Author Archives: Lloydville

DIEGO CORRALES

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This
past May, boxer Diego Corrales (above) died in a high-speed motorcycle crash
here in Las Vegas.  He’d been drinking and was driving without a
valid license — trying to outrun his demons, I guess, whatever they
were.

Exactly two years to the day before his death he fought one of the
most remarkable fights in modern boxing history against Jose Luis
Castillo.  I was there.  Here’s my report of the fight,
written the day afterwards, reprinted as a tribute to a man who lived
out his “crowded hour” with distinction, honoring everyone who was privileged to see it:

CORRALES-CASTILLO

8 May 2005

They’re already calling it a classic, one for the ages, the fight of
the year — a year which isn’t even half over and which has also seen
the recent epic combat between Morales and Pacquiao.

If you’re a member of the Fancy you know I’m talking about the awesome
battle between Diego Corrales and Jose Luis Castillo at the Mandalay
Bay Events Center in Las Vegas last night. If you’re not, take a look
at a rebroadcast or tape of the fight sometime and try to believe your
eyes. I saw it in person, and I still don’t believe mine . . .


For the rest of the report on Corrales-Castillo, go here.

For more boxing reports, go here.

CORRALES-CASTILLO

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[Above, promotional decor for the first Corrales-Castillo fight outside the restaurant Aureole at Mandalay Bay.]

CORRALES-CASTILLO

8 May 2005

They're already calling it a classic, one for the ages, the fight of
the year — a year which isn't even half over and which has also seen
the recent epic combat between Morales and Pacquiao.

If you're a member of the Fancy you know I'm talking about the awesome
battle between Diego Corrales and Jose Luis Castillo at the Mandalay
Bay Events Center in Las Vegas last night. If you're not, take a look
at a rebroadcast or tape of the fight sometime and try to believe your
eyes. I was there, and I still don't believe mine.

There were some goofy undercard fights which did not prepare one for
what was to come — but looking at the faces of Corrales and Castillo
on the big video screens as they made their ways to the ring one could
see that the mood of the night was about to shift. These guys had the
air of men facing something terrible but inevitable.

Castillo is a fighter who doesn't move exceptionally well on his feet
or punch exceptionally hard, but he's a skillful enough boxer. He likes
to go forward and pound away at an opponent and grind him down.
Corrales is taller and rangier, with more speed and a harder punch but
not known for his sturdiness. Like many rangy fighters he can't always
absorb punishment well and has been knocked down, though not out, a
lot. Both men have awesome wills, though, and never give up, so the
fight did not figure to go the distance.

My sense of it was this — either Corrales would knock Castillo out
sometime in the first four rounds, or Castillo, if he survived the
early going, would knock Corrales out sometime in the last four rounds.
Beyond that, prediction would be foolish.

In the end it went much (though not quite) as I had foreseen, but on a level no one could have imagined.

Corrales did indeed dominate the early rounds, but just barely. He hit
Castillo repeatedly with combinations that would have felled a lesser
man — and almost felled Castillo. But Castillo gave almost as good as
he got and the rounds were very close.

When the fourth ended, I thought — now Castillo's time has come . . . now he will win.

But the balance never tipped too far in either direction and as the
battle wore on I was gripped by a strong feeling of sadness at the
thought that someone was going to lose this fight. It had become a
battle of wills, a contest on a moral and spiritual plane. By the 8th
round I had a feeling that Corrales had the edge. He seemed to be
landing the harder blows and he seemed, surprisingly, fresher. But that
just made Castillo's refusal to surrender all the more admirable.
Still, moral determination can take you only so far — in the end the
body has its limits. But anyone who watched this fight now knows that
those limits are sometimes wider than the mind can easily conceive.

In the 8th Castillo made a startling comeback, fighting it seemed on
willpower alone. He opened a cut under one of Corrales's eyes and
nearly closed both of them. By this point both men seemed to have
abandoned defense altogether, willing to take any amount of punishment
to find the opening that would end things decisively.

And then, in the 10th, it happened — exactly as I had predicted.
Castillo landed a combination that put Corrales down. He got up to
continue but he looked dazed and unsteady on his feet. The crowd, which
heavily favored Castillo — Las Vegas boxing fans are overwhelmingly
pro-Mexican, and Corrales was a mere American — had been roaring
incoherently throughout the fight. The roar turned mournful in the
middle rounds, with an undertone of shock and anger. Now it soared into
the realms of delirium.

A guy behind me screamed, “It's over!” — and I agreed with him.
Corrales's destruction was now just a matter of time, and not much time
at that. Castillo struck with more combinations and Corrales went down
again. Somehow he got up on all fours and then up on his feet to beat
the count, but he looked like he was somewhere else, far from Las Vegas
and this ugly beating he was getting.

Both times he went down Corrales lost his mouthpiece — by crafty
design or simply from punch drunkenness. Fighters who are ready to give
up often spit out their mouthpieces in unconscious anticipation of
surrender. In any case, retrieving the mouthpiece and getting it put
back in by his cornermen gave Corrales a few extra seconds to get his
head together and his legs coordinated.

