Mercato centrale

 

Pluses and minuses of living next door to the Mercato Centrale of Florence for a week:

+ Almost instant access to the freshest most beautiful food in the world

+ Tidbits and tastings -- olive oils, vinegars, meats and cheeses -- throughout the two market floors (Have you ever tasted 45-year old balsamic vinegar -- reserved fro fine meats, cheeses and desserts?)

+ Inexpensive and colorful kabab cafes operated by Arab and African immigrants who work and live in this district

+ The Forno (literally, oven) operating across from the market, with its racks filled with foccaccio, pizza, calzone, pane (bread), lasagna and other aromatic enticements

+  "Our" corner gelateria -- the San Lorenzo -- with the best prices for quick snacks and late night libations, too.

+ A view of the dome of San Lorenzo, and the layered sounding of bells at 7, noonish and midnight.

 + A very convenient location, once we had the winding plan of the city in mind -- just a few minutes to the Duomo.

+ Street stalls stretching the length of the next plaza away, filling the street with a bazaar of silk scarves, kitchy souvenirs, purses and jackets with their aroma of  leather wafting up to our window.

 

 
Minuses

- Those same mobile street stalls lived in garages under our 3rd (in US terms 4th) floor apartment, and -- until we figured to close the double windows and shutters and use earplugs -- the noise of their rattling, metalic departure in the early AM was sleep shattering. (Even if their movers were some of the most beautiful shirtless men I saw in Italy, and that, my dears, is saying a lot.)

 

– Tiny shower

– That's it. 

If you're interested, contact the owners of San Lorenzo apartments (I think they are associated with the restaurant down stairs and stones throw away, the Traattoria Garibardi). The Beatrice was the front apartment and had the peekaboo view of San Lorenzo, the rear one, far quieter but only an interior courtyard view, was Dante. Both had simple furnishings, cooking corners, small bathrooms, airconditioning and TVs -- quite good set-ups for the price and location.

$60 Trip to Paris

 

How to share the journey? How to linger in the images? Bask in the afterglow?

Keeping a journal on trips is a longstanding habit and ritual. The oldest one in my collection dates from sometime in the 1960s (when I get home from my current teaching gig in Kingsville, I'll post a sample page), and  I filled another nice fat book on this three week-plus trip to Italy. And I came home with more than 600 photos on my digital camera. My plan is to share -- over the next month -- the inspirations, the landscapes, the  flavors and vistas both from my journal and from my photo files. And, please note, this online journaling is at its heart a way for me to keep the journey going a little bit longer.

Jumping into work the day after a grueling return trip (bad layover to begin with, delayed by 4 hours because of Midwest thunderstorms, lost luggage) I am still trying to catch my breath. This dream of a lifetime trip almost seems to have evaporated overnight. So, indulge me as I return via picture, day by day, room by room, train ticket by train ticket.

 

Of course, I'll weave in the present tense, too. I'm certain that June at home will have its own savory moments. But perhaps not so savory as the $60 trip to Paris. The enroute trans-Atlantic leg was also delayed by thunderstorms. We ended up with vouchers for hotel meals and little cubicals in Orsee near the airport. Jumping into a cab, we took a whirlwind trip around the landmark sites of Paris, a first for Linda, and even though I had been to Paris a few decades ago, I'd never seen it this way. Sure, it cost each of the three passengers $60, but I doubt I'll get to Paris that cheaply again!

 

 

 (P.S. I promise not to post all 600+ pictures.)

Firenze

Would you just like a list of all that we have eaten?

The full report must wait until I can upload photos and use a keyboard that has a familiar ching ching to it. However, let this be a warning to you all.  I am now working on a fiber arts Italian adventure for next year. It will begin in Florence and proceed to Selva, a Tuscan home and studio deep in the woods of a 1000 acre estate near Lucca. We will see silks and cashmere goats, weaving and dyeing, and do our own work (as well as cooking classes) in the kitchen studio.

Foods to consider: bread soup and bread salad, bufalo mozzerella (forget everything you thought you knew about the cheese), gelati in all imaginable flavors, buttery lettuce and tomatoes shaped like the duomo, chocolate bars by the Bolognese Majana, lasagna from the street corner cafe, eggs with yolks as orange as saffron.

And that was I think day one. 

Art and Quilts and Art Quilts, Part 2

 

This is my life on wheels: stuffed full of papery piñatas, careening along, headed who knows where.
What is success for an artist? Or more precisely, what does success look like for me?

If I am not willing to make some definitions, to set some, dreaded word, goals, will I get "there?"  If I don't have a clue where  there is, is it enough to "follow my bliss?"

For a few years, charting a new path in the domestic dimension of my life has determined most of the path I have been trekking: selling a home, buying a new one, moving and balancing a new kind of daily life, different than my city life of King William. The rest of the time was defined by other almost-automatic steps, once the new house and studio were in place: starting my workshop/retreats here at El Cielo, closing Textures gallery. And the rest of my time has been taken up with the things that are on automatic repeat status: the teaching stints at Southwest School where I am an established adjunct, King Ranch Art Camp for a week in the summer, being an active member (now President) of FASA.

Then, last fall, two consulting projects came along that seemed a good fit for my life (and my rapidly diminishing savings account): Dora and Diego's Garden Adventure and the Botero Family Days at the branch libraries. My friend and partner in art ed stuff Zet Baer was available and off we went. And then a crazy plan to spend three weeks in Italy!

