Juan Jose’ and his son, Abel
Juan Jose Ramos Medrano is the grandson of the renowned sculptor, Candelario Medrano. Candelario was a sewer pipe maker who began making ceramic sculptures out of the pipe clay. This became known as the “betus” clay tradition of ceramic art. The subjects of this playful artform are often fantastical creatures. Each piece bears the unmistakable stamp of the particular folk artist who made it.
Photo of Candelario Medrano glazing one of his creations.
Juan Jose, or JJRM, as he signs his work, carries on his grandfather’s folk art tradition. He lives on the outskirts of Tonala, Jalisco, in a small community called Santa Cruz de las Huertas. He works in his humble house creating soulful pieces of art. He prepares his brick kiln days in advance while he kneads the clay into figurines and paints them. He then coats his colored creatures with “betus” or Birch extract oil to give them a lacquered finish. The pieces are then dried before baking at a very low temperature to prevent them from exploding.
Juan Jose’ often draws inspiration from a magical creature known in Mexico as the “Nagual”. A Nagual is a human being who who uses magic to convert himself into animal form. The Nagual may also transform into more powerful, fantastical animals. The Nagual use their powers either for good or for evil, depending on their personality.
Visiting Juan Jose at his house and buying his art was a fantastic experience for my wife and I. We were lucky enough to encounter his art through Stan and Jose’ who run Casa de Las Flores in Tlaquepaque. We loved JJRM’s child-like and soulful style and knew his art would be perfect for our shop, Hello! Good Morning!
Driving through Juan Jose’s neighborhood.
Our treasures. The yellow figure to the right is a “nagual”.
Juan Jose’s backyard garden.
Juan Jose’s kilns. The fire is prepared days in advance to create a low temperature that will be sustained for a long time.
One of Juan Jose’s specialties is capturing the gestures of animals.
Abel shows off the mask he made. Fourth generation folk artist!
Soulful brahma bull and musician.
This past year, my wife and I traveled to Guadalara, Mexico to purchase original folk art for our gift shop, Hello! Good Morning!. We stayed with Stan and Jose´ at their wonderful bed and breakfast, Casa de Las Flores.
Stan and Jose´ have been collecting art for over 30 years and have an incredible array of the diverse folk art of Mexico. An entire wall in their garden oasis is dedicated to masks. These were a few of my favorites.
If you’re into other kinds of masks, check out my Pinterest board here
A few images from the march in Portland, Oregon.
At the Oscar’s, in Francis McDormand’s acceptance speech, she brought the term “Inclusion Rider” to national attention. What is an inclusion rider? An inclusion rider is a clause that would be inserted into a movie contract to secure a more equal distribution of female actresses and minorites into the project.
In theory, inclusion riders are a great idea. But the problem with inclusion riders is they don’t address a more fundamental problem we have in our films and television shows:
The racial and gender bias inherent in most screenplays.
The movie I’m thinking of is the same one that Francis McDormand won for Best Actress. Three Billboards Outside Ebbing Missouri.
First a little history on the project. Written and directed by Martin McDonagh, a British filmmaker and playwright who, twenty years ago, took a Greyhound bus trip through the Southern United States. He witnessed several billboards with angry messages targeting the local police and wrote the screenplay from that idea.
So let’s get this straight. A British man, just passing through the South on a bus trip twenty years ago, saw some billboards and wrote a screenplay. A screenplay about our country. About the South. How could he possibly know the complexities of the South, breezing past on a Greyhound bus?
Yes there are more than a few women characters. But two of the female characters are written as laughably stupid. Their stupidity is supposed to make us laugh. That should not be funny. The only educated woman is the wife of Chief Willoughby who is British. Hmmm.
Yes there are African American characters. But two of the African American characters are used to make Mildred, a white woman, look sympathetic. Hey, she’s got black friends, she’s cool. Look critically at those characters. That’s the only purpose they serve.
And then there’s “the midget” played by Peter Dinklage. He’s a running joke throughout the film and again, we’re invited to laugh along. That’s not cool. He has a sad moment where he questions the bigotry but it does not excuse what the writer/director did by making a dwarf a joke.
Yes there is bigotry and racism in our country. But let’s applaud the stories made by people from those places or those that spend the time getting to know the people. That represent them accurately. Not as stereotypes to look down on. Not a story written by someone from another country just passing through on a bus. Authentic Stories.
Inclusion riders are a step in the right direction. Authentic screenplays about real people from diverse voices is the next most important step.
