Summer Postcards 2012
Strange Duet
It’s just shy of seven o’clock, and the concert doesn’t start until eight, so Brandon and I take our time along the 72nd Street transverse in Central Park. We follow the same route we took all last summer to our shared office in the basement of the Frick Collection.
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Francisco Martinez of San Miguel de Allende faces a young bull, or novillo, during the tercio de muerte (“death third”) of a fight.
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A triumphant novillero, or novice bullfighter, raises his sword at the Plaza de Toros Oriente in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. Spectators wave handkerchiefs to implore the judges to grant the young man, Hector de Avila of Tenancingo, a severed bull’s ear as a trophy.
Sobrevivientes
It was what I’d imagined a classroom of sixty- and seventy-year-olds to be like. There was the mean kid, Guillermo, sitting in a corner.
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Men push a handcart stacked high with tomato crates through the monsoon-flooded parking lot at Azadpur Mandi.
The Major-League Market
They use a cloth to cover their hands and wiggle their fingers to negotiate prices and execute secret trades.
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Rodrigo Sebastián of Mexico City makes a pass at a bull. Sebastián later received two bull’s ears as trofeos (trophies) in recognition of his valor and grace in the ring.
Goodbyes
When you're studying at a language school like the one I’m at in Bordeaux, you get used to people coming in and out of your life with the coming and going of each week.
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Cucumbers, packed in whirlpool configurations for maximum protection, sit ready to be sold in Azadpur's giant produce market.
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Francisco Martinez salutes the crowd as he rides out of the bullring on the shoulders of another man. Judges award a bullfighter a salida en hombros (literally “exit on shoulders”) if he performs exceptionally well.
A Gypsy in Athens
Just as Greece is plopped between East and West, developing and developed, that gypsy girl sits astride poverty and stability. Both oddly comfortable but forced to beg, they know they have a right to something.
