New Year's Eve in Antigua

A final selection from the entertainments laid on in the Calle del Arco both before and after the stroke of midnight. If I do have to have one complaint about New Year's Eve in Antigua it is that midnight never seems to strike; instead there's a less precise three minutes or so of extended noise that marks the transition of one year to the next. Some people in the crowd do the 10,9,8,7,6...thing, but usually a bit prematurely.



And lastly this group with its drum section made of turtle shells:

Another one bites the dust

Banco de Comercio - a small bank which began operations in 1993 - is about to be suspended by Guatemala's central bank after it apparently loaned out more money than it is allowed to under law.

Tulum's peerless beaches

I wrote about Las Ranitas when I passed a couple of nights there in December. It's one of those places one might be reticent about recommending too strongly in case it were to be spoilt by 'them'. The French owners spoke of their own concerns that the airport at Tulum might soon be upgraded to cater for international flights.

Nevertheless, you can already get a cheap return flight to Cancun from London from as little as one hundred and fifty pounds, and the peerless beaches of Tulum are just a couple of hours' ride further south.



Before departing for Belize I got up around six and went for a last stroll along the beach...

The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada

Tommy Lee Jones approached Guillermo Arriaga (Mexican novelist and writer of both Amores Perros and 21 Grams and now Babel) and asked him to write a script for his directorial debut. The result is a fascinating modern Western, filmed on and around Jones's west Texas ranch and over the border in the state of Chihuahua.

It's about one man's slightly deranged committment to seeking justice for his dead Mexican friend, and how that comes to involve taking his killer along as he fufills his promise to return Melquiades to his pueblo for burial. The first half of the story features much of Arriaga's trademark temporal scrambling, before it straightens itself out for the journey south.

I loved this movie; it's just the sort of thing I needed to see while reading Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian. It reminded me a bit of Central Station, where the key moments in the personal and geographical odyssey are all in the pathos of the chance encounters along the way. (Yet but for the very last scene I still didn't have that much to counter Agent Norton's wife's assessment that her husband was "beyond redemption".)

Ebert picked up on one interesting aspect of Arriaga's storytelling technique: "Some of the hidden connections produce ironies that only we understand, since the characters don't know as much about each other as we do."

Jones apparently gave each cast member a copy of The Outsider to read so that they might understand alienation. I'm not entirely sure I understood alienation that much better after reading Camus' novel, but I'm sure it helped. It's nice and short anyway.

Que?

El Loco has decided not to attend the Mexican premiere of his Apocalypto.

Gibson has said that he wants to make the Mayan language "cool" again and encourage young people "to speak it with pride." Shame then that he gave all the main roles to non-Maya native Americans and that many Yucatec Maya report not being able to understand a word they are saying!

Mind the parrot!

Woman's best friend

Los Cool-itos de Gallo

Having started out the evening in Gaia, the Gallo girls and their drummers later took to the tarima and performed in front of a mildly enthusiastic audience.

They claimed they were going to throw free beers into the crowd, which sounded interestingly dangerous, but the only freebies they had in the end were those tight red shirts, which look rather less appealing when they no longer have a Gallo girl in them.

When the fireworks had died down a bit V and I clambered up there and danced to a clanking marimba beat with a whole bunch of others; we stayed as close to the edge as possible in case it collapsed. V described my dance style as matando cucarachas (much like the guy on the right in the Baile de los Campesinos video.)

A smartly-dressed young Mexican appeared below me with hand extended and alerted me to his pressing need to ascend by shouting "Dame la mano cabrón."

A trip around the ficus

Baile de los campesinos

Folkloric dance that formed part of seventh annual Festival of the Calle del Arco on New Year's Eve. Mayan peasants always remove their hats to eat.

Feliz Año!

Thanks largely to the considerable loss of life in the fire at La Terminal before Christmas, the local authorities in Antigua have finally seen sense and moved the firework stalls out of the main area of the market and posted some bomberos on permanent watch in their new location behind the buses. It has seemed like the obvious thing to do for years. (Though look where this girl is resting her elbow!)

