Intersections

The scene in Puerto Vallarta *

[Image removed by request!]

An invigorating exchange of ideas and energy in Vallarta for the arte contemporaneo festival this week. Sprinkled in this shot from left to right, moments after a rather charged panel on the intersections of tourism and artesania, are artist and academic Mariana Botey, architect and restaurateur Heidi Padilla, fashion designer Denise Marchebout, artist and educator Sandra de la Loza, and artist and writer Kathryn Garcia. Three galleries are hosting work by the invited artists, and there are site-specific works around town. Today we'll be talking about youth, borders, and culture on a panel. Afterwards, music by Dr. Lakra and Sonido Apokalitzin outdoors at Parque Cardenas. The streets sing with heat and partying -- and the pools are nice. * Edited slightly.

Calle 13 makes reggaeton worth it

This is a new single by the Puerto Rican reggaeton group Calle 13, featuring Big Yamo. Calle 13, a writer-producer duo of brothers, are no strangers to controversy and criticism. But no one can deny the danceability and wit of one of their jams. Meanwhile, the Obama song phenomenon has not only reached reggaeton, but now the kingdom of reggae. Check out "Barack Obama," by Coco Tea. And if you read Spanish, enjoy below the intricate word-play of this "Tocarte Toda" verse:

Soy la nueva cara del rock,
el nuevo new kid on the block,
que me sigan el el coro los estupidos
calle 13 y DJ jabo suenan nitido,
te vo´a a sacar el aire de la cabeza,
dandole un masaje a tu cerebro con cerveza,
pa´ cambiarle esa mente de fresa,
hay que consumir como cien tabletas,
chupate esta, una masajito por tu piel grasienta,
pa´ que sienta hasta la placenta,
pioca, pica, pica como pimienta
nos fuimos hipies como en los setentas
a ti yo te sedo la silla y la mesa
plaza de su alteza
eres una gata montesa, de las pezuñas hasta la cabeza

Mexico City at your feet **

This is a walkable map of the Centro Historico of D.F., part of a permanent exhibit about the city at the Museo de la Ciudad de Mexico. There's also a traveling exhibit on Mexican graffiti. Below, a detail of a large 1963 acrylic and pencil on wood piece by Luis Covarrubias, imagining Tenochtitlan and the great Lago de Texcoco before the arrival of the Spanish.

* Here is a cool and kinda weird virtual depiction of a battle during the fall of Tenochtitlan at YouTube. The rain and lightning are very apt. It's crazy to think that the ground where all that happened is the same ground we walk upon today: Colonial buildings and churches, McDonald's and Zara and Oxxo, metro tunnels.
** You may or may not see slight glitches in coming posts at Intersections. TypePad 'upgraded' its composing functions, reminding me that the look and functionality of this blog remains at the will of its hosts, and that maybe I should upgrade myself and seek to go solo somehow, again.
I know it must be easy, but I'm a dingbat when it comes to the mechanics of blogging. And anyway, with freelance work and the book project looming larger than ever, posting in general may be scaled back through the end of the year. Thoughts? Leave a comment, or email me.

A focus on contemporary art, in Puerto Vallarta

An art scene, in Puerto Vallarta? The easy-going, tourist-friendly port on Mexico's Pacific coast may not be immediately associated with cutting-edge contemporarty art, but a festival coming up at the end of this month may help permanently shift those perceptions. L.A. gallerist, curator, and editor Pilar Perez, a Vallarta native, is organizing Puerto Vallarta Arte Contemporaneo 08: Extended Borders, Shifting Cartographies.

The invited artists include many prominent Mexican/American cultural producers: Ruben Ochoa, Sandra de la Loza, Ruben Ortiz Torres, Vincent Valdez, Shizu Saldamando, Francis Alys, Marco Ramirez Erre, Eduardo Abaroa, and others. Panelists include Mariana Botey, Alma Ruiz, Rita Gonzalez, Cuauhtemoc Medina, and more. I'll be participating on a panel about cross-border youth subcultures.

"There are about 20 commercial galleries in the city, but most are very traditional and show only painting or sculpture, and the market is oriented to tourists," Perez told me in an interview. "We hope to broaden the scope of the cultural experience — as well as the media presented — and provide a missing and necessary link to the existing international contemporary art world."

Vallarata is not the only emerging Pacific city positioning itself as a focal point for contemporary art in the new century. Also in June, San Jose, Calif. is hosting 01SJ: A Global Festival of Art on the Edge, and in 2009, my hometown San Diego, Calif. is hosting Beyond the Border. From these new urban poles, I'm sensing an energy and flexibity that you're less likely to get in established art capitals like Los Angeles and Mexico City.