If you’ve ever seen a Japanese game show then you know the zany side of Japanese culture. In “Slippery Stairs”, contestants in vinyl onesies attempt to climb a rubber staircase covered in liquid soap. Hilarious.
Japanese people are some of the most stylish in the world. Even Japanese uniforms are stylish.
Consider also their love of monsters. The Yokai were supernatural monsters from Japanese folklore who appeared as early as the first century.
And then of course, there were the Kaiju. The giant monsters that began appearing in film with Godzilla as the grandaddy of them all.
In subsequent films, Godzilla fought other giant monsters.
Later, came Ultraman. The TV show became a pop culture phenomenon and “spawned dozens of sequels, spin-offs, rip-offs, imitators, parodies and tributes.” (Wikipedia)
From all of this, came the most delightful costumes the world has ever known.
And yes, ultra bad guy, Starfish Hitler.
See more photos of awesomeness on my Ultraman Pinterest Board
My goal is to write a blockbuster novel. While I was writing my current work in progress, “The Clarity Rebellion”, I had a problem. Readers liked my book but they weren’t raving about it. I needed to fix that but how?
I came across this great book that proves blockbusters are a lot alike. As I was reading it, I found that many of these concepts were already in my book. I took several months and incorporated more of these concepts into my manuscript and strengthened the ones I already had in there. Then I tested it on readers and there was a difference. They loved it.
There are a number of books analyzing blockbusters. This is the best one I’ve read so far:
Hit Lit: Cracking the Code of the Twentieth Century’s Biggest Bestsellers by James W. Hall.
These are the notes I took on the book and I’d like to share them with you.
A SMALL STORY TOLD AGAINST A SWEEPING BACKDROP – This pattern is repeated again and again in blockbusters. Two stories at work. A small story foreground narrative and an epic broad panaramic background narrative. In GONE WITH THE WIND, Scarlett schemes for Rhett’s love while also confronting soldiers, triumphing in the business world, and successfully adapting in the most wrenching social changes America has ever known. The Civil War.
SUPERPOWERS AT WAR – One mafia family against the other (THE GODFATHER), Good vs. Evil with head spinning terror (THE EXORCIST), Man vs. Nature with the biggest shark ever (JAWS), broad examination of corrupt mores and class warfare (PEYTON PLACE). The blockbuster chronicles principle social issues of the era.
HIGH CONCEPT
Can the idea be turned into a great movie? A high concept is one that can capture the dramatic energy coiled in a novel by a single catchy phrase.
Must be a unique and creative mash-up of two or more traditional genres.
Once the hook of the high concept is set, new complications and new questions propel the story forward.
HERO QUALITIES
The hero must have deep conviction and fervent, stubborn resolve, capable of passions that rise well beyond the normal range of human experience. In the end they must show clarity and intensity of purpose (especially if they waffle at the beginning) and decisive actions. They must have an emotional intensity that makes them commit to gutsy and surprising deeds. They are pushed by the story to their emotional breaking point and beyond and forced to stay at that outer limit of what they can endure.
A reader must have a connection to the hero by understanding and sympathizing with that character. A reader must have PITY and FEAR for a character.
The hero’s intense commitment to his or her cause, while not always pure and selfless, is ultimately a goal most of us find worthy and important.
Lack of introspection – common feature among blockbuster protagonists. They are not self-absorbed or contemplative. Rarely do we go wading into their stream of consciousness.
A powerful emotional bond must be forged between reader and hero, made up of one part pity and one part fear.
SPEED
Characters show up on the page fully formed. What we learn about them we learn through what they do and say in the now. No time for backstory.
SUSPENSE
Serious physical or psychological peril shows up in the first few pages and accelerates from there through the novel.
DRAMATIC IRONY – When the audience knows something the characters don’t. If it’s something bad that’s coming for the character, it creates sympathy in the reader for that character.
THE BIG CLOCK – That clock is always running out!
FOCUS ON SOCIAL MOBILITY – racial, gender, and class fairness; the struggles and triumphs of the poor set alongside similar conflicts of the powerful. In other words, they are stories about characters pitted against large forces, not characters in conflict with themselves.
CONTROVERSY OF THE DAY – abortion, gay marriage, church and state, global warming, school prayer, gun control, race relations, immigration policy, capital punishment. Use the loaded language of that subject matter and set up a simple story line that idealizes one side and demonizes the other. Ideally it must express some larger, deep-seated and unresolved conflict in the national consciousness. The Civil War is still usable because race relations are unresolved.
VALLEY OF THE DOLLS took tabloid sensationalism and put characters in place of real actors.
