{"id":6715,"date":"2015-10-23T23:06:42","date_gmt":"2015-10-24T06:06:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/?p=6715"},"modified":"2015-10-24T11:51:10","modified_gmt":"2015-10-24T18:51:10","slug":"trip-to-guanajuato-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/2015\/10\/23\/trip-to-guanajuato-1\/","title":{"rendered":"Trip to Guanajuato, Mexico #1. Mummies, Photography, Bef."},"content":{"rendered":"

Some travel notes from my trip down to a month-long arts festival in the lovely town of Guanajuato in the middle of Mexico. I was there for four days. The days were very full.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

I went there to be on an \u201cSF and the Future\u201d\u009d panel with the novelist and graphic artist Bef Mexico City, he\u2019s a fan of mine\u2014going back to his reading Software <\/em>when he was fifteen\u2014and I once published one of his stories in Flurb<\/a><\/em>. I\u2019ve been trying to get together with him, first last night and now this morning, All night I dreamed about setting up the meeting…I can\u2019t just phone him because I don\u2019t know his number here, or the international prefixes, and I\u2019m paranoid about international phoning charges on my cell. Email kind of works, but it\u2019s spotty.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

I think I\u2019ll see Bef and his friend Gabriela Fries in about half an hour, Gaby for short. She\u2019s on the organizing committee of this giant month-long arts festival they\u2019re having here, Cervantino, and the Bef connection is why I\u2019m invited.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Guanajuato is an old town in a little valley, it grew up in the 1500s. I\u2019m in the central historical part of the town, all stone buildings and cobblestone streets, some of the buildings very grand\u2014baroque or neoclassical, as if in Italy or Spain. At one point Guanajuato was one of the richest towns in the world, due to its silver mines. The hills on either side are covered with blocky little houses, a little like in San Francisco, but the house colors are way more saturated and less pastel. Mexican colors. Vibrant.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

I can\u2019t speak Spanish at all, which feels awkward when people talk to me. It\u2019s an interesting change from California\u2014down here it\u2019s the Mexicans who run the show. Crowded streets, most of the people reasonably well off. <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Some incredible Mexican hipsters.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Dig the lovers in the lower right corner. <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

As soon as I got here last night, I ordered what were in effect two dinners at a large mariachi-infested Posada Santa Fe on a plaza. Seemed kind of expensive, but I\u2019m confused about pesos, with all those zeroes. (After a day of mulling it over, I figured out it was only about $18 US.) It was unwise to overeat so immediately. This one table at the restaurant, with a man and a woman, they had eight or even ten musicians around the table, playing as loud as they possibly could, for over an hour. The man at the table was singing along some of the time, a lean guy with a mustache and a cowboy hat. His woman looked absolutely thrilled. I took a picture with my phone and she seemed glad. A big night.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Took a walk this morning, enjoying the cool fresh air\u2014we\u2019re at something like 7,000 feet. the sunlight, and all those wonderful colors on the walls. The streets wind around, all cobblestone, and there\u2019s stone alleys between them. I followed one old woman for a block to make my way through a confusing zone. An archetypal behavioral pattern: following in a local\u2019s steps. Mexico as another world. I can see a scene with my characters following an alien in Million Mile Road Trip<\/em>\u2014maybe a bubble or a bird or an ant.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

I really aced my panel session\u2014I \u201ckilled,\u201d\u009d as the stand-up comedians say. About three hundred people there. I spoke slowly, acting relaxed, explaining cyber+punk, trans+real, science+fiction. The listeners could get simultaneous translation headsets. \u201cThe scientists say it\u2019s not science, and the literary critics say it\u2019s not fiction.\u201d\u009d Wheenk, wheenk, wheenk.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

For the rest of the day, many people who knew who I was, and they came up to me on the street. I was talking to a young man named Franco, from Mexico City, and I mentioned how it was nice to see Mexicans in their own habitat instead of in the US where many of them are in a bad position. I wasn’t sure if I should say this, but Franco totally knew what I meant. He was happy to talk about Mexicans. He said when he visited the US he felt sorry for the Mexicans there, he thought they looked lonely and hangdog. He thought it was strange, or maybe funny, that there’s so many millions of Mexicans in the US.<\/p>\n

