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I was really, really going to spend some time last night checking my friends blogs and leaving some comments. Please believe me. But then Peat Wollaeger, the artist in yesterday's post, emailed me and invited me to his pre-Cinco de Mayo parade party in a print shop and gallery on Cherokee Street. So, as Robert Burns said, the best laid schemes o' Mice an' Men, Gang aft agley. Right you are, Robbie. Big time.
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St. Louis doesn't have a big Hispanic population like many U.S. cities but what we have is full of enthusiasm. There is a growing, energetic Cinco de Mayo festival in early May on Cherokee Street. Cinco de Mayo is a curious celebration. It's mostly observed in the State of Puebla, celebrating the victory of the Mexican forces against a far larger French army in 1862. It's not a national holiday in Mexico and is far less important than Independence Day on September 15. The U.S., however, has seized on it as an excuse to swill gallons of Corona and Tecate, gobble burritos and listen to brassy mariachis.I shot 1,037 pictures yesterday. (I promise I won't post them all here.) Most of them were the usual repetitive, poorly composed junk but there were some pearls. Here, a father and son wear the headgear of luchadores, the masked wrestlers of lucha libre, the wildly popular Mexican form of professional wrestling.
There is a growing set of photos from the festival on Flickr here. More to come over the next few days. 
I've mentioned lucha libre over the last couple of days, Mexico's unique form of professional wrestling. The contestants are often smaller, more agile men than U.S. wrestlers, emphasizing aerial maneuvers done by flinging themselves off the ropes. They always wear a mask and adopt a persona. There is an interesting discussion of the history masks for role-playing in Mexican culture leading up to lucha libre here.
These paintings of luchadores on sheets of plywood were out on Cherokee Street in our Little Mexico during the Cinco de Mayo festival. I think they're fabulous (but, by definition, I have strange tastes). There is something very edgy and contemporary in them. It wouldn't surprise me to find these works in the Whitney Museum of Contemporary Art in New York or one of the city's more out-there downtown galleries, selling for a lot of money. You would never guess that their first show was sitting on the sidewalk in a sketchy part of south St. Louis.
By the way, this picture was a technical challenge. The scene was horribly back lit. When editing it, the sky would be completely blown out or the foreground would be too dark. I decided to put a mask (no pun intended) on the sky, darken it, brighten the foreground and bump up the color saturation all over. It creates a sort of unnatural glow that I like. Tell me if it works for you.
TOMORROW: Cherokee Street
I was really, really going to spend some time last night checking my friends blogs and leaving some comments. Please believe me. But then Peat Wollaeger, the artist in yesterday's post, emailed me and invited me to his pre-Cinco de Mayo parade party in a print shop and gallery on Cherokee Street. So, as Robert Burns said, the best laid schemes o' Mice an' Men, Gang aft agley. Right you are, Robbie. Big time.
