Nothing Special

Jamie Woon - Night Air (Official Video) HD

2011-01-25T20:25:00.000-08:00

Nocturnal

2011-01-25T20:24:00.000-08:00

My cat loves the night. Once the sun has sunk underneath a horizon of grey concrete buildings and tangled coils of electric cables; once the streets have grown quieter, as people have arrived home after long commutes; after stagnant hours stuck in the evening traffic; when darkness hits the sky and as the lights of the city begin to flicker, the little grimalkin loves to make her way onto the roofs of the barrio.
    She feels safe, hidden in obscurity; her black fur is a perfect dissimulation. She is a little pudgy ninja, sauntering about in search of larks. Sometimes, as I look up to her on the roofs an see her looking down at me with the moon behind her in a starless polluted city sky, with just the rough outline of her little body, pointy ears, exited tail, and the flicker of her intense cat eyes, she resembles a bat, an owl or a gargoyle. She really seems to belong to the night.
    All seems quiet in that stygian void in the sky; underneath it, the sublunary fallen city emits its characteristic hum; sometimes abruptly complemented by the distant howl of sirens, or the sporadic car blaring music, as it recklessly passes by at top speed, through the deserted streets.
    Is it the pulsation of her instincts that makes her go out, an intense curiosity to see the world in penumbra? At day time, the loud voices and radios of my neighbours and general human movement seem to scare her, but at night humans keep themselves inside their homes, there only vital signals being the intermittent and changing colours seen through their windows that stem from their televisions.
    I have never felt as comfortable during the late hours as she does; I guess I’m more a being of the day; night-time makes me anxious, it always has. But I think I understand her partiality towards it. There is something very alluring about the intense stillness and the anonymity it engenders; it is like a break from the dementia this city, any city for that matter, seems to produce.
    Night time belongs to the revellers, dancing away their inhibitions in human perspiration and the excitement of fortuity and its random encounters en la noche tropical. But it also belongs to the lonely souls writing away the early morning listening to Miles Davis and, of course, to the cats on rooftops, contemplating silence and its implied backdrop: urban chaos.

The Insatiable Mechanics of Desire

2011-01-18T20:07:00.000-08:00

At first it was the novelty of unfamiliar skin, a scent not previously registered; unmapped territories to discover; another girl to decipher. But the freshness of the experience was a deception; it was only the renewal of a ritual of expectation and disappointment.
How far could I go before feeling remorse; before considering it pointless and futile? The novelty would soon wear out; then, it would all feel too painfully constrictive and a new object of desire would have to be sought. It was only the insatiable mechanics of desire.
I kept telling myself this was just the uncharted domains of a beaten track; the contra-diction of two motions pulling in opposite directions and the oxymoronic play of withered and worn out conceits. Infatuation? Love?
I know desire, I just feel ashamed to acknowledge it, but love is a complicated thing to recognize; it‘s an elusive jaguar whose very existence I sometimes doubt. And yet, how many times have I justified desire in a visage of love or have I disdained love for being just a fleeting whim of the former, an elaborate dissimulation to keep me searching for some neurotic principle of an impossibility of fulfilment.
I know repression, at least now it’s a conscious endeavour. Although I’m not sure what consciousness exactly is, but for years now I have grown suspicious of what the litany of the junkies of reason says it is.
Still, I do not wish to yield to desire but cannot truncate its force. Thus, I walk the streets of this city at the end of the world looking to seduce and be seduced; another spy in the house of love, lying myself in and out of brief relationships and even briefer episodes of lust; sabotaging my search through guilt and fear, while simultaneously fuelling insane quests for something that seems impossible to grasp.

I walked away and left her untouched, feeling awkward and confused.