Referee Tony Weeks, a seasoned veteran, seemed to take his time
transferring the mouthpiece to Corrales's seconds — I had a feeling he
was giving them a chance to stop the fight, because Corrales looked on
the verge of absorbing some vicious and possibly debilitating further
punishment. But Joe Goosen, Corrales's trainer, obviously had no
intention of throwing in the towel. Indeed, after the second knockdown
he gave his fighter a stern and admonitory look — as though trying to
convey to him the gravity of the situation. Goosen appeared serious but
oddly calm — which may have had some influence on what happened next.

The fight resumed. Corrales didn't yet seem to be all there, but his
dislocation from reality took an astonishing form. He stood up
straight, with no attempt at defense, and attacked Castillo fearlessly.
There was no time to tie up and regroup — he'd lost three points in
the 10th, two from the knockdowns and one from Weeks, who had penalized
him, quite correctly, for spitting out his mouthpiece the second time.

At times in the middle rounds I'd had a sense watching Castillo of
seeing a ghost in action. Physically beaten, he was operating by pure
will, transcending the physical. Now Corrales seemed to have entered
the same disembodied territory. His body was beaten — something else
was fighting in the ring in its place.

[AP Photo]

He hit Castillo with a punch that stunned him, sent him back into the
ropes. He hit him again four times as he leaned against the ropes, his
hands down, his eyes rolling upwards, out on his feet. Weeks called an
end to the fight to prevent certain permanent damage to Castillo and
possibly his death.

Corrales had come back from the dead and was now champion. Castillo,
who'd had the fight won in merely mortal terms, had lost. I discovered,
when my mind settled a bit, that my mouth was wide open and that I was
holding my head in my hands — a perfect cartoon-figure expression of
shock.

The cry from the crowd was indescribable — filled with sorrow and
astonishment and an almost inhuman excitement. The place seemed
suddenly crowded to the rafters, bursting its seams — a case of
emotional standing-room only.

At the end of the night, Steve Albert and Jim Gray, the Showtime
announcers, made their way past me out of the arena. Someone shouted
something to Gray, who turned back and said, “You'll never see a better
fight than that.”

I'm sure I never will. Joe Goosen, when asked about the possibility of
a rematch, on everyone's mind after such a contest, said, “These two
should never fight each other again — it's too much.” They will, of
course, boxing economics being what they are — but it's hard to
imagine any other outcome than one of them killing the other in the
bout.

I went over to RM Seafood, an ultra-moderne restaurant at the Mandalay
Bay, for some soothing crabcakes and beer. I couldn't think about the
fight — there didn't seem much to think about. All its meaning had
been fully explicated and exhausted in the ring. What remained for me
was a kind of wonder, an expanded sense of the horizons of the human
will.

DRIVING IN MEXICO

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There's
really no way to explain this precisely, but driving in Mexico is
different from driving in the States.  Mexicans don't follow
roadsigns or rules except in the vaguest sort of way — they respond to
the behavior of other drivers.  At an intersection with four-way
stop signs, a Mexican driver, if he or she thinks there's time, will
scoot through on the cross street ahead of you without stopping at all
— you are expected to expect this and react accordingly.

Anything is permitted between drivers as long as it makes sense. 
It's more like navigating a crowded sidewalk as a pedestrian than
driving on streets and highways north of the border.  In other
words, it doesn't work if people aren't instinctively respectful of
other people's space and right of way.

I came to enjoy driving in Mexico very much — it was always an
adventure and always interesting, because it required you to pay
attention to other drivers, to imagine what they were thinking. 
It was disturbing to drive in Las Vegas afterwards.  I found it
almost impossible to imagine what other drivers were thinking —
because they usually weren't thinking at all.  Cell phones are a
big part of the problem here — in Mexico it's illegal to drive while
talking on a cell phone, and people, at least in Baja California, don't
do it.  Not, I suspect, because it's against the law, but because it's not
sensible.  In general, drivers in the States rely on lanes and
signs and signals to avoid collisions with other cars.  In Mexico, you have
to rely on a careful anticipation of how others are going to behave — and sometimes of how livestock are going to behave.

On a related note, streets signs are posted very spottily in Mexican
towns, even in big towns like La Paz.  You can't navigate by them,
even with a reliable map.  This requires stopping often to ask
directions — an occasion for a social interaction that is almost
always pleasant.  Why put up street signs when you can have a
friendly interchange with a human being who will tell you how to get
where you're going, and the best way to get there?

Once we got caught in a maze of street construction in Loreto. 
There were policemen posted at all the intersections with
detours.  When you asked one how to get to Mexico 1, he would
point vaguely in a certain direction — “That way.”  Eventually,
that way would lead you to another policemen, who would tell you to go
“up there.”  At last you'd find yourself back on a familiar
street, heading for Mexico 1.  Why complicate things with
elaborate directions, much less with temporary signs, when there are
enough officers around to give you the part of the puzzle you need at
any given moment?

It should be noted that the police in Mexico do enforce the driving
laws.  Contrary to popular belief they don't target tourists, but
they don't give them a pass, either.  Noting the presence of
police is part of the acute environmental awareness necessary for
driving in Mexico.


For previous Baja California trip reports, go here.





[Photos © 2007 Harry Rossi]

THE SLAPSTICK ENCYCLOPEDIA

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In
case there's anyone out there who doesn't know it, The Slapstick
Encyclopedia is awesome — offering about eighteen hours worth of
silent comedy shorts on five DVDs. It's an education in silent comedy,
and the first lesson it teaches is that silent comedy could accommodate
a stunning range of talent and tone, from the subtle sophistication of
Sidney Drew to the certifiable madness of Charlie Bowers.