\"\"
\nClick <\/a>for larger image.<\/p>\n

I ended up at a hotel called El Meson de los Poetas. Great view of the town, with all the houses on the slopes and, as I say, the vibrance <\/em>and saturation <\/em>dialed way up. I\u2019m always processing my photos in Lightroom, and using two sliders with those names. More vibrance makes pale <\/em>colors as intense as the bright colors, and more saturation makes all <\/em>the colors more intense. In Mexico, it\u2019s like there aren\u2019t any pale colors at all, and all the colors are, like, whoah<\/em>!<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

I\u2019m starting to see in terms of sliders, because I post process my images a lot days. For me, the images I take out of my camera are my negatives, and I use Lightroom like a darkroom for making a final \u201cprint\u201d\u009d image of those originals that I decide to keep. I crop a lot because I have a wide angle lens. And I tweak with the exposure, highlights, shadow, clarity, contrast, distortion, vibrance and saturation, horizontal and vertical transform, etc.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

I was supposed to wait for Bef and Gaby to have lunch, but I got hungry and went to a cafe in a plaza. I ate two bowls of soup and a milkshake in only ten minutes at a sidewalk cafe. I could hardly believe how fast it went. \u201cHas my watch stopped?\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Then I spent some time at a different cafe with Bef and Gaby. Gaby is a mathematician and a science promoter. She\u2019s writing a thesis essay on my novel Software<\/em>, and I talked about the book, with her typing some notes into her laptop. We\u2019d meant to record it, but neither of us remembered to bring a recorder, so we were down to analog realtime life, off the grid in Mexico.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Bef and Gaby were being so nice and sympathetic that at one point I almost burst into tears. They were saying stuff like: Had I realized what a completely revolutionary novel Software <\/em>was? Does it bother me that I\u2019ve gotten relatively little recognition for my work? Would I say that now, after 35 years, the public is finally beginning to understand? It\u2019s been a long road, and I\u2019ve stuck to it, always doing it my own way, happy with the work. It\u2019s balm when, now and then, someone understands what I\u2019ve been up to all along.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

High on the friendly acclaim, I bought some cigarettes and, back in my room, I stood on my Mexican balcony with my shirt off in the sun, feeling like a Beat ex-pat. Instead of getting stoned, I took a selfie.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Bef himself has published about ten novels, some of them crime novels, and a couple of SF. He says he did two narco crime novels, but now he\u2019s moving on to new crimes, like art forgery. He also does graphic novels, one of them, Uncle Bill<\/em>, is about Burroughs shooting his wife in Mexico City all those years ago. A theme also treated in my novel Turing & Burroughs<\/a><\/em>. Bef has a Tumblr called Beforama<\/a>\u2014these days he\u2019s mostly posting cartoons of Frankenstein.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Bef and Gaby said they have a friend who lives in Tijuana, somehow involved with the underworld, and this guy took them to \u201cthe most sordid bar in Tijuana.\u201d\u009d They sold pot and coke and acid over the counter there, the place had never ever been cleaned, but, says Bef in his mild, calm voice: \u201cIt wasn\u2019t at all threatening. It felt very safe. Everyone was friendly.\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

We talked about Mexico City, where Beg and Gaby live. The population is 24 million. They call the city just \u201cMexico,\u201d\u009d just as a New York City dweller speaks of \u201cNew York.\u201d\u009d Regarding this Mexico, Bef says it has one of the largest ex-pat American populations in the world, yet…the Mexicans never see them. The ex-pats live in enclaves, go to American restaurants, send their children to American schools. Like hidden aliens. But maybe that\u2019s not so different from other ex-pat communities worldwide.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

I shouldn\u2019t have had those cigarettes yesterday, my chest hurts today. I sent a lot of recklessly cheerful emails last night, almost as if I was drunk. Social networking gets so important when you\u2019re alone.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