El Soundtrack adecuado para estas fiestas patrias de bicentenario

2010-09-15T18:30:00.000-07:00

Si tuviera que encontrar una canción que pudiera servir de marco musical para la condición actual del país y su celebración del bicentenario de la independencia, no sería alguna pieza de Mariachi ni una canción ranchera, no sería una Polka norteña, ni música de banda, algún Corrido o algún Son y definitivamente no sería alguna canción oficial ridícula fabricada para la ocasión por algún artista mainstream.
La canción que yo escogería sería Police and Thieves de Junior Murvin, producida por el gran Lee “Scratch” Perry. Por extraño y fuera de lugar que parezca escoger un clásico de Reggae para México, teniendo tanta riqueza musical endémica, creo que dicha canción describe el estado de sitio en el cual el crimen organizado, la policía corrompida y el ejército tienen a parte del país en este momento histórico:

'Police and thieves out on the street, scaring the nation with their guns and ammunition.'

Murvin escribió esta letra como representación de la violencia que se vivía en su época, (los años 70s, principios de los 80s) entre las “posses” y la policía en los ghettos jamaiquinos. Violencia que iría en escalada durante la década de los ochentas y noventas, debido a la inserción de Jamaica en el paso del tráfico de cocaína proveniente de América del sur rumbo a Estados Unidos. Todavía en junio de 2010, la captura y posterior anuncio de extradición a EU de Christopher “Dudus” Coke, provocó tiroteos entre la policía y allegados de “Mr. Coke,” en Kingston, dejando alrededor de 70 muertos.
La violencia derivada del narcotráfico es moneda corriente en el México contemporáneo, a 28 mil muertos, la guerra entre criminales y “policías” (además de ejército) cimbra a la población civil mediante desapariciones, “levantones,” asesinatos, extorciones, secuestros, violaciones a los derechos humanos, tiroteos y bombazos.

‘Get out, Get out you people if you don’t want to get blown up.’

Welcome Back

2010-08-24T23:33:00.000-07:00

Well, it has been a long time since I stopped writing in this blog, a little more than two years now. A lot has happened since then and at the same time my life seemed to have come to an ominous halt in the very core of life itself, in its inevitable flux of becoming. Off course, this was an illusion and it was the illusory stagnation what caused the ominous feeling, life can never become stagnant. This “halt” included a writer’s block which seemed more like a complete denial of my need to write, but now I’m back; now I know how central writing is to my life and that blogging is a good writing exercise, a way to publish with a certain sense of immediacy and without allowing too much edition to occur. If you are visiting this blog and reading my posts I thank you in advance for your kind attention.

Untitled

2010-08-24T23:23:00.000-07:00

I dreamt a strange man, grey hair pony tail and unshaven, clad in denim and gaudy jewellery of Aztec design; one of the last haggard creatures of the (lost) flower generation, now withered by the effect of time; a romantic of the “counter” cultural movements of a violent century. Blood shot eyes, tobacco yellowish stains on his teeth, hair and face.
In my dream, this old hippie is in the middle of an unrecalled Mexico City street, playing with a large scorpion the size of a tarantula and a shell the colour and lustre of onyx. It looks like a crawling polished precious stone. The man is ranting something I can’t seem to fathom, like if he was shouting words underwater. But he is playing with the scorpion, doing magic tricks with the nasty thing; he takes it in his hand and makes it disappear, only to pull it out of his mouth. The scorpion can also do tricks, it can transform into a bright yellow and ochre scorpion like the poisonous varieties that swarm warm climates.
Next thing I know, I’m in a maze of alleys in a shanty town, the place looks tropical, somewhere in the cancer line, more specifically Latin America or the Caribbean. A large black Rastafarian man smokes a spliff, he looks sullen and at first says nothing, another lost prophet of the times. Next to us, a small girl in a tattered pink dress plays in the street all by herself; she has those slim and elegant features of Ethiopians. The Rastafarian asks: ‘Is it pleasure you are after? Or is knowledge your distorted kick?’
There is the scorpion again, in his yellow-ochre avatar, crawling on a whitewashed adobe wall of some abandoned hacienda in some deserted Oaxaca pueblo. The sun beats down so hard there seems to be transparent fumes lifting up from the erosioned soil, like the fumes from a boiler; the hot tarmac of the highway which in the distance fades into sky. An old campesino, sitting under the meagre shade of a withered Huizache, tells me in a languid exhausted voice:

‘If you let it sting you, the rush of its poison is harsher than dry mescal, sweeter than salvia smoke and more potent than Derrumbe mushrooms.’