The
pantheon isn't seriously challenged, however — the work of Chaplin,
Keaton and Lloyd shines with a special radiance, as you'd expect — but
there are pleasant surprises at every turn.


Harry Langdon remains a
puzzlement to me, based on the two shorts included here, from his
Sennett days. I can't decide if his art is sublime or boring or, by
some mysterious alchemy, both at once. Langdon moves so beautifully
that you simply can't take your eyes off of him, even though you
desperately want to.


The
Charley Chase vehicle Fluttering Hearts, directed by Leo McCarey, has
a light but sure comic tone that never falters, and a short directed by
Roscoe Arbuckle after the scandal, The Iron Mule, is proof positive
of Arbuckle's exquisite plastic imagination.


The
collection is organized logically but flexibly, with shorts grouped
sometimes by studio, where there was a strong studio style at work (in
the cases of Sennett and Roach,) sometimes by artists noted for their
collaboration, sometimes by theme.


Chaplin appears in a volume devoted
to the influence of the English music hall, and it's fascinating to see
how much he took from its traditions, and also how magically he
transformed them. Lesser artists working from the same traditions —
even the wondrous Stan Laurel — simply inhabit another, more
circumscribed realm of cinematic possibility.

The Slapstick Encyclopedia ends with a grab bag called The Anarchic Fringe, which
presents several shorts of outright lunacy verging on the incoherent,
but the
collection actually climaxes in the penultimate volume, The Race Is On,
which offers comedies involving various mad chases. Chasing Choo
Choos, with Monty Banks, cut down into a short from the climax of a
feature, includes the God-damnedest train sequence ever put on film.
Delirious, relentless, impossibly beautiful and beautifully impossible,
it's one of the most glorious passages in all of movies, and is as
close to a religious experience as one can have by purely cinematic
means.

The
DVD set is marred by one irritation. There is no single listing by
volume and disc of all the shorts included. This will only bother you
when you decide to revisit one of the many treasures included — but
then again that's something you'll probably end up doing a lot. The
Silent Era website offers a complete listing of the films which is
worth printing and keeping with the box.


Here's a link to the list:

The Silent Era Web Site

Check out other posts in the Slapstick Blog-A-Thon here.

TODAY’S TIP FOR TRAVELING IN MEXICO

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The most important thing to know about everyday Mexican culture is that it’s organized around a system of subtle but highly formal and ritualized courtesies between people.  Even when you have business to conduct in Mexico, the situation — at a gas pump, a cashier’s stand in a department store, a roadside taquería — is first and foremost social, not commercial.  If you treat a Mexican waiter or merchant or clerk as a functionary, if you get right down to business or generally act as if you’re in a hurry to conclude it, the Mexican is likely to see you, quite correctly, as a barbarian.

Mexicans are accustomed to Yankees behaving like barbarians.  They have a defensive reserve when dealing with gringos.  We saw pompous middle-aged Yankees, soi-disant sportsmen, ordering dignified waiters and bartenders around as though they were children.  The waiters and bartenders took a little extra time doing what they were told, and if you caught their eye in such moments, they would offer the slightest trace of a smile . . . and a shrug.  A civilized person can never be humiliated by a barbarian — only saddened, or amused.

But if you take your time, look them in the eye, exchange greetings like a civilized human being, they are more than likely to break out in wide smiles and treat you with an almost familial warmth.  If you show them that you’re interested in them, they become interested in you, interested in what you want, interested in helping you get it.  The situation has become personal — humane.

The moment of greeting, of establishing a personal contact, can be very brief, but it must entail a perceptible pause, an unhurried ease, a sense that nothing will or should happen until the two of you have sized each other up and shown each other respect.  Your Spanish can be dreadful — it’s the timing and the demeanor of the parties that define the interchange.

Mexicans are never servile, but they have a servile mask they can assume when dealing with barbarians.  It’s a mechanism for getting through with the interaction as quickly and painlessly as possible.  It has a melancholy quality, too — because in truth they are feeling sorry for you.  But nothing delights a Mexican more than being of service to a compadre.  Accommodation and co-operation are values of the highest order in Mexico — a legacy of its revolutionary history and a necessity in an underdeveloped economy.

When we took our cruise to the Isla Espíritu Santo I left the
lights of my car on.  When we got back the battery was dead.
The guy who rents the kayaks at Pichilingue instantly went to his car,
pulled it around to mine and got out his jumper cables.  But we
couldn’t get my car into neutral without power and so couldn’t push it
out close enough to the guy’s car to hook the engines up.  The guy
went and got his boat battery, which charged my engine enough to allow
the shift to neutral.  We pushed the car next to his and soon had
it going again.  He never once gave the impression that he was
doing me a favor.  When I slipped him 100 pesos afterwards he
nodded gravely but didn’t look at the bill — just tucked it into his
pocket.  The gesture had been enough — but the gesture was very
important.

Bargaining in Mexico is a game between equals, conducted not for financial advantage to either party, but for fun.  We saw fellow tourists angrily and self-righteously berating a hotel clerk for not honoring some sort of discount coupon, treating the clerk like an imbecile.  The clerk, who spoke perfect English, pretended not to understand what they were saying.