THE EXORCIST – Came at a time when God was proclaimed dead. Challenged the nonbelievers and hit a raw nerve.
JAWS – reenacts a moral sellout of its citizens by its political leaders. Played on American’s mistrust of political authority and it contemporary manifestation.
THE DEAD ZONE – The second coming of the antichrist gets elected. Hmmm.
THE DA VINCI CODE targeted the Catholics with provocative and outlandish claims. Passionate cynics rallied behind it.
SIMPLE PROSE – Raw and simple prose that gives access to all readers.
SIMPLE TONE – Subtlety, ambiguity and intricacy are not a part of these bestsellers. They are sincere and heartfelt. Simplicity of tone. No segregation and no secret handshakes – every reader is on equal footing.
BIG BIGGER BIGGEST – Grandness of scale is reinforced with superlatives.
“The world’s most famous painting”
The longest building in Europe”
“The most famous piece of art in the world”
Blockbusters are often books about America and Americans. They are ordinary American folks from humble roots who have answered some resounding call and risen beyond their limitations to impossible heights.
AMERICA AS PARADISE
An idyllic baseline is often established. A paradise in which characters are tragically alienated from and in some way struggling to get back to. (Eden)
Eden always has a snake. Slavery is the snake in Gone with the Wind.
For Michael Corleone in THE GODFATHER, murder lurks in the hillsides of Sicily. Dangerous Eden – both beautiful and wild with danger. Michael Corleone has a few weeks of Eden with his new beautiful (Eve like) wife in Sicily before she gets killed.
A bite from the apple. In Scout enjoys her Eden as a place of creativity, naivete, and gender equality. When the trial of Tom Robinson, Scout’s Golden Country comes to an abrupt and ugly end. Her innocence dissolves and her childhood comes to a close. The lingering memory of her golden country defines her character thereafter.
THE GOLDEN COUNTRY
The “golden country” is either a splendid natural location or a wild and secret place, where some form of innocent sensuous idyll took place. It becomes nostalgic and wistful as the character loses something crucial from that time.
In JAWS, the beach town is at first portrayed as paradise. Then the skinny dipper is eaten and paradise ends. The sheriff wants the mayor to go public about the shark but the mayor senses economic catastrophe and continues to perpetuate a hoax. That the town is still an eden and the appearance of the finned snake has not appeared.
For Brody and others like him, Amity is the golden country. For the mayor, Amity is the golden opportunity. Nature is a commodity to be merchandised. Tourists from the city will put the Islander’s secret place under siege. The shark is killed but what’s been lost is the innocent belief that what is beautiful is also benign. The islander’s golden country has become a bygone yearning for innocence.
In PEYTON PLACE, Eden is a secret place, an unharvested bit of woods. Allison goes there to bask in the ecstatic glow and calming effect of nature. 25 pages later, Allison walks her best friend there and Selena refuses to go into the woods. Selena reveals to Allison that this is where boys bring girls at night to make out. Naive Allison has unwittingly chosen lover’s lane as her golden country. In its irony and dark realism, the scene is a paradigm for the entire novel. She returns later with a lover, a bookish boy who fails to arouse her. She goes on a quest to meet a boy that has a sensuousness. Later she’s cruelly deceived by him and learns of all the darkness in Peyton Place. In the end she returns to the same place for solace. It doesn’t have the same power it once had. But it is enough.
THE SNAKE OF GREED
THE FIRM starts with the couple in law school living in a two bedroom apartment making love and eating takeout after the protagonist lands a great job. (an uncomplicated simple life) He is tempted by the snake of greed throughout the book and this beginning scene is the baseline for which he begins to long for as his life goes off course. In the end, they are expelled from the false garden of Eden and start afresh in their new golden country, with a new improved simple life with a white house on the beach, making love and drinking rum.
FACTS
People have an innate desire to improve themselves. These books either give nuts and bolts facts about submarines, tell you how to survive Hollywood, give you a peek behind the doors of a law firm, make outrageous facts about how Jesus was married. These books satisfy the need to be instructed and informed, to emerge from the novel with a wider understanding of some grand or esoteric subject matter.
SECRET SOCIETY
Blockbusters often expose the inner workings of at least one secret society. They give us a privileged glimpse into a secret society. The mafia, opus dei, shark fishermen, exorcists, small-town cliques, Broadway superstars, southern aristocracy.
