Intersections

From downtown to Imperial, the lost jazz life of San Diego

A bit of a D.F. detour, directed at all the uninformed who've looked at quizzically and a bit intellectually offended when I claim that San Diego is very much a "black city" at its core, stereotypes of malls, Marines, and white privilege aside. This piece, "A Hidden Gem" in San Diego CityBeat, explores the lost history of my hometown's jazz scene, long overshadowed by that of L.A.

Writer D.A. Kolodenko visits the lost sites of the city's jazz life with local legend Daniel Jackson, a 70-year-old native San Diegan who still plays his tenor sax to this day:

It’s a warm but breezy day and Jackson—exceptionally cool in a white rayon dress shirt, black vest, black slacks, dress shoes, shades and a black beret—takes long but measured strides, greeting everybody we pass, including kids. Now a predominantly Latino neighborhood, from the 1930s to the 1970s, Logan Heights was home to much of San Diego’s African-American community, and Imperial Avenue was the musical Mecca of San Diego’s black nightlife.

Read more here. Shout-out to those neighborhoods where we grew up -- Shelltown, Southeast, Chollas, City Heights -- where the city's true urban culture still manifests itself in the testimony of elders and the beats of the sidewalks.

* Thanks, Alexandro!

Political graphics and public art in Ciudad Neza

When you see on the covers of books about Mexico City a vast urban grid, the horizon of which is only hinted at by a colorless cloud of smog, you’re looking at Ciudad Nezahualcóyotl, Neza for short. The city is an autonomous municipality that is technically not within the Federal District, but just across its border in the state named -- clearly not in the interest of clarity -- Mexico. Still, Ciudad Neza is considered a part of the Mexico City metropolitan region, like Pasadena or Long Beach is to L.A.

Spent all day there with a local painter, and met a few artists and musicians. There is lots of creative activity in Neza, much of it with a political progressive bent, but most people in D.F. have a wild, misplaced fear of it for its rough reputation. To me Neza and its people felt sensible and fairly middle-class, although I'm told this is a relatively recent development. The image above is work enjoyed at the Centro Cultural Jose Marti, a place that reminded me of Self-Help Graphics & Art in East L.A.

Above, a view inside Neza's palacio de gobierno. The main stairwell features a large canvas painting by a local artist named Francisco Urbina. The piece, from 1983, gives a visual history of Neza from its pre-Colonial founding to its present-day hugeness. Check out the valiant, proud indigenous figure on the right. Faded murals adorn the outer walls of the government complex, which is shaped in some parts like a stepped pyramid.

The best part though was the plaza outside, where someone decided to start a business renting motorized play vehicles for kids bored brainless while they wait for parents to tend to bureaucratic business inside. Awesome:

* Much more to come in future writings.

Haz Patria: Hernandez becomes a Mexican, for reals

I've just received outstanding, once-in-a-lifetime news from my mother, via an email chockful with delicious Mexican and Tijuana lingo:

CONGRATULATIONS!!!  Ya eres oficialmente un MEXICANO 100%.!!!!! Daniel Michel (nadie sabe pronunciar Michael...) Hernandez Andrade de Tijuana, El Florido pa' que mas te guste...ju-juy!!! Ah! y todo mundo conoce el nombre Michel porque asi se llama el hijo menor de Veronica Castro (hermano de Cristian Castro) [...] ju-juy!!!!!!!

What this basically means, friends, is that I've acquired Mexican citizenship! I am now an authentic Mexican-American, or American-Mexican. Or Meximerican? We'll need some time to think this through.

Meantime, the short version of how it happened is, since both my parents are Mexican-born, and since the Mexican government allows for such things, I was able to get a birth certificate in Tijuana denoting myself as a "Mexican born on foreign soil," i.e. Kaiser in Mission Valley, San Diego. I know, I know: hilarious, but brilliant. And, frankly, what a relief.

* Your still-active-but-less-frequently-so blogger is pictured above on a windy and chilly recent night at the observation deck of the Torre Latinoamericana, Mexico, D.F.