My bad hip hurts a lot. Next Monday I\u2019m getting it replaced for the third frikkin\u2019 time\u2014don\u2019t even ask\u2014and I\u2019m uptight about this. It\u2019s affecting my mental stability. I\u2019ve been having nightmares almost every night. Last week I dreamed about a nurse who wasn\u2019t really a nurse, she was the angel of Death. Vintage horror move. The moment of realizing that this \u201cnurse\u201d\u009d isn\u2019t caring for you, she\u2019s imprisoning you, and she\u2019s terribly strong, and she seems to have more than two arms. The starchy plastic cloth clamped across my nose and mouth. And why oh why <\/em>does the doctor have no face? <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Two nights ago I dreamed about trying to calm a guy who was screaming that he couldn\u2019t stand disorder. Last night I dreamed that I was unloved and alone, a wistful outsider, lost forever. My first thought this morning was, \u201cI wish I was dead.\u201d\u009d But then I looked out from my balcony and again everything was good.<\/p>\n

\"\"
\nClick <\/a>to see larger image.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m very happy to be in Guanajuato, and I wish I could stay longer. Like…forever<\/em>? Learn Spanish. Some of the people are very attractive, others grotesque, others archetypal in Bruegelian ways. I can only guess at their inner lives, these denizens of an unknown world.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Huge numbers of police in town, riding around six or seven in a car, looking a little like street gangs. All different kinds of cop uniforms, some of them carry automatic rifles or machine guns. Bef says it\u2019s because the governor of the Guanajuato state doesn\u2019t want any kind of bad thing to happen at their prized festival.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Yesterday I spent some time with another conference participant, a somewhat eccentric map-maker named Peter Eberhardt latched onto me two separate times, and a welcome diversion both times, Peter behaving like a tour guide. Very knowledgeable, he lived in Mexico for many years. He says he\u2019s drawn the best map ever <\/a>of the US, and it won a prize. He was looking to find a local educational poobah whom he could tell about his map. It was fun to be with him. He pushed our way into this huge folkloric dance show, with thousands of people watching. I was glad to be on the scene, although I tend not to like that kind of spectacle. \u201cAwkward mating rituals,\u201d\u009d as Eberhardt put it. He says the folkloric dances are particularly well-loved in Mexico, a cultural touchstone.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

I wonder if Bef likes the dances. He\u2019s a city guy. He says he doesn\u2019t like Gabriel Garcia Marquez\u2019s books or magic realism. Why not? He finds found these books corny\u2014perhaps in same way that I find some of Ray Bradbury\u2019s work corny. Nostalgic evocations of rural life. Who cares about made-up caricature people who never could have existed in the heartfelt teary-eyed way being described. <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Today Bef insists on going to see the Mexican mummy museum, and I think it\u2019ll be freaky and depressing, also it\u2019s a half hour\u2019s walk from here, and in an unkown part of town. My son Rudy Jr. was urging me to see it too. He was on a tour around Mexico a few years ago with the Cyclecide Bike Rodeo group\u2014putting on shows with a gang of SF hipsters\u2014and he passed through Guanajuato. So I guess, yeah, I\u2019ll see the Mexican mummies.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

I didn\u2019t eat all that much yesterday, and I\u2019ve been avoiding fresh vegetables and unpeeled fruit, and drinking only bottled water, and I still don\u2019t have the \u201csquirts,\u201d\u009d which I dread getting again in Mexico, like I did back in Puerto Vallarta when we went there nearly thirty years ago, or in Spain when I was there fifty years ago, or in Manhattan about twenty years ago. You don\u2019t want to repeat those kinds of experiences that you remember with horror for decades.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

