This last week/weekend, I had the extreme good fortune and pleasure of speaking at a design conference in Tijuana, Mexico - Esquina Norte 8, put together by organizer Jhoana Mora, who contacted me a few months ago, sounding as though TJ’s reputation would be a deterent. C’mon, I grew up in San Diego! OF COURSE I’ll come to Tijuana, I told her.

I flew into San Diego and was picked up and whisked south of la linea, to a very utilitarian hotel - but I really didn’t expect much more. Tijuana is pretty gnarly in parts, that’s no lie, and it’s in the San Diego news almost daily because a huge conflict is going on between rival drug cartels. The violence is affecting members of the cartels primarily, so I didn’t think it would affect us, and thankfully it didn’t.

I’ve been spending some time in Mexico over the last year, and it’s great. Really creative community down there right now, and the amazing carvings and characters I saw earlier this year in Mexico City at the Mexico National Museum lead me to believe it’s always been that way.

The conference was attended by several hundred design students, all really enthusastic. Two days of presentations and a day of workshops, I was one of eight other guests, including fellow Drawing Board/Def Jam alumni Jason Noto’s company, Morning Breath, with his partner Doug Cunningham, Minneapolis’ Aesthetic Apparatus, author Tristan Manco, artist Héctor Galván, and several other super cool folks that I’m too tired to hunt down links for right now. ¡Lo Siento!

The Aesthetic Apparatus guys. They’re amazing, and really down to earth.

Doug and Jason, dba Morning Breath, and some fans

Translation booth! UN styles!

There was a huge lunch break every day, between 1:30 and 4pm. Siesta time, I guess. So we’d head off into the TJ sun…

A taco stand some of the students took us to. Yeah, I’ll admit, at 50 feet it looked sketchy - but as you can see, it’s real oficial, and the food of course was great.

I was scheduled to speak on the second day, Friday. I was gonna do my presentation out of iPhoto, like I did once before. Not the optimal solution, but clean. Simple. But during the first day, watching the other presentations, I began to see how cool Keynote could be - it’s Apple’s version of PowerPoint, if you don’t know. Really godawful boring technology that runs the world, along with Blackberrys. I was assured it was easy to use, and it is - instead of going out with everyone else to the rad-sounding 80’s music night at TJ club “Porky’s”, I stayed in and hammered out my presentation (Despite two run-throughs, it still came off wild and unrehearsed, but eh, whadya do? I think I was cramming too much info in there.)

StageHand please report to the dancefloor

But that’s not why I’m writing about it - I’m writing to mention that the TRULY ILL move was logging on to the iPhone AppStore and finding the app StageHand - a program that lets you control Keynote from your iPhone or iPod Touch. Sooooo worth the $7.99 to control your presentation laptop from remote. Not too hard to get running; I had switched my presentation to Keynote and used StageHand to geek out at the event not even 20 hours later. StageHand lets you preview your notes on the phone’s screen, switch slides forward and backward with right and left swipes, and if you turn the phone to a horizontal orientation, you get a thumbnail of the slide you’re showing, and: you can touch the screen and move a highlight around in real time, on the projected image. Crazed. The other Keynote heads was flipping. out.

This fuckin’ guy, he thinks he’s Steve Jobs now

After the presentations, these students were stoked, and crowded around the presenters for questions, photos, and autographs. I even got a little attention, (but seriously, not as much as those Morning Breath guys!) and two students had even drawn portraits of me presenting! I was so shocked I didn’t even think to take pictures of the drawings… Big regret of the trip at this point. So cool! If you ever read this, Mexican designer/portrait artists, please e-mail them to me! They drew me looking like some old dude, it was sort of a reality check. Another ‘oh well’ on that - my mom always told me the the alternative to getting old wasn’t too appealing either.

Friday night was pretty bangin’ down there - we went for tacos, headed to some club, Estrella, and then to some steamy basement bar blasting The Doors and the Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon, then ended the night at a silly strip club.

Estrella, a great dancefloor-centric bar, Los Tigres Del Norte-type place, with some NORE and Reggaeton thrown in randomly.

Estrella clientele - with the amazing paintings around the perimeter. ¡Dios Mio!

El Guillermo McMillionero. El Amigo Solamente.

Claro, Like El Baller that I am, I took a taxi to the border and walked across, had my bags x-rayed, and took the San Diego Trolley back to downtown SD. Awesome trip. I’d do it again in a second. Thanks to Jhoana, and all of the amazing students who attended and welcomed us with true enthusiasm!

Jhoana Mora, organizer

BONUS: Play this while reading the post…

This entry was posted on Friday, October 3rd, 2008 at 12:16 and is filed under Mexican, modern dance, design, q & a, awesome, culture, art. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.