For more on the over-all scene in Vallarta, see here. Vallarta is the inaugural festival's definite "hook," Perez assured me. "Five days at the beach, a nice hotel, an interesting group of people, and art. Did I mention margaritas?"

* Image above, a work in progress by local Puerto Vallarta artist Javier Rodriguez, titled "Epifinia Futbolera."

Ferocious cultural agent: Olivier Debroise, 1952-2008

Critic, curator, author, filmmaker, and 'myth-destroyer' Olivier Debroise, 56, died suddenly on May 6 in Mexico City. The cultural community in D.F. is reeling from his loss. This is how Debroise's friend and colleague Cuauhtemoc Medina memorializes him, in this potent and moving obituary, translated at e-flux:

Tempestuous, brilliant, and tireless, Olivier Debroise was a representative of an era in which fixed concepts of identity — personal, professional, and political — lost meaning, giving way to a contemporaneity in which the past is always active, and radicalism functions without need of dogmas. In a world of organic intellectuals and fossilized academics, Olivier saw the opportunity to treat culture like an adventure series within the cycle of upsets that was the twentieth century.

Read more here. And here is Ruben Ortiz Torres on Debroise's passing.

Debroise and Medina co-curated the landmark exhibit last year at UNAM, "The Age of Discrepancy, 1968-1997," a sweeping and unprecedented journey through previously unmapped experimental art practices in Mexico between the pivotal year of 1968 through the rapid internationalizing of Mexican art during the 1990s. Edited by Debroise, the show's giant bilingual catalogue is packed with rich essays and rare, thrilling images. It will now be one of many living testaments to Debroise's singular intellectual curiosity and might.

* Links: e-flux, ArtNet, The Backroom, Ruben Ortiz Torres, El Universal, Blow de la Barra, La Jornada, Anodis.

* Image above, "Death of an Art Dealer/La muerte del Art Dealer," 1982, by Ulises Carrion, from La era de la discrepancia, UNAM, 2007.

Mourning in China *

These are two images from the devastation in Sichuan province, southwestern China, from the International Herald Tribune.

Now, pity for the human toll of nature's fury is not normally an impulse we heed on Intersections. What can be done? Right now, Burma is dying. Towns in Oklahoma have been wiped out. Yet these past two days I've been walking the streets, eating, taking the train, waking up, all in a dazed sense of grief over Monday's earthquake in China. It's a total human nightmare.

A friend just sent me this, a report by NPR's Melissa Block from Duijiangyan. She comes across a couple looking for their child and his grandparents in the rubble of a collapsed apartment building. It is very, very difficult to listen to the story's inescapable conclusion.

* Here is another report from Duijiangyan, in The Guardian. Here is Jim Yardley on the anger and agony of grieving parents in Juyuan. And here is the English edition of China's official news agency, Xinhua.

Transsexual Mexicans, man and woman, to marry

There's an extraordinary story making the rounds in some Mexican papers this week, about a couple madly in love and struggling to have their union recognized, or at least not ridiculed, by Mexican society. It's Diana and Mario, transsexuals, both of them, who plan on getting married this Saturday.

"Trapped," began the story in today's El Universal, "She in the body of a man, he in the body of a woman." But love, as they say, knows no boundaries, right? The paper is calling it the first dual transsexual wedding in Mexico -- the couple declined to try Mexico City's new same-sex civil union option and will wed as man and woman before a civil judge. In the El Universal video above, you can watch the couple articulate in Spanish their opinions about their transformations, and their unique attraction to one another.

"I am a person with two eyes, a mouth, a nose, I am a respectful person, intelligent, read, prepared, I do not consider myself a phenomen," a bearded Mario says. "I simply consider myself someone who was given a situation where my mind did not correspond with my body. But I don't consider that a phenomenon, I see a condition of life different from others."

The coverage is itself fascinating. Tabloid El Centro in Tuesday's editions published cutesy photos of Diana shopping for a wedding gown in the tiny dress shops found down in the pathways of metro Chapultepec. Above the story, a flourishing "Diana & Mario" banner, with wedding cake clip-art, and a countdown to Saturday ... "Four days left."

Hip-hop kiddie TV taking over: It's 'Yo Gabba Gabba!'

My brother Sergio was the first to introduce me a while back to "Yo Gabba Gabba!," a TV show aimed at kids that he was almost as excited about as my nephew, Eligh, his youngest of two. No. He was basically a lot more excited about it than Eligh appeared to be. I quickly saw why.

