MC Quixote

Local Heroes Part 22

I have this appreciation for the everyday heroes who live in this community. They make the idea of living as a hero tangible.

Sometimes I see them in the local media, I follow them via Facebook, and I'll go see them at local events. I like to see what they're up to, not in a stalker way, but a type of observing that reassures me there is a way to live in this society and be original, creative, and help make things better.

It sounds selfish, but most of all I like to hang out with my heroes. I ask them questions, watch how they move, what they eat, how they do the little things that life requires in a graceful, dignified way.

So I've decided to take some of my local heroes out to lunch. I've invited Theresa , Ruby Chacon, and Pilar Pobil to go to this cool restaurant in Salt Lake called Frida's. Yes, it's strange that Salt Lake would have a Frida Kahlo themed restaurant, but life is strange.

I chose a Tuesday in May. Maybe it was some type of Mother's Day event for me, with my mother far away in Mexico. I really wanted to bond with older, strong, artistic, female figures like my mom. I thought Tuesday would be good because it's such a modest day and all three of these heroes might be free. I chose lunch over dinner because it costs about half as much and as it turned out, they all accepted my offer.

I set the event up so that we'd all meet at the restaurant at one PM and when I arrived at 12:50 Pilar was sitting at the bar with a fresh glass of sangria, which seems so Pilar. She's a Spanish immigrant here in Salt Lake and sangria just seems so Spanish.

Pilar has this young-at-heart sensibility and yet she's probably nearing her 80's which is one of the reasons why I look to her as a model. How cool is it that you can be in your late 70's and be one of the hippest people in town? Wow, now that's hopeful in and of itself, but what she's done with her artwork really makes her a hero to me.

I've really gotten to know her through her paintings. It was Ruby Chacon who introduced me to Pilar's work and I was able to meet Ruby through the Meztizo Café. Meztizo is an art café that Ruby and her husband own. This was a natural place for me to hang out (I mean the Meztizo Café? In Salt Lake?) and after a while I got to know Ruby. She has her art studio right in the café and after she got to know me, I was let into her art studio / private sanctuary.

I remember hanging out with Ruby in her studio and watching her paint. I was captivated by just watching her hands hold the brush and transform a two-dimensional surface into something almost alive. It was kind of like a portal into a dream world.

I remember her talking to me while she was painting, and she described painting as a process of making millions of decisions. She kept saying that over and over, little decisions about paint, about color, about composition, about emotion, about background, foreground, subject. Most of all it seemed to be this relationship with the fundamentals of the craft. Things like mixing the paint, and mixing paint, and mixing paint, choosing brushes, using turpentine, and back to mixing paint.

I could see her making all these decisions about the paint, trying to get the right colors. It really seemed to be all about the paint. I finally understood the name of this craft, "painting", it's all about the paint. And Ruby's painting really showed me what the process of painting is about, what it is to work and rework and rework something over and over again. And that's what crafting something is all about, the process of working and reworking.

With Pilar, her studio is a separate structure behind her house. I've come to see that the spaces where the painters work have a sort of mystical feeling about them, like going into a church, the space is reserved for the sacred act of creating.

I read recently that creativity is the highest form or expression of learning/intelligence. The idea comes from this guy named Benjamin Bloom. He's a professor who studied how people learn which led him to the creation of a taxonomy / hierarchy of learning.

Ironically, most of the ways we're taught in school reinforce the lower-level thinking skills, like memorization and recall. I like it when my intuition is backed up by someone's research. I always knew deep-down that my art class in elementary school seemed like the place where more learning was going on and I always liked these types of classes the most. Which shows me that humans prefer higher level thinking tasks and dumbing things down seems to go against human nature.

Back to Pilar, I went to her studio with Ruby to see some of her art and watch her work. I was surprised to see how different her process of painting was from Ruby's. I vividly remember Pilar talking about bringing the paint to life and the emotional side of painting; she reflected on how painting is about being free to let your imagination bridge consciousness and unconsciousness.

In some ways this was almost the opposite of Ruby's approach of "millions of decisions" to a method of painting that frees one from conscious decisions and allows the unconscious mind to express itself. It seems more like a trance state or catharsis with Pilar when she's painting. Something like a ritualized ceremony.

I saw clearly that these were two different approaches to painting that were both successful, neither one being better or worse, just different / an example of variation. Variation seems to be a good thing. Yet with technology it seems to be rapidly diminishing, that is variation in day-to-day life externally; and unfortunately, it seems to be happening internally too.

I was talking with Pilar and Ruby about it and Pilar said,

"The world has flattened out quite a bit because of globalization. I go back to Spain and I see the same stores selling the same products, similar fast food, clothing, even the same music, TV, and movies. It's gotten so bad I'm starting to feel less of a need to go to Spain."

I went online to find the origin of this idea of the world being flat and it turns out that there's a book by Thomas Freidmen called The World is Flat. He proposes that with the new global economy things have become more uniform throughout the world; which I think he views as a good thing. I disagree with this idea and surf the net to try to figure out more.

The biggest problem that I have with sameness, uniformity, "flatness" is that it's not as interesting as variation, difference, and diversity. I know that sounds selfish again, but when I think of the most offensive thing that someone could call me, it would be that I'm boring or uninteresting.

I remember when someone said something like that and I was really upset, and I called them on it, saying something like,

"You can call me crazy, you can call me weird, you can call me selfish or misunderstood, but you can't call me boring." That's one of my credos; no matter what I do in life, it won't be boring.

It's kind of a mantra that I say to myself,

"When in question, if it's not interesting, I'm out of there."

So when it comes to the world being flat, it doesn't pass the test. Moving toward less variation is going in the wrong direction. And there's also the fact that it seems dishonest.

Variation seems like one of the laws of nature. Change and variation seem like the two laws that I see reflected the most in the universe. So it's futile to fight against change and variation. Sorry Mr. Freidman, but I think your claim that the world is flat will slowly lose its validity because of the laws of nature.

Funny that this conversation started with Pilar and Ruby, and when I come to think of it, I'd really like to get Theresa Martinez's ideas on globalization and flatness in the world today.

I remember when I first saw Theresa, she was giving an opening speech at this conference for high school Latino students. She subdued the thousands of students by talking about the Pre-Columbian cultures that we come from.

"Why is that Tenochtitlan isn't as important as Athens or Rome?"

I was mesmerized by her, but at that time she seemed like much too big of a rock star to ever really get close to her.

Strangely, two weeks after the conference I saw her walking through the halls of Kearns High after school one day. I just ran up to her and asked her what she was doing at Kearns. She told me that she had started this afterschool program called the FACE movement and that they were going to have a meeting that afternoon, and I just followed her to the meeting.