Time to remember the big display on New Year's Eve that acted as a kind of appetiser to all the private rocket launches that burst the silence of the first few moonlit hours of 2007.

The Matador

The script is a few slugs short of a full clip, but Pierce Brosnan's performance as Julian Noble, friendless "facilitator of fatalities," is so completely captivating that you hardly notice. I could watch it over and over, just to re-enjoy all the nuances of this seedy character.

"Just consider me the best cocktail party story you ever met," Noble tells under-performing suit Danny Wright as he leaves him sitting in an open-air bar in Mexico City. Just one of many memorable quotes, such as:

"I wouldn't do that for all the teenage twat in Thailand."

"I look like a Bangkok hooker on a Sunday morning, after the navy's left town."

"Margaritas always taste better in Mexico...Margaritas and cock."

Indeed, the homoerotic underside to this buddy movie comes out much more strongly in the deleted scenes.

Yet another soundtrack for the Fabulosos Cadillacs to grace.

Set-back?

Guatemala's presidential commissioner on racism, Ricardo Cajas has had his own pop at Apocalypto now, claiming that Gibson's madly entertaining movie has hindered understanding of the Mayan people, setting it back 50 years.

A propos of this I recently watched (thanks to Scott) a "sensationalist" documentary movie about Guatemala's natives made back in 1934, which seriously questioned their commitment to personal hygiene and wrongly identified their ancestors as "the Toltecs". The film was titled The Menace of Guatemala and can be downloaded here.

Two other bits of Chapin news. Firstly it seems that the recent cash crisis has now evolved into a gathering credit card debt crisis, and secondly it is being reported that the US is getting ready to deport thousands of Guatemalans, some of which have lived up there in the north for over twenty years. (There are said to be some 200,000 outstanding asylum applications from Guatemalans dating back to the 1980s.)

Toritos and Mariposas

The journey in was just that little bit more bearable this morning. Soon I won't even be noticing how bland the bananas are here.

On the other hand, I am feeling a sense of release at having put some distance between myself and V's Guatemalan cocoon of light-hearted, yet still profound paranoia.

No longer is every human shape on the road ahead a potential perp. Motorbikes are especially sinister for her - undoubted harbingers of approaching doom. She spotted one the other night and recoiled. "He has a little kid on his back," I pointed out. "It could be a dummy," she retorted. It was kind of inanimate.

A couple more videos. Not in fact a cruel form of public execution, but standard entertainment for evenings of great celebration such as New Year's Eve - the Torito (Little bull).



Followed by the Mariposa (Butterfly).

Fire Dance

My first night in Mexico; the Blue Parrot. I had wanted to post a fun little clip I made of trancers chucking shapes on the white sand dancefloor, but Revver seems to think I lack the necessary copyrights for the music! So instead, here are the fire dancers that perform every Saturday at Playa's famous nightspot, giving the amateurs a chance to pause and watch:

Silent Night...

...unholy racket.

You'll need headphones to appreciate the din that attends the stroke of midnight on Christmas Eve in Antigua. I saw some gringos apparently fleeing for their lives!

Beach Club

No need for an iPod at Mamita's Lounge, Playa del Carmen.

Goodbye again

My final evening in Antigua is always such a melancholy experience - I hate it when the light starts to seep away and I have to come to terms with the fact that I have yet again used up my precious supply of luminous, birdy-trilled mornings.

On Friday the twilight found us in the market stepping between the candles the last few sellers use to illuminate their produce. On previous final-night occasions we have made for Lloyds' (now Cuzcatlan) corner in the parque − our corner − as the old bank's steps are ideally placed to absorb and retain the warmth of the sun from early in the morning until the time it drops behind Fuego.

I have reorganised the sets of images I took in Central America this Christmas to make them a bit easier to review.