The scorpion is a live syringe containing ‘honey dew and the milk of paradise,’ I think in my dream, it coils its tail, but I’m too repulsed to even touch it.
‘Where are all the men and women?’ I ask the old man.
‘Gone north to the poppy fields.’ He answers.
Poppy fields? North? I ponder.
’Don’t you mean that as too separate things?' I ask, either north across the border, or somewhere in the sierra tending crops for heroine? But the unconscious is lazy and prone to amalgams and wordplay.

Remembrance of a Vipassana Retreat

2010-08-24T22:45:00.000-07:00

It happened nine years ago, memories of the experience are slowly erasing, many already seem distant. Mostly I remember the pain surrounding the whole endeavour; The pain of hunger, the constant craving for chocolate and crisps; the back pain and the numbed legs; the tense shoulders; the fear, apprehension and the mental confusion over nothing, over simple theoretical discrepancies that were totally irrelevant, but seemed abysmal at the time, enough to drive me a little mad.
I remember crying in the dark of night, hidden behind trees so that no one would see me, over a heartfelt acknowledgement of the Four Noble truths and my mother’s inevitable death, the death of all sentient beings. I only wish I could remember my dreams of the time, but I think they might not have been that spectacular or insightful, I could hardly sleep during the ten day interval. I remember standing on a metro platform after the retreat was over and I was back in the city, feeling the calm sadness that ten days of silence had left inside of me, how painful it felt to return to the everyday rush of DF.

I remember the expectation that comes into any spiritual quest and seeing those expectations shattered to bits. It was during the first day, after the first two morning sessions that; being aware of the sensations in my upper lip and nostrils; brought about by the in-out motion of breathing; I noticed how sharply aware and mindful I felt. This was not even Vipassana meditation itself; it is the preliminary exercises for making concentration more acute. But it felt good, crisp and clear, almost effortless. At that moment I thought how wondrous this whole experience could be if this was only the beginning of the first day and I already felt this way. But as the days progressed my impetus became obtruded by the harshness of discipline and routine, the insomnia; the waking up at 4am; or the failure to do so; the theoretical hang-ups between Mahayana and Hinayana. My idea of effortless concentration was crumbling, my self-criticism rising, why wasn’t I living up to my expectations of progressing from my initial experiences up to higher levels of consciousness? I felt like a complete failure. I decided to ask the instructor in one of the private sessions why was my meditation becoming worse instead of better.

‘Why do you cling to an experience that has already happened? Why do you place value judgements of good or bad in your meditation?’ Why not let it arise without your interpretations of proficiency or deficiency. Meditation is never repetitive or progressive, it is always fresh and new, it just is as it is.’ The instructor told me. So I gave up on my gaining ideas and left that private talk with the clear understanding that I would no longer subdue the Vipassana experience to my expectations of high-times and spiritual realizations, I would just let things manifest as they came: a wild mind, a painful body, the sadness and fear of death and solitude; that is all, that has been life so far.

Eventually in the midst of pain and repressed sadness a great experience of compassion came about, like an utterance of the Boddhisattva vow, a spontaneous vow not taken but uttered from the utmost depths of my being. I sat at a football field during one of the meditation breaks and touching the ground, I vowed to liberate all sentient beings, at least the ghosts in my head. Since then I have forgotten many of the accomplishments of those 10 days at a Vipassana retreat. But this is nothing to be hesitant about, back then I remember it happening like that and now it is like this, why would I want to repeat what already was?