On a more upbeat food note, I\u2019ve had some really excellent tacos at this dive called Trompo. So good that I moan and grunt while I eat them\u2014hey, I\u2019m eating alone. The corn tortillas are fresh-made, and they fry them in fragrant meat grease, and the meat is chopped small and singed black. The taco is tiny, two little corn tortillas on top of each other, with the meat on that, and you have bowls of cilantro and pickled chopped onion and a great green salsa to add on. I can eat one of those Trompo tacos in about two bites. I had five of them in a row yesterday. The pork taco al pastor is far and away the best. I see lots of people eating tacos at stands on the street, as well, crowds of them, and Rudy had urged me to try those, but I\u2019ve held back from that. Don\u2019t want to go all muy squirtado<\/em>.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

I hiked up to the ridge above my hotel, a serious climb, like a thousand feet, up stone staircase alleys, the air thin, my heart clenching in my chest. At the top I could see into the next valley, with similar kinds of houses, but not so many. The houses on the hill are ancient, many have been here for five hundred years. Like an anthill or a stone hive. Like the Alfama district of Lisbon, Escherian with twists and turns. Barking dogs and crowing roosters. Some of the dogs barking in a blood-chilling kind of way\u2014in an oh-I-think-I\u2019ll-go-into-a-different-alley kind of way.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Beneath the surface of Guanajuato is a maze of tunnels, with tunnel intersections, and ramps popping up here and there. Retrofitted from drainage tunnels built by those excavation-happy miners. Means there\u2019s less surface traffic in the lovely town. You can walk <\/em>in the tunnels too, if you want to, but I didn\u2019t want to.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

After my hike, Bef showed up and we talked for awhile, sitting in armchairs by the balcony window in my room. I noted down a few of the things he told me. He mentioned the word chiflado<\/em>, meaning \u201ccrazy.\u201d\u009d It comes from the verb chiflar<\/em>, meaning \u201cwhistle.\u201d\u009d The chiflado has been touched by the whistling breath of the beyond. He also mentioned that his brother had been in a reggae\/ska band called Mam\u00c3\u00a1 Pulpa, meaning Mother Octopus. Here\u2019s a video of their tune, \u201cQue Mal Gusto<\/a>.\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n

\"\"
\nClick <\/a>for detailed image.<\/p>\n

Bef also told me one of the biggest bands in Mexico at one time was called Caf\u00c3\u00a9 Tacvba. Here\u2019s a video of their tune, \u201cQuiero Ver<\/a>.\u201d\u009d And he was involved with a zine called Sub <\/em>(as in subliterature, as in Sf or crime novels.) And he was in a story anthology called Mexico City Noir.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

And then we did go to the Mummy museum\u2014my legs were rubbery by now, so we took a Mexican bus part of the way, exciting for me, and not something I could have managed on my own. I told Bef I was happy to be seeing the sights with him, as being his partner made me cool, and less of a tourist. He said I didn\u2019t look like a tourist anyway because my eyes are intelligent as opposed to dull and blank. Of course I do <\/em>carry a camera. Bef pointed out a nice little cyberpunk tableau\u2014a man repairing computers with a screwdriver and pliers in a store that was, literally, a hole in the wall.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

I took really a lot of photos in Guanajuato, about 200, continually carrying my kick-ass street-photographer wide-angle 22 mm lens Fujifilm model X100T. You have to switch the battery at least once a day. Working the camera so intensely, I\u2019m getting smoother at using its dauntingly large array of settings. Something I\u2019m trying to learn is how to grab shots of things happening, that is, when I see something staring, I want to quickly aim at it and press the shutter button and get a fast click and have the photo be in focus. There can be this deal-killing lag of a half a second while the camera focuses. <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Something I haven\u2019t tried recently is to manually set the focus to a reasonable range, and not have it getting measured, and that speeds up the response. Or go even more manual and set some reasonable shutter speed as well, like 1\/125. And let the camera decide on the aperture. Or even pre-set the aperture too, which speeds up the camera\u2019s response even more. If you\u2019re running the images through Lightroom or Photoshop, you can usually fix a frame that\u2019s too dark (underexposed). The thing you can fix is if it\u2019s out of focus or if there\u2019s motion blur.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

