Beautiful books: Saltillo sarapes

Saltillo sarape, note the Mexican flags used as decorative motifs in the rhombus.

One of the great textile traditions of the world, the magnificent Saltillo sarapes of Mexico have been a symbol of wealth, prestige and rugged individualism for over 250 years. In the second half of the 19th century, beginning with the reign of Mexican Emperor Maximilian, the Saltillo enjoyed a final flowering of artistic achievement.

Sarape Museum in Saltillo, Mexico

The McCormick Gallery in Chicago, Illinois has recently published a comprehensive book on the subject featuring essays by Mark Winter and Thomas McCormick. Winter is the foremost authority on Saltillo Sarapes and McCormick has collected these textiles for 35 years.

Related:

From Smithsonian magazine, click here to read:  The Sarape: Latin America’s Wrap for All Seasons | Articulations.

From the McCormick Gallery

Saltillo Sarape, A survey: 1850-1920 by Mark Winter and Tom McCormick

Previously published work on the Saltillo sarape has primarily concentrated on those textiles classified as Classic, that is to say, weavings produced from the eighteenth through the mid-nineteenth centuries. This is certainly understandable as these world-class weavings are among the most magnificent ever produced in any culture. They have always been costly, a sign of wealth and privilege, and they are rare and expensive to collect today. Mark Winter, the foremost authority on the topic, has written insightfully in his essay about the history and development of the Classic Saltillo sarape.

However, Saltillo sarapes woven in the post-classic period, after 1850 and up to the decline of the indigenous Mexican weaving industry in the early twentieth century, have received considerably less attention. This represents a seventy-five year period in which superb examples were produced with an expanded canon of design concepts and the benefit of newly available dyes and yarns. This was also an era of growing nationalism, when the sarape became a symbol of Mexican pride. Tom Mccormick provides new insight on the weavings of this period.

The book, with 112 pages featuring over 100 color illustrations, is available through the gallery or by visiting www.saltillosarape.com.

Ricardo Legorreta, Praemium Imperiale Laureate

Ricardo Legorreta (Mexico, DF 1931 - )

Ricardo Legorreta has been awarded the Praemium Imperiale prize (architecture).

The award, given to individuals who have “shown extraordinary acheivement in the fields of architecture, music, painting, sculpture and theatre/film, recognizes lifetime achievement in the arts in categories not covered by the Nobel prizes.

Ricardo Legorreta, among Mexico’s most significant living architects, combines the traditions of Western modernism with the building culture of his native country. Vibrant color, geometric shapes, fountains, light-filled spaces, and intimate courtyards are hallmarks of his style. With more than 100 design projects to his name he has created a diverse body of work in Mexico and abroad.

Official website for Ricardo Legorreta: http://legorretalegorreta.com/

Video in Spanish: http://esquire.esmas.com/video/351377/legorreta-premio-japon

The other Praemium Laureates this year are Seiji Ozawa (Japan) Music, Bill Viola (USA) Painting, Anish Kapoor (UK) Sculpture, and Judi Dench (UK) Theatre/Film.

Related, Books:

1001 Buildings You Must See Before You die:  The World’s Architectural Masterpeices (Quintessence Books) Hardcover; Mark Irving, Editor

Mexican writers

The Vasconcelos Library in Mexico City

In celebrated Chilean author Roberto Bolaño’s 1998 novel The Savage Detectives, a brilliant but depressive group of young poets roams through Mexico City, writing and drinking at bars across the frenetic capital.  Nearly all those poets, modeled on real writers, were men. Today, the Mexican literary stars frequenting the same bars are just as likely to be women.

Gabriela Juaregui

Writers like Gabriela Jauregui, the author of the critically acclaimed poetry collection Controlled Decay  who is now at work on her first novel, are part of a surge of young, urban Mexican women whose talent, vision, and drive are challenging the country’s traditionally macho literary culture.

Valeria Luiselli

No longer just the domain of male greats like Bolaño, Octavio Paz, and Juan Rulfo, Mexican literature has given rise to a new class of female scribes who are racking up successes at home and abroad… “There are some times when I feel compelled to say, ‘This is also Mexican,’ ” says Jauregui, who has written poems about riding the subway in Mexico City and blue-collar workers in East L.A. who dress up in ornate cowboy outfits at night and practice roping in neighborhood parks.