The Northern Wind

2008-04-26T16:08:00.000-07:00

We drove in the evening darkness with windows full open so as to relieve ourselves from the subtropical humidity and heat, darting through the thick mass of seditious forest and the sporadic little villages spattered to the sides of the winding road. My friend Luis manoeuvred his SUV as fast as the upward curves would allow, Deep House blaring from the stereo and a remarkably star sparkled sky on top of us, a sky only matched by the scintillating vastness of the Chacahua nights, both skies uncommon phenomena for a filthy sky Mexico City dweller like myself.
We wanted to make it as far as San Jose del Pacífico before midnight, have dinner there and crash for a few ours before heading towards Oaxaca in the wee hours of the morning. We joked about getting magic mushrooms at San Jose, although it was dry season.
That day we had procrastinated our return to Oaxaca and frittered away the morning in Puerto Escondido at a restaurant overlooking Zicatela beach, slowly sipping liquids so as to hydrate. We then, out of fancy, decided to drive towards Mazunte in the afternoon to watch the Pacific sunset at Punta Cometa and then take the San José-Miahuatlan road to Oaxaca from Potchula.
During the drive from Puerto Escondido towards Mazunte, we had noticed a northern wind incoming from the mountains and rushing past the coastal plains, barren fields and scarce milpa plantations, hitting straight into the mango and papaya orchards and violently swaying palm trees tensing their pliability and flexibility. The SUV quivered and shook as the wind hit it sideways, just as SUVs are well known to do considering their lack of stability. When the northern winter winds from the US come in through the Gulf of Mexico and hit land in Veracruz all the way to the Isthmus of Tehuantepec in the Oaxaca Pacific coast, it even throws trailers sideways. We should have known better at that moment.
So when night time came and we had decided to head for Oaxaca City crossing the Sierra, although unaware at first of the wind, due to the driving speed and the loud music, we soon started noticing again, just like in the afternoon, how the boughs of trees swayed violently on the sides of the roads and above us, and then the sudden hit on the breaks and the strategic swerves of the wheel so as not to drive into the falling debris of branches on the tarmac of the mountain road. Somewhere along the road maybe an hour away from making it to San Jose, the highest population post this side of the Sierra Madre, we were stopped by a small line of parked vehicles as the mountain locals where diverting the sparse traffic of cars and buses. We got off the SUV and walked over to the people diverting traffic: ‘The road is closed, too many fallen and falling trees due to the wind.’ So we were informed.
As we walked around on that spot of the road, stretching our legs, wondering what to do next and just looking around, we noticed how the wind didn’t howl, it growled, it growled like a cascade of force from the starlit heavens above. Trees swayed with such force, we could barely stand up or walk against the thickness of sheer power that had formed an invisible wall. I saw a massive stalk of thick bamboo chaotically sway and contort like blades of long grass in some summer prairie.
We got back on the vehicle and highballed back in the direction opposite to where we had been going, down from the mountains and back to the coast. We would have to spend the night somewhere like Puerto Escondido and maybe take the Juquila-Cimatlán road the next day. Still heading back to the coast was risky, for we could encounter falling trees on the road or falling on top of us, but staying right there, where the cars where being diverted could also be dangerous.
Such sheer strength in the wind, in nature, in everything that surrounds you and you cannot control, no matter how hard you try, nature as the chaotic phenomena, the un-interpreted discourse of who knows what: God, truth, life, love and death. But in moments like this philosophy is redundant and clumsy. You are not thinking, you are just feeling the fear, the anxiety and the sheer will to survive, to speed through the mountains cautious of falling trees. The need to survive is like a fresh hit of reality, the coolness and the chill on the spine, the cold sweat. In survival there is directness of experience, there is no launch into the symbolic, there is just the sheer vastness of THAT and the fickleness of THIS (touch your chest). (Photos: Alisa)

"Sour Times"

2008-04-26T15:46:00.000-07:00

We were listening to Portishead songs at a friends house, when all of a sudden it struck me how pathologically sick and needy Beth Gibbon’s lyrics are.
We were just lost in the reverie haziness of a Oaxaca winter afternoon, each one of us lost in our own exegesis of lyrical neurotic fixation, but there was some kind of silent bond between us. She told me she was thinking the very same thing at the very same moment I was: ‘this lyrics are too neurotic.’ cool trip-hop neurotic.
Oaxaca would seem such a distant place to Bristol, the sun always shines and life is a drunken stupor, laziness and provincial procrastination. But still you are sad enough to reverberate with the gloom of a rainy British afternoon.
Anyway, poverty is poverty everywhere you go, Oaxaca or Bristol, the transparent clarity of hunger, the longing and not having, the greed it produces: ‘All mine, you have to be all mine.’
She smelled of Pomegranate, I gently stroked skin that I was later to kiss.

