7 Color Lagoon

Photo © Howard Dratch.

It has been nearly a month since I have posted.  My other blogs are languishing while I try to survive in my own changed environment, changed circumstances and interests.  However, I miss writing even if only a little.

The plan is to continue this blog, 7 Color Lagoon, with changes.  It is less about travel and living as an expatriate as it will be about global economics, photography, economic news and whatever happens to catch my eye and interest.  Links will slowly be checked and redone and the ads and Amazon store re-arranged to reflect the new subject matter.  Please support the advertisers as it helps continue the blog.

Here is a current (5/16) report from Canal Once, the Mexican news and TV network from the Polytechnic Institute in the capital city.  The 5th annual meeting of leaders of the Latin American states is being held in Lima, Peru under guard by 9000 police.  A major issue being discussed is global food supplies in light of diversions to biofuels, poverty and climatic changes.

This is an excerpt from Canal Once in Spanish,

Sumida en la pobreza sobrevive una tercera parte de la población de América Latina, son 220 millones de personas que carecen de lo indispensable. A este sector se dirigieron los trabajos de la Quinta Cumbre de Jefes de Estado de Latinoamérica, el Caribe y la Unión Europea en Lima, Perú, a la que acudieron 45 gobernantes.

Desarrollo sustentable, cambio climático y energía fueron otros de los temas principales. Se llegó a un acuerdo para analizar un posible gravamen al consumo de petróleo y gas licuado a fin de conseguir fondos que serían destinados a mejorar el medio ambiente.

The Lima meeting is concentrating on the poverty that continues to affect one-third or the Latin American population — 220 million people.  President Garcia opened remarks with the declaration that hundreds of millions of people are threatened with hunger in the midst of abundance.  The European Union is the primary donor in  humanitarian aid.

Garcia warned of the consequences of eyes closed against the food crisis and proposed increasing by 2% world agricultural production.  The Spanish president, Josè Luis Rodriquez Zapatero, lamented the impact of biofuel production on  rising food prices.  Besides Hugo Chavez, Venezuelan president, trying to turn the meeting to the political crises between his country and Columbia; the major themes were sustainable development, climate change, energy needs and funds to improve the environment.

The food crisis is not just a Market manipulation.  It may well be partly a result of what Robert Heilbroner called a “revolution of rising expectations”.  Like global warming that revolution gathered momentum slowly and is now breaking out in a rapidly ascending line.  People want things they didn’t have before nor even thought to have.  More meat in their diet (healthy or not), regular meals, cell phones, national infrastructure, TV, education, credit and consumer goods, etc.  The revolution has been won in that the world is more and more demanding that its expectations be met.  Providing those expectations may strain resources on an over-crowded planet and change the political face of many parts of the world.

Photo © Howard Dratch, 2008.  Pasta & tofu.

The world may not be waiting for this heart-healthy dish of tofu, nopal cactus, chaya leaf and zucchini but it is tired of waiting for 2 or 3 meals a day.  Now that everyone - almost - watches TV they are aware that the world has plenty of food and toys and they want a piece of the action, a slice of the pie.

Doesn’t that sound great? Apple could announce their new addition to the attempts to design the digital alternative to our beloved books, newspapers and magazines that are held in the lap, folded into subway squares and tossed away into the street, used to wrap fish or, trust the British, wrapped around fish and chips. But Steve Jobs hasn’t tackled the project. At least so far.

So I made my own.

Or, rather, I found something wonderful to do with my (now) slow iBook 900 ghz G3 computer. It was my first and stood up to my errors and ignorance when I first bought it in 2003. It still hums along minus its built-in 56K modem which was blown out by some power surge from the wondrous quality of Mexican utilities — CFE (the state electric company) or Telmex (Carlos Slim’s monopoly telecommunications giant). It has been replaced by the new MacBook Pro 2.16 Intel Core 2 Duo I bought last January which is even more perfect. The G3 seemed slow and its screen is both smaller and reproduces less well.

