Lets Get Messed Up-On Art

When you think of art, you just have to think of history. As long as we have been around, we have decorated stuff we carried. Lots of reasons exist. You can say we did it to please the gods, or ward off evil, or attract good. But defining visual art can be easy. Stuff made to ellicit an emotional response in humans. 

In Puebla, Mexico, the entire city sweats, bleeds, and pisses art. Some of this can be unpleasant. Some is delightful. Some is for sale. Some would please even anarchist/artists like Banksy in its inneffable unliftable unsellable ephemeralism. (Banksy.co.uk or Banksy.com). The fabulous graffiti/signage found had a blogspot address! want it? Ok...its www.elmonofacil.blogspot.com. I think that means The Easy Monkey. my SOuth American friends called me Mono Gordo when we were all climbing together. I think that means Honored Brother. (Please- don't correct my Spanish. I couldn't take it.)

In Puebla, the true afficionado must leave the credit cards with a trusted friend. Tallavera pottery is so wonderfully cheap and available, in several fine shops. I also found and bought recycled glass  drinking glasses, and antique jewelry as gifts. These did not strain the pocketbook, and were high quality. 

Puebla has what Santa Barbara and Beverly hills aim for: that funky working-class authenticity that makes simple objects valuable. real soul and a working knowledge of what's working. Does this mean every gallery is a winner? No. Enough said.

But it also had incredible signs, even better than those I found on the walls of Mexico City. Signs for Auto Repair and Upholstery Shops were as good as those for galle

ries. And graffiti, so artfully blended into edifices, had another quality from the unfurling screed that is ever present in my native Portland, Oregon. The 'mi mi mi meeeeee' art I once heard aptly described as 'kids playing with paint'. Its like listening to the radio and thinking you do not like music. You do, just not radio crap.

And trees? I wish I could say they were respected, understood, loved. I wish they had been in enough soil to be healthy, pruned so that they were not dangers 'to themselves and others'. But they weren't. The trees had bands strapped around their stems and major limbs, effectively cutting off the circulation in a slow constriction depending on the tree's growth.

Trees were set in one or two major parks I saw (Paseo Bravo, El Paseo San Francisco, and the main square) and not allowed outside those parks on pain of death. Any that had escaped were confined to walled front yards or cracks in pavement and liberally dusted with pollution, pee and trash. Then dried for a period of years, hacked at by brave climbers hobbled by nineteenth-century methods, and left to thrive.

Herein is a photo of a few trees in the main park, girdled to death or close, in one case, by metal bands. Its hard to imagine, because we know it is wrong, but some folks have not had the education yet, and cannot figure out this cause and effect. We know they love their trees, and the lights are hung there because fiestas are fun amongst the trees. But its killing them. Anyone want to go down and do a teaching trip? I volunteer to accompany you.

I belong to an organization called the International Society of Arboriculture (isa-arbor.org) Can I say without complaint, with urgency, with dread, that I have seen pruning,planting and tree care get better all over the US when I visit, but in Europe and Mexico, I have seen no change from when I started 27 years ago? Plenty of Europeans in the ISA directory, and some in the directory are from South America.

Its time we started to get our 'I' back. If we are truly international, we need to bring education to South Americans, as well as North Americans and Europeans. Conventions have people form all over the world. But the word is not getting out fast enough. The trees are dying. The globe is warming. Something must be done. Its been said that the trees in the Urban Forest are the only ones that the public really have control over; all the rest are in corporate or private hands.