Merry Christmas

2007-12-19T19:12:00.000-08:00

There is so much I would like to write down, to tell you about. But there is not enough time. My life is a "movable feast" and the feast is moving to Oaxaca. Yep, that's right, lots of friends might be coming over, hopefully, and visiting. I hope to spend time in the city of Oaxaca and also in the coast. It's been a hectic last few months and I need the break. I need the time out.

Happy Holidays!

I Love This Quote

2007-11-02T16:19:00.000-07:00

Be patient towards all that is unsolved in your heart
And try to love the questions themselves.
Do not seek the answers that cannot be given to you
Because you would not be able to live them
And the point is to live everything.
Live the questions now,
Perhaps gradually without noticing it
You’ll live along some distant day into the answers.
Rainer Maria Rilke.

Home

2007-11-02T16:05:00.000-07:00

I often find myself in the odd situation of wandering the streets of the different sectors of this city without exactly knowing what to do or where to go, I know something must be done, some activity must be fulfilled. But I cannot get in motion or decide my next move, I just linger, I intermittently walk around in circles or stop my tracks, dead, feeling anxious about my obtuse inability to make choices and direct my steps out of the confusion, the mental indecision.
If only destiny could step forward and direct me somewhere “meaningful,” somewhere revealing of truth. I read somewhere that ‘you don’t search for truth, truth finds you.’ But no, it hasn't found me so far, so I just painfully linger around, waiting for truth and stupid meaning to find me, usually tired and hungry, under the mid-day sun in the reflecting heat of the dirty concrete.
Sometimes it’s the complete opposite, I do know where I want to go with complete certainty and I have a complete clarity of knowing where to direct myself: that place is usually home. I want to go home. I want to come home. But then its late in the evening on a working day and I’m waiting for the metro on a lonely platform or for the bus at a vandalized bus stop sheltered from the summer rains or the autumn winds, only later to be crammed into public transportation, stuck in the rush hour traffic through tunnels and avenues feeling numbed and weary of the vast broken space. So much fragmented space. I just want to go back home to truth.

Casual Conversation

2007-11-02T15:48:00.000-07:00

We stroke up casual conversation upon bumping into each other at the airport; both acting in a feigned stupor to disguise de pain of muted temperaments, quiet naturally but lifeless, like if we had never stopped seeing each other, but like if it was over anyway.

Nothing Special

2007-08-07T13:50:00.000-07:00

“As long as we are alive, we are always doing something. But as long as you think, “I’m doing this,” or “I have to do this,” or “I must attain something special,” you are actually not doing anything. When you give up, when you no longer want something, or when you do not try to do anything special, then you do something. When there is no gaining idea in what you do, then you do something…if you continue this simple practice everyday you will obtain a wonderful power. Before you attain it, it is something wonderful, but after you obtain it, it is nothing special.”
Shunryu Suzuki.
Taken from Zen Mind, Begginer's Mind By Shunryu Suzuki.

Hello

2007-08-05T14:36:00.000-07:00

The civility of a personal introduction should never be overlooked, but there is no point in saying much about me except that my name is Gabriel and that I’m just another of the 25 million inhabitants of this over grown, over polluted metropolis known as Mexico City.
Secluded in anonymity I go about my daily business, like most people, as a series and a continuum of projections, interpretations and re-interpretations of a seemingly impossible perception of truth.
I seek happiness and pleasure above everything else, even though I like to kid myself from time to time into believing that I also seek other more “meaningful” and “transcendental” goals such as perfection and wisdom; but I pray, whoever might be reading this, that you will pay no attention to such neurosis and pretension, whenever it does show up. The rest of the time I just try to run away from loneliness and suffering as much as possible (without much success, I must admit).
Life in Mexico City can seem at times a complex and a hectic ordeal, at others futile. Urban habits seem to want to reduce life’s purpose to nothing more than to make it through the day with food in your stomach and digital TV and wireless Internet access at home. How pathetically sad, I know, and still; due to lack of money, I’m actually hungry most of the time and at the present moment I don’t even own a TV or have internet access at my flat. I am what you could consider in contemporary terms as a complete economic failure. This is not a voluntary and socially conscious decision, I am not rebelling against the demands of a global economy that is turning human beings into one homogeneous mass of over-caffeinated, over-sexed, anxiously stressed-out consumers, I’m too meek and feeble for that, too gullible and rather naive for great fits of an enlightened decrying of the social injustice that seem to pervade this city and this country to it’s very historical sinews. Somehow I just have the sick need to let other fellow human beings acknowledge my silly existence. I guess I’m just lonely sometimes.