But when my sister haggled with a hotel clerk for a reduced room rate by
suggesting, with a face that was a little too perfectly straight, that
her children were weeping and fainting in the car from heat exhaustion,
the clerk laughed . . . and reduced the rate.  Once a hotel clerk
told my sister that he couldn’t reduce his rates because it was high
season.  “But high season is in February,” she replied.  The
clerk looked around furtively, pressing a finger to his lips.
“Tell no one,” he said.  My sister laughed . . . and he reduced
the rate.  The game had been played well.

Some mornings in La Paz I would go across the street from our hotel to a little food stand in a park, for a cup of coffee.  It cost eight pesos and I would always leave the señora behind the counter ten pesos, which she always accepted with a mixture of gracious formality and genuine delight.  Once my sister joined me for coffee and when she went to pay for it, the señora felt it was her duty to tell my sister that I customarily left a two-peso tip.  I think she was afraid that my sister might embarrass herself, and perhaps compromise my own honor, by forgetting this tiny, infinitesimal courtesy.

[Photos © 2007 Harry Rossi]

CARNE ASADA TACOS

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The
next time you feel like fixing yourself a hamburger, try a carne asada
taco instead, which is sort of the equivalent of a hamburger south of the border,
fast, ubiquitous and comforting.

Here's how to make the ultimate carne asada taco, courtesy of Rick Bayless' indispensable Mexican Everyday:

Get yourself some skirt steak, a 7-ounce can of chipotle chiles in
adobo sauce, a few medium white onions, some flour or corn tortillas
and some olive oil.  (A bottle of hot sauce is optional.)

Put the chipotle chiles and their sauce into a blender and purée
them  Remove the fat and white membranes from the meat and then
brush the chipotle purée over both sides of it.  Let this sit for
a while.  (You will have lots of the purée left, but it will keep
for weeks in the fridge.)

Eventually . . . turn your oven on at its lowest setting.  Cut up
an onion into quarter-inch thick slices.  Heat two tablespoons of
the oil in a skillet over medium to high heat and sauté the onions
until they're lightly browned but still crunchy.  (Takes about
five minutes.)  Transfer them to an oven-safe container, leaving
as much of the oil in the skillet as possible, and place the container
in the oven.  Return the skillet to the burner at the same heat
setting, add another tablespoon of oil and cook the chipotle-smeared
steak until it's well done.

Cut up the steak into thin slices,
mix it with the onions from the oven, salt it to taste, add some hot
sauce if you want (the chipotle sauce is fairly spicy to begin with)
and roll it all up in a tortilla.  Eat it with a cold beer or a
Mexican Coca-Cola (which is still made with real sugar and can be found
at many of the smaller Latin markets in the U. S.)

This is just about as easy to make as a hamburger with grilled onions
and way more interesting — Mexican food at its most basic and most
delicious.

LEAVING LA PAZ

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We
hated to leave La Paz but the hotel bill, even with the discount rate,
was mounting and the kids had stories they wanted to tell their dad and
their friends back in Los Angeles.  So we packed our frozen fish
in a cooler and headed north again, a prospect made more pleasant by
the thought of re-visiting the towns we'd stopped at on the way down.

There was much excitement about the first night's stop in Loreto,
because of that great pool, but the La Pinta inn there was booked —
which turned out to be a happy circumstance in the end because it drove
us to the Hotel Oasis, which was wondrous:

A great bar where the
kids were welcome to hang out, playing darts and pool, a great seaside
restaurant, hammocks strung up between the palm trees and on the
porches.  Nora took advantage of one of them to finish the magical
book Half Magic:

On subsequent days, San Ignacio and Catavina proved to be every bit as
charming as we remembered them.  There was even a horse grazing outside our rooms this time at the La Pinta in San Ignacio:

But we made a fatal miscalculation at
the end of the journey.  We decided to drive north of Ensenada and
stay at Rosarito, and then take the toll roads across to Tecate, to
save some time.

It was fun to drive by the Fox studio outside Rosarito, where Titanic
was filmed, but the town itself was a nightmare of traffic and hustlers
and tourists.  We stayed at a bland motel, whose only advantage
was that it was across the street from a famous old restaurant
specializing in carnitas, slow-roasted pork, which we hadn't run into
often in Baja California (it's not a specialty of the region.)  The carnitas was good, and so was a
shrine near the restrooms to Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe:

Driving the next day proved to be a nightmare.  The toll road
north was fine and fast, but there were no signs for the turn-off to
the toll road to Tecate and we got lost in the shabby maze of a Tijuana
suburb.  Between the hideous condos on the coast and the wretched
poverty of Tijuana, we felt as though we'd entered another
country.  It made me think of the old saying — “Poor
Mexico!  So far from God, so near to the United States of
America!”  Things in this part of Mexico are probably just going
to get worse in the years ahead, and I don't think the condo-sized
Jesus, below, is going to help much.

We eventually made it to Tecate, where we waited for over an hour in a
long line of cars to cross the border.  The crossing itself was a
breeze.  The U. S. guard, who spoke English with a Spanish accent,
asked us a few questions then waved us through — and suddenly it was
all over.  We were back in the States.

All that was left was to miss Mexico — something I haven't stopped doing since.


For previous Baja California trip reports, go here.





