarded, but more akin to a Gershwin hangover: jaunty and fun, a bit slow in places, but able to pull off the whole day admirably (even without coffee).

Here’s to you PD, you fickle bitch goddess. See you at the vending machine…

Love,

Manny

May 27th, 2007 | Tags: Bloody Marys, Gramps, Jesus, Open Letter to The Perfect Drunk, Stewardesses, The Perfect Drunk, Whiskey, Whiskey & Women | Category: Booze | Comments (4)

Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

I’ve expected it for years. Never wanted to add his name to my Dead Pool entry sheet for disrespect (though I suspect he’d've found it funny). Never could believe that somewhere (and from my own home country no less) the man who wrote Slaughterhouse Five, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, Bluebeard and, among others, my personal favorite -Timequake was breathing the same air as I was, deleterious as it was.

For a while Kilgore Trout figured as sort of an antihero of mine, a would be picaresque version of me at 70 and what I should be striving to become daily. But, better left to Vonnegut, his Trout caricature is best left to fiction, for despite the beauty in his heart, to live life as Trout was imagined to have would make even the late great author shudder at the thought. I gave that up years ago. I’m still trying to be an unrecognized writer of satirical science fiction though, in case you were interested.

I am writing this (belatedly) to say, I really have nothing to say on the passing of one of America’s greatest authors, which is why I guess I am so late in saying it. I had to make sure. Despite the flu, I feel fine. Despite the air, I breathe on.

And so it goes.

April 19th, 2007 | Tags: Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Timequake | Category: Books | Leave a comment

The Hero

Departure – Call to Adventure

A point in a person’s life when they become aware that life is going to change.

Refusal
Often when the call is given it is refused – due to a sense of duty, obligation, fear, insecurity, … .

Supernatural Aid
Once committed to the quest the hero’’s guides (magical helper) appear to assist.

Crossing the Threshold
The actual crossing into the field of adventure, leaving the known and venturing into an unknown.

Belly of the Whale
The final separation between the old world/self and the new. This is the point of transition – a metamorphosis.

Initiation
The traveler experiences trials, tests, tasks and ordeals that begins his/her transformation.

Meeting with the Goddess
Here love that has power and significance, unconditional is experienced. It is the union of opposites – the experiencing of a non-dualistic reality.

The Temptation
Distractions that may lead the hero to abandon the quest – a metaphor for the physical/material diversions of life.

Atonement
Here the person must confront and be initiated by whatever holds the ultimate power in his or her life, (the center point of the journey). – For the transformation to take place, the old identity must be left behind so that the new self can come into being.

Apotheosis
To move beyond duality to a state of divine knowledge, compassion, bliss and fulfillment.

Ultimate Boon
Achieving the quest – all the previous steps served to prepare for this step.

Return
Returning back to normal life with all its concerns; yet retaining the wisdom gained on the quest and shares that wisdom, (usually difficult).

Mastery
The hero/heroin achieves a balance between the material and spiritual. The person has become comfortable and competent in both their inner and outer worlds.

Freedom
Mastery leads to freedom from the fear of death, which in turn is the freedom to live – the journey is complete.

from Joseph Campbell

January 26th, 2007 | Tags: Joseph Campbell, The Hero With 1000 Faces, The Hero's Journey | Category: Life & Death | Comments (1)

Soñando de Mexico

Last night I was having sex. In my dream. With a giant roasted chile. Somewhere in the Mexican desert. Yes, of course, it was hot. Sandy. Spicy too. And when it got too hot to stand, it began to rain horchata. Nothing like beautiful, soothing, delicious, ice-chilled and cinnamon-spiced rice milk rain to snap you back into reality: that being 3-freezing-A.M. in the Japanese morning, no taco stands in sight, and the frightening realization my pillow is not only not a roasted pepper (nor, alas, a woman…sigh), but only – you got it – a pillow.

Sigh.

Rolling over, a thunderstorm of memories collapsed upon me: onions, garlic, chiles, avocados, tortillas, salsa, horchata, cerveza, Santa Barbara, Milpas, La Casa del Greco, the avocado tree in back, trading Jose avocados for bagels from Jack’s, La Tolteca, Three Bohemia lunches at La Super Rica, Tacos de Rajas – roasted Pasilla chiles sauteed with onion and garlic, topped with Crema Mexicana, chile verde and cilantro on fresh, handmade corn tortillas, the perpetual line around the corner, Sofia & D all sunglassed up in the glinting warm sun, beers and smiles at the salsa-stained, white plastic table…

The short version of the story is summed up by saying that La Super Rica is the best Mexican restaurant in Santa Barbara. The long version begins in the spring of 1995 when, after almost a year of living in Isla Vista whilst attending UCSB, my cousins invited me to meet them at La Tolteca during a trip up from San Diego. Downtown Santa Barbara being yet a mystery to me, I got lost on the 20 minute jaunt south from Isla Vista. When I finally found it I joined my cousin, her husband and his sister at their table outside the small tortilleria and checked out the menu. After introducing me to P, the sister, it went something like this:

“You haven’t been here, have you? We should’ve taken you to La Super Rica first, but we’ve already had that for lunch and dinner yesterday and we’ll probably go there tonight, so no worries, you’ll come with us tonight, yeah?”

“Umm, yeah.” I went inside to order my burrito and a Tecate. Just having matriculated into the photography portion of the Art Studio department I couldn’t help but notice shots of what appeared to be wartime Japan lining the walls. What appeared to be the iconic shot of the marines raising the flag atop Mt. Suribachi on Iwo Jima by Joe Rosenthal, caught my attention. I had seen reprints of the photograph what seemed like a thousand times, but never a framed print. This one was cropped differently or taken from another angle. There was something odd about it.

Handing me my change, the woman behind the register pointed at the photos, “My husband took all of these. He was a photographer in the war. He took that one too, but the military didn’t like Mexicans then, so they gave credit to that other guy. No one believes that story, but it’s true.”

I wandered outside, dazed and wondering how history could get so skewed. Maybe she was telling the truth, maybe not, regardless, she believed what she had said, as doubtless did her husband and entire family, beyond which maybe a few friends and patrons had heard anything about it at all. I said nothing to my cousin. Daydreaming about what it must have been like to have been a photographer, let alone a Mexican one, in Japan during WWII, I sucked on my beer until my food came.

Greasy, overly-creamed and fat American-friendly Mexican fare isn’t what I’ll remember about La Tolteca. Unmemorable as that meal was, more than that photograph is burned in my retinas, but also the way the sun blinded us off our beer bottles as we sat chatting, the breezy shifting shadows of palm fronds falling at improbable angles, ants attacking dollops of salsa fallen upon the uneven sidewalk, and most of all the wife’s big brown eyes. The woman’s eyes, glazed with anger, telling the true history of her and her husband’s story in her breath, her movements, the pauses of her words.

Having lived mere blocks from La Tolteca, I chanced to walk past the storefront a hundred times after that, but never felt the need to go in again. My place became La Super Rica, memorable for good cheap food and cold bottles of beer. Great for providing fodder for future dreams.

January 15th, 2007 | Tags: Eat Me Drink Me, Iwo Jima, Joe Rosenthal, La Super Rica, Mexican Food, Sex with a Roasted Chile, Soñando de México | Category: Sueños | Comments (3)