It was still too disloyal and wasteful to treat it as a doorstop but too foreign (Mexico is still enmeshed in Windows systems with HP and Dell high on the list of appliances in use) to sell here. So I was keeping it charged and its software up to date but not finding a lot to do with it that I wouldn’t rather do on the MacBook Pro.

Now that I upgraded its Panther system (10.3.9) to Tiger (10.4.11) it is even slower but much more useful. The recent Java updates made the screen images far more satisfying than I thought they could be. I began to look for what my old friend would do well that didn’t require blazing speed or state of the art technology.

Then I opened a pdf book and downloaded Adobe’s Digital Editions reader. They both work and require no massive speed. ITunes works fine and Apple has kept iTunes and QuickTime up to date for Panther and Tiger systems. So my old friend can show me books and present audio recordings (with headphones since the built-in speakers are laughably bad). It will even play a movie. The screen may not equal the MBP but it doesn’t have to to play, for instance, the free and legal downloads in the public domain from the Internet Archive.

It found its job and now hangs out on the table where a book used to be propped on something to be read when passing by or eating alone. Since my eyes have deteriorated badly in old age and both had cataracts removed in the past year, it does something all those lovely books can’t — changes text size at will. It can be set to show text at a height that I can read it from across the table, across the room. OK. It isn’t wireless (but neither is Mexico) and it is the model with a 14 inch screen. The 12“ would have been a bit better for this and fit more easily in the lap but it is the one I have.

An old Apple is not a bad Apple. Don’t contaminate the environment with old computers thrown out; put them to good use. Read a digital book today.
It is possible to find great uses for aging digital appliances.

10 to the First Power or The Power of 10: Miami Art Museum’s collection is increased by gifts of collectors.

The Miami Art Museum, which they want to call MAM, is celebrating its 10th anniversary. It is not old for a museum — not even for an American museum. But Florida, when I grew up here in the 1950s and part of the 60s, was not noted for its culture. It still is much better at presenting amusement parks and ball games than museums or the performing arts.

The focal point for its’ tourism success is a huge amusement park in the center of the state based on a cartoon mouse. Mouseworld tries to create a mythological America that never existed. It is the symbol of Florida. They even put one in France and an original in California. Symbols of America like golden arches. Symbols and myths do not always deliver cultural benefits, educational excellence. Florida also boasts a beer garden for the kindergarten set in Tampa and multiple arenas for the worship of football and baseball, some terrific racing of cars, hydroplanes and other beautiful things that go fast.

Miami has both the pop boat shows, grand prix racing and a new performing arts center, growing galleries, the “Design District” and some museums. MAM sits in the center of the Downtown and is planning to break ground for a massive new facility in 2008 in what is to become Miami’s Cultural District.

The plan was to report on the Tamayo show at MAM that ran from June through September 23. The plan was to report on it before it was taken down but some surgery got in the way of my writing energies. Still, the show (Tamayo: A Modern Icon Reinterpreted) was organized by the Santa Barbara Museum of Art together with the Consejo Nacional de Bellas Artes and Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporàneo in Mexico City. In Miami the Consulate General of Mexico also helped present it.

If you get a chance to catch it in a different gallery or museum, do it. Tamayo was known to me, some of his works familiar from the Modern and, I seem to recall, works in an L.A. museum and in books looked at in that great pile in my memory that have lost their titles and where I found, borrowed, bought or merely looked at them. Rufino del Carmen Arellanes Tamayo (Mexicans have not only wonderful names but lots of them) was Oaxacan even though he ended up painting in both Mexico and the United States.

His history mirrors many other artists through the ages who were destined and groomed for some useful and responsible profession. His mother died in 1911 when he was 12 and was moved with an aunt to Mexico City. She put him in accounting school (someone once suggested I become an accountant rather than photographer and, luckily, I demurred) so that he could do the financial reporting for the family fruit-selling business. He wisely followed the muse to the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes where he sat in on classes until they took him in officially in 1917.

