Monday, July 30, 2007
Deja vu: The Big Apple at a Mexican Short Film Festival
Two days ago, I sa the black and white film "Native New Yorker," a documentary shown at Expresion en Corto, the Short Film Festival held in my adopted home town of Guanajuato, Mexico. This rhythmic film showing a Native American walking New York City had a quiet, quirky take on a city I came to love. About 20 minutes long and hope you'll have a chance to see it sometime. It was part of the Best from Tribeca series.
Labels: 9/11, film, Manhattan, Native New Yorker, New York City
Monday, December 18, 2006
Good food in Midtown East and a friend in town
I just had what I think of as a "New American style" lunch, meaning the core was roast chicken, sweet potatoes, green beans and cole slaw but surrounded by a stuffed vine leaf and mixed peppers. All this and a cup of decaf hazelnut coffee for $6.47 at a buffet restaurant whose exact name and location I'll reveal on my next post. Mostly I've been eating Indian, Chinese, Japanese, Spanish (Oh, the crema catalan) but finally got hungry for the old familiar food, especially the sweet potatoes.
The artist Theresa Ramey who lived in Guanajuato for three years until the end of 2003 is in the Bronx visiting her middle son. Today we met to eat Chinese soup laced with shrimp, beef and pork, then went down to Chelsea where we gallery hopped galleries with contemporary work, Theresa filling in just the right amount of explanation, and finally topped the day off by sharing a vegetarian platter of garbanzos, rice, veggies, salad and rotis (warm flatbread) from an Indian takeout near Jon's apartment.
Theresa's heart problems seem under control and she is doing new work, smaller than the canvasses she used to lug around from place to place, made of lots of little short strokes. It was wonderful for me to connect with an old friend in the City of Cities. As Theresa, had already told me about the free Fridays evenings at the Museum of Modern Art, by now I've been to MOMA twice.
The artist Theresa Ramey who lived in Guanajuato for three years until the end of 2003 is in the Bronx visiting her middle son. Today we met to eat Chinese soup laced with shrimp, beef and pork, then went down to Chelsea where we gallery hopped galleries with contemporary work, Theresa filling in just the right amount of explanation, and finally topped the day off by sharing a vegetarian platter of garbanzos, rice, veggies, salad and rotis (warm flatbread) from an Indian takeout near Jon's apartment.
Theresa's heart problems seem under control and she is doing new work, smaller than the canvasses she used to lug around from place to place, made of lots of little short strokes. It was wonderful for me to connect with an old friend in the City of Cities. As Theresa, had already told me about the free Fridays evenings at the Museum of Modern Art, by now I've been to MOMA twice.
Labels: buffets, ethnic restaurants, New York City
Monday, November 20, 2006
My bilingual acquaintances
New York is full of people who speak our English but are just as at home in Spanish. I keep meeting them. In the elevator of the building where I'm staying, the other person, a young man, looked as if he could have been Mexican. I asked if he spoke was bilingual. He answered in English, then on the way out volunteered, "I'm from Puerto Rico."
In line at a used book sale at one of the branch libraries, I heard Spanish used intermittently with English behind me. After five minutes I turned around and said something in Spanish. Got in a conversation with the couple in English. Turned out she has been in NYC for 22 years, her partner (Iranian) for "much longer." We talked about Mexico for a long time (the line was slow in moving). The man especially was very uptodate. I enjoyed being able to talk with people who knew something about the country! When we got onto the topic of migration, the man said the reason for the loss of jobs in the Midwest is not Mexicans but the competition from China. I brought up the number of imprisoned or dead journalists in Mexico. He said, Mexico isn't the worst in Latin America. I asked who was. He said Cuba.
The superintendent of the apartment building where I live speaks Spanish with his family but idiomatic unaccented English with the workmen he knows.
Yesterday I came back on the train from Princeton, was sitting across from a darkskinned young man who turned out to have come from Peru when he was twelve, the adopted son of missionary parents. He goes back every four or five years. When I said I'd heard Peruvians speak the purest Spanish in the Western hemisphere, he looked surprised, said he'd never met "anyone else" who knew that. His English was perfect, his courtesy Latin American in style.
I'm deciding New York is an island of polylingualism in our mostly monolingual country. I hear many people speaking languages I don't understand as I walk down the street.
In line at a used book sale at one of the branch libraries, I heard Spanish used intermittently with English behind me. After five minutes I turned around and said something in Spanish. Got in a conversation with the couple in English. Turned out she has been in NYC for 22 years, her partner (Iranian) for "much longer." We talked about Mexico for a long time (the line was slow in moving). The man especially was very uptodate. I enjoyed being able to talk with people who knew something about the country! When we got onto the topic of migration, the man said the reason for the loss of jobs in the Midwest is not Mexicans but the competition from China. I brought up the number of imprisoned or dead journalists in Mexico. He said, Mexico isn't the worst in Latin America. I asked who was. He said Cuba.
The superintendent of the apartment building where I live speaks Spanish with his family but idiomatic unaccented English with the workmen he knows.
Yesterday I came back on the train from Princeton, was sitting across from a darkskinned young man who turned out to have come from Peru when he was twelve, the adopted son of missionary parents. He goes back every four or five years. When I said I'd heard Peruvians speak the purest Spanish in the Western hemisphere, he looked surprised, said he'd never met "anyone else" who knew that. His English was perfect, his courtesy Latin American in style.
I'm deciding New York is an island of polylingualism in our mostly monolingual country. I hear many people speaking languages I don't understand as I walk down the street.
Labels: bilingualism, New York City, NYC street talk, polylingualism, Spanish