[Photos © 2007 Lloyd Fonvielle & Harry Rossi]

THE NARROW MARGIN

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An excellent brief review (with plot spoilers) of The Narrow Margin on the ever-useful films noir web site.  I personally classify this film as a police procedural, not a genuine film noir — which I think helps explain why the treatment of the apparent femme fatale, played by Marie Windsor, is so unsatisfying.  Femmes fatales
serve no real dramatic purpose in a police procedural — they're just,
if anything, red herrings . . . and who wants to see Marie Windsor
treated as a red herring?

Meanwhile Joe D'Augustine from Film Forno sends this comment on Odds Against Tomorrow:


“This
is a great movie! One of Jean Pierre Melville's favorites. Ryan and
Belafonte are amazing. Bravo to HB for financing it, that took guts and
no wonder it dealt with the frustrations of a black American male so
honestly. It was also one of the first films edited by DeDe Allen, her
next was The Hustler. The old cop who got screwed out of his pension is
excellent as well. Ed Begley, Is he corrupt or was he turned corrupt by
a corrupt system? I guess he is on a friendly basis with the
bookie/gangster. And he is the mastermind of the big steal. Great
locations, it is one of Wise's best! He really made all kinds of films
and made them well.”

PESCADORES

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The
Mar de Cortés is one of the world's great fishing grounds and we
decided we couldn't end our time in Baja California without at least
one fishing expedition.  Morning is the best time to catch fish in
the waters around La Paz — the earlier the better — so we decided to
arrange the expedition through the hotel, which meant we'd get picked
up there instead of having to drive ourselves to a distant rendezvous at some
ungodly hour.

Captain Jack, the hotel's agent for such things, confirmed the wisdom
of this when he told us we had to be ready to leave at quarter to five
in the morning.  We would be driving an hour to the beach we'd set
off from.  The 4:45 departure and the long drive sounded grim
but encouraging — we would be in the hands of people who were serious
about catching fish.

We stumbled into a van with four other pescadores
at the appointed hour and headed off towards the west, across the
peninsula that forms one side of the Bahía de La Paz.  The last
part of the trip took us over bone-rattling unpaved roads to a remote
beach lined with pangas.  The sun had not yet risen but Jorge, the
captain of the panga we'd rented, appeared out of the darkness and
rounded us up, loaded rods and a drink cooler into his boat, dragged
the boat into the ocean, helped us on board and set off towards the
Isla Cerralvo, about a half hour away by sea.

Just off the island he rendezvous-ed with two men in a skiff who sold
us our live bait for the day.  The two men wore baseball caps and
slickers and had the exact demeanor of Maine lobstermen — with faces
that seemed carved from granite.  (People who work the sea tend to become mythological.)

The sun was well up by now, and our taciturn captain finally asked us
what sort of fish we were looking to catch.  “Fish to eat,” I
said.  “Only fish to eat.”  His face lit up, he smiled
happily and began replacing the big hooks on the poles with smaller
ones.  I don't know if he was happy because he thought catching
fish to eat made sense, or because it meant he wouldn't have to deal
with the sort of egos that can't be satisfied with anything less than
impressive sporting trophies, but he was incredibly kind to us from
then on, warm and solicitous.

There were several other chartered boats out in the channel looking for
fish — all open pangas like ours.  Our captain looked around to
see who was catching what and finally stopped at a likely spot. 
He baited our lines for us and spooled them out by hand to the
indicated depth — he said that the channel here was about 60 feet
deep, its bottom lined with rocks which attracted marine life of all
sorts.

It's always so dramatic and mysterious to set a fishing line out into
the ocean — it seems wildly improbable that it will ever connect with
anything swimming down in that alien realm.  I was so happy just
to be out on the surface of that enchanting sea that I wouldn't have minded if we never
caught a thing.  But almost instantly Nora's rod began to
jerk.  “Fish!” shouted the captain, and slowly but surely Nora
reeled in a big, beautiful dorado, also called a mahi mahi, one of the
tastiest fish to be found in any ocean.

Then I hooked something really big — it was all I could do to land
it.  But it turned out to be a bonito, a humongous bonito, which
is not a good a good fish to eat.  The captain said he would save
it anyway to give to a friend, for shark bait.

Then Nora landed a smaller bonito, which we threw back, and I landed a good-sized tuna — which of course we kept.

By this time Harry had
become seasick.  He was truly miserable but the beach was too far
away to land him on — an hour's round trip.  Finally he threw up
over the side, said he felt much better, took up his rod and
immediately caught a nice tuna of his own.

Then his stomach turned
on him again and he was more or less out of commission for the rest of
the trip.  (This explains why there are no cool photos here of our time out on the water.)

I caught a parga (a red snapper), a great eating fish, and a trigger fish,
an odd-looking flat fish which I'd never heard of before.  “It makes the best ceviche,” our
captain assured us — and he was so right.  Lee caught a tuna
then, and we felt we'd had a most successful expedition.

Back on shore the captain (sharpening his knife above) filleted the fish and our driver put it in a
cooler in the van.  (I gave the captain my big tuna for his family
— we had more fish than we could eat ourselves in several meals.)