Now, mid April, nearly, all the chickens are heading home to roost. For the next four months my calendar is chock full of activity - weekends blasted, travel bleary, wild woman on fire. So, success. And money, at least a bit, coming in. And time squeezed in here and there in the studio. Even art in a few local and regional exhibits (but note, these opportunities to show my work came to me -- I didn't apply or send out a proposal or write any letters, I just said yes).

I figure I can either continue the mode of planning/notplanning that has gotten me through these last two years, or  imagine some active, precise images of what I'd like my life to look like in five years. I'll be 59 in about three weeks, 60 seems an almost impossible age to be, but I am counting on it!

Deep breath. It's scary to write outloud about goals, don't you know. "Someone" is going to think me big-headed. "Someone" is going to think I have a lot of nerve. "Someone" is thinking you gotta be kidding. And "others" are going to wonder why I would ever tell everyone reading this blog about my plans. And "they" are going to think I am some kind of idiot.  (Did you hear the Drudge report on NPR about "the someones" in Katie Couric's interview with the Edwards?) So, despite all that from the arena, here goes, 5-year targets:

Art/Quilts -- I will make more art and sell my art. I will see my work in a couple of national exhibits a year, including some of the prestigious juried shows. I will have a solo show in a good gallery somewhere. I will see my work published in national magazines and journals. I will earn $25,000 a year selling art. (NOW that's a leap, my inner critic is yelling.)

Teaching -- I will have eight successful sold-out workshop/retreats a year here at El Cielo. I will continue teaching at Southwest School of Art and Craft, but with fewer on-going classes. I will teach at three prestigious national schools, conferences or events each year -- places like Arrowmont, Split Rock, QSDS.

So what gets in my way? Fear. Saying yes to things that don't add up. Being disorganized with time and money and paperwork.

Dye Ceremony

The day was beautiful. The setting perfect. The ceremony perhaps less of a ritual atmosphere than I would have liked (but as my friend Susan said, perhaps Izukura realizes how little tolerance and experience westerners have of ritual). We sat in the circle of the riverside gazebo, in this early spring wind and sun, and dyed beautful scarves, each woven in two weaves to give texture to the wisp of color that resulted. The dyes were from plants and insects (mine, a final soft grey) was dyed with cochinil. 

  

Moving Sound/Sound Movies

 

First, moving sound. And something, too, about our use of carbon fuels. Changing worlds. How to make it come clear. 

Two movies engaged us this weekend, on DVDs of course (I keep forgetting to go the real movies when I am in town). About the first, I won't say much, except, forget what ever prejudices you may hold for or against Al Gore, and see "An Inconvenient Truth."  I resisted it, fearing that I would only become more depressed about the future of the environment, but, he makes a compelling case that, should the political and cultural will be found, the scientific solutions are already known.

 

 On a lighter note, but no less profound for those of us fascinated with human perception, creativity and the power of the individual who finds her/his true path -- "Touch the Sound" -- a documentary unlike any other, hosted by Grammy award winning percussionist Evelyn Glennie. Ms. Glennie, though hearing impaired, is a renowned musician, and this film explores her vision of sound. A vision that the film makers share with us though images so auditory, they are the filmic equivalent of Arthur Dove's paintings.  (If you know of any other painter who gets sound like he does, let me know -- I'm working on a book for parents and kids about cross-form perception and creativity.)

More from Real

Dulces para los ojos.

 

 

Real Inspiration

Real de Catorce, mysteriously named "the royal fourteen" is a recovering ghost town (once larger than now prospering Monterrey), which, as our host Ed Alexander suggested (only part in jest) owes its renaissance largely to Texans who have moved in, rebuilt ruined houses and invited their friends to visit. Since out first visit about 10 years ago, the town has visibly recovered walls and rooflines -- and a rather bad movie, The Mexican, brought some Hollydollars to bear on the water system, and some well-connected visitors (Julia Roberts and Johnny Dep). Technology has made its inroads -- when we first traveled over the cobblestone road and through the long tunnel that are still the best access to the village, there was one telephone, a total pesos-only economy, and most of the kids had to leave home to have schooling beyond the 6th grade. All the citizens seem better dressed and the horseback guide business is obviously flourishing.

Now, there's an ATM machine in the Municipal Building's Department of Tourism (when we were there first, a civil feud had closed the city offices and the doors were barricaded), some cell phones work, and the internet is weaving its web -- including an internet school for the teenagers.

But, Real avoids -- at least for now -- taking on too many overnight tourists, too much comfort, too many mod-cons. It still feels like time travel. The rocks, the dust, the dry high 9000 feet in the mountain air speak with ancient accents. The Huichol people from distant Nayarit still travel there to gather the sacred peyote from the nearby mountain deserts; a lively international group of ex-pats -- Italians, Swiss and Americans mostly -- have a parallel society (some of whom are also there for the peyote.) Thousands of devote pilgrims travel there in September and October in Mexico's second-largest religious pilgrimage, this one to the honor of a healing and peripatetic Saint Francis of Asissi, whose milagro covered robe and countless testaments of thanksgiving painted on tin, paper, box cardboard and wood, are evidence of the perceived holiness of this place that is sometimes called the Macchu Pichu of Mexico.

 Most of my photos are on a laptop that isn't home at the moment, so check back here for more pictures later.