A secret society is any group that for one reason or another has isolated itself from the rest of the world by creating a collection of rules, rites, sacraments, or cover behaviors that reinforces its separation from the larger population. The group is exclusive, usually powerful in some domain, with its own initiation rituals and its own sense of justice and duty, sometimes it’s own language, and even its own criminal code.
Exotic chants, rites, prayers, a specialized lexicon, rules of authority and hierarchy, incense-drenched ancient ceremonies of worship and formal acts of obedience all play roles.
Blockbusters often portray the triumph of a righteous individual over the often dehumanizing prejudices of a secret group.
CITY vs COUNTRY
The fish-out-of-water story line.
Often there is an exodus from countryside to city or vice versa creating the fish-out-of-water character. If it is from countryside to city, agrarian values play a part in whether the hero succeeds or fails. Red state vs. blue state, working class vs. corporate elite, virtuous vs. decadent, bible pioneer spirit vs. corrupt city.
Urban life is often portrayed as mythic proving ground.
Money is in the city. Values are in the country.
The sheriff’s wife in JAWS has an affair with a dashing city guy. She realizes her mistake but the damage is done by the long shadow of the corrupted city falling on the small town. (she was born in the city and moved to the cultural deprivation of Amity. She finds herself bored but in the end embraces the values of the country.)
When THE EXORCIST begins, Father Merrill is relaxing in the pastoral countryside monastery where he is summoned back to the city to battle the devil. Although in the end, it takes the combined efforts of a country priest and a city priest to defeat the devil.
In THE DA VINCI CODE, country people can’t be trusted and there’s an evil lurking in the rural hillsides. City folk are our only hope. Leigh Teabing, the villain, lives in the country in a castle.
Bestsellers use the tremors of the fault lines between the city and country.
GOD
Many bestsellers feature religion in prominent ways, consistently critiquing orthodox religious practices and the dangers of zealotry.
The bible has consistently been a bestseller.
Religious themed books have sold so well, they have their own separate category.
Books like “LORD OF THE RINGS”, “CELESTINE PROPHECY”, “THE DA VINCI CODE”, “THE ROBE,” and “BEN HUR” have based their success on their spiritual themes. “THE SHACK” or “JONATHAN LIVINGSTON SEAGULL” have done incredibly well with their quasi religious overtones.
These novels portray a character with spiritual doubt. The authors all challenge religious thought often ridiculing religious hypocrisy. They focus on the worldly consequences of religious practice rather than its spiritual aspects. In other words, secularism.
AMERICAN DREAM/AMERICAN NIGHTMARE
Rags to riches stories as well as the foiling of this national myth.
The message for the American Dream is that hard work and fair play will be rewarded.
AMERICAN DREAM CYNICISM
In TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD, a black man is accused of murder but everyone in the courtroom knows he’s innocent. Justice is not even close to being just.
MAVERICK HERO
Bestseller heroes are rebels, loners, misfits, or mavericks. They don’t fit in worth a damn and that’s one of the reasons we love them so much.
Most are teetering on the brink of flat-out rejection of conventional society and are ready to embrace an individualist isolation from the customs of the mass culture.
A maverick is extreme. A maverick rejects the general status quo and will not be branded by it’s white-hot iron of normalcy. A maverick is a drop out, a nonconformist, a misfit. In short, a maverick is fully independent of the herd, an individual who acts without regard to others’ opinions or rules.
Scarlett from GONE WITH THE WIND and Scout from TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD are two very dissimilar mavericks. Scarlett is defiant out of selfishness and romantic delusion. Scout is a natural-born questioner of authority, an innocent seeker of the honest truth. But they are similar in that both are self-sufficient and brave. Both characters win our respect by remaining unbranded, using every means at their limited disposal to butt heads against the pressures of convention. They fact that they are female southerners and subject to additional social demands and pressures makes their independence more triumphant.
In THE DEAD ZONE, Johnny wants to lead a normal life. That’s all he wants. In the end, the only one that can save the world is a genuine maverick, a man willing to take the most extreme act of individualism one can imagine, sacrificing his own life to save millions of others.
THE GODFATHER. Michael Corleone, the war hero and Ivy League boy who will always be an outsider to the mafia, becomes the maverick leading the mavericks.
FRACTURED FAMILIES
Dysfunctional family life are common in blockbusters. Affairs, divorces, missing parents, etc.
Stress events that ratchet up the drama. Death of a spouse, death of a close family member, pregnancy, change in residence, sexual difficulties, etc.
GONE WITH THE WIND and VALLEY OF THE DOLLS are part romance novel, part critique of romance novel and both of these stories strip bare the hopeless, swooning fantasies of their heroines.
