Let 'em eat cake

On the enormous ground floor of the Pastelería Ideal bakery on Calle 16 de Septiembre in the centro histórico, there's an overwhelming selection of everything sweet that could possibly emerge from an oven: cakes, rolls, cookies, doughnuts, pastries and muffins. The smell of sugar is so overpowering that it alone could put a diabetic to the hospital. But if you follow your nose up a flight of stairs, you'll find a veritable museum of cake.

Six- and seven-tier wedding cakes, with green, blue or peach-colored icing. Cakes that weigh 240 pounds, can be divided into 1,100 portions and cost over a thousand dollars. Cakes that sport spurting, functioning fountains. Cakes that serve as immense platforms, atop which are staircases comprised of six progressively smaller cakes.

There's a section of white wedding cakes, in the midst of which you feel as if you were in front of the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg after a snowstorm.

A few days after a notable earthquake in 1999 I visited the Ideal and asked if any of the cakes had fallen. "No," the woman at the cash register told me. "They just danced a little."

Signs of Christmas in Mexico City

Perhaps because I am from New York I associate Christmas with cold weather and the possibility of snow. But in temperate climates, Christmas has to make itself manifest in more subtle ways.

OK, maybe subtle isn't quite the appropriate word. Would you be embarrassed to drive around with these reindeer antlers attached to your windows? The city is crawling with them.

How about "Spider Claus?"

This is perhaps not precisely a manifestation of the holiday that is upon us. But the Christian message struck me as entirely appropriate.

Teresa

In Luis Buñuel's classic about street children, Los Olvidados, there is a scene filmed on the Eje Central, a boulevard which was known at that time (1950) as San Juan de Letrán. Some may remember that there is a brief view of this marquee, of a movie theatre called the Cine Teresa.

Today it's a porno theatre. Perhaps appropriately, the name of the closest street is Delicias, and on the corner there is a doctor who will treat you for venereal diseases. The day I shot this photo, the bill included a double feature of Lust and Take it in the Throat. The place has such a seedy appearance that even I (with a customarily high tolerance for seed) have not gone in there. If anyone has had an experience in the Teresa, please post a comment.

Barbecued wings of the dove

In my previous post I mentioned that, at the Guadalajara Book Fair, one gets the idea of how hard it is to sell books. In case anyone needs further evidence that literature doesn't pay, take a look at this photo, which was taken on Highway 150 in North Carolina, not far from Greensboro.

Guadalajara

The Feria del Libro in Guadalajara, which finishes on Sunday the 7th, is the largest book fair in Latin America. When you walk through the floor of the convention center, the enormous quantity of books being sold is overwhelming. Perusing what is on offer makes it eminently clear that the lion's share of the publishing business is selling self-help and children's books. Literature is more or less a footnote in the panorama.

Fetching mariachis as well as abundant free cocktails make the fair a little easier to swallow.

The above photo was taken at a press conference announding the Aura Estrada Prize, about which I will write more at a later post. I didn't catch his name at first, but novelist Francisco Goldman later told me that the old guy sitting next to him is called Gabriel García Márquez.

For me, the book fair is really an excuse to visit my favorite haunts in Guadalajara. Among them is a piano bar called El Gato Verde, on Calle Robles Gil #137. The main entertainment comes from Mari Tere, pictured behind the bar, who has sometimes doubled as a waitress. Once inside you may feel you have inadvertently wandered into a David Lynch movie.

Then there is Mariscos El Negro, in the Santa Teresita neighborhood, on the corner of Francisco Zarco and Ignacio Ramirez, one of the best seafood restaurants in all of Mexico. All of the cold and raw-bar offerings are amazing, as are the shrimp tacos and the pescado zarandeado, a Guadalajara specialty of spice-rubbed fish.

I could, um, hardly help noticing one of my fellow diners down the aisle. She was so conspicuous that it was only after I downloaded the photo that I realized there had been a baby at her side. Somehow I imagine him many years from now talking to a psychiatrist about his obsession with his mother's behind.

When in Guadalajara I always stop by Bar Saúl, a cantina on Calle Degollado in a dubious corner of the Centro Histórico. The front room is tiny, and in the back there are photos of movie stars, both Mexican and gringo. In this photo, New York editor Ethan Nosowsky, of Graywolf Press, is feeling no pain after half of his first tequila of the hour. He was drinking Centinela Reposado.

Aside from Mariscos El Negro, the other culinary achievement of Guadalajara is the torta ahogada (drowned sandwich), chopped pork in a hard roll "drowned" in tomato sauce, and then dressed with a dangerous hot sauce spiked with onions. If you like, you can also add shredded lettuce, refried beans and other condiments. There are many places to get a good torta ahogada in the city but some tapatios (as people from Guadalajara are known) say the best are to be had at Tortas Las Famosas, which has many branches around the city. The mother ship, in an industrial area at Avenida Patria No. 2546, has a wonderful oasis-at-the-end-of-civilization feel.