Chloe Aridjis

In Chloe Aridjis’s widely praised novel Book of Clouds, the female Mexican protagonist, like most immigrants, struggles with xenophobia and cultural alienation while trying to preserve her humanity in Berlin. And Brenda Lozano’s All Nothing is an intimate, humorous portrait of a girl dealing with loss and grief.  Valeria Luiselli’s essay collection, False Papers, deals with people’s relations to spaces—including her own sense of being “in between” Mexico and the United States, neither native nor foreign in either.  She ruminates on the isolation of the city: “The more nights you spend in other rooms—hotels, rented apartments, borrowed beds, sofas, shared spaces—the more you will get to know yourself.”

Brenda Lozano

Getting published in Mexico is no easy feat, especially for unknown writers: big publishers tend to focus on profit-reaping established authors. A few independent presses, like the successful Sexto Piso, have published Mexican writers in Latin America and Spain. “Many young authors first get published by small publishing houses, but their presence is very small, so the books go practically unnoticed,” says Eduardo Rebasa, a founder of Sexto Piso. “However, in recent years there has been a surge in independent publishing, with houses trying to publish quality stuff, but also trying to be successful financially and create a project that is sustainable in the long term.”

Readers can count on seeing more such works, thanks to an increase in the number of both female writing students and writing collectives for women. And their stories will continue to reflect a rapidly changing Mexico, even if most of the writers call other places home.

Excerpts from Newsweek Magazine and The Poetry Foundation.

Related articles

• 10 of the best books set in Berlin (guardian.co.uk)

Timeless travel books

Study for Mayan monument, c. 1842 by F. Catherwood

This drawing is one of only a few originals not destroyed by a disastrous fire in a New York gallery in July 1842. John Lloyd Stephens, the outgoing American writer, and Frederick Catherwood, a quiet English artist, were the first explorers to accurately describe and illustrate the art of the pre-Hispanic Maya of Mexico and Central America. Through their highly popular publications (first published in 1841 and 1843 and still in print today), they introduced the ancient Maya to a world that knew little of their existence and stimulated research on the Maya for generations.

Their books, Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas and Yucatán and Incidents of Travel in Yucatán, are available from Amazon and Dover.

…not just engrossing but surprisingly up-to-date. His complaints about the execrable state of the roads, the pernicious “moschetoes” and the enervating humidity still ring true. – Claire Wrathall

Beautiful Books

Books about Mexican muralists:

Mexican Muralists: Orozco, Rivera, Siqueiros by Desmond Rochfort

Diego Rivera. Obra mural completa/Diego Rivera. The complete murals. Text by Luis-Martin Lozano and Juan Rafael Coronel Rivera, directed and produced by Benedikt Taschen, photography by Rafael Doniz and Francisco Kochen.

Happy Birthday!

Guillermo del Toro, 1964 -

Today is the birthday of director, screenwriter, and author Guillermo del Toro born in Guadalajara, Mexico.

As a boy, he was something of a misfit, and more than a little bit morbid. His first toy was a plush werewolf that he helped his great-aunt make. When he was five, he asked for mandrake root so he could perform dark magic. When he was seven, he came upon a copy of a cult magazine, Famous Monsters of Filmland, in a supermarket, and he was hooked. He learned English just so he could understand the magazine’s puns. He’d make fake scars out of theatrical makeup to scare his nanny. He started making movies in high school, went on to film school, and wrote a book-length essay on Hitchcock when he was 19.

He’s since developed a reputation for making smart, arty horror films like Pan’s Labyrinth (2006), but he resists being pigeonholed. “There is a part of me that will always be pulp,” he told The New Yorker. He’s been trying for years to make a movie of H.P. Lovecraft‘s novella At the Mountains of Madness (1931).

P. S.  Thanks to The Writer’s Almanac for its poetry and regular birthday updates.

Related articles

• Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark – review (guardian.co.uk)

Sometimes the answer is right in front of you, continued…

So, besides recommended sleep, what’s on my mind this week?