In La Paz that afternoon I took our fish to the restaurant at the hotel and asked
the staff to cook up enough of it for dinner for four that evening and
to
freeze the rest.  I asked them to make some ceviche out of the
trigger fish.  The waiters had to call the chef to identify the
trigger fish, which they didn't recognize, but he beamed when he saw
it.  “Ceviche — yes,” he said.

That night we dined like kings — like fishermen.  Nora's
dorado
was generally acclaimed as the best-tasting fish of them all, which is
saying a lot when the competition is freshly caught tuna and red
snapper, and the
ceviche made from the trigger fish was sublime.  The ocean had
been generous to us, and we took no more from it than we could
use.  Life was good.


For previous Baja California trip reports, go here.





[Photos © 2007 Harry Rossi]

NOIRISH: DOMESTIC NOIR

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The dark view of the world reflected in traditional film noir
found expression in other kinds of Hollywood movies, ones which didn't
necessarily reflect a preoccupation with specifically male anxieties or
use the night-time urban underworld as an image.  A strong tradition emerged
which centered on the home and domestic relationships and the ways
these seemed to be threatened by the colossal derangement of war on a
global scale and later by the specter of nuclear annihilation.  Here are some of the films I see as representative
of this tradition:

Shadow Of A Doubt

Double Indemnity
Clash By Night
Blonde Ice


Leave Her To Heaven

Sunset Boulevard
The Night Of the Hunter

Scarlet Street
Daisy Kenyon
The Bad and the Beautiful




American homes weren't physically threatened by the violence
of WWII, at least not directly, but millions of sons and husbands and fathers from those homes
were sent out into harm's way — and the whole scale of the war seemed
to be a threat to the very idea of social order, to the very idea of
home and family as the bonding agents of civilization.

Hitchcock's Shadow Of A Doubt was the first great expression of this sense of domestic insecurity.  Billy Wilder's Double Indemnity
offered a vision of how comfortable middle-class life might be infected
by the violence and cynicism of a world that had seemingly gone
mad.  In the post-war era, in the shadow of nuclear annihilation,
other films, like Leave Her To Heaven and Clash By Night, reflected a deep suspicion of the old domestic verities — a sense that they might no longer be viable.

I would place Wilder's Sunset Boulevard in the category of domestic noir. 
For one thing its action is mostly centered inside one house — but
the whole film is basically Wilder's deconstruction of his “home”, Hollywood, for which he felt both affection and
disgust.  (Wilder's cynicism was very personal and eccentric, so
its dangerous to connect it too directly with broader social currents
— but it's clear that these broader social currents made his dark
visions commercially viable, and he must certainly have had at
least an intuitive appreciation of this fact.)




The Night Of the Hunter is, in my opinion, way too poetic, metaphorical and explicitly religious to be called a film noir, but it's certainly a dark film, and it deals with the issues of collapsed manhood that also informed the classic films noirs.  If anything it's domestic noir. 
It deals with the destruction of one home by a failed father, a long,
perilous journey in search of a new home, and the threat to that new
home by a demonic shadow father.  Its expressionistic visual style
harks back to the silent era, to the UFA style, and has little in
common with the harsh, jagged, tabloid-style photography of classic noir.

It's interesting to note that The Night Of the Hunter was a box-office flop on its initial release, while the general run of classic films noirs
were consistently (if modestly) profitable almost to the end of the
Fifties.  This suggests that Americans weren't prepared to
confront their post-war anxieties about manhood and the home too
directly.  The film noir
form allowed for a kind of indirect expression of these anxieties
within the context of a nominally conventional crime thriller. 
When exposed outside this context, as in The Night Of the Hunter,
they turned audiences off — the medicine was just too strong, the
scalpel too close to the bone.  (Note that in the poster above, Sunset Boulevard
identifies itself as “a Hollywood story” whose pathology of the
collapsed male could, presumably, be imagined as confined to Tinsel
Town.)

All the films listed above involve murder or the threat of murder, which is why they are often thought of as films noirs, but they differ from the classic film noir in that they offer a strong female perspective and locate the origins of their existential catastrophes inside a home or homes.

The anxieties addressed by these domestic noirs
would be addressed more subtly and ultimately more accessibly in other kinds of
films in the 50s, most notably in the work of Douglas Sirk and in the
cycle of films concentrating on teen angst.  When
filmmakers were able to deal with dark visions of American domestic
life outside the conventions of a crime thriller, the domestic noir lost much of its usefulness as a form.

[The noir credentials of the films listed above are as follows . . . Clash By Night is included in the Warner DVD noir series . . . noir expert Eddie Muller considers Sunset Boulevard one of the greatest of all noirs . . . Leave Her To Heaven, Shadow Of A Doubt and Double Indemnity are included in Nicholas Christopher's noir filmography in his book Somewhere In the Night and appear on many other lists of films noirs . . . the Wikipedia entry on the subject identifies The Night Of the Hunter as a classic-era film noir . . . the Internet Movie Database, as well as the VCI DVD, call Blonde Ice a film noir . . . Scarlet Street is included in Kino's second box set of films noirs . . . Daisy Kenyon is part of Fox's DVD noir series.]

FOOD IN LA PAZ

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It's
hard to have a bad meal in La Paz, especially if you stick to
seafood.  In fact, if you stick to seafood (and avoid the Burger
King and Applebee's) it's hard not to stumble upon some of the best
meals of your life, just about anywhere.