I Write Because I'm Lonely

2007-08-05T14:35:00.000-07:00

I write because I’m lonely. Loneliness doesn’t exactly mean that you leave a solitary existence, I certainly don’t, I know people, I have friends and family and someone whom I love very much. But there is a very primordial sensation that sometimes tickles my gut and that keeps reminding me in certain moments in life, such as those of depression, insomnia or hunger, about the impermanence of all phenomena and the uncertainty of human experience. These moments of awareness create a by-product of loneliness.
I am not saying that loneliness is a bad thing, or that it’s something worth cataloguing as an uncomfortable feeling and thus that we should proceed to numb it away with company, drugs, alcohol, technology or whatever other modes of evasion we, as humans, have come up with through-out history. Quiet the contrary; I would say there is something very worthy in the feeling of loneliness, something fresh and sad but extremely revealing. Something worth looking into from time to time without any hint of over-indulgence.
I suppose then that I blog out of a need to know that you are out there and that we hold a common purpose together: The common purpose of finding some sort of connection, of knowing ourselves lonely together; because, in the end, that is the very essence of human collectiveness.
Even the Byronic heroes of the world, tackling the cruel designs of heaven and earth, they also secretly long and yearn for a human bonding that might bring rest and bliss to a tormented soul. May we all find happiness in loneliness, as well as in the company of the world and all of its inhabitants.

Silence and Mexicans

2007-08-05T14:16:00.000-07:00

Mexicans have silence phobia, anybody visiting Mexico will be surprised at how loud everything is in this country and of how important, even “vital” it would seem for Mexicans to have music blaring from their speakers, at home, in the street, the country-side, the beach anywhere for that matter, at immoderately offensive decibel levels. It would seem that Mexicans cannot stand silence, almost it would seem that they loathe it.
A builder working at a construction site once told me that if he didn’t have the radio blaring the latest hits in Ranchero music, he and his fellow co-workers felt kind of lonely and melancholic hammering away and shovelling to the hum of distant cars and the chirp of sooty smog ridden birds. There is nothing more common in Mexico than to find yourself in some far away mountain range overlooking a vast expanse of immeasurable open skies; at desert planes stretching away into a fathomless horizon; or in a quiet sea cove with crystal clear waters washing away any cares from your mind; only to have a large Mexican family shouting and laughing and playing Cumbia music at full volume next to you. I have heard a lot of my fellow countrymen say that they feel lonely when they do not have music playing loud enough for them not to hear themselves inside. Mexicans seem to have a great difficulty in any inward inquiry, anything else but a histrionic need to shout and scream and be loud and garrulous just isn’t enough to forget about that existential discomfort that loud music seems to cure. Off course, one can never generalize about a whole country, a whole human population, but it is a most obvious observation for anyone who might have the opportunity to contrast other cultures and other modes of behaviour from around the world.
Silence is not an easy thing to face or become accustomed to. Silence can certainly be uncomfortable, but how long can we actually shut it out until it comes back to haunt us?
Playing loud music without any consideration of your next-door neighbours or other people around you would seem like a typical Mexican antisocial stance. But then again, it might be the fact that Mexicans are not stingy even with their music and enjoy sharing it with the rest of the world.

Note: The author of this blog here wishes to express that in no way is he uncomfortable around loud music and is able to enjoy both silence and rowdy Mexican noise.

Meche

2007-08-05T14:01:00.000-07:00

I stumbled upon this car parked in an unpaved back street in downtown Mexico City, a block away from the flat where I used to live a few years ago (a big shout out to Victor and Hector). I thought it seemed very uncanny to find such a wicked well-kept vintage Mercedes as this, parked in front of a tortilla shop and next to old VW beetles with stickers of flaming skulls.

2007-08-05T13:57:00.000-07:00