Family tensions and parental legacies underpin critical events in these stories. A crew on a submarine is a family. In THE HUNT FOR RED OCTOBER, family is at the root of the soviet protagonist’s rejection of the Soviet way of life. The hero never knew his father and was deeply alienated by his mother. The hero pours his love into his wife but she dies from Soviet medical negligence, plummeting him into despair and driving his motivations. This underpinning provides the human counterweight to all the overt action of the story. The first thing the Soviet hero asks the American commander is if he has a family. We all have the urgent human need for domestic relationships.
MISSING PARENTS
Missing fathers, mothers or wives propel most of the characters to greater attainments. Scout’s mother died of a heart attack when she was two. It prepares a child for the wrenching passage to adulthood. Scout has three surrogate mothers. They drift away, leaving Scout to fend for herself and learn how to break the ties on parental protection and become fully independent.
SEX
Jaws cover art by Roger Kastel
(photo by Tucker Good)
The Florida school shooting that killed 17 people was the 273rd attack in America since the Sandy Hook Elementary School attack in 2012.
In total, 430 people have been shot, most of them kids.
You can help prevent future shootings. How? By voting and sharing information with your friends on social media.
You are powerful. You can exercise your right to vote. You can vote against the lawmakers that have voted against gun control laws and vote in lawmakers that will vote for gun control laws. You can share your information with everyone you know.
If you are eighteen are older, you can register to vote. Google search: “How to register to vote in (your state)”
When you receive your ballot, another simple google search will tell you how the candidates will vote in regards to gun control. Google search: “Where does (candidate’s name) stand on gun control?”
Vote for a candidate that will stand up for gun control.
How did your lawmaker vote on gun control?
In 2016, our lawmakers had 4 chances to change gun control laws. Each time they failed to reach the 60 votes necessary to pass those laws. (From this article at Slate.com)
Here is how the vote tallies broke down:
Dianne Feinstein’s Democratic amendment, that the Washington Post notes, would “let the attorney general deny firearms and explosive to any suspected terrorist.”
John Cornyn‘s Republican amendment that would allow the government to delay the sale of a firearm to terror suspects “only if [the attorney general] could prove to a judge within three business days of the attempted sale there was probable cause to suspect the buyer of ties to terrorism,” according to the Post.
Chris Murphy’s Democratic amendment that would “expand background checks for anyone trying to purchase a firearm at a gun show or online,” according to the Washington Post.
Further reading:
How to Operate a Seat Belt
My Neighbor’s Garage Contents
Types of Traffic
The Disadvantages of Educated White Males
Floss Your Way to Perfection
Organize Your Light Bulbs!
10 Ways to Repress Anger
Eat Your Way to Emotional Fulfillment
Top 20 Toilet Bowl Cleaners
I’m into Vermin!
5 Signs You Have Trench Mouth
How to Crush Your Spouse in a Dishwasher Argument
Twee Tree Tweets
Accounting for Accountants
Leeches and the Joy They Bring
Passive Aggressive Infant Training
Types of Traffic
Cookies for Kid Cannibals
Cloud Storage Haikus
(Please add your titles in the comment section!)
Dear H. P. Lovecraft,
How can I get Donald Trump out of my mind? He seems to be everywhere and I’m totally bummed out all the time. I think I’m going to have PTSD.
Signed,
Orange Everywhere
Dearest Orange,
Speak not the name of this ill-formed, belligerent beast from the foul Netherlands of Hades. He is the scourge of the Earth, the demon whose lies invade the mind and attack the truth. For he is Cthulu, poorly reborn in the form of a human.
Take this advice: Acquire the purest sand and have it blessed by a holy person. Spread the sand in an unbroken line around your sacred home. Speak an incantation besmirching this malodorous foe and command the deceitful demon to never cross the sacred line. Afterwards you must proclaim your home to be ever free of this foul ghoul.
The name of this hideous troll must not be uttered within this sacred space. Remove any pictures or written word of the despicable hobgoblin. Blockade any portals, physical and mental, with which it could use to travel. Oranges, carrots, and persimmons must be removed and only eaten outside the circle lest their color alone drag you into the claustrophobic dungeons of despair. Your mind must become the moat around your castle, replete with vicious and loyal monsters at your bidding, strong enough to vanquish any thought that arises of this festering demon.
With these steps, your mind will become calm and with it, your home. Let this sacred space steel your soul against the deceitful ogre and prepare you each day to leave your home refreshed again, to fight anew this vile and putrid imp.
-H.P. Lovecraft