The fanciest place we ate at in La Paz was the Bermejo, the restaurant
at Los Arcos, our hotel, but we didn't pay fancy prices there because
we dined on fish we'd caught ourselves (an experience I'll write about
in a later post.)  The hotel, which caters to fishermen, is happy
to prepare fish you supply yourself, and to freeze any of it you want
to carry home with you.

The simplest place we ate at was the Super Tacos de Baja California
Hermanos Gonzáles, an outdoor stand with a big terrace that's an
outgrowth of a sidewalk stand that got so popular it had to
expand.  My sister Lee had some stupendous fish ceviche there,
Harry and I shared some equally stupendous octopus and clam
tacos.  (Nora isn't a seafood fanatic and often had quesadillas of
one sort or another.)  We never ate better or cheaper food
anywhere in Baja
California.  One wall of the place had cool murals (above.)

One evening we took a lengthy walk along the marinas to the south of the malecón
to a medium-priced restaurant called the La Costa, palapa-roofed, right
next to the water.  We had super-fresh seafood there and Harry
felt moved to record the crab dinner he ate.  “A lot of work,” he
said, “but worth it.”

The Bismark is a rarity — an indoor seafood restaurant back several blocks from the malecón. 
The seafood was terrific and the decor was even better:

Harry and
I had dinner one evening at the Bismark II, which the clerk at our
hotel recommended.  It's right across the street from the malecón,
with seating on a terrace or back under a high palapa roof.  A
charming place with the same great seafood as its parent establishment.

The only bad experience we had dining out in La Paz was at a place right on the malecón, the Kiwi.  Lee and I had fine smoked marlin tacos and Harry had a wonderful pescado entero
— a whole fish fried quickly in super-hot oil and then served whole
(but with olives replacing the fried eyes), which Harry also felt moved to
record (see the images at the beginning and end of this post.)  But Nora ordered fish and chips and the fish had gone bad
— very bad.  There's just no excuse for this in a restaurant
within spitting distance of the ocean, in a town where fresh seafood is
so ubiquitous and so cheap.  Foisting a small bit of bad fish on a
child might have saved the restaurant as much as fifty cents, I
suspect, but it lost our goodwill forever.

La Paz is a seafood lover's paradise, not just because there's so much
and such a great variety of it, and not just because it's so fresh, but because of the simple, perfect
ways it's cooked and served.  You feel you're eating the same food
the chef would make for himself or herself, or for their families,
prepared with the same unpretentious care and respect.


For previous Baja California trip reports, go here.





[Photos © 2007 Harry Rossi]

LAND'S END

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I
was leery of visiting Cabo San Lucas, reputed to be an outpost of
Orange County, but El Arco is there, the rock arch (above) that marks the
bottom of the Baja California peninsula, and it seemed unthinkable to
have driven most of the length of the peninsula and not visit its
terminal point, where the waters of the Pacific meet with the waters of
the Mar de Cortés.

We decided to make a beeline for land's end, see the cape, and head
straight back to La Paz.  This turned out to be easier than
expected because there's a new road to Cabo San Lucas from La Paz
which runs down the Pacific side of the peninsula.  (Mexico 1,
formerly the only paved route from La Paz to the cape, runs down the eastern shore of the peninsula and is a bit longer.)

The new road on the Pacific side is in superb shape, allowing for faster speeds than
normal, and we made it to Cabo San Lucas well before noon.  The
town of Cabo San Lucas still has some charm, but it's ringed about by
hideous condo compounds — enclaves for people who want the views but
don't want to live among Mexicans, in anything resembling Mexican
culture.  In forty years the whole of Baja California will
probably be encrusted with these compounds, as the Pacific coast above
Ensenada already is.  Go see it now, before the
yuppie stain grows insupportable.

The tip of the cape can only be visited by sea, unless you're an expert
rock climber.  We rented places in one of the glass-bottom
superpangas that take tourists out for a look.  Fortunately the
other passengers were one large extended Mexican family, cheerful and
friendly and good company.

As we motored out of the harbor we were greeted by the strange and
nauseating sight of huge party boats filled with tourists drinking and
listening to bad pop music from live bands blaring their sounds out
over huge amplifiers.  “We're having an experience — we're having
fun now!” was the message.  Not.  “We might as well be in Las
Vegas!” was more like it.

El Arco looks as though it might have been designed for dramatic effect
and beauty by some 19-Century landscape artist like Frederick Law
Olmstead.  It's a most appropriate and theatrical punctuation mark
at the end of the great peninsula.  Just beyond it you can
actually see the light green water of the Mar de Cortés mix with the deeper
blue of the Pacific.

The captain of our panga had his wife and kids and father on board —
his oldest son took the helm on the ride back to the docks.  His
father beamed at him and made sure we all saw how well he was doing.

We decided not to tarry in Cabo San Lucas but headed back
towards La Paz and stopped about halfway there at Todos Santos for
lunch.  Todos Santos is a lovely little town that's become
something of an artists' colony.  We looked forward to visiting
the galleries there, but they were all closed, because we came on
a Sunday.  You would think that Sunday would be the one day of the
week most likely to bring tourists into the galleries, but there is
obviously a higher law at work here — the Lord's day, and the day of
rest, trumping commercial concerns.