French street artist Fafi in Mexico City

The famed Fafi was in town this weekend to paint a mural for the new Adidas store in Condesa. She painted (along with a couple local female graffiti writers) on Friday afternoon on a wall outside the neighborhood mercado, while hyper-dressed hipster kids milled out, watching, taking pictures, checking each other out.

Later she handled a bunch of press interviews inside the new space and got some fresh kicks for her and her homegirl Jeanne. The party was cool, but weird. They were playing mid-90s Top-40 hip-hop, basically, and not ironically. Then Diego Jimenez, who does a lot of everything here, took us to an opening of a new design store.

Fafi's work is notable because she belongs to graffiti culture but uses acrylic and brushes. She's easily one of the most celebrated street artists in the world, and in Mexico she was treated as a bona fide star. A few years ago my brother Sergio took Fafi to paint in Tijuana, where Sergio has pieces all over the place. The little girl in one of these shots is my niece Analiyah.

Homenaje a Cuitlahuac y la vistas de la ciudad

It's difficult to convey in words or images how the vertical, muscular environment of Mexico City creates awesome visual effects with scale and depth, but the above shot I hope comes close. It shows some (surviving) apartment towers at Tlatelolco and a monument to Cuitlahuac on Paseo de la Reforma. The base is pyramid-shaped. Cloud formations above the Valley of Mexico are frequently spectacular, and the lines and angles created by a maze of overhead powerlines often enhance the megalopolis's arresting views.

The umbrella in the foreground covers one of the many stands at the Lagunilla market, which specializes in antiques and vintage goods such as watches, eyeglasses, jewelry, books, small appliances, toys, records, hats, lamps, pendants, and big old chests with metal locks. Below, a sidewalk shot. As ever, every price is negotiable.

Mexico as muse for Anni and Josef Albers

* Image above: Josef Albers, untitled lithograph, 1942.

"Mexico is truly the promised land for abstract art," Anni and Josef Albers wrote in 1936 to Wassily Kandinsky, "for here it has existed for thousands of years." This line, from a letter to the founding father of abstract art, is reproduced in a dim corner on a wall at the Antiguo Colegio de San Ildefonso museum in Mexico City's Centro Historico. It expresses the essential argument behind the exhibit "Anni y Josef Albers: Viajes por Latinoamerica," which charts the couple's extensive travels in Mexico and lays out the enormous influence that indigenous Mesoamerican architecture and design exerted on their celebrated lives as artists.

It is a dazzling show that pairs photographs, videos, letters, and pre-Hispanic artifacts against dozens of original pieces by the Albers couple which bear the unmistakable impressions of Indian civilizations, from before the Conquest and during their times: in the manner of the work's geometric principles, the uses of color, and the stark structural formalism drawn from Mesoamerican pyramids. In some instances the correlation is striking, yet with the Albers works you get the added tastes of the various artistic movements that overlapped with their careers in the 1930s, 40s, 50s, and 60s.

San Ildefonso, one of the finest museums in Mexico City, is my personal favorite because it is situated in one of the city's oldest colonial landmarks and is graced with Revolution-era frescoes by Jose Clemente Orozco that would alone be worth the cost of admission (free on Tuesdays). Also currently showing, photographs from around the world by Rene Burri, contemporary works by young artists from the very strong VIII Bienal Monterrey -- Mexico's major northern metropolis -- and a terrific exhibit of turn-of-the-20th Century photographs by H.G. Peabody and Guillermo Kahlo (Frida's father).

That show has Peabody and Kahlo in playful dialogue, highlighting photos both men took of the same cathedrals and historic structures in cities in central and southern Mexico.

¡Todos con el peje! -- at least at the Zocalo on Sunday *

These two classy ladies were decked out in PRD yellow at a mass rally on Sunday for Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, the self-proclaimed "legitimate president" of Mexico, at Mexico City's central Zocalo. The mainline domestic and foreign press stopped covering these rallies long ago, as the general impression of the man they call "el peje" (even among members of his own party) is one of farcical delusion.