New Year's Eve in Antigua was particularly spectacular this year. The main event was the seventh annual Festival of the Calle del Arco and such is its regional fame these days that many hundreds of visitors came from neighbouring countries and beyond. There was hardly any room to throw fajas de cohetes. ("¿En donde estan nuestros amigos de Mexico?" a an organiser asked into her microphone. "En Pollo Campero!" a member of the crowd shouted back.)

The festival began the year after the Millennium celebrations. They had been pretty good, but the main engines of fun had been the myriad of semi-private parties dotted around the city. At the end of 2000 the committee of the Calle del Arco formed and Antigua has seen in the New Year in an increasingly loud, colourful and public manner ever since.

In London you get about ten minutes of premium explosions shortly after midnight courtesy of the mayor, then everyone troops home in the cold and damp. In Antigua the fireworks are still lighting up the sky several hours after midnight. On Monday morning at 2am the parque central was as packed as it gets on a Saturday afternoon. I've been to Rome and Seville on the 31st of December during those seven years − riotously fun nights both − yet still a notch or two short of Guatemalan exuberance.

Time for me to hit the sack now. I didn't get any sleep on the plane last night and have been doing all I can to last through to a reasonably nocturnal hour tonight. I've started to notice the strange lacunas in the flow of my consciousness over the past hour or so...

Marimbas Voz del Valle

This lot were accompanying the dance of the viejitas in the Calle del Arco on New Year's Eve in Antigua. I have many more little clips like this, from that night and others and will try to get them uploaded over the next week or so.

Apocalypto

Some may be wondering if this sort of thing is more or less bigoted now that's there's no longer a need for screaming blonde damsels or seven storey primates to frame our interest in archetypally unfriendly natives?

It turns out Gibson's movie isn't really about the ancient Maya after all. Other than great entertainment, it's another exploration of the meaning of the Amerindians' forced dis-isolation from the rest of the World in the late fifteenth century − some six hundred years in fact after the Classic Maya collapse.

The indigenes hostility no longer needs to be directed at us because they have kindly lined up in the two main teams that we have always consigned them to: In the blue corner we have the noble-savages: wise, fun-loving hunter-gatherers at one with their forest habitat. And in the red corner we have the somebody else's skin wearing types with their penchant for industrial level human sacrifice (matched with a bed-wetting terror of precisely the kind of celestial events that ancient Mayan astronomers had managed to identify and predict with such unique accuracy.)

Even the creatures of this forest aren't the sort to hang around smiling sweetly on Pocahontas' shoulder. Not unless they fancy tucking into her face for breakfast that is.

Yet there's no wanton ignorance of the facts going on here. Gibson has gone about his re-concoction of history with his customary single-minded vision. Everything is carefully calculated to carry out its function in terms of cinematic drama, imaginative storytelling and symbol-making, and all together it works pretty well and was playing to a packed house at Cineworld.

When the Royal Academy held its Aztecs exhibition in London four years ago I remember thinking at the time that the nightmarish qualities of that civilisation had been deliberately played down in order to emphasise the more refined tastes that the RA's patrons would more readily identify with. There's no question that the Mesoamerican tradition of blood sacrifice that most likely began with the Olmecs had reached its apocalyptic apogee in the sixteenth century, with the first Spaniards on the continent witnessing the mass slaughter of up to 80,000 individuals. Controversy will however continue to surround Gibson's use of the Maya here, perhaps driven by the desire to employ actors from a semi-intact native culture speaking their own language (as opposed to Nahuatl).

While I was away I read a chapter in the Rough Guide about the growth of pan-Mayan consciousness, or Mayanidad. Several standard drivers for this were suggested, such as the intensified political oppression of the eighties. The notion that Western culture fascination with the heritage of ancient Maya might also have been important in helping the modern tribes to recover their heritage was not mooted. Yet on balance I think the Maya have benefitted from the spotlight thrown on them by the likes of National Geographic, and Mel Gibson's singular film should do little to undermine this progress.