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Tag Archives: chile
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Invierno | 2002 | Valparaiso.
![](http://www.migueldelosandes.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/catermccaters.jpg)
Stolen camera, glaciers, cowboy plays for Korean boys and girls.
January 16, 2012. Woke up before dawn to finish my wild west script for the kids I teach. Skyped with my dad about Patagonia glaciers, sailboat adventures across the Pacific, train rides through Russia, bike touring across Asia…
Learned that my mom’s Nikon D70 camera got stolen in Valparaiso. Doesn’t surprise me. I tell a lot of the people I meet not to visit Chile because of lo mala clase que alguna gente es. According to my mom, who tends to pepper a lot of her narratives with Latin American magical realism, she was dragged up some stairs in the struggle. It was probably true. She’s mostly sad about the pictures in her camera. Any photographer would be.
Then I laid to sleep while half watching Fincher’s Se7en.
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Chile en Super8 Part 2
Part 2: The jail my dad was locked in during the early months of 1974 had three floors. It grew out of a hill like most old buildings in Valparaiso do. The southern exterior wall of the jail had a huge drop where more than one inmate must have tried escaping by jumping onto a passing hay cart. My dad told me they had him on the third level with the rest of the communists. He wasn’t a communist but he was charged as an armed subversive because he owned a gun in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 coup. According to him, the unregistered gun he kept in the toolshed next to the paint thinner was “older than him” and was meant for deterrence only. Every time I heard my dad’s gun story, peppered with his typical hyperboles, I imagined one of those guns pirates used during the golden age of the man blouse. A poor weapon choice in the event of an escalating conflict with anybody over the age of 11, in my opinion.
My dad was apprehended late at night on Cerro Marisopa in Valparaiso. I imagine him cooking ravioli when he heard a knock on the door. There were cops and they had submachine guns. He didn’t resist. Not even in his embellished retelling of the story. He spent the next three months in jail. How the cops knew my dad owned the gun has always been a mystery to me.
When I shot the Super8 film in 2002 the prison had become a cultural center.
El Funeral del Caramelo
Caramelo was our family’s gringo cat from Nantucket, MA. He died in December of 2008. We bury our cats with pomp if we feel creative. So my dad and I made this video (I had been morbidly wishing to make an Evita-style pet funeral since I saw the movie’s opening scene @6:25). Sadly, most of our cats have gone into unmarked grave around the white fig tree without an Ave Maria or nutcracker pall-bearers.
Caramelo’s death was mysterious. We thought he had contracted cat TB because mucus was constantly coming out of his nose and eyes. The vet had been called but before he could show up, Caramelo disappeared. The sick cat most likely crawled into a cubbyhole in the roof, closed his eyes and took his last little catnap with dignity. Because his body was never found, I always thought somebody, a cat hater, had disappeared him.
Chilean miners for halloween
Halloween 2010, Pearl Street Mall, Boulder, Colorado.