It sometimes annoys people if you grab a shot of them. I kind of like being sneaky, although now and then I\u2019ll go brazen like patron saint street photographer Gary Winograd, and get right in people\u2019s faces, and then smile and nod at them as if what you just did is okay. If you ask a subject\u2019s permission before the shot\u2014that\u2019s more the \u201cpolite\u201d\u009d thing to do, but then you may not get a good shot, as they\u2019ll be tense, or posing in a blank way.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

What will <\/em>work is if you go further than just asking permission, that is, if you take the time to chat with them and get to know them a bit, and have them be as curious about you as you are about them\u2014my sense is that Diane Arbus took this route. But I hardly ever do that. I\u2019m not someone who\u2019s great at talking to strangers. If someone ends up looking wearily pissed off in a photo then I do feel slightly bad. But it might also be a good photo.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Anyway<\/em>, the mummies were even more disgusting and horrible than I\u2019d expected, but at least the \u201cmuseum\u201d\u009d wasn\u2019t all plastic and educational<\/em>…it was scuzzy and funky and Mexican and like carnival side-show. By the way, these bodies weren\u2019t deliberately mummified in the Egyptian sense\u2014there\u2019s something about the dry, hot air around Guanajuato that just preserves some bodies, makes them look like hideous sagging beef jerky. These mummies were, as I understand it, bodies that were excavated and evicted from this one particular graveyard next to the mummy museum. The families of these bodies were unable or unwilling to pay the graveyard an additional fee for \u201cperpetual burial.\u201d\u009d So the mofos running the graveyard dug up the \u201cdeadbeat\u201d\u009d bodies and put them on display!<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

The impresarios seem to have a certain sense of macabre humor. The mummies are dressed or posed in odd ways. Like, dig how this zombie guy is undoing his pants, presumably so as to unleash his ectoplasmic penis… Eeeek! The very worst are the mummies of babies\u2014I refused to even look at them. Bef didn\u2019t mind the babies. He likes the museum in the way that a kid might like creepshow horror comics. The last time Bef went there was when he was eight, a big family roadtrip up from Mexico City to see the Mexican mummies!<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Bef recounted a story (possibly an urban legend) that at one point, like in the 1950s, the Mexican mummies of Guanajuato were lent or rented to an American sideshow for a year, and when they came back, one mummy was missing<\/em>. A great set-up for an SF\/fantasy\/horror tale. \u201cThe Missing Mummy.\u201d\u009d He’s coming back, he’s about to step out of this taxicab down in the street outside my midnight balcony, and look at the nice red glow of the tail lights on the cobblestones. The mummy has come to town to seek me out. Needs some advice on certain interdimensional anomalies. Maybe Bef and I can co-author such a story or graphic novel of these days. Do it in a bilingual edition, Spanish and English. Sell it to Berlitz and Rosetta Stone for their language courses…<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

On the way to the mummy museum, Bef went into a Mexican wireless service store, I think it was Telcel, not that this photo of the Telcel office—which is every bit as cold and and monochrome as an Apple outlet. Bef wanted to renew his phone plan, and it took a long time (and he was unsuccessful), but I didn\u2019t mind waiting.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

I was glad to sit down, and I filled up a whole page of notes for ideas about this \u201cUltrastorm\u201d\u009d chapter I want to write for my Million Mile Road Trip<\/em>. And I\u2019ll talk about these ideas in the next entry of these \u201cWriting Notes,\u201d\u009d incorporating some further revelations I was granted while visiting the Diego Rivera Museum in Guanajuato on the next day.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Stay tuned.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Oh, and many thanks to the Cervantino Festival<\/a>, to Bef, and to Gabriela Frias. I like Bef’s Batman T-shirt here. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Some travel notes from my trip down to a month-long arts festival in the lovely town of Guanajuato in the middle of Mexico. I was there for four days. The days were very full. I went there to be on an \u201cSF and the Future\u201d\u009d panel with the novelist and graphic artist Bef Mexico City, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6715","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-million-mile-road-trip"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6715","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6715"}],"version-history":[{"count":23,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6715\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6739,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6715\/revisions\/6739"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6715"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6715"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6715"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}