Certainly a lot on my to-read list, including Twyla Tharp’s classic: The Creative Habit:  Learn it and Use it for Life, which suggests that oft quoted phrase “use it or lose it”, and then the many people and projects to share:

• The exhibition Retofuturo of Mexican artist, Rafael Coronel, at the Palace of Fine Arts,
  

  Coronel Moro, by Rafael Coronel

• visiting Mexico city’s art galleries,
• a post about Mexican candy because only in Mexico is almost all the candy covered in chile piquin,
• my admiration for the creator of ArtDaily, Ignacio Villareal Junco, because his art newspaper on the web is so often much more all-inclusive than other art publications I try to follow; see my websites for the ArtDaily link and for Mr. Villareal’s own personal site,
• the upcoming Electronic Video and Art Festival; check out my Tweets,
• An extraordinary film directed by Gerardo Naranja, from a script he wrote with Mauricio Katz, called Miss Bala, highly recommended by David Lida; See my blogroll for the link to Mr. Lida’s review, and
• sharing the work of other generous bloggers, interesting websites, and all that crosses my blog desk…

What’s on your mind this week?

Sometimes the answer is right in front of you.

Reblogged from What. No Mints?:

I was sitting here perusing the depths of my Pinterest boards, trying to scrape together some semblance of a decent post to get the WNM week started – When I came across this …

Running on fumes after a long day at work and just about no rest … sleep is exactly what I need.

Goodnight.

Read more… 2 more words

Excellent and SO VERY TRUE.  Thank you fellow blogger of What. No mints? (WNM).

Conscious Listening: My Mexico City — by Jennifer Clement

In Mexico the faces of poets are represented on some of our money. On the 100 peso note is the face of Nezahualcóyotl, the prehispanic ruler. The 200-peso bill holds the face of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, the nun who lived in the 17th century and wrote some of the greatest verses ever written in Spanish. And one of the designs featured on the 20-peso coin, which has become hard to find recently, is engraved with the face of Mexico’s Nobel Prize-winning poet Octavio Paz. I always think that a country that has poets on its currency can only represent a place where anything can happen and everything does.

Colonia El Toro, my neighborhood in Mexico City, is still a place where old and new Mexico congregate and everything happens. This morning the knife grinder came past my house on his bicycle and blew his whistle; the garbage truck stopped outside while the driver rang a brass bell; and the gas truck arrived with a man who walked beside the vehicle and screamed dozens of times over and over, ¨El gas!¨ A bread seller came to the door with a large basket attached to the handlebars of his bicycle. I could hear his high-pitched bell from blocks away. Three Jehovah’s Witnesses rang my front door buzzer.

Later in the morning the ironmonger walked past. He cupped his hands around his mouth and called out that he was willing to buy any scraps of metal or old newspapers. His voice was silenced by a pickup truck that drove by selling oranges. It had a loud microphone attached to the side door with an unintelligible recording about the price of the fruit.

At noon the neighborhood crier stood outside screaming the news about the latest crimes in the neighborhood: the mechanic Señor Diez had killed his wife; an ATM machine had been vandalized; two chickens had been found dead inside a green Volkswagen.

In the afternoon a man walked by announcing with a megaphone that the circus would be arriving at the end of the week. He yelled, “We bring real Indian tigers. We bring an elephant. We bring a boy with three eyes.”

Later one man stands at the corner below my window playing the trumpet. He plays “Las Golondrinas” (“The Swallows”) off key. A tin can for tips is tied to his waist.

By late afternoon Señor Primitivo, an old man with three cows, walks up the road. One cow limps. Señor Primitivo explains to me that a man driving a red BMW and talking on his cellular telephone hit this cow. He shakes his head while he makes the hand gestures of driving and talking on the telephone.

In the evening a man pushes his steaming cart down my street and the air is filled with the scent of sweet potatoes and bananas. The tamale vendor walks past and cries, “Tamales from Oaxaca for sale. Tasty, delicious tamales for sale.”

Mexico City is made up of dozens of villages that have joined together over the past one hundred years due to overpopulation and construction projects. This development has created a terrible and fascinating urban sprawl. Therefore, some neighborhoods are more modern and others more traditional. Almost all areas can claim a yam and banana vendor.

At midnight, in my part of the city that is in the south near the UNAM University, I hear the soft, comforting whistle of the watchman as he makes his rounds under a sky that has no stars, because of the pollution and because of the electric lights, a sky that only has a moon. The word Mexico means “the navel of the moon.”

