ORGAN GRIND
        Journalism, home & abroad          

Escamoles, or ant eggs, on a puree of cauliflower and parsnip, course four at Alcalde Without a doubt the jewel piercing the otherwise linty outie bellybutton of Mayor Alfaro’s recently-christened “gastronomic corridor” (being a collection of restaurants dotting Avenida Mexico between the perpetually congested Lopez Mateo and Golfo de Cortes roundabouts), Restaurante Alcalde is also a headliner on the city’s capacious culinary scene as a whole - perhaps its chief attraction,

When your first opportunity to eat currywurst is inside a massive, drafty suburban shopping mall in Guadalajara, Mexico, you may found yourself meditating upon the un-predictable ways the strands of our complex human universe are interwoven. Also, reflections on the au courant issue of cultural appropriation may occur, being that this dish (an already Frankenstein-esque German street food staple created by a Berliner housewife using local sausage, ketchup, and curry powder c

Work by artists Peque vrs and Pwoz Mac, calle Morelos and Roja Gonzalez In case you hadn’t heard, art imitates life, which is no less true for being a tired old cliche. Oaxaca City’s street art, for instance, so troublingly resembles reality that authorities regularly paint over political murals as part of “civic beautification.” Thus, a visitor to the colonial southern capital who knows something of her history of resistance and conflict might be surprised to see so much un

Sitting in the sun-lit office of Chapultepec-adjacent tattoo shop Chamuca at three in the afternoon, owner and artist Rodrigo Ruiz related an anecdote which may serve to give nuance to the perception still held by a minority, that of tattoo artists as untrustworthy occupants of the squalid depths of society’s lower strata. “I had a guy come in,” Ruiz told the Reporter, “who was burned as a child, leaving a scar all over his chest and entire left arm. Every time he would go to

Mayor Alfaro (center) holding forth during COME's inauguration in October Upon completion of an examination of Guadalajara’s newly minted “COME, Gastronomic Corridor” on two separate occasions, that sobriquet - applied by Mayor Alfaro and a consortium of local business owners to a somewhat drab stretch of Avenida Mexico sandwiched between two giant roundabouts - seemed like a linguistic swindle, a coat of paint perfunctorily applied to a brothel outhouse. However, this dubi

Nothing fogs up the windscreen of the critical faculties like having within arm’s reach an eight-foot-tall tree (fake, but made of real wood) jutting up from the center of your table, decorated all over with small plastic bottles of Patron tequila. Even less conducive to forming a clear-eyed appraisal of a restaurant’s pluses and minuses is having a stream of un-aged agave spirit etch a path down your esophagus vis-à-vis a burnished steel luge wielded by a giggling waitress.

Guadalajara’s Expo Ganadero, an annual livestock fair and competition running from October 5 to November 2, is for the first-time attendee a bewildering overload of several of the cardinal senses. First and foremost is smell: the Aegean stables have nothing on the effluvia that is constantly being emitted by the fair’s furry, feathered or otherwise clad captive organisms. Sound came in second, with the grunt and lo of cattle, blaring banda music and yowling children creating

There’s a typewriter repair shop on Calle Libertad one block north of Plaza Nueve Esquinas. Peering into its gloomy interior, the eye slowly adjusts, revealing a massive heap of mechanical typewriters stacked at odd angles about 8-foot high, stopping just two feet shy of scraping the ceiling. Out of the middle of this forlorn heap of black, brown and beige obsolescence peers a small, rumpled man in late middle-age with the mien of a drowsy koala. Jose de Jesus Hernandez Mez

Two weeks ago, I covered the Traditional Mariachi Festival and was impressed by its participants’ adherence to an older - and less popular - tradition of mariachi. And because I’m a journalist dedicated to giving all perspectives their day in court, I faithfully covered the subsequent festival, the International Festival of Mariachi and Charreria - but only the free events so as to maintain my allegiance with the hoi polloi. Fortunately - and to the organizers’ credit - the

For the last few decades, Guadalajara’s heart has been slowly hemorrhaging its inhabitants in all cardinal and inter-cardinal directions - a one-way circulatory system which neglects to pump oxygenated blood back into its most important organ. Construction for the number three subway line along Alcalde/Septiembre 16 has only worsened the problem, pinching off pedestrian traffic on and around said avenue that would normally have sustained its commerce. But the economic devast

On a cool evening on the roof terrace of a snazzy Zapopan mall complex ringed by the soaring husks of new construction, a month and change of jazz-related events in Guadalajara both educational and diversionary came to a head in five hours of live music, speechifying and canapes. The Jalisco Jazz Festival is the result of what must be a herculean effort on the part of non-profit Fundacion Tonica and its founders, Gil Cervantes and Sara Valenzuela, who founded the organization

The American Consulate celebrated its parent country’s independence from the U.K. inside the massive convention hall of a technical school on the northwest outskirts of Guadalajara, Friday, June 30. Tecnologia Monterrey Campus GDL, which dangles from the southern edge of a large air base, was heavily fortified for the event, with multiple checkpoints manned by grave-faced officials with clipboards and several security details bristling with high-tech weaponry - all hired to p

The stylistic breadth in evidence at last Sunday’s Fiesta de la Musica, an annual multi-stage affair in Guadalajara, seemed to warrant optimism regarding the state of the city’s music scene, specifically as it concerns its eclecticism and heterogeneity. That vigor was exemplified by two bands, each teasing Parque Agua Azul’s sultry air with two very disparate sonorities: electro cumbia and shoe gaze/noise rock. Guadalajara’s annual Fiesta de la Musica - modeled after an even

Astute observers of urban milieus, be they dilettantes or professional urbanists, can’t have failed to noticed the proliferation in the past few years of a specific trope which could be described as a haute bourgeois mutation of the classic suburban strip mall, within whose confines are found, say, a collection of boutiques, a variety of vendors hawking whichever foods are currently the “hotness” (Korean tacos, pork belly bao, fried ants), and a couple of expiatory temples of

According to two dispassionate, bored teenagers manning a t-shirt stall, the tiangius cultural next to Parque Agua Azul has been going down every Saturday for about 30 years. That’s a lot of matchbox cars and spiked dog collars. In case you’re unfamiliar with the concept, a tianguis cultural is simply an open-air market where all and sundry is available. At the iteration just outside one of Guadalajara’s largest urban parks, offerings include native handicrafts, Star Wars f