Toddlers are the target audience, of course, but with that unmistakable hip-hop flavor and humor, and all those cool celebrity guest spots, "Yo Gabba Gabba!" is the kind of kiddie show that is drawing ardent adult fans. And inevitably, stoner college kids.

But now I gotta go, cuz there's a party in my tummy.

The creeping march of narco violence in Mexico

The war between Mexico's cartels and law enforcement agencies reached a chilling new height this week. Assassins ambushed the acting chief of Mexico's federal police, Edgar Millan Gomez, as he walked into his apartment in Col. Guerrero in Mexico City early Thursday morning. The papers are saying the Millan Gomez murder is the work of the Sinaloa cartel. Put in perspective, this means violent criminal organizations are engaged in low-grade, pinpointed warfare against the whole Mexican law and order infrastructure -- and they're winning.

Thursday's high-profile assassination throws the country's entire anti-narco effort into a state of uncertainty, while narcotics continue to flow north and the killings go on incessantly. So far 1,000 people have died in the narco war this year alone. It just doesn't stop. It was another bloody week in the Mexican north, with a sex crimes investigator killed brutally in her driveway in Juarez on Monday. And just this morning, gunmen shot and killed a high-ranking federal anti-kidnapping agent, also here in Mexico City.

Read more at "Sex crimes investigator assassinated in Juarez."

* Photo above, federal officers salute recently fallen police, by AP via the L.A. Times.

Immigration check-points, while driving, yes, south

That's right. As immigrants are leaving the country, federal agents have been staging check-points and rounding people up. The L.A. Times, reporting from the San Diego-Tijuana border, says that ICE is actually defending this policy. In the article by Richard Marosi, a population-control reactionary argues that immigrants who are arrested as they leave the United States could become "ambassadors of enforcement" once they eventually reach Mexico with their hard-earned dollars. As my mom would say, ¡Ya, esto es el colmo!

But this is the sort of officially defended government inanity and criminally wasteful use of resources that we've come to expect in the Bush Era. It's a long list of outrageous stories that gradually work to erode and disrupt the country's little remaining links to decency and reason, and we can only hope that with a Barack Obama presidency, finally, something might change. Might.

* L.A. Times photo above by Mark Boster.

Lurid advertising: 'That's why she's my mommy'

This is a billboard that shows a beautiful young mother shielding the eyes of her child from something awful, maybe a traffic accident, or a bloody crime scene. The image feels taut and in motion. It is clearly playing to the culture of fear in Mexico City -- fear of kidnappings, fear of freak calamities, fear of death. At the same time it is nodding at the mystique of motherhood that still dominates concepts of Mexican femininity.

So what's it selling? Why, it's Nido, the decidedly non-threatening milk powder. It's a whole campaign, by the way, saying essentially, If you're a good Mexican mother, you'll cover your kid's eyes from a horrible sight, and you'll buy him Nido. This particular billboard was spotted on the speedy north-south artery Calzada de Tlalpan, near the surface station of metro Portales.

* Link: "Exploiting Real Fears with 'Virtual Kidnappings'."

Resistencia: Rocking on May Day in Mexico City

Here are some pscyhobilly kids hanging out at a music festival during May Day on Thursday. The Rebel Cats played, and so did Los Pardos, the Rude Boys, and many others. Half-way through the day I remember thinking, "Oh my, every day is Coachella in Mexico City!"

Read more at my latest 'Letter from Mexico City,' "Searching for real resistance on May Day," at LA Daily.

'ASCO' in Olde E: It's 1981 all over again *

Never seen this image before. It's a 1981 photo by Harry Gamboa Jr. of artists Gronk and Teresa Covarrubias. Notice the ASCO in Olde English letters on Covarrubias's tank. * More photos related to the East L.A. punk scene of the late 70s-early 80s at Tu Ciudad. Also, once again, see Diane Gamboa's "Unpopular Culture" photo series at KCET.

* UPDATE: There's a exhibit opening this month at the Claremont Museum of Art titled "Vexing: Female Voices from East L.A. Punk," curated by Pilar Tompkins. The press materials read: "Taking its name from the all-ages music club The Vex, once housed within East Los Angeles’ Self Help Graphics and Art, Vexing is an historical investigation of the women who were at the forefront of this movement of experimentation in music, art, culture and politics, while exploring their lasting legacies and contemporary practices."

The opening, for L.A. people, is May 17 and will feature rare performances by Teresa Covarrubias, Alice Bag, Lysa Flores, and Angela Vogel. * My instincts were on when I saw this photo; I'm told it will be making its public debut at the Claremont museum.

* Related: "'Phantom Sightings' arrives in Los Angeles."