JENNIFER CLEMENT is currently the President of PEN Mexico, part of a worldwide organization to promote literature, defend freedom of expression and develop a community of writers worldwide. The author of numerous award-winning books, Ms. Clement lives in Mexico City, Mexico. Learn more about author and poet Jennifer Clement at her website:  http://www.jennifer-clement.com/  My Mexico City was originally published in National Geographic’s Ultimate City Guides. Check mexicocitylife’s websites: Mexico City, Mexico for the link to National Geographic’s site.

In her essay, Ms. Clement writes of the many people and sounds on the streets of her neighborhood that are such a distinctive part of Mexican city life.

Each year, Mexico City celebrates Semana del Sonido/National Sound Week to document sounds that are unique to Mexico City and its culture and as a strategy to increase citizens’ listening habits and a conscious awareness of the audio environment.  A video at the TEDGlobal 2011 conference by Julian Treasure, 5 ways to listen better focuses on this as well.  In our louder and louder world, says sound expert Julian Treasure, “We are losing our listening.”  His fascinating talk shares five ways to re-tune your ears for conscious listening — to other people and the world around you.  Five Ways to Listen Better

The concept for a national sound week began in France in 2004, and in 2009 a similar celebration began in Quebec, Canada; Mexico is the third country to adopt this event.  Organized by Fonoteca Nacional, the first Semana del Sonido occurred September 2010; this year the event took place May 23-29.  For more information on Fonoteca Nacional, working since 2008 to safeguard and promote the audio heritage of the nation, see: http://www.fonotecanacional.gob.mx/  (This site is in Spanish).

At this link, Sounds of Mexico’s street vendors, you will see and hear the bread vendor, the garbage collector, the gas man, the iron and scrap metal collector, organ grinder and knife sharpener.  Also, below, I’ve attached a locally famous video of a Oaxaca tamale vendor that haunts the streets at night.  One person suggests the recording that blares from the vendor’s speakers was made in the 1920s.  What do you think readers?

Lucha Libre: Books, Comics and Graphic Novels

Due to the tremendous fan base of Lucha Libre throughout the world, there are many books, comics and graphic novels in English on the market worthy of note.

•   Lucha Loco, by Malcolm Venville.  A stunning collection of portraits of luchadores.  The portraits, in large format film and shot in a Mexico City Studio, are reproduced in stunning color.  Each portrait is clearly identified and paired with a quotation from the wrestler.  CHECK THIS OUT:  Online interviews, quotes and photos at Welcome to Lucha Loco.

   

• Lucha Libre, Masked Superstars of Mexican Wrestling, by Carlos Monsivais and Lourdes Grobet (Photographer).  The result of a 20-year study, the book features over 500 photos of luchadores, as well as pictures of their families, friends and fans, onstage, backstage and even at home.  It includes interviews and essays, images of lucha promotions: stickers, flyers, postcards, and stills from cinema.
• For children of all ages:  Lucha Libre:  The Man in the Silver Mask: A Bilingual Cuento/Story, by  Xavier Garza.  In this book about Lucha Libre, young Carlitos attends a lucha libre match in Mexico City for the first time. He’s with his Papá Lupe, but his Tio Rodolfo, who’s supposed to join them, doesn’t show up. At ringside, Carlitos sees the famous luchador, el Santo—the Man in the Silver Mask, a man whose eyes look terribly familiar. El Santo even smiles at Carlitos! Carlitos is mesmerized as el Santo, is pitted against the terrible forces of evil—los rudos, the bad guys of lucha libre who make the audience boo and hiss! In the end, though, el Santo triumphs and, in the process, gains a lifelong fan.  
• Lucha Libre: Heroing’s a Full Time Job (Tips Appreciated).  This 5 series anthology was originally published in France and is now available in English by Image Comics.  Find an interview with Jerry Frisson and a lot of information about the characters, plots, and pictures of the comic book art at: “Lucha Libre” Unmasks at Image Comics – Comic Book Resources.
• Strongman, by Charles Soule and Allen Gladfelter (Illustrator).  A graphic novel of the fictional luchador, El Tigre.  ”El Tigre was the best, a legendary luchador who was a hero in the ring and out. But an act of treachery left him defeated and disillusioned, and El Tigre retreated from Mexico to live an anonymous life in New York City’s Spanish Harlem…El Tigre, now throwing wrestling matches to men twenty years his junior for drinking money, takes a final shot at redemption. When a beautiful young woman begs for his help in breaking up an organ trafficking ring, El Tigre has to find the hero that has lain dormant within him for forty years.” (from Goodreads)