Suburban Mansions, Dapper Bicyclists, Dia de los Muertos

This morning mom made us all pancakes and we sat around drinking coffee trying to figure out what Brenda wanted to do with her morning in Phoenix.

We settled on visiting "Street of Dreams," a tour of five palatial homes in a new development among the alfalfa fields and outlet malls of south Gilbert. Each of the homes was over 6000 square feet, and most of them ranged in price from 1.7-2 million dollars a pop. We decided to go to these homes because Brenda, mom, and I are all incredibly snarky and these things are almost self-parodies.

To start with, there is the absurdity of owning a 7000 square foot house which has been designed with 2-3 bedrooms. There is no staff space. An army of cleaning staff will probably come once or twice a week to maintain the huge spaces. The houses also sit on lots which are barely larger than the house. You have to turn sideways to squeeze through gaps between the side walls and the house- the backyards don't have room for real pools since they're jammed up against the next phase of development.

One of the houses had a massive garage, and then a second garage which was even larger below grade. This garage we renamed the batcave since there was a giant turn table to rotate your car when you drive in. And a boat.

Another house had a shooting range in the basement with a painting of the Godfather at one end and a life-sized statue of Predator at the business end of the range.

There was a below grade window to a bedroom which had been converted to an aviary filled with colorful African finches.

One of the houses featured a giant stuffed peacock perched above ludicrous magenta couches. We decided the decor of the house was intended for a flamboyantly gay couple and perhaps one of their mothers.

One of the houses, the one with at least 10,000 square feet of space and slate tiled conical roofs, was supposed to have been inspired by "classical Parisian chateau living".

The gatehouse to the subdivision featured an outdoor fireplace.

Everyone agreed that that the decor had been provided by TJMaxx and Ross Dress for Less. It was awful across the board. Amazingly, some of the houses had drawings where you would provide them with your contact info and they you could win a piece of the decor. I'm interested in a lot of things, but I didn't see a single thing (apart from some seriously large TVs and expensive built in appliances) that I would take home with me.

The least awful house was done in an "Old World Mexican style," never mind that Mexico is part of the  New World. It at least acknowledged that no life was to be found in the street or the views of the other depressing houses in the subdivision, and so it turned inward to focus on a pleasant interior courtyard with a shady colonnade around and lots of hand painted tile. They also overfilled with with crap and furniture since apparently Old World Mexico means over the top textures and too much furniture.

We stopped by Joe's Real BBQ for lunch since Brenda had never been and she bought us plates of BBQ. I just grabbed a single sandwich and side since I always overeat there. It was a good call.

This afternoon, I biked over to the bus and bussed up to central Phoenix, aiming for the second Dia de Los Muertos festival at the library park. On my may, I ran into a bunch of bicyclists dressed up in hipster and foppish attire, and I thought, you know, I bet Tempest is with these guys. Ryan Tempest was a friend from undergrad who stayed in Phoenix after he graduated, became a licensed architect, and is now heavily involved in trying to advocate urban living in Phoenix. He did pull up beside me and I joined him on the last leg of a big group ride out to the Palomar, a swanky new hotel in Phoenix in the CityScape development.

We chatted for a bit, and exchanged cards, and then I biked back north to get to the park and the festival.
It turns out another guy I know, Noah, was also there, and I didn't recognize him, although his wife won the "most dapper dame" prize at the hotel.

The festival was a small affar at one end of the park. I was curious about how the festival would be translated. It was much more multicultural, with a few African dancers, and a Japanese kodo drummer also in attendance. Lots of people in calavera masks. Got a few good photos.

There is something much more intimate about Dia de Los Muertos than Halloween. The indigenous populations believed that on a certain day, the spirits of the ancestors would return to earth, and so they set up altars. When the Spanish missionaries arrived, they combined with the All Saint's Day, and threw a vener of Catholicism over it, and the two became inextricably mixed, although the original customs are more clearly seen in the older, more indigenous parts of Mexico while it simply became a symbol of national/ethnic pride in Mexico City.

 In any event, in the US, Halloween means different things to different people- it's amazing when you're 5, it's  lame when you're 13-17, it's binge drinking and wild costume parties when you're 18-25, and then it kind of devolves into waiting until you think little kids in costumes are cute when you hand out candy. The holiday is a sugar rush, a plastic mask lightly worn.

Dia de los Muertos goes much deeper- it is both a meditation on death, not a terrifying, but a natural and spiritual part of life, and a remembrance of people who died. It is also a festival, but a festival which seeks to celebrate life through the acknowledgement of death. It makes a friend and a companion of death.