The early paintings are dark and heavily influenced by both European movements — Cubism, Fauvism, Neo-impressionism and other rising isms of the new century. He threw in Mexico’s indigenous facets and the violence of the Revolution of 1910. Then he stirred in his hopes and dreams and the power of the isms and out of the cauldron came Mexican forces labeled him traitor to the Revolution which helped propel him into the New York of the 20s and, later, the late 30s and 40s.

Sadly, some of MAM’s galleries, particularly for these earlier works, were poorly lighted. The lighting appeared to be an on-going problem which, we can assume, will be addressed in the building for which ground will be broken next year. Not all the pieces were impressive but the jewels that were among the choices were just that, jewels of his own modernism infused with the spirit of Abstract Expressionism of post-war New York. There are Mexican women of Tehuantepec drawn Cubist style that still smell of chiles and emanate hot tropical style unknown to Picasso. There are supernatural figures with glowing eyes, phantoms of the post-war apocalyptic fears of nuclear annihilation that threaten to escape from the confines of the canvas frame and symbolic birds with tropical colors and universal hopes and fears.

He was still painting in the 1970s and 80s although death had become one of the motifs in his work. We are not surprised since that angel, that seductive temptress that comes for us all, hovered with his muse and he made his peace with her. He shows it in his work. He shows, too, the love for his wife of many decades in the portrait of her that embodies so much in so little. Luckily these later pieces, the supernatural, the birds of the Cold War are the ones that I found in the better-lit galleries. MAM impresses in a state usually in love with the new and pop, chain stores and art on velvet.

Tamayo is gone from Miami but, wherever the show lands next, I hope you get to see it. If not dive into a mound of art books and pull some of the images out to imprint in the galleries of your mind.

Ten to the first power at MAM. Yes, MAM. The show at the Miami Art Museum is called the <i>Power of Ten</i>. This one runs through 23 October and you can still get there to celebrate gifts the museum has received during the first 10 years of its life as a “collecting institution”. Are they all good? Are they equal in vision in quality? They are gifts, mind you, and we all have a closet with some ties that didn’t make the grade, a pair of multi-colored golfing slacks along with the treasures without which our life would be lessened. So it must be with museums. (more…)

The expatriate is back in town, in Miami, in Florida, in the great, free bastion of liberty, my United States. What do I find when I flick on the no-longer-flickering eye of the TV? A young man, muchacho, student with a hint of serious in his demeanor approaches the podium at the old but un-respected University of Florida and insists on questioning one Senator John Kerry after the politician has given his views and opened the floor for questions.

The U of F has never been regarded as an academic school. It has been noted for its pre-professional ball teams, called “gators” to warn of the harshness of its environment. I remember my uncle’s graduation when I was about 3 or 4 but only the red-brickness of the campus. It had, for a time, a great photography department after I had left another poor Florida state university for an academic college in New York that revels in the protection of liberty, freedom and constitutionalism within an atmosphere of academic freedom firmly protected from the ever-present threat of interference. Waves of paranoia roll across the American landscape at regular intervals.
Each threaten our liberties. There were the Tories who wanted to tie us to King George, southern spies who would have enslaved our history and Japanese to store in the Nisei concentration camps out west (but none for the Germans). Each was a good excuse to protect ourselves by giving away our rights in exchange for “security”.

Now there is a world of Arabs waiting to destroy all of western civilization, to explode themselves in murderous frenzies against women, children and random men. No question but that they are there and do want to bathe the world in blood. But does that mean that America must give up everything that made us free in order to protect ourselves from the forces of evil?

Today Andrew Meyer, a University of Florida student did that which students are supposed to do. He thought about politics, about candidates, about the nature of democracy and about his vote and he barged up to the podium in that party school and attempted to engage Senator Kerry in a discussion. Yes. He became heated and took more than his minute and that catapulted him into his 15 minutes of international fame. (more…)