We did have a fine lunch at the Hotel California, a charming place
that
is often visited by Americans on the mistaken assumption that it has
some connection with the Eagles' song.  Harry had the Mexican
equivalent of surf 'n' turf — a plate of shrimp and carne asada tacos.

We got back to La Paz before dark, in time for drinks at sunset on the terrace of the Hotel Perla.

We were happy we'd visited Cabo San Lucas,
and land's end — even happier that we didn't have to spend the night
there.


For previous Baja California trip reports, go here.





[Photos © 2007 Harry Rossi]

MORE ON MEXICO AND FILM NOIR

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Check out the image above, from Where Danger Lives.  A fatal femme,
a trusting hunk, an inconvenient husband “accidentally”
dispatched.  What's next?  Mexico, of course — if they can
just make it across the line in time.

There are certain settings that appear over and over again in film noir
— nightclubs, dive bars, industrial plants, train yards, cheap hotels,
mostly in cities and mostly at night.  But there are also
settings that offer sunlit relief from these oppressive locales, most notably
rustic mountain or lakeside cabins . . . and Mexico.  Even more often, Mexico
is simply an impossible dream — a place to escape to, to hide out from
fate, but always just out of reach.

There's a rustic cabin in They Live By Night,
a temporary refuge, but the protagonists dream about making it to
Mexico, where they can leave their criminal past behind, start
over.  It's the same dream entertained by the outlaw couple in Gun Crazy, by Mitchum and femme fatale Faith Domergue in Where Danger Lives — and just as hopeless.  Only the couple in Where Danger Lives even gets close, but they get very close indeed — fate tracks them down just inches from Mexican soil.

Greer and Mitchum in Out Of the Past
have their romantic idyll in Mexico but can't bring the magic of it
back with them to the States.  This fits in with the notion of
Mexico as a lost or unattainable paradise.  But sometimes the idea
of Mexico went to filmmakers' heads — they got giddy with the
possibilities of it.  Films that started out noir would, once they crossed south of border, turn into larks, lighthearted and feckless.

Re-teamed in The Big Steal, Greer and Mitchum venture into Mexico to try to extricate themselves from typical noir predicaments
involving betrayal and unjust accusation, but the dark clouds vanish
almost immediately — they find love and high-spirited adventure
instead of noir's dark, impenetrable maze, and all ends well.  Film noir expert Elizabeth Ward amusingly suggests that The Big Steal ought to be labeled fiesta noir — a designation that would fit His Kind Of Woman equally well.

His Kind Of Woman
also stars Mitchum, this time paired with Jane Russell.  The
malevolent fate that dogs his character at the beginning of the story
more or less evaporates in Mexico, and the film turns into something
approaching a screwball comedy.

In general, though, the rustic cabin and Mexico are tantalizing chimera in film noir — poignant, even tragic images of an unrecoverable innocence and freedom.

Read more about Mexico and film noir here.

ESPIRITU SANTO

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The
early Spanish explorers of Mexico, who almost always traveled with
priests, had a habit of giving religious names to the places they
“discovered” — which was fortuitous with respect to the region of the
Mar de Cortés, which has an unearthly, supernatural beauty.  It's
hard to imagine talking about, even thinking about, the Isla Espíritu
Santo, Holy Spirit Island, under some more prosaic name.

It's a severe, haunted, sublime place.  When the Spanish first
arrived there were about 300 Indians living there — they must have
been hard, solitary folk.  Disease or some other European-borne
catastrophe left the island unpopulated until a French entrepreneur set
up a camp there for pearl fishing around the time of the outbreak of
the Mexican Revolution.  Disease again intervened, wiping out the
pearl-oyster beds throughout the Mar de Cortés between 1936 and 1941.

Today there are a few shacks used by local fishermen (with solar panels
on their roofs for electricity) and a luxury tent camp for wealthy tourists.

There is something shocking, even frightening about the landscape of
Espíritu Santo.  It's a place for gods and monsters, not
people.  I kept thinking that when blind Homer imagined the
settings of The Odyssey in his mind's eye, they probably often resembled the Isla Espíritu Santo.

We rented a panga, with a captain, at Pichilingue beach for a cruise to
the island.

It was a magical journey — we flew like the wind
across miles of open sea to reach the island, then circumnavigated it
slowly, pausing to marvel at many wonders.

The captain took us
at speed through rock-bound channels barely wider than his boat, into caves and
along the seemingly endless curves of totally empty beaches, running the boat close in to the shore for dramatic effect.

We stopped to snorkel at a small island populated by hundreds of
braying sea lions, who swam close to us when we were in the water, eying us
ironically.  “You don't really think you can pass muster as an
aquatic mammal?” they seemed to say.

We stopped to look at what appears to be a mask carved into the rock
face of the island.  That seemed like an ironic gesture by nature
itself, vaguely threatening.

Finally we came ashore at a lovely beach.  The captain set up a
table under an umbrella and produced lunch — ham and cheese
sandwiches, exceptionally fine fish ceviche and pickled marlin.  We swam and ate and
felt utterly elated.

It was good to go to the island, and good to leave it — it didn't seem
like a place that wanted to be visited for too long by the children of
men.  All the same it might be interesting to camp out on it for a night
— like spending a night in a haunted house.  I imagine one would
hear exceedingly strange voices in the wind.


For previous Baja California trip reports, go here.





[Photos © 2007 Harry Rossi]