Yet it is difficult to dismiss Lopez Obrador's remarkable ability to sustain a popular movement, or his ability to crystallize the problems facing Mexico's dispossessed. Adherents that I met this weekend were as devoted to their man as they were this time last year. How does he do it? On Sunday AMLO called for protests to block the potential privatization of Mexico's oil interests. The rally spilled into the Catedral Metropolitana, which regrettably was shut closed by Cardinal Norberto Rivera. According to Reforma, protesters chanted something to the effect that Hell awaits him. Not a good look. Now, it's turned political, with PRD Mayor Marcelo Ebrard saying the cathedral belongs to the people, not the Church. Uh-oh.

Last week, the Luis Mandoki documentary about the 2006 presidential election, "Fraude," was released here. The subhead on announcements blanketing the city dubs it a film "starring millions of Mexicans."

* EXTRA: Interesting post at The Mex Files on the current economic situation in Mexico. Note to the U.S.: Mexico needs you less than it has before.

Catchy reggaeton remix of '¿Por qué no te callas?'

By now everyone's heard the blunt "shut up" King Juan Carlos I of Spain lobbed at Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez last week. But have you heard it with a reggaeton beat?

Link.

For the gods, 'all is play': Paz on the pyramid

From a 1972 edition of Octavio Paz's "The Other Mexico: Critique of the Pyramid," translated to the English by Lysander Kemp, which I've just finished reading on the metro ride the other morning on Linea 1 from the Centro Historico:

The metaphor of the world as a mountain and the mountain as the giver of life materializes with astonishing literalness in the pyramid. Its platform-sanctuary, quadrangular like the world, is the theater of the gods and their playing field. And what is the game of the gods? They play with time, and their game is the creation of destruction of the worlds. [...] Creation and destruction are antithetical notions to man, but identical to the gods: all is play. In their games -- which are wars which are dances -- the gods create, destroy, and sometimes, destroy themselves.

The chapter "Critique of the Pyramid" is stellar. In it Paz examines the truncated pyramid symbol at the core of Mexican civilization and argues that a sustained critique of the Mexico of monuments, museums, and myth is essential to be free like "a liberated dream":

The true heirs of the pre-Columbian world are not the peninsular Spaniards but ourselves, we Mexicans who speak Spanish, whether we are Creoles, mestizos, or Indians. Thus the museum expresses a feeling of guilt -- except that, by a process of transference and unburdening which psychoanalysis has often studied and described, the guilt is transfigured into a glorification of the victim. At the same time -- and this is what seems to be decisive -- its ultimate exaltation of the Aztec period confirms and justifies what in appearance condemns the museum: the survival, the continuing strength, of the Aztec model of domination in our contemporary history.

[...]

Independent Mexico, in its turn, explicitly and implicitly prolonged the centrist, authoritarian, Aztec-Spanish tradition. I repeat: there is a bridge that reaches from tlatoani to viceroy, viceroy to president.

Paz wrote these essays partly in response to the massacre of untold hundreds of students at the plaza at Tlatelolco, on 2 October 1968, a turning point for modern Mexico.

With street vendors gone, noise drops in Centro Historico

Mexico City's Centro Historico, the old urban heart of the capital, has seen a significant decrease in measured noise levels since the local government managed to relocate the "informal" street vendors that for years choked the stone streets and sidewalks. At the same time, noise levels have risen in the areas where the ambulantes were moved, the streets surrounding designated in-door shopping markets mostly on the eastern side of the Centro, reports El Universal in today's edition.

The paper adds a sceney sidebar about how dramatically life has changed for merchants and residents in Centro since the ambulantes left. People who live and work in Centro seem uniformly awed by how open and practically new the area looks and feels. But are the ambulantes better off?

* Pictured above, a D.F. gent on a Sunday afternoon outside the National Museum of Art, one of my very favorite in the city. The vendors in the rear were part of a temporary food and crafts fair.

Dipping into the underground, ever so slightly

It became difficult to tell who was being friendly and who was merely being drunk, who was male or who was female, as in, acting in accordance to their gender or in rebellion to it, who was Mexican or who was foreign, or a mix of both, and, a final de cuentas, whether any of it mattered. The point was, there in the Centro Historico of Mexico City at 2 or 3 a.m., in the haze and laughter, everyone seemed very committed to the ritual at hand.

A few fashionable discoveries in Mexico City

These are shoes created by up-and-coming Mexican fashion designer Denise Marchebout, who with partner Enrique Gonzalez-Rangel are the creative forces behind their own lines and a botique in Col. Condesa called Clinica. Hung out with them Wednesday night. Here's a shot inside:

The shoes are hand-made with lycra and leather. They were presented by the models who wore Denise's bathing suit line during the recent Fashion Week Mexico, which I barely missed. Here's the video from her show, at the Clinica site. After checking out the shop we went to a fashion show somewhere in the Centro, on Calle Tacuba, in a run-down historic building. Very interesting scene and crowd.

There was free tequila and the after-party went real late, but more on that later. Across from me during the show sat young performer/cross dresser/local scene celebrity Zemmoa (seen at the right in the photo below) and the artist Miguel Calderon, among other boldface names.

* Add: Here's Mexico City blogger Chicamamacita on the Wednesday night fashion show, by Paola Arriola.

Mexico vs. Mother Earth: Tabasco update, and a small quake

The worst appears to be over in Tabasco after heavy rains last week caused rivers to swell and flooded the capital city Villahermosa and much of the low-lying state, displacing hundreds of thousands of people. Now there are fears of disease spreading and looting, and questions about how Tabasco may rebuild. And the Earth is still claiming victims. On Sunday a wall of mud swallowed a village in Chiapas. At least 16 people are missing.

Foreign Policy Association's Mexico blog notes that images of Tabasqueños trapped on their rooftops were reminiscent of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, but that the coordinated response by Mexican authorities prevented a major loss of life, despite Mexico's strained resources:

The newly elected President Felipe Calderon has met many environmental challenges since taking office in 2007. The Mexican petroleum sector, one of Mexico’s main sources of revenue, took many environmental hits with two hurricanes passing through the area of the Gulf of Mexico this past summer where much of Mexico’s oil and gas reserves reside.

Link. More from National Geographic, and Ioan Grillo in Time, who writes from Villahermosa:

The relief efforts stand in stark contrast to how Mexico dealt with disasters during its 71 years of one party rule that ended in 2000. Authorities were slow to react to a catastrophic earthquake in 1985, leaving much of the rescue efforts to the public while officials tried to underplay the casualties. The new culture of disaster response has centered around active civil protection agencies, pre-planned shelters in every community and a lively media, giving minute-by-minute updates on the catastrophes.

Link. In related news on a much smaller scale, a small earthquake rattled hotels in Acapulco after midnight Tuesday but caused no major damage. Here in Mexico City, the local police made rounds across the capital to check on possible injuries and damages, and reported none. At home last night, the tremblor felt like a soft nudge against the wall.

* Photo above by EPA.

Little Fergie sings Lionel Richie to creepy clown

Awwwwww......

I'll never tire of it. Is it because it's my birthday?

Day of the Dead at the Zocalo in Mexico City

I arrived Thursday, Nov. 1, on a clear and gorgeous afternoon, just in time for the first of two nights that Mexicans celebrate their dead, and Death itself. Altars and outlandish displays were crammed all over the Zocalo and surrounding the Metropolitan Cathedral on Friday. Many in the city had the day off, so some streets in the Centro Historico were closed to traffic. People everywhere. People people people. Here's a view inside the cathedral:

Outside, ditches covered with heavy glass apparently offered views of recently dug remnants of the Templo Mayor, the Aztec temple upon which the Spaniards built the cathedral. Everyone was trying to get a good look:

In front of the National Palace, mourners placed altars for "dead" ideas, mainly democracy, and accused President Felipe Calderon of their murders. People everywhere! Walking proved difficult. Little kids in Halloween costumes. And in the middle of the square, rows after rows of 3,600 molded heads and skulls, hung as the Aztecs did to their captives. Savage, and cool:

There in the distance you can see the tip of the Torre Latinoamericana. I found the artists behind the heads and they called the project En el Corazon de Mictlan. Here's a close-up:

And a view walking back to the metro, to get back to Tacubaya, where I'm staying, to nap, rest, and prepare for the nighttime costume